Irregular Books

If you’re looking for something truly irregular to read, let me suggest the Ozark Howler comic book. A surfer from Santa Barbara gets sent off to the Ozark Mountains, which seems like a curse enough. Then, however, he discovers that he’s inherited a curse from his father. He begins to transform into a shape-shifting creature called the ozark howler.

Teenager discovers that he is going to become a shape-shifting monster like his father. How very psychological. I think it’s safe to say that this is one plot you have not read before - except for maybe The Graduate.

A couple years ago, I found the web site of the Progressive Book Club, only to find that the PBC wasn’t actually up and running. It was only in the planning stages. I signed up to get updates by email, but I never got any email announcing the beginning of the book club’s business, so I assumed it never became operational.

I was wrong. It took me a while to check for sure, but when I did today, I saw that the Progressive Book Club is fully online… and not just at the Progressive Book Club web site. They’re on YouTube as well, where they offer interviews with politically progressive authors such as the following one with Antonia Juhasz, author of The Tyranny of Oil:

In January of 2009, religious author Clemens Sedmak will have a new book released for sale. It’s called “Religious Intelligence: Developing Religious Literacy in a Secular World”. Introducing the concept of the book, publicity materials state,

“This book offers an exploration of religious intelligence in an era where public and personal belief has become inseparable. Since the events of 9/11 it has become increasingly evident that it is impossible to regard religion as a matter of personal belief alone and ban it from the public sphere. Current debates about veils and headscarfs in Germany, France and England, caricatures of the prophet Mohamed in Denmark, and the public reaction to Pope Benedict’s Regensburg lecture on 9/12/2006 clearly show the need for better concepts of dealing with religiously sensitive issues, and people.”

This paragraph in itself reveals a slippery grasp on the concept of intelligence.

How have public and personal belief become inseparable? Huge numbers of people separate them quite effectively, and many more people choose not to engage in religious belief at all, without any harm to themselves.

What evidence is there that it is impossible to regard religion as a matter of personal belief alone? Plenty of people regard religion as a merely personal matter. Does the author suggest that government mandates on religious practice are inevitable?

How do the religious controversies cited indicate that there is a need for improvement in dealing with “sensitive” religious issues? Couldn’t it be that the problem is the sensitivity itself, and not the lack of coddling for it? The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were religiously inspired, as were the other controversies cited. The common crisis in these controversies comes from individuals trying to impose their personal beliefs in the public sphere. So, Sedmak’s solution seems to be part of the genesis of the problem.

Sedmak seeks to convince people that there is an innate “religious intelligence” in the human brain that needs to be understood. In making this argument, however, Sedmak fails to understand the concept of intelligence itself, by mixing it up in belief. It’s ironic that Sedmak should choose to cite the Regensburg lecture by Pope Benedict, given that a significant purpose of that lecture was to blast the separation of church and state in secular societies, and attack academics for attempting to preserve the separation of intellectual thought from religious faith. Benedict announced that the Catholic Church seeks to “overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable”.

To mix reason with the empirically unverifiable is to make it unreasonable. Likewise, to propose that faith is a form of intelligence is to suggest that authority and tradition are comparable to skeptical inquiry. We might as well talk about scientific religion as to discuss religious intelligence.

Religious authorities have tried for generations now to co-opt the power of secular society for their own uses, inventing unintelligent chimaeras such as Creationism, Intelligent Design, and faith-based initiatives in an attempt to grab once more the worldly power that they lost long ago due to their incompetence and barbarity. The intelligent choice is to leave religious concepts in the realm of private, personal belief, and preserve the public square as a place where reasoned, truly intelligent arguments based on empirically verifiable reality are required to set common policies for the government of the whole.

In the waning days of summer, as the weight of September comes near, my mind turns to the weird of the world. Here’s a summertime wish list of weird books:

- Exploring the Supernatural: the weird in Canadian Folklore

- Weird Tales from Northern Seas

- The Book of Weird

- Wyllard’s Weird

- Asian Horror Encyclopedia

The Conservatives Have No Clothes, by Greg Anrig, offers a positive view of politics in America. In this vision, right wing ideology has failed, and will inevitably continue to fail. The main purpose of the book is to explain “Why conservatives can’ t govern – and why conservative ideas will continue to flop”.

That’s sweet and rosy and all, but how is it that “conservative” ideas are flopping? Right wing ideology is expanding, not contracting. Even Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee for President, is promoting many right wing ideas: “Faith-based” religious programs paid for by the government, offshore drilling, the death penalty and warrantless wiretapping of Americans, for example.

The following video offers a rather simplistic approach, claiming that progressive ideas are based on real experiences, whereas “conservative” ideas are based on clever distortion of reality. It’s essentially an argument that reality should defeat marketing every time. The weakness of that idea is in itself proof enough that marketing matters.

Anrig works for a prominent think tank. That sounds like an asset, but it turns into a burden when Anrig cannot break away from logical arguments about what ideas people should support. If only Anrig could embrace the power of persuasion, he’d be a lot closer to providing a useful plan for progressive regrouping. In politics, being correct matters much less than being perceived as correct.

I wanted to enjoy The Conservatives Have No Clothes, but instead I found it to be detached and unconvincing, offering a cold and clumsy approach to politics rather than a plan for grabbing people’s attention. I can’t recommend it.

