Book Review

Freedom's Orator:

Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s

by Robert Cohen

     In the fall of 1964, onSproul Plaza of the UC Berkeley campus in Oakland, a young physics student climbed on top of a parked police car and made a speech. The car was surrounded by several thousand students, all sitting on the pavement, making a coordinated effort to prevent the police from approaching it and driving it away. This was the beginning of the Free Speech Movement and the student on the police car was Mario Savio, its main spokesperson. The Free Speech Movement began when the administrators banned political speech at Berkeley, primarily to prevent student activists from educating others about the Civil Rights Movement which was approaching its peak at the time. Robert Cohen’s biography Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s does a quality job of bringing the days of the FSM to life for readers in our current times.

As any biographer would, Cohen starts off with the family upbringing of the young subject, showing how Mario Savio’s childhood prepared him for his role in later life. His parents were working class immigrants from Sicily who raised Savio in Brooklyn. The youth was an academic high achiever who suffered from a severe stutter that was caused by anxiety and got worse when in the presence of authority figures. Cohen returns to this fact repeatedly throughout the book to illustrate how overcoming this problem propelled Savio to be an advocate of free speech and an effective speech-maker throughout the rest of his life. Other contributing factors in Savio’s development into a political activist were his grandfather’s membership in the fascist party of Mussolini and the trauma of childhood sexual abuse which made him feel a deep solidarity with all the downtrodden people of the world.

Mario Savio went on to be involved with activism as soon as he left high school. He went to Mexico to help indigenous people build modern housing for themselves and spent time in Mississippi working with SNCC to register African-American voters while the KKK were trying to terrorize and kill them. When he returned to Berkeley he participated in non-violent demonstrations in favor of equal representation for Black people in the labor market. When SNCC, CORE, and other leftist political organizations began setting up tables on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza to educate students about Civil Rights, the pro-establishment administration called the police to have them arrested and removed. That led to the spontaneous demonstration where Mario Savio made his groundbreaking speech.

From there, Cohen details what happened with the Free Speech Movement and their two committees that worked on solving the conflict they had with the authorities. The FSM not only had conflicts with Berkeley’s management team, they also had internal conflicts that had to be overcome. Mario Savio was also a man who had his own deep, internal conflicts. The biography examines these issues both sympathetically and critically, never shying away from pointing out where the FSM’s weaknesses were even though he wholeheartedly admires what they did.

Other topics covered are Mario Savio’s relationship to the New Left movement and the hippie counter-culture, neither of which was he enthusiastic about in his support, his battle with mental illness, his career as a college physics professor, and his lifelong commitment to advocacy for minority and low-income students in their struggle to pursue higher education. The final part of the book is a collection of Savio’s speeches and essays. This was the least memorable part of Cohen’s biography, mostly because all the key ideas there were already addressed in the first three sections. The final essay, an effective explanation and defense of affirmative action, hits all the right notes and is well worth your time even if it is a bit dry.

Aside from the clear and precise details, a strength of this biography is how well Cohen explains the methods of the Free Speech Movement which provides a good contrast to the political activism of our current times. Mario Savio saw the educational institutions of America as being run like machines so they believed in shutting down their operation through demonstrations and forcing the authorities into a position where they would have to negotiate in order to get the machine running again. When the Berkeley students seized the police car, they held it for ransom and the price was a place at the negotiating table, not some outlandish over-the-top abstract claim like ending the patriarchy now or stopping capitalism. The FSM risked their safety to put themselves into a position where they could make demands. Their activism was done with the intention of reaching short terms achievements that could lead to more short term achievements which collectively would result in a larger transformation of society at a later time. Political activism today is mostly done by ineffective street demonstrations and picking fights with strangers on the internet, neither of which have proven to be effective. The end result of political correctness was Donald Trump. Occupy Wall Street is a great example of the colossal failure of the 21^st century American left; it was a massive demonstration where nobody made any clear demands and so nothing got accomplished. Today’s activists should learn a few lessons from the Free Speech Movement and the Civil Rights Movement to see how things actually get done. Demonstrations are not magic spells that correct the world’s problems. Arguments on the internet have never, ever, succeeded in convincing anybody to change their mind about anything significant. Without direct action that leads to realistic demands and negotiation, activism amounts to nothing more than vanity, publicity stunts, and whining.

Mario Savio is here portrayed without any embellishments. His style was plain and down-to-Earth. There was nothing flamboyant in his character which again stands in stark contrast to the celebrity boutique activism we have now and the McLeftist-tainment costume shows we get from activist at the street level. Savio acted out of conviction more than egotism. For him, change was more important than fame and that is why he was able to lead the Free Speech Movement to victory armed with nothing but the minds and bodies of the people who supported the cause. Mario Savio comes off as any ordinary man on the street, albeit an ordinary man on the street who made a significant difference in the conduct of our nation.

While the cause of free speech in the 21^st century has become the domain of loony conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and other bizarro right wing ideologues, leftists have come full circle and are now demanding censorship for offensive speech. UC Berkeley has become a big part of the reactionary left’s blunders since they have banned Bill Maher, Ann Coutler, and Milo Yiannaoulis from speaking on their campus; the latter two individuals deserve all the humiliation the receive at the hands of the public and then some, but they still should have the right to make asses of themselves on any college campus they choose. Colleges are supposed to be places for the free exploration of ideas, not factories, as Mario Savio would say, for producing pre-fabricated workers for big business and government bureaucracies. Universities are also not meant to be indoctrination centers which is what they become if speech is censored in the name of not offending people. It is a sad irony that UC Berkeley, after having put a commemorative plaque to Mario Savio on Sproul Plaza, is now a hotbed of censorship and cancel culture being propagated by the people who have benefited the most from the Free Speech Movement. Without Mario Savio, some of the advances made in the name of minority rights, women’s rights, and LBGTQ rights would not have been possible. Activists of today’s left owe it to themselves to read a book like Freedom’s Orator so they can raise their awareness of how freedom of speech benefits everybody and censorship only benefits the people of privilege they claim to be fighting against.

Cohen, Robert. Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s. Oxford University Press, New York et al: 2009. 

 

Book Review

     Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power is a very odd book. Appearing at first glance to be a psycho-sociological treatise on crowd psychology, it actually is a mishmash of anecdotes, weakly examined theories, and prose poetry that doesn’t add up to a whole lot. But it isn’t entirely uninteresting.

Canetti begins his discourse by defining and describing different varieties of crowds. From the start you could be forgiven for thinking this typographical section will introduce definitions that will later be used as support for theories. At least that is one method of structuring a good quality work of social science. But these descriptions get awkward and problematical from the start. Some of Canetti’s crowds are described in vague and poorly defined terms. One example is when he says that all members of a crowd are equal, but he gives no qualification as to what he means by “equal”. Are they of equal economic status? Equal in height, weight, or age? Equal in levels of happiness or sadness? Equal in educational achievements? We can not really know because he does not give any explanation or examples of what he means. From there he assigns symbols to different types of crowds. One type of crowd is like fire, another like wheat grains, another like a river, and so on. While this may help to clarify the ideas he had just explained, it reads more like a literary exercise, a poetic version of semiotics, than legitimate sociological theory.

Another large portion of the book leaves the idea of the crowd behind and focuses more on the psychology of the individual. One type of individual Canetti describes is the “survivor”, the man who triumphs over death in order to make himself more powerful. This, in combination with his concept of debt being used to exert power over individuals, might sound familiar to some readers, particularly those who have read Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. That is because Canetti lifted those ideas, uncredited of course, from that classic work of philosophy. (Canetti does make mention of Nietzsche in one place, referring to The Will to Power which he calls Nietzsche’s most significant work, a strange idea considering that book is nothing but a collection of scraps that the existentialist philosopher decided not to use in his published writings. Some of them were possibly not even written by him.)

