STARSHIP PUPPIES:

Whose Future Is It Anyway?: Jess Maginity reviews Jordan S. Carroll’s “Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right.” (Jess Maginity, November 12, 2024, LA Review of Books)

IN THE 1970s, a group of French right-wing intellectuals coalesced around the idea that cultural influence, not direct political action, determines the future. Led by Alain de Benoist, the Research and Study Group for European Civilization (GRECE) borrowed heavily from communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci to promote the ideas of what would become the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right). At the time Gramsci was writing, communist doctrine theorized culture as something emergent from the economy, and not something with a distinct impact on the organization of a given society. Gramsci disagreed. He argued that ideas, politics, and economics are each active forces in society and while they all impact each other, none of them simply emerges from another. The New Left embraced this paradigm through countercultural movements in the 1960s; what is often overlooked in history books is how a New Right was not far behind. The use of culture as a vehicle for politics (referred to as metapolitics) belongs to neither the Right nor the Left; a culture war needs two adversaries.

In the world of science fiction, this culture war has been evident in online forums, publications, and awards campaigning. The fight is for ownership of the genre. In the mid-2010s, the Hugo awards served as the primary battlefield for this front of the culture war. A group of right-wing science fiction fans and creators calling themselves the Sad Puppies formed a voting bloc to advocate the return to the genre’s supposed roots: pulpy outer-space hero stories. The Sad Puppies’ campaign was a populist one: they argued that elites, disparagingly referred to as “literati,” were pushing a political agenda and were silencing the true values of the people by presenting awards to more underrepresented authors whose stake in the genre was often, the Puppies insinuated, inauthentic. The Rabid Puppies emerged a few years into the Sad Puppies’ efforts. As their name suggests, the Rabid Puppies were unapologetic in their misogyny, homophobia, and racism. Whereas the Sad Puppies wanted the Hugos to celebrate the science fiction they were nostalgic for, the Rabid Puppies wanted to burn the Hugos to the ground. Why did a genre built around speculation and infinite possible futures spark such an impulse towards exclusivity? In his new book, Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, Jordan S. Carroll argues that the stakes of this cultural battlefield boil down to one question: who deserves to write the future? […]

In his introduction, Carroll discusses the close proximity of science fiction to radical right-wing politics since the early 20th century. To some extent, popular culture was always a tool used by the Far Right. Theorists of the French New Right described intentional ideological influence on popular culture aimed at a distant political victory as “metapolitics.” As Andrew Breitbart summarizes, “Politics is downstream from culture.” Carroll describes this tactic, alluding to his focus on speculative genres, as “fascist worldmaking.” The ideology that structures fascist worldmaking is speculative whiteness: “For the alt-right,” Carroll says, “whiteness represents a matrix of possibilities more important than any actual accomplishments the white race may have already achieved.” There are five “myths” that constitute speculative whiteness: first, white people are uniquely good at speculating about the future and innovating in the present; second, nonwhite people are incapable of imagining the future and making long-term plans for the future; third, the true grandeur of whiteness will only be apparent in a high-tech fascist utopia; fourth, science fiction is a genre only white authors are truly able to produce; and fifth, speculative genres have the metapolitical potential of allowing a brainwashed white population to see their racial potential.

Big Sister Is Watching You (Whittaker Chambers, December 28, 1957, National Review)

One Big Brother is, of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls “productive achievement” man’s “noblest activity,” she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau. She might object that she means much, much more; and we can freely entertain her objections. But, in sum, that is just what she means. For that is what, in reality, it works out to. And in reality, too, by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself (as Miss Rand believes it should be), and feeling any restraint on itself as, in practice, criminal, and, in morals, vicious — as Miss Rand clearly feels it to be. Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship.

Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler‘s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?

Something of this implication is fixed in the book’s dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!” The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture — that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house.

THE WRONG SHIP FOR ANARCHY, BROTHER:

Patrick O’Brian is a Great Conservative Writer: His concern is the problem of right authority (Henry Farrell, Sep 07, 2024, Programmable Matter)

This is counterposed against the Tory notion of the ship as an organic society, in which the rules are administered so as to provide a kind of general comfort, a belief in an order that is undoubtedly harsh but that still provides some comfort in its harshness. When the Articles of War, with their threats of capital punishment are read out:

Death rang through and through the Articles; and even where the words were utterly incomprehensible the death had a fine, comminatory Leviticus ring, and the crew took a grave pleasure in it all; it was what they were used to – it was what they heard the first Sunday in every month and upon all extraordinary occasions such as this. They found it comfortable to their spirits, and when the watch below was dismissed the men looked far more settled.

