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Tentatively, A Convenience
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Born
in Baltimore, The United States
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October 2007
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https://www.goodreads.com/tentativelyaconvenience
Thanks to the idiocy of Goodreads policy my books are no longer easily found & do not all appear here. Instead, 5 of them appear under "Tentatively a Convenience": https://www.goodreads.com/author/show... .
My name is "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE". It is NOT "Tentatively, A Convenience". The completely disrespectful push for conformity is on. Such 'normalization' of my spelling, wch I've been using since 1979, is a symptom of what I call "AU", Artificial Unintelligence - both that of algorithms wch can't possibly cope w/ the human imagination & that of robopathic humans - say the type of person who studied creative writing w/ a professor who isn't a creative writer & who isn't published. This type of person then proceeds to learn 'how to be Thanks to the idiocy of Goodreads policy my books are no longer easily found & do not all appear here. Instead, 5 of them appear under "Tentatively a Convenience": https://www.goodreads.com/author/show... .
My name is "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE". It is NOT "Tentatively, A Convenience". The completely disrespectful push for conformity is on. Such 'normalization' of my spelling, wch I've been using since 1979, is a symptom of what I call "AU", Artificial Unintelligence - both that of algorithms wch can't possibly cope w/ the human imagination & that of robopathic humans - say the type of person who studied creative writing w/ a professor who isn't a creative writer & who isn't published. This type of person then proceeds to learn 'how to be creative' in a completely uncreative way & goes on to not be a creative writer or to be published either but to still be convinced that they're qualified to edit actual published actual creative writers. That's a form of regrettably delusional behavior fostered in them by their inability to educate themselves outside of potty training.
Alas, some GoodReads fiend has removed my date of death! I had it as "September 3, 1953" - before my date of birth so that my death won't happen in my lifetime. Some humorless GR person must want me to die. Foo on them.
Making matters even worse, my bk "footnotes" has been removed from the database here & I'm now listed as the author of "15" bks instead of the correct SIXTEEN. "footnotes" was still for sale online the last time I checked so I highly recommend getting a copy before they disappear altogether.
OTHERWISE, please read this extensive interview w/ me by poet/essayist Alan Davies as part of "Otoliths 27" ( http://the-otolith.blogspot.com.au/20... ). It's a DOOZY, I promise. It'll also hopefully be published as a small & cheap bk
ALSO, my friend Anthony Levin-Decanini has started an excellent new (as of mid 2013) improvising series called "Crucible Sound" in Pittsburgh at Modernformations Gallery & I was honored by his interviewing me regarding improv for his relevant blog. I quite like the interview & I hope you do too. Here's the link for part 1:
http://cruciblesound.blogspot.com/201...
& the link for part 2:
http://cruciblesound.blogspot.com/201...
I hope you find it interesting enuf to subscribe to the blog & to check out the other programs. If you're in or nearby Pittsburgh, PLEASE ATTEND THE CRUCIBLE SOUNDS! Things like this don't last forever, but while they do they can be quite lively!!
The photo of me is by my friend Julie Gonzalez. Maybe someday I'll write a bio in here but, in the meantime, I'll just sign w/ some of my email signature:
electronically signed,
He-Who-Has-Written
Amir-ul Kafirs
Some tenuous beginnings of P.N.T. (Perverse Number Theory):
(for all x)x = (for all x)x (Anything is Anything)
(A Double Negative As Not A Positive)
(A finite quantity represented as a set containing
an infinite quantity of its subdivisions
(such as its subdivision in terms of rational numbers)
does not equal the same finite quantity
represented as a set containing an infinite quantity
OF A DIFFERENT DEGREE of its subdivisions
(such as its subdivision in terms of irrational numbers).)
m + n does not equal n + m is isomorphic to x
the ceiling of x is greater than or equal to the ceiling of the ceiling of x
(Enough is Enough)
The Formula o ...more
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Tentatively, A Convenience
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Tentatively, A Convenience
As far as I 'know', most of these questions have been created by Goodreads staff to stimulate the 'Goodreads authors' to make public statements that m…moreAs far as I 'know', most of these questions have been created by Goodreads staff to stimulate the 'Goodreads authors' to make public statements that may be of interest to people ON Goodreads. That's all well & good. The questions are generic & more or less irrelevant to my actual praxis but that's ok. I aim to please. SO, how DO I deal with writer's block?
1st off, I don't have "writer's block". EVER. Or any other kind of creative block. Why don't we hear about "Composer's Block" or "Pornographer's Block"? Maybe the writers who have writer's block are simply impotent, people w/ no ideas worth translating into texts in the 1st place.
2nd. when I see a writer's block I want to carve it, I want to carve a swan into it & watch it melt. Is that sadistic? I don't think so, the writer's block isn't able to feel pain. Or is it? There's always Hylozoism. Maybe the writer's block is ALIVE! Did you ever think of that you insensitive impotent sniveling writer?!
3rd, when I see the writer's block I wonder whether it's a Rubik's Cube. Maybe I just need to twist those little facets until everything lines up, until everything is 'perfect'. But what wd it say to US if it cd talk? 'Please, STOP, my reactive arthritis is killing me'?
4th, there's always the risk of getting the writer's block PREGNANT. I've known thousands of deadbeat writer's block dads. Sure, they act like they're completely comfortable w/ having knocked up a block, a chip off the old block.. but are they really? Look out for those furtive glimpses at table corners, room corners.. They're thinking of the wee ones.. & that one night stand when they had to PROVE to themselves that they weren't impotent, when they were going to stick it to that writer's block no matter what it took. But did they think further? NooOooOoooOo.. Bad plotting, bad narrative structure, no outlining, no thinking of how-it-wd-all-end. (less)
1st off, I don't have "writer's block". EVER. Or any other kind of creative block. Why don't we hear about "Composer's Block" or "Pornographer's Block"? Maybe the writers who have writer's block are simply impotent, people w/ no ideas worth translating into texts in the 1st place.
2nd. when I see a writer's block I want to carve it, I want to carve a swan into it & watch it melt. Is that sadistic? I don't think so, the writer's block isn't able to feel pain. Or is it? There's always Hylozoism. Maybe the writer's block is ALIVE! Did you ever think of that you insensitive impotent sniveling writer?!
3rd, when I see the writer's block I wonder whether it's a Rubik's Cube. Maybe I just need to twist those little facets until everything lines up, until everything is 'perfect'. But what wd it say to US if it cd talk? 'Please, STOP, my reactive arthritis is killing me'?
4th, there's always the risk of getting the writer's block PREGNANT. I've known thousands of deadbeat writer's block dads. Sure, they act like they're completely comfortable w/ having knocked up a block, a chip off the old block.. but are they really? Look out for those furtive glimpses at table corners, room corners.. They're thinking of the wee ones.. & that one night stand when they had to PROVE to themselves that they weren't impotent, when they were going to stick it to that writer's block no matter what it took. But did they think further? NooOooOoooOo.. Bad plotting, bad narrative structure, no outlining, no thinking of how-it-wd-all-end. (less)
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How to Write a Resumé - Volume II Making a Good First Impression 2nd edition
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Paradigm Shift Knuckle Sandwich & other examples of P.N.T. (Perverse Number Theory)
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Not Necessarily NOT Very Important
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HiTEC (Histrionic Thought Experiment Cooperative) "Systems Management"
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The Kavyayantra Press Reading Series: "vii"
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Puzzle Writing
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But Not Limited To:
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THE SCIENCE (volume 1)
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Everybody Loves a Poetry Critic (volume 1: January 8, 2008 - December 8, 2012)
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Everybody Loves a Poetry Critic (volume 2: January 10, 2013 - December 28, 2020)
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review of E. C. Tubb's World of Promise by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 22, 2026 I've read 14 of the Dumarest of Terra series so far (including this one) & it's been, predictably, an up & down experience for me. Most of them have been engaging review of E. C. Tubb's World of Promise by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 22, 2026 I've read 14 of the Dumarest of Terra series so far (including this one) & it's been, predictably, an up & down experience for me. Most of them have been engaging, a few have been almost insufferably repetitious. This one was on the more enjoyable end of the spectrum b/c it deviated slightly & introduced the academic context at its most pernicious. That worked for me. There's often a carnival scene in wch thrills for the debauched are on offer. "drugs to heighten perception, others to increase the sensitivity of nerves so that a touch became an ecstasy, a kiss unendurable pleasure; compounds to dull, to distort, to change; salves, pills, tablets—the girl offered them all. ""And you, my lord?" Her eyes met Dumarest's. "Is there nothing you desire?" "Nothing she could supply and she must have read the answer in his eyes. Oddly her own filled with tears. ""I am sorry, my lord," she whispered, "So very sorry." "A sensitive? It was possible, carnivals and fairs were natural resting places for such misfits. But what had she seen to make her cry? What had she guessed?" - p 12 "A sensitive"? Always a good idea. As usual, Dumarest commits an act of dangerous heroism, this time to save a child from a genetically modified fighting creature, is nearly killed, & awakens under the medical care of a beautiful woman who just-so-happens to be the woman who engineered the fighting creature in the 1st place. Small world, eh?! ""Intravenous feeding," she explained, unnecessarily. "You've been under slowtime, six weeks subjective." "Over a normal day he had lain, his metabolism speeded by the drug, healing with accelerated tempo. Even though he'd been fed, his body showed signs of wastage. ""You were cut up pretty badly inside," she explained casually." - p 20 Yeah, What's new, there, eh, Dumarest? Gee, I wonder if this woman will seduce him? ""Earl?" She was insistent. "Drink, Earl, Drink!" "Light and music. Shine and glitter and the sweet brittle tinkling of endlessly ringing crystal. The perfume assaulted his senses and turned his yearning into an impatient fire. "Pheremones, chemical messengers emitted by her glands to trigger his masculine response. An aphrodisiac against which there was no defense. A demand impossible for him to resist." - p 26 The details of his depiction of an academic planet are one of Tubb's innovations here. "The fear was always present and each time after a new intake came the moment of truth. If student enrollment was low in certain subjects then she was wrong to have agreed they should be included in the curriculum. If tutors proved unpopular, the same. Too many mistakes and she would have demonstrated her failure to make valid judgments. One too many and her career would be in ruins. And she was too old to start again." - p 40 This is also the bk in wch the previous bk (The Terra Data my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ) is referred to as a more-or-less direct precursor to the events at hand. Most of the other bks start 'fresh', there're previously written-about events referred to but not as if they were of the recent past in the story timeline. Having read The Terra Data not long before this one, I enjoyed that. ""Did you know a man named Boulaye? A geologist?" As she nodded Dumarest reached out his hand and dropped something into her palm. "He sent you this." "She stared at it, not noticing the warning red flash from the lantern on the table, her eyes filled with the soft blue effulgence of the metal she cupped in her hand. A nugget large enough to fashion a delicate bracelet or a heavy ring. "Juscar," she said wonderingly, "So Rudi found his mine." "He had found it and lost it together with his life" - p 45 This was published in 1980. I was alive & partying in 1980, in my late 20s. I find this description of a party entertaining. "Someone with a taste for the bizarre had decorated the room with skulls and bones, death masks and symbols culled from ancient graves. The music matched the decor: wailing threnodies which stung the ears and sent ants to crawl over the skin; mathematical discords set in jarring sequences which created unease and irritation. A condition aided by the glare of strobotic lighting which three faces in unreal prominence with various shades of livid color." - p 49 Seems IRRITAINING as Herr Stiletto Studios might say. "And all from the same mold—students who had graduated to stay on and take post-graduate studies and then to become assistants and gain doctorates and gain a professorial chair; prisoners in a system which fed on itself to create more; academics lacking the spirit or courage to break free of the surrogate womb and blinding themselves to the reality beyond the university walls." - p 56 Well, I didn't take any more reviewer notes after referring to that to be quoted. I reckon there probably wasn't anything that seemed noteworthy to me. I'm sure Earl Dumarest of Terra came really close to what he was looking for, the coordinates to Earth, but was thwarted after some near-death struggles. I enjoyed it but I'm sure I can live w/o reaching the climax of all this, presumed to be in the last bk of the series. ...more |
