The Iraqi Chupacabra?

Today's NY Times picks up the swirling street memes out of Basra regarding killer swamp rats, surveillance squirrels, and other trained mammalian minions of the British military. Sounds like a perfect opportunity for Mulder and Scully to come out of retirement.

From Iraq’s Rumor Mill, a Conspiracy of Badgers

By STEPHEN FARRELL
Published: July 31, 2007

BASRA, Iraq — Nazariet al-Muwamara, they call it in Arabic: the conspiracy theory. As they go, this one is a gem.

Take a Western army wearing out its welcome in the ancient land of Mesopotamia. Add a sharp-toothed creature with the claws of a bear and a reputation here to rival the Hound of the Baskervilles. Simmer in the 120-degree temperatures of summer and sprinkle with provincial Iraqi newspapers eager to fill newsprint gaps left by vacationing officials.

The result? Many residents of the city of Basra in southern Iraq have convinced themselves that the British Army has loosed savage cattle-eating badgers onto its unsuspecting populace as a final gesture of ill intent before it departs this summer.

Throw in, for good measure, the fervent belief that British soldiers have planted snake eggs in waterways and unleashed bomb-sniffing dogs purposely infected with rabies.

All three stories have been manufactured by Iraq’s tireless rumor mill, the only machine in the country seemingly capable of functioning day and night without need of electricity or generators.

The Iranian news media have gotten in on the act too, claiming that foreign forces have been fitting squirrels with miniaturized surveillance devices and sending them scurrying across the border to spy. Iranian news reports, monitored by the BBC, recently referred to 14 spy squirrels being captured by alert Iranian intelligence officials before the animals could take action against the nation.

***

The British were soon blamed, perhaps aided by the unfortunate coincidence that one of the British Army units is named Badger Squadron.

Maj. Mike Shearer, a British military spokesman in Basra, rebutted all animal-related allegations with a straight face: “Of course we categorically deny that we have released badgers into Basra."

A spokeswoman for Britain’s Foreign Office was more succinct in denying the rumor. “Don’t be silly,” she said.

At the British headquarters, commanders have weightier matters to consider. On senior officers’ desks sit copies of Carl von Clausewitz’s 1832 treatise, “On War,” and David Galula’s colonial-era French manual, “Counterinsurgency Warfare.”

Asked whether coalition forces were ever likely to have been as welcome in Iraq as prewar optimists hoped, one senior British officer shook his head wearily. “It would have been difficult, given the conspiracy mindset,” he said. “Just look at the badgers.”

Lots more here from the British press.

A Defense of Bulwer-Lytton

Well, it’s mid-summer, and that means that English department at San Jose State University is announcing the winners to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. And so, once again, poor Bulwer-Lytton is coming in for mockery that is mostly undeserved. The following, which is an adaptation of the appendix to my Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, is meant as a corrective, or at least dissent, from this:

In his lifetime Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron of Knebworth (1803-1873) was a popular, prolific, and influential writer. But thanks to the vagaries of time and changing literary tastes Bulwer-Lytton’s name has become synonymous with bad writing, to the point that the English department of San Jose State University has, since 1982, held the "Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest" for the "opening sentence of the worst of all possible novels." The decline in Bulwer-Lytton’s reputation is at least somewhat understandable, as many aspects of his style have not aged well. Bulwer-Lytton’s work can be stiff, wooden, and melodramatic. He often unsuccessfully strains for affect. He had a fatal weakness for prolixity, fustian, and bombast. He is little-read today.

But Bulwer-Lytton deserves better. Never mind that he wrote in the style of his era, and that to single him out for writing like his contemporaries is unjust. Never mind that other writers who are his stylistic inferiors are not targeted so; no sober critic would read Walter Scott or Fenimore Cooper, and then read Bulwer-Lytton, and declare that Bulwer-Lytton is more deserving of derision. Never mind that, as Jaime Weinman says, "It was a dark and stormy night" isn’t really that bad. (I can find several opening lines in Dickens that are worse).

Bulwer-Lytton deserves praise and admiration. Few writers, of any time or of any country, were as influential during their lifetimes. Few writer possessed his commerical instincts or had as great an insight into the tastes of the reading audience. And few writers were as consistently experimental over as long a period of time. The following is a summary of his accomplishments:

