James E Hartley

UBIKuitous Incoherence

The Library of America (that authoritative guide to all things Classic in American Letters) has a three volume set of Philip Dick, the science fiction author from the 1960s and 70s.

UBIK, the fourth novel in the first volume of that set. Having read all four, I must confess to a certain wonder why Dick deserves this All-Star treatment.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed UBIK. Reading it was a pleasant diversion. Dick writes in a style which is not particularly great, but makes it easy to just go along for the ride. Where is this ride going? That is surely a question worth asking before elevating a book to Great Book status, and it is here that Dick trades in cheap tricks as a substitute for substantive ideas.

UBIK offers up a bewildering array of science fiction tropes, but as it turns out most of them are the literary equivalent of the magician’s trick of waving a hand to divert attention from where the real action is happening. There is an entire story of people with psychic powers and an organization set up to stop people with psychic powers from using those powers. There is a plot of a woman with the ability to change the past, generating a new present—though how she knows what she has done in the new present is totally unexplained and likely internally incoherent. But neither the woman nor the whole psychic power thing matters in the end.

The real story is about half-life—a state which people enter after death in which their conscious self still lives on in a bizarre dream world. Living people have some odd ability to talk with those in half-life, but only at some sort of company which specializes in enabling contact between the living and those whom Miracle Max would call the Almost Dead.

Those Half-life people move along in some sort of odd time which seems to be shorted as they spend more time talking to the living, susceptible to interaction with other Half-life people whose bodies (corpses) are physically close, but sometimes the physically close corpse can take over half-life person’s world or even that person’s channel of communication with the living and if this is making any sense at all, then I am providing clarity where there really isn’t any in the book. And, all this is totally irrelevant to the real story too.

The real story. Our hero may be alive or he may be in half-life and he doesn’t know and we don’t know which either. Indeed, neither our hero nor we have any idea what is going on—until the penultimate scene in which we discover that our hero is, in fact, in half-life and, while there, he has to fight against nefarious evil plans of another half-lifer. Why the plans of an evil half-lifer to do evil things to dead people matters is a bit unclear.

And then we get the final scene in which—ready for mind-blowing conclusion?—we find out that the person who was revealed to still be among the living may be in half-life after all, so maybe that previous conclusion isn’t right after all. The most coherent conclusion would be that everyone is in odd parallel half-lives, but that conclusion isn’t really coherent. Indeed, I suspect there is no coherent storyline in this book.

So, where does that leave us? A pleasant, but totally incoherent story. If that was the aim, it would be one thing. But, I suspect the author has delusions of grandeur here. This book seems designed to make us question the nature of Reality. Are we too living in some sort of half-life state, just imagining we are still among living? It’s the old “How do you know you aren’t a brain in a vat somewhere imagining that all of this is real?” A trippy, unanswerable question? Or, like Samuel Johnson, when faced with an older incarnation of the idea, do we just kick a rock and say, “Philip Dick is refuted thus”?

So, UBIK takes an old philosophical question and converts it into an incoherent science fiction novel. Fine. Reading it is a decent enough way to spend an evening. But the Library of America treatment? There are two more volumes of Philip Dick to go; perhaps the answer lies there.

No Longer at Ease

The last time I read Things Fall Apart, I read the author bio at the back and was quite surprised to discover that the author, Chinua Achebe, had written a sequel.

Obviously I had never read the author bio before. I was intrigued by the idea of the sequel.

Then I noticed the title: No Longer at Ease. Shock. That book was on my bookshelf. I had picked it up at a library book sale years ago and filed it away for later reading. I had no idea it was a sequel. Nowhere on the cover of No Longer at Ease does it say it is a sequel. Odd.

Not surprisingly, I read it. The quick answer: it isn’t as good as Things Fall Apart. But it was worth reading; it is short, so that helps, but even on its own terms it is worth reading.

