The wedding was great. I was the official photog, but I was also a guest. Autumn and I had a fabulous time in Vegas. I took over 1500 photographs, including our visit to Hoover Dam and plenty on the Vegas Strip, not to mention the hundreds of the wedding and events surrounding it. Thanks, again, to Heather and Chris for letting be a part of their nuptials.

The Norman Mailer Society Conference was held in D.C. this year, the first time (for me) our of Provincetown. While it was a good conference, attendance was down, and Mike Lennon stepped down as president in order to focus on his biography of Mailer. While I think our new prez, Mark Olshaker, will do a good job, I get the feeling the Society will change. I think we’re back in P-town next year. I’ll be publishing my paper here soon. It’s really just a thought piece, as my original idea for a part two to last year’s film was not possible. Still, I like the connections I make in the essay. Stay tuned for that.

Here is a slideshow of my photos from the conference and from around the capitol.

On a similar note: we published our third volume of The Mailer Review. While I’m listed still as the Deputy Editor, I really didn’t do much. All the work should be credited to Phil Sipiora and his awesome team of graduate students, including the indefatigable Constance Holmes. The issue is gorgeous and chock full of Mailer goodness. Get your copy today.

So, now I’m getting caught up. This includes grading. Lots of grading. Hopefully the semester will begin to quiet down in November.

Southern Baptists, Norman Mailer, and Me

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our education system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. —Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

It began with a beer.

OK, that’s not entirely accurate: first I had to earn my Ph.D., get a tenure-track job, find a place to live, and move to Macon, Georgia — about 80 miles south of Atlanta. It was the summer of 2002, and the next phase of my life was beginning . Though I had fond memories of graduate school in Tampa, it was time to begin the journey toward maturity. After accepting my position at a small college in Central Georgia, I began searching for a place to live. During my search, I met realtors, apartment complex managers, and landlords — all of whom asked me the same thing: “where do you go to church?” This question has reverberated through my life ever since.

Growing up in Florida, I never heard anyone ask this question, and I never asked it. Even though I was raised Catholic, until, as George Carlin says “I reached, the age of reason,” I was taught that religion was a personal decision that helps guide us in everyday life, but something that should be kept out of politics. Religion was something for church, the before-meal head bowing, and my heart. This silence about religion was profound: it was a weighty silence that kept me in-line and unquestioning. Indeed, if we never talked about religion, we couldn’t question it.

However, this place where I was moving — the new nexus of my personal and professional life — seemed to have the opposite view of religion. Southern Baptist is the religion of Central Georgia, and their practice of it is a bit more overbearing than the Catholicism of my childhood. It seems to command silent devotion through dicta, commandments, and imperatives that it proudly displays on church marquees, road-side signs, t-shirts, and bumper stickers on half-ton trucks and SUVs. As if to remind all citizens of God’s profound omnipotence, pithy sayings of His order are displayed liberally around town and the countryside, as plentiful as — well, as churches in the south. These signs demand obedience, threaten punishment, incite anxiety, and remind us of our place.ﾠ

As a symbol of the wealth, power, authority, and supremacy of God, cathedrals used to be built at the heart of a town, symbolizing the importance of God the center of the community. These imposing structures spoke of the greater glory of God, took lifetimes to construct, and stood as watchful reminders to citizens to behave themselves. The people’s life-long investment to the construction and support of the cathedral assured their loyalty to the community, to the state, and to God. Today in the South, the literal cathedral has been replaced with a figurative one: the architectural dominance of the cathedral is now a bazaar of smaller, cheaper, and decentralized expressions of right.ﾠ

However, while the centralized ideology remains the same, the practice is not: churches seem mostly segregated affairs where class and race rarely mix. A heterogeneity is maintained in isolated packets of devotion — the rich and white attending their stucco and steel structures surrounded by a sea of parking lots, while the lower-class racial minorities seem to attend rural churches that are little more than double-wide trailers at the end of dirt roads. Yet, despite these ostensible differences in class and race, the Baptist church keeps its flock under the same aegis of devotion that does its best to ignore racial and social inequalities. Discussion of devotion, belief, and faith is encouraged; questioning is ignored, frowned upon, or silenced. In order to avoid confrontation, Southern Baptists seem to think that these annoying realities should be kept in the closet, much like homosexuality, women’s rights, and education beyond high school.

