The most recent episode of South Park mocks inconsiderate f–––––s:
I wasn’t expecting them to run with the whole question of what The F Word — not the F word, the other one — even means, but they handled it well — dialing the vulgarity to 11, yes, but also including some nuanced subtext.
In Serial Killers, Steve Sailer discusses the precursors to modern serial dramas like Mad Men:
In its time, thirtysomething was probably the best written and certainly the most realistic show on television (my twentysomething new bride and I watched it wide-eyed as we learned what was in store for us). For a few years, it had a limited but lucrative yupscale demographic enthralled over whether Michael and Hope would be able to make their marriage work and other questions that seemed a lot more interesting at the time than they do now. (At this point, I can mostly just remember Miles Drentell, the ruthless Sun Tzu-quoting CEO of the trendy ad agency where Michael worked.)The downside of “And then what happens?” is that the answer usually turns out to be “A whole bunch of stuff.” While satisfying at the time, serials tend to be consumable only once. For example, although thirtysomething was immediately influential within the entertainment industry, it was almost forgotten by the public once its run was over in 1991. (It wasn’t even released on DVD until this year).
A reaches back to some even earlier precursors to such “novelistic” shows — actual novels:
Novelists have given up publishing their works in installments, even though that was hugely profitable for numerous 19th Century novelists, such as Charles Dickens. His books were typically serialized in 20 monthly installments of 32 pages of text and 16 pages of advertising. The protracted death of Little Nell in Dickens’ serialization of The Old Curiosity Shop turned into an ongoing international tragedy. At New York’s piers in 1841, American fans would shout out to docking boats from England, “Is Little Nell alive?”Tom Wolfe, who had long denounced 20th-century literary fiction for not showing us The Way We Live Now (an Anthony Trollope novel that was, of course, serialized), published his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, in 27 installments in Rolling Stone in 1984–1985. Jan Wenner paid him $200,000 for the rights, and the pressure forced the vastly ambitious Wolfe past the writer’s block he had developed after spending years hinting broadly that one of these days he was going to show all living novelists how fiction should be written.
Unfortunately, Bonfire didn’t make much of a splash in Rolling Stone … because it wasn’t very good. It was a first draft, and Wolfe’s first drafts turned out not to be as good as Dickens’s had been. Moreover, there are obvious problems inherent in going public with the beginning before you’ve written the ending. (This has been a particular conundrum for American TV serial dramas because the writers don’t even know how many years the show will run. Thus, they tend to start strong and peter out. In Britain, however, fixed durations serials are more common.)
Wolfe then rewrote Bonfire after doing the additional research necessary to change his protagonist’s career from Wolfe’s lazy initial choice — writer — to a much more timely and under-publicized one — bond-trader. Revised, Bonfire became a huge bestseller. A long string of subsequent real-life incidents all the way up through the Duke lacrosse rape hoax that seem like plot twists out of Wolfe’s tale of the hunt for “the Great White Defendant” has cemented its status as the Great American Novel of the 1980s.
Sam Anderson describes Mrs. Logic with verve:
Whenever Ayn Rand met someone new — an acolyte who’d traveled cross-country to study at her feet, an editor hoping to publish her next novel — she would open the conversation with a line that seems destined to go down as one of history’s all-time classic icebreakers: “Tell me your premises.” Once you’d managed to mumble something halfhearted about loving your family, say, or the Golden Rule, Rand would set about systematically exposing all of your logical contradictions, then steer you toward her own inviolable set of premises: that man is a heroic being, achievement is the aim of life, existence exists, A is A, and so forth — the whole Objectivist catechism. And once you conceded any part of that basic platform, the game was pretty much over. She’d start piecing together her rationalist Tinkertoys until the mighty Randian edifice towered over you: a rigidly logical Art Deco skyscraper, 30 or 40 feet tall, with little plastic industrialists peeking out the windows — a shining monument to the glories of individualism, the virtues of selfishness, and the deep morality of laissez-faire capitalism. Grant Ayn Rand a premise and you’d leave with a lifestyle.Stated premises, however, rarely get us all the way down to the bottom of a philosophy. Even when we think we’ve reached bedrock, there’s almost always a secret subbasement blasted out somewhere underneath. William James once argued that every philosophic system sets out to conceal, first of all, the philosopher’s own temperament: that pre-rational bundle of preferences that urges him to hop on whatever logic-train seems to be already heading in his general direction. This creates, as James put it, “a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned?…?What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great universe of God. What it is — and oh so flagrantly! — is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is.”
