Cameron Willis

I have a ....blog?

2008-04-01T00:59:03Z

So, I have a blog. Here is the link: http://anatomylesson.wordpress.com/

And the latest post:

“I would say that the fascist agenda was Utopian, and that it adopted the cult of science. That’s what leads Hitler to try and breed humans and apes to try to create an oversized warrior or to send expeditions to Tibet to find a pure, Aryan race. I mean, that’s not science. It’s the cult of science, and I think the New Atheists also make that leap from science into the cult of science, and that’s a problem. The Enlightenment was both a curse and a blessing, because it was really a reaction to the kind of superstition, intolerance, bigotry, anti-intellectualism of the clerics, of the church. But it also ended up with the Jacobins, [who said] well, if we can’t make certain segments of the society “civilized,” as we define civilization, then they must be eradicated, in the same way that you eradicate a virus.

I write in the book that not believing in God is not dangerous. Not believing in sin is very dangerous. I think both the Christian right and the New Atheists in essence don’t believe in their own sin, because they externalize evil. Evil is always something out there that can be eradicated. For the New Atheists, it’s the irrational religious hordes. I mean, Sam Harris, at the end of his first book, asks us to consider a nuclear first strike on the Arab world. Both Hitchens and Harris defend the use of torture. Of course, they’re great supporters of preemptive war, and I don’t think this is accidental that their political agendas coalesce completely with the Christian right.”

-Chris Hedges, author of I Don’t Believe in Atheists, interview on Salon.com (via the existence machine)

“We think of modernity as an idea in the social sciences, when actually it is the last hiding place of ‘morality’. Believers in modernity are convinced that - natural disasters aside - history is on the side of Enlightenment values. After all, that is what being modern means, is it not?

In fact, there are many ways of being modern, and many of failing to be. It is not for nothing that a number of Expressionists were amongst Nazism’s earliest supporters, or that Oswald Mosley gave press interviews seated behind a black steel Futurist desk. The Nazis were committed to a revolutionary transformation of European life. For them, becoming modern meant racial conquest and genocide. Any society that uses systematically uses science and technology to achieve its goals is modern. Death camps are as modern as laser surgery.

A feature of the idea of modernity is that the future of mankind is always taken to be secular. Nothing in history has ever supported this strange notion. Secularization has occured in a few European countries…There is no sign of it in the United States. Among Islamic countries, only Turkey possesses a well-entrenched secular state; in most others fundamentalism is on the rise…In China and Japan, where the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic idea of religion has never been accepted, secularism is practically meaningless.

Theories of modernization are cod-scientific projections of Enlightenment values. They tell us nothing about the future. But they do tell us about the present. They show the lingering power of the Christian faith that history is a moral drama, a tale of progress or redemption, in which - despite everything we know of it - morality rules the world.”

- from John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Whenever Muslim society has felt safe it has felt able to be open, and the image Islam presents of itself at such times is nothing like the caricatures of today. I don’t claim that the older image is a more accurate reflection of the original spirit of Islam; merely that Islam, like any other religion or doctrine, always bears the marks of time and place. Societies that are sure of themselves are mirrored by a religion that is confident, serene and open; uncertain societies are reflected in a religion that is hypersensitive, sanctimonious and aloof. Dynamic societies have a dynamic Islam, one that is innovative and creative; sluggish societies have a sluggish Islam, one that resists change.

But let us leave for the moment such contrasts between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ religion - they are bound to be simplistic - and concentrate on something more precise. When I refer to the influence of societies on religions I am thinking for example of the fact that when Muslims in the Third World attack the West, it is not only because they are Muslim and the West Christian, but because they are poor, downtrodden and derided, while the West is rich and powerful. I say ‘also’ but I think ‘above all’. For when I look at the militant Islamic movements of today I can easily detect, both in their words and methods, the Third World theories that became popular in the 1960’s; I certainly haven’t been able to find any obvious precedent in the history of Islam itself. Such movements are a product of our times, with all its tensions, distortions, stratagems and despairs.

…What I am saying now is that while I can see quite clearly how such movements are the product of our troubled times, I cannot see how they could be the product of Islamic history. Watching Ayatollah Khomeini, surrounded by his Revolutionary Guards, asking his people to rely on their own strength, denouncing the ‘Great Satan’ and vowing to remove all traces of Western culture, I couldn’t help thinking of the elderly Mao Tse-Tung of the Cultural Revolution surrounded by his Red Guards, denouncing the ‘great paper tiger’ and vowing to remove all traces of capitalist culture. I wouldn’t say the two cases were identical, but I do see many similarities between them, whereas I don’t see anybody in the history of Islam who reminds me of Khomeini. Nor, however carefully I look into the history of the Muslim world, do I find any mention of the setting up of an ‘Islamic republic; or the coming of an ‘Islamic revolution’.

- from Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong

Somnambulant vacuum

2008-02-23T03:16:00Z

“The precariousness of short-term contracts and high staff turnover is now taken for granted everywhere, in supposedly worthwhile careers as well as in the temp bargain bin. There is a constant pressure, from the moment of getting a new job, both to keep hold of it and to start looking for another one, as well as actually doing whatever you are paid for; and this means constantly looking over one’s shoulder for the ‘team leader’ wielding the stick of performance targets and appraisals, while also looking ahead at the carrot of career fulfilment kept dangling forever just out of reach. Of course these extra duties leave very little room for other interests, as so much time outside work is spent searching and applying for more jobs (in writing this piece, for instance, I am aware that I am frittering away the ‘free’ time which I should be using ‘responsibly’ by searching for the next vacancy), and work -time recreation is reduced to furtive text messaging or sneaking onto the internet between spreadsheets. Such low-level rebellion has been programmed into the operating systems of working environments, inoculating the institutional network against any real threat: without their umbilical apparatus of mobile phones, iPods and websites, the workforce would surely be unable to function at all. It’s no wonder that, with people drifting off into their disparate myspaces, any atmosphere of camaraderie or collectivity in these transient zones has been replaced by a somnambulant vacuum. Meanwhile, the constant reconfiguring of internal policies, jargon and technology deters contemplation of any larger picture, including the context of the job and how worthwhile or damaging it really is. The scenery never stays still long enough to be able to orientate yourself. “

- an excellent piece from http://shykitten.livejournal.com/24691.html

I feel on the edge of such a situation, never entirely forced into the ’somnambulant vacuum’ of exhausted dejection and resignation. I have yet to work in a job where I am micromanaged, held to a level of efficiency that is almost inhuman (and certainly will never allow creative or intelligent, independent thought) and fired for showing the least bit of spirit. The waste of bleak, grey water, a sea of computer screens and sloughing eyelids, awaits; I’ve never been in debt, but I may end up there, and destitution and the uselessness of my HBA may bring me under. Unpleasant dystopia, in the most literal sense, because it exists, after all. The capitalist culture at the heart of this is not some passing fade, either; it is institutionalized, firstly, and made a part of ‘management culture.’ A recent article in Profit magazine, amongst several other cold-blooded pieces, argued that an employer should ‘hire slow, fire fast’, solidifying the situation what the post excerpted above made clear: we are to grovel and expend tremendous energy to find a job, but if we should deviate in any way, make a mistake, have an emergency or an injury, we are gone, out on a limb, a used husk to be cast away. Even the ludicrous seminars and help groups the unemployed must visit are ludicrous: how is imposing a ludicrous, jargon-laden way of approaching resumes and interviews anything more than a further way to demonstrate our servility?

A Lament for Canada, Part Infinite

2008-01-19T04:34:40Z

"The pundits were falling all over each other in praise of Barack Obama’s campaigning skills. I was especially struck by Tom Brokaw’s describing the Black candidate as “A thoroughbred who has broken away from the pack,” a perfect encapsulation of the idiotic horse race character of these elections.
Despite the intense rivalry between Obama and Hillary Clinton, they both are cut from the same mold, namely the Bill Clinton presidency
...Although it is not widely understood, Obama is pretty much committed to the neoclassical economics outlook of his home-town University of Chicago..."

- from Louis Proyect on Obama's Economic Advisors

"And the generally ignored story of this race so far is that in truth, dramatic ideological change among the Republicans is highly unlikely. Despite Bush's failures and the discrediting of conservative governance, there is every chance that the next Republican president, should the party's nominee prevail next year, will be just as conservative as Bush has been—perhaps even more so.

The party is still in the hands of three main interests: neoconservatives; theo-conservatives, i.e., the groups of the religious right; and radical anti-taxers, clustered around such organizations as the Club for Growth and Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. Each of these groups dominates party policy in its area of interest—the neocons in foreign policy, the theocons in social policy, and the anti-taxers on fiscal and regulatory issues. Each has led the Bush administration to undertake a high-profile failure: the theocons orchestrated the disastrous Terri Schiavo crusade, which put off many moder-ate Americans; the radical anti-taxers pushed for the failed Social Security privatization initiative; and the neocons, of course, wanted to invade Iraq.

Three failures, and there are more like them. And yet, so far as the internal dynamics of the Republican Party are concerned, they have been failures without serious consequence, because there are no strong countervailing Republican forces to present an opposite view or argue a different set of policies and principles."

- from They'd Rather be Right by Micheal Tomasky in the New York Review of Books

Both of these articles are worth a read, at least because they give a good idea about both the failure of a two-party democratic state where both parties are enormous machines run by a cabal of people that are, by and large, cut from a similar mode; they give a good perspective on American politics in the current primaries race, that will naturally affect Canada, and because they are far more honest in their reporting and interpretation of the realities of American politics and society than other news sources I've read, watched or listened to.

Not surprising they come from fringe interpreters.

I can never seem to find this kind of lucid, in-depth analysis and historical information about [politicians, parties and government about Canada in time for it to mean anything. I am so out of touch with what is happening in our provincial and federal legislatures.

I need to find more magazines, papers and commentators that have the intelligence and integrity to take a look at Canadian politics on a regular basis and show the history of elected officials, the ties of business and government, that discusses the acts and laws being passed right now.

Because the CBC and the mainstream corporate media won't do. When the CBC spends a week reporting on the tragic death of seven jocks and one day on the military ombudsman blasting the Conservatives for cutting funds to support de-mobilized soldiers, their families and the families of overseas troops, you know something is wrong, very wrong. I remember listening to the CBC during the Outremer by-election in Quebec, and their half hour special on it talked about how much this would test Stephen Dion, how much it was a failure of a non-entity, how well-known the NDP candidate was, and how this affect the Liberals during the next election; not a whisper about what either candidate stood for, what were their policies and appeals, and whether voters supported the NDP because they agreed with their election platform. Instead, a cult of personality around Dion, an obsession with image and appearance, the dismissal of NDP appeal as being solely caused by the Liberals, and a complete inability to analyse in any but the most superficial way.