Before moving to Macon, I was introduced to the writing of Norman Mailer. In most of his writing, I discovered an iconoclast who seemed to speak as the creative conscience of the American people. A hard-hitting conscience, he wasn’t about to let us get away with any self-deception in what’s important. Nothing was too sacred for his pen: the American dream, our involvement in war, our right to control our own destinies, our responsibilities as citizens, and our creative potential.

Shortly after 9/11 and the American invasion of Iraq, I thought that America was like Dante in his dark wood, about to enter Hell. I seem to have found a kindred spirit in Mailer. His 2003 book Why Are We At War? posits that America was going through an identity crisis, and a new breed of flag-waving American conservative was leading the battle cry into Iraq. This battleground was the beginning of an international crusade to define ourselves anew as a world empire. The goal, Mailer argues, is to morally reform America.

From a militant christian point of view, America is close to rotten. The entertainment media are lose. Bare belly-buttons pop on to every TV screen, as open in their statement as wild animals’ eyes. The kids are getting to the point where they can’t read, but they sure can screw. One perk for the White House, therefore, should America become an international military machine huge enough to conquer all adversaries, is that American sexual freedom, all that gay, feminist, lesbian, transvestite hullabaloo, will be seen as too much of a luxury and will be put back in the closet again. Commitment, patriotism, and dedication will become all-pervasive national values again (with all the hypocrisy attendant). (Mailer War 52).

So shut up. Do not ask questions. Do not listen to those who ask questions. Keep your mind on God and the moral cleanliness of the USA. This call for silence seems like the philosophy of the Baptist South writ large that I encounter daily as a college professor in Central Georgia.

Mailer observes that a flag-waving love for America springs from a like religious devotion, that

[[Play "mailer-war2.aiff" "In a country . . . distinctions" (108).]]

Freedom and democracy is what’s at stake here; indeed the former is an integral component of the latter. Totalizing views demand an uncritical devotion, a surrender of rights and freedoms, a rebuking of dissent or suggestion of the new or different, a silencing of individuality. Ironically, those who publicly claim to be the most American, the most patriotic, the most devout seem in practice to be the ones who are most inimical to democracy and freedom.

We all must beware of totalizing tendencies in our own practices. While I’m being critical of many groups of people here, my daily experience is that many who ostensibly belong to such groups are not determined by them. I have met many Baptists, conservatives, and Southern white gentlemen that do not fit an easy typification, but are thoughtful and generous people that struggle with complexities of living in America — the kind of people a democracy needs.

Democracy, it seems to me, depends on two freedoms above all: participation and education.

Participation must be active, deliberate, and gregarious. It takes place on street corners, bars, and coffee houses. It involves a practice of inclusiveness and a generosity toward others, regardless of their skin color, sex, or economic conditions.

Church and our current state also demand a participation, but it seems to be a passive one. Growing up, I went to mass every Sunday. Yes, it’s a gathering of people, but we’re all automatons sitting, standing, kneeling on command, mouthing the same prayers every week, like machines in a factory. After church, we go home and watch TV, apart from others, in the security of our castles that we work hard to build, afford, and maintain. This is the kind of participation that keeps us easy to control — participate passively by remaining silent, so you might keep your freedoms, your job, and your house.

We must move out of the house to participate. The classroom is where active participation likely begins — through education. Mailer states that “When we think we’re nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil” (72). Through education, by openly and critically engaging these important issues that effect our everyday lives, can we learn the importance and the necessity of participation in our community. By reading fiction and non-fiction, can we discuss the complexities of life and develop a critical and creative capacity to support a delicate democracy, for

Democracy is a state of grace attained only by those countries that have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it. (Mailer 71)

Soon after I moved to Macon, I had my first experience with a southern penchant for silence and devotion. I was dining with an out-of-state friend at a local restaurant, and we were engaged in an animated conversation about students, teaching, religion, politics, and other issues throughout the evening. The next week, I was summoned to the Dean’s office along with my department chair. She had received a letter from a local attorney that accused me of being a vulgarian and questioned the appropriateness of allowing me in a classroom. After being admonished, I walked back to the department with my chair. We were silent for most of the way until he finally said: “Welcome to the south.”