This explanation of the survivor makes a comfortable segue into a treatise on the man of power or the man who exerts power over crowds. The concepts surrounding crowds he describes at the start of the book recede into the background at this point and almost entirely disappear from the text. Canetti’s preoccupation is with only one kind of power, the despot who amasses large amounts of strength by killing masses of people. In this way, despots like Genghis Khan and Napoleon absorb the departing souls of those they kill. Here Canetti has left the discipline of social science and entered into the domain of pseudoscience, occultism, and mysticism.

Somehow this makes sense because the support he offers for his sketchy, and often vague, theories is based on anecdotes provided by 19^th century anthropologists, mostly about tribal people subject to colonial rule. In fact, at least a good quarter of the book is comprised of long passages directly copied out of these anthropological studies. After each of these quotes, Canetti offers an analys but these analyses are little more than verbatim retellings of what you just read without offering any enhanced insights into the matters at hand.

Aside from the problematical nature of these lifted passages (19^th century anthropologists worked in the service of colonial governments, functioning in a similar way to what the CIA does now), there are methodological problems too. Canetti draws hasty and grandiose conclusions based on flimsy evidence that is cherry picked to support whatever claim it is he wants to make. Only one anecdote is supplied for each claim; a narrow range of data is used to the exclusion of other information that may justify or disprove whatever it is he wants to say. Canetti doesn’t even come close to examining the full range of data and furthermore never even argues in favor of his own theories. He states them without explaining them or evaluating them in any detail. There is no process of reasoning behind what he says, no examination of theses and antitheses.

Just as bad is the way that Canetti writes in terms of sweeping generalizations. He writes as though all members of a crowd feel exactly the same way as each other. All despots have the same thoughts and use the same tactics for conquering and subduing people. Shamans, in every culture of the world, do exactly the same things; they fly into the air to command spirits in the sky and they swim to the bottom of the sea to command the spirits of the water. He uses this same explanation more than once. Anybody remotely familiar with shamanism would likely concur that the practices of shamans vary widely across cultures even if they do serve similar functions all around the world.

What is truly interesting about this book is that Canetti does an excellent job of curating the passages he quotes from anthropological sources. In fact, these passages are the best parts of Crowds and Power which is a little sad considering he didn’t write any of them. But he did have a good eye for clearly described and well-written accounts of so-called “primitive” people in Australia, Africa, and South America. There are some fascinating stories about religious rituals, communal feasts, initiations, and mythologies. A lot of them are quite dark. Aspects of morbid curiosity are detailed in accounts of deaths during pilgrimages, self-flagellation rituals, funeral rites, and bodily mutilations as well as myths involving self-cannibalization and suicide. There is a strong predilection for exoticism or what Edward Said would refer to as “orientalism”, which is not considered politically correct in today’s university social science departments. Still, these are actual things that people did and believed and they reveal interesting sides of the human experience that we can not otherwise access in today’s world.

As far as books on the social sciences go, Crowds and Power is not a great book. Elias Canetti was an armchair anthropologist with no experience in field work, data collection, or analysis. He was a collector of curios which he tries to pass off as a middle-brow version of the old Ripley’s Believe It or Not comic strip. He doesn’t provide an amazing insights into either crowds or power and he certainly doesn’t state anything that hasn’t been better explained by other writers either before or after his time. The overall effect of this book is like visiting a literary wunderkammer or watching a mondo movie, that genre of 1970s exploitation films that posed as educational movies with the ulterior motive of shocking and titillating the more sordid variety of audiences. It is surprising this book is still in print since it probably isn’t being used as a university text these days unless professors want to use it as an example of everything that was wrong with the social sciences in the 20^th century. It is an interesting read though. Just don’t take it too seriously.

Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. Farrar Strauss and Giroux, New York: 1984. 

 

Book Review

Earth Is Room Enough

by Isaac Asimov

     Isaac Asimov wrote a vast number of short stories that varied in quality. Earth Is Room Enough is a collection of them from the 1950s. That particular decade was a time when the possibilities of space travel captured the public’s attention so science-fiction writers catered to that interest with a vast output of writing regarding that subject. Asimov, however, was never the kind of guy who tried to keep up with all the hacks and sometimes went his own way by also writing stories that take place here on Earth. Some of these are collected in this short volume. While the location of all of them is our current home planet, there really is not one dominant theme that strings them all together.

The first story, titled “The Dead Past”, is the longest and best of the bunch. A historian hears about an invention that makes it possible to watch the past the way we watch television. He wants to observe the ancient city of Carthage to prove his theory that the Carthaginians did not practice child sacrifice; he believed that the accounts written about this were actually fictional propaganda meant to make the Roman citizens turn against the Carthaginians. (Was this an ancient version of Qanon?) When he contacts the company that owns this technology he only gets turned away. He finds a scientist who agrees to build this machine but they become suspicious that the government is involved in a cover up operation to keep this technology a secret. “The Dead Past” is not so much of a conspiracy theory story as it is a re-examination of the Frankenstein’s Monster complex where technology ends up harming its creators more than it helps them.

“Kid’s Stuff” is another interesting story. An author of pulp fantasy stories is working when a large insect-like creature appears on his desk. Despite its appearance, it claims to be an elf from Avalon then proceeds to dominate the mind and actions of the author. The elf’s plan is to enslave the author and take him to Avalon in order to teach the fairies there how to build a technological society. The author is unwilling to resist the telepathic domination of the elf but his son comes to the rescue at the end. Of course, the story ends with a happy resolution and a nice, neat explanation as to what actually happened, just as we would expect. Asimov did at times explore some radical themes but here we get a good example of how he often stuck to a conventional formula for story-telling.

The third most memorable story is “Dreaming Is a Private Thing”. A technology has been invented in which its user wears a helmet that transplants dreams into their heads, kind of like virtual reality. Since most people have dull imaginations, they hire professional dreamers to create dreams to be transmitted to others through the device. The elderly executive of the most successful dream company is under various kinds of pressure to keep the business at the top. Competitive market forces, new technological innovations, and government intrusions all threaten the company’s stability. On top of it all, his most talented dream-maker wants to quit in order to have a more ordinary life. While the technology sounds interesting, it is actually a gimmicky vehicle that Asimov uses to carry a statement about the need for quality over quantity. The director’s dilemma is whether or not he should sacrifice the quality of their product to stay competitive in the marketplace or not. An intelligent reader should have no trouble guessing what decision is made in the end.

The rest of the stories are somewhat interesting. There is the usual stuff about robots, a couple supernatural fantasies, a story that illustrates the multiverse hypothesis in quantum mechanics, and then there are some short stories that are more like jokes than works of literature. Jokes do not age well and the ones in this collection are just as corny as the ones your grandfather would tell when you were a little kid.

Overall this book is good for a one-time read. The ideas and insights are interesting but Isaac Asimov does a better job with the same themes in other works. Some of these stories could have been expanded and written with more depth but the author was a busy man and obviously had other priorities. Earth Is Room Enough is a collection of odds and ends that don’t really congeal into a unified whole the way I Robot does. But if you manage to pick up an old paperback imprint in nice condition, it is worth going over once as a light diversion.

Asimov, Isaac. Earth Is Room Enough. Fawcett Crest, New York: 1957.