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review of the Seth Siegelaub organized The Halifax Conference by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 8, 2026 The complete review will eventually be on its own webpage here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticH... [The cover here is different from th review of the Seth Siegelaub organized The Halifax Conference by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 8, 2026 The complete review will eventually be on its own webpage here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticH... [The cover here is different from the cover I have but the edition's close enuf] I picked up this bk b/c I saw that some of the artists in it are: Carl Andre, Elaine Baxter, Iain Baxter, Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, Jan Dibbets, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, & Lawrence Weiner. Of those 12, Burin, Dibbets, Merz, Morris, Iain Baxter (as "N.E. Thing Co."), & Weiner were in the Ursula Meyer edited Conceptual Art (1972) bk, an art bk probably in my top 10 of art bks of the most importance to me. Seth Siegelaub, the organizer of the conference, I knew of as one of the primary promoters of Conceptual Art, starting in the 1960s in NYC. As such, I was expecting this to be a document from an early conference in wch ideas about Conceptual Art wd've been bandied about. I expected it to be rich in ideas. INSTEAD? I found it to be rich in domineering political outspokeness. Even tho the conference took place over several hrs over 2 days I found that very little was accomplished by it. Many of the participants never even sd a word. All in all, reading the transcript was quite a weird experience for me, it was entering into an argument that didn't seem to really go anywhere. The appendix at the end from the Art Workers' Coalition is much more coherent & much less ego-driven. That sd, I'm glad I read this, I wonder if there're any conferences that're more recent that have this much conflict in them. "Disturbed by the video recording and public transmission of the conference, several artists—Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, and Robert Morris—refused to enter the boardroom to take part in the discussions. Led by an enraged Serra, they addressed the students directly on Oct. 5 about their concerns. Serra and Smithson left Halifax the morning of Oct. 6 without further participation. Morris remained to deliver his diatribe during Session Five." - p -v Unfortunately (unless I missed it somehow) there's no documentation of what was sd directly to the students. As a person who tries to document things thoroughly w/ vaudeo (video) it's difficult for me to relate to their objections, even w/ allusions to these objections expressed during the sessions I find them unclear. The 3 artists who bowed out in protest are all people whose work I'm familiar w/ so that was a disappointment. Some artists, such as Michael Snow, didn't speak at all.. so that was a disappointment. Joseph Beuys, Lawrence Weiner, & Carl Andre, all spoke quite a bit. I've had a strong dislike for Weiner's work, been somewhat indifferent to Beuys's, & been ambivalent to Andre's. Beuys "Yes. It is the same mind, you could say, that a new born child is able to make a good quality artwork politically. That is the same mind in another constellation... "Weiner "But he is less capable of an artist to talk about it. That's the difference: He can't tell you about it. That means he's politically irresponsible. Political irresponsibility which is a Marxist crime." - p 1-12 ??!! "a new born child is able to make a good quality artwork politically"??!! What?! I find that more than a little difficult to agree w/, a newborn child is more likely to be shitting itself, crying, & reaching for its mother's breast. If I were to do that as an old man it might be "a good quality artwork politically" but I think I'd have to make a good case for it. As for Weiner's reply that a newborn child is "politically irresponsible. Political irresponsbility which is a Marxist crime", I find that even more demented. If one were to put a newborn child behind the wheel of a moving truck & were then to jump out of the vehicle I don't think I'd hold the newborn responsible for the resultant accident, it wd be the adult who put the baby there that'd be in trouble. How can a newborn be expected to be "politically irresponsible" or politically ANYTHING when they're fresh out of the womb & completely unaware of any imperatives other than instinctual survival ones?! Weiner & Andre both come across as strident leftists of a Marxist bent (no anarchists need apply). That really surprised me since I'd never gotten that from their work. I imagine it's there, at least in Weiner's case, so I'll have to give it a more attentive look. Weiner has an extensive dialog w/ a painter that I'd never heard of named Richard Smith. "Weiner Well, would you agree with me on my position: After you make the art, when you make it, it's art. After, in any way that a culture accepts it. it becomes history, and it no longer is art, it's history. Would you accept that? Smith "No, I think that this is up to the individual response. Certain artworks in the past become solely history. Other artworks can be viewed as history, but you can also view them as tired." - p 1-16 Wow. I find Weiner's assertion interesting but it makes no sense to me. He proposes an 'either/or' situation in wch it's implied that no other possibility exists. Why are "art" & "history" mutually exclusive? Smith's reply is equally nonsensical to me: "Certain artworks in the past become solely history"?! Really??!! "you can also view them as tired"?!: These statements seem empty to me, in disguise as somehow 'logical'. "Weiner "I can't speak for anyone else left in this room, but perhaps there are artists who have accepted the designation "artist" as an economic survival measure. But they're not quite sure if they're artists anyway. They know that they're involved in cultural politics and they know they're involved in cultural action, but they don't know if they're artists. But they accept the designation "artist" as an economic survival method." - pp 1-24-1-25 To me, that's one of the more intelligent things that Weiner says. I don't usually call myself an artist b/c I think that art is an outmoded context for creativity, I prefer my own terminology. Unfortunately, the things I make are often reliant on an infrastructure for their presentation & that infrastructure usually operates under an arts umbrella. I make movies, e.g., & movie theaters are generally defined as places where art is presented. Declining the label "art" is likely to lead to lack of support by Arts Councils & such-like. Arts Reporters won't write about the work. Every creative activity 'has to' be corralled into the arts enclosure in order to be acceptable. Paintings sold out of an up-scale gallery are paintings that're being marked as being of investment value. The very same paintings sold at a yard sale are marked as worthless. The context is what determines the value, little to nothing of the actual object has a part in this determination. If the maker plays along w/ the established market they're much more likely to thrive financially. Outside that, they're barely respected at all. "Smith "So, it's cocktails. "(WEINER, SMITH, and DIBBETS rise and exit the boardroom. The others remain seated.) "END OF SESSION 1" - p 1-35 That's that for October 5, 1970. It doesn't seem to me that much was accomplished given that this was a situation full of fantastic promise. Andre "I don't know what to call it, "advanced art," um, although the word is hated, "experimental art," "research art," or what. Or whatever you want to call it. I don't care what the name is because I don't put any value on the container. "Weiner "How about "contemporary art"? "Andre "No, because, that includes Andrew Wyeth, who is in an entirely different commodity slot, I think." - p 2-74 Andre may not "put any value on the container" but I'm sure he'd object if his work were sold as Neo-Nazi Art or Cutie-Pie Art or Joseph-was-a-carpenter Art or some other wildly inappropriate contextualizing. The problem w/ wholesale labeling is that the maker's intentions aren't necessarily taken into consideration & the way the art is skewed in consequence becomes accepted as 'fact'. Andre "What I'm saying is artists and people related to art find a tremendous resistance to analysis, an economic analysis of their own profession, their own milieu, their own life-system within a larger life-system. If you go to your gallery, and try to negotiate terms with your gallery, they'll say: "Oh, it's so expensive. Expenses here, expenses there." And I'll say, what expensies? Let's see it in black and white. And they'll say, "Oh you can't write it down. You can't write it down. It's a lot." Whenever there is this mystification surrounding any area of human knowledge, know there's huggabug and skullduggery going on there." - p 2-76 That makes me far more interested in Andre then I've ever been before. I saw a wood sculpture of his at the Baltimore Museum of Art long ago, maybe as much as 45 or 50 yrs ago. It amazed me b/c it was basically just a box but there were no right angles, everything was very subtle & the joining was perfect, no seam cd be seen. As craft it was extraordinary. ANYWAY, what he says above about art world economics is very interesting to me. It seems to me that the 'value' of an art object is mainly as an object of investment manipulation. An artist makes something, if it's displayed by a gallery the gallery owners try to convince a potential buyer that the work will accrue value. From there, the object moves from one owner to another, each successive buyer gambling on a dramatic increase in value in a fairly short amt of time. The person stuck w/ the work at a high cost, unable to resell it at an even higher cost, is the loser - or a person w/ a longer-view vision of the value. Of course, the gallery owner will avoid being pinned down b/c they're taking a chance that they may not be able to maximally profit so they screw the artist as much as possible in the meantime. "Smith "Well, for instance, this conference. I was talking to the PR man from Benson & Hedges, and its cost his company £40,000." - 2-80 In 1970, when the conference happened, that wd've been the equivalent of $96,000 US. That's about $826,273 as of the time of this writing (August, 2026). That's quite an investment assuming that Benson & Hedges was hoping for cultural cred advertising. "In 1970, major cigarette brands like Benson & Hedges (owned by Philip Morris) typically invested tens of millions of dollars annually across total marketing and media campaigns. Exact per-campaign line-item budgets for individual brands from that era are proprietary and rarely published, but industry figures show parent company Philip Morris spent roughly $50 to $70 million per year on overall domestic advertising before the 1971 broadcast ban." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benson_... It's interesting too that a "broadcasting ban" wd've been imposed w/in a yr of the Halifax Conference. Were they investing in a legal loophole for future adverttising? "Beuys "No, "quality" means very, very good work. Quality. "Andre "It's a bourgeois class myth. "Beuys "No. "END OF SESSION 2" - p 2-86 In the above, Beuys & Andre argue about the comcept of "quality". This interests me partially b/c in 2002 I was invited to be on a board of curators for a proposed performance series at the Brew House in Pittsburgh. There wasn't any overall unifying concept or any plan at all. One of the curatorial board members sd something to the effect that they just wanted to present "quality product". I thought that was funny b/c it seemed like a business term, something that might be in a supermarket ad - so I proposed that our series be called "Quality Product", a name that was immediately adopted. Adding to the humor, the same person who sd "quality product" then attacked me when I proposed that I give a performance, apparently not acknowledging that my previous history of roughly 45 yrs of performance might qualify me. Strangely enuf, she had scheduled her band to play, a band in wch she played guitar. Even tho I never heard of her band before or since she apparently didn't have any critiques of her own qualifications. People interested in my history as a 'performer' might be interested in this movie of mine: "You Hid to be There" - 1920 X 1440, 29.97fps - 3:08:08 - finished August, 2025 - on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/you-hid-t... An endnote to this section informs tha reader that: "On May 2, 1970, four months prior to the Halifax Conference, Carl Andre helped organize a protest by the ArtWorkers' Coalition alongside the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition at the MoMA, New York, for its "undemocratic" policies. The AWC originally included Andre, Lippard, John Perreault, Irving Petlin, Rosemarie Castoro, Hans Haacke, Max Kozloff, and Willoughby Sharp." - p 2-87 Now, Castoro & Haacke were also in the aforementioned Conceptual Art bk & Wllloughby Sharp was the editor of Avalanche magazine, another important publication to me. I wasn't expecting such a politically charged tone to this conference. Heightening this is that "Appendix D" is a section on the AWC that provides this: "The ArtWorkers' Coalition began to form in early 1969 through meetings held by several artists and critics in New York City. By Feb. 1969 thirteen demands had been identified, which were then boiled down to elevan in June, and finally revised slightly to apply to all museums in March 1970." [..] "1. The Board of Trustees of all museums should be made up of one-third museum staff, one-third patrons and one-third artists, if it is to continue to act as the policy-making body of the museum...." - p D-181 Of course, that's just the tip of the artberg but I just wanted to give you a taste. More political activism that informed the Halifax Conference was from Feminists. "Siegelaub (reading from a pad of paper) "A telegram that was read to me over the phone last night said: "Pay your dues. We are due for ours. Women Art Workers."" - p 2-41 A different endnote on p 2-87 informs the reader: "It has long been assumed Lucy R. Lippard was the author of the telegram read aloud by Siegelaub the morning of Oct. 6. Lippard has confirmed her contemporary critique of the Halifax Conference and thinks the telegram was likely sent on behalf of the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists" [..] "A telegram sent on the afternoon of Oct. 6, 1970, was recently discovered in a previously sealed and restricted folder held at the NSCAD University Library. This telegram reads as follows: "International Conference on the Future of Art Nove Scotia College of Art...Mail chauvinist pig artist stop everythin remove pants now that you've got that straight jerk-off on the future of art whil you still can replace pants contemplate your obsolescence. Te Sisterhood. [sic]" - p 2-87 This 2nd telegram was apparently from a different group of women than the 1st one. If I were a woman artist I'd probably feel that the almost entirely male participantion was an act of sexual discrimination & I'd feel angry. There were plenty of great women artists in 1970: Adrian Piper, Valie EXPORT, & Leonora Carrington immediately come to mind. I do want to make it clear, tho, that the emphasis on women artists in an artistic context can be just as cynical & explotative as its supposed patriarchical nemesis. To give an example: I was invited to be a part of a VHS video compilation around 2001. I might've been the 1st person to contribute, the 2nd was another man. The originator of the project realized that she cd get grant money if she made it an all-women compilation so the men were excluded. She made the all-women comp & got funding for it that she used to get a new computer, wch was she wanted all along. Was she righting the wrongs of exclusion of women in 2001? Hardly, for one thing she cdn't have cared less, for another thing, those wrongs had long-since been reversed. Her purpose was to get a new computer & she was just cynically exploiting the appearance of feminism to make it happen. But that was 2001, not 1970. In 1970 the sexism was clearly in favor of men. "Andre {Raising his voice gradually) "The Rockefeller family, the Mellon family, the Ford family. The families of ... "Murray (Bothered) "Oh my god! Essentially, how many of those families are really involved in art and the war effort? "Andre "Have you heard of the Mellon Foundation? The Rockefeller Foundation? The Museum of Modern Art?" - pp 3-92-3-93 Notice that Murray says "the war effort". That's a euphemism meant to sanitize mass murder. Conceptual Artist Hans Haacke did a great piece at MoMA where he asked attendees to drop ballots in a transparent box. One side was for people who opposed Rockefeller's support of the Vietnam War, the other was for those who were in favor of it. Most were against Rockefeller. Rockefeller was not only a politician, he was a money source behind MoMA. Hence Haacke's poll. "Held (Assertively) "It is essentially a question of good citizenship here. And so far the idea or the notion that the artist has the right solution on moral citizenship . . . I just think, ah, it doesn't make too much sense to me. I think it's conceivable to me that someone could be a fascist son of a bitch and a good artist. And you could have good art that's immoral." - 4-117 I can agree w/ that. It's not so cut'n'dry that 'good people make good artists make good art'. Look at Marinetti, primary mover of the Italian Futurists: he was allied from time-to-time w/ Fascist leader Mussolini & participated in the burning of a Communist bkstore. He was also more inspired than, IMO, most artists of the time. It's been previously mentioned that Robert Morris, one of the people who refused to participate in the conference, "remained to deliver his diatribe during Session Five." (p -v) Below is an excerpt from that: "Is there any sense, in addition, to the idea of putting out a book, which in itself is a certain kind of information passed on through another kind of medium? I think that's one of the great errors of our time. To put out something with peripheral and minor information, for us, continuous and always there, is . . ." - pp 5-155-5-156 ...more |
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review of H. G. Wells's Love and Mr. Lewisham by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 3, 2026 I'm continuing my spree of reading work by H. G. Wells. I've read 5 SF bks by him & 6 'straight' realist novels. He's reputed to've written over 100 bks so I review of H. G. Wells's Love and Mr. Lewisham by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 3, 2026 I'm continuing my spree of reading work by H. G. Wells. I've read 5 SF bks by him & 6 'straight' realist novels. He's reputed to've written over 100 bks so I've barely scratched the surface. I think he's remarkable. I feel like he's falling by the memory pool wayside. [I checked 2 bkstores recently, I found nothing by Wells at one & only The Time Machine & War of the Worlds at the other.] I hope to counterbalance that. I started off very enthusiastically reading this one.. then it became too sad for me. He depicts people trapped in their financial bracket. I've been there.. in fact, I'm still there, possibly worse than ever. I never had kids, partially b/c I felt like I cd never afford to take care of them. But even more importantly, I wanted to dedicate myself as much as possible to my 'work', wch I've done. Still, choosing to not have kids b/c you 'can't afford them' is one of those absolutely insane traps that many of us find ourselves in b/c we're constantly struggling & not privileged. Anyway, this bk isn't about not having kids, it's about being trapped in financial circumstances beyond one's control & drowning in it. There's an Introduction written by Benny Green. "Of the four Wellsian heroes rooted in the youth of their creator, George Edgar Lewisham is the only one not trapped behind the counter of a drapery emporium. While Hoopdriver, Kipps and Polly, their inchoate sighs muffled behind bales of cretonne at four-and-eleven-three-farthings, seem doomed to go haberdashing haplessly down a predestined path ending in a pensionless cul-de-sac, Lewisham is a sternly dedicated intellectual, a young man on the threshold of dazzling academic honours, a threadbare seeker after truth who digests six impossible irregular verbs before breakfast, whose every waking hour is dedicated to the subtlest of all the taxidermist's arts, the stuffing of his own brain with as many abstruse facts as can be acquired. With his degrees and his diplomas brandished like tilted lances, he will smash his way out of the prison of Class and become master of his fate." - p v No such luck. "the fifteen year-old Wells was swept up in yet another family campaign to turn him into a draper's assistant, a condition of life he had already so far outstripped that he records in his autobiography the comical incongruity of the juxtaposition between his daily duties and the speculative philosophic abstractions to which he was becoming increasingly committed. Discussing one day the nebulosities of pantheism and atheism with a fellow-prisoner, his ruminations were received as follows: 'God may be everywhere', said Platt, 'or God may be nowhere. That's HIS look out. It doesn't alter the fact we've got to stack these bloody cretonnes before eleven.' " - pp vi-vii "Mr Lewisham as a very carefully planned, and meticulously written book, one of his few attempts to compose a novel artistically instead of assaulting it journalistically. Years later the irrepressible empirical scientist in him regretted all the agonizing over midnight oil and thought that perhaps the outcome might have been better had Jamesian strategems been thrown to the winds and his muse allowed to rip. But for better or for worse, Love and Mr Lewisham makes a consciously controlled book, full of ironic undertones, not the least bitter of which is to be found in its title. Love and Mr Lewisham sounds like a hymn to romance, but that is not at all what is intended, as the reader very soon begins to realize. The story is a cautionary tale in which two elements of the title are in deadly opposition." - p viii Maybe it's the "meticulously written" aspect of this that I responded to so strongly when I 1st started reading it. On the other hand, I'm not really so sure I detected that any more than I have in the other Wells novels I've read. "Throughout a long and pugnacious life Wells swept aside with a derisory flick of his intelligence all the pernicious twaddle of the supernatural and the occult. He was the exemplary logician, whose intensity of gaze saw through the blowsy rhetoric of the politicians, the received wisdom of the priests, the canting hypocrisy of the moralists." - p xv But that didn't stop him from writing stories of the supernatural (see my review of H. G. Wells's A Dream of Armageddon - The complete Supernatural Tales here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticA... ). The relationship & conflict between Lewisham & his father-in-law, a fraudulent medium, is one of many interesting aspects of this bk. The 'medium' is smarter than Lewisham & better at argument & ultimately self-identifies as a 'knave'. Lewisham starts off as a 'nose-to-the-grindstone' scholar w/ efficient habits. "He was sitting facing the diamond-framed window, writing, writing fast, on a second yellow box that was turned on end and empty, and the lid was open, and his knees were conveniently stuck into the cavity. The bed was strewn with books and copygraphed sheets of instructions from his remote correspondence tutors." - p 4 The use of the inverted yellow box seems uncomfortable to me but Necessity is the Mother of Invention & I admire that. Lewisham's 1st love is moving away & communication between them seems unworkable. " 'How are you to write to me?' she asked, and they discussed a new obstacle between them. It would never do to write home—never. She was sure of that with an absolute assurance. 