There is much in this that is alien – even obnoxious – to modern sensibilities. The claim that it is “what they were used to” is regularly invoked throughout the books as justification for this or that sordid practice. But there is also something that the liberals and left could stand to learn from.

If O’Brian is unfair to Bentham – and he certainly is – he is not entirely unfair. And we are all (for values of ‘we’ that encompass most people who I think read this kind of newsletter), Bentham’s children to some greater or lesser degree. We are often more comfortable dealing with abstractions – introducing measures to help the poor or the working class; improving general ‘prosperity’ – than in talking to, or engaging with the sweating, breathing, imperfect and complicated people whom we affect to help. Even the most supple forms of democratic authority work through abstractions, formalities and complications, rather than face to face relationships. There isn’t an organic relationship between those who rule or at least influence rule, and those who are ruled. We do not like to think of ourselves as exerting authority, but we most certainly are, through collectively and abstractly legitimated forms of coercion.

Conservatism in its attractive form discovers the troubles of this means of organizing society. I think of Chris Arnade, who makes walking into a form of political discovery, spending days and weeks on foot, going through ordinary neighborhoods and seeing and talking to the people there. The implicit, and sometimes explicit reproach to liberals and the professional left is that we don’t much have these kinds of contacts, except for those of us who do it in a professional capacity. And for many of us (myself included) he’s right. The Whiggish mode of organizing society tends towards a radical disconnection.

And that is the burden of O’Brian’s books. He lays out a conservative alternative – an understanding of authority that ought properly be organic, based on a recognition of relations of authority and power that liberals might prefer to pretend do not exist. A good captain – a good exerciser of authority – ought accept their role and their isolation both, without losing all human connection. They should be ‘taut,’ perhaps sometimes even a ‘right hard horse,’ but they should never be a tyrant. O’Brian’s claim – again voiced through Maturin – is that this is very unlikely, but not impossible.

there are many good or at least amiable midshipmen, there are fewer good lieutenants, still fewer good captains, and almost no good admirals. A possible explanation may be this: in addition to professional competence, cheerful resignation, an excellent liver, natural authority and a hundred other virtues, there must be the far rarer quality of resisting the effects, the dehumanising effects, of the exercise of authority. Authority is a solvent of humanity: look at any husband, any father of a family, and note the absorption of the person by the persona, the individual by the role. Then multiply the family, and the authority, by some hundreds and see the effect upon a sea-captain, to say nothing of an absolute monarch. Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human; unless it so happens that he is immune to the poison. In the nature of the service this immunity cannot be detected until late: but it certainly exists. How otherwise are we to account for the rare, but fully human and therefore efficient admirals we see …

[‘Efficient’ in the last sentence presumably meaning not Whiggishness, but the capacity to get what needs to get done, done.]

This is the great theme of the O’Brian books as I read them, and their great contribution too. Condemning them as middlebrow is silly nonsense. They have their faults, as Dickens does – frequent longueurs; sometimes grotesque contrivances of plot. But so too they have their greatness, and the larger part of that greatness comes from their statement of a particular view of human beings, and their perpetual return to the vexed problem of right authority. We exercise authority over each other; sometimes verging on the absolute. How can we do it well, without becoming monstrous?

SUBTLE-TIES:

Ezra Pound’s Blue Dun (Ezra Pound, July 1976, Fly Fisherman Magazine)

[…]

Dark fur from a hare’s ear for a body

a green shaded partridge feather

grizzled yellow cock’s hackle

green wax; harl from a peacock’s tail

bright lower body; about the size of pin

the head should be. can be fished from seven a.m.

till eleven; at which time the brown marsh fly comes on. […]

Pound’s interests were oblique and wide-ranging, and yet our attempts to find an origin for this charming passage have not turned up any evidence that he was either a fly fisherman or fly tier. Although he often boxed with Ernest Hemingway, there is no evidence that he had fished with him. Perhaps it is only that the poet enjoyed the parallel between his own fascination with the importance of the subtle shadings of words and the fly fisherman’s fascination with the importance of the subtle shadings of color in fly tying. For the poet, the slight variation between two words can make all the difference in the value of his poem, just as the slight variation between two colors can make all the difference in the effectiveness of the fly fisherman’s pattern.

