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Posts Tagged ‘Mars’

Links #141

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 17, 2013| 4 Comments »

I don’t call him my boyfriend.  He’s more a good spirit friend who happens to be from the octopus race.  –  Stephany Fay Cohen

Sometimes it becomes obvious early in the week who’s going to be the lead contributor, but other times it’s close up until posting time.  And once in a while I have actually collected the leader’s links at the top of the draft, only to have him fall behind in the end.  That’s what happened this week; Jesse Walker only surpassed Radley Balko on Friday afternoon, and then by only one link.  All of the links down to the first video are Jesse’s, as is the last part of “welcome to our world”; the first two parts were contributed by Marginal Utilite and Mike Siegel respectively, and the first three links after it are Radley’s.  Both videos were supplied by Grace; the first one features her kind of guy (her own inventions aren’t quite that Goldbergian), and the second is a primer on a  Supreme Court case I’ve mentioned before.  “Warrant” and “judicial overreach” were provided by Gideon’s Trumpet, “unnecessary quotes” by Popehat, “new teeth” by Luscious Lani, “penis thieves” by Michael Whiteacre and “errant shooting” by Aspasia.  This week we’ve also got an unusually-high number of articles by link contributors, as the bylines will show.

From the Archives

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Thursday Links

Posted in Current Events, History, Links, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 21, 2013| 42 Comments »

While female orgasms were most commonly experienced during foreplay,  copulatory vocalizations were reported…most often…with male ejaculation …[indicating] that there is at least an element of these responses that are under conscious control, providing women with an opportunity to manipulate male behavior to their advantage.  –  Gayle Brewer & Colin Hendrie

This has been rather a quiet week, which is good because it’s allowed me to get ahead on my work, and to adjust my schedule for being out of town next week (I’ll explain where I’m going one week from today).  This “Links” feature has almost finished its circuit; next week it will once again be adjacent to the TW3 column, and two weeks after that it will be back to its accustomed place on Sunday (where it will remain except when some special occasion displaces it).  Radley Balko was top dog again this week, contributing all the links down to the first video; that was provided by Satoshi Kanazawa, and examines an interesting problem in probability which fooled me until it was explained (and even then required some thought).  The second video isn’t nearly as intellectually challenging, but may be harder to accept emotionally for many Americans; it’s a short recording of a protest based on a principle I have myself stated to Grace (who is a quarter Choctaw) many times.  The links between the videos were supplied by Michael Whiteacre, Brooke Magnanti, AL 360, Jack Shafer, Amy Alkon, Popehat, Mike Siegel and Jesse Walker, in that order.

From the Archives

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Enough is Enough

Posted in Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , on September 5, 2012| 51 Comments »

Going too far is as bad as not going far enough.  –  Chinese proverb

Most people will probably agree that quality is more important than quantity, and most reasonable people recognize that it’s possible to have too much of a good thing.  But it seems very few people, especially in America, can resist the temptation to want more of something that was fine as it was.  This isn’t about portion size, though I suppose one could stretch the point to include that; what I’m really talking about is portion number.

The hero of C.S. Lewis’ fantasy novel Out of the Silent Planet, Dr. Ransom, arrives via a series of adventures on Mars, whose inhabitants never “fell” and therefore still live in a state of grace.  One of the Martians tells Ransom that his people cannot understand the human drive to keep repeating things; if a Martian has a pleasant experience, he appreciates it for what it was and feels no compelling need to do it over again.  In fact, they feel that to repeat it too soon would actually cheapen the initial experience.  Reading that was one of those moments in which a book has a profound effect on one’s life; I had always felt exactly like Lewis’ Martians, and had never understood why other people didn’t.  That passage gave me the words to describe how I felt, and let me know that I wasn’t the only person on Earth who saw it that way.

Let me give you a few examples.  Once Olivia told me that she liked a new album so much she had “put it on repeat all afternoon”.  I told her that I didn’t think my CD player had such a function, and she replied that she suspected it did but I just hadn’t ever looked for it.  As it turned out she was exactly right; it had simply never occurred to me.  Though I do play favorite albums more often than others, I literally could not comprehend why anyone would want to play the same album over again immediately after listening to it once.  I was similarly flabbergasted by the kids who had seen Star Wars dozens of times; though I like the movie, I’ve probably seen it fewer times in my life than some of those kids watched it in a month.  It’s the same thing with food flavors:  every time we went to Plum Street Sno-Balls I got a different flavor, and would never return to the same one twice in a summer no matter how much I liked it; Jack, on the other hand, got the same flavor (pralines and cream) every single time we went there, without fail.  The query, “Don’t you even want to try another flavor?” was invariably answered with, “I like this one.”  I reckon that’s why I sympathize with the male need for sexual variety, even though I don’t really feel it myself (for reasons I’ve previously explained); on the other hand, I just don’t “get” why anyone would want to have sex twice in a single hour.

As you can probably guess, I find Hollywood’s addiction to unnecessary sequels, remakes and “reboots” incomprehensible.  There are some movies which either need or can smoothly accommodate sequels, and others which can’t; there are some which practically scream, “Do not cheapen me with a sequel!” (Rule of thumb:  if the writers can’t think of an actual name and instead just call it “Such-and-such II” it probably didn’t need one).  Sometimes it’s easy to tell; nothing short of physical force or a very large sum of money could have compelled me to see Highlander II, because though I loved Highlander I could clearly see that the only way to make a sequel was to pervert the story.  Alas, I wasn’t so perceptive when it came to Ghostbusters II.  The same thing goes for television shows; I truly respect producers who end a show while it’s still strong, rather than allowing it to “jump the shark” and degenerate into self-parody before finally limping into its grave.  And I promise you that if I ever feel my creative juices ebbing and recognize that the quality of this blog is starting to slip, I will have the wisdom to say “OK, that’s enough,” and go out on a high note.

