Reason Magazine - Topics > Books

Apocalypse Forever

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:30:00 EDT

Convinced America is going into the shitter? Tempted to buy into the recent rise of rise-and-fallism? Make sure you first read this great little World Affairs Journal survey by Georgetown professor Robert Lieber of retrospectively inaccurate and sometimes comical American "declinism." A sample:

It was in the 1970s that declinism began to take on its modern features, following America's buffeting by oil shocks and deep recessions, a humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam, victories by Soviet-backed regimes or insurgent movements in Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia, and revolution in Iran along with the seizure of the U.S. embassy there. A 1970 book by Andrew Hacker also announced The End of the American Era. At the end of the decade, Jimmy Carter seemed to give a presidential stamp of approval to Hacker's diagnosis when he used concerns about a flagging American economy, inflation, recession, and unemployment as talking points in his famous "malaise" speech calling for diminished national expectations.

By the early 1980s, declinism had become a form of historical chic. In 1987, David Calleo's Beyond American Hegemony summoned the U.S. to come to terms with a more pluralistic world. In the same year, Paul Kennedy published what at the time was greeted as the summa theologica of the declinist movement-The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, in which the author implied that the cycle of rise and decline experienced in the past by the empires of Spain and Great Britain could now be discerned in the "imperial overstretch" of the United States. But Kennedy had bought in at the top: within two years of his pessimistic prediction, the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union in collapse, the Japanese economic miracle entering a trough of its own, and U.S. competitiveness and job creation far outpacing its European and Asian competitors.

Link via Opinion L.A.

"Almost, Not Quite, Entirely Unlike Tea"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:48:00 EDT

This month in retro-futurist news: The sad death of David Caminer, who "found the earliest ways to use a computer for business purposes, including standardizing flavorful, cost-effective cups of tea."

Caminer worked for a huge tea-cookies-meat pies-and-other-Britishy-things company called Lyons. The company needed faster clerical work to handle the math required to figure out efficiency stats and employee wages at its growing empire. In 1951, years before similarly useful* IBM computers were a twinkle in an American eye, they had a usable business computer up and running.

To help us laymen comprehend this development, New Scientist made this comparison: “In today’s terms it would be like hearing that Pizza Hut had developed a new generation of microprocessor, or McDonald’s had invented the Internet.”

All this brings to mind the greatest instance of automated tea in all of fiction: Arthur Dent's noble, computer-handicapping struggle to get a decent cuppa after the Earth is destroyed. The ship's computer eventually manages to produce a substance "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea."

I've never tasted the fruits of Caminer's labors, but I believe he managed to do slightly better by not asking the computers to make the tea directly.

More delicious retro futurism here.

*Updated: IBM had, of course, been around forever, puttering around with big clunky mainframes.

State of Discontent

mmoses@duke.edu (Michael Valdez Moses) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Diary of a Bad Year, by J.M. Coetzee, New York: Viking, 231 pages, $24.95

The South African novelist John Michael Coetzee is celebrated for his uncompromisingly critical, ethically complex, and highly cerebral writings about the nature of power. His philosophically dense, ironic, and self-reflexive fiction has exhibited a consistent suspicion of political authority without being either didactic or propagandistic. Both his fiction and his nonfiction offer merciless portraits of the human devastation wrought by state power: South African apartheid, European imperialism, the U.S. war in Vietnam, the totalitarian violence of Nazism and communism. His newest novel, Diary of a Bad Year, contemplates—among many other things—a radical rejection of the state itself.

Coetzee’s work mixes formal elements in ways that are often unsettling. He blends memoir with fiction, academic criticism with novelistic narration. When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, Coetzee delivered not a traditional lecture but a meditation ostensibly written by Robinson Crusoe about “his man,” the novelist Daniel Defoe. In his 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee transformed a series of academic lectures he gave over several years into a full-fledged fiction about an aging female novelist who hails from Australia, whose career at times eerily resembles Coetzee’s own, and whose life intersects with that of Coetzee’s contemporaries. Were that not strange enough, this “novel” does not end with Elizabeth Costello’s death, but follows her misadventures into an afterlife that she herself recognizes as a kind of cut-rate parody of Kafka’s parable, “Before the Law.”

Similarly, Diary of a Bad Year refuses to recognize the border that has traditionally separated political theory from fictional narrative. Indeed, Coetzee suggests that the politics of an oppressive state are only one dimension of a broader web of contention that encompasses the private struggles of his characters. In this complex work, his characters’ lives are marred by the conflicts and limitations in which the state itself originates. The search for an apolitical existence free from the evils of state power inevitably comes face to face with the dangers and discomforts of a “natural” world where the clash of personal desires is unregulated by any independent governmental authority.

The book’s narrative structure is formally innovative and technically ambitious. It is partly narrated by “Señor C” (a.k.a. “John,” “Juan,” and “J C”), a world-famous writer in his seventies suffering from Parkinson’s disease, who has recently left his native South Africa to take up residence in Sydney, Australia. (Coetzee currently resides in Adelaide, Australia.) Señor C counts among his many internationally known works of fiction and nonfiction a novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (a book actually published under Coetzee’s name in 1982), and a study of literary censorship that sounds suspiciously like Coetzee’s own 1996 book Giving Offense.

Diary of a Bad Year features two diaries, each written by Señor C. The first and longer diary, commissioned by a German publisher, consists of a set of “Strong Opinions” on timely political and social subjects: “On the origin of the state,” “On anarchism,” “On Machiavelli,” “On Al Qaida,” “On Guantanamo Bay,” and so on. The second diary consists of “gentler” opinions, not intended for publication: “On the erotic life,” “On aging,” “On compassion,” “On the writing life,” “On J. S. Bach.” These are less obviously political and more personal in tone and subject.

To make matters more complicated, both diaries usually share the book’s pages with other strands of narrative. Solid horizontal lines divide the pages into sections. A top section consists of Señor C’s “strong” and “soft” opinions. A middle section includes his more intimate record of an ongoing (and “Platonic”) relationship with Anya, a sexually alluring half-Filipina twenty-something whom C meets in the laundry room of his apartment building. Finally, a bottom section offers Anya’s own narrative, in which she reflects on Señor C, who hires her to be the typist of his “Strong Opinions” manuscript (though he seems far more interested in the scantiness of her clothing than her lamentable typing skills). She also chronicles her turbulent ongoing relationship with her boyfriend, Alan, an unsavory 42-year-old investment counselor.

Coetzee adds yet one more narrative twist: C’s voice often gives way to Anya’s in the “middle” sections, while Anya’s “bottom” sections are often colonized by Alan’s voice. The result is an intricate interplay between Señor C’s pronouncements on a wide rage of political, cultural, and highly personal subjects and the emotionally resonant story of the deeply fraught romantic triangle involving Señor C, Anya, and Alan.

This complex, fugal narrative is more than a mere exercise in technical virtuosity. Diary of a Bad Year poses serious and deeply troubling questions: “Why is it so hard to say anything about politics from outside politics? Why can there be no discourse about politics that is not itself political?” Señor C’s struggle to describe a world free of state power is burdened by his realization that he lacks an adequate literary form to represent such a perfectly free existence. What, C might wonder, would the language of pure freedom, of undiluted individual autonomy sound like? What hitherto unknown literary genre or artistic form, uninflected by the sorry history of human government, might body forth such a world? It is as if we were to ask what tongue Adam spoke before the fall.

Although Alan (a not entirely convincing representative of amoral capitalism and belligerent “neo-liberalism”) describes Señor C as a sentimental socialist, C characterizes his own brand of political thought as “pessimistic anarchistic quietism.” He explains: “anarchism because experience tells me that what is wrong with politics is power itself; quietism because I have my doubts about the will to set about changing the world, a will infected with the drive to power; and pessimism because I am skeptical that, in a fundamental way, things can be changed.”

In wide-ranging remarks that wrestle with the political thought of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Etienne de la Boétie, the 16th-century philosopher of civil disobedience, Señor C finds it especially troubling that “the only ‘we’ we know—ourselves and the people close to us—are born into the state; and our forebears too were born into the state as far back as we can trace. The state is always there before we are.” For Señor C, the state originates in a criminal conspiracy: gangs of armed men employ force to extort money and obedience from their “subjects.”

C insists that the criminal activities of the state do not end with the act of its founding, but are always and everywhere present in the contemporary world. The aerial bombing of civilian populations, the detentions at Guantanamo Bay, the suspension of civil liberties and widespread increase of surveillance in the war on terror —all speak to the fact that the state establishes its absolute sovereignty through violence.

By such means the state continually demonstrates that there is no authority higher than itself, that it is the ultimate source of all law and justice, that it possesses the “right” to treat “outlaws”—that is, individuals who reject its legitimacy—with impunity. What particularly depresses Señor C is the universal powerlessness and (more worrisome still) unwillingness of individuals to throw off this criminal conspiracy that goes by the name of “the state.”

For all the passion of his opinions, Señor C senses their ineffectuality. Merely to express his outrage in print will not bring about a fundamental change in contemporary political life. In fact, it might paradoxically suggest a willingness to play by the rules set down by the political status quo. Insofar as the system tolerates C’s “strong opinions” (and even indirectly rewards him financially for giving them vent) it demonstrates that it can quite easily withstand the most vehement and radical jeremiads of its critics. C’s meeting with Anya, and his willingness to let her read and comment on his “strong opinions,” alerts him to the need to revise his opinions or offer an alternative set of reflections. The increasingly personal and intimate nature of his second, “gentle” diary, which Anya prefers to the first, marks C’s decisive turn away from public to the private affairs, from an aggressively anti-political to a more evasive apolitical mode of being in the world.

