The nature of the catastrophe

If we just stuck to reading in our chosen fields we would be a sad bunch, wouldn’t we?

BTW Will Self has a review of MN in the latest Prospect. Made me want to read it.

“Reading all the philosophy, history, economics, social science isn’t enough? I just don’t see where you have the time to work all this fiction in as well. Maybe your tenure committee will see my point.”

Yo, you wind from nowhere, has it occured to you that some people:
– like to read for the sheer pleasure of it;
– can be inspired by the play of ideas in fiction as well in non-fiction;
– have “tenure committees” or some such beasties that appreciate academics who stretch their minds a bit; and
– can read without moving their lips.

Why not try a little Ballard yerself. Start with “War Fever”, an uncanny twist on the “Flypaper” strategy, written long before that that meme started getting peddled around.

I’ll bite quayle’s troll bait. The move from “its Ballard that gives rise to muddy thinking” to ” puts the reader into a state of ADD and prevents them from confronting the author and argument in a serious way” is itself an example of a muddy argument. First, there’s very little charity for the presumed reader. Second, he’s confronting the book as if it were a piece of scholarship, an impoverished view of literature. By no means does the engagement of ideas in scholarship signify its identification as scholarship any more than Shakespeare’s use of the four humors implies his engagement with the science and scholarship of his day. Third, without any evidence his position is as superficial as cultural criticism that adduces hip consumerism as the result of false consciousness induced by advertising. Fourth, by example, will reading Sherlock Holmes, with his superhuman observations make me fail to confront the realities of induction? Or even more absurd, will watching action movies with wire work leave me confused about physics? There’s a difference in kind here that is entirely ignored by quayle. I hope the lame insult in quayle’s most recent post is a sign of his exit.

Great post chris. As I was clicking on the comment button I was planning to post that while I have nothing insightful to say about the topic you’ve inspired me to start reading novels again. I have a list of the 100 best books of fiction as chosen by noted author’s that has been hanging on my wall for years (reproduced here) but I think I might take you up on Ballard.

Cheers,

Shai

Right. I clicked again to post that. I sometimes confuse you and Henry because you write on similar topics (politics, political philosophy, etc) that are greek to me, even if I enjoy reading them.

Shai, I’m not talking about the reader of Ballards book, I’m talking about the way Ballard reads the world. This is the ‘muddy thinking’ that picks off on argument with a first intuition, denies or fails to pay attention to its real content, and cannibalizes it for literary fame.

Quayle

Let me pretend for the sake of argument that you’re not a troll, and that you have a serious point. First of all, are you really claiming, as you seem to be (a) that fiction has no insights to offer into human society, and (b) that academics should be confined to reading academic works and academic works alone? Both of those arguments are self-evidently ridiculous. Second – no first string academics in the blogosphere? Why don’t you take yourself over to “Brad de Long’s”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/ site and check out what he’s been up to in the profession. Read through his postings over the last couple of months while you’re at it – he too seems to have an unfortunate tendency to be distracted by fiction. It doesn’t seem to have held him back much. I believe that Eugene Volokh may have a couple of academic accomplishments too; another academic who has the poor taste to read non-academic books. I mightn’t agree with much of Amitai Etzioni’s work – but he’s a major figure in the field. And those are just a few of the more obvious candidates.

Or perhaps you should just crawl back into your hole, and pull it back in after you. You’re not worth arguing with – and I don’t think you’re interested in argument anyway – just in provoking a response. Now you’ve gotten one. You are the weakest link. Goodbye.

Reading all the philosophy, history, economics, social science isn’t enough? I just don’t see where you have the time to work all this fiction in as well.

Philosophy, history, economics and social science are fiction. If you disagree, please provide mathematical proofs.

Loved Crytonomicon, but can see that not everyone would.

More to the point, though, the course that I always wanted to teach (but now won’t get to) would have juxtaposed works of fiction with works of political theory/philosophy. Essentially, both fiction writers and people like Hobbes or Rousseau or Marx or whomever are answering a particular kind of “what if?” question, and they all have to ground their answers in a set of assumptions about human nature, human possibility, etc. Lots of potential there, and I always thought it’d be a great way to introduce students to the concepts and analytic foundations of political theory. (For one example, Brave New World poses interesting problems precisely because its inhabitants really are pretty happy. They do work that they find satisfying, etc., and dissenters can always go off to the Falklands (!), which isn’t the same as being executed, for example.

Anyway, I do wish someone would teach that class . . .

>>I thought so too, until I read “The Kindness of Women”.

I hereby sentence “Quayle” to watching the film of Ballard’s “The Atrocity Exhibition” for a period not to exceed the remainder of Bush 1.5’s term.

Gotta wonder just what he thinks the “speculative” in speculative fiction’s about. Sometimes the best way to comment on the present is to use, in John Shirley’s phrase, “a mirror you can edit”.

ps: Good item on Disch a while back.