Del Rey's Mortals and Monsters

 

Lester del Rey. Mortals and Monsters (1965) Del Rey was a good journeyman writer. He supplied the pulp fiction trade with reliably entertaining tales, many of which suggested deeper questions than his protagonists tangled with. The irony wasn’t lost on his readers, though: The guy who invented time-travel by stealing a time-travel machine from a museum erected in his memory gets himself trapped in an eternal loop, a whirlpool in the river of time. The reader exists outside the fictional universe and sees the loop that’s hidden from the thief.  So who or what is the observer of our universe, watching us drifting on the river of time?
     A man whose body rejects the rejuvenation treatments realises that a limited life-span has more value than an unlimited one. An autonomous robot who doesn’t understand instinct learns what it is when his team recreates a human. An alien stranded on Earth manages to persuade a human to help him get home (but it’s a tougher story than the movie ET). And many more. Pulp fiction is underrated: the authors use the expected tropes and stereotypes, but the must make their tales newer than last month’s publications, so they ask questions that can lead us into the most subtle and profound of the enigmas that puzzle us.
     A good collection. ** to ***

Aliens and Other Strangers: Dickson's The Stranger.

 

Gordon R. Dickson. The Stranger (1987) It seems our obsession with extra-terrestrial life has needed assuaging for centuries. One of the earliest fantasy fictions was written in the 1600s. The traveller used geese to fly him to the moon, where he encountered aliens. Of course, in that century Europeans encountered many new peoples. Travellers’ tales were very popular. Extending the itch for exploration stories to the Moon was I think an inevitable step, even though the technology of the time mean it was speculative fiction.
     Dickson, like most SF writers, riffs on the Alien, and does so better than most. Some are stranded on Earth, some are sought by Earthlings, some are denizens of the far future, one is a machine that manages global life (and tolerates no opposition). Like all tales about encounters with the Stranger, they tell us as much about the teller as the told. Dickson has a generally optimistic view of humankind: his protagonists usually prevail. The dangers come from human hybris, stupidity, or moral lethargy.
     The collection includes work from the 1950s to the 80s. The earliest stories can be read as expressions of the Western fear of Communist domination: the Stranger disguises appearance and intention. The later stories explore the notion of “stranger” in the widest sense: we humans are the strangest critters we know. Worth reading. ** to ****

215 Graves

 

I wrote this a week ago, it's a little rough around the edges.

 215 Graves

215 Graves with no names
215 names lost forever
215 sparks of God's fire
drifting away on the river.

They were worlds of wonder loving God's bounty
Loving the earth and the sky and the river.
It carried them on, it swept them away,
Time’s cruel waters drowned love's fire.

215 Graves with no names...

Pride and power took them from family
Took them for shaping as if they were clay
But God's spark within them resisted the potter
Flamed bright and loving until they gave way.

215 Graves with no names...

Then they were buried, discarded, forgotten;
The warm earth received them and held them safe,
Safe from the beatings, the scoldings and pain,
Dreaming of fathers and mothers and home.

215 Graves with no names...

Now we have found them, now their bones cry to us,
Were you the ones who talked of Christ’s love?
Now we must reckon with guilt of our ancestors,
But power and pride live on in us.

215 graves with no names....

We’re all one family, children of Earth,
Earth-mother who offers us love of each other,
Love that can heal us, love that can lift us
Above pride and power, above guilt and fear.

215 graves with no names....

When we let go of the greed that defines us,
The greed that we think will free us from fear,
Then the bones of the children will rise up and embrace us
And love will reshape us into children of light.

215 graves with no names
215 names to recover
215 sparks of God’s fire
lighting the way to love.

 

© 2021 W. Kirchmeir

Monty Python and Others: scripts by John Cleese

 

John Cleese. The Golden Skits of Muriel Volestrangler EHRS & BAR (1984) Cleese wrote or collaborated on sketches for several TV shows, Monty Python’s Flying Circus being the one best known in North America. This sampling demonstrates his skills, but as with most printed scripts, it helps to have seen at least some of them performed. Tones of voice, pregnant pauses, furrowed brows etc don’t show in print. The book is great fun, with repeated reminders of the absurdities hidden in what we think of as normal behaviours.
      Most of the time, it’s habit and context that makes us behave as we do. Switch to different contexts, and the habitual behaviours become absurd. Consider the flying sheep sketch: the observers behave as “observers”, and so see nothing odd about the sheep’s attempt at flying. Other writers have used to the same trick to show how habits can be lethal. I recall a Christie story whose plot turns on the insight that we habitually see a “policeman”, not a human being with passions.
      Much of what we think of as our (and other people’s) personality is merely the behaviour expected of us in some specific context. (See Leo Ross’s “attribution error”). We play the roles we feel are expected of us, which include expectations of our idiosyncrasies. One of the blessings of comedy and satire is that it reminds us of how much of what we think of as free choice is merely rote reaction. Recognising that may help us achieve a few degrees of autonomy.
      The Dead Parrot sketch is _not_ included. ***