And that brings me to my main point (yes, there is one):  I feel the same way about lives as I do about shows.  Even if a person has a happy life, even if he has a spectacular life, everything has a point at which it’s best for it to end.  Change is natural; just because a person is aging or disabled due to disease or injury does not mean his life is necessarily worse than it was when he was young and hale.  In fact, some people are actually happier after such a change of life, just as some sequels surpass the original.  So I’m not saying there should be some specific point at which everyone hangs it up; some TV series are spent after three seasons, while others can carry on for seven or more.  What I am saying is that I respect the wisdom of those who can see when it’s time to go, and choose to leave this plane in a dignified manner of their own choosing rather than being dragged kicking and screaming across the threshold, pathetically clinging to life like the cast of After MASH.  Furthermore, I think it’s an abomination for tyrants to prevent people from doing so, even when their lives have degenerated into inescapable nightmares; an individual who does not own and control his own body is a slave, and self-determination includes the right to self-termination.  Quality, as I said at the beginning, is far more important than quantity, and a successful life is judged by its character rather than by the number of years it endures.

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Ad Astra

Posted in Biography, Call types, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , on June 24, 2012| 49 Comments »

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales.  –  Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Locksley Hall”

Ray Bradbury’s passing on the 6th set off a chain of thoughts and reminiscences about my lifelong love of astronomy and space travel.  Ever since I was a small child, I dreamed of visiting other worlds, and eagerly devoured books and shows which allowed me to do so in my imagination.  It didn’t much matter to me whether the stories were realistic or fantastic, hard science fiction or pure fantasy, illustrated or not; I was just as happy with Adam Strange’s travels by zeta-beam to the planet Rann as I was with John Carter’s astral projection to Mars or the voyages of the starship Enterprise, and every bit as fascinated by the real moon landings as I was by Dr. Dolittle’s lunar excursion on the back of an immense moth.

As so often happens, the fiction inspired me to explore the fact, and I read every book on astronomy and/or space travel I could get my hands on.  I must’ve read We Came in Peace (a pictorial history of the space program published a few months after the landing of Apollo 11) dozens of times, and about 6 or 7 years ago was overjoyed to discover a copy in a used-book store in New Orleans while I was killing time between calls.  By the time I reached high school I was determined to be an astronomer, but after I saw Cosmos I modified that to “astronomy popularizer” instead; I wanted to be a female Carl Sagan, writing books explaining science in general and astronomy in particular to lay people.  I figured I might even get my own show one day, using my sex appeal to bring the viewers in.  That dream never quite went away, either; when Denise won a scholarship in chemistry and her friend Jane (to whom I was also very close) excelled in pursuing a physics degree, we conceived of the notion of trying to sell one of the cable networks a show called The Astronomy Babes after the two of them had earned their PhDs.  I would also go back for my doctorate in library science, and the three of us would host the show together, talking about astronomy and space science dressed in sexy outfits.  I think it would’ve been a winner; we were all beautiful, intelligent and unusually busty, and each had her area of specialization (Jane would explain physics aspects, Denise chemistry, and I would handle the cultural and historical segments).  Alas, real life intervened for all three of us, but it’s fun to fantasize about an alternate world where our show is entering its third season and I’m raking in royalties from Astronomy Babes DVDs, T-shirts, web promotions, etc.

Realistically, a show like that takes some serious putting together and we probably would’ve all had to relocate to Los Angeles.  But I had one other astronomy-related fantasy which was much more achievable, and had I not fallen in love I would probably be living it right now.  What I envisioned was that after building my house I’d semi-retire around the age of 40, then go on tour to all the parts of the country where interesting astronomy projects were going on while Grace ran the agency at home.  I planned to take only one or two calls a day (mostly just enough to pay for hotels, food and gas), leaving plenty of time to do sightseeing, visit observatories, etc.  Like my heroine Phryne, I would have established a sliding scale: high prices for most clients, typical ones for highly-paid science types and nothing at all for astronomers and other scientists who took the time to give me tours and answer my questions.  I know I have a number of scientists as readers, and at least one astronomer, so I’m very sorry, guys; life always seems to take me in a different direction than I imagine it will.  Had I gone down that path I probably wouldn’t be doing this blog, which I humbly believe will prove more important in the long run.

Though I still love astronomy, it’s grown increasingly difficult for me to follow the newest developments.  Just a few weeks ago, for example, I read an article on the neutrino observatory in Antarctica which discussed neutrinos of different masses; now, although I was familiar with the idea that neutrinos might indeed have an infinitesimal mass, the last I heard (from an astrophysicist client back in 2000) was that the concept had been disproven…and here this new article is treating neutrino mass as an established fact!  And now they’re saying the Higgs boson could be detected any day now; I despair of keeping up.

Space travel, on the other hand, has become exactly the opposite for me now:  I still know what’s going on and have no problem understanding it; I simply don’t give a damn about it.  The endless delays of the shuttle program (chasing the ridiculous goal of eliminating all risk in an inherently dangerous pursuit), the bureaucratic obstacles which blocked all efforts at commercialization of the field so that we’ve only recently reached a point which should have been achieved about 30 years ago, the psychotic waste of trillions on warmongering, oppression and political games when a hundredth part of that could’ve opened up the solar system to us by now…all of these have contributed to my present attitude on the subject, which might be best described as, “wake me up when you actually do something.”  My attitude toward most recent science fiction cinema is similar; I see it as a lot of noise and flash with no real substance.

