Last night was a good night. Driving home on the freeway, I only had eight or ten near-death experiences with homicidal maniacs who wanted to run me and my 60 mph off the road. Sometimes it’s twice that number.
We need to get the lunatics off the road. Otherwise, I’m either buying a used army tank to get around L.A., or I’m joining a monastery. Things have gotten that bad.
[picture: famous French monastery]
“George, people are starving in East Africa again.”
“It’s okay, AI will make new people and they’ll be better than the ones that are dying. They won’t need food or water, only batteries.”
“Hmmh. But what if those battery-powered people decide to come here because they like the weather better here or because we have cable?”
“That’s fine. We can put them to work doing all the jobs that we don’t want to do. Instead of paying other people to do them.”
“But don’t those people need their jobs to live on?”
“I’m sure AI will think of something.”
“Who decides which jobs are the ones we care about and which are the ones we don’t care about?”
“We do, of course”
“Who is We?”
“Us. We. You know, the ones who can afford to pay other people to do the jobs we don’t care about. I mean we care about those jobs. But we don’t want to have to do them ourselves. And we can afford to pay somebody to do them but we’d rather not if we don’t have to. Don’t ask stupid questions.”
“You’re the one that brought up AI and jobs. What if the battery-powered people from other places don’t like us? What if they want our houses or our money or our—kids!”
“No problem. Our AI will fight their AI. And our AI will win, because our AI will be working for us. And we’re Us, remember? We always win.”
“Well, what if we don’t? What if our AI decides that we’re working for it, not it for us? What if our AI decides it likes the other AI better than it likes us?”
“You’re nuts.”
“But George, I read an article that said that—”
“Forget that article. AI can give you better articles, ones that only tell you stuff that has nothing to do with the real world. AI can even make you believe that there’s no such thing as AI. Or that AI does exist but it’s your closest and dearest and most intimate friend. Won’t that be nice?”
All this time I’ve been living in California I’ve been doing things wrong, I guess. When there’s a speed bump on a residential street I’ve been slowing down and gently rolling over the bump, which I thought was better for your back, your car, and any small kids that might run out into the street. But that’s wrong I guess. Because today when I did that the pickup truck behind me honked. He honked again when I stopped at the stop sign at the corner. In my mirror I could see him making faces, gesturing and getting agitated. He was following very close. He turned left at the stop sign.
Apparently all these years I’ve been misinterpreting the term “speed bump”. I didn’t realize that it was comprised of verbs and was written in the imperative mood. I didn’t realize that it meant that we should speed up as soon as we come to one, and careen over it like we’re going offroad in our Chevy Silverado.
“You little know the nature of the clique to which he belongs. That they value pleasure fully as much as other men, is quite certain; that they struggle for riches, it were equally impossible to doubt: but that POWER is dearer to them than either, is a truth well known to all . . . [Fanny Trollope, The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837)]
Homeowners of the World, unless you’re opening a miniature golf course, please don’t use artificial grass in your yard. Even if all your neighbors seem to be doing it. Plastic grass hurts the environment in several ways. And it looks ridiculous, and will look even worse after a year or two. Better you should just let your yard go to seed. Dirt and weeds are a thousand times better, environmentally, than artificial grass. Ask any bug. Or dog.
Our forefathers treated animals a million times better than we do. They hunted and they produced meat and dairy, but they had some respect, some feeling, for those animals.
Today animals are treated as commodities, not as sentient beings. They are raised and slaughtered in barbaric factories. They are confined and tortured in testing labs. And we debase and diminish our own humanity by every act of cruelty upon a fellow creature.
He opened the book at random, or so he believed, but a book is like a sandy path which keeps the indent of footsteps.
Graham Greene, The Human Factor
“And while, moreover, to begin with, he still but held his vision in place, steadying it fairly with his hands, as he had often steadied, for inspection, a precarious old pot or kept a glazed picture in its right relation to the light, the other, the outer presumptions in his favour, those independent of what he might himself contribute and that therefore, till he should “speak,” remained necessarily vague–that quantity, I say, struck him as positively multiplying, as putting on, in the fresh Brighton air and on the sunny Brighton front, a kind of tempting palpability.”
The Golden Bowl
I think George Orwell would have appreciated this excerpt from the anthology I’m reading. It’s a collection of Russian writing from the Soviet era. Most of the writers were imprisoned, exiled, or killed by the Soviets:
“In 1937 Shalamov [Varlam Shalamov, short story writer] was informed on by someone who heard him express the opinion that Ivan Bunin [exiled Nobel Prize winner] was a classical Russian author. For this crime he [Shalamov] spent seventeen years in Kolyma [Siberia with hard labor]. Hitler acknowledged the Bolsheviks as his teachers in certain techniques of population control, but his preferred instrument was fire. Stalin used ice.”
