Ender in Exile; Same-Sex Marriage in Asylum

At my grandma’s place this evening, bookended by a grilled cheese sandwich and a tribute to George Carlin, I spent some time thumbing through an etymology book that was laying around.  Hangnails, those things that I usually rip from my fingers the instant they begin to smart, used to be called angnaegls.  Well, I have an angnaegl, and it happens to be Orson Scott Card.

Last year, arguably the first in which I had more than a fleeting interest in politics, I stumbled upon Orson Scott Card’s semi-frequent sociopolitical blog posts.  I’m not sure how I deluded myself, but by some motivation I believed that an author who filled hours of my childhood with escape, and who writes magical fiction, rather than stock science fiction, would march in lockstep with my own beliefs, generally, in the realm of politics and ethics.  What can I say, I’m naive.  Card’s disavowal of Same-Sex marriage wasn’t bigotry; in addition, everyone is entitled to their opinion and I even find many arguments against same-sex marriage compelling (some not; this link I found at the recommendation of Mr. Card, on his website).

The bothersome bit of skin I’m gnawing is that the most recently published addition to the Ender’s series, Ender in Exile, so blatantly pushes this position.  Here’s the first example (it’s about as subtle as five inches of cleavage):

“No,” she said.  “I’d do it.  Sel, you’re the smartest, everyone knows it.  And you shouldn’t be cut off without having children.  It’s not right.  We need your genes in the pool.”

“That’s the genetic argument,” said Sel.  “Then there’s the social argument.  Monogamy has been proven, over and over, to be the optimum social arrangement.  It’s not about genes, it’s about children – they have to grow up into the society we want them to maintain.  We voted on this.”

. . . and another:

As Father always said, “Monogamy is what works best for any society in the long run.  That’s why half of us are born male and half female – so we come out even.”

This second example expresses ‘what was is what shall be’ and this perpetuation is signed off by a paternal authority.  The first example throws and handful of dirt or shredded ballots into the face of the material dialectical understanding of the way systems, such as societies, function.  The material dialectic is the closest mode of thought to empirical methodology, and goes a step further to unite multiple fields in hopes of further understanding the connectedness of stuff. The material mode argues that reality, the world we live in day to day and act upon and are acted upon by, is what organizes the society one lives in.  So when Card writes “they have to grow up into the society we want them to maintain” it supplants a natural progression of society with an ideal.  If same-sex couples are allowed to marry and raise children, the society and its superstructure would auto-correct and become stable.

Orson Scott Card, you are a fiction writer.  Please let us believe that we won’t drag party lines and inequality across decades and across the galaxy.

Vocabulately

Great new words that, for one reason or another, I’ve just learned:

antediluvian: relating to the time before the Great Flood of the book of Genesis in the Old Testament; as in, “After doffing his shoes, Karl found that his tattered wool socks smelled positively antediluvian.”

brinksmanship: maneuvering a risky situation to the fringe of safety in order to get a return of the greatest advantage; as in, “In a feat of pure brinksmanship, she finished the second half of the pinot noir before meeting Mrs. Wheeler for her daughter’s parent-teacher conference.”

Big

While clearing out the stuff at my mom’s apartment, my grandma stumbled over a story that I had wrote.  It’s called “Big”, and when carbon dated, shows a creation date of December 21st, 1994, less than a month after my ninth birthday.  Obviously, the literary genius was already manifesting.  So, here it is . . . (all original punctuation and spelling have been unaltered).

One day I was riding my mom’s friend’s big bear, and it came to life.  I was astonished.  So it took us to The Hiwain Islands.  We had fun there that night.  When we woke up I noticed that we weren’t at home.  I looked for a phone, but no luck.  So we just had to ride back home  .When I looked for the big bear I relized it was gone.  Now what could I do.  For a while I thought.  (For a long while.)  I had no choice but than to swim.  By the time I got back my face was green.  It took a while for me to get back.  And I noticed that it wasn’t my mom.  I noticed that I was In Texas not Minnesota.  So I called the travel agency, and asked for a ticket to Minnesota, but there wasn’t any left.  Then I got so mad that my head was as red as a rose with my face tucked inside it.  then I saw the big bear on someone else’s truck.  My face got even more tucked in my rose head.  I told the man that the big bear in his truck, he did his monkey call.(cause he was King Kong.)  I finally got it back, and I finally got a plane ticket to Minnesota.  My mom was worried about me.  THE   END

