What a mouthful this title is: Robert A. Heinlein In Dialogue With His Century, The Authorized Biography, Volume I: Learning Curve (1907-1948). And it's a hefty volume too, at 594 pages, including appendices and notes. Written by William H. Patterson, Jr. and sent to me as an advance reading copy by TOR.com, who will be publishing it on August 17, 2010, this is a detailed biography that reads almost like a novel.
The introduction presents the point of view that "Heinlein's writing career spans the transformation of a subliterary pulp genre into a significant dialogue partner at the interface of science and public policy--a transformation for which he is in no small degree responsible" and enumerates the social movements Heinlein helped to engineer: "science fiction and its stepchild, the policy think tank, the counterculture, the libertarian movement, and the commercial space movement."
As if that isn't enough to attract your attention, the details of Heinlein's life include little vignettes about human nature that remind me of listening to my southern relatives sitting around telling stories and speculating about peoples' motives, like this one:
A young couple was walking along a set of railroad tracks that cut through the park in those days when the woman got her heel caught in a switch--a nuisance, until they heard a train whistle approaching at speed. Another young man--the newspapers later said he was a tramp--stopped to help them get free. As the train bore down on them, the husband and the tramp struggled to get the woman free and were struck, all of them. The wife and the tramp were killed instantly, the husband seriously injured.
Why did he do it? Not the husband, who was, after all, simply (simply!) doing his duty by his wife--but the tramp, who had no personal stake in their welfare and could have jumped aside, even at the last minute, to save himself."
Although any devoted reader of his fiction has probably absorbed some of Heinlein's philosophy and a few details about his life, I was most impressed to learn from this biography that he was a child who didn't even have a bed, much less a bedroom, that as an adult he had a veritable plethora of health problems, and that he moved around the country almost continually in his first forty years.
Reading about Heinlein's high school classmate Sally Rand goes a long way towards explaining the character of Patricia in Time Enough for Love, and finding out that a 1927 book entitled Companionate Marriage might have influenced his liberal views on marriage enlarges my picture of the man and the kinds of marriages he dreamed up in his fiction.
What Heinlein said after getting his first check for a story sounds a lot like what his character Jubal Harshaw would say: "How long has this racket been going on? he demanded rhetorically. "And why didn't anybody tell me about it sooner?"
The stories about Heinlein's relationship with Captain Ernest J. King before Pearl Harbor certainly help to explain why a writer would create so many characters who are authoritative but bend the rules when necessary, like Jubal Harshaw, Professor Bernardo de la Paz, Lazarus Long, and Kettlebelly Baldwin.
The list of writers Heinlein helped along (often inviting as houseguests) is a long one, featuring such well-known people as Sprague de Camp, Ray Bradbury, L. Ron Hubbard, C.L. Moore, and Isaac Asimov.
I love the way Patterson inserts letters written by Heinlein into his narrative, telling, for instance, about a period in which he was confined to bed and quoting from a letter describing this period years later, to show why he came up with the idea for the waterbed:
"Bothered by bed sores and with every joint aching no matter what position I twisted into, I thought often of the Sybaritic comfort of floating in blood-warm water at night in Panama--and wished that it could be done for bed patients...and eventually figured out how to do it, all details, long before I was well enough to make working drawings."
Patterson even manages to make the political campaign segment of Heinlein's life interesting by including phrases like the one Manny laughs at during his first political rally in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress: "shoulder to shoulder."
As a writing teacher, although not a creative one (that is, a teacher of non-fiction writing), I particularly enjoyed this insight into "the most useful English Department course Heinlein ever got" in which
"each midshipman was given a tactical situation for which he had to write an operational order. Then everyone in the class would pick it apart, trying to find a way to misunderstand the order....if anyone could... misunderstand the order, the midshipman got a zero mark for the day."
And as a reader, I was both gratified and amused at the section about how Heinlein and his wife Leslyn, early in their marriage, used two particular books "as a touchstone...to measure the personal compatibility of any new acquaintance." My guess is that few, if any, of the people who read this biography will have read either of these two books, but one or two may decide to look them up and read them afterwards.
This volume ends with the marriage of Robert to Virginia. It was a revelation to me that it was she who converted him into a cat-lover, and--although you know I'm not usually a non-fiction reader--I will be waiting almost as anxiously for the second volume of this biography as I would for any second part of an absorbing story with well-delineated characters.
