Diciadain sa chaidh dh’fhàg sinn an clas tràth airson a dhol gu taisbeanadh mu Ro-aithris na Luingeis aig a’ Chrichton, le còrr is ceud neach. Tha an neach-labhairt, Charlie Connelly, air a bhith dèidheil air a’ chraoladh o chionn fhada, mar a tha gu follaiseach air mòran dhaoine eile. Bidh seòladairean agus iasgairean ga chleachdadh gu mòr ach tha a’ mhòr-chuid de luchd-èisteachd nan leabaidh agus tha e gan socrachadh agus gan cuideachadh a’ cadal. Gu neònach, tha e math airson seo a chluinntinn gu bheil uisge trom agus gaothan a-muigh air a’ mhuir, agus tha e dha-rìribh! Tha e ag obair dhòmhsa.
Bha Mgr Connelly glè mhath air gun a bhith sgìth ach chan eil mise agus mar sin cha bhith mi a’ bruidhinn airson ùine mhòr. Thòisich an t-Àrd-mharaiche Fitzroy, caiptean a’ Bheagle, air ro-aithris na sìde airson shoithichean san naoidheamh linn deug agus b’ e còd Morse agus teileagrafaireachd a’ chiad ro-aithris luingeis. Chaidh an cleachdadh an toiseach air an rèidio ann an 1924 agus bha iad cho cudromach is gun do rinn iad an ro-aithris fhathast nuair a bhàsaich an Rìgh agus dhùin an rèidio airson caoidh.
Bha Connelly airson tadhal air tìr anns a h-uile sgìre mara far an robh tìr. Chan eil fhios agam an do shoirbhich leis leotha uile, ach chaidh e gu eilean Danmhairgeach ann am Bàgh na Gearmailt far an robh ionad bhùthan an rud as inntinniche. Air Utsire bha sgioba ball-coise glè shoirbheachail a bha an urra ri an luchd-dùbhlain a bhith tinn mara nuair a chluicheadh iad nan aghaidh. Tha iad a-nis air an toirt gu bhith a’ cluich air tìr-mòr Nirribhidh agus chan eil iad air geama a bhuannachadh bhon uair sin. Thadhail e cuideachd air Sealand, ann an Linne na Tamais, a tha na àrd-ùrlar a tha ag ràdh gur e dùthaich neo-eisimeileach fhèin a th’ ann. Is dòcha gun deach e gu Lundy cuideachd, far a bheil càl ro-eachdraidheil. Cha b’ urrainn dha faighinn gu Rockall. Tha Rockall trì cheud cilemeatair bho Shòaigh anns na h-Eileanan Siar agus bha e na phàirt de Siorrachd Inbhir Nis. Tha e còig ceud seasgad seachd cilemeatair bho Inbhir Nis, agus tha sin na shlighe fhada ri thighinn gus na bionaichean fhalamhachadh. Chuir an t-Arm dithis shaighdear agus bogsa geàrd air airson beagan mhionaidean. Tha Èirinn ag ràdh gur ann leotha a tha e, agus tha Innis Tìle agus na h-Eileanan Fàro ga iarraidh.
Is e ‘Sailing By’ le Ronald Binge an ceòl airson an Shipping Forecast agus chaidh a sgrìobhadh airson bailiùnaichean èadhair theth.
Mu dheireadh, chleachd an nobhail agam ‘Unspeakable’ na sgìrean mara Shipping Forecast mar shiorrachdan, ach is e sin sgeulachd eile gu litireil.
Ar Dinnear
Airson iomadh bliadhna a-nis, tha mi air biadh sònraichte ullachadh aon uair san t-seachdain. Roimhe seo, bhiodh biadh sònraichte agam airson gach latha den t-seachdain, ach dh’fhàs mo theaghlach gu math sgìth dheth sin, agus mar sin is e am biadh seo an aon bhiadh a bhios mi fhathast a’ dèanamh gach seachdain. Tha bhidio YouTube mu dheidhinn air aon de na seanalan agam. Is e seo am biadh a thuit mi air an làr mus tàinig mi gu clas Gàidhlig beagan mhìosan air ais, agus mar sin bha mi fadalach airson an leasain sin.
Tha mi a’ smaoineachadh gu bheil e cudromach do theaghlach biadh ithe còmhla, agus na h-aon bhiadhan ithe gu cunbhalach gus ar cumail ceangailte. Is toil leam cuideachd biadh a dhèanamh a tha mo theaghlach dèidheil air. Air Diardaoin, is urrainn dhomh tilleadh agus am biadh seo ithe agus chan fheum mi a theasachadh, oir is e salad a th’ ann. Nuair a rinn mi e air Dihaoine ann an Sasainn, rinn e nas fhasa a dhol gu cafaidh Street Pastors far an robh mi a’ cuideachadh. Is urrainn dhomh cuideachd dèanamh cinnteach gum faigh ar mac, a tha a’ fuireach còmhla rinn, biadh fallain an-asgaidh aon latha san t-seachdain ma nì mi seo. Rinn mi e gu cunbhalach airson lòn eaglaise cuideachd, le biadh eile.
Tàthchuid: sligan pasta làn-ghràin, sùgh liomaidan uaine, basail, sabhs soy, ola ollaidh, ollaidhean, pònairean dubha air am bogadh agus air am bruich gu math, ceithir-deug duilleagan basail, piopairean, aon chucumar, tomatoan agus tofu no càise buabhall uisge. Chan eil ar mac ag ithe tofu, agus mar sin gheibh e am càise buabhall uisge na àite. Chan eil sinn ag ithe a’ chàise.
1. Bruich am sligan ann an uisge airson deich mionaidean.
2. Fhad ‘s a tha am sligan a’ goil, gearraich na tomatoan agus an cucumar agus cuir iad ann am bobhla.
3. Drèanaich agus cuir na h-ollaidhean agus na pònairean dubha ris.
4. Reub ceithir-deug duilleagan basil airson gach bobhla agus cuir iad ann am bobhlaichean.
5. Dòirt an ola a-steach do bhobhla.
6. Gearr agus brùth na liomaidean uaine a-steach don bhobhla.
7. Cuir an sabhs soy ris a’ bhobhla.
8. Cuir na piobair ris agus measgaich an leaghan gu math le forc.
9. Cuir eagal aig sligan, drèanaich agus cuir ann am bobhlaichean.
10. Dòirt an dreasa a-steach do na bobhlaichean, measgaich gu mionaideach agus fritheil.
Beagan rudan. ’S e liomaidean uaine toradh as searbhaiche agus tha iad nas saoire na liomaidean, agus mar sin ’s fheàrr an cleachdadh. Tha basil math ach tha e làn alùmanaim, agus mar sin is dòcha nach eil e sàbhailte. Tha na beathachadh a’ toirt a-steach pròtain, bhiotamain C, bhiotamain B, searbhag folic, flavonoids, carotenoids, sinc agus feadhainn eile.
A E van Vogt
I have a whole “splodge” of thoughts at the moment about what might constitute an interesting blog post. I’m thinking about Peter Mandelson, the trajectory of Lagash in Asimov’s novelette ‘Nightfall’, a rejoinder to French feminist theory, the principle of hope, connections between Celtic languages and others, the attitude of some Trotskyists towards Yoga, and the writing technique of A E Van Vogt. I’m also aware that threatening and frightening days may be upon us all, which relates to a couple of those possibilities, but when one writes about such things it’s important to take a tone that spurs people into effective action, makes them feel less isolated or does something similar, and there is also a place for escape. I’m a little concerned that while all this stuff is going on, I seem to be a bit away with the fairies, but I’d say that’s a response to the trauma of the outside world. The other subjects I mention will doubtless come up on here but for now, in order to stop my brain turning into an overcrowded airport with ideas circling while their fuel gradually diminishes, I do need to set pen to paper, metaphorically anyway, just to clarify things a bit. And since I’m talking about writing here, the subject may as well be writing, so here it is.
Before you assume that I’m just going to be talking about a science fiction author here, I’m going to ask you to bear with me because this is not about the genre in which the author in question was writing in but the approach taken to creation and writing style, which has a much broader application and in fact was applied more broadly outside that genre. Please don’t just stop reading because you dislike science fiction, although there’s more to be said about genre fiction here, but in the meantime I can assure you this is interesting.
I used to have a friend who was trying to write, substantially for profit. In order to achieve this, he read a number of Mills & Boon romances to analyse them and work out their structure and style. He frankly found the whole process nauseating but it was still a potentially useful exercise. My father used to have a quote from Samuel Johnson on his study wall: “No man but a blockhead wrote, except for money”. Maybe Johnson lived in a time when there were enough people buying books for this to be true, but it doesn’t seem apt for today’s environment and even when it was, I strongly suspect authors took pride in their craft and were emotionally involved in the writing. It also seems to me that Johnson’s dictionary was a labour of love. I don’t know what else he wrote.
