DNA IN CAMBRIDGE BEFORE WATSON AND CRICK

Today would have been Douglas Adams' sixtieth birthday and it is massively unfair that he is not alive to celebrate it. I can remember reading The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (it was a rite of passage in my house, along with reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, that signaled one was an adult, with adult tastes and opinions, etc.) in grade six and boring my friends by reading long passages to them. It was the most brilliant thing I'd ever read at that time, and the whole series remains one of the funniest things ever committed to paper. I know that my sense of humour and my outlook on life can often be traced back to his writing ("Life: loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it."), and I'm grateful for every minute I've spent reading him. I almost walked out of the 2005 movie version of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy--it felt overtly Disneyfied, more an insult to his legacy and a betrayal to his vision than anything else (even if he approved it)--but not even that could dim my love for his books (though it did increase my appreciation for the wonderful BBC television series a hundredfold).

Dig that theme music! 

While I love how madcap and zany he could be, I also love the darkness of the last three Hitch Hiker books. He may have felt they weren't in keeping with the tone of the early books and radio serials, but they were still wonderful, even with the humour absolutely pitch black and the characters succumbing to all sorts of horrible events. What's more, they felt in line with the Dirk Gently books, particularly The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, in a way that helps to unite his entire corpus (not that someone with as distinctive a voice as Adams could really write something that wouldn't be recognizably his). There is--and it's unfair I can't find it online (though my own stunning ineptitude is probably the reason)--one of the more beautiful passages in the English language, one that I often find running through my head at the end of a long day, in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, and it's moments like that, when you suddenly realize that you've been laughing hysterically because someone managed to write something so profoundly true, to get the universe and what it's like to live in it so right, that make Adams such a pleasure to read.

Happy birthday, Douglas Adams!

THOUGHTS FROM A CONVALESCENT

I've been sick for the past few days--surprisingly sick for what seemed like a simple cold--but after about sixteen hours of sleep last night, I'm feeling much better today. I still sound like hell, but at least I don't feel miserable. Obviously I haven't done a whole lot of anything while I've been sick so this update might be a little thin.

I went to a screening of the humanitarian group Invisible Children's film Tony on Wednesday night (this was probably a mistake in retrospect: I felt like crap Wednesday morning, and spending all day on campus having to be awake and somewhat sociable probably did nothing to help my immune system fight off what was coming), and I found it an interesting presentation, if flawed. While I support the group's work to help villages warn each other of, and possibly fend off, attacks from rebel groups in central East Africa, and while their film made at least a token gesture to the idea that white people coming in to Africa and throwing money and consumer goods around does not, in fact, fix anything, I was uncomfortable with the overall tone. There was more than a hint of orientalism (perhaps that's not the exact word I want--maybe just othering or exoticizing Africans?) throughout the video, with the titular man shown to be both a person of tremendous perseverance and a kind of cipher for all the desires, dreams, and guilt of middle and upper class whites about Africa, a kind of "look, we gave him Nikes and rap CDs and he likes us just so much and we're just such great friends, isn't it great?" type narrative. I couldn't help thinking that if Christian Lander had been there, he could've used the film to illustrate any number of points in Stuff White People Like (I think the entries on "Nonprofit Organizations," "Having Black Friends," "Awareness," "Documentaries," "Knowing What's Best for Poor People," "T-Shirts," "Following Their Dreams," and "Self-Importance," at the very least, could easily be illustrated by various aspects of Tony).* At the same time, the subtitles that appeared any time a black person spoke in the video--while all whites remained unsubtitled even when the sound quality of handheld footage made it difficult to make out any words--was, I thought, a telling touch.

The purpose of the video was less to tell the story of Tony than to explain how Invisible Children is the coolest organization you could hope to be a part of, one that will help you "follow your dreams" and realize your "true self" through its internship program: driving around in vans and fundraising for the group by showing their movies and speaking to high school, university, and church groups. The mix of handheld and professional camera work, combined with the quick cuts and trendy camera effects, made it feel like a well-made YouTube video diary. Coupled with the stylish t-shirts and bags on sale after the screening, and the organization's social network style fundraising website, it seemed like a great pitch to capture teens and and university students. The roadtrips appear perfectly designed to serve as material for cooler Facebook status updates and tweets than those of one's peers. Ultimately, I was left cold by the film (and by the personality of the organization's founder, who came across like Tucker Max running a nonprofit), even as I found many of the group's goals admirable. I'd required my students to go to the screening, but I'm less comfortable with that decision now than I had been. A complicated issue, to be sure.

