Here is the latest outrage from Will about how Hillary Clinton ought to dry up and drop dead. I thought she was a U.S. Senator, sixty years old, in good shape and with a lot of years of public service ahead of her still. Does this poem, from which Will quotes a snippet, really describe Ms. Clinton?
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I have just finished reading Brian Aldiss’s autobiography, The Twinkling of an Eye, published in 1998. Brian Aldiss b. 1925 has long been my favorite science fiction writer. Even when I knew nothing about his life, I sensed a strong affinity with him which has to do with something about his imagination that I click into. For him as for me the outer life illustrates the inner life, not the other way around. Imagination is paramount. His central psychological dilemma is the same as mine: dealing with parents who treated us, their children, in a cold and arbitrary way. And never understanding why they couldn’t be kind and loving.
As well, in Aldiss’s case, his growing up years, especially his experience as a foot soldier, cannon fodder in Burma, during WW II, added to his neurotic burden.
Aldiss attended the kind of second rate “public” school that middle class English people sent their children to where he was, improbably, quite well educated because some of the masters had fine minds. Unfortunately, these schools also taught the arts of bullying and herd behavior so necessary to soldiering. Nowhere was heard the voice of conscience. No boys spoke up and said, “I say, that’s not fair. That’s poor sportsmanship. That’s wrong.” Certainly not little Brian.
As he says, life in the grimmest circumstances as a young soldier in the Far Eastin WW II was not much different from being a boy in a public school. There were compensations, however. There was the license soldiers enjoyed: to steal, to destroy, to use girls and women. He availed himself of all these opportunities. Like the poor, what the foot soldiers did did not matter, so they just got what they could out of the situation. The important thing was to station oneself as high on the pecking order as possible, and of course to stay alive.
He and his mates witnessed the ruination of the Far East during and after WW II and did their part to contribute to the chaos as well. He describes in excruciating detail the “jig-jig winter” of 46-47 in Hong Kong when hundreds and thousands of destitute young women were reduced to selling their bodies on the street for pennies. This is not the kind of noble picture of the heroic allies who saved democracy that we have grown up with. It is obvious that Aldiss and many others never really readjusted to civilian life after the absolute license of those days, in spite of the advantages they enjoyed in the prosperous post-war years.
Aldiss also picked up the habit of heavy drinking and became a “working alcoholic,” that is, a person who can remain functional at high levels of alcohol consumption. Oh, yes, and there is his sex addiction. His writing gives me a good picture of a man who has inhabited his time in the most intimate way, “seen the world.” I do not like his morals much, and his sexism is of the type that leaves the women in his story (and in his life, I suppose) with very little agency. This does not mean he did not love his wives and children, of course. In the U.S. we have de-glamorized alcoholism and sex addiction, but Aldiss sees these traits of his as the wellspring of his creativity. I take no sides, except that I think the real source of his excellence is in the lonely hours of boyhood that he spent reading and thinking.
His heroes seemingly have no internal life, or at best an internal life that lacks clarity. They do not understand themselves. Other characters are known only by their behavior. People work, play, observe, experience, muse and reflect, but they do not think much, nor, would I say, do they feel very strongly. Depression stalks them.
So what is it about his work that haunts me? Here is a short list. Its variety, its visual power, good stories, action and adventure, realism and plausibility even in the strangest circumstances, constant authorial “presence,” sense of dialoguing with the reader, philosophical and social content, humor. At his best, brilliance.
Many critics have complained about much of his work seeming careless or unfinished, and that’s true enough, but his best work is top drawer. For me in the end it is his imagination that reigns supreme.
A good place to begin with Aldiss is to read his early books, Hothouse and Non-Stop. If you like these you might want to go on reading.
His short work, Supertoys Last All Summer Long was adapted as the basis for Stephen Spielberg’s film, AI. Aldiss's verdict on the film was that it was "crap," but I thought it was a pretty good remake of Walt Disney's Pinocchio.Of course I hated Pinocchio. Oh well.
You can read Supertoys here in its entirety.
As I was driving back from an errand in Puna this a.m. I saw what looked like a grey felt blanket thrown over Mauna Kea from about 3,000 feet (my estimate) up. There was a sharp line of demarcation between the voggy and clear areas. The trades are back, and it's clear here, as this photo from 10:00 a.m. today shows. In the distance you can see the plume from the Pu Oo eruption 25 miles from my house, which has been going on for years. The problem now is that there is so much vog that it takes very strong trades to blow the added emissions away, the emissions emanating from Halemaumau. So in spite of the trades, areas of the Island are experiencing a lot of pollution. Where there used to be one major source of vog, now there are two sources.
(As always on this blog, click on photo for enlargement.)
