Jack Vance’s Wyst: Alastor 1716 (A Socialist Dystopia)

Current Spatterlight Edition of Wyst

Towards the end of a long life, the American genre writer – and merchant seaman, jazz-man, and master of many trades – Jack Vance (1916 – 2013) produced an amusing autobiography entitled This is Me, Jack Vance! (2009); the book also carried a parenthetical and apologetic subtitle, Or, More Properly, This is I.  In the subtitle Vance takes a jocund swipe at grammatical pedantry, and therefore at pedantry and Puritanism generally speaking, but he also affirms his passion for order, of which grammar is the linguistic species, without which (order, that is) freedom and justice, both of which he held as dear as anything, would be impossible.  There are a number of scholarly anthologies devoted to Vance’s authorship and at least one book-length single-author study of his fiction, Jack Rawlins’ Dissonant Worlds of Jack Vance (1986).  It is a pity, however, that no intellectual biography of Vance exists.  This is Me gives the essential details of its writer’s curriculum vitae, but it is largely bereft of information concerning Vance’s artistic-philosophical formation.  So is Rawlins’ study although it remains otherwise useful.  If only, like Henry Miller, Vance had written his version of The Books in my Life!  Concerning Vance’s artistic-philosophical formation, however, one might plausibly infer and arguably surmise a few probabilities.  A writer is liable to be a reader, a prolific writer a prolific reader.  A merchant seaman, as Vance remarks in his autobiography, finds himself with a good deal of time on his hands.  Vance, who had briefly studied English at the University of California Berkeley, spent long stretches at sea during the Second World War, with a good deal of time on his hands.  Two plausible guesses in respect of books that would have impressed themselves profoundly on Vance as he passed his time in their company are The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas père and The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler.

The Count of Monte Cristo would have supplied Vance with a plotline, that of righteous and carefully schemed vengeance against arrogant and powerful offenders, which he used in his own brilliant way many times.  Two books of Vance’s Alastor trilogy, Trullion (1973) and Marune (1975), are vengeance stories, as are all five volumes of The Demon Princes (1964 – 1981).  As it did for F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, and science fiction writer James Blish, among innumerable others, The Decline of the West would have deepened Vance’s sense of meaning and large-scale patterning in history; and it would have stimulated his interest in the comparison of cultures.  In Spengler’s theory of the Great Cultures, as he called them, each Great Culture has a distinct physiognomy (Spengler’s term) that imprints and flavors its institutional manifestations and pervades the mental outlook of its every individual.  A major element of Vance’s fiction is to establish through detailed description the distinct physiognomy – or as he calls it in a coinage of his own, the esmeric – of each of his fictional worlds and their societies.  The Decline would also have honed Vance’s sensitivity to the crisis of European civilization, just as it had for Fitzgerald and Miller.  Once again, the breakdown of social structures and the descent of civilization into renewed barbarism interest Vance almost obsessively.  Vance’s authorship contains many other signs of Spengler’s background presence, not least in its tendency to insert extended philosophical discussions, sometimes as footnotes, into the unfolding story.  In Vance’s later work, commencing with The Demon Princes, references occur to a certain “Baron Bodissey,” who seems to have been the Spengler of the settled cosmos, or the “Gaean Reach,” in the long-colonized solar systems of which, and among immensely old societies, Vance’s stories tend to occur.  Spengler saw his Great Cultures as living entities.  Vance’s Ecce and Old Earth (1991) quotes Bodissey’s study of “The Morphology of Settled Places,” in which he argues that “towns behave in many respects like living organisms,” a decidedly Spenglerian proposition.

Liberal Sexuality Cannot Work, & So Tends to Traditional Marriage

Traditional sexual morality can be stated in a single sentence, that covers all the wrinkles: any sex whatever outside of marriage is utterly proscribed. Thus the only sort of sex that is traditionally permissible must transpire between man and wife.

The Sexual Left Devours Itself

The Great Sex Harassment Witch Hunt of 2017 is mostly hitting liberals. It is leaving conservatives largely unscathed (at least so far). Why should this be?

Marriage as an Ontological Real

By training and habit, we moderns think of marriage as a mere and adventitious arrangement of pre-existent and utterly independent entities. We think of it therefore as merely conventional, and so as subsistent completely in the continued agreement of its constituent members, the husband and wife, and so by either of them ever and completely severable, thus eliminable, without appreciable rupture or wound to the goodness inherent in the causal order. We think of it as a deal, and nothing more – as if deals were nothing. We think of marriage, that is to say, as not truly real. We think of it as a social and legal fiction.

In this, we err. It is not so. For, deals are real. And they really impose themselves upon us, so shaping our acts. They *oblige* us. Who has not felt this?

