books

From a 2001 Bookforum interview with Alan Moore (link long dead), writer of the graphic novels Watchmen, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell (all ruined or about to be ruined by Hollywood):

"Michael Moorcock, a living saint of English gutter fiction, once observed that Victorian middle-class morality had erected wrought-iron rails about the confines of what could be considered literature--essentially Jane Austen and the novel of manners. All other forms of writing, like genre fiction and the literature of the fantastic, were exiled to the wastelands out past the perimeters. Literature was a vanity mirror for the social strata that could afford to be literate, and only writing that reflected an absorption in the social intricacies of the book-buying classes would be allowed past the gate, past the critics, past the guard dogs. This still obtains. No admission for the too-flamboyantly attired, for the impassioned and overexcited, for the rowdy or intoxicated or possessed, who are relocated to where the surfaced roads peter out and the inbred web-toed monsters really start to kick in. With the gothic melodramas and pornographies and ranting pamphlets. This isn't a nice district. You're not likely to have a park named after you. On the other hand, there are advantages . . ."

Posted as a comment to L.M.'s Page-inspired GIF cluster:

A C.M. Kornbluth story called "Shark Ship," written in the '50s, I think, has a flotilla-based oceangoing people surviving and conserving every calorie in a Waterworld type scenario.
The mainland has killed itself because of a death cult that took hold in the over-refined, decadent general populace.
The cult was started by an Irving Klaw-like bondage photo entrepreneur, who recognized in B&D the public craving for death and turned that appetite into a repressive mass cult.
The oceangoing people were set adrift years before by wise social engineers, in anticipation that the mainland would inevitably burn itself out. The boat people's purpose (unbeknownst to them) is to revitalize the mainland culture. By focusing so keenly on group survival, for several generations, they have rediscovered what is good and necessary in life and become Earth's next generation of leaders.
(Your science fiction tie-in for the day--although it doesn't deal with the mysticism aspect of your mandelbrotdalas.)

Jeffrey Saut:

While most people know “The Wizard of Oz” as one of the most popular films ever made, what is little known is that the book was based on an economic and political commentary surrounding the debate over “sound money” that occurred in the late 1800s. Indeed, L. Frank Baum’s book was penned in 1900 following unrest in the agriculture arena due to the debate between gold, silver, and the dollar standard. The book, therefore, is supposedly an allegory of these historical events, making the events easier to understand. In said book, Dorothy represents traditional American values. The Scarecrow portrays the American farmer, while the Tin Man represents the workers, and the Cowardly Lion depicts William Jennings Bryan. Recall that at the time Mr. Bryan was the official standard bearer for the “silver movement,” as well as the unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate of 1896 who gave the “Crucified on the Cross of Gold” speech at that year’s Democratic National Convention. Interestingly, in the original story Dorothy’s slippers were made of silver, not ruby, implying that silver was the Populists’ solution to the nation’s economic woes. Meanwhile, the Yellow Brick Road was the gold standard, and Toto (Dorothy’s faithful dog) represented the Prohibitionists, who were an important part of the silverite coalition. The Wicked Witch of the West symbolizes President William McKinley; and the Wizard is Mark Hanna, who was the chairman of the Republican Party and made promises that he could not keep. Obviously, “Oz” is the abbreviation for “ounce.”

After Hollywood was through with it, the lessons of Baum's story were trite conventional wisdoms:

1. Don't aspire to anything greater than slopping hogs outside that prairie shack you're living in (even though we're having a blast here in Tinseltown).

2. Life is irrational and threatening but eventually the witch melts and you get through it OK.

3. People have more talent than they think they have. Wooo, deep.

Update: Alan N. Shapiro has a better way of looking at Item 3 above. It isn't made clear in the Hollywood version but is ultimately more satisfying to read than Sauter's reduction of Baum's tale to dated political symbols above (which now seems flimsy, in comparison to the passage below):

Speaking of classics about wizards, L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) is a very important text of Western literature – much more than a children’s novel as it is usually regarded to be – that has yet to be lucidly interpreted. The enormous popularity of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, starring Judy Garland, is in some ways responsible for this missing interpretation. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a story about why the psychological character of the cultural citizen of modern Western society is that of someone who does not have a brain (the Scarecrow), who does not have a heart (the Tin Woodman), and who does not have courage (the Cowardly Lion), although at the same time the cultural citizen of the West secretly (always already, to use the Althusserian phrase) has a brain, has a heart, and has courage, but he has not yet figured out how to existentially access them.