One might understand C’s second diary as an attempt to resist the power of the state by burrowing ever more deeply into the (ever shrinking and always imperiled) sphere of his private life. And just as C’s second diary corrects his first, and thereby ideally serves to delimit the sphere of politics, the more intimate narrative streams carry Coetzee’s reader that much farther away from the public realm the state claims as its own.

But if the novelistic world inhabited by C, Anya, and Alan provides a minimal and precarious refuge from the omnipotence of the state, it is not, at least as Coetzee portrays it, a utopian or prelapsarian realm. Indeed, they discover that their personal lives are blighted by the very ethical disagreements, primal struggles, and potentially dangerous forms of sexual and material competition that historically gave rise to the state itself (or, at any rate, provided a pretext for its establishment).

In an effort to steal C’s financial assets, Alan has used the unwitting Anya to plant spyware on C’s computer. He reads both of C’s diaries in manuscript without his prior consent. Though Anya objects to and Alan abandons his scheme to defraud Señor C, he nonetheless humiliates the septuagenarian author, informing him in savage fashion that he is not only a hopeless political relic but also an over-the-hill Don Juan whose sexual interest in Anya will never be reciprocated. By the end of the novel, C is left to confront his loneliness, his inexorable physical decline, and his inevitable death with only his stories, memories, and fantasies of Anya as potential sources of solace.

In Coetzee’s fiction, the story of domestic life can be nearly as cruel and merciless as the political world. But at least the misdeeds and missteps of private existence have the virtue of being freely chosen. For Coetzee’s characters, the difference between involuntary subjection to the state and a freely chosen individual path, however harsh and barren, may be the only difference that matters.

Contributing Editor Michael Valdez Moses is associate professor of English at Duke, author of The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (Oxford University Press), and co-editor of Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899-1939 (Duke University Press).

A (Not Really) Working-Class Journalist Is Something to Be

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:05:00 EDT

Try to guess the provenance of this sentence:

Weren't nobody happy when Ma got pregnant with me [...], what with her being barely seventeen and all and the father being my old man, who wasn't nobody's idea of a young go getter. Me? I can't complain -- I got borned, didn't I?

Is that some snippet of oral history from a WPA project on Appalachian life? Perhaps a selection from The Autobiography of Chicken George?

Nope! It's from a new nonfiction book by a New York Times staff writer, who grew up in, uh, New Hampshire. As Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley, who flagged this passage (and liked the book), put it, such demonstrations of "hardscrabble bona fides" sound "contrived and artifical." They also sound a lot like the round-the-clock Tim Russert tributes that have clogged the media's tubes since Friday's news. Who knew that being a fan of a professional sporting team was such a telltale indicator of regular-guy, working class heroism?

In watching bits of MSNBC's ongoing Russert telethon, Beltway elitist after Beltway elitist waxed positively proletarian about the Meet the Press host's authentic Joe Sixpackitude, his instinctive "connection" with the great unwashed lunchbuckets of (late-campaign) Hillary Clinton's Real America. It was kind of like watching Stephen Hawking sing the glories of the Yanomami tribe.

Being the son of sharecroppers myself, I tend to be allergic to the sight of monocle-wearing Kennedy Center regulars expressing wonder that a guy can really make it in this big old world without Ivy League certification. And needless to say, the bizarre ritual of resume de-padding at the top of the heap would strike me as borderline offensive if I wasn't so busy working three jobs and going to night school. But maybe there is a more charitable interpretation.

Why are baseball players the most superstitious athletes in the world? Because 1) the game is a festival of failure, where screwing up 7 times out of 10 is a much-coveted goal; and 2) they get to be bajillionaires as long as they can continue to slightly beat the odds and stay healthy. The joyride can be stopped at any time, without warning. Something similar is at play with hot young actresses − they're rich, they're famous, they're adored, they're despised ... and they can be out of work forever overnight, for reasons often out of their control.

It makes a kind of perfect sense that those lucky few who ascend the rickety throne of network TV news would pay constant, treacly tribute to the masses who make it all possible. If an army of Viagra-popping geriatrics was paying for my baseball season tickets, I too may be tempted to wax poetical about the gritty hometown I long left behind, and the ironclad Wisdom of Big Russ' Greatest American Heartland Generation of Our Fathers. Also, maybe there are worse things than an elite class that feels under constant pressure to demonstrate their jes'-folks street cred.

But still. If, as former reason editor Virgina Postrel suggested in a fascinating recent Atlantic column, rising incomes on the lower end of the economic scale are eroding the need for immigrant and minority communities to overcompensate with conspicuous consumption, maybe it's time for a mirror effect to begin taking shape at the top. It's OK, you Skull & Bones fancy-lads who will always rule the world − you no longer have to pretend to like Pabst Blue Ribbon! Besides, only Dennis Hopper ever drank that shit to begin with.

"But the really new thing is that the authorities are coming to our attention."

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:30:00 EDT

The science fiction blog io9 has a great interview up with cyber/steam/techno-punk novelist William Gibson, touching on everything from the surveillance state to Godzilla. Here's Gibson's response to being dubbed a "dystopian" writer:

None of us ever live in dystopia. That's an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don't seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl.

Whole thing here. reason's legendary look at the upside of "zero privacy" here.

List: Revolution for Kids!

info@reason.com (Cory Doctorow) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Cory Doctorow is a one-man miniature media empire. He is co-editor of Boing Boing, one of the most popular blogs on the Internet, and he has also written Essential Blogging (2002). He has also written several science fiction books, most famously Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), a novel about a post-scarcity society run by informal, voluntary “adhocracies.” In his spare time, he’s an activist for copyright reform.

His latest book, Little Brother (Tor), is a dystopian young adult novel set in a near-future security state put into place after terrorists attack San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. We asked Doctorow, a devout civil libertarian, to recommend three political books for young adults:

1 Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, by Daniel Pinkwater: “One of my all-time favorite books, period. A subversive novel about a kid who moves from a funky urbanized inner city neighborhood to a place where he attends Heinrich Himmler junior high and is lost among very plastinated people. He and a friend discover an occult book shop in the funky neighborhood and go spelunking.”

2 Pretties, by Scott Westerfeld: “Well paced, and wildly popular. It’s about the pressures on young people to conform, specifically to physically conform and to switch off their minds while they’re conforming. All Westerfeld’s books are good revolutionary texts.”

3 Animal Farm, by George Orwell: “It’s probably the most perfect bit of political exposition disguised as fairy tale of all time.”

I Cannot Live Without Books

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:01:00 EDT

Writing from the annual publishing industry brouhaha BookExpo America, which is being held this year in Los Angeles, New York Times reporter Edward Wyatt chronicles the fear and resentment sparked by electronic reading gadgets such as Amazon's Kindle. Have e-book buyers forsaken the physical originals? "We don't see people buying both versions," one publishing executive told Wyatt. "I think there is almost a one-to-one cannibalization."

For a more optimistic, or at least more idiosyncratic case for the printed word, the great urban historian Luc Sante offers this gem at the end of a long, discursive Wall Street Journal essay on the endless book collecting that has shaped and dominated his life:

I would very much miss books as material objects were they to disappear. The tactility of books assists my memory, for one thing. I can't remember the quote I'm searching for, or maybe even the title of the work that contains it, but I can remember that the book is green, that the margins are unusually wide, and that the quote lies two-thirds of the way down a right-hand page. If books all appear as nearly identical digital readouts, my memory will be impoverished.

Will on Healy

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 27 May 2008 09:34:00 EDT

In this week's Newsweek, George Will lets loose with some resounding praise for Gene Healy and his book The Cult of the Presidency, calling it "the year's most pertinent and sobering public affairs book." Will then gushes:

Healy's dissection of the delusions of "redemption through presidential politics" comes at a moment when liberals, for reasons of liberalism, and conservatives, because they have forgotten their raison d'être, "agree on the boundless nature of presidential responsibility." Liberals think boundless government is beneficent. Conservatives practice situational constitutionalism, favoring what Healy calls "Caesaropapism" as long as the Caesar-cum-Pope wields his anti constitutional powers in the service of things these faux conservatives favor.

Will—easily the most intellectually honest conservative pundit in the business—has been known to tease out his inner libertarian from time to time.

An ~~excerpt~~ adaptation from Healy's book ran as the cover story in our June issue.

Hogwarts Law School

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Harry Potter gets along with his fans. Some media companies fire off menacing legal threats at the first sign that someone might be doing something unauthorized with one of their characters, but J.K. Rowling and Warner—the author of the Harry Potter books and the studio behind the Harry Potter movies, respectively—have had a generally tolerant attitude toward the amateur fiction, home movies, and online guides created by the boy wizard's fan base.

