Book of the Month – A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

One of the more intriguing aspects of speculative fiction is an author’s ability to communicate the collective psychology of the time in which the book was written, regardless of whether or not this is done consciously. As I’ve said before, science fiction – particularly dystopian science fiction – is less about the future and more about the time the author lives.

Take Snow Crash. My response upon finishing Neil Stephenson’s near-future cyberpunk jaunt was: “Well…that was the most 90s thing I’ve ever read.” I mean that as a compliment. The book successfully captured a culture’s collective psychology at the time of its composition.

But perhaps the finest example of this concept is Walter M. Miller’s brilliant, visionary, post-apocalyptic work, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960).

Set six hundred years after the destruction of civilization in a global nuclear war (it is simply referred to as the “Flame Deluge”), the world remains technologically stagnant due to selfishness, hatred, and ignorance. Mostly ignorance. The title comes from The Albertian Order of St. Leibowitz, a monastic order dedicated to preserving knowledge – a dangerous task, given that even literacy is feared following a backlash against technology following the nuclear war. [Hmm. Now that I mention it, Stephenson's Anathem and Scalzi's The God Engines are also on my “Book of the Month” list. Two of the first three selections, actually. Maybe I've got a thing for books about archaic future techno-monks or something.] The tragic nature of the monks’ work captures everything we were on the cusp of losing during the Cold War, and could still lose.

Beautifully ironic and stunningly composed, A Canticle for Leibowitz is simply the best damn book ever written about the end of the world.

Look for the Helpers

So much hate.

Humans maliciously causing so much destruction in Boston and around the world today can shake one’s belief in their own species.

But empty saber-rattling does little good at this point. So instead of thinking about those demented enough to commit these atrocities, I’ll quote Fred Rogers — “Look for the helpers. You will always find people helping.” — and offer a picture of one of those helpers.

Former Patriots guard and three-time Super Bowl Champion Joe Andruzzi successfully beat non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and founded a charity to fight cancer and provide financial assistance for patients and their families. He has three brothers, all of whom are New York firefighters, all of whom responded to the World Trade Center attacks in 2001.

Here is a picture of Joe from today (source: Bill Greene/The Boston Globe) carrying a woman away from the scene of the blasts.

He’s just one of the hundreds of heroes today who, not knowing if another explosion would take them as well, selflessly came to the aid of their fellow human beings.

If thinking about those who did this makes you fear your fellow man and fear for the future, then think about Joe. Think about the helpers.

Book of the Month – House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Horror, taken on the average, is the genre of fiction that has the strongest immediate effect on its audience and the weakest lasting effect. Cheap thrills are typically exacted from a situational awareness evolved to treat the unknown as a threat, then the hard constant of reality dismisses the fantastical images for what they are. The genre suffers from a dearth of authenticity; its verisimilitude exists only in the moment and rapidly evaporates under greater and greater scrutiny.

Yet that indescribable feeling of true authenticity is the heart of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Rather than presenting a single, cohesive tale, the book is about someone reading the book you hold in your hands, which itself is an analysis of a terrifying documentary which itself does not exist. These tiered levels of abstraction that separate the reader from the narrative actually make the narrative all the more frightening because the references from the imaginary author, Zampanò, and notes from the imaginary reader, Johnny Truant, cause the story to appear more real than it actually is. Rather than an observer, you feel as if “you are a participant, another level of a story that begins to occupy your own reality.”¹

Is it Zampanò or Johnny…or is it you that is screaming out to an empty and unfeeling world, please, please Können Sie mir behilflich sein?²

——————-
¹Rosemary Fontaine’s Borges Redux (San Francisco: Urban B-light, 2002)
²The hell is Lucksinger doing here? As usual, pretentious as all fuck with his German. Maddeningly unnecessary. Esoteric ≠ intelligent. Dipshit. I was going to look up a translation, but I decided finding its meaning would be an excellent excuse to see Yvonne again. German girl. Parents moved here from Germany, anyway. Lives in San Dimas or Ontario or Pomona or somewhere down 10. We left Lude at the bar while he was vainly attempting to impress a pair of sisters (sorority, not literal…I think) from USC with some fake Desert Storm story. She and I hit two drops each and then she hit the gas and pressed me deep into the leather. 110 120 130 while tripping how we didn’t die but I didn’t give a shit I embraced the imposition of the truth of mortality. I needed it. Badly. I’d been slipping. I don’t trust my house. I don’t trust the air. But in the blitz of color and light and truth I looked over to see that mad and beautiful smile her hair frozen in the air as time lost hold and her eyes fuck man. That feeling, you know the feeling, when it doesn’t matter how fucked shit is anywhere else, even two fucking feet from you, that pavement flying by wanting to reach up and grab you and rip your face off and fuck you if you think I’m being sentimental because this is where real life and real meaning is. Hell of a lot more meaning than wasting time finding the meaning of Lucksinger’s fucking meaningless linguistic flotsam.^3
3“Can you help me?” – Ed.

——————-As the story progresses, space begins to stretch, but not just in the story. The words on the page lose their traditional, orderly placement. Whole sections go missing. In other sections only pieces have been recovered by the reader of the book within the book. It captures you. It will not release you. It cannot release you. It is as it was and will be as a stone sits and the lark flies it will not be cannot anything but that which it is. It grabs you by the throat. It drags you into the darkness, the foreverblack of death, the home of your end. The Minotaur waits.