Science Fiction Refugee Future

Amanda had been reading Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide for a while and I was feeling some Ender-envy, so I decided to gradually re-read the Ender’s Shadow series, which focuses on another Battle School attendee, Bean.  Just last night I finished the first book in a fit of temporary insomnia.  I was intrigued by a seemingly minor detail, but one that undergirds the entire first section of the novel: that the Netherlands has become international territory and is essentially a dumping ground for the world’s refugees.  It is important to note a few contextual points that support this territorial restructuring.  Importantly, an invasion of hive-swarming, insectoid aliens has attacked earth and nominally united the world’s governments.  Also, the invasion has killed over 100 million and displaced many more.  Not only is the story set in the semi-distant future, but the cataclysmic attack has unnaturally increased the number of refugees.

Anyhow, bring on the unbridled thought experiment: what would happen to the Netherlands if it were set up as international territory in the present day, and the world’s refugees were sent there to be protected?

In 2008, the Netherlands was home to approximately 16 1/2 million people, whereas, according to National Geographic, the world hosts 35 million refugees.  In Ender’s Shadow, Card never explicitly shares whether the original Dutch inhabitants stay in the Netherlands or are transported out of the country.  Let’s assume that they stay, due to the fact that the public services and commercial sector would not only need to stay running, but would also need to be ramped up.  Also, in the novel, while a language called IF Common has become the spoken tongue, Dutch is widely used and a first language for many.  Someone needed to stay to teach everyone Dutch.  So, in our hypothetical post-invasion Netherlands, the population would rise to 51 1/2 million residents in an unprecedented amount of time.

According to the 2008 population statistics, the Dutch average a population density of 396 people per square kilometer.  If the population rose, due to the incoming refugees, to 51 1/2 million, the new population density would exceed 1,200 residents per square kilometer.  For the purpose of scale, Minnesota is more than 5 times the size the Netherlands, but Minnesota’s density is 25/sq. km., less than 1/5 that of the Netherlands.  The density of Minneapolis is 2,595/sq. km., Rotterdam, a large city in the Netherlands as well as the setting of the early chapters of Ender’s Shadow, packs 2,850 people into each square kilometer.

Many of the refugees, I assume, would make their home in the larger cities, such as Rotterdam and Amsterdam.  The cities would be certainly ill-equipped for such a migration, but much less so than the suburbs and rural areas of the country.  I also assume that population growth would outpace development greatly, and the density of large cities would double, at least.  Rotterdam would become a hub of wanderers as dense as Rio de Janeiro (5,212/km. sq.), nestled in the bosom of Western Europe.   However, in the Ender-series, the invasion occurs at a point in the future when the invasion could be countered (respectably) quickly with a pan-galaxy war-fleet, and it must be assumed that the world’s population would not only be greater, but the number of refugees created by devastation would be exponentially greater.  Perhaps in the contextual framework of the Ender series, Rotterdam has become like modern-day Mumbai, with a population density of 22,658/sq. km.

NOTE: All assumptions are made without any formal training in population statistics or demographics.  Sorry.

More Trees

The names of two more giant California redwoods mentioned in Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees: Elwing and Eärendil.  Who do these trees draw their namesake from?  More Tolkien of course.  Elwing is elvish and Eärendil is human, both are the parents of the helpful, benevolent leader of Rivendell, Elrond.  Yes, the Elrond played recently by Hugo Weaving in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy.  Here are some of Weaving’s other roles:

• A nameless thug in Sky Pirates (1986)
• The voice of Rex the Sheepdog in pig-thriller Babe (1995)
• A one-episode cameo in a series called Naked: Stories of Men (1996)
• Agent Smith in the Matrix trilogy
• Antihero V in V for Vendetta (2005)
• Holyshitthevoiceof MEGATRON in Transformers (2007)

Who is another bi-racial political leader who has a distinguished education and toils against evil?

Now let me be clear . . . Mordor is that way folks!

I’d like to mention a few similarities and differences between the two very capable politicians.