I realize that image and personality are important in politics, but I wonder how much the tail is wagging the dog here, how much does the superficial reporting of the CBC and its corporate ilk shape politics by treating every election as a clash of personalities and imagery rather than as a clash of ideas, a chance to repeal a failed or corrupt government, ie. democracy. Superficial reporting can only breed superficiality in the politics and politicians, and in the voters. I know many people, just from talking with them at work, that hate hearing about politicians when they want to hear about policies and plans. When the most outspoken commentators are comedians and guests arguing for finding out what Obama really stands for instead of focusing just on his rhetorical skills, and by extension arguing for this in Canadian politics, then we have a problem.

That tosh with Mulroney is just the tip of the iceberg, and I suspect the Conservative government knows they could distract attention from their own record by allowing a disgruntled German white-collar criminal to rim out his former partner-in-crime (in taking bribes to favour the purchase of German equipment for the Canadian Army!). MY idea of what the Conservatives have been doing is fragmentary, because I rely on the sequential, ahistorical reporting of major media, but I know that their foreign policy has been excessively pro-Israel, pro-American, supportive of torture by Canadian allies (and by extension, our collaboration in it), staying the course in Afghanistan, staying the murderous course in Haiti, supportive of bombing Lebanon and cutting aid to Palestine (the new package is intended to train cops useful as our proxies against Hamas), and obstructionist toward tackling global climate change, while domestically continuing to deny our status as major, MAJOR polluters, and prevent any serious movement forward. From what I can tell, from fragmentary reporting, the Conservatives have widened and deepened NAFTA, including passing a law that would reduce taxes and tariffs on American acquisitions in Canada, while doing nothing to help consumers faced by purchasing inequality and producers hampered by a high dollar, except to utter platitudes and exhortations (despite the fact that the Federal Government has significant powers in this regard).

To do so would violate the ideology of the Party, which apparently in the case of Harper and his closest advisors, is inspired by Friedrich Hayek, who viewed any government controls on the economy as leading right to slavery...unless total untrammeled free-for-all capitalism could survive. This would explain why Harper sneered that Kyoto was a "socialist scheme" and why his government has resisted so much imposing taxes, and has removed them on business and the rich, supporting private health care at the expense of the public, and rewarding former lobbyists like our Defence Minister and Culture with high positions in the Cabinet. Harper is a good politician, no doubts there, he has controlled the nutter religious wing of the party very well. The other curious thing about most of the policies I've read about or tried to find out about is how often they were actually advanced or started by the Liberals under Martin and Chretien (afghanistan, haiti, cuts to taxes on the rich, privatisation).

So, in essence, does anyone know any good commentators, papers and magazines that would be able to tackle these subjects with a discerning and intelligent eye?

The Anti-Canon of Science Fiction, Part 2.

2008-01-11T03:53:53Z

In my last post, I discussed the formation of something very closely approaching the canonical lists of science fiction authors YOU MUST READ that assemble with the regularity of flies swarming to a melon, on
avenray's livejournal. It got me to thinking about Canons and what we consider essential for literature. There are obvious questions that come up: how do we form opinions about what is good and bad? How do we find out about authors, painters, musicians, etc? Are Canons and 'Best of' lists essential, or should we form our own opinions (which of course, are never fully our own)? Why care that the standard Anglo-American Canon of Science Fiction excludes most non-English speakers, with Stanislaw Lem almost always a huge exception, whereas most French, or Japanese, or Russian canons at least try and include English-speaking authors (Philip K. Dick is HUGE in France)?
     I would argue that it is important because it opens up vistas, gives us all experiences of other cultures, their ideas and approaches, their opinions and attitudes, because the view of the world from France or Japan can be exciting, thoughtful and ascetically pleasing. The national styles of Science Fiction, from France to Russia to Japan (we are, after all, mostly familiar with manga and anime science fiction) are immensely different and provide so much in terms of ideas, solutions, and pure thought candy.
    However, I would also argue that there are plenty of Anglo authors who write good but relatively unknown science fiction. So, that is why I am producing this short ANTI-CANON. Besides sounding cool, the ANTI-CANON is a list, hardly exhaustive and hardly a collection of MUST-READ books, that nonetheless includes some of the most influential unknowns, and some of the best of the obscure.   It is not heavy on later 20th century SF, that is not its point, nor will it be universal. It will suggest, merely, not lead. It will complement, like a dark shadow, the list of greats we all contributed too.
     My definition of science fiction is also broader then one might assume from the Canon list we assembled: rocket ships, space empires, hard science, aliens and the future are all well and good. But that is not always what science fiction is, which is why the term Speculative Fiction has really caught on as a better way to describe what these works are. No matter how much SF tries to make itself a prediction for the future, it nonetheless exists in the present, and mirrors the fear, anxieties, joys and dreams of the human race in the here and now, even if disguised by some giant space empire run by elitist technocrats or mirrorshades.
    I accept Joseph W. Campbell's definition of science fiction: 'Fiction is simply dreams written out. Science fiction consists of the hopes and fears (for some dreams are nightmares) of a technically based society.' That, therefore, is my starting point here.

Alfred Jarry - Best known for his Ubu plays, absurdist, insulting, heavy with swears, puns and nonsense, two science fiction novels distinguish Jarry to me as a very important part of the Anti-Canon, The Supermale, from 1902, and Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, pataphysician, published after his death. In the first, the supermale, one of the first appearances of the Superman in fiction, is a powerful cyborg human possessed of incredible stamina and power, which he uses to win bicycle races and have sex with woman. But ultimately his power bores him, and he is killed by scientists when they hook him up to a machine that would satisfy his lust...it falls in love with the supermale and strangles him. Its theme: what is love in the modern mechanical age? In the second novel, the hero is an detective who subscribes to the anti-philosophy of 'Pataphysics, which deals with "the laws which govern exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to this one". 'Pataphysics states that every event in the universe is accepted as an extraordinary event, and bills itself as the science of imaginary solutions. It reminds me of Van Vogt. Jarry also described the so-called Bachelor Machines, analyzing a phenomena of much latter science fiction: the Bachelor Machine is a scientific marvel, never fully explained, whose main purpose is to propel the plot, a la Wells' Time Machine. Important as influence on Dadaism, French literary culture as a whole and as inspiration for New Wave authors like J. G. Ballard.

Other French authors of note...and sadly, neither are available in English at all:, raising up the first problem...how much of what I read is available to us here in Canada..I'll avoid further selection like these two,

J.-H. Rosny the Elder, wrote the original novel Quest for Fire, upon which the movie was based, and wrote several strange, haunting novels in which alien life is posited, and this is long before the pulp jungle, as being fully alien, incomprehensible and strange only because humanity has nothing in common with it. Another World, 1895 is the strangest one, in which a narrator capable of seeing through dimensions perceives esoteric worlds beyond our own, where life occurs as it does here but in unknowing intersection with our own.

Andre Maurois wrote several science fiction satires in the early 20's, the only one I have read being Fragments d'un histoire generale, two stories in which humanity is lampooned thoroughly. In the first, world leaders lie about an impending alien invasion to unify the world, and build a weapon to attack the Moon, only to discover that it is inhabited. In the second, an alien scientist surveys the solar system and decides that Earth has no sentient life...a story idea mirrored decades later by Arthur C. Clarke in the short story Report on Planet Three.

Also note the thorough pages on Wikipedia about Fantastique and French science fiction.

Olaf Stapledon - Always forgotten it seems when considering truly epic science fiction, despite the fact that he basically invented whole conceits still used in science fiction, like symbiotic races, artificial planets, planetary federations, telepathy, forced human evolution and the attempt by sentient life to survive end of the universe itself. His First and Last Men (1928) is a history of the evolution of mankind from us, the First Men, our extinction, and the rise of Eighteen other human species, who eventually settle on Uranus and then evolve beyond humanity entirely. Starmaker (1930) is even broader in scope, where humanity's evolution only marks a few pages in the novel: it is a history of the evolution of sentience, from society to planet to species wide organization, and the quest to understand the intimations of something, the Star Maker, very much like God. Both Sirius and Odd John use the superman conceit to great effect: in Sirius, a dog, and in Odd John, an outcast, find themselves suddenly much smarter then the rest of humanity, and driven to depression over the respect and love they want. His novels are humane, intelligent, committed to a political and scientific solution to mankind's troubles (his ideal society in Starmaker is a socialistic commune united by a shared consciousness) , and written in simple but poetic language. His nonetheless bleak vision of mankind's destiny is an excellent companion to...

H. P. Lovecraft: Not much to say about this guy that hasn't been said: always left out of anthologies and lists of good science fiction, because he is horror, or something. Except his horrors are alien intelligences, beyond us, uncaring about us except as food, and generally ignorant of our petty world, a potent evocation of themes explored by Lem and Stapledon as well. As Houellebecq argues in his critical study H. P. Lovecraft, Against the World, Against Life, Lovecraft's science fiction saw that "the human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure 'Victorian fictions'. Only egotism exists." At the Mountain of Madness is a decent start to his work, which is erratic, often hokey but at its best evocative of deep unease and nihilism; the new edition has a bitching intro by China Mieville.

Yevgeny Zamyatin: Though he wrote only one overtly science fictional novel, the excellent We, it was enough to inspire the 20th century's obsession with the dystopia. Huxley, Orwell, Rand, they all read this book and used its ideas, either deliberately or subconsciously, in their own dystopian visions, and usually less well. We (1927) is not so much an attack on the Soviet Union, as Zamyatin was himself a Bolshevik, but instead an assault on the mechanization of society and the dominance of rational machinery and its boring human bureaucrats over the human soul and individual. It's imagined future state is ruled by time tables, formulas, and rigid plans, where sex itself is something booked for an hour.The book is not only chilling, but well-written, with wonderful metaphors and a deep human sympathy for his less then perfect characters. Easily my favourite author on this list...maybe matched by Jarry.

Speaking of Russians....Kim Stanley Robinson did his reading of Russian science fiction, because apparently one of the characters in the Mars Trilogy is named after two different Russian sci-fi writers. The first is Alexei Tolstoy, a relative of Count Tolstoy who wrote one of the first Soviet pulps, Aelita, about revolutionaries who go to Mars to forment a rebellion against the despotic king. Interesting, but not essential. More interesting are the Strugatsky Brothers, Boris and Arkady, who have often been compared to Clarke or Asimov, and were themselves contemporaries of Stanislaw Lem. Their fiction, in many ways is superior to Lem's, in the sense that their prose is more complicated and lyrical and their ideas much more about challenging about the organization and destiny of the human race. Their ouevre is enormous, most of it is not available in English, though I do have a copy of The Second Invasion from Mars, a 1968 novel in which the Martians from Wells' book return as businessmen and claim that they only wanted human gastric juices, and after striking a deal with humanity, proceed to cure poverty and disease to ensure a more pure supply of the gastric juice, therefore conquering Earth without firing a single shot. I also have read The Final Circle of Paradise, from 1965, which shares some similarities with Dick's work: the protagonist is an agent infiltrating a country where the population uses "Slug", a device that generates an artificial reality significantly more intense than normal reality, to the point where there is virtually no comparison between our reality and that of the "slug." People become addicted to it and spend increasing amounts of time unconscious in their bathtubs until it kills them by nervous exhaustion or brain hemorrhages. It's ending is not happy, but it is very well done. Other novels deal with the morality of interfering with other cultures, when our own is imperfect, and the temptations of technological power over less advances species.

