I'm trying again to do the poem a day thing for national poetry writing month. If past years are a good predictor then I will probably be giving up in the next few days. In the meantime here's my first NaPoWriMo poem

Happy April Fools Day
I
still
dreamt
about
you
again
and
will
again
my
.

In 1973 Paula Smith, the editor of a Star Trek Fanzine, wrote a story called "A Trekkie's Tale" as a satire of the kind of strange wish fulfilling fan fiction that she received from people writing themselves in to the crew of the Starship Enterprise. The story featured a character named "Mary Sue" who was a fifteen and a half year old wunderkind who in the course of a few brief paragraphs earns Captain Kirk's love, Mr. Spock's respect, is revealed to be half vulcan, and then runs the whole ship while the main characters from the TV show are languishing with a sickness. In the end she dies of the sickness herself, mourned by the entire crew, and is given her own "national holiday" aboard the enterprise. The story spawned the term "Mary Sue" as a pejorative term for an authorial surrogate whose primary purpose is to live out the fantasies of the author in a fictional world. This criticism has worked its way into the sort of collective unconscious of amateur writing, and admonitions to avoid writing Mary Sue characters is well known in the fan fiction world.

I say this now because as I'm continuing to write my extended, in depth criticism of Atlas Shrugged, there are going to be times when the close reading will require the engagement of aesthetic rather than political or philosophical concerns. As I'm trying to show that it is the worst book ever written, it is necessary to take on not only the bad ideas in the book and the quality of the storytelling, but also the quality of the craftsmanship at the level of the language. In order that people know where I'm coming from, I figured it would be better to lay it all out here in a brief abstract rather than have to constantly re-state things about what I think makes for good and bad writing within each individual piece.

In writing, where the content is not primarily concerned with the communications of facts or criticism of some form whether it be literal or cultural—that is to say, where it is not political/philosophical treatise, some sort of non-fiction, or the interpretation of other work—I take to be primitive several statements by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Among them:

"Philosophy ought to be written only as a form of poetry."

"What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."

"What can be shewn cannot be said."

"There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical."

"We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense conditions are ideal, but also, because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk, therefore we need friction. Back to the rough ground."

"If a lion could speak, we could not understand him."

"In a large number of cases, though not for all, the meaning of a word is it's use in a language-game."

JF Quackenbush will not be posting an Atlas Shrugged update today because he is too damn sick of reading the book and cannot read anymore at the moment. Please stay tuned.

We should all give thanks to Mr. Quackenbush for reading this crap so we don't have to.

I recently discovered online one of my favorite short stories from when I was younger, a humorous SF story that's just over 250 words long, published in 1954. I had completely forgotten the title and the author, but remembered indelibly the closing lines. And here it is: "Answer" by Frederic Brown.

Makes me want to hunt down a read more of Brown's stuff...

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand is the worst book ever published. The characters are poorly drawn, the story is ridiculous, the philosophical underpinnings are incoherent and morally repugnant, and the writing is incompetent. Quite frankly and put as simply as I possibly can, there is no value to this book, it should not be read by anyone for any reason. And yet it is. By millions. It has sold a bajillion copies and is a touchstone of political thought for a wide swath of the American public who for some reason have come to the conclusion that it has something to offer. I offer in return the thesis that these people are fucking idiots. As a public service in order that no one else should ever have to read this garbage, I am undertaking the following analysis, in detail, of the book in its entirety, page by excruciatingly awful page. If you're interested in following along, it will be useful to know that all page references and quotations are from the 1999 Plume Paperback edition with a new introduction by Leonard Peikoff. But I discourage anyone from following along. It's my hope that this summary and close reading will be more entertaining than the actual text, and that one can read this instead of ever having to suffer through the actual book.

It is my completely objective and inarguable opinion that the series finale of Battlestar Galactica was a steaming pile of horse crap. That is all.

So the French, ever anxious to be first, have decided to call a general strike today. People are already comparing this strike that hasn't yet happened with the general strike of May 1968 that brought the country to its knees, very briefly heralded the coming of the global communist revolution, then got boring and ended with a whimper when everybody got sick of crap wine and decided to go back to work.

Well, maybe this time the froggies will get it right and really will spark off the rebirth and spread of Komintern, and this time next week we'll all be speaking mandarin chinese and thanking heaven for chairman mao. I'm not holding my breath, but stranger things have happened.

But in case the revolution is on its way, folks, and this is not just more growing pains of late capitalism, here are a few things you should remember as the bourgeoisie incites the proletariat rises up and throw off the shackles of our capitalist masters:

1.) The Revolution Will be Televised.

No matter what Brother Scott-Heron said, the 24 hour news cycle will not go down with out a fight. be sure to wear your best fatigues and berets. Also, I expect to start seeing some hammer and sickle merchandise showing up more often at hot topic, so stock up now. Enterprising anticapitalist crusaders might want to consider a small investment in silk screening equipment to crank out a few t-shirts with images of Commandante Guevarra or Thích Quảng Đức on them. Better download some hi res jpegs first before the internet shuts down. Barring of course the slim likelihood that a bunch of nerds at MIT might decide to just keep the global infrastructure working on homebuilt servers just for the heck of it. I wouldn't count on it tho. They'll probably all be up against the wall before we actually need them.

2.) get in yr stores of brewers yeast now

Some years ago, I read an article in a mainstream magazine that basically said, "There's no doubt about, being a geek is cool. Everyone is dressing like geeks, watching superhero movies, using computers, truly geekdom is in." And I remember thinking, "What planet is this guy living on?" Yes, people may be using the Internet on their iPhones, dressing in Buddy Holly glasses and wearing plaid sweater vests on their way to see The Dark Knight, but they're also laughing at Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons or at Triumph the Insult Comic Dog making fun of people at San Diego Comic Con. Certain elements of geek culture have been appropriated by the mainstream, to be sure, but geekiness itself is not "cool"; in fact, if I understand the words correctly, the two are by definition in opposition. (Like the old oxymoron "it's hip to be square".)

There has over the years, of course, been a movement to reappropriate the word "geek" as positive, as something to be celebrated, usually on the model of the homosexuals' reappropriation of the word "queer." This movement seeks geeks to be proud of their culture and their differences from the mainstream, to celebrate it, to shout "we're here, we're geeky, get used to it." Of course, geekdom is not exactly analogous to homosexuality for a huge number of reasons, but one can sympathize with the people who were bullied in school and now want to declare absolutely to the world that there's nothing wrong with themselves.

Atlas Shrugged. It is the worst book ever written and much more deserving of my attentions than Dune. Sorry to bait and switch. Updates begin Monday.