It’s a sad economy for almost everyone - including writers. Sales are down, of books, magazines and newspapers. Reading is now regarded as something to do with discretionary income.

Doing some old-fashioned web surfing this evening, I came across a site called Get A Freelancer, where writers can bid for the privilege of working on freelance projects. My eye was immediately caught by the extremely low rate of pay that these writers are competing for.

One bid offered “10 articles, 500 words each” - for just fifty dollars. That’s five dollars for a 500-word article.

For writers looking to sustain themselves, there has to be a better way. Don’t stop writing that book.

The focus on geography starts with the subtitle of the book A World Treasury of Myths, Legends, and Folktales: Stories from Six Continents. So, I may be seeming picky, but my criticism is from the standard set by the publishers.

Toward the end of the book, there is a story called The Snake’s Arrow, which is about a younger brother who defeats a pair of demon monkeys and marries a magical toad woman. It’s an interesting story, but it’s quality is damaged for me by a set of illustrations by Mikhail Fiodorov.

The problem is that the illustrations get the monkeys wrong. The folktale is set in South America, but the monkeys are mandrills. Mandrills are Old World monkeys. Furthermore, the mandrills are shown having tails. Mandrills don’t have tails.

I know that some imagination is allowed in mythological illustrations, but the imagination ought to take place from within the cultural area from which the story comes. Fiodorov might as well have had maple trees in the background, with a man in a plaid shirt collecting syrup for his pancakes.

In general, I’ve enjoyed sharing this book with my son, but I won’t be able to read this story again without suppressing a grimace.

Scott McClellan has made it to the number one selling spot on Amazon.com in less than one day with his tell-some book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

In this book, McClellan admits that he misled the American people as Press Secretary for George W. Bush, telling people things that just weren’t true. McClellan also tells us that he was left out of the inner circle, so that he didn’t really know what was going on in the Bush White House. Yes, that’s right - in a book entitled What Happened, the author acknowledges that he doesn’t know what happened.

Why are people reading this book? The author already acknowledges that he has been untruthful to us. Why should we believe him now?

Well, there’s a lot I don’t understand about why people buy things. So, maybe instead of thinking my way to success in the book industry, I should just copy Scott McClellan’s approach and hope for the best.

Here are the titles of some books I’m working on as of today, in the hopes that I can have book sales like Scott McClellan:

- Wha Happened?
- I Lied To You, But You Can Believe Me Now
- How I Made A Sucker Out Of You
- Lying for Powerful People
- My Insights As An Outsider
- Out of The Loop
- My Excuses
- I Was Only Following Orders
- Wisdom From A Man Stupid Enough To Believe George W. Bush
- It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time

Can you think of any other good book titles to fit into the new genre of political book created this week by Scott McClellan?

Back in 2004, Irregular Times created a new kind of reference book: 2004 Reasons to Boot Bush. The book listed 2,004 separate reasons to remove George W. Bush from the White House in the 2004 presidential election. These “reasons” were not mere bullet points, of the sort you might get from David Letterman. Most were explanations long enough to be considered political essays.

The following video looks back to this political book from 2004 as a way of reflecting on how, sadly, America is still suffering from the problems created by the first term of President Bush. In the second term, come to think of it, things have gotten even worse.

This retrospective comes just as Irregular Times is releasing its new political reference guide, 2008 Reasons to Elect a Progressive President. This new book is not an update of the 2004 Reasons to Boot Bush. It’s new material written just for this year. It also includes a much more extensive discussion of political issues that the 2004 book did. 2008 Reasons to Elect a Progressive President is about three times as long as the 2004 reference guide, and so has had to be divided into two separate volumes: (See Volume One and Volume Two).

On the terms of some children, If The Dinosaurs Came Back, by Bernard Most, is a fine book with some interesting visualizations imagining what would happen if the Earth of tens of millions of years ago was combined with the Earth today. For my son, however, the book doesn’t quite ring true.

Bernard Most seems to imagine dinosaurs mostly as really big tools just waiting for people to come along and use them. Most visualizes dinosaurs serving as bridges for people to drive over, ladders for painting houses, cranes for building skyscrapers, and plows for turning the earth over for giant farms.

The dinosaurs in this children’s book are docile implements for human domination of the Earth. What would they be fed in order to fuel their gigantic appetites? Where would all the vegetable matter for the sauropods come from, what with all the dinosaur-powered construction covering nature up with asphalt? Who would provide the flesh for tyrannosaurus work horses to feast upon?

These questions weren’t dealt with. The dinosaurs in this book are rather uninteresting anti-godzillas, confirming our Earth-wrecking habits rather than confronting them.

One might say these issues don’t matter, because it’s just a children’s book, or that we can’t expect the book to represent the responsible relationship between people and their environment, because the book was written way back in 1978.

However, my seven year-old son spotted the gap between the natural character of dinosaurs and the contrived behavior of the resurrected beasts in this book. After I got done reading it to him, he commented, “Dad, if dinosaurs came back, they would be wild animals and ferocious.” It’s a truth obvious enough even for elementary school.

If you want comforting stories about animals rather than ferocious tales of nature, then stick with Mrs. Tiggywinkle the hedgehog. Don’t mess with the character of dinosaurs.