warm fuzzy

I like being tagged for blog memes, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy. Thanks, Krister!

The game is:
Pick up the nearest book of at least 123 pages
Find page 123
Find the first 5 sentences
Post the next 3 sentences
Tag 5 people.

Attempt #1: Haraway's Modest_Witness displays a painting by Lynn Randolph, "Self-Consortium," on page 123. Haraway uses quite a lot of Randolph's work in this text. Randolph also produced the painting below, entitled "Cyborg," in response to Haraway's famous "Cyborg Manifesto."

So, attempt #2:

The third goal is to demonstrate what practical difference this counter discourse might make in respect to the formation and performance of Christian convictions within an emerging technoculture. This objective is completed in the final section by focusing on the central role of formative practices.

It was argued in the previous chapter that Christian theological claims about providence and anthropology are devoid of any meaningful content in the absence of eschatology.

My five: TKP, Mom, Em, Ally, Brent. Most of whom don't blog worth a damn anymore, but oh well.

Harry Potter and the posthuman

As we all know, Book 7 is due quite soon. Day after my birthday, in fact, which is really quite nice. So this post is a sort of anticipatory celebration.

Really it should be "Harry Potter and the part-human," but Rowling deals with it all: non-, part- and post-humanity. This theme has grown in the series right along with Harry, Hermione and Ron; as they have matured, this dark element of the wizarding world has become more and more prominently the source of the evil Voldemort represents.

It begins with a simple distinction between wizards and witches, and non-magic people: Muggles. It's not, I think, insignificant that we poor non-magical slobs have a label, though not necessarily mean-spirited (one can imagine it being said affectionately). But this divide is absolute. One is Muggle or magical; one lives in the Muggle world, blissfully or otherwise ignorant, or one lives in the entirely separate magical (=real) world as a witch or wizard.

Unless you're a Squib: the in-between people who do not inherit magical ability but who remain a part of the real world. That Rowling introduces this in-between category is indicative of her penchant for complexifying the initial simplicities of the early books. I like this.

What's interesting is that although these distinctions and categories and derogatory labels have real force, Muggles, Squibs and non-pure-blood wizards (as Rowling's term is clearly analogous to the n-word, which I cannot bring myself to say or write, I will avoid it as well) are all considered obviously human.

But not everyone is human. There are part-humans, including Hagrid, the centaurs, Lupin the werewolf, and vampires. And there are non-humans: goblins, giants, house-elves. What we begin to see most prominently in the fourth book, with Hermione's creation of S.P.E.W., is that there is a huge and until now mostly hidden problem in the wizarding world: the unquestioning assumption of the superiority of wizards over other kinds of beings.

And it is this very assumption that, carried to its logical conclusion, leads straight into the pure-blood mania that serves as the rhetorical appeal of Voldemort and his followers. The echoes of Hitler and Nazism are hard to miss.

But Voldemort tells Harry as early as the second book that he is no longer concerned with the goal of pure-blood wizard ethnic cleansing. Voldemort's real goal is the attainment of immortality. This ambition, and fear, is what makes Voldemort the posthuman figure. Human, for Voldemort, is synonomous with mortality, the enemy. And so all humans are to be despised--not simply mixed-blood wizards and Muggles, but everyone. He alone is the enlightened and powerful one.

What I would anticipate most about the seventh book is how the different threads of this theme will come together and prove to be the basic conflict between the Order and Voldemort and the Death Eaters, the thing that distinguishes the good from the bad: who is willing to accept the Other in all its varied forms, and who is determined to annihilate them?

on being savonarola

So, the Wild at Heart discussion over at KB's blog, and the related discussion here, prompt me to wonder--not about societally assigned gender roles, really, since I've been reading other stimulating material lately on that topic--but about the ethics of the disposal of books.

See, I own a lot of books. I also married into a lot of books. A lot plus a lot, is, well, a whole lot. So many that Clare's first word, and I assure you that now she most definitely means it, is "book." BooKKKK. Booooooooook! Book-ook. B-gook. Book!

Our books are important to us. They are for work and for play and for comfort and for personal betterment. They are advisors, friends, lullabies, nostalgia. But lurking among their ranks are traitors: books from the past which betray my former self, back before I started, you know, thinking about stuff. Shameful books. False friends and bad advisors. Books that keep me awake at night and remind me of aspects of my past I'd rather forget.