That was four years ago. And while I have not had a similar incident, I do continue to speak of politics and religion in public, but more importantly, also in the classroom. Even though many a student evaluation suggests that the classroom is an inappropriate forum for these topics, it’s my duty as an educator to present alternatives and ask questions. I also respond to such criticisms by assigning more Mailer.

In my recent reading Mailer and Lennon’s conversations in On God, I took away a general lesson. Even in his thoughts on metaphysics and the afterlife, Mailer was, in the words of Don Delillo, a “writer in opposition” (49). In his life and his work, Mailer “was not just a voice, but a force—chronicler, participant, and provocateur” (49). Indeed, the first and only time I ever met Norman Mailer I told him where I live and teach. We discussed the South in a general way, and I asked him which of his novels he would teach in my Central Georgia classroom. He thought for a moment, and turning to me with a glint in his eye, said “teach my new one: it has something in it to piss everyone off.”

Well, what about that beer I started with? Another fact of life in Georgia is that citizens cannot buy beer on Sunday. To me, this seemingly trivial blue law stands as a testament to the totalizing religious and political South. It’s an annoying weekly reminder of my place in the Baptist South and the control that these forces have in my life. Yet, there is an upside to this law: it only imposes on package stores, not restaurants, so my friends and I make it a point come together on Sundays, and over a beer or two, we discuss students, teaching, religion, politics, and other issues.

We just don’t do it too loudly.

Works Cited

DeLillo, Don. “The Writer in Opposition” The Mailer Review Vol. 2 (2008): 49-50.

Mailer, Norman. Why Are We at War? New York: Random House, 2003.

Interview with Norman Mailer and His Family. Harry Ransom center. 2006.

The following photos and videos were either used or considered for this film. Most are licensed by a creative commons license, but if I use an image of yours illegally, please let me know so I can remove it.

Untitled [Flags & Clothesline] • “(0422) Toledo (Castilla – La Mancha) Spain” • “293/365: SILENCE = DEATH” • “A Follower” • “All My Regrets” • “Antioch Baptist 1806 #1″ • “Antioch Baptist 1806 #3″ • “apophenia2″ • “Best T-shirt in the history of humanity” • “Bush White House” Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press • “Cartoon God #2″ • “Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin” • “Cologne Cathedral During WWII” • “Crying out to God” • “Dark Duomo” • “Dead Silence” • “Don’t leave home without….” • “The Evangelical War on Science” • “Fortress Cathedral” • “Free hugs” • “Generosity” • “God Is Everywhere…” • “he is risen!” • “Hello Jesusland!” • “I think this means they have guns” • “I Questioned Homosexuality” • “Jesus Army Rally ~ Clapham Common, London” • “Jesus hates Hip Hop” • “Jesus I” • “jesus of the electric” • “jesUSAves – patriotic porn” • “jesusland boss” • “Jesusland, TN” • “Jesus With a Shotgun T-Shirt” • “Luthern Evangelical Church (1).jpg” • “More Jesus shirts” • “Mt Calvary Church, Ben Hill County GA” • “Orquestral e Divino – Orchestral and Divine” • “Patriotic” • “Praise Rock” • “Project X” • “Really?” • “Rusty Beliefs” • “Silhouettes on Paris” • “Sun Setting” • “The prayers” • “three crosses over east jesusland” • “trucking for jesus” • “Worship” • “You Alone I Long to Worship”

I’m in the process of composing my paper for the Norman Mailer Society’s annual conference. Here’s the proposal:

I moved to the American South almost six years ago. About that time, I was introduced to Norman Mailer’s work. Both gave me an interesting perspective on America, its values and its problems (sometimes stemming from said values). This presentation will examine Southern religious values (mostly conservative Baptist) vis-a-vis those of Norman Mailer, particularly in his later work, including The Gospel According to the Son and On God. I will include a short multimedia presentation that documents some of my experiences, interviews members of the Baptist church, and attempts to come to terms with seemingly disparate perceptions on the place of religion in America.

The images I’m collecting are part of the multimedia presentation. I think I’m going to focus more on digital technology as a metaphor for the devil. Still thinking about it. But, if you have some images of church marquis, especially those that link religion with consumerism, I’d love to borrow them.