PEOPLE ARE SURPASSING PECULIAR:

When a Woman Turns into a Wife: Jenessa Abrams reviews Sarah Manguso’s “Liars” in the wake of Andrea Skinner’s revelation about her sexual abuse and her mother Alice Munro’s silence. (Jenessa Abrams, July 23, 2024, LA Review of Books)

I sent a different version of this piece to my editor days before Skinner published her devastating and poignant essay about the abuse in the Toronto Star. When I wrote that first version, the connection between Munro and her work felt straightforward. So did the connection between “Too Much Happiness” and the book I’d set out to review: Sarah Manguso’s sophomore novel, Liars (2024). Both stories confront the impossibility of marriage for women who long for an identity outside of it. For women who wear the title of wife as a shackle. For women whose husbands view their independence as a threat. For women whose husbands need to be held and coddled.

As the world now knows, Munro chose to stay married after learning about her husband’s sexual violence. She rejected her then nine-year-old daughter’s innocence and blamed her as an adulterer. Where does one go from here? A wife learns of her husband’s evil and chooses him anyway. The evil is done to her child. The wife is a woman is an author is a mother. The child is a child is a child is a child is a child is a child is a child.

This piece was never meant to be about Munro. It was meant to be about Liars and women who are erased by men—as, for many years, was the fate of the fictionalized Sofya Kovalevskaya and the silenced Andrea Skinner. That erasure is not only done by men, of course. There are also the women who enable them.

In “Too Much Happiness,” Munro retells the story of Sofya, a Russian mathematician who lived during the late 1800s and whose findings on partial differential equations made her the most significant female scientist of her time. (Here, I use the Russian spelling Sofya to distinguish between the real woman and the fictional character whose name Munro altered to Sofia.) In addition to being a mathematician and an author, Sofya was a wife and a mother—though her marriage was a formality she orchestrated to leave Russia to pursue an advanced education, and her child was sent to live with relatives so that Sofya could remain dedicated to her work. In Munro’s story, Sofia is rendered a bit like a schoolgirl due to her all-consuming love for the man she intends to marry.

Like many, I have assigned myself the task of reconsidering Munro’s authorial intent as it relates to the inner lives of the fictional women and children in her stories—though one’s intent can be easily manipulated into a digestible excuse, perhaps of the same sort that allowed Munro to stay with her husband in the face of proven abuse. I have done this somewhat involuntarily, knowing it’s probably the wrong task altogether, as it further centers Munro instead of Skinner—Munro, who chose to view her daughter’s sexual violation as a betrayed wife instead of as a mother.

Toward the end of her life, Sofya fell in love but never intended to marry, perhaps understanding the contractual realities of a woman binding herself to a man. Munro’s reimagined Sofia is engaged to her lover and acknowledges that she is unable “to think of anything but him”; this “at the very time when she should [be] working day and night.” Ultimately, it is Sofia’s impending nuptials to this man—who retreats emotionally after she receives a major award because, in the glow of her success, “he had felt himself ignored”—that is the too much happiness that kills her. In this way, the narrative suggests that the marriage of equals is impossible.

GOING WITH THE GRAIN:

The Theology of Fantasy (Timothy Lawrence, 9/01/24, Voegelin View)

Theology and fantasy are akin in that they are both imaginative projects. Theology concerns itself with a reality that is beyond the direct experience of our senses and thus must necessarily be known by the imagination – the same faculty that underwrites fantasy. The book centers around this trifecta: because theology and fantasy have imagination in common, they not only become relevant to each other, they can talk to one another, and the conversation can go both ways: theology can inform fantasy, and fantasy can inform theology. Fantasy can both “implicitly articulate what we believe” and “help us imagine a world that is still enchanted.”

Drawing from C.S. Lewis’ famous statement that the fantasy of George MacDonald “baptized” his imagination, a crucial step in his conversation to Christianity, Thrasher and Freeman suggest that the “baptism of the imagination” shapes what it is plausible or even possible to believe: “fantasy functions as a tool to shape the conditions for belief.” At the same time, fantasy is unavoidably shaped by the beliefs of those who make it. Each essay in the book concerns itself in some way with this back-and-forth dialogue between theology and fantasy, and in so doing demonstrates fantasy’s potential as a tool for serious theological work, rather than just a frivolous, escapist hobby.

