Book Review: Mountains of Madness

My final opinion of H.P. Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness:



I've given this a lot of thought. Now, it's still entirely possible that I'm just not understanding the historical context of the story, I can accept that. But it doesn't make the story any better.

It really should qualify as sci-fi and not horror, and I'm not sure how anyone could make such a mistake. Granted, the genres cross. But they don't typically cross during scientific expeditions where giant plant-animals and germ wads are discovered in Antarctica. That is solidly sci-fi territory, where horror geeks get phasered by Trekkies on a near-daily basis. All the other horror writers know to stay away, and there Lovecraft is flossing his Ancient Ones right in the middle of the Kirk-Picard debate.

I hereby lodge my objection to the subtitle of the Lovecraft book that I have, which goes "and other tales of terror". It should be adjusted, such that it reads "a mildly unsettling tale; followed by some other stories sure to make you walk home at night at the exact same speed you always do, confident in the knowledge that no monsters or madmen are behind you, and that your world is remarkably understandable and in no way alarming". I realize it's long, but it's accurate.

It's a little embarrassing. The truth does that sometimes.

Why Obama is Braking

This is the Presidential Daily Brief. It's full of things that he wasn't allowed to know as a senator, and lots of those things are, in the annoying campaign parlance that we've all grown to hate, "game changers". Obama's been putting on the Foreign Policy brakes pretty hard, and this in my opinion is probably why.

Makes you wonder what he read about Guantanamo Bay. I hope it wasn't that nuclear terrorists have acquired cannons that fire big ugly spiders and they're only surrendering them on pain of Cuban music, but I admit that I fear the worst.

Who To Blame for Mumbai

There's still chatter about how the Pakistani ISI might have had something to do with the Mumbai massacre, especially on the center-right (the left flat-out doesn't care). The ISI would be stupid to do it though, and while that's not impossible, there are too many reasons why it would behoove Pakistan to disallow it if possible.

First, there's no strategic logic to the ISI involving themselves or allowing the Mumbai attack. There's been a solid cease-fire over Kashmir since 2004 and in some places, there's discussion over demilitarizing completely. The only reason that could support the kind of covert action seen in Mumbai would be if diplomatic proceedings had gone dramatically wrong for Pakistan, and they thought it necessary to force their hand to get back into a position of strength in the negociations. To people who follow Indian politics (all three of you), it's clear that this didn't happen, at least not overtly. Public tensions were about normal in the weeks leading up to the attack, so there's really no suggestion that the relationship had gone sour. It's not impossible, just very unlikely.

Second, it's important to remember that while the ISI may have had a significant hand in the formation of Laskshar e-Taiba as an anti-soviet proxy, that this group wasn't formed out of thin air. There was a group of people there before willing to fight or close to that mark, and they were co-opted by the ISI. That's the only way a viable insurgent group starts; without pre-existing internal volition, insurgencies don't start or last, and can only be supported temporarily by covert funding and influence. What this means is that the relationship between the ISI and Lakshar e-Taiba is not characterized by the heirarchal notions suggested by a creator-creation relationship. It's symbiotic; both feed off eachother, but do not neccesarily operate to eachother's benefit and it is defined more by influence than control. Lakshar e-Taiba will have its own agenda and modus operandi, and it will not always be to the ISI's benefit, even if they cooperate where it suits them. Other examples will include the relationship between the CIA and Nicaraguan Contras, and the relationship between the US Military and the 1920's Brigade in Iraq.

And, just like the 1920's Brigade does things that the US Military doesn't always approve of, just like the Contras sometimes resorted to human rights abuses that were detrimental to the CIA's cause, Lakshar e-Taiba will occasionally act without regard for the interest of their co-opter.

It's important to understand that Lakshar e-Taiba is not a "Pakistani" group per se; it's fallacious to label them as such because they're really a transnational terrorist group that happens to operate out of Pakistan. Their interests are Islamist interests, not Pakistani interests, and there's going to be a pretty wide gulf between them on a regular basis. The influences of their base nation take a side seat to the interests of their religious convictions wherever those interests end up in competition. The Mumbai assault is a very good example.

The attackers did throw out some pretty generic stuff about Kashmir, but it was oriented towards the percieved crimes against muslims and Islam in Kashmir, making the assault not a nationalist issue over Kashmir, but a religious issue. This is perhaps what makes it a little confusing when considering whether or not it was really about Kashmir. It was, but in a different context than is normal. Further, the attackers made clear that they percieved Kashmir as land belonging to Islam; to them, the attempted ceding of the territory to China by Pakistan in 1964 is just as illegitimate as the Indian claim to the territory; they're both tahut, just to different degrees.

The result was an islamic attack on India over Kashmir in Mumbai, which was against Pakistani state interests and only has a valid strategic logic when understood in an Islamist context. But it would be short-sighted to leave the blame with nobody but these Islamist groups, because they are so often co-opted by nations as proxy utilities against conventional military and political power. There must be some reasonable amount of responsibility levied on the people and institutions who continue to co-opt these groups, and lend them legitimacy in doing so. The ISI here is only distally responsible, and probably not responsible at all for the Mumbai assault - that one belongs entirely to Islamism (and if the ISI participated, they were profoundly stupid for doing so). But it's also clear that the relationship, however strained now, can't be allowed to continue if halting preventable terrorism is the interest.