My job is to write 3000 words that defines SpecFic within the context of American Literature. Easy? Nope. Anytime I begin to think critically about genre, genre tends to sink. Genre is a ship full of small holes. Still, it’s an interesting experiment, and I’m having fun getting back in to the history of science fiction.

I’m actually surprised I’m getting anything at all done today. After the cocktail party last night (Dr. Bell’s annual soirée for the faculty), I went downtown with Dan, Shawn, and Creighton. We played pool, drank, chatted, drank, listened to music, and drank. Did I mention the drinking? Yeah, it’s a bit hazy today, and no, I’m not talking about the lingering effects of Tropical Storm Fay. However, the continual gray rainfall outside mirrors the one in my head.

Still, I must write.

Goethe wrote Faust in two parts (Part I in 1808, Part II in 1832), and together they revise the Faustus legend to fit with Romantic sensibilities and eighteenth-century attitudes toward earthly life and the beyond. The theme of a man selling his soul to the devil for earthly desires—fame, knowledge, wealth, power—developed from a profound Christian belief in life after death. Goethe updates the legend by adding a prolonged love story, making his devil an ironic and mocking figure, and allowing Faust’s soul to escape damnation.

Read more on eNotes…

If you’d like to see the original photo, or even purchase a print, check out my gallery.

Ray Kurzweil explains the theories behind quantum computing to the layperson in his The Age of Spiritual Machines. Based on the idea that phenomena need conscious beings to perceive and order them, quantum computing begins through paradox until the “answer” is determined through a decision, causing the ambiguity to resolve, or disambiguation. Like digital computing, quantum computing is based on bits: a one for on and a zero for off. In digital computing, these bits are either on or off (one or zero) and sequences of these bits form larger structures of information: text, graphics, word processors, etc. Instead of bits, the quantum computer would use qu-bits, or bits that are both one and zero at the same time, until the “process of disambiguation causes that particle to ‘decide’ where it is, where it has been, and what properties it has” (Kurzweil 110). Like a beam of light hitting a pain of glass, each photon that makes up the beam either goes straight through the glass or bounces off of it, reflecting away. Each photon actually takes both paths until something observes the phenomenon and forces each particle to decide which path to take. While the outcome of research in quantum computing would be to dispel ambiguity and arrive at the correct answer to a particular problem, the theories behind quantum mechanics and the application are products of an Einsteinian view of physics that posits multiplicity and relativity as the norm — states of fluctuation that do not necessarily concur with human perceptions of actuality.

Since we live in time of flux and post-Einsteinian physics, Murray proposes that we have become more comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity (136). However, while this opinion might hold credence in how we experience fiction, I suggest that we still want our everyday lives ordered, certain, and predictable. Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” explores the implications of fiction entering the everyday, much like “José Chung.” “Gernsback” begins in medias res with the unnamed narrator trying to regain a more normal perception of reality by narrowing his vision “to a single wavelength of probability” (Gibson 1). With mention of a “flying-wing liner” and “mad-doctor chrome,” the narrator flings us abruptly into his continuum, catching us off guard and forcing us to penetrate his reality: what happened to this guy?

Our narrator’s predicament begins when Dialta Downes, a British dilettante of American popular culture, hires him to photograph images for her newest book: The American Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was. The narrator comments on the British “obsession with the more baroque elements of American pop culture,” what Downes calls the “American Streamlined Moderne,” that are remnants of thirty’s and forty’s architecture “that most Americans were scarcely aware of.” He slowly realizes, showing that he is an example of “most Americans,” what she is talking about:

This “American Streamlined Moderne” is derived from both the realized expressions of this vision of the future in the architecture that can still be glimpsed everywhere from the Chrysler Building in New York City to the façades of McDonald’s in small, rural towns of Georgia. Yet coupled with those fading landmarks are also scenes from the “covers of old Amazing Stories pulps” that featured impractical glimpses of flying luxury machines:

I hesitated over one sketch of a particularly grandiose prop-driven airliner, all wing, like a fat symmetrical boomerang with windows in unlikely places. Labeled arrows indicated the locations of the grand ballroom and two squash courts. It was dated 1936.

“This thing couldn’t have flown . . .?” I looked at Dialta Downes.