I can think of several authors who took a somewhat similar but hybridised approach. There’s a right-wing political theorist whose name escapes me just now – I thought it was Friedrich Hayek but apparently it wasn’t him – who wrote horror stories to help fund his work. Michael Moorcock has two sets of novels, one popular and the other more intellectual, the former for his living expenses to write the latter, which he actually wanted to write and cared about. Finally, J G Ballard claimed that his first novel, ‘The Wind From Nowhere’, was just written to make money, again to fund his career as a serious author. This last case is odd though, since that novel recounts the world ending because of a mysterious destructive wind and is followed by three other apocalyptic novels, ‘The Drowned World’, ‘The Burning World’ and ‘The Crystal World’, which are all accounts of the world ending because of a natural phenomenon, and apparently, though I haven’t checked, these three have protagonists who are basically the same characters with different names placed in the circumstances of each story, meaning that the structure of his first book is similar to the next three even though he claimed the first was written purely for money, so what’s going on there? It seems that the author can only ever be themselves and therefore the idea of excluding a particular set of works from a more cerebral approach may be futile, as their distinctive character will always infuse their writing. This, I think, is evidence that even if a particular way of writing is pursued simply for money, it may end up in any case reflecting the author’s personality, and besides this, it will always tend to reflect their cultural milieu.
But I’m not focussing on these authors here, but on the Canadian author Alfred Vogt, whose name is usually styled as A E van Vogt. Born in Manitoba in 1912, van Vogt is the oldest and first author of the so-called “Golden Age of Science Fiction”, along with Heinlein, Asimov and several other authors who published in pulp magazines from the 1930s on. His first sale, ‘Black Destroyer’, and to a lesser extent another short story of his, is notorious for having apparently served as the basis for Ridley Scott’s 1979 cosmic horror film ‘Alien’ without his permission. Although it’s somewhat different, it is in fact quite a bit closer than a lot of film adaptations of various other stories, even excluding the ones which are in name only, and it was also demonstrated to satisfaction in court that this was so. This also means, a little strangely, that there’s an extremely famous and successful work out there which hasn’t been officially credited to him. So much for making money from writing. As well as that, he seems to have been the first SF author to come up with the idea of a starship with a large crew on a multi-year exploratory mission through the Galaxy encountering strange new life and, well, boldy going where no-one has gone before. There are plenty of other stories which show that before ‘Star Trek’, but he seems to have been the first, so basically he also invented ‘Star Trek’. I obviously acknowledge ‘Forbidden Planet’ here too.
He’s a most singular author, most unlike the other Golden Age writers but very influential on later ones, and this is what interests me about him. On the whole I don’t care for his stories in terms of characters, events or ideas but I still find his writing fascinating. He’s not big on plausibility or even world-building really, and he comes across as quite unreconstructed, but that isn’t where the interest lies. Damon Knight famously wrote about him being like a dwarf using a giant typewriter, and said that his work reads like that of a small boy trying to impress someone with big numbers and flashy imagination without much depth. That essay did a lot of damage to his reputation, and here we can loop back to the questions of whether he was just writing for money and if that makes any difference when considering his stories, but clearly he was trying to “wow” his readers and is the origin for many tropes of genre science fiction without which it’s hard to imagine the genre at all in its dominant form.
One way in which he is widely acknowledged to succeed is in creating what’s been called a “sense of wonder”. This, along with “if this goes on. . .” is the foundation of sci-fi as we know it. Sense of wonder, and here I’m paraphrasing the ‘Encyclopedia of Science Fiction’, is notable in being conveyed even in works which are generally regarded as being rather badly written, such as those of E E Smith, which brings into question what does in fact constitute bad writing: if it succeeds on that level, is it really fair to see it as bad just because it doesn’t conform to the received wisdom of what counts as good? Nonetheless both van Vogt and Smith do strike me as pretty awful and I don’t feel like I’m doing myself justice intellectually or emotionally when I read their stuff. Two of his novels at least end in sentences which, so to speak, start the ripples in the reader’s imagination. One of these does so in part by using the word “sevagram”, which occurs nowhere else in the English language, including that novel itself, leading to the reader wondering what a sevagram is, how the plot could’ve led to it and what’s going to happen after the story ends, the sevagram being unquestionably important in the universe of that novel, but then just abandoned, set adrift in the reader’s mind. Sense of wonder has been linked to the sublime, and I’m afraid I can’t follow that further due to my lack of ability in literary criticism. It has a dream-like quality, and this is where van Vogt’s technique becomes relevant because to some extent he did base his writing on dreams. He used to set an alarm to allow himself to sleep in ninety minute blocks and write down his dreams each time he awoke. This is to my mind remarkably similar to Salvador Dalí’s method of using dreams to inspire his painting, and although the painter is generally considered to be more a populist than a great artist he’s still top-rank in many assessments of his work, so if it’s a productive technique for him, why not for van Vogt?
It doesn’t end there though. A very prominent feature of his stories is that they’re written in eight hundred word blocks, each of which contains a “hook” to the next block to keep the reader engaged. This is often not apparent at first glance, which can be expected to some extent from a good writer, which he may not in fact be of course, but it does often become obvious once you know he’s done it. Two examples are found in the form of his short stories (and there’s more to say about that too) ‘Dear Pen Pal’ and ‘Far Centaurus’. The former is epistolatory, which is a particularly clear way of using this method. The latter is told by a single member of a small team of astronauts on their way to Alpha Centauri as he comes out of suspended animation every few decades and becomes aware of the events that have transpired on the ship in the meantime, until they reach their destination, at which point the story pivots into a novel direction, then does so again shortly before the end. One of the disconcerting things about this story is that the intervals are by no means regular, and that’s part of the vertiginous nature of his writing. You never know where it’ll go next, which again keeps you reading, because his plots are illogical and disjointed but he takes the reader with him, presumably through his “hook” approach.
Before the mid-twentieth century CE, many stories later to become novels were published in serialised form in magazines. This is true of his stories, but in his case he used it to the benefit of his novels in a peculiar manner. Instead of serialising a properly connected narrative, van Vogt invented the term “fix up” for a common and already-established technique of compiling several short stories together into a connected novel. His external reasons for doing this are also interesting, which I’ll come to. ‘The Voyage Of The Space Beagle’, for instance, is a compilation of four stories, some of which are somewhat altered in order to fit together, but rather than simply taking stories A, B, C and D, he sometimes intersperses the stories, taking story A, dividing it up and inserting the other stories within it, so it’s more like A1, B, A2, C, A3, D, A4. This, I’m guessing, then spurs him on to write creatively as a way of resolving the initial discrepancies between the stories.
All of these taken together – the hooks between the sections, the larger sections constituting short stories in themselves and the hooks between sentences within the sections – give the whole work a kind of fractal quality to it, being similar on a smaller scale to the entire novel. As I’ve mentioned, there was a reason within his life why he wrote fix-ups, at least in his mid-career. He worked with L. Ron Hubbard to set up the latter’s initial self-help technique referred to as Dianetics and was running a local chapter of the movement, which tied up most of his time and led to him having to repackage his former short stories as novels with connecting passages. Before concluding that his association with Dianetics, and later Scientology as it became when Hubbard turned it into a religion, makes him a dodgy piece of work, it should also be noted that he was later to part company with Hubbard when he didn’t like the direction Hubbard was taking it. Nonetheless, Dianetics are relevant to his writing too, because his heroes are often men whose thinking is based on non-Aristotelian logic. Without introducing spoilers, both ‘The Enchanted Village’ and ‘A Can Of Paint’ involve solutions to seemingly intractable problems when an entity within each realises there’s a completely different way to solve the problem at the end of the stories. His heroes are lateral thinkers. They also tend to be unexpectedly superhuman. Both of these features are integral to his writing, as they’re his way of presenting a different kind of logic to the reader. They’re not just plot twists because they’re supposed to be inspirations to apply the same kind of approach to everyday life, which is what he was trying to do too. His use of dreams and approach to fixing up come across as lateral thinking solutions to problems his life presented him with such as lack of time to write when he was working for Hubbard and the need to come up with plot ideas with terrifyingly short and inflexible deadlines through forcing himself to dream. I have to wonder whether that kind of sleep schedule was good for him in the long run. It should also be said that although I’ve described his protagonists and the flow of his stories as illogical, he doubtless saw them as following their own unconventional and more intuitive logic, superior to the conventional form. He was pioneering lateral thinking in a fairly coherently articulated form several decades before De Bono named it.
For all these reasons, van Vogt is worth studying, my main problem with that being not wanting to sit and count eight hundred words to find the breaks and paperings over in his stories where they’re not obvious. It doesn’t end there though: he’s also very influential. I’ve already mentioned ‘Alien’ and ‘Star Trek’, but there are two other major ways in which he influenced writing, and I’ll also mention the significance of his technique outside SF. One was by being a factor in inspiring New Wave SF. Although his characters, unlike those of the New Wave, are simple and flat, the fault lines apparent in his writing with the sudden twists and turns are also an important part of that sub-genre, and the dream logic he employed, often literally, is also found there. Both he and that movement focus more on the effect of the writing than on seeking a hard, science-like explanation. It made him atypical of the Golden Age already.
