How Hegsethian heroes destroyed themselves and their entire civilisation

I haven’t yet seen the Odyssey film[1], but reviews mention a minor obsession of mine, the Late Bronze Age collapse and the ensuing Greek Dark Age. I first encountered this at the end of Ken McLeod’s Intrusion where the character Geena compares modern nihilists to the mysterious “city burners” responsible for the massive destruction of cities in the Eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BCE.

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Progressives scored a win over establishment Democrats in the Michigan primary election for Senator on Tuesday’s election. Abdul El-Sayed beat Haley Stevens by 1 point, despite many polls predicting that he would win by 7 or more. And Stevens beat him soundly in Wayne (Detroit), Oakland, and Macomb counties, where the most Democratic votes will be in the general election. Without getting blacks in Detroit on board, he is toast. And a defeat in the general for the candidate who campaigned on Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and ending aid to Israel would also support the argument of the establishment wing of the party, that progressive issues are too far left to win in Michigan, which features an almost exact 50-50 split between the Democrats and the GOP.

Yet on any issue other than Israel that would actually come up for a Senate vote, El-Sayed and Stevens would not vote much differently. Although El-Sayed throws off DSA vibes, he is not a member and calls himself a capitalist. I suspect that many of El-Sayed’s votes came from the considerable segment of Democrats who are upset with their party because it lacks “fight,” and are treating candidates who take what are seen as very progressive stances in an aggressive tone of voice as a proxy for being tough fighters. But that conflation is a serious mistake. It confuses a certain style of performative politics with having a real grasp of how to change things so that public policies that help ordinary people can be enacted.

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According to various sources, John Crowley has died. This probably means something to many of you: Crooked Timber readers are not a random draw even on the population of highly literate people. Those of you who don’t know who John Crowley was will likely have been indirectly affected by his work. If you read at all in the space where science fiction and fantasy meet literature, you’ll almost certainly have read someone who knew his books, and very likely loved them. Susanna Clarke said in her long ago Crooked Timber seminar that she too had read Little, Big, and I think that it shows. Her most recent book, Piranesi, draws on Borges’ Library of Babel, but I suspect that it was influenced too by the memory palaces that Crowley built on foundations laid by Dame Frances Yates.Ursula Le Guin described Little, Big as “a book that all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.” As James Hynes described Little, Big in the Boston Review.

it is a long, gorgeously written, picaresque family saga, in the last fifty pages of which all the major characters, with one heartbreaking exception, turn into fairies. I’ve read Little, Big four times now, and wept shamelessly each time over those last, extraordinary fifty pages, and over the years have purchased and given away fifteen copies of it (when I could find it–it is inconsistently in print). When “You’ll love this” isn’t recommendation enough, I have proceeded to claim (as I’m claiming here) that Little, Big is an Important American Novel that bears comparison to such works as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Nabokov’s Ada.

Me too, on the tears, the giveaways, and the importance. Every time I see a copy anywhere, I buy it, later to press upon some unsuspecting person who seems a likely prospect. I could keep going. Kim Stanley Robinson admires Crowley’s non-f/sf book about Roosevelt’s dream of industrial America, Four Freedoms. Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch owes nearly as much to Crowley as it does to Narnia, and at one point practically quotes the thesis of Crowley’s extraordinary long story, “Great Work of Time.”

I don’t mourn Crowley because of his influence on others, but because of how his writing shaped me. I mention his work often in my own writing, but have never talked about it in its own right. What Crowley wrote is too deeply and intimately entwined with my sense of my own self to to be able to view it from the outside.

When I think about Little, Big, I remember being twenty-one, walking up the hill from work to my family’s house in a small town in Tipperary in Ireland. I had bounced off the book the first time I read it, but for some reason felt pulled back to try again, and read and re-read it, falling in love with it as I have never fallen in love with a book before or since. Walking up the road on a temperate summer afternoon, thinking about the book and how it folded back into the world and itself, felt like a quiet explosion of joy in my chest.

When I think about Aegypt, it is a memory from a year earlier, taking a long train ride from New York to Toronto to visit friends, and rounding a bend to see what was obviously the original for Butterman’s castle. Decades later, when I read “This Is Our Town,” collected in the small Totalitopia volume, it seemed to me a version of my own childhood, transplanted to a small American town; an ordinary Catholic boyhood, whose suffusions of the supernatural painstakingly captured with the apparatus of the fantasy genre.

I got to know Crowley very slightly via email, as he wrote his final book, Flint and Mirror, which was set in Ireland before and during Hugh O’Neill’s rebellion. It was a bitter war. My and Maria’s ancestor Turloch Breasalach was a contender against Hugh for the O’Neillship. Our family tree records that out of twelve sons that Turloch Breasalach had alive at the beginning of the Elizabethan wars, only three were surviving at the end of it. Crowley wanted to use the book to talk about colonialism. The brutal war and its aftermath set some of the parameters for what Britain did later in other parts of the world. John Dee, who appeared in Flint and Mirror as well as several other Crowley novels, was not just a wizard but an imperial propagandist.