I no longer believe human beings will walk on Mars in my lifetime, nor that we will strike out for the stars anytime in the next several centuries unless we’re forced to by some unforeseen circumstance or easily enabled to by some unforeseen discovery; human society has turned in on itself again, as it has so many times before, and the hands that hold the purse-strings are more interested in their own petty power-games than exploring new worlds.  A new Enlightenment will come, as it always does, but I won’t see it in this incarnation; so of late I’ve turned away from what passes for space travel in the real world, and devoted my attention instead to explorations of the mind.  Though I will never set physical foot on another world myself I have walked a thousand of them in my imagination, and there is nothing to keep me from going outside on a clear summer night and turning my eyes upward to the stars.

One Year Ago Today

“Dirty Whores” analyzes the reasons for the persistent myth of the diseased whore, and contrasts it with the truth of the subject.

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My Favorite Books

Posted in Biography, Favorites, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 26, 2012| 67 Comments »

A room without books is like a body without a soul.  –  Marcus Tullius Cicero

Back in December I published “My Favorite Things”; Part One listed my favorite movies, and Part Two my favorite albums and musicians.  In the comment thread for the first part, regular reader N/A requested a sequel listing my favorite books; I promised to provide one, but told him it would require a lot more thought.  Well, here it is at last!  As I think I’ve mentioned before, I have a lifelong preference for short fiction; as a lass I often read short novels (especially in the summer), but I tended to eschew longer ones unless they came highly recommended or I was already fond of the author from reading shorter selections.  This is because for me, a large part of the pleasure of a book is the mood it sets, and if that mood is disturbed I can’t enjoy it nearly as much.  Short stories are quickly consumed, and even novellas or short novels can be read in one extended sitting.  But with the exception of episodic novels (which are almost like series of connected stories), I have always tended to avoid very long books except at those junctures in my life when I knew I would be uninterrupted for long enough to finish them, even if it took a couple of days.  When I started whoring the long-established preference for short fiction grew even stronger, because I knew that at any moment I might be interrupted by a phone call from a client and have to run off.

The main reason it took me so long to get around to doing this list is that I had to define the word “book”.  For example, the volume in which I first read H.G. Wells was named Seven Science Fiction Novels; however, in 1967 there was a boxed paperback set of the same seven novels with the same group title.  Is that one book or seven?  Finally I decided that if I liked many or most of the books in a series, I would list them as one book even if I had never in fact seen such an omnibus edition; that broke my mental logjam and the rest was easy.  I simply listed all the books I’ve read more than twice and would read again if I had the time, with a couple of exceptions I’ll explain.  I excluded nonfiction because to me it would be comparing apples and oranges.  The books are listed alphabetically by author; I have provided PDF copies of #1, 6, 8, 11, 12 and 13, but the others are not yet in the public domain (see notes on #6 and 9).

1)  Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott

Though this slim little book is indeed a fiction, it was written to explain the 4th dimension (not time, but rather the 4th physical dimension), and it does so brilliantly and entertainingly in only 54 pages.  If you are interested in science fiction, physics or math to the slightest degree you owe it to yourself to read this book, which has the distinction of being the single title I have given as a small gift most often.

2)  The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

Bradbury is among my favorite authors and this my favorite of his titles, just edging out Something Wicked This Way Comes and Dark Carnival.  The Illustrated Man is a collection of 18 short stories of dark fantasy, horror and science fiction woven together by a frame story in which the narrator meets a tattooed stranger and discovers to his shock and fascination that during the night the “skin illustrations” move and tell the stories that comprise the collection.  It’s been in print continuously since 1951, so you won’t have any problem finding a copy in any bookstore.

3)  The Complete Mars Series of Edgar Rice Burroughs

I’ve written before of my love for Burroughs’ work, and the Mars series is my favorite.  None of these novels is very long by modern standards; the first three, telling one story, would certainly appear as a single volume if first published today.  And though those first three are the best of the series, the fifth, seventh and eight approach them in quality and sheer reading pleasure.  They were among the first books I purchased with my own money, despite having read them before, and I’ve read the entire series at least three times since that purchase.  They were my husband’s first introduction to Burroughs as well (I loaned him my set while we were dating), and well-known writers including Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein and Carl Sagan have praised them as inspirational.  Don’t bother with the failed blockbuster which distorts the story nearly into unrecognizability; just read the books.  I wish this omnibus edition really existed, but I’m afraid the best you can do is a boxed set of all 11 or the 4-volume omnibus set I’ve linked here.

4)  One Thousand and One Arabian Nights translated by Sir Richard Burton

I’m sure everyone knows at least a few of these tales, and most of you have read some retellings; that was certainly my only experience with them until the day early in 1997 when I discovered that the Jefferson Parish Library owned the entire Burton translation…all 16 volumes.  I’ve only read the entire thing through once, but my husband bought me the Forgotten Books edition for Christmas of 2010 so I plan to read it again before too much longer.  It’s an amazing work, full of magic, spectacle and wonder, and though the famous ones like Sinbad and Ali Baba are all there, there are many other adventures, fables, comedies, philosophical discourses, romance and even smut, and Burton translated every word plainly and literally, caring not if he offended the English sensibilities of his time.

5)  Magic in the Alley by Mary Calhoun

I discovered this enchanting  book, in which a young girl discovers a box full of magic that leads her and her best friend into a strange adventure every time they enter a new alley, when I was about 9; I remembered it so fondly that years later I borrowed it again as an adult librarian, then a few years ago bought a copy for myself.  I cannot explain why I love it so, except perhaps that it reminds me of a time when summers were for exploring and I could still believe in magic if I tried hard enough.

