Puck

review by Brian Charles Clark

Brodie’s Report
by Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher: Penguin, 2005

Jorge Luis Borges is best known in North America as one of the stars of “magical realism.” Such stories as “Funes, the Memorious,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” cemented his reputation as a meta-fictional writer concerned with the relationship between memory-as-story, life’s narrative arc, and the art of writing. After reading the stories in Ficciones or Labyrinths, one can never feel quite the same when browsing the stacks of a library which, for Borges (himself employed for many years as a librarian at the National Library in Buenos Aires), was a kind of labyrinth. Continue Reading »

The creationists’ back-door attempt to sneak their mythology into public education is called Intelligent Design. The issue is on trial as I write in Pennsylvania. The matter has been well covered by a number of publications, including The Onion which, as usual, has fair and balanced reporting. What a lot of the coverage has missed is the racism inherent to Intelligent Design (ID). That’s because the race card is kept hidden by both advocates and enemies of ID. Advocates of ID also try to keep the “G” word out of the discussion, too. But the canny critic sees through the veil. The argument goes like this. ID is racist because it is an argument for the design of complex systems. Some systems, though, are better designed than others. Continue Reading »

review by Brian Charles Clark

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
Reza Aslan
Random House, 2005

Reza Aslan has written an important and wonderfully readable book on the history of Islam. A devout Muslim who cares deeply about his religion, Aslan is also a thoughtful humanist. No god but God generously, gracefully and intelligently incorporates both these sets of values. It’s important for Americans to read this book: we keep asking, Why do they hate us?, and reply foolishly with thoughtless answers like, Because they’re jealous of our freedoms (as George W. Bush has maintained for the past several years). More likely, it seems to me, the answer lies in our own ignorance: what do we really know about Islam? Recently I was asked to teach an Introduction to the Humanities class at a community college. The regular instructor bailed out at the last minute; I was given a textbook on a Friday and told to be prepared to start teaching the following Monday. I read fast, but knew I had to skim most of the required textbook in order to prepare. One of the chapters I read in detail, though, was the one on the history of Islam. To my horror is read, in this widely used textbook, the authors’ claim that the Prophet Mohammed married Fatima. This kind of ignorance of other cultures and other faiths is deeply offensive. In this case, Fatima, as we all should know, was the Prophet’s daughter (his wife’s name was Khadija). How could the authors (an archeologist and a theologian, both of prestigious U.S. universities) implicitly accuse Mohammad of a crime—incest—that all the children of Abraham find offensive? Continue Reading »

review by Brian Charles Clark

The King, the Crook, and the Gambler: The True Story of the South Sea Bubble and the Greatest Financial Scandal in History
by Malcolm Balen
Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2004

Nearly 300 years ago, a group of financial speculators dreamed up a plan to make money from England’s national debt. In an age when someone making £100 a year was considered wealthy, the national debt was huge: about £9 million. The idea behind the South Sea Company was that British merchants would trade English goods in South America, then controlled by Spain and Portugal. The problem was that Spain and Portugal wouldn’t allow any such thing to happen: they had a strictly controlled monopoly. What actually happened was that John Blunt, the director of the South Sea Company, ended up convincing the British government to sell its debt to the public through the Company in the form of shares. From the profits of the share sales, the Company would then repay the debt. Moreover, “in the persuasive but intrinsically nonsensical analysis” put forward by the South Sea Company, “as surely as night follows day, the bigger the debt, the greater the profit.” Continue Reading »

OK, people, let’s cut the crap. You’ve heard about the Bush Administration’s Big Idea: we’ll go “back to the Moon” within 10 years. Why? In order to build a base on the Moon that will serve as a jumping-off point for a “manned” (their sexist language, not mine) trip to Mars. Can we talk? If the U.S.–or anybody else, for that matter, wants to send a human’d flight to Mars, OK, that’s one thing. But why do it from the Moon? Why go all the way to the Moon–which takes 3 days and billions of dollars–to then take off for Mars? Continue Reading »

review by Brian Charles Clark

Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land
John Crowley
William Morrow, 2005

Here’s what we know. In June of 1816, Lord Byron, John Polidori (Byron’s personal physician), Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) and Claire Claremont all gathered at Byron’s place on the shore of Lake Geneva, Villa Diodati. 1816 was a “year without a summer” because the year before a huge volcanic eruption had sheathed the planet in a blanket of sun-blocking dust. On what must have been one of many dark and stormy nights that summer, the above-named crew sat around a fire and told stories. (See Ken Russell’s 1986 film Gothic for a wonderfully kinky version of the story of that famous night.) It was so much bone-chilling fun that young Mary (she was not quite nineteen at the time) suggested that they all write supernatural stories. And all agreed.

What followed is history: Mary wrote Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus, the grandmother of all science fiction novels. The rest of the Diodati gang went on to fame or obscurity, as the case may be, but none followed up on Mary’s challenge. Or did they? Polidori, in fact, wrote a short novel called The Vampyre, generally credited with being the first tale of blood-sucking in English. But there’s a controversial line of evidence that strongly indicates that Polidori, more than a bit of a blood-sucking sycophant, stole the idea and plot of The Vampyre from Byron. There’s a scrap of a prose manuscript by Byron on that subject, and it seems likely that Byron, before he told Polidori to hit the road, conveyed to his doctor, in great detail, the nitty-gritty of the vampire tale. So Polidori’s novel, this line of reasoning goes, is really “Lord Byron’s novel.” Continue Reading »

review by Brian Charles Clark

Borges: A Life
by Edwin Williamson
Publisher: Penguin, 2005

Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinean writer, led a fascinatingly diverse life almost entirely within the city limits of Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires was, in the early twentieth century, one of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities on the planet, and so it is fair to say that Borges experienced numerous worlds without needing to leave home. Born in 1899, he was bilingual from the first, as his grandmother was British. His parents were in conflict over Argentinean politics, which perhaps influenced Borges’ seeming non-partisanship in his writing.

Indeed, if there is a problem with Williamson’s Life, it is the reduction of Borges’ life, character and work to this conflict between his parents. Williamson frequently tries to psychoanalyze the life and work in terms of this conflict and, as far as it goes, this provides insight. But did his parents really shape Borges’ entire life? The evidence provided by Williamson himself indicates otherwise. Continue Reading »