Three Short Comments from Princeton

I. Many machines on Ix...*

Today as I went for dinner I saw a cardboard box, sitting by the trash at the bottom of the stairwell. A big Dell box, bigger than the one I found last time.

(Oh?... yes?)

So I took it. I have plans for it. Plans within plans. For storing things.

No laughing at my new box, now. It's a newcomer and doesn't have the history that the others do, but it will. It's strong. It's capable of eating the old box, as you can plainly see. I'm resisting saying that it can bend like a reed in the wind, because that attempt would likely destroy it.

* For many good reasons I translate any Latin that might come up, so why not Geek, which is still more obscure? Whatever you feel about the qualities of the adaptation, there are many wonderful things about David Lynch's Dune, and this snippet of dialogue is one of them.



II. More lock stories

I mentioned that I've not yet locked myself out. In truth when last fall I arrived on the contrary I felt locked in. The first time I put my key in the lock it became stuck; I had to brace myself against the door and hook two fingers in the ring of my key chain to wiggle/yank it out. This scene repeated itself. I began to fear that one day I would open my door and not be able to retrieve my keys. It would close and my housekey would just sit there. What would the lock do for me then?

But as often happens the problem went away by itself, or was helped by a little bit of use.

Now I have a different trouble. The lock is a deadbolt with one side tapered so that when the door falls into the frame the bolt draws back until it locks in place in the slot. I've noticed quite a bit over just the past 3 days -- already in the fall, irregularly, but often recently, right now, even -- the door not recessing the whole way. I've set my feet against the ground and pushed and the damn'd door doesn't fall far enough to let the bolt fall into place.

Just fiddling with the lock right now I've discovered that it has a second deadbolt, which can only be set into place from the inside, if you can make sense of that. (The key does draw it back, though.) It also has a little switch set into the side of the door which apparently toggles the autolock on the first deadbolt (the movement of the door-knob/handle draws that bolt back, and the switch releases or freezes the outside knob). Sometimes I wish I could live in an unlocked world, but my natural caution and my laptop make me think my wishes won't be like fishes.* Last year I left the door unlocked whenever I could, but those NGC buildings have a keycard entry system the OGC lacks.

I figure it -- the lock -- it's setting me up. When I stop compulsively jiggling the keys in my pocket every time I step through the threshold -- one day, somehow, I'll miss them and then it'll be click! like the assassin's blade. Sometimes, you know, I walk in and, carefree, drop my keys on the desk. They're camouflaged there. And then I think: that's just what it wants, and quickly replace them in my pocket. When those keys jingle on the desk, that to me should be like the sound of the nightingale floors of the Tokugawa fortress.

Apparently any life can be a little like an episode of The Outer Limits if you work hard enough at it. I'm thinking of the ones with a twisted set-up and diabolical reversal. Like the one about a (male) POW on an alien world who falls for the female human POW target of cruel alien interrogators and to whom he mentions, to cheer her a little, about the starships massing at the Lagrange point behind the sun that'll turn the war. Predictably (I always tried to figure out the most depressing ending possible consistent with the set-up, and wasn't too often surprised) she turns out to be an alien in human make-up, as it were. The next episode in this story line, by the way, has Wil Wheaton accidentally annihilating the Earth instead of the alien homeworld.


* "If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets" -- ancient Caladan proverb.



III. The end of credibility

I'm sure everyone's heard a story, probably many such stories, about someone who made trouble for themselves without quite realising it by posting something on-line. It might have been humourous or harmless, a little off-colour, a confession that shouldn't have been announced-in-principle to the entire English-speaking world, a phrase worded more strongly than it deserved, whatever. (Some of us are especially guilty of that one, multiple times per post, and a recent Globe and Mail column fairly took us to task. I've said it in passing, but just to be clear, the Lord Kelvin Useless Creation Award is firmly ironic in character.)

Some pundits even remark that future political careers are being ruined by such seeming-harmlessness. This on the face feels unduly pessimistic to me. After all, the underlying problem, as it so often is, is about data organisation, and not capacity. Still, perhaps there's something to it.

More worrisome to me at the moment is the casual and accidental intrusion of someone making a serious inquiry and getting their Google returns clogged with my useless prose. It doesn't happen so much, and there's a little thrill in the search engine's compliment. But something I read recently elsewhere (you know who you are) brought me back to the subject. Apparently someone got here looking for the Monster sporadic group, and I'd apologise to them, but I looked myself and I wasn't in the first fourteen pages, thank heavens. On the other hand, someone with a light-hearted interest in Ed Witten discovered me buried only three pages deep (mostly behind other, more well-known math-physics blogs) repeating a rumour that he sometimes plays at the local chess club. (At the time it was to me a rumour, anyway.) Frankly, half the embarassment in this "http referrer" business (when you click a link your browser tells the new site what page was linking to them) is that I feel like I'm snooping on someone else's affairs.

