Gandhi rose early, usually at three-thirty, and before his first bowel movement (during which he received visitors, although possibly not Margaret Bourke-White) he spent two hours in meditation, listening to his “inner voice.” Now Gandhi was an extremely vocal individual, and in addition to spending an hour each day in vigorous walking, another hour spinning at his primitive spinning wheel, another hour at further prayers, another hour being massaged nude by teenage girls, and many hours deciding such things as affairs of state, he produced a quite unconscionable number of articles and speeches and wrote an average of sixty letters a day. All considered, it is not really surprising that his inner voice said different things to him at different times. Despising consistency and never checking his earlier statements, and yet inhumanly obstinate about his position at any given moment, Gandhi is thought by some Indians today (according to V.S. Naipaul) to have been so erratic and unpredictable that he may have delayed Indian independence for twenty-five years.
For Gandhi was an extremely difficult man to work with. He had no partners, only disciples. For members of his ashrams, he dictated every minute of their days, and not only every morsel of food they should eat but when they should eat it. Without ever having heard of a protein or a vitamin, he considered himself an expert on diet, as on most things, and was constantly experimenting. Once when he fell ill, he was found to have been living on a diet of ground-nut butter and lemon juice; British doctors called it malnutrition. And Gandhi had even greater confidence in his abilities as a “nature doctor,” prescribing obligatory cures for his ashramites, such as dried cow-dung powder and various concoctions containing cow dung (the cow, of course, being sacred to the Hindu). And to those he really loved he gave enemas — but again, alas, not to Margaret Bourke-White. Which is too bad, really. For admiring Candice Bergen’s work as I do, I would have been most interested in seeing how she would have experienced this beatitude. The scene might have lived in film history.
There are 400 biographies of Gandhi, and his writings run to 80 volumes, and since he lived to be seventy-nine, and rarely fell silent, there are, as I have indicated, quite a few inconsistencies. The authors of the present movie even acknowledge in a little-noticed opening title that they have made a film only true to Gandhi’s “spirit.” For my part, I do not intend to pick through Gandhi’s writings to make him look like Attila the Hun (although the thought is tempting), but to give a fair, weighted balance of his views, laying stress above all on his actions, and on what he told other men to do when the time for action had come.
Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.
August 9, 2018
QotD: Gandhi the man
August 1, 2018
Isaac Asimov – Foundation & Empire – Extra Sci Fi – #3
Extra Credits
Published on 31 Jul 2018Asimov’s Foundation stories were absolutely foundational for science fiction — they introduced the concept of a space empire, bringing along analogies from historical civilizations to the social issues of advanced technology and humanity’s future.
July 26, 2018
Isaac Asimov – Laws of Robotics – Extra Sci Fi – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 24 Jul 2018Asimov is famous for coining the Three Laws of Robotics, but to him they weren’t the “answer” to how robots could be used in the future — they were an intentional reflection of humanity’s potential failings.
July 24, 2018
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
The Great War
Published on 23 Jul 2018He is regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, but before that, he was an ambulance driver on the Italian Front in the Great War and also took part in the Spanish Civil War and World War Two.
July 18, 2018
Isaac Asimov – Master of Science – Extra Sci Fi – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 17 Jul 2018Isaac Asimov didn’t have a birthday. Nobody knew the exact date of his birth, so he picked one for himself at a young age — and that choice, quite possibly, was what gave us one of his best creative periods.
July 14, 2018
June 26, 2018
QotD: Writing essays in school
To find their way in American life, high-schoolers need to be able to speak English, to read, to listen to and respect other people’s opinions, to have a command of the basic elements of courtesy and, to a lesser extent, to write. (They do not need to know how to write a thesis sentence. More injury is done to high-school essays by the imposition of the thesis-sentence requirement than by any other means. The trick, kids are sometimes told, is to begin with a word like “although.” No.)
Nicholson Baker, “Fortress of Tedium: What I Learned as a Substitute Teacher”, New York Times Magazine, 2016-09-07.
June 24, 2018
Life In The Tomb – WW1 Author Stratis Myrivilis I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
The Great War
Published on 23 Jun 2018Get Life In The Tomb: https://amzn.to/2MF8TMZ [Affiliate Link]
Stratis Myrivilis was a Greek Author, but he was also a soldier that fought in the Balkan Wars, World War 1 and the Greco-Turkish War. His experience in the First World War, was the basis for his most famous novel Life In The Tomb.