No one would have been angrier about this claim, and no one confirms its truth more profoundly, than Ayn Rand. Few fellow creatures have had a more intensely odd personal flavor; her temperament could have neutered an ox at 40 paces. She was proud, grouchy, vindictive, insulting, dismissive, and rash. (One former associate called her “the Evel Knievel of leaping to conclusions.”) But she was also idealistic, yearning, candid, worshipful, precise, and improbably charming. She funneled all of these contradictory elements into Objectivism, the home-brewed philosophy that won her thousands of Cold War–era followers and that seems to be making some noise once again in our era of bailouts and tea parties. (Glenn Beck and Ron Paul are Rand fans; Alan Greenspan, once a member of her inner circle, had his faith in the market’s rationality shaken by the crash.)
It’s easy to chuckle at Rand, smugly, from the safe distance of intervening decades or an opposed ideology, but in person — her big black eyes flashing deep into the night, fueled by nicotine, caffeine, and amphetamines — she was apparently an irresistible force, a machine of pure reason, a free-market Spock who converted doubters left, right, and center. Eyewitnesses say that she never lost an argument. One of her young students (soon to be her young lover) staggered out of his first all-night talk session referring to her, admiringly, as “Mrs. Logic.” And logic, in Rand’s hands, seemed to enjoy superpowers it didn’t possess with anyone else. She claimed, for instance, that she could rationally explain every emotion she’d ever had. “Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive,” she once wrote, “and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.” One convert insisted that “she knows me better after five hours than my analyst does after five years.” The only option was to yield or stay away. (I should admit here my own bias: I was a card-carrying Objectivist from roughly age 16 to 19, during which time I did everything short of changing my last name to Randerson — a phase I’m deeply embarrassed by, but also secretly grateful for.)
Rand insisted, over and over, that the details of her life had nothing to do with the tenets of her philosophy. She would cite, on this subject, the fictional architect Howard Roark, hero of her novel The Fountainhead: “Don’t ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think.” But the things she thought, it turns out, were very much dependent on her family, her childhood, her friends, and her feelings — or at least on her relative lack of all that.
Anne Heller’s new biography, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, allows us to poke our heads, for the first time, into the Russian-American’s overheated philosophical subbasement. After reading the details of Rand’s early life, I find it hard to think of Objectivism as very objective at all — it looks more like a rational program retrofitted to a lifelong temperament, a fantasy world created to cancel the nightmare of a terrifying childhood. This is the comedy, the tragedy, and the power of Rand: She built a glorious imaginary empire on that nuclear-grade temperament, then devoted every ounce of her will and intelligence to proving it was all pure reason.
This anecdote says so much:
Toward the end of her life, Rand listened as a prominent psychologist stood onstage and dismissed her fictional heroes — those idealized steel barons and physicists and composers — as implausible. Soon she’d had enough and stood up in the crowd, outraged.“Am I unreal?” she shouted. “Am I a character who can’t possibly exist?”
She intended this, one suspects, as a refutation. It strikes me as maybe the most profound question she ever raised.
A few years ago, Steve Sailer tried out Pandora, the “Music Genome Project” for Internet radio — which does not recommend songs based on shared tastes but rather relies on experts’ assessments of songs across 250 factors — and found that it worked pretty well:
But one response was off: I put in Revolution Rock by the Clash, which isn’t a rock song at all, but a lazy, joyous reggae ramble. Pandora came back with the punk Career Opportunities by the Clash, which suggests that one of their employees had cut corners and categorized Revolution Rock by title rather than by music.
Anyway, a recent New York Times Magazine piece shares this anecdote:
[Pandora CEO Paul Westergren] likes to tell a story about a Pandora user who wrote in to complain that he started a station based on the music of Sarah McLachlan, and the service served up a Celine Dion song. “I wrote back and said, ‘Was the music just wrong?’ Because we sometimes have data errors,” he recounts. “He said, ‘Well, no, it was the right sort of thing — but it was Celine Dion.’ I said, ‘Well, was it the set, did it not flow in the set?’ He said, ‘No, it kind of worked — but it’s Celine Dion.’ We had a couple more back-and-forths, and finally his last e-mail to me was: ‘Oh, my God, I like Celine Dion.’ ”This anecdote almost always gets a laugh. “Pandora,” he pointed out, “doesn’t understand why that’s funny.”