The hero of this tale (Obi Okonkwo) is the grandson of the hero of Things Fall Apart. The first novel is the African Tribe’s first encounter with the British. This novel traces what came after that encounter.

The tribe we met in the first novel has scraped together enough money to send one of its own, young Obi, to England for an education. Obi returns to his homeland, and this novel is the result of what follows.

The title tells it all. From Eliot’s poem, “Journey of the Magi”:

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.

Obi doesn’t fit. He isn’t British, but he also is no longer truly at one with his tribe. He is bewildered by both the colonial culture and the tribal culture. Indeed, it is a society which is nearly impossible to navigate. Obi does not meet with a good end, which comes as no surprise, since the novel opens with his conviction in court for accepting a bribe. The rest of the novel is a flashback showing how Obi arrived at this point.

As a novel about the problems of Colonial Rule in Africa, it is pretty good. It’s not a good society; it would be hard to spin the situation as good for anyone, African or British. It would be a simple matter to spin this novel into a question about the merits, or lack thereof, of colonial rule. But, to do so reduces Obi to a prop.

Think about his plight, not the plight of Africa as a whole, but the plight of the individual, and it is suddenly obvious that there is a much deeper problem to ponder.

Obi returns from England. The hopes of his tribe are on him—they paid for his education and now they want a return on their investment. Obi is meant to get a job in the government, from which he can return favors to the tribe. There is a weight of expectation on Obi, not just to provide for his family and his tribe, but to keep up the appearance of being a success.

It is not long before Obi finds himself mired in debt. On top of that, he falls in love with a women, who it turns out is from an abhorrent caste. Now such things shouldn’t matter in a modern Westernized society, but tribal memories die hard and everyone in his tribe, his parents included, are adamant that Obi cannot have a relationship with a woman of this class.

Now put yourself in Obi’s situation. What do you do? Is there any way to live in that society without disappointing someone? Do you discard the expectations of your tribe, your family, or your employers?

And thus begins the slow slide into accepting bribes to square the circle, but of course that doesn’t work either. It isn’t at all clear that Achebe has given any way out for Obi.

And therein lies the deep matter of this novel; how do you live a life when there is absolutely no way to fit into the world in which you find oneself? Why are the magi in Eliot’s poem no longer at ease?

I had seen birth and death
But had thought they were different: this Birth was
Hard and Bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

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Do We Need Children?

Do children serve any purpose in life besides the obvious propagation of the species?

Obviously, we need children in order to make adults.

But, do these societal leeches serve any purpose before weaning themselves of the bloodstream of the community and becoming productive members of it?

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story (using the word “story” loosely) “Little Annie’s Ramble” argues they do. After a pointless ramble with a kid in tow, Hawthorne concludes with the following reflection:

Sweet has been the charm of childhood on my spirit, throughout my ramble with little Annie! Say not that it has been a waste of precious moments, an idle matter, a babble of childish talk, and a reverie of childish imaginations, about topics unworthy of a grown man’s notice. Has it been merely this? Not so; not so. They are not truly wise who would affirm it. As the pure breath of children revives the life of aged men, so is our moral nature revived by their free and simple thoughts, their native feeling, their airy mirth, for little cause or none, their grief, soon roused and soon allayed. Their influence on us is at least reciprocal with ours on them. When our infancy is almost forgotten, and our boyhood long departed, though it seems but as yesterday; when life settles darkly down upon us, and we doubt whether to call ourselves young any more, then it is good to steal away from the society of bearded men, and even of gentler woman, and spend an hour or two with children. After drinking from those fountains of still fresh existence, we shall return into the crowd, as I do now, to struggle onward and do our part in life, perhaps as fervently as ever, but, for a time, with a kinder and purer heart, and a spirit more lightly wise. All this by thy sweet magic, dear little Annie!

That passage first of all raises an interesting question about whether reading the story of the ramble, not the ramble itself, but the time spent by the Reader, was a waste of time. At first glance, it was unambiguously a waste of time. It’s a really pointless story. But, then if that final paragraph teaches us something, then maybe it isn’t so pointless after all.