“Oh, no, quite impossible, even with those twelve giant props; but they loved the look, don’t you see? New York to London in less than two days, first-class dining rooms, private cabins, dancing to jazz in the evenings. . . . The designers were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.” (Gibson 3-4)

Downes’ obsession pulls the narrator into her vision of an American dream world. This obsession, which slowly becomes that of the narrator as he attempts to “photograph what isn’t there” by thinking himself “into Dialta Downes’ America” (4), I would argue, is the point of trauma that introduces violence into the narrative and causes the intersection of quantum realities: the narrator’s and the one in which that giant wing liner can fly.

As the narrator becomes more involved in his assignment, some of his subjects begin to take on, at least in his perception, aspects of totalitarian and fascistic designs that were mixed in with kitschy car lots and motels. Images of Hitler and totalitarianism mixed with fictional representations of utopian/dystopian “martial architecture” begin to dominate the narrator’s thoughts as he photographs Downes’ America: “During the high point of the Downes Age, they put Ming the Merciless in charge of designing California gas stations” (Gibson 4). He begins to pose what-ifs, comparing his world with that of “the inhabitants of that lost future world,” which might be his point of trauma. Murray posits that often anxiety and trauma result from the continuous posing of what-if questions to oneself that allow doubt and uncertainty enter into one’s own choices and experiences that precipitated one’s current reality. The narrator’s “frame of mind” begins to focus increasingly on this “architecture of broken dreams” until he “penetrated a fine membrane, a membrane of probability” that ostensibly allows this world of half-fictions and fragments to break through and manifest itself in the narrator’s reality as a “twelve-engined thing like a bloated boomerang, all wing, thrumming its way east with an elephantine grace, so low that I could count the rivets in its dull silver skin, and hear — maybe — the echo of jazz” (Gibson 5).

Shaken by his sighting, the narrator consults his friend Mervin Kihn, a free-lance Fox Mulder type who is in touch with the “loonier reaches of the American mind” (Gibson 5). Kihn blames the sighting on what he calls a “semiotic ghost”; these are like a feedback loop that uses the mind to manifest into actuality the reality of popular culture, like The X-Files:

Seemingly, Downes’ obsession coupled with the narrator’s desire to photograph “what isn’t there” caused latter’s own traumatic sighting. The possibility exists, too, that the sighting was nothing but an odd hallucination caused by the narrator’s use of drugs in the sixties. Yet, Kihn easily dismisses the narrator’s trauma by suggesting that he is “obviously impressionable” and relates the case of a girl’s encounter in Virginia that sounds very similar to the case in “José Chung”:

The narrator leaves Kihn unsatisfied, takes “a crumbling diet pill that had been kicking around in the bottom of [his] shaving kit for three years,” and begins his drive through the desert back to Los Angeles.

His trip through the desert is colored by his recent sighting coupled with the old diet pill, but he is able to limit his “vision to the tunnel of the Toyota’s headlights,” so he is fine until he stops for a rest on the side of the road “safe amid the friendly roadside garbage of [his] own familiar continuum,” or so he thinks ADDIN ENRfu (Gibson 7, 8). When a light shining from behind him wakes the narrator, he sees “an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come . . . soaring up through an architect’s perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires” (Gibson 8). He is quick to dismiss this vision as “amphetamine psychosis,” drawing on one of Kihn’s explanations and his recent ingestion of an old diet pill, but the manifestation of this city and its two citizens on the road beside him begin to convince him otherwise:

The word “real” remains problematic, suggesting that indeed this scene is real, having been imagined in the books on Thirties design that the narrator kept in his trunk; and the images contained in these books also are part of, as Kihn suggests, the mass unconsciousness, and so represent semiotic phantoms that the narrator is so sensitive to because of his assignment to photograph Downes’ streamlined moderne. Downes’ obsession with this lost aspect of American culture has, to some extent, been passed to the narrator like a virus and therefore has influenced his perceptions of his reality, as if he were feverish, suffering from a particularly virulent strain of the flu. Sickness makes one aware of the reality of one’s situation — of the physical dis-ease that has invaded the body at the same time it distorts perception. Here, perhaps, the virus, rather than biological, is informational, attacking cognitive abilities and perhaps growing and mutating within the host.