Early on, the text sets forth a Christian understanding of fantasy, drawing largely from the work of J.R.R. Tolkien (who in turn drew from George MacDonald and Samuel Taylor Coleridge). According to the Christian mythopoetic theory of Tolkien, arguably the greatest Christian fantasist, fantasy has its roots in the theological and anthropological claim that humans are made in the image of God. As such, human fantasy is an echo of God’s own creative work. The human makers of fantasy are, in Tolkien’s terminology, “subcreators” whose make-believe worlds reflect the real world created by God. As Tolkien writes in On Fairy-Stories, “[W]e make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.”

THE ROAD DID LEAD HIM SOMEWHERE:

Evil and Good in Cormac McCarthy: a review of The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy
By Vereen M. Bell (Reviewed by Michael Yost, University Bookman)

Another such asterisk—one that seems to counteract Bell’s thesis of McCarthy the nihilist, the ironic Diogenes of literature—is McCarthy’s novella/play The Stonemason. The play is set in the Louisville, Kentucky of the 1970s. Its action follows the Telfair family as they cope with the death and legacy of their patriarch, affectionately referred to as “Papaw,” a master stonemason. Papaw’s grandson, Ben Telfair, narrates. He is the only member of the family who has carried the fire. His own father abandoned the family trade, but Ben had a close relationship with his dying grandfather. As the play progresses, McCarthy allows Papaw to become an ideal figure, an image of a good man in a world that often lacks integrity. Papaw’s goodness and integrity come from his trade. Ben comments: “for true masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity. That is to say, by the warp of the world. By the stuff of creation itself. The keystone that locks the arch pressed in place by the thumb of God.” This relationship between the “truth” found in masonry and the cosmos alike is reiterated throughout the play. Indeed, masonry sets the moral standard of the play, and the various character’s proximity to or distance from the craft determines their fate. Ben’s nephew, Soldier, joins a gang and becomes a drug addict. His father commits suicide. Ben occupies the center of the story as leader of his sorrowing family and heir to his grandfather’s wisdom. That wisdom is particular, but also cosmic. Ben speaks of his grandfather:

I see him standing there over his plumb bob which never lies and never lies and the plumb bob is pointing motionless to the unimaginable center of the earth four thousand miles beneath his feet. Pointing to a blackness unknown and unknowable both in truth and in principle where God and matter are locked in a collaboration that is silent nowhere in the universe and it is this that guides him as he places his stone one over two and two over one as did his fathers before him and his sons to follow and let the rain carve them if it can.

McCarthy allows, in a rare moment, for the possibility of a connection between the principle of existence and the phenomena of existence. He sees it incarnate in knowledge of the world, in the logic of human craft. Even if the principal cause of the world is “unknown and unknowable,” it is still “silent nowhere in the universe.” From the creator of the demonic Judge Holden, this is an astonishing sentence. It echoes St. Bonaventure, who wrote that “the entire world is like a mirror full of lights presenting the divine wisdom . . . ” But of course, just as we cannot attribute the Judge’s words to McCarthy, neither can we do the same with Ben. However, this sentence is significant precisely because it runs so much against the grain of McCarthy’s broader work. It is as if, having presented his witness to the reality of evil and steeled himself against it. He felt compelled to quietly testify to the primary existence of goodness and its possibility for human beings. It is primarily because of The Stonemason that I believe McCarthy was not simply an ironist. Bell’s thesis may be true as far as it goes, but it still has to contend with the fact that McCarthy chose to represent both evil and good, both demonic vice and human goodness, both life and death in his work.

And ultimately chose light.

CRANK IT UP:

The Scholar Who Inspired a Legion of Cranks (Colin Dickey, JULY 16, 2024, The Chronicle Review)

The publication of The Book of the Damned was a watershed moment in 20th-century culture. Without Fort, there would be no X-Files or Twin Peaks, no Unsolved Mysteries or In Search Of…, no Ancient Aliens or the dozens of similar shows on History and the Discovery Channel. Fort’s book gave space to theories and beliefs that were dubious, unpopular, and problematic; it gave readers tools to push back against biologists, physicists, and historians; and it encouraged people to remain skeptical toward academic orthodoxies. There had been plenty of cranks before Fort’s time: amateurs who’d set themselves up as pseudo-archaeologists to argue for the existence of Atlantis or pseudo-physicists to prove that ghosts were real. Having tried and abandoned that tactic, Fort found success by critiquing the establishment without offering a fully fleshed-out alternative theory. He didn’t need to have the answers; what he instead demanded was that scholars take seriously all that he claimed they had ignored and damned to irrelevance.

