John C. Wright's Journal

I hope I can be excused if I violate slightly my no-posting until Friday rule, but this is a needed follow up to yesterday’s post. This will be short. Well, it will be long, but it will be short for me, since my normal posts are Tolstoyan in length.

Those of you who regard me, John C. Wright, not-quite world-famous author, as merely a shrill echoing and partisan shill for the Republican Party, first let me say YOU’RE RIGHT!

Or, rather, let me say I WISH YOU WERE RIGHT!

I would be delighted to live in a country where one of the parties was somewhere, anywhere, near where I stood politically on any issue. Read the remainder of this entry »

I am only posting a link, and asking one question.

Here is the link: http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/pcourrielche/2009/09/21/explosive-new-audio-reveals-white-house-using-nea-to-push-partisan-agenda/

The article concerns using the NEA, the National Endowment for the Arts, to use taxpayer money (including the tax money from artists like me who make my living by the pen, brush, bow or chisel) to fund “artistes” (including those who cannot make their living by the pen, brush, bow or chisel because they are no-talent poseurs pretending to be someone like me) not to produce art for the community, such as public monuments to fallen servicemen nor public recitals of classical music written by famous native sons, but to crank out pro-Obama agitprop.

Here is my question for the members of the Republican Party (hereafter to be called ‘the Stupid Party’): why did the NEA continue to exist for even one day after your party had majority control of the House and Senate and White House?

How hard is it to run a red pen through one line in a federal budget, if you have control of the Congress, or how hard is it to send a squad of heavily armed men in riot gear into the headquarters of the NEA, have them burnt to death Waco style, and sent off to slavery in Cuba Elian Gonzales style?

I mean, when the Democrat Party (hereafter to be called ‘the Evil Party’), stubborn jackass of totalitarianism, gallops into control of the state, it can use the full power of the federal stormtroopers in their jackbboots to mug religious oddballs in Texas and little escaped slave-boy orphans in Florida, and then afterward go back to their favorite past-time of trampling a human face forever, but when the mighty GOP, elephant of fiscal responsibility, somehow tramples its path to power without tripping over its ears like Dumbo, we cannot find even one pencil-necked Bureaucrat willing to send a politely-worded eviction notice to the longhairs at NEA headquarters?

If I were asking two questions, I would ask the Stupid Party where in the Constitution the federal government is specifically enumerated the right to fund art projects? Any power not specifically granted the general government is reserved to the states or the people, remember.

My comment: very well, I will be more than happy to think and to talk about it. As a preliminary, let me call you a liar as you have called me, and all Americans, cowards. You casually assume, nameless Mouth of the Dark Lord of Newsweek, that no one can disagree with your political program except through an unwillingness to think about the issue due to quaking fear. Let me also call you a liar again, for claiming our health care system is broken. It is not even sick. But all this to one side, let us talk about this anathema idea, shall we? Let’s.

First, let us review a few facts. Read the remainder of this entry »

Ok, well, this one needs be only two words long:

SOLOMON KANE!

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John Derbyshire, monger of gloom, over at National Review Online, is talking about Howard Philips Lovecraft.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzBhMTg4YzA0ZDUyYTc5ODNmYmY0YTBhNzNmYWYzZjM=

My comment: I note this as an odd cultural artifact. You must realize my formative years were BSW (Before STAR WARS) and in the culture of my youth science fiction was an outcast literature, read only by hooded lamplight in dismal smuggler’s caves far from where the prying lamps of civilization and propriety might spy. I recall serious discussions among us that no fantasy movie could ever be made, on the grounds that no one wanted to watch half-naked barbarians cleaving skulls, or see an elf by moonlight in Lothlorien. Movies, in the Jimmy Carter years, were all grim and depressing.

That a literate scholar, such as C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien, might read or write the stuff was astonishing, albeit allowed on the grounds that it was for children, and perhaps instructive  — all the more astonishing was that, while being universally dismissed as mere ‘Buck Rogers junk’ there were writers (and I am thinking of John W. Campbell Jr., Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov) who took seriously the idea that science fiction was meant to be sober, literate, serious, and transformative, it was propaganda (I mean that in the religious sense of the word–the literature to propogate the faith) for belief in technical progress. The message was: The Stars Are Yours! Go Up, Young Man! (I seem to recall that the only book I have seen in recent years firmly in this Campbellian tradition was Victor Koman’s KINGS OF THE HIGH FRONTIER. Are only Libertarians still believers in progress?) — but outside the SF ghetto, the scorn of the muggles for sciffy was universal. Harlequin romances had more cachet.