Karel Capek - The preeminent Czech science fiction author, his two most famous works are the play Rossum's Universal Robots, or R.U.R. (1920) and the novel War With the Newts (1936). Both are similar in that they detail the subjection and exploitation of a non-human work force until it rises in bloody revolution and kills humanity, a fateful prophecy perhaps from Capek's view. R.U.R. gave us the word robot, from the Czech for worker, and its basic outline and plot have dominated the treatment of robots in SF until Asimov and continue to inform all sorts of thematic elements, about servility, workers, exploitation and the morality of creating a slave labour force of machines, even today.   Of note, the robots in R. U. R. are more like clones then robots. The Czechs have been pretty prolific at science fiction: for instance, two Czech expatriates, Stefan Wul and Roland Torpor, gave us the plot and imagery of the fantastic SF film, La Planete Sauvage, or Fantastic Planet (1973).

Jorge Luis Borges: I've written about him before, and tirelessly tell everyone why he is so great...so I'm not going to say much. His 1941 collection Ficciones is basically the best collection of short stories I have ever read: they are not science fiction, per se, just about fictional libraries, reviews of imagined books, and my favourite, the first story of Ficciones, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', a short story in which an aberrant version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica contains an entry to a fictional country called Uqbar, whose legends refer to Tlon. And then the narrator, Borges himself, find an encyclopaedia of Tlon itself, a world where thought is more potent then reality, where objects are made by desire alone, and then, as people discover Tlon, and desire it, it too becomes real.   Here is a copy available online: http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/Borges_-_Tlon,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius.html

Several other Argentinian authors, amongst them Adolfo Bioy Casares' The Invention of Morel, about a scientist who builds a machine capable of crafting illusions with something close to souls, and Julio Cortezar, whose own works mash science fiction, pulp and experimental literature.

The Three Already Mentioned:

Stanislaw Lem:   Again, not much to comment on here. His alien contact stories are some of the best I have ever read, especially, and naturally, Solaris.

Ursula K. Le Guin: I'm glad she got on the list, because her science fiction work, especially the two 'biggies', the Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, deal with very human issues in a non-intrustive science fictional way, and really push boundaries in their willingness and bravery to discuss issues rarely touched in science fiction...at least with such direct honesty. I like The Dispossessed more then the former, probably because The Dispossessed is a sombre and well-paced, not to mention well-written, exploration of the possibilities of something genuinely approaching a Utopia. The novel is subtitled An Ambigious Utopia precisely because the barren moon Annares, where anarchy rules, is not perfect, but is instead ruled by custom and tradition that can be stifling and unfair, despite the equality and relative freedom of the citizen; it is a world of poverty, which forces everyone to a degree of comradery not seen on the sister planet of Urras, where two rival superpowers are locked in ideological warfare. By exploring the ambiguity of a genuine solution to capitalism, Ursula K. Le Guin continued the fine strand of SF that tried to view in the imagination, emancipation.

Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is probably his best, but I really enjoyed Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, the Man in the High Castle and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Like Van Vogt, Philip K. Dick unconsciously continued the traditions of Alfred Jarry and the French science fiction authors who viewed the technological progress and rational mechanization of the age with distrust, and answered with absurdity, or in Dick's case, with deep unease and paranoia.

James Tiptree Jr. - Pen name of Alice Sheldon, succeeded in simultaneously proving that women could write science fiction, while also proving that they could write 'masculine' science fiction sometimes better then their male counterparts. Her work made Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg think she could only be a man, and her own fiction, almost entirely short stories, deals with issues like that, though, naturally, not exclusively, as is evidenced by one of my favourites, 'The Last Flight of Doctor Ain', about the extermination of the human race to prevent ecological disaster. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is the easiest omnibus of her fiction to find.

Anna Kavan - A contemporary of J. G. Ballard and very much lauded by the New Wave SF authors of the sixties and seventies, Anna Kavan strictly speaking only wrote two novels that are science fiction...like most of the people on this list. She is an odd one, most of her life was living an ever increasing fiction, her name is actually a nom de pleume taken from one of her novels. Her style was heavily experimental, and her major novel Ice (1967) was also her last. Like Ballard, Kavan was fascinated by disaster and destruction, and the exploration of society and the individual's psychology when faced by disaster. Ice takes place during the end of the world, as glaciers strangle our civilization. As chaos comes and the end grows nearer, the novels grow increasingly fragmented and abstract, as if the dissolution of society also dissolves the meaning of the written word. One of the few cases of science fiction where the structure and language of the novel is the point.

Other women writing science fiction that should be on the list but aren't because they are far too new but really good: Liz Williams, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Storm Constantine, Elizabeth Hand, Mary Gentle and Angela Carter (though the last two write, more strictly speaking fantasy, they blend genres and such like with impunity).

J. G. Ballard - Most of us have heard of Ballard, even if we don't realize it: the movies Empire of the Sun and Crash (the Croneberg film) are based on novels by Ballard, and his influence extends even into the music scene, as his work influenced Joy Division and John Foxx, amongst many, many others. Ballard was the leader of the New Wave movement in 1960's Britain, though his influence extends far beyond that, as I've already stated: his ambitious statement that only 'inner space remains as the last place of science fiction' remains largely unfulfilled, as aliens and outer space is still much more interesting. The book to read is The Atrocity Exhibition (1971) which, from the very start, when the narrator, variously known as Travis, Traven, T, etc. encounters the fighter pilot "whose faces planes did not seem intersect", the reader is assaulted by strange structure, odd stories, like Christ being reborn on a B-42 bomber, or "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagen' or 'Notes Toward A Mental Breakdown', a story consisting solely of one sentence and a footnote to every word...and classic Ballardian imagery.   Most of the stories are written as clinical examinations or diagnoses, but it is never clear who or what is being diagnosed, though I would imagine the twentieth century and modern civilization; the psychic landscape of our future and past is mapped out on Bikini Atoll, Hiroshima and celebrity death.

Other New Wave authors worth checking up on are Micheal Moorcock, specially the Jerry Cornelius quintet, an adventure of parallel universes, Brian Aldiss, especially Report on Probability A, and Thomas Disch, whose 334 is one of the most convincing dystopias of modern America I have ever read.

Japanese Science Fiction
The language barrier is what largely prevents all of us from reading SF in other languages, but it is worst with the massive corpus of Japanese science fiction, mainly because it has been mainly ridiculed (look at what it is most famous for exporting: Godzilla and Pokemon) but also because it is difficult to translate and rarely receives much attention in the West. Which is unfortunate, because Japan probably produces more science fiction then any other country in the world, and some of it is very, very good, but largely unknown. What distinguishes Japanese science fiction is both its willingness to go that extra distance in terms of thinking out the end result of its ideas, and the sheer variety of media, where art, imagery, film and television have been dominated by Science Fiction at least since the 60's, as compared to North America, where it is still hugely a laughing stock in movies and television. Manga and anime are what most of think of when we think of Japanese science fiction, and with good reason, I would argue that Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, which predates Neuromancerand yet contains many concepts considered essential to cyberpunk, and Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (probably the best 'it is so far in the future that it is old school genre of post-apocalyptics) not to mention the serious SF manga of Osamu Tezuka are some of the best graphic novels, and novels, really, period. Japanese prose and print science fiction is much, much harder to come by, so I looked forward to the anthology from The University of Minnesota Press, Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime. Science fiction has also been influential on 'mainstream' Japanese fiction, with Nobel-prize winning author Kobo Abe writing several novels, including Ark Sakura and Man Without A Face with overtly science fiction concepts, and Haruki Murakami, whose novels mix SF elements with surrealism and American pop culture.

- - - -
And thus concludes my far too long ANTI-CANON of Science Fiction Literature. It is not complete, it is not exhaustive, it doesn't even start to remedy the problems I pointed out and am helpless to cure...but it was fun to write, and hopefully provides some idea of the 'other' great novels of the science fiction genre out there.

Also, this list I enjoyed: fifty science fiction and fantasy works that socialists should read

The Anti-Canon of Science Fiction, Part 1.

2008-01-10T04:04:21Z

Many of us have by following the request for suggestions for science fiction books and authors by avenray. We've all had a good time overwhelming her with suggestions and touting our favourite authors. The list that has emerged so far has got me to thinking about canons, those authors deemed largely essential to anyone who considers themselves interested in literature, how they are formed, and how useful they can be. The list, as it has congealed, seems to include novels by the authors listed below, who have been mentioned several times and praised, often justly, to their sci-fi heavens. They mostly represent the Science Fiction Canon, as is often represented in, for instance, the Cambridge Guide to Science Fiction, or other such illustrious tomes, whether they consider themselves encyclopedia, best of lists or critical books by SF authors like Brian Aldiss' Trillion Year Spree. Here is that list, as far as I can tell (I've left my own suggestions out for the moment, because they were, well, idiosyncratic to say the least):

Aldous Huxley
Robert Heinlein
Kim Stanley Robinson
Stanislaw Lem
Neal Stephenson
William Gibson
Arthur C. Clarke
Isaac Asimov
Philip K. Dick
Ursula K. Le Guin
John Wyndham
Octavia Butler