Fort inspired a legion of acolytes, and they are the subject of Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers (University of Chicago Press, June 2024), by Joshua Blu Buhs. While Fort himself has been the subject of several biographies, Forteans, Buhs writes, are far less understood, “ignored or dismissed as etiolated imitators.” This is unfortunate, he argues, because those who wrestled with Fort seriously “forged a unique response to modernity,” and their influence had a long, if unexpected, tail. These followers set themselves the task of transforming Fort from an outlier — “a magnificent nut,” in Tarkington’s words — to the center of a movement. How, they asked, could Forteanism be made into some kind of discipline, method, or system? Can a positive program be assembled from the facts of the damned? Can one make a science out of the rejection of science?

Perhaps the person most invested in this question was Tiffany Thayer, Fort’s main devotee and the man most responsible for attempting to shape his legacy. During the 1930s, Thayer had been an incredibly successful novelist, his lurid blockbuster Thirteen Men having made him a household name. (The follow-up, Thirteen Women, would be adapted as a pre-Code shocker starring Myrna Loy and Irene Dunne.) Thayer reached out to Fort when the latter’s career was at a low ebb, and helped get Fort’s third book, Lo!, published in 1931. He subsequently helped organize the original Fortean Society in New York City — a collective that would include Dreiser and Tarkington as well as other eminent literary men like the cultural critic H.L. Mencken and the playwright and screenwriter Ben Hecht. The Society’s goal, according to Dreiser, was “to make scientists take Fort seriously — as a thinker, not a crank.” It was a group effort at first, with the various members taking turns editing the Fortean Society’s magazine, Doubt. But gradually Thayer came to the fore, taking over the editorship of Doubt as well as Fort’s archives after Fort died in 1932.

Thayer devoted most of the rest of his career to attempting to shape Fort’s legacy and to establish a Fortean way of doing things, a methodology that could be self-sustaining in the absence of the author’s inimitable literary personality. Think to New Worlds chronicles Thayer’s attempts to create a stable discipline of Forteanism while constantly pushing back against the various ways in which other readers and thinkers tried to use Fort.

In a sense, the Fortean method was simple: Doubt everything, refuse to accept anything on faith, and seek out that which is generally excluded from dominant epistemologies. This radical skepticism was, Buhs notes, a kind of “anti-religion,” and Fort’s books became a Bible for those who’d seen the improbable or believed the implausible. Ufologists, from the start, leaned heavily on Fort’s work. As soon as the pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine shiny, unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier in June 1947 (setting off the modern UFO craze), believers were quick to look to Fort for answers. A Chicago AP writer published a report of Arnold’s sighting alongside various evidence that he had pulled from Fort’s collected works as a means of bolstering Arnold’s claims: The unsigned article, “Rare Book Tells of Freak Discs in the Sky Long Ago,” culled passages from The Book of the Damned regarding “a luminous cloud moving at high velocity” over Florence, Italy, in 1731, “globes of light seen in the air” over Swabia in 1732, an “octagonal star” seen over Slavange, Norway, in 1752, and an event that happened in Skeninge, Sweden, in 1808, where the “sun turned brick red” and “there appeared on the Western horizon a number of round objects, dark brown in color and seemingly the size of a hat crown” that “passed overhead and disappeared on the eastern horizon.” Arnold’s was not, it seemed, an isolated experience: Here was a long, detailed history of similar sightings, alongside rains of frogs and reports of mutilated livestock. As more sightings accumulated and as people began to think governments were hiding something from the public, ufologists increasingly turned to Forteanism to help bolster their credibility.

Thayer fought back against this tendency, doing his best to keep Forteanism from becoming synonymous with ufology. Doubt had long solicited reports from its readers, but by the early 1950s Thayer’s mailbag was swamped with UFO sightings, which he tried to keep out of the magazine as much as possible. He had begun to doubt the doubters, and wondered whether the whole thing was only a hoax concocted by the CIA. The credulity with which the public embraced UFOs bothered him, and the ways in which the UFO community wanted to reduce all examples of Forteana to visitation by aliens enraged him. In 1953 he wrote to a friend, “I am now killing every man woman or child who says ‘saucer’ to me.”