June 4, 2018
L. Neil Smith on his time in the salt mines of the Star Wars universe
Around the time I picked up my first L. Neil Smith novel (Tom Paine Maru), I saw his name on a couple of Star Wars tie-in novels. I didn’t buy them, as I’ve rarely found tie-in work to be worth much unless you’re a huge fan of the larger franchise. By the time I’d gotten around to reading Tom Paine Maru and rushed back to buy all the rest of Smith’s available works, the Star Wars books had gone. I haven’t seen any of them in my travels since then. In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Smith explains how the books came to be:
In 1983, I was chosen (or condemned — it depends how you look at these things), by Del Rey Books, a division of Random House, and Lucasfilm Ltd., to write three little ”exploitation” novels about the Star Wars character Lando Calrissian, specifically because I wasn’t Brian Daley, author of three similar books about another Star Wars character, Han Solo.
“Lando Calrissian, meet Londo Mollari. Lando, Londo. Londo, Lando … ”
The late Brian Daley was one of the kindest, gentlest, most generous men I’ve ever known, a colleague to be proud of, and it was bewildering trying to figure out why the movie company had told the book publisher, when arranging for the second set of books, “Anybody but Brian Daley!”
Brian loved Millennium Falcon. He was like a little kid when he got invited to go out to Hollywood and was most excited that he got to clamber around inside the set. But it turned out that he had accidentally and unknowingly allowed himself to become associated with the losing faction in some kind of petty internal corporate feud and found himself rendered persona non grata.
My editor at Del Rey obligingly brought my name up. I was extremely reluctant to write in anybody else’s corpus, but I needed the money very badly — around that time I’d spent two weeks with nothing in the house to eat but a bag of shredded coconut. When requested, my editor sent LucasFilm a “sample” of my work — a copy of my highly-political libertarian first novel, The Probability Broach. I’d love to have been there, a fly on the wall, when they saw it. Remember Beaker, from Muppet Labs, with a shock of bright red hair, a big red nose, great big eyes, whimpering and terrified of every known phenomenon? It must have been a lot like that.
In any case, LucasFilm freaked out, and, hypocritically asked that Brian be brought back into the project as my co-author, apparently to temper my politically incorrect passions. My editor told me later that he blew up dramatically, and told them “These are authors we’re dealing with here, not Hollywood writers, they don’t write by committee!” They backed down eventually, but I had to promise I would write no politics in the books — which, given the attitude they were displaying, I interpreted to mean as much politics as I could possibly squeeze in before they squealed.
I was told to write about Lando but leave all other Star Wars characters and other things alone (I did end up using mynocks). I told them I would have the spaceship, or I would give the project a miss. Brian started calling us “the Brotherhood of the Falcon”. My editor advised me to politely decline any invitations to come to Hollywood, and stay out of company politics, which I gladly did. I invented a number of animals for the books but was told that only animals made up by George Lucas could be capitalized.
In the beginning, they gave me sixteen weeks to write three books which I regarded as tough, but doable. “But wait! We have to approve your outlines first!” And by the time they finished — altering my arch-villain Rokur Gepta to something other than a “Dark Lord of Sith” and making other insignificant changes, I had nine weeks left. For two and a half months, I got up each morning and wrote. My cute little fiancee came home for lunch and then I wrote. We had supper and I wrote. Then I collapsed and started the whole thing over the next day. Forget anything resembling a real life. This was just before word processors came along, and I did the whole thing in one draft, as Robert Heinlein advised, on a Sperry-Remington knock-off of an IBM Selectric II. It took a long, long time to recover my health.
May 24, 2018
QotD: Hunter S. Thompson on the importance of breakfast
It is not going to be easy for those poor bastards out in San Francisco who have been waiting all day in a condition of extreme fear and anxiety for my long and finely reasoned analysis of “The Meaning of Jimmy Carter” to come roaring out of my faithful mojo wire and across 2,000 miles of telephone line to understand why I am sitting here in a Texas motel full of hookers and writing at length on The Meaning of Breakfast……. But like almost everything else worth understanding, the explanation for this is deceptively quick and basic.
