Reading: John Fowles, A Maggot

Listening: Eurythmics, Be Yourself Tonight and Revenge

Viewing: Blue sky. Drug deals in the park.

1 December 1999: Forbede us thyng, and that desiren we

I'm digesting Forbidden Knowledge. And I really like A Maggot so far. It's one that Suzy, head of general books at the UC Coop, thought RDC would like. She knew our reading tastes backward and forward. She introduced us to Littlejohn and All the Pretty Horses. She doesn't like Don DeLillo but knows it makes sense that RDC does. (I liked White Noise but not Libra and I admire Sabrina for teaching Underworld to freshling.) Visiting home in the summer of 1996, I picked up A Country Year and she knew I would love it and I did. I also picked up Galatea 2.2 because it looked interesting--and I haven't read it yet but RDC was amused by it. When I told her I'd hated Bonfire of the Vanities, she wasn't at all surprised. She knows. I miss a bookseller who knows me that well.

So anyway. The only thing about A Maggot that bothers me is the way Fowles arranges his dialogue. Each person's speech is in a separate paragraph, as should be, but the stage directions describing the speeches are also in different paragraphs, so if two people are talking and one pauses between speeches, he'll have three paragraphs, speech pause speech, and it's hard to keep track of who's saying what, especially really early in the story when I have no idea what's going on. But I like having to apply my head to the book.

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I don't pretend to know much about what's going on with the World Trade Organization in Seattle. I'm on the protesters' side as far as I know, since the WTO seems to want free trade without restrictions or oversight for laborers' or the environment's sake. Either I don't understand Adam Smith or he was too optimistic, but laissez-faire is too anarchistic for my tastes. In my usual insightful, reductionist way, I summed them up thus: they're Randists. Not a compliment.

Which led me to think about Ayn Rand again today, something I try to avoid doing usually. Two principles in Atlas Shrugged occurred to me as internally contradictory. One, Rand thought it was a mistake for the U.S. to go off the gold standard, hence the gold money used in Mulligan's Valley and Ragnar Danneskjöld returning people's income tax in gold. I personally like the fact that our money has as much value as we think it has, but she was never one to go along with the zeitgeist.

The ABC nightly news this evening reported banks getting upset with advertising feeding on the Y2K panic. Polaroid or Kodak agreed to pull one in which a man photographs an ATM display showing his account to hold hundreds of dollars just before midnight and millions just afterward. KIA refused to pull its. Apparently no one's made a fuss at Nike showing a jogger just doing it the morning of January 1st as ATMs spit out cash, missiles explode, and escaped giraffes run amuck. This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with anything, but it somehow goes along with my theory that money is just as strong as our faith in it.

So anyway. Rand, with her supposedly objective understanding of the physical world, I shall assume to have known that gold, as an element, exists in finite quantities on this planet. A further assumption on my part is that she should have had no respect for the philosoher's stone, since its theory contradicted natural laws. However, maybe not: maybe she thought it was a great idea for human intellect to overcome natural laws. In fact, she did: Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden talk about the sun's eventual burning out as not that big an obstacle because by the time that happens, man [sic] will have figured out an alternative. I should find the exact passage because no one in their right mind who hasn't read her could possibly believe anyone could lack that much hubris. But gold is still finite.

So anyway this love of the gold standard, dependent on a finite element, contradicts, as far as I understand, another of her principles, which is that the creation of wealth is infinitely expandable.

I read Ayn Rand the way I read Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time: easy target. (I like Small Changes, Vita, and Braided Lives a lot and don't go around dissecting them. I did blow her reading off to go hear Sarah Weddington instead, though.)

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The premise of Forbidden Knowledge is to question whether there is knowledge that humans should not possess or knowledge that is, regardless of its application, evil.

One of my favorite bits was Roger Shattuck quoting the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. picking out "as one of the great errors in history the interpretation of power and love as polar opposites and the association of power with violence. King cut to the core of the matter with a no-nonsense simplification:

It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpreation which induced Christian theologists to reject Nietzschean philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we've got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice."

Or maybe it was another passage of Shattuck and not the WTO that reminded me of Rand's characters (since them I know like my right thumbnail). He quotes Plato in Theatetus:

...the story about the Thracian maidservant who exercised her wit at the expense of Thales, when he was looking up to study the stars and tumbled down a well. She scoffed at him for being so eager to know what was happening in the sky that he could not see what lay at his feet.

My marginalia: Rand's characters ignore their feet because they can trample everything, because a well would sooner seal itself off than extract from itself one spark of evil that might annoy a character's finger. Apologies to Shakespeare there.
The unexamined life might not be worth living, but the overexamined life will put you down a well and rightly so.
That book had me running for a dictionary more than anything since I read Dr. Dolittle in first grade:

  • anodyne: serving to assuage pain
  • casuistry: a resolving of specific cases of conscience, duty, or conduct through interpretation of ethical principles or religious doctrine
  • encomium: glowing and warmly enthusiastic praise also: an expression of this
  • hapax: an individual occurrence of a thing: here, a personality; Merriam-Webster lists hapax legomenon as a word or form occurring only once in a document or corpus. I believe the word "hapax" was a hapax legomenon in Forbidden Knowledge. To my recollection it certainly has been one in my life up to now.
  • pleonexia: not in the dictionary
  • talion: ditto

I never kippled* much as a child. My favorite bit in the whole book was in the beginning, when Shattuck mentions the Elephant's Child of the Just So story which explains the origins of the elephant's trunk. The Elephant's Child (whom I first met as Rob Austin's toy in Meet the Austins) malaprops "insatiable curiosity" (which his elders tell him he should curb) into "'satiable curtiosity" (he is a polite pachyderm).

* This is an old cartoon. A young couple is sitting under a tree. One asks, "Do you like Kipling much?" and the other answers, "I don't know. I've never kippled."

Shattuck shows his age and conservativism in the way he approaches the Marquis de Sade--face turned away, fingers of one hand pinching the nose closed and the other hand blinding groping (with two fingers) for a bit of rubbish. I feared, after reading the Amazon reviewers, that he would advocate censorship in this case. He doesn't. Quite. "The divine marquis represents forbidden knowledge that we may not forbid. Consequently, we should lable his writings carefully: potential poison, polluting our moral and intellectual environment." Right alongside my copy of Blood Sugar Sex Magic.

Today's title is from one of Forbidden Knowledge's three epigraphs. Alysoun, Chaucer's Wife of Bath, remains one of my favorite literary characters. And she's right.

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