 

Book Review

Book Review

Big Sur by Jack Kerouac

     Jack Kerouac is the kind of author that you either get or you don’t. The people who don’t get him usually hate him and to be fair, a lot of the people who love him don’t really get him either. The ones who do get him are those who read and re-read most of his works over and over again, discovering something new each time they burn through one of his novels. Kerouac’s works really do get richer with repeated readings and when you begin to see the broad patterns across his books, you realize how organically interconnected the entire oeuvre actually is. Of course, some of his writing are forgettable; his poetry is first to come to mind, Satori in Paris could be skipped, and Book of Dreams can be taken or left alone although I think it is worth at least a quick skim since the dream he has where is sitting on the toilet and eating the toilet paper instead of using it for its intended purpose is bizarre and hilarious. His later work, Big Sur, is necessary since it shows where Kerouac ended up in life; it refers back to other books he wrote in a significant way and acts as a sad and depressing culmination of a life lived too fast.

     This short novel starts with Jack Duluoz sinking into a drunken depression in San Francisco. After becoming a famous author, he isn’t happy or comfortable with the attention he gets and drinks himself into a stupor night after night while sleeping in a cheap hotel. He decides to sober up and reconnect with himself and his spirituality while staying in a cabin at Big Sur, the canyon and beach head just outside of the city. Experienced Kerouac readers will see the connection here with the time he spends on Desolation Peak in The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels. At Big Sur, Duluoz tries to complete what he didn’t finish on Desolation Peak. Like some kind of Pagan faun, he wants to connect with nature while at the same time reaching Buddhist enlightenment and atonement with the Catholic God, all the while writing about the experience. Instead of rapturous ecstasy, his encounter with the massive waves of the Pacific Ocean is sublime, scaring him half to death while casting an even darker shadow over his existence than what was there before. He also walks in the canyon and relaxes by the creek and these passages about nature are some of the most lyrical, rhythmic, and melodious prose that Kerouac ever wrote. His writings about forests and mountains often sound like joyous Elysian music being played softly on a flute.

     The solitude and the overbearing sound of the ocean start to get to him so Duluoz heads back to San Francisco to party with his friends. He is possessed of a never ending restlessness and can never stay in one place for long. When Jack Duluoz is in the city he longs to be in the wilderness and when in the wilderness he longs to be in the city. Back in San Francisco he meets up with Lorenzo Monsanto (Lawrence Ferlinghetti) and a couple other guys. They hang out, get drunk, and do the usual Beat Generation things. They get tired of being in the city so Duluoz takes them all out to the cabin at Big Sur. The parties start off well but then Duluoz gets drunk and depressed so they follow him back to San Francisco. He bounces back and forth like this throughout the novel. This is standard Kerouac writing though with the difference that his mood swings start slowly creeping into the narrative.

     Along the way, Jack Duluoz reconnects with his old friend (significant other? Muse? Latent homosexual lover?) Cody Pomeray (Neal Cassady) and his wife Evelyn (Carolyn Cassady). Many references are made back to On the Road and it seems as if Duluoz is trying to recreate the good times he had when they were young. But Cody is married with children and a little mellower. Duluoz doesn’t hesitate to mention that Cody had always shared Evelyn sexually with him. In fact, Cody has a new mistress named Billie and he is eager to have Jack Duluoz meet her so they can sleep together. Jack and Cody had always had a curious habit of sharing their sexual partners with each other. (Check out Carolyn Cassady’s writings for further insight into this. She says that they were simultaneously her two husbands).

     Billie lives in an apartment with her son Elliot and hangs out with a rough crowd. When Duluoz starts sleeping with her and staying at her place, everything starts going to hell. He starts drinking heavily and falls into a pit of drunkenness, depression, and self-loathing. He decides one last time to go back to Big Sur with Billie and Elliot. They are accompanies by his poet friend Dave Wain (Lew Welch, a Beat Generation poet who later committed suicide) and his nudist Romanian girlfriend named Romana. With each succeeding visit to Big Sur, Duluoz gets more crazy and unhappy. This time he hits rock bottom. He keeps getting more and more drunk while falling into an abyss of dipsomania, delirium tremens, hallucinations, paranoia, despair and an almost complete nervous breakdown. In one of Bob Dylan’s greatest songs “Ballad Of a Thin Man” he sings “something is happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you Mr Jones?”. This line could have been about Jack Duluoz at Big Sur but the name “Duluoz” doesn’t really harmonize well with the music (but Bob Dylan never really was a master of harmony anyways, was he?). Billie doesn’t react to his insanity in a sympathetic way either. She switches from insisting that she can save him by marrying him but then flies into rages where she beats her son and threatens to commit suicide while Duluoz’s nerves are so frayed he can’t comprehend what is really happening. Dave Wain and Romana are too drunk and too busy having sex in the woods to acknowledge Duluoz’s mental collapse as well.

     For the first three quarters of Big Sur it appears that Jack Duluoz is at the onset of his mid-life crisis but this turns into a full on psychotic episode that takes on the dimensions of a personal apocalypse. In some ways, the end of the novel reads like a retelling of the climax of Dr. Sax. Remember his vision of the massive snake that devours the entire world? Big Sur, in the end, is like yet another Catholic Armageddon mental meltdown. But this time it is more harrowing, hopeless, and frightening than anything else Kerouac has ever written. Big Sur might even be a borderline horror novel. Part of what makes it so disturbing is that Kerouac had a talent for such honest and personal writing that a reader can feel as if they are on intimate terms with him, as though Kerouac is a close friend and companion. When he plunges into insanity, you go along with him and end up hurting just as badly as he does. Being inside his mind as he self-destructs is even more painful when you remember what a gentle and kindhearted literary persona he built up in his previous works. But then you can’t be surprised because he lived so fast and hard that he could do nothing in the end but crash and burn. Neil Young sings that it’s better to burn out than to fade away and this novel is Kerouac’s moment of burning out.

     Severe alcoholism is a disease and it was an illness that obviously afflicted Jack Kerouac. He probably had some some underlying mental health issues too. If he had sought treatment for his problems would he have written all these great books? Only lovers of Kerouac’s writing should be allowed to contemplate that answer. The rest of you can just shut the fuck up.

     So now Big Sur will go back on my shelf, along with all my other Jack Kerouac paperbacks, to wait a few more years when I begin re-reading his whole literary cycle again. As I have gotten older his books have become more meaningful to me. The span that stretches from The Town and the City to Big Sur is an odyssey like The Lord Of the Rings only it isn’t mythical or fantastic. It is realistic and personal.

Kerouac, Jack. Big Sur. Penguin Books, New York: 1992. 

Book Review

Book Review

The Altered Ego by Jerry Sohl

     The setting is Los Angeles in 2045 and scientists have discovered how to store a person’s memories and transfer them to another body after death. Jerry Sohl, author of The Altered Ego, was a prolific scriptwriter for The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and other tv shows of that era. So here we get a lean, plot driven novelette that can be entertaining when looked at through the proper lens.

Bradley Kempton is the genius leader of a corporation that produces optical systems for spaceships. Kempton gets murdered and brought back to life but his son Carl quickly realizes that his father is not the old self he used to be. Carl and his hot girlfriend Marilla start to investigate why and learn that a subordinate employee named John Hardesty had died a month earlier; the corporate scientists who record and preserve people’s memories had implanted Hardesty’s mind into Kempton’s body before resuscitating it.