Speaking of which, the good news is that I am no longer "south of zealots and smut-mongers". There are some strange things about that particular query (the titular quotation of this journal). For example, the third result is to a result page of another crawler that turns me up on a different query. My Blogger user profile is right below the afore-mentioned zealots but above an entry from oldpoetry.com, which error I now ameliorate. The smut doesn't make it into the first page, but truncating to just "sun-drunken delight" shifts things around -- now my user profile is below. On truncating yet further the good news is that we have considerable standing. The very bad, bad news is that there's an actual thing -- a thing with a website -- and, well, I didn't have the heart to pursue it much, but I suspect certain kinds of smut are unbeatable. I wouldn't mention it except that this has been an important source of incoming traffic for me lately. Oy.

[Predictably, I note in a brief update a little while after writing this, the presence of the keywords in this entry hasn't helped. Oh, well. Fight the fights you can win, they say.]

On a brighter note, and returning to the data organisation theme, if at the beginning of this year you searched a thing called IceRocket Blog Search (which I've never heard of until now but which site possesses a curiously Google-like layout) on a certain Dune-related theme, you might find your way here. The reason you'd have to do it then is that this search engine organises apparently returns first by date. I note with a hint of schadenfreude that someone else has mentioned this book in a parenthesis and thereby opened their own definitely-not-for-the-dinner-table discussion to public scrutiny. (Let's just say that I shortly determined that it wasn't grammatical ignorance causing all those first-person pronouns to be capitalised.) Fortunately for them, they're getting buried, day by day, by more of the same.

ambivalence resolved

I visited Chapter's at Robson one time during the summer. I had mischronometrised and arrived quite early for a lunch appointment with Craig and Papa. It's very pleasant to visit all the old haunts: see what's new, what's old that's reprinted and new again, what never went away. I have a mental checklist: any new-old Silverberg? or Heinlein? or Herbert? or --

Alas, that there could be new-old Herbert; alas, there only is new-new Herbert. Instead of a re-issue of Destination: Void, which even Papa doesn't seem, to my frustration, to own, or of The White Plague or The Jesus Incident, we get, at best, The Road to Dune, which, well -- it styles itself thus, above the oversized "DUNE" in that characteristic font that now means another wretched volume has come upon us:

The companion to the New York Times bestsellers including never-before-published chapters from Dune and Dune Messiah, original stories, and a new novel by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.

This book first came to my attention that summer day. It was sitting there in hardcover. There is barely a hundred and twenty pages of actual Frank Herbert material, but such is the hold of it over me that I was tempted to grab it right then. But my better senses prevailed, and I left it alone.

A few days ago I was again in the Chapter's at Robson. It was the day after Boxing Day. It was very obviously the day after Boxing Day. The shelves often contained gaps great and small and many books on them showed curled corners and scuffs on the cover and ruffled pages: surely they'd been bought and returned and reshelved this Christmas season. With two gift cards whispering in my pocket and no prospects to use them for many months anon I was eager to increase the burden of my space-crunch. So when I saw The Road to Dune in friendly paperback size I was certain I had to have it.

And at home as I started to read I was not disappointed. I read a summary of an article that Frank Herbert was thinking to write in the 50's, about how for the first time a system of plantings had been developed to stop the encroaching sand dunes from burying the little town of Florence, Oregon. The dunes are driven some twenty feet a year by wind, like water in tempo largo. More than ten thousand types of grass had come into the experiment to find one that would set down roots that would help fix the top sand in place. Reading this, reading Frank Herbert's excitement at the ecological solution to an historic problem and his agent's nonplussed replies, I thought of green plants in the desert, of ornithopters, of the opening of the film Koyaanisqatsi with Philip Glass's awed score over waves of water and clouds and cars, of (Mother of Muad'dib!) rain from the sky of Dune --

I decided that if I was ever in the area I should drop by to see the environs of the town of Florence, Oregon, this place that set in motion these thoughts in Frank Herbert's head. A quasi-hajj to Mecca-on-the-West-Coast. I discovered that my friend Daniel, a.k.a. Billy, formerly of UBC Math and now of Oregon Math, attends school just two miles from the town. That started me thinking.

From the reportedly many boxes of notes and text uncovered by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson in the pieces of Frank Herbert's estate they gave us some hundred pages of drafts and excised material from Dune. Some of it requires no explanation:

Paul stepped out of bed in his shorts, began dressing. "Is she [the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim] your mother?" he asked.

"That's a fool's question, Paul," Jessica said. She turned. "Reverend Mother is merely a title. I never knew my mother. Few Bene Gesserits of the schools ever do; you know that."

There are so many things wrong with this passage about the only piece of interest is to know that even the pen of Frank Herbert scribbled the kind of things that I'd write and strike out instantly. There's no indication of where this fragment came from, and I imagine it was indeed quickly discarded, and survived by happenstance among the many pages of unused material.

Much of the discarded material is like this in character, almost pure exposition either dropped or strongly reworked into more natural settings. A little is reasonably polished work from earlier drafts of the plot, like a visit of Jessica and Duncan and twelve-year-old (!) Paul to Dr. Kynes. Some, a very little, is really literarily indistinguishable from the finished product; for example, a deleted scene from Dune Messiah wherein Paul receives Otheym's message from the Tleilaxu-made dwarf Bijaz, which ends:

"The spice, M'Lord," Stilgar said.

