Foundation, Part 3: Foundation and Empire

Foundation and Empire, the second novel in the Foundation series picks up more or less where the first novel leaves off.  This book follows much of the same plan that the first one does and, like any good sequel, it expands on the themes of the original.
Asimov picks up on the long arc of history that he set in motion in the first novel.  That is, the Foundation continues to consolidate influence as the sole remaining scientific powerhouse as the Galactic Empire continues its fall.  Now at a greater remove from the events in the first novel, Seldon, Psychohistory, the encyclopedists, and even the Foundation itself have taken on mythic tones.  As the empire falls apart, lines of communication and trade likewise deteriorate.  This isolates planets on the periphery of the galaxy that then revert to feudalism.  Where another author might summarize much of the above, Asimov creates separate scenes, interspersed through time and space to demonstrate these plot lines.  In a way, this helps to develop the drama of history, but it also undercuts it by revealing the artifice of the narrative.  The events that Asimov writes about are so far distant in time and space that they have to be -- essentially -- sped up.  Each of the narrative slices provides a peek into one time and place before shuttling off to the next.  This creates an exaggerated urgency because he can collapse events that might take place fifty or one hundred years apart to make them seem more causal, more immediate.  Whatever the actual events of history, Seldon's immediate influence has shifted.  While in the first novel, Seldon's holographic appearances were eagerly anticipated, Asimov reveals that two of the subsequent appearances had no audience.  In this sense, Seldon and psychohistory have become more totemic.
Then, two weird things happen.  First, people start talking about someone called the Mule.  There are all kinds of rumors about the Mule and about the powers that he has.  The other thing is that two of the characters meet a space clown named Magnifico.  If you are a reader like me, you will have noticed that Asimov goes to great pains not to describe the Mule and you will further suspect that this space clown actually is the Mule.  This turns out to be the case.  Also, the space clown Mule/Magnifico can essentially read people's thoughts and alter their emotions.
There are some cool scenes of the empire in decline.  As technology declines, colonists are forced to turn back to the soil and bartering.  The Mule wants to rebuild the empire but is frustrated in the end because he is unable to locate the mythical second Foundation that is located somewhere on the opposite side of the galaxy form the original Foundation.  The two separate Foundations are set up in the first novel but the second one has been kept more hidden.  Some of the characters speculate that the scientific first Foundation is countered by an emotional second Foundation which would be ideally suited to fighting against the Mule.
I lost track of where Seldon is in all of this.  Honestly, the space clown threw me a bit and the Mule seemed like a pretty dumb character so I glossed over parts of this book.
As sequels go, this isn't bad.  The book does play around with some of the same themes that made Foundation interesting and it extends other ideas.  However, this book also loses even more focus on the encyclopedia which is the thing that drew me to these books in the first place.

Found Writings, Part 4

What follows is a review/analysis that I wrote about a book of poetry that I found in a second-hand book store called Punk Novel by someone named Bad Al.  This book is really something.  Difficult to describe, difficult to read, difficult to write about.  You can see some of the tool marks in my writing as I try to find a way to write about the book honestly but still be charitable (a little, at least) to the author.  I have never seen another copy of this book anywhere and no one I know has even heard of it.  I will try to dig it up and repost the cover here.  If I can't find it, I am not entirely convinced that I didn't just dream it up.
While looking into this a bit, I came across this quote, "Rock and Roll poetry by (probably) Shel Silverstein", which is about the only information that is available for this book on Amazon.
I did not, and probably could not, edit the original post.

Punk Novel

“So this ain't a novel

so what

look how ya grovel cause ya

think it's something hot.”

Punk Novel is a book that I bought a number of years ago in a used book store.  I knew nothing about it, had never even heard of it, but the title and the fact that it was 2 bucks was enough for me.  The book is by Bad Al and it is something of a concept poetry book although I already get the sense that I am giving it too much credit.  Let me be clear, Punk Novel is not good.  It doesn't make a lot of sense and even the author seems to be amazed that the thing was published.  The dedication reads, in part, “I want you to know that only three people in the whole fucking publishing business liked Punk Novel for any reason whatsoever.”