Showing posts with label Robert Heinlein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Heinlein. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Monday, June 8, 2009
Shanghai Girls
My friend Sarah sent me a copy of Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan a few years ago, and like most other people who read, I enjoyed it. So when I was offered a copy of Shanghai Girls from the ARC shelf at my local college bookstore, I remembered the first one I'd read by her and decided to give it a try. When I finally got to it (spurred by a positive review at Devourer of Books), it was an absorbing read, and because so much of it is set in the U.S. (Los Angeles), some of the story of the Chinese assimilating in the U.S. after WWII reminds me of the assimilation story of Amy Tan's Chinese characters in San Francisco (The Joy Luck Club.) The book is out now, and I would recommend it mostly to female readers.
A main theme of this novel is the importance of womens' stories:
"So often we're told that women's stories are unimportant. After all, what does it matter what happens in the main room, in the kitchen, or in the bedroom? Who cares about the relationships between mother, daughter, and sister? A baby's illness, the sorrows and pains of childbirth, keeping the family together during war, poverty, or even in the best of days are conswidered small and insignificant compared with the stories of men, who fight against nature to grow their crops, who wage battles to secure their homelands, who struggle to look inward in search of the perfect man. We're told that men are strong and brave, but I think women know how to endure, accept defeat, and bear physical and mental agony much better than men."
Although early on, a scene in the novel in which the first-person narrator, Pearl, suffers unimaginable agonies in a time of war seemed to be steering the novel on an all-too-predictable course, the way in which she endures becomes more interesting than I would have expected, culminating with her realization that her homesickness for her life as a "Shanghai Girl" has kept her from enjoying her life in America:
"I regret the years of homesickness and loneliness I've felt for Shanghai: the way I turned it into so many golden-hued remembrances of people, places, and food that...no longer exist and will never again exist. I berate myself: How could I not have seen what was right in front of me all these years? How could I not have sucked in all the sweetness instead of pining for memories that were only ashes and dust?"
That line of reasoning certainly resonates with me, and so rather than someone who is teaching me what it's like to be a foreigner in a strange land, Pearl is teaching me how to look at my own life, which is really quite a good trick, especially for one who spends so much of her life characterizing herself as the "beautiful girl" that she was in her youth in Shanghai. The way she tells her story, especially the parts where she defines herself in opposition to her even more beautiful sister, May, makes me think of what Jubal Harshaw says about a Rodin sculpture in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land:
"Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist-a master--and that is what Auguste Rodin was--can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is...and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be...and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart...no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn't matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired--but it does to them."
Pearl's story is the story of two sisters who were meant to be admired for their looks, and who learn how to look out of various kinds of prisons to see where they can go next, propelled like rockets by the spirits of the girls they once were still burning inside.
A main theme of this novel is the importance of womens' stories:
"So often we're told that women's stories are unimportant. After all, what does it matter what happens in the main room, in the kitchen, or in the bedroom? Who cares about the relationships between mother, daughter, and sister? A baby's illness, the sorrows and pains of childbirth, keeping the family together during war, poverty, or even in the best of days are conswidered small and insignificant compared with the stories of men, who fight against nature to grow their crops, who wage battles to secure their homelands, who struggle to look inward in search of the perfect man. We're told that men are strong and brave, but I think women know how to endure, accept defeat, and bear physical and mental agony much better than men."
Although early on, a scene in the novel in which the first-person narrator, Pearl, suffers unimaginable agonies in a time of war seemed to be steering the novel on an all-too-predictable course, the way in which she endures becomes more interesting than I would have expected, culminating with her realization that her homesickness for her life as a "Shanghai Girl" has kept her from enjoying her life in America:
"I regret the years of homesickness and loneliness I've felt for Shanghai: the way I turned it into so many golden-hued remembrances of people, places, and food that...no longer exist and will never again exist. I berate myself: How could I not have seen what was right in front of me all these years? How could I not have sucked in all the sweetness instead of pining for memories that were only ashes and dust?"
That line of reasoning certainly resonates with me, and so rather than someone who is teaching me what it's like to be a foreigner in a strange land, Pearl is teaching me how to look at my own life, which is really quite a good trick, especially for one who spends so much of her life characterizing herself as the "beautiful girl" that she was in her youth in Shanghai. The way she tells her story, especially the parts where she defines herself in opposition to her even more beautiful sister, May, makes me think of what Jubal Harshaw says about a Rodin sculpture in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land:
"Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist-a master--and that is what Auguste Rodin was--can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is...and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be...and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart...no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn't matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired--but it does to them."
