A thoroughly well-deserved Nobel Prize in Literature to America’s unofficial poet laureate — Bob Dylan. Some good news that we can all cheer during these troubled, changing times. In the Nobel committee’s words,
For having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.
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Video: TV Movie, The Times They are a Changing’ (1964), directed by Daryl Duke and starring Bob Dylan.
Many see the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the United States as a force for good. Many recognize the NRA as a force for evil. To some, it is the heroic protector of the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution. To others it is the organization that allows gun violence to take the lives of over 30,000 citizens each year.
Yet, did you know that the NRA is also in the business of publishing fairytales? Actually, the NRA publishes children’s classics that have been re-imagined to include guns. Now you can enjoy classics like Hansel and Gretel (Have Guns) and Little Red Riding Hood (Has a Gun), with wholly appropriate gun violence and NRA-fashioned endings, as they should have been intended.
So, I can’t wait for handguns, semi-automatic rifles and more instruments of efficient death to take a stand in our classic American literature: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (With an AK47), Invisible Man (and Lots of Guns), The Great Gatsby (and His Glock 40), Moby Dick (and the Tomahawk Cruise Missile).
But, why stop there?
We need to re-imagine Shakespeare’s works complete with shotguns, and our best poetry would certainly benefit from several truck-loads of tactical nuclear weapons, And, of course it’s time to give Jesus a well-deserved sniper rifle and a couple of literary grenades to love fend of the Pharisees, devil, Pilate, and Judas Iscariot.
Thank you NRA for opening the minds of our children to real possibilities.
Much has been said about the demise of reading, literature, books and bookstores. In the US alone between 2000 and 2007 around 1,000 independent bookstores shuttered their doors. The national chain Borders went bankrupt in 2011, closing over 600 locations. Electronic forms of entertainment, e-readers, and Amazon.com have all been highlighted as villains in the destruction of physical print and brick-and-mortar bookstores.
Yet, over the last few years a somewhat surprising trend seems to have emerged. It’s not an exponential curve, such as new members flocking to social media in their gazillions, but it’s encouraging nonetheless. According to the American Booksellers Association, the number of member independent bookstores has increased more than 20 percent during the five year period from 2009 to 2014. And, to add icing to the cake Amazon recently declared open a real, physical bookstore! Yes, you read the last sentence correctly — the bookstore is located in Seattle, and carries around 5,000 titles.
So, what’s going on?
From ars technica:
Literary fans in Seattle will no longer need their MacBooks to procure the latest bestselling book: they just need to stroll down to the local Amazon Books store. Today, the online retailer is opening its flagship physical outlet in Seattle’s University Village. According to a press release, the selection of available titles is based on Amazon.com customer ratings, pre-orders, sales, popularity on Goodreads, and curator assessments. If you need further convincing, Amazon Books is also stocking “review cards” so as to ensure you know exactly what everyone else thought about your potential purchase.
Interestingly, the books will all be displayed “face-out,” meaning that customers will be able to see the covers instead of merely the spine. The reason for this, explains Amazon Books vice president Jennifer Cast, is that the company wants to showcase the authors and their work rather than cramming as many things on a shelf as possible. The first Amazon Books store is fairly large at 5,500 square feet (510 square meters) of retail space and 2,000 square feet (185 square meters) of storage.
Read the entire ars techica article here.
From Slate:
The recent news of the opening of an independent bookstore on Manhattan’s Upper West Side was greeted with surprise and delight, since a neighborhood once flush with such stores had become a retail book desert. The opening coincides with the relocation of the Bank Street Bookstore near Columbia University, leading the New York Times to declare, “Print is not dead yet — at least not on the Upper West Side.”
Two stores don’t constitute a trend, but they do point to a quiet revival of independent bookselling in the United States. They also underscore the shifting sands of physical bookselling, where the biggest losers are not—as was once assumed—the independent booksellers, but rather the large book chains.
Only a few years ago, observers projected that the rise of chain stores and Amazon would lead to the vast shrinkage of independent bookstores. According to the American Booksellers Association, the number of member independent bookstores has increased more than 20 percent since the depths of the recession, from 1,651 in 2009 to 2,094 in 2014. Meanwhile, Borders went bankrupt in 2011, and the fate of Barnes & Noble, which failed to make the Nook into a viable e-reader competitor with Amazon’s Kindle, appears murky. What happened?
The short answer is that by listing their shares as public companies, both Borders and Barnes & Noble were drawn into a negative vortex that destroyed the former and has crippled the latter. Not only did they become public companies, but they positioned themselves as high-growth companies, focused on innovation and disruption. That forced them to compete with the growth company par excellence in their space: Amazon. It also forced them to pursue high sales volume at the expense of inventories. Those strategies, as it turned out, were precisely wrong for the actual business they were in: selling books to a selective audience. Which is precisely what independent bookstores are good at.
Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-A-Million, and even Costco looked to be squeezing the life out of indies in the 1990s and into the aughts. Borders alone went from 21 stores in 1992 to 256 superstores in 1999. Barnes & Noble saw even greater growth. Those stores offered more choices, cafes, magazines, and for a while, music. Many independents, already operating with razor-thin margins, couldn’t compete. Between 2000 and 2007, some 1,000 independent bookstores closed.
But even as they were expanding, the chains were beset by questionable management decisions pressured by the demands of public markets to grow, grow, grow. Facing the need for expensive investment in technology, Borders sold its online distribution to Amazon in 2001 and threw its efforts into more stores and bigger stores, using its share price to finance massive debt. Barnes & Noble opened more superstores as well, but it also decided to challenge Amazon by developing the Nook at a cost of more than $1 billion.
The results were disastrous. Barnes & Noble bled money; it just announced earnings with yet another quarter of losses and declining revenue. Amazon dominated because it could spend far more money on technology than the chains, and because its core competency was in the disruptive technologies of e-readers, distribution, and inventory management. Amazon was never seen primarily as a retailer, and hence it could carry massive inventories that were a drag on its earnings and then spend billions on research and development because investors accepted Amazon’s narrative that it was a disruptive technology company redefining how everything is sold, not just books.
The chains, however, were valued as retailers, which meant that they had to have higher sales, more stores, and lower inventory to justify their stock prices. Because investors viewed the chains as retailers, they had to move product. That is what clothing stores do: Old inventory gets put on sale and then off-loaded to discount stores. Unsold inventory shows up on income statements as a negative against sales. To demonstrate higher profitability, retail stores have an incentive to turn over their inventories quickly.
For clothing and electronics and automobiles, that workflow is in sync with consumer behavior. Consumers want new fashion, the newest flat-screen, the latest model car. Book consumers aren’t the same. Yes, new titles can drive sales, but book buyers also look for forgotten classics and hidden gems. That means poring over shelves, and that requires old inventory. The chains and their management could have tried to set investors’ expectations for higher unsold inventories as a healthy part of the specific business of buying and selling books. But they didn’t. They treated old inventory as a drag rather than an asset and began to trim their shelves of titles. (Alternatively, they could have tried to position themselves as larger, better-stocked versions of the independents, focusing on the particular desires of book customers.)
Independent bookstores never had to answer to the dictates of public markets. Many of their proprietors understood, intuitively and from conversations with customers, that a well-curated selection—an inventory of old and new books—was their primary and maybe only competitive advantage. In the words of Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, “The indie bookselling amalgam of knowledge, innovation, passion, and business sophistication has created a unique shopping experience.”
Read the entire Slate article here.
Image courtesy of Google Search.