6)  The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll

This is a combined edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, with annotations by Martin Gardner.  Observant readers knew the Alice books would be on this list; I have used more quotes, pictures and references from them than from any other source except the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare.  I first read Wonderland in second grade and Looking-Glass about two years later; if I had to pick a number one favorite on this list, this would be it.  I’ve included PDFs of the original books, without the annotations which are still under copyright.

7)  The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody
by Will Cuppy

Probably the funniest thing I have ever read; it’s a series of comedic takes on historical figures from ancient Egypt to the 18th century.  I keep it right next to 1066 and All That, another hilarious take on history.

8)  The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

This is another book observant readers knew would be here; I have loved the tales of the great detective since discovering an illustrated edition of all the short stories when I was 17.  If you only know of Holmes from movies and television shows, you don’t know him at all; brew yourself a pot of tea, find a comfortable seat and dive into this collection of his adventures, as inimitably chronicled by his friend Dr. Watson.  The game is afoot!

9)  Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling

Another book I discovered in fourth grade, the year I began exploring libraries on my own.  I’m supplying an online copy rather than a PDF because I could not find one which included the illustrations, and as Alice asked, “what is the use of a book without pictures?” – especially when those pictures, drawn by Kipling himself, are almost half the story.  If you buy this one, mind you get an older (pre-1960s) edition; modern editions shamefully bowdlerize a few politically-incorrect words without any notification.

10)  Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber

I discovered this book by accident because the edition in which I first read it was published during the ’60s gothic romance craze, and the cover made it look like one, thus attracting my attention when I was on my own gothic kick a decade later.  To fully appreciate it you must remember it was written for a male audience in 1943, a time when women’s lives were largely a mystery to men:  Leiber expertly builds on the paranoid premise that all women use witchcraft, but hide it from men.  And here he thought he was writing fiction…

11)  Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft

The grand master of cosmic horror was known to a very limited audience in his lifetime, but most modern writers of true horror list him as an inspiration.  Some modern readers find his complex sentences and baroque adjectives off-putting, but there is no other writer who can evoke the terror of cyclopean vistas of space and strange aeons of time haunted by alien gods of unspeakable loathsomeness as the Old Gentleman from Providence could.

12)  The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe

Before Lovecraft there was of course Poe, the creator of the horror genre as we know it.  I honestly don’t feel I need to say much about him, as I can’t imagine anyone who grew up in any Western country not having read him.  But if you are from a land in which he isn’t known as well, or just missed out on him due to the unforgiveable negligence of teachers who should be walled up in a dank cellar for the omission, open up this PDF and start with “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “The Black Cat”.

13)  The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This book was given to me by a nun when I was twelve; it’s a sort of fairy tale that can be read by children but is really for adults, and concerns a little boy who lives alone on an asteroid and sets out on a quest to discover the meaning of the strange feelings inspired in him by the arrival of a rose.  You can read a religious or spiritual meaning into it if you like, or just take it as a parable of where we place and misplace our priorities, but if you’re unwilling to accept for the sake of a story that birds can migrate through space, it isn’t for you.

Tomorrow:  My favorite authors.

One Year Ago Today

“Dr. Schrödinger and his Amazing Pussycat” will either be the strangest column of mine you’ve ever read, or it won’t.  Or both simultaneously.

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Fictional Interlude: Penelope

Posted in Fiction, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 11, 2012| 41 Comments »

Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles first appeared as a series of short stories published in the late 1940s; in the fictional “future history” depicted therein American economic strength and technological prowess grew rapidly in the second half of the century, but society slid into increasing fascism and repression.  In this world the ‘60s brought no civil rights movement, but rather a stifling political correctness that enshrined “rational” thought and resulted in the brutal censorship of imaginative fiction.  After the first explorations in 2000, humans descended upon Mars by the thousands from 2001-2005, dotting the red landscape with towns and farms; Bradbury wrote, “The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke.  And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye…” Many who came were poor or oppressed, including black Americans in search of a world of their own.  But in November of 2005 there was a mass exodus back to Earth in support of a nuclear war, leaving only a few scattered individuals and small settlements behind. 

Years after The Martian Chronicles was published, Robert Heinlein proposed that since the universe is infinite, every world of fiction describes an actual parallel reality.  In this story, I imagine an episode from my own life in the world depicted by Bradbury, the world’s greatest living writer of fantasy…

“It’s time to go.”

“I told you, I’m not going.”

“Maggie, you can’t stay here; the whole town is going.  And if you change your mind later, there isn’t another rocket within driving distance; most of the others have already left.”

“I don’t live in town, and you should know by now I don’t change my mind once it’s made up.”

Bill sighed a sigh that came all the way from his shoes, and fidgeted with the brim of the hat in his hands; I watched warily against the possibility of his attempting to physically force me to his truck, and congratulated myself on having had the foresight to place my shotgun within easy reach behind the door.

“Damn it all, woman, if you aren’t the stubbornest…what you got worth staying here for?  Your husband’s already gone.”

“Against his will, and even if I went with you I wouldn’t be able to see him on Earth.  When he eventually gets free, he’ll come looking for me here.”

“Is that the only reason you’re staying?”

“Even if it were, it’s Earth that has nothing for me; everything I have I’ve built here in the last three years.  Even my business is illegal there.”

“It’s not like you’re gonna have many customers here, either,” he spat sarcastically.

“It’s not like I’m going to need many, with all the bill collectors gone.  And even though I won’t have any field hands any more, I reckon there’s enough food stored in town to keep me alive for decades.”