Sometimes racism just irritates me rather than infuriating me. Canada has a racial designation called "visible minorities," which is actually used in official demographics. As I mentioned somewhere or other I heard a women say, when I was in Vancouver, that Edmonton is no longer a white city, because they have 18% visible minorities. This kind of language is an invitation to think in the stupidist way about immigrant groups, native American groups, and so on. In linguistic terms, "visible minorities" marks people as belonging to a non-standard group, much as "man" is the standard human being, whereas "woman" is a variant on the standard. In Canada it is "normal" to be white and "abnormal" not to be. So my Irish hostess at a dinner party I attended was considered plain Canadian in spite of her strong Irish accent, and her kids were totally assimilated, whereas the children of (say) East Indians would be considered members of an outsider group. And Central and Eastern Europeans, in spite of being very different culturally from Anglo-Canadians, assimilate rapidly.
So if any Canadian wants to talk to me about white racism, I will just point out that Canada is pretty racist too, but they are covert about it.
Now if you are considering moving to (say)Toronto, you can pull up maps that show you the exact racial and ethnic composition of any neighborhood you might consider moving into.
I myself belong to a visible minority. I am a white person living in Hawaii. If I lived in California, I would be a "visible minority," too. A lot of white people here are very uncomfortable with this visibility, out of the very natural (for them) notion that they are supposed to be in charge of everything and don't want anyone pointing out to them that the reason they think they should be in charge of everything is because they are white.
It's all very silly.
Here is the classic piece by Molly Ivins on the godawful swillmeister, Camille Paglia. God I miss Molly Ivins. What would she have said about the current political goings on? The feminist cause lost a great person in her. She had the breadth, she had the depth. No one can replace her, alas.
Can you imagine racial attacks on Obama similar to the misogynistic attacks on Clinton? Of course not.
Maybe to the point: I'm reading Phillip Roth's Exit, Ghost, which treats of an elderly famous author who is pitching the woo to an up-to-date upper class Texas girl and Harvard graduate. He grills her closely about her sex life and they talk about books. Well, this is not Roth's finest work, I'll put it that way.
The lamest thing about it, aside from the post-prostate cancer impotence of the hero, is Roth's complete inability to place convincing dialogue in the mouths of any but his Jewish characters, the old guys, the kvetching moms, the street-wise kids, the wryly ironic professional men. So the girl comes off as a totally artificial sex goddess and book lover, kind of like Woody Allen's "Whore of Mensa," but without the hairy legs. Gosh, Mr. Zuckerman, isn't Hemingway just the greatest? D. H. Lawrence? Like my tits? Want a blow job?" Ha ha ha.
In fact, the whole "voice" is off here, the way it was in Roth's only out and out bad book, from 1967, When She was Good, which is about a blonde who goes insane. Very much of its time.
Just to show that Zuckerman (we know him pretty well by now, don't we, he has inhabited so many of Roth's books) is not just an old lech, we see a tender relationship unfold between him and the wife of a late friend of his who has had brain surgery and is a physical mess, just like him, in spite of which he actually visits her squalid apartment and even kisses her! Gosh, she was a sex goddess herself once, who stole his friend away from his first wife and whom Zuckerman always confused with Anne Frank, although she could not possibly have been Anne Frank.Wow. What a big heart he has, after all. Or is this just confusion? Oh, there's incest mixed up in all this, too, but it is not very interesting incest. Some say incest is best, but not in this case. Well, I'm not finished, so there may be some juicy revelations toward the end.
I'll let you know.
Update: Exit, Ghost, is really really bad, as bad as When She was Good.
Here is Clive James in the NYT Book Review going on about what a great novel Exit, Ghost is.
Christopher Hitchens redeems himself in this great takedown of Exit, Ghost.
Not a word about this in the local paper.
Last night 1/2 of our electricity went out at 7:00 p.m. and did not go back on until 7:30 a.m. today. We have two lines into the house so we get these odd power failures. Sometimes it's one line, sometimes the other.
The vog is terrible. It's affecting the birds and animals who are shrieking, barking, and meowing according to their kind. My mouth tastes of sulfur and acid. My head aches. The rubber duckies are unaffected. So you don't have to envy me my life in paradise today.
More: This link has some "before and after" pictures from Ocean View Estates. They have been very hard hit. If the SO 2 concentrations we're getting now don't even register on the satellite monitor, I can't imagine how bad it must be down there today. In fact, for the last several days I've looked at this map, they have been in the red.
It's 10:30 and the trades are up. They have blown most of the vog away from us, but it is lingering to the south.
Update: Yikes! Now we're in the red. I try to talk about the situation with people, but everyone's in denial.
From the Washington Post The Democratic primary campaign has exposed the extent and virulence of sexism in the U.S.; the McCain-Obama contest will do the same for racism. The Obama campaign has been trying not to draw attention to this inevitability, but there is a backlash brewing. I believe the strategy of the Obama campaign has been to present a vision of a new America where the old problems of race (if not of gender) will be swept away, leaving the country cleansed and united. That his been his selling point, much as it was Bush's (a uniter, not a divider). Clinton has been portrayed as the divisive candidate and this perception has apparently defeated her.
I expect that we will be subjected in the coming months to the tiresome racial politics that make our country such a drag to live in.
More: I want to plug Shakesville, a really good blog.