• Pelham (1828) was the most popular and influential of the Silver Fork genre of novels. The Silver Fork (or "fashionable novel") genre described the improper behavior of the aristocratic set, as told to the public by (supposedly) one of the aristocrats themselves. The Silver Fork novel was popular from the 1820s until the 1840s and was the transitional genre between the novel of the upper classes and the domestic realism of the Victorian novel proper. Pelham made the fortune of the publishing firm of Colburn and Co. and may have been the best-selling novel of the 19th century. Pelham also set the style, still the standard today, for men wearing black evening dress rather than blue.
• Paul Clifford (1830) and Eugene Aram (1832) were the first two major Newgate novels and essentially established the genre. Neither novel was quite as popular as William Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood, but both novels were successful (and scandalous), and Rookwood and the succeeding Newgate novels would not have been written without Bulwer-Lytton’s precedent.
• The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) was not Bulwer-Lytton’s first historical novel (the undistinguished Devereux (1829) was), but it was his first success in the genre. It is the best historical novel of the 1830s and was seen by critics as having topped the work of Sir Walter Scott. Bulwer-Lytton followed Pompeii with Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835), The Last of the Barons (1843), and Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (1848). Scott deserves credit for the creation of the modern historical novel, but Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novels were among the most popular in the genre in the 1830s and 1840s, and The Last Days of Pompeii created the subgenre of historical novels set in Rome, a group which would later include Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurian (1885) and Lewis Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880). Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novels set the standard for applying scholarship and research to the writing of historical romances, and The Last of the Barons and Harold were among the first historical novels to apply contemporary social political issues to the past: in Barons, the negative effect of the Industrial Revolution on England; in Harold, the question of what it is to be "English" and a celebration of the romantic Toryism of the Young England movement of the early 1840s.
• England and the English (1834) was an important criticism of English culture which was politically radical in its call for education and child labor reform.
• Athens: Its Rise and Fall (1837) is one of the best and most readable Victorian histories of ancient Greece.
• Ernest Maltravers (1837) is the novel in which the influence of the Germans on Bulwer-Lytton is the most pronounced. Bulwer-Lytton was greatly influenced by the German thinkers and writers, Goethe and Schiller especially, and he translated Schiller’s lyrical poetry and wrote essays on Wieland, Lessing, Herder, and Klopstock. Bulwer-Lytton admired and liked the Germans and helped spread an appreciation for German thought among the English, and in Ernest Maltravers Bulwer-Lytton did a passable attempt at emulating Goethe.
• Night and Morning (1841), another of Bulwer-Lytton’s Proto-Mysteries, was reviewed by Edgar Allan Poe in the same issue of Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine in which appeared Poe’s "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Poe’s first C. Auguste Dupin story. Though not wholly complimentary of Bulwer-Lytton, Poe nonetheless praises Night and Morning’s plot construction. Poe probably did not read Night and Morning before he composed "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," but it is likely that the complicated plot of Night and Morning had some effect on Poe’s composition of "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter." Moreover, Night and Morning’s detective Monsieur Favart, though an imitation of Eugène François Vidocq, is an early example in crime fiction of the police detective character. Both Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins knew of Night and Morning, and it is arguable that Favart was an influence on Dickens’ creation of Inspector Bucket (in Bleak House) and on Collins’ creation of Sergeant Cuff (in The Moonstone). The mystery genre would be different without the example of the Newgate novels to draw upon. The mystery genre would not exist without the work of Poe, Dickens, and Collins, all three of whom were influenced by Bulwer-Lytton.
• Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (1861-1862) created the occult fantasy genre. Bulwer-Lytton had predecessors, including William Beckford (in Vathek), but it was Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni and A Strange Story which were influential on and imitated by later writers of occult fantasy.
• The Caxtons (1849) was not the first major domestic novel–Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847) has that honor–but Bulwer-Lytton’s prestige (by the mid-point of the century Bulwer-Lytton was seen as England’s leading novelist) gave significant impetus to domestic fiction and helped make it fashionable.
• The Haunted and the Haunters (1859) was the first modern haunted house story. It is set in the London of the day and uses psychic phenomena rather than the rationalized supernatural of the Gothics. The Haunted and the Haunters has been imitated dozens of times and is one of the two or three most influential haunted house stories ever written.
• The Coming Race (1871) was multiply influential. It is a significant early work of science fiction and uses concepts which would become standards in science fiction, including a version of atomic energy in the vril force. The Coming Race is the best-written of the 19th century Hollow Earth novels and was influential on later utopian novels, including Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872). And the mystical vocabulary and ideology of The Coming Race were adopted by Helena Blavatsky and incorporated into the philosophy of Theosophy.

The preceding list does not include Bulwer-Lytton’s work (1831-1833) as an editor on the New Monthly Review, one of the most popular of the monthly fictional magazines; his political career as a Member of Parliament (1831-1841, 1852-1866) and as Secretary of State for the Colonies (1858-1859); his satires, including The New Timon (1846), with its then-shocking attack on Tennyson, and Money (1840), which like England and the English retains its bite today; his great influence on modern occultism, including the Order of the Golden Dawn; his influence on other writers, particularly Dickens; his efforts on behalf of other writers, both toward creating effective copyright laws and, through the Guild of Literature and Art, to support struggling writers and artists; his extensive critical work on the theory of fiction; and his attempts to experiment with narrative structure and to expand the possibilities of contemporary fiction, especially in My Life (1853), in which the narrative is interrupted by criticisms from the characters.