So some were surprised last fall when Rowling and Warner sued to stop RDR Books from publishing Steven Vander Ark's The Harry Potter Lexicon. The Lexicon is essentially a hard-copy version of Vander Ark's website, which collates information about the Potter series; the site is filled with detailed lists of the peoples, places, spells, and creatures that inhabit Rowling's world. Much of the text was drawn directly from Rowling's books, prompting the novelist to argue that Vander Ark intends to make money by repackaging her words. It's unclear how the courts will rule, but I'm inclined to agree with Columbia Law School's Tim Wu as to how they should rule. Wu wrote in Slate that Rowling "has confused the adaptations of a work, which she does own, with discussion of her work, which she doesn't….Textually, the law gives her sway over any form in which her work may be 'recast, transformed, or adapted.' But she does not own discussion of her work—book reviews, literary criticism, or the fan guides that she's suing."

Yet even if the courts end up agreeing with Wu, Vander Ark has lost a more important battle. The Harry Potter fan community has overwhelmingly sided with Rowling, shunning Vander Ark and denouncing him with such phrases as "arrogant, egotistical, self-absorbed jerk." The reasons for this reaction are complex. In part it reflects the difference between a book sold for profit and a website offered for free. In part it reflects allegations that Vander Ark misled potential contributors into believing his book had Rowling's blessing. In part it simply reflects the fact that fans are predisposed to agree with their favorite authors. The case hasn't been decided yet, but in the court of his peers Vander Ark will be punished—is being punished—either way.

Speaking at the OnCopyright conference in Manhattan on May 1, Wu pointed out just how sharply this cuts against most people's expectations. Ordinarily we assume that the fan norms surrounding intellectual property will be looser than the letter of the law. This time, the law may be more permissive than the fans.

The conference was sponsored by the Copyright Clearance Center, a company that helps guide businesses, universities, and others through the thicket of licenses and permissions required by intellectual property law. There were four panels over the course of the day: one on copyright's collision with technology, one on copyright and society, one on copyright and the arts, and one on copyright and the law. The speakers ranged from industry figures eager to strengthen intellectual property controls to radicals ready to dump some rules into the harbor.

But the most important division on display wasn't the split between the conservatives and the reformers. It was the line that divided the law panel from all the others. The former featured three intelligent attorneys debating how the law should be interpreted and what the law should say. The latter featured artists, journalists, entrepreneurs, activists, and academics grappling with a world where people's behavior is governed much more by tools and norms than by statute books.

Kevin O'Kane, for example, is the man behind redlasso, a service that makes it easier to search for ongoing and recent TV and radio broadcasts, extract the parts you want, and drop them into the context of your choice. You could, for example, find all the references to the word "Myanmar" in the last 12 hours of TV news, pull out the appropriate clips, and add them to an online news commentary. The result, O'Kane hopes, will be an "online media center for bloggers."

There may come a day that CNN or Fox or a local broadcaster in Iowa City decides that this useful tool is a machine for piracy and takes redlasso to court. But you need only visit YouTube, Crooks and Liars, or any video-heavy blog to see that the Web already welcomes such efforts to recycle what used to be perishable content, that this enriches our ability to discuss the issues of the day, and that people across the political spectrum engage in this behavior without pause. If the law thinks they're wrong, then our norms may know something that our laws do not.

Nor did this informal borrowing begin with the Internet. On the arts panel, the novelist Jonathan Lethem spoke about the imitation and appropriation that has always been embedded in creative activities. Every artist begins by copying, he said, and some of the best—he singled out William Shakespeare and Bob Dylan—keep borrowing until the end of their life. This is part of the creative process, he argued, and it should be welcomed rather than banished.

Lethem has covered this territory before. Last year he contributed an article to Harper's called "The Ecstacy of Influence: A Plagiarism"; it not only touted the virtues of quoting and appropriating other people's work, but was itself largely stitched together from other writer's words, a fact revealed at the end of the essay when he listed the texts he had pilfered. It was a clever stunt, but it highlighted something important about creativity: not just the fact that writers draw on other people's work, but the fact that the best writers transmute those influences into something of their own. Lethem's novel Gun, With Occasional Music carries a critic's quote on the cover declaring that it "Marries Chandler's style and Philip K. Dick's vision." It's a good description: The book, a murder mystery that features talking apes and kangaroos, feels like a mash-up of Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled crime writing and Philip K. Dick's surreal science fiction. But it's impossible to imagine either Chandler or Dick producing this particular story. It's part Chandler, part Dick, and all Lethem.

The book also says something about what the world would be like without that free-flowing creative exchange. Where other dystopian novels imagine states that force individuals into a suffocating collective, the totalitarian society in Gun keeps people apart, by limiting the questions they can ask and the memories their minds can contain. The result is a world without communication and a world without a past—a world where every thought is an orphan work.

Not even the most militant copyright maximalists would consider that desirable. But even if they tried to impose such a restrictive regime, they'd be helpless in the face of technologies that make it easy to defy antiquated copyright rules, and in the face of norms that put more gentle restrictions on our behavior. The OnCopyright conference didn't give me the impression that the lawyers were on the verge of fixing America's intellectual property laws. But it did bolster my faith that we'll manage to muddle through anyway.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

Attn: SoCal Reasonoids -- McCainapalooza Tour!

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 02 May 2008 10:19:00 EDT

This Sunday, May 4, I will be at the Palm Springs Book Festival, hawking McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, and appearing on two panel discussions: 1) "The Presidential Race," at 1:00 p.m., featuring Hugh "A Mormon in the White House?" Hewitt, Robert "The Pornography of Power" Scheer, Greg "Armed Madhouse" Palast, and John "Pure Goldwater" Dean. And 2) "American Imperialism and its Consequences," at 4:30 p.m., with Chalmers "Nemesis" Johnson. Between those sessions there will be an interesting-sounding discussion on Barry Goldwater.

Can't make it to the land of shag carpets and fabulous waiters? There will be other opportunities to hurl pricey foodstuffs in my general direction. On Saturday, May 10, I'll be speaking at a meeting of the Rancho Palos Verdes Democrats (both of them?), details to come. On Wednesday, May 14 at 7:00 p.m., I'm apparently delivering a lecture at the Pasadena Public Library.

And on Thursday, May 15 at 7:00 p.m. comes the big enchilada -- "Deconstructing McCain," a Zocalo L.A. event at the gorgeous Los Angeles Central Library.

Each and every one of thse will feature plenty of time for cross-examination, semi-hostile discussion, and book signing. Most will involve (please Jeebus) some post-game libations.

Speaking of John Dean, he's got a new piece out today about the testy relationship between McCain and the maverick senator he replaced, Barry Goldwater; something you can basically read about in our two books, and nowhere else. Here's an excerpt:

Although Goldwater initially supported McCain's run for the Senate, Goldwater knew an opportunist when he saw one, and did not like any of them. We chose not to dwell on the McCain/Goldwater relationship in Pure Goldwater, but we did report how, after assisting McCain win his Senate seat, Goldwater was forced to pull McCain up short for using his good name for fundraising, when McCain had tarnished his own name because of his involvement with the Keating Five. We also included correspondence to shows that McCain is not very good at keeping his word.
To know Goldwater -- as we believe those who read his unpublished private journal will -- is to understand how different these men are, and to see that McCain is cut from very different cloth than Goldwater. Goldwater considered public service a high calling, not an ego trip or power play. McCain was fortunate that Goldwater never publicly exposed him, but Goldwater was too good a Republican to do that and he thought too highly of McCain's father to sink his successor in the Senate.
Had Goldwater publicized what I believe to be his true feelings about John McCain, I doubt McCain would be the presumptive nominee of the GOP in 2008. Goldwater's political perceptions of others have proven extraordinarily prescient, so his reaction toward McCain is telling.

Look for Daniel McCarthy's review of Pure Goldwater in our June issue. And check out Nick Gillespie's 2006 review of Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience.

I Am Curious (Wiki)

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:53:00 EDT

I'm pro-Wikipedia. I think it's an inspiring example of bottom-up collaborative creation. Knock it for its inaccuracies, and I'll reel off the usual defenses: Sure, it isn't completely reliable, but there are thousands of eyes monitoring it. When someone makes an obviously inaccurate edit, someone else will usually pounce to fix it. In the meantime, the uncertainty encourages a different, more skeptical sort of reading.

That said: Boy, but some weird crap manages to slip through the cracks there. From the entry on Curious George:

As stated in an interview, the book Curious George Takes a Job was inspired by a true story. A boy, whose name is not known today, was born in Hamburg in 1909 with Down's Syndrome. He was institutionalized by his parents, condemned to a life at the facility.

When the boy was 15, he escaped from the institution and fled into the city streets. Hungry and in search of food, he found the briefly unattended kitchen of a restaurant, where a cook found him playing with the food and eating it. The cook, intrigued, put him to work to clean dishes, and took him home that evening. Within the following days, the cook arranged with a friend to have the boy wash windows at an office building.

The boy's work went well at first. But in one office, he found colored paints. He used them to paint a mural on the wall of the office. The tenant returned to his office after a lunch break to find the boy busy painting, and he started to chase after him. The boy jumped out a third-story window, breaking some bones.

The story made local headlines. After several weeks of hospitalization, the boy was formally adopted by the cook, and he later became the star of an amateur movie. He was recognized in the coming years as a talented artist. Some of his artwork was sold by the renowned bookseller, A.S.W. Rosenbach.

Tragically, his identity, art, and other details of his life were lost in the ravages of World War II, and he is believed to have been put to death by the government of Nazi Germany.

