Relevant History

The decline of the public intellectual, revisited

20 years ago, Russell Jacoby published The Last Intellectuals, on the rise and fall of the public intellectual in 20th-century America. He has an op-ed piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education that reviews the book, public (or at least academic) reaction to it, and how the argument has stood up.

The piece is worth reading, if only because it nicely lays out his argument:

I offered a generational explanation for what I saw as the eclipse of younger intellectuals. Why in 1987 had the same intellectuals dominated for more than 20 years, with few new faces among them? Why was it that the Daniel Bells or Gore Vidals or Kenneth Galbraiths seemed to lack successors? Professionalization and academization appeared to be the reason. Younger intellectuals were retreating into specialized and cloistered environments.

Earlier 20th-century thinkers like Lewis Mumford and Edmund Wilson kept the university and its apparatus at arm's length. Indeed, they often disdained it. They oriented themselves toward an educated public, and, as a result, they developed a straightforward prose and gained a nonprofessional audience. As his reputation grew, Wilson printed up a postcard that he sent to those who requested his services. On it he checked the appropriate box: Edmund Wilson does not write articles or books on order; he does not write forewords or introductions, does not give interviews or appear on television, and does not participate in symposia.

Later intellectual generations, including, paradoxically, the rebellious 60s cohort, do give interviews; do write articles on demand; and most evidently do participate in symposia. They grew up in a much-expanded campus universe and never left its safety. Younger intellectuals became professors who geared their work toward their colleagues and specialized journals. If this generation — my generation! — advanced into postmodernism, post-Marxism, and postcolonialism, where the Daniel Bells and Lewis Mumfords never trod, it did so by surrendering a public profile.

The book is still well worth reading, I think.

[To the tune of Bill Evans Trio, "What Is This Thing Called Love?," from the album "Portrait in Jazz".]

Best book review ever?

"Reading this book is like watching a flaming piano fall out of an airplane and land in a puppy farm." (Sadly, No! on Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism)

[To the tune of Jimi Hendrix, "House Burning Down," from the album "The Essential Jimi Hendrix (Disc 2)".]

New review

My review of Stuart Clark's The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began is in the latest issue of American Scientist.

It was a good book, but to be perfectly honest, it was one of those reviews that the editor took apart, rearranged, and greatly improved. So equal credit on this one should go to Flora Lewis.

Thanks to Bill C. for letting me know it was out!

[ Posted from Caffe Espresso 1929 via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: astronomy, books, history, history of science, science

Next thing to read

Now that I'm almost finished with Terry Pratchett's Making Money, I need something else to read: Squidpunk!

SQUIDPUNK: THE MANIFESTO

Fiction that unlike New Weird, Steampunk, or Slipstream, is at its core not only about squid, but about the symbolism of squid as color-changing, highly-mobile, alien-looking, intelligent ocean-goers. As a powerful ecosystem indicator, the squid is a potent symbol for environmental rejuvenation. Squidpunk is almost exclusively set at sea and must contain some reference to either cephalopods or to anything that thematically relates to squid, in terms of world iconography and tropes. Squidpunk is never escapist or whimsical. It is always serious and edgy. This combination of a hard punk aesthetic with the fluid propulsion system common to the squid has produced a unique literary hybrid beloved by Mundanes and Surrealists alike.

Actually, Jaron Lanier and Bruce Schneier would love it. [Via Pharyngula]

[To the tune of Russ Ballard, "Voices," from the album "Anthology".]

Technorati Tags: books, science_fiction

Liveblogging Harry Potter in England

My wife is now on her way from Cambridge to Hamburg, to spend the weekend with friends before flying home next week. Before she left, though, she got copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Apparently, it was quite the scene.

Most of the people here seem to be adults and teen-age girls.  There are a few little kids, some look under 10, and I am not quite sure what the point of that is, although the fellow who just came by had a brilliant Harry Potter costume on, he looked just like the young Harry Potter – but should he be up this late getting the last book?

It should be no surprise that many adults have academic robes to use for this in Cambridge.  What is a surprise is how many children have them.  Did they get them just for this?

The family that dresses up together, stays together

[There's] a large group of very small boys, they look they are like they can’t be older than 8.  They are dressed as a Quidditch team, they look very cute, but they will be so tired tomorrow.

12:50.... I walked past Waterstones. The line went out the door, and all the way down the street past the gates to Sidney Sussex College.  It was amazing.

Also, one of the exchange programs had a bunch of students who wanted copies, but the program has a strict curfew; so they agreed to send some of the tutors out to buy copies for all the kids, and bring them back to the college.

I really need to reread volume 6 before too long. I hardly remember any of it.

[To the tune of Keith Jarrett, "Vienna, Pt. 1," from the album "Vienna Concert".]

Technorati Tags: books, Cambridge, England, Harry Potter, travel

The Terror

A few days ago, I got Dan Simmons' new book, The Terror: A Novel. It's based on the ill-fated Franklin Expedition, which set out from England in 1845 in search of the fabled North-West Passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Despite having two of the better cold-weather ships in the Royal Navy, and years of provisions, the party disappeared into the Arctic. The ships were trapped in ice, Franklin himself died, and after two years, the ships were abandoned. So far as we know, all 120-odd members of the expedition died.