The other was Philip K Dick, who openly confessed that he was influenced by him. His first novel, ‘Solar Lottery’, depicts a world where the leader and their potential assassin are both selected at random through a lottery, which for the characters provides the same kind of sudden change of fortune as found in the other author’s stories (and incidentally reminds me more than a little of Asimov’s ‘Franchise’). In other works, Dick portrays similar mental disciplines of which van Vogt was a fan and tried to apply, but is clearly suspicious of them and believes they must ultimately fail. Dick builds the same kinds of worlds but peoples them with more sophisticated characters and tends to give the whole thing a bit of a side-eye compared to the other author’s enthusiasm and trust.
The mainspring of van Vogt’s writing technique is the writing course he did before his career began, although he very much made his own thing of it and developed it well beyond its initial scope. This was based on the books of the Canadian veteran John Gallishaw, ‘The Only Two Ways To Write A Story’, ‘Twenty Problems Of The Fiction Writer’ and ‘Advanced Problems Of The Fiction Writer’. These turned out to be influential on more than just van Vogt. Of all people, F Scott Fitzgerald is said to have used these techniques, also Bradbury, Heinlein and Hubbard. Sometimes his ideas are more floating in the ether or could be discovered by careful analysis of authors directly influenced by him, but outside the realm of SF these seem to include Georgette Heyer, Ellery Queen, the later Agatha Christie, and outside genre fiction entirely John Updike, Truman Capote, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison and Eudora Welty. In some of these cases it’s probably more osmosis than conscious and deliberate study or influence, but it’s there, more strongly and obviously in genre fiction but also in mainstream literary novels.
It won’t have escaped your own attention that although this post isn’t fiction I’ve made an effort to include a couple of van Vogt’s and therefore presumably John Gallishaw’s methods in this, undoubtedly much more clumsily and perhaps inappropriately, and it’s not hard to spot them. It’d be an interesting experiment to try this out in fiction and see what happens.
An Banais
Tha an là as brònaiche anns a’ bhliadhna, an tritheamh Di Luain na Fhaoilleach, ach airson ar nighean HUG bha e snog. Bha an sin Di Sathairne an latha a pòsaidh, agus bha Di Luain an là nuair chaidh i fhèin agus an duine ùr aice air mìos na meala. An ainm air an fear-taighe TO’E, agus bha an ionad ann an Peak District, Chesterfield, Sasainn.
An teacghlach Th mòr, Èireannach agus fuaimneach, ach cuideachd snog. Tha grunn dhiubh bodhar. Tha T agus H a’ fuireach ann an Doncaster ann an Alba (ach ann an Sasainn cuideachd!). Tha iad air a bhith còmhla airson dà bliadhna deug agus tha dithis chloinne aca. Thathar ag ràdh gum bi bainnsean daor a’ tighinn ro phòsaidhean goirid. Bha ar banais saor agus b’e sin fichead bliadhma agus trì deug air ais. Ach tha sinne cinnteach gum bi iadse toilichte. Bha e glè dhaor.
Cha robh an deas-ghnàth cr`bhach, ach ‘s e ministear a th’ann am piuthar Sarada, agus bheannaich i am pòsadh às dèidh sin.
Meal do naidheachd air HUG agus TO’E!
Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray (with a bit of Cixous)
Due to the focus of this blog away from gender identity, this is going to be a difficult post to write. I’m probably not going to say anything edgy or controversial, but it’s hard to know how to word it without impinging on the subject. Nonetheless. . .
I had a dream, and no it was not like the one Martin Luther King had. I’ll slightly fictionalise it, but I find memories of dreams to be very flexible, as if they’re still forming when one awakes. In this dream, I’m back at Warwick University and Christine Battersby says that in order to stay on course for an MA, we all have to write an essay on Julia Kristeva. We have an hour to do it. This is in a way very much like the dream where you find yourself back at school having to do your exams and aren’t ready, but there’s a twist. When I look at the paper I’m planning to write on, all of it has stuff printed on it and with fifteen minutes to spare, I go back to my room to get clean, plain paper. On getting outside, I’m in Bristol. I can literally write anything at all on Julia Kristeva and get through, but even that seems to be beyond me in the dream.
OK, so hearing about other people’s dreams is boring isn’t it? For most people anyway. That said, it’s worth dwelling on this one to some extent and here comes the tightrope walk. There used to be a book with a mirror cover called ‘A Woman In Your Own Right’. It was about assertiveness and I didn’t buy or read it because at the time I definitely didn’t regard myself as a woman in my own right and felt that were I to become assertive it would be at the cost of actual women. I think I was fourteen at the time. There’s a long tale here about whether being assertive or successful occupies someone else’s space which I won’t go into here, but this was the beginning of a general approach towards feminist theory which I continued to pursue well into adulthood. Whether or not it made sense, I still had that attitude when I was doing postgrad at Warwick, that feminist theory was for women to read, not men, and that for a person constructed as male to do so was transgressive, invasive and violating, as well as effectively stealing women’s intellectual work, and that I wouldn’t understand it anyway because my mind was inferior to that of a woman’s due to emotional imbalance and male-socialised fake rationality. Consequently, I had some difficulty when I started my MA because, being in continental philosophy at Warwick, there was a big overlap with the Women’s Studies department. Most of my interaction with the staff there was with Gillian Rose and Christine Battersby. Gillian very sadly died of cancer in 1995, although the view was expressed that people took her work more seriously than it deserved to be because of her illness. I can’t comment because I know nothing. I heard something from her and knew a little of her. I was aware that she wanted to promote women’s work in philosophy, so I ignored her so as not to interfere. Christine Battersby is different. She’s chiefly known for her ‘Gender And Genius’, which analyses the concept of genius in the Romantic tradition and the appropriation of emotion from a feminine to a masculine trait. I mean, I haven’t read it, so I’m guessing there.
And this is the thing: I’ve never read it, whatever “it” is, in this setting. I was aware of Kristeva and Irigaray, but clearly I’m focussed on the former in this dream, and I am kind of honouring this dream by now writing about Kristeva here, and I’ll go on to write about Irigaray: semiotic and post-structuralist thinkers in the French mode.
Both of them were followers of the famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Although I’m no fan of his, simply because they used to be his acolytes, it doesn’t follow that they either slavishly followed his sexist assumptions or built on them, and it’s possible to salvage positive things from an unpromising start. Sometimes, also, you presumably have to make compromises to get where you aim to be in your career. Anyway, Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French polymath working in the area of critical theory, and when I say she’s a polymath I mean she applies her thought to a number of disciplines. She sees them through the same lens. Two important concepts of hers are abjection and the chora, although there are others such as the symbolic vs the semiotic and intertextuality. At this stage, all I have is a dream I experienced a few days ago and a peremptory examination of her work, but I can plonk these two in front of you. Abjection is the idea of what emerges from one which is therefore intermediate between subjective and objective. A really obvious example is excrement, but an interesting observation can be made on another form of the abject. Speaking for myself, if I had a glass of water in front of me I was about to drink and I spat in it, I’d no longer want to drink it. This is of course apparently absurd, as that saliva would have immediately mixed with the water when it was in my mouth. Likewise, what one does in the toilet is expel matter which is already in one’s body, yet most of the time this is not dwelt upon. Probably most people, when asked to reflect on this, would say it’s an instinctive response which protects one against possible danger such as infection or poisoning, but Kristeva’s view is that it’s a psychoanalytical phenomenon which is extended to others, and in fact to the Other, which has a significance beyond instinctive survival. I can get on board with this to some extent because I can see that much of the time we don’t eat to keep ourselves alive, don’t play ball games to practice hunting skills and so on: function and purpose are in different realms, so that’s okay. There’s an important principle here actually, that evolution is effectively blind and produces whatever is good enough from the resources available.
Though somewhat elaborate-seeming, the abject is similar to the disgusting and the abhorrent. Kristeva uses it, as do others, in the analysis of horror and film critics have applied this to horror films. This also blends into the “monstrous feminine”, not so far as I know a specific concept of hers but overtly developed from this concept. In ‘Alien’, for example, the alien lays eggs in humans and hatches out in the abdomen before tearing out of it. The ‘Star Trek’ episode ‘The Devil In The Dark’ is about a mother alien killing human miners, and it even applies to ‘Beowulf’. The claim goes further than that to propose that all horror is in fact about the monstrous feminine. I have to say that that seems quite far-fetched but I haven’t read the arguments, which is a general problem with what I’m writing today. I haven’t read her at all.
Abjection is extended to refer to the Other, i.e. those who are “not we”, which often includes other humans whose differences, and even similarities, to oneself, are emphasised. Hence for a White able-bodied heterosexual man that could be women, non-Whites, the disabled and queers, or a combination of those. It could also work the other way but this is seldom done, or at least not enough. The situation is complex because as well as othering the people concerned, one also recognises, and possibly fears, oneself in them. This is clearly similar to the anthropological idea that things which don’t fit neatly into single categories are deemed disgusting, the classic example being a flying squirrel since in terms of the culture concerned it was neither beast nor bird – I don’t know what they thought of bats.