'My mother—' she said and stopped. "The prohibition cut him, for at that time he had the makings of a voluminous letter writer. The whole world was unpropitious—obdurate indeed. . . . A splendid isolation à deux." - p 42 Wells uses writerly tricks that I find amusing. One is where he addresses an imaginary observer w/in the world of his story: "(Surveying him, Madam, your eye would inevitably have fallen to his collar—curiously shiny, a surface like wet gum. Although it has practically nothing to do with this story, I must, I know, dispose of that before I go on, or you will be inattentive." - p 55 Mr Lewisham has taken to wearing a red tie. "Where had you seen a crowd—red ties abundant and in some way significant? The truth has to be told. Mr Lewisham had become a Socialist !" - p 56 Wells is always direct in his support of Socialism, his leading characters are always aware of how the class structures they're born into restrict the manifestations of their qualities & of their financial mobility. " 'And have you read Looking Backward?' " 'I want to.' " It's interesting that Bellamy's bk gets recommened in other bks I've read. I've read Looking Backward long ago but don't remember it any more. I've read something inspired by it by Mack Reynolds too.. but I don't really remember that either. What do you make of that?! Mr Lewisham finally meets his father-in-law, the con artist medium, Mr. Chaffery, in person. Chaffery knows that Lewisham disapproves of his chicanery so he proceeds to intellectually intimidate Lewisham. "He grimaced and dropped his glasses against his waistcoat buttons. 'I'm very glad of that,' he said, replacing them. 'The Dissenter, the Nonconformist Conscience, the Puritan, you know, the Vegetarian and Total Abstainer, and all that sort of thing. I cannot away with them. I have cleared my mind of cant and formulae.['] " - p 154 Chaffery continues: " 'Now I am prepared to maintain,' said Chaffery, proceeding with his proposition, 'that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilisation made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even violent Lying['] " - p 161 & as an honest anarchist I'm somewhat inclined to agree.. but that's part of my critique of the status quo NOT a critique of honesty & anarchism. I often say that politicians MUST be liars in order to represent their constituency. " [']You know Right from Wrong ! My boy, so did Adam and Eve . . . so soon as they'd had dealings with the father of lies !' " - p 168 Lewisham is desperately trying to get a job so that he can make ends meet. To his dismay, the people in positions to help him get one have philosophies not that different from his father-in-law's. "For the first time in his life Lewisham faced the necessity of telling a lie in cold blood. He glassaded from the austere altitudes of his self-respect and his next words were already disingenuous. " 'I won't promise to tell lies if I'm asked,' he said aloud. 'I can't do that.' " 'Scratch it out,' said Blendershin to the clerk. 'You needn't mention it. Then you don't say you can teach drawing.' " 'I can't,' said Lewisham. " 'You just give out the copies,' said Blendershin" - p 180 All in all, this was an excellent realist novel. The thing is, I find reality depressing - at least social reality.. wch was where this novel was placed. ...more |
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review of J. G. Ballard's Hello America by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 2, 2026 There was a time when J. G. Ballard was certainly in my Top 10 favorite SF writers, probably in my Top 50 writers in general. I read everything I cd get by him. Th review of J. G. Ballard's Hello America by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 2, 2026 There was a time when J. G. Ballard was certainly in my Top 10 favorite SF writers, probably in my Top 50 writers in general. I read everything I cd get by him. Then, gradually, I started losing interest, I'd still get his bks.. but I wdn't read them. The last time I posted mention of any of them was a decade ago. I'm surprised to discover that I've listed 20 of his bks as ones I've read but I'm not sure I've actually reviewed any of them. If I have, I might've done so in my early days of Goodreads 'reviewing' when I wrote very superficially. Hopefully, this review will be more substantial. Ballard's Crash & Empire of the Sun have been made into big budget movies. I've read them both & liked them very much. I've witnessed both the movies too & was less enthusiastic about Cronenberg's Crash. I don't really remember Empire of the Sun. I've been told there's a movie of The Atrocity Exhibition too but I haven't witnessed that one. I made a movie in 1988 called "EYE-TRACKING" that uses text from The Atrocity Exhibition but it's very NO BUDGET & doesn't, really, deserve that much credit (even though I like it). Alan Price made a short computer animation based on The Crystal World in 1992. I remember that as very good. Hello America seems to me to've been written in the hope that it'd be turned into yet-another big budget movie. I hope it will be someday b/c it wd excellent as such. This was originally written in 1980, copyrighted in 1981, but this edition was released after Ballard's death in 2009. The setting is roughly 100 yrs in the future, the United States has been almost entirely deserted by its inhabitants & has turned largely to desert b/c of a damming of the Bering Strait. Transportation has reverted to more primitive manifestations b/c fuel has practically disappeared &, therefore, electricity has too. "As he reached the deck a cloud of soot-flakes fell from the funnel and covered the glowing fore-sail with hundreds of fireflies. Crew and passengers crowded the rail, waiting impatiently while the antique engines of the Apollo, clearly exhausted by the seven-week voyage across the Atlantic, laboured against the slack coastal water." - p 14 A small scientific expedition has come from Europe, complete w/ stowaway Wayne, to investigate high levels of radioactivity in abandoned US cities. "Dozens of towers rose through the afternoon light. Even at a distance of three miles the glass curtain walling of these huge buildings glowed like bronze mirrors, as if the streets below them were stacked with bullion. Wayne could see the old Empire State Building, venerable patriarch of the city, the twin columns of the World Trade Center, and the 200-storey OPEC Tower which dominated Wall Street, its neon sign pointing toward Mecca." - p 15 "Perhaps McNair saw in Wayne's determination to reach the United States something of his own intense need to get away from a tired and candle-lit Europe with its interminable rationing and subsistence living, its total lack of any flair and opportunity." - pp 15-16 Wayne rises in stature from stowaway to leader. " 'Think, Wayne—the forty-fifth President of the United States . . .' " - p 18 The 44th President, unbeknownst to Ballard, was Barack Obama, 2009-2017. Donald Trump was the 45th (& is currently the 47th). Hhmm, let's see, Wayne vs Donald. One of the characters is a pompous professor faking his 'knowledge'. "He now stood beside Professor Summers, calling out landmarks to her. " 'There's the Ford Building, Anne, and the Arab Quarter. If you look closely you can see the Lincoln Memorial . . .' " - p 21 Yeah, you know, the Lincoln Memorial in NYC?! (NOT) Damming the Bering Strait & the consequences? Ballard has always been a leading figure w/ dire prophecies about humanity-induced ecological change. "These impressive feats of geo-engineering steadily transformed the landscape of the American continent. Chief among them was the damming of the shallow waters of the Bering Straits between Siberia and Alaska. By pumping the cold Arctic water south into the Pacific, so that warmer Atlantic currents would flow into the Arctic Circle through the Greenland Gap, the entire climates of northern Europe and Siberia were revitalised. For the first time, winter temperatures rose above freezing point, permafrost melted, and millions of acres of wilderness were reclaimed for agriculture and coal-mining, summer wheat-crops were harvested well within the Arctic Circle." - pp 54-55 The expedition discovers small groups of nomads still surviving in what's left of the US. Some of them have taken their names from the surviving giant corporate signs. " 'You ask GM and Xerox. Weren't a vision at all, Captain.' " 'Dad's right—giant space-ship, no doubt about that, Captain.' The son, GM, a restless youth with a scarred face, lifted his ancient M16 to the dark sky. 'Higher than the OPEC Tower and Empire State together.' " 'Just hung there,' added his wife Xerox. She sat in tandem behind her husband, bright-eyed and pregnant, little more than a child. 'I thought it was coming to take us up to heaven.' " 'That's it, heaven . . .' The fourth nomad, Pepsodent, a strong, solemn young negro, spoke with a deep sigh. 'It moved off to the south, like telling us to leave, get away before the big quake comes.' " - p 70 One of the strange (& slightly irritating for me) things about Ballard's writing is his frequent use of simile: the pages are peppered w/ "like" such'n'such & "like" so'n'so". It's as if he cdn't be bothered to express it any other way. Then there's the psychology: "Under the guise of crossing America, as Wayne soon discovered, they were about to begin that far longer safari across the diameters of their own skulls." - p 81 The expedition reaches an unexpected version of Las Vegas where many aspects of 20th century US culture are still alive & well. Take the music, e.g.. "Ursula touched a tab, and immediately Elvis Presley filled the car with his powerful beat. An old style disc jockey cut in, his commentary a high-pitched gabble of show-business gossip, airline information and plugs for a local automobile dealer. " 'Ursula, for God's sake . . . ' Paco gripped the reverberating bowl of his helmet. 'We;re supposed to be on duty.' "Ursula grudgingly reduced the volume, her vivid eyebrows raised for Wayne's benefit. 'Paco, you're too serious . . . all the time that Stravinsky, Stockhausen and John Cage. When are you going to come dancing? Wayne, I'll show you my jive steps. Or maybe you're the tango type?' " - p 135 Elvis vs Cage & Stockhausen?! What's not to love? "The Giraffe paused among the pools of water in Fremont Street, raised its delicate muzzle in the rain-washed air and gazed at the glittering façade of the Golden Nugget. As it continued its elegant hobble along the deserted pavement, Wayne rested on the pedals of the Gossamer Albatros, three hundred feet above. The previous night's lightning had cut swathes through the jungle to the north of Las Vegas, driving this gentle creature into the suburbs of the city." - p 159 It's imagery like this that wd drive a Hollywood Blockbuster into fantastic splendour. Dr. Fleming is the mad scientist behind the more outré elements of the story. One of his inventions is a pedal-powered glider made of glass. " [']All you need is a diamond cutter and a reel of steel wire and you can turn one of these out a day. A team of forty or fifty men working together could build an air force in next to no time.' Dr Fleming smiled casually at Wayne. 'In fact, that's what I have in mind—forty-four men, to be exact . . . ' " 'Forty-four—?' " 'Forty-four Presidents!' Dr Fleming chuckled" - p 178 Why hasn't this been made into a big budget movie yet? It has more than the usual amt of everything-you-need. "When J. G. Ballard passed in April 2009, the reading world lost one of its most prophetic writers." - p 235 & I agree! ...more |
