Category: Books

Although I met many of the Oregon-based science-fiction and fantasy writers community over the course of a couple of two decades from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, I never had much contact with the late Robert Sheckley. For a number of years he lived within walking distance of my house; his wife, Gail Dana, wrote a couple of pieces for my book review magazine. In earlier years, I probably would have tried harder to meet with him, but I’ve tried to be more observant of authorial privacy as the years go by.

I always admired Sheckley’s wit. His stories, in particular, always seemed to have a sardonic edge to them that appealed to me. Sheckley belongs to the tail end of a generation of science-fiction writers that is fast disappearing, a generation that developed in the dark of an era where you really had to go looking for material from the genre, before it broke into the light of mainstream culture and movies. I’m already starting to regret not pressing harder to get to know him personally.

Robert Sheckley’s website

Calvin Trillin.

From the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader:

WUKY cancels radio program over offensive content

By Jamie Gumbrecht
HERALD-LEADER CULTURE WRITER

A few weeks after The Boston Globe called The Writer’s Almanac radio program “a confection of poetry and history wrapped in the down comforter voice of producer and host Garrison Keillor,” WUKY-91.3 FM canceled the daily featurette for offensive content.

* * *

Reaction to the cancellation has been minimal so far, Godell said. WUKY managers decided to stop carrying the Almanac after a recent spate of language advisories, although they were tracking the content for about a year, Godell said.

The warnings, issued by the program’s production company, came about Curse of the Cat Woman by Edward Field, which contained violent themes and the word “breast”; Thinking About the Past by Donald Justice, which also used the word “breast”; and Reunion by Amber Coverdale, which contained the phrase “get high.” The poems were scheduled for broadcast between July 23 and Aug. 12.

* * *

Keillor, who will perform Feb. 21 at Centre College’s Norton Center for the Arts, said in an e-mail that stations are within their rights to cancel the Almanac but he’s proud of the poems he reads.

“There isn’t one of them I would hesitate to offer to any high school English class,” Keillor wrote. “The fact that someone is troubled by hearing the word ‘breast’ is interesting, but what are we supposed to do with A Visit From St. Nicholas and the ‘breast of the new fallen snow’? Should it become a shoulder or an elbow? I don’t think so.”

I always knew there was something suspicious about poetry.

A journalist (who shall remain nameless) once complained about a piece I wrote in which I included (without consent) their brief response to a letter I wrote, accusing me—me—of unethical behavior and saying I didn’t understand just how unethical such behavior was, and telling me they had not realized they were on the record.

This was part of my response (heavily redacted to avoid identifying the journalist):

* * *

I do have an idea of how unethical posting your [type of correspondence] would be—if I was a journalist. However, I make no pretense of being one…. I don’t do any reporting or break stories. I don’t have sources—on or off the record.

But if a fact in a news story strikes me as wrong, I pluck it out for examination, sometimes doing research to determine whether numbers add up, references are correct, etc. … If I write a letter and get something back, I might put those up. Rather than a journalist, think of me more as Lazlo Toth without the funny.

In any case, I try not to write anything in email or elsewhere that I’d be ashamed of.

* * *

The truth is, there are many precedents for publishing correspondence without consent. Apart from Don Novello (who’s been doing the Lazlo Toth gag since the Nixon administration), there are simple pranksters like Sterling Huck, Ted Nancy, and Paul Rosa. Apart from Novello’s politically-oriented work, that type of thing isn’t my particular interest, but it’s certainly something that’s been a thriving subgenre of publishing for over three decades.

Robert Pape, author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism talking about suicide attacks on NPR’s Morning Edition on July 19, 2005. This quote comes from 1:06 into the story.

The next most famous group in history to use suicide attacks were the Ismaili assassins in the eleventh and twelfth century. They, uh, would attack a sultan and leave a message, uh, which would say there would be further attacks unless you leave our community alone. This was where we get the word assassin from, because of their propensity to assassinate enemy leaders with a suicide attack.

He’s sold me.

Matt Taibbi, who was touting his book Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart the other night, wrote an article in the New York Press from the perspective of the a post-nuclear holocaust history text by William Shirer IV called The Rise and Fall of the United States.