A basic problem that you can’t get around in Pandora:
If you like a song not so much because of the style but because it’s an expert execution of a style, then Pandora isn’t as good as a recommendation site.
Pandora performs a sort of factor analysis on your musical tastes, Sailer notes — although he layers quite a bit of his own “insight” on top of it:
Listening to these songs that I picked out a few years ago plus other ones similar to them, I would say I have post-British Empire upper middle class public schoolboy tastes in music. This may seem odd, but my tastes in songs would seem most natural for a Scottish or northern English lad at a southern English boarding school for toffs, or maybe at Sandhurst, the military academy.
[...]
Very strange, but it also fits a lot of my taste in authors as well (Waugh, Orwell, Wodehouse, etc.). I now remember how much I liked David Niven’s autobiography, who was a Sandhurst grad. And the autobiography of Churchill, another public schoolboy/Sandhurst man.So, it’s no surprise that The Clash were always my favorites. After all, Joe Strummer, despite his appalling teeth, was an upper middle class public schoolboy whose dad, a friend of Kim Philby’s, was a diplomat (i.e., spy) for the fading British Empire.
You could use Pandora’s database for scholarly purposes, he suggests:
For example, T.S. Eliot pointed out that an artist creates his own “school” of predecessors that nobody noticed had anything in common before. For example, I’ve always felt that the ancestors of the punk rock of 1976 included from the 1968 to 1973 era: Communication Breakdown by Led Zeppelin, Paranoid by Black Sabbath, and Saturday Night’s All Right for Fighting by Elton John, three songs that sounded like they have more in common after you’d heard the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and Clash than before. This giant proprietary database would presumably allow those kind of academic hypotheses to be tested objectively.
Barnes & Noble is set to reveal its new Kindle competitor next week, Gizmodo says, with a black-and-white e-ink screen and a color multitouch screen, like an iPhone — all in a Reardon-metal frame, if the photos are to be believed. And it should run the Randroid OS.
(The sample page is from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.)
The creative team from Sesame Street presents Mad Men — and sad men, and happy men:
Larry Gonick — whom Bryan Caplan calls Gonick the Great — has finished his “magisterial” five-volume cartoon history of the universe:
Gonick’s masterpiece has many virtues: It’s full of facts and wisdom, horror and humor. It treats the Great Butchers and Useless Idiots of history with the respect they deserve. It’s multi-cultural in the good sense: He impartially covers a wide variety of human cultures, and spares no sacred cows. He’s a master of the Entertaining Aside, as well as what Tullock calls the “open secrets” of history.Gonick’s one-two punch of pictures and words isn’t just a gimmick; it makes it much easier to remember the facts of history. If we really wanted kids (or adults!) to learn history, we’d throw away our textbooks, and teach Gonick. Everyone from kindergarteners to Ph.D.s can enjoy his cartoon histories — they’re The Simpsons of history. Seriously — I read these books to my sons when they were in kindergarten, and they couldn’t get enough.
They could be better though:
Gonick barely mentions the three amazing and almost unprecedented facts of the last two centuries: The doubling of life expectancy, the six-fold increase in population, and (by conservative estimates) the ten-fold increase in per-capita income. Sure, he talks a little about industrialization, new technology, and cheaper stuff. But he doesn’t notice that a billion human beings now live better than the emperors of Rome.None of this is a political point — Brad DeLong will tell you the same thing. But I confess that I’m also unhappy with Gonick’s leftist economics. He makes snide references to free trade, without even considering that free trade might really be an important reason for rapid progress. And he writes about 19th-century socialists’ critique of industrialization as if they had a point. They didn’t. The socialists were lashing out at the greatest thing that ever happened to mankind — and when they seized power, they proved to be the kind of bloodthirsty tyrants Gonick exposed in his earlier volumes.
The source of his blind spot, perhaps, is his historian’s sense that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Gonick’s so used to conquerors’ phony rationalizations that he assumes that free-market policies are just the latest window dressing for plunder.