     At first, The Altered Ego reads like a detective novel in a science-fiction setting. Carl seeks out hard data on John Hardesty while Marilla shadows the newly restored man. Both learn that Hardesty indulges in the seamy side of Los Angeles. Like Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, the story opens with a mystery that is solved almost immediately but the early solution leads to the uncovering of a conspiracy. Sohl’s conspiracy, however, is one of international and intergalactic proportions. It is the pursuit of the how and why of the plot that draws the protagonists along a path of quick and sharp plot twists.

     As Carl learns more about the conspiracy, he crosses the paths of the men responsible for it. He winds up in a psychiatric hospital, only to discover his father, the real Brandon Kempton, is imprisoned there too. However, his father’s memories had been implanted into the brain and body of a psychopathic killer. The big revelation is why Brandon Kepmton’s mind was preserved for the sake of the criminal cabal.

     That is where the best parts of the book end. The chase scene and the climactic confrontation are formulaic and cliched. The story ends the way you might expect a movie of the 1950s to end which should be no surprise considering who Jerry Sohl was in real life. The final chapter is especially bad; a detective explains everything that happened in a typical mystery story fashion. But all he really does is run through the events of the previous chapter; assuming you actually read that chapter before going on to the last chapter, you have to wonder why the author thought this was necessary. Maybe Sohl thought it was too fast paced for you to comprehend or you are horribly deficient in memory. Maybe he thought there was a need for closure. Maybe he was contracted to write a certain number of pages and used the final monologue as filler. Or maybe he just ended it that was because Sohl insisted on slavishly following the murder mystery formula, paint-by-numbers style. Even worse, the final lines of the story are especially cheesy. You might be left with a better impression in the end if you skip the last chapter entirely.

     The Altered Ego can be criticized for a number of other shortcomings. It is a plot driven book so character development is only taken to the point where the personality traits make each person fit the role they are meant to play in the story. It is thematically shallow. The switch between John Hardesty and Brandon Kempton could be an effective, if unoriginal, exploration of the doppelganger motif. Marilla could represent the strive for women’s equality in the world of fiction. John Hardesty’s attempt at seducing Marilla, his faux-son’s girlfriend, looks like a reversal of the Oedipal Complex. The conspiracy could be a useful metaphor for Cold War politics and the science of the sanitarium could be a reference to the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind control program. But these themes are only hinted at and never explored. Sohl’s novelette appears formulaic and cartoonish. But if you like cartoons, that is perfectly alright.

     The Altered Ego has its faults. Really, it is intended to be read for entertainment more than anything. If you read it that way it fulfills that purpose and is, honestly, fun to read if you do not take it too seriously.

Sohl, Jerry. The Altered Ego. Pennant Books, New York: 1954. 

Book Review

Book Review

Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution

by Patrice Higonnet

     History books about the French Revolution can be perplexing. The ideologies and motivations of the participants are complex, contradictory, and not easy to grasp in the context of today’s political paradigm. This is complicated by the way that ideologues have projected their own biases and agendas onto their writings on the subject. Otherwise the meaning of the French Revolution can gets sidelined as some authors grapple with the easier to manage narrative of events and participants. That is not Patrice Higonnet’s method or intent in Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution. Instead his history dissects and examines the thoughts and beliefs of the Jacobins while minimizing the importance of what actually happened.

     The book starts with a quick and simple timeline of events from the Fall of the Bastille to The Terror and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. It is a sketchy narrative. Readers who are new to the subject of the French Revolution would be wise to read a more clearly and detailed account of what happened before starting Higonnet’s book. Having said that, it is also clear that Goodness Beyond Virtue is far better than Thomas Carlyle’s muddled babbling in The French Revolution which should be avoided by anyone who values their own sanity. Higonnet is a chronicler of ideas and his abstract writing style does not function well in describing people or what they do.

     From there, the rest of the book is about the Jacobins, what they did, and what they believed. The Jacobins were a social club that splintered off from the Freemasons but they were not a secret society and their membership, at least for quite a while, was open to almost anyone and their activities were not clandestine. They were not the ones who started the French Revolution but when it began they were there to give it shape and guidance. The Jacobins were primarily middle-class, the proto-bourgeoisie as Karl Marx would have it, and intent on recreating the world from scratch by ending feudalism, government by monarchy and aristocracy, and rule by the Catholic church; all this was to be replaced by a Parliamentary form of government. They wished to usher in a new era of rationality based on the values of the Enlightenment. Patrice Higonnet points out that their ideals were too lofty to be realized by mere mortals. In addition, the heart of their theories contained a fundamental contradiction that, in addition to the previously mentioned problem, eventually led to their downfall. This contradiction was their belief in both individual freedom and communitarian principles. On one side, they thought that every human being had the right to live to their full potential but on the other side they thought that this meant a maximum amount of civic engagement. They never took into account that the two sides of the equation placed restrictions on each other that proved to be irreconcilable.

     It is difficult to situate the Jacobins in today’s conceptualization of the political spectrum. They called themselves libertarians but that term meant something entirely different to them than it does to the conservative extremists who use the term now. “Libertarianism” for them had a lot to do with social justice and equality; the idea was that by removing the governing forms of the Old Regime, all citizens would have a chance to participate in political decision-making and this would lead to greater socialequality across class lines, The rich, the middle class, and the poor would all have equal say in government despite their financial status. Curiously enough, the Jacobin clubs allowed members from all sides of the political spectrum to join; initially both liberals and conservative worked together for the common goal of initiating the modern era of politics. After a while this alliance did not hold, though, and the schismatic conservative Girondin faction separated and began bickering with the leftist Montagnards who began the Terror, a time when the Parisian Jacobins introduced the guillotine to remove anybody they saw as standing in the way of progress.

     Goodness Beyond Virtue is written in a very French writing style that may be frustrating for readers not used to this. There are a lot of long, run-on sentences that sometimes have evasive meanings. Some paragraphs and chapters read like lists of thoughts that do not appear to have any central idea. There is not necessarily anything wrong with this style; it is just the way French authors write.

     Higonnet also leaves a lot out. The writing is largely oriented to the left wing faction of the Jacobins and little is said about the Girondins. Danton, a major figure in the revolution, gets skimmed over too and a lot of the writing revolves around Saint-Just, Marat, and Robespirerre. But this all serves the author’s intentions well since his whole purpose in writing this book is to exonerate the Jacobins. He clearly states that the Terror was a terrible mistake but that Jabin ideology was in the service of a noble cause and should be honored despite the bloodbath that the French Revolution became in the end. Higonnet wants to save the Jacobins’ reputation from conservatives and reactionaries who believe that their ideology was the cause of the Terror. He argues that the atrocities were a political miscalculation rather than the result of a flawed and dangerous doctrine.

     Goodness Beyond Virtue is not a good place to begin your studies of the French Revolution. It is an examination of a set of thoughts, beliefs, and ideas. When abstracted and disembodied from the people who produced them, they might seem a little too obscure to be of any value. However, if you are already familiar with this time and place in history, it can do a good job on enhancing your understanding of it.

Higonnet, Patrice. Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: 1998.

Book Review

The Metal Monster

by A. Merritt

     Serious record collectors will be familiar with rock genres like prog rock, krautrock, space rock, and heavy psych. These kinds of music had themes of mysticism, science fiction, fantasy, space travel, drug trip, and the experience of alternate dimensions. Some of it had high technical proficiency while at other times the bands had more imagination and enthusiasm than musical ability. They spanned the full range from profound to downright goofy. The best of these bands are obscure. What all those genres had in common was a strong desire to offer their listeners a mind blowing experience. A. Merritt’s novel The Metal Machine is like a literary version of those genres, albeit one that was published 40 years earlier, and it would appeal to the same kinds of people.

