MTheads

My Heart Name Is "Why The F- Did I Read This Stupid Book!"

La la la, just a normal human being, la la la.  Ahhh, love the Ice.  Ice makes love to me.  Make ice hammers and smash ice into humans.  F word F word F word.  Speak to me heart!  Urination.  F word F word F word.  More brothers of the heart.  The light!  Hammer some humans.  The light! Hammer some humans.  Cuddle while thinking about the light.  F word F word F word.  Hammer some humans. Big meet up.  Puzzling end.

That was my weekend, and that is basically the plot of Sorokin's Ice Trilogy, with a bit of editing.  I did not like the book. Yet the reviews practically gush.  Here's a typical one from the New York Review of Books:

Pulp fiction, science fiction, New Ageism, pornography, video-game mayhem, old-time Communist propaganda, and rampant commercial hype all collide, splinter, and splatter in Vladimir Sorokin’s virtuosic Ice Trilogy, a crazed joyride through modern times with the promise of a truly spectacular crash at the end. And the reader, as eager for the redemptive fix of a good story as the Children are for the Primordial Light, has no choice except to go along, caught up in a brilliant illusion from which only illusion escapes intact.

Yeah, uh-huh.  It was like an even more horrible, horrible Johnathan Livingston Seagull with lots and lots of F words and rough sex.  And with about as much trippy transcendental blah blah blah.   No character development.  Unlikeable characters.  Too much urinating and defecating, though admittedly it's difficult to find that sweet spot between too much and too little.  Redundancy and more redundancy. No tension. Plot given early on and then we never deviate, depriving us of any suspense or surprises.  

What was there to like??  I'm thinking it was the Russian writer thing and the time trip through Moscow.  

 

 

Was It Legal?

Some people are asking whether the killing of Osama bin Laden was legal.  It gets me to thinking, legal by whose laws?  Ours?  Pakistan's?  The International Community's?  God's?  The Universe's? 

We certainly have political reasons to call our actions legal.  We want to have right on our side.  We want to justify our actions to ourselves and to the world and say, "Look, everything we did was perfectly legal.  It's right here in this giant document.  No, keep turning.  Page 13563.  Never mind."

The question of legality is not the correct one.  The question should be, Was it justified?  We can write it up as legal later if we determine what we did was justified.   Without considering Justice, laws are a sterile set of rules followed for no other reason than following them is considered good.  Without considering Justice, our question on the legality of killing Osama Bin Laden becomes only a question of did we file the proper paperwork.

Was it legal implies the law trumps everything.

But laws are only codes written and enforced by people to impose certain standards.  Laws are not in and of themselves "good."  They can impose an objective measure for behavior and provide equal justice -- certainly good.  But they can also be used to dispossess people of their property and lives as happened under Nazism.

A nation's number one reason for existing is to promote and to maintain its particular way of life as determined by any number of factors.  In our case, by our particular history and by our citizens.  If our nation is worth anything, it is worth defending.

A legal system that does not allow us to defend ourselves is fatally flawed.  Our president and government are given the responsibility to defend our nation.  We are within our rights to do this in whatever way we can justify within our particular American moral philosophy.  Without this acknowledgment that we have the right to act unilaterally in our best interests, we give our destiny over to others. 

So, was it legal?  In the sense that our country has the right to act in its own self-interest, yes.  Was it justified?  That is the harder question, and the correct one.

Some people think there is something more important to defend than our sovereignty.  What that something is explains the question, "Was it legal?"

 

There's An Intellectual Side To Me, Not Just A Stupid Animal Picture Side

As I'm in a rather international community here in Moscow, I've been motivated to read books by authors with strange names like Saramago and Zamyatin and Llosa.  I've been surprised how good these books are.  Not that I think less of non-English language authors, but that I think so little of contemporary fiction.  Several of these authors have made me love fiction again.

Blindness by Jose Saramago was a wonderful read.  I loved his style of writing in that stream of consciousness with less attention paid to grammar and stops.  I partly chose to read the book because of the bad review given him overall in National Review after his death.  The reviewer is not a fan. 

But something about the review caught my attention.  I happen to love modern art.  And what I read in the review reminded me strongly of how I feel about certain kinds of modern paintings.  Can't say for sure what.  So, I read the book.  Fantastic.

I also sought out Mario Vargo Llosa after reading reviews in the NR.  His book The War of the End of the World was great.  It was a sweeping story written in the wry manner without sentiment I particularly love and with memorable characters I still think about.

I did not love Arto Paasilinna's book The Year of the Hare. I worried too much about the rabbit. 

I finally got around to reading Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  It was much better than I had supposed, partly because I had had absolutely no idea what it was like.  And I had expected it to be a typical Northern European type mystery so popular now -- where the misery and the darkness and the futility of even thinking one could possibly be happy is so thick death is welcome.

I have also read several Russian works, in English.  But, then, I love Russian literature so no surprise how good Gogol's Dead Souls was.  What is it with those guys?  Why and how are they so good?  Although Zamyatin's We wasn't quite up to that standard.  It certainly was interesting as a post-apocalyptic Soviet world sci-fi.

Next up, and I can barely wait to nudge the tiny square button on my kindle and turn the first page, is Sorokin's Ice trilogy.  It just recently became available on Kindle.   So, I'll say goodbye and go read.

 

Kitties Gone Bad In Cell Block H

There's a tiny shank just out of sight...I think we might have ourselves a cat fight.

Reactionaries Demand Schools Just Like Grandma Attended

Another essay on the success of vouchers.  Wall Street Journal: The Evidence Is In - School Vouchers Work.

Why fight vouchers?  Is it the "team" mentality, where one foregoes thinking and adopts whichever side is taken by their political peer group?

Many people believe the current system of public schooling is fine.  It is society that needs to be reformed...Always nice to have an iron clad excuse for failure -- the imperfectability of mankind.

Consider opening your minds and imagining a world that has moved on from the 50's.  Talk about your reactionaries.