Extra Credits
Published on 26 Feb 2019Dune is an ecological novel. Nature isn’t just the background setting, but firmly integrated into the science and systems of the world. Frank Herbert explores big ideas around environmental conservation, through the spice that must flow.
March 1, 2019
Dune – Wandering in the Desert – Extra Sci Fi – #3
Comments Off on Dune – Wandering in the Desert – Extra Sci Fi – #3
Theodore Dalrymple on Michel Houellebecq: “Houellebecq runs an abattoir for sacred cows”
At the New English Review:
Not reading many contemporary French novels, I am not entitled to say that Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting French novelist writing today, but he is certainly very brilliant, if in a somewhat limited way. His beam is narrow but very penetrating, like that of a laser, and his theme an important, indeed a vital one: namely the vacuity of modern life in the West, its lack of transcendence, lived as it is increasingly without religious or political belief, without a worthwhile creative culture, often without deep personal attachments, and without even a struggle for survival. Into what Salman Rushdie (a much lesser writer than Houellebecq) called “a God-shaped hole” has rushed the search for sensual pleasure which, however, no more than distracts for a short while.
Something more is needed, but Western man — at least Western man at a certain level of education, intelligence and material ease — has not found it. Houellebecq’s underlying nihilism implies that it is not there to be found. The result of this lack of transcendent purpose is self-destruction not merely on a personal, but on a population, scale. Technical sophistication has been accompanied, or so it often seems, by mass incompetence in the art of living. Houellebecq is the prophet, the chronicler, of this incompetence.Even the ironic title of his latest novel, Sérotonine, is testimony to the brilliance of his diagnostic powers and his capacity to capture in a single word the civilizational malaise which is his unique subject. Serotonin, as by now every self-obsessed member of the middle classes must know, is a chemical in the brain that acts as a neurotransmitter to which is ascribed powers formerly ascribed to the Holy Ghost. All forms of undesired conduct or feeling are caused by a deficit or surplus or malalignment of this chemical, so that in essence all human problems become ones of neurochemistry.
On this view, unhappiness is a technical problem for the doctor to solve rather than a cause for reflection and perhaps even for adjustment to the way one lives. I don’t know whether in France the word malheureux has been almost completely replaced by the word déprimée, but in English unhappy has almost been replaced by depressed. In my last years of medical practice, I must have encountered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of depressed people, or those who called themselves such, but the only unhappy person I met was a prisoner who wanted to be moved to another prison, no doubt for reasons of safety.
Houellebecq’s one-word title captures this phenomenon (a semantic shift as a handmaiden to medicalisation) with a concision rarely equalled. And indeed, he has remarkably sensitive antennae to the zeitgeist in general, though it must be admitted that he is most sensitive to those aspects of it that are absurd, unpleasant, or dispiriting rather than to any that are positive.
Comments Off on Theodore Dalrymple on Michel Houellebecq: “Houellebecq runs an abattoir for sacred cows”
February 27, 2019
QotD: When progressives took over SF publishing
When I sold my first novel in the late 90s. Most Americans might not be that sensitive to the “climate” but I was. I had after all grown up in a socialist (at best, during the better times) country where to graduate you had to present the proper progressive front. I knew the signs and the hints and social positioning of “further left than thou.” For instance, my first SF cons, as an author, in the green room, I became aware that “a conservative” was a suitable, laughter inducing punchline for any joke; that all of them believed the Reagan years had set us on course to total dystopia; that the US was less enlightened/capable/free than anywhere else; that your average Republican or even non-Democrat voter was the equivalent of the Taliban.
As for Libertarians, I will to my dying day cherish the dinner I had with my then editor to whom I was describing a funny incident at MileHi where for reasons known only to Bob, I found myself in an argument with someone who wanted to ban the internal combustion engine. My editor perked up and (I swear I’m not making this up) said “Oh, a Libertarian.” At which point my husband squeezed my thigh hard enough to stop me answering. But yeah. That was a not uncommon idea of a libertarian. If it was completely insane and involved banning something, then it was a libertarian.
I once overheard the same editor talking to a colleague and saying that if she got submissions across her desk and they were – dropped and horrified voice – somewhat conservative she recommended they try Baen.