    There were some other votes for A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, and Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes, and Margaret Atwood got in there, though strictly speaking she doesn't like to be considered a science fiction author, so I'll leave her out. Octavia Butler has not been received as Canon until recently; same goes for Samuel Delany, one of the beardiest, most tattoed, old homosexual black science fiction writers out there; they both end up seeming like the token black tacked on at the end....as I have done here. Oops. I'm not accusing the SF community of being racist, because, well, Neal Stephenson usually doesn't make the Canon lists either, but generally, they are often discussed within the context of race, gender or sexuality, rather then as SF authors in their own (which is partly a result of what they write about, I know!)
       Quibbles aside, that leaves a pretty solid list of the best SF writers we could all come up with, and it's a pretty damn good list, we all agree. These authors, except for maybe Butler, Robinson and possibly Lem, have been pretty damned influential; they are names we associate almost automatically with science fiction. The ideas postulated in their works are often still be grappled with today, especially in Asimov's and Heinlein's case (Asimov for robots, Heinlein for politics) Gibson defined a whole genre. Le Guin produced some of the most intellectual works of their kind, and Dick and Clarke, well, we got Blade Runner from Dick, and 2001 from Clarke; for those movies alone, their names are secure.
        Every canon has its detractors, and I would argue, from personal taste that Heinlein and Asimov are overrated in the sense that their shadow tends to eclipse other, less famous authors, and because their Canon status as A BIG DEAL has made it harder, in many cases, to question the weakness, as literature, or as speculative work about human society, of their body of works. I think Gibson was a one note wonder, essentially, and that Wyndham also tended to write very similar novels, often not very impressively.   Clarke started writing sequels, and everything went down hill thereafter, but his classic novels (Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama) are still excellent. Huxley lectures in his novels, and we all know...ahem...how boring lectures can be in fiction.
        The point remains, however, that Heinlein and Asimov deserve to be on the list (much, much less certain about Wyndham). I do, however, have two points to make about this list: that it is made up of authors from the last fifty or sixty years, and that almost all of them are white, male English-speaking and generally American or British in some way. There is one non-British European, two women, one of whom is black. Several major authors didn't make it, specifically Jules Vernes and H. G. Wells, to whom most of the writers on this list owe a great debt, as they are generally writing in response to these two authors initial works. The inclusion of Jules Verne, often considered the first major science fiction writer, is important, because he is usually the token European on any list of essential science fiction, or in a history of science fiction.
        As I was discussing with gdh there is a deep chauvinism in much established science fiction criticism, from the Cambridge History of Science Fiction down to illustrated encyclopaedia's, pop histories and 'best of' lists that pop up on the internet. The assumption hasn't changed since the days of Kingsley Amis and his study of science fiction, New Maps of Hell, repeated, for instance, in Brian Aldiss' Trillion Year Spree, that science fiction is essentially an American and British enterprise, with a few European forefathers, true, but mostly, especially after 1950, something that only the English-speaking world could produce or produce the best, the Germans and Japanese being just pale imitators. The popularity of manga and anime has broken some of this cultural monopoly, but it still remains, the idea that the science fiction literature of the English-speaking world is the most essential, the best written, fully representative of the world at large. Of course it isn't, but this chauvinism, or perhaps ignorance, runs very deep, and extends to fiction of all sorts: the Random House/Modern Library list of the best books of the century includes NO book that wasn't composed in English, although a few books by non-Britons, Canadians, Australians or Americans found there way on (http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100rivallist.html)
    That, my friends, is not a good library.
    My next post will include a list that I will explain further as we go,
    One final proviso: THIS POST IS NOT MEANT AS AN INSULT OR ATTACK ON ANY OF MY FRIENDS TASTES! I treasure the fact that I have so many friends who are passionate about science fiction, who love it, who read it, who discuss it, and it isn't somehow a deep fault of yours that you, say, love Heilein, Asimov or anyone else on the Canon list above.   As I said, they are all good authors....but I feel restless with such a list. All Canons tend to make me feel a little stifled, and I itch to suggest, to goad, to guide, whoever is interested toward books and authors that might be interesting to them! Also, I like making lists like this.

The Year in Review, Part 2...or I read One Hundred and One Books in 2007 !?!?

2008-01-08T02:39:58Z

Books, I love 'em. That much is clear. So how was 2007 in books? I don't know; I don't have a list for you of that, unlike the Globe and Mail, the Village Voice, the CBC and Amazon.ca all like to do: I don’t have any. The idea off listing of the best books of this last year is as ludicrous as trying to do the same for music, or at least, in my case it is ludicrous. There could very well be plenty of good books out there that got missed, written in other languages, released by small presses, or subjective upon taste, and yet it leaves the problem of having no time to read that many NEW books on top of the millions, yes, millions of books written over the last, say, even quarter century. There is the problem of rushed reading and journalistic writing, so that a mediocre book on second reading is actually seen as being brilliant on a first, deadlined rush

   There are few critics I really trust anymore on new fiction: John Clute on science fiction, the reviwers in the London Review of Books for almost anything. The year of 2007 in books has been rather boring, then, though there are some good books out there, some good ones on Blackwater or consumer waste or food networks, worth reading. I read three books from 2007 this year: Why God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, Infidel by Ayaan Ali Hirsi and a book about the Roman Empire and plague by William Rosen. I wasn’t impressed by any of them, for reasons I’ve already stated at great length. Only one book on many critics list has interested me, a reprint of the anarchist editor Felix Feneon’s strange little epigrams, Novels in Three Lines. Other then that, nothing,. That happened to me this year: one book, one book alone, re-appeared on every list. ONE BOOK.

    My reading was dominated by dead or living white English-speaking males. The majority of the fiction by single authors I read this year was dominated by two Britons, one a Scotsman the other a Londoner: Iain M. Banks and China Mieville, both of whom I have spoken about at length on this radio show...incidentally, I also read a lot of M. John Harrison, who I have also spoken about on this show. Most of the history I read was written in the English-speaking world, though interestingly enough, including big examples like Linda Colley’s Britons and C. V. Wedgewood’s opus The Thirty years War, they were written by women. I read numerous novels in translation, such as Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s 1927 satire Kappa and was told tirelessly to read more Haruki Murakami by Wil Rutledge. The other writer to dominate my interest was Jorge Luis Borges, whose collections of essays and short stories I read again and again and again, all unfortunately in translation. Some Germans in translation, Hesse and Kafka, and the 1668 war story and black comedy Simpliccisimus by Grimmelhausen, round off a list this year mostly dominated by science fiction or its literary antecedents.

    What would I change about last year in books, and thus what would I do this year in books?

    Well, I didn’t read a lot of books by women. That is a major problem. There are lots of woman out there writing excelently, I know, and I feel bad that my list has been dominated heavily by wealthy, middle-aged white writers. So, I plan on changing that in the new year: some writers I’m considering reading are Anna Kavan and Ann Quin, both relative unknowns but famed for their Dada-esque and abstract fictions that play upon real fears and dreams, as do the works of Angela Carter. Luckily history is being written more and more by women, who offer to the field something much more interesting then the old political, military and nationalist narratives of history.

        I haven’t read a lot of science books, which is a real shame, because I am very interested in the natural sciences, astronomy and zoology and animals, insects and quantum particles. I own many many books about these subjects, but I suspect that their foreign language, thick size and difficult maths is what is keeping me away from despite the fact that these subjects are important, the singularity is important, Steven Hawkings and black holes are important, quantum quarks and voids and hyperspace are interesting. So that is going to be a big priority in 2008.

    Philosophy was likewise neglected, and I suspect for the same reasons as the sciences: the books are thick, imposing, large, difficult vocabulary and concepts. I had been meaning to read or re-read several books of philosophy this year, including Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, In the Name of Identity: Killing and the need to belong by Amin Maalouf and Chuang Tzu’s complete works. Or even Das Kapital by ol' Karl Marx. No such luck.

I want to direct my reading more, and basically read according to a rough plan instead of just going at it willy-nilly. So, below, a list of the books I bought this year that I would most like to read!

               1)   The Supermale by Alfred Jarry
               2)   Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel
               3)   The Singularity is Near by Kurtzweil
               4)   Hyperspace by Michio Kaku
               5)   In search of the Quantum by Banesh Hoffman
               6)   Monster of God by David Quammen
               7)   Vicious: wolf and Man in America by Coleman
               8)   The Society of the Spectacle by Guy DeBord
               9)   The System of Objects by Jean Baudrillard
               10) History of Madness by Micheal Foucalt
               11) Absence of Myth by George Bataille
               12) Angel of Darkness by Eernesto Sabato
               13) Terrorism and Communism by Leon Trotsky
               14) several interrelated books on the Bolskeviks
               15) The Structures of Everday Life and Commerce and Society by Fernand Baudrel
               16) King Mob by Christopher Hibbert
               17) Absolute Destruction: The Practice of War in Imperial Germany by Isabel Hull
               18) The Aqquyunlu: Tribe, Confederation, Empire by John E. Woods
              19)     Naukur, Rajput, Sepoy: The Military Ethnography of Hindustan by Holff
        20) Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis
             21) City of Quartz by Mike Davis
         22) Archeologies of the Future: Science Fiction and the Desire Named Utopia by Frederic Jamieson
         23) Master and Margaritta by Mikhail Bulgakov
         24) The Complete Novels by George Orwell
         25) La Machine Infernale by Jean Cocteau
         26) Q, by Luther Blisset

And finally, the big list, the big deal, the total of all the books I read this year. I included books I had to read for school if I read them cover to cover and enjoyed them in some way or learned seriously from them; most of the school books are thus for my thesis. Some of these books, especially the ancient legends of Japan and China, were read in fragments and pieces: the Nihongi is easily the longest book I own by several hundred pages, clocking in at 1600...clearly I didn't read all of that in one go, or in a coherent fashion. I did not include the inumerable magazine, scholarly journal and blog articles that I read and from which I get much of my information and news about the world. That is a whole other list. Without further ado, after the break, the 101 books I read this year. Yes...it actually turned out to be a hundred books. the I forgot that i re-read Solaris I am shocked, just a little. Ahem

