DON'T MISS OUR OCTOBER HALLOWEEN POETRY ISSUE! With the resplendent leaves, the quickenin' wind, the ripenin' apples, the raw mornings, and all of yesterday's spooks returnin' to haunt the land, Autumn deserves to be preserved in rhyming verse.
This Jolly Roger is humbly dedicated to Western Science "Science without religion is dull. Religion without science is blind." --Albert Einstein
"The only rational way of educating is to be an example-- if one can't help it, a warning example." -- Albert Einstein
"O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind."--Herman Melville, Moby Dick
"Today also there is an urge toward social progress, toward tolerance and freedom of thought. . . but the students at our universities have ceased as completely as their teachers to embody the hopes and ideals of the people. Anyone who looks at our times soberly and dispassionately must admit this."-- Albert Einstein.
Thank you Newton for calculus, thank you Planck and Einstein and Bohr for the quantum, thank you Schroedinger for standing on the shoulders of these giants and creating Schroedinger's equation, thank you Compton for demonstrating that electrons behave as waves, and thank you Brillouin and Bloch and Debeye and all those who applied wave mechanics to a silicon crystal lattice, and thank you to the countless unnamed innovators who perfected silicon technology, and thank you to all the countless rugged individuals, from before Newton to this present moment, now building the previously unbuildable in their garages and thinking the previously unthinkable in their studies, all united by a relentless will for the Truth. Thank you for the WWW, as now with the touch of a button I can deliver words that mean things to over nine hundred and ninety-four intellectual pirates in sixteen nations. And I can do it without the permission of the sinking liberal literary machine, which has lost its faith in the medium by which man speaks to his soul-- the printed word.
Technology cannot change what words do mean,
There's yet me, the phantom in the machine. --Drake Raft
TABLE OF CARGO CONTENTS 1. POETRY FOR PHYSICISTS-- by Drake Raft.
2. GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE-- (how Einstein posthumously agrees with us), and FOOLS SELDOM DIFFER-- how President $hapiro of Princeton agrees with tenured liberals.-- by Elliot McGucken. ALSO REVEALED IS OUR SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY OF A USE FOR LIBERAL EDUCATIONAL BUREAUCRATS-- ENTERTAINMENT!
3. FELLOW PIRATES RESPOND: Thank you! Thank you! You're all too kind!
JOIN THE NAS SCIENCE NEWS LIST! science@nas.org (Details Below)
And now the tide has begun to ebb,
let us raise the anchors and rig the sails
to the truth's raging wind,
for though ungraspable to mortal flesh,
we can hoist our souls to the passing gale,
and let her blow them
through eternity.
Ahoy from The Captains
Ahoy me maties! Ahoy Lefty, Shell, Hook 'n' Slice, Swabbylady, Captain Kirk, Sir Percy Blakeney, Peskey Pete, Ye Salty Mango, Ked Tennedy, Scalleywag, Frank Rizzo, and Slimey! Welcome to the fourteenth perilous voyage of The Jolly Roger! Raise ye the anchors! I say she's been taking hits from all sides in the hostile liberal waters of rec.arts.books and alt.society.generation-x, but all aboard this vessel, as well as the powder kegs, are bone dry within the solid hulls of THE JOLLY ROGER, for this hardy warship is constructed from "Oak planks of reason, riveted with rhyme, designed to voyage across all of time!" Ahoy John Long, Finbar The Terrible, Lobster Boy, The Great Imposter, Flemmish Jam, Oluf, Zaphod Beeblebox, Thomas Paine, Bamamama, Captain Jinx, Eternal Hackman, and Neer-do-well. Feel you the rising breeze? Some say it's just a N'Easter blowin' in Autumn a tad early this year, off of Cape Hatteras, but it is far greater than that, me maties. It is the Truth returning to this barren land overrun with pop-culture, and carried upon the imacualte breeze are the ghosts of the Greats. Rig the sails then, ye pirates, for she but blows while she blows! Ahoy Smiling Beard, Strange Paul, The Merlin, Nevermind, Steelsword, Henry V., Black Beardblack Beard, Miss Scarlett, and Captain Redbeard! Ah, Redbeard-- hailing from the Stanford Harbor! Are you ready to sound the signal on the left coast? Hey-hey-ho-ho-Western Culture is where we row! Yo-ho-ho! Ahoy Rageing, Yodoni, Icehand, Moby, Mazzy Yebby, Blind Bart, and Pirate Pete! Man the Western Canon and prepare to deliver broadside blasts of Truth upon all vessels sailing 'neath the liberal flag! Aye Aye then Jolly Jim, Jojo, Queen, Evil Ed, Lee the Liberal Lambaster, Chugchug, Phat Albert, The Wizard, The Mic-- The Mic! Are you ready to shiver the timbers of Duke Universities' stealth feminist President, Nan Keohane? We'll make her swab the intellectual deck of her frigate before we board her! Ahoy Plague, Frederick Mission, Studly One, Rikki-tikki, Hodgeyman, Schucks, Neer-do-well, Fake Drake, Phreak, Nickname, Exalted Cyclops, Gunzo, Ike, Pixiefighter, Lord