And now SF is mainstream. It is part of the culture, so that even conservative political commentators read and remark on writers who never published outside the pulp pages of Farnsworth Wright’s WEIRD TALES.

In a variation on last week’s theme, Mr. Mojzes writes of moral ambiguity in storytelling.

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/84306.html

My comment: I don’t know whether moral ambiguity is good or bad. To me, it is sort of a gray area. Who am I to judge? How are we to know? Or, to get to the point, who are we to judge the issue of how we are to know whether or not moral ambiguity (if it exists) should be judged or not? These are deep and troubling questions that have given such thinkers as Ellsworth Toohey many idle minutes of entertainment and a prolific career.

I know what you are saying — "Isn’t Ellsworth Toohey one of those cardboard-stock characters Ayn Rand made up for her outrageously polemic book ATLAS SHRUGGED?" The answer is a resounding "no!" followed by a lilting laugh and a girlish toss of my locks. Ellsworth Toohey is a stock-cardboard character from Ayn Rand’s outrageously polemical THE FOUNTAINHEAD. It is a completely different book! I would laugh with a condescending sneer at Ayn Rand’s completely unrealistic and artificial and preposterous characterization of Ellsworth Toohey, except (1) laughing while sneering causes hiccoughs and (2) I know people (a lot of people) who talk and think and act just like Ellsworth Tooehy in real life, and which I think is totally unfair, on the grounds that such pure darkness offends the cherished idea that life is full of gray areas of moral ambiguity!

As always, please send any mash notes, favorable comments, gifts of flowers, or blank checks to my wife, who fights crime under the codename "Lamplighter", and who needs the money, and send your hate mail to Mr. John Scalzi, who does not need more greif, and has no time to fight crime. And while you are at it, why not ask Mr. Scalzi for some favors in your burgeoning writing career? And no, I am not cleared to know his codename.

Something I wrote a while back, but (if you will forgive the postmodern self-referential nature of the comment) it bears repeating:

I have said on many occasions that the belief in “memes” is merely a self-replicating bit of information code, passed from mind to mind through speech, and having no reality other than its ability to replicate itself further.

Grammatically, memes only ever exist in the third or second person, not in the first person. Their or Your deeply-held and cherished beliefs are memes, whereas My deeply-held and cherished beliefs are enlightenment.

This belief in memes is convenient because it excuses a debater finding himself in a position of weakness in an argument from having to address the content of opposing thoughts. By being called a “meme” the opposing thought is merely gratuitously asserted to have no content, and, hence, nothing exists to argue against.

The debater is hence able to make a response, a more or less meaningless series of words, which has the surface appearance of being an answer, and which (to the unwary) creates an impression of being a devastating riposte or counter-argument; which of course is much easier to accomplishing, requiring neither learning, thought, inside, wisdom, training, care, or patience, which might be demanded to achieve the same effect one might enjoy if actually answering the argument.

One gets something for nothing. Fools can look wise, and the uneducated and lazy thinker can rout, or seem to, the educated and rigorous argument of his opposition.

Both the victim of the meme ad hominem and the audience, being under the same pressure to minimize the effort put into thought, and craving the shallow appearance of being thinkers, will remember and repeat the belief in memes, so it becomes part of their thought-pattern, without, of course, ever being taken seriously by any thinkers. And so it spreads. That is the Darwinian selection that allows a belief in memes to continue.

No one really believes in memes, of course. Any honest thinker who actually believed that some or all thought-content was no more than self-replicating lines of words without meaning would doubt his own beliefs first (including the belief that his thought-content was no more than self-replicating lines of word without meaning).

Belief in memes is just a meme.

Please pass this idea along to as many people as you know.

This is what I would have posted had I been doing a daily post, but since I have two books or more overdue at the publisher’s, not to mention working a day job, I can only summarize.

So just imagine the following points were explored, dwelt upon, and ranted about for several pages, perhaps illuminated with video clips of Hammer’s SHE or Fogley’s GIRL GENIUS, and seasoned with really long and obscure words (words like ‘nuncupatory’ – a Jack Vancean word, and ‘cyclopean’ – a H.P. Lovecraftian word in more ways than one, and ‘urticate, salpinx, bordereau’ – words so remarkably Gene Wolflike in character, that they are as rare as an onager with a dulcimer).
Read the remainder of this entry »

I am violating my ‘Friday-only’ posting rule, because this story is (1) an enormity (2) timely and (3) I am only posting a link. You can read it and decide for yourselves what the mind-set and political philosophy is which leads up to such things, and from what sort of philosophical and political position such things come.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1211950/Premature-baby-left-die-doctors-mother-gives-birth-just-days-22-week-care-limit.html#ixzz0QcrzUSS0

My beautiful and talented wife has posted another Wright’s Writing Corner

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/82274.html

Naturally, the same instruction as previous posts apply–leave compliments and praise on her website, where she can answer it, and leave criticism and rude barking here, where I can ignore it. Chivalry demands no less, gentlehobbits.