Pearl's story is the story of two sisters who were meant to be admired for their looks, and who learn how to look out of various kinds of prisons to see where they can go next, propelled like rockets by the spirits of the girls they once were still burning inside.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
The Noise the Hairless Make
Last night I went to a rehearsal for the "Good Friday Project, an arts event focusing on the human realities of suffering and death." It put me in a mood, especially the piece about a wife who had trouble forgiving her husband for being in the hospital and taking all her care for granted. It made me want to slap her, and the somber cello piece following did nothing to dispel my mood. I had to go home and read some poems from one of my favorite volumes of poetry, Cemetery Nights by Stephen Dobyns.
"The Noise the Hairless Make" is the poem that did the most to restore my equilibrium:
How difficult to be an angel.
In order to forgive, they have no memory.
In order to be good, they're always forgetting.
How else could heaven by run? Still,
it needs to be full of teachers and textbooks
imported from God's own basement, since only
in hell is memory exact. In one classroom,
a dozen angels scratch their heads as their teacher
displays the cross-section of a human skull,
saying, Here is the sadness, here
the anger, here's where laughter is kept.
And the angels think, How strange and take notes
and would temper their forgiveness if it weren't
all forgotten by the afternoon. Sometimes
a bunch fly down to earth with their teacher,
who wants them to study a living example, and
this evening they find a man lying in a doorway
in an alley in Detroit. They stand around
chewing their pencils as their teacher says,
This is the stick he uses to beat his wife,
this is the bottle he drinks from when he
wants to forget, this is the Detroit Tigers
T-shirt he wears whenever he's sad, this is
the electric kazoo he plays in order to weep.
And the angels think, How peculiar, and wonder
whether to temper their forgiveness or just
let it ride, which really doesn't matter since
they forget the question as soon as it's asked.
But their muttering wakes the man in the doorway,
who looks to see a flock of doves departing
over the trash cans. And because he dreamed
of betrayal and pursuit, of defeat in battle,
the death of friends, he heaves a bottle at them
and it breaks under a streetlight so the light
reflects on its hundred broken pieces with such
a multicolored twinkling that the man laughs.
From their place on a brick wall, the angels
watch and one asks, What good are they? Then
others take up the cry, What good are they,
what good are they? But as fast as they articulate
the question it's forgotten and their teacher,
a minor demon, returns with them to heaven.
But the man, still chuckling, sits in his doorway,
and the rats in their dumpsters hear this sound
like stones rattling or metal banging together,
and they see how the man is by himself without
food or companions, without work or family
or a real bed for his body. They creep back
to their holes and practice little laughs
that sound like coughing or a dog throwing up
as once more they uselessly try to imitate
the noise the hairless make when defeated.
As the man from mars says in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, laughter is a kind of bravery. I've had times in my life when I wasn't brave enough to be able to laugh, but I'm not proud of them, and I don't see the sense in dragging them out for display once they're past. It seems a morbid fascination to me. I think it's nearly impossible to properly compose your thoughts to deal with the paradox of Good Friday while wallowing in other peoples' suffering. Because "only in hell is memory exact."
"The Noise the Hairless Make" is the poem that did the most to restore my equilibrium:
How difficult to be an angel.
In order to forgive, they have no memory.
In order to be good, they're always forgetting.
How else could heaven by run? Still,
it needs to be full of teachers and textbooks
imported from God's own basement, since only
in hell is memory exact. In one classroom,
a dozen angels scratch their heads as their teacher
displays the cross-section of a human skull,
saying, Here is the sadness, here
the anger, here's where laughter is kept.
And the angels think, How strange and take notes
and would temper their forgiveness if it weren't
all forgotten by the afternoon. Sometimes
a bunch fly down to earth with their teacher,
who wants them to study a living example, and
this evening they find a man lying in a doorway
in an alley in Detroit. They stand around
chewing their pencils as their teacher says,
This is the stick he uses to beat his wife,
this is the bottle he drinks from when he
wants to forget, this is the Detroit Tigers
T-shirt he wears whenever he's sad, this is
the electric kazoo he plays in order to weep.
And the angels think, How peculiar, and wonder
whether to temper their forgiveness or just
let it ride, which really doesn't matter since
they forget the question as soon as it's asked.
But their muttering wakes the man in the doorway,
who looks to see a flock of doves departing
over the trash cans. And because he dreamed
of betrayal and pursuit, of defeat in battle,
the death of friends, he heaves a bottle at them
and it breaks under a streetlight so the light
reflects on its hundred broken pieces with such
a multicolored twinkling that the man laughs.
From their place on a brick wall, the angels
watch and one asks, What good are they? Then
others take up the cry, What good are they,
what good are they? But as fast as they articulate
the question it's forgotten and their teacher,
a minor demon, returns with them to heaven.