Virus, here, is not necessarily pejorative, though the narrator seems to think so. Perhaps, the informational virus has made the narrator not only aware of the multiplicity of his reality — his material and experiential history that has molded his mind just so — but has somehow allowed him to penetrate the folds of quantum realities in order to glimpse a path that was taken by his culture in another fork in time, space, and perception. Like in Borges’ “Garden of the Forking Paths” where the flow of time is not a single path — it only appears to be based on how we experience it. Once a choice is made and a path is chosen, it is traveled with only the occasional musing about where other paths would have led. In “Gernsback,” Gibson not only addresses the residue of a Gernsbackian future left over in a cultural consciousness, but suggests that time is not as linear and uniform as it appears to our perception; time may be very much like a web that intersects every possibility. The narrator becomes conscious of the “pullulating possibilities of life,” but his conception of time is linear and absolute, not fluid and multiform (Murray 35). He cannot process the splitting of his real world by that of Gernsbackian view of the future made real. “The Gernsback Continuum” represents a postmodern view of parallel possibilities that do not remain separate, but can merge through linked points of trauma, infection, or dis-ease, much like reading a hypertext. Our narrator, via diet pill, semiotic ghosts, or cultural overdose, has ended up in this quantum flux in the middle of the Arizona desert experiencing “all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda” (Gibson 9).

Not only does this alternate present seem totalitarian to the narrator based on the images that he has photographed so far, but suggests another layer to the metaphor. The narrator sees this Gernsbackian reality being forced upon him, perhaps trying to replace the current reality of his world, leaving him stranded in what he sees as a fictional world. Yet, if this alternate reality is indeed another parallel time, then its appearance points to the complete fictionality of the quantum path we call reality. Even while photographing these various aspects of American culture before going “over the Edge,” the narrator muses about “what the inhabitants of that lost future world would think about the world I lived in” (Gibson 5). Indeed, while attempting to cure himself of his visions, the narrator espies, perhaps the ultimate icon of American totalitarianism: Disneyland.

Hollinger suggests that “Gernsback” “warns against the limitations, both humorous and dangerous, inherent in any vision of the future which bases itself upon narrowly defined ideological systems which take it upon themselves to speak ‘universally,’ or which conceive of themselves as ‘natural’ or ‘absolute’” (Hollinger 39). Perhaps “Gernsback” is also a warning about our perception of time and reality. These ideas seem absolute and certain, but only insofar as we agree to them. Technological advances may one day show the possibility of time and space travel that crosses the, perhaps arbitrary and deceptive, borders made solid by our perception of them. The first step to realizing that technology, if it is indeed desirable, would be to imagine it, or else keep our vision narrowly focused on the small point in front of us.

The narrator’s cure, as we found out in the beginning of the story, is to narrow his perception into “a single wavelength of probability” (Gibson 1). And slowly, through hours of watching television, movies like Nazi Love Motel, and other “really bad media,” he begins to exorcise his semiotic ghosts and block out the other possibilities through the mundanity of game shows, soap operas, and porno movies. Yet, some residue of the experience remains with him, for the flying wing makes one more appearance. Yet, we are able to assume that his actual writing of his experiences was able to purge most of his system of his quantum information virus, much like the narrator suggests in Julio Cortázar’s “Axolotl”: its writing becomes the obsession, purged to a piece of paper that can now be spread to the readers. So his writing becomes an anti-viral, which ironically passes the informational virus to the reader.

I can’t think of a more appropriate story to read on a scorching summer day than Alfred Bester‘s “Fondly Fahrenheit.” This science fiction narrative uses the heat almost as if it’s a character with its own volition. If not a character, it’s definitely a force of nature that seems to act on the protagonist in deliciously violent ways, like the Dog Days when Sirius’ influence would incite disease, discomfort, and insanity. Heat is the major influence in this story, bringing about violence and disorder in James Vandaleur. It seems that the world is not immune to heat’s influence, and Bester’s protagonist(s) embody nature overthrowing and subduing human reason.

Vandaleur radiates a bit more heat than he does light. He and his malfunctioning android are always on the run, but Vandaleur is not always smart about how he does it: his cravings seem to get the better of him, eschewing his common sense for gratification. For example, when he changes his name, he always uses the same initials, as his short-lived lover Dallas Brady points out when she confronts him: “And Valentine was a little too close to Vandaleur. That wasn’t smart, was it?” (824). Also, rather than staying inconspicuous, Vandaleur can’t seem to overcome the lure of his libido.