There’s a single word in Flint and Mirror that I helped shape; a tiny return for the way in which Crowley’s work shaped me. The wave that sinks a ship in the last part of the book is the third wave, because in Donegal folklore, the third wave was the fairy wave. I passed that on to Crowley from a story that my and Maria’s grandaunt Maire MacNeill translated from Irish, “The Knife Against the Wave.” Since Crowley loved fairytales as well as writing them, here is that one. I will miss his writing very much.

The Knife Against the Wave

Long ago a fine able handsome man named Séimín Rua was living at Baile Mór. He and his crew went out fishing with lines to Cúl Fastó an Chladaigh Bháin, a fishing ground in Donegal Bay.

The day changed and the sea rose and it seemed they would be wrecked. Séimín was in the stern of the boat and saw a monstrous wave coming at them. He pulled off one of his shoes and threw it out against the danger. Before long he saw a second wave coming at them: he pulled off his other shoe and threw it out and the sea calmed a little but this was only a short respite. It was not long until the third wave of the sea rose at them and each one of the seven thought that this one surely would drown them. There was a big bait-knife stuck in behind the stern-seat. Séimín caught hold of it and threw it against the danger. No sooner had he done so than the sea fell and became as smooth as a board.

They came home then drenched to the skin and when they reached the shore their families were there waiting for them for they thought by the way the day had changed and the sea had risen they would never see them again. No wonder there was great rejoicing for them. When they had divided whatever fish they had caught and moored the boat they all went home.

Well and good. When darkness fell Séimín was sitting beside the fire, his soles to the warmth, all the neighbours in and he telling them about the hard day they had had. With that, there was a bang on the door. Someone went to open it and who was standing on the threshold but a rider on a white horse! The rider asked if Séimín was within and was told he was. The rider called from the door:

“Séimín,” he said, “I would be very thankful if you would come with me to such a place to pull out the knife you cast into my sister’s heart today!”

Séimín recognized immediately what kind he was. “I will not go out the door on such a journey unless you promise me that neither you nor any of your kind will ever harm me or anyone belonging to me.” “I promise you that,” said the rider, “and I promise you as well that you will be left back home safe and sound before daybreak tomorrow.”

Séimín went with the rider and he neither heard nor saw anything until the white horse came to shore on the Red Strand at Mullaghmore in Connacht. The horse continued on to a crag at the top of the strand where a door opened into the hill and the horse entered. Before long they reached the finest castle Séimín had ever seen. The rider tethered the horse and led Séimín inside. They went upstairs and he was taken into a room where a girl was lying. The bait-knife he had thrown against the dangerous wave was stuck in under her heart and she was screaming with pain.

“Come here,” she said, “and pull this knife out of my heart!”

“I will do that willingly,” said Séimín, “if you promise me you will never harm me or anyone belonging to me.”

“I promise you that,” she said.

Séimín drew out the knife and she was healed. “Why did you try to drown us today?” asked Séimín. “Because I am in love with you and would like to have you for myself.”

“And you were going to drown the whole crew because of me!” “I was,” she said. “I would do anything in the world to get you for myself.”

“Well, you won’t get me,” said Séimín. “I must be on my way home.”

The rider of the white horse was standing at the door waiting for Séimín who mounted behind him, and the horse never stopped until he was left at the door of his own house. The rider bade him farewell and Séimín saw him no more from that day until the day of his death.

A friend on facebook says that Hamnet contains a pretty serious error — naming the Costwolds the Chilterns (or, pretty much equivalently, mislocating the Chilterns between Stratford and Oxford). I’m not sure that would ruin the book for me, but I definitely would find it annoying (knowing both areas very well makes it worse, but even if I didn’t know them!).

My, recent, error/irritation, was in the film Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer meets Jean Tatlock at a cocktail party and one of them (I forget which) almost immediately attributes the slogan “Property is theft” to Marx; the other (again, I forget which one) agrees that Marx said it. I then spent the rest of the movie wondering whether it was the characters, or the screenwriters, that made the error. If its the characters that tells us something quite interesting about them: they are basically poseurs, or at least posing in this context where they are also flirting, and (probably) one of them is refraining from correcting the other (for whatever reason, perhaps connected to flirting). It’s not out of the realms of possibility that someone who worked for the CPUSA at the time (as, I gather, Tatler did) would get this wrong, still less that she endorse a flirtee’s error. But… if it’s the characters who are in error surely the screenwriters know that the vast majority of the audience won’t pick up on the implication, and the tiny fraction of the audience that know Marx and Proudhon will likely spend some substantial part of the movie puzzling about exactly what I was (and still am, slightly, puzzled about). Why would they do that? So… I was tempted to conclude that it was a screenwriter error. But… did nobody who read the script catch it? Are they all really that ignorant? And then I thought of all the people I knew who went into that industry (surprisingly many, including someone who was nominated at a young age for the Academy Award for best director) and think, yes, they really might all be that ignorant. And then I thought, ah, but the only actual Academy Award winner I’ve ever known was a lifelong Trotskyist, and he would have caught it. But, of course, he was a Trotskyist, not a Communist (which returned me to realization that someone working for the CPUSA in the 30’s might well have made the error). [1]

My conclusion is that it was a screenwriters mistake. But: would you like to contribute other examples of errors like these two that have puzzled and/or irritated you?