• The name “Barack” roughly means “blessing” while the name “Elrond” means either “Vault of Stars” or “Elf of the Cave”
• Barack Obama was 47 when confirmed as the first African-American President-Elect; Elrond left Middle-Earth at approximately age 6,520
• Barack Obama has two daughters; Elrond has two sons and one daughter, Arwen*
• Barack Obama was born on an island whereas Elrond was born near a river delta
• Barack Obama can make small objects levitate with his mind; Elrond is immortal

* Please note: Arwen’s love-interest in Aragorn is mottled by far-removed incest.

Telperion

The Wild Trees

The second section of Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees is called “The Fall of Telperion”.  The book is largely about a small community of enthusiasts, who all live for climbing California redwoods, Douglas firs, and other massively trunked arbores.  “The Fall of Telperion” details the search, discovery, climb, and abrupt obituary of one a 359 foot redwood.  After reaching the very peak of the Humboldt tree, one of the main actors of the narrative

lay in his hammock, looking at the moon.  He didn’t like Michael Taylor’s name for the tree, and he thought that a better name for it would be Telperion, or the Tree of the Moon.  It was a name taken from The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s mythic history of Middle-earth.  Sillett mentioned his idea to the others.  They thought it was rather like Steve to give the tree a weird name.

The Two Trees of Valinor

According to The Silmarillion, Telperion (as well as his twin sister Laurelin) bathed the world in light; Telperion shone silver and Laurelin gold.  The trees were destroyed out of jealousy by a giant spider-like creature called Ungoliant and the last flower of Telperion was used to make the moon, while the last fruit of Laurelin birthed the sun.  Just as the inhabitants of Middle-earth outlive the Telperion, the tree-climbers of California outlive the redwood.  The redwood crashes to the ground and destroys a second tree in a squall similar to one that the crew of climbers live through, after Steve Sillett casually asks the sky “what’s in a name?”

Patriots

I started reading Death With Interruptions this evening, recently written and released by Nobel Prize winner José Saramago.  This is my first Saramago book and I’m already hooked.  The premise is simple, but the consequences and details are complex: death, in one country only, has been suspended – no one dies, regardless of injury, age, or will power.  If I were you, I would anticipate numerous posts as I work my way through it.

A bitty on patriotism:

One day, a lady, recently widowed, finding no other way of showing the new joy flooding her being, although not without a slight pang of grief to think that, if she did not die, she would never again see her much-mourned husband, had the idea of hanging the national flag from the flower-bedecked balcony of her dining room.  It was, as they say, no sooner said than done.  In less than forty-eight hours the hanging out of flags had spread throughout the country, the colors and symbols of the flag took over the landscape, although more obviously so in the cities, of course, there being more balconies and windows in the city than in the country.  Such patriotic fervor was impossible to resist, especially when certain worrying, not to say threatening statements, where they came from no one knew, began to be distributed, saying such things as, Anyone who doesn’t hang our nation’s immortal flag from the window of their house doesn’t deserve to live, Anyone not displaying the national flag has sold out to death, Join us, be a patriot, buy a flag, Buy another one, Buy another, Down with the enemies of life, it’s lucky for them that there’s no more death.  The streets were a veritable festival of fluttering insignia, flapping in the wind if it was blowing and if it wasn’t, then a carefully positioned electric fan did the job, and if the fan wasn’t powerful enoughto make the standard flap in virile fashion, making those whip-crack noises that so exalt the martially minded, it would at least ensure that the patriotic colors undulated honorably.  A small number of people murmured privately that it was completely over-the-top, nonsense, and that sooner or later there would be no alternative but to remove all those flags and pennants, and the sooner the better, because just as too much sugar spoils tha palate and harms the digestive process, so our normal and proper respect for patriotic emblems will become a mockery if we allow it to be perverted into this serial affront to modesty, on a part with those unlamented flashers in raincoats.  Besides, they said, if the flags are there to celebrate the fact that death no longer kills, then we should do one of two things, either take them down before we get so fed up with them that we start to loate our own national symbols, or else spend the rest of our lives, that is, eternity, yes eternity, having to change them every time they start to rot in the rain or get torn to shreds by the wind or faded by the sun.  There were very few people who had the courage to put their finger on the problem publicly, and one poor man had to pay for his unpatriotic outburst with a beating which, had death not ceased her operations in this country at the beginning of the year, would have put an end to his miserable life right there and then.