Sinclair Lewis possessed the Cold Eye, and this, John Derbyshire argues, made him more conservative than he would have admitted:
The one organ indispensable to a social novelist — much more so than, for example, a brain — is the Cold Eye: the ability to see one’s characters in all their folly and self-absorption, from a detached point of view — and yet with cynicism kept always at bay by some tenderness and a little envy. In that respect, at least, Sinclair Lewis was a great social novelist, which is of course a much higher thing than a mere satirist. The Cold Eye is everywhere in his books: he could not be sentimental if he wanted to — which, of course, he didn’t.The passage I always remember in Main Street is the one where Carol decides that:
[I]n the history of the pioneers was the panacea for Gopher Prairie, for all of America. We have lost their sturdiness, she told herself. We must restore the last of the veterans to power and follow them on the backward path to the integrity of Lincoln, to the gaiety of settlers dancing in a saw-mill … This smug in-between town, which had exchanged ‘Money Musk’ for phonographs grinding out ragtime, it was neither the heroic old nor the sophisticated new. Couldn’t she somehow, some yet unimagined how, turn it back to simplicity?She therefore seeks out the Perrys, elderly survivors from the pioneer days when the town was founded.
Their heroism and simplicity, however, seen up close, repel her. The Perrys are, in fact, narrow-minded fundamentalists who believe that: “What we need is to get back to the true Word of God, and a good sound belief in hell, like we used to have it preached to us … All socialists ought to be hanged … People who make more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundred are wicked …”
Carol’s hero-worship dwindled to polite nodding, and the nodding dwindled to a desire to escape, and she went home with a headache.There is endless scope for sentimentality in a passage like that one: sentimentality of all sorts, from Old Left romanticizing of the hardihood and courage of common folk to New Left tongue-clicking about the wickedness of white Christians pushing aside colorful, soulful aborigines. Lewis succumbs to none of the available temptations. He shows the pioneers as they undoubtedly were, and sends his sentimental heroine home with a headache.
As a child of the Midwest himself, Lewis knew of course that the nation could not have been made without the dull-witted, slightly fanatical sturdiness of the pioneers. He lets you know it, too. This is the America that is, that we must somehow come to terms with, as Carol eventually comes to terms, somehow, with her town and her marriage, as George Babbitt comes to terms with his city and his work. For those of us who think that wishful thinking is the defining characteristic of the Left, Sinclair Lewis is a friendly spirit.
Sergey Brins argues for a library to last forever:
Because books published before 1923 are in the public domain, I am able to view them easily.But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down.
Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to deteriorate slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon — a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report, published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.
Because books are such an important part of the world’s collective knowledge and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first proposed that we digitize all books a decade ago, when we were a fledgling startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and challenging a project that we were unable to attract anyone to work on it. But five years later, in 2004, Google Books (then called Google Print) was born, allowing users to search hundreds of thousands of books. Today, they number over 10 million and counting.
[...]
In the Insurance Year Book 1880-1881, which I found on Google Books, Cornelius Walford chronicles the destruction of dozens of libraries and millions of books, in the hope that such a record will “impress the necessity of something being done” to preserve them. The famous library at Alexandria burned three times, in 48 B.C., A.D. 273 and A.D. 640, as did the Library of Congress, where a fire in 1851 destroyed two-thirds of the collection.I hope such destruction never happens again, but history would suggest otherwise. More important, even if our cultural heritage stays intact in the world’s foremost libraries, it is effectively lost if no one can access it easily. Many companies, libraries and organizations will play a role in saving and making available the works of the 20th century. Together, authors, publishers and Google are taking just one step toward this goal, but it’s an important step. Let’s not miss this opportunity.
Of course, his real goal is to present Google’s legal dealings in the best possible light:
This agreement aims to make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or for free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing back to the rights holders, be they authors or publishers.Some have claimed that this agreement is a form of compulsory license because, as in most class action settlements, it applies to all members of the class who do not opt out by a certain date. The reality is that rights holders can at any time set pricing and access rights for their works or withdraw them from Google Books altogether. For those books whose rights holders have not yet come forward, reasonable default pricing and access policies are assumed. This allows access to the many orphan works whose owners have not yet been found and accumulates revenue for the rights holders, giving them an incentive to step forward.
Others have questioned the impact of the agreement on competition, or asserted that it would limit consumer choice with respect to out-of-print books. In reality, nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns. Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.
