The secret of not bankrupting your bank

"Banking should not be exciting."

Thanx to Oliver Willis

(no subject)

Stranger in a Strange Land programmed me in ways that were not obvious for months and even years, and some that were right away. It is now obviously flawed, largely in the ways it failed to meet the author's goal of challenging all the assumptions of his society (most notably sexual dimorphism), but I still retain a lot of the benefits I got from reading it.*

Russell Blackford makes the case for the good parts while noting the flaws. Blackford may have been the first to notice that the book is an anatomy, or Menippean satire, a category defined by Northrop Frye as made up of large books in which the central plot is subsidiary to digressions, copias, lists, set pieces, parodies, and other sideshows, creating a whole larger than the sum of its parts, a quality later noted in William H. Patterson jr. and Andrew Thornton's excellent defense brief, The Martian Named Smith.

Most of the fiction I really love is anatomies, including Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, Illuminatus!, Matt Ruff's Sewer, Gas, & Electric, Neil Stephenson's The Cryptonomicon, Paul Di Filippo's Ciphers, John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, John Barth's Letters (and other books of his to a lesser extent), The Recognitions, and The Public Burning. With a bit of stretching, we could include my two favorite works of Big Trash, The Carpetbaggers, by Harold Robbins, and The Godfather, by Mario Puzo.

*( Read more... )

Not redundant

Charles Pierce had a defining moment at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where he observed a dinosaur. Wearing a saddle... But worse than this was when the proprietor exclaimed to a cheering crowd, "We are taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!" He knew then and there it was time to try and salvage the Land of the Enlightened, buried somewhere in this new Home of the Uninformed.

An interview with the author of Idiot America

Thanx to zarq