A sad symptom of our expanding media binge culture and the fragmentation of our shortening attention spans is the demise of literary fiction. Author Will Self believes the novel, and narrative prose in general, is on a slow, but accelerating, death-spiral. His eloquent views presented in a May 6, 2014 lecture are excerpted below.
From the Guardian:
If you happen to be a writer, one of the great benisons of having children is that your personal culture-mine is equipped with its own canaries. As you tunnel on relentlessly into the future, these little harbingers either choke on the noxious gases released by the extraction of decadence, or they thrive in the clean air of what we might call progress. A few months ago, one of my canaries, who’s in his mid-teens and harbours a laudable ambition to be the world’s greatest ever rock musician, was messing about on his electric guitar. Breaking off from a particularly jagged and angry riff, he launched into an equally jagged diatribe, the gist of which was already familiar to me: everything in popular music had been done before, and usually those who’d done it first had done it best. Besides, the instant availability of almost everything that had ever been done stifled his creativity, and made him feel it was all hopeless.
A miner, if he has any sense, treats his canary well, so I began gently remonstrating with him. Yes, I said, it’s true that the web and the internet have created a permanent Now, eliminating our sense of musical eras; it’s also the case that the queered demographics of our longer-living, lower-birthing population means that the middle-aged squat on top of the pyramid of endeavour, crushing the young with our nostalgic tastes. What’s more, the decimation of the revenue streams once generated by analogues of recorded music have put paid to many a musician’s income. But my canary had to appreciate this: if you took the long view, the advent of the 78rpm shellac disc had also been a disaster for musicians who in the teens and 20s of the last century made their daily bread by live performance. I repeated one of my favourite anecdotes: when the first wax cylinder recording of Feodor Chaliapin singing “The Song of the Volga Boatmen“ was played, its listeners, despite a lowness of fidelity that would seem laughable to us (imagine a man holding forth from a giant bowl of snapping, crackling and popping Rice Krispies), were nonetheless convinced the portly Russian must be in the room, and searched behind drapes and underneath chaise longues for him.
So recorded sound blew away the nimbus of authenticity surrounding live performers – but it did worse things. My canaries have often heard me tell how back in the 1970s heyday of the pop charts, all you needed was a writing credit on some loathsome chirpy-chirpy-cheep-cheeping ditty in order to spend the rest of your born days lying by a guitar-shaped pool in the Hollywood Hills hoovering up cocaine. Surely if there’s one thing we have to be grateful for it’s that the web has put paid to such an egregious financial multiplier being applied to raw talentlessness. Put paid to it, and also returned musicians to the domain of live performance and, arguably, reinvigorated musicianship in the process. Anyway, I was saying all of this to my canary when I was suddenly overtaken by a great wave of noxiousness only I could smell. I faltered, I fell silent, then I said: sod you and your creative anxieties, what about me? How do you think it feels to have dedicated your entire adult life to an art form only to see the bloody thing dying before your eyes?
My canary is a perceptive songbird – he immediately ceased his own cheeping, except to chirrup: I see what you mean. The literary novel as an art work and a narrative art form central to our culture is indeed dying before our eyes. Let me refine my terms: I do not mean narrative prose fiction tout court is dying – the kidult boywizardsroman and the soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy are clearly in rude good health. And nor do I mean that serious novels will either cease to be written or read. But what is already no longer the case is the situation that obtained when I was a young man. In the early 1980s, and I would argue throughout the second half of the last century, the literary novel was perceived to be the prince of art forms, the cultural capstone and the apogee of creative endeavour. The capability words have when arranged sequentially to both mimic the free flow of human thought and investigate the physical expressions and interactions of thinking subjects; the way they may be shaped into a believable simulacrum of either the commonsensical world, or any number of invented ones; and the capability of the extended prose form itself, which, unlike any other art form, is able to enact self-analysis, to describe other aesthetic modes and even mimic them. All this led to a general acknowledgment: the novel was the true Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.
This is not to say that everyone walked the streets with their head buried in Ulysses or To the Lighthouse, or that popular culture in all its forms didn’t hold sway over the psyches and imaginations of the great majority. Nor do I mean to suggest that in our culture perennial John Bull-headed philistinism wasn’t alive and snorting: “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.” However, what didn’t obtain is the current dispensation, wherein those who reject the high arts feel not merely entitled to their opinion, but wholly justified in it. It goes further: the hallmark of our contemporary culture is an active resistance to difficulty in all its aesthetic manifestations, accompanied by a sense of grievance that conflates it with political elitism. Indeed, it’s arguable that tilting at this papery windmill of artistic superiority actively prevents a great many people from confronting the very real economic inequality and political disenfranchisement they’re subject to, exactly as being compelled to chant the mantra “choice” drowns out the harsh background Muzak telling them they have none.
Just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. Simply because you’ve remarked a number of times on the concealed fox gnawing its way into your vitals, it doesn’t mean it hasn’t at this moment swallowed your gall bladder. Ours is an age in which omnipresent threats of imminent extinction are also part of the background noise – nuclear annihilation, terrorism, climate change. So we can be blinkered when it comes to tectonic cultural shifts. The omnipresent and deadly threat to the novel has been imminent now for a long time – getting on, I would say, for a century – and so it’s become part of culture. During that century, more books of all kinds have been printed and read by far than in the entire preceding half millennium since the invention of movable-type printing. If this was death it had a weird, pullulating way of expressing itself. The saying is that there are no second acts in American lives; the novel, I think, has led a very American sort of life: swaggering, confident, brash even – and ever aware of its world-conquering manifest destiny. But unlike Ernest Hemingway or F Scott Fitzgerald, the novel has also had a second life. The form should have been laid to rest at about the time of Finnegans Wake, but in fact it has continued to stalk the corridors of our minds for a further three-quarters of a century. Many fine novels have been written during this period, but I would contend that these were, taking the long view, zombie novels, instances of an undead art form that yet wouldn’t lie down.
Literary critics – themselves a dying breed, a cause for considerable schadenfreude on the part of novelists – make all sorts of mistakes, but some of the most egregious ones result from an inability to think outside of the papery prison within which they conduct their lives’ work. They consider the codex. They are – in Marshall McLuhan’s memorable phrase – the possessors of Gutenberg minds.
There is now an almost ceaseless murmuring about the future of narrative prose. Most of it is at once Panglossian and melioristic: yes, experts assert, there’s no disputing the impact of digitised text on the whole culture of the codex; fewer paper books are being sold, newspapers fold, bookshops continue to close, libraries as well. But … but, well, there’s still no substitute for the experience of close reading as we’ve come to understand and appreciate it – the capacity to imagine entire worlds from parsing a few lines of text; the ability to achieve deep and meditative levels of absorption in others’ psyches. This circling of the wagons comes with a number of public-spirited campaigns: children are given free books; book bags are distributed with slogans on them urging readers to put books in them; books are hymned for their physical attributes – their heft, their appearance, their smell – as if they were the bodily correlates of all those Gutenberg minds, which, of course, they are.
The seeming realists among the Gutenbergers say such things as: well, clearly, books are going to become a minority technology, but the beau livre will survive. The populist Gutenbergers prate on about how digital texts linked to social media will allow readers to take part in a public conversation. What none of the Gutenbergers are able to countenance, because it is quite literally – for once the intensifier is justified – out of their minds, is that the advent of digital media is not simply destructive of the codex, but of the Gutenberg mind itself. There is one question alone that you must ask yourself in order to establish whether the serious novel will still retain cultural primacy and centrality in another 20 years. This is the question: if you accept that by then the vast majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web, do you also believe that those readers will voluntarily choose to disable that connectivity? If your answer to this is no, then the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth.