     1) Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century by Grail Marcus (1989)
     2)   Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks (1990)
     3)   Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History, edited by Euan Cameron (2004)
     4)   The Histories by Herodotus (5th century BC)
     5)   The Lurking Fear and Other Stories by H. P. Lovecraft (short stories) (1920's)
     6)   The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks (2004)
     7)   Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse (1927)
     8)   Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality by Ewen & Ewen (2006)
     9)   Bengal, the British bridgehead: Eastern India 1740-1828 by P. J. Marshall (1987)
     10) Quebec: The Revolutionary Age, 1763-1791 by Hilda Neatby (1963)
     11) Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf (1929)
     12) Discourse on Colonialism by Aime Cesaire (1953)
     13) The Sextants of Beijing by Cohen Waley (1999)
     14) The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach (2005)
     15) Shaka Zulu by E. A. Ritter (1974)
          16) Sun Yat-sen and the origins of the Chinese revolution by Harold Z. Schiffrin (1968)
     17) The Origins of the Chinese Revolution by Lucian Bianco (1971) (third reading)
     18) The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks (1984)
     19) The Confucian Transformation of Korea: A Study of Society and Ideology by Martina
     Deuchler (2004)
     20) Utopia by Thomas More (1516) (third reading)
     21) Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (collection of short stories) (1961)
     22) The Thirty Years War by C. V. Wedgewood (1938) (5th reading)
     23) The Unfortunate Traveller by Thomas Nashe (1594)
     24) The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America by P. J. Marshall (2005)
     25) Peasant, Lord and merchant: rural society in three Quebec parishes, 1740-1840 by Allan Greer (1985)
     26) Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500-c.1800 by Anthony Pagden (1998)
     27) The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels (1848) (third reading)
     28) selected letters, articles and essays by Karl Marx, The Portable Karl Marx, edited by Eugene Kamenka (1983)
     29) The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks (re-read)
     30) Rabelais and His World by Micheal Bakhtin (1965)
     31) Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now by Jan Wong (1996)
     32) Indian society and the making of the British Empire by C. A. Bayly (1987)
     33) The transition in Bengal, 1756-1775: a study of Seiyid Muhammad Reza Khan by Abdul Majed Khan (1969)
     34) The Ideological Origins of the British Empire by David Armitage (2000)
     35) Les Canadiens Aprés la Conquête 1759-1775 by Michel Brunet (1969)
     36) A view of the rise, progress and present state of the English government in Bengal;
     including a reply to the misrepresentations of Mr. Bolts, and other writers by Harry Verelst (1772)
     37) Karl Kautsky by Dick Geary (1987)
     38) Rosa Luxemburg: Ideas in Action by Paul Frolich (1972)
     39) Writings of V. I. Lenin: Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, The State and
     Revolution and What is to be Done? in the Essential Works of Lenin, edited by Henry M.
     Christman (1966)
     40) Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697. Translated by W. G.
     Aston. (Compiled in mid-8th century) (read only about a half century of entries from mid
     6th century)
     41) Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 by Linda Colley (1992)
     42) First to fourth reports of the Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Nature, State and
     Conditions of the East India Company, by the British House of Commons (1772-1773)
     43) Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of Canada, 1759-1791, Volume 1,
     edited by Adam Shortt and Arthur G. Doughty (1918)
     44) A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright (2004)
     45) The Bridge by Iain Banks (1986)
     46) Simplicius Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1668)
     47) Nations and Nationalism by Eric Hobsbawm (1991)
     48) Demian by Herman Hesse (1919) (re-read)
     49) Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (re-read)
     50) Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertold Brecht (1939) (based on Simplicissimus)
     51) The Tales of Ise (mid tenth century, read several fragments and many poems)
     52) Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski (1982)
     53) ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide by Sven Lindqvist (1996)
     54) Eden by Stanislaw Lem (1959)
     55) One Human Minute by Stanislaw Lem (1987)
     56) Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem (1986)
     57) The Classic of Mountains and Seas (first century, read only some ‘books’ of it)
     58) Duel in the Snows: The Younghusband Mission to Tibet by Charles Allen (2004)
     59) The Committed Men by M. John Harrison (1971)
     60) The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison (1975)
     61) The Bedbug and Selected Poetry by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1913-1929)
     62) Osman’s Dream: A History of the Ottoman Empire by Caroline Finkel (2005)
     63) The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks (collection of short stories) (1989)
     64) Why God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens (2007)
     65) The Four-Dimensional Nightmare by J. G. Ballard (collection of short stories) (1963)
     66) The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925)
     67) Japanese Ghosts and Demons by Stephen Addiss (1991)
     68) The Great Game: On Secret Service in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk (1989) (terrible book!)
     69) North of Athabaska: Slave Lake and Mackenzie River documents of the North West Company, 1800-1821, edited by Lloyd Keith (2003)
     70) The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, 1710-1780 by Jos L. Gommans (1995)
     71) The Dry Salvages by Caitlin Kiernan (2004)
     72) The Franco-Russian Alliance by Georges Michon (1925) (re-read)
     73) The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustave LeBon (1896) (re-read)
     74) The Moment of Eclipse by Brian Aldiss (collection of short stories) (1971)
     75) The King in Yellow and Other Stories by R. W. Chambers (collection of short stories) (1901)
     76) The Fall of the Safavi Dynasty and the Afghan Occupation of Persia by Lawrence Lockhart (1965)
     77) Justianian’s Flea: Plague, Empire and the Birth of Europe by William Rosen (2007)
     78) Arthur’s Britain by Leslie Alcock (1971)
     79) Trade and Dominion: European Overseas Empires in the 17th and 18th Centuries by J. H. Parry (1971)
     80) The Seventh Horse and Other Stories by Leonora Carrington (collection of short stories) (1977)
     81) Child of the River by Paul McAuley (1997)
     82) The Terminal Beach by J. G. Ballard (collection of short stories) (1964)
     83) Other Inquisitions: Essays 1937-1952 by Jorge Luis Borges (collection of essays) (1975)
     84) Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (third reading)
     85) The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges (1969) (re-read)
     86) Kappa by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1927)
     87) Infidel by Ayaan Ali Hirsi (2007)
     88) Perdido Street Station by China Mieville (2000)
     89) The Scar by China Mieville (2002)
     90) Iron Council by China Mieville (2004)
     91) Ten Days That Shook The World by John Reed (1918) (fourth reading)
     92) The Age of Empire, 1870-1914 by Eric Hobsbawm (1987)
     93) The Rise of the Working Class by Jurgen Kuczynski (1967)
     94) The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton (1909)
     95) The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad (1908) (re-read)
     96) The Ice Monkey and Other Stories by M. John Harrison (collection of short stories)
(1987)
     97) Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme (collection of short stories) (1981)
     98) Solaris by Stanislaw Lem (1961) (re-read)
     99) A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 by Alistair Horne (1977)
     100) The Birth of Our Power by Victor Serge (1930)
     101) The Foundations of Christianity by Karl Kautsky (1908)

23

2008-01-07T17:36:58Z

I have now listened to Blonde Redhead's song '23' from the album 23 exactly twenty three times. What does this mean? OMG I am stuck in that terrible Jim Carrey movie! But with ethereal Japanese singer Kazu Makino instead!!!

The Year in Review, Part 1.

2008-01-04T04:06:44Z

This is hardly a confessional, and as a review of the last year, I am not going to talk about all the things I lost, or things gained, the triumphs, tragedies, etc. and the ambitions I have for the new year, which are pretty much 'stay the course, you're doing fine' kind of thing. I did want to say a few words about what I was up to culturally this year; after all, I have a radio show where I talk about books and play music, so surely the music and books I delved into this year are interesting...right?

However, I don't really care for top ten albums of the year kind of things; the numbers seem arbitrary, the lists long, though they do provide a good starter for finding one or two albums out of the mix of totals; that seems the most practical way of approaching it, because five years on, at 25 albums a list for some magazines like Paste, that is far, far too many albums to own, appreciate and call 'essential'.

The non-shocker about the year in music was that there wasn't one for me, or at least, I didn't pay much attention to new music, so this list is right away not a Best of 2007; I'm not even going to try to compile anything like. I've grown a little...disenchanted...with indie music of late, which was the main genre that got me into music to begin with and now seems to have lost much of its appeal; I can't keep up with it, for one, and so much of the post-ironic, post-sarcastic, attitude really don't do it for me. I'm generalizing to a great extent, but generally, my musical tastes have been spent pursuing music of a different sort.

Not that newer music isn't bad; far from it. The Knife's Silent Shout, Metric's Old World Underground, Where Are You Know? and TV on the Radio's Young Liars Ep and their first album Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, to name but a few, are pretty much always being listened to here.

However, the music that has propelled me into actually buying their CD's and listening to constantly, have mostly come from the late 70's and early 80's: bands I have been listening to pretty heavily, newly discovered this year and moved into immediate rotation, include The Wipers, Josef K., The Au Pairs, Young Marble Giants, and especially Pere Ubu, all from the very early eighties, like 80-81. Specific albums from bands who only made one album and then disbanded or only made one good album, like The Pop Group's Y and This Heat's Deceit have been especially good and innovative (for 1979), if a little jarring, jangly and discordant. The biggest change has been an interest in the solo works of artists I was more aware of from their other, more prominent projects: Brian Eno's first three albums, especially Here Come the Warm Jets, John Foxx, who I was aware of from his early work with Ultravox, when that band was actually good, especially his debut solo album Metamatic, and finally, most happily of all, Peter Hammill, lead vocalist and writer for early 70's progressive rock band Van Der Graaf Generator, whose solo albums, especially the cool, quiet and sinister Chameleon in the Shadow of the Night, the bombastic and aggressive In Camera and the proto-punk Nadir's Big Chance (a favourite of John Lydon from the Sex Pistols and PiL) have been very enjoyable artistically and musically.

So, then, what are my albums of 2007> In no order:

The Arcade Fire, Neon Bible
LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver
Bat for Lashes, Fur and Gold
Blond Redhead, 23
Fiery Furnaces, Widow City (more important not because it is amazing, per se, but because it has restored my faith in that duo after Rehearsing My Choir, which even for me was unlistenable)

And now some videos for fun:

John Foxx, 'Underpass' from Metamatic (1980)

The Pop Group, 'She is Beyond Good and Evil' from Y (1979)

Are Friends Electric?

2007-12-07T03:34:04Z

I heard Gary Numan on Magic 99.9, the station the whole family can enjoy they say; a song from the album 'Replica'. The End Times are nigh.

Delectable Delights Lay Beyond the Veil

2007-12-06T05:02:30Z

A Christmas present earlier for avenray who will undoubtedly enjoy its unique qualities as old erotic photographs of women and strange things!

Who would have assumed they would be into giant snails?

Or skellingtons?

"Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature"

2007-11-15T05:30:08Z

    My relationship to fantasy literature is...uncomfortable. I used to read a lot of it; the first novel I read was The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and I was a fierce devotee of those novels for a very long time, naturally so insular as to have no other reference point of literature but other fantasy; I used to read Robert Jordan a great deal, owned all the Wheel of Time novels and clutched to them for much longer then I expected too. I loved fantasy, and specifically, I loved the so-called High Fantasy (though what Low fantasy was is never mentioned, and I suspect that I never would have thought to analyse this dialectic, it wouldn't paint a good view of the kind of fantasy I read now). I fancied myself some day writing a fantasy novel series about brave warriors, decrepit empires, dragons and demons, intricate magic and stirring battles, ignoring the fact that I didn't know how to write and my literary influences were hardly the height of literary skill.
    Which is perhaps why the two articles I'm putting up here hit me so fiercely, because they tear apart the foundations of my adolescent fantasies and laying bare just how shallow my aspirations were. I wasted my time drawing maps and creating cultures and swords and such without realizing that it was mostly a dead end. I'm not sure if I realized that before I read these articles, though I am aware at 20, before I had heard of China Mieville or M. John Harrison, that my fantasy novels and fantasy days are over. I had a backlash period, when I espoused science fiction as the key, a much more serious genre that had moved beyond the shallow stereotypes of its 'golden age' in the 1950's, and indeed, that still holds true in the commercial sense; the dominant authors in SF today, commercially and critically, are people like Iain M. Banks and Alistair Reynolds: intelligent, inventive, stylists with figurative language, mixing literary territory more traditionally associated with 'high' literature in with space opera and hard science fiction. Then, and surely this has much to with Mieville and Harrison, and the discovery of Borges and Stapledon and Le Guin and Wolfe and Cabell as well, the realization that fantasy, as a literary and metaphorical vehicle, has tremendous power, to transgress, imagine, shock, brood and discourse on themes as big as any handled by writers writing in what is considered mainstream or 'literary' literature. My final thoughts on this are best summarized by Gene Wolfe: "All fiction is fantasy. Some authors are just more honest about it."
    I include these two pieces by Mieville and Harrison because they provide a needed broadside, one first sounded by Micheal Moorcock decades ago, against the staleness of commercial mainstream fantasy, and an appeal towards readers pursuing fiction with more rigour and originality then the works of Eddings, Jordan, Brooks, Rowling, Goodkind, Williams and Feist. Perhaps you do not agree with what they have to say; fine, but tough, because it is to me required reading of a sort, essential because it is unpleasant, disconcerting and potent.

Mieville first:

"When people dis fantasy - mainstream readers and SF readers alike - they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien’s innumerable heirs. Call it ‘epic’, or ‘high’, or ‘genre’ fantasy, this is what fantasy has come to mean. Which is misleading as well as unfortunate.