Other than that, not much more to report. As I said, being sick sort of wiped out the last few days. I've (slowly, oh so slowly) been working my way through James Fennimore Cooper's The Pioneers, and while it has more points of interest than I'd been led to believe, it's hard to overcome Mark Twain's masterful putdown of Cooper and give the novel the benefit of the doubt. I'm twenty chapters in and there hasn't been much in the way of plot yet; however, I've been assured that much will take place in the next twenty--for the sake of my brain, which is in danger of turning to mush if I come across another two-page description of what one character or another is wearing, I certainly hope so. On the plus side, this week we're talking about Tom Stoppard's Arcadia in my other class. You might say I'm a little excited: a play about academics is awesome--it's not often I actually get to talk about my primary scholarly interest in class.

A sign of the times as I finish? A balloon (it looks like one of the bright plastic helium balloons) shaped like a man just floated across the sky above the houses across the street.


*Of course, part of what makes that book ride the "this is funny"/"this is painful/infuriating" line so well is its accuracy: you can laugh at the foibles of those around you and feel outraged/find yourself forced into justifications about the things you like. The book also goes a long way, I think, to furthering the idea that "white" is, more and more, an economic designation: the last time I filled out the checklist in the back of the book, it told me I was less than 20% white despite my being practically translucent and able to burn on a moment's notice in sunlight; I simply don't have the kind of disposable income necessary to be "white." Of course, this refers to a fairly narrowly defined idea of whiteness, one that groups on the right might be less willing to embrace, even though it shares a particular kind of anti-intellectualism underneath its well-cultivated appearance that would fit in well with the right (the constant belittling of the humanities [and higher education in general], the disparaging remarks about intellectual figures [both Zizek and Lacan are presented as nothing more than fodder for PoMo posers, devoid of any real substance]).

ROBERTSON DAVIES AND THE PLACES THAT HAUNT US

My bedtime reading for the past week or so has been Robertson Davies' The Fifth Business, the first book in his Deptford trilogy (the other two being The Manticore and World of Wonders). I first read it in high school during our one unit on CanLit. We'd been given a list of six or seven Canadian authors to choose from, along with recommended books. I asked my mom for advice, and she suggested Davies to me as the writer who would most appeal to my tastes. She was right there. She has, in fact, never failed in suggesting books to me, and even though we don't share exactly the same tastes (she is not an SF fan, and she can't really get on with magical realism), no one manages to get my taste in novels right more often. The Fifth Business might be her best recommendation, though. Since high school, I've read it a handful of times. My parents have a handsome, hardback copy (it might be a first edition), but I didn't own a copy until I spied the entire trilogy in a used bookstore in Corvallis, in the same Penguin print run as my copy of The Rebel Angels. I got all three for the princely sum of $4.50, fifty cents cheap than each sold for individually when first released, and I'd have quite willingly parted with more to get them.

Few novels speak to me in the way that The Fifth Business does. While I adore the entire Deptford trilogy as a whole, I would not for a second suggest that The Manticore or World of Wonders are the equal of their precursor. Part of its initial appeal was the shocking realization that someone could write a novel about life in a small town in Ontario. This was unbelievable; to my teenage self, art was made by people who lived in glamorous places, like London or Paris or Rome, or in exciting places like New York and Los Angeles. The books and movies I liked that weren't set in those places were set in the future or in space. Art most definitely did not come from people writing about fictional towns on the wrong Thames. I was sure of that. That the small town in Ontario in which I grew up could be worthy of commemoration or reflection in this way was stunning. Since then, I've grown accustomed to the idea--indeed, I'm fairly convinced that I owe a great deal to growing up in the suburbs, intellectually and otherwise, although the sense of inferiority about where I come from (is this a general Canadian feeling? It might be. . .) has both served me well and hindered me at various times--and, as I read this time, when I came upon Dunstan Ramsay's line that "I boarded the train--there was no crowd at the station this time--and left Deptford in the flesh. It was not for a long time that I recognized that I never wholly left it in the spirit," I was so overcome and agitated I had to put the book down for several minutes. Nothing else has ever quite captured so well the way I feel about Canada while I'm in the States: the physical disconnection, but psychic/spiritual hyperconnection that is at once painful and embarrassing (I kind of hate being reminded of it by other people, especially by several people in the same day, or by the same person over and over again) but something that I long for and need (I will surprise myself at odd times with the need to assert, to myself as much as to anyone else, that I am Canadian).

