I’m happy, nay, ecstatic to report that The Taint released today at Lyrical Press. You can download the ebook in a variety of formats via that link, though you can also get the book at Amazon (for Kindle owners), Barnes & Noble (for Nook owners), and several other online storefronts.
In honor of this auspicious occasion, I’m guest blogging over at the Lyrical Press blog, and will have several posts up there over the next few weeks.
The second problem is that naturalism, being a false picture of things, is inevitably destructive of nature, both cosmic and human. I mean not only that the age of technology has, as we all know, given us the power to ruin the world about us with magnificent profligacy. I mean also that it makes it all but impossible for human beings to inhabit the natural world as participants in its gratuity, greatness, and enchantment. And this is rather tragic, because all of civilization—quite literally all of it—springs up in the space between mortals and the mystery of the divine within and beyond the things of earth.
But to find that space—that clearing in the forest—we must first consent to be servants, not simply masters. The works of our hands have to be the way in which we respond to the summons of the ever deeper mystery within things, born out of a primordial human capacity for wonder that never presumes to know more than it can know, and that never tries to determine in advance what may or may not reveal itself. And any deafness to this summons, or any arrogant forgetfulness of this mystery, is the deepest, most barbarous irrationality of all.
Vending machine in China dispenses live crabs:
me: why do the norwegians get their own hug day? i suspect racism
B: I think there is some other group that gets one too, so clearly there is no racism at all.
me: well, there you go. if two group both get hugs, we have clearly vanquished racism forever
B: Well Obama is president you see so that was all that was left to do
I got back from my month-long vacation a few days ago. What did I do? Well, in the first place I completed an epic road trip with my family along this route:
Along the way we:
So… good vacation! Now back to work.
So WisCon rescinded Moon’s offer after all. This makes me want to take back my cautious optimism on the earlier state of the argument and revert to my usual, seldom-disappointed misanthropy.
I’m on vacation, so no comments here. In two weeks when I get back, I may have cooled off enough to write some more about this whole fiasco.
Retractio:
This needs to go at the top of the post, even though it’s the last thing I wrote.
A few days ago I read a blog post by Elizabeth Moon, in a random act of Googling. I don’t normally follow her livejournal, and I wasn’t aware of any controversy surrounding it at the time. Later I heard that yet another “fail” incident had been stirred up over the post, which honestly ticked me off. In the past I had seen people taking the anti-racist side act like total assholes in a way that made me embarrassed to agree with them, so I was predisposed to assume that this was another tempest in a teapot. I started writing this post with that in mind.
However, when I went to actually look at the content of what had been said in the most prominent venues, I found something different. People were expressing disagreement, often vehemently, but the argument was largely free of the name-calling and egregious ad hominem that had characterized Racefail. Some people were losing it–somebody, somewhere is always losing it–but for the most part the discussion was actually constructive. Strong opinions, forcefully expressed–this is not a problem, even if the opinions are ones I disagree with. This that was the meta-point of my whole post, so where was I getting off criticizing Moon’s critics?
So I decided to leave the first half of this essay as-is, but not to finish it. Instead, this brief note acts as apology and conclusion.
Here’s some responses to Moon’s post which illustrate what I’m talking about:
SF Author Elizabeth Moon had a very interesting post up the other day about citizenship and the obligations of immigrants. She started off with an observation so true and pithy that I almost just want to quote it and leave the rest of it alone:
[T]he person with no loyalty to anything but his/her own pleasure is not a noble hero of individualism, but a pathetic failure as a human being.
From there she goes to riff on the responsibilities of citizenship, the particular ways in which those responsibilities impinge on immigrant communities, and the position of the Muslim immigrant community in the US. Along the way, she makes some very thoughtful and cogent points, including this one:
The point here is that in order to accept large numbers of immigrants, and maintain any social cohesion, acceptance by the receiving population is not the only requirement: immigrants must be willing and able to change, to merge with the receiving population…. Groups that self-isolate, that determinedly distinguish themselves by location, by language, by dress, will not be accepted as readily as those that plunge into the mainstream. This is not just an American problem–this is human nature, the tribalism that underlies all societies and must be constantly curtailed if larger groups are to co-exist.
This is true as a description of how societies actually work. While it might be nice to suggest that everyone be perfectly tolerant of others regardless of how different they are, this is not likely to happen on any world inhabited by actual human beings.
That said, in the conclusion to her post, Moon goes off the rails in a few different ways:
So I clearly disagree with major points made at the end of Moon’s post. Nonetheless, this is the sort of thing that reasonable people should be able to argue about without needing to call for the other’s head on a pike. Speech that you disagree with or which critiques a group that you belong to should not be called “hate speech” just for that reason. These sorts of issues are complicated and admit multiple points of view, and Moon clearly is thoughtful and sensible enough for me to give her the benefit of the doubt and engage her constructively.
But I forgot: this is the internet! Time to get your outrage on!
[And this is where I stopped to google, which resulted in the retractio printed above.]
I don’t understand half of the things that John Clute says in his columns, but they’re always really interesting to read.
(I also can’t decide if he’s crazy, or brilliant, or just pretentious.)
Indian Slavery in the Pacific Northwest by Robert H. Ruby
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The subject of this book is a surprising practice that most people don’t know about: the Indian slave trade that existed throughout the Pacific Northwest before the arrival of Europeans and persisted into the late 19th century. The Chinook Indians of the lower Columbia River were the most prolific slave traders, but the slave trade network reached all the way to the Tlingit in Alaska and to the Plateau cultures of inland Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Indian slaves were kept as displays of status, and as such were often killed in potlaches or buried with the chiefs who owned them.
Unfortunately for this book, though, the summary I gave above is almost all of the interesting things that we know about Indian slavery. The authors in the foreword complain about the paucity of documentation that they found, and this becomes evident as the book becomes very repetitive after about the second chapter–compounded by the book’s dry style. So while the subject matter is very interesting, I can’t highly recommend this book itself.
Doing a Google image search for “bacon” returns a surprising number of NSFW images.
Thought you’d like to know.
J.S. Bangs 