Also, even early in the story, Vandaleur seems to be the third-person narrator, but there’s an occasional “I” thrown into the story, and sometimes a “we.” At first, this was confusing enough to make me question what I was reading, or if I had been paying attention. I had to look back over what I just read to be sure it was what it was. This constant and progressively apparent switching of narratorial point of view seems to be an early clue about Vandaleur’s state-of-mind.

Not only does Vandaleur’s desire cloud his judgment, but this theme runs throughout “Fondly Fahrenheit.” While Dallas accuses Vandaleur of not being too smart, she, too, seems to be a victim of her own body’s cravings. When she is first introduced, the narrator describes her: “She was short, stocky, amoral, and a nymphomaniac” who seduces Vandaleur and hires his android (824). Not too bright herself, especially since she continues to employ the android even after she figures out who Vandaleur is.

Another example of desire overcoming reason can be seen in the figure of Blenheim, the blind mathematician. Since Vandaleur can’t figure out why his android has become seemingly psychotic, he attempts to rob Blenheim, who is suffering from his own troubles: he is getting old, and he is losing his enthusiasm and creativity for numbers. He wants so desperately to hold onto his his renown as a great mathematician, he agrees to help Vandaleur, even though the latter just tried to mug him and will probably kill him once Blenheim figures out why the android is malfunctioning. Blenheim eagerly takes the risk in order to get what he wants — in essence blinded by his desire to recapture his waning youth.

Perhaps this is Bester’s main idea here: that no matter how advanced humans think we can get through our reason and the products of that reason — technological sophistication ȃ there is always a force of nature that lurks just below the surface that can snatch it away at an instant. Bester examines human passion and reason, the way heat is measured on a Fahrenheit scale. Yes, we can know by looking at a thermometer that it’s 101°F outside, but rationally knowing that fact is not the same as a body’s experiencing it. The heat does weird things to the body, making it see what isn’t there, and confusing the senses, shutting down reason (light) through exposure to too much passion (heat).

This passion is contagious. We all have experienced road rage at one time or another. This type of rage seems to be exacerbated in the hot summer sun. As a motorcyclist, I swear that more SUVs pull out in front of me on hot days than they do in on moderate or cold ones. When this happens, I feel my own blood pressure rising and my scalp bristling in my helmet: didn’t that jerk see me?! Normally a very rational person, I suddenly flare up like a blow torch, ready to scald whatever comes near me. I seem not to be alone in this.

Bester calls this idea projection: “a throwing forward. It is the process of throwing out upon another the ideas or impulses that belong to oneself” (832). Vandaleur’s own psychosis is not only covered up by his own rational mind, it seems, but those ideas and impulses are so strong that they are communicated to his android — a being that is itself a product of human reason. Even his sense of identity becomes projected outside his body, so that “I” becomes “he” and sometimes “we.” The point of view changes quickly and frequently enough to cause me discomfort, but I got used to it after a while, like one might the sun on a hot day. However, I have to wonder if, like that summer sun, this constant shift is doing me any harm. What is it doing to my reason? Perhaps, since the android’s senses are more in-tune with its surrounding, it is more vulnerable to projection? Possibly, since technology is imbued with the whole history of human evolution, it also contains that heat that was so important for humanity’s survival for so long.

Bester suggests that reason might not be as powerful as we think, a veneer that can crack as easily as paint on a house under a relentless sun. But we are fond of thinking we are in control of our passions, indicated by our propensity to measure, scale, and contain that which, like the heat, is not containable in any scale, be it Celsius or Fahrenheit.

Indeed, I just paid the highest electric bill I have ever paid during the summer, since it’s the hottest summer I remember ever experiencing in my life. And it’s just going to get hotter, I’m afraid. Perhaps it’s already beginning to melt away our reason. Can we ever escape the heat? Man, I know that Jerry is hot! We are.