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?"
From http://www.arcanology.com/2003/10/29/go-china/
And Harrison next:

"The commercial fantasy that has replaced them is often based on a mistaken attempt to literalise someone else’s metaphor, or realise someone else’s rhetorical imagery. For instance, the moment you begin to ask (or rather to answer) questions like, “Yes, but what did Sauron look like?”; or, “Just how might an Orc regiment organise itself?”; the moment you concern yourself with the economic geography of pseudo-feudal societies, with the real way to use swords, with the politics of courts, you have diluted the poetic power of Tolkien’s images. You have brought them under control. You have tamed, colonised and put your own cultural mark on them.

Literalisation is important to both writers and readers of commercial fantasy. The apparent depth of the great fantasy inscapes—their appearance of being a whole world–is exhilarating: but that very depth creates anxiety. The revisionist wants to learn to operate in the inscape: this relieves anxiety and reasserts a sense of control over “Tolkien’s World.”

Given this, another trajectory (reflecting, of course, another invitation to consume) immediately presents itself: the relationship between fantasy and games—medieval re-enactment societies, role-play, and computer games. Games are centred on control. “Re-enactment” is essentially revision, which is essentially reassertion of control, or domestication. (The “defusing sequels” produced by Hollywood have the same effect: as in Aliens, in which the original insuperable threat is diminished, the paranoid inscape colonised. Life with the alien is difficult, but—thanks to our nukes and our angry motherhood no longer so impossible as it seemed.)"
From: http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/viriconium/

cain_devera @ 2007-11-01T20:17:00

2007-11-02T02:03:18Z

What I have on my reading shelf right about now, books read, books being read, books being thumbed through, books to savour. I've been into fantasy a lot more of late, as you can tell, (another post on that) and truly, truly recommend Mieville with the highest praise, for one, and Ballard as well; Chambers can be skipped, it is pretty bad:

The Scar, China Mieville
Child of the River, Paul McAuley
The Gormenghast Novels: Titus Groan.Gormenghast.Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake
Pavane by Keith Roberts
The King in Yellow by R. W. Chambers
The Second Invasion from Mars by the Strugatsky Brothers
The Final Circle of Paradise by the Strugatsky Brothers
The Atrocity Exhibition by J. G. Ballard
Imajica by Clive Barker
Dada & Surrealism, by Dawn Ades (just a warm up for my massive art book tome, Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Paris, etc.)
The Graphic Art of Odillon Redon
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels
A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright
The Age of Empire, by Eric G. Hobsbawm
The Muqaddimah or An Introduction to History by Ibn Khaldun
The Fall of the Safavi Dynasty and the Afghan Occupation of Persia, by Laurence Lockhart
The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, 1710-1780 by Jos L. Gommans

And albums on my MP3 playlist, as I stubbornly refuse to listen to single songs at random from these bands. Not bad at all, though fairly eighties heavy, only two new bands and two new albums, though most of these bands produced stuff lately, notably Pere Ubu, still chugging away good as ever, and King Crimson, not so good:

Public Image Limited, Metal Box
Public Image Limited, Flowers of Romance
Cabaret Voltaire, Red Mecca
John Foxx, Metamatic
Pere Ubu, Terminal Tower
The Pop Group, Y
New Order, Movement
New Order, Substance
Scanners, Violence is Golden
This Heat, Deceit
KIng Crimson, Discipline
Bat for Lashes, Fur and Gold

The Genocidal Imagination of the Atheist Liberal?

2007-10-18T05:51:07Z

I left a question mark before this journal for a reason. Such a title is likely to cause a stir, especially because most of my friends might describe themselves as liberals and atheists. I don't mean to insult you, but I must nonetheless point out these articles. Judge for yourselves, please because my judgment has already been made and is obvious to anyone who knows me.

To me, this is a trend that is disturbing but is not unknown historically, those who call themselves enlightened, rational, intelligent human beings agreeing with state violence, conquest, the terror of bombardment and the firing squad in the name of civilization: the Fabians in Britain, American consensus about 'Red Indians,' Hispanics and Asians (from Chinatowns to Vietnam) throughout history, the ambivalence of French liberals and communists toward the Algerian War of Independence, and on and on. The War on Terror has created a certain climate in which the expressions of violence toward the unknown or known Barbarics and the language of massacre once considered to have been consigned to the domain of monsters, Stalinists, Nazis and the nihilists of the Khmer Rouge seems to be reemerging as topic of legitimate discussion.

1)
Three excerpts follow, the first a report from a blog I enjoy reading, Pharyngula, whose author recently attended a certain Freedom from Religion Convention attended by one Christopher Hitchens.

Now, I have made no secret of my dislike of Hitchens and his bellicose pronouncements, his puritanical atheism, his arrogance, his occasionally stupendous bombast and hypocrisy, for instance, in castigating Nelson Mandela for a lack of 'moral courage,' in an article in Slate several years ago, because Mandela opposed war against Iraq, (Hitchens has moral courage, of course, because he writes about blowjobs and why women aren't funny in Vanity Fair). He generally seems to act and write as if he knows everything, despite a sometimes poor grasp of facts, lack of citations, poor memory toward his own prior stances and his Marxism and evasive argumentiveness best demonstrated in his polemic A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq. He is also committed to freedom of speech, to rational argument, to art, culture and intellect, and I admire some of his articles, including my favourite, "The Chorus and Cassandra" in defense of Noam Chomsky from several decades ago, which makes him all the more frustrating. Now, I am heavily biased, obviously, so that is why I chose an excerpt from someone who is a supporter of Hitchens and agrees (mostly) with his stance on religion and liberalism:

        "Then it was Hitchens at his most bellicose. He told us what the most serious threat to the West was (and you know this line already): it was Islam. Then he accused the audience of being soft on Islam, of being the kind of vague atheists who refuse to see the threat for what it was, a clash of civilizations, and of being too weak to do what was necessary, which was to spill blood to defeat the enemy. Along the way he told us who his choice for president was right now — Rudy Giuliani — and that Obama was a fool, Clinton was a pandering closet fundamentalist, and that he was less than thrilled about all the support among the FFRF for the Democratic party. We cannot afford to allow the Iranian theocracy to arm itself with nuclear weapons (something I entirely sympathize with), and that the only solution is to go in there with bombs and marines and blow it all up. The way to win the war is to kill so many Moslems that they begin to question whether they can bear the mounting casualties.

        It was simplistic us-vs.-them thinking at its worst, and the only solution he had to offer was death and destruction of the enemy.

        This was made even more clear in the Q and A. He was asked to consider the possibility that bombing and killing was only going to accomplish an increase in the number of people opposing us. Hitchens accused the questioner of being incredibly stupid (the question was not well-phrased, I'll agree, but it was clear what he meant), and said that it was obvious that every Moslem you kill means there is one less Moslem to fight you … which is only true if you assume that every Moslem already wants to kill Americans and is armed and willing to     do so. I think that what is obvious is that most Moslems are primarily interested in living a life of contentment with their families and their work, and that an America committed to slaughter is a tactic that will only convince more of them to join in opposition to us.

        Basically, what Hitchens was proposing is genocide. Or, at least, wholesale execution of the population of the Moslem world until they are sufficiently cowed and frightened and depleted that they are unable to resist us in any way, ever again."

The whole entry can be found at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/10/ffrf_recap.php#more

You could also search the above blog for 'Hitchens' and finds it as well. Again, Mr. Myers on Pharyngula is intelligent, scientific, rational, and someone I can disagree with on several points in his article. But he is therefore a more reliable commentator then I ever would be in a similar situation.

2) The second excerpt is from a lengthy and well-documented and best of all, well-argued article by Richard Seymour (of Lenin's Tomb)fame in Monthly Review Magazine from 2005. It is entitled "The Genocidal Imagination of Christopher Hitchens" and even if you disagree with the author's politics, his beliefs and arguments, and consider him biased, it still must be read, for the sake of argument at the very least. He cites Hitchens close to the beginning of his article saying:

"We can't live on the same planet as them and I'm glad because I don't want to. I don't want to breathe the same air as these psychopaths and murders [sic] and rapists and torturers and child abusers. It's them or me. I'm very happy about this because I know it will be them. It's a duty and a responsibility to defeat them. But it's also a pleasure. I don't regard it as a grim task at all."

The whole article can be found here: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/seymour261105.html.

3) Finally, an interview from Reason Magazine with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who had her close friend Theo Van Gogh stabbed to death several years ago by Muslim extremists, has a bad relationship with her fundamentalist parents and generally doesn't have a very high regard for Islam. She calls herself a liberal, an atheist and sometimes a humanist. She is frank, honest and potent in her writing; she is also good friends with such high visions and luminaries of humanity as Bush speech writer, coiner of "The Axis of Evil" David Frum and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton. In this interview she channels the same emotions, violent language and genocidal imaginings as Mr. Hitchens', or so I see. It is unpleasant and apocalyptic, even:

"Reason: Should we acknowledge that organized religion has sometimes sparked precisely the kinds of emancipation movements that could lift Islam into modern times? Slavery in the United States ended in part because of opposition by prominent church members and the communities they galvanized. The Polish Catholic Church helped defeat the Jaruzelski puppet regime. Do you think Islam could bring about similar social and political changes?

Hirsi Ali: Only if Islam is defeated. Because right now, the political side of Islam, the power-hungry expansionist side of Islam, has become superior to the Sufis and the Ismailis and the peace-seeking Muslims.

Reason: Don’t you mean defeating radical Islam?

Hirsi Ali: No. Islam, period. Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace.

Reason: We have to crush the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims under our boot? In concrete terms, what does that mean, “defeat Islam”?

Hirsi Ali: I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars. Islam can be defeated in many ways. For starters, you stop the spread of the ideology itself; at present, there are native Westerners converting to Islam, and they’re the most fanatical sometimes. There is infiltration of Islam in the schools and universities of the West. You stop that. You stop the symbol burning and the effigy burning, and you look them in the eye and flex your muscles and you say, “This is a warning. We won’t accept this anymore.” There comes a moment when you crush your enemy.

Reason: Militarily?

Hirsi Ali: In all forms, and if you don’t do that, then you have to live with the consequence of being crushed."

That full interview can be found at http://www.reason.com/news/printer/122457.html

That also spells the end of this post, overlong as it. I hope somebody will bother to read it. I know that I am not that erudite, and that this is basically a summary, but I hope in some way to provoke discussion and thought about the nature of the global situation in these days, especially with someone like Michael Ignatieff a major player in the federal Liberal Party here in Canada. Dark days ahead, I wonder...

There's No Chance For Survival

2007-10-14T03:15:58Z

If you haven't already watched this, do: it is pretty good.

Also, I should stop posting in the heat of the moment my political views. I always sound like more of an arrogant asshole that way.
Cheers!