Which the other editor (from a different house) agreed with, because after all, they weren’t in the business of publishing conservative works.
This immediately put me on notice that in the field if you were a conservative (I presume libertarians were worse, or at least they seemed to induce more mouth foaming. And though I was solidly libertarian and – at the time – might have qualified as a Libertarian, I suspect if faced with my real positions they would have classed me as conservative, because my positions were self-obviously not left and that’s all it took.) there was only one house that would take you, and if what you wrote/wanted to write wasn’t accepted by then, then you were out of luck.
After that I lived in a state of fear
I imagine it was similar to living in one of the more unsavory periods of the Soviet Union. You saw these purges happen. Whisper-purges. You got the word that someone was “not quite the thing” or that they associated with so and so who associated with so and so who was a – dropped voice – conservative. Suddenly that person’s books weren’t being bought and somehow people would clear a circle around them, because, well, you know, if you’re seen with a – dropped voice – conservative they might think you’re one too. And then it’s off to Never-Never with you.
I found a few other conservatives/libertarians (frankly, mostly libertarians) in the field, all living in the same state of gut clenching fear.
We did such a dance to test both the reliability and discretion of the other before revealing ourselves that we might as well have developed a hanky code. [Blue for true blue Conservative, white for pure Libertarian, red for the blood of our heroes, brown for OWL (older, wiser libertarian), purple for squishy conservative, powder blue for Brad Torgersen. (The powder blue care bear, with the bleeding heart… and the flame thrower.)]
Conventions were nerve wracking because I watched myself ALL the TIME. And you never knew how much you had to watch yourself. Suddenly, out of the blue, at a World Fantasy the speaker, a well known SF/F writer went on about Dean Howard, our next president. The room erupted in applause, some people stood to clap, and I sat there, frozen, unable to actually fake it to that point but too shocked to even put a complaisant expression on my face.
Sarah Hoyt, “Say Goodbye To The State Of Fear”, According to Hoyt, 2017-03-11.
Comments Off on QotD: When progressives took over SF publishing
February 24, 2019
Another review of Curl’s Making Dystopia
Having read a few reviews of James Stevens Curl’s recent Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism, I’m likely to add it to my booklist (when I have a budget for new books again, that is). Here, Michael Mehaffy shares his comments on the book:
Cumbernauld Shopping Centre, voted as Britain’s most hated building in a Channel 4 poll.
Photo by Ed Webster via Wikimedia Commons.
For most reform-minded urbanists today, the complicity of architectural Modernism in the urban fiascoes of the last century is not in dispute. A representative (and seminal) criticism was Jane Jacobs’ withering 1961 attack, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she described Le Corbusier’s “wonderful mechanical toy” that “said everything in a flash, like a good advertisement” — but as to how a city actually works, it told “nothing but lies.” Jacobs’s work was of course a major inspiration in forming the Congress for the New Urbanism, along with the work of other reformists like Leon Krier, Christopher Alexander and Vincent Scully.
In fact, the 1996 Charter of the New Urbanism almost precisely inverts Le Corbusier’s 1933 Athens Charter: in place of the Modernists’ functional segregation, we would have mixed use; in place of their dominance of fast-moving vehicles (especially cars), we would have walkability and multi-modal streets; in place of wholesale demolition of historic districts and prohibition of historic styles, we would have preservation and renewal, and buildings that “grow from local climate, topography, history, and building practice.”
Yet in the last few decades, architectural Modernism has enjoyed a resurgence among some New Urbanists, as it has in the wider profession of architecture. For them, it’s reasonable to separate the urban mistakes of Modernism from its alleged architectural genius, which, as they see it, continues to offer inspiring building design ideas that can take their place happily within great new cities.
