“Notes Towards the Definition of Culture” by T. S. Eliot

“Notes” is far more than it implies, as Eliot has two overarching themes.  The first is that religion and culture are inseparable, and the second is the relationship between regional, national, and world cultures. Eliot believes that a world culture is the only basis of peace, but probably impossible because of the lack of a world religion.  His definition of a healthy culture seems to be a shared system of beliefs that allow both mutual understanding and vibrant disagreement at the same time. This is not unlike the great theological debates of the High Middle Ages, Christianity’s most confident time, when Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Peter Abelard, Albert the Great, and other philosophers flowered.

He wrote these “Notes” in the 1940s, with Nazis fresh in memory and in the shadow of Stalinist Russia. Sometimes he seems elitist and dated, other times full of timeless wisdom, and always writing very well. His chapter on education is presented almost as an afterthought but has actually held up the best over the years.  His appendix on the poetic nature of the English language and the mutual influences European cultures have had upon each other is also inspiring (and written for a German audience).

“To the unconscious level we constantly tend to revert, as we find consciousness an excessive burden; and the tendency towards reversion may explain the powerful attraction which totalitarian philosophy and practice can exert upon humanity.  Totalitarianism appeals to the desire to return to the womb.”

In lesser words, group think is for babies who don’t have the courage to think for themselves.

“Aesthetic sensibility must be extended into spiritual perception, and spiritual perception must be extended into aesthetic sensibility and discipline taste before we are qualified to pass judgment upon decadence or diabolism or nihilism in art.  To judge a work of art by artistic or religious standards, to judge a religion by religious or artistic standards should come in the end to the same thing, though it is an end at which no individual can arrive.”

Eliot’s Christianity is as unapologetic as his poetry, and it is heartening to know that even an Eliot struggles with the relationship between his art and his belief. 

“We know that good manners, without education, intellect, or sensibility to the arts, tends towards mere automatism; that learning without good manners or sensibility is pedantry; that intellectual ability without the more human attributes is admirably only in the same way as the brilliance of a child chess prodigy; and that the arts without intellectual context are vanity…we must not expect any one person to be accomplished in all of them… we are driving in the end to find it in the pattern of the society as a whole.”

I think this paragraph says a lot about the sort of people Eliot had to spend too much of his time with: pedants, prodigies, and the vain.  Not that these are his friends, but he’s obviously tired of single-minded or thoughtless individuals he met in his circles. But he’s also right… it brings to my mind the famous Paulian scriptures about the relationship between faith, hope, and love. Virtues need each other’s support.

“I have suggested elsewhere that a growing weakness of our culture has been the increasing isolation of elites from each other, so that the political, the philosophical, the artistic, the scientific, are separated to the great loss of each of them, not merely through the arrest of any general circulation of ideas, but through the lack of these contacts and mutual influences at a less conscious level, which are perhaps even more important than ideas.”

I think the real divide today is between the political elites and the elites he mentioned above. Our political class has learned how to win political battles, but are woefully ill-informed about the truths of what they are fighting over.

 

 

Rollar coaster day

Well, I had a great morning and a pissy afternoon, and not just because it can’t decide if it’s going to rain or not.

The morning was great because I wrote a thousand words of a novel, then went to the gym, came home and ate, and then wrote another thousand words. So far, so good.

Then I went to a lecture about research methodology that was too vague to be very useful, which wasn’t so bad really. I got a chance to diss Google for their search engine’s partialities, but didn’t get a chance to complain about how the days of browsing for books in a library is more difficult than it used to be. I can’t just ask, “Where’s the Chinese lit section? I want to browse for books on a particular topic,” because it’s all so electronic and the libraries so big even the librarians can’t keep track.

Then I went to poetry class and we had a constructive dialogue about each other’s poems, but then the professor put on his bad cop hat and told us he was disappointed with our essays judging by criteria he was never very specific about in the first place. If he had given us the same speech two weeks ago, we would have given him the essays he wanted. My professors are good at explaining their subjects; I just wish they were better at explaining their assignments.

I also think I told too much about myself to one of my classmates, because we had talked about a third classmate and this afternoon the third party looked at me funny, in a knowing sort of way. Fortunately I didn’t say anything particularly bad, just that when he invites the class to go hang out in a bar my first thought was that I didn’t really have the money, so we might be self-conscious around each other for a while because he’s rich and I’m not (and she made it quite clear she knows how much money he has).  But I’m not going to tell the first classmate anything more about myself if she’s going to be like that.

I have chess club tonight but I don’t really feel like going. With all the scheduling nonsense and room changes I’ve only made it to chess club twice in a month and a half. I’m beginning to think my club fee will be a donation.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Stranger, pause and look;

    From the dust of ages

Lift this little book,

    Turn the tattered pages,

Read me, do not let me die!

    Search the fading letters, finding

    Steadfast in the broken binding

All that once was I!

 

From the “Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay”

 

Millay has a way of hitting things on the nose. I’m really enjoying her “Collected Poems” and am reading on the side “Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal” as a part of grad school strategy to not only read more poetry but to figure out how to read (and understand) it.  Meanwhile I’ve snatched up two stanzas from her poems to kick start two of my own novels (attributed, of course).

 

The first essay in “Millay at 100” argues that she is underappreciated in the sense that critics don’t think she’s worth the time to analysis but academics apparently enjoy quoting her. Perhaps that a good sign that her poetry is well written, evocative, and easy to understand. For most people ease of understanding is a sign of good writing, but I suppose critics need difficult writers to justify their profession.

 

I chose this quotation above because it speaks to me personally, and to anyone else out there being an author, regardless of your publishing success. Anyone’s work could, basically, molder away, become an “ex-poem” in the sense that no one reads it anymore. The statistical chance of anyone achieving the literary longevity of Austen or Dickens is depressingly low, and probably getting lower with 3000 new published books each year crowding for attention, drowning each other out.

My Introduction to Exeter

I can’t believe how busy I have been between the paperwork, getting to know various clubs, seminars on life and law in England…

 

Exeter is a beautiful place, but the hills are both a source of the beauty and my leg aches. My butt is sore after walking up these hills and when I get home and sit down my calves take their turn to complain. It’s a very nice small city and I’m amazed at how far a pound will go when I go grocery shopping.

 

At the club for SF, fantasy, and horror, there wasn’t much talk about any of that, but at the Sherlock Holmes fan club they talked about Holmes, Dr. Who, Harry Potter… I suggested they rename themselves the Fandom Club. They took that comment in the spirit in which it was intended.

 

The student body is pretty diverse and interesting.  I ran into some of the same people more than once and the conversations grow from there. I’ve found that I can strike up conversations with Chinese pretty easily by starting off with “Ni hao. Wo zai Nanjing Daxue wu nian jiao Yingyue,” which means, “Hi. I taught English at Nanjing University for five years.” The conversation usually moves back to English, but it’s the opening I need. I could end up with as many Chinese friends in England as I had back in China, depending on how busy everyone is.