The Election and MMP Elections

2007-10-13T02:23:29Z

A slight check for those who believe the voters on October 10 were stupid and didn't get it: Jolene's family, my family, my co-workers, fairly representative Ontarians, mostly lower and middle middle-class, some education, some intelligence, didn't understand the pamphlets, the website, etc. They did not understand, and when it was explained, they reacted poorly, and sometimes rightly: they cry "We will lose representation in the North." True. "People will be in office that weren't chosen by the voters." Also true. Ontario's excuse for MMP was pathetic and undemocratic, naive in the belief that somehow letting parties (notoriously prone to cronyism as it is) chose who will sit in Parliament to fill seats is a good idea. It was watered down from the original Citizen's Assembly proposition, including the requirement of at least 60 percent of the voters and 60 percent of the ridings (which is why BC failed to pass its own proportional representation); rather ironic, as in a first-past-the-post system, it would have passed in BC for sure (though not in Ontario). No party, even the Green's and NDP who stood the most to gain from a potential MMP victory, stood up and supported it during the election. Finally, the referendum had no guarantee that it would become law; it was entirely possible that the McGuinty government, who watered down the Citizen Assembly's first proposal, would have passed on it anyway. So don't y'all get pouty and start ranting about how stupid the voter's are. As the former federal head of the NDP, Ed Broadbent, said on CBC (I'm paraphrasing here): that 50% of the electorate didn't vote is the real problem and MMP might not have cured that.

Big Things

2007-08-01T02:40:36Z

Heyo. Long time no talk. Big things are occurring.

Once again I will be on LU Radio again! Huzzah. I believe I will call the show The Anatomy Lesson, for some reason. I seems either inspired or pretentious, both of which work for me.

Made some awesome books finds at the Furniture Recycle (more on that in a moment) in Fort William, including the complete novels of George Orwell and Voltaire and the complete plays of Jean Cocteau (!) Then, astonishingly, I found at Friends of the Library in Victoriaville four (!) hardcover Stanislaw Lem books, including two novels and two very humorous collections of short stories, for five dollars. Given Lem's status as the preeminent Polish science fiction author and as a giant of literature internationally, his books are exceedingly hard to find and most of even my sci-fi fans have never heard of him. So, doubly good.

Why was I at Furniture Recycle you ask (or not)? Well, that is the store my new landlord owns. Jolene and I found a place on Cumberland for 800$ a month, which sounds pricey until you realize the many, many perks: floor space easily triple that of 390 John Street hardwood floors, 12' foot ceilings, claw foot tub, two sinks, our own laundry, fully furnished kitchen and all inclusive utilities of every sort! Awesome (je souhaite)!

Finally, a quote to prove Lem's Worth:

"Humanity pumps 53.4 billion liters of blood per minute, but that red river is not surprising; it must flow to sustain life. At the same time, humanity's male organs eject forty-three tons of semen, and the point is that though each ejaculation is also an ordinary, physiological act, for the individual it is irregular, intimate, not overtly frequent, and even not necessary...and yet that white stream flows with the same constancy as the red river system. The irregularity disappears when the statistics take in the whole Earth, and that is what surprises. People sit down to tables set for dinner, look for refuse in dumps, pray in chapels, mosques and churches, fly in planes, ride in cars, sit in submarines carrying nuclear missiles, debate in parliaments; billions sleep, funeral processions walk through cemeteries, bombs explode, doctors bend over operating tables, thousands of professors simultaneously enter their classrooms, theatre curtains raise and drop, floods swallow fields and houses, wars are wages, bulldozers on battlefields push uniformed corpses into ditches; it thunders and lightnings, it is night, day, dawn, dusk; but no matter what happens that forty-three ton impregnating stream of sperm flows without stop, and the law of large numbers guarantees that it will be as constant as the sum of solar energy striking the Earth. There is something mechanical about this, inexorable, and animallike. How can one come to terms with an image of humanity copulating relentlessly through all the cataclysms that befall it, or it has brought upon itself?"

- from One Human Minute by Stanislaw Lem

cain_devera @ 2007-04-27T01:59:00

2007-04-27T06:04:09Z

Dissertation done. Got to look through two and a half century old documents. School done. Graduating. Moving out. Lots of reading. Needing job.

Checked out Youtube. There are some wicked cool videos of Genesis live back in the early 70's here and here. Also been checking out some New Order and The Knife videos lately, and very pleased with some live Joy Division, though my favorite live recording of Gang of Four has disappeared. Oh well. On to more important things.

While looking through a book I got today, "Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin", I found this interesting passage about World War I; does anything about it sound familiar?:

"The Western democracies had by this time convinced themselves, as embattled democracies tend to do, that the entire future of civilization depended on the outcome of the military struggle...there is, let me assure you, nothing in nature more egocentrical than the embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own war propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision of everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side, on the other hand, is the center of all virtue. The contest comes to be viewed as having a final apocalyptic quality. If we lose, all is lost; life will no longer be worth living; there will be nothing left to be salvaged. If we win, then everything will be possible; all problems will become soluble; the one great source of evil - our enemy - will have been crushed; the forces of good will then sweep forward unimpeded; all worthy aspirations will be satisfied."

- George F. Kennan, 1961.

In other news, Canada is responsible for knowingly abetting torture in Afghanistan, not just by Afghan officials, but by Americans (source), while the NDP has finally called for an end to our private little Vietnam. (source) The UN has accused the Iraqi puppet government of covering up the rise in civilian deaths caused by the American 'surge' in Baghdad, though wrongly blaming it on sectarian violence and failing to point the finger at that great big old elephant in the room, while an intrepid lawyer in Iraq finds evidence of renewed torture, spawned by that wonderful US-founded organization, the Special Police Commandos. Oh how the browner peoples of the world must yearn for our beneficial handiwork!!

cain_devera @ 2007-04-21T19:59:00

2007-04-22T00:09:31Z

"Feminism is the new spam mail, offering you the latest deals in lifestyle improvement, from the bedroom to the boardroom, from guilt-free fucking to the innocent hop-skip all the way to the shopping mall - I don't diet so it's ok! I'm not deluded! I can buy what I like!

Feminism TM is the perfect accompaniment to femme-capital TM: Politics, such as it isn't, belongs to the well-balanced individual (the happy shopper), sassiness is like, so where it's at (consumer confidence) and, most of all, one must never, ever admit to cracks in the facade (oh, you know, ideology). This foundation is flawless! And it lasts all night! Unlike men, titter, titter, etc. etc. Capitalism makes a better lover than any guy - it's full of shoes, and Sex in the City DVDs and gossip mags and, like, now we've proved that eating chocolate is more exciting than kissing....but didn't we know that all along, girls?...The world is ours for the taking...just let me finish this packet of Maltesers first..."

From Infinite Thought

Some Quotes

2007-03-08T07:29:44Z

"All this dire misery, therefore; all this of our poor workhouse workmen, of our Chartisms, Trade-strikes, Corn-Laws, Toryisms, and the general downbreak of laissez-faire in these days, - may we not regard it as a voice from the dumb bosom of nature, saying to us: Behold! Supply and demand is not the one Law of Nature; Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man, - how far from it. '"

- Thomas Carlyle

"The reigning economic system is founded on isolation; at the same time it is a circular process designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins technology, and technology isolates all in turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to televisions, also serve as weapons for that system as it strives to reinforce that isolation..."

- Guy DeBord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967

"... And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant...it is Nazism, yes, but ... before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of the Western civilization in its reddended waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack.

* * * *

What am I driving at? At this idea: no one colonizes innocently, no one colonizes with impunity either, that a nation that colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization - and therefore force - is already a sick civilization, a civilization that is morally diseased, that irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one repudiation to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean, its punishment."

- Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1955

“I would not like to die before having emptied a few more buckets of shit on my fellow men."

- Gustave Flaubert

Also, this book looks really cool, and it goes by the name:

The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times

cain_devera @ 2006-10-02T02:42:00

2006-10-02T06:48:58Z

Firstly:

From F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night:

"See that little stream, we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a whole month to walk to it, a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs."

Brilliant.
Less impressive things follow.

Memorial
I once walked down Memorial Street,
and there a wooden sign I did greet,
that told me: "many soldier men died
so that we can enjoy smooth rides."
And along that strip, trees were laid,
willows grow, to mourn young men made
dead. The trees are gone, and instead:
the strip club, bathed nightly by lamp red.
It can still be nice to walk it on Friday,
noon, with no sad gravestone cliche
about travelling sons, who fought Huns;
the local strippers, basking in the sun,
might be put off by too many tombs.
Finally, we can move on, make room
for happier days, hold a lover’s hand
lit by the dusk star or a neon brand.

My Blood
I got the doctor to check, and I’m sorry
but my blood, it turns out
is better then your blood; don’t worry,
doc said: “Your DNA just comes from mud
richer then theirs.” Don’t pout!
I’ll list off all my best points:
My macrophages have shiny new missiles,
My haemoglobin is a modern production line,
My platelets build walls against illegal cell
invasion, and scab their foreign ways.
My villi draw close the crucial mineral fissiles,
and digest, disguise best, the dining
horrors I inflict. (Not just my blood is swell!)
A pinch of my blood, the doc, proud, says
equals in worth gallons of yours.
Sorry, I know, it hurts to hear,
my blood is better then your blood.
This explains so much, except
when we cluster bomb your neighbourhood.

Should be reading these for Random Acts of Poetry. What do you all think?

cain_devera @ 2006-08-23T23:40:00

2006-08-24T04:02:17Z

Two things: I'm going to be doing my last radio show this Sunday coming up, I think.

So, right now, I'll be fielding requests.

Have any of you out there have any special song in particular you want to hear on the radio? Mr. Rutledge has already asked me to play a little something by Sunset Rubdown! Anyone else got something they'd like to hear?

Second. please comment on my various creatures. I need some feed back on the last few posts, or I'll never know how good I am (or bad, so very bad). So please, comment! With Words!

- bye

cain_devera @ 2006-08-18T22:08:00

2006-08-19T02:18:19Z

EXCERPT FROM “A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE INSECTS OF SUMATRA” by Simeon Van Berger Op Zoom, translated by Jules Fischer, published in Britain by Random House, 1958.

In general it is the size of Sumatran insects that is most remarkable, rather then any general deadliness to the species of man; the density, humidity and fecundity of the Sumatran jungle, especially in the Achinese highlands, guarantees that most insects found there will be large. Most are harmless, as hopefully this work has done at some lengths to assuage the reader in lands remote and altogether more civilised then the isle of Sumatra. There is, however, a curious but also potentially lethal exception to be found on this tropical island, to which this chapter will now turn. The Sumatran Red Tiger Beetle, or Vorocarnisae sumatranus, sole amongst predatory insects, has a dangerous habit during its larval stage of eating out the insides of a human skull, brain and all. Despite this terrifying behaviour, the Sumatran Red Tiger Beetle is practically unknown outside of Sumatra. We hope to rectify this situation somewhat.

The Sumatran Red Tiger Beetle is a member of the Cicindelidae family, better known to the public as the tiger beetles. Tiger beetles as a whole are identifiable by their large bulging eyes, long, slender legs and large curved mandibles, in addition to an inability to fly well and a quickness of foot on the ground; those species common to North America are ground-dwelling predators, often startled out from under rocks during the day or seen prowling at night. Vorocarnisae sumatranus shares some of these characteristics, particularly as it is equipped with a heavy pair of mandibles and long slender legs. In other ways it is morphologically distinct.