Davies can flat out write about place. His description of a public mental hospital does such a good job capturing its atmosphere and evoking dread and loneliness that I found it (again) so unsettling as to require me to put the book down:

[T]he building was an old horror. It was about eighty years old and had been designed for the era when the first thing that was done with an insane patient was to put him to bed, with a view to keeping him there, safe and out of the way, till he recovered or died. Consequently the hospital had few and inadequate common rooms, and the patients sat in the corridors, or wandered up and down the corridors, or lay on their beds. The architecture was of the sort that looks better on the outside than on the inside; the building had a dome and a great number of barred windows and looked like a run-down palace.
Inside the ceilings were high, the light was bad, and in spite of the windows the ventilation was capricious. The place reeked of disinfectant, but the predominating smell was that unmistakable stench of despair that is so often to be found in jails, courtrooms, and madhouses. [The smell of the carceral society; and wouldn't Foucault have just loved that grouping: the apparatus of discipline!]
She had a bed in one of the long wards, and I left her standing beside it, with a kindly nurse who was explaining what she should do with the contents of her suitcase. But already her face looked as I remembered it in her worst days in Deptford. I dared not look back, and I felt meaner than I have ever felt in my life. But what was I to do?

Of course, that's not his only stunning description of place (his depiction of the Staunton house on Christmas morning as "a dismal, toy-littered waste of wealthy, frumpish domesticity" is delightfully savage), and really the entire novel is a long investigation of the psychological ramifications of places (especially homes). Davies' writing is uncanny, but in a quiet, subtle way. Without ever really seeming to disturb, he manages to get under my skin and make me uneasy.

Freud looms large in his novels in more than that sense of the uncanny, though. While his work is often discussed in relation to Jung--Dunstan Ramsay mentions a preference for Jung over Freud, and The Manticore is in the form of a Jungian analysis of its protagonist--in his tracing of the conflagration and commingling of history, religion, and myth in everyday life, his exploration of the logic of obsession and fetishes, and his depiction of psychosexual trauma as a key lens through which a person's life must be read, Davies is unabashedly a Freudian (cf. "I was trying to forget the spectacle, so horrible in my visions, of what I had seen when first I happened on them--those bare buttocks and four legs to strangely opposed. But I could never forget"). As in his evocations of the uncanny, the darkness of the pleasure principle and the death drive bubbles below the surface for the most part, but it will burst out in sharp passages that sear one's brain and cause a slight recoil in horror from the images on display. In fact, with all of its discussion of the Real and the Symbolic and their place in our lives, The Fifth Business might be of particular interest to a Lacanian. . .

There are other reasons the novel resonates with me: Dunstan Ramsay's appreciation of learning and his valourization of his scholarship as a hagiographer made my current life path seem glamorous, even when I was in high school. The plot is full of action and adventure, surprising for a novel so focused on deep psychological exploration. It is, to a degree I probably underestimate, a book that has shaped the way I see the world and the way I interact with the people and things I encounter. I can think of only a very small number of novels that have equaled it in terms of impact, and I don't think anything had such a radical and profound impact on my worldview until I really started to get into theory in grad school. At this point, I have a great deal invested in The Fifth Business. Once, after several years of me prompting her to do so, an ex-girlfriend read it: she said it was a good book, but the narrator sounded so stuffy and old that she couldn't really enjoy it. I should've known right then and there it wouldn't work out between us.

EDIT: I forgot one of my favourite passages. It's rare that someone catches the pain of puberty with such precision:

I thought I was in love with Leola, by which I meant that if I could have found her in a quiet corner, and if I had been certain that no one would ever find out, and if I could have summoned up the courage at the right moment, I would have kissed her.

That was painfully funny and painfully true to my high school self.

DON'T CALL IT A COMEBACK: END OF SUMMER AND THOUGHTS ON ASIMOV

Well, summer is officially over for me. I am back in Pittsburgh, writing this from the desk of my new apartment. When I stare out my window, I no longer see student slums. That has to count for something. There are many things to do in the two weeks between now and the first day of classes (like finally getting around to writing that syllabus . . .), but I should hopefully have enough time on my hands to resume blogging with whatever approaches regularity for me on this thing. I've been working on the long promised post about chillwave (thesis [essentially]: chillwave is a specifically North American form of hauntology) and I hope to have it up (famous last words) by tomorrow evening. After that, I'll try and tackle my impressions of DFW's The Pale King--it really does seem to me to lend itself to a reading via capitalist realism--and some of his other later work.

Before I get to any of that, though, I've just finished re-reading Asimov's three Lije Baley/R. Daneel Olivaw novels (The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, and The Robots of Dawn). When I was younger, I loved all three, but I have to admit I didn't find them as enjoyable this time around (it's been probably five years at least since I'd even glanced at them). While I was impressed with the resonances between some of Asimov's sociological and psychological commentary and current social and political situations--particularly in the two earlier novels--what left me cold were the glimpses of the much stranger novels that got left behind in their adherence to fairly conventional mystery/adventure templates. In some ways, the humaniform robot R. Daneel Olivaw invites speculation on the nature of the human vs. the simulation, the authentic vs. the simulacrum from the first: he is introduced to the reader as a human, and is under orders to maintain his disguise as a human at all times (a deception he achieves much more successfully in the second novel, but which is rendered impossible in the third). Asimov is too clever to dispense entirely with speculation on the above themes, but he avoids lengthy digressions on the subject, preferring the issues to remain in the background (and to arise mostly as secondary or tertiary subtexts to other conversations or internal monologues by Baley). Indeed, Daneel becomes increasingly "human"--or is thought of as such by Baley--throughout the series, to the point where he is able to smile in the third novel (something he is unable to do successfully in the first). Whereas this would seem to be the point at which to push the distinction between the authentically human and the imitative robot to its extreme or to dissolve it entirely, Asimov does neither.