Second, is our moral nature revived by children? If we think of children as complete beings, not really. Children can be, if you will recall, every bit as mean and cruel and lazy as adults; they can also be every bit as nice and sweet and kind and helpful as adults. Our moral nature isn’t revived by children but rather, at best, by our romantic idea of children. We think of them as these sweet innocent little things, we imagine they are always like that. We imagine that “airy mirth” and presume it is the permanent state of children.

Every parent knows better, but oddly even parents forget the hard times with kids and remember the good times. When I think back on my own children’s youthful years, I do immediately recall all the amusing and charming and loving moments. Yet none of my children were perfect angels.

Why do we romanticize children? I have no doubt that many people do feel reinvigorated after spending an hour with children; grandparents seem to love having their grandkids around. And don’t get me wrong—I like spending time talking to children too. They amuse me. But, I do not emerge from contact with children “with a kinder and purer heart, and a spirit more lightly wise.”

Does anyone really get that? Does anyone on whom life has settled down darkly truly find a renewed sense of purpose from spending an hour actually wandering around a town with a real, not an imaginary, little kid? Note, the question is not whether an afternoon so spent can be enjoyable—it can—the question is whether such an afternoon can be anywhere near as life-changing as Hawthorne indicates. On that I am skeptical.

It’s not that children serve no purpose in our lives. Christ, after all, used them as a rather interesting example of the nature of faith; children are, in fact, ridiculously credulous. And the experience of being a parent certainly has a deep effect on one’s outlook on life, both good and ill.

But, it seems to me the real advantage of spending time with children is not about what they do for us, but what we can do for them. And if that that is right, then this fantasy of children is turning children into some sort of commodity in which we evaluate them based on their use value. I can watch football, read a book, or spend an hour with a kid—which will bring me the greatest temporary release from the trials of life? Thought about like that, kids are a very poor entertainment good—they are not always entertaining in the way a football game is. The comparison is illustrative—imagine watching a football game that at the drop of a hat turned into a soccer game. The horror. Now you have a picture of spending time with a child—when good, they are very, very good, but when bad, they are naughty.

Oh, and I know this rambling discourse on the “Ramble with Annie” is going to earn me some severe excoriation, but really: I like kids! Honest! Think of this as a corrective to some bizarre infantilization of our idea of our duty toward the next generation.

The New Class Conflict

Every now and then a book comes along which while not really saying anything you didn’t know already, rearranges all those bits of knowledge into a new, and fairly interesting, pattern.

Joel Kotkin, The New Class Conflict is such a book.

Here are the bits of information:

1. There is a growing divide in American society (See Charles Murray’s Coming Apart for the best description of this divide.) The divide is not solely income based. The divide is also a cultural divide.

2. There is a Dominant View among the opinion-makers of society (Academia/media) (see any college campus for a good example)

3. There is a lot of new wealth in the Silicon Valley, Seattle and other Tech hubs.

4. There is a coming generational storm in which the baby Boomers in their retirement are going to divert a lot of resources away from the young to the retired (see Social Security)

5. There are imploding cities and sprawling suburbs. (See Detroit and All sorts of second-tier cities in the US)

Now, rearrange all that stuff.

Kotkin argues that the New Divide in America is:

1. On one side there is the Clerisy (the academy and media and government) and the Tech Oligarchy (the nouveau riche of the Silicon Age). These two have partnered together to impose a new order on society. The new oligarchs are using their money to fund the visions of the Clerisy. In return, the Clerisy vehemently argue against “the Rich” but somehow the tech Oligarchs always get a pass when talking about the Rich. Generic Wall Street Banker is bad; but Bill Gates is good. But, then in a subtle shift, the Clerisy also props up the New York Bankers.

2. On the other side is The Yeomanry. This is everyone else. Al those people who, you know, work for a living. They want a steady job and enough income to buy a house in the suburbs.