Of course, many critics would not agree — including many of the profession’s most prominent insiders. For them, the building-scale and urban-scale failures of Modernism have been of a piece, borne of a totalizing but defective theory of habitat, and even a dubious theory of architectural form itself. As the Post-Modernist Rem Koolhaas observed (in his 1995 book S,M,L,XL), “Modernism’s alchemistic promise, to transform quantity into quality through abstraction and repetition, has been a failure, a hoax: magic that didn’t work.” Nor was Koolhaas the first to attack the ideological foundations of Modernism. Similar criticisms came from earlier insiders like Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, wife of Bauhaus pioneer Lazslo, whose stinging 1968 essay on the Bauhaus labeled it “Hitler’s Revenge.” Its built works in the US carried, for her, “the browbeating symbolism of a negative ideology that was already bankrupt when the dying German Republic unloaded it on America.”
Yet for a movement that has been so frequently discredited, Modernism still has a curious grip on the profession even today. That’s because from the beginning, according to historian James Stevens Curl, the movement has been populated by “architectural bullies” who would stop at nothing to seize power, extinguish its competitors, re-write history, forbid all other styles (especially those with any ornament), and otherwise enforce a radical agenda — one that only seemed to offer all things alluring, progressive and historically inevitable. Beneath that marketable cover story, he says, the real agenda was an exhilarating quest for power and dominance, and especially later, for the wealth generated by a profitable industrialization of the human environment. Modernism sold, and no matter if it also sold out—cities, people, history, the future. For Curl, that approach was (and is) nothing less than “architectural barbarism.”
Comments Off on Another review of Curl’s Making Dystopia
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Warners (Part 3/2)
Lindsay Ellis
Published on 20 Apr 2018Nothing is pure.
From the comments:
Special Agent Washing Tub
2 months agoMe; * watching this and feeling my childhood shatter*
“Why does it hurt so much?”
Lindsay: “BECAUSE IT WAS REAL.”
Comments Off on The Hobbit: The Desolation of Warners (Part 3/2)
QotD: Wine books
There are three categories of wine book. The first are guides, like those of Robert Parker, which seek to offer practical help in the purchase and consumption of wines – though their effects are often contrary, adding feverishness to the acquisition (‘I’ve landed a 95-pointer!’) and self-consciousness to the drinking (‘Did you get black truffles on the nose?’). The second category consists of historical surveys and château profiles, the latter often little more than disguised puffery, since the author will have been given privileged access to the archives, and will have been vetted, if not actually chosen, by the château, will have been wined and dined until he – or, occasionally, she – is practically wearing the château’s label as a blazer badge. Famous wine houses are nowadays international businesses, and no less good at promoting themselves than Nike and Benetton. Thirdly, there are books of almost no practical value but which appeal to the nostalgic, fetishistic or cork-sniffing side of oenophilia: celebrations, anthologies, reminiscences of the wine country and its colourful characters, evocations of people and vintages often long since dead. The wine buff will often buy such useless treasures second-hand and will employ them to induce harmless reverie, rather like leafing through an old Sears Roebuck catalogue.
Julian Barnes, “Did You Get Black Truffles on the Nose?”, Literary Review, 1994-10.
Comments Off on QotD: Wine books
February 23, 2019
The Hobbit: Battle of Five Studios (Part 2/2)
Lindsay Ellis
Published on 3 Apr 2018So we’ve looked into what the problems were with these movies, the question now is … why? What happened, Peter Jackson? WHAT HAPPENED?
From the comments:
app
5 months agoThat interview clip with John Callen near the end broke my heart. I also grew up with the hobbit and was bored to tears by the movies. But I never thought about the actors of the Dwarves and how important it was that they got pushed aside. The hobbit could have been amazing if it was this band of actors, dressed like dwarves, trying to reclaim their culture and finding out what that really means. It’s a pure idea, and ironically it was corrupted by greed… you reminded me what I loved about the book! :'(
Comments Off on The Hobbit: Battle of Five Studios (Part 2/2)
February 22, 2019
The Hobbit: A Long-Expected Autopsy (Part 1/2)
Lindsay Ellis
Published on 27 Mar 2018In which we look back at The Hobbit trilogy and try to give it a fair shake.