Another contingent of Forteans could be found among science-fiction writers, who consistently mined Fort’s work for ideas. As John W. Campbell, author of Who Goes There? (the basis for John Carpenter’s The Thing) and editor of Astounding Science Fiction, wrote of the 1941 Thayer-edited omnibus The Books of Charles Fort, “It probably averages one science-fiction or fantasy plot idea to the page.” Fort had offered up nothing but a litany of the weird, the unusual, the thought-provoking, and the impossible — precisely the kind of things that science-fiction writers loved. H.P. Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in Darkness begins with a textbook Fortean element: newspaper reports of odd and inexplicable things of unknown organic matter (“pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be”) found in the wake of a historic flood. An early Robert Heinlein story, “Goldfish Bowl,” features two Fortean investigators whose inquiry into a pair of mysterious water spouts (a favorite anomaly of Fort’s) leads to revelations of disturbing alien intelligence. Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, mentions Fort by name in his story “Rat Race,” and in Stephen King’s novel Firestarter (which is about pyrokinesis, a staple Fortean topic), a man reads Lo! to his daughter as a bedtime story.

Thayer tolerated the science-fiction writers more than he did the ufologists, but not by much. Despite his own success writing commercial potboilers, Thayer remained far more interested in modernism and the avant-garde: “Science fiction was too conventional, too hackneyed, and boring,” Buhs explains. Thayer dreamed of Fortean dance, Fortean music, whatever that might possibly look like. But he found it impossible to guide Doubt’s readership away from science fiction and weird tales.

Swapping one crank science for another is not skepticism.

WHO WILL STOP THIS SENSELESS SLAUGHTER?:

Woman in a Red Raincoat (Clellan Coe, July 10, 2024, American Scholar)

In William Trevor’s story “A Meeting in Middle Age,” such a reversal almost happens. The story is about two strangers, a woman and a man. She is an unhappy wife wanting a divorce, which in mid-20th century Ireland meant supplying evidence of adultery. He is a lonely bachelor who, for a fee, agrees to play the part of the co-respondent by spending the night with her in a hotel room. As planned, they meet up on a train, then spend the evening visibly together, first in the hotel bar and then in the grill-room, before retiring to the room for the night. She, Mrs. da Tanka, is the more worldly one. “You must not feel embarrassment,” she tells him early on. “We are beyond the age of giving in to awkwardness in a situation. You surely agree?” Mr. Mileson doesn’t know how he feels.

During the evening, someone makes a wrong comment, someone is impatient, someone is rude, and, little by little, anger builds, bickering erupts, and personal remarks are made by these two strangers. They insult each other. Through the night it continues. Facing each other the next day in an empty carriage of the train, it goes on. Mrs. da Tanka taunts him with his solitary life. “When you die, Mr. Mileson, have you a preference for the flowers on your coffin? It is a question I ask because I might send you off a wreath. That lonely wreath. From ugly, frightful Mrs. da Tanka.”

Mr. Mileson, who has tried on other occasions to imagine his funeral, is taken off guard and answers. “Cow-parsley, I suppose.”

“Cow-parsley?” she echoes. She is surprised. She remembers cow-parsley from her happy childhood days. She remembers sitting in the sun amid bunches of it. “Why did you say cow-parsley?” she asks him, twice. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t answer. She tries to say something, but after the night they have passed, she can find no words that fit. She looks at him, imagining a different outcome to their meeting. She pictures them strolling out of the hotel, arm-in-arm, discussing and agreeing which direction to turn. On the train, he senses something and wants to speak, but his suspicion of her is too strong, and the words die on his lips. The two go on in silence. They leave the train together at their stop, then separate. The love affair that might have developed never gets a start, both people having joined in to ruin a chance.

REBELLING AGAINST THE BEAUTIFUL REQUIRES EMBRACING THE UGLY:

Dune: The Perfect Deathwork: How the thought of Philip Rieff illuminates a modern epic. (William Batchelder, June 26, 2024, Modern Age)

To reengage fully with the dark myth at the heart of Dune, it is best to turn to the work of one of the most pessimistic of our contemporary social theorists.