The battle is most vivid in the Environmental debate. On the one side are the Clerisy and their financial backers in the Tech Oligarchy who want to impose a particular vision on society—no commuting, small houses. The Clerisy and tech Oligarchs don’t like the yeomanry. The yeomanry does not fit their vision of the new society. They want to pack people into those small living spaces in Big cities and keep them quiet. Think Bread and Circuses.

The Yeomanry are constantly rebelling, but it is hard because the new ruling classes are constantly putting barriers in the way of that steady job in the suburbs. So, the Keystone Pipeline or fracking become examples of the divide. On the one side are the Clerisy and tech Oligarchs who oppose such things. On the other side are the Yeomanry who support such things because it will give them lots of jobs and low energy prices and allow them to lead the lives they want to lead.

Meanwhile, the youth are growing up and if those youth do not end up in the clerisy or the tech oligarchy, where exactly will they go? Not much hope there. The Middle class is drying up.

Like I said, not much new here, but I had never really put things together in this way—I had, for example, never really thought about the Silicon Valley-Clerisy connections before, but Kotkin may be right—they are aligned.

So, where is the way out? On this, Kotkin is right—the solution here is economic growth. Without economic growth, there is no way out. The Clerisy does not like Economic growth.

But, how to get economic growth? Kotkin has some fantasies of a return to a small-scale existence. Think Russell Kirk or Wendell Berry, but with a growing, dynamic economy. People spread out across the country, all self-employed, running their own little businesses, being empowered to lead fulfilling lives, setting their kids up to be richer than their parents. It is a pretty picture in its way. It is also nearly impossible to imagine it happening.

Has Kotkin tried to start a small business in modern day America? Sure, it sounds nice and all. But, it is a giant headache. I know. My wife has her own small business. She grows plants and sells them. She does garden consulting. The amount of paperwork and regulations to do something like that are stunning. In the years she has done this, I have never ceased to be amazed at all the little petty tyrannies thrown up by the government which make it just that much harder to run a small-scale business.

Take the income tax alone. I have a PhD in economics, but figuring out the income tax code is too complicated to be worth my time. Long ago, I gave up trying to do our taxes by hand, so I bought TurboTax every year. That was ridiculous. But, then add a new business, and now we hire an accountant every year just to pay our own income taxes. That’s crazy. Just plain crazy. And this is, let me remind you a small business.

If my wife wanted do hire someone to help her out, the paperwork goes up to a whole new level. If she wanted to hire some 17 year old kid at $15/hour to help out on Saturdays from April through July, the amount of extra paperwork involved would mean hiring a bookkeeper.

Moreover, she can sell tomato plants. But, if she were to also sell, you know, tomatoes—yep, whole new levels of paperwork. She sells perennials (those are the ones that live for more than a year (yeah, you probably knew that)), but if she sells “woody” perennials, then, yep, whole new levels of paperwork.

We have a farm stand on our property—self-serve, stop by, get the plants, put the money in the box. But, because we have a farm stand and a greenhouse, we had to add a farm policy to our homeowner’s insurance—and you guessed it, whole new type of insurance company—and even better, there is exactly one farm insurance company licensed to operate in the state of Massachusetts, so we get to pay monopoly rates.

And, we added a shed to store some pots. It had to be on a temporary foundation or else, you guessed it, we would have had to go through whole new levels of paperwork to get a building permit in order to add a shed to store pots.

And…well, you get the point. I could go on like this for hours. And this is a small business.

Kotkin thinks lots of people can set up small businesses—he clearly hasn’t done the paperwork for one. The Clerisy has already stamped out that route to self-sufficiency.

So, Kotkin may be onto something in the diagnosis here—the tech oligarchs and clerisy are operating in tandem to restructure American Society in their own image. But, I am afraid his solution isn’t much of a solution.

Escaping

Michael Chabon’s, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

This book won the Pulitzer, which is not necessarily a recommendation. But, in this case, the award is fully merited. I really enjoyed reading this book. In the realm of modern fiction, it’s a star.