“You could get a different job on Earth; you’re the smartest person I ever met.”

“What different job?  I was trained as a librarian, and that’s an obsolete profession in a world where books are banned.”

“Not all books are banned!”

“No, only the ones worth reading.  I was eight years old when they had the Great Burning, and I’ve watched the number of banned genres, the penalties for being caught with them, and the powers of the Moral Climate Monitors growing ever since.  When I was twenty-eight the burning crew came to destroy the library where I worked after they discovered we were keeping a secret collection, but we were tipped off and had time to hide the books elsewhere.  After I came to Mars, I got in touch with the underground and they’ve smuggled tons of contraband here, where it isn’t illegal yet…and never will be if I have anything to say about it.”

“You mean you’re staying because of a lot of stupid books full of nonsense and fairy tales?” he asked, genuinely incredulous.

“Somebody has to guard our cultural legacy against fanatics, control freaks and the people like you who don’t have the spine to stand up to them.  Especially if you all incinerate yourselves in an atomic war.”

He lunged forward to grapple me, but I anticipated it, grabbed the shotgun and had it leveled at him before he closed half the distance.  “You won’t shoot me,” he scoffed.

“Try me.”

With a mix of anger and exasperation he exclaimed, “How long do you think you can wait here alone?”

“Penelope waited twenty years for Odysseus.”

“Who are they, more storybook characters?”

“Something like that,” I answered quietly.  “Now, please get out of my house.”

He crammed his hat back onto his head and stalked out the door, turning at the bottom of the porch steps to yell, “I hope the Martians get you, you crazy whore!”  Then he climbed into his pickup and roared off down the drive, leaving a huge cloud of red dust in his wake.

I didn’t even wait until he was out of sight, but went for the satchel hidden in my storm cellar, adding a few perishable food items to the things already in it.  I made sure my cat and livestock had enough food and water for a few days, shouldered the satchel, picked up the gun and walked out the back door, calling my dogs to follow.  By the time Bill returned with a posse to “rescue” me against my will, I had already reached the secret sanctuary I had prepared several weeks ago, when talk of returning to Earth began.  I figured they might look as long as 24 hours before giving up, so I made sure I had enough provisions for a week just to be on the safe side.

Apparently, they had enough respect for my competence to recognize that they wouldn’t find me if I didn’t want to be found, at least not in the available time with the few men they could spare for the search.  Early the next morning I was awakened by the sound of thunder, and I watched as the rocket rose swiftly on a pillar of flame, carrying the prodigals back to the world that, in the end, they had never really left.  I figured I’d wait until late afternoon to go home, and after breakfast I opened up a volume of Homer to pass the time, mentally preparing myself for what I knew was apt to be a long, lonely vigil.

One Year Ago Tuesday

That was the day last March’s fictional interlude was published, and considering its premise I thought it most appropriate I call your attention to it today rather than two days from now.

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Mass Hysteria

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 30, 2011| 27 Comments »

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make.  Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars.  –  Orson Welles

On this day in 1938, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the Air broadcast “The War of the Worlds”, a radio play adapted from H.G. Wells’ then-40-year-old novel of the same name.  As you can hear for yourself, the play was cleverly structured so as to seem like news flashes were interrupting a music program; since the Mercury Theater had no sponsor (an atypical but not rare situation in 1938) it ran without commercials, thus lending a further air of verisimilitude.  I’m sure I don’t need to remind anyone of the result of this realistic approach:  many believed the story of a Martian invasion and, predictably, panicked.  It’s become sort of a joke in the intervening 73 years; oh-so-clever modern Americans read about the events of that night and laugh at those “credulous fools”, those innocent yokels of a simpler time, believing in stories of invaders from Mars…even though many of these cosmopolitan sophisticates believe in tales of the government hiding alien bodies and devices in New Mexico and fantastic yarns of large fractions of the teen girl population spirited off into “child sex slavery” without anyone noticing.

There were a number of factors contributing to the panic, the most prominent of which was anxiety over the possibility of war in Europe; Germany had annexed the Sudetenland only three weeks earlier, and many were skeptical of Chamberlain’s claim that his policy of appeasement would produce “peace for our time”.  Not every listener caught the part about the invaders being Martian; some assumed they were Germans using some new scientific weapon (the heat ray) and the familiar scourge of poison gas.  One of the actors playing a government official “advising the nation” imitated president Franklin Roosevelt’s voice, and the lack of commercials and scant reminders that the show was a fiction (after the initial announcement, the next one wasn’t until the 40-minute mark) combined to make it all seem more real.  In one small town in Washington State, a power-station fault during the broadcast blacked out both electricity and telephones, thus coincidentally simulating the effect of a Martian attack.

Furthermore, media historians believe that newspapers anxious to make their increasingly-popular competitor medium look bad may have exaggerated both the extent and the seriousness of the panic; though it is estimated that about 1.8 million listeners believed the story was true and 1.2 million of them were genuinely frightened by the broadcast, most of them did nothing more than jam the telephone lines of police departments and CBS affiliates and/or later file lawsuits against the network for “mental anguish” (in those saner days, judges dismissed all of the claims).  There were a few incidents (such as the New Jersey farmer who blasted a water tower with his shotgun after mistaking it for a Martian tripod machine), but they were the exception rather than the rule.