“A History of England” by David Harris Willson

I was a little surprised that this textbook was written by an American, since America plays such a minor role. Granted, when it was published America was new to being a superpower, but it even makes our roles in the First and Second World Wars feel so trivial.

It was also written before professors stopping putting their own conscious opinions into the textbooks, so we get little authorial asides about which historical figures he wishes to redeem. For example, he goes out of his way to write that the appeasement of Hitler wasn’t entirely Chamberlain’s fault; English memories of WWI were still too painful and the Depression was keeping their concerns economic. The last several Prime Ministers had been trying to help Germany recover to become a market for British goods, and the Germans electing who the Brits thought at the time was just some nutter wasn’t going to stop their desperate economic policies.

The take home lesson from reading these 800+ pages was the precariousness of good government. For 2000 years, England has wavered from good to bad government, regardless of being monarchical or democratic. Power shifts that have little to do with policies and too much with politics change the government of their, and probably most, countries.  It’s rather depressing to be reading about a good king or prime minister doing their best only to have it set back by a following incompetent.

And yet progress is made. England did become wealthier and more democratic, often times in spite of their leaders. Progress comes from innovators, grass roots movements, and the expansion of knowledge, while politicians play their games.

From Robert Scholes “The Roots of Science Fiction”

“This radical dislocation between the world of romance and the world of experience has been exploited in different ways. One way, the most obvious, has been to suspend the laws of nature in order to give more power to the laws of narrative, which are themselves projections of the human psyche in the form of enacted wishes and fears…in the sublimative narratives of pure romance they are merely more obvious than elsewhere because less disguised by other interests and qualities.”

 

This is why literature is the true window to our souls, reflecting our worldviews more than our world. People who wish to resist evil but don’t have the power to do so will be attracted to stories about the successful resistance, and the less power one has the more power one will dream of having, hence why children are attracted to comic book and video game heroes. Adults develop “other interests and qualities” so one’s taste in literature can evolve, but the same basic desire for empowerment or satisfaction never goes away completely.  Just yesterday I read an otherwise very good novel, “The Language of Flowers” in which the heroine has remarkably forgiving friends, leaving me wondering if that is what the author secretly wishes for.

 

“When romance returns deliberately to confront reality it produces the various forms of didactic romance or fabulation that we usually call allegory, satire, fable, parable, and so on…traditionally, it has been a favorite vehicle for religious thinkers, precisely because religions have insisted that there is more to the world than meets the eye, that the common-sense view of reality – “Realism” is incomplete and therefore false. Science, of course, has been telling us much the same thing for several hundred years…thus it is not surprising that what we call ‘science’ fiction should employ the same narrative vehicle as the religious fictions of our past.”

 

Science fiction latches onto many of the same questions as religion, but no one novel that I am aware of tries to answer all of them.  The existence of evil is the most common question addressed, but free will v. fate, equality v inequality, our relationship with nature, and our origins are all questions SF authors have struggled with.  Books like “Dune,” “Foundation,” and “The Lord of the Rings” have directly shaped more minds than any book of philosophy. Philosophers may have indirectly shaped more minds, because more popular authors have read their books, but a literary game of connections gets too complicated for me.

 

“And if a writer transports men to Mars merely to tell a cowboy story, he produces not structural fabulation but star dreck – harmless, perhaps, but an abuse of that economy of means that governs mature esthetic satisfaction. Or if he allows such a variety of magical events that his fictional world seems deficient in its own natural laws, his work will fail structurally and cognitively, too, though it may retain some sublimative force.  But in the most admirable of structural fabulations, a radical discontinuity between the fiction world and our own provides both the means of narrative suspense and of speculation. In the perfect structural fabulation, idea and story and so wedded as to afford us simultaneously the greatest pleasures that fiction provides: sublimation and cognition.”

 

Probably the reason I named “Dune,” “Foundation,” and “The Lord of the Rings” is because they provide both sublimative and cognitive satisfaction. Any of the books I enjoy rereading reach that beautiful level of story and idea, from “Jane Eyre” to “The Gap Series.”  Even the controversial “Atlas Shrugged” reveals ideas through plot and description, even if it is weighed down by excessive dialogue.

“Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey” by Isabel Fonseca

“Bury Me Standing” is a disillusioning book, disillusioning about both Europe and the Gypsies. Fonseca seems to have organized the chapters to ease us into the degree of perfidy Europe is guilty of in its treatment of gypsies, from the simple discrimination familiar to students of African-American history to the Holocaust (called the Devouring by the gypsies). 

 

What was disillusioning about the gypsies was how their freewheeling, nomadic, romantic reputation was really a vast minstrel show. The real gypsy culture involves child marriage, rampant illiteracy, and superstitions about the uncleanliness of women. Their real poetry and music are things they keep for themselves, while bear training and fortune telling are cons they pull on us. The most free-wheeling aspect of their lives is a substitution among their men for small time wheeling and dealing capitalism instead of professional careers, and that only works out well for a minority of this largest of European minorities. They aren’t even very nomadic, since the vast majority of them have been settled for generations, only moving when forced to by violence.

 

What was disillusioning about Europe was the centuries long mistreatment of these people. Linguistically they can be traced back to India, but as a group were apparently first brought from Armenia as slaves for a certain Vlad of Romania, the father of the Vlad who inspired Dracula. And like most enslaved groups, they were vilified to justify the slavery. And ever since they have been vilified as criminals, spies, or traitors to justify discrimination to this day, even in countries that would never again dare do the same to Jews.

 

My sweeping statements are necessary for the sake of summarization, but Fonseca worked with an anthropological style, interviewing gypsies all over Europe and even living among their families. Her approach was more individual and thus more heart breaking than mine.

Any Suggestions?

In Aldiss and Wingrove’s article “On the Origin of the Species: Mary Shelly” promoting Shelly as the founder of science fiction, they wrote, “This book (referring to James Gunn’s collection of essays “Speculations on Speculation”) however, makes it clear that we can recognize SF fairly easily, although it is rarely found in a pure isolated state. Just like oxygen.”

 

This got me to thinking that literary conventions, tropes, archetypes, even styles, could call be considered elements of literature. The mixing and matching of these elements creates compounds that we call stories. Long and complicated strings of compounds become novels.

 

A literary SF novel could be called one part prose and two parts SF (Sf2P) just as water is referred to as H2O.  Paranormal romance could R2H(orror). Just about any romance novel would be R2-something: R2S(uspence), R2C(omedy).  I think Star Wars would AFSf while Star Trek would be Sf2F.  Firefly would be Sf2W.

 

This simple coding could tell anyone at a glance just what they are getting into, and perhaps even lend a more scientific organization to literature as a whole. Maybe after all the different novels and movies have been coded, we could match them up with the “Rotten Tomatoes” website and see if particular balances get better or worse ratings.

 

So I’ve started a table. Any suggestions for filling in the blanks?

 

A=Action/Adventure

B=?