Reviewing four of Jules Verne’s later works leads John Derbyshire to question his title as the father of science fiction:
You could make a case, in fact, that Verne was not really interested in science at all, so much as in technology. Certainly he was a magpie for curious technological and biological factoids, and had a fairly good head for numbers. The imaginative side of science, though — the side that actually propels science forward — was a thing he had no acquaintance with. I am sure he would have been baffled by Vladimir Nabokov’s remark about “the precision of the artist, the passion of the scientist.” The great pure-science advances of his time made no impression on him. I do not know of anything in Verne’s works that would be different if Maxwell’s equations had not appeared in 1865. About Darwin’s theory he seems to have been utterly confused, employing a sort of crude pop-Darwinism in books like The Aerial Village (1901), yet declaring himself “entirely opposed to the theories of Darwin” in an interview he gave at about the same time. This was not likely an opposition based on religious belief. Though he always, when asked, described himself as a “believer,” this was part of the bourgeois façade that Verne chose to live behind after some youthful dabbling in la vie Bohème. He actually gave up attending Mass in the 1880s, and probably died an agnostic.Though a gifted storyteller, in fact, at any rate in his early years, Verne had not sufficient powers of imagination, or scientific understanding, to rise to true science fiction. Here the contrast with his much younger (by 39 years) competitor for the “father of science fiction” title, H.G. Wells, is most striking. The concept of a fourth dimension, for example, first took mathematical form in the 1840s. By 1870 it was, according to the mathematician Felix Klein, part of “the general property of the advancing young generation [of mathematicians].” Wells grasped the imaginative power of this notion and used it to produce one of the greatest of all science fiction stories, The Time Machine (1895). Verne never used it at all, and would probably have found the notion of a fourth dimension absurd.
Gifted storytellers are rare enough that we should welcome them when they appear, especially if they have a strong appeal to young readers. The Mollweide projection of the earth’s surface in my grandfather’s 1922 Atlas-Guide to the British Commonwealth of Nations and Foreign Countries still has a jagged blue-ballpoint line running across it, made by the hand of a fascinated small boy circa 1956, to trace the progress of Phileas Fogg on his eighty-day journey. The point of science fiction, however, is something more than to offer engrossing narrative. As was stated by Kingsley Amis in his survey of the field (New Maps of Hell, 1960), science fiction exists “to arouse wonder, terror, and excitement” in its readers. Verne rose to this challenge once or twice in his early books, but it is not met, nor even glimpsed, in these four Wesleyan translations of later works.
“Father of Tech Fi” is a title for which I would rate Verne a very strong contender. One of the blurbs on the Wesleyan edition of The Mighty Orinoco, taken from the New York Times, calls Verne “the Michael Crichton of the 19th century,” which I think is very precise, and conveys the same idea. True science fiction, however, began twenty years later than the masterpieces of Verne’s youth, and on the other side of the English Channel. I can’t say that I found it visible at all in these four later books of Verne’s.
Behold the original Muppet Show pitch reel — which failed to sell the show to any American networks:
This edited version, which appears on the season-one DVD set, lacks the punch-line:
After Leo’s powerful speech, Kermit appears from off-screen against a CBS logo and shrugs, “What the hell was that all about?”
There are actually two quite distinct kinds of historical novel, John Derbyshire explains — hard and soft:
On the one hand the writer of historical fiction may attempt to capture the inner life and motivations of some real and well-documented historical figure. Robert Graves’s Claudius novels offer outstanding examples of this “hard” sub-genre. Our author might, on the other hand, center his story on some invented person, who is then let loose amidst historical scenery: think of Gone With the Wind or Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories. (As a slight variant of this “soft” sub-genre, the same thing can be done with a historical figure sufficiently obscure he might as well be an invention.)The “hard” sub-genre is less often attempted because it is much more difficult to pull off. To give a convincing account of the thoughts and emotions of, say, Charlemagne, you need to do a great deal of research into the man, his family, friends and colleagues. You also need a good understanding of human types, an imaginative appreciation of people who may be quite unlike yourself. This combination of diligence and insight is not often found among fiction writers, who tend if anything to be more lazy and self-obsessed than the human average. “Soft” historical fiction, on the other hand, can be tackled by anybody, including the kind of novelist whose central characters are really nothing more than self-impersonations. It is, in fact, rather amusing to imagine oneself wandering around in old Carthage or fighting at Manzikert. Probably anyone who has contemplated fiction writing at all has had the urge to write a book of this sort; and it is plain from the proliferation of low-grade “bodice-rippers” that lots of people want to read such books.