In the article, he discusses his own part in that fall, where — prior to his own humiliation and eventual execution — he develops a Queer Eye-inspired reality television show called Extreme Fascist Makeover that begins with a redo of the White House:

In the program, five fascists of various types–one Le Penite, one German Nazi, one Italian blackshirt, one Spanish Falangist and an offensive coordinator for the Nebraska Cornhuskers–”made over” the Oval Office and Bush in the areas of “fashion, grooming, food and wine, interior design and culture.” In his memoir, Taibbi describes the transformation:

We took Bush away to be fitted for epaulettes… When he came back, he found that we’d painted the White House jet black and covered it with scary vines… The fence-posts around the presidential residence were adorned with human heads, which he quickly recognized, to his delight, as belonging to Democratic Congressmen. The walls on the inside were covered with his presidential portraits, while on the front lawn there was a raging bonfire fueled by portraits of his predecessors. On his desk, we’d left an executive order for the cancellation of elections… We asked him what he thought. He laughed. “This is amazing,” he said. “Laura is going to love this.” Then this little abashed smile came on his face, and he wiped one of his eyes. That was the money shot. The show was pretty much off and running from there.

The show was an immediate hit, and subsequent episodes featured makeovers of the U.S. Constitution, Reed College, Cuba and the Sundance Film Festival, among others. In one of the highest-rated and most rebroadcast programs in the history of American television, Extreme Fascist Makeover spent a half-hour tackling the New York Times–and ultimately, in what must seen as a humorous gesture, left it exactly as it had been.

As always, one of the usual suspects.

Waaaay back in March, neurologist Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings) wrote a tribute to Francis Crick, of double helix fame, in The New York Review of Books (article available online only to subscribers).

In his article, which related a twenty-year correspondence between the men about topics largely related to visual perception, Sacks briefly mentioned working with a group of genetically colorblind natives from the isolated South Pacific island of Pingelap.

Things being what they are, I didn’t get around to reading the article until this past weekend, some four months after it was published. Always a sucker for stories of collaboration and cameraderie, I sucked it up. The name Pingelap and the mention of the colorblind Pingelapese twitched my mind, however, since I’d never run across it before.

So imagine my surprise when — in the very next day’s edition of the Oregonian (which I almost didn’t see because it was one of the extremely rare occasions when our paper didn’t show up) — there was a 700-word article by reporter Melissa Sanchez on a Pingelapese reunion here in Portland. Apparently, Portland has one of the largest populations of Pingelapese outside of Pingelap (about 100), and an equal number of US residents came for the event as well.

Odd coincidences.

Willamette Week theater critic Steffen Silvis says goodbye in this week’s issue, something I can only applaud.

Silvis is apparently confused about the length of his tenure, titling the article “The Seven-Year Itch” when, in actuality it’s been almost nine years since his predecessor, my wife, Barbara Moshofsky, decided several years of three, four, or five shows a weekend during the season was enough, in December 1996. She took time off then to go on vacation to London — where we did not see any theater — let Silvis fill in while she was gone, and then decided to turn over the reins when she got back.

Silvis’s approach to theater criticism can be summed up by a line in his farewell note: “The truth is that Portland is often an amateurville horror, with far too many ego-driven poseurs, painted hams and desiccated frauds crowding the stage.” Gee, who would possibly have known that about local theater without Silvis helpfully pointing it out? Of course, that line could just as easily have been written about Silvis himself, whose reviews — like his farewell note — tended to fix the facts to pre-determined themes they might not always have fit.

It’s a shame that more people online don’t see her work, because Sharon Begley, the “Science Journal” columnist at the Wall Street Journal gets off the occasional slam at wacko theories. I was catching up on some copies of the hard edition of WSJ the other day and ran across “Theory Men Are Wired To Kill Straying Mates Is Offensive and Wrong” (and unlike some other folks, I know that you can occasionally do a Google search to find WSJ articles without registration).

In her May 20 column, Begley discusses a theory put forth in a new book on the origins of homicide by David Buss, a psychology professor at the University of Texas, Austin, entitled The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill. The column opens with a “Just So” story of why men “evolved” to kill mates who stray, then continues (emphasis added):

Killing, according to his [Buss’] Kipling-esque reasoning, offered so many “advantages to our early ancestors in the competition for survival and reproduction” that, today, “all men have an evolved psychology of mate killing that lies latent in their brains.” Men with the genetically based mental circuit for uxoricide had such an edge over their pacifist peers, in other words, that all men living today — their descendants — have this murder circuit, too.