But the man, still chuckling, sits in his doorway,
and the rats in their dumpsters hear this sound
like stones rattling or metal banging together,
and they see how the man is by himself without
food or companions, without work or family
or a real bed for his body. They creep back
to their holes and practice little laughs
that sound like coughing or a dog throwing up
as once more they uselessly try to imitate
the noise the hairless make when defeated.
As the man from mars says in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, laughter is a kind of bravery. I've had times in my life when I wasn't brave enough to be able to laugh, but I'm not proud of them, and I don't see the sense in dragging them out for display once they're past. It seems a morbid fascination to me. I think it's nearly impossible to properly compose your thoughts to deal with the paradox of Good Friday while wallowing in other peoples' suffering. Because "only in hell is memory exact."
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Just Hum a Few Bars?
Yes, I take requests. Lemming put in an "official request" for an animal poem. Thing is, she didn't say why, or what kind of animal poem she'd like.
My first response was to give her Ogden Nash's "The Panther" in the comments. My second response is to give her Woodchucks by Maxine Kumin, because it's the second poem that comes to my mind when someone says animal poem. But there are lots of others, most of which use animals metaphorically (like The Heavy Bear That Goes With Me). It crossed my mind that Lemming might want a poem to share with her two little girls, but what I thought of was Harry Graham's poem about John and the shark, from Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes (which you can read on Google Books if you type in the title, but I can't for the life of me make a link to it) and Shel Silverstein's poem Feeding Time:
Oh alligator, palligator, get up out of bed.
It's breakfast time and I can't find
Our keeper Mister Fred.
He smokes a pipe and wears a little
Derby on his head,
And he was 'sposed to meet me here
To help to get you fed.
Maybe it's just the contrariness that winter brings out in me, but Woodchucks is not a soft and cuddly animal poem, either. I have my animals gathered close around me on this frigid winter day (children too, since it's a snow day), but there's no use trying to find a poem about how soft the bunny's fur is or what a cat's face looks like when you open door after door and still fail to reveal the door into summer. So here is a poem about woodchucks:
Gassing the woodchucks didn't turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick at the bone
and the case we had against them was airtight,
both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,
but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range.
Next morning they turned up again, no worse
for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes
and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch.
They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course
and then took over the vegetable patch
nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots.
The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling
to the feel of the .22, the bullets' neat noses.
I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace
puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing,
now drew a bead on the littlest woodchuck's face.
He died down in the everbearing roses.
Then minutes later I dropped the mother. She
flipflopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth
still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard.
Another baby next. O one-two-three
the murderer inside me rose up hard,
the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith.
There's one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps
me cocked and ready day after day after day.
All night I hunt his humped-up form. I dream
I sight along the barrel in my sleep.
If only they'd consented to die unseen
gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.
Don't you just love the use of the word "Nazi" in that last line? As I've echoed before, "I hate those guys." And I just saw a preview for a (real) movie about Nazi zombies.
So. Any more requests?
My first response was to give her Ogden Nash's "The Panther" in the comments. My second response is to give her Woodchucks by Maxine Kumin, because it's the second poem that comes to my mind when someone says animal poem. But there are lots of others, most of which use animals metaphorically (like The Heavy Bear That Goes With Me). It crossed my mind that Lemming might want a poem to share with her two little girls, but what I thought of was Harry Graham's poem about John and the shark, from Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes (which you can read on Google Books if you type in the title, but I can't for the life of me make a link to it) and Shel Silverstein's poem Feeding Time:
Oh alligator, palligator, get up out of bed.
It's breakfast time and I can't find
Our keeper Mister Fred.
He smokes a pipe and wears a little
Derby on his head,
And he was 'sposed to meet me here
To help to get you fed.
Maybe it's just the contrariness that winter brings out in me, but Woodchucks is not a soft and cuddly animal poem, either. I have my animals gathered close around me on this frigid winter day (children too, since it's a snow day), but there's no use trying to find a poem about how soft the bunny's fur is or what a cat's face looks like when you open door after door and still fail to reveal the door into summer. So here is a poem about woodchucks:
Gassing the woodchucks didn't turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick at the bone
and the case we had against them was airtight,
both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,
but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range.
Next morning they turned up again, no worse
for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes
and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch.
They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course
and then took over the vegetable patch
nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots.
The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling
to the feel of the .22, the bullets' neat noses.
I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace
puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing,
now drew a bead on the littlest woodchuck's face.