After more than ten years of trying to deal with politics and politicians in a professional manner, I have finally come to the harsh understanding that there is no way at all – not even for a doctor of chemotherapy with total access to the whole spectrum of legal and illegal drugs, the physical constitution of a mule shark and a brain as rare and sharp and original as the Sloat diamond – to function as a political journalist without abandoning the whole concept of a decent breakfast. I have worked like 12 bastards for more than a decade to be able to have it both ways, but the conflict is too basic and too deeply rooted in the nature of both politics and breakfast to ever be reconciled. It is one of those very few Great Forks in The Road of Life that cannot be avoided: like a Jesuit priest who is also a practicing nudist with a $200-a-day smack habit wanting to be the first Naked Pope (or Pope Naked the First, if we want to use the language of the church)….… Or a vegetarian pacifist with a .44 magnum fetish who wants to run for president without giving up his membership in the National Rifle Association or his New York City pistol permit that allows him to wear twin six-guns on Meet the Press, Face the Nation and all of his press conferences.
There are some combinations that nobody can handle: shooting bats on the wing with a double-barreled .410 and a head full of jimson weed is one of them, and another is the idea that it is possible for a freelance writer with at least four close friends named Jones to cover a hopelessly scrambled presidential campaign better than any six-man team of career political journalists on the New York Times or the Washington Post and still eat a three-hour breakfast in the sun every morning.
Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’76: Third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous — hanging with Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and a bottle of Wild Turkey”, Rolling Stone, 1976-06-03.
May 17, 2018
Tom Wolfe “would spend the rest of his days in a golden cage of a book deal”
In the National Post Colby Cosh explains why Tom Wolfe was so significant in the literary world almost from his first published work:
… Tom Wolfe was an educated man: unlike any of the macho novelists he was sparring with, he was entitled to adjoin an honest-to-God PhD to his byline. In the end, he could not escape the prejudices imprinted on him in youth. It is a truth universally acknowledged: a prose artist must excrete a novel to demonstrate his true mettle.
Wolfe described it this way himself in a 2008 interview. “Originally, I was only going to write one novel, to prove to myself and any random doubters that I could do it.” “Random doubters” sounds so dismissive and calm until you remember the amount of work Wolfe was proposing to undertake in order to impress them. He continued: “But that novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was such an astounding success… I’m afraid I got swept away.”
Wolfe, I suppose, was too well-raised to utter the word “money” in front of an interviewer. (The explicit subject of all his work, his journalism and fiction, is social status: but social status and money do travel together mighty closely.) Bonfire (1987) became one of the publishing events of the epoch, and he would spend the rest of his days in a golden cage of a book deal. The dabbler in the novel had proved too much: he had proved that the novel really is still in a class by itself as a social phenomenon.
More novels in the vein of Bonfire — deeply researched, socially prescient, full of truculent conservative squareness — followed. I myself would not trade The Right Stuff, Wolfe’s 1979 nonfiction book about the Mercury astronauts, for the whole pile, Bonfire included. (And I say this knowing full well that there is some quantum of sheer bull in The Right Stuff.)
Wolfe continued to insist, returning to the interview already mentioned, that “Nonfiction remains the most important literary genre in American literature of the past 60 years.” He still, 20 years on from Bonfire, felt the need to half-apologize for abandoning non-fiction. My instinct is that it was indeed a mistake, but I am only a consumer of Wolfe, looking back at the corpus from without: none of us readers had to meet Wolfe’s dry-cleaning bills.
May 9, 2018
Comics and Hard-Boiled – Pulp! Noir – Extra Sci Fi
Extra Credits
Published on 8 May 2018Many sci fi writers, especially in the United States, had backgrounds in reading and writing detective stories. They introduced to the sci-fi genre the action hero — no longer just scientific or philosophical protagonists.
April 25, 2018
Hugo Gernsback – Pulp! Amazing Stories – Extra Sci Fi
Extra Credits
Published on 24 Apr 2018Sci fi “pulp” stories sometimes have a reputation for being cheesy and over-dramatic, but they were extremely important for building up the sci fi genre as something *anyone* could write for AND get paid for — not just famous authors.
April 19, 2018
Lord Dunsany – The History of Sci Fi – Extra Sci Fi – #6
Extra Credits
Published on 17 Apr 2018Dunsany is arguably the “father of fantasy,” bringing to life the classic worldbuilding tropes that inspired so many authors, from H.P. Lovecraft to Ursula K. Le Guin. But his short stories and novels have sadly fallen out of memory…
April 2, 2018
The Five Forms of Ancient Egyptian Writing!
The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Published on 12 Mar 2018In this brief video I discuss the five different forms of writing in Ancient Egypt!