Read the entire excerpt here.
Image: Will Self, 2007. Courtesy of Wikipedia / Creative Commons.
In the eyes of many teachers and parents, a novel is not a novel when it is graphic — as in, graphic novel, with illustrations and images, not necessarily explicit in content (when did “graphic” come to connote negativity anyway?) Educators who tell their students to put the graphic novel back on the shelf — in favor of a more wordy tome — still tend to perceive this form of literature as nothing more than a bound, cartoonish comic strip aimed at childish readers or nerdy boys. Not so! Graphic novels are not your father’s Dandy or Beano (though, in themselves are entertaining too).
Some critically acclaimed and riveting works have recently debuted in graphic form, and the genre is holding its own and slowly proving its worth. The stories both true and imagined are rich and moving, and the illustrations, far from detracting the eye, add gravitas and depth. And, the subjects now go far beyond the realm of superheroes, zombies and robots — they walk us through all that is to be human: tragedy, atrocity, love, angst, guilt, loss, joy.
A few recent classics come to mind: Persepolis, a French-language, autobiographical graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi; Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, a graphic novel about the quest for logic and reason in mathematics, by Apostolos Doxiadis; Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel; Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History, by Art Spiegelman; Blankets an autobiographical graphic novel by Craig Thompson.
From Washington Post:
A Young girl, a primary grade-schooler with a well-worn library card, was enthusiastically reading a riveting memoir when a stern tone descended upon her.
“What is that?” the teacher asked/accused.
“It’s a graphic novel,” came the girl’s reply.
Such works, the girl was told, were unacceptable for classroom “reading time,” let alone for a book report. The teacher’s sharp ruling boiled down to a four-word excuse for banishment:
“Graphic. Novels. Aren’t. Books.”
Sigh.
Here we go again…
Really? Two decades after Art Spiegelman’s landmark Holocaust graphic novel “Maus” won the Pulitzer Prize and helped stake a fresh claim for comics as literature — paving the way for the appreciation of such works as “Persepolis” and “Blankets” and “American Born Chinese” — do a significant number of teachers and administrators remain mired in such backward thinking?
Unfortunately, my rhetoric is rhetorical. These curricular “world-is-flat’ers” are still thick on our school grounds. But it’s time for the culture’s tectonic plates to more rapidly force a shift in academic thought.
As we step into 2014, this lingering bias in curriculum needs to cease. We fervently urge the least enlightened of our educators to catch up with the rest of the class. And to make our case, let us present Exhibit A:
The young girl who faced that rebuke of illustrated books was a relative of mine. And that book (a-hem) in question was “Stitches: A Memoir,” acclaimed author David Small’s poignant personal story of a dysfunctional childhood home — including his adolescent battle with throat cancer, which may have been caused by his doctor-father’s early over-embrace of X-ray radiation. In Small’s masterful prose and liquid pictures, we vividly experience the voiceless boy-patient’s raw emotions.
Even four years ago, quite a few people would have begged to differ with that grade-school teacher. “Stitches” climbed the bestseller list of the New York Times, which deemed the book worthy of review; was named one of the best books of the year by such outlets as Publishers Weekly; and was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. No less than Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist/author/playwright/screenwriter Jules Feiffer said aptly of Small’s masterpiece: “It left me speechless.”
Of the teacher’s wrong-headed thinking, I was left speechless. Her decision was not a mere judgment against one book, but an ignorant indictment of all graphic novels. As blanket criticism, it was unabashedly threadbare.
Consider my commentary here, then, to be a criticism of that criticism. Because what the larger academic problem calls for is not damnation, but persuasion. A struck match. Into Plato’s cave, let us bring truer illumination.
What follows is not some broad indictment of modern American education. I was born into a brood of teachers — the family crest might as well be a chalkboard — and I deeply value what too often is one of the nation’s more thankless and underpaid cornerstone careers. Plus, as an artist who has spoken to thousands of impressive educators — many of whom appreciated my history-themed syndicated comic strip — I applaud those who thoughtfully and passionately help inform and shape young minds, while keeping an open mind themselves. On this front, so many of them “get” it.
What this essay is, at heart, is an extended hand in the name of better understanding — especially as our schools are filled with so-called “reluctant readers” and other struggling learners. We face an educational imperative: Why not use every effective teaching tool at our disposal? Decades of studies have shown the power of visual learning as an effective scholastic technique. Author Neil Gaiman (winner of the Newbery and Carnegie medals for children’s lit) recently noted that comics were once falsely accused of fostering illiteracy. We now know that comics — the marriage of word and picture in a dynamic relationship that fires synapses across the brain — can be a bridge to literacy and a path to learning. Armed with that knowledge, the last thing we need blocking that footbridge is the Reluctant Teacher.
Fortunately, 2013 rises to aid our cause. It was a banner year for graphic novels; top authors ranged from a young hip-hop fan to a heroic septuagenarian congressman writing his first comic — and in between were a couple of world-class cartoonists who also happen to be widely recognized educators.
Great works help beget great change. So here, then, is our examination of 10 stellar graphic novels and illustrated books from the year past (all equally fit for adult consumption, to boot). Because the writing is on the classroom wall. As generations are weaned on the Internet, our culture grows ever more visual. And the take-home lesson is this:
Let us meet our young minds where they live.
Let us smartly employ the resources of visual learning.
Read the entire article here.
Image: Persepolis 1 and Persepolis 2, book covers by Marjane Satrapi. Courtesy of Marjane Satrapi / Wikipedia.
Dragons have long filled our dreams and nightmares, and maps. Until recently, cartographers would fill in unexplored areas on their hand-drawn charts with monsters and serpents. Now, most of the dragons we encounter are courtesy of the movies or the toy store, though some of us harbor metaphorical dragons within (or at the office). Thus with the next Hobbit movie — The Desolation of Smaug — on the horizon it is fitting to look back at the colorful history of our most treasured and terrifying dragons.
From the Guardian:
I doubt if JRR Tolkien would recognise his Smaug in Peter Jackson’s new CGI Hobbit spectacular, with its colossal, grandiose dragon voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch. Tolkien’s beast, at least in the author’s original illustrations, was an elegant Rackhamesque creature: a fire-orange, slightly languid lizard, all stuck over with jewels from years of lolling about in his lair, where his vast treasure was stored.
Smaug was created by Tolkien out of his love for Beowulf, whose hero battles with “the fiery dragon, the fearful fiend”. But Tolkien also threw in a little wordplay for good measure: the name came from the old German smugan, meaning to squeeze through a hole, presumably in reference to the biblical parable about rich men and needles; while Smaug’s treasure-guarding echoes the origin of the word dragon itself, from the Greek drakon, “to watch”.
For all its contemporary role as a cliche of fantasy epics, the dragon’s true power comes from a darker place. It casts a long shadow over our folk memory, across the caverns of our collective fears. It may even reach back into prehistory: when the fossilised bones of sauropods were first discovered, they were claimed to be the remains of dragons – a notion encouraged by the convention that dragons didn’t really die, they just cast off their bodies.
But the dragon cannot be contained by palaeontology. It writhes out of reality and into western creation myths, from the pagan Norse beast Níðhöggr, gnawing away at the roots of Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life, to the Book of Revelation and its “great red dragon with seven heads and 10 horns” that attempts to eat the offspring of “the woman clothed with the sun” as she gives birth.