This is, ultimately, where the weirder novels that lurk just beneath the surface of the trilogy start to appear. Not overtly, but rather as the ghosts of what other writers might have done with this material, particularly Asimov's doppelganger in terms of hyperprolific American science fiction writers with an extraordinarily large influence over the field: Philip K. Dick. The Caves of Steel could become, with some minor tweaking, a dry run for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? What happens instead is that at the very point where Dick's novels and stories break into epistemological and existential chaos, at the point where the human and the real become impossible to locate or verify, Asimov's novel closes the door to that chaos through the relentless logic of Baley the plainclothesman. Where in Dick's hands Daneel would grow steadily more unnerving as he became increasingly human--and where Baley's shifting attitude toward Daneel (from fear and loathing to love and respect) would be matched by an increasing uneasiness towards Baley's own humanity--Asimov's Baley is already so machine-like, so rooted to cause and effect, to chains of logic, that he can point to Daneel's artificial nature and discuss that nature with the robot without ever really making the question of the human/robot distinction a live one. Baley's physical shortcomings (his agoraphobia, for example, or his need to eat, to defecate, etc.), what would on the surface seem to point to his very humanity, become affectations on par with Daneel's in the robot's attempt to be taken as human. The many references to Baley's long, glum face, a face that only rarely smiles, seem like deliberate echoes of Daneel's own grave visage and Baley's revulsion at the lifeless smile he commands Daneel to display for him in The Caves of Steel.

The two become mirrors of each other, but where Daneel's resemblance to/echo of everything that should distinguish Baley as the human in the pair should unnerve, should awaken exactly that primal fear Freud mentions in "The Uncanny," it fails to do so precisely because he has no one who appears to fulfill the criteria of the "human." This, ultimately, is the disturbing part of the series, and it is in some ways more deeply unsettling than Dick's questioning of the human. Where Dick worked hard to locate the "authentic" human gesture--"The concept of caritas (or agape) shows up in my writing as the key to the authentic human. The android, which is the unauthentic human, the mere reflex machine, is unable to experience empathy"--Asimov works with a similar basic assumption (the reflex in this case being a robot's unfailing response to the First Law of Robotics), but then undercuts them (the search for the Laws of Humanics) with a desire to make the human more like the robot, like Lije Baley, who is identified at the end of the third novel as the template for the "ideal" human to colonize the galaxy.

PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON (THE FIRST 1/5 OF) DFW'S THE PALE KING

I went on something of a book-acquiring spree over the past few days. At a used bookstore in town I managed to pick up on the cheap Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (more on this soon), Philip Roth's The Human Stain, and Richard Russo's Straight Man (yes, two more novels about professors). To go along with these books, I finally fulfilled a promise to myself and picked up DFW's The Pale King (along with Jess Walter's The Financial Lives of the Poets [which, if Walter's reading of the first chapter and my own perusal of the first two chapters in the bookstore are anything to go by, will be hilarious], the purchase of both of which made me curse the disparity between the cost of new books in Canada vs. the USA).

Anyway, I'm not super far along into The Pale King just yet (looks like ~1/5 of the way), but a few thoughts have crossed my mind so far:

1. I'll go along with critical consensus (based on early reviews) and say "Wow" to the first chapter. I mean, serious writing chops on display and it's mostly just a list (of course, large parts of The Things They Carried are "mostly just a list" and the effect in that novel, as in The Pale King, is nothing short of electrifying). At the same time, while the (long) first sentence received a lot of attention (and, truthfully, it merits it), I was more drawn to the start of the second paragraph: "Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse semlls at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted." Painting with language, indeed. You can see and smell and feel and hear everything about that scene.
2. Chapter 3 feels like a leftover from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.
3. Chapter 9, the "Author's Foreward," though it has (again) been singled out for both praise and criticism by a number of reviewers (mostly because of its seeming way too clever and metafictional and postmodern for its own good) is, by and large, mostly wonderful. The "landscape" writing is what's impressed me most so far about the book (the description of the trailer park and the gypsum hills, the grandmother's house, the first chapter, Sylvanshine's view from the plane as it comes in for a landing, etc.), but Chapter 9 is like an obvious dose of "classic" or "vintage" DFW that just zips along until building to his chief philosophical/thematic concern in its final two paragraphs (based on the material surrounding The Pale King and other "late" writing of his like "This is Water," and even, to a certain extent, most of Brief Interviews). In a lot of ways this theme, especially as it is phrased in these paragraphs, reminds me of Mark Fisher (aka k-punk)'s comments re: life under capitalist realism. Is The Pale King capitalist realist fiction par excellence? 

"Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with out full attention. . . . [S]urely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets' checkouts, airports' gates, SUVs' backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down. . . . [L]iving people do not speak much of the dull. Why this silence? Maybe it's because the subject is, in and of itself, dull . . . only then we're again right back where we started, which is tedious and irksome. There may, though, I opine, be more to it . . . as in vastly more, right here before us all, hidden by virtue of its size."

I think what I have in mind is something like Fisher's excellent gloss of this photo: "The image above is so evocative because it suddenly suggests an outside, an effective interruption of the blank trance you can see in the model's abstracted eyes, which reflect our own ...". Similarly, DFW's investigation of dullness, of boredom, of the "something else, way down" that's "hidden by virtue of its size," forces us not only into an awareness of that dullness and boredom that we cannot simply flee by closing the book (because now we are aware, and actions taken to mask the dullness and boredom reveal the states they are masking the more effectively they do the job, thus making it impossible to actually escape the dullness and boredom and necessitating a confrontation with the psychic pain that dullness and boredom force us to recognize in ourselves--cf. Zizek's remarks on the power of the "conceptual Jew": "The fantasmatic 'conceptual Jew' is not a paternal figure of symbolic authority, a 'castrated' bearer-medium of public authority, but something decidedly different, a kind of uncanny double of the public authority that perverts its proper logic: he has to act in shadow, invisible to the public eye, irradiating a phantom-like, spectral omnipotence. On account of this unfathomable, elusive status of the kernel of his identity, the Jew is--in contrast to the 'castrated' father--perceived as uncastratable: the more his actual, social, public existence is cut short, the more threatening becomes his elusive fantasmatic ex-istence"*), but also into a questioning of the larger systemic causes of the "psychic pain" that makes dullness and boredom--which are, in the end, merely symptoms of life in that larger system/social structure/cultural moment/historical era--so unbearable. That is, The Pale King creates, by offering a glimpse of the boredom and dullness that is contained (and therefore visible), an outside wherein the "blank trance" of that dullness and boredom is interrupted by an awareness of its own existence. The psychic pain that is kept at bay through a constant and ceaseless determination to experience neither the dull nor the boring (via the devices DFW mentions in the passage I quoted above, amongst other activities) is cast in sharp relief, and we wonder "what causes this pain and why do I experience it?"

Is this also, I wonder, pointing to some "obscene underside" of the action of enjoying a commodity in one's leisure time (i.e. the book The Pale King) in that reading the book--the process of enjoying that commodity--leads to the above understanding re: dullness/boredom/psychic pain and becomes the aim in and of itself (i.e. the experiencing of that psychic pain) rather than the enjoyment of the entertainment device that would ostensibly combat the dullness/boredom of modern life and prevent an awareness of that psychic pain from emerging? That is, the effects of the system are best revealed through a conscious participation in the system (a participation that the system encourages because of the difficulty of that participation ever being conscious [due to the psychic pain that participants attempt to avoid and that conscious participation makes readily apparent]). Indeed, the aforementioned psychic pain would seem to make acting against the system (which in this case are those cultural/political/financial institutions that help to create and perpetuate the "information society" [late capitalism]) difficult, let alone actually participating rather than just existing in the blank trance of rote actions--so, in the end, the system gets both to inflict pain and, by allowing the person within the system the chance to become aware of the pain that the system is causing, to offer a way to prevent that pain in a single gesture.

Anyway, some initial thoughts on The Pale King as I make my way through it. I'm excited to see where this novel is going.

[EDIT BASED ON MORE READING: The conversation in the elevator and the story about obetrolling/doubling clearly lend themselves to discussions of capitalist realism, and, in the case of the former, are essential to the novel's working (and not just stuff from high school civics class that should be cut). The most interesting mistake (?) so far: the sudden intrusion of the dialogue tag "I said" out of nowhere in the middle of the elevator conversation.]

*This is from Zizek's essay "Between Symbolic Fiction and Fantasmatic Spectre: Toward a Lacanian Theory of Ideology" from Interrogating the Real (229-48; the quote itself appears on 239).

REVIEW: BRIAN ALDISS, THE LONG AFTERNOON OF EARTH

No, I'm not planning on turning my blog into a series of book reviews, but I'm finding it difficult to simply enjoy the books I'm reading without saying anything about them. I guess grad school has finally won.