C=Children’s

D=Dark

E=Erotic

F=Fantasy

G=gothic

H=humorous

I=?

J=?

K=

L=literary

M=mystery

N=?

O=?

P=Poetical prose

Q=?

R=romance

S=suspense

Sf=science fiction

T=thriller

U=?

V=?

W=western

X=women’s

Y=men’s

Z=?

“Father, Son, and Co.” by Thomas J. Watson Jr. and Peter Petre

Thomas J. Watson Sr. built IBM from a tiny company into the dominant name in office machine supply, especially punch cards machines. He brought his son, Thomas Watson Jr., into the company, and he began the massive transformation of IBM into a computer giant. This is their story.

 

It is the story of two strong, stubborn, temperamental personalities who were not the easiest to live with, including with other.  Their battles with each other were as epic as their battles with competitors. Thomas Sr. both wanted his sons in the company, but didn’t want to let up on his control. Yet it was Thomas Jr. who realized that computers would drive punch cards out and dragged IBM into the second half of the twentieth century. Since they also liked smart, stubborn people, the Watsons surrounded themselves with smart, stubborn people, creating a “team of rivals” except their goal was to make money, and make money they did.

 

Thomas Sr. and Thomas Jr. both had adventuresome lives. The father worked his way up from poverty to moving the circles of power in American industry. As one of the few liberal businessmen, he had access to the Roosevelt Administration, and pioneered the good treatment of workers to create company loyalty.  Chapter twenty-four of this book borders on Thomas Jr. considering paternalistic companies as an antidote to what Marxism would call the alienation of worker; he considered ways to turn IBM into a company owned by its employees and related that to the protection of democracy.  Thomas Jr. was an Air Force pilot in WWII, flying in Russia, China, and over the Atlantic, and after his retirement an ambassador to the Soviet Union.

 

You can also read this book for an outline of the computer industry in America.  IBM provided most of the computers in the nation. The New Deal created so much paperwork that IBM’s sales and thus production increased through the Great Depression and obviously then WWII. To explain company decisions, Thomas Jr. had to explain his competitors, too. Much of the middle third of the book is the struggle to keep up not only with technological advances, but with years of back orders.

 

So whether you are interested in family history, computer history, or management theory, this is a good book for you.

“The Casual Vacancy” by J. K. Rowling

When I watch “The Midsomer Murders” I’ve often wondered how these small British towns could sustain a murder rate high enough to sustain the TV series; after having read “The Casual Vacancy” I wonder why there aren’t more.  The only sympathetic people in the book were a couple of Londoners who moved out there because the mother had thought she could marry one of the townsmen, much to the chagrin of the daughter who lost her school, her friends, and her boyfriend.  The mother even ends up with a lower paying job to be closer to the schumck, which introducers her as a social worker to the life of a family ruined by addictions to drugs and sex. I feel sorry for the kids of that impoverished family, even if the daughter’s angry acting out leaves me glad I won’t have to actually meet her.  

 

The majority of the book is about the ramifications of the death of the one reasonably good person in Pagford, and even he apparently neglected his family to try going good for society as a whole. As the ripples spread, as people compete for his seat on the parish council, the unhappy people of Pagford mistreat each other and rat each other out for it. Fear, selfishness, and hypocrisy drive the people of this town and it’s too small for the people to escape it except by leaving altogether.

 

The contrast between “Fats” and Kay, the social worker, reveal one aspect of the possible theme of authenticity.  “Fats” attempts to be authentic are justifications for his being a jerk of the typical teenage boy variety, and his one act of redemption is accept blame for the misdeeds of others. Is Rowling telling us that civilization depends upon inauthenticity, since the authentic human being is so unlikeable?  Civilized values, and even more so liberal, cosmopolitan values, require education and training.  On the other hand, Kay’s quixotic search for love, and her daughter’s, is derailed by her boyfriend’s inability to be honest with her.

 

This is not to say I didn’t believe the book. There are people like this all over the world; Pagford was just at the unlucky end of a bell curve for collecting so many of them into such a small area. Underneath all the repulsive characters is a talent for plotting that brings so many lives into a web of human weaknesses. 

“The Casual Vacancy” by J. K. Rowling

When I watch “The Midsomer Murders” I’ve often wondered how these small British towns could sustain a murder rate high enough to sustain the TV series; after having read “The Casual Vacancy” I wonder why there aren’t more.  The only sympathetic people in the book were a couple of Londoners who moved out there because the mother had thought she could marry one of the townsmen, much to the chagrin of the daughter who lost her school, her friends, and her boyfriend.  The mother even ends up with a lower paying job to be closer to the schumck, which introducers her as a social worker to the life of a family ruined by addictions to drugs and sex. I feel sorry for the kids of that impoverished family, even if the daughter’s angry acting out leaves me glad I won’t have to actually meet her.  

 

The majority of the book is about the ramifications of the death of the one reasonably good person in Pagford, and even he apparently neglected his family to try going good for society as a whole. As the ripples spread, as people compete for his seat on the parish council, the unhappy people of Pagford mistreat each other and rat each other out for it. Fear, selfishness, and hypocrisy drive the people of this town and it’s too small for the people to escape it except by leaving altogether.

 

The contrast between “Fats” and Kay, the social worker, reveal one aspect of the possible theme of authenticity.  “Fats” attempts to be authentic are justifications for his being a jerk of the typical teenage boy variety, and his one act of redemption is accept blame for the misdeeds of others. Is Rowling telling us that civilization depends upon inauthenticity, since the authentic human being is so unlikeable?  Civilized values, and even more so liberal, cosmopolitan values, require education and training.  On the other hand, Kay’s quixotic search for love, and her daughter’s, is derailed by her boyfriend’s inability to be honest with her.

 

This is not to say I didn’t believe the book. There are people like this all over the world; Pagford was just at the unlucky end of a bell curve for collecting so many of them into such a small area. Underneath all the repulsive characters is a talent for plotting that brings so many lives into a web of human weaknesses. 

“Moment in Peking” by Lin Yutang

Weighing in at 951 pages, “Moment in Peking” is a good literary introduction to pre-Communist modern China, when the Chinese were struggling to absorb western ideas without losing their Chinese identities.  It is told mostly from the point of view of a middle class Chinese woman, starting from when she was a little girl with her family fleeing Peking (now Beijing) during the Boxer Rebellion to when she, as an older woman, flees Peking ahead of the Japanese invaders while her son joins one of the Chinese armies.  I suspect the entire book has a Taoist structure; I will leave it to you to decide if I’m imaging things.

 

Lin Yutang loves his China enough to have written extensively about it, both fiction and non-fiction, including my favorite aphorism about the Chinese character: that they are so good at making the best of life that they forget to make it better. The Chinese friend who gave me the copy I read told me that Yutang was a feminist; I was skeptical until I realized that Yutang is a feminist in the sense that he likes women. Uniquely, he likes both traditional and modern women (the yin and yang of Taoist femininity?) as long as they are good tempered and educated conversationalists. Even the young woman who takes the “bad girl” path finds new heroism as a spy against the Japanese. 