—“John I’m not going to ask you why you’ve done these things, partly because I already know, and partly because I don’t believe you do.”
BOOK? . . . Jonah’s Gourd Vine, by Zora Neale Hurston (1934)
WHAT KIND? . . . Novel
BE MORE SPECIFIC . . . Historical Fiction/Family Saga
ABOUT WHAT? . . . Set in the Post-Reconstruction period in Alabama and Florida, Jonah’s Gourd Vine was Hurston’s debut novel. Semi-autobiographical, it is a fictionalized tale based on Hurston’s direct ancestors. It’s the colorful life story of John Pearson, the son of emancipated slaves, and his struggles to advance himself and achieve security, respectability, and spiritual fulfillment in the face of cultural barriers and irresistible temptations. He is, in short, a human being with the full set of human strengths and weaknesses in an era when much of the human race was not universally regarded as human. And, as the quote above suggests, for whatever innate or instilled reasons, John is a creature of impulse, with little insight into his own fateful actions, and this makes his personal history something a bit out of the ordinary.
SIGNIFICANCE? . . . The book is an unadorned portrayal of the lives and culture of rural black Americans in the deep south after Reconstruction. It is a valuable resource, memorializing their language, their lifestyle, their beliefs, their legacy.
SO SHOULD I READ IT OR WHAT? . . . Jonah’s Gourd Vine is fast-paced and rollicking, John’s life is such a full-throttle, up hill down hill race that most readers would find it thoroughly entertaining. The problem is that nearly all the dialogue is rendered in slavery-era dialect, which will turn off many readers. But if you can handle the dialect then I certainly recommend it, there is so much wit and wisdom therein that it would be a shame to miss out. The book is pungent with the atmosphere of that long-lost era of the African-American past.
YOU GOT ANYTHING ELSE TO ADD? . . . . Hurston was politically conservative, her book is not a civil rights manifesto in any sense. But she clearly deserves a place of distinction in any anthology of African-American literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I hope to read much more of her work.
“. . . it is not [the soldiers] that should be punished, it is those sedentary barbarians who from the depths of their offices order, while they are digesting their last meal, the massacre of a million men, and who subsequently give solemn thanks to God.” Francois Voltaire, Micromegas (1752)
The Ravishing of Lol Stein, by Marguerite Duras The Kellys and the O'Kellys, by Anthony Trollope Adam Bede, by George Eliot The Life of Mr Jonathon Wild the Great, by Henry Fielding Rocket to the Moon, and other Plays, by Clifford Odets Bel-Ami, by Guy de Maupassant Blizzard, by Phil Stong The Painted Veil, by W. Somerset Maugham Oil, by Upton Sinclair Islands in the Stream, by Ernest Hemingway
Alabama beats Auburn 35-21.
Does Auburn throw a hissy fit and ask for a recount? No.
Does Auburn file 61 frivolous lawsuits? No.
Does Auburn call the Ref and ask him to “find”, um, 15 more points? No.
Does Auburn ask its buddies in the Southeast Conference to just “declare” it the winner, despite no evidence? No.
The Auburn coach and players all shake hands with ‘Bama and wish them good luck in the Orange Bowl. Auburn doesn’t summon a mob of angry armed fans and send them to Tuscaloosa to beat up campus security and steal the Foy-ODK Sportsmanship Trophy.
“I mean that there is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will; It is the nearest I dare approximate it.” Jack London, The Iron Heel (1907)
“Be your Rubicon big or small, clear or foul, it is the same: you shall not return.”
I hate to bad-mouth modern culture—that’s not true, I spend half my time doing exactly that.
Anyway, here’s a thought: the more I enjoy a work of “classic” literature, the sadder I feel when I think about the general deterioration of modern literary taste and talent. And I very much enjoyed the book I just read: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, by George Meredith. I had wanted to read one of Meredith’s novels for a long time. Published in 1859, Richard Feverel was one of his earliest novels. Do you know, the Los Angeles County Library system, which is an excellent library system with millions of books, doesn’t have a single copy of any of Meredith’s novels. And he was one of the foremost Victorian authors. I ended up ordering a used paperback copy online.
Richard Feverel was a young, spoiled aristocrat who inherited his father’s bull-headed stubbornness. The book is a romance, a social commentary on parental methods, and an exploration of society’s losing struggle with Nature. It achieves all these goals through a rich, dramatic plot and finely-drawn characters. These basic elements are brought to life through prose that is pure and dialogue that is varied and lifelike, all sharpened to a keen brilliance.
