"Glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument

'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.
 
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'

I went to a play a couple years ago, and grew quite annoyed. About midway through the play it became apparent that the play's villain was a preacher with a southern accent. Not like I haven't seen the Christian made into the villain before. Likewise it's not like I haven't seen the white guy, the business man, or the corporate lawyer similarly demonized.

This was so trite and predictable that I decided to rewrite the play in my mind. The preacher from Alabama was really a union organizer from Chicago posing as an Evangelist. Tho he said he intended to spread the gospel, the fella really wanted to spread International Marxism.

I decided to engage in a malicious interpretation of the text. And so can you. So can any reader with any text. Ask any Atheist to explain the Bible to you.

When the post-modernists speak of reader-response it is not immediately apparent that the response is disgust at heavy-handed axe-grinding by the author. That's the thing about reader-response, it varies with the reader and whatever s/he has in mind at the moment.

Returning to post-modernism, I think much of what passes for scholarship is mere vandalism. As our culture has died, they are the agents of putrefaction rendering our cultural heritage into bones and rich fertile earth.

Deconstruction generally takes the work of dead authors who cannot defend their work, and then attaches ridiculous meanings to their words. Disagree? Well, that's not how I read the post-moderns. But, but, that's not what they meant. This doesn't work when it's played against itself.

Perhaps a different model for reading is called for. One that uses communications theory as a metaphor. One big difference between mathy technical studies like communications theory and literary kultursmog is that the mathy stuff has to work. Bridges fall down and levees fail without any respect to the political influence of their builders.

When parties A and B communicate, the process begins with a message held by A that gets encoded for a channel, then the encoded message gets sent over that channel, then the message is decoded by B. In life A says something and B hears it. Thoughts are encoded as words in sentences, these words are pronounced by speaker A. Listener B hears the sounds, maps them to words, parses the words and thinks a corresponding thought.

Communication fails when the idea cannot be put into words, or the words cannot be heard, or the words map to different ideas.

Suppose A happens to be Pliny the Elder thinking Roman thoughts expressed in Latin on parchments that are copied by hand by Christian monks that are eventually printed and read by B, who happens to be Joe Random Latin student.

This communications problem is subject to the same considerations as a telephone conversation or a chat room. Since Pliny did not address his remarks to Joe, we should understand the historical-cultural context of Pliny and his interlocutors--in particular, how they used words and idioms. We should understand that some words like "damn" might be bowdlerized into "darn" by the copyists. And we should understand that Joe was napping during one of his Latin lessons.

It's hard enough to get communication right without axe-grinding vandals going on about dead white European males, colonialism, and sexual personae. They're just as bogus as me turning a southern evangelist into a union organizer.

This may seem a bit abstract, but it is as practical as reading a newspaper. In the novel 1984, Winston Smith's job is historical revisionism. He does his job by cutting away any aspect of the cultural legacy that does not support the state's current ends.

A less extreme example is Jerry Pournelle's Co-Dominium stories where a US-Soviet alliance manages to freeze technological and scientific advance by subtly revising math tables and reference works to obscure the anomalies that point to scientific revolutions like quantum mechanics and relativity.

We need to grasp the world as it is. Not the way we would prefer it to be. Because truth is complicated, this means parts of it will support International Socialism, and other parts National Socialism. We've got to sort through what is while being prepared to modify our partisan positions in light of reality.

And we've got to stand up to bullies who'd sell our birthright for a pot of message.

Reading and Writing Manifestos

Some years ago I happened upon an essay in The Atlantic that became a standalone book, "A Reader's Manifesto." It lamented the sorry state of American contemporary literature: What respectable authors wrote as serious, respectable literature was just awful, pretentious, and affected as far as readers are concerned.

I'm sorry to say that though this essay resonated with me and most of my writer friends and all of my reader friends, the Brahmins who decide what shall be published and who give out MFA degrees did not take any deliveries from the clue bus.

Now we are hearing that the publishing industry is doomed, doomed I say because of ebooks. Or something.

Doom is what happens to any business when those who decide upon the products to be offered make their decisions based upon ideology, politics, and group-think instead of based upon market demand. The jargon term is Market Failure and it happens when customers cannot acquire the goods they desire from providers. When this happens, the consumer Goes Somewhere Else. (If the market failure is caused by a government regulating prices or censorship, Somewhere Else is called a black market.)

Disruptive technologies are God's gift to humanity, because their disruptions often undermine formerly unassailable monopolies, creating opportunities for small, agile mammals to raid the nests of big, stupid dinosaurs. In this context, the disruptive technologies of the ebooks plus Internet booksellers, enable the unsatisfied reader to go Somewhere Else.

When I was a child, there was exactly one dystopian novel of any note. (Atlas Shrugged didn't seem dystopian, because I knew John Galt was going to stop the engine of the world and remake it in Ayn Rand's image.) 1984 was a young adult novel only because every high school student was required by Mrs. Grundy to read it in English class.

Why waste time with Big Brother when there are novels with rocket ships and space suits written by fellas a boy could identify with--featuring protagonists who were escaping danger and helping friends out of danger--or better--hunting for and finding treasure. They weren't filled with angst about who would bite them on the neck and suck the life out of them.

Heinlein's protagonist in this novel worked in a pharmacy and lamented his oversight of failing to stock his space suit with amphetamines. Let's see someone try to get away with something like that in today's YA market. Granted, times change and the American culture changes what it finds acceptable.

Hard work, initiative, and resourcefulness characterized Kip Russell (pictured above), not drug use. Readers of 1958 understood that. They saw NASA putting up satellites and would soon see men in orbit and then go to the moon. The future was full of hope and opportunity that could be exploited for everyone's gain.

Editors of 2012 have tended to steer book deals to Yet Another Dystopian story. (Remember when Star Trek made the Enterprise drive 55?) Is the present bleak and the future hopeless? Are there limits to growth?

Maybe. But I won't spend money buying books about it. None of this is new. I've made some of these observations before.

I believe reading is not punishment. The reader is primary and delivering value to the reader is the writer's duty and the reader--not the writer or the editor--defines what constitutes that value. I hope that my writing as it provides that value can also illustrate some of the wonder and beauty of the universe and human nature, but that can't get in the way of the story.

What is new this week is news of a subversive group of revolutionaries (or reactionaries) who are standing athwart history crying stop. Sarah Hoyt has invited fire by articulating certain principles that she thinks characterizes Human Wave Science Fiction writing. And she's put together a manifesto for Human Wave Science Fiction. She names names of writers producing prose that fits this label and manifesto. And she names my favorite SF authors in the process.

I have always thought the future might hold great tribulation, but things will improve as we get smarter about how the universe works. This optimism is probably the most subversive thing that Mrs. Hoyt, et al. is manifestoing.

Manifestoing?