Throughout the Bible, in fact, the dragon is the embodiment of evil, a stand-in for Satan. There’s a wonderful 15th-century oil in the Prado, attributed to a “master of Zafra”, that depicts the archangel Michael (looking rather girly with his crimped hair and bejewelled breastplate) straddling an extraordinary dragon. This medieval mashup has the paws of a lion, the wings of a vulture, the neck of a sea serpent and a head seemingly composed of a horned cow crossed with the archetypal Chinese dragon familiar from 1,000 vases and takeaway menus.
It’s a mark of the monster’s shape-shifting qualities that its satanic western aura is sharply contrasted by the rearing, joyous, prancing imperial dragons of China: symbols of good luck and nobility rather than of disaster, often bearing pearls and surrounded by clouds and fire. At least one emperor, Yaou, was said to have been the product of a liaison between his mother and a red dragon.
In fact, so rich were the oriental legends of dragons that they convinced the Victorian geologist Charles Gould that dragons had really existed. “There is nothing impossible in the ordinary notion of the traditional dragon,” Gould declared in his 1886 book Mythical Monsters. “It is more likely to have once had a real existence than to be a mere offspring of fancy.” Gould surmised that these dragon stories drew on a “long terrestrial lizard, hibernating and carnivorous, with the power of constricting with its snake-like body and tail, possibly furnished with wing-like extensions”. Since Victorians regularly read reports of maned and long-necked sea monsters in their newspapers, such faith in the fabulous was by no means unusual.
For all his mentions of Darwin and “rational study” of the evidence, Gould betrayed his creationist beliefs when he declared that the dragon disappeared during the “Biblical Deluge”. Nevertheless, his fellow cryptozoologists not only insisted that dragons had existed, but that they still did – in the brontosaurian shape of Mokele Mbembe, cavorting in the Congo’s swamps like an African Loch Ness monster.
The Prado painting proves that the medieval world thronged with dragons; its skies were as full of them as ours are of 747s. But it is to the 19th century that we owe our contemporary image of the dragon. From Tennyson’s “Dragons of the prime, / That tare each other in their slime”, to the art of William Blake, Edward Burne-Jones and Aubrey Beardsley, the period teemed with the beasts. Blake’s Great Red Dragon watercolour series revisited the baby-eating beast of Revelation, and has much in common with Swiss surrealist HR Giger’s designs for Alien (itself a sci-fi version of the dragon). Morphing weirdly between human and beast, they are so intensely physical they must surely have emerged from Blake’s many hallucinations. To Burne-Jones, the dragon was a more muscular physical reality, a bleeding, biting beast to be wrestled by St George. Beardsley, on the other hand, produced an epicene, ambisexual Arthurian dragon, all curlicues and decadent flourishes – an enervated, languorous, stupefied beast, barely capable of a roar.
It has always struck me that the pterodactyls and prehistoric lizards that hang off London’s Natural History Museum, not to mention the terracotta dragons perched on the eaves of suburban terraces, were really only excuses for the Victorians to invent their own gargoyles and demons as a retort to the worrying new doubts of Darwinism. Like all monsters (the word comes from the Latin monstrum, “to warn”), dragons fulfil a particular niche, whether for a Chinese emperor, Victorian artist, or contemporary film-maker: they become precisely what the age demands of them, their roars tailored to contemporary concerns. In his intriguing, postmodern study The Last Dinosaur Book, WJT Mitchell sees the dragon as “the cultural ancestor of the dinosaur … the ruling reptile of premodern social systems, associated with kings and emperors, with buried treasure and with the fall of dynasties”. Rather than exorcise the atavistic monsters, the appearance of real dragons – in the shape of Tyrannosaurus rex et al – merely reinforced belief in their imaginary predecessors.
That’s why, in the movies of Ray Harryhausen and other fantasy films from Godzilla to Jurassic Park and beyond, dinosaurs and dragons are almost interchangeable: a reflection of new 20th-century myths, auguries of a nuclear age. From Tolkien and CS Lewis to Dungeons and Dragons (with a particular appeal to boys – and quite a few men), they speak of an alternative existence into which we might escape when reality threatens. Perhaps that’s why the abusive term “dragon” is reserved for “terrifying” women (despite all the phallic symbolism of a dragon’s serpentine neck).
Enter not Bruce Lee, but Carl Jung, stroking his beard and declaring that the dragon is an archetype of our unconscious fears: the devouring nature of our mothers, or our fear of sex – the dragon inside us all. Furthermore, Jung diagnosed the dichotomy of the dragon and its two faces: as feared enemy in western myth; or as the positive, transformative power within ourselves (“the Great Self Within” in Jung’s phrase) in the eastern tradition. Cue a parade of new-age dragons, their sulphorous breath replaced with pungent patchouli.
Read the entire article here.
Image courtesy of Google Search.
Intrepid literary detective work spanning Europe, China, Japan and Africa uncovers the roots of a famous children’s tale.
From the Independent:
Little Red Riding Hood’s closest relative may have been her ill-fated grandmother, but academics have discovered she has long-lost cousins as far away as China and Japan.
Employing scientific analysis commonly used by biologists, anthropologist Jamshid Tehrani has mapped the emergence of the story to an earlier tale from the first century AD – and found it has numerous links to similar stories across the globe.
The Durham University academic traced the roots of Little Red Riding Hood to a folk tale called The Wolf and the Kids, which subsequently “evolved twice”, he claims in his paper, published this week in scientific journal Plos One.
Dr Tehrani, who has previously studied cultural change over generations in areas such as textiles, debunked theories that the tale emerged in China, arriving via the Silk Route. Instead, he traced the origins to European oral traditions, which then spread east.
“The Chinese version is derived from European oral traditions and not vice versa,” he said.
The Chinese took Little Red Riding Hood and The Wolf and the Kids and blended it with local tales, he argued. Often the wolf is replaced with an ogre or a tiger.
The research analysed 58 variants of the tales and looked at 72 plot variables.
The scientific process used was called phylogenetic analysis, used by biologists to group closely-related organisms to map out branches of evolution. Dr Tehrani used maths to model the similarities of the plots and score them on the probability that they have the same origin.
Little Red Riding Hood and The Wolf and the Kids, which concerns a wolf impersonating a goat to trick her kids and eat them, remain as distinct stories. Dr Tehrani described it “like a biologist showing that humans and other apes share a common ancestor but have evolved into distinct species”.
The Wolf and the Kids originated in the 1st century AD, with Little Red Riding Hood branching off 1,000 years later.
The story was immortalised by the Brothers Grimm in the 19th century, based on a tale written by Charles Perrault 200 years earlier. That derived from oral storytelling in France, Austria and northern Italy. Variants of Little Red Riding Hood can be found across Africa and Asia, including The Tiger Grandmother in Japan, China and Korea.
Dr Tehrani said: “My research cracks a long-standing mystery. The African tales turn out to be descended from The Wolf and the Kids but over time, they have evolved to become like Little Red Riding Hood, which is also likely to be descended from The Wolf and the Kids.”
The academic, who is now studying a range of other fairy tales, said: “This exemplifies a process biologists call convergent evolution, in which species independently evolve similar adaptations.”
Read the entire article here.
Image: Old father Wolf eyes up Little Red Riding Hood. Illustration courtesy of Tyler Garrison / Guardian.
Enough is enough! Our favorite wordsmiths must call a halt right now. First we lost Chris Hitchens, soon followed by Iain Banks. And now, poet extraordinaire, Seamus Heaney.