Michael Chabon’s, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier
and Clay. This book won the Pulitzer, which is not necessarily a recommendation. But, in this case, the award is fully merited. I really enjoyed reading this book. In the realm of modern fiction, it’s a star.

It is a slice of life novel: New York in the ‘30s and ‘40s. (1930s and 1940s, that is. When will saying the ‘30s not instantly be assumed to mean the Great Depression? In 2030? Or earlier? 2029? 2026?) Two cousins. One a Jewish refugee; one a New York native. They become comic book writers. The time period is, as comic book aficionados know, the Golden Age of Comics. Superman, Batman and the Escapist are all created. Haven’t heard of the Escapist? He is fictional—created by Kavalier and Clay. [Your Humble Narrator is not unaware of the irony of calling the Escapist a fictional comic book hero to distinguish him from Superman and Batman.]

[In a marketing stunt which was as inevitable as it was undoubtedly a disaster, there are now actual comic books starring the Escapist. I would be shocked if said comic books were not Beyond Awful.]

If you love comic books and high literature, then you should instantly put The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay on your reading list. It is that good. If you don’t like comic books, but do like literature, then this book is still highly recommended. It is a great story, and the comic book elements do not get in the way. After all, in any slice of life novel, the protagonists have to have some job. You may not care at all about Dentistry, but you don’t avoid McTeague because it is about a Dentist, do you? If you don’t like comic books or literature…hmmm, why are you reading this blog?

Escape is, not surprisingly given the title of the fictional comic book hero, the overarching theme of the book. The characters in this book are constantly seeking to escape. They want to escape from their pasts and their presents and their futures. They want to escape from their own identities and their surroundings. Why?

It’s not the desire of the characters in the book to escape that intrigues me. That is all pretty explainable from the novel itself. Why do non-fictional people (like you, Dear Reader) want to Escape?

I received a letter once from a good friend of mine, noting among other things “The adults I know are never fulfilled.” And, it occurs to me now that I am thinking about this book that her observation and this book have a lot in common. People are not fulfilled, they sense that there must be something better, and they want to Escape into that better thing. But, nobody quite knows what that better thing is. How do you escape when it is not clear to what you are escaping?

At this point, I would dearly like to provide the obvious religious answer that fulfillment is found in Christ. But, I am haunted by that sentence: “The adults I know are never fulfilled”—well, that applies to most Christians I know too.

That is, of course a bit of a dodge—theologically I know that fulfillment is only found in Christ, that short of Divine Fulfillment, we are all left eternally desiring something more. So, there is a religious answer. But, does the theological answer mean that fulfillment is possible or not? If we are inherently aliens here, if we are strangers in a strange land, then is it wrong to be fulfilled? If our souls are longing for the City of God, is it a sin to feel fulfilled in the City of Man?

But, that religious answer merely begs the question. Why do people so desperately want to escape? How have we been hardwired to lack a sense of fulfillment? Why is being perfectly content so remarkably rare? Why is it rare even among those whose religious convictions assure them that they have the capability of feeling fulfilled within themselves?

And, the even more pressing question, the question this novel raises but to which it fails to provide even a remotely satisfying answer: can we escape that deeply felt sense of not really belonging where we are, that there is some better place we should be inhabiting? Can we escape not ourselves and our surroundings, but the feeling itself that we need to escape? Short of finding fulfillment, is escape even possible?

Some Books are Just Awful

Sometimes, I despair. Sometimes, I read a book that is just thoroughly bad. Unbelievably bad. As in, how-does-something-like-this-get-published? bad.

And moreover, how in the world does someone who writes this book get a contract to write seven more books after this one?

The book: Christmas is Murder, by C.S. Challinor (which I sure hope is a pen name because surely nobody would want to be known as the person who wrote Christmas is Murder).