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) offers an effective theoretical framework for interpreting Dune as deathwork and dark myth. Rieff made his early reputation as an interpreter of Freud. At the heart of his later work was a historicist interpretation of Western civilization, which he divided into three “cultures.” The first culture was the culture of paganism; in all such polytheistic cultures the gods themselves emerged from a “metadivine,” a source of power prior to and greater than the gods themselves. This source of fathomless power above even the gods Rieff called the “primacy of possibility.” Charged with the “constant energy of menace,” the primacy of possibility can turn men monstrous or destroy them. First culture man understood the primacy of possibility through myth; his relationship to it was mediated by unfathomable, amoral, and relentless fate. To keep his distance from its menacing power, he observed taboos.

Rieff’s second culture is that of the Abrahamic faiths. There is no metadivine; nothing stands above the God of Israel. In place of the taboos walling off the primacy of possibility there are the “interdicts”: directly commanded thou-shalt-nots declared by the God who reveals Himself. Man’s relationship to this God, the final authority, is characterized not by mysterious fate but by faith. The second culture sinks the interdicts into each individual beginning in a preconscious foundational process that builds individual character.

The third culture is the culture of modernity. It rejects God and the interdicts. Rieff believed that, because there can be no culture without either tabooed prohibitions or the character-shaping interdicts, the third culture is an “anticulture.” This third culture was ushered in by an “officer class” of intellectuals and artists. Nietzsche, Weber, and of course Freud were the most important theorists of the officer class; Joyce, Duchamp, and Wallace Stevens its artists par excellence. Rieff observed that this officer class, while godless, feels itself perpetually “god-threatened.” These intellectuals are compelled to address themselves to the God of the second culture in endless artistic acts of defacement and mockery. Rieff called such works of art the “deathworks”: intellectual and artisticassaults on the old, now disestablished, second culture.

To Rieff, the closest this modernist officer class can come to the affirmative creation of culture is to create deathworks that negate the second culture of faith while also attempting an unbelieving return to the “primacy of possibility”—the source of power beyond even the gods themselves—that marked the first culture. Of course, a skeptical modern cannot approach the primacy of possibility as a first culture man did. Instead, third culture imaginations invoke the oceanic power of the primacy of possibility self-consciously, even ironically. To some moderns, this primacy of possibility returns as atheistic invocations of what Rieff called “the Nothing,” which serve as a kind of anti-creed best expressed in endless hostile parodies of the second culture. Rieff cites as an example Joyce’s mockery of the Old Testament and his sneering “Woid” (void) in place of the “Word.”

To fill the emptiness, other third culture imaginations have embraced, or even self-consciously invented, some supra-human power echoing the ancient primacy of possibility. Moderns have embraced everything from the Trotskyists’ “permanent revolution” to Wilhelm Reich’s orgone energy. Wallace Stevens, in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” demanded the angels keep silent while the poet creates a self-conscious pseudo-religious abstraction as a substitution for the Trinity: “It must be Abstract. It must Change. It must give Pleasure.”

Dune is a perfect third culture deathwork because it offers an eloquent address to the Nothing and a invokes a fictive primacy of possibility almost profound enough to approach again the slopes of myth.

The constant need to define themselves in opposition to God is a confession. Richard Dawkins recent admission to being a cultural Christian was particularly hilarious.

GNOSTICISM IS ALWAYS A HOAX:

A Book Club of Two: The Time I Started a James Joyce Reading Group in College (Kristopher Jansma, June 14, 2024, LitHub)

Our professor seemed unsurprised that we weren’t getting into it, even after he gave us a schema that explained the themes and explained that Joyce’s contemporaries had been similarly puzzled, until he’d given them this guide. We settled in with these charts that paralleled the chapters back to Homer’s Odyssey, and perused the maps with the paths of the characters throughout Dublin on the day—June 16th—now known as “Bloomsday” in honor of this wonderful novel. He brought out a big green Gifford annotation and had us read it alongside the original text so that we could see all that was wrapped up inside.

But I couldn’t get into it. An international holiday was nice, I conceded, but what the hell is the point of a 768-page book that even the author’s closest friends needed to read with a cheat key?

it’s a fascistic exercise in an author controlling rather than entertaining his “readers’. (No one has ever actually read it)