He died down in the everbearing roses.
Then minutes later I dropped the mother. She
flipflopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth
still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard.
Another baby next. O one-two-three
the murderer inside me rose up hard,
the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith.
There's one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps
me cocked and ready day after day after day.
All night I hunt his humped-up form. I dream
I sight along the barrel in my sleep.
If only they'd consented to die unseen
gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.
Don't you just love the use of the word "Nazi" in that last line? As I've echoed before, "I hate those guys." And I just saw a preview for a (real) movie about Nazi zombies.
So. Any more requests?
Monday, May 12, 2008
The Battle of the Labyrinth
Of course Walker read the new Percy Jackson book, The Battle of the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan, the day I brought it home. As soon as he got out of school he picked it up and began reading me the chapter titles out loud (my favorite title is "Nico buys happy meals for the dead." Let me tell you, that chapter definitely delivers what it promises.) Walker also had to read me the first sentence out loud: "The last thing I wanted to do on my summer break was blow up another school." So Walker started reading at 2:30 and despite interruptions to take care of the guinea pigs and then the rabbit, finished at 5:30. "How was it?" I asked him. "It's better than #2 and as good as #1 and #3," he said.
Last night I finished reading it (courtesy of mother's day, time to sit around and read). It was thoroughly enjoyable all the way through. There's a nice mix of new characters and clever plot twists (yeah, they're literal in the labyrinth) with characters as old as myth itself and situations that you can see coming if you've read enough of the myths. Another good chapter title (well, they're all good, let's face it) is "We steal some slightly used wings." Guess whose. (Here's a hint: "'Land!' Annabeth yelled. 'These wings won't last forever.'")
One of the things that interests me about this book is Grover's quest to find Pan. It comes to a satisfactory conclusion, especially in terms of word etymology as an explanation of how the foes of the half-bloods are suddenly overthrown when Grover screams. But the culmination of Grover's search for Pan strikes me as a bit of a seam in this otherwise seamless fictional world. Grover and his friends are advised to take care of some little bit of nature, because the God can't do it anymore. It reads a bit like the usual kid "save the rainforest" propaganda. Don't get me wrong; I'm in favor of saving the rainforest. I gave an impromptu speech on it the other day when a kid came home from school asking "but what's wrong with drilling for oil in Alaska?" But I am not in favor of mixing propaganda in with fiction. Good fiction convinces because of the story, not in terms of something added to the story.
The whole kid conservation movement bothers me, and I'm beginning to be able to articulate why as I continue to read and think about what's currently being called "nature deficit disorder." Wouldn't it do the rain forest more good if a kid learned to value the nature in his own neighborhood and then extrapolate from that love to wider vistas as his power to influence his world grows? Kid conservation encourages them to pay lip service to a problem without being able to solve it. As adults, these kids are going to feel that they did what they could, but it didn't work. Oh well. On to something else.
But what else? I am a supporter of the space program and Robert Heinlein's idea that humans shouldn't "put all our eggs in one basket" (e.g. should find other inhabitable worlds). Have we done that, though? No, we've largely given in to the people who prate about how we shouldn't be exploring outer space when we can't even feed the people on earth who are hungry. And we shouldn't eat cheap hamburgers because they're raised on land chopped out of the rain forest, where medicines we can't even dream of could be available....
We do need someone larger than life, someone who doesn't have to be tarnished by the election process, to get us out of some of the strange loops created by teaching children the "correct" way to treat the earth. We need a Percy Jackson, with wise parents to guide him on a path neither of them can follow.
Last night I finished reading it (courtesy of mother's day, time to sit around and read). It was thoroughly enjoyable all the way through. There's a nice mix of new characters and clever plot twists (yeah, they're literal in the labyrinth) with characters as old as myth itself and situations that you can see coming if you've read enough of the myths. Another good chapter title (well, they're all good, let's face it) is "We steal some slightly used wings." Guess whose. (Here's a hint: "'Land!' Annabeth yelled. 'These wings won't last forever.'")
One of the things that interests me about this book is Grover's quest to find Pan. It comes to a satisfactory conclusion, especially in terms of word etymology as an explanation of how the foes of the half-bloods are suddenly overthrown when Grover screams. But the culmination of Grover's search for Pan strikes me as a bit of a seam in this otherwise seamless fictional world. Grover and his friends are advised to take care of some little bit of nature, because the God can't do it anymore. It reads a bit like the usual kid "save the rainforest" propaganda. Don't get me wrong; I'm in favor of saving the rainforest. I gave an impromptu speech on it the other day when a kid came home from school asking "but what's wrong with drilling for oil in Alaska?" But I am not in favor of mixing propaganda in with fiction. Good fiction convinces because of the story, not in terms of something added to the story.
