For web logs published in October 2015, click here.
‘Great
works, but despicable as human beings’
Should one still go ahead and read the work of an author (be it a novel, a play, a poem, an essay or whatever other literary form) after having found out that the person who wrote it indulged in behaviour that was ‘morally reprehensible’ (to use an understatement)?
On Sunday, I finished Bernard Werber's ‘La voie de la terre’ (The voice of the earth) and I decided to read a biographical outline of the English science-fiction writer H.G. Wells because one of the main characters of Mr Werber's novel is called David Wells. I had read H.G. Wells's The Time Machine and The Island of Dr Moreau as a teenager and I remembered these works fondly. So I was thinking that maybe I would pick up one of the works he wrote in the later part of his life. However, I was put off by the following passage in the Wikipedia entry on this author:
Personal life [...]
With his wife Jane's consent, Wells had affairs with a number of women, including the American birth control [my emphasis] activist Margaret Sanger, adventurer and writer Odette Keun, and novelist Elizabeth von Arnim.[19] In 1909 he had a daughter, Anna-Jane, with the writer Amber Reeves,[20] whose parents, William and Maud Pember Reeves, he had met through the Fabian Society; and in 1914 a son, Anthony West (1914–1987), by the novelist and feminist Rebecca West, 26 years his junior.[21]
In Experiment in Autobiography (1934), Wells wrote: "I was never a great amorist, though I have loved several people very deeply".[22]
[...] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells
Of course, there is this school of thought which says that, as texts, literary works stand on their own – i.e. literary works are independent of the lives of the authors who wrote them (this ‘deconstructionist’ approach went so far as claiming that the author was ‘dead’). However, I cannot seem to be able to ignore this aspect of Mr Wells's life. In this respect, I have become like a university classmate of mine, a Chinese Malaysian, who had shocked me in my uni days when he had told me that he would not read any of Ezra Pound's poetry (we were attending a seminar on modernism) because the latter was anti-Semitic.Maybe I ought to read instead Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, a study which lambasts some famous names for having failed in one way or the other as human beings (and which has been on my reading list for almost twenty years). ;-)
PS Interestingly, Mr Werber is also in favour of birth control and of a world government.
Link
Book review of Paul Johnson's Intellectuals: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/12/books/the-great-unwashed.html
Lausanne, 17th September 2015
‘Welcome to "Orwell-land"’
Even before Snowden's revelations I believed that computers and other electronic devices were the state's dream tools in that they would allow over-zealous bureaucrats working for a state's security apparatus to set up some very powerful control systems, in effect enabling Jeremy Bentham's nightmarish vision of a panopticon* to take hold in our societies. Very early this morning I came across this interesting piece of information in a (blog) post of the BBC (‘Who are these Russian fighters posting pics of themselves in Syria?’):
[...]
What can we tell from these photos? Well, many are geo-tagged - they
include location information.
[...]
But some of the photos are tagged with locations in Syria's huge Homs
province,
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-34188569
In other words, the meta information contained in our pictures reveal our whereabouts. This is not surprising because 1) many cameras now also have geolocation chips inside them; 2) many pictures are taken using mobile phones (which as we all know contain a geolocation chip in their ‘bellies’). Given that we have been conditioned to go ‘social’ (i.e. post pictures on FB, on blogs, etc), we are thus leaving traces of our whereabouts which are very useful for some (marketers, government agencies, employers, etc) and from which predictive patterns can be modelled (‘Modelling human mobility patterns using photographic data shared online’, 12th Aug 2015, http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/8/150046); in other words, we are what others infer we are or predict we are based on our posts and other meta data.
Last point, as I have to go now: to me, it looks like the USA and its British lackey are trying their best to condition us mentally for war against Russia; do you remember your Orwell? No? Hhmm, here is a reminder:‘War is peace.’, ‘Freedom is slavery.’, ‘Ignorance is strength.’
*
Lausanne, 10th September 2015
‘Apparently, H.G. Wells had already imagined it!’
Last week, I was left in a state close to dismay after having realised that calls for a world government were being made (or had been made) by intellectuals such as Jared Diamond (the author of Collapse), Jacques Attali (a prolific author, ex-presidential adviser and ex-banking head) and Bernard Werber (a sci-fi author who is among the top three best-selling authors writing in French) as I found it somewhat suspicious. So last night I was a little reassured when I came across the following passage in a book on nuclear accidents, or near misses, involving atomic weapons of massive destruction, Eric Schlosser's Command and Control:
The idea of an “atomic bomb”, like so many other technological innovations, had first been proposed by the science fiction writer H. G. Wells. In his 1914 novel The World Set Free, Wells describes the “ultimate explosive”, fuelled by radioactivity. It enables a single person to “carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city.” These atomic bombs threaten the survival of mankind, as every nation seeks to obtain them — and use them before being attacked. Millions die, the world’s great capitals are destroyed, and civilization nears collapse. But the novel ends on an optimistic note, as fear of a nuclear apocalypse leads to the establishment of world government. “The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities… shook them also out of their old established habits of thought”, Wells wrote, full of hope, on the eve of the First World War.
Page 37, I have added the italics and used UK English.
I shall definitely have to borrow a collected works of H.G. Wells's or read a biography written on that author as I have always admired his vast imaginative powers and exploration of subjects of a moral nature – e.g. the Morlocks and the Eloi in The Time Machine.
‘Electronic logbook’
I have decided to start the equivalent of a logbook in which I intend to record ideas which I feel warrant further development – but for which I do not have the time or the energy to do so in the form of a separate entry yet – or my own reactions to important events happening in the world or even in my own life. In short, a section that corresponds more to what a blog is supposed to be – as a reminder, the word comes from the combination of web and log; the latter in the sense of the systematic and regular recording of incidents or observations.
logbook
/0ˈlɒgbʊk/ noun. L17.
[ORIGIN from log noun¹ + book noun.]
1 Nautical. A book containing a detailed daily record of a ship's voyage
(including the rate of progress as indicated by the log); Aeronautics a
book in which particulars of aircraft flights, flying hours, etc., are
recorded; gen. any book containing a detailed record. L17.
Source: Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
I feel that by keeping an electronic logbook instead of writing single-page entries (which are convenient if one wants to develop an idea or a topic a little, but are also time consuming) I should gain in terms of responsiveness as well as benefit from the opportunity of exploring writing as an intermediate stage between note-jotting and fully-formed paragraph-based expository prose. Lastly, having a single repository for fleeting or half-formed trains of thought might offer some advantages over keeping them spread over numerous ‘.txt’, ‘.doc’, ‘.docx’ or ‘.odt’ files, which are causing my computer to suffer from a strange virus which I am tempted to describe as ‘file overload’:
Dare I mention
that I own several computers?
Lausanne,
9th September 2015