 

Reading “Moment in Peking” after living in China for nine years leaves me thinking that the period from 1937 (the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong) until 1980, roughly when China really kick started its economy, was an aberration.  Reading his book about the turn of the last century, I recognize the corrupt governments, the students who are both idealistic and cynical, and the tightly knit families. The ideological period of Communist rule that ground China down is like a nightmare from which China has awakened, and the Confucian and Taoist character of Chinese psychology has reasserted itself.

 

Yutang doesn’t have a steady point of view. He’s willing to switch to other characters and freely changes the distance from close POV to a distant, historical view as if this book was the Tao and POV distance a flow between yin and yang. He finds time to have a character expound upon his views, such as promoting the idea that Taoism is a good religion for scientists. The patriarch of the family is also a Taoist version of “Father Knows Best,” rarely ordering his family around but people who take his advice have happier lives. Yutang isn’t a dogmatist about his religion (to be a dogmatic Taoist would be quite the contradiction, but I’ve heard of stranger), giving good scenes to Confucians, Buddhists, and even one to Catholic nuns hiding two Chinese women from Japanese invaders. Yutang drew such close parallels between Buddhist and Catholic monastic life that I wasn’t quite sure which they were until the Mother Superior spoke French.

 

But in the end, “Moment in Peking” is a family epic, with the plot having more to do with romance, marriage, raising children, and gaining personal wisdom than the great events.  The sprawling family has to continually adjust to this complicated period in Chinese history, so the reader will flow between learning about Chinese individuals and Chinese culture the way the Taoist symbol flows between yin and yang.

“Anatomy of Criticism” by Northrop Frye

So I finally finished reading “Anatomy of Criticism” today. The first 150 pages and the last 50 page are fascinating reading, but I did get bogged down in the middle as he tried to prove his theories instead of just explaining them. Proving ideas is always the more tedious duty of scholars, undoubtedly why pundits avoid it.

 

Frye’s attempt to free literary criticism from the tides of philosophy gave me a lot of food for thought. He was tired of literary criticism being dragged in the wake of Marxism, feminism, etc, and preferred to find an independent means of literary analysis. To do so, he has to hope that literature has an inner logic of its own independent of culture. Sometimes he sounded a little like a bridge player who knows in order to win the hand he has to play as if the distribution of the cards is in his favor, and if not, oh well, at least he tried.

 

He often compares his image of literary logic to math.  Math is a symbolic representation and perhaps underpinning of science; perhaps literature could be a symbolic representation of reality.  Math works so well that it can make predictions about reality as well as any scientist.  Someone asked Einstein if he was worried an experiment would disprove his theory; he said he wasn’t worried because his math was correct. If literary criticism is equally valid then maybe the educational value of reading novels would finally be proven, even if only concerning the psychology of people.

 

Thus, Frye spends a great deal of time defining terms, and this is where it starts getting tedious. But if he wants to shape the debate, the first step to control the definitions. The book picks up again when he starts discussing the literary nature of “The Bible,” the book that more than any other shaped our literary world.  Most of our conceptions of heroism, morality, and coming of age stories can be traced back to “The Bible.” Stories about the fall and redemption in characters abound in literature, while “The Bible” is about the fall and redemption of humanity.

Green is the New Sexy

Do the Aristotelian unities really matter when dealing with space opera?

Nah.

I saw “Guardians of the Galaxy” last night, and while some of the characters took themselves a little too seriously, I had a lot of fun.  The previews had not given me much hope, but word came back that it was better than it looked, so I gave it a chance; it was funny when it meant to be and exciting the rest of the time.  Movie magic is still catching up with comic book imagination; no one in Hollywood has demonstrated the ability to beat comics at this most pure element of creativity: unbridled dreams. All Hollywood can do is cherry pick the best elements, distill them down to their most dramatic, and make money of distributing them to the rest of the world.

It was definitely an ensemble movie; Quill had the most face time and gave the inspirational speech, apparently because he’s the white guy because I’m not sure why else, but Gamora contributed more information and kicked plenty of ass of her own. She was the one who originally wanted to resist the bad buys, so it would have taken little tweaking to make her the main character. She reminded me a lot of my college girlfriend: good at martial arts, pretty, surrounded by male friends, and severe daddy issues.

Don’t get me wrong, the guys, the tree, and the raccoon did a good job, but the movie  I want to see next is the Black Widow and Gamora vs. the Expendables. My bet is on the ladies.

 

A Religious Theory of Literary Criticism

While listening to a lecture about the origins of psychological literary theory, I found myself wondering what a religious literary theory would be like. My vague recollection of “The Autumn of the Middle Ages” suggests it would be just as symbolic as feminist, Marxist, or Freudian theory, but symbolic of the intentions of God.

Instead of comparing Kirk, Spock, and McCoy to the Id, Ego, and Superego, or Heart, Mind, and Spirit, would they become the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and would we be arguing over which was which? (Note to self, write a novel in which the bad guys are the Freudian and the good guys are their New Age equivalents?)  It is easy to find intentional Christ-figures in many movies and books: “Man of Steel,” “Aliens III,” even the avowedly atheist “Atlas Shrugged” has the hero being tortured on a machine so the villains can expose the futility of their own evil.

Since we have a Christian mythos imbedded in our psychology, it’s normal to find Christian psychology in our literature and movies, but what about Buddhism? Books like “Cloud Atlas” and movies like “Groundhog Day” could be interpreted by my theoretical Buddhist literature professor as referring to how our spirits learn through the cycle of reincarnation. Martial art movies often discuss the proper control and channeling of emotions as the key to victory.

But no matter the philosophy or theology of your imaginary professor, these novels and movies are more often than not a push back against reality. All those movies about people giving up making more money to spend time with their families describes the behavior of a minority. All those movies about rogue cops breaking the rules to kill bad guys represent the frustration we have with rules designed to prevent rogue cops from imprisoning or shooting the innocent and incidentally make it more difficult to arrest the guilty. All those SF movies in which humans triumph over superior technology and overwhelming odds might well be push back against our fears of our technology and our smallness compared to the infinity of space-time.

Since moral systems are push back against the same amoral world, it shouldn’t be surprising that Christians, Buddhists, etc, have similar moral conclusions. Since philosophical systems are attempts to understand a similar world, we shouldn’t be surprised when we find similarities.  Since ideological systems are Ego-attempts to shape the world in Id-visions, and everyone’s Id is the product of the same evolution, we shouldn’t be surprised at similarities between tyrannies. When Christians and Buddhists disagree about moral decisions, chances are one of them is using their religion as a moral system and one of them is using their religion as an ideological system.

An image of literary evolution...