     Something has to be said about Merritt’s writing style. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. He was a pulp science fiction author who set himself apart by writing in a Victorian style with long sentences, highly detailed descriptiveness, and an over-abundance of adverbs. Some of his sentences seem like little more than strings of adverbs so much so that the meaning of the sentence gets lost. But the descriptions of characters, their surroundings, and the metal creatures they encounter are precise and easy to visualize. Merritt’s dialogue tends to be wooden but conveys the meaning of the story clearly. His descriptive writing style does not work so well with landscapes and background scenery which come off as sketchy, sparse, and sometimes confusing. It does not work so well in passages of violence, warfare, or action either; these battles move slowly when a leaner vocabulary range would have sped up the fights to a normal pace. I do not know if there is a literary equivalent to slow-motion film sequences but if there is, A. Merritt found it. He did have the ability to write descriptive prose well; he just applied it to the wrong parts of the novel. The Metal Monster was serialized, written in monthly installments for a pulp sci-fi magazine and this does effect the flow. There are times when reading it can make you drowsy but if you concentrate and pay attention to all the fine details, it is a rewarding reading experience. Lazy readers, people with short attention spans, and anyone who gets bored with writing that lasts longer than a Twitter post aren’t going to get anything out of this.

     Then there are the characters. Professor Goodwin is a botanist, traveling from Persia to Tibet with a Chinese cook he hired in Tehran and a pony, neither of which figure significantly in the story. The cook gets killed off early in the narrative. Goodwin is searching for a rare plant; you may wonder if it is some kind of hallucinogen considering Merritt himself was a botanist who specialized in psychedelics. As he enters a valley filled with blue poppies (yes the poppies used for making heroin), he meets up with his friend’s son Dick Drake. They move on an eventually encounter two more friends, Ventnor and Ruth, who are also brother and sister. How four old friends just happened to meet up with each other while wandering in a remote region of Central Asia is a mystery. If you get too caught up in it, you will not be able to focus on the more interesting aspects of the novel. When strange things begin to happen, a beautiful sorceress named Norhala appears like a fantasy woman and protective mother figure straight out of the pages of Playboy. She saves them from getting killed, falls in love with Ruth, and takes her away to another dimension. Of course, Dick Drake has fallen in love with Ruth and Ventnor is her guardian brother so they have to chase after the two pretty lesbians.

     The thrust of the story is that an ancient city of Persians has somehow survived in the valley, untouched by time and living the way they did thousands of years ago. The Persians are ruled by Cherkis, the son of Xerxes whose people had been chased away when Alexander the Great invaded. These timeless fighters are engaged in constant conflict with Norhala who commands a giant metal monster made out of cones, cubs, and spheres. It can change forms according to the needs of the time and works well as a serious ass-kicking war machine that defeats the Persians every time.

     A large portion of the book is taken up by descriptions of the metal creatures who are actually parts of a metal city which is a complete living being. The metal city/monster is controlled by a giant upside down cross and an oval disk; they drain energy from the sun to feed the smaller metal particles who do the bidding of Norhala according to her needs. The metal monster is actually peaceful and not inclined to harming anything unless necessary.

     In the middle of all the action is Ruth. She is a one-dimensional character, sometimes partially nude and twice tied up for some light bondage scenes; like Helen of Troy, she gets kidnapped and tossed around like a ball from captor to captor. When the Persians abduct her, she is the prize sough after by Norhala the lesbian witch and the metal monster who engage them for the final confrontation.

     The key to the meaning of The Metal Monster is revealed when Ventnor explains the dreams and visions he had while unconscious. The metal monster exists sometime in the future; it is literally metal technology that evolved to the point where it became self-conscious and no longer needed humans to control it. The only surviving link between humanity and the metal monster is Norhala and her servant Yukun, a grotesquely deformed eunuch dwarf who is enslaved to her, worships her, and does whatever she commands. He is the symbolic remnant of a human race that is no longer relevant. The novel can be read as a conflict between humanity’s barbaric past, represented by the Persians, and the technological future, represented by the metal monster. The moral ambiguity is that the metal monster is capable of exterminating humanity and nature while the brutal and sadistic Persians show strength and humanity in their reverence for beauty and the desire to fight for survival. Technological advancement comes at a price. Caught in the middle of this struggle are Professor Goodwin and his friends, the representatives of contemporary humanity.

     This novel can be considered dated but some knowledge of the cultural context from which it came can go a long way in making it comprehensible. This is a place where context DOES matter so I will politely tell postmodern literary theorists and deconstructionists to fuck off at this point. In the 1920s, metal was a valuable commodity; industrialization, architecture, and the rise of the automobile industry made it one of the most sought-after materials. America was emerging from the Gilded Age and sleek, steely, shiny objects were revered along with their artistic counterpart in the Art Nouveau and Art Deco stylizations. New discoveries in science were changing the understanding of the relationship between matter and energy. America and Europe had just finished World War I, a meeting ground for primitive barbarity and technological power where the possibility of the mass slaughter of human beings was witnessed by many firsthand. The animistic and occult theologies of Gnosticism and Theosophy were in vogue in some literary and artistic circles. Some writers saw the American version of the English language as a degenerate form of traditional English so they wrote with a Victorian idiom, mistakenly believing themselves to be prese0rving the true English language. Add all these elements into the mix and you can get a clear picture of where A. Merritt was coming from he wrote this.

     Finally, I can hear some stoners out there saying, “he must have been doing some heavy drugs when he wrote this”, as if that is a default answer that some people have to anything mystifying, strange, or far out of the norm. I have to say though, even while reading for deeper meaning, there are some passages in The Metal Monster that made me say, “yeah he must have been tripping pretty hard when he wrote this.” There are some long passages that appear to be little more than a light show meant to dazzle people under the influence of LSD. But if you, ahem, are one of those who have experimented with mind-altering substances then those passages can be quite enjoyable. Even if those sections are flawed, along with other aspects of the book, there is still a lot to be gotten out of this unique work of fantasy. You have to make the effort though. 

Merritt, A. The Metal Monster. Avon Publications Inc., New York: 1920.

Book Review

     Death and desire have always been a part of the human experience. Cars and car crashes are something relatively new. The former themes are deeply-rooted psychological currents that manifested in the Romantic paintings of artists like Caspar David Friedrich while the latter cultural phenomenon emerged as modern technology and its modernist and postmodernist artistic expression. In Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture, Ricarda Vidal uses the car crash motif to demonstrate how the two themes are related.

     Vidal uses the theoretical framework of the Futurist avant-garde art movement, as detailed by Tomasso Marinetti in his manifestos, to illustrate the trajectory of society’s fascination with the automobile. Marinetti conceived of the car as the primary element of the technological utopia he envisioned before Word War I. Cars were to be the vehicle that transform the world into a state of rapid acceleration, a plunge into speed that would never end but perpetually keep going faster until everything ended in death. The Apollonian Futurists were obsessed with hygiene and war. The car was to transcend gender, being both a protective metallic womb and an object of penetration. Despite the automobile’s obvious use as a sexual metaphor, the Futurists were anti-sexuality and sought to eradicate gender. They claimed to be making a clean break from the Romantic artistic tradition with its longing for an imaginary mythical past, its celebration of nature, and its preoccupation with death and decay. But the fact that cars crash and auto-fatalities interrupt the process of never-ending acceleration cocked up the humming motors of Futurist cars. Vidal explores the extent of Futurist theory and how it has emerged until recently.