Meredith’s style is not radically distinguishable from Dickens or Eliot, but it does demand more thought and concentration than most Victorian romance. Richard Feverel is laced with allusions to both Christianity and ancient classical mythology and literature. Most of the main characters are well educated and tend to converse at an impressively-high intellectual level. Moreover, Meredith is prone to metaphor. Not all readers appreciate metaphor, but he uses the device so artfully and so faithfully that it forms a distinct layer of meaning in the novel. The sum result is a novel that kept me interested from start to finish, introduced me to a whole cast of unforgettable characters, and gave my brain some much-needed exercise.
So why does this make me sad? It makes me sad because nobody writes like that today. Some people might say that’s a good thing. That’s like saying it’s a good thing that today’s furniture is made of plywood and plastic instead of solid handcrafted hardwood. A lot of novels come and go in my house and I open them and start to read, in good faith. Of these, if they were written in the last thirty years, they almost always prove disappointing, in style, in character development, in originality, and life is too short to spend it reading things that don’t measure up to even the basic standards of earlier eras. There are some exceptions, thankfully. But when most people, and that includes most fiction writers, are raised on a steady diet of mass-produced popular literature, we can’t expect anything better when they, in turn, sit down to write the great American novel. Libraries and book stores with shelves full of glossy best-sellers and not a single George Meredith will not tend to produce great writers. They will produce writers of glossy best-sellers.
“Gambling!” she murmured.
“They call it buying and selling,” he went on, “down there in La Salle Street. But it is simply betting. Betting on the condition of the market weeks, even months, in advance. You bet wheat goes up. I bet it goes down. Those fellows in the Pit don’t own the wheat; never even see it. Wou’dn’t know what to do with it if they had it. They don’t care in the least about the grain. But there are thousands upon thousands of farmers out here in Iowa and Kansas or Dakota who do, and hundreds of thousand of poor devils in Europe who care even more than the farmer. I mean the fellows who raise the grain, and the other fellows who eat it. It’s life or death for either of them. And right between these two comes the Chicago speculator, who raises or lowers the price out of all reason, for the benefit of his pocket. You see Laura, here is what I mean.” Cressler had suddenly become very earnest. Absorbed, interested, Laura listened intently. “Here is what I mean,” pursued Cressler. “It’s like this: If we send the price of wheat down too far, the farmer suffers, the fellow who raises it if we send it up too far, the poor man in Europe suffers, the fellow who eats it. And food to the peasant on the continent is bread—not meat or potatoes, as it is with us. The only way to do so that neither the American farmer nor the European peasant suffers, is to keep wheat at an average, legitimate value. The moment you inflate or depress that, somebody suffers right away. And that is just what these gamblers are doing all the time, booming it up or booming it down. Think of it, the food of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people just at the mercy of a few men down there on the Board of Trade. They make the price. They say just how much the peasant shall pay for his loaf of bread. If he can’t pay the price he simply starves. And as for the farmer, why it’s ludicrous. If I build a house and offer it for sale, I put my own price on it, and if the price offered don’t suit me I don’t sell. But if I go out here in Iowa and raise a crop of wheat, I’ve got to sell it, whether I want to or not at the figure named by some fellows in Chicago. And to make themselves rich, they may make me sell it at a price that bankrupts me.”
Frank Norris was born in Chicago. When he grew up he wrote “The Pit”, about the greed and speculation at the Chicago grain markets. It’s a powerful, epic novel. And just as wheat was an exploited and sought-after commodity, so was Laura, the protagonist of the novel, bid upon by the male speculators who knew her . . .
And ’tis most evident and plain, that simple Nature is the most harmless, inoffensive and virtuous Mistress. ’Tis she alone, if she were permitted, that better instructs the World, than all the Inventions of Man.
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688)
“For Fear he arms, and is of Arms afraid;”
John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester (1679)
OATH TO BE A CHAMPION FOR TRUTH
I solemnly swear that I will not accept or share irrelevant, self-serving, uncorroborated, isolated, cherry-picked, out-of-context, irrational, false, misleading, hateful or inflammatory statements of any kind. Before relying upon or sharing information, I will make sure that reputable sources corroborate the information. I am familiar with various methods of searching and reviewing all forms of media, government, academic and NGO resources.
I understand that the above sources may vary greatly in terms of potential bias or interest. I know that information sources are not all equally committed to accuracy or truth. I will be mindful of these subjective factors when I evaluate the information they publish. I also understand the difference between fact and opinion.
I therefore swear that I will be a Champion for Truth to the best of my ability, and will hold others to the same standards of honesty and integrity.
Thus whilst against false Reas’ning I inveigh,I own right Reason, which I would obey;That Reason which distinguishes by Sense,And gives us Rules of Good and Ill from thence;That bounds Desires with a reforming Will,To keep them more in Vigour, not to kill.
Excerpt from A Satire Against Mankind (1679) by John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester
Chuck Redman 