Guns (Wheee!)

It's fairly obvious that I'm a gun rights advocate. So it will come as even less of a surprise that I think the Brady Campaign is full of it. Here's something they said today:

"We don't dispute [the gun sales hike] because the numbers from the federal system certainly confirm that there is increased activity out there. We just think it's a bit stupid," said Peter Hamm, spokesman for the Brady Campaign against Gun Violence.

"Anyone who thinks they need to rush out and buy a firearm clearly has not been paying attention to how quickly we make progress on this issue. We don't think these are first-time buyers. We think they are people who already have more than enough guns at their homes to protect themselves and are buying more."

Hamm is very likely correct, that people who already own guns are out buying more. But more than they need? I could make the old arguments that this nation isn't based on "need" and that it's based on individual liberty, but that would fall on perennially deaf ears. So I'm going to use a somewhat different tack that hopefully will make enough sense to become the new main line of counter-argument.

What the Brady Campaign has never understood, and fails to understand even now, is that this isn't a matter of intelligence or legislation. It's a simple matter of Zombies.

Now, just because we've been making shaky progress in the stock market away from the 7000-point, Dow Jones Insta-Zombie level (DJIZ), that doesn't mean that we've escaped the inevitable, and the American Public isn't fooled.

Peter Hamm might say that those people who are out buying guns don't need more. But who is really in a position to dictate the needs of others in the face of a likely zombie apocalypse? Certainly not someone who knows so little about guns to begin with like the Brady Campaign. Even I wouldn't assume to know, because I don't know how many openings of what size are in any individual's household. If I did, I'd know exactly how many guns could be made to point out of them, which is what I would imagine necessity will dictate.

Besides, the people buying weapons now are buying the ones that Zombie Collaborators like Hamm don't want us to have because they're the effective ones. Everyone knows that.

Publishers Sell Good Books, Dummy

Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers. -- Jimmy Breslin

Maureen Dowd. Don't leave, please, just bear with me a moment.

She's on vacation, and Timothy Egan is filling in with an opinion piece up at the New York Times about writers and writing, which launches a boring and predictable diatribe against a couple of conservatives who have the gall to put their thoughts into printed words. Go ahead and read it. I'll wait. This column will still be here when you wake up from your idiocy-induced blackout.

Good, you're awake again. I'm sorry I had to do that. You're stronger for it.

I certainly understand the sentiment that's behind that third-grader's rage, but it fails completely to strike a sympathetic chord with me because you can't even make it from the front door of the Border's to the Seattle's Best coffee shop in the corner without passing through a section filled with more pretentious crap than anyone without a triple-pierced lip will ever want to read. It's also pretty clear to me that there's plenty of room in said Borders for two more books, even if they are by Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin.

And I may be going out a shade far on an already precarious limb, but I'm going to go right ahead and say that there may well be other bookstores out there.

Point being, the market for books is large, and very, very wide. These two people aren't going to push the hungry masses of starving artists out of print and into obscurity. They were there to begin with.

John Kennedy Toole was dead before he was published. A Confederacy of Dunces won him a posthumous Pulitzer. Were his publishers rushing potboilers to print which prevented him from getting a foot in? Probably. It's pretty hard to market a comedy of the type he wrote. Is that the norm? Not really.

JD Salinger was famous during his liftime, because people thought that what he wrote was poignant. Vonnegut was famous in the same way. So was Hemingway. So was Twain. This was because their writing was exceptionally good on a regular basis.

The next generation of Twains, Vonneguts, and Hemingways won't be kept down by potboilers either (hopefully, the next Salinger will be an exception). They won't be, because their writing will be exceptionally good on a regular basis. People who are having trouble breaking into the industry, by and large, are having trouble for a reason.

And the reason isn't that Sarah Palin wants to write too.

New Layout

It's much prettier this way. The vintage photo above is actually of Main Street in Stevens Point circa 1908. It makes the site look much more respectable until one gets to the content.

The Great Tragedy

The Panic of 2008 is going to be in the history books. It is going to challenge us severely in the years ahead. But there is something worse. Something much more troubling.

And that, dear reader, is the looming dearth of refrigerator magnets.

With the economy shrinking, fewer businesses will have the capital to create advertisement in sticky-thing form; they will be forced to spend on advertising that's actually effective. This means no more free magnets clinging to our refrigerators, loudly touting the superiority of Don's Muffler Service while holding up our childrens' art projects.

The side effect, of course, is that we will forget what our childrens' art projects are like at all, with no way to keep them visible on our refrigerators there will be no way to see them.

An entire generation's creative side is going to be lost in it's infancy.

Good Day

Chemical Ali is sentenced to death today, which is great.

And here, Muslim groups in India want to deny burial to the Mumbai terrorists.

These men are not Muslims. Why should we give them place anywhere? There is no place for them in our hearts and in our cemeteries," said Hamid Abdul Razzak, president, Dawat-e-islami.

Amen to that.

And, better still, the Thai protests that have lasted for 3 months over election fraud have come to a successful close. Kind of makes you wonder why the whining left couldn't do something like that for the last 8 years if they were really sure of a stolen election.

It's a good day for civilization so far.

Reading List

None of these are new releases, but having just run into them at a bookstore here and having not seen them elsewhere, they've made it onto my list fairly easily.

Tell Me How This Ends

Reconciliation