"Of course we'll stop all shipments of the spice," Paul said. "Let's see how they like that." [...]

Bijaz began to giggle.

Paul turned toward the dwarf, noting how the creature had the attention of everyone in the room.

"How they'll wish on the morrow they had no teeth," Bijaz sputtered between giggles.

"What in the name of the worm does he mean by that?" Stilgar demanded.

"Without teeth they'll be unable to gnash," Bijaz said, his voice reasonable.

Even Stilgar chuckled. Paul stood silent, watchful.

"Who do you mean by they?" Paul asked.

"Why, Sire," Bijaz said, "the ones who planted that stone-burner on you. Could it be they wanted you to stopple the spice?"

The prose is clean, smart, and beautiful, and paced like poetry. No coincidence: we are told that many passages in Dune began as Haiku and the like before being enlarged only as necessary to make grammatical English, and if Frank Herbert later discontinued this practice it's clear he'd mastered the lesson.

The Road to Dune contains a re-constructed short novel entitled Spice Planet, apparently based, how loosely one couldn't say, on original notes (characters and events) for a story about narcotics and feuding noblemen set principally on a planet known as Duneworld. This, it seems, was the first draft of the Dune concept, later expanded into a whole new universe shot through with themes of ecology, politics, leadership, history, religion, -- and so many more besides. It would be interesting to see the story of Duneworld written from Frank Herbert's hand, but mostly because it would be from Frank Herbert's hand.

The volume also contains a hundred pages or so of short fiction by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson. Most of it pertains to their books which they claim tell the story of the Butlerian Jihad. The last of them they describe in the introduction as in part a bridge between the end of Chapterhouse: Dune and their Hunters of Dune, the new first part of "Dune Seven" that they're writing. On the basis of this I sat down to read it. It's called "Sea Child," and it's a little over fifteen pages long. Someone please explain to me, then, why the first two are a summary of the current state of galactic politics. It's difficult to pick out something as representative of their prose, but this paragraph, towards the end of that summary, offends me particularly:

In moments of despair, Corysta [the Bene Gesserit protagonist of the short story] felt she had two sets of enemies, her own Sisters and the Honored Matres who sought supremacy over everything in the old Imperium. If the Bene Gesserits did not find a way to fight back -- here and on other planets -- their days would be numbered. With superior weaponry and vast armies, the Honored Matres would exterminate the Sisterhood. From her own position of disadvantage, Corysta could only hope that her Mother Superior was developing a plan on Chapterhouse that would enable the ancient organsiation to survive. The Sisterhood faced an immense challenge against an irrational enemy.

There's no sentence of this dreadful paragraph that doesn't make me cringe. The centerpiece of its naivete (as opposed to its rotten, cliche-ridden prose, which is a sample representative of the whole) is that little aside about Mother Superior. It reads like bad fan-fiction: the blunder is of assigning paramount significance to exactly what was in the text of the prior books, no less and no more. If we the reader spent two books following Mother Superior, surely Mother Superior is on everyone's mind. Truly she must have some awesome cult of personality to be solely responsible for the course of galactic politics. As to the details of the war, it's clear they don't understand that the weapons and battles are incidental. The motives of the foe, moreover, were revealed slowly and imperfectly to us, and I don't remember "supremacy over everything in the old Imperium" being anything more than a means; but this is the level of subtlety that Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson will pitch to us.

For the lesson is that there will never be a moment in the books of these two like when Bellonda drops into the scene with an anguished cry: "Lampadas!" We know what she means: the training planet has been found and destroyed; all the Sisters and Reverend Mothers and the soldiers who defended them and their marshal, who we knew, died there. It is a crushing sentence for our protagonists and for us, and it's one the like of which we won't see anywhere in Dune Seven. They'd blow one word into a full scene and the content would be shot away, unrecoverable, just like they spammed us with two pages of irrelevant galactic simplifications in a fifteen-page short that barely gets off the beach before it delivers its metaphors with a heavy, Harkonnen-sweaty hand.

So what I'm saying is -- the spirit of restlessness that came years ago with the production of new books with "DUNE" in great letters upon them has fallen still. There is not now and will not be more old Herbert. The shlock released between those covers is puerile and clunky in equal measure. It is by me simply unreadable. There is no other thing to say about a book that can't pass half a page without dropping some dreadful nonsense, say:

In the floating image, the bristling ships opened fire, unleashing incineration waves with devices the Bene Gesserit had since named "Obliterators,"

to borrow a half of a single sentence from the first page of the excerpt of Hunters of Dune helpfully included at the back of Road.

So what I'm saying is -- I'm not buying any more of their damn'd books.

So what I'm saying is -- if anyone manages to get through "Dune Seven," let me know what's up with the Enemy. I'm all right with not knowing, but hey -- as with the transcendentality of π, if you could know, wouldn't you want to know?

That's all I'm saying.