Schoolmasterly Memoir: Swan Song of A. J. Wentworth

 

H. F. Ellis. Swan Song of A. J. Wentworth (1982) The second (and final) chronicle of Wentworth’s life and career, as told by himself. It’s a mildly amusing and occasionally sharply skewering satire of the naively blinkered fool, in the peculiarly English tradition of Diary of A Nobody. Several of its parts appeared in (the now defunct) Punch, a magazine that appeared as if by magic in my Grandfather’s house when I was a boy barely capable of understanding the cartoons, let alone the prose pieces.
     I enjoyed this book, but I suspect that it’s a specialised taste. Too many of the jokes depend on allusions too very English traits and attitudes, most of which were already obsolescent when this book was written. Wentworth is given a trip to the USA; it seems his experience as a maths teacher at Burgrove prep school qualify him for a lecture tour. He ends up a married man, but the causative events leading up that blessed state were recounted in the first volume, which I haven’t read. Drat! **½

Milligan's Q Show Scripts

 

Spike Milligan. The Q Annual (1979) Scripts and a few photos commemorating Spike Milligan’s TV series “Q” (intermittently from 1969 to 1982). I also looked at a few online videos. Typically Milligan, outrageously absurd and sometimes offensive, the skits I think show Milligan’s unassuaged pain and rage. It seems to me that his wartime experience left him with psychological wounds that he could not heal, (these days called “post-traumatic stress disorder”). An early attempt to cope led to The Goonshow, which was kept within bounds by his friendship with Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe, and the producers’ ability to tone down what I suspect were screams of psychic pain in the pre-production unedited scripts.
I don’t think “enjoyed reading this book” is the best way to describe the experience, but I can’t think of a better string of words. Essential for any Milligan fan, and worthwhile for anyone interested in the absurdist period of British radio and TV comedy. ***

Thinking Out Loud about Reality, Experience and Truth

     Our experience of reality is created by the brain. We know reality indirectly, since the brain creates our experience from the sensory inputs. Past experience, expectations, emotions, social context, focus of attention, etc all determine what we perceive as reality “right now”. Thinking about our experience produces what we believe is an accurate description of reality. One way to understand reality is to list a hierarchy of complexity, like the following. It’s not original with me, but I can’t recall exactly where and when I first came across it. “Many decades ago”, is about all I can tell you.

Sensory data
Sensation
Perception
Fact
Knowledge
Significance
Insight
Understanding
Wisdom

     Every level in this hierarchy combines data, primarily from the immediately lower level, but also from any other level. Controlling the data used at any level controls the experience. Magicians know this, and do their best to control the data the audience receives.

     Sensation and higher levels occur entirely in the brain, not the sense organs (which, by the way, also combine data from several sensors), although the process can be affected by factors like alcohol, oxygen deprivation, etc. For example, “seeing” is what the brain computes from the data provided by the eyes. However, perception of a shape (and its colour and motion, etc) is not enough to identify the object: Fact is another computation, which includes information from other senses, and from memory, etc. And so it goes. Your conscious experience consists of the level on which you focus your attention, perhaps surrounded by a kind of nimbus of all the other levels of experience. That’s something that seems to vary both between and within individuals.
     For example you’re looking at your back yard at night, and perceive a dark irregular shape moving across the visual field. What is it? A bear, or the neighbour’s dog? The answer is the fact that it’s the dog.
     Once you’ve identified your neighbour’s dog, the next level is knowledge: What is it doing in your back yard? At this point, guesswork (hypothesis) enters in. You know the dog roams the neighbourhood, so that’s what it’s doing. Is this knowledge significant? To compute that, you need more information, such as the dog’s habits, whether or not the neighbour is at home, whether coyotes or foxes have been seen in your neighbourhood, etc. It depends on how you get on with the neighbour and their dog, or your knowledge about doggy lives, or your tolerance for strange animals in your back yard, or your town’s ordinances about stray pets, or any combination of these and many other factors that make up the context of the event. You may decide to call your neighbour, and tell them their dog’s out. Or maybe not.
     Will you derive some insight? Maybe. Perhaps you realise that the dog is on patrol, and will return tomorrow night. Could be that you realise that you rather like the idea of a dog roaming in your back yard. Or that you really must find some way of persuading your neighbour to keep their dog under control. Or whatever. And then perhaps you may understand that the inconvenience, if any, if the dog’s invasion is really of little importance. With luck, you may achieve the wisdom of deciding not to call the neighbour about their dog.