YouTube teasers for Egan's science fiction novel Incandescence: 1 / 2
(hat tip pierre) (the second one gives me chills)

Bought and read the book shortly after it came out last spring. Some Amazon readers complain it's anticlimactic and overly "teachy." It is, but still mind-expanding. It's been compared to the Hal Clement "Mission of Gravity" novels, and that's fair, but with an extra layer of Egan lore: synthetic minds backing themselves up before zooming across the galaxy as electronically beamed data, etc. One almost needs to read certain of his books in publication order to "get" the Egan universe--to some extent each builds on the previous (Quarantine, Permutation City, Diaspora, Schild's Ladder). The new one lacks the scope and characters of some of the forerunners: it's almost a short story or vignette with the goal of teaching you physics from the point of view of intelligent primitives. You work as a reader because the characters work--their lives depend on solving a specific set of experiments, and the book suggests (without necessarily meaning to) that we're all going to have put on our academic beanies before it's all over.
Another book Incandescence remotely resembles, at least in a theme of eleventh-hour, collective problem-tackling in the face of ultimate peril, is Theodore Sturgeon's To Marry Medusa. Egan occupies the frigid end of the emotional thermometer relative to Ted's febrile sentimentality, however.

From Joyce Carol Oates' intro* to a collection of H. P. Lovecraft stories:

Readers of genre fiction, unlike readers of what we presume to call "literary fiction," assume a tacit contract between themselves and the writer: they understand that they will be manipulated, but the question is how? and when? and with what skill? and to what purpose? However plot-ridden, fantastical or absurd, populated by whatever pseudo-characters, genre fiction is always resolved, while literary fiction makes no such promises; there is no contract between reader and writer for, in theory at least, each work of literary fiction is original, and, in essence, "about" its own language; anything can happen, or, upon occasion, nothing. Genre fiction is addictive, literary fiction, unfortunately, is not.

You could substitute music, movies, or web art for fiction in the above passage. The idea of a contract between producer and consumer and the artiste who violates the contract may have universal application.

*The original link for this quote was http://www.usfca.edu/fac-staff/southerr/lovecraft.html but it's broken now. Thanks, USFCA!

Update: through the magic power of the Internet the Library at USFCA sent me a working link. Much appreciation to Randy Souther.

Update, 2012: The link to the Lovecraft essay is dead again. In fact it appears that quote is no longer posted by USFCA. Have emailed to find out about this.

Another 2012 update: Haven't heard back from USFCA. The quote above also appears in a NY Review of Books essay by Oates. Am not sure how that differs from the book introduction I originally read and linked to - did Oates recycle the essay? It has other passages I recall from the intro, such as this one:

There is a melancholy, operatic grandeur in Lovecraft’s most passionate work, like “The Outsider” and “At the Mountains of Madness”; a curious elegiac poetry of unspeakable loss, of adolescent despair, and an existential loneliness so pervasive that it lingers in the reader’s memory, like a dream, long after the rudiments of Lovecraftian plot have faded.

Ah, here is another confirmation that the "genre fiction is addictive" paragraph occurred somewhere besides the NY Review - this is the book I was referring to:

On the same shelf I found the HarperCollins trade paperback of Tales of H. P. Lovecraft, selected and edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Though the text has shockingly narrow margins, I have to recommend it if for no other reason than Oates' introduction. Oates, like most rabid HPL fans, first read the author at age 13. (Does this mean that the Golden Age of HPL is 13?) 'Genre fiction is addictive,' she states in the intro. 'Literary fiction, unfortunately, is not.' Apparently it was HPL who addicted her.