Still, the fact remains that the first impulse of about 20% of the people who heard the broadcast was to overreact and to demand that authorities “do something” rather than simply verifying the reports by the simple expedient of changing the channel or calling newspaper offices when they couldn’t get through to the police.  When faced with horrifying claims announced by perceived authorities, almost a third of listeners credulously accepted those claims as true without even trying to check them independently.  And that, I’m afraid, hasn’t changed; when faced with patently ridiculous assertions from “authorities” that large percentages of the female population are raped or beaten by men every year, or that the entire country is infested with human-sacrificing cultists, or that nomadic hordes of tens of thousands of prostitutes follow major sporting events, or that almost one in 80 American girls is a “child sex slave”, or that the average sex worker is 13 years old, the reaction of many Americans is to believe without question and to repeat the outlandish tales without the slightest attempt at verification.

As in 1938, many people are anxious about an economic depression and fearful of violent invaders; they are distrustful of technology, worried about foreign influences and have blind faith in the statements of “authorities”.  But unlike the Americans of 1938, modern people are not limited to a small number of limited, unidirectional sources of information; we have literally tens of thousands of sources at our command, and we can ourselves initiate requests for specific information from those sources rather than being forced to wait for those on the other end to make announcements.  The audience panicked by Mr. Welles’ hoax had at least some excuse; the much-larger audience panicked by the neofeminist/governmental/rescue industry hoax does not.  And though the fantasy they have accepted is perhaps not quite as implausible as that of a Martian invasion, it has swept the country for a decade rather than vanishing with the morning light.

One Year Ago Today

“Deadbeats” are those men who make appointments with no intention of keeping them, and so deserve to be choked by the Black Smoke or incinerated by heat rays.

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The Girls from Tarzana

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on September 12, 2011| 18 Comments »

…in this splendid novel…Mr. Burroughs has…given you as remarkable a heroine as you might expect.  For the Girl was a member of “the oldest profession in the world,” and the hero was foreman of the grand jury.  –  Editorial foreword to The Girl from Farris’s

Near the end of June, regular reader Americanus sent me an email containing the following passage:

…the French military had a group called “Mobile Field Brothels”…The women were all volunteers from French Algeria and part of a tribe known as the Ouled Nail…[who] teach their young women the arts of dancing and prostitution.  The young women then go out and…[work] to gain a large enough dowry…once they do, they return to the tribe and marry without any resentment on the part of the men.

I found this exciting not merely as a great column topic, but also because I had encountered the term “Ouled Nail” before.  I’m sure regular readers have noticed that I have an exceptional memory, and can often recall unusual words encountered years before.  And I remembered exactly where I had seen this one; in The Return of Tarzan, the ape-man escapes his enemies with the assistance of an Ouled Nail.  In the book, the term is used synonymously with “dancing girl”, and I was thrilled to discover the extra dimension which linked this character to my own profession.  But Tarzan’s friend is not the only harlot to appear in his creator’s oeuvre, and so I’d like to follow yesterday’s column on the Ouled Nail with one on whores in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Each of the works cited contains a link to a free online copy, so if you intend to read them please be warned that this column contains spoilers.  Also note that The Return of Tarzan and The Gods of Mars are sequels to Tarzan of the Apes and A Princess of Mars, respectively.

As I’ve said before, when my beloved cousin Jeff taught me to read he preferred to use his own favorites rather than “baby books”, and the authors to whom he introduced me over the next few years are still among my favorites.  One of these was Burroughs, who is most famous as the creator of Tarzan but also wrote several other series and many stand-alone works in a career which stretched from 1912 to his death in 1950.  Burroughs is generally considered a “men’s author”, and that is a shame because his books are full of romance and strong, interesting female characters; I honestly believe that one of the reasons I found traditional romance novels boring was that in Burroughs’ stories I found love intertwined with adventure in settings which excited my young imagination.  And though he was in many ways a product of the Victorian Era (born 1875), he had some very liberal views about nudity and sex which, though restrained in his earlier works by commercial necessity, are much more obvious in his writings of the ‘30s and ‘40s.

While researching yesterday’s column I revisited The Return of Tarzan and discovered that, though Burroughs’ understanding of the Ouled Nail is clearly faulty, he does hint at their prostitution in a passage from chapter 7:  “The frightened Ouled-Nails were crouching at the tops of the stairs which led to their respective rooms, the only light in the courtyard coming from the sickly candles which each girl had stuck with its own grease to the woodwork of her door-frame, the better to display her charms to those who might happen to traverse the dark enclosure.”  The story takes place in 1910, after the French authorities had restricted the Nailiyat to working for licensed cafes, and the girl who tips Tarzan off to the planned attack and helps him to escape his pursuers is depicted as a slave, abducted by marauders and sold to the café owner.  She senses Tarzan’s nobility by the way he speaks to her and the respectful manner in which he tips her after her dance, and so alerts him to his danger at great risk to herself.  Of course Tarzan rescues her from the café and returns her to her father, and in chapter 10 she again risks her life to rescue him from another band of nomads hired by the villainous Nikolas Rokoff to accomplish what two previous groups of hirelings had failed to do.  Not all of the whores Tarzan encounters are so principled; in chapter 3 of the same book, Rokoff hires a Parisian streetwalker to lure Tarzan into an ambush by calling for help, and after he defeats his assailants she lies to the police, telling them that the ruffians had tried to save her from an attempted rape by Tarzan.

The Girl from Farris's by Frank Frazetta (1965)Burroughs also tried his hand at contemporary drama; the heroine of The Efficiency Expert (1921) is a prostitute called “Little Eva” who befriends the hero when he works for a while as a waiter at a cabaret she frequents.  Her belief in him inspires him to apply for the titular position, and her unflagging support keeps him going when he is later accused of murder; he is acquitted due largely to evidence she collects herself, and only her death in an influenza epidemic keeps him from marrying her.  I’ve never quite forgiven Burroughs for the poor girl’s fate, though I’m sure he could not have used the ending I wanted in an Argosy title of that time.  June Lathrop, the heroine of The Girl from Farris’s (1920) dodges the censors in a different way; though in the first scene she escapes from a brothel and we assume throughout the novella that she is a (reformed) prostitute, it is revealed at the end that she was actually the victim of a bigamist who had merely housed her in a room rented from the brothel owner.  Thus, she is free to marry the hero without provoking outrage in the readership.