     All the while, your attention flits around the total constellation of disparate sensations, perceptions, facts, significance, etc, as you try to figure out what to do about the dog. At any moment, some event may attract all your attention so that you forget about the dog, until next day, when your neighbour tells you that he came home badly injured from an encounter with the fox.

    The brain makes errors at every level, some of which can be corrected by training/education, and some of which cannot be corrected, even when they are recognised as errors. This is most obvious in the computation of perceptions from sense data: Visual illusions persist even when we know we are seeing an illusion.
     We also suffer from illusions of fact: that dark irregular shape is actually a bear, but our brain has computed it to be a dog. We need more data to correct that illusion. But even with added data we may be still be convinced it was a dog we saw. Why? Because we expected to see a dog, and not a bear.
     There are illusions at more abstract levels. We suffer from illusions of insight, understanding, etc. Call them conceptual illusions. Some can be detected and corrected (with some effort) by applying logical analysis to our descriptions of our insights and understanding. This is one of the goals of scientific inquiry.
     Science is a method of recognising errors, and if possible correcting them. It begins with our remembered experience, which modifies our present experience. To understand what the dog is doing in our backyard we test a guess against everything we know about that particular dog, about dogs in general, about our neighbourhood, about wildlife in our neighbourhood, etc and so on and so forth. We do all this very quickly, mostly unconsciously, and repeatedly modifying our guess until we have a plausible explanation. “Plausible” merely means “fitting the specific and general facts well enough to feel correct.”
     This still isn’t science, however. Science is systematic and conscious framing and testing of guesses in order to have a more general understanding of dogs, and neighbours, and wildlife, and social obligations, and so on. It will likely entail gathering more facts, and/or integrating several pieces of knowledge. Items will have to be evaluated for their significance, and with luck and perseverance, we may arrive at some insights that lead to a more complete understanding. We want to be able to say,  “Because of my understanding of reality, I know how to make wise choices”

      We want the feeling that we have an understanding of reality that’s general enough to include a large swath of our experience. We want to be able to say, “This, my individual experience of reality is valid. What I have to say about it is true.” More, we want a Theory of Everything. We want to believe that, at least in principle, all human experience can be explained, that it’s possible to describe Reality in such a way that everything is included, and that every possible statement in that description is true.

 

 

Half Moon Street: Thomas Pitt and the Dead Photographer.

 

Anne Perry. Half Moon Street (2000). Superintendent Thomas Pitt is called to the scene of a bizarre murder: A dead man dressed in a green velvet gown, and shackled to a punt in an obscene pose, may be a member of the French Embassy. He isn’t (and that loose end is tied up nicely in the end). The dead man is a photographer of great skill and reputation, some of whose clients have “sophisticated” tastes, and some of whose photos are reprinted as naughty postcards. There is also a link with the theatre, and Pitt’s sister-in-law Caroline. Hidden secrets, dysfunctional families, strong differences of opinion about the changing values of late Victorian England make this a novel of ideas as much as of crime. A good read, despite the somewhat stereotypical characters. **

Beatles I Love You!

Bill Adler, ed. Love Letters to the Beatles (9164) A rather touching selection of the hundreds of thousands of letter sent by American (mostly) girls to the Beatles in 1964, the year they landed in the USA. Data for anyone who wants to understand something of their appeal to the tween and teen female, possibly a nostalgia trip for some. I enjoyed reading it. ***

 

Stories by Asimov (Buy Jupiter!)

 Isaac Asimov. Buy Jupiter (1975) A collection of mostly short-short stories, which range from shaggy-dog jokes to parables. Asimov writes a short note about each story’s genesis and publishing history, which together form a sketchy autobiography of his life from the 1940s to the 1970s. All of the stories raise or suggest deep questions. Asimov’s strengths are dialogue and the character sketch, well suited to the short story.
     The title story imagines aliens who want Jupiter as a billboard to be viewed as their starships pass by our solar system. But they aren’t as canny as Earthlings when it comes to advertising, so they don’t realise they should also ensure they have the rights to Saturn and the other outer planets. One of Asimov's repeated theses is that the outlier, the oddball, the “unsettled mind” are the creative ones that drive what little progress homo sapiens has achieved. (This thesis shapes the Foundation series.) I wouldn’t go that far: These people drive change, and change is just as likely to be regress as progress, when it’s not merely a ineffectual distraction from the orderly flow of the daily round.
     I enjoyed this book, reading most of it one evening, and finishing it the next morning. ** to ****

 Update 2021-08-15: Re-read the whole thing this past week. Discovered that I'd forgotten most of the stories, which shows that Asimov's fiction isn't especially memorable. It was clearer than ever that these short tales are more or less elaborate jokes: a slow misleading build-up, a quick delivery, and a punch-line to underscore the point. They were all funny, albeit several of them  macabre jokes. Still, I enjoyed reading them. Maybe I'll remember them better now. If, that is, I really want to. Same ratings.