For proof, Prof. Buss cites homicide statistics showing that more men than women kill, that over a five-year period in Dayton, Ohio, 52% of the women murdered were killed by a husband, lover or ex, and that women age 15 to 24 are killed by their mates or ex-mates more than over-the-reproductive-hill women are. His explanation: Only the former have evolutionary value, so men are wired to kill them if they stray but not to bother with unfaithful old bags. Also, unemployed men are more likely to kill women who dump them than are gainfully-employed men. Such low-status men, explains Prof. Buss, have the toughest time replacing their lost access to a uterus, so they’re wired to raise their attractiveness to women (“you’re so strong and powerful!”) by murdering a cheating mate.

As evolutionary theory, this is ludicrous. Killing the owner of the uterus that is your only current chance to get your genes into the next generation (the evolutionary imperative), especially if she is caring for your current children and has a father or brothers who take exception to your uxoricide, is an excellent way to a dead end personally and genealogically. Being the target of angry in-laws, not to mention life imprisonment or lethal injection, tends to limit one’s reproductive opportunities.

As a parsimonious explanation of data, the “evolution made me do it” explanation pales beside alternatives. Yes, murdered women skew young. But twenty-something men are more impulsive than fifty-something men and more likely to have a 23-year-old than a 57-year-old as a mate. And yes, unemployed men are more likely to kill or try to kill when dumped. But traits that make getting a job tough (being poorly educated, stupid, impulsive, psychotic …) can also incline a man to murder.

Keep in mind that Buss is a psychologist bending evolutionary theory to his own uses (which, presumably, could include future court testimony to support a defense of “my genes made me do it”), not a biologist explaining an adaptation.

Begley goes on to make a couple of other points against Buss’ thesis, and she deserves credit for her exposure of this incredibly stupid conjecture. However, there is one argument against the evolution of the mate-killing trait that she misses.

Successful evolutionary adaptations are usually shared by the majority of a species. Eyes, for instance, can be considered a successful trait in humans, as they are in most complex animals on earth. Most humans have eyes when they are born; those who do not or whose eyes are non-functional have difficulty leading an unassisted life. Opposable thumbs are a successful trait. Most people are born with them; some, myself included, have one or more missing or malformed thumbs. I can tell you, having two thumbs would be handy sometimes (sorry, I couldn’t resist).

Eyes and thumbs are dominant traits in humans, murder of a mate is not. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, but genetic defects occur all the time and they’re not treated by biologists as the norm. Buss’ treatment of evolution in this thesis is almost as confused as that of the intelligent design crowd. Rather than looking at humans in general and hypothesizing a process of evolution that reaches that point, he chooses an outlier subset of men and draws his conclusions about all men from that small sample.

Most humans will never kill another human. Most men will not kill their mates, no matter what the circumstances. Those who do are not considered acceptable to society at large in most cultures.

As Begley points out, some of the traits that make men unemployable are also linked to murderous urges. Certainly, many people are stupid, many are impulsive, many are psychotic, but even the average person fitting each of those descriptions is unlikely to commit murder. My wife’s family once had a (non-feral) cat that would lash out at anyone but my mother-in-law unprovoked, scaring another male cat of theirs twice his size, until the day he slashed my sister-in-law’s wrist so badly the tendon was exposed and they finally, tearfully, decided to put him down. That was a maladapted cat.

If evolutionary psychology wants to end up with more credibility than, say, phrenology, it must accept the same logical constrains as biological evolution. There’s no doubt that inherited physical differences in the brain can affect behavior. In all likelihood, some of the internal forces that would lead a man to murder his mate are related to differences in the makeup of his brain. That’s not the same thing as saying that mate-murder is an evolutionary adaptation of male humans in general, particularly since the act is statistically uncommon.

Perhaps Buss intends us to view those with a predilection to murder as a further evolution of the human species, like the X-Men. But it would seem to me that the numbers lie with the mass of non-murderous humanity, and that those of us who make it through our three score and ten without taking another’s life (and here I make exceptions for self-defense, public safety, combat, etc.) can consider murderers as lacking something that’s supposed to be there but isn’t quite right — sort of like my left thumb.