So, we mourn and celebrate with an excerpt from his 1995 Nobel acceptance speech. You can find more on Heaney’s remarkable life in words, here, at Poetry Foundation.
From the Independent:
When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
At the time I am thinking of, such an outcome was not just beyond expectation: it was simply beyond conception. In the nineteen forties, when I was the eldest child of an ever-growing family in rural Co. Derry, we crowded together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world. It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other. We took in everything that was going on, of course – rain in the trees, mice on the ceiling, a steam train rumbling along the railway line one field back from the house – but we took it in as if we were in the doze of hibernation. Ahistorical, pre-sexual, in suspension between the archaic and the modern, we were as susceptible and impressionable as the drinking water that stood in a bucket in our scullery: every time a passing train made the earth shake, the surface of that water used to ripple delicately, concentrically, and in utter silence.
But it was not only the earth that shook for us: the air around and above us was alive and signalling too. When a wind stirred in the beeches, it also stirred an aerial wire attached to the topmost branch of the chestnut tree. Down it swept, in through a hole bored in the corner of the kitchen window, right on into the innards of our wireless set where a little pandemonium of burbles and squeaks would suddenly give way to the voice of a BBC newsreader speaking out of the unexpected like a deus ex machina. And that voice too we could hear in our bedroom, transmitting from beyond and behind the voices of the adults in the kitchen; just as we could often hear, behind and beyond every voice, the frantic, piercing signalling of morse code.
We could pick up the names of neighbours being spoken in the local accents of our parents, and in the resonant English tones of the newsreader the names of bombers and of cities bombed, of war fronts and army divisions, the numbers of planes lost and of prisoners taken, of casualties suffered and advances made; and always, of course, we would pick up too those other, solemn and oddly bracing words, “the enemy” and “the allies”. But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror. If there was something ominous in the newscaster’s tones, there was something torpid about our understanding of what was at stake; and if there was something culpable about such political ignorance in that time and place, there was something positive about the security I inhabited as a result of it.
The wartime, in other words, was pre-reflective time for me. Pre-literate too. Pre-historical in its way. Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker. But it was still not the news that interested me; what I was after was the thrill of story, such as a detective serial about a British special agent called Dick Barton or perhaps a radio adaptation of one of Capt. W.E. Johns’s adventure tales about an RAF flying ace called Biggles. Now that the other children were older and there was so much going on in the kitchen, I had to get close to the actual radio set in order to concentrate my hearing, and in that intent proximity to the dial I grew familiar with the names of foreign stations, with Leipzig and Oslo and Stuttgart and Warsaw and, of course, with Stockholm.
I also got used to hearing short bursts of foreign languages as the dial hand swept round from BBC to Radio Eireann, from the intonations of London to those of Dublin, and even though I did not understand what was being said in those first encounters with the gutturals and sibilants of European speech, I had already begun a journey into the wideness of the world beyond. This in turn became a journey into the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival – whether in one’s poetry or one’s life turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination, and it is that journey which has brought me now to this honoured spot. And yet the platform here feels more like a space station than a stepping stone, so that is why, for once in my life, I am permitting myself the luxury of walking on air.
*
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. I credit it immediately because of a line I wrote fairly recently instructing myself (and whoever else might be listening) to “walk on air against your better judgement”. But I credit it ultimately because poetry can make an order as true to the impact of external reality and as sensitive to the inner laws of the poet’s being as the ripples that rippled in and rippled out across the water in that scullery bucket fifty years ago. An order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. An order which satisfies all that is appetitive in the intelligence and prehensile in the affections. I credit poetry, in other words, both for being itself and for being a help, for making possible a fluid and restorative relationship between the mind’s centre and its circumference, between the child gazing at the word “Stockholm” on the face of the radio dial and the man facing the faces that he meets in Stockholm at this most privileged moment. I credit it because credit is due to it, in our time and in all time, for its truth to life, in every sense of that phrase.
*
To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against. Even as a schoolboy, I loved John Keats’s ode “To Autumn” for being an ark of the covenant between language and sensation; as an adolescent, I loved Gerard Manley Hopkins for the intensity of his exclamations which were also equations for a rapture and an ache I didn’t fully know I knew until I read him; I loved Robert Frost for his farmer’s accuracy and his wily down-to-earthness; and Chaucer too for much the same reasons. Later on I would find a different kind of accuracy, a moral down-to-earthness to which I responded deeply and always will, in the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, a poetry where a New Testament sensibility suffers and absorbs the shock of the new century’s barbarism. Then later again, in the pure consequence of Elizabeth Bishop’s style, in the sheer obduracy of Robert Lowell’s and in the barefaced confrontation of Patrick Kavanagh’s, I encountered further reasons for believing in poetry’s ability – and responsibility – to say what happens, to “pity the planet,” to be “not concerned with Poetry.”
This temperamental disposition towards an art that was earnest and devoted to things as they are was corroborated by the experience of having been born and brought up in Northern Ireland and of having lived with that place even though I have lived out of it for the past quarter of a century. No place in the world prides itself more on its vigilance and realism, no place considers itself more qualified to censure any flourish of rhetoric or extravagance of aspiration. So, partly as a result of having internalized these attitudes through growing up with them, and partly as a result of growing a skin to protect myself against them, I went for years half-avoiding and half- resisting the opulence and extensiveness of poets as different as Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke; crediting insufficiently the crystalline inwardness of Emily Dickinson, all those forked lightnings and fissures of association; and missing the visionary strangeness of Eliot. And these more or less costive attitudes were fortified by a refusal to grant the poet any more license than any other citizen; and they were further induced by having to conduct oneself as a poet in a situation of ongoing political violence and public expectation. A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
In such circumstances, the mind still longs to repose in what Samuel Johnson once called with superb confidence “the stability of truth”, even as it recognizes the destabilizing nature of its own operations and enquiries. Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses. The child in the bedroom, listening simultaneously to the domestic idiom of his Irish home and the official idioms of the British broadcaster while picking up from behind both the signals of some other distress, that child was already being schooled for the complexities of his adult predicament, a future where he would have to adjudicate among promptings variously ethical, aesthetical, moral, political, metrical, sceptical, cultural, topical, typical, post-colonial and, taken all together, simply impossible. So it was that I found myself in the mid-nineteen seventies in another small house, this time in Co. Wicklow south of Dublin, with a young family of my own and a slightly less imposing radio set, listening to the rain in the trees and to the news of bombings closer to home-not only those by the Provisional IRA in Belfast but equally atrocious assaults in Dublin by loyalist paramilitaries from the north. Feeling puny in my predicaments as I read about the tragic logic of Osip Mandelstam’s fate in the 1930s, feeling challenged yet steadfast in my noncombatant status when I heard, for example, that one particularly sweetnatured school friend had been interned without trial because he was suspected of having been involved in a political killing. What I was longing for was not quite stability but an active escape from the quicksand of relativism, a way of crediting poetry without anxiety or apology. In a poem called “Exposure” I wrote then:
If I could come on meteorite!
Instead, I walk through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,
Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a slingstone
Whirled for the desperate.
How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends’
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me
As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.
For what? For the ear? For the people?
For what is said behind-backs?
Rain comes down through the alders,
Its low conducive voices
Mutter about let-downs and erosions
And yet each drop recalls
The diamond absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner émigré, a grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne
Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;
Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once in a lifetime portent,
The comet’s pulsing rose.