Twitter: @thelindsayellis
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/loosecanon
From the comments:
J Girl
9 months agoWho else is waiting for the next video to be titled “part 2/3” as a slap in the face to the fact that they switched it from two movies to three
Comments Off on The Hobbit: A Long-Expected Autopsy (Part 1/2)
February 21, 2019
Dune – Plots and Plans – Extra Sci Fi – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 19 Feb 2019On the surface, Dune appears to be a peak demonstration of “the competent man” trope so popular in Golden Age science fiction, but Herbert deconstructs this by carefully demonstrating how all of the characters make bad assumptions on faulty premises…
Comments Off on Dune – Plots and Plans – Extra Sci Fi – #2
February 19, 2019
Judging a book by its cover (or people by their appearance)
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb reviews How to Judge People by What They Look Like, by Edward Dutton:
This short book is equally naughty and entertaining. It bounces along, making its points in a light-hearted and generally a witty manner. It is naughty so far as it is a flat challenge to many of the pieties of our age.
We are told never to judge a book by its cover — that the substance of a person, this being character and intelligence, have no measurable relationship to his external form, this being his physical appearance. At the extreme, of looking at correlations between race and intelligence, you can get into serious trouble for disputing this piety. Even moderate dissent earns hostility or just ridicule. Look, for example, at the relevant textbooks. The phlogiston theory is covered as an early theory of combustion, superseded by the truth. Phrenology is denounced as barely short of a moral and intellectual failing. No one thinks ill of Lamarck for this theory of inherited characteristics. Lombroso and his measurement of criminal heads are seen as steps on the road to Auschwitz.
The author of this book takes aim at every one of these pieties. He begins with the easy targets. Within ethnic groups, he goes over the increasingly rehabilitated claim that intelligence is largely inherited — about 80 per cent. He adds the other increasingly rehabilitated claim that there are differences of average intelligence between groups—that the peaks of each distribution curve occur at different points along the scale.
[…]
Now, what follows from all this? The answer is that all truth is important — so far as this is the truth; and I do lack the statistical grounding and the time or inclination to check the author’s scholarship. Even when a particular truth has no practical value, a regard for truth is a generally useful prejudice. But there are certain conclusions that appear to follow.
First, there is has been a progressively greater diversity of external form since the industrial revolution. The stated reason for this is that the harsh conditions of a traditional society, in which about 40 per cent of children died, and the higher classes had more surviving offspring, created a strong bias towards the survival of the intelligent and conscientious. Since then, the fall of infant mortality towards zero has thrown this process into reverse. That may explain the growing fall in genius or just high intellectual quality as a fraction of modern populations. It may also explain the decay — and the author says nothing of this — of free institutions, and their replacement by less complex and more maternal forms of government. Old England was free because its people were capable of being free. Modern England is unfree because the people have changed.
Comments Off on Judging a book by its cover (or people by their appearance)
February 18, 2019
Modernism as “architectural PTSD”
In Architect, the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, Witold Rybczynski reviews James Stevens Curl’s Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism:
The buildings in my neighborhood, Logan Square in downtown Philadelphia, fall roughly into two categories. There are those that offer visual pleasure, whether they are modest run-of-the-mill brick row houses or the rather grand Board of Education Building, an Art Deco-ish pile topped by busts of Sir Isaac Newton, Ben Franklin, and Alexander Graham Bell. “How nice that someone actually took the trouble,” I think as I walk by. And then there is the second category: utilitarian apartment slabs with unrelieved gridded façades, infill condo housing that looks as if it had been trucked in from the suburbs, a grim precast concrete retirement home that takes up a whole block. “I wish they hadn’t built that,” is my all too common reaction. The Board of Education Building dates from 1932. That’s the approximate cut-off date. Before the 1930s, the buildings are pretty good; after that, not so much. What happened?
