Oh, Robert!

As I continue going through our many bookshelves, deciding what to donate to our library book sale, sometimes I just have to re-read a book before consigning it to the pile of donations.

I have a bunch of Robert Heinlein's novels--mainly well-worn paperbacks but a few hardcovers. I think I started reading him in junior high. I was a big fan of YA sci-fi. Heinlein could tell a good story and imagine so many futures. I was hooked.  Farmer in the Sky, The Rolling Stones, Citizen of the Galaxy, Double Star, Time for the Stars, Starship Troopers, and many others are still quite enjoyable to me.

Stranger in a Strange Land came along when I was an adult--and I loved it. But at some point Heinlein's adult fiction took a turn. Still interesting plots, for sure, but the main characters began to seem all alike. Alpha males and perky yet submissive females. Lots of casual nudity, a touch of incest . . .oh, nothing truly awful, but kinda annoying. (If the male protagonist threatens to spank his girlfriend one more time . . .)

I found on rereading these two that my reaction was much the same that caused me to toss my James Bond books. I'd really enjoyed those stories fifty years ago but time, social mores, and I have moved on.

These two will go to the library sale. Job has an interesting, if confusing, premise, but it revisits so many old Heinlein tropes that it had me groaning. It does, however, have an fun take on the Rapture, Heaven, Hell, and various gods. (Who knew that Jehovah had a Jewish accent?)

The Door into Summer was written earlier, before Heinlein got so repetitive. (He wrote 32 novels and 59 short stories so one sees how this might happen.) It has a great twisty plot with corporate theft, the "long sleep" (suspended animation to allow the sleeper to skip thirty years,) and time travel which allows for the righting of wrongs. It was a quick fun re-read, but I don't foresee wanting to read it yet again. Into the library pile with it.

You can see why this de-accessioning is taking a while.

 

Looking Back. Looking Forward

                                                                                 

 Continuing with my de-accessioning of books. So far, about ten good-sized boxes of books have gone to the library to be offered in their fall book sale. Assorted popular and classic fiction for the most part but now I've moved upstairs. That's where there's a whole wall of children's fiction which I'll clean but hang on to for Josie. 

And then the gardening books. Beautiful, aspirational books but at this point in my life, I'm not making gardens. So goodby to books like The Englishwoman's Garden, The Italian Rennaissance Garden (now that was a real flight of fancy,) and all the copies of Fine Gardening. I'm keeping some, and especially the more practical, but passing on quite a few--surely there are some garden dreamers who'll give them a home.

                                                       

On Wednesday, with Josie's help to reach the lowest shelves, I addressed my sci-fi collection. In my teens, I was an avid reader of this genre and I have the paperbacks to prove it. Some I'll keep--The Martian Chronicles and Dune, but others--like all the spawn of Dune, all of which I found disappointing, are out of here. As are many paperbacks of vintage sci-fi. I hope they'll find a nostalgic reader or two.

                                                         

And then there's all the Heinlein. His YA books were early favorites--I just re-read and enjoyed Citizen of the Galaxy and Double Star. I won't get rid of Starship Troopers or Stranger in a Strange Land. Much of his later stuff will probably go in the box. And I found I had a copy of For Us, the Living, his first attempt at a novel, written in 1938-39, and published posthumously.

                                                               

 

 I don't remember reading it, so I gave it a shot. Yikes! As a novel, it's mind- numbingly bad-- a man is inexplicably thrown from 1939 to 2086 and people there are eager to help him understand what he's missed and the structure of the current society. It's nothing more than a device to allow Heinlein to theorize about the future--the state of the USA and the world in 2086. And to lecture on his idea of an ideal society. As Spider Robinson states in a foreword, the seeds for many of Heinlein's future novels are here.

Heinlein's vision of the future is always fun--and sometimes funny (he has folks on spaceships using slide rules.) But there was a bit in FUTL that caught my attention. In the world of this novel, in 1944, (remember, Heinlein is writing in '39) the Republican candidate for president is a Senator Malone, "a typical demagogue. . .red-faced and raucous" who ran on a "platform of blaming everything on Europe of the radicals."