That passage has been part of the article for over a year. During that time, the page has not suffered from an absence of attention. There has been a long-running battle about whether George is an ape or a monkey. There have been arguments over the political subtexts of the stories. There have been efforts to add obviously phony info to the entry, prompting editors to leave comments like this one:

I seriously doubt "Curious George Gets AIDS" was one of the books. I don't want to change it myself since last time I made a minor edit I was banned from making any further ones by Wikipedia.

Yet that shaggy-dog story about Curious George Takes a Job is still there. No one has even suggested that it be sourced with a citation stronger than the vague "As stated in an interview."

It is my power as a Wikipedia reader to make the necessary changes myself. But a bizarre and funny passage like that one deserves to be immortalized, so I'm blogging it instead.

Bonus links: A communiqué from the Curious George Brigade.

Fr. Archimedes Aloysius Anarchy's Curious George fan fiction, including such unforgettable tales as Curious George Goes to Jail and Curious George Does LSD.

A Curious George true crime story.

Curious George meets rave culture:

How Do You Know When a Kid's Interest in Sex Is Prurient?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:37:00 EDT

Indiana booksellers are worried about a new state law that requires anyone who sells "sexually explicit materials" to pay a $250 fee and register with the secretary of state so he can be tracked by local officials. In addition to books, magazines, and videos intended for "the stimulation of the human genital organs," the targeted material includes anything deemed "harmful to minors." The latter category is nebulous and potentially wide, defined elsewhere in the Indiana code as material that "describes or represents, in any form, nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sado-masochistic abuse"; "appeals to the prurient interest in sex of minors"; "is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable matter for... minors"; and "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors."

An Indiana bookstore owner suggests that definition, depending on whom you ask, could cover "just about any coming-of-age novel and books on health, hygiene, and human sexuality." Chris Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, agrees that the law sweeps more broadly than its authors and supporters (who had in mind businesses that specialize in pornography) anticipated:

The way we read this bill, if you stock a single book with sexual content, even a novel or a book about sex education, you will have to register as a business that sells sexually explicit material....This is just outrageous from our standpoint, and we believe it is a violation of the First Amendment.

A co-sponsor of the law, state Sen. Brent Steele (R-Bedford), tells the Indianapolis Star the booksellers are overreacting. He notes that the law does not cover "a person who sells sexually explicit materials on June 30, 2008," so existing booksellers need not register as smut peddlers. Unless they move to a new location. Or change their inventory.

[Thanks to Nicolas Martin for the tip.]

Keith Richards Must Be Rolling Over in His Coffin

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:49:00 EDT

Can loud-mouthed British performance artists be barred from entering the United States on grounds of "moral turpitude," due to tales of licentious drug use and staged crucifictions from a new tell-all memoir? Even though they claim to be sober for several years now? Yes they can!

reason on the increasingly oxymoronic Visa Waiver program here.

44 Years of 3-Minute Poems

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Ray Davies: Not Like Everybody Else, by Thomas M. Kitts, New York: Routledge, 302 pages, $19.95

When the Kinks recorded The Village Green Preservation Society in 1968, the north London quartet was not trying to create a commercial failure. Quite the opposite. But surely they must have realized that the year of the street riot was not a propitious time to greet the rock world with couplets like "We are the Office Block Persecution Affinity/God save little shops, china cups, and virginity." They sang those lines with genuine enthusiasm, even if it's a sure bet that no one in the band was a virgin at the time.

The song—the sprightly, catchy title track of a nearly perfect album—had been composed by Ray Davies, one of rock's greatest lyricists. It was not a tribute to virginity so much as a tribute to the idea of virginity and of everything else praised in this romantic English anthem: village greens, the George Cross, strawberry jam, draught beer, "the old ways." The record recalls a more rooted existence, but its list of artifacts worth saving draws on pop culture as much as pastoral life: "We are the Sherlock Holmes English Speaking Vernacular/Help save Fu Manchu, Moriarty, and Dracula." There is even a shout-out to Donald Duck, who's about as English as Donald Trump.

The album sold less than 500,000 copies. Four years earlier, the Kinks had been one of the most popular bands in the West, climbing the American and British charts with two brash, loud rock songs, "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night." Indeed, as Thomas M. Kitts points out in this intelligent study, The Kinks "were ranked with the Rolling Stones, both only second to the Beatles." There was an enormous stylistic gap between the quiet nostalgia of Village Green and the Kinks' earlier, noisier explosions of adolescent lust and frustration—and that contrast only begins to hint at the band's range. In their first decade as a recording unit, the Kinks experimented with trad jazz, musical theater, Indian raga, and New Orleans funk. Above all, they delved into the English music-hall tradition, with its vaudevillian showmanship, singalong melodies, working-class sympathies, and epicene moments of burlesque.

The constant thread was a willful refusal to follow pop fashions. The Kinks were happy to set trends: The early singles paved the way for punk rock, heavy metal, and grunge, while the band's later, quieter character studies ("Rosie Won't You Please Come Home," "Two Sisters," "Autumn Almanac") and satires of modern British life ("A Well Respected Man," "Dedicated Follower of Fashion," "Sunny Afternoon") would have a strong impact on other English artists. Yet even when no one was imitating them, the Kinks kept doing their own thing, recording well-crafted but poor-selling LPs like Village Green and, in 1971, Muswell Hillbillies, a jazz and country-flavored concept album about the injustice of urban renewal programs. By the mid-'70s, the band had evolved into a touring troupe that staged Brechtian rock musicals. There were plenty of rock operas in that era, but there was a big gulf between the bombast of Tommy or Jesus Christ, Superstar and Kinksian efforts like Preservation, a witty if tangled three-disc story about a socialist revolution that becomes a puritanical, totalitarian nightmare.

The group took another turn in 1976, when they signed with a new label, Arista, and tried to work within the genres that happened to be popular at the moment, from new wave to metallic hard rock. Davies even dabbled in disco. He was still drawn to the theater, but he generally expressed this interest outside the Kinks (co-writing the musicals Chorus Girls and 80 Days) or channeled it into directing music videos. The band became enormously popular in America again, though not in the UK. For the most part, the Kinks' new records succeeded artistically as well as commercially, at least until they left Arista for MCA in the mid-'80s. In the '90s they finally disbanded. Ray and his brother Dave—the group's lead guitarist and an important architect of its sound—have since enjoyed low-profile but impressive solo careers.

Muswell Hillbillies is my favorite Kinks record, but The Village Green Preservation Society stands out for being so tenaciously removed from its time. Inspired by Dylan Thomas's play Under Milk Wood, the album describes the colorful inhabitants of an unnamed English town. The title track, that toe-tapping ode to Donald Duck and virgins, presents itself as a love letter to the past, but the singer knew very well that the place he was romanticizing wasn't lost so much as imaginary. Kitts quotes Davies' description of the village as "a fantasy world that I can retreat to. ... It was my own Wizard of Oz land."

Davies' other retreat was a very real place: Muswell Hill, the London suburb where he was raised. The heart of the young Davies' world was the front room of his family home. "After the pubs closed at 11:00 pm," Kitts writes, Davies' father "would invite his drinking cronies to join his extended family and children's friends for an after-hours party in what would be the family's overcrowded front room, which, in those largely pre-television days, held the family's old upright piano, the most important piece of furniture in the Davies's home, and a 78 r.p.m. wind-up gramophone." The parties featured rowdy performances of pop hits and music-hall standards, with Davies's father doing a drunken impersonation of Cab Calloway. As Kitts notes, "The influence of these parties on the Kinks, particularly the campy Kinks of the early to mid-1970s, is remarkable. Whether consciously or not, it seemed as if Ray was trying to recreate the Saturday night parties of his family's home—complete with chaos, beer, and singalongs."

In theory, there is a wide gap between the camp aesthetic, with its love of artifice and role-playing, and the traditionalist outlook, with its focus on the permanent things. Yet the Kinks at their campiest were the Kinks at their most rooted. Susan Sontag famously wrote that the camp worldview "sees everything in quotation marks." Davies does too: "Everybody's a dreamer, and everybody's a star/And everybody's in showbiz, it doesn't matter who you are," he sang in "Celluloid Heroes." But usually he's yelling for someone to tear those quotation marks down, even as he suspects that life as a quotation might have its own numb pleasures ("I wish my life was a nonstop Hollywood movie show/A fantasy world of celluloid villains and heroes/Because celluloid heroes never feel any pain/And celluloid heroes never really die").

Davies—one of the few pop figures with a strong cult following among both gays and conservatives—does not simply combine camp with traditionalism. He is at once the alienated individualist and the communitarian populist, a man who praises both the misfit and the ordinary rituals that everybody enjoys ("I like my football on a Saturday/Roast beef on Sundays, all right/I go to Blackpool for my holidays/Sit in the open sunlight"). Village Green, like Under Milk Wood, wove those strands together by populating Davies's village with eccentrics; by celebrating their individuality, he celebrated their small community as well. Muswell Hillbillies is a darker album, but it takes the same approach, mixing songs about the bizarre characters on Muswell Hill with angry jeremiads at the authorities that bulldoze homes and neighborhoods.

Politically, this outlook translates into an intense distrust both for large corporations and for the state. Like many rock stars, Davies has written songs attacking venal Big Business. Unlike most rock stars, he has written songs attacking domestic government bureaucracies ("I was born in a welfare state/Ruled by bureaucracy/Controlled by civil servants/And people dressed in gray"). And he may, depending on how you interpret Neil Young's "Union Man," be the only rocker ever to devote a song to attacking unions. Davies doesn't dislike organized labor per se, but he had a bad experience with a printers' union in his teens, and in the mid-'60s his band was barred from touring America for several years because the musicians' union refused to issue the required work permits. He retaliated with 1970's "Get Back in Line": "But that union man's got such a hold on me/He's the man who decides if I live or I die, if I starve or I eat/Then he walks up to me and the sun begins to shine/And he walks right back and I know that I've got to get back in the line."