Death With Interruptions

If I’m not mistaken, that was only seven or eight sentences . . . welcome to the whole book.  Saramago implies that fervent patriotism is starting from insignificant events that shouldn’t have riled an entire population.  Notice that the dutiful wife doesn’t place a flag to honor a war-ravaged husband, but rather half-grudgingly celebrates an eternal life with no hope of reconciling with her spouse in the afterlife; this is certainly different from the boom the American flag industry strutted through after September 11th (that’s something a nation can rally behind).  Was the woman expressing the quiet optimism of the nation? and really, the patriotic outpouring was eventual?  Saramago gestures toward a shallow patriotism, one that quickly and effectively leads to violence (a trend that we cynical high-schoolers picked up on ways back).  The ultimate cynic of this passage is the man who, for his dissident opinion, is beaten to not-death.    That is sort of a strange turn around . . . the patriotic swell is caused by one woman’s celebration of life and the most audibly outspoken person of its ill-utility is punished . . . with life.

Hardboiled

So I read The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain very quickly – it’s right around 115 pages with the curt, no-nonsense prose similar to the 1930s and 1940s.  I’m almost positive I’ve never read another “hardboiled” crime novel, though, which I found out hardboiled means a lot of unsentimental crime and sex.  For example:

“She started for the lunchroom again, but I stopped her.  “Let’s – leave it locked.”

“Nobody can get in if it’s locked.  I got some cooking to do.  I’ll wash up this plate.”

I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers . . . “Bite me! Bite me!”

I bit her.  I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth.  It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.

Well.

He got in, but shoved his face out to the window and let go one.  I braced my feet, and while he still had his chin on the window sill I brought down the wrench.  His head cracked, and I felt it crush.  He crumpled up and curled on the seat like a cat on a sofa.  It seemed a year before he was still.  Then Cora, she gave a funny kind of gulp that ended in a moan.  Because here came the echo of his voice.  It took the high note, like he did, and swelled, and stopped, and waited.

This book cuts to the chase right away, the first quote comes on page eleven.  I’ve read novels dealing with adultery, but they either start off with some cuckolding or slowly lead up to it, analyzing the subtle (or not so subtle) emotions and considerations.  The Postman Always Rings Twice is right in the middle.

By the way, James M. Cain went on trial for obscenity and his novels were briefly banned from the entire city of Boston.

The Tragic Midwest

Early in December, I gave Matthew a used copy of Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt for his birthday.  I told him that, generally, Sinclair Lewis writes about tragic, hypocritical Midwesterners.  Later, I decided that I wanted to explorey m utterance a little further.

I looked to Martin Light’s work, The Quixotic Vision of Sinclair Lewis, for some enlightenment.  Light tackles the whole of Lewis’ bibliography, his collected letters, and biography, however, he focuses two entire chapters on Main Street and Babbitt.  As for Main Street, Light claims that:

When seen as the story of a woman with a mind shaped by romantic notions, who challenges the community with her impractical idealism and suffers rebuffs and self-doubt, Main Street appears to have more purpose, unity, and psychological interest than many readers have been willing to concede to it.

Carol Kennicot, Main Street’s leading lady, suffers from a tragedy hovering somewhere between a foolish quixotism and the scandal of Emma Bovary.  After migrating from flashy St. Paul to the bucolic Gopher Prairie, delusionally, Carol, imagines that the entire underdeveloped world needs to be reformed and match her liberal education and cultured experiences: “Her sense of mission returns; she will transform and redesign a prairie town.”  She assumes everyone wants and needs to know about early German socialism and film noir.  And this delusion is the seed of her failure; she buckles down to conquer a giant that is actually a windmill called “small-town life”.  I remember when I was younger, and my aunt Irene still lived on the border of Theodore Wirth park in North Minneapolis, that I wanted to change part of the forest and creek bed into a “nature area,” apparently oblivious to the fact that I was in one of the only “nature areas” in North.  I explained: that we should try to pick up all the trash, replant grasses from other parts of the park to start regrowing patches damaged by vagabond-bonfires, and encourage population growth for flora and fauna in their natural habitat.  I learned that encouraging “population growth for flora and fauna in their natural habitat” was a good thing from the monthly-magazine Ranger Rick, which was nearly gospel to me at the time.  The task was ridiculous, albeit noble, which is most likely why my aunt never stopped hiking further into the woods and yelled over her shoulder, “Why would you want to do a fool thing like that?”