The whole kid conservation movement bothers me, and I'm beginning to be able to articulate why as I continue to read and think about what's currently being called "nature deficit disorder." Wouldn't it do the rain forest more good if a kid learned to value the nature in his own neighborhood and then extrapolate from that love to wider vistas as his power to influence his world grows? Kid conservation encourages them to pay lip service to a problem without being able to solve it. As adults, these kids are going to feel that they did what they could, but it didn't work. Oh well. On to something else.
But what else? I am a supporter of the space program and Robert Heinlein's idea that humans shouldn't "put all our eggs in one basket" (e.g. should find other inhabitable worlds). Have we done that, though? No, we've largely given in to the people who prate about how we shouldn't be exploring outer space when we can't even feed the people on earth who are hungry. And we shouldn't eat cheap hamburgers because they're raised on land chopped out of the rain forest, where medicines we can't even dream of could be available....
We do need someone larger than life, someone who doesn't have to be tarnished by the election process, to get us out of some of the strange loops created by teaching children the "correct" way to treat the earth. We need a Percy Jackson, with wise parents to guide him on a path neither of them can follow.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Favorite Books
When I go to a party and someone asks what I "do" and I tell them some variation on "I have a PhD in English and try not to waste it entirely," there are two categories of response. One is "oh, I'll have to watch my grammar." I laugh politely at that one. The other is "oh, I never have time to read." I like that one a little better because it gives me a way to say that we make time for what we can't do without.
My favorite response to the what do you "do" answer came when I was still in graduate school. The man who eventually married our friend Miriam said to me "what are you studying in grad school?" I said "English." There was a pause. "Haven't you learned it yet?" he said.
So what do you do when someone asks what your "favorite" book is??? I have various strategies for answering such a question, including picking six off the top of my head, as I did for my blogger profile: Animal Dreams, Love In the Ruins, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Lord of the Rings, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Princess Bride.
A strategy that makes more sense is to pick two or three favorites from a specific genre--favorite science fiction books: Stranger in a Strange Land, The Door Into Ocean, Ender's Game.
My favorite way to answer this question now is a strategy I borrowed from my friend Lemming's Christmas letter. She and her husband used to recommend their favorite book of the year. This narrows down the selections to a manageable level, plus you can buy the favorite book of the year for everyone on your list. My favorite book of this past year is Boomsday.
Of course, this strategy necessarily privileges contemporary literature. How can we include favorites from the past? Usually I don't try. There's no need to repeat what thousands of high school English teachers have said before me: To Kill a Mockingbird is a great book. One of the purposes of telling other people what your favorite books are is to get them to read those books.
With that purpose in mind, tell me what your favorite books are. I'm the person you know who is most likely to read them.
My favorite response to the what do you "do" answer came when I was still in graduate school. The man who eventually married our friend Miriam said to me "what are you studying in grad school?" I said "English." There was a pause. "Haven't you learned it yet?" he said.
So what do you do when someone asks what your "favorite" book is??? I have various strategies for answering such a question, including picking six off the top of my head, as I did for my blogger profile: Animal Dreams, Love In the Ruins, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Lord of the Rings, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Princess Bride.
A strategy that makes more sense is to pick two or three favorites from a specific genre--favorite science fiction books: Stranger in a Strange Land, The Door Into Ocean, Ender's Game.
My favorite way to answer this question now is a strategy I borrowed from my friend Lemming's Christmas letter. She and her husband used to recommend their favorite book of the year. This narrows down the selections to a manageable level, plus you can buy the favorite book of the year for everyone on your list. My favorite book of this past year is Boomsday.
Of course, this strategy necessarily privileges contemporary literature. How can we include favorites from the past? Usually I don't try. There's no need to repeat what thousands of high school English teachers have said before me: To Kill a Mockingbird is a great book. One of the purposes of telling other people what your favorite books are is to get them to read those books.