I was watching an Open Yale lecture by Paul Fry and it got me to thinking about the context of authors: a world of ideas. My image is thus: take a piece of paper and place three random dots on it, then draw radiating lines in 6-8 directions from each dot. Those dots are books, those intersections are authors. Of course, those authors can then radiate lines as well. You can imagine the lines in three or four dimensions as well. And there you have my own image of cultural/memetic evolution.

“Saladin” by Anne-Marie Edde

“Saladin” is an interesting book about an interesting figure in history. She spends most of her time considering not just how his contemporaries saw him, but why they saw him in a certain way.  Saladin was praised in many Christian stories about that Crusade to the point of Christianizing him, because they could think of no other way to justify his victory. It seemed impossible to the medieval Christian mind that non-believers could defeat them, so Christian legends about him made him a descendant of Christian knights, or a closet Christian, or an eventual convert to Christianity. They certainly held him to be a virtuous knight, because in the Middle Ages’ theological mindset, right made might, so Saladin had to be good to have won.

Edde extensively explains Islamic sources as well. Saladin was a Kurd, so in many ways he could transcend the Arab-Turkish-Persian rivalries for power in the Islamic world. But those same documents show the vices of his virtues; Saladin was so generous with his trophies that his family was poor after he died, and he was so busy fighting wars he failed to establish a lasting power structure (in the historical sense). For a long time Saladin’s reputation in the Middle East was overshadowed by Baybars, who defeated the more ruthless and numerous Mongolian invaders only 70 years after Saladin’s death. It was only with WWI and its colonial aftermath that Muslims again began turning towards Saladin as a hero.

Edde also provides a great deal of historical context to explain Saladin’s decisions, so much can be learned about why Saladin was tolerant of other religions, about economic trade, the proper treatment of women (in that time), and the ‘rules of war.’  Saladin was particularly tolerant of Jews and Christians with philosophical and medical backgrounds or, like Richard the Lion Hearted, lived up to his warrior ideals. This is in sharp contrast to groups like ISIS, which are presently attacking both non-Muslims and other Islamic groups, which in the long run is why I think they will run out of steam. Being too exclusionary is the primary reason most religious variants fade out.

The most surprising thing about “Saladin” was how it resembles our time.  Western countries, then and now, had more reliable means of transferring power. Today we vote, yesterday power descended from father to son (generally), and unless there were unusual circumstances, people accepted the transfer. Meanwhile, then and now, Islamic countries have often not had such stable means of transferring power, which means the Islamic world has spent more time at war with itself.  Saladin, a Sunni, learned most of his warcraft fighting Shiites to unite Islam against the Christians, wars that turned so rough that his armies against the Crusaders were smaller than his previous armies against Muslims.  And yes, it does seem ironic that he was more tolerant of Jews than of Shiites.

I also thought it was interesting that, then as now, politicians scrambled to make sure that trade is not too disrupted by prejudice, religion, and sometimes even war. No secular ruler wants to stop the stream of taxable trade.  A pope was angry that Christians were selling materials useful in war to Muslims, but Muslim rulers would protect Christian merchants, especially in Egypt.

"Fringe"

I finally reached the ending of "Fringe." Aside from some too long longing looks between each other while under fire and in critical need of moving fast, I was generally satisfied with how they ended the series. I was especially happy with how Nina Sharp showed her metal, how the Fringe heroes used their stored up tricks from villains to rescue Phillip, and the transcendence of the emotion v reason argument.

I think the acting skills of the characters had shown up the most during the season focused on the parallel universe as the actors had to portray different versions of themselves and even react to each other. The episode where the two Astrids meet was especially touching.

Over all, I feel like this built and improved upon "The X-Files" even if the producers didn't quite have the same knack for atmosphere. But maybe that's not important; on a sliding scale between horror and sci fi, "X-Files" was more on the horror side and "Fringe" more on the Sci fi side, so a different atmosphere makes sense, even if many of the episodes seem to have been filmed in the same part of Canada.  I guess the biggest difference is that "Fringe" knew what it was and "X-Files" never quite made up their mind.

Trinities in Frye’s Philosophy

 

From “The Anatomy of Criticism” by Northrup Frye:

“This is the division of ‘the good’ into three main areas, of which the world of art, beauty, feeling, and taste is the central one, and is flanked by two other worlds. One is the world of social action and events, the other the world of individual thought and ideas. Reading from left to right, this threefold structure divides human faculties into will, feeling, and reason. It divides the mental constructs which these faculties produce into history, art, and science and philosophy. It divides the ideals which form compulsions or obligations on these faculties into law, beauty, and truth…

“Similarly, we have portrayed the poetic symbol as intermediate between event and idea, example and precept, ritual and dream, and have finally displayed it as Aristotle’s ethos, human nature and the human situation, between and made up of mythos and dianoia, which are verbal imitations of action and thought respectively.”

I acknowledge the historicity of these divisions. These are such incredibly common metaphors that they are unavoidable when discussing Western art and philosophy because the artists and philosophers assumed their validity. If I had been born in the 12^th Century I’d probably write this essay about how will, feeling, and reason reflect the holy trinity of Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost and my fellow monks and I would probably argue about which symbols from which trinity matched the symbols from the other while stomping around in grape buckets making wine.

Trinities of these natures abound in fiction.  The classic example from “Star Trek” has been Spock (mind and thesis), McCoy (heart and antithesis), and Kirk (will and synthesis), even if the original series focused on that more than the Kirk/Spock duality represented by the recent movies.  The tensions in “Harry Potter” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” have come from purposefully re-aligned trinities.  In the “Potter” books, true power resides not with the “will” but with the “heart,” while Ron merely wishes he was a hero and is frustrated. In “BtVS,” the power also lies with someone who doesn’t want it, and instilling the slayer power in women leaves the men around them often feeling inadequate; being men they do not take their secondary status as well as women do in these sorts of shows and movies.

But one of the lessons that really stuck with me when I read “Atlas Shrugged” was that will, reason, and feeling work out best when aligned rather than separated. All three come from our brain, and neuro-science has found plenty of evidence of how humans go wrong when reason and feeling are cut off from each other. When I am writing fiction, I am happiest with the result when my historical knowledge, philosophical beliefs, and artistic knowledge are working in tandem. I suspect the most common reason lawyers, for example, become unhappy is because their profession places them in situations that create contradictions, such as an idealistic law student finding himself defending oil companies.

On a more personal note, I do not believe I could marry a woman unless my heart, my mind, and my will (in this case my sex drive) agreed upon her. If any one of those ingredients was removed, a relationship of some sort is possible (heart + mind = friendship, heart + will = romantic relationship, mind + will = something a little more sordid), but marriage would probably be a bad idea.

Maybe this is why I’ve found so many artistic endeavors lacking. Many artists fall so hard on the side of emotions that I find myself shaking my head at their naivety. I don’t believe love reforms bad boys, I don’t believe that if you build it they will come, and I don’t believe running wild killing bad guys makes the world a better place.