I call this a concept poetry book, but I might also call it a printed concept album.  The title page looks like a track listing of 13 songs (complete with run time though it is uncertain whether the time is meant to represent the time it should take to read the “song” or the time spent composing it) are split across 2 sides.  This format calls attention to the blurred lines between lyrics and poetry.  This is probably the most interesting part of Punk Novel.  The work itself is typeset in a Courier look-alike font and several pages contain collage artwork, which makes me think that this first existed as a zine.  

The poems are not good.  They are simplistic and I would say that some of it resembles slam poetry more than anything else, but I don't want to give the impression that this is as good as slam poetry.  Now, I will say that there are a lot of really dumb lyrics to punk songs.  Sometimes this is on purpose and conforms to a larger theme in the punk aesthetic and sometimes the idiocy is genuine.  But these poems contain a grating combination of idiocy and arrogance.  Bad Al seems to be pretty impressed with something but I can't really see what it is.

One poem, “Hemorrhoid,” is a story song about the community service psychologist that Bad Al's mother and sister go to in order to fix their contentious relationship.  The psychologist wants to see Bad Al, who he thinks is at the heart of the problem, “'Cept this punk don't wanna be shrunk.”  Bad Al recounts all of the tricks that he plays on the psychologist when he goes in.  He reveals what he takes to be “textbook” pyscho-babble but it is a bit it is more or less like an episode of Frasier.  The jewel of this poem, though, is Bad Al's chorus which runs: “MAYBE YOU CAN SHRINK A HEMORRHOID/BUT MAH HEAD'S A WHOLE OTHER THING.”  At the end of the poem, Bad Al reveals to the psychologist that he has been pretending the whole time and the psychologist is amazed at how smart Bad Al is.  Of course.

Perhaps the best lines in the book are the chorus to “Mother,” the first track on the second side, which runs:

I GOTTA TAKE MAH MOTHER APART

PUT HER BACK TOGETHER AGAIN

FEET FIRST

STICKIN' UP OUT OF THE HEARSE

BRAINS LAST

I GOTTA MOVE FAST

MAH MOTHER'S FUTURE'S BEEN HER PAST.

I don't know what this song is about.  Parts of it seem to make fun of “mother's” friends for being old and sometimes it seems to be about killing his mother.  But then again, there are elements that suggest that mother might be abusive or drug addicted.  Thing is, Bad Al is actually better when the poems are more dissociative.  This poem, odd as it is, is more affecting than many of the other poems that either express a unified message or present a narrative.  

Contrast “Mother” with “You the Jury,” which is about how much jury duty sucks.  This poem is pretty unified in this message but one gets the impression that the whole idea from the song is meant to be an ironic twist on either Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury or the movie adaptation of the same name, starring Stacey Keach.  In any case, the narrator of the poem is dismissed from jury duty (Bad Al does allude to Spillane in “Geronimo and Hollywood”).  So, one wonders what the problem is.

My overall impression is that Bad Al steps over decent lines and couplets in order to extend thoughts that don't really need to be extended.  Take this from “Jury Duty”:

“Me and The Knife they called him

before they hauled him in,

me and Rutherford Brown

was how they introduced him as they accused him

of buryin' two inches of ice-cold steel

into the commonweal,

me and him,

me and Rutherford The Knife Brown

made eye contact,

made a sort of pact,

signed a sort of soul contract.”

The first four lines are repetitious and could be reduced to two.  The lines “buryin' two inches of ice-cold steel/into the commonweal” is actually clever.  It is a decent couplet that expresses the dual conceits of crimes committed against individuals and communities at the same time as well as Bad Al's complicit in the community.  Fair enough.  What kills it, though, is the “contact,” “pact,” “contract” triad.  This is not necessary and pushing the stupid rhyme into the third line buries a decent couplet and a decent idea in a long stanza that doesn't end up meaning much.  This happens elsewhere, but you'll forgive me if I don't quote more examples.  