I finished Brian Aldiss' The Long Afternoon of Earth (1962) this afternoon (one that I would describe as long). It didn't reach the heights of A Case of Conscience, and overall I found it disappointing. But first, the good: it has an awesome title and the novel's setting (an Earth that has become a murderous jungle, much like standard SF depictions of Venus before people found out what it was really like there) is fantastic. The ecology of that setting is worked out in such detail and complexity that it rivals (though it doesn't quite surpass) Herbert's Dune. Seriously, Aldiss does a great job of painting the world his characters inhabit. You can practically see vines and branches start to emerge from the pages of the novel.* The section of the novel that takes place in Nomansland is both terrifying and exhilarating, mainly because of the sheer variety and inventiveness of the plants that Aldiss comes up with. Of particular interest is the character of morel, an intelligent fungus with plans for world domination. The speculative or fantastic elements are entirely biological, which is a welcome respite from hard, glittering worlds of computers, spaceships, and cities. The emphasis on living things, on the ways life adapts to changing environments makes the whole novel throb and hum. There's a kind of sexiness to its focus on the violent struggle of life (a sexiness that, unfortunately, is entirely lacking in the novel's sex scenes) that is a rarity in SF. The old masters--Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein--are many things, but they aren't sexy. There is some nice and surprisingly subtle social commentary and philosophical speculation on the question of slavery and what it means to be human, as well.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of problems that (for me, at least) sink what is otherwise an engaging novel. It reads like a stitch up (the practice of turning independent short stories into a novel) even if it isn't one. The novel was originally serialized in five parts, but only three parts are labelled in the novel itself. The break between the second and third parts is particularly arbitrary (it would make more sense at least one chapter later than when it occurs). Similarly, the first part of the novel spends most of its time laying out details and putting in a motion a plot that--while it is finally resolved in the closing pages of the novel--acts for over two-thirds of the novel as an an annoying question mark because of its apparent disconnect from the main thrust of the story.

Indeed, not one, not two, but three (arguably four) sets of characters are introduced, only two sets of which belong to narratives that are resolved. The vast majority of the characters seem to exist only to be killed off in elaborate set pieces that show off the danger and mystery of the world Aldiss has created. The characters the reader spends the most time with are not very compelling (the “hero” of the novel, Gren, is particularly unpleasant), and the minor characters are irritating to the point of distraction. The fate of the second set of characters--they literally walk out of view--is never resolved, or even mentioned by any other characters, though Gren is initially part of this second cast. The novel's treatment of its female character manages to be both atypical (they are not the descendants of dime novel stereotypes and film noir femme fatales that inhabit so much SF) and wildly misogynistic at the same time. Much of the energy and momentum the first half of the novel gains from its unique setting is squandered by too much time spent simply following the characters from one setting to the next in the second half (each less unique and interesting than the one before it). The ending reneges on many of the promises set up earlier in the novel in favour of a fairly conventional closing that seems to negate the character development Aldiss takes care to repeatedly emphasize leading up to the final chapters.

All in all, I have to say that I was disappointed with The Long Afternoon of Earth. It can be suitably imaginative (the first half is a minor masterpiece), but too many balls are left in the air for too long and too many questions go either unanswered or are lamely explained away for it to sustain the energy of that first half. The Long Afternoon of Earth reminds me in many ways of William Tenn's masterful Of Men and Monsters, but it lacks the black humour of that novel to pick up the slack when the action wanes, and Aldiss' Gren is less interesting than Tenn's Eric. If pressed, I would probably recommend Tenn's book over Aldiss', though it is a joy to experience the care and craft Aldiss puts into imagining his jungle earth.


*This made for an uncomfortably tense experience this afternoon as I ran along a trail in a nearby park. After several hours with Aldiss' forest, I never expected to make it back to my apartment alive.

REVIEW: JAMES BLISH, A CASE OF CONSCIENCE

I just finished James Blish's A Case of Conscience (1958), which I picked up in a used bookstore today based on its reputation as a classic piece of SF. After reading it, I can definitely see why the novel has achieved its status: it's a well-written piece of SF that's more concerned with moral and philosophical problems--the case of conscience of its title--than with gadgets and technology (though those get their play as well). The second half of the novel, set on an Earth that exists almost entirely underground in “shelters,” is reminiscent of Asimov's The Caves of Steel (though more pessimistic) and the overall tone and feel (along with the personality of the main character, Father Ruiz-Sanchez, SJ) recalls (or, more accurately in terms of chronology, points to) Silverberg's novels of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly Tower of Glass and The Masks of Time.

While Ruiz-Sanchez and the other major characters--the scientists Liu Meid and Michelis and the alien Egtverchi--are not quite as memorable as Lije Bailey and R. Daneel Olivaw, they are fairly compelling. If at times Blish uses them more as mouthpieces for philosophical and ethical positions than as actual human beings, it is justified given the fascinating nature of what they discuss: the nature of matter, the question of evil, and the existence of God and the Devil. Ruiz-Sanchez in particular is a masterful portrait of grief and doubt, a man confronted by a startling revelation that both undermines and confirms his deepest belief.