The Gap Series

By Stephen R. Donaldson

 

I just finished rereading “The Gap Series,” which I do about every other year, five books in a space operatic universe, except better thought out than most. Humanity is threatened by its own corruption and the “genetic imperialism” of an alien race similar to the Borg but more insidious and with biological technology.  The themes are the struggle between virtue and vice within and without individuals and how people build narratives to understand the world.

 

It is also about Morn Hyland, a good cop in a corrupt organization, who is captured and raped by a pirate, and then sold to pirates who work in a mercenary fashion to do work too dirty even for the police. The main characters on the second pirate ship are Nick, a man driven by vengeance, Mikka whose primary goal is the protection of her brother, and Vector, a scientist who fled after the police suppressed his vaccine for the virus the aliens use to turn us into them. The police did so to keep people afraid of the aliens thus enhancing their own power.

 

While Morn struggles with abuse and eventual pregnancy, the police themselves struggle to rise above the political corruption within their own organization.  There is continual tension between Data Acquisition (their CIA) and Enforcement Division, and the head of the police struggles against the powerful businessman who had too much control over the government. These struggles even influence the programming of a super-cyborg created using the body and brain of Angus, the rapist who is the father of Morn’s son, and whether the cyborg should kill or save Morn.

 

And those are just the first two books.

 

Style wise, the most interesting thing about these books is that the every character spends a lot of internal energy creating stories to find the meaning within their limited facts. None of the characters know everything, so they all have to engage in guess work based upon rumors, research, and the careful weighing of their lives’ premises. The winners are those who build narratives the closest to reality and yet leave open the possibility of improving humanity.

 

 

Hierarchies of Literature

From “Anatomy of Criticism” by Northrop Frye:

 

“Every deliberately constructed hierarchy of values in literature known to me is based on a concealed social, moral, or intellectual analogy. This applies whether the analogy is conservative and Romantic, as it is in Arnold, or radical, giving the top place to comedy, satire, and the values of prose and reason, as it is in Bernard Shaw. The various pretexts for minimizing the communicative power of certain writers, that they are as obscure or obscene or nihilistic or reactionary or what not, generally turn out to be disguises for a feeling that the views of decorum held by the ascendant social or intellectual class ought to be either maintained or challenged. These social fixations keep changing, like a fan turning in front of a light, and the changing inspires the belief that posterity eventually discovers the whole truth about art. 

 

“A selective approach to tradition, then, invariably has some ultra-critical joker concealed in it.”

 

Just as most people choose their novels to meet their emotional needs, social groups rank novels by its needs as well.

 

When I was a kid, I devoured Asimov, Heinlein, and Star Trek fan fic (that Paramount endorsed to profit off of in book form) because those kinds of novels suited my emotional need to spend a few hours in a world in which intelligence was linked to heroism. As I grew older, I read more difficult texts like Tolkien, Donaldson, and Rand, but the basic idea was the same. I also read Jane Austen because she seemed to be the only woman author who liked intelligent, sensitive, guys such as myself.

 

I’ve also had a period of my life when I only read books by authors whose name I couldn’t pronounce. That was literally my criteria because I wanted to read authors from other cultures. I also spent a year reading popular books just to figure out why they were popular. I read lots of Chinese literature while living in China, as a way of engaging with the culture and having a ready topic of conversation with the people around me.

 

And I could be a snob about it; I maintained my own ego by making sure I was reading “better and more interesting” books than other people. As a writer, a friend of mine teased me about all the kick ass Asian heroines in my novels, and it’s occurred to me that I was writing about women who are strong enough to be the heroes of their own stories; these women kill their bad guys. Marrying such a woman myself would relieve me of the need to be the hero of her story and give me time for my hobbies instead, which I suspect many actual women would resent.

 

And professors like promoting books that are hard to understand; being hard to understand as a virtue in literature keeps professors employed. Proving that books are best understood in the context of other books also keeps professors employed.

 

Bestselling and unpublished authors alike have reasons to argue over the relationship of quality of literature and quantity of sales.

 

If you think the most important quality in a novel is characterization, might you also think individuality is a more important virtue?  If you think the best thing about a book is the plot, might you also think an active and purposeful life is more important? Doesn’t the very assumption of ‘heroes’ place too much stress on individualistic heroism and deemphasize collective action?

 

I don’t have the answers to those questions. Tolstoy thought he did, disregarding his masterpieces in favor of novels that used emotional intimacy with characters to impart moral lessons.

 

One of the ironies of Frye’s position is that sometimes the Powers That Be who rank books don’t know what they are talking about. Back in the 90s, in that brief decade of domestic policy’s triumphal ascendance over foreign policy in the news, there was a lot of argument over ‘the canon’ being taught. Conservatives wanted to keep the established classics as the focus of literary education, which basically meant living white guys wanted dead white guys’ books being taught in college classrooms, while liberals wanted books by women and minorities added.  What conservatives probably didn’t realize was that books that are established canon today were, even if written by white guys, radical in their day. The canon includes Marx, Sinclair, and Steinbeck; the majority of writers in the canon are at the very least liberal anyway. This leaves me to suspect that the true reason we have greater literary freedom today is that the sort of people who would ban books are too busy watching television to know what we’re up to. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” probably did more for gay rights than any novel.

 

And the hierarchy is more complex than before.  Publishers and readers have a chicken and egg relationship in determining which writers get published; editors have to really push to get a different sort of book published.  With the triumph of marketing research and methods over criticism and editing, the cultural determinants over writers are the publishers’ perceptions of what people will buy.  Book sales, television ratings, and elections are not pure evidence as to the desires and norms of society, since they are often manipulated, but word of mouth, grassroots movements, and social media still demonstrate public desires that eventually demonstrate what we want from our writers, no matter their medium.

Schopenhauer and “Fringe”

“…the representation of a great misfortunate is alone essential to tragedy (which may be caused by a) character of extraordinary wickedness…blind fate…by the mere position of the dramatis personae, through their relations, so that there is no need either for a tremendous error or an unheard of accident, nor yet for a character whose wickedness reaches the limits of human possibility; but characters of ordinary morality, under circumstances such as often occur, are so situated with regard to each other that their position compels them, knowingly and with their eyes open, to do each other the greatest injury, without any one of them being entirely in the wrong. This last kind of tragedy seems… to surpass the other two, for it shows us the greatest misfortunate, not as an exception, not as something occasioned by rare circumstances or monstrous characters, but as arising easily and of itself out of the actions and characters of men, indeed almost as essential to them, and thus brings it terribly near to us. In the other two kinds we may look on the prodigious fate only from afar, which we may very well escape without taking refuge in renunciation. But in the last kind of tragedy we see that those powers which destroy happiness and life are such that their path to us also is open at every moment; we see the greatest sufferings brought about by entanglements that our fate might also partake of, and through actions that perhaps we also are capable of performing, so could not complain of injustice; then shuddering we feel ourselves already in the midst of hell.”

I’m not a big fan of Schopenhauer, since it appears his best ideas were better said by the Buddhists, but when I was reading this I couldn’t stop thinking about “Fringe.”

