Compassionate Fangs

Last week I received my DVD of Dreams With Sharp Teeth, the new documentary about Harlan Ellison. I've watched it a couple of times now, thoroughly enjoying it. Neil Gaiman makes the observation in the film that Ellison has been engaged in a great big piece of performance art called "Harlan Ellison" and I think he's spot on. Harlan---he is one of the only writers who ever worked in the realm of fantastic literature to be known almost immediately by his first name---is very much part and parcel of his work. You don't get the one without the other. Which is not to say the work doesn't stand on its own. It does, very much so. No doubt there are many people who have read the occasional Ellison story and found it...well, however they found it. Anything, I imagine, but trivial. If they then go on to become fans of the stories, eventually they will become aware of the person, mainly by virtue of the extensive introductions Harlan writes to just about everything he does, secondarily by the stories told by those who know, or think they know, something about him, either through personal experience or by word of mouth. He's fascinating to watch. Sometimes it's like watching a tornado form. Harlan was born in 1934, which makes him 75 now. This seems incredible to me, sobering even. He will always seem to me to be about 40, even though I have seen him now for years with white hair and other attributes of age. The voice has gotten a bit rougher, but he's just as sharp as ever. I have been in his actual presence on two occasions. In 1986 he showed up in Atlanta at the world SF convention that year and I have a couple of autographed books as a result. He dominated a good part of one day for us. The second time was in 1999 or so, at a small convention called ReaderCon in Massachussetts, where he was guest of honor. On that occasion I had lunch with him and few others and that lunch remains memorable, because I got to see the man when he isn't On. That is, it was before the convention began and he was, so to speak, "off duty" and was more relaxed, less hyperbolic. And it was a great pleasure. It is easy to see why people are drawn to him. He is something of a contradiction.

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Amazon.com Now Censors As Policy

Amazon.com has just initiated a new marketing policy. They are stripping away the sales ranking of any book with so-called Adult Content. Here's their little explanation: "In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature. Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us. Best regards, Ashlyn D Member Services Amazon.com Advantage What this mean in effect, however, is that books primarily with gay and lesbian content are being singled out for exclusion from database searches. It is being applied in a bigoted and surprisingly hamfisted manner to conform to someone's standard of what constitutes Offensive Material. Adult Content generally means anything with more than coyly suggested sex in it. However, as a sample of the books not having their sales ranking stripped away, consider these: --Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds by Chronicle Books (pictures of over 600 naked women) --Rosemary Rogers' Sweet Savage Love" (explicit heterosexual romance); --Kathleen Woodiwiss' The Wolf and the Dove (explicit heterosexual romance); --Bertrice Smal's Skye o'Malley which are all explicit heterosexual romances --and Alan Moore's Lost Girls (which is a very explicit sexual graphic novel) These book sell very well, generally, so it's obvious that there's a dollar connection to this new policy. Midlist---the vast majority of books---will be targeted.

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Comfort – Discomfort

Iconic anti-evolutionist Ray Comfort has come forward again. He's written a book entitled, "You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think: Answers to Questions from Angry Skeptics". Plenty of scathing reviews are available. F'rinstance:

His style of writing can barely be called argumentative. He posits no compelling evidence for his beliefs, makes blind assertions, and clearly does not understand natural forces such as evolution by natural selection and by writing a book which mischaracterizes science, is undermining observation, experimentation, rational thought and critical thinking.

or a 5-star review, presuming Poe:

Ray is the master of satire. While reading this fine book I could just picture him sitting around, getting wasted, and dreaming up all of these hilarious proofs. He is a genius!

The reviews discuss how every point made in the book had already been debunked thoroughly on or around Comfort's online publications (blogs, videos, etc). Why, they ask, does he keep shutting down blogs and popping up new ones? Who is this book going to reach that hasn't already made up their minds? Granted, one can also apply that last argument to pro-science books like The God Delusion or The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Meanwhile, Qualia Soup has produced a concise video clearly explaining what evolution is and isn't, in 10 minutes. It implicitly refutes every point we've seen Comfort make, without the discomfort of mentioning Comfort.

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Reading On The Rise

According to this report, reading is on the rise in America for the first time in a quarter century. It's difficult for me to express how pleased this makes me. Civilization and its discontents have been in the back of my mind since I became aware of how little reading most people do. To go into a house---a nice house,well-furnished, a place of some affluence---and see no books at all has always given me a chill, especially if there are children in the house. Over the last 30 years, since I've been paying attention to the issue, I've found a bewildering array of excuses among people across all walks of life as to why they never read. I can understand fatigue, certainly---it is easier to just flip on the tube and veg out to canned dramas---but in many of these instances, reading has simply never been important. To someone for whom reading has been the great salvation, this is simply baffling. Reading, I believe, is the best way we have to gain access to the world short of physically immersing ourselves in different places and cultures. Even for those who have the opportunity and resource to travel that extensively, reading provides a necessary background for the many places that will be otherwise inaccessibly alien to our sensibilities.

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Judging the violence of others

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written an excellent multidisciplinary work on the meaning of life, entitled The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006). I am presently reading Haidt's book for the second time, paragraph by paragraph.  This is clearly one of the books I would take to a…

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