(from North)
Read the entire article here.
The world of fiction is populated with hundreds of different genres — most of which were invented by clever marketeers anxious to ensure vampire novels (teen / horror) don’t live next to classic works (literary) on real or imagined (think Amazon) book shelves. So, it should come as no surprise to see a new category recently emerge: cli-fi.
Short for climate fiction, cli-fi novels explore the dangers of environmental degradation and apocalyptic climate change. Not light reading for your summer break at the beach. But, then again, more books in this category may get us to think often and carefully about preserving our beaches — and the rest of the planet — for our kids.
From the Guardian:
A couple of days ago Dan Bloom, a freelance news reporter based in Taiwan, wrote on the Teleread blog that his word had been stolen from him. In 2012 Bloom had “produced and packaged” a novella called Polar City Red, about climate refugees in a post-apocalyptic Alaska in the year 2075. Bloom labelled the book “cli-fi” in the press release and says he coined that term in 2007, cli-fi being short for “climate fiction”, described as a sub-genre of sci-fi. Polar City Red bombed, selling precisely 271 copies, until National Public Radio (NPR) and the Christian Science Monitor picked up on the term cli-fi last month, writing Bloom out of the story. So Bloom has blogged his reply on Teleread, saying he’s simply pleased the term is now out there – it has gone viral since the NPR piece by Scott Simon. It’s not quite as neat as that – in recent months the term has been used increasingly in literary and environmental circles – but there’s no doubt it has broken out more widely. You can search for cli-fi on Amazon, instantly bringing up a plethora of books with titles such as 2042: The Great Cataclysm, or Welcome to the Greenhouse. Twitter has been abuzz.
Whereas 10 or 20 years ago it would have been difficult to identify even a handful of books that fell under this banner, there is now a growing corpus of novels setting out to warn readers of possible environmental nightmares to come. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour, the story of a forest valley filled with an apparent lake of fire, is shortlisted for the 2013 Women’s prize for fiction. Meanwhile, there’s Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow, set in a future New York, about a mathematician who deals in worst-case scenarios. In Liz Jensen’s 2009 eco-thriller The Rapture, summer temperatures are asphyxiating and Armageddon is near; her most recent book, The Uninvited, features uncanny warnings from a desperate future. Perhaps the most high-profile cli-fi author is Margaret Atwood, whose 2009 The Year of the Flood features survivors of a biological catastrophe also central to her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, a book Atwood sometimes preferred to call “speculative fiction”.
Engaging with this subject in fiction increases debate about the issue; finely constructed, intricate narratives help us broaden our understanding and explore imagined futures, encouraging us to think about the kind of world we want to live in. This can often seem difficult in our 24?hour news-on-loop society where the consequences of climate change may appear to be everywhere, but intelligent discussion of it often seems to be nowhere. Also, as the crime genre can provide the dirty thrill of, say, reading about a gruesome fictional murder set on a street the reader recognises, the best cli-fi novels allow us to be briefly but intensely frightened: climate chaos is closer, more immediate, hovering over our shoulder like that murderer wielding his knife. Outside of the narrative of a novel the issue can seem fractured, incoherent, even distant. As Gregory Norminton puts it in his introduction to an anthology on the subject, Beacons: Stories for Our Not-So-Distant Future: “Global warming is a predicament, not a story. Narrative only comes in our response to that predicament.” Which is as good an argument as any for engaging with those stories.
All terms are reductive, all labels simplistic – clearly, the likes of Kingsolver, Jensen and Atwood have a much broader canvas than this one issue. And there’s an argument for saying this is simply rebranding: sci-fi writers have been engaging with the climate-change debate for longer than literary novelists – Snow by Adam Roberts comes to mind – and I do wonder whether this is a term designed for squeamish writers and critics who dislike the box labelled “science fiction”. So the term is certainly imperfect, but it’s also valuable. Unlike sci-fi, cli-fi writing comes primarily from a place of warning rather than discovery. There are no spaceships hovering in the sky; no clocks striking 13. On the contrary, many of the horrors described seem oddly familiar.
Read the entire article after the jump.
Image: Aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. Courtesy of the Independent.
Professor of Philosophy Gregory Currie tackles a thorny issue in his latest article. The question he seeks to answer is, “does great literature make us better?” It’s highly likely that a poll of most nations would show the majority of people believe that literature does in fact propel us in a forward direction, intellectually, morally, emotionally and culturally. It seem like a no-brainer. But where is the hard evidence?
From the New York Times:
You agree with me, I expect, that exposure to challenging works of literary fiction is good for us. That’s one reason we deplore the dumbing-down of the school curriculum and the rise of the Internet and its hyperlink culture. Perhaps we don’t all read very much that we would count as great literature, but we’re apt to feel guilty about not doing so, seeing it as one of the ways we fall short of excellence. Wouldn’t reading about Anna Karenina, the good folk of Middlemarch and Marcel and his friends expand our imaginations and refine our moral and social sensibilities?
If someone now asks you for evidence for this view, I expect you will have one or both of the following reactions. First, why would anyone need evidence for something so obviously right? Second, what kind of evidence would he want? Answering the first question is easy: if there’s no evidence – even indirect evidence – for the civilizing value of literary fiction, we ought not to assume that it does civilize. Perhaps you think there are questions we can sensibly settle in ways other than by appeal to evidence: by faith, for instance. But even if there are such questions, surely no one thinks this is one of them.
What sort of evidence could we present? Well, we can point to specific examples of our fellows who have become more caring, wiser people through encounters with literature. Indeed, we are such people ourselves, aren’t we?
I hope no one is going to push this line very hard. Everything we know about our understanding of ourselves suggests that we are not very good at knowing how we got to be the kind of people we are. In fact we don’t really know, very often, what sorts of people we are. We regularly attribute our own failures to circumstance and the failures of others to bad character. But we can’t all be exceptions to the rule (supposing it is a rule) that people do bad things because they are bad people.
We are poor at knowing why we make the choices we do, and we fail to recognize the tiny changes in circumstances that can shift us from one choice to another. When it comes to other people, can you be confident that your intelligent, socially attuned and generous friend who reads Proust got that way partly because of the reading? Might it not be the other way around: that bright, socially competent and empathic people are more likely than others to find pleasure in the complex representations of human interaction we find in literature?
There’s an argument we often hear on the other side, illustrated earlier this year by a piece on The New Yorker’s Web site. Reminding us of all those cultured Nazis, Teju Cole notes the willingness of a president who reads novels and poetry to sign weekly drone strike permissions. What, he asks, became of “literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy?” I find this a hard argument to like, and not merely because I am not yet persuaded by the moral case against drones. No one should be claiming that exposure to literature protects one against moral temptation absolutely, or that it can reform the truly evil among us. We measure the effectiveness of drugs and other medical interventions by thin margins of success that would not be visible without sophisticated statistical techniques; why assume literature’s effectiveness should be any different?
We need to go beyond the appeal to common experience and into the territory of psychological research, which is sophisticated enough these days to make a start in testing our proposition.
Psychologists have started to do some work in this area, and we have learned a few things so far. We know that if you get people to read a short, lowering story about a child murder they will afterward report feeling worse about the world than they otherwise would. Such changes, which are likely to be very short-term, show that fictions press our buttons; they don’t show that they refine us emotionally or in any other way.