The other big concept is the chora, from the Greek and adopted from Plato’s idea of the inaccessible origin of creation, including the uterus as well as the primal chaos of the abyss from which the cosmos came forth. Kristeva tried to reclaim this concept from its patriarchal setting as Plato conceived it. For her, it’s a nourishing maternal space. It can also be thought of as early infancy, before the Mirror Stage, a significant event in Lacanian psychoanalysis where children first recognise themselves in mirrors. Before that point, the mother’s body is the sole mediator between the chora and the symbolic realm: she’s everything to the chora. Hence another distinction in Kristeva’s thought between the semiotic and the symbolic. The former is not to be confused with semiotics. Instead, it’s emotional and non-linguistic, involving rhythms, music and the poetic. This continues after entering the symbolic phase but is kind of hidden in crevasses. To me, that’s also fine but with both the chora and the semiotic it’s a major assumption, given the importance mothers have for their children, that they would be the sole progenitor of their children much of the time. This to me comes across as a model of development frozen in the past. This is often an issue with psychoanalysis: it feels like it’s frozen in a particular culture at a particular time in history. Even so, to some extent this is still valid and it’s certainly germane to the wider human world even today.
I can’t spend too long on Kristeva, but I will say a couple of other things about her. She was also a novelist, writing detective stories which were linked to her theory, with a journalist character representing her called Stephanie Delacour. I haven’t read them of course. The other thing was that she may have worked as a secret agent for the Bulgarian government and her early writing was published in Maoist journals. I don’t know how much evidence there is for that allegation and I’m just passing it on. It’s quite odd though because she seems quite conservative politically to me.
Now for Luce Irigaray, who wasn’t in my dream. She didn’t explicitly respond to Kristeva although some of her work is clearly a response to hers. The first thing I think of with Irigaray is that when my ex and Sarada were discussing her in a pub once, having read some of her work, they were interrupted by men who seemed to be threatened by the idea of two women talking about something intellectual. I don’t know if they’d noticed it was feminist theory. I wasn’t there, but clearly it was something important to the two of them around the time Sarada and I got together. I don’t know where my ex stands with her now, but Sarada can’t remember much. I could ask my ex I suppose.
Irigaray is a difference feminist. That is, she doesn’t believe women and men are the same and they’re both men, but that women have the potential for their own subjectivity which is inadequately explored, equal to men’s subjectivity and also different. She views Western society as inherently unethical because of the patriarchy. Regarding sexuality, I find her views are really rather strange. She says male sexual satisfaction can only be achieved via an instrument, by which I presume she means the phallus, whereas females are constantly auto-erotic because they are constantly touching themselves, by which she means that the labia are in contact with each other. This enables her to view penis in vagina sex as an interruption of this contact, so I presume that’s where she’s going with that. But the whole thing seems highly metaphorical. Clearly the human body regardless of sex is constantly in contact with itself, and this may be affirming but it doesn’t feel like much can be built on it. It seems to me that if one confines oneself to the metaphorical and poetic, as Irigaray seems to do, it changes philosophy’s role, or perhaps reveals a different role which seems unproductive, which is maybe what she was already either trying to do or already existed in continental philosophy. After all, philosophy is seen by some as literature. But to illustrate what I mean, in the analytical tradition philosophy is used to inform ethical debates, analyse politics and to design digital electronics. All these are thoroughly practical uses, although it’s easy to see the last as fairly irrelevant to social progress. If philosophy is to be replaced by a more metaphorical approach, either it has another function or it needs to proceed in a very unfamiliar way, perhaps in the way literature does, and of course I don’t know what that is but to me it may not be progress because of the peculiar phenomenon of universalism. If we have the ability to appreciate works written in Greek, Roman or Mediaeval settings, that common connection is positive but it also seems to mean it can’t touch social justice or provide a means of improving things, and I would expect a feminist philosopher to want progress.
Irigaray has notoriously been challenged by Sokal in his ‘Fashionable Nonsense’, but it’s unclear whether he simply misunderstands her or is onto something. The issue is that Irigaray states that physics has a masculine bias because it focusses on solid mechanics rather than fluids and also that E=mc² prioritises c as it’s the “fastest” constant. Irigaray also uses mathematical terminology without seeming to understand what it means. Sokal regards all of this as uninformed and unscientific, and as creating illusory profundity. Lacan is sometimes seen as having done the same with his focus on the Borromean Knot.
It has to be said that this feels like some bloke with unearned self-assurance wading into an academic field and explaining things to a woman, whether or not that’s what actually happened. It’s like Richard Dawkins’ fight with Mary Midgley. Irigaray is not trying to do science here but something like psychoanalysis or semiotics, so the question may be about whether what she’s doing is worthwhile compared to what a male scientist might be doing. It’s quite close to being an art vs. science debate. Irigaray has a practice of what’s been called “mimesis”, where she uses scientific terminology to subvert it from within. She may also be trying to show how anti-language is used, and as such it seems to have worked almost too well with Sokal. It is also true that the likes of turbulence and chaos, as reflected for example in how blood flows through the circulatory system in pathological situations and in forecasting the weather and predicting climate change, should be considered more seriously than it has been. Sokal has been accused of scientism, which is the idea that the findings of science are the only important set of views.
One of her aims was to make it clear that scientists and in fact the culture in general was unconsciously perceiving things from a masculine perspective. So for example, many scientific papers and other writing uses the “editorial we”, which is of course gender-neutral in most European languages, but in fact that “we” usually refers either to men or to women who have been induced to adopt a male-centred approach.
‘Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un’ – ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’ – is among her most important works. Now this is an interesting title, bringing to mind the idea that the female body is the default from which the male form deviates, which is how things are among most mammals including humans and meaning that the female sex is not a sex but simply the standard, unmarked and straightforward human form. However, strangely, she seems to mean the opposite. It’s a collection of essays including the eponymous one. Her view, and I’d agree with this, is that the patriarchal view of sex has historically been that the male is the unmarked and the female is either denied or seen as a deviation. The essay itself is about the Freudian idea of penis envy, which it deconstructs. The vagina is literally a sheath or a hole rather than a thing in itself and the clitoris is ignored completely. It does make sense that in a male-dominated society these things are made to be so and do assume such significance although she seeks to deconstruct this too. It’s also interesting that it seems to be autoeroticism which is the contrast to heterosexual penetrative sex rather than lesbianism for her, although this does provide some kind of solitary self-sufficiency, but it omits the solidarity of women together needing each other and not needing men, which seems like a missed opportunity. She also posits the idea that heterosexual sex for a man involves a sadistic fantasy into which women can only insert themselves in a masochistic role, which seems to be an unrealistic generalisation about the male psyche, doesn’t allow for the existence of masochistic men and also for masochistic women whose masochism is deeply in accord with their desires. It seems, in other words, to be kink-shaming. This reminds me of Andrea Dworkin’s views as expressed in ‘Intercourse’, where Dworkin seems to describe a willing submissive role as in some sense morally wrong for women, presumably because of failure of solidarity with other women in this respect. Overall, I do actually find what Irigaray says as rather unsatisfactory and unfair on women, regardless of her view of men.
‘Speculum de l’autre femme’ preceded the other work, and I’ve not read it. This is also a collection of essays which as I understand it analyse male thinkers in terms of their phallocentrism. Published in 1974, this seems long overdue for the time and it could suffer from the problem hindsight imposes on some cultural phenomena of making them seem trite and tired simply because their ideas were ground-breaking and then adopted widely, so it may be difficult to appreciate how revolutionary her ideas were at the time. She asserts that female sexuality is like a “dark continent” for psychoanalysis because of its prior focus on males and their sexuality. I’m intensely curious about whether the speculum referred to is not just a metaphorical mirror but a reference to the gynecological instrument. I’m assuming it is, but as I say I haven’t read it.
There is a third prominent author of this kind whom I’ve not read and who seems to be less well-known in the Anglosphere but equally prominent in the French-speaking world, namely Hélène Cixous. Her most famous work is the 1976 ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ – ‘The Medusa’s Laugh’ – which calls for the development of écriture feminine, also referred to as writing with white ink, the metaphor being partly connected to breast milk. I know even less about her than I do the other two, but I do know that Irigaray shared the idea of using female-centred language and I’m guessing this is similar.
In what I’ve written, I may have come across as quite dismissive of the ideas and writing of these thinkers. I feel that I may have missed something in knowing practically nothing about French literature, but it does seem to me that there is an attachment to words and language here which is not about communication and clarity, and therefore not about sharing wisdom and being open to the wisdom of others. There seems to be an arrogance to it which I guess is inherited from Lacan. Another aspect of this is the fairly vapid nature of psychoanalysis itself. I see it as a necessary early stage of depth psychology, i.e. the kind of stuff you talk about in counselling and psychotherapy, but in my own training in psychology and psychiatry it’s notable that other paradigms are much more evidence-based and helpful, and psychoanalytical concepts as applied to non-conforming behaviour and presumably the states of mind associated with those are simply an unnecessarily elaborate mind game.