Or better yet, send your hate mail to John Scalzi, because (a) he grades it and (b) he makes me laugh. (NOTE: no John Scalzi were harmed in the making of this post. He was not consulted, and he does not know me from Adam, but I think he is a funny guy, so here is a link and a free plug for his book.)

In the interests of chivalry, let me also link to and plug my wife’s book, PROSPERO LOST.

Listen to what her close friends and relatives have to say about it! "The characters are lovable and the plot is enthralling. The author, Lamplighter, has written some fantastic short stories through the years but this is her first book. She’s done an excellent job. I highly recommend it to all." — Mark W. Lamplighter. There you have it! The book was so good  that the top Amazon.com reviewer, Harriet Klausner, gave it six or seven stars even though (a) Klausner had not read the book, or even the book jacket and (b) Amazon.com only allows you to give up to five stars. But where this book is concerned, the impossible is possible!

Here is a quote from Edgar Allen Poe that touches on a discussion recently in this space, particularly the relation of taste to intellect and moral sense. I am delighted to see he is of an alike mind with me with his reverence for Truth, and for the cool-hearted approach on must take toward that most virginal of goddesses. I differ from him somewhat in that I see a profound and obscure interconnection between truth and beauty, or, if you like, between the needs of drama and the needs of logic. Here is the quote:

With as deep a reverence for the True as ever inspired the bosom of man, I would nevertheless limit, in some measure, its modes of inculcation. I would limit to enforce them. I would not enfeeble them by dissipation. The demands of Truth are severe. She has no sympathy with the myrtles. All that which is so indispensable in Song is precisely all that with which she has nothing whatever to do. It is but making her a flaunting paradox to wreathe her in gems and flowers. In enforcing a truth we need severity rather than efflorescence of language. We must be simple, precise, terse. We must be cool, calm, unimpassioned. In a word, we must be in that mood which, as nearly as possible, is the exact converse of the poetical. He must be blind indeed who does not perceive the radical and chasmal difference between the truthful and the poetical modes of inculcation. He must be theory-mad beyond redemption who, in spite of these differences, shall still persist in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth.

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What is the first Science Fiction novel?

This question was raised in an interesting article by one Jim Harris at Auxiliary Memory (found here http://jameswharris.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/the-time-machine-by-h-g-wells/) where he argues that THE TIME MACHINE by H.G. Wells is the first science fiction novel properly so called.

Let me quote his words, so as not to mislead:

I agree in part and disagree in part. What would I consider the first science fiction novel properly so called? That depends on what I consider the boundaries of science fiction to include.
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I hope I will be forgiven for breaking my “no posting save on Friday” rule for an issue of astounding importance: GIRL GENIUS JUST WON THE HUGO! (And by "just" I mean it happened a month ago, and I only noticed just now.) Congratulations to Kaja and Phil Foglio! (and to the colorist, whose name is Wright. I bask in the reflected glory.)

This award was granted at the World Con in Montreal (which I also attended, thank you, with my lovely and talented wife, L. Jagi Lamplighter, whose book PROSPERO LOST had its debut there)— but I did not stay for the ceremony due to the iron necessity of the airline flight schedules, and thus was ignorant of the news.

Fortunately, a wholly accurate and illustrated account of the significant segment of the awards ceremony has been recorded for posterity. See below

Read the remainder of this entry »

For this week’s Wright’s Writing Corner, Mrs. Wright introduces guest Danielle Ackley-McPhail to describe writing description.

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/80664.html

I have consulted with my Jesuit Confessor, Father de Casuist, who tells me that merely posting a link, does not count as "posting" and hence does not violate my "Only Posting on Friday" rule. He also says that rumor that the Pope Joan in the Thirteenth Century ordered Friday to be a day to avoid meat because of the foresight that I in the Twenty-First Century would be posting on Friday, while not being true in the literal sense, is nonetheless an appropriate rumor for veneration and instruction.