The parallel to science fiction is clear:
Science fiction fans like to speak of the “sense of wonder.” Kingsley Amis, for instance, said that the purpose of science fiction is “to arouse wonder, terror and excitement.” Some similar sense is stimulated by good historical fiction. To think that this person actually lived! (Or, in the case of the “soft” style: To think that some such person probably lived!) Everyone who has reached middle age has a sense of the remoteness and strangeness of life even a scant few decades ago. Children in iron lungs; drama on the radio; having your feet X-rayed in the shoe store; people smoking cigarettes all the time, everywhere. How much odder things were a century before that! And a millennium? Two millennia? Even to try to imagine such worlds one needs help. The writer of historical fiction supplies that help.Yet ultimately historical fiction is, like all art, an illusion. Here are people just like us: same facial features, same limbs, their desires and hates arising from the same springs as ours. And yet their actions were often bizarrely, fathomlessly inexplicable to us. When the clergy of Seez filled an episcopal vacancy by election without consulting Geoffrey of Anjou, their lay lord, Geoffrey had the lot of them castrated, and the bishop-elect, too. An earlier Count of Anjou, Fulk the Black, in penance for his sins, voluntarily shuffled to Jerusalem and back three times — total 15,000 miles, much of it trackless mountain and forest — while shackled in irons. What on earth were they thinking? We cannot know. By the narration of such things, though, a skilful writer can rouse us to wonder and awe.
I have not read Lord Geoffrey’s Fancy, by Alfred Duggan, which describes 13th-century Greece under the rule of Frankish knights, but I was just making the point to a friend that a modern audience would never recognize, say, the Old Testament, with the names changed — and that the original Battlestar Galactica was a thinly veiled retelling of Mormon mythology:
All the geography and ethnography of that place is refracted through the language and sensibility of these knights. Athens is “Satines”; Corinth is “Chorinte”; the natives are “Grifons” (Greeks) or “Esclavons” (South Slavs). The effect is to render the whole story as taking place in a completely imagined world, a Tolkeinian fantasy without the magic; yet the history is sound and well researched.
I haven’t watched The Daily Show in quite some time, but Bruce Bueno de Mesquita made a recent appearance to push his new book:
(Hat tip à mon père.)
Conservative commentator John Derbyshire (mis)spent some of his youth in Hong Kong — where he appeared in a Bruce Lee movie:
Well, I was sitting there reading when a young Chinese guy came in. Seeing that I was the only person in the lounge, he addressed me. “Do you speak English?” I said I did. “Know any martial arts?” I said I had taken a few lessons. “Want to be in a movie?” I asked him if it paid. “Sure. Seventy bucks a day.” (Hong Kong dollars, he meant — around US$12 at that time.) I said I was game. “Good. Be outside the Miramar Hotel front entrance tomorrow morning, seven thirty.”There were half a dozen other ghost-heads (gwai-tau, the generic Cantonese term for a non-Chinese person) outside the Miramar. We must have looked an unsavory lot — the casting director had obviously just trawled around the low-class guest-houses for unemployed foreigners of a sufficiently thuggish appearance. One was a dead ringer for Jimi Hendrix. Another was a full-blood Maori from New Zealand, a huge fellow — an obvious rugby lock — who made a meager living as a night-club singer in the colony’s low dives. A minibus arrived and drove us out to the New Territories — that is, the countryside that stretches out back of urban Hong Kong forty miles or so to the Chinese border. (Beyond which Mao Tse-tung’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was going through one of its nastier phases. Rafts of rotting corpses would occasionally float down the Pearl River past the colony.) Here there was a movie studio. We were led into a huge shed used for indoor sets, and spent the next two days filming fight scenes in that shed.
Bruce himself directed Meng Long Guo Jiang. He was on set all the time, setting up the fights, working out positions, talking to the lighting crews and the cameramen. There was, by the way, no sound crew. Chinese movies at that time were shot without sound. The sound was dubbed in later. When you watch a Bruce Lee movie, you are not hearing Lee’s voice, though I think they might have inserted his qi-ai — the intimidating yells, grunts and howls he used when fighting — into the soundtrack of Meng Long Guo Jiang. The qi-ai sound like his, anyway. In fact the first dubbing was always into Mandarin, and the on-screen lip syncing was to Mandarin words. Bruce, though fluent in English and Cantonese, could not speak Mandarin, so this was a constant vexation to him when filming, and probably the main reason he has very few speaking lines in his movies.