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review of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's Dancing in the Streets by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 1, 2026 This is something like my 34th bk.. not counting Artists' Bks, wch wd bring it up to 38, not counting Chapbks, wch wd bring it up to 40 or mo review of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's Dancing in the Streets by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 1, 2026 This is something like my 34th bk.. not counting Artists' Bks, wch wd bring it up to 38, not counting Chapbks, wch wd bring it up to 40 or more. Let's say 34. I try to make each bk (or group of bks) different from each other in terms of content focus. Some of them are big &, by my standards, expensive; some are small & affordable for just about everybody. This is in the latter category, 6X9", 74pp, full color, a mere $8.00. i WANT PEOPLE TO BUY THEM & READ THEM COVER TO COVER. My 1st bk is called: t he bk t he referent 4 wch consists of t he non-materialized transparent punch-outs from a letter/whatever stencil & it's not written anywhere on t he bk. I think you'll agree that that's a unique title. Dancing in the Streets ISN'T a unique title. Looking for my own bk online I find 5 others but not mine. One of them is called Dancin' in the Streets! & is edited by Sureealist Franklin Rosemont. I'm interested in reading all of them. Mine, I reckon, is modest in comparison to the others. Nonetheless, I was fortunate to be able to get photographs relevant to or from the following people & events: Mark Knobil, retired PBS cameraman Paula Gillen, retired photo editor for The New Yorker magazine & someone I've been collaborating w/ for almost 50 yrs (see my website about her here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CoGil.html } mIEKAL aND, cofounder of The Festival of the Swamps, Xexoxial Endarchy, & Dreamtime Village Vermin Supreme: Intergalactic Ruler (not metrical or divided into inches) etta cetera, anarchist activist & artist extraordinaire What?! Collective, What Collective? HiTEC (Histrionic Thought Experiment Cooperative), well, really, colorful character Carlee Freeman Visionary Arts Festival, featuring Stephanie the Hula-Hoop Tamer John-Allen Gibel, a shaman, a philosopher, & a demonstrator of the Chicken Dance to children in Chandi Bhanjyang Village, Chitwan, Nepal; John-Allen's essay "ON THE ONTOLOGICAL WEAPONIZATION OF THE INCONVENIENT: A TREATISE CONCERNING THE EXISTENTIAL HAZARD POSED BY THE OEUVRE OF tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, AND THE URGENT NECESSITY OF HIS ASSIMILATION INTO COMMERCIAL ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA AS THE SOLE AVAILABLE PROPHYLACTIC AGAINST CIVILIZATIONAL COLLAPSE" graces the end of Dancing in the Streets & provides an appraisal of my Guerrilla Playfare that only a rare fellow traveler cd provide. Dmitry Veleskevich's "City - a place for Dreaming" is presented in stills from its incarnation in my "Limpolysemia" movie of the IMP ACTIVIST conference of the same name. Kommisar Hjuler, a former senior police detective, now an avant-garde performer provides a slide of a nude woman dancing on the beach as part of the packaging for one of the many records he publishes tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, well, there're images of & from me throughout; there're 2 stills of a slackliner named Ethan from a tENT movie called "Slacklining (M)Usic" Claire Elizabether Barrett, a dancer imitating a pose on a relief in Ephesus, Turkey Grayson Morris, someone I know next-to-nothing about but he provided 5 highly appropriate photos of, yes, people actually dancing in the streets tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, yes, well, w/ some assistance from Julie Gonzalez, there're 4 series of a feeble old 72 yr old not-even-coming-close to his vitality of 40 yrs before - still, it was worth a try Adam Welsh, an artist & musician of exceptional ability to pay attn to detail These people provide a (quasi-)panoply of extraordinarily active cultural workers of the last half-a-century. By the by, I DID eventually find this bk for sale online here: https://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Street... ...more |
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review of E. C. Tubb's The Terra Data by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 24, 2026 So close & yet so far. As I've written before, I bought something like 16 of these Dumarest of Terra novels in a lot off eBay just to give the author a whirl. I don't review of E. C. Tubb's The Terra Data by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 24, 2026 So close & yet so far. As I've written before, I bought something like 16 of these Dumarest of Terra novels in a lot off eBay just to give the author a whirl. I don't exactly regret it but I definitely have better things to do than read these. Nonetheless, I read them. They're easy & if & when I'm too exhausted for anything else, they're 'perfect'. I just now noticed that the skull on the cover has a hole in the middle of its forehead. That's a spoiler but who cares? I've kvetched before that these bks, being part of a serial, have too many repeating elements. Once you've read about the Tisane & the Basic & the Rafts & the Cyclan & High & Low Passage & all the rest you don't necessarily want to read about them again. & again. But if you read these bks you will. Again. & Again. This one devotes more time to the Cyclan than any of the others I've read yet. I suppose that's a trifle refreshing. As for women? Well, if you're Earl of Dumarest there're going to be one or more eager to have sex w/ you, eager to tell you how much they love you, & eager to destroy yr life if you won't let them own you. This bk's from 1980 so the yrs are slowly marching along here. "Ambition, even the emotionless aspirations of a cyber, had to accept the limitations pf reality. It took time for a cyber to gain the trust of a ruler. More to make himself indispensible. Years and even decades before the domination of the Cyclan could be so firmly established that nothing could shake it." - p 10 Jesuits, in other words. Honestly, I just want them, & all their fellow travelers, to fail & be done w/ it. One of the more unique aspects of this bk, in terms of the serial, not in terms of bks in general, is that there's a world where human culture is slowly deteriorating b/c of the widespread use of what one might call the "laissez-faire" drug, a drug that causes its user to feel like everything's ok the way it is & that, therefore, any effort beyond the hedonism of the moment is a waste of time. Or something like that. ""There's no manna in it, that I swear. I don't use the stuff. I saw what it did to the man who owned this place, my parents, too many others. Drink up, Earl, and let me work on those bruises."" - p 94 Each of the Dumarest novels puts the hero in an ever-more dangerous situation. The one in wch he uses the Affinity Twin to battle a giant undersea creature might've been my personal favorite. This time he's engaged in mining in an attempt to recover the "Terra Data" of the title. Much to no-one's surprise there's a mine cave-in in wch Dumarest saves a fellow miner by being what he always is: the guy w/ the courage & intelligence & strength to stick his neck out in just-the-right-way. &, yes, it's exciting. ""Watch!" Sven Axilia held a bowl of oil in which floated a burning wick. Gently he set it down on the floor of the tunnel and retreated to stand beside Dumarest. "Watch," he said again. "The tunnel was dark, external noises muffled by turns and distance, the tiny point of light throwing a clear, steady glow. Too steady as Dumarest knew. ""No drafts," he said. ""Which means no ventilation."" - p 121 "They were long, thin, perforated with countless holes rammed deep into the slope under Axilia's direction. The tanks Mtouba had supplied contained a blend of chemicals which, when mixed, generated a high-pressue, low-temperature gas of extreme permeability. Blasted from the nozzles it should create a bond to hold the loose detritus by the creation of ice. ""Ready?" Axilia stooped over the couplings. "Here we go!" "Frost whitened the union and nozzles, more coating the slope with a thin, glistening film. The miner lifted a warning hand as Toscaw moved in." - p 161 I continue reading these bks b/c I have them, they're quick & easy, & I want closure. There's always something to every bk that grabs my interest, in this case the mining particulars, but as a serial experience I find them rather tedious. Still, they're better than any SciFi adventure I've ever written (I haven't written ANY) so who am I to criticize?! ...more |
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review of H. G. Wells's The Croquet Player by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 15, 2026 This was really.. interesting. 1st, it's a hardback Viking Press bk, 6&1/4" X 9&3/8", w/ heavy paper designed to last & somewhat large print that's easy to read. T review of H. G. Wells's The Croquet Player by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 15, 2026 This was really.. interesting. 1st, it's a hardback Viking Press bk, 6&1/4" X 9&3/8", w/ heavy paper designed to last & somewhat large print that's easy to read. There're elegant line drawing illustrations by Clifton Line. It's a novella, only 98pp long, but given the full novel treatment by the publisher. What is it? Is it a comedy? A social satire? "The Croquet Player Introduces Himself": "I have been talking to two very queer individuals and they have produced a peculiar disturbance of my mind. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that they have infected me with some very strange and unplesant ideas." - p 9 "The ghost they told me about was something much larger than that, a haunting of a whole countryside" - p 10 The above vaguely introduces the 'mysterious evil' of the story, the following introduces the Croquet Player narrator: "I have soft hands and an ineffective will. I prefer not to make important decisions. My aunt has trained me to be her constant associate and, with displays and declarations on all possible occasions of an immense maternal passion for me, she has—I know it clearly—made me self-indulgent and dependent. Yet I do not blame her very much or resent it very much. It is how we two have been made. She was always been rich and free to do as she liked, not only with herself but with others, and I have always felt well off and secure. Our lives have been easy so far. Like most most well-born, well-off people, we have taken inferiors for granted, and the general good behaviour of the world towards us." - p 13 ""Reading crowds the memory and prevents one thinking."" - p 20 I take both of the above as a taste of class parody. Nonetheless, I don't find the bk to have an overwhelming moral about the stupidity & obliviousness of the character or the paranoid dementia of the 2 doctors who tell him their stories. The 1st dr claims to've set up practice in a marsh. It's there that the story of ghost-like malevolence begins: ""At first it did not seem to be of any particular significance that the traceable consumption of soporifics and opiates by this apparently insensitive population was not only remarkably high but increasing, nor that the proportion of suicides and inexplicable crimes—inexplicable as distinguished from normally motivated offences—over this part of the world was exceptional and apparently rising.["]" - p 30 Ah.. so what do you make of that? Ordinarily an increase in such things parallels an increase in despair, usually an economic despair, ways of making a living disappear, drugs to enable escapism from what seem like insoluble problems appear, drug dealers get rich off of the despair & escapism, the escapism leads to deeper entrapment, people get more deranged & commit crimes of a more deranged nature - but the explanation here isn't of such an obvious nature. The dr more & more decides that there's an increasing malevolence that's growing out of the land. ""There was an unusual terror of the dark. My old servant, I found, would not venture out after twilight to the pillar box a hundred yards away. She would make every sort of excuse and when she was cornered she refused absolutely to go.["]" - p 35 ""And then he bagan to talk less sanely. The evil was in the soil, he declared, underground. He laid great stress on the word 'underground.' He made a downward gesture with his quivering hand. There was something mighty and dreadful buried in Cainsmarsh.["]" - p 40 The dr conveying these paranoid fears goes to the local marsh vicar in search of some sort of wisdom on the matter. "["]He wanted suppression, he wanted persecution of Science, of Rome, of every sort of immorality and immodesty, of every sort of creed except his own, persecution, enforced repentance, to save us from the Wrath that was coming steadily upon us. 'They turn up the soil, they strip things bare, and we breathe the dust of long-dead men.' It was as if he was trying to escape from our common marshland obsession by sheer screaming violence. 'The doom of Cain!' he shouted, 'The punishment of Cain!'" - p 43 Perhaps the mst interesting idea in this bk is that the increasing malevolence & despair is caused by a change in humanity's relation to time. It's stated that animals live in the present but that humans live in the past, by excavating it, in the present, & in the future, by anticipating it. The increased evil is attributed to this, as if our savage past comes to haunt us as we become more aware of it. Such a theory may not be presented seriously by Wells but given that the bk was written by him in 1937, there were plenty of reasons for him to be sounding a warning of some sort, inspired by Nazism in Germany. In the meantime, the Croquet Player is being put off his game by imagining the cave man rearing up his head in the present. "The cave man was becoming more and more plainly a living presence as the story germinated in my mind." [..] "It made me inattentive so that in the afternoon my combinations at croquet were unusually shortsighted and poor, and in the evening I offended my aunt deeply by failing to play up to my usual form. She was against me, but, as she reckoned on my playing up to my usual form, she was surprised and perplexed by the things I did, and put off her game, so that she and her partner lost heavily." - p 81 Things are getting serious, eh? The Croquet Player meets the paranoid dr's psychotherapist only to find him even more abrasively paranoid than his patient. "["]Man is still what he was. Invincibly bestial, envious, malicious, greedy. Man, Sir, unmasked and disillusioned, is the same fearing, snarling, fighting beast he was a hundred thousand years ago. These are no metaphors, Sir.["]" - p 89 Is this comedy? Is it social satire? Anything that upsets one's croquest game is worrisome. ...more |