I am convinced that, at this point, I have put way more thought into this book than anyone else has (potentially author inclusive).  I don't recommend this book if you are even able to find it.  I will happily lend my copy to anyone interested in perusing the pages as long as you send me postage and promise to give it back.  There is something a little endearing about this book and I definitely want to have it as a part of my collection.  

Bad Al, in case you ever see this; I'm sorry I didn't like your book, though I doubt you'd be surprised that I didn't.  I can say that I did have fun writing about it and, based on what little I know about you, I think you would take this review in the spirit it's offered.  

Foundation, Part 2: Re-reading Foundation

I meant to sit down and write this post after I finished reading the novel about a week and a half ago but I got caught up in some other writing projects and this fell to the wayside.  What this means is that I meant to give a more in-depth summary and analysis of Asimov's classic Foundation but what you are going to get is more nebulous.  I still have some notes from what I was going to write before, so I am going to work from that.
This may get sloppy and I know that I am going to miss some of the details.  I am okay with that.
This was my third reading of this novel.  The first time I read Foundation was in graduate school when I was working on the encyclopedic novel.  This novel is not encyclopedic, but it does contain thematic elements of the encyclopedia.  This is something that drops out of other novels (as I have written elsewhere) but is pretty heavy in the first one.
The second time I read this novel was with my sci-fi reading group.  We would alternate between reading classic sci-fi and newer novels.  Foundation filled the bill for a classic sci-fi novel that many in the group wanted to read, so we took it up.  I don't remember much about that conversation now, but I probably spent some time talking about the Encyclopedia Galactica.
This third time I am taking it up is with a view toward reading the entire series.
Foundation opens with a couple of really fascinating premises: the science of psychohistory and the aforementioned Encyclopedia Galactica.  I have written about the encyclopedia elsewhere, so I want to focus on psychohistory here.  This science blends sociology, group psychology, and statistical analysis into a science that may be used to predict future events.  The idea is that a properly trained psychohistorian can take a set of data about a current culture and its broad trends and use this to judge the likely outcome of certain events.  Hari Seldon is the most gifted practitioner of psychohistory and he uses it to predict long-scale historical events, including the eventual downfall of the current galactic empire, the dark ages that will follow the fall, and the eventual rise of the second empire.

The science of psychohistory is interesting because it seeks to quantify human action on a macro-scale.  Asimov explains away individual action by relying on probability and using civilization-wide sample sizes to make predictions.  This means the psychohistory relies on the broadest of trends, making individual contributions much too small to be a factor.
In order to show actions on this broad scale, the narrative must make leaps into the future.  This is not an uncommon device in sci-fi, but it takes special care to pull it off.  The author must keep certain thematics steady enough draw along plot and must be careful to re-establish context after each jump forward in time.  Each jump requires new characters as well.  This means that there are a lot of balls to keep in the air at once to pull it off.
Asimov does this with varying success.  The idea of psychohistory and following the plotting of civilization is compelling enough to draw readers along, even as they may have difficulty keeping characters and events straight.  Hari himself remains a constant throughout the narrative despite dying early on in the timeline.  He does this by preparing holograms of himself that are designed to appear at specific times in the future to help guide civilization along its proper course.  Seldon realizes that he must simultaneously nudge civilization in the right direction while also keeping it ignorant of his plan.  This is an unresolved problem of the whole scheme because people begin anticipating these emergences of new information, these "nudges" from Seldon.  Asimov never gets deep enough into the mechanics of psychohistory to deal with this kind of anticipation.  There must be a profound faith in Seldon's prescience for this to be carried off at all.  And this seems to be at odds with the tenets of psychohistory itself.