There are several books about the Kinks already, but these are mostly written by rock journalists. Kitts, by contrast, is a professor of literature at St. John's University in New York. He gives Davies's lyrics serious scrutiny without neglecting to consider the ways they are amplified, undercut, or elaborated by the music. He also looks beyond Davies's recorded output to consider the singer's experiments in film, fiction, and theater. I have my occasional disagreements with his conclusions, but that is inevitable. The depth and breadth of the study are worlds away from the typical pop-star biography and more in line with the other academic work Routledge publishes.

That said, one strength of Davies' best work is that it is pop, even when it's resolutely ignoring the rest of the pop universe. "The Village Green Preservation Society" may be the most un-1968 song of 1968. It is also one of the most infectious recordings of the last 40 years. Davies could have been a full-time filmmaker, poet, or novelist; we should be grateful that he chose to do most of his work within the confines of the three-minute pop song instead.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker is the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press). This article originally appeared in The American Conservative.

Arthur C. Clarke, RIP

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:51:00 EDT

The novelist Arthur C. Clarke has died at age 90. It's been a couple decades since I last read any of his books, but I enjoyed several of them in my teens, especially 2001 and the wonderfully ambiguous Childhood's End.

And then there was his larger cultural influence, which stretched all the way from here...

...to here:

Rest in peace.

Who's Reading What Where?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:28:00 EDT

In case you thought that globalization/the Internet/media conglomerates/The Man had finally succeeded in homogenizing people's tastes and consumption habits, think again.

Among Amazon's many curated features is a fascinating Best of the Month list, where they've just started offering regional breakdowns. Here's some trend analysis from Amazon's bloggers at Omnivoracious:

in the early March returns a few interesting things pop out: Stephenie Meyer is much more popular in the West and the South. Jodi Picoult and Valerie Bertinelli are popular in the East; Jonah Goldberg is not. Richard Price and Tori Spelling are doing well on the coasts; James Patterson's latest Maximum Ride and Mary Kay Andrews's new cooking mystery are big in the South. And African American bishop E. Bernard Jordan's The Laws of Thinking, not in the top 10 in any other region, is #2 in the South.
That's only based on a limited data set so far, though, since March just started, so I went back and filled in the data for February too, which you can see on our Best of February page. What jumps out there? Well, FairTax: The Truth, by radio host Neal Boortz, is a regional blockbuster: #2 among all books in the South but not in the top 10 for any other region. Among February releases it does make the top 10s in the Midwest and the West (barely), but in the East it wasn't even close: #122! On the other hand, Greg Mortenson's paperback hit about building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Three Cups of Tea, and Susan Jacoby's modern jeremiad, The Age of American Unreason, both did much better in the West than anywhere else. Baseball fans (or at least Baseball Prospectus statheads) appear to be grouped, as you might expect, in the East and Midwest, and, even less surprisingly, the only part of the country where the Sports Illustrated New York Giants Super Bowl Commemorative Edition made the top 10 was, yes, the East (it didn't even make the top 500 in the West or the Midwest).

To see the whole current list, go to their Best of the Month and scroll down toward the bottom of the page to "Most of the Month."

Friday Mini Book Review: Head Case

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:40:00 EST

See past mini book reviews.

Head Case: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain, by Dennis Cass (HarperCollins, 2007). More in the "sensitive but not too earnest, hapless but not too pathetic" guy non-fiction mode, on a topic that could certainly use some humane and skeptical voices: the graspings of modern neuroscience.

The book is a perfectly entertaining failure; it reads quickly and smoothly as any given Esquire feature (which it resembles in voice and weight) and switches skillfully and entertainingly from the poignant memoir part (the author's troubles coping with the memory of his mentally troubled stepfather) to the wacky participatory journalism parts (he gets his brain scanned, takes Adderall, leads his own psychological research team to a mall).

Cass plays the naif too much to get to any deep conclusions about what we actually understand, and/or can control, about the human brain; this humble voice is appropriate to such a confused and confusing topic. One comes away intrigued with the knowledge that Adderall makes Arby's sandwiches taste even crappier; thinking that his nutty stepdad might have been hell to live with but is pretty interesting to read about; and that perhaps the wisest sentence in the book is "When Bill [the stepdad] talked to me this way he wasn't a brain; he was a shitty dad."

Cass is a good writer who took on an important topic--perhaps a more important topic than he even fully grasped. Sometimes contemplating neuroscience and its curious and troubling connection to the humane life--its advances, its imperialism, its reductionism, its tautologies--I think it must demand either slavish obedience or rebellious resistance. Doubtless, that's a limbic reaction. A middle way is surely more sensible, more responsible, more defensible. Cass takes that middle way, and proves that, at least when it comes to popular journalism, that middle path is alas far less fascinating.

A Secular Fantasy

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 07:00:00 EST

The controversy surrounding The Golden Compass, the recently released screen adaptation of the first book of Philip Pullman’s best-selling fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, was not exactly unexpected. Pullman, a 61-year-old British writer of fantasy and mystery novels for children and young adults, has been dubbed “the most dangerous man in Britain” by Daily Mail columnist Peter Hitchens. He is a self-proclaimed atheist who has referred to himself, tongue in cheek, as being “of the devil’s party.” He makes no secret of the fact that his books are intended as a sweeping attack not only on organized religion but on the monotheistic concept of God.

Yet the world of Pullman’s sacrilegious epic is not a conventionally materialistic one. It includes all the basic elements of Christian theology, from God and angels to the souls of the dead, but in a way that turns the traditional religious viewpoint on its head. The phrase “his dark materials” comes from a passage in John Milton’s Paradise Lost in which Satan contemplates the possibility that God may use “his dark materials to create more worlds”—a reference not only to the multiple worlds of Pullman’s universe but to his retelling of the Miltonian epic with the rebel angels as the good guys.

The film version of the first novel, brought to the screen in December by New Line Cinema and marketed as a Lord of the Rings–style grand epic fantasy, has been scrubbed of explicit references to religion—enough to pacify the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other mainstream religious organizations. (William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, unappeased, still called for a boycott.) There is a certain irony to this, since the movie opens on the heels of an atheist revival of sorts, heralded by such recent books as Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.

It remains to be seen whether the two sequels, if they get made, will manage to navigate the dangerous waters of Pullman’s narrative and to translate his anti-religious message into a general anti-authoritarian one without diluting it beyond recognition. In any case, it is a safe bet that the movie, which opened to mixed reviews and a respectable though not spectacular box office performance, will lead to a resurgent interest in Pullman’s books, not only among adventure and fantasy fans but among readers interested in the case against religion and for a secular morality. As a novelist, Pullman may be to militant atheism what Ayn Rand was to militant capitalism: a writer who can convey important ideas through frequently riveting fiction but can’t always stop those ideas from congealing into rigid ideology.

Pullman’s Parallel Universe
Who is Philip Pullman? A Christian-bashing God hater or, as the liberal Catholic writer Donna Freitas has argued, a profoundly unorthodox religious thinker? A propagandist for godlessness or a master of storytelling whose enchantment draws in both children and adults? This much is certain: His blend of fantasy and philosophy has been highly successful. The Dark Materials trilogy, hailed for skillful plotting, exquisite prose style, and imaginative fantastic landscapes as well as challenging ideas, has sold about 12 million copies worldwide. (The Golden Compass, published in 1995, was followed in 1997 by the second volume, The Subtle Knife, and then in 2000 by The Amber Spyglass, which became the first children’s book to win the prestigious Whitbread Prize for literature.) The series has earned Pullman a devoted following among well-educated adults as well as children.

The books’ greatest strengths are several memorable characters—above all the spunky and precocious 12-year-old heroine, Lyra Belacqua, raised as a ward of a college at Oxford—and an equally memorable alternate world. For Lyra’s Oxford is not “our” Oxford. It exists in a vaguely Edwardian-era England that has sophisticated flying craft and research into particle physics, in a world with such countries as Muscovy and Texas—and a powerful, oppressive, united Christian Church whose hierarchy, the Magisterium, is based in Geneva. This world is populated by witches who fly and live for hundreds of years and Arctic tribes of intelligent white bears who wear armor and are skilled metalworkers. Most unusually, every human being in this universe has a “daemon,” a talking animal that embodies his or her soul; their bond is so close that separation by more than a few feet causes agony to both. A child’s daemon can change into any animal, but it “settles” at puberty, taking on a shape that reflects the human’s identity: dogs for loyal servants, birds for free spirits, and so on.

Pullman excels at fleshing out his imagined universe, with its unique technologies, its social rules (there is a strict taboo against touching another person’s daemon), and its linguistic quirks (in Lyra’s English, chocolate is “chocolatl” and electricity is “anbaric power”). He excels, too, at drawing the reader into the story and deftly pulling together seemingly unrelated strands of the plot.