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Tentatively, Convenience
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review of H.G.Wells's In the Days of the Comet by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 11, 2026 I've been on a 'spree' of reading Wells lately, I read & reviewed A Dream of Armageddon - The complete Supernatural Tales ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Cri review of H.G.Wells's In the Days of the Comet by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 11, 2026 I've been on a 'spree' of reading Wells lately, I read & reviewed A Dream of Armageddon - The complete Supernatural Tales ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticA... ) & When the Sleeper Wakes ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). As I wrote in my review of the former: "It seems to me that I start every review of an H. G. Wells bk in pretty much the same way: Reading his The Time Machine was an instantiating experience of reading SF at an early age (12? 13?) of great importance to me; I had a picture of him & his wife sitting naked on the porch of a cabin in a nudist colony - this, too, made quite an impression on me." So, now I read my 5th SF work by him. I loved it. I'm even going to give it a 5 star rating. Why? B/c Wells manages to mesh together several threads of major importance to me: class anger & a Socialist perception thereof, personal passion that veers into the deranged, an SF intervention that rearranges everything, a new utopic society replacing a dismal & destructive industrial one. As I think is usually the case w/ Wells, it's very visionary. Wells uses a writerly device that seems to've been more common around the turn of the 19th-to-20th century than it is now, one that I've never been fond of: the finding of someone else's ms (in this case someone who's still alive & writing it - a slightly unusual deviance from the typical) that tells an extraordinary history. In this case, the author of the ms writes: "The passage of years brings a man at last to retrospection; at seventy-two one's youth is far more important than it was at forty." - p 9 Given that I'm now 72 as I write THIS that might be an element that influenced my enthusiasm. This was originally written in 1906. Things in the story enforce this time placement: "My memory takes me back across the interval of fifty years to a little ill-lit room with a sash window open to a starry sky, and instantly there returns to me the characteristic smell of that room, the penetrating odour of an ill-trimmed lamp, burning cheap paraffin. Lighting by electricity had then been perfected for fifteen years, but still the larger portion of the world used these lamps." - p 10 "Already we begin to forget how modern an invention is personal cleanliness. It is a fact that Parload had never stripped for a swim in his life; never had a simultaneous bath all over his body since his childhood. Not one in fifty of us did in the days of which I am telling you." - p 12 Wells communicates the specialness of Atheism & Socialism in this time: "We had shared each other's secret of religious doubt, we had confided to one another a common interest in Socialism," - p 13 Or is it that different from now? The problem of class has yet to be resolved, 120 yrs later: "There on the one hand in a crowded darkness, about the ugly factories and work-places, the workers herded together, ill clothed, ill nourished, ill taught, badly and expensively served at every occasion in life, uncertain even of their insufficient livelihood from day to day, the chapels and churches and public-houses swelling up amidst their wretched homes like saprophytes amidst a general corruption, and on the other, in space, freedom, and dignity, scarce heeding the few cottages, as over-crowded as they were picturesque, in which the labourers festered, lived the landlords and masters who owned the pot-banks and forge and farm and mine." [..] "We saw everything simple, as young men will. We had our angry, confident solutions, and whosoever would criticise them was a friend of the robbers. It was a clear case of robbery, we held, visibly so; there in those great houses lurked the Landlord and the Capitalist, with his scoundrel the Lawyer, with his cheat the Priest, and we others were all the victims of their deliberate villainies." - pp 24-25 Yes, it is a bit different now, the worst conditions have been moved to Mexico & elsewhere. The places left behind, like Flynt, Michigan, rot like an untended garden covered w/ toxins. Still, labor has made some strides forward, steelworkers retired at age 46 in Braddock w/ more to live on than workers like my book-keeper grandmother who worked for 56 yrs w/o ever having a chance to retire & who dropped dead at 74. "Rawdon and the Rawdonesque employer and the injustice of "wages slavery" and all the immediate conditions of that industrial blind alley up which it seemed our lives were thrust." - p 28 The main character's mother, who he lives w/, is an important figure to the plot. She's religious, long-suffering, & self-effacing. "her poor dear simple beliefs could not help me at all—and she did not understand! Hers was the accepted religion, her only social ideas were blind submissions to the accepted order—to laws, to doctors, to clergymen, lawyers, masters, and all respectable persons in authority over us, and with her to believe was to fear." - p 31 I have to wonder if Wells is describing his own mother here. I've read that he came from a lower middle-class background, as did I. His description of the character's mom is not too far from a description of my own. Nonetheless, the mom in the story dies fairly young, probably under 50, & mine made it to 93. Class struggle is central to this novel & is one of the reasons why I like it so much. "All my enormous hatred of his class had flared up at the sight of his costume, at the fancied challenge of his words. I knew him. He was Edward Verrall, son of the man who owned not only this great estate but more than half of Rawdon's pot-bank, and who had interests and possessions, collieries and rents, all over the district of the Four Towns. He was a gallant youngster, people said, and very clever. Young as he was there was talk of parliament for him; he had been a great success at the university, and he was being sedulously popularized among us. He took with a light confidence, as a matter of course, advantages that I would have faced the rack to get, and I firmly believed myself a better man than he." - p 52 I have a saying: "Some Arrogant Rich People Mistake Their Privilege for Superiority". That's probably true more often than not. But the most interesting thing, for me, about this novel, is that while Wells's sympathies are clearly Socialist, his solution ends up being a Deus ex machina Sci-Fi style. "I believe I should have gone striding athwart the dark stage of that stagnent industrial drama without asking a question, if Lord Redcar had not chanced to come upon the scene about the same time as myself and incontinently end its stagnation. "He had promised that if the men wanted a struggle he would put up the best fight they ever had, and he been active all the afternoon in meeting the quarrel half-way, and preparing as conspicuously as possible for the scratch force of "blacklegs"—as we called them—who were, he said and we believed, to replace the strikers in his pits." - p 64 Eventually war comes along. War is great for distracting the fighting classes as well as good for thinning their ranks. "there was not a man alive who could have told you of any real permanent benefit, of anything whatever to counter-balance the obvious waste and evil, that would result from a war between England and Germany" [..] "And the press was the chief instrument that kept these two huge multitudes of people directed against one another." - p 75 & the mass media is still the chief instrument of mind control 120 yrs later. AND THE AVERAGE PERSON SEEMS TO'VE STILL not figured out how to critique its malevolent influence, they still let it define reality for them. The story manages to cover alotof ground, using the propellent of the main character's jealous anger. ""You see," I said, "I'm a socialist. I don't think this world was made for a small minority to dance on the faces of everyone else." ""My dear fellow," said the Rev. Gabbitas, "I'm a socialist too. Who isn't? But that doesn't lead me to class hatred."" - p 102 Yes, the reverend is a 'socialist' too. "Who isn't?" Why everyone that it doesn't benefit. Things don't really go right for our (anti-)hero. Suicide, anyone? "I drew my revolver from my pocket and looked at it, and held it in my hand. Life? Or Death? . . . "I seemed to be probing the very deeps of being, but indeed imperceptibly I fell asleep, and sat dreaming." - p 124 During all this high tension, this drama, a comet was approaching the Earth. There wasn't much trepidation about the matter, humans were distracted by their usual attempting to kill each other. & then the Earth was in the tail of the comet, engulphed in green gases. "I felt very light, full of the sense of physical well-being. I perceived I was lying on my side in a little trampled space in a weedy, flowery barley field, that was in some inexplicable way saturated with light and beauty. I sat up, and remained for a long time filled with the delight and charm of the delicate little convolvulus that twined among the barley stems, the pimpernel that laced the ground below." - p 133 "Blinded, I made a step. My foot struck something hard, and I looked down to discover my revolver, a blue-black thing, like a dead snake at my feet. "For a moment that puzzled me. "Then I clean forgot about it. The wonder of the quiet took possession of my soul. Dawn, and no birds singing!" - pp 134-135 Do wonders never cease! Deus ex machina to the rescure. The comet has changed the composition of the air, primarily the nitrogen. &, this, in turn has changed the mood of humanity. Is this so preposterous? Perhaps.. but I find it brilliant. Imagine, the air becomes less polluted, e.g., & everyone breathes more easily.. & life generally improves. Hhmm.. "Men stood up; they took the new air into their lungs—a deep long breath, and the past fell from them; they could forgive, they could disregard, they could attempt. . . ." - p 139 Our hero soon crosses paths w/ a prominent statesman. This statesman, too, has become changed by the new air. ""Stop what?" said I, stepping forward instinctively to help him. ""War," he said in his great whisper, putting his big hand on my shoulder and making no further attempt to rise, "I'm going to put an end to war—to any sort of war! And all these things that must end. The world is beautiful, life is great and splendid, we had only to lift up our eyes and see.