Ultimately, this is a really enjoyable book.  It is compelling and there is a lot going on.  Asimov is always a big idea author and I am generally ready to forgive the small details that don't always add up.  I tend to think that his characters are generally weak, but again, his are novels of ideas and not character studies so it is easy to set this to the side and enjoy the novel as thought-experiment.

Found Writings, Part 3

What follows is a blog post that I wrote back when I thought that this was all going to be about punk rock.  It is more about my early initiations into punk and the music that I liked.  It is a bit more personal take on the music than some of the things that I have written, but I stand by pretty much all of it.  Here it is, without any edits:

Post 2 – The introduction

Green Day/Bad Religion (1993-4)

My first punk rock show was Bad Religion in Cleveland in the early/mid-nineties.  I don't remember which tour.  It was either the Recipe for Hate or Stranger than Fiction tour.  At this point I had already been listening to punk for a while after my older brother had gone to some shows with his friends.  We mainly listened to early Bad Religion and the first couple of Green Day albums.  We had to listen to dubs of Kerplunk because the album was nearly impossible to find at the time.  Within the year, their catalog was widely available.  

It was about a year later when I did get to see Bad Religion at the Agora in Cleveland and they would return every year just before Thanks giving for many years.  Each show, they would play a mix of their classic material and songs from their newest album.  This band has been important to me because of the people who they are.  Not only were they around from my very first awakening to punk rock, but the band – and lead singer Greg Graffin, in particular – showed me that there was a place for intelligence and that smarts, properly applied, are revolutionary.  Punk rock is a criticism and an outlet for anger.  I was angry because I never felt that I fit in with my peers.  I was a smart kid and didn't know how to express this.  Graffin's witty lyrics and political engagement stamped me and set a standard for the way that I still listen to music.  As a dude I worked with in a pizza shop once told me, “we can't all be politicians.”  True, but what we can all do is mean something.  This new standard for music that I came into had no patience for self-indulgence and trifling.  I wanted serious and I wanted meaningful.

These new desires for serious and meaningful might seem to be at odds with my love of Green Day, and particularly in conjunction with Bad Religion.  But I have come to associate the two bands so closely because I came to them at roughly the same time and because these two bands were so different from the Def Leppard, Guns 'n' Roses, and Slaughter that I had been listening to before (I still love G 'n' R, but for different reasons now).  What I saw in Green Day was engagement with emotion.  I don't know if I realized this at the time, but when I look back what I think I identified was unironic investment in emotion.   At the same time that I needed the intellectual stimulation of Bad Religion, I needed my stupid teenage hormones legitimized.  The world is full of platitudes about how a kid will understand things when he grows up and people telling kids they don't understand.  This is bullshit because every teen knows that their emotions are 100% real.  An adult can look back and recognize that these emotions are fleeting but in the moment they are the most real thing.  Green Day's emotion was a perfect counter to Bad Religion's logic.  I now fully recognize that what I saw as originality in Green Day was heavily influenced by the emotional engagement of the Descendents and the witty banter with boredom of the Ramones but at that time, this is what I knew and I have a strong nostalgic draw to these two bands.  

I don't remember the date, but I did get to see Green Day not all that long after the show I mentioned earlier.  This would have been after Dookie hit big and Green Day put on a show at Blossom music center outside of Cleveland.  The big draw was that Green Day would play a show that anyone could go to and to prove this they charged $3 a ticket.  This concert happened after a free show at the same venue had been cancelled.  I went with a group of my friends and my brother's friends and nearly everyone I knew was there.  I don't remember much of the show aside from it being a huge event and a couple of my friends and I spent a lot of time pulling up pieces of sod to hurl into the crowd (I also found $5).  I wasn't as interested in this show because by then I had already been to a number of club shows in Cleveland in much smaller venues.  Outdoor venues like Blossom could house in the tens of thousands and removed the personal connection that had been so important to me.  I have only been to a few big venue concerts and festival shows since then because of this.  I always felt more connection to the bands than to the people seeing the bands with me.