However, all of that must be placed in context, some of which is sympathetic to feminism and some of which is more to do with intersectionality. I actively avoided reading any feminist texts other than those I was compelled to do as course requirements for two reasons. One was that I regarded those texts as for women and explicitly excluding me, and it was important for them to have their own space. The other is that due to constructing myself as a man, I felt that feminist theory would be beyond me in the same way as mainstream literature is: I lacked the ability to respond to or understand it properly. I suppose this is a little like the chora, in that I wanted there to be a nurturing space for women to find their own authenticity. Obviously I’ve abandoned all that now (and I’m edging into dodgy territory). The intersectional approach is more hostile to this theorising. One of the most peculiar experiences I’ve had with respect to gender politics is when I read ‘The Sexual Politics Of Meat’ by Carol J Adams, where she made the startlingly false assertion that it surprises some people that so many feminists are vegetarian/vegan (“vegn”). My own experience of that was precisely the opposite. It was notable to me that so few feminists were vegn, the reason for that apparently being that they regarded linguistic construction as central to consciousness and therefore rejected the possibility of non-human consciousness. Therefore, the whole time I’m engaged in this, I’m acutely aware of the possibility that these feminist theorists are hostile or apathetic about animal liberation and may also be White supremacists. All of these people are White and European and seem to be oblivious of those facts, and that makes it hard to trust their judgement.
All that said, it probably is worthwhile reading them and I plan to do so.
Mìosachan Reul-eòlais
Tha neach-dèiligidh agam a tha an-dràsta ag iarraidh orm mìosachan reul-eòlais a dhèanamh dha. Is e seo an dàrna turas a rinn mi rudeigin mar seo. O chionn grunn bhliadhnaichean, rinn mi mìosachan planaid dhearg airson bliadhna a’ phlanaid dhearg 214 bliadhna às deidh dha Galileo fhaicinn an toiseach tro teileasgop. Bha sin gu math cumanta ach leis gun do dh’innis a’ chompanaidh clò-bhualaidh breug mu chaitheamh inc aon de na clò-bhualadairean a chleachd mi air a shon, bha e ro dhaor a dhèanamh. Dh’fhàs mi feargach agus thilg mi am clò-bhualadair dhan ionad-reic. B’ àbhaist dhomh a bhith nam dhuine gu math feargach. Chan e sin an duine a th’ annam tuilleadh. Na bi gam bhreithneachadh a rèir na b’ àbhaist dhomh a bhith.
Tha ùidh mhòr aig mo neach-dèiligidh ann an tachartasan anns na speuran leithid cuin a tha a’ ghealach a’ coimhead nas motha no nas lugha na an àbhaist, cuin a tha a’ ghealach eadar sinn agus a’ Ghrian no nar sgàil agus dàrna gealach ann am mìos, agus mar sin thairg mi mìosachan a dhèanamh dha a dh’innseadh dha cuin a thachradh iad sin. Bha e glè thoilichte leis an seo, agus mar sin nì mi sin, le bhith ag innse do einnsean reusanta mar a nì thu e oir is e seo an dòigh as sìmplidh air a dhèanamh.
Ciamar a nì thu e, is e sin ceist eile. Ged a tha beagan eòlais agam, tha e duilich suidheachadh na gealaich agus nam planaidean obrachadh a-mach. Bidh e airson faighinn a-mach cuin a tha a’ ghealach a’ coimhead as motha, cuin a tha i a’ coimhead as lugha, ìrean agus cuin a tha a’ ghealach, a’ ghrian agus an Talamh ann an loidhne dhìreach. Tha iad sin gu math furasta. Ach feumaidh mi cuideachd obrachadh a-mach cuin a tha coltas planaidean a’ dol air ais, cuin a tha trì ann an loidhne dhìreach eadarainn, cuin a tha iad a’ coimhead as fhaide bhon Ghrian, na gluasadan agus na h-ìrean aca, agus innse dha càite a bheil iad. Tha cuid dhiubh sin furasta cuideachd, ach chan eil siostam na grèine rèidh, chan eil na orbitan nan cearcallan agus chan eil na h-àiteachan far a bheil iad as fhaisge air agus as fhaide bhon Ghrian san aon taobh. Feumaidh mi co-dhùnadh cuin a thòisicheas mi. Is dòcha gur e deagh cheann-latha a th’ ann am Bliadhna Ùr 4713 RC, ach chan eil fios agam càite an robh iad an uairsin, agus mar sin an àite sin coimheadaidh mi airson àiteachan agus gluasadan o chionn ghoirid nan cùrsaichean aca agus obraichidh mi a-mach iad às an sin. Feumaidh mi an uairsin na suidheachaidhean a chithear bhon Ghrèin a thionndadh gu na suidheachaidhean a chithear bhon Talamh, obrachadh a-mach dè cho fada ’s a bheir e air solas faighinn bho na nithean thugainn an seo agus mar a tha an àile gan dèanamh coltach ri bhith ann an diofar àiteachan.
Chan eil fhios agam dè a chanas mi ris na planaidean anns a’ Ghàidhealtachd. Is e an dàrna fear gu soilleir Reul na Maidne agus Reul na Feasgair. Dh’ fhaodadh an ceathramh fear a bhith air ainmeachadh mar rudeigin coltach ri bàrr sleagha Chù Chulainn, ach is e ainm Èireannach a tha seo agus tha e cuideachd air a chleachdadh airson reultan-reubadh. Tha mi airson barrachd fhaighinn a-mach mu bhith a’ coimhead rionnagan anns a’ Ghàidhealtachd.
Is dòcha nach eil fios aig mo neach-dèiligidh gu bheil na tha dha-rìribh a’ tachairt anns na speuran gu math eadar-dhealaichte bhon rud a thathar ag ràdh a thachras a rèir reul-eòlas, ach feumaidh mi a bhith onarach, agus mìnichidh mi rudan mar a tha iad dha-rìribh.
Feet Of Clay?
We all rewrite our personal history, but due to journal-keeping I can check on early versions of events. Therefore I think I can say with some confidence that I’ve never really had heroes or role-models. The closest identifiable person was one I mentioned in a school essay when I was thirteen, a couple of years before I started writing a detailed diary in earnest and at length, and it was Kate Bush. I can still see that, to be honest. I obviously wouldn’t have a sportsperson as a hero due to my total lack of interest, but I suppose I might have a scientist or an author, or there might be someone in my everyday life such as a friend, relative or teacher, and in fact there probably are two identifiable people who fall into this category. They are one of my English teachers and Isaac Asimov.
I’ll start with my English teacher, whose name I won’t mention. Just to be clear, I had two particularly significant English teachers I have reason to refer to and I don’t want them to be confused. One was the folk singer John Jones of the Oysterband, known under the name Fiddler’s Dram for the one-hit wonder ‘Day Trip To Bangor’. This is not the person I’m talking about and I want to emphasise that although my view of him at the time was unfairly negative for some reason I don’t understand, he’s clearly a diamond geezer and I once tried to get his band to sing at a fundraising festival for Greenpeace. Not him, not him, not him! Okay?
So, the guy I’m talking about is my favourite teacher of all, and a significant influence on me, shall as I said remain nameless. At an early stage he opened my eyes to the evils of homophobia, encouraged my creative writing, introduced me to Radio 4 and facilitated my appreciation of literature. He was my English Language and Literature teacher for three years altogether, at twelve and from fourteen to fifteen. I visited him in his home twice. Whenever I begin a sentence with a present participle, that’s his influence. He was also blind, apparently due to albinism, but refused to be registered blind because he regarded it as an unnecessary encumbrance. He had disguised his blindness at his job interview. He was also single the whole time I knew of him, and left the school as a full-time teacher shortly after I did, citing me as the reason, because he felt the school couldn’t cope with my talent and personality and nurture me properly. Yes, he specifically left my school because of me, and this isn’t just something he told me but something which appeared in the local paper when he became a post master. If you want a model of what he was like, watch ‘Dead Poets’ Society’. A minor but interesting detail which came out later was that he had also been Boris Johnson’s teacher a few years previously, at a different school, and in fact the first time I heard Boris Johnson’s name was in 1979 when he mentioned him as a star pupil in passing. I honestly never had a better secondary school teacher and he really believed in me.
I’m sure you know what’s coming because this is how all stories like this end. A few years ago, he was found guilty of serial sexual abuse of children at another school where he taught in the 1960s CE and early ’70s and sentenced to fourteen years. This had been at a previous school, the one where he taught Boris, and it had been conveniently omitted from his reference for my state school, and to me the implication is that the independent school in question decided that it was okay to have him teach at such a school because oiks don’t matter. A book has been written about this whole situation, which incidentally criticises J K Rowling for promoting boarding schools as positive institutions because the author sees them as inextricably rife with abuse and ‘Harry Potter’ as making children want to go to them where he expects them to suffer at their hands. My school friends and I talked about the situation at length shortly after it came out and we agreed that you could see the signs. One frustrating aspect of the book written about him is that the author is not allowed to report on his defence, which he predictably made himself, because it would give insight into how abusers think and operate and therefore that way of thinking went unchallenged when it was in fact entirely spurious and easily refuted, and the insidious nature of his arguments would therefore continue to persuade people otherwise.