At the start of The Golden Compass, Lyra learns that her uncle, Lord Asriel, is leaving on a polar expedition to study something called Dust—a mysterious substance, invisible to the naked eye, that the Church regards as evil and sinful. This development coincides with a series of kidnappings that claims Lyra’s best friend, Roger, and the appearance of a beautiful aristocratic woman who befriends Lyra and is connected to the abductions. Lyra’s journey to rescue Roger puts her on the trail of a hideous Church-sponsored experiment to keep children pure of sin. It also puts her on the trail of Lord Asriel, who is working on an experiment of his own to open a window into parallel worlds.

As events unfold in the next two volumes, it turns out that Lord Asriel’s real goal is nothing less than to overthrow the rule of God, and that Lyra has a special role in this quest: A prophecy names her as the new Eve, destined to free humanity from the yoke of sin and death. Lyra’s allies on this worthy mission include witches, bears, rebel angels, and two people from “our” London: Mary Malone, a physicist and ex-nun, and Will Parry, a boy Lyra’s age with a unique destiny of his own. After harrowing adventures and great sacrifices, Lyra devotes herself to building a “Republic of Heaven” in her world to replace the false promise of the Kingdom of Heaven. This republic, our young heroes learn, must be based on human self-government rather than divine authority, and on the conviction that we should live life to its fullest in this world rather than aspire to bliss in the next one.

In Pullman’s universe, God, also known as the Authority, is worse than nonexistent: He is a tyrannical fraud. According to Pullman’s peculiar theogony, in the beginning there was Dust, a substance generated when matter develops consciousness. Dust condensed into beings of pure spirit—angels—and the first of them established his dominance over the others by falsely telling them he had created them and the world. (In the final volume of the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, this entity is explicitly identified as the Judeo-Christian God.) In a similar twist, the afterlife is real, but it’s a bleak, desolate prison camp for the souls of the dead, and true salvation lies in the oblivion expected by atheists. In a powerful sequence deliberately modeled on the Christian story of the Harrowing of Hell, in which Christ descends into the underworld to liberate the righteous, Will and Lyra invade the world of the dead and lead the souls out into a living world where they blissfully dissolve into atoms.

Pullman deserves credit for tackling ideas of this depth and magnitude in his novels, and for his ambitious reimagining of myth and theology (at times bringing to mind Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic Russian fantasy novel The Master and Margarita, with its unique take on the Devil and the life of Jesus). Unfortunately, His Dark Materials suffers from serious flaws both as literature and as a religious critique.

Evangelizing Atheism
While Pullman has said that he is interested in “telling a story, not preaching a sermon,” he slides more and more frequently into preaching as the story goes on. Some of his favorite ideas—for instance, that the human body with its senses is far superior to the fleshless spirit of the angels, or that the best afterlife is to become one with nature—are stated again and again and again and again. The idea that the transition from childhood innocence to adult experience should be welcomed, not feared, is illustrated by a heavy-handed plot twist in which Lyra and Will’s sexual awakening proves to be the key to the world’s salvation. When ideology and literature collide, literature suffers. The Amber Spyglass is not quite on a par with the first two novels: Its new characters and worlds are generally less interesting, far too much space is given to sententious musings about the meaning of life in a post-God world, and eventually you start to feel that Pullman is trying to cram too many messages into his narrative, even if that means unnecessarily dragging it out.

He stacks the deck too. It’s not clear, for instance, why the Authority needs to keep the souls of the dead in such a wretched place and not even bother to reward the faithful. Conversely, to sell the idea that “the sweet and most desirable end” for the souls of the dead is to drift into nothingness, Pullman depicts this dissolution as an ecstatic moment in which the souls’ atoms not only become one with the universe but mingle happily with the particles of deceased loved ones (whom, for some reason, they couldn’t find among their fellow ghosts).

Worse still, Pullman paints every character connected to the Church or religion, from the fascistic zealots of the Magisterium to the crazed monk in the world of the dead who stubbornly believes he’s in paradise, with an antipathy that sometimes recalls Ayn Rand’s demonization of her welfare-state bureaucrats. (In a 2003 interview with the Christian magazine The Third Way, Pullman conceded that this tendency was “an artistic flaw.”) Those on the anti-God side, meanwhile, are judged far more leniently. Lord Asriel, who sacrifices the life of an innocent child to his single-minded crusade, is still a heroic if flawed figure. The witches can be ruthless and vindictive—we learn that one witch queen punished a tribe that failed to honor her by slaughtering the white tigers it worshipped as totem gods—but they are still portrayed sympathetically because they are nature-loving, Church-hating pagans. The double standard grates at times.

When Time Out New York asked him about his anti-religious message, Pullman replied, “The position I’ve always taken is that religious intolerance and tyranny is just one aspect of a wider problem, which is the tendency in human societies toward absolutism.…We have to struggle all the time against that tendency toward wanting the one ‘true’ answer that abolishes all the others forever. That’s true in politics, and it’s true in religion, and it’s true in every aspect of human life.” But Pullman is soft-pedaling his position. His Dark Materials, at least, explicitly singles out religion as the major source of oppression throughout human history. “That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling,” the tiger-slaying witch queen says with the author’s obvious approval. In Pullman’s novels, religion is not credited with any positive contributions to human society (whereas, in real history, the Catholic Church played a key role in ending such practices as forced marriage and infanticide) and is blamed for some things to which it has little if any connection (such as genital mutilation intended to prevent sexual pleasure).

The Third Way interview offers an interesting window into Pullman’s beliefs. At first he asserts, very much in the vein of Dawkins and Hitchens, that faith in one God is itself the source of evil: “Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don’t accept him.” Asked about the crimes committed by atheistic totalitarian regimes, Pullman responds that “they functioned psychologically in exactly the same way,” with their own sacred texts and exalted prophets: “The fact that they proclaimed that there was no God didn’t make any difference: it was a religion, and they acted in the way any totalitarian religious system would.”

The interviewer presses on, pointing out that in that case, perhaps belief in one God isn’t really the root of the problem—and that not only Stalin but even the secular French revolutionaries in the 18th century killed more dissenters than any Church authority. Pullman fires back with a non sequitur: “Well, that was very comforting as the flames were licking round your toes.” When he finally acknowledges that “the religions are special cases of the general human tendency to exalt one doctrine above all others,” it comes across less as a reconsideration of his views than as a grudging concession. There are no reports of Pullman’s plans to write a sequel to His Dark Materials in which the attempt to build an earthly Republic of Heaven ends in firing squads and gulags.

An Attack on Narnia
The intolerant underside of Pullman’s views also can be seen in his intemperate attack on C.S. Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia, launched in a 1998 essay in The Guardian. He is hardly the first to accuse Lewis of sexism for his tendency to relegate girls to subordinate roles, and of racism for his negative depiction of the dark-skinned Calormenes. What stands out is the nastiness of Pullman’s rhetoric: He calls the Narnia books “ugly and poisonous things” and “nauseating drivel,” and he declares that he hates them “with a deep and bitter passion.”

Pullman’s specific criticisms of Lewis—which include not only racism and misogyny but class snobbery and a “sadomasochistic relish for violence” and the elevation of childhood innocence over adulthood—are cautiously supported by some critics and hotly disputed by others. If you approach His Dark Materials in a similarly uncharitable spirit, you could find similar grounds for complaint.

Sexism? Heroic though Lyra is, it is mostly Will who fights and who gets to possess a special mystical weapon, while some of Lyra’s greatest feats are accomplished by the “feminine” method of clever manipulation and lies. The trilogy’s main adult female character, Mrs. Coulter, is virtually a cliché of feminine evil—a cold, ruthless siren who schemes, lies, and seduces her way to power—until she is partly, and not very plausibly, redeemed by a spark of stereotypical feminine virtue: maternal love.

Class snobbery? The illegitimate but aristocratic-born Lyra is vastly superior in intelligence and initiative to the lower-class children she befriends; the other hero, Will, is the son of an officer in the Royal Marines. Sadomasochistic violence? Pullman’s trilogy features some very unpleasant deaths and mutilations.

This is not to say that Pullman is a misogynist, a class snob, or a sadist, only that he should be more cautious in branding others with such labels. It is not much of a stretch to think that Pullman sees himself as the anti-Lewis. Third Way asked Pullman if he is “a conscious antidote to C. S. Lewis, seeking to do for a moral atheism what he did for Christianity.” Pullman gave a curious reply: “It’s largely nonsense, of course” (emphasis added). Writing in the British Spectator, critic Caroline Moore argues that “Pullman, for all his superior imaginative powers, is paradoxically more intolerant, more fiercely exclusive and more violently propagandist than Lewis.” That’s a shame, because there is much in Pullman’s message that deserves to be commended, including the idea that, in a world without God, one can find meaning in human consciousness, human work, human freedom, and human responsibility to the world.

Yet His Dark Materials has already earned a place of honor in contemporary popular literature and may well end up as long-lived and beloved as the Narnia series. An interesting if often frustrating thinker, a masterful if flawed storyteller, Philip Pullman deserves the larger audience he is likely to find with the release of the Golden Compass movie. For some readers, his stories will stimulate a discussion of religion and freedom, raising tough questions for believers and nonbelievers alike. For others, it will be the stories themselves that endure: tales of bravery and magic, of heroic children and armored bears, that can stand on their own regardless of any self-consciously heretical message.

Contributing Editor Cathy Young (cathyyoung63@gmail.com) is the author of Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality (Free Press).