We have learned that people are apt to pick up (purportedly) factual information stated or implied as part of a fictional story’s background. Oddly, people are more prone to do that when the story is set away from home: in a study conducted by Deborah Prentice and colleagues and published in 1997, Princeton undergraduates retained more from a story when it was set at Yale than when it was set on their own campus (don’t worry Princetonians, Yalies are just as bad when you do the test the other way around). Television, with its serial programming, is good for certain kinds of learning; according to a study from 2001 undertaken for the Kaiser Foundation, people who regularly watched the show “E.R.” picked up a good bit of medical information on which they sometimes acted. What we don’t have is compelling evidence that suggests that people are morally or socially better for reading Tolstoy.
Not nearly enough research has been conducted; nor, I think, is the relevant psychological evidence just around the corner. Most of the studies undertaken so far don’t draw on serious literature but on short snatches of fiction devised especially for experimental purposes. Very few of them address questions about the effects of literature on moral and social development, far too few for us to conclude that literature either does or doesn’t have positive moral effects.
There is a puzzling mismatch between the strength of opinion on this topic and the state of the evidence. In fact I suspect it is worse than that; advocates of the view that literature educates and civilizes don’t overrate the evidence — they don’t even think that evidence comes into it. While the value of literature ought not to be a matter of faith, it looks as if, for many of us, that is exactly what it is.
Read the entire article here.
Image: The Odyssey, Homer. Book cover. Courtesy of Goodreads.com
On June 9, 2013 we lost Iain Banks to cancer. He was a passionate human(ist) and a literary great.
Luckily he left us with a startling collection of resonant and complex works. Most notably his series of Culture novels that prophesied a distant future, which one day will surely bear his name as a founding member. Mr.Banks, you will be greatly missed.
From the Guardian
The writer Iain Banks, who has died aged 59, had already prepared his many admirers for his death. On 3 April he announced on his website that he had inoperable gall bladder cancer, giving him, at most, a year to live. The announcement was typically candid and rueful. It was also characteristic in another way: Banks had a large web-attentive readership who liked to follow his latest reflections as well as his writings. Particularly in his later years, he frequently projected his thoughts via the internet. There can have been few novelists of recent years who were more aware of what their readers thought of their books; there is a frequent sense in his novels of an author teasing, testing and replying to a readership with which he was pretty familiar.
His first published novel, The Wasp Factory, appeared in 1984, when he was 30 years old, though it had been rejected by six publishers before being accepted by Macmillan. It was an immediate succès de scandale. The narrator is the 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame, who lives with his taciturn father in an isolated house on the north-east coast of Scotland. Frank lives in a world of private rituals, some of which involve torturing animals, and has committed several murders. The explanation of his isolation and his obsessiveness is shockingly revealed in one of the culminating plot twists for which Banks was to become renowned.
It was followed by Walking on Glass (1985), composed of three separate narratives whose connections are deliberately made obscure until near the end of the novel. One of these seems to be a science fiction narrative and points the way to Banks’s strong interest in this genre. Equally, multiple narration would continue to feature in his work.
The next year’s novel, The Bridge, featured three separate stories told in different styles: one a realist narrative about Alex, a manager in an engineering company, who crashes his car on the Forth road bridge; another the story of John Orr, an amnesiac living on a city-sized version of the bridge; and a third, the first-person narrative of the Barbarian, retelling myths and legends in colloquial Scots. In combining fantasy and allegory with minutely located naturalistic narrative, it was clearly influenced by Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981). It remained the author’s own avowed favourite.
His first science fiction novel, Consider Phlebas, was published in 1987, though he had drafted it soon after completing The Wasp Factory. In it he created The Culture, a galaxy-hopping society run by powerful but benevolent machines and possessed of what its inventor called “well-armed liberal niceness”. It would feature in most of his subsequent sci-fi novels. Its enemies are the Idirans, a religious, humanoid race who resent the benign powers of the Culture. In this conflict, good and ill are not simply apportioned. Banks provided a heady mix of, on the one hand, action and intrigue on a cosmic scale (his books were often called “space operas”), and, on the other, ruminations on the clash of ideas and ideologies.
For the rest of his career literary novels would alternate with works of science fiction, the latter appearing under the name “Iain M Banks” (the “M” standing for Menzies). Banks sometimes spoke of his science fiction books as a writerly vacation from the demands of literary fiction, where he could “pull out the stops”, as he himself put it. Player of Games (1988) was followed by Use of Weapons (1990). The science fiction employed some of the narrative trickery that characterised his literary fiction: Use of Weapons, for instance, featured two interleaved narratives, one of which moved forward in time and the other backwards. Their connectedness only became clear with a final, somewhat outrageous, twist of the narrative. His many fans came to relish these tricks.
Read the entire article here.
Image: Iain Banks. Courtesy of BBC.
One great writer reflects on the influences of another.
[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]
I grew up with George Orwell. I was born in 1939, and Animal Farm was published in 1945. I read it at age nine. It was lying around the house, and I mistook it for a book about talking animals. I knew nothing about the kind of politics in the book – the child’s version of politics then, just after the war, consisted of the simple notion that Hitler was bad but dead. To say that I was horrified by this book would be an understatement. The fate of the farm animals was so grim, the pigs were so mean and mendacious and treacherous, the sheep were so stupid. Children have a keen sense of injustice, and this was the thing that upset me the most: the pigs were so unjust.
The whole experience was deeply disturbing, but I am forever grateful to Orwell for alerting me early to the danger flags I’ve tried to watch out for since. As Orwell taught, it isn’t the labels – Christianity, socialism, Islam, democracy, two legs bad, four legs good, the works – that are definitive, but the acts done in their names.
Animal Farm is one of the most spectacular emperor-has-no-clothes books of the 20th century, and it got Orwell into trouble accordingly. People who run counter to the current popular wisdom, who point out the uncomfortably obvious, are likely to be strenuously baa-ed at by herds of angry sheep. I didn’t have all that figured out at the age of nine, of course – not in any conscious way. But we learn the patterns of stories before we learn their meanings, and Animal Farm has a very clear pattern.
Then along came Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949. I read it in paperback (the copy of which is pictured here) a couple of years later, when I was in high school. Then I read it again, and again. It struck me as more realistic, probably because Winston Smith was more like me, a skinny person who got tired a lot and was subjected to physical education under chilly conditions – a feature of my school – and who was silently at odds with the ideas and the manner of life proposed for him. (This may be one of the reasons Nineteen Eighty-Four is best read when you are an adolescent; most adolescents feel like that.) I sympathised particularly with his desire to write his forbidden thoughts down in a secret blank book. I had not yet started to write, but I could see the attractions of it. I could also see the dangers, because it’s this scribbling of his – along with illicit sex, another item with considerable allure for a teenager of the 1950s – that gets Winston into such a mess.
Orwell became a direct model for me much later in my life – in the real 1984, the year in which I began writing a somewhat different dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale. By that time I was 44, and I’d learned enough about real despotisms that I didn’t need to rely on Orwell alone.
[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]
[div class=attrib]First edition cover of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, and first edition cover of Nineteen-Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Courtesy of Wikipedia and respective publishers.[end-div]
Author Joe Queenan explains why reading over 6,000 books may be because, as he puts it, he “find[s] ‘reality’ a bit of a disappointment”.
[div class=attrib]From the Wall Street Journal:[end-div]
I started borrowing books from a roving Quaker City bookmobile when I was 7 years old. Things quickly got out of hand. Before I knew it I was borrowing every book about the Romans, every book about the Apaches, every book about the spindly third-string quarterback who comes off the bench in the fourth quarter to bail out his team. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but what started out as a harmless juvenile pastime soon turned into a lifelong personality disorder.