On the surface, “Fringe” is about people suffering from either blind fate or the actions of wicked men and the heroes fighting back, but as “Fringe” evolves as a show, it moves towards the superior sort of tragedy. The wicked man turns out to be the wronged man, for his son was stolen by one of the main characters, and yet the kidnapper, from his point of view, was saving the boy’s life.

As the curtains of the plot are pulled back, we see again and again that the heroes and villains are not good vs. evil, but relatively normal people pitted against each other, seeing themselves as the heroes and the others as the villains. Some of the most interesting moments in the show occur when they realize how their own mistakes are causing the problems.  It is their abnormalities that make them interesting to us, but their abnormalities were created in part by each other’s decisions.

Writing From the Bottom Up

“Having made an utter failure of my life, I found myself one day, in the midst of my poverty and wretchedness, thinking about the female companions of my youth. As I went over them one by one, examining and comparing them in my mind’s eye, it suddenly came over me that those slips of girls – which is all they were then – were in every way, both morally and intellectually, superior to the ‘grave and mustached signior’ I am now supposed to have become…I had brought myself to this present wretched state, in which, having frittered away half a lifetime, I find myself without a single skill with which I could earn a decent living. I resolved that, however unsightly my own short comings might be, I must not, for the sake of keeping them hid, allow those wonderful girls to pass into oblivion without a memorial.

 

“Reminders of my poverty were all about me: that thatched roof, the wicker lattices, the string beds, the crockery stove.  But these did not need to be an impediment to the workings of the imagination. Indeed, the beauties of nature outside my door – the morning breeze, the evening dew, the flowers and trees of my garden – were a positive encouragement to write. I might lack learning and literary aptitude, but what was to prevent me from turning it all into a story and writing it in the vernacular?”

 

From the first chapter of “Dream of Red Mansions” by Cao Xueqin

 

And so the inspiration of the greatest novel China produced began when a writer hit bottom and looked beyond himself. The books of mine other people have liked the most had the least to do with me.  The novel I wrote that came the closest to publication was about a samurai who was duty bound to kill himself, but did not so he could help save a child. The conflict between honor and compassion defined his character… the editors loved it, the marketers vetoed it. I had simply wanted to illustrate the most difficult part of Japanese culture for Americans to understand.

 

I wonder what hitting bottom would mean for me.  I’m not sure it’s possible, since I always have the cushion of family to land on. To ‘hit bottom’ would require a Bruce Wayne-like determination.  In one of the movies, the crime lord scolded Wayne for being too soft to understand crime, so Wayne gave his coat and money to a beggar and went hunting for the bottom, not so much to join it as to understand it. It took a certain arrogance on his part to assume he would survive it, of course, but that’s what happens to obsessive people.

 

The narrator, which commentators have assumed is Cao, argued against the assumption that poverty prevented inspiration. In contrast to the West, where poverty is assumed to be fuel for inspiration, in China most writers were independently wealthy scholars who belonged to little clubs where they shared their work with each other. Word of mouth was the only advertising.

 

Sometimes in Chongqing I would be sitting in my 15^th floor apartment thinking, is this really my life? Coming home every evening to a lonely apartment I haven’t even bothered to fully furnish because I know I’m leaving the country anyway?  Then I would stand on the balcony and look down at the people who make their living selling food on the street, either as groceries or cooked, and I would wonder how they managed to eek out a living.  I was a regular at one stand where the woman basted chicken and grilled it right in front of us. She was an expressive woman; I didn’t need to know Chinese to know when she and her husband were arguing. Most days they were happy, some days they would be working side by side without looking at each other. The Chinese are much more willing to reveal their family difficulties to the neighborhood.

 

But I don’t generally need to hit bottom to kick myself in gear again. I can use the shame of making a mistake to guilt myself into writing. I can give myself deadlines. Right now I have a post it note on my computer, “What have you written today?”

 

But it’s not just about how much one writes, but what one writes. If I hit bottom, what would I write about? Would I be too ashamed of how I got there to be honest about what it was like? Would I fall so hard I’d crack the mirror and find a distorted reflection?

One Part Romance, One Part Adventure, Seasoned with Satire

Fifty Ways to Love Your Lover: The Novel http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KROBHRE

 

Candice is a brilliant and beautiful young woman from a wealthy and abusive family. She meets a young man who is strong and intellectual, but doesn’t understand woman. She undertakes his education, helping use his IQ to raise his EQ, but when she turns him into the perfect boyfriend, can she give up her plans to marry a rich man?

 

Kissing the Anti-Christ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KNSUX6K

 

Christina Graves, intrepid liberal reporter, is searching for a story, while Senator Derek Hardy is searching for power. After he announces his campaign for the presidency, she starts to hunt after his secrets.  While she squirms her way through an increasingly conservative management and he through the twisty maze of his father’s power structure, they are drawn towards each others’ determination, intelligence, and, yes, good looks.

Will ambition triumph over love?

 

Ancient Lesbian Sex Secrets http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KMA0D1Y

 

When WRIP free radio starts running out of money, the Dark Lord, satanic talk show host, aka Kenneth, decides to tell his audience that their prayers will be answered or their money back.  When Jessica Hoh needs more money to pay for college, she joins an escort service.  When Feather’s poetry brings in the pennies, she writes paranormal romance novels to pay the bills. When Sam’s video game profits slump, he needs a way to advertise them.

 

When they meet each other, they naturally decide to a make a movie, one that will settle all their woes: The Ancient Lesbian Sex Secrets.

My Non-fiction

Dressed for Yesterday http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KRPX2W6

 

This is my humorous take on my life, that of traveler and teacher, reader and writer.

 

Sun-Tzu, Bruce Lee, and the Tao of Martial Arts http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KNNFU1S

 

The first regular exercise I ever found was in Tae Kwon Do when I was about thirteen, but after getting my black belt I moved on to study many others like aikido, Tai Chi, judo, and boxing. Since I generally prefer an intellectual understanding of what I’m doing, I read the Taoteching and books by martial artists and ancient Chinese generals who used Taoism as the basis for their strategies. This book is the result.

Frye and the Organization of Literature

“As literature is not itself an organized structure of knowledge, the critic has to turn to the conceptual framework of the historian for events, and to that of the philosopher for ideas…it is clear that the absence of systematic criticism has created a power vacuum, and all the neighboring disciplines have moved in.”  - Northrop Frye

 

I can think of all sorts of examples of philosophical schools colonizing literary studies: feminism, Marxism, post-modernism, just off the top of my head. To push these theories off to the side (perhaps not all the way out, since philosophy and history are the context of literature), people would have to study literature from the inside outwards.

 

But I wonder how much one can understand music by studying acoustics, how much one can understand painting by studying the chemistry of paint, so how much can we understand literature by understanding words?  Is the proper study of literature really just linguistics? Or would linguistics be to literary studies what neuro-science is to psychology?