     She begins by comparing Futurist theory to the ideas of Henry Ford and the Fordist vision of future humanity; in Ford’s mind, the mass production of cars would become a means of social engineering. He believed in mass conformity and limits to individuality; every person was to be an appendage to a motorized vehicle. His dream was one of a cybernetic society that moved smoothly and efficiently like a perpetual motion machine that never breaks down, one that can be easily controlled by a small number of men possessed of superior intelligence.

     From there the car becomes a vehicle for individuality and freedom as we see in the proliferation of road trip movies and the writings of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation. The car liberates the individual from the restrictions of what Henry Ford desired. As the Beat Generation’s high speed, spiritual experience on wheels and asphalt became more commonplace, so did the inevitable unwanted consequences of of traffic jams, the car crash, and the disappearance of human empathy in the face of tragic disaster. Vidal takes up the two latter themes in her analysis of Andy Warhol, amongst others, and J.G. Ballard’s Crash and its cinematic counterpart in David Cronenberg’s film.

A major hinge in Ricarda Vidal’s critical analysis comes in the chaper on Swiss photographer Arnold Odermatt’s landscape portraits in which the ruins in the Romantic paintings of Friedrich get replaced with the inclusion of wrecked cars in somber, mystical settings. A significant portion of Vidal’s analysis exemplifies the flaws and unintended disasters the Futurists could not envision in their time. Ultimately, without her having saying explicitly saying so, she proves that Marinetti and his movement were shortsighted and myopic.

     Another theme introduced in this book is gender via the installation pieces of Sarah Lucas and the films Thelma and Louise and Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. In Vidal’s view, the car has also been a tool of liberation for women. As a hermaphroditic object, simultaneously womb-like and phallic, it provides women with an opportunity to control gender roles. The Futurists believed in the end of binary gender distinctions but this did not connote what it does today; they were all about hyper-masculinity and the car for them was a tool for destroying and eliminating weakness and passivity, in other words, traditional roles associated with women. For the Futurists, the transcendence of gender meant an unadulterated purification of masculinity and phallocentric power. As one of my art history professors said, they exaggerated and reinscribed traditional macho Mediterranean values. They didn’t fight against toxic masculinity, they reveled in it and glorified it. So in Vidal’s analysis, when women take control over gender roles, they become more domineering and equal to men by embracing the sadism and violence traditionally associated with the masculine.

     If these ideas are not troublesome enough, you might want to consider what Ricarda Vidal chose not to say about the Futurist art movement. The Futurists were early supporters of fascism and Tomasso Marinetti formed a futurist political party that later merged with Mussolini’s fascisti. Their preoccupation with hygiene and cleanliness entailed their disregard for sexuality and dismissal of the orgasm as an obstacle to never-ending speed and acceleration. Their end game was about progressing faster and faster until the ultimate explosion and transformation into pure energy, in other words death. Their visual idioms glorified misogyny, violence, war, and the conquest of nature. Admittedly, Vidal’s book is not a political tract and the aesthetics of this particular art movement can be understood without the obvious fascist political overtones they encapsulate. But fascism was such a big part of Futurist ideology that it seems a little weak of her not to engage with it at all. Maybe she saw it as a distraction to her main thesis or maybe it might have tainted her work in ways that would have guaranteed her cancellation as a cultural critic. If we keep the fascist aesthetics of Futurism in mind though, it adds another disturbing element to her writing; it might imply that the end goal of technological advancement might be fascism, disaster, and dystopia. In terms of her analysis of gender politics, it might lead to the conclusion that a genderless society could also result in fascism or totalitarian social engineering. To be fair, we also have to remember that Vidal’s selection of art mostly prove the Futurists to be wrong on some levels and she never actually says she likes what the Futurists had to say; her tone on that avant-garde art movement is neutral and non-judgmental, neither celebrating it nor discrediting it.

     On a final note, why is this book, along with most books in the Western intellectual tradition so American and Eurocentric in scope? It covers a geographical region that does not extend any further east than Switzerland and no further south than France. Should intellectuals always be stuck in the assumption that the ideas of the Transatlantic represent all the psychological currents throughout the world? Don’t people in China, Thailand, Nigeria, Cuba, or Uruguay have thoughts about cars? Why not include the culture of automobiling in Saudi Arabia, a country that, despite its ban on alcohol, has one of the highest rates of auto-related fatalities in the world, a country where women only recently were given the right to drive, a place where illegal high speed drifting is popular entertainment, and where rich young kids earn bragging rights based on how many sports cars they have destroyed in wrecks? Are France, the U.K., and America really the only places where car crash culture matters?

     Overall, Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture is thought-provoking and has a keen sense of where we started with car technology and where we have ended up. Her artistic critique is arbitrary but serves a definite purpose and despite what is left out the ideas hang together nicely. Maybe someday a similar book will emerge about the all-pervasive presence of computers in our lives. The thriving tech-utopianism of the 1990s has died down as we begin to see the dark side of internet technology. Cyber-crime, trolling, election hacking, the easy distribution of child pornography, sweatshop labor in Asian cellphone factories, more non-biodegradable plastics in our garbage dumps from discarded technology and other atrocities may be the car crashes of the future. Can these cultural disasters be another manifestation of the Romantic ruins of art in times past?

Vidal, Ricarda. Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture: A Century of Romantic Futurisms. Peter Lang, Oxford: 2013. 

Book Review

The Ship of Ishtar

by A. Merritt

     The pulp fantasy writer A. Merritt once had a huge following in America. Times have changed. His writing style and themes are no longer relevant to contemporary readers. His most famous novel, The Ship of Ishtar, is not a great piece of writing but may be of interest simply because it does not transcend the time it was written in.

     The first half of the novel is a fairly entertaining read. An archaeologist named Kenton receives a package at his New York City home. It contains a stone box from a colleague that contains a carved ship. Without warning, he gets transported through space and time to the deck of the ship that is fated to sail eternally. Kenton now lives in an ancient time when Babylon ruled as the dominant empire of the Middle East. The inhabitants are, on one hand, led by a woman named Saharane and her consort of bare breasted beautiful women. The other half is inhabited by Klaneth, an evil priest and his followers. The two groups are able to see each other on their respective halves of the boat but they can not cross into the others’ territory since Ishtar, the goddess of love and creation agreed to this arrangement with Nergal, the god of destruction. Sharane and Klaneth are mortal representatives of Ishtar and Nergal.

     The other people on board the ship are slaves who work below the deck as oarsmen. Kenton gets seized by Klaneth and set to work as a slave but while chained to the oars he befriends a Viking named Sigurd. Kenton breaks free and leads a rebellion against Klaneth with the help of Sigurd and two of his henchmen who take sides against the evil priest. This battle happens after a particular kinky passage in which Kenton binds Sharane to her bed and gags her with silk cords so she can not interfere with the fight. When the little war is over, Sharane falls madly in love with Kenton and they retreat to her cabin while Sigurd stands guard outside, polishing his sword. Really.