Burroughs pushed the envelope a little farther in The Girl from Hollywood (1922), whose titular character, Shannon Burke, is an actress who becomes the kept woman of a director who “auditions” her on the “casting couch” and then gets her addicted to morphine in order to control her.  While shooting on location at the Rancho del Ganado (a fictionalized version of Burroughs’ own Tarzana ranch, on which the town of Tarzana, California was later built) she befriends the Pennington family (based on the Burroughs family), who help her to break her addiction and even forgive her for her sordid past.  The standards of the day did not allow Burroughs to allow an unrepentant whore a happy ending, and indeed the one heroine who is specifically described as a prostitute (and not excused via enslavement or downplayed as a kept woman) has to be killed off at the end as in Camille.  However, I think it’s clear that in all of these cases he does his best to show that the mere fact of a “sinful” life does not make a woman “bad”, and indeed his fictional analog even bestows his blessings on a relationship between such a woman and his own fictional son!

My final example (and certainly the most coy treatment of the subject) is Thuvia, Princess of Ptarth on the planet Mars.  Burroughs’ Martians believe in a physical paradise at the South Pole of their planet, presided over by a race of living gods called the Therns; those who are very old (their natural lifespan is over a thousand years) or tired of life can make a Pilgrimage to this paradise and never return to the outer world.  But as the hero John Carter discovers in The Gods of Mars (1913), the whole thing is a gigantic hoax perpetrated by the evil and cannibalistic Therns, and those who make the Pilgrimage are captured and either eaten or enslaved.  Some years before Carter’s arrival, the beautiful but moody young Thuvia makes the Pilgrimage (for reasons never disclosed) and becomes the plaything of a Thern leader.  After her rescue by John Carter (who exposes the whole horrible scam to the world) she returns home and is treated like a virgin despite the fact that after years as the slave of a degenerate cult she absolutely could not be in any literal sense.  The only thing I can guess is that, though Martian standards of female chastity are Victorian in their rigidity, an exception is made for rape; and though most Martian noblewomen would rather commit suicide than submit to violation, Thuvia instead chose to live.  This is but one of the enigmas surrounding Thuvia, who is certainly one of the most interesting characters in the series; I believe her to be, like the Ouled Nail of Sidi Aissa, one of the earliest examples in the development of Burroughs’ recognition that there was something not quite right in the conventional ideas of female sexual morality prevalent in his time.

One Year Ago Today 

“Greek God”, a short story I wrote in 1985, is the earliest example of my writing which has ever appeared on this blog.

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New Film Reviews

Posted in Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 14, 2010| 9 Comments »

The following are simply a few new movie reviews which are being incorporated into the filmography page; I realized that if I didn’t call attention to them regular readers who had already read that page would miss them, so I felt it was better to feature them in the column. Besides, it gives me a break from having to write a full essay today!

Doctor Detroit (1983) is an absurd 80s comedy whose heart and head could not be farther apart.  In heart, the movie borrows heavily from Man of La Mancha; Dan Aykroyd portrays a timid university professor with a powerful sense of chivalry who embarks on a Quixotic mission to protect three beautiful hookers from gangster domination by posing as their flamboyant “pimp”, the titular character.  At heart, therefore, the film portrays whores as women just as worthy of love, respect and chivalrous protection as any other woman.  Factually, though, it is populated by the usual silly Hollywood “hooker” and “pimp” stereotypes moving through a ridiculous series of settings and situations which resemble the real lives of whores about as closely as The Blues Brothers resembles actual church fundraising.  But if you’re a Dan Aykroyd and/or 80s comedy fan and can check your brain at the door, you’ll probably find it an amusing way to kill 90 minutes.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) features what must be the most widely-remembered portrayal of a streetwalker in the past several decades, namely the Vietnamese whore who opens the second half by sauntering on to the screen while “These Boots are Made for Walkin’” plays on the soundtrack.  Her “me so horny” and “me love you long time” advertising spiel quickly became standard catchphrases for anyone portraying a stereotypical Asian prostitute, and they were made even more famous when rappers 2 Live Crew sampled the lines for their 1989 hit “Me So Horny”.  I feel compelled to point out, however, that though the hooker’s approach is rendered comical by her poor command of English, it is actually the same strategy employed by many porn stars, sex writers and whores:  The appeal to male fantasy by the pretense that one’s primary motivation is lust rather than profit.

An Indecent Proposal (1993) was, IMHO, an awful, depressing movie; a couple in dire financial straits (Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore) see a way out of trouble when a billionaire (Robert Redford) offers them $1,000,000 to spend one night with the wife.  After some deliberation they agree, and the rest of the movie is nothing but Sturm und Drang as Harrelson’s character is eaten up by jealousy and the ease with which his wife took to whoredom.  Obviously, I’m prejudiced; my husband would never have inflicted emotional torture on me for rescuing our entire economy by one night of work (or even several years of work), but then he’s not a shallow, two-faced dickhead like the husband in the movie.  Another fatal flaw in what could’ve been a provocative exploration of the falsity of the Madonna/whore duality was the way that the edge of the dilemma was dulled by a typical Hollywood reductio ad absurdum; the fee isn’t simply generous, it’s a MILLION DOLLARS; the couple couldn’t just use the money, they’re sunk without it; and the billionaire is played by freaking ROBERT REDFORD, for Aphrodite’s sake!  I daresay few people could’ve declined the offer, no matter what they claim in public, and that totally invalidates the moral dilemma.