Martin Light even proffered criticism that resonated with my more recent, barely-dodged immersion into Midwestern-high-school-goth-culture.  He writes that “Carol knows all too well that the tragedy of her life is ‘that I shall never know tragedy, never find anything but blustery complications that turn out to be a farce.’”  Without slipping into too much childish bickering, this is the problem with sullen, suburbanite kids: too much culture, drama, and time to think about the lack of the two former things.  Sorry, tragedy isn’t all it’s cracked-up to be.

Babbitt is far more subtle.  Babbitt, the character, ensconces himself in an illusionary world, and transforms his perception with his own language.  He narrates his day and describes his fellow Americans as if the voice of Charles Dickens were spewing out of his mouth and constantly commenting on high-society.  (Side note: the first pornographic magazine I accidently found was called High Society, which also sounds like it could be the name of a marijuana-paraphernalia distribution company).  Babbitt is fully understood when “Lewis gives us the babbitt-vision of the American Dream.  Babbitt has lived according to its inspiration, but it is a dream which leaves the dreamer restless and betrayed.”  This motif gushes like the blood through modern, contemporary American cultural production, and spatters, blinding us, in the form of Death of a Salesman, American Beauty, and A Raisin in the Sun.  It is only one of my favorite motifs.  Note: please assume all uncredited quotes are from Marin Light’s book.

In other news, the snow on the ground was delightfully squeaky today.

Data Mining

The trade website io9 has released an article that lists science-fiction authors that have “become beloved of literary hipsters”.  As I had assumed, upon reading the article I discovered that I myself am a literary hipster, having read work from Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe, Stanislaw Lem, Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Harlan Ellison, plenty of Kurt Vonnegut, some Jonathan Lethem and Neal Stephenson, and more Ray Bradbury than I can keep track of.  Although he’s usually lumped in the the grand circle of Hard SFers, I think Robert A. Heinlein deserves a place on this list, due to his treatment of counter-culture and liberty in Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, as well as the unashamed use of “grok” or “grokking” which I’ve overheard in the Coffman Union bookstore multiple times.

Gibson's Pattern Recognition

As it turns out, I happen to be reading one of these literary hipster sci-novels right now.  This is 2003’s Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.  This is, of course, a direct commentary on not only globalization, and the voracious capitalism of the marketing industry, but also an early fascination with viral videos, which in the context of the novel, comes in the form of independently-produced, film clips of meticulous artistry.  The hitch is that the global networked community can’t quite figure the origin of this footage, which gives the text a techno-suspense edge.  Pattern Recognition is only the second work of length I’ve read to be set shortly after 9/11 (the first was Saturday by Ian McEwan), and Cayce, the novel’s protagonist, searches for the father she presumes to have disappeared in the wreckage of the collapsing towers.  These two known unknowables are both rooted in the ubiquitous hand of globalization: both the anonymous, global, web-based obsession and the sudden, unexplained absence of her father only pester Cayce, in a large part due to the effective opening-of-the-international-gates.  Thomas Friedman argues well, in The World is Flat, that the barriers for an unprecedented number of people to enter the global marketplace are being torn down, further so each day.  Gibson juxtaposes the triumphs and catastrophes of this new reality under the guise of an ever more fragmented, detached, modern world.

Tancer's Click

I’m reading another book that has wonderful connections to Pattern Recognition, Bill Tancer’s (of Newsweek) Click.  Tancer works for Hitwise, a firm that analyzes data based on search-query statistics for commercial interests.  Of course, both Cayce and Tancer’s job is pattern recognition and the analysis of those patterns; Cayce is a branding “coolhunter” and Bill is a business consultant.  One of my favorite statistical nuggets from Tancer’s book is that the type of pornography people pursue is based on political affiliation:

If we break Internet visitors by state into their red-state and blue-state contingents and then rank adult sites by their percentage of contribution to overall use in those states, we find that red-state visitors are likely to visit wife-swapping sites, adult webcams, adult matchmaking services, and sites devoted to voyeurism, while blue-state visitors are most likely to visit directories for adult entertainers and escorts.

I’ve subscribed to the Hitwise blog and I plan to circulate any interesting factoids I stumble across, such as the previous one.