     It must be obvious by now that there is nothing unique about Merritt’s story. What makes it stand out, just a little bit, it the writing style. While the characters are as stereotypical as they can possibly be, the descriptions of their appearances is one of the stronger points. Klaneth and his friends look like impish devils from one of Brueghel’s apocalytpic canvases. Sharane and her followers are reminiscent of the Art Nouveau stylizations of an Alfonse Mucha painting. The king of Emakhtila could be a character straight out of Fellini’s Satyricon. The Ship of Ishtar is more style than substance. The language is also something in and of itself. Sentences are long and wordy with lots of adjectives and some odd syntax that might make you want to reread some lines just to make sure you understand what they say. It is like reading classic epic poetry that has been translated by an amateurish Victorian author. This may be interesting for some while being pretentious and annoying for others. On the bad side, some of the descriptions, especially of the ship and the Temple of Bel in Emakhtila are not well described and hard to visualize.

     The second part of the novel is not as interesting and as the narrative starts to run out of steam. True to her status as a trophy wife, Sharane gets kidnapped by Klaneth after he escapes from the ship. He imprisons her in the Temple of Bel in the city of Emakhtila. Also true to his stereotype, Kenton is the muscle-bound action hero who must go and rescue her. Once they get back to the ship, Kenton has a mystical vision where his identity as an emissary for Nabu, the god of wisdom, is revealed while he sees the ship’s spiritual counterpart with Ishtar and Nergal’s faces in the sky.

     Kenton’s big hallucination is unique to this type of story. What it reveals is that a theme of tension between the secular and the divine runs throughout the narrative. Kenton resists the sleep-inducing magic of a trumpet by putting ordinary objects in his ears so he can not hear. His companions complain about the stupidity of the gods. The king of Emakhtila claims his power over the city is the result of his disbelief in magic, superstition, and religion. Kenton and his crew win all their battles with strategy and strength rather than magic and Klaneth’s magic does nothing to hold them back. When the gods command Kenton to make a judgment about life, he curses them for causing so much human suffering. Although the voice of Nabu speaks to Kenton at times, this supernatural guidance serves a more explanatory narrative purpose rather than being useful as magic to increase Kenton’s prowess in battle. In the smoke and mirrors of all the mysticism and hallucinatory imagery, The Ship of Ishtar hints at a secular dissatisfaction with the religious side of life.

     A. Merritt’s novel strives to be better than an ordinary sword and sorcery fantasy tale. It injects a touch of modern existential angst into a flowery, sometimes overwrought writing style. But this novel does not go far enough. With a little more effort this could have been a book with more staying power but, as it is, it feels just a little dated. But maybe this is part of its charm; it might be interesting because it is like a good museum piece or an interesting object in an antique store, existing now but hopelessly trapped in the 1930s. 

Merritt, A. The Ship of Ishtar. Avon Publications Inc., New York: 1934.

Book Review

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

     Strong scientific theories are like strong genes in that they stay around for a long time. The ideas put forth by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene are still circulating in the discourses of genetics and evolutionary biology after approximately forty years. That is a long time considering how scientists rigorously dismantle weak theories through the process of testing and evaluation. What makes Dawkins’ book a survivor is a combination of sound reasoning and clear descriptive writing that makes his ideas accessible to people outsider the disciplines he is involved in.

     The book starts off with a crash course in genetics. Genes are the basic and most fundamental buildings blocks of all living organisms. Upon conception, the genes pair off in sequences that form strips called chromosomes which combine to form complete living creatures. While genes across all organisms are mostly the same, it is their sequence on the chromosome that distinguishes one living form from all the others. Dawkins calls each individual creature a survival machine because the living body is a vehicle for the gene to use.

     That is what genes are. This about is about what genes do, though. The Selfish Gene is all about how genes are exactly what the title says: they behave selfishly because by doing so they increase their chances of reproduction. When chromosomes combine to form an organism they do so according to instructions given to them by genes; these instructions give form to the body and tell it how to behave. Therefore genes influence how a being behaves but it does not control what it actually does. In various ways, an organism can resist the temptation to follow the genetic instructions it has inherited. A gene’s ultimate goal and purpose is to replicate or reproduce exact copies of itself to be passed along into other organisms. The selfish genes are the ones most equipped to replicate and the ones most successful at building and instructing organic bodies that maximize reproductive behavior. Genes that do not replicate die out and therefore evolutionary selection takes place at the genetic level, not at the species level as some scientists have previously argued.

Dawkins uses games theory as a tool of analysis for animal and human behavior. Games theory is a mathematical technique based on the idea that social behaviors are calculated by each individual to maximize benefits to themselves; in Dawkins’ case this means maximizing the potential for reproduction and genetic replication. He gives fascinating examples throughout the book to illustrate his point. The analyses are primarily of birds and mammals in the beginning with some sections on insects, fish, and plants. Most of what he says about humans comes in the latter part of the book. We learn some interesting things along the way like how there is a difference between bearing and raising offspring, why some birds are monogamous and others are not, how ants enslave other ants to run their farms, how cheating and deception are used as survival strategies, why people feel more emotionally tied to members of their kinship groups then they do to people outside of it, and how altruism is actually a masked strategy of selfishness.

     The examples given fit nicely into the theory of the selfish gene and serve to credibly strengthen it. The theory and its examples fit together logically like pieces of a puzzle and at times they strive towards a symmetry that achieves a type of poetic beauty. Most importantly, The Selfish Gene succeeds as a book because it explains these ideas in clear, simple language that is accessible to non-scientists without dumbing the ideas down to a point of condescending simplicity. It is a great work of public relations for science because it opens doors to its readers and welcomes them into the world of genetics in a way that it interesting and entertaining.

     The latter chapters focus more on human behavior. The idea of cultural memes is introduced. These are ideas that replicate themselves by passing from person to person and have a strong influence on behavior. This chapter is interesting but it is short and is meant to be a springboard towards further research rather than a complete description.

     Another chapter uses games theory to analyze the Prisoner’s Dilemma game; the conclusion drawn is that altruism is the strongest survival strategy since it maximizes benefits to all members of a community in the long run whereas mutual antagonism ultimately causes communities to collapse and disintegrate. That chapter is not only interesting but also optimistic since it justifies the idea that human culture can override some of then genetic tendencies that drive people to do terrible things for the sake of ensure the replication of their genes. It could be said that rape, for example, is the result of a genetic disposition to reproduce but educational initiatives taken by society can be used to train people to control their urge to rape or force women into unwanted pregnancies. The downside is that this is the most abstruse chapter of the book and it is a major pain in the ass to read.

     Overall, The Selfish Gene is a great introduction of Dawkins’ theory and an excellent illustration of how the theory works. It is an introduction, though, and far from a complete exegesis his ideas. Dawkins himself does a good job of pointing out some of the shortcomings of his theory and also explains some parts that simply beg for further research. Unfortunately, this book has also been latched on to by some naive libertarian ideologues who see it as a justification for an infantile culture of narcissism and greed while their equally naive opponents have condemned this book because of that. A careful and honest reading of The Selfish Gene should put those misinterpretations to rest. 

Dawkins Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1999.

Book Review

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

    Most likely it is impossible for a white person to fully know what it feels like to be black. That does not mean that white people should make no effort to understand what it feels like to be black. As we move further into the future, it may even be necessary for that attempt to be made no matter how incomplete that knowledge may be in the end. For a good number of reasons, specifically pertaining to the experience of African-American people in the 20^th century, Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man could be one of the best places for white people to start such an undertaking.