["]" - p 149 "We common people of the old time based our conception of our statesmen almost entirely on the caricatures that formed the most powerful weapon in political controversy. Like almost every main feature of the old condition of things these caricatures were an unanticipated development, they were a sort of parasitic outgrowth from, which had finally altogether replaced, the thin and vague aspirations of the original democratic ideals. They presented not only the personalities who led our public life, but the most sacred structural conceptions of that life, in ludicrous, vulgar, and dishonourable aspects that in the end came near to destroying entirely all grave and honourable emotion or motive toward the state." - p 168 Are caricatures really that powerful? Perhaps.. if they're circulated thru the mass media widely enuf to become commonplace representations of their target(s) - but in order for that to happen the media hierarchy must be behind the cartoonist. I don't think that happens very often w/o a concerted oligarchical intention to bring someone in particular down. I can attest that at least one powerful person I knew personally was afraid of a local political cartoonist here in Pittsburgh. The reason I say this is b/c that cartoonist had come to speak at an institution where I worked, a museum, & he needed an overhead projector. I was the projectionist but my department didn't have an overhead projector & I didn't have the keys to a department that might have. Well, the director of the museum, apparently worried that not providing the projector wd lead to the cartoonist depicting the director or the museum negatively, took on the personal responsibility of fetching that projector & delivering it to the cartoonist. That was, ahem, a bit unusual. Anyway, the change happens, & the world is transformed. How extremely it's transformed is described in some detail that I won't repeat here. After all, I want you to read the novel. "Where is the old world now? Where is London, that sombre city of smoke and drifting darkness, full of the deep roar and haunting music of disorder, with its oily, shiny, mud-rimmed, barge-crowded river, its black pinnacles and blackened dome, its sad wildernesses of smut-greyed houses, its myriads of draggled prostitutes, its millions of hurrying clerks? The very leaves upon its trees were foul with greasy black defilements." - p 176 I've read that Wells was a proponent of Free Love & when I was a kid I had that afore-mentioned photo of him & his wife naked on the porch of a cabin, presumably in a nudist camp - that's the sort of thing that a proponent of Free Love might do so I tend ti believe it's true. ""No woman has ever believed them." ""You have to choose a man," said Verrall, apprehending her before I did. ""We're brought up to that. We're told—it's in the books, in stories, in the way people look, in the way they behave—one day there will come a man. He will be everything, no one else will be anything. Leave everything else; live in him."" - p 190 "["]Here I am between you. Here is Edward. I—love him because he is gay and pleasant, and because—because I like him! Here is Willie—a part of me—my first secret, my oldest friend! Why must I not have both? Am I not a mind that you must think of me as nothing but a woman? imagine me as always a thing to struggle for?" She paused; then she made her distressful proposition to me, "Let us three keep together," she said. "Let us not part. To part is hate, Willie. Why should we not anyhow keep friends? Meet and talk?"" - p 193 While I was taking a break from writing this review, I watched the "Children of Frankenstein" part of something called "The Sci-Fi Files". To quote from the back of the DVD packaging: "For centuries, science fiction has predicted our future through films, television, books and comics, it is one of the world's most popular genres, from fact to fiction, The Sci-Fi Files explores the history of this art form" As a Sci-Fi enthusiast (I've written a 6 volume set of bks of Sci-Fi criticism) I found this immediately annoying. For one thing, they call Mary Shelley the founder of Sci-Fi b/c of her bk Frankenstein (1818). I think Frankenstein & Mary Shelley both are great & very important but saying she started sci-fi then misleadingly leaves out such bks as Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyages to the Moon and the Sun (pre-1657) & Restif de la Bretonne's The Discovery of the Austral Continent by a Flying Man (1781). That, unfortunately, is standard simple-minded inaccurate history. However, "The Sci-Fi Files" gets much worse. They conveniently leave out Wells's admittedly ambivalent Socialism by completely twisting the moral of his The Time Machine on its head. Instead of having society split into the Eloi (the upper classes) & the Morlocks (the working classes) be the result of capitalist exploitation they basically have the Morlocks be an extension of ostensible Working Class parasitism off of those 'nice & intelligent & beautiful' ruling elites. I think we can further expect Wells's support of Free Love in In the Days of the Comet to be largely erased from Sci-Fi history. I admit, tho, that Free Love or no Free Love, I cd've done w/o the love affair between Nettie & Willie as an ongoing trope here. ""She wasn't worthy of you, dear," she would say abruptly, leaving me to guess the person she intended. ""No man is worthy of a woman's love," I answered. "No woman is worthy of a man's. I love her, dear mother,and that you cannot alter." ""There's others," she would muse. ""Not for me," I said. "No! I didn't fire a shot that time; I burnt my magazine. I can't begin again, mother, not from the beginning."" - p 204 Moving on, a bit about horseback riding appears. "Hardly anywhere was the inhumanity of horse traction to be found after the first year of the new epoch, everywhere lugging and dragging and straining was done by machines, and the horse had become a beautiful instrument for the pleasure and carriage of youth." - p 205 I grew up in what started out to be rural but quickly became the suburbs b/c of people like my family. As I vaguely recall, t was common for people to ride horses at the time & as I even more vaguely recall I decided against doing so b/c I felt it was an imposition on the horse - or even a cruelty. That must've been one of my 1st animal rights (in)actions, probably in the early 1960s. ...more |
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Tentatively, Convenience
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review of E. C. Tubb's Iduna's Universe by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 13, 2026 I just gave Lloyd Biggle Jr.'s Monument a 5 star rating & now I'm going to give this a 5 star rating too. What's happening to me? Do those green tentacles growing o review of E. C. Tubb's Iduna's Universe by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 13, 2026 I just gave Lloyd Biggle Jr.'s Monument a 5 star rating & now I'm going to give this a 5 star rating too. What's happening to me? Do those green tentacles growing out of my shoulders have anything to do w/ it? I mean, it's been so much easier to just let them do the typing, I'm sssssooooooo tired. But, really, after having gotten thoroughly sick of all the series-sustaining repetitions I finally reached one where they barely exist at all. This was refreshingly new. This has an unusually bucolic beginning. "It was late afternoon when Dumarest reached the crest and he paused to look down the gentle slope of the valley and at the village it contained. A small, neat, tidy place with snug houses set in close proximity, the walls washed with a variety of pastel shades. The thread of a narrow river wound between banks thick with reeds and flowering shrubs, the stone bridge crossing it mottled and stained with lichens, softened with time. The square was clean, dotted with bright figures as women bustled about their business and men stood talking in the shadows cast by solidly built edifices." - p 5 But, of course, this being an Earl of Dumarest story, brutality is just lurking around the corner, waiting to fuck up yr life. But, 1st, a little philosophy. ""We can talk, certainly." ""A cautious man." The Hausi smiled. "One who is reluctant to commit himself. Do you intend a further hunt?" ""Killing for the sake of it?" Tetray frowned and sat down his glass. "I think not. To encourage the young to regard living forms as a source of revenue is against our beliefs. It is obscene to slay for the sake of skins and bone and fur." "A statement, not an opinion, and Dumarest knew better than to argue against a point of view which he shared." - p 8 The Hausi, the trader, warns the peaceful people on this planet that they're in danger of being raided by slavers but even Dumarest doesn't realize that that's what he's doing. Then, yes, the slavers come & Earl Dumarest manages to kill quite a few of them before he's subdued & taken to their matriarchal planet. ""You have time to relax a little," said Shamarre doggedly. "A bath, even. Certainly something to take the stink of execution from your nostrils." ""You disapprove?" ""The man had to die. You didn't have to attend." "A mistake and one she knew all too well. Even though she was Matriarch yet still she was the prisoner of custom and Shamarre must know it." - p 21 One of the many things I liked about this novel is that he doesn't present the Matriarchy as some sort of idealized nurturing society as some people wd probably imagine it. Instead, women in power are just as inclined to abuse it as men. That sd, Tubb also uses this matriarchy to show how some patriarchal men treat women by having the women treat the men that way, as 2nd class citizens. "Men, she thought. Weak, romantic fools for the most part. Illogical and immature even when nearing the end of their natural span. Who else would risk seemingly inevitable madness for the sake of an ideal?" - p 68 Dumarest is restrained by a collar that wd explode if he tried to remove it. "The slaver slapped the box at her waist. "I've got him collared." "Kathryn could see it around his throat, the thick band of flexible links shining with a gilt luster. Too close-fitting to be slipped over the head it would detonate if removed with any other means than the correct key. The device incorporated within would respond to signals sent from the slaver's box and turn nerve and muscle into liquid fire should the man disobey." - p 31 For those women who think that all women are equal to men in every respect except for the one in wch they take responsibility for being vicious, blaming that, instead, on men, I suggest that you consider the case of Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong & her murder of Brian Wells, a pizza deliverer, using a collar bomb. I read about it in a bk called Pizza Bomber - The Untold Story of America's Most Shocking Bank Robbery (see my review here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticC... ). Diehl-Armstrong got away w/ multiple murders of men, making herself out to be a victim of these men, despite the murders being cold-blooded & 1st degree. I wonder if she ever read this story & was inspired by it? Dumarest makes a deal to avoid being executed, a deal in wch he's to attempt to retrieve the matriarch's daughter from a mysterious object that has apparently captured her mind. No one who's attempted this prior to Dumarest has survived unharmed. "And, walking, he stepped through time and space to a point years in the past when a happy, carefree child came skipping into a deserted study to discover something new and wonderful which held an immediate fascination. A bright and glowing object illuminated by the dusty light of the setting sun. Enigmatic, mysterious, magical. "And he became that child, running now, entranced, eager to discover what a doting parent had bought. To reach out with open arms. To fold them around the Tau. To hug it close and to press his face against the bright enchantment. To feel the faintest of tingles and to see the luminosity suddenly expand to engulf him. To take him elsewhere." - pp 51-52 "They came from nowhere, oddly shaped creatures of garish colors and peculiar appearance. Eyes and heads and face seemed alien and yet totally familiar. They moved and talked and aped the style of humans but they were not and could never have been fashioned in human form. They were more like caricatures of familiar types; the fat one with the round, shining face, the fox-like one, the pigs, the toad, the nodding, weaving monkey, the solemn policeman with his truncheon, the giggling girl, the staid matron—the playmates of a lonely child." - p 54 One of those elsewheres was to his own highly unpleasant childhood on Earth. I hadn't read about that in any of the other Dumarest of Terra novels so it was a welcome bit of detail. "But this world was not one he had known. His childhood had contained no similar comforts. It had been a time of harsh deprivation unrelieved by moments of joy. "Dumarest shivered, remembering, then shivered again to the chilling wind. "It came from the north where ice still coated the ponds and snow filled the gulleys; the residue of winter stubbornly defying the sun. He glanced at it, narrrowing his eyes against the glare, wishing the watery brightness held more strength. Soon it would be dark and all hope of game lost and, again, he would hug an empty belly and nurse bruises from savage blows." - pp 55-56 Dumarest relieves his stowing away on a spaceship to escape Earth. ""Your name, boy?" He nodded as it was given. "Well, Earl, so you decided to stowaway. A mistake." "Dumarest said nothing. ""A bigger mistake than I think you realize. It is my duty to evict you into the void." ""To kill me, sir?"" - p 64 Coincidentally, the next bk I started reading after I finished this one is J. G. Ballard's Hello America wch also stars a stowaway. Strange. There've been a few coincidences in my life lately, more than usual. I sent a txt to a friend who lives in a different city asking about what's new to then learn that she had just arrived in town the day before; then I was walking on a park trail looking at sticks on the path when I realized that I shd be more careful b/c I might be mistaking snakes for sticks, w/in seconds of this the next object I saw on the trail was, indeed, a snake about 2+ ft long. Be alert for such things. Ha ha! Tubb, too, is critical of the medical industry. "Again Remick touched the hand, his