First: why did I read it? It was a Christmas gift. I read books people give me for Christmas. I hasten to add that this book was not given to me by my wife. I hope the person who gave me this book has never read it. I hope it was just on the bargain rack of Christmas books at Barnes and Noble.

It was a story pretending to be a mystery—a sort of Agatha Christie whodunit except Agatha Christie threw out manuscript fragments vastly better than this. It isn’t fair to call it a mystery because it was perfectly obvious who done it the whole time.

The best thing that can possibly be said about this book is that it didn’t take long to read the whole thing. In fact, that is the only good thing that can be said about this book. I am trying hard to think of something else which was just bad instead of unbelievably awfully bad, but I can’t. I started this blog post thinking I would catalogue all the crimes of this book—not the crimes in the book, but the crimes of the book, but I cannot bear to start listing them because it would take forever.

I don’t even know where to start. So, how about this? I’ll give you the motive for the murder.

You see, there is this lady who runs a bed and breakfast. Her husband and son both died in Iraq. An editor from some publishing house is staying at the bed and breakfast. The editor has a manuscript she (the editor) is supposed to read to decide whether to publish the book or not. The manuscript is a book about George Bush. So, the owner of the bed and breakfast decides to murder the editor and burn the manuscript because she (the owner) doesn’t like George Bush. I’m not kidding. That is the motive. By the way, the editor doesn’t like the manuscript—on page 30, she calls her firm and tells them that the book is terrible and shouldn’t be published.

That motive is one of the more plausible things in the book, by the way. Because, if you kill some mid-level editor at a publishing house to which an author submitted a manuscript about George Bush, then obviously…hmmm. I can’t figure out what happens after that, but it is obviously a good thing for someone whose husband and son died in Iraq.

I know you don’t believe me that the motive is one of the more plausible things in the book. I know you think the book can’t be that bad. So, how about this? After the editor dies, our hero, the amazing Rex Graves, looks for the manuscript, but it can’t be found. But, gosh, there is a big pile of ash in the fireplace. Maybe that is the manuscript? Fortunately, there are some small fragments that are not burned. One of those fragments says “l Qa” That starts lots of wondering about what “l Qa” could be. Hard to figure. So, they look in a dictionary and it turns out every English word that starts with a Q is followed by a u. Shocking.

Yeah, you don’t believe me that this is shocking, but I can prove it. A quotation from Christmas is Murder: “Well, blow me,” Charley said. “I never realized every word in the English language beginning with ‘q’ started ‘qu.’” (That incidentally, is one of the more artfully written passages in the book.) Fortunately, our hero later sees a newspaper which has…get this…an article about Al Qaeda…Wow! who would have thought of that?…so, maybe that heap of ashes was the missing manuscript about George Bush.

Ok, so that is not even remotely the most implausible thing in the book. How about this? Three people are murdered in this hotel. Ah, but there is a big snowstorm. The hotel is close enough to town that our hero can walk to the hotel from town using a pair of tennis rackets he inexplicably brought along with him as snowshoes. Ah, but the police can’t make it to the hotel. Three murders, but, you know, the police guy in town, he has this cold, see, and there is all that snow, I mean there is a lot of snow, so it is really hard for the police to go up to the hotel to deal with all these murders, but maybe in a day or two, if some of the snow melts, they can come up to investigate.

Sadly, all the guests of the hotel also feel obligated to hang around a hotel with a mass murderer running around because, you know, it would be a drag to trudge through the snow to get down to town to stay at a hotel with no mass murderer. Well, except that our hero and his love interest do ski down to town to go out for a beer, but, you know, it is rather silly to just stay in town, so they go on back up to the hotel.

Yeah, that isn’t the most implausible thing either. The most implausible thing is that anyone could write this book and that anyone could read it and think it should be published. Yet it happened. I have the evidence on my desk. I despair. Truly, I despair.

Oh, and if you still think the book can’t be all that bad, if you think I am just exaggerating, then I dare you to read it. In fact, I double dog dare you to read it.

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