     Ellison’s novel takes us through the life of a young black man from the South. The unnamed narrator tells his story in the first-person, going from hist brief stint at an unnamed all-black college, based on Tuskeegee University, to his young adult life in Harlem and membership in The Brotherhood, a representation of the Communist Party of America. The narrator goes through life carrying a briefcase into which he puts different items as he goes along; he collects papers from college, a grotesque and broken bank shaped like an African-American boy in the worst of Americana-type, depictions, documents and pamphlets from The Brotherhood, a paper doll of an African-American man that dances when its string is pulled, and other various things. Each item represents a major turning point in the narrator’s development as an individual. The broken bank is something he puts into the briefcase when he begins to be financially self-sufficient and the doll is emblematic of when he realizes he is being used like a puppet by The Brotherhood. As terrible as some of these symbolic items are, he carries them with him in the briefcase because they represent realizations that act as steps along the way to self-development. The briefcase gets carried all the way to the end of the novel. In this sense, Invisible Man is a bildungsroman, a novel about a young man in search of himself.

     This novel is also a picaresque story; the individual characters the narrator encounters provide clues as to what stage of growth he is at and where he is going. His encounter with the white trustee of the college, Mr. Norton, reveals to him a lot about relations between white and black people. The school director, Dr. Bledsoe, reveals how the university is being used to keep African-Americans in their place below the white people who run society. Jack, the leader of The Brotherhood, shows him how white activists use African-American people as tools in their own political machinations; not only does The Brotherhood use the Harlem community as a political tool but it is done in a way that damages that part of society as a whole. Ras the Exhorter, the violent and clownish black nationalist, reveals the potentially self-destructive dead end of racist politics in the Harlem community. There are so many others. Through his encounter with each character, we see how the narrator grows and changes and we also see a different facet of American society, some of which are not pleasant to look at even though they need to be seen. Like Stephen Daedalus in Joyce’s A Portrait Of the Artist As a Young Man, we see how each social institution the narrator encounters seems to be liberating at first but later turns out to be just another prison cell in an inescapable labyrinth of prison cells.

     By far, the strongest aspect of Invisible Man is the raw honesty of the narrator. As readers we get access to all his deepest thoughts, perceptions, and emotions. When a narrative is written so that a reader is allowed in to such private psychological spaces, it is hard not to feel close to the narrator. It is hard not to feel his hopes, his pain, his dreams, his frustrations, his optimism, and his disappointments. It is the possibility for such a deep level of intimacy between the reader and the narrator that makes this such a compelling novel for people of any race or ethnic background to see the situations and dilemmas the novel presents us with. The bare reality of the narrator’s thoughts are revealed so clearly that it is hard not to feel as if we have a lot in common with him despite any of our differences. Any person who has felt ignored, stereotyped, disillusioned, used, or treated unfairly can find some way to relate. These are universal characteristics of the human condition that are made imminent in the story of a young African-American man who wants to make the world better by making himself better.

     So the narrator’s big epiphany, that he is invisible, is stated at the beginning and the end. He is not physically invisible but rather his true nature as an individual human being is because people are incapable or unwilling to see who he really is. Again, he makes a statement about being African-American in American society but this feeling of not being seen for who you are is something that many people of any background can relate to. That is why Invisible Man is such an excellent starting point for anybody who wants to attempt to understand the African-American experience. The novel demands that you see who and what he is. It forces you to see him as a complex and worthwhile human being as long as you make the effort to read it.

     Ralph Ellison’s novel does not end on a happy note. The epiphany that results from the narrator’s search is an existential crisis, not a resolution; it is brought on by a long series of disappointments, each being worse than the previous one and climaxing in a riot. But it does not end on a bad note either. While the narrator loses faith in The Brotherhood, he does not lose faith in brotherhood itself. He does not take the path of Ras the Destroyer and instead believes that diversity and difference is beautiful and desirable despite all the painful trials he went through in his pursuit. The thread of hope is still there to be grasped. It is tiny and so small it may be difficult to comprehend but do not forget that it is there.

     Invisible Man is not without its flaws. The pacing is uneven and some passages are muddled and confusing. However, there are so many powerful passages throughout that those mistakes seem like minor problems that can easily be overlooked without significantly diminishing the novel’s impact. While this is a cornerstone in the canon of African-American literature, it is possible to consider that it even transcends that status and should be considered one of the greatest American novels of the modern era.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Vintage Books, New York: 1972.

Book Review: The Bomb by Frank Harris

The Bomb by Frank Harris is a novelized account of the Haymarket Riot and bombing in Chicago during the 1880s. Narrated by Rudolph Schnaubelt, a real suspect in the actual event, we get a point by point account of his life and what led up to the bombing that kills 60 police officers or so. It is definitely a book with strengths and weaknesses.

Schnaubelt emigrates from his native Germany to New York City where he goes through the trials of doing brutal construction work at low rates of pay. His life gets better when he starts writing articles for a German socialist newspaper. He is not happy with his life so he moves on to Chicago and continues building his career as a journalist. It is there that Schnaubelt meets Elsie, a young, pretty woman who he pursues throughout most of the story. Elsie, however, hates political radicalism and often defends the capitalist system even though she and her mother live in poverty. Their relationship is melodramatic. There are long conversations between the two where they can not decide whether they want to be together or not. They do a lot of kissing, caressing, and embracing. That much of it is tedious and it started to seem possible that Schnaubelt's desire to bomb a police squadron was partially a result of sexual frustration. That would be symbolic, though, and Harris did not seem to be interested in using symbolism in this particular novel.

Rudolph Schnaubelt, as a journalist, begins attending socialist and labor union meetings and eventually ends up at an anarchist club where he befriends Louis Lingg, another German immigrant and labor leader with a dream to see fair rates of pay, an end to child labor, and an eight hour work day. In Lingg's apartment, the narrator finds books about chemistry and soon it is revealed that his friend is planning on making bombs to fight the police. Lingg is described as a magnanimous man, larger than life in his care for the working poor and the oppressed immigrant population (At that time, white European immigrants were feared, hated and scapegoated the way Latino immigrants are now which makes you wonder how the ancestors of immigrants could be just as bad as the people who treated their forefathers like dirt. Those who do not learn the lessons of history...). But Schnaubelt's praise for Lingg does not match up directly with the man as he is depicted; his thoughts and speeches are vague and weak and his presence in the novel is diminutive in comparison to Schnaubelt's first person subjective narration. Another of the novel's flaws is that Harris could not portray Lingg with the strength that he actually thought that character had.

Frank Harris's sentences are wooden and he writes with a limited vocabulary range but his prose is not nearly as terrible as Ayn Rand's. There are times when this works to his advantage though; this writing style does not help the way the relationships are described but it does work well when describing the lives of immigrant laborers who lived stark, bleak lives. And the descriptions of the riots and police brutality involved really are vivid and frightening.

Despite all these flaws, there is one thing that Harris got right in The Bomb and that is the narrator, Rudolph Schnaubelt, himself. While the prose may not always be dynamic, the inner life of the narrator is. From his subjective viewpoint we see him transform through out life from a naive immigrant, to a disillusioned journalist, to a frustrated lover and on to the point where, after seeing a teenage girl get shot by police at a labor union rally, he becomes an anarchist bomb-thrower and fugitive from justice. His moral conflicts about the terrorist act are well-developed and makes him succeed as the main character where other people in the story come off as two-dimensional and sentimental.

It is interesting that The Bomb is still being read more than one hundred years after its publication considering it is not a masterpiece of a novel and Frank Harris is, at best, a minor literary figure. It is probably the enduring interest in the labor unrest and union movements of the late 19th century that are keeping it alive. Or maybe it is the novel's raw humanity itself; after all, your ordinary person tends to be sentimental and melodramatic and very few people actually are good story-tellers. The narrative is accessible and the moral ambiguity is something that many people can relate to. Maybe, for these reasons, this novel succeeds, in some ways, accidentally.