With that purpose in mind, tell me what your favorite books are. I'm the person you know who is most likely to read them.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Variable Star
I just reread Spider Robinson's book Variable Star, created from Robert Heinlein's outline. It's a curious way to write a book, to be sure, and the first time I read it, I was surprised at how much I liked it. Most of the book is Spider. There's the occasional homage pun (her eyes were Hazel, stones, rolling), and he pays lip service to Heinlein's stock in trade, like briefly mentioning that one of the main character's girlfriends has decided to enter into a group marriage. The plot, though, does seem to me to be one that Heinlein could have written. Details about the planet that the characters are headed towards are incredible and detailed, and the starship drives are mysterious in their workings, which is (oddly) appropriate to this particular book. Some of my favorite parts are when the characters talk about history:
"Webb was an idiot. His analysis presumed that if other life did exist, it could not be more intelligent than him. It was the characteristic flaw of the entire PreCollapse millennium: the assumption of vastly more knowledge than they actually possessed." He closed his eyes and rubbed them. "Over and over like a recurring flu they developed the imbecile idea that they understood nearly everything, in all but the finest details. They had no slightest idea what lightning was, how it worked. They had absolutely no clue how moisture got farther than about ten meters up a tree--the highest that capillary action can push it Fifty years after the splitting of the atom, they accidentally noticed for the first time that hurricanes emit gamma rays. There were quite a few large, significant phenomena they could 'explain,' often elegantly...over and over again...and had to, because the explanations began falling apart at the first hard data-push. Things like he Tunguska Event, gamma ray bursts, why an airplane wing generated lift, what ninety percent of our DNA was doing there...yet they were solemnly convinced they basically understood the universe, except for some details out in the tenth decimal place.
"They somehow managed to persuade themselves that computer models constitute data. That very complicated guesses become facts. They made themselves believe they had the power to accurately model, not merely something as inconceivably complex as, say, a single zygote...but a national economy, a weather system, a planetary ecosphere, a multiplanet society--even a universe. They made solemn pronouncements about conditions a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, on the basis of computer models which they had produced with computers not even bright enough to talk, let alone understand speech. They were unlike all the generations before theirs in several ways, but chiefly in that they had no faintest clue how ignorant they were. Previous ages had usually had a pretty good handle on that."
"Things got worse in that direction soon."
"Sure. Scientists were claiming godlike knowledge, and couldn't deliver. It go to where even the average citizen could sense they were bluffing. They could go on for literally days on what happened in the first five minutes of creation, without ever saying a single thing that meant anything, did anybody any good. They wouldn't even discuss what happened when you died, let alone how random chance produced life. No wonder the citizens decided to go back to a different kind of omniscience, that came with omnipotence and omnibenevolence thrown in at no extra charge. Twentieth-century science handed the world over to Nehemia Scudder, on a plate. No wonder some people preferred 'intelligent design' to evolution. At least it put intelligence somewhere in the mix."
A very Spider-like rant, isn't it? But I find it strangely compelling, especially in company with a later explanation of what caused the "Terror Wars," a smug Canadian-type analysis of the actions of the US after 9/11, but ending with this description of Americans:
"They were some of the most intelligent and humane people in the history of the planet: what could they have been thinking?"
"Of course they were not. They were feeling."
I like science fiction that not only shows us a possible way to go, but provides a bit of road map for how people could get there. Variable Star does that, in the best Heinlein tradition.
"Webb was an idiot. His analysis presumed that if other life did exist, it could not be more intelligent than him. It was the characteristic flaw of the entire PreCollapse millennium: the assumption of vastly more knowledge than they actually possessed." He closed his eyes and rubbed them. "Over and over like a recurring flu they developed the imbecile idea that they understood nearly everything, in all but the finest details. They had no slightest idea what lightning was, how it worked. They had absolutely no clue how moisture got farther than about ten meters up a tree--the highest that capillary action can push it Fifty years after the splitting of the atom, they accidentally noticed for the first time that hurricanes emit gamma rays. There were quite a few large, significant phenomena they could 'explain,' often elegantly...over and over again...and had to, because the explanations began falling apart at the first hard data-push. Things like he Tunguska Event, gamma ray bursts, why an airplane wing generated lift, what ninety percent of our DNA was doing there...yet they were solemnly convinced they basically understood the universe, except for some details out in the tenth decimal place.
"They somehow managed to persuade themselves that computer models constitute data. That very complicated guesses become facts. They made themselves believe they had the power to accurately model, not merely something as inconceivably complex as, say, a single zygote...but a national economy, a weather system, a planetary ecosphere, a multiplanet society--even a universe. They made solemn pronouncements about conditions a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, on the basis of computer models which they had produced with computers not even bright enough to talk, let alone understand speech. They were unlike all the generations before theirs in several ways, but chiefly in that they had no faintest clue how ignorant they were. Previous ages had usually had a pretty good handle on that."
"Things got worse in that direction soon."