 

If you subscribe to the idea of narrative psychology, the idea that your identity is a narrative we have formed out of our memories, that we turn our memories into stories with a theme (the meaning of life) and a main character (you), the perhaps literature is what happens when your brain becomes so good at creating narratives that it goes hog wild, and yet compartmentalizes them to keep you from going crazy (conspiracy theorists might actually be using a similar skill set as novelists). Nor would it surprise me if mythologies have more in common with literature than with history.

 

So if we wanted to make literary studies more scientific, then studying narrative psychology would be a good start.

My Funny Fantasy

Might and Right http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KTJ10D8

 

For Emperor Vor, conquering an empire is the easy part, ruling it is hard. His brother wants his throne, his wife disagrees about which son should secede him, a wizard conspiracy wishes to stop him, and a mixed bag of heroes is coming to kill him. His allies are his tea sipping, spy master sister, a chaos wizard, and a death priest.

 

The delicate political balance of his empire is upset when his daughter returns from her adventures in the mysterious West and Winderon, an elf born under the most dangerous of moons, finds the deadliest magic of all to use again him.

 

Love the Sin http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KNTIA00

 

Everyone searches for love, except for Cindy Wainrock, but everyone has to struggle through the difficulties to find it. Maria struggles against poverty, Deputy Tony Sanchez has to solve a murder, and Xia has to slay the vampires who kidnapped her would be boyfriend for his virgin blood. Yet Cindy may face the greatest danger of all, a murderer given a magical defense perfect against any but the purest of heart, which she definitely is not.

 

Ninja B Goes to College http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KN0J2EM

 

Ari’s grandfather is the head of the ninja clan, and sends her to college in America to study computers, but the university is hunting grounds for vampires. Unfortunately her bounty collecting is interrupted by biggest problems, for the vampires are only one part of the Anti-Christ’s cult, and her ally Cindy Wainrock’s father is a rich jock who likes wearing body armor while driving an armored car to hunt down liberal activists. 

 

What will happen when the satanic plot to rule the world conflicts with the alien conspiracy that already does? Can she ally with the Chinese kung fu master Xia who had come here to study engineering?  And what will happen when Xia and her junior mad scientist boyfriend finally create his dream: a quantum mechanical AI?

My High Fantasy

From Before the Flood http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IAZ0NM2

 

Soon after the fall from Paradise, people were not alone on Earth. They had giants for neighbors and thunder lizards to avoid. Angels came down from Heaven and ruled many areas as demi-gods, but when Satan’s minions rescued him from demonic torture, he plotted his revenge against God and humanity. While angels battle for the future of the world Yesu (daughter of a god) and Lilith (Adam’s first wife) fight for the future of humanity.

 

Whispers on the Wind http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KNNUH70

 

Louis Averone, the bard, thinks he is the only one who can hear the Song whispered on the wind, but when it sings of Sorrow, suicides spread. The more attuned to magic wizards are, the more they are crippled by depression.  As wizards move to steal the magic and warriors to kill the source, whatever it is, Louis Averone, Csaris the wild wizard, and Captain Valorie de’Lane hope to heal the Singer.

 

The Dragons are Coming http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KNN4WC6

 

For their forbidden love, Bernard was castrated and Helen sent to a nunnery, but while sacking an ancient, distant temple, Bernard discovers the original prophecy of dragons returning to destroy the lands. Realizing the translation his people have used is dangerously inaccurate, he rushes back to save Helen. Only she wishes him to tell the Church Mothers, and introduces him to the son he never knew he had.

Criticism's Relationship to Literature

Quotations from Northrop Frye’s “Anatomy of Criticism”

 

“Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism. It is therefore impossible to ‘learn literature’: one learns about it in a certain way, but what one learns, transitively, is the criticism of literature…criticism, rather, is to art what history is to action and philosophy to wisdom: a verbal imitation of a human productive power which in itself does not speak.”

 

Looked at it from this perspective, is philosophy then the attempt to study how to be wise, history the attempt to understand political actions, and criticism the study of how to write better? No, because that would reduce science to the attempt to make better technology, which is, by the way, the position in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” that the primary goal of science is to find better ways to do things, not just satisfy human curiosity. But I digress.

 

 All metaphors are imprecise, of course. I can definitely see the primary benefit of studying history being the improvement of politics, even if as a child I read history because it engaged my imagination.  I mostly read political and military history because I enjoyed the military conflicts between great generals and the debates between great politicians. It wasn’t until I took AP history that I realized the importance and interesting aspects of economic and cultural history that I now realize are the context of generals and politicians alike. I remember an article I read that the democratic spirit of American soldiers gave them a tactical advantage in WWII because American squad leaders were more likely to make decisions on their own while their German counterparts were more likely to wait for orders.

 

The idea that philosophy is a “verbal imitation of” wisdom which is a “human productive power which in itself does not speak” requires precise definition of those terms. You have to define wisdom by your actions and philosophy by the understanding of those actions. For example, we could debate the wisdom of a President’s decisions, and our argument would reveal our philosophy.  We made decisions all the time, often without thinking about it because we ‘just know’ what to do; philosophers try to figure out why we know what we ‘just know.’ In this light, criticism helps us to understand why we like or dislike various books.

 

But physics is just one way of studying one part of nature. There’s also biology, chemistry, etc. Is criticism more like physics or is it more like science, a collection of disciplines?  Given the number of different philosophies of literature, I’d say “criticism” is more of a general term like science than a specific term like physics. But Frye’s point is that criticism is not just another kind of literature, which was apparently a common idea when Frye wrote his books. He’s after objectivity in criticism, without which there is little justification for critics. If you can’t be objective about literature, critics are just better read and more verbose snobs.

My Science Fiction

Escapees from Hell http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IAZ0NM2

Two thousand years ago, aliens conquered Earth and turned humanity into a military-industrial complex to fight their interstellar wars. Anyone who resists is sent to Hell, an underground prison, but someone escapes…

From Whence Gods Came http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L3D7GEQ

Soul’ren is a young teacher, an alien among humans, living within a broken Dyson Sphere, with her adopted father, a war hero with a shattered memory. An invasion from another universe had been thrown back, but not before great damage to galactic civilization.  That enemy is trying to break back through the geometry of the universe, and Soul’ren must find a space ship while her father searches his broken memories for the way to hold them back.  Accompanied by the stern Kractor, the dashing Andelis Ali, and genetically enhanced gorilla warrior Dark Tiger, Soul’ren will face the dangers of mountains, ice fields, and jungles just to challenge the last bastion of technology, ruled by a mad alien and his robot minions.

 

The Sea of God http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KMI8N72

While telepathically exploring the universe, Daowyn meets June, an American teenager grieving over her late father. She mistakes him for an angel and latches onto his mind, causing a mental swap that leaves her with what she thinks are miraculous powers and the alien crippled back on his home world. While she explores the potential of spirituality to create a life based upon love and freedom, he searches for a way to Earth to restore them both to normalcy. Told from the point of view of a law of physics in stream of consciousness style.