The eyes, for instance, are very diminutive, especially in the adults, and it is unlikely that vision is heavily used in hunting. Although its antennae are filiform, the Sumatran lacks the fivefold segmentation of tarsi found in other Cicindelidae. Indeed, so distinct is the Red Tiger Beetle from all other species of Cicindelidae that it has a genus all to itself; the closest living relatives are the large South African beetles of the genus Mantichora. Even then, the Sumatran Red Tiger Beetle stands apart, notably in its bizarre and lethal form of reproduction. To this day, it is the only species of tiger beetle known to be deadly to man.

The mature adult of the species is not as active a hunter as other members of the family Cicindelidae. Its body is considerably more rotund, its double pair of mandibles arranged in a vertical rather then lateral fashion. Along its elytral are several brightly coloured ovals, the vestiges of special glands, phosphorescent in nature, present on the larvae. Like all tiger beetles, the Sumatran is brightly coloured, especially on its legs and underside of the thorax, with the elytra being much duller, variegated only by alternating stripes of light and dark browns. The elytral, as in most tiger beetles, is fused and incapable of opening, forming an excellent protective shield. The pronotum teeth are especially smooth and well-linked together.

Nearly 2.5 inches in length, Vorocarnisae sumatranus is primarily an ambush predator, waiting carefully for prey as large as frogs. The presence of numerous fine hairs on their limbs allows them to sense vibrations made by prey, whereas the fused tarsi are heavily clawed and well-adapted for climbing and digging burrows. The adults are nonetheless usually found on the forest floor, often hidden by fallen logs or leaves. They are most commonly seen by humans around or on corpses, which earned the beetle its popular name in Indonesian, badanmak, or ‘body-eater’.

Like all beetles, Vorocarnisae sumatranus, goes through holometabola, or complete metamorphosis, changing from a worm-like larva to a quiescent pupa to a beetle during its life. The Sumatran Tiger Beetle depends upon the decaying remains of higher animals for reproduction. The adult female, after a short mating season, lays a cluster of eggs in a cavity on the corpse of a large animal like a water buffalo or orangutan. The eggs hatch very quickly, and the new oligopod grubs, brightly coloured with alternating stripes and possessing a jaw structure much better suited to chewing and rasping then the adults, burrow into the decaying body through an orifice. For unknown reasons the larva have active phosphorescent organs, although this may be related to driving away other scavengers or startling predators. The larva, after upwards of ten days, emerges and crawls away to pupate. Although this in itself can be ghastly to humans, it is no worse then what maggots or other scavengers do. Vorocarnisae sumatranus,, however, has adapted a considerably more terrifying way of feeding.

Somehow, long ago, the Sumatran Red Tiger Beetle adapted itself to lay eggs in a living host. The eggs are usually deposited in the ears, and after hatching, the larva, very small, quickly crawl down the main cavity and find their way into the brain, where vast amounts of protein can be rapidly accumulated for growth. This is extremely painful for the victim, who is often aware of a kind of burning sensation in the immediate hours afterwards. The larva usually devour non-essential sections of the brain first, leaving the basic pulmonary, cardiac and sensory systems operating until the end. The pain grows worse and worse with every passing day. In the final phase of this predation, the victims eyes roll back into the head due to the larva’s actions upon the main optic nerves. Still functioning, the victim’s eyes can see the greenish glow of the larva at work. Death is almost always inevitable, and there is no known method of prevention or removal of the larva, short of cutting open the head or pouring pesticide down the ear. Neither treatment is likely to save the victim. Luckily, because the Sumatran Red is a relatively sluggish animal, and because they are easily spotted, deaths are rare, even if highly visible. The victim is often rendered near insane by the larva, perhaps leading to Achinese legends of demonic possession. The first widespread knowledge of the Sumatran Red only came, however, after the Dutch invasion of Aceh in the 1870's; the Dutch soldiers, unused to jungle warfare, often fell prey to the Vorocarnisae sumatranus, and thus the symptoms came to be known as ‘Dutch madness’.

cain_devera @ 2006-07-20T23:26:00

2006-07-21T03:27:26Z

So, anyone want to go see A Silver Mt. Zion with me in Winnipeg on the night of August 9th? Pretty please?

cain_devera @ 2006-07-17T23:33:00

2006-07-18T03:45:29Z

Okay, I'm tired of complaining about how stupid the world is, how corrupt our government is, how evil our leaders are, and how fucking spineless the media and the public often are. I'd like to say, before anything else, thank you Canadian public, for being really god damn stupid and voting for Stephen Harper, especially if you did so because you thought all that SCANDAL and CORRUPTION needed to be punished. Sure did, the Liberals are corrupt, and certainly that is their ONLY crime, and not all the other free-trade, privatisation, moral bankruptcy bullshit; so, in responce you fuck-tards collectively known as the Canadian public voted for the moral and political Conservatives, who TELL YOU in their NAME what they aim for, who are staffed by Alberta nutters and the richest of the rich of South Ontario, all aiming to be more efficient at being even less good for Canada. So what, you say, as long as they could things done? Oh for shit's sake, that is the lamest argument EVER; "Gee, Mussolini sure seems great, cause he'll get things DONE g'all darn it!" Listen, Harper's cabinet is stuffed with a Minister for Defense who used to be a LOBBYIST for arms dealers, and by a minister who, like the rat he is, jumped to the Conservatives once he knew the nearly-the-same Liberals were sunk. We have a PM who has heavily armed our border guards, continously downplayed and yet insisted upon Canada's part in the occupation of Afghanistan, and even now, while Canadians fucking DIE in Lebanon, in supporting Isreal's right to impoverish two nations over THREE kidnapped soldiers. I'd pray to God, but I hear he is a good friend of the Conservatives.

Anyway, I'm tired of doing nothing.
I'm donating money to a Lebanese human rights group. I also got a letter from the UN today, asking for help with humanitarian aid in the Darfur region. Unfortunately, to provide a decent home for a Sudanese refugee family; it costs five hundred dollars. But, if we all pitch in, we could at least buy a nice canvas tarpaulin for some refugees. That is right! I am doing a call out to my friends, at least those who read this LJ: let us raise 75 dollars, at least, and send it to the UN! Please! If like ten people pool together, we can do this easy! PLEASE HELP!

Also, I'll be putting up a new strange beast soon. Please read my last entry and comment, if you enjoyed the carcaphange.

A Historie of Foure Footed Beastes, Part. 1

2006-06-15T05:32:48Z

A Short and Compiled History
of the
Strange and Savage Beast
Known as a Carcaphane

A Sketch of the Carcaphane circa. 1773

The cacarphane is first mentioned by name in Pliny the Elder's Natural History, Book 8, wherein he describes it as a "four-footed beast, twelve cubits long, possessed of great teeth like a saw, a thick black tongue and a tail, both like rope. It has thick scales upon its back, and short black fur along its legs and sides." Pliny implicates the beast as a terrible hunter, capable of cunning ambushes, using its teeth to saw branches from trees to lay deadfalls and to saw through the legs of horses, a favoured meal. Pliny also insists the carcaphane is unable to swim and is likely to be easily scared by fire; nonetheless, he insists a man will die if crossing paths with a cacarphane on a Tuesday, especially if the beast comes from the left side. The cacarphane may have been known much earlier, as it is alluded to in the Histories by Herodotus; the tokens and jewels of the Scythians are said to be covered in "terrible knife-toothed beasts". Certainly the pioneering archeological work of Sergei Rudenko substantiates this claim, though he himself does not support this theory and doubts if Scythians and carcaphanes ever interacted.

            In Christian bestiaries, such as The Historie of Four-Footed Beastes, by Edward Topsell, from 1607, a fairly late era compendium of earlier monstrosities, the cacarphane is allegorically employed as sin; its saw-like teeth cut down a tree to capture its prey, much as sin can cause a fall into darkness. Though few in Europe had ever seen a carcaphane, and indeed no physical evidence was ever brought of one from ‘Tartary', it was included, alongside the lion, elephants and hyenas, in the debate over the manner of reproduction. Whether it did so backward or forward being the subject of dispute, with Sir Thomas Browne, in Vulgar Errors, Bk. 3, supporting the backward ‘pizel', whereas in Horwart von Hohenburg's Thesaurus, from 1628, the point is made against. Such theoretical and theological debates, however, did little to clarify the nature of the cacarphane, which was little more then a legend to most Europeans.
    The carcaphane is generally considered a creature native to the Russian steppe and to Siberia, and yet very little is accurately known from that quarter, either. Cossacks are said to have feared the cacarphane, when they feared little else, and thus had little contact with it, a beast known for its relative speed, cunning and resilience; Yermak Timofeyevich, who first crossed the Urals, reportedly sought in vain for it, but always the Tartars said the animal had moved on, always ahead of the explorers, always elusive, always farther east. Amongst some Altai tribes, the teeth of dead cacarphanes were used as shears. Almost certainly, carcaphanes was worshipped and feared by the Kalmyk, Omiak, Telengits, Chelkans, Khants and Mansi, among many others, showing up as a fearsome devil in many religious rites, though this is hard to confirm because of the spread of Orthdox Christianity in the wake of the Cossack settlers. The carcaphane seems to have avoided the Russian camps and town spreading across Siberia, to the point that it all but disappeared from the Steppe by the late 17th century.   Yerofey Khabarov is said to have sighted several solitary cacarphanes along the Amur in the 1650's, though Bering eighty years later was to sight none of the creatures from his ships, and despair of them as merely as legend.   The story was everywhere the same: as civilisation spread across Siberia, the cacarphanes retreated.
    One abberant case is related by the French encyclopedist Diderot, who during a visit to the court of Catherine the Great, during the fall and winter of 1773, remarked in his journal on a story then current in St. Petersburg society, relating that "un bette terrible, possessé des griffes comme epée et un machoire comme une scie ... terrorise les inhabitants d'un village Siberienne, mais n'aucun person pouvez l'attrapé." Though too ill to travel, Diderot studied any rumour and report about the creature, compiling anecdotal evidence that indicated a large, heavy carnivore, clearly not similar to a bear and much fleeter of foot, with very heavy teeth and a thick body, was responsible for the attacks, which soon subsided. Nikolay Muravyov, in his memoirs, wrote that as governor of Siberia, he received occasional reports of cacarphane sightings, and some trappers even attempted to sell pelts of the predator, short-furred, stiff, too inflexible, and prone to rotting away even when properly cured. Bronislaw Piotr Pilsudski, a Polish scientist exiled to Sakhalin Island in the late 1890's by the Tsarist government, reputedly observed carcaphanes at close proximity, but as he drown in the Seine in 1918, the report was never compiled, and all his papers were lost. The only definite evidence of a, regrettably slain, cacarphane was reported in early 1904, when one Captain Feodor Kruzych shot and killed one in northern Manchuria. The sketches and pelt survived the Russo-Japanese War, though he did not; the pelt, later photographed and put on display in the Far Eastern State University, was completely lost during the Russian Revolution. It is entirely possible that carcaphanes still exist in the wilds of eastern Siberia, but no sightings have been reported in the last hundred years, meaning that for all intents and purposes, the carcaphane has disappeared.

CW - a first attempt. See how this works.