The callow call Bulwer-Lytton "Barely Literate," and the annual "Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest" invites similarly shallow jibes, but Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton is as deserving of respect and appreciation as any other writer of his age.

¿Volver?

Today's New York Times report on the imminent release of deposed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega from the federal prison in Miami where has has been stewing since 1990, in addition to making me nostalgic for the kinder gentler elder Bush and his less apocalyptic era* (and the killer PSYOP that punctuated his 1989 invasion), causes me to wonder what mischief El Piña might get up to if he really is freed. Maybe a campaign of payback against the son, a perfect karmic bookend to Bushito's own inter-familial revenge mission against Saddam? A back-to-the-future sideshow involving official voodoo, cocaine, Central American politics, and maybe even some Styx. Maybe throw in a Libyan hit squad for good measure. That would freaking rock, better than a Miami Vice marathon directed by Jean-Luc Godard from a script by John Milius.

* (See, e.g., the quote on background from "an official in the current Bush administration who was involved in American policy in Panama before the invasion ordered by the first President Bush in December 1989": "As military regimes go, Noriega's was a relatively benign one. They didn't kill that many people. They didn't torture that many people.")

**Hey, kids! Bookmark your own Noriega release watch here, courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Prisons' searchable database.

That'll teach me

Yesterday, I was feeling pretty chipper about Pope Benedict making nice with evolution. I should've expected some sort of cosmic balancing of the accounts, so Texas Governor Rick Perry's appointment of avowed creationist Don McLeroy to the chairmanship of the State Board of Education pretty much fits the bill.

Rick Perry is the awfullest governor Texas has ever had, and if you know Texas politics, that's saying something.

Religion vs. science, round 397

Pope Benedict has waded into the evolution vs. creationism debate:

Pope Benedict XVI said the debate raging in some countries — particularly the United States and his native Germany — between creationism and evolution was an “absurdity,” saying that evolution can coexist with faith.

I always get pretty nervous when he does this. Unlike Pope John Paul II, Benedict has not shown that much respect for science, particularly when it runs up against his personal dogma. Within the first year of his becoming pope, his top lieutenant Cardinal Schönborn denigrated evolution then turned around and backtracked somewhat. Benedict does a much better job of keeping to John Paul II's clear-eyed position on the matter, but even so, he still tries to shoehorn theology into the science itself, saying, "while there is much scientific proof to support evolution, the theory could not exclude a role by God." Well, of course not. Science cannot legitimately include or exclude "God" because "God" cannot be measured or quantified. Science can only measure and quantify that which can be measured and quantified. I believe it's perfectly acceptable to view science through a religious worldview. If the observer is being honest, the facts won't change, even if the observer's belief influences their understanding. There are Christian, Moslem, Jewish, Hindu, atheist and agnostic scientists doing great work today in everything from evolutionary biology to cosmology, and while their spiritual view of the universe may differ significantly, the underlying science is a shared understanding. But saying that science itself is somehow deficient because it doesn't include metaphysics is like saying a cheeseburger is lessened by the fact that it doesn't solve Fermat's last theorem.

Saturday Matinee with Marxists in Space

Thanks to the Austin Film Society's outstanding summer series, "Other Worlds, Other Minds: Global Sci-Fi Cinema," I had the good fortune this week to catch a screening of The Heavens Call (Nebo Zovyot), a gorgeous Russian mission to Mars film from 1959.



A Soviet state art project directed by Mikhail Karyukov and Aleksandr Kozyr, the film is a kind of Cold War bookend to Destination Moon (with a healthy dose of 2001). Instead of Heinlein's libertarian dream of a private entrepreneurs building the rocket for parallel goals of profit and progress, Heavens Call tells the story of dedicated technocrats working to propel their socialist utopia into the solar system, with their giant ship "Motherland" bound for the Red Planet. The leader is Kornev, a benevolent, patriarchal elder who never loses his cool and can be consistently relied upon to have just the right selfless philosophical utterance for every situation.



Unfortunately, their ideologically pure mission is screwed up by a competing American mission that could be operated by the same guys behind Destination Moon -- "The Mars Syndicate," selling canalside lots for $10 an acre, with their fast rocket "Typhoon" piloted by astronaut "Mr. Clark" (a Chuck Yeager analog famous for his masterful emergency landing of a wild rocket in El Paso, played by a silver-haired brick of a Russian with actual divots in his face and the tangible gravitas of a hero of Stalingrad) and accompanied by a glib dilettante celebrity broadcaster. When the Americans, in their greedy rush, end up falling toward the sun, the selfless Russians abandon their mission to save the misguided capitalists, then find themselves stranded without fuel on the asteroid Icarus. As they stand in a cubist variation on a Chesley Bonestell spacescape, watching the ripe red planet rise before them, co-pilot Andrei voices the tantalizing frustration of their near miss, to which Kornev replies that the next mission will be more successful because of this "useful lesson in the consequences of useless competition."