Now I don’t know what the argument was, but I’m going to take a stab at two candidates for it. My original thought was that it was based on pederasty, and remember this isn’t just idle speculation: I had extensive contact with him over many years. Pederasty, which you probably know about already, was an openly acknowledged and positively sanctioned institution in the Greco-Roman world where a sexual relationship existed between a fully adult man and an adolescent boy as part of a mentoring situation, which might later be repeated by the boy after he reached maturity. Given his background in independent schools, which in England often emphasise Greco-Roman patrician culture, I can easily believe that this is where he was coming from.
The other candidate I can think of, and the two aren’t mutually exclusive, is a common line of argument in the ’60s to the ’80s that just as homosexuality and extra-marital sex became accepted, so should active paedophilia. In fact I’m almost certain that he believed this. It was really prevalent at the time. The National Council for Civil Liberties supported paedophilia, as did the German Green Party in the ’80s, and there were also adoption programmes for paedophiles in Germany at the time which encouraged known paedophiles to adopt children in orphanages so that they could abuse them. In Britain there was the Paedophile Information Exchange. It was simply seen as the logical extension of tolerance for homosexual sex at the time, for several decades. We need to acknowledge that this was so and, equally, assert calmly, without panicking, that this is not okay. Nonetheless, I think this may have been how my teacher argued, and ironically by arguing to me that homophobia was no better than active racism and sexism, he persuaded me to adopt the attitude I still have today, and it is correct. But he very probably took it further. What was absent, and I think this applies more widely, was the notion of consent and the ability to do so.
It’s very easy to say that he had a bad and a good side and that people are complex, and that’s true but I don’t think it’s that simple. For him at least, I think these things were part of an organic whole. The very qualities I perceive positively are intimately related to the vices. It isn’t that people can’t function and be, say, anti-homophobic, pro-feminist, anti-racist without also being child abusers, but in his case they were all connected and that made sense to him. So I suspect.
The other example is less personal, although he too has been an influence on me in a way, and this time it applies to many millions of other people. I’m talking, of course, about Isaac Asimov. Asimov goes back a long way for me and I’m not sure exactly how far, but I do know I got his ‘Guide To Science’ for Christmas 1975 and I was already familiar with some of his fiction then. I was also aware of his screenplay for ‘Fantastic Voyage’, although like many other people I didn’t realise he wasn’t the author. Much of his fiction, though not all, consists of men talking to each other in rooms far away from any action, which may not even be happening, and his main genres are science fiction and mystery, but from the ’60s onward he moved away from fiction towards more general writing, initially in science as he was a professor of biochemistry and then famously branching out into every century of the Dewey Decimal System except philosophy. One of his major qualities is writing extremely plain language and he’s a genius at communicating complex concepts clearly to the general reader. Even today, I sometimes go back to his explanations, for instance for the electron configurations of the transition metals and rare earths, because no-one I can recall is as good as he is at clear, explicatory writing. He’s famously responsible for the Three Laws of Robotics and like many other sci-fi authors he successfully predicted the internet and many other 21st century technologies. Going back to his sci-fi, he made a major attempt in his later years to link most of his stories together in a manner which I and many other readers found tiresome, and his second attempt at ‘Fantastic Voyage’ is probably the second most tedious novel I’ve ever read (the most boring is Aldiss’s ‘Report On Probability A’). His most celebrated story is ‘The Last Question’, but actually I don’t think it’s that good. Two of his favourite stories, and here I agree with the consensus that they are indeed brilliant, are ‘The Ugly Little Boy’ and ‘The Dead Past’. The former is about a nurse who is hired by a scientific establishment to care for a Neanderthal child whom she develops a strong caring relationship with and ultimately makes a major sacrifice forced upon her by a heartless decision by her employer. It’s good, brilliant in fact, but to my mind his best story is ‘The Dead Past’, which has a number of things going on but basically recounts a professor of ancient history who strongly suspects he accidentally started a house fire years before which killed his daughter and is attempting to prove that the Phoenicians didn’t sacrifice their children by fire by persuading a physicist to develop a Chronovisor to look into the distant past, but is being investigated by a McCarthyite, CIA-like government body which it turns out is trying to protect the privacy of the general public and is being genuinely benevolent. To my mind, ‘The Dead Past’ is one of the best stories I have ever read, regardless of genre. It should also be said that although the ‘Foundation Trilogy’ can be perceived as a textual sleeping pill, it also presents an interesting parallel to Marxist theory, invented the idea of music videos in the early 1940s, formed the basis of the setting which ‘Dune’ reacted against and ‘Star Wars’ copied and created the concept of the Encyclopedia Galactica, which in turn led to Douglas Adams’s Guide and ultimately Wikipedia. It must also be said that the Apple TV series using the same name is an adaptation in name only and that the film ‘I Robot’ is also very dissimilar to any of the robot stories.
But there’s a complication, of course. It manifests itself in his fictional writing fairly clearly. Asimov is not keen on characterisation and up until fairly late in his career, he tended to avoid portraying sex and relationships. There are some exceptions. For instance, ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’ is about a woman committing adultery with an android, ‘Feminine Intuition’ is about a gynoid being designed to find the nearest habitable planet because masculine thought processes are getting nowhere. Moreover, the chief robopsychologist in the robot stories is Susan Calvin and she is not in any way a stereotype, being single, child-free and asexual. However, Asimov’s behaviour in real life with women is from a 21st century deeply dodgy. He was known to be “all hands” and was nicknamed “The Octopus” at science fiction conventions. One of the women he worked with complained about his sexual harassment in something like the 1950s or 1960s and was actually listened to, so it must’ve been pretty bad. He also wrote two books, ‘The Sensuous Dirty Old Man’ and ‘Lecherous Limericks’ which celebrated sexual harassment and assault as perceived today. The former is actually an instruction manual for it, although to be fair it is also a parody of a pair of books popular at the time, ‘The Sensuous Woman’ and ‘The Sensuous Man’, so the context for this is missing. Later in his life, the slightly older SF author Alfred Bester, who was incidentally exceedingly monogamously married to a woman for forty-eight years until her death, and also seems to have been a bit of a jock as opposed to Asimov’s nebbischkayt (nerdishness) gave him a bear hug, snogged him and repeatedly pinched his bottom to teach him a lesson, and he was somewhat repentant after that but unfortunately the way he put his response made it sound more like that he was personally hurt because his advances had been constantly unwelcome. Furthermore, although parents can’t be held entirely responsible for their adult children’s actions, David Asimov was found by California police to have the largest collection of images of child sexual exploitation ever found in the area.
But as I said, it isn’t that simple. In the late ’50s or early ’60s, he was at a meeting about scientists and someone made a comment about their wives, to which he chipped in “or their husbands”, scandalising the meeting, including women, because they thought he was talking about gay men when he meant female scientists, and he went on to say that it wouldn’t matter if they were gay either. At another point at a conference about Judaism, and although he was Jewish he wasn’t observant or religious, he objected to another Jewish person saying they didn’t trust scientists or engineers because of their involvement in the Holocaust by saying that the only reason the Jews hadn’t persecuted anyone historically was that they hadn’t had the opportunity to, and that on the one occasion when they had, with the Maccabees, they’d done so, which was not anti-semitic so much as an observation that it’s a general problem with human beings that, if we can, we may well persecute others. This seems quite prophetic in view of recent events.
Okay, so the differences between Asimov and my English teacher are naturally considerable, but the advantage of considering the former is that he’s much more prominent for all sorts of reasons to the English-speaking world. My English teacher has some notoriety nationally, but it’s quite low-key, and this makes him harder to treat as an example. It isn’t enough even to use the excuse that “it was a different time” here, because even at the time Asimov’s behaviour was strongly objected to and it must’ve been quite serious. However, he was also protected by his fame. On one occasion, when he sexually assaulted someone in a lift at a conference, the woman’s partner objected and it was he, not Asimov, who was ejected from the building. I’d be surprised if this was the only time this happened. Women would avoid SF conferences because he was there and this is very likely to have impacted on their careers long term and kept them away from success.
These things tend to come to notice about public figures due to the internet. The question arises of what may have happened in the past which never became widely known about others. It’s said that one should never meet one’s heroes, but it may be even worse than that. Maybe most people’s lives don’t bear scrutiny. Thinking about my own past, I can’t think of much that I’d be unhappy if it were more widely known, but maybe that’s how it works. Maybe people usually justify things to themselves or alter their own memories in their favour. I tend to think that the only difference nowadays is that things are harder to hide.
There is also the question of changing values and attitudes. Jimmy Savile, for example, wasn’t just protected by his fame, but also by the normalisation of sexual assault, objectification and harassment at the time. It isn’t just a question of faulty record-keeping. Rolf Harris is an even harder case to conceptualise, because unlike Savile he was actually very talented and creative. Savile probably was too, but not publicly so much as being good at getting away with his abuse. Even he, though, has his defenders. Some of the people he helped on ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ went on to build successful careers on the contacts they made and won’t hear a word against him. There can be a kind of sunk-cost fallacy here, in that having committed oneself to a particular set of opinions about someone, it’s hard to change one’s mind and retract them, even internally.