Brent used to turn the spines backwards on books he preferred to pretend weren't infiltrating our bookshelves (oddly, he has the same habit with old evangelical T-shirts; he still wears them--but inside out). Now, quite a lot of our books are boxed and in storage (displaced by the small but disproportionately powerful presence of Clare). Most of the shameful titles are therefore now safely tucked away out of sight in the perpetually damp storage space provided for use--at the tenant's own risk--in the basement: Book Hell. Our multiple copies of James Dobson's marriage book, all wedding gifts, are down there. Transforming Your Workplace for Christ--a random title I picked up at an estate sale for use as a resource of example text for a Christianity in Culture final exam a couple years ago, is down there. The Purpose-Driven Life, and workbook, are down there. Who Stole Feminism, which I wrote a book review of my first semester at Harding, is down there...back before I was a feminist.

I'd like to get rid of these books, I think. But how?

There's a dilemma in getting rid of the traitorous books of one's shameful past. What, exactly, can you do with them? You can't give them away to people you know--unless you want to try explaining 1) why you no longer want to be associated with that book and 2) why you think it's just perfect for them... Perhaps, then, you can sell it: at the annual PTS book sale, enormous and anonymous, or half.com. But then you think, wait. How can it be okay to give away a harmful book? And even worse, to make someone pay you for that harmful book?

Of course, there's always the bonfire option. But Fahrenheit 451 is not on my list of traitorous books.

"The Glove of Power" vs. "Power Glove"

This semester, I have my dream job: I get to read SF books, and then get together with other people and talk about them, and get paid for it. Oh, there are a couple things I'd change about this job if I could: 1) I'd make it permanent and 2) I'd pay myself a lot more. But really, to be paid at all for doing something you love and would do anyway...who can beat that?

One of the things we've discussed is, what is the difference between SF and fantasy literature? There are a lot of definitions floating around there proposed by critics who spend their time doing things like defining genres and getting paid for it. I guess that's their dream job. Or at least I suppose it pays the bills. But I have yet to read a definition that beats the distinction proposed by my OR friends: "When the title is 'The Glove of Power,' you know it's fantasy...when it's 'Power Glove,' it's SF."

As I child, I probably gravitated toward the fantasy end of the SF-fantasy spectrum. I read Narnia, of course, and L'Engle, and Lloyd Alexander's series, and Earthsea, McAffrey's Pern books, and a whole host of other things that were less worthy but equally enjoyable for a kid. I also read early Heinlein (Dad kept Stranger in a Strange Land out of my hands till high school) and later on Asimov. And as I got older I found myself gravitating more to SF. I still enjoy a good fantasy series, as long as the author has the sense enough to end the story well before it dies the death of a thousand wordy sequels. But it's SF that most often gets my mind going in the speculative directions I enjoy most.

I'm unsure why this is. It could perhaps simply be a personality thing, a quirk of temperament and preference. But it seems that fantasy, as genre, offers the same possibilities as a good SF story for exploring the matters that concern me most, both philosophical and socially critical. Perhaps the mode of exploration differs a bit; but in the creation of any alternate world, whether it is built on magical or technological systems of manipulating physical reality, there is the possibility of commentary on the sorry state of things as they are through the simple juxtaposition of the world of the text and the world of the reader. So why is it that I find this so much more often in SF than fantasy? Is fantasy inherently escapist? SF inherently realist?

While I'm at it, just for fun, here's a list of Heinlein novels that I read as a kid and still regularly re-read today, that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to anyone who enjoys a good SF yarn. In all of these are direct and indirect commentary on social matters such as education, sexual taboo and norms, systemic economic injustice, racial oppression, politics, gender, and religion; in all, a sense of both the potential and depravity of human beings. (Yes, depravity: I used the Presby word. I wonder why that might be.) Most of these are not terribly philosophical, except perhaps for the first, which asks some direct questions about criteria for life, sentience, and humanity.

1. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
2. Have Space Suit--Will Travel
3. Sixth Column
4. Citizen of the Galaxy
5. Podkayne of Mars
6. Tunnel in the Sky, Starship Troopers and Space Cadet