Hippies in Space: Some '70s Flashbacks

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 10:21:00 EST

In the days before camcorders and YouTube, fans of countercultural DIY video put their hopes in Sony Portapaks and cable access television. Howard Rheingold has just posted one artifact from that era, shot in 1976 and starring a young Rheingold as "Howard K. Martian, extraterrestrial anthropologist."

On a related note (sort of), here's an online edition of Space Colonies, a book published in 1977 by the CoEvolution Quarterly. The Quarterly was a spinoff from the Whole Earth Catalog, which wasn't just a bible for the back-to-the-land movement but offered a helping hand to those who wanted to go up-to-the-skies.

Today's Libertarian Moment of Zen

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:38:00 EST

"If, from the more wretched parts of the old world, we look at those which are in an advanced stage of improvement, we still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised, to furnish new pretenses for revenue and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey, and permits none to escape without a tribute….

"The amazing and still increasing expenses with which old governments are conducted, the numerous wars they engage in or provoke, the embarrassments they throw in the way of universal civilization and commerce, and the oppression and usurpation they act at home, have wearied out the patience, and exhausted the property of the world."

Some words of wisdom from Thomas Paine, the anti-Christian, pro-booze, logorrheic Christopher Hitchens of the Founders. Today's Libertarian Moment of Zen was brought to you by Liberty Fund, on whose dime I am currently attending a conference on the author of Common Sense, The Crisis, and the words above, from Rights of Man.

Me on Tom Paine here.

UPDATE: Greatest. Comment. Ever.

From a Finnish reason reader: "When I went to look Paine up in the university library catalogue. Ironically, right below him in the author index was Paineastialainsäädäntötoimikunta, the beautiful 32-letter Finnish word roughly translating to "The Committee for the Regulation of and Legislation on Pressurized Vessels". It is unclear if this means pressure cookers or submarines or what, but I'm sure they have come with ingenious ways to tax air pressure."

Friday Mini Book Review: Perfect From Now On

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:11:00 EST

Past mini book reviews.

Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life by John Sellers. (Simon and Schuster, 2007). It’s unlikely a review of a book like this can be fully fair, balanced, and just. One possibility is that its subject matter—one American male born in 1970’s personal journey through music fandom—will seem inherently impenetrable and uninteresting to the reviewer, and thus all the author’s self-deprecating wit and problems-with-dad material—see, this topic has something universal to say about the human condition, and this writer is just an all-around interesting voice--will be seeds thrown in a barren field.

Another possibility is that the reviewer will himself have a fanatical obsession about popular music and its attendant fandom, thus see the material through his own strongly and often emotionally gripped thoughts on what’s really important about the topic, what sort of relation to this music is most illuminating, and, most dangerously, have dark thoughts about how and why this guy…this self-admitted quasi-poseur (first heard Pavement in ‘93! First heard Guided by Voices in ’02! Bases his book on his insight into and fanaticism for these bands!) got the Simon and Schuster contract for this hardcover original on this topic.

Not to say that, in principle, this couldn’t have been a very interesting book, Sellers’ John-come-lately status notwithstanding. It’s readably affable, and occasionally pleasingly witty. The reader should bear in mind it is firmly of the by now either classic or clichéd mode of self-referential quasi-memoirish modern nonfiction, sensitive-but-not-ickily-so, funny-and-self-deprecating division, lots of irony but still just enough sincerity. It’s the tone common to lots of slight modern nonfiction about topics that aren’t obviously stuffed with emotional depth or excitement, those topics smaller than being abused by your nutty parents or adventuring by choice or circumstance in dangerous foreign lands.

Thus, it’s suburban and loaded with way too many footnotes full of personal asides, instant-critiques of his own writing, and sideline mini-essays. It’s got a cockamamie and neither funny nor enlightening attempt to create a foolproof mathematic formula for musical greatness. While reading it, I was simultaneously reading the huge hit from a few years back Candy Freak, which approaches candy with the same tone and authorial voice (though more actual reporting), which added to how aggravated I was by this one—try to read only one book of average guy quirky topic nonfiction at a time, my friends. Readers of Esquire and GQ will be very, very, very, very familiar with this voice—the attempt to craft an authorially useful, engaging, and showily “honest” voice for modern manhood in a somewhat schlubby world minus sports and war. It’s the Judd Apatow voice for modern non-fiction (and yes, I know it preceded Apatow.)

So, we learn how Sellers is embarrassed by his Michigan-youth love for Huey Lewis and Bryan Adams and Duran Duran--lots of this unlovely status-climbers obsession with being (publicly, at least) embarrassed by his old passions, which is unfair both to him, the objects of the passions, and the reader who should be owed a deeper understanding of how and why their authorial guide relates to the world. He gets lightly hipped to the likes of Morrissey and New Order, and goes on a (dull and uninsightful) pilgrimage to Manchester in honor of his fandom. His love for music, of course, gets mixed up with his love for certain girls, who we never really get to know.

The book has some pleasures, if you can handle the lack of depth in his understanding of his ostensible subject matter. (Yes, I mean both his own life and indie rock.) Halfway through the book, he becomes a fanatical fan of Pavement and Guided By Voices, two of the archetypal public faces of American indie rock of the 1990s. The book wraps up with a way-too-long account of how he actually got personally involved with GBV leader Robert Pollard and then made a mistake that got him cast out from the kingdom.

It’s the kind of gossipy stuff that would be quite gripping if it was happening to your buddy and you were hearing about it daily in grumbles over beers and forwarded emails, but didn’t bear the weight of a quarter of this book’s narrative and almost all of its drama. It ain’t indie-rock if you don’t attitude-drop, and I’ve got my own, even less interesting but blessedly much shorter, story of a quasi-Pollard encounter, involving being blind drunk with pals in Manhattan singing a song called “Where are the Nazis?” we had just made up on the spot, ringled by a former GBV bassist, into Pollard’s answering machine. That’s all I really remember; ask Michael Moynihan, he was there. Actually, I’m not even entirely sure that incident is less interesting than Sellers’.

To those who are interested in the cultural history of indie rock told through a personal narrative, which seems to me promised by the subtitle, Sellers’ coming into it all so late and so lightly is a problem. Because “indie rock,” man, means being involved in at least some degree with the world of zines and scenes, small clubs, and forming your own bands or labels. If not actually D-ing IY, you'll get this subject best if you have at least some awareness and involvement in that world, which was key to the cultural and personal meaning of the music.

Sellers comes in purely as a guy who listened to some records and liked them, which isn’t nearly as interesting. I know it makes me sound like a ridiculously annoying snob to say that merely being a listener isn’t good enough to write a smart and knowing and valuable book about indie rock. I do believe the failures of this book, by a writer who is clearly thoughtful and talented, shows that I’m not wrong.

Tuesday Fun Links, Ultimate Fighting Division

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:38:00 EST

It probably marks my age (10,000 years old), but the success of loud n' proud libertarians in "mainstream culture" still amuses and pleases me, and strikes me as worth noting. So herewith noted, fightin' Objectivist and former Cato intern Michael Malice (see his graphic novel biography* by Harvey Pekar, Ego and Hubris) has a co-written biography of Ultimate Fighting Champ Matt Hughes freshly out, and freshly on the New York Times bestseller list.

Me on Ego and Hubris.

Also, Malice (a pal) has a new web site, "Worst Email Ever" for time-wasting at the office and potentially for publicizing foolish, objectionable, and inexplicable emails from your own life.

*not autobiography as I first wrote--though strangely, written in Malice's voice.

Friday Mini Book Review: Strictly Right

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 18:05:00 EST

It’s Friday, so time for another of what used to be (and may someday again be) the Wednesday Mini Book Review. A rich history of mini book reviews.

Strictly Right: William F. Buckley and the American Conservative Movement by Linda Bridges and John R. Coyne Jr. (Wiley, 2007). Two old National Review hands come out with a loving insiders' look at the life of the magazine’s founder, the magazine, and the American and conservative movement history that the man and the magazine wove through and shaped.

Unfortunately, these two are no D. Keith Mano, Hugh Kenner, Florence King, Digby Anderson, or even W.H. von Dreele--a somewhat random quintet of past NR contributers who could have added, respectively, more scabrous observant wit, deep and complicated thoughtfulness, outsider’s mordant comedy, goose fat, and wacky rhyme schemes to the story. (Yes, I know Kenner is dead.)

That is to say, this book is respectful, dutiful, and all-too-plainspoken, hindered most by its attempts to be something bigger than it ought to be while not being enough of what it should be. Way too many pages are dedicated to stepping aside from the tale of Buckley, his magazine, and conservatism to give shallow context about the political history of the times (including way too much attention to the downfall of Spiro Agnew, who Coyne used to work for).

Still, there are plenty of interesting, well-drawn details here about WFB's courtship of young heiress Patricia Taylor, what life was like being raised by oilman Will Frank Buckley, the delicate juggling of eccentric prima donnas such as James Burnham, Willi Schlamm, Brent Bozell, and Whittaker Chambers in the early days of the mag, Buckley’s charmingly quixotic 1965 New York mayoral race (he got 25 percent in Staten Island!), his forays as a sailor man all over the seas and a ski bum in Gstaad, his shift into popular novel writing, the magazine's defining conservatism down over the years in the attempt to remain "realistic" (they couldn't abide Nixon in '60, loved 'im in '72) and a few (not enough) good narratives of the crises attendant in publishing political periodicals (like having to rewrite pretty much an entire issue after Bobby Kennedy was shot, since the one going to press had “invidious references” to him “on nearly every page…even in Russell Kirk’s column”).