Bruce Lee’s presence was as striking in person as on screen. I have never seen a man who gave such an impression of concentrated energy. If he got animated when talking to you, he would make little springy skipping movements with his feet, as if warming up for a fight. When nothing much was happening, he would drop down and do one-arm finger-thumb push-ups at one side of the set, or have someone hold up a board he could practice kicks on. Just as a skilful schoolteacher knows how to get the class’s attention by speaking very softly, you were most aware of Bruce’s presence, and he was most intimidating, on the rare occasions his body was dead still. In the relaxed state, he was in constant motion. Crouching tiger, indeed.
Movie fight scenes are a devil of a thing to get right. We did everything a dozen times, levels of frustration and discomfort rising each time. This was summer in the tropics, and if the place had any air conditioning, it wasn’t adequate. There were huge electric fans everywhere, but they had to be switched off for filming, or the actors’ hair would all be streaming out horizontally from their heads. Yet through the entire two days I was on the set, I never saw Bruce lose his temper, or display any negative emotion stronger than momentary mild annoyance. He was just as I had seen him on TV: smiling, cracking jokes, smoothing out difficulties and differences, coaching, teasing, encouraging, cajoling. I have a tall, lean physique, so he addressed me as “Slim.”
“Hey, Slim, let’s try that again — and this time look mean. You hate me, remember? I’m a runty obnoxious little Chink, just stole your woman, trashed your car and pissed in your beer. Whaddya gonna do to me? Huh? Whaddya gonna do? Come on …” (He spoke perfect idiomatic American English the whole time.)
The fight scenes were all improvised out of his head. I can say this authoritatively, as I got a chance to read one of the scripts. The entire section I was involved in — two days filming, though of course less than five minutes in the finished movie — was encompassed by four Chinese characters in the script: Li da xi ren — “Lee strikes the Westerners.”
S. T. Joshi summarizes Lovecraft’s vision:
Humanity is not at centre stage in the cosmos, and there is no one to help us against the entities who have from time to time descended upon the earth and wreaked havoc; indeed, the ‘gods’ of the Mythos are not really gods at all, but merely extraterrestrials who occasionally manipulate their human followers for their own advantage.
Samuel Francis, writing in the May 1997 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, offers his own take:
Mr. Joshi is correct about the cosmic level of meaning in Lovecraft’s stories, but he largely neglects another, social level of meaning. On that level, Lovecraft’s stories are dramas of modernity in which the forces of tradition and order in society and in the universe are confronted by modernity itself — in the form of the shapeless beings known (ironically) as the “Old Ones.” In fact, they are the “New Ones.” Their appearance to earthly beings is often attended by allusions to “Einsteinian physics,” “Freudian psychology,” “non-Euclidean algebra” (a meaningless but suggestive term), modern art, and the writing of T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. The conflicts in the stories are typically between some representative of traditional order (the New England old stock protagonist) on the one hand, and the “hordes” of Mongoloids, Levantines, Negroes, Caribbeans, and Asians that gibber and prance in worship of the Old Ones and invoke their dark, destructive, and invincible powers.What Lovecraft does in his stories, then, is not only to develop the logic of his “cosmicism” by exposing the futility of human conventions, but to document the triumph of a formless and monstrous modernity against the civilization to which Lovecraft himself — if almost no one else in his time — was faithful. In the course of his brief existence, he saw the traditions of his class and his people vanishing before his eyes, and with them the civilization they had created, and no one seemed to care or even grasp the nature of the forces that were destroying it. The measures conventionally invoked to preserve it — traditional Christianity, traditional art forms, conventional ethics and political theory — were useless against the ineluctable cosmic sweep of the Old Ones and the new anarchic powers they symbolized.
Lovecraft believed that his order could not be saved, and that in the long run it didn’t matter anyway, so he jogged placidly and cynically on, one of America’s last free men, living his life as he wanted to live it and as he believed a New England gentleman should live it: thinking what he wanted to think, and writing what he wanted to write, without concern for conventional opinions, worldly success, or immortality. And yet, despite the indifference he affected, Howard Phillips Lovecraft has in the end attained a kind of immortality, for the classic tales of horror he created will be read as long as that genre of literature is read at all.
(Hat tip to Bradlaugh at Secular Right who correctly notes that Lovecraft is more fun to read about than he is to read.)