There are some flaws with the novel--certain plot threads are not satisfactorily resolved, and several major developments are simply a little too convenient (there is no adequate explanation for the destruction of the Message Tree, for example, other than to quell obvious objections to the novel's resolution: “Why didn't they just call them?”)--but they generally do not detract from the experience of reading the novel. Indeed, given that the novel was first published over fifty years ago, it has aged surprisingly well. Certainly it is less cringe-worthy than some of Heinlein's efforts from the same period. It is a great example of SF that is more sociological than technological, and really pushes the limits of what the genre can do without resorting to the (occasionally gimmicky) shock tactics of some of the New Wave SF writers of the 1960s and 1970s.

One interesting point: I was surprised to find a preface from the author defending himself against criticism for suggesting that in the almost century difference between the publication of the novel and its setting (2050) there would be certain changes in Catholic doctrine. Just last week I would have dismissed such a preface as unnecessary and distracting, but after hearing the theology students in the German class I am taking go at it over (what seem to me at any rate) mundane and rather obvious problems (such as whether or not it is acceptable to use gluten-free communion wafers), I can see why Blish felt the need to make clear his reasoning behind the proposed doctrinal changes.

Anyway, I recommend A Case of Conscience to any SF fan (and to all readers, really). Any SF novel that can make its central plot concern the consequences of an heretical opinion (Manichӕanism) by a Jesuit priest regarding whether or not to open a planet for settlement by humans is worth a look. The political and social commentary the novel makes and its treatment of the problem of evil are also fascinating (indeed, I would like to say more about this when I've had time to digest the novel). This novel proved to be well worth the one dollar it cost me (ah, cheap old SF paperbacks. Is there anything better?).

CLOSE READING: HOW/WHEN DID YOU LEARN TO DO IT?

I will preface this by saying that I've never done any research on this topic, so I might be repeating the most mundane conclusions in the world. They're new to me, though, so I thought I'd share.

After a conversation with a colleague about close reading and how to teach it to first-year university students, I tried to remember how I learned to close read. At this point, the practice is so ingrained in me that it is largely unconscious. Obviously I picked it up somewhere, but I couldn't nail it down to a particular assignment, a particular class, or even a particular level of school (I can remember, however, discovering New Historicism--or my very basic imitation of it--as a result of a high school essay. I didn't know it was called that then, nor was I encouraged to engage in its practices, but that's a story for another day). I'm fairly certain I learned the term "close reading" in university, but I could already perform a basic close reading when I entered university.

I remembered two books this evening that seem to me to offer a starting point (or at least a pretty significant nudge along the path) for my life as a practitioner of close reading. I can't remember the title of either book, but I do know that they were both mystery novels. One was a kind of traditional whodunit and the other was a graphic novel (I recall my mother hated it for that fact alone) and involved a "haunted" house (the resolution of the mystery proved it to be a perfectly normal house with the hauntings contrived by a conman to deprive a family of its millions; the gothic's anxieties about property and its rightful transmission surface again!). Both explicitly modeled the practice of close reading a text in order to uncover information that would otherwise be hidden, with the graphic novel going so far as to have an "answer key" in the back that contained examples of the kind of information hidden in its words and pictures the alert reader would spot and use to solve the mystery before the book presented the solution. The more traditional novel relied on wordplay to disguise clues to the murderer's identity in otherwise innocuous-seeming sentences (a character helpfully explained all the wordplay in the denouement). For whatever reason, I found this strategy infinitely less irritating than Dan Brown's use of basically this same device in The Da Vinci Code.

Anyway, those mystery stories seemed particularly suited to demonstrating the practice of close reading to a novice reader. Obviously what they were doing was simplistic and didn't necessarily offer a way to immediately translate the skills they flaunted to other texts, but they made me aware that techniques like the ones on display existed. Without that kind of exposure I don't know that I could have taken to literary analysis. I wonder: is there something inherent to mystery stories that relates to close reading that makes them so effective at demonstrating this skill? I guess that would explain the interest (obsession might be a better word) that literary theorists have with Poe--his mystery stories somehow model practices that they want to encourage readers to make part of their repertoires, so they highlight what Poe is doing and how's he doing it.

Of course, the ways these skills were being modeled for me were not without their ideological, social, and political purposes, I'm sure (just like early teen slasher films usually served--covertly--as a warning about premarital sex). That, once again, is a topic for another day, though. For now, I'm going to try and remember the name of that graphic novel. I really liked it, and I never did manage to figure everything out without the "answer key." Could I do it now?