The answer to that question is the subject of James Stevens Curl’s controversial new book, Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism (Oxford University Press, 2018). Curl is a British architectural historian, professor emeritus at De Montfort University in Leicester, and the author of more than 40 books, including the well-regarded The Victorian Celebration of Death (most recently updated in 2004) and The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture (1999). According to Curl, what happened was “architectural barbarism,” which is how he characterizes modern architecture. He does not mince words. Describing the emergence of the International Style in the 1920s, he writes: “It became apparent that something very strange had occurred: an aberration, something alien to the history of humanity, something destructive aesthetically and spiritually, something ugly and unpleasant, something that was inhumane and abnormal, yet something that was almost universally accepted in architectural circles, like some fundamentalist quasi-religious cult that demanded total allegiance, obedience, and subservience.”[…]
Buildings like PSFS were not the result of the First World War, of course, but it was the war that opened the door to radical change — whether it was political (Nazism), economic (the New Deal), or architectural (Modernism). This, rather than Curl’s theory of a quasi-religious cult, is a more convincing explanation for the “strange rise” of modern architecture. As the title of his book suggests, the author assumes malevolence on the part of Gropius, Le Corbusier, et al., but what if the International Style was instead the result of a sort of postwar architectural PTSD?
[…]
The ultimate failure of modern architecture is not that it was incapable of producing beautiful works of individual art. There have been plenty of those, pace Professor Curl. The real drawback is that while the Modern Movement effectively suppressed an architectural language that had taken hundreds of years to evolve, it proved incapable of developing a successful substitute, the weak-kneed antics of Postmodernism notwithstanding. The strength of pre-modern architecture was that it provided a rich variety of modes of expression. It permitted complicated things to be said in complicated ways, and simpler things in simpler ways, analogous to the spoken language, which can be used to write drama and poetry or instruction booklets.
Comments Off on Modernism as “architectural PTSD”
February 15, 2019
Dune – Origins – Extra Sci Fi – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 12 Feb 2019Frank Herbert’s epic novel Dune began as a photograph of the Oregon coastline — literally, the dunes themselves. From there it grew into a poem, then three books, then a serial in John W. Campbell’s Analog magazine, and then at last… a car repair manual publisher?
If you’re curious, check out our earlier episode on John W. Campbell here, a notable magazine editor in the history of science fiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctpvd2VvukQ
Comments Off on Dune – Origins – Extra Sci Fi – #1
February 7, 2019
Lord of the Rings – The Return of the King – Extra Sci Fi – #3
Extra Credits
Published on 5 Feb 2019Tolkien lived in a dark time in history, but he believed not only in having hope, but in sacrifice as a means to redemption, which is why we get such a satisfyingly bittersweet ending in the Lord of the Rings.
Comments Off on Lord of the Rings – The Return of the King – Extra Sci Fi – #3
February 4, 2019
Jane Austen – Sarcasm and Subversion – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 2 Feb 2019Jane Austen wrote in the name of making critical social commentary of the privileges she and others held while the rest of Europe was in political turmoil. Her novels like Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma made waves in their time for how they criticized
VictorianRegency-era society.
Join us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
From the comments:
Extra Credits
2 days ago
Jane Austen saw the hypocrisy of an entire class of the most powerful empire on Earth taking tea and planning balls while the world burned. And from a young age she took up arms against that hypocrisy with the only weapon she had: her pen.(Comment from Belinda) I don’t know if anyone else has had this experience with Jane Austen’s works, but in the educational culture I grew up in, the historical context of Austen’s writing was almost never emphasized. Pride & Prejudice in particular is frequently reduced to being the original formula for romantic comedies (to say nothing of its own spin-off movies of the same name). I remember in high school class it seemed really weird to me that we would be talking about this 19th century novel as a progressive feminist work because it’s already a given in the 21st century world that marrying for love is extremely commonplace. I’m really proud of our writers Jac and Rob, and our artist Ali, for bringing to life the “extra History” of Jane Austen that gets glossed over by popular culture. <3
Comments Off on Jane Austen – Sarcasm and Subversion – Extra History
January 31, 2019
Lord of the Rings – The Two Towers – Extra Sci Fi – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 29 Jan 2019Tolkien’s writing was majorly influenced by the world he lived in — the concerns of World War II and the aftermath thereof were reflected in the themes of industrialization, more highly nuanced good-and-evil, and “questing” that The Two Towers emphasizes.
The Two Towers presents one big theme that impacted science fiction: industrialization. Isengard really brought into popularity the whole idea of “if you don’t treat nature with respect, you’ll be doomed by nature’s wrath.”
Comments Off on Lord of the Rings – The Two Towers – Extra Sci Fi – #2