Why Do Humans Believe Nonsesnse? (Gardner's Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science)

 

      Martin Gardner. Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957) The book that made Gardner’s reputation as a skeptic. In most of his writing, he focussed on mathematics, and for many years wrote a mathematical recreations column for Scientific American.
     This book is a revised and expanded version of his 1952 book In the Name of Science. It deals with then current pseudosciences, cults, medical fads  and quacks, and con-artists of the technical kind. As evidence of the effects of semi-literacy, wishful thinking, and envy of expertise it is as relevant as ever. Mystery-mongers are more plentiful these days, and have a wider reach, with slickly made videos purporting to tell the “suppressed” history of Atlantis, ancient civilizations, alien surveillance of (and interference with) humans, and so on. Political conspiracies are seen everywhere, and all the old pseudo-scientific notions are revised to fit the latest physics, and to signal political virtues to match the current political animosities. Time travel is enjoying a vogue on YouTube, with an astonishing number of videos claiming to show photographic proof.
     The last 60-odd years have yielded insights that a allow some new responses to 1950s foolishness. L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics has morphed in the Church of Scientology, which sues anyone who questions its bona fides as a religion or theory of the higher realities. Nutritional science has advanced, and lately the researchers have been edging towards the conclusion that diet is idiosyncratic, and that the only generally valid advice is to eat a large variety of different foods, and to limit caloric intake. Rhine’s investigations into psi have been consigned to a footnote of the history of science even as the belief in ESP etc continues to muddle thinking about statistics.
     On the other hand, the dissemination of relativity and quantum physics has given the quacks an updated vocabulary of nonsense, and medical pseudoscience in particular has become a plague. New Age piffle is still with us, and has begun to claim that all the traditional emanations, levels of consciousness, and mental powers impinge on our universe from the multiverse that surrounds us.
     And so on. The book is well done. This is a reread, and my general impression is that a modern version of it would differ only in the names of some cranks and the dates of their works. ***

Homo Faber: Technology (Lapham's Quarterly XIV/1)

 

 Lapham’s Quarterly XIV/1 Technology (2021) Simon Winchester in his introduction to this collection adduces three phases of “technology proper”: the mechanical, the electronic, and the atomic, and argues that despite the Greek aptitude for mechanical devices, the mechanical age did not begin until an arrangement of mechanisms powered by steam was invented by Watt and his contemporaries. I think this view of technology is limited both conceptually and historically, even though it’s wider than the current most widely used meaning of the word. “Technology” these days usually means electronics, and often (more narrowly) electronic digital devices. More seriously, Winchester ignores spinning and weaving: I wonder who had the wit to put an image of a spinning wheel on the cover.

     I think that technology evolves out of tool making. Homo sapiens and its relatives became the dominant hominids because they went beyond the shaping of natural objects into tools, a process they refined over several hundred thousand years. But then they figured out how to combine shaped pieces of hide, wood, bone, and stone into more complex objects, and how to combine pieces of animal hide into clothing. They discovered a method of invention. Invention is an exponential process. We now have such rapid development that our habits, customs, ethics, and laws all fail to keep up with it.

     I recently came across the thesis that technology as such begins with the invention of spinning and weaving, a far more complex process, which depends on more than the recognition that reshaping a natural object may make it more useful. There is simply no natural analogue to textiles. They may have been inspired by spider webs, but they are a wholly new human invention. Through most of human history textiles were a more precious material than any others. Since the invention of the power loom, textiles have become so cheap that we think nothing of throwing them away. In fact, we make too much of the stuff, and even the poorer countries of the world no longer want our cast-offs.

     The next major phase of technology was the production of new materials, ceramics and metals. Both require exquisite control of fire and raw materials. Both put a premium on the human ability to imagine consequences, to observe and infer effects from causes, to imagine possibilities and find ways of testing them. The industrial revolution that Winchester adumbrates as the beginning of technology began when some European “natural philosophers”, inspired by Arabian examples of extensions of ancient knowledge, devised methods of systematic investigation of the world around them. By so doing, they accelerated that process of the mutual interplay of inquiry and technology that Winchester describes in his introduction. We live with the effects, in a system of constant invention and (occasional) improvement. This collection shows us how we have become more aware of both the process and our inability to escape from it.
     Another well done overview. ****