REARRANGING MY BOOKSHELVES

A tip of my hat (an old, battered Montreal Canadiens hat) to Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking my Library" for the title and concept.

I spent today doing some cleaning around my apartment. It was badly needed (somehow there's still a sinkload full of dishes to do) and as I've heard any number of people mention this as a favoured form of procrastination, I thought I'd give it a try.

I reserved extra time for rearranging my bookshelves. I should come right out and say that I love books. If you give me money, I will spend it on books before basically anything else. Part of it is the conspicuous consumption and cultural capital angle (yes, I'm not too proud to admit that I like the fact that there are a lot of heavy hitters peering down from my shelves), but given that I've had a grand total of two visitors to my apartment in the time that I've been living here (my parents), I'm not exactly taking full advantage of my books for that. As embarrassing as this is to admit, I've never had bookshelves before. When I moved in, before I had anything unpacked, I assembled a bookshelf I purchased from Target. It was hotter than it ever gets back home, and by the end of it there was a minor flood in my kitchen/living room area because of all the sweat, but I had a bookshelf. I spent the rest of the day ordering my books on the shelves. I ran out of room. I bought another bookshelf. I filled that one. Then I unpacked my clothes.

I did some pretty major reorganizing today. I have a long, short bookcase dedicated to fiction and creative nonfiction, arranged alphabetically by author's last name. For multiple books by the same author, they are arranged chronologically according to publishing date. My fairly small collection of poetry and drama used to be housed on this bookshelf as well, but I moved them over to unit #2, a tall, slim set of shelves. Unit #2 now starts at the top with literary theory/philosophy, and moves down to pedagogy, poetry/drama, history, and, on the bottom shelf, anthologies (mainly by Norton). I'm thinking of switching poetry/drama and history, though. As with the fiction/creative nonfiction bookshelf, books on unit #2 are arranged alphabetically by author's last name, and multiple books by the same author are arranged chronologically by publishing date.

The attention I pay to the order of books on my bookshelves might suggest that I'm a very organized person. This is not the case. I am messy and disorganized (I will pause for a moment to let the people who know me stop laughing at this understatement) [this is one of many reasons why I can't have nice things, like a girlfriend]. Nevertheless, I am quite organized when it comes to my bookshelves. I'm proud of them and hope to be prouder still some day. When I come home and I've had a particularly trying day, I'll often spend a few minutes just browsing over my shelves. I'll pull out a book that catches my eye and read a few pages before putting it back to rest with the others and moving on to a new book.

Rearranging the shelves was an incredibly relaxing activity this afternoon. It took me about two hours to do what should have taken ten minutes. I couldn't help myself, though. Every book seemed to ask for me to pick it up and look at it, even if it was just to look at its cover and flip through the pages. Some books I haven't read yet (projects for this summer) and it took everything in my power not to immediately retire to my bedroom and get started on them right away. While I'd love to do just that, I have dates with Toni Morrison, Stanley Fish, and Shirley Jackson for classes I'm taking or teaching. Other books on my shelf are begging to be reread in light of new experiences, new knowledge, and newly read books. Hopefully I'll get to them soon, too.

I love my books (even the ones I hated reading). I love flipping through their pages and catching an annotation in my hand or my telltale underlining (seriously, I know when I've underlined something and when someone else has. It's very obvious). I've given something to my books; I can't identify it, but I can feel it. I would suffer an irreparable loss were they to disappear. I know this for a fact: I lost some books in a break up and it pains me to think of them not sitting on my shelves with the others (Notable exception: Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent. If you would like my copy, let me know. I'd practically pay you to take it). Most of my books are cheap paperbacks (I'm not into the whole rare book thing), but to me they are valuable beyond measure.

We talked about Wolfgang Iser in class the other day, and his idea of the ways that books allow for limited conversation between work and reader frequently came to mind as I rearranged my shelves. My copy of The Professor's House, for example, has so many annotations by me that there is barely any white space left in the margins of the book. If I lost that book, it would mean more than losing the story and those notes, though. It would mean losing my memories of reading that book (conjured as they are as soon as I catch sight of the book). Part of myself would go missing. I can tell a lot about who I am (and remember a lot about who I've been) by rereading The Professor's House and reliving all my previous encounters with it through my notes in the margins and the passages I've underlined. That book is no longer just Willa Cather's narrative of Godfrey St. Peter and Tom Outland. It's as much (if not more) a narrative about me reading Willa Cather and what that means to me.

I suppose that might be why I spend so much time fussing over my bookshelves. In many ways, my voice is there, contained inside those books I know and love (or at least read once when forced to for class, cf. Crescent). New books mean new ideas and conversations, so I need to reflect the changes in my voice through the organization of my books. I guess that's why I like to keep my bookshelves tidy, even as my laundry and the dishes pile up.