Nothing was ever heard from the expeditions (by Europeans, anyway-- apparently, the ships were almost a tourist attraction for the Inuit, and David Woodman's Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony gathers voluminous material documenting local knowledge of the expedition), which makes it a great platform for an historical thriller. And when one of the ships is actually called Terror (the other was Erebus), it's inevitable that someone writes about them.

I find much of Simmons' work quite compelling, both in an emotional sense-- reading Song of Kali made for a very disturbing afternoon-- and an intellectual one-- his Ilium and Olympos, which replay the Homeric epics on Mars, on the base of Mount Olympus (with a big dose of The Tempest stirred in), are wonderfully audacious. (Imagine Steven King rewriting the Old Testament, with an emphasis on all the really gory stuff.) The Terror is a bit like The Difference Engine or Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, in that all begin with real historical events and people, but then spin off into these weird alternate universes.

Some of the books' recurring themes are a bit disturbing. A few of Simmons' books have, shall we say, a complicated relationship with Catholicism. Characters you spend a lot of time with have a way of getting horribly mutilated or killed. The societies he conjures are defined principally by their relationships with some awful monster or threat: to paraphrase Freud, the discontents of the civilizations in Simmons' books tend to be things that decapitate their victims before sucking the still-warm marrow out of their bones. The result is a world-view that's equal parts Thomas Hobbes and H. P. Lovecraft.

Still, Simmons is unquestionably a brilliant writer, and I have to respect anyone who thinks on such a big scale.

[To the tune of Ludwig van Beethoven, "Sonate no. 22 op. 54 in f gr.t., ," from the album "Piano Sonatas Vol. 2".]

Technorati Tags: science_fiction

Today is Towel Day

I didn't realize, but it's Towel Day:

Towel Day is a day when you carry around a towel all day to commemorate the late, great Douglas Adams, author of the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

[To the tune of Earth, Wind & Fire, "Can't Hide Love," from the album "Earth Wind & Fire: Greatest Hits".]

Technorati Tags: books, science_fiction

Wintersmith

My daughter and I just started Terry Pratchett's Wintersmith, the third in his series of young adult novels featuring witch-in-training Tiffany Aching. We'd already read The Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky, the first two books about Tiffany, and my daughter enjoyed them both.

At first, she mainly enjoyed the Nac Mac Feegle, creatures who are a cross between fairies and the Mark Wahlberg character in The Departed, with heavy Scottish accents thrown in for good measure. She still likes them, as do I; but I think she's also becoming much more interested in the character of Tiffany, and her development. I love the Feegle, but Tiffany is the most interesting character Pratchett has created since Sam Vimes, the policeman who figures prominently in a number of the Discworld books.

Doubtless there are groups who decry the books as Bad For Children, but in Pratchett's world, witchcraft is about 5% supernatural, and 95% work, responsibility and social networking. The witches who dress like Stevie Nicks ca. 1978 and spend lots of time on the occult are always bested by the witches who wear boots and listen carefully to village gossip. So in the long run, I think reading the books probably drives down the odds of girls eventually joining a coven or getting into wiccan.

And for me, reading these books is a pleasure because Pratchett is one of my favorite authors, and one of the few I'm likely to be able to share with my children. He's a real pleasure to read aloud, and it'll be years before my daughter is old enough to read Alan Furst or William Gibson (much less Neal Stephenson or Dan Simmons). For the forseeable future, Pratchett will be a common literary reference point for us, and a genuinely literary one: you don't read a Discworld novel with the movie adaptation superimposed on your imagination, as you do when you pick up a J. K Rowling book.

[To the tune of Elton John, "Crocodile Rock," from the album "Greatest Hits".]

Technorati Tags: Discworld, science_fiction, Terry Practchett

Britannica Firefox search plugin

At long last, there's a Britannica Firefox search plugin. Good for them.

On the other hand, Britannica's short contributor biographies used to note when the author had died; those notes have been taken out. Granted, encyclopedias like to think of themselves as existing in a kind of timeless, Platonic dimension of Truth, and writing for Britannica is a form of literary immortality. But noting whether an author had passed on to the Great Library in the Sky used to provide a rough sense of how old the article was; and the only reason to remove the notation is to take away that measure. And the only reason to do that is to make it harder to figure out how old (and perhaps how out of date) an article might be.

I understand the instinct, but when it's so easy to find information about just about anyone, and when every Wikipedia article carries a nauseating amount of metadata, it's a dumb thing to do.

Technorati Tags: encyclopedia

Literature and habits

While I was soaking in the bath, I realized something: I've gotten into the habit of taking long, hot baths when I travel, largely because at the beginning of Alan Furst's Kingdom of Shadows, the main character, the Hungarian Nicholas Morath (traveling under a diplomatic passport), has a long soak in his girlfriend's tub after returning to Paris from a trip to Budapest.

How many habits do we have that are partly literary references? When I go hang out and work in cafes, I often think of a line in Point Counterpoint in which a character is described as renting a cafe table for the price of tea and a sticky bun. I wonder if there are others.

[To the tune of Paul McCartney & Wings, "The Long And Winding Road," from the album "Wings Over America (Disc 1)".]

Technorati Tags: Alan Furst, travel