Visually, the film is stunning, from the majestic slow dance of the rocket launch that plays like a Tchaikovsky ballet version of Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds, to the pre-Kubrick rotating space station/platform (open to all members of the human race without discrimination or fee -- sorry, no Hilton and no Pan Am here), to the crazy futurist landscape of the asteroid. The ordered beauty of the Soviet utopia, with its beautiful thick happy people moving through time and space and labor and love with mellow grace and lots of Theremin music, is best illuminated when interrupted at the end of Act II with the appearance of the Yankees: Times Square! Neon! Boogie woogie! Cars! Celebrities! Private property!



The narrative contrast is ultimately the more powerful one: Thoughtful socialists like Kornev don't need happy endings. Or, the success of *cooperation* between the Russians and the Americans is more important than achievement of the scientific mission objective -- which makes the celebratory return of the astronauts, righteously riding the waves in an open motorboat to meet the roaring crowd of family, workers, and uniformed Young Bolsheviks, all the more emotionally vivid and real. It's fun to imagine other Hollywood genre archetypes repurposed in a similar fashion. Of course, as previously noted in this space, you are hearing this from a guy who is nostalgic for the lost dream of utopia in our excessively pragmatic, ideologically bereft age.



The film is touring with several other Soviet SF pictures as part of Seagull Films' "From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema," so keep an eye out for it (or get some folks together to bring it to your local repertory house).

(Or, if you're desperate, you can pick up the bastardized American version, Battle Beyond the Sun (1962), in which Roger Corman hired a young Francis Ford Coppola to recut the film as a Northern Hemisphere v. Southern Hemisphere thing, complete with attacks by vagina dentata space monsters.)



And if you're in Austin, you can check out anime apocalypse Akira next week or the awesomely titled To the Stars by Hard Ways the week after, which is surely worth it just for this mysterious lost android alone.

Potter mania

I have to admit I'm amazed by the frenzy whipped up over the impending release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but I suppose I shouldn't be. Ever since The Prisoner of Azkaban's release prompted waiting lines and book release parties at bookstores across the country, Harry Potter has been growing into a colossal multimedia juggernaut, complete with its own filkish subgenre.



I don't begrudge Rowling her success--if anyone deserves to become the first billionaire author, it's the divorced mother who wrote the first book while struggling to make ends meet on welfare. But I have to shake my head at her anger directed toward the New York Times for a positive, if somewhat uninspired, advanced review of the book that gave away precious few "spoilers" that could impact one's reading of the book in any manner.

"I am staggered that some American newspapers have decided to publish purported spoilers in the form of reviews in complete disregard of the wishes of literally millions of readers, particularly children," she said.

Which spoilers are she talking about?

J.K. Rowling's monumental, spell-binding epic, 10 years in the making, is deeply rooted in traditional literature and Hollywood sagas - from the Greek myths to Dickens and Tolkien to Star Wars - and true to its roots, it ends not with modernist, Soprano-esque equivocation, but with good old-fashioned closure: a big screen, heart-racing, bone-chilling confrontation and an epilogue that clearly lays out people's fates.

Is that it? That the end of the book clearly lays out people's fates? Or that it doesn't end with an ambiguous fade-out to an old Journey song? Gimme a break. The only real spoilerish material here is the reviewer's passing mention that "at least half a dozen" characters die in the book, which might be something revelatory if this were a new A.A. Milne Winnie-The-Pooh book, but is relegated pretty much to the "So what" category since it jibes with the "people die, but it's not a bloodbath" quote Rowling has been dishing out in every interview she's done over the past six months. The long and short of it is, if you want to find juicy spoilers, the New York Times' early review is probably the last place you're going to want to look. It's simply a case of manufactured hoopla, and when the review hit, Rowling and her handlers saw a golden opportunity to garner even more headlines than they already had by stirring up a banal tit-for-tat war of words with the New York Times. As far as problems go, it's a nice one to have.

For all my aura of bemused indifference, I, too, will be reading Deathly Hollows shortly. I won't be in line tonight at the local Hastings for the obligatory midnight release party (more likely I'll be washing dishes, or surfing the internets in the name of "research," which is a convenient way of avoiding actual writing), which will spare me the now-obligatory "Snape kills Dumbledore" drive-by shoutings.



My wife pre-ordered the book a month ago from Amazon. It should arrive sometime on Saturday, and I won't see much of her--or the book--for the next few days as she plows through it. Not that I'm losing any sleep over it. I'm in the middle of China Mieville's Un Lun Dun at the moment, and it's a crackin' good book. I'm disinclined to put it down, multimedia juggernaut or no.