But why does it happen like this? Is there something about success that breeds this? Is it that success and the atrocities go hand in hand because they result from the same origins? Or, is it more that people who become well-known have their lives more closely scrutinised and that basically everyone’s a bit of a git when it comes down to it?
I’m aware that there’s a long list of men in this post. There are terrible women too, and there’s a bias I’ve seen referred to as the “women are wonderful bias”, which excuses women of more and presumes their good faith. However, it remains the case that men are more successful than women in public life and therefore have more opportunities to do wrong, so even without a gender bias they can be expected to have sinned against more. That said, there are allegations against Marion Zimmer Bradley. Although she may be less well-known than the men I’ve mentioned, MZB as she’s often referred to was a sci-fi and fantasy author whose daughter Moira Greyland accused her of sexually abusing her throughout her childhood, exposing her to other people to sexually abuse her and being forced to participate in ritualised sexual abuse. Unfortunately from a queer-tolerant perspective, Greyland sees this as integral to LGBTQIA2S (you can see why I hate that initialism) identity. MZB’s husband was found guilty of multiple counts of child sexual abuse – this much is not in doubt. As far as I understand it, she also defended his behaviour publicly, and also claimed to be feminist. This is to some extent reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir, who is on record as publicly defending active paedophilia.
I don’t know, I haven’t got an answer to this. What do you think?
Feamainn
Tha na costaichean timcheall na-h-Alba nas fada na na costaichean timcheall na Sìna, mar sin tha e mòran feamainn. Tha e trì fineachan feamainn: dhearg aig an cas na tràigh, dhonn air an meadhan agus h-uainne air an ceann.
Tha e cuideachd feamainn ghorm ach chan eil an duine i ith. Tha an feamainn an biadh blasta, slàn agus an-asgaidh. Tha feamainn dhearg agus uainne lusan ach chan eil an feamainn dhonn lusan.
Tha cho mòran mathas ann an feamainn. Tha e air uairibh tuilleadh ‘s a’ chòir. Tha e ola iasg innte.
Nis their mi dhà rhiaghailt còcaireachd airson feamainn:
Tàthchuidean: duileasg, buntata, creamh, piopar dearg, sìolan sgeallan, ola, balgan-buachair, uinnean, piopar tiolaidh no cantarnaid.
Goil an buntata, glan agus geàrr. Teasaich ola agus cuir ri na sìol agus buntata. Fraidhig gus buidhe agus thoir air falbh. Blàthaich an ola agus fraidhig còig mionaidean na tàthchuidean eile ach a-mhàin duileasg. Cuir ri an duileasg agus buntata. Gluais deug mionaidean agus frithealadh.
Bara lawr. Aran slòcan. Tha e dà fheamainn airson an biodh seo: glasog agus slòcan. Goil an feamainn gus bloinigean-gàrraidh, rol ann na coirce agus fraidhig ann geir bagùn no ola trom, ith airson bracaist.
Mu dheireach, is dòcha gun ith sibh feamainn oir tha an cairgean ann an reòiteag, “blancmange“, ceitseap no stuth-fhiaclan, agus mòran eile.
Blogging In Gaidhlig And English
This is not a good blog with prospects. It’s more a verbose, waffly dumping ground for my conceptual earworms. I don’t stick to topics, I digress, I don’t pay attention to the quality of my writing and there are probably a load of other things I’m supposed to do which I just don’t. To some extent I’m not bothered about this or my readership, which raises the question of why I don’t simply write it all down in a notebook or diary. I do that too. I don’t know why I don’t do it with everything, but what you see here is a small fraction of my writing. I never make more than one draft and I rarely plan. I rarely do research. It’s also influenced by my diary-writing habit of never going back and editing anything, which leads to strange wording on occasion because I won’t do something like change “strange wording on occasion” to “occasional strange wording” or “occasionally strange wording”. I do have rules. I never blog about herbalism, gender identity or education, although I have just now and then stuck something on here which covers both or all three due to not having a single topic. The historical reason for this is that I used to have blogs on these topics, but it helps me to develop thoughts about other subjects which I might otherwise neglect, and I can also escape from “day job”-type matters. Not that I really have a day job, but anyway.
This affords me a certain level of freedom in what I do with it. Nobody reads it, so I can cock up and it doesn’t matter. I can experiment in a way which others can’t without losing readers because I have none. Obviously I don’t literally have zero readers, but there are sufficiently few that I don’t need to worry about people bailing en masse, because there is no «masse» to bail. To quote Samuel Beckett, I’m talking into a vacuum.
So: this is what I’m going to do with this. I’m going to start writing two types of post on the same blog. One will be the kind of thing I’ve been writing up until now. The other will be in Gaidhlig, and incidentally I don’t know how to type a stràc on this computer so I’ll probably use a different device, the aim being to practice writing in that language. I’ve been writing a short passage in Gaidhlig for my weekly class for about a month now, but since term’s come to an end I won’t be doing that for a bit and there are also things I want to write about which aren’t appropriate for that setting. Due to the subject matter of the bits so far, they won’t obey the usual rule of excluding herbalism, education and perhaps gender identity. I’ve already written about herbalism for example, and also seaweed, and I wouldn’t usually stick something like that on here. I mention gender identity because although I won’t be talking about the central issues, it does interest me to attempt to write gender-neutral Gaidhlig, an issue which arose because one of the students is non-binary.
So far I have the following already written:
- Seaweeds
- Herbalism
- My grandfather
The Gaidhlig will be bad. That’s the point. I want help and I want to practice. Although this may not happen, I would greatly appreciate it if people whose grasp of the language is better than mine comment on how I can improve this. After these three, I plan to write about my six plans to move to Scotland and the history of clans McIver and Macintyre.
I’d also like to make a few comments on how I approach language-learning which may not be apparent to people whose first language isn’t the same as the language I’m attempting to acquire. This has a history to it, which also means it never applied to French. I’m fluent in Esperanto and have also been a FORTH enthusiast. FORTH is a programming language I’ve mentioned here before, characterised by the definition of more complex words in terms of simpler words, and Esperanto is largely made up of morphemes which can be chained together to modify the meanings of words. This has led me to take the same approach in languages where my vocabulary is small, so for example I’ve worded “died” as “lost (his) life” in some passages. Such an approach I plan to replace with actual words, and it can run up against idioms, either in English or the other language, but it does hopefully communicate itself well for the time being. I tend to do this on the fly.
I might end up writing things which are seldom or never written about in Gaidhlig, but it’s a living language which needs to be used for whatever purpose needed.
That’s it for now then. Watch this space in Gaidhlig, which I don’t know well enough, but I hope this will change.
The Gap
Still following ‘Pluribus’ but this is interesting way beyond that. First of all, an introduction. The Darién Gap is a hundred kilometre stretch of land straddling the more or less irrelevant border between Colombia and Panama, and its presence is what makes that border irrelevant. It’s inhospitable in various ways. Where to start?
Well, the longest road in the world stretches from southern Argentina to Northern Alaska and is thirty thousand kilometres long, meaning that flattened out it would go three-quarters around the planet. Except it doesn’t, because of this gap. It’s almost impossible to get between Colombia and Panama, at least for humans, even with high-tech transport methods such as ships and motor vehicles. As can be seen from this map, the roads run out either side:
As you can see, there are no railways, canals or roads between them. It is, however, occupied by people traffickers and drug smugglers, and there are two peoples, the Guna and the Emberá. Remarkably, the Guna flag looks like this:
The swastika needs some explanation. It’s a local sigil called Naa Ukuryaa symbolising the four corners of the world whence the Guna hail, so in other words it’s practically the opposite of the Nazi use. Olaf Stapledon once claimed that Homo sapiens would use this symbol with varying significance throughout our history. But a people is more than a flag. They mainly live on coastal islands and moved westward into Panama. Some of them are white and have a special role defending the Moon against a dragon. The Emberá have a larger population and like several other indigenous peoples have a tradition of FGM although they’re working to eliminate it. They traditionally live on river banks but then the same applies to the West. They’re an egalitarian society whose shamans are however revered. I just thought I’d mention these peoples because the rest of this post is going to be about other things.
Immigrants are constantly attempting to travel through the area, often ending up dead as a result. Even by the time they start, they’re not in good condition and are unlikely to have the equipment needed to survive. The situation is similar to the “small boats” plight in the Manche/English Channel, with many deaths and a lot of corruption, but the drug trade, currently illegal, makes it even worse. The transit of people from more Westernised conditions through the gap has led to economic interactions with the indigenous people which pulls them toward the money economy and there is also, quite startlingly, tourism in the region which has the same effect.