"He called for the outlawing of the Communist Party, protection of the American home, and a return to rationalism in education which he defined as readin', 'ritin', and 'rithmatic and a particularly jingoistic patriotism. He advocated deportation of all aliens, laws to prevent women from holding men's jobs, and protection of the moral of the young."

Malone was elected and quickly moved to gag the press and to turn Federal agents into his own private army. Before midterm elections, he declared a state of emergency and martial law. . .

Sounds kinda familiar, though we dodged a bullet (so far.) 

Heinlein got a lot wrong, but he could sure write a playbook for a would-be dictator.

                                                                            

Wanted: Fair Witness

When I was taking a required education course at the University of Florida back in 1962, one of our weekly assignments was to observe (through one-way glass) classes in progress at the university's laboratory school and to report on what we saw without drawing conclusions or making assumptions. Just the facts, ma'am. It was amazingly difficult and probably the most useful thing I learned in that course.

Robert Heinlein's  novel Stranger in a Strange Land posits a legal profession consisting of people with superior memories and trained in such factual observation -- Fair Witnesses. These Fair Witnesses, in the white robes of their professions, are invaluable in court, as their testimony is invariably accurate and true -- as far as it goes. For example, when Heinlein's Fair Witness character is asked the color of a house she's looking at, she replies that "It is white on this side," making no assumptions as to the color of the other sides.

Fire and Fury -- Michael Wolff's blockbuster book that purports to give a look inside today's White House -- had me longing for a Fair Witness. How to sort out the truth from the assumptions, hearsay, breathless gossip, and unreliable sources?

Did Ivanka really divulge the secret of her father's strange coiffure? Does DT really strip his own bed? Was the DT campaign really blind-sided by their victory? Is DT really that pathetically insecure and ignorant? Are we being governed by a president with the emotional maturity of a two-year old or by his team of sycophants and handlers?

The book reads like an opera --- palace intrigue, warring factions, a mad emperor and those who attempt to use him. It's fascinating stuff like the car wreck everyone slows down to gawk at. And I have to admit that I'm enjoying knowing that it's really upset the man in the White House.

In the absence of a Fair Witness to assure me of what is true and what isn't, I can only say that much of the book rings true, based on the president's own words in speeches, interviews, and tweets. And his denials and the denials of his surrogates have no validity for me. He and they have proven over and over that, for them, truth is what they want it to be. Alternative facts, indeed!

Still, those of us in the loyal opposition to this administration should beware of the same behavior and not rush to embrace this account as The Truth -- no matter how much we want it to be. Supposedly Wolff has recordings to back up some of his statements -- but, of course we all know that recordings can be altered. Oh, for a Fair Witness!

Quoting Aaron Blake in the Washington Post: "In some ways, this is the tell-all that Trump's post-truth presidency deserves. Trump's own version of the truth is often subject to his own fantastic impulses and changes at a moment's notice. The leaks from his administration have followed that pattern, often painting credulity-straining images of an American president, As the New York Times's Maggie Haberman notes, that makes claims in Wolff's book that would ordinarily seem implausible suddenly plausible."

Ah, sweet irony...

Working on the List

I have a huge, multi-headed list of Things That Need To Be Done Around Here and one of those things was to re-pot all my potted plants.  It sounds a lady-like occupation that might involve a pot or two of ferns or African violets but the truth is otherwise. Some of my potted plants are twenty or even thirty years old  and some are too heavy for me to lift. 

Justin brought me this nice load of composted manure from our pasture and John helped to haul out the large ficus trees and the junipers from our deck. Everything got the treatment, from this rosemary to the huge bay bush to the calamondin and, yes, some ferns. 

This rosemary isn't nearly so rootbound as some poor junipers that had been in the same pots for six years.  I hacked and root-pruned mercilessly -- I just hope they all survive the treatment. I think they'll enjoy being able to stretch out a bit in this lovely new soil.

And speaking of lists, this quote from Robert Heinlein caught my eye when I was reading the weekly compendium of comments on A Word a Day.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Dang!

That's a pretty long list. I might manage a dozen -- and I know that John could do some that I couldn't. 

But plan an invasion? Hmmm. I'll have to work on that. Right after I learn how to program a computer and fight efficiently.