Upstate Consolation University Addresses Statue Crisis

 

The Mehar Shandruff-Danpoo Multicultural Center and Cafetorium (UCU Main Campus)

As the fall semester began in the first week of August at Upstate Consolation University, student radicals and their faculty sponsors, seeking solidarity with their fellow Social Justice Warriors elsewhere in the country, rallied in the Mehar Shandruff-Danpoo Multicultural Center and Cafetorium, formerly the Andrea Dworkin Memorial Housing and Parking Office, to announce their determination to overturn and smash all statues of Confederate Civil-War heroes currently standing on the teaching-college’s architecturally bland lakeside campus.  On leaving the rally, however, to go in search of offensive icons to topple and desecrate, the emotionally overheated crowd could find none.  There were various commemorative statues scattered about the grounds of UCU, but not only did none of these represent or honor any Confederate Civil-War hero, none represented or honored any Civil-War hero, or, with one exception, any participant in any war. This fact is perhaps unsurprising given that UCU was only founded in 1958, nearly a century after the Southern surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. The absence of targets nevertheless provoked the protesters maddeningly, causing them to retreat to designated “safe places,” where volunteers supplied them with pearl necklaces to clutch and offered smelling-salts to redeem the marginalized and oppressed from their debilitating white-privilege-induced vapor-attacks.

The Lethal Sociological Misprision of Modernism

Feminists, Marxists, libertarians – indeed almost all moderns – are alike stuck in the improper reduction of all social relations to struggles for power. They cannot see that struggles for power are not the basis of society, but rather defects thereof. Society is constituted fundamentally of charitable exchange, communion, friendship, familiarity, commensality.

There is struggle, to be sure. But you can’t struggle for social power if there is no society to begin with.

The modernist’s reduction of society to its diseases leaves him unable to understand his quotidian predicaments in any other way than as constant battle. This dooms him to … constant battle. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Is There a Second Reality?

Reality Winner, Queen of the Resistance (“Winner, winner, chicken dinner”)

Yes, her name is “really” Reality Winner. (That’s what I would name my daughter.) When this, or she, or it, is the First Reality, it automatically produces the Second Reality; the process is akin to that of a college-student on Spring Break taking a “selfie,” or rather innumerable “selfies.” The Second Reality is always in the character of a “selfie.” This is an open thread.  Like, totally, way open!  Comments are invited.  (“On what topic are comments invited?” — “Whatever, Dude.”)

Witness another version of the Second Reality below —

The Alphabeticity of Nations

Dear Representative Pelosi:

My wife and I are stalwart Democrats seeking advice.  We are planning an elaborate summer tour of several nations, some of them transatlantic, and we would like to know the correct order in which we should visit those nations.  Here are some questions that we hope you can answer. –

Supposing that we planned a visit to London, should we list that on our itinerary as a trip to Britain or a trip to England?  In either case, if we wished also to visit Edinburgh, in Scotland, would we need to visit either Britain or England first?

If we listed our London and Edinburgh destinations as the United Kingdom rather than Britain, England, or Scotland, would we need to visit Serbia, Slovenia, or Ukraine first?  And does the Byelo in Byelorussia count, or is it the same, by your reckoning, as Russia?  Again, how should we count Abkhazia, were we to visit there?  Is it subsumed alphabetically by Georgia?

When visiting Finland, should we list it as Suomi, as Finns call their nation, and touch base Somalia first?

In what order might we correctly visit the different places called Georgia?

Finally, on a related topic, which bathrooms should we use when visiting the autonomous region of Trans-Dniester?

We are sincerely yours,

Mr. and Mrs. Qwerty

This Just About Sums Up Our Present Predicament

The search strings by which surfers of the web arrive at the Orthosphere sometimes pique my interest. Most are just what one would expect, involving such words as “Trinity,” “Atheism,” “Reaction,” “GNON,” or “Vatican.” But now and then we get a really odd one. This morning’s list featured a string that almost had me spitting out my coffee:

How to change tradition minded boyfriend.

I hope that boyfriend keeps reading on the traditionalist web …

Warren Farrell on Why Men Earn More

Warren Farrell’s book Why Men Earn More and What Women Can Do About It is a useful resource on the topic – a topic that surfaces most prominently on the eve of presidential elections only to disappear again afterwards. Shortly before the election, BBC America and MSNBC both ran stories on the wage gap on the same day, apropos nothing at all, seemingly as a conspiracy-theory-inducing coordinated action. The BBC made a special point of saying “for exactly the same jobs.” That is not remotely true. While individual instances of unfairness may be found, the 20% difference is due to factors like different occupational choices, choices of college majors, continuity of service, willingness to relocate, men who work full-time working more hours than women who work full-time, men commuting twice as far as women on average, and most particularly, women taking time off to raise children. Never married childless women earn more than never married men on average. Thomas Sowell points out that comparing “single” men and women is misleading because it includes divorced women who may have worked part-time or not at all while their children were young.

Last semester I had two students who insisted that the wage gap was the result of a pay differential within exactly the same jobs. When they hear such things on the supposedly reputable BBC and from politicians like Hillary Clinton it understandably sounds improbable that what they are hearing is a lie. One of the students sent some statistics to support her case which actually did no such thing.

The following is a summary of key arguments in Farrell’s book – Why Men Earn More published at The Brussels Journal, a topic Farrell started to explore when he wondered why employers would ever hire men if they could hire women to do the same job for 20% less.