fingers searching automatically for the pulse. Drugs could restore the flush to the sunken cheeks but it would be a temporary illusion and only a momentary staving off of the inevitable end. And a man should be allowed to die in dignity, not hooked and incorporated into a machine, a part of devices which pumped blood and air and adjusted the endocrine balance and turned the body of man into a thing of mechanics. "A respite gained at what cost? "Remick had seen such things in the big hospitals on wealthier worlds and had seen, too often, the fear and greed and envy such things induced. To live! To last another day, another hour! To stave off death. To linger no matter what the cost. To squander the accumulated wealth of years and rob the young of their patronage. To glory in the cult of self. To yearn for immortality.. "Madness!" - pp 71-72 I'm feelin' it. "Was the Tau nothing but a gateway to hell? ""Hardly, my friend." The man who appeared next to him smiled in his whimsical fashion and gave a shrug. "But what is hell? All men, surely, create their own? And as they face the perils of an unfeeling universe, the careless indifference of fate, at least they have a defense. To laugh. To joke. To regard everything as a source of humor. Only so can we remain sane."" - p 88 I'm feelin' that too.. but I don't want to have to feel it any more than I already have, wch has been entirely too much. "A mock battle fought from the depths of his memory, given versimilitude by his own experiences, set as a stage piece to attract a child. "Red set to strive against blue, yellow as an ally, green as a background, orange and purple and violet as minor instruments in the orchestration, swaths and strands of metallic colors to lace the whole into a composite pattern of noise and light which followed the dictates of his mind. "His mind—could it exist beyond his imagination? "And, even if she noticed it, would she be interested enough to investigate its cause?" - pp 89-90 Dumarest, already imperiled by the psychological challenges by the world he's entered, has left his body behind at the entrance to the Tau where the Matriarch is being incited by a bad advisor to try electroshock to speed up the apparently too slow pace of his mission. ""Something Tamiras mentioned," she said. "Electronic stimulation of muscle and sinew. If we use electroshock therapy on Dumarest the impact might produce an interesting reaction."" - p 138 All in all, a very rich & inspired bk. All impatience & boredom I may've felt reading the bks that led up to this one has been erased away by its brilliance. ...more |
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Tentatively, Convenience
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review of Lloyd Biggle Jr.'s Monument by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 12, 2025 I'm going to do something I rarely do here wch is give this a 5 star rating. I loved it. I can only remember reading 3 eco-SFs: John Brunner's absolutely fabulous The review of Lloyd Biggle Jr.'s Monument by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 12, 2025 I'm going to do something I rarely do here wch is give this a 5 star rating. I loved it. I can only remember reading 3 eco-SFs: John Brunner's absolutely fabulous The Sheep Look Up (1972), & Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia (1975) wch I don't remember & don't remember liking very much. Some people might consider Michael Crichton's State of Fear (2004) to be eco-SF but I found it to be a despicable anti-eco-SF. Monument was published as a novel in 1974 but the short story of the same name was published in 1961 so maybe Biggle was even more prescient than the amazing Brunner. There's a shipwrecked spaceman named Obrien on an idyllic planet whose future he's concerned about. He's known to the locals as the "Langri". He warns the beloved planetary dwellers about what'll happen if more of his kind discover the planet & decide to exploit it. "["]The men from the sky will take this land—whatever they want of it. They will take the hills and the forests and the beaches and even the sea, the mother of life. There will be boats that sail above and below the waters and poison them, and the koluf, the staple of life, will be driven into deep waters where the hunters can't find it. Our people will be pushed back into the mountains where there is no food. The strangers will bring strange sicknesses, and entire villages will lie in the fire of death.["]" - p 9 Obrien tries to teach them about the worlds beyond their world in order to ultimately make them ready to receive his advice on how to deal w/ the expected invaders. "He expected these young natives to stare openmouthed while he described flaming space wars, and fantastic creatures, and worlds beyond worlds, and suns more numerous than the leaves of the forest; but their attention spans seemed even shorter at night than during the day." - p 18 Obrien expounds further on what he perceives as what threatens the planet. ""The moment it occurs to anyone to put a vacation resort on this world, you're doomed. That man is your enemy, and you've got to fight him to the death. If you let him build just one resort, there'll be ten or a hundred more before you know what's happening. You'll have to move your villages back into the forest, and even if you're allowed to use the sea there'll be no more hunting. The resorts will drive away the koluf, and you'll starve. And I can't make you understand."" - p 22 The amazing thing about the plot of this novel is that he picks a menace that most people might not recognize as such & then articulates why it is so. War or mining wd be more obvious choices but the subtlety of the resort problem, of the colonizing of an area for its beauty is much trickier. Obrien dies & his great-great-grandson, Fornri, is left awkwardly in the position of trying to follow the protective plan that Obrien had laid out. The anticipated spaceships start to arrive. "An office opened a door in the circle of props, and Fronri stepped through and turned as Dallman and Protz followed him. "He ignored the proferred chair and faced Dallman with splendid dignity. "It is my unfortunate duty to inform you that you and the personnel of your ship are under arrest," he announced. "Dallman sat down heavily. He looked blankly at Protz, who grinned and winked. The native had spoken in a firm tone of voice, and beyond the circle the waiting officers were struggling to contain their laughter. "A seminude native possessed of not so much as a dull spear had calmly walked in and placed the Rirga under arrest. It was a gag worth retelling–if anyone would believe it." - p 39 The ENEMY has arrived, Wembling, who will eventually try to build the vacation resort, as predicted. Before he gets up to that mischief, he builds primitive ferries for fording rivers & thinks he's impressed the natives w/ them. ""Come out of there! Quickly!" Hort snapped. "Startled, she scrambled ashore, and he helped her from the boat and into a place of concealment behind some bushes. An instant later two natives emerged from the forest on the opposite bank. Without breaking stride they walked through the river, which was only waist-deep, and disappeared into the forest. ""Don't they use it at all?" she asked bewilderedly, when the natives had passed out of hearing. ""Only when they think one of us is watching," Hort said. He led her back to the boat, and so that she could wax properly enthusiastic about it without an uncomfortable amount of lying, she gave herself a round-trip crossing while Hort watched from the bank." - p 67 Biggle is a musician, I love it when that shows in his stories. "Sets of strings were strung from a yoke near the top to a wood collar near the bottom. The nab was not an instrument; it was many instruments. More musicians joined in, each on another set of strings, until Talitha counted eight playing one nab. Probably there were others hidden by the instrument. The rhythm took on fantastic complexities." - p 71 Two winners in my bk: an instrument invented by the author & fantastically complicated rhythms - both of wch cd apply to my own (M)Usic. Obrien's prediction comes true in the form of Wembling, business tycoon. ""That's the answer, Tal!" he exclaimed, "The people of Langri can operate a vacation resort, and the profits will finance a medical center and anything else they want. And setting it up for them will make my reputation." ""I don't think the natives would want their world cluttered up with tourists," Hort said." - p 81 A part of the genius of this bk, for me, is that Biggle reveals how a medical center, seemingly set up philanthropically for the good of the natives, is actually a PR foot-in-the-door for capitalist exploitation, one likely to be of very little actual benefit to the inhabitants. Biggle knew what he was talking about. Obrien tried to teach the natives, some of them his descendents, his PLAN for foiling the anticipated exploiters. Alas, he was dying while he did so. "Everything the Plan predicted had happened, every instruction they had followed succeeded easily, and Fornri needed no further evidence of the Langri's infallibility. Either they followed the Plan, or they would lose their world and their lives." - p 88 Despite the plan, Wembling & his cronies press forward destroying the environment in pursuit of the bldg of the vacation resort & 'golf courses'. I read once some statistics about the incredible amt of land wasted for golf courses, for the amusement of the idle rich. I don't remember the statistics now but it seems to me that they were given to make a point in relation to Native American reservations. "The machine skidded to a halt a few centimeters from a native who had sprung out of nowhere to fling himself across its path. As Wembling charged up, the operator got out and bent over the native." - p 108 Prescient, pure prescience. To put such a tactic in context, keep in mind that Earth First didn't start until April 4, 1980, 19 yrs after this story was 1st published, 6 yrs after this bk was published. The defenders of the old growth forest of Goolengook in Australia built a 'fort' on the logger road to prevent logger trucks from being able to access the forest. ""When we first got here I got Wembling to import all kinds of seeds," Hort said. "The few things that grew were mutated and nutritionally suspect." ""So the natives are forced to eat koluf, which would be a wonderful fate if they had enough of it." ""Right. The water activity by construction and naval personnel, the machinery and construction noises transmitted through the water, the pollutants that are dumped offshore—all this and maybe other things are driving the koluf into deep water where the natives can't catch them.["]" - p 139 I'm glad to report that in this fictional world there's a happy ending. May it be an inspiration in the 'real world'. ...more |
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Cognitive Dissidents
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Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Librarians Group is the official group for requesting additions or updates to the catalog, including: * Adding new books or editions * Editing book information (including covers) * Combining and merging book editions * Edits to page counts, quotes or awards * Correcting author profiles for authors not in the Goodreads Author Program If you're a Goodreads member with a new request, click Join Group. Once you're added to the group, you can post your question following this link. Simple requests (e.g. page count updates) typically take around 48 hours depending on the volume of requests, while more complex requests could take up to a couple of weeks (e.g. adding a new book). Authors, if you are a member of the Goodreads Author Program, you can edit information about your own books. Find out how in this guide. Keep in mind that Librarians don't: * Grant or give insights into Librarian applications / Librarian status * Move ISBNs or ASINs between editions * Help with non-catalog Support questions (e.g. How do I reset my password?) For help with these queries or to submit general questions, comments or feature requests, try Goodreads Help or use the Contact Us form. If you're a Librarian and want to process requests, please refer to our Librarian Manual to ensure edits are performed in line with Goodreads policies. ...more
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What sort of books do working class readers enjoy? Clearly all books! but OK if we are thinking reading in a class conscious way, what might we highli What sort of books do working class readers enjoy? Clearly all books! but OK if we are thinking reading in a class conscious way, what might we highlight to other working class readers. This might be books by working class writers; it might be books about working class lives or jobs or themes; but it might be something else! ...more
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