It’s a book about a man going crazy as he reads a book…which causes you to go crazy as you read it.

And as the walls of the house bend, the text in the book be n d s      a n   d
s     t     r     e      t    c    h    e   s  w i th it.

Words
seem
to
dr
o
p

o
f
f

t
h
e

p
a
g
e

a
n
d

s
p

i
r

a

l

into nothingness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You feel the haun
ting dread as the
walls squeeze tig
hter and tighter
around you. Claus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

trophobia tran
sferred direct
ly point-to-po
int from page
to synapse. It

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

is not
the ch
aracte
rs but
your p

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

sych
e it
self
which

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

disappears into the

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

lonely

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

dark

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

of the

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                         house.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Or perhaps it’s just a trick to tell a simple horror story. Or maybe “horror story” isn’t even a word that can be applied to a piece of art as unique as House of Leaves. What is it really? As Danielewski once said: “I had one woman come up to me in a bookstore and say, ‘You know, everyone told me it was a horror book, but when I finished it, I realized that it was a love story.’”⁴

Maybe it’s simpler. Maybe it’s not even a love story or a horror story. The book is filled with unnecessary and – for the most part – fake citations of – for the most part – arrogant and wrong-headed analysis of this fake documentary. It’s been suggested⁵ that House of Leaves is a satire of literary criticism.

Maybe I’m over-thinking it. Maybe we’re all over-thinking it. Maybe it’s just a parody of those of us who think so much of ourselves for thinking so much.

—————–
⁴Wittmershaus, Eric (2000-05-06), “Profile: Mark Z. Danielewski,” Flak Magazine
⁵Poole, Steven (2000-07-15), “Gothic scholar,” Guardian Unlimited

Book of the Month – Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

At the 2006 Beyond Belief Conference, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson politely “rebuked” biologist Richard Dawkins due to the tendency for the content of Dawkins’ message to be overshadowed by the aggression with which he delivers it.

Dawkins, quoting a former editor of New Scientist, politely responded: “Fuck off.”

Dawkins was of course kidding (and attempting to show that he’s not the “worst in all this”), but it is indicative of his typical method of communication on matters of both science and religion.

However, the closest I’ve seen Dawkins get to having the “sensitivity” Tyson wished for is Unweaving the Rainbow, his book on the beauty of science. This is not because Dawkins shows any actual sensitivity (come on; it’s Dawkins) but instead because the primary focus is on the beauty of life as opposed to other people’s idiocy.

Mostly. Occasionally he gets sidetracked with rants about people being hoodwinked by obvious falsehoods. Again, it’s Dawkins; he can’t help himself. But for the most part it is a fantastic exploration of the beauty of life. The entire book is worth having if only for the grandeur of the first chapter, which begins…

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

The beauty he finds in the real reminds me very much of comedian/musician Tim Minchin’s nine-minute beat poem, “Storm,” in which he asks:

Isn’t this enough?

Just this world?

Just this beautiful, complex
Wonderfully unfathomable, natural world?
How does it so fail to hold our attention
That we have to diminish it with the invention
Of cheap, man-made Myths and Monsters?

Unweaving the Rainbow is a wonderful exploration of this unfathomable, natural world.

The Components of Mediocrity

My latest column over on Inside Texas is the downward spiral of UT sports and the collection of challenges the Longhorns face.

The Components of Mediocrity

Book of the Month – The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

I’ve mentioned in a previous BotM post that Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is the one piece of non-fiction that is required reading for everyone. I’d like to add an addendum that all Americans have another piece of homework: The Looming Tower.

Lawrence Wright doesn’t just give the who and the how. The Looming Tower is the most important book about September 11th because more than any other work on the topic it address why. It does not begin with Osama bin Laden founding Al Queda in 1988. It does not begin with him joining the mujahideen a decade before. It does not begin with Ayman al-Zawahiri and Al-Jihad.

It begins in 1948, with Sayyid Qutb, the writer and eventual martyr who gave the modern Islamist movement its philosophical underpinnings. The book then provides a duel narrative, following both bin Ladin’s life and FBI agent John O’Neil’s hunt for bin Laden leading up to 9/11.

I was already planning on making The Looming Tower my book of the month, but it’s probably appropriate in light of some less than accurate portrayals that have come out. (I did go see Zero Dark Thirty, by the way. Wonderfully crafted film. But if you’ve actually done any research on the topic, you’ll be distracted by the number of obvious falsehoods. It’s too bad that Bigelow got fed so much horseshit by the CIA. Kind of ruins the experience. My recommendation: wait until it comes out on Netflix, then just fast forward to the last half hour. The bin Ladin raid itself is stunning film work.)

Twelve years hence, the attacks on September 11th, 2001, are still difficult to process in terms of scale, but the why is even more difficult to process. If you want to understand why, The Looming Tower is the best place to begin.

Mythmakers

My column for Inside Texas this week is on the subtle schematic differences between the traditional West Coast offense and…ah who am I kidding. My column is on the one topic on which every Internet columnist is required to voice an opinion: Manti Te’o and the collective sucking of sports media.

Mythmakers