Skip to main content

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.



Short cuts. St Johns Park, New Town. June 2011.

Breaking my streak of books that haven’t disappointed me (I was up to TEN) is the highly regarded sci-fi ‘classic’ Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch. I shall admit that perhaps I was not in the best frame of mind to tackle this one, but like many novels of its time (1968), I fear that it has not aged well.

Set during a war that seemingly emerged from the Vietnam War, this altered history posits a United States as having taken a decidedly authoritarian turn. The narrative is the journal of a poet of some renown, the lapsed Catholic Louis Sacchetti who has been sent to a secret military installation as punishment for his conscientious objecting. This experimental camp sees military prisoners are injected with a form of syphilis that is intended to make them geniuses and thus harness their genius for the good of the state. Of course, things are never that simple.

Don’t be fooled by the sci-fi tag, the book is crammed with a multitude of obscure literary references, and a running thread is the constant (and transparent) allusion to the story of Faust. Unsurprisingly, the book descends into an exploration of the fluid boundaries that marked the territories of genius, creativity and insanity. While this is an interesting theoretical exercise, I shall confess that it makes for tedious reading. Perhaps I have been contaminated by prior exposure to the work of French metaphysicians like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (i.e. masturbatory intellectual grandstanding/ game playing), but – in the words of Shania Twain – that don't impress me much.

Disch is a smart cookie, and he can write for sure. The intellectually rich prose matches the tone required to pull of the objective, it just doesn’t particularly resonate with me. However, it might with you! Avoid if you don’t like show offs.
Labels:

Comments

Roddy said…
Learn to read and my god you come across some rubbish.
I like historical novels.
A lot of fact if the writer has done their homework.
29 July 2011 at 10:30
smudgeon said…
I'm most impressed - namedropping Guattari in the same sentence as Shania.

I don't dig sci-fi all that much (especially after my disastrous recent reading of assorted Ben Bova, Aasimov, et. al.) and I think it's probably got a lot to do with your point about how it ages. If I remember correctly, CS Lewis wrote a book once about a steam powered space ship which went to Venus, where gigantic blue people took pity on a tramp. If it were much less serious, it would have been genius.
29 July 2011 at 10:48
Kris McCracken said…
Roddy, depends on the novel.

Sudgeon, I'd say Shania has more of a clue than Felix. I've come around a little bit to sci-fi. That said, I still have more misses than hits in my recent ventures into that territory.
29 July 2011 at 13:24
Roddy said…
Of course! The novel! A good book and it can be educational, a bad one and it is just a book.
31 July 2011 at 12:33
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...
5 comments
Read more

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...
38 comments
Read more

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.
36 comments
Read more