Incidentally, the one thing I liked about this movie was that it gave me the opportunity to blatantly state my true feelings about prostitution in a socially acceptable manner; it was the subject of discussion among the women in the library staff room, with most women claiming that they would never take such a deal.  I of course piped up, “I would,” then in response to the scandalized looks I said, “And so would most of you no matter what you say.  You know how much money a million dollars is?  You and your husband could both retire and live better than most people just on the interest.  Hell, most of us would sleep with Robert Redford for free, much less for that kind of cash!”  Of course that speech was greeted with blushes and nervous laughter, because most of them knew I was right.

Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) is Norman Jewison’s screen version of the seminal Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice rock opera released three years earlier.  I review it here because, as in so many popular treatments of the life of Jesus, it portrays Mary Magdalene as a prostitute; in fact, my first encounter with that tradition was in listening to the album at the age of 12.  In the number “Strange Thing Mystifying” Judas takes exception to Jesus’ relationship with her, provoking a musical argument which is followed by “Everything’s Alright”, in which she massages Jesus’ feet with ointment in order to calm him down; later in the film she sings “I Don’t Know How To Love Him”, in which she expresses confusion and frustration over her inability to think of Jesus as dispassionately as she does her clients.  This view of Mary appears to have been influenced by the Gnostic Gospels, except that here it is Judas rather than Peter who argues with Jesus over his treatment of Mary.  The music is just as good as it ever was; personally, I thought Webber was better when he was partnered with Rice but that’s just IMHO.  As for the film itself, well, the fact that it was made in 1973 is amply demonstrated by its hippie-style costumes, minimalist sets and heavy-handed symbolism.  Even so, it’s still worth re-watching if you’re over 40 or enjoying for the first time if you like early ‘70s rock.

Pretty Woman (1990): It’s nigh-impossible to find an internet discussion on this film without at least a few would-be critics complaining that it is “unrealistic”.  This would merely be a case of “No shit, Sherlock” if they actually knew what they were talking about, but they don’t; none of them ever mention that Julia Roberts’ character Vivian is a Hollywood whore who looks like a call girl but acts like a streetwalker.  Nobody talks about how the film makes her only barely a prostitute by saying she’s very new at the job, was pushed into it by extremity and cried through her first call; nor how it cheats by having Richard Gere’s character “accidentally” pick her up rather than simply hiring her.  Few of them even seem to notice that the plot was lifted straight from Shaw’s Pygmalion (on which My Fair Lady was also based); you didn’t think that real-life Eliza Dolittles actually made a living just by selling flowers, did you?  No, these jackasses bray that the film is unrealistic because it doesn’t show Vivian as a pathetic, diseased drug addict who is dominated by a pimp.  In other words, they denounce the film for following Hollywood’s unrealistic stereotypes rather than the ones preferred by governments, neofeminists and bluenoses, and thereby reveal themselves as nothing but opinionated ignoramuses.  It’s a romantic comedy about a hooker made by Disney and you expect cinéma vérité? Please, get a life.

Total Recall (1990) is a science-fiction adventure set in a future human colony on Mars, where prostitution is legal (at least in the red-light district called “Venusville”).  Not only is the heroine Melina (Schwarzenegger’s love interest) a working whore, nearly all of the positive female characters are!  Their brothel is a front for the resistance movement dedicated to overthrowing the evil dictator of Mars, and a number of the girls (including some mutated ones) are active and even heroic members of the resistance (as were many French prostitutes during the Nazi occupation).  In addition to enjoying the clever plot and sci-fi Arnold action, I must admit I really enjoyed seeing the whore cast as the “good girl” and the wife as the “bad girl” for a change!

Whore (1991) was billed as “The dark side of Pretty Woman”, and that is an apt description; where Pretty Woman portrays a sort of Disneyfied Hollywood hooker stereotype, Whore portrays a Ken Russell-ized social purity activist hooker stereotype.  Both characters are supposed to be streetwalkers, both are innocents who fall into bad ol’ prostitution because of hard knocks, and both have to be rescued from their terrible lives by men.  Both films make the typical assumption that most whores are controlled by pimps; Pretty Woman’s Vivian vows never to have one (implying that most others do) and Whore’s Liz is controlled by a rather nasty one (though to the movie’s credit, he’s white and dresses like a businessman).  But while Pretty Woman is a Disney fairy tale with a happy ending in which the heroine is rescued by a handsome prince, Whore is a Grimm fairy tale in which the heroine’s life is one horrible misadventure after another.  I’m sure there really are girls whose lives are as horrible as Liz’s, but for most of us that portrayal is as much a fantasy as Vivian’s life is, despite the opinions of film critics who wouldn’t know a call girl if one sashayed up and kissed them on the nose.

The Wicker Man (1973) has been called “the Citizen Kane of horror movies”, and it certainly transcends its genre.  It would be more precise to say “genres”, because it actually falls into several simultaneously.  To describe very much about it would ruin the experience, so I’ll limit myself to saying that the film portrays a zealously Christian policeman (Edward Woodward) investigating a possible crime on a remote Scottish island which is home to a fully-developed pagan society (ruled by Christopher Lee).  What makes this movie interesting for our purposes is that it contains what is to my knowledge the only positive cinematic portrayal of a sacred prostitute (Britt Ekland), if not the only cinematic portrayal.

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