[1] Ok, since I’m in a flippant mood today, I’ll share this one… I watch a lot of cricket through Willow TV, and in recent weeks I have been inundated a particular ad for the Tom Tiffany for Governor of Wisconsin campaign which, evidently, thinks that people watching Pakistan v West Indies test matches in Madison are fair game. His ad starts out by saying “This is not your grandparents’ Democrat Party. Or your parents'” and shows a picture of Saunders, AOC, and a couple of Democratic Party Governor candidates with, I kid you not, a hammer and sickle. My first thought was to wonder which voters are triggered by a hammer and sickle, and my second, quite seriously, was to wonder whether he is trying to convey the (true, as he no doubt knows) thought that whereas there were lots of Communists in “your grandparents'” Democratic Party (nearly every Communist I knew in LA in the 1980s was a Democrat, and nearly every Democrat I knew was some sort of Stalinist, because those were the circles within which I moved), not one of the people depicted in his ad is one. Obviously not.

So there was a modest puff of articles last month about astronomers discovering “the edge of the galaxy”.  They were referencing this recent paper, which… doesn’t really say that.  But it’s an interesting paper anyway, so let’s discuss.

As we all learned back in school, our Sun is one star in the Milky Way galaxy, which is a flat spiral containing several hundred billion stars.  And spiral galaxies don’t exactly have an “edge”.  We can’t see the details of the Milky Way, because we’re inside it.  But we have excellent photographs of thousands of other spiral galaxies, and they mostly sort of gradually blur off into intergalactic space.



So if you travelled outwards from Earth, away from the center of the Milky Way, there wouldn’t be any sudden cutoff where stars just stopped.  Stars would gradually get further and further apart.  At some point, there wouldn’t be any stars anywhere near you. 

But there wouldn’t be any “edge” as such.  No glowing purple force field —

— or golden pillars or anything.


What the paper actually found was the edge of the star-forming region of the galaxy.  And that’s a different kind of interesting.

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In the final comment on my most recent CT post, John Q strategically grants a premise from an earlier comment by poster Matt: John Q grants that “it’s perfectly plausible that the number of US golfers exceeds the population of Australia.” This was not a concession to Matt’s main point, as John Q goes on to point out that it’s “highly unlikely that this fact contributes much in way of meeting people from very different social networks.”

Rather than bringing us back into the substance of this disagreement, I want to go off about something entirely different. As you’ll soon see, I’m far out of my depths on this one.

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The producerist vision of AI seems to assume an endlessly expanding market for reading. And reading. Well. It is rather more than a market.

Warning: this post is a little more sweary than usual. If that bothers you, maybe read something else.

We read aloud in our household. A lot.

We always have.

When my daughter was five years old (she’s now 26) she and I once squished into a beanbag and read Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen aloud. When we got to the end of the story I realised to my horror that we were so absorbed that it was her bed time and we (OK, responsible adult here, I) had forgotten we also needed to cook and eat dinner.

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A number of commenters noted a malware problem with the site.It appears to be a well known attack called ClickFix.

It’s now fixed, thanks again to Doctor Memory

My son Daniel points me to a piece by Nate Silver which announces the discovery that highly educated workers with low or precarious income are the natural constituency of the Democratic Socialists of America. We’ve been over this at length at CT, starting as far back as 2012 (and it wasn’t new then). Given that Silver treats the question as new, I thought it might be useful to restate the basic points from this discussion.

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I love Rory Stewart’s memoir about being a politician; its one of the best books I’ve read about British politics. Among his many observations about the dysfunctionality of government is that ministers typically know nothing about their briefs prior to taking their jobs, and don’t stay in post long enough to get any command. There may be worse examples than Education, but I doubt it. The advice is to the newest Secretary of State for Education is simple: before you do anything significant read my dad’s last book, and spend a week talking to some of your predecessors (particular recommendations below).

Now some facts:

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I just learned about The Fandom and Social Connection Initiative and I’m intrigued. The idea is to study the possibility that sports fandom can be an antidote to the “connection recession,” as traditional “third places”—like churches, civic organizations, and bowling leagues—play a diminishing role in our lives. The researchers think their early findings suggest that sports fandom can motivate people to connect, including connecting across racial, economic, and political divides.

Here’s an excerpt from this article, in which one of the studies is described:

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… to CT reader and commenter Dr Memory, who has cleaned up our database, eliminating many of the badly rendered quotation marks and similar problems. Those problems reflect the fact that the blog is now more than 20 years old, and has gone through multiple formatting systems.

An unexpected side benefit is that commenters can now use emojis, which weren’t even available in Unicode when CT started out.

I enjoy reading over our old posts and discussions, and will enjoy it more now that they are properly readable.

Thanks again, Dr M.