He is very young, perhaps in his early twenties, fearless, tall, fleetfooted, strong, a compound of muscle and beauty with so powerful a sense of his own precedence that he is willing to let the war go badly when his honor is sullied. The Trojans, led by their stalwart, Hector, kill many Greeks and come close to burning the Greek ships and cutting off their retreat. Hoping to stem the tide, Achilles’ tentmate and beloved friend Patroclus enters the battle. He dons Achilles’ armor, and in that armor — as a substitute for Achilles — he is slain by Hector. Achilles’ withdrawal now comes to an end. Enraged, inconsolable, he prepares at last to enter the battle (we are deep into the poem, and we have not yet seen him fight), an event accompanied by a cataclysmic rending of the heavens and the seas. The sky darkens, the underworld nearly cracks open. Huge forces, unstoppable, move into place. Achilles begins to fight, expelling his anguish in a rampage. As Book XXI opens, he is driving the Trojans back toward Troy:

But when they came to the crossing place of the fair-running river
of whirling Xanthosa stream whose father was Zeus the immortal,
there Achilleus split them and chased some back over the flat land
toward the city, where the Achaians themselves had stampeded in terror
on the day before, when glorious Hektor was still in his fury.
Along this ground they were streaming in flight; but Hera let fall
a deep mist before them to stay them. Meanwhile the other half
were crowded into the silvery whirls of the deep-running river
and tumbled into it in huge clamour, and the steep-running water
sounded, and the banks echoed hugely about them, as they outcrying
tried to swim this way and that, spun about in the eddies.
As before the blast of a fire the locusts escaping
into a river swarm in air, and the fire unwearied
blazes from a sudden start, and the locusts huddle in water;
so before Achilleus the murmuring waters of Xanthos
the deep-whirling were filled with confusion of men and of horses.

But heaven-descended Achilleus left his spear there on the bank
leaning against the tamarisks and leapt in like some immortal,
with only his sword, but his heart was bent on evil actions,
and he struck in a circle around him. The shameful sound of their groaning
rose as they were struck with the sword, and the water was reddened
with blood. As before a huge-gaping dolphin the other fishes
escaping cram the corners of a deepwater harbour
in fear, for he avidly cats up any lie can catch;
so the Trojans along the course of the terrible river
shrank under the bluffs. He, when his hands grew weary with killing,
chose out and took twelve young men alive from the river
to be vengeance for the death of Patroklos, the son of Menoitios.
These, bewildered with fear like fawns, lie led out of the water
and bound thcir hands behind them with thongs well cut out of leather,
with the very belts they themselves wore on their ingirt tunic
sand gave them to his companions to lead away to the hollow ships,
then himself whirled back, still in a fury to kill men. (XXI, 1-33)

Homer didn’t have to tell his listeners that the leather thongs, tightening as they dried, would cut into the flesh of Achilles’ Trojan captives. Nor did he have to explain why Achilles later kills a Trojan warrior, an acquaintance, who begs for mercy at his knees. But how is the American reader supposed to respond to this? He comes from a society that is nominally ethical. Our legal and administrative system, our presidential utterances, our popular culture, in which TV policemen rarely fail to care for the victims of crime, are swathed in concern. Since the society is in fact often indifferent to hardship, it is no surprise that irony and cynicism barnacle the national mood. By contrast, the Greek view was savage but offered without hypocrisy. Accepting death in battle as inevitable, the Greek and Trojan aristocrats of the Iliad experience the world not as pleasant or unpleasant, nor as good and evil, but as glorious or shameful. We might say that Homer offers a conception of life that is noble rather than ethical — except that such an opposition is finally misleading. For the Greeks, nobility has an ethical quality. You are not good or bad in the Christian sense. You are strong or weak; beautiful or ugly; conquering or vanquished; living or dead; favored by gods or cursed. Here were some of Tayler’s “binary opposites,” but skewed into matching pairs alien to us, in which nothing softened Homer’s appraisal of quality.

Academic opponents of courses in the Western classics constantly urge readers to consider “the other” — the other cultures, odd or repugnant to Western tastes, which we have allegedly trampled or rendered marginal and also the others who are excluded or trivialized within our own culture: women, people of color, anyone who is non-white, non-male, non-Western. But here, at the beginning of the written culture of the West (the Iliad dates from perhaps the eighth century B.C.E.), is something like “the other,” the Greeks themselves, a race of noble savages stripping corpses of their armor and reciting their genealogies at one another during huge feasts or even on the field of battle. Kill, plunder, bathe, eat, offer sacrifices to the gods — what do we have to do with these ancient marauders of the eastern Mediterranean?

[From "Does Homer Have Legs?"]