The best parts—and the kind of thing you wish had taken up more of the book, certainly in place of the potted political history of the past 50 years of life in these here American states—are Buckley-specific tales, like the time National Review ran straight-faced a set of parody Pentagon Papers, Buckley’s recusing himself from Watergate commentary since Howard Hunt was his old CIA mentor and had named WFB as trustee for his children, his unpublished screed against the Securities and Exchange Commission (which he felt was persecuting him for some paperwork errors with a radio broadcasting Buckley chaired, resulting in WFB being banned from directorship of public companies for five years). My very favorite was the tale of his young associates compositing—in the pre-computer days—a prank page of the magazine with every one of WFB’s particularly hated errors, taping it into the copy of the issue mailed to him overseas, and waiting for the explosion.

Buckley, National Review, and American conservatism will continue to inspire historians, friendly and angry—he, it, and the movement were that important, and that interesting. I very much look forward to Sam Tanenhaus’s long planned Buckley book. This one has earned itself a place in the pile, and certainly anyone writing about Buckley in the future needs to consult it for some of the interesting but too-few personal details. But overall it's deficient in juice, fun, distance, and even the thick anecdotal details that friendly insiders are best suited to provide.

My (non mini) review of a previous NR insider history of the mag and the movement, by Jeffrey Hart.

Friday Mini Book Review: XXX Scumbag Party and Misery Loves Comedy

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 19:03:00 EST

The mini book review is on Friday again this week. Past mini book reviews.

XXX Scumbag Party by Johnny Ryan (Fantagraphics Books, 2007).

Misery Loves Comedy by Ivan Brunetti (Fantagraphics Books, 2007).

Leading art-comics publisher Fantagraphics' two cartoon bards of offensive trash each issued new collections of their periodicals recently. Johnny Ryan’s comic book is Angry Youth; Brunetti’s, Schizo.

Johnny Ryan’s work—um….well, I can’t even really hint at much specific about it and remain within a long city block of propriety and decency. His comics are utterly degenerate and utterly hilarious, with nearly every joke relying on the punching of sexual, excretory, religious, or racial taboos.

I’m sympathetic to those who sneer at “shock comedy” for the sake of shock, but my goodness Ryan’s stuff is just...well, it’s just really, really, really funny. It pushes transgressive buttons not with grim obviousness, but with a gleefully antic grossness, with cartooning so joyously alive (while still skilled and tight) that it doesn’t feel hateful or ugly--just bursting with life-affirming awfulness.

This volume features lots of Ryan’s EveryScumbag Loady McGee and hapless sidekick Sinus O’Gynus; the adventures of two sensitive cartoonists who just weren’t made for these times trying to out-old-timey each other; an “art movie” featuring (among the only barely mentionable elements) mustard that makes you horny and a robot prostitute powered by liquid baby sent on a mission to give the Moon a venereal disease; and over a hundred pages of gut-busting offensiveness. Pre-caveat: for anyone who reads it and finds any part of it unutterably beyond the pale: I didn’t laugh at that part. Just, um, most of the other parts.

Brunetti is more serious about his offensiveness. He’s got no antic glee, just anhedonic and troubled self-hatred. Most of the pages star a grotesquely detailed figure of himself spewing bile (figuratively and literally), and stabbing out at everything about civilization, humanity, and himself he despises, including his marriage and office job.

While piece by piece not clearly intended to be “funny” per se he’s got that Celine/Notes From Underground classic lit-misanthropy thing going sharply and efficiently, but his cartoon avatar is a more feckless "character" than Bardamu or even Dostoevsky's underground man. Brunetti's misery is purely internalized and poured only into meticulous cartooning.

Sure, it's relentless and repetitive; "I can see all my flaws, magnified into monuments, surrounded by floodlights. I'm a crumbling edifice of frustation, every mistake etches onto me in a garish bas-relief. I'm overwhelmed by every stimulus, so I retreat into introversion and sink into a spiral of suicidal 'logic.' Zen nihilism. All is one, and that one is a pile of shit." That's about what he has to say, for all hundred plus pages. But still, he says it in a surprisingly entertaining way. If you are in the mood for bottomless self- and world-hatred expressed through bilous, vertiginous cartooning, Brunetti's unstoppable.

Ryan, at worst you’ll find grossly silly and perhaps feel it your duty as a humanist to be offended; Brunetti can seriously bum you out if you've ever found yourself feeling anything close to what he claims to feel every second of his life. Both of them are excellent cartoonists and together provide opportunity for fun evenings spent (preferably alone) giggling (sometimes nervously) at the abyss.

Friday Mini Book Review: I Have America Surrounded

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 17:59:00 EST

Sometimes the Wednesday Mini Book Review appears on Friday. Why? No one knows.

A tasty panoply of past mini book reviews.

I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary, by John Higgs (Barricade Books, 2006). Timothy Leary is a 20^th century American character who suffered, until 2006, perhaps the most skewed ratio of importance to biographical attention of anyone I can think of. In 2006, he got both the doorstop major publisher slash-and-burn from Robert Greenfield (reviewed by Nick Gillespie in the Washington Post and Jesse Walker in American Conservative) and this thinner, but more sympathetic and idiosyncratic, take, from a more obscure house, which got almost no attention from anyone.

Higgs, a British documentarian, gets the basic story down—a story, as many have rightly noted, that would be unbelievably baroque and absurd for a novelist. Higgs is also better, and more sympathetic, on Leary’s intellectual and cultural significance than was Greenfield, even in about half the wordage.

The Leary that interests Higgs the most is the post-prison break Leary of the early 1970s, living an alternately harrowing and decadent life in exile with Eldridge Cleaver in Morocco and Michel Hauchard in Switzerland, until the Feds kidnapped him in Afghanistan. It takes Higgs only 107 pages to get Leary to the point where he’s over the wall of the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo, and the narrative gets much thicker from there. (The book’s main text weighs in at 274 pages.)

Before then Higgs has dutifully, though entertainingly (it’s certainly a hard story to make boring) hit the high points of the life of Leary: the rogue with his troubled West Point and collegiate career; his innovations in, and growing dissatisfactions with, psychological classification and testing methods and his explorations in interpersonal/transactional psych as an on-the-rise star in what could be seen as the Psychological Decade of the 1950s; his troubled first marriage that ended in his wife’s suicide; his dogged pursuit, against the advice of his more prudent co-conspirators, of a gleefully populist approach to the spread and study of psychedelics; the madness of his psychedelic training camp at Millbrook; his self-recasting as religious guru; the arrests and gubernatorial campaign.

It seems inevitable that this reckless scamp is gonna end up in jail; and equally inevitable that he’ll escape. Leary made himself feel better about being in jail by deciding that all truly successful philosophers face state punishment as a common occupational hazard. He’d lie back and think of Socrates.

An interesting interpretive take on Leary, not taken up by Higgs, is how perfectly trendy and emblematic of the classic version of every American decade Leary’s life tended to be, from West Point (he was booted out) and World War II to ex-soldier boy turned egghead college boy in the ‘40s; suburban angst wife-swapping psychological Organization Man-controller in the ‘50s ended up at Harvard; drug guru revolutionary in the ‘60s; ‘60s hangover refugee turned Me Decade jail bird snitch in the ‘70s; coke party Hollywood sub-celeb in the ‘80s; avatar of the computer revolution in the ‘90s. It’s a theory I don’t have time to expound on here myself but I think a fruitful one in Leary Studies.

Higgs is especially taken with Leary’s ‘70s-exile strange intellectual partnership with occult devotee and researcher Brian Barritt, a very interesting figure who Higgs, clearly fascinated with more than most other writers (Barritt gets two whole chapters in this book), makes a grand case for as biography-bait of his own. Higgs makes perhaps too large a case for Barritt as a shaper of Leary’s thought from then on, in his “eight-circuit brain/SMI2LE” days, though further research is certainly warranted. I am glad that this book has more info on Leary’s curious and wonderful collaborative LP with Ash Ra Tempel than I’ve found elsewhere.

Leary was a man whose importance, while subterranean, is vast—and it underlies, in that subterranean way, a lot of what was interesting in American culture in the second half of 20^th century, a historical league in which baseball obsessive Leary could be well considered an MVP, though a controversial and truculent one. I Have America Surrounded is a good book; anyone interested in Leary beyond seeing him traduced will be sure to enjoy it, if not love it.

But I still dream of a biography of Leary by a writer ready and able, and with the space, to dig deep into his work and standing as an important psychologist in the 1950s before that fateful day in Mexico in 1960 that he ate psychedelic mushrooms and the Timothy Leary the rest of the world came to know was born; a writer who is learned in and able to position Leary vis a vis all his influences and all the roles he played, all the figures he interacted with and emulated or needs to be understood in terms of, all the Sullivans and Szaszs, the Huxleys and Hollingsheads, the Hoffmans and Dohrns, the Gurdjieffs and Crowleys, the Wilsons and O’Neills, all the fancies and positions this self-consciously trendy philosophical polemicist (a far better description of his role from 1961 on than scientist or scholar) Leary played with. Leary was also, which both Greenfield and Higgs note but neither makes much of, an advocate of libertarianism—alas, not as successful an advocate as he was of psychedelics.

A random bloggy aside: Dr. Leary and I talk about food.