Another situation which comes to mind here is the one in the DMZ of Korea and around Chernobyl. These places deny access to most humans and consequently have gone back to a less interfered with condition, which for Chernobyl is deeply ironic. The ionising radiation in the latter also makes the situation less straightforward, with for example black frogs using it to warm their bodies and increase metabolic rate and fungi with high levels of melanin being favoured by the environment, but in the DMZ between the two Koreas the situation is more similar, since it’s human activity which has stopped the strip from being interfered with. In the Darién Gap, humans do things but not in a manner similar to the organised centres of many territories. The way international and smaller scale borders often exist, good ones at least, is that they’re placed in relatively inaccessible places. For instance, Loughborough, where I used to stay, is on the northern edge of Leicestershire and if you try to walk thence into Nottinghamshire through fields, you’re confronted not only by the unsurprising river which often forms a border but also by rather boggy, wet ground, which makes it a good place to put a border as nobody wants to argue over it. Likewise the border between Scotland and England runs through high, rocky heathland and is sparsely populated compared to, say, the Central Belt or the large cities of Yorkshire and Lancashire. The Darién Gap is the same. Humans do live there but they have difficulty doing so unless they’re hunter-gatherers. Agriculture would be hard and the heavy rainfall is the cause of frequent flooding. It’s also mountainous, like much of Central America.
The wider political structure of the region shows the relatively large territory of Mexico to the northwest becoming the increasingly fragmented area to the southeast, and in fact this already existed in pre-Columbian times. This is associated with the volcanic, mountainous and also increasingly humid nature of the isthmus as one goes south. It’s also remarkable to consider that the area is also a bottleneck for the human population, as the descendants of the humans who entered the Americas via Beringia between Siberia and Alaska to the far north and most, though possibly not all, of the population of South America before 1500 CE were descended from people who had come through the Gap. I say not all because there may have been some between Polynesians and the indigenous peoples of South America, as can be seen in the cultivation of the sweet potato, human genomes on Easter Island and chicken bones dating from the fourteenth Christian century in the Inca Empire, or at least that area. But apart from that, everyone came through the Gap.
If you go a bit further west from Darien, nowadays you’ll come across the Panama Canal. This is of course economically very important and necessary due to the closure of the Isthmus of Panama, which I’ll mention again. Of course, this does depend on long-distance trade being considered important, which is probably not ecologically sound. There was a time before it was practically to dig canals of that scale, and in the late seventeenth century, before the Union, Scotland attempted to exploit this with the Darien Scheme, the establishment of the colony of New Caledonia, where the idea was to transport goods across the Gap from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and charge for each transaction there. Apart from the obvious colonialism (“A big boy did it and ran away”, but this is before the big boy), this might sound like a good idea, particularly when you consider that it’s a mountainous and rain-soaked area like a certain other country thousands of kilometres to the northeast, but it didn’t work. Scotland invested a heap of money in the scheme, taken from the purses of Scots of fairly limited means who invested their life savings. I’m going to try to summarise what happened.
William Paterson, Scottish founder of the Bank of England, began a company known as The Company of Scotland Trading To Africa And The Indies. Lionel Wafer talked Darien up to him and he decided to found a unique type of colony which would neither exploit the land or people on it nor produce goods for international trade, but simply move items between the oceans for a fee. The East India company unsuccessfully lobbied the English parliament to impeach the new company and then threatened to boycott anyone who traded with Paterson, who raised £400 000 from the Scottish people for the colony, to be called New Edinburgh. He took five ships which carried various items useful for the colony but also three carriages without horses to transport them, a large quantity of garments and also many combs and mirrors which he planned to use to trade with the Guna. Leaving without telling the settlers or anyone else where they were going until they were well on the way to avoid word getting to the East India company, they arrived having lost a remarkably small number of the initial 1200 settlers. Their initial attempt to build a settlement was hampered by the unsuitability of the land and the recalcitrant nature of the jungle, whose trees would need to be felled and cleared for it to work, so they moved to another site and tried again. In Spring 1699, torrential rain and tropical diseases killed two hundred within a month and they were losing ten a day at one point. The Guna were also not interested in the mirrors and combs and the land was unsuitable for farming, so they were forced to eat less than a pound of mouldy flour boiled in water each per week, skimming off the infesting maggots and worms in the process. They then attempted to trade with other nearby English colonies but William of Orange, English king at that point, forbade trade with them, and they also got wind of an imminent Spanish attack so they abandoned the colony and went back to Scotland. Only two hundred of them made it there. In August 1699, Paterson tried again with two thousand settlers who hadn’t heard about the disastrous first attempt. They once again suffered disease and malnutrition, accompanied by rebellion against the leaders and a local pastor blamed their misfortune on their revolt, which was seen as deeply sinful by the leaders. However, they then united with the Guna in an alliance against another threatened attack by the Spanish, who blockaded them by land and sea with cannons and ships until they surrendered in March 1700. The Spanish were gracious enough to let them leave for Scotland, but by the time they got back everyone hated them, they’d lost everyone’s life savings, they got disowned and ostracised and Scotland had lost all of its money. And of course a lot of them died. As a result, the English parliament agreed to bail the Company out to the tune of £398000 in return for the Union, which became known as the Price Of Scotland, because although they had enough money to pursue the ongoing War of the Spanish Succession, they also needed bodies and there were more men available as cannon fodder in Scotland than in England, so that’s what they did. Scots were also soon involved in running the Empire and keep the British economy going. Many Scots saw the money as a bribe and the Union as the result of corruption and incompetence. So that’s a rough sketch of the role of the Darien Gap in the downfall of Scotland and the Act of Union’s success, which as well as everything else was partly the result of the inhospitality of the region to European-style human settlement, and it also means that Scotland is morally compromised to some extent by being instrumental in keeping the British Empire going. Had this not happened, it isn’t clear that the Empire would’ve been as victorious as it turned out to be, so whereas Scotland has every right to gripe about its position, the rich and powerful of this nation played their part in putting it in that predicament although the relatively modestly off also had a role. The likes of crofters and fishing families, of course, got the short straw and can’t be blamed at all for it, as usual.
There’s one further aspect to the Darien Gap I want to cover, which is connected to climatic and other changes which led to the ice ages and also, in my opinion, the Biblical Fall of Man. You can ignore the last bit for now if you find it too off-putting, but this is how things went. Right now the Southern and Arctic Oceans alone stretch all the way around the world and in the case of the latter it isn’t bordered by land on both north and south, since there is by definition nothing north of the North Pole. The Southern Ocean, however, provides a vast swirl of current all the way round the planet. There also used to be another such ocean in prehistoric times, known today as the Tethys, which separated the northern and southern continents, and like the Southern Ocean it had an uninterrupted current passing all the way round Earth flowing east to west. Its remnants today are present as the Caribbean, parts of the Atlantic and Pacific, the Med, Black Sea, Caspian and certain other lakes through central Eurasia. Three million years ago, this ocean finally closed for the time being at least when the Americas collided. This had immediate effects on the wildlife of the two continents, with exchanges such as camels, armadillos, opossums and the extinction of much of the life on the southern continent in particular. It also caused the current passing across what was now the Atlantic to be blocked by the Gulf of MEXICO and the warm water to be redirected north, where it increased precipitation and warmed the lands around the North Atlantic. Snowfall also increased due to the humidity, which did two things: it increased the reflectivity of the planet overall, bouncing heat and light back into space, and it locked up a lot of the planet’s water in ice, making it drier and increasing the spread of grassland and desert while causing the rain forests to shrink. It also lowered sea levels, exposing continental shelves, ultimately making it possible for fauna, including humans in the end, to move between North America and Eurasia. However, all of this was less significant than Milankovitch cycles, which are beyond the scope of this post.
It’s also possible that the shrinkage of rain forests led to our ancestors having to leave them for harsher environments such as the savannah, where less food was available, threat from predators was greater and water was harder to come across. This is where the “Fall Of Man” comes in. I believe it’s possible that this harshness led to different, for instance more aggressive, behaviour in and between our communities due to having to compete for fewer resources and various deficiencies in our diets and the ability to deal with health problems, which led to two things: stressed out malnourished pregnant people giving birth to babies who were less than optimally behaved, and parenting and other activities which tended to traumatise them and lead to poor behaviour. In other words, the Fall. We’re all the victims of this and it’s handed down by the rather dystopian flavour of society. The fruit of the tree of knowledge is actually the absence of fruit, not its presence, and the serpent is our base desires and impulses being brought to the surface by these harsh conditions. I realise this sounds nuts, and the questions of free will and a benevolent God are compromised by this line of thought.
I want to end with Keats’s ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’:
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
I realise there’s a lot going on in this poem, but there’s one thing which I don’t think is at all and want to mention the unfairness of the criticism. I think Keats was fully aware that Cortez never went to Darien (which is not surprising since he had a successful career destroying the Aztec Empire and so on before going back to Spain to end his life in his early sixties as opposed to being bitten and killed by a puff adder or dying of dysentery) and was attempting to convey that he had vision enough to “see” the Pacific. It’s not erroneous at all to my mind. I just wanted to get that in.
In the meantime, this has given me a Thompson Twins earworm even though that song has nothing at all to do with Panama, and I haven’t thought about the fashion chain at all.
A Box Of Chocolates 