Fifty-five years later, with at least 6,128 books under my belt, I still organize my daily life—such as it is—around reading. As a result, decades go by without my windows getting washed.
My reading habits sometimes get a bit loopy. I often read dozens of books simultaneously. I start a book in 1978 and finish it 34 years later, without enjoying a single minute of the enterprise. I absolutely refuse to read books that critics describe as “luminous” or “incandescent.” I never read books in which the hero went to private school or roots for the New York Yankees. I once spent a year reading nothing but short books. I spent another year vowing to read nothing but books I picked off the library shelves with my eyes closed. The results were not pretty.
I even tried to spend an entire year reading books I had always suspected I would hate: “Middlemarch,” “Look Homeward, Angel,” “Babbitt.” Luckily, that project ran out of gas quickly, if only because I already had a 14-year-old daughter when I took a crack at “Lolita.”
Six thousand books is a lot of reading, true, but the trash like “Hell’s Belles” and “Kid Colt and the Legend of the Lost Arroyo” and even “Part-Time Harlot, Full-Time Tramp” that I devoured during my misspent teens really puff up the numbers. And in any case, it is nowhere near a record. Winston Churchill supposedly read a book every day of his life, even while he was saving Western Civilization from the Nazis. This is quite an accomplishment, because by some accounts Winston Churchill spent all of World War II completely hammered.
A case can be made that people who read a preposterous number of books are not playing with a full deck. I prefer to think of us as dissatisfied customers. If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it’s probably because at some level you find “reality” a bit of a disappointment. People in the 19th century fell in love with “Ivanhoe” and “The Count of Monte Cristo” because they loathed the age they were living through. Women in our own era read “Pride and Prejudice” and “Jane Eyre” and even “The Bridges of Madison County”—a dimwit, hayseed reworking of “Madame Bovary”—because they imagine how much happier they would be if their husbands did not spend quite so much time with their drunken, illiterate golf buddies down at Myrtle Beach. A blind bigamist nobleman with a ruined castle and an insane, incinerated first wife beats those losers any day of the week. Blind, two-timing noblemen never wear belted shorts.
Similarly, finding oneself at the epicenter of a vast, global conspiracy involving both the Knights Templar and the Vatican would be a huge improvement over slaving away at the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the rest of your life or being married to someone who is drowning in dunning notices from Williams-Sonoma. No matter what they may tell themselves, book lovers do not read primarily to obtain information or to while away the time. They read to escape to a more exciting, more rewarding world. A world where they do not hate their jobs, their spouses, their governments, their lives. A world where women do not constantly say things like “Have a good one!” and “Sounds like a plan!” A world where men do not wear belted shorts. Certainly not the Knights Templar.
I read books—mostly fiction—for at least two hours a day, but I also spend two hours a day reading newspapers and magazines, gathering material for my work, which consists of ridiculing idiots or, when they are not available, morons. I read books in all the obvious places—in my house and office, on trains and buses and planes—but I’ve also read them at plays and concerts and prizefights, and not just during the intermissions. I’ve read books while waiting for friends to get sprung from the drunk tank, while waiting for people to emerge from comas, while waiting for the Iceman to cometh.
[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]
[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Southern Illinois University.[end-div]
While pop culture columnists, behavioral psychologists and literary gadflies debate the pros and cons of “Fifty Shades of Grey”, we look at some more notable, though perhaps no-less controversial works, in their time. Notable in the sense that ideas from any of these books — whether you are in agreement with them or not — have had a profound influence of our cultural, political, economic and scientific evolution.
Yet while all combined have come nowhere close to the 1 million-plus sales in just over 10 weeks, with 20 million in sales so far, of the sado-masochistic pulp fiction, they do offer an enlightening counter-balance. So, if you need some fleeting titillation by all means loan “Fifty Shades…” from a friend or neighbor — why buy one, everybody else has one already. But then, go to your local bookstore or click to Amazon and purchase a handful from this list spanning 30 centuries — you will be reminded of our ongoing, if sometimes limited, intellectual progress as a species.
1 I Ching, Chinese classic texts
2 Hebrew Bible, Jewish scripture
3 Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer
4 Upanishads, Hindu scripture
5 The Way and Its Power, Lao-tzu
6 The Avesta, Zoroastrian scripture
7 Analects, Confucius
8 History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
9 Works, Hippocrates
10 Works, Aristotle
11 History, Herodotus
12 The Republic, Plato
13 Elements, Euclid
14 Dhammapada, Theravada Buddhist scripture
15 Aeneid, Virgil
16 On the Nature of Reality, Lucretius
17 Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Laws, Philo of Alexandria
18 New Testament, Christian scripture
19 Parallel Lives, Plutarch
20 Annals, from the Death of the Divine Augustus, Cornelius Tacitus
21 Gospel of Truth, Valentinus
22 Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
23 Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus
24 Enneads, Plotinus
25 Confessions, Augustine of Hippo
26 Koran, Muslim scripture
27 Guide for the Perplexed, Moses Maimonides
28 Kabbalah, Text of Judaic mysticism
29 Summa Theologicae, Thomas Aquinas
30 The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
31 In Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus
32 The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli
33 On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther
34 Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais
35 Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin
36 On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, Nicolaus Copernicus
37 Essays, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
38 Don Quixote, Parts I and II, Miguel de Cervantes
39 The Harmony of the World, Johannes Kepler
40 Novum Organum, Francis Bacon
41 The First Folio [Works], William Shakespeare
42 Dialogue Concerning Two New Chief World Systems, Galileo Galilei
43 Discourse on Method, René Descartes
44 Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
45 Works, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
46 Pensées, Blaise Pascal
47 Ethics, Baruch de Spinoza
48 Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
49 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Isaac Newton
50 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke
51 The Principles of Human Knowledge, George Berkeley
52 The New Science, Giambattista Vico
53 A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume
54 The Encyclopedia, Denis Diderot, ed.
55 A Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson
56 Candide, François-Marie de Voltaire
57 Common Sense, Thomas Paine
58 An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
59 The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
60 Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
61 Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
62 Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke
63 Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft
64 An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, William Godwin
65 An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Robert Malthus
66 Phenomenology of Spirit, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
67 The World as Will and Idea, Arthur Schopenhauer
68 Course in the Positivist Philosophy, Auguste Comte
69 On War, Carl Marie von Clausewitz
70 Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard
71 Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
72 “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau
73 The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
74 On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
75 First Principles, Herbert Spencer
76 Experiments on Plant Hybridization, Gregor Mendel
77 War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
78 Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, James Clerk Maxwell
79 Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
80 The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud
81 Pragmatism, William James
82 Relativity, Albert Einstein
83 The Mind and Society, Vilfredo Pareto
84 Psychological Types, Carl Gustav Jung
85 I and Thou, Martin Buber
86 The Trial, Franz Kafka
87 The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper
88 The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes
89 Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre
90 The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich von Hayek
91 The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
92 Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener
93 Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
94 Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff
95 Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein
96 Syntactic Structures, Noam Chomsky
97 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, T. S. Kuhn
98 The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
99 Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung [The Little Red Book], Mao Zedong
100 Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B. F. Skinner
The well-rounded list featuring critically acclaimed novels, poetic masterpieces, scientific first principals, political and religious works was compiled by Martin Seymour-Smith, in his 1998 book, The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today. Seymour-Smith is a British poet, critic, and biographer.
[div class=attrib]Image: “On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres” by Nicolaus Copernicus, 1543.[end-div]