"Sure. Scientists were claiming godlike knowledge, and couldn't deliver. It go to where even the average citizen could sense they were bluffing. They could go on for literally days on what happened in the first five minutes of creation, without ever saying a single thing that meant anything, did anybody any good. They wouldn't even discuss what happened when you died, let alone how random chance produced life. No wonder the citizens decided to go back to a different kind of omniscience, that came with omnipotence and omnibenevolence thrown in at no extra charge. Twentieth-century science handed the world over to Nehemia Scudder, on a plate. No wonder some people preferred 'intelligent design' to evolution. At least it put intelligence somewhere in the mix."
A very Spider-like rant, isn't it? But I find it strangely compelling, especially in company with a later explanation of what caused the "Terror Wars," a smug Canadian-type analysis of the actions of the US after 9/11, but ending with this description of Americans:
"They were some of the most intelligent and humane people in the history of the planet: what could they have been thinking?"
"Of course they were not. They were feeling."
I like science fiction that not only shows us a possible way to go, but provides a bit of road map for how people could get there. Variable Star does that, in the best Heinlein tradition.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Fully grown tomcat on the keys
My three cats are bored. They have almost given up on finding the door into summer. Like the cat in the Heinlein story, they spend most of the winter convinced that at least one of our doors "must lead into summer weather." But by the end of February, they get bored of waiting to go outside and start picking on each other and the upholstery.
Yesterday, Sammy was sitting on the back of a picked-over easy chair next to my desk. I was using my laptop computer on the desk, which is unusual because for months I've been using it on the bed as I recovered from my knee replacement. I wasn't paying any attention to Sammy. He's a nervous cat, and it's not entirely my fault. He was raised by a feral mother and has the uncanny ability, described in Fritz Leiber's story Space Time for Springers, of being able to be in one room and then instantaneously materialize in a different room, usually half-way up the curtains. I must confess that occasionally I make a sudden movement or noise just to see Sammy levitate. But I was ignoring him, as I said, and typing on the computer in the middle of a quiet house. All of the sudden, there was a cat explosion. My screen changed to a darker color, with a white box that appeared and then disappeared, leaving me with a screen I'd never seen before, and a "c" key that had come entirely off the keyboard. As I sat there, I realized that the moment before the explosion, I'd seen black out of the corner of my eye. Chester had come up behind Sammy and detonated him. I also realized that my left wrist was bleeding slightly. There were no cats in the room. The house was silent.
Those of you who are not cat people are thinking "why does she put up with such animals?" All I can say, amid my chagrin at being told that I will have to send my laptop away to get the keyboard repaired, is what Heinlein already said best:
Cats have no sense of humor, they have terribly inflated egos, and they are very touchy. If somebody asked me why it was worth anyone's time to cater to them I would be forced to answer that there is no logical reason. I would rather explain to someone who detests sharp cheeses why he "ought to like" Limburger. Nevertheless, I fully sympathize with the mandarin who cut off a priceless embroidered sleeve because a kitten was sleeping on it.
Yesterday, Sammy was sitting on the back of a picked-over easy chair next to my desk. I was using my laptop computer on the desk, which is unusual because for months I've been using it on the bed as I recovered from my knee replacement. I wasn't paying any attention to Sammy. He's a nervous cat, and it's not entirely my fault. He was raised by a feral mother and has the uncanny ability, described in Fritz Leiber's story Space Time for Springers, of being able to be in one room and then instantaneously materialize in a different room, usually half-way up the curtains. I must confess that occasionally I make a sudden movement or noise just to see Sammy levitate. But I was ignoring him, as I said, and typing on the computer in the middle of a quiet house. All of the sudden, there was a cat explosion. My screen changed to a darker color, with a white box that appeared and then disappeared, leaving me with a screen I'd never seen before, and a "c" key that had come entirely off the keyboard. As I sat there, I realized that the moment before the explosion, I'd seen black out of the corner of my eye. Chester had come up behind Sammy and detonated him. I also realized that my left wrist was bleeding slightly. There were no cats in the room. The house was silent.
Those of you who are not cat people are thinking "why does she put up with such animals?" All I can say, amid my chagrin at being told that I will have to send my laptop away to get the keyboard repaired, is what Heinlein already said best:
Cats have no sense of humor, they have terribly inflated egos, and they are very touchy. If somebody asked me why it was worth anyone's time to cater to them I would be forced to answer that there is no logical reason. I would rather explain to someone who detests sharp cheeses why he "ought to like" Limburger. Nevertheless, I fully sympathize with the mandarin who cut off a priceless embroidered sleeve because a kitten was sleeping on it.
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