Nelson, Drak Dragon, Cabin Boy, Spike, Stokes, Tercel, Spock, One-eyed Charlie, Dr. Death, Mother Chuck, Swilldo, Dark Knight, and Deckhand! Steady as she goes! Keep the rudder straight mates, keep your pistols clean of all grunge, and cocked at all times, primed with passion, loaded with wit! Avast Captain Drudge! Keep your cunning craft steady now! We'll be running with the risin' wind tonight so watch that the Corporate Conglomerate Schooners which are tackin' 'gainst the truth don't get in THE ROGER'S path! Ahoy Gumby The One-eyed Pirate, Peg Leg, Patch, Felix D. Cat, Sterling, Woodenleg, Yellowman, Cleric, Nighthawk, Jim-lad, Triangle Man, Slash, Beerme, Cuervo Man, Ransom, Shroom Head, Shorty, Big Pegglegg, Hook'd, Crazy Eights, Gandolf, Moby Dick, Yo-ho-ho-ho-honey, Puce Beard, Barnacle Breath, Ad-Rock, Anonymous, Slim, Moondog, and Lon Ponschock! Up in the crow's nest! Call out when you spot the life-boats of liberalism's sinking institutions, and let the rugged mutineers come and join our fleet! Feed the starved souls on words that mean things-- there's plenty aboard this ship! Aye aye! A resounding Ahoy to you and the four hundred and ninety four new buccaneers who've signed aboard THE JOLLY ROGER since last month's perilous voyage! With nine hundred and ninety four buccaneers from fifteen nations around this watery globe, we're the WWW's largest literary frigate and the undisputed terror of the Seven Cyber Seas! United 'neath the skull 'n' bones, we're fearlessly voyaging forth to pirate the treasures of the Great Minds the resentniks have buried 'neath feminism, postmodernism, and nihilism, so that we might return the fantastic bounty to its rightful owners-- the people. Postmodern pedants see The Roger on the horizon, and their knees start a knockin', as they should, for rumor has it that we are taking no prisoners. And we have our reasons-- if we cluttered our hold with a bunch of resentniks we would run the danger of achieving critical mass, at which point they would start chantin' something.
--THE RED AVENGERS OF ALL THAT IS RIGHT AND TRUE
Drake "Red Avenger" Raft, Elliot "Ahab" McGucken, Becket "Bluebeard" Knottingham
EINSTEIN ON CLASSIC LITERATURE: "Somebody who reads only newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent upon the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous. There are only a few enlightened people with a lucid mind and style and with good taste within a century. What has been preserved of their work belongs among the most precious possessions of mankind. We owe it to a few writers of antiquity that the people of the Middle Ages could slowly extricate themselves from the superstitions and ignorance that had darkened life for more than half a millenium. Nothing is more needed to overcome the modernist's snobbishness." --Albert Einstein
1.
POETRY FOR PHYSICISTS
by Drake RaftAbout a year ago, while conducting Rutherford Backscattering Spectroscopy experiments in the 2 MEV Van de Graff Accelerator Lab, I was seized by a startling revelation. I am sure that I will look back on the insight as the happiest thought of my life. "What," I wondered to myself, bathed in the soft green glow from the controlling terminal, "would it be like if words meant things?" I was caught off guard. For in such an imaginary world, one could use words to say things that meant something! Emotions could be captured, laughter could be preservered, and thought could be expressed! I quickly recorded this profound discovery in my lab notebook before it had a chance to fade from my mind. The proof of my theorem was trivial in one and two dimensions, but I had a hard time extending it to the twenty-four dimensions in which we live. It wasn't until 6:00 AM the next morning that I realized the magnitude of what I had discovered. I had discovered the New Conservative Literature.
But what physics journal would publish this marvel of nature? I knew I was ahead of my time, and with NSF being defunded, it would be difficult for me to acquire a grant to make my work legitimate. My hard work would be passed over in the notorious peer review process. Ah! And then I saw my fate, as I recalled what James Clerk Maxwell had said. "New theories are never accepted by the established scientists. It's not until old guard dies-- then the new theory gains prestige and recognition as the new minds, who created the theory to describe their world, take their rightful positions in the institutions which yesterday had beat them down." I forget the exact words, but the sentiment is preserved.
Unlike many members of the slacker new-age academic left, like Andrew Ross, I respect science. Science has given us cars and computers. With each passing minute, the resolution of the TV one can purchase at Circuit City is increasing, while its cost is falling, because of science. Science has provided me with the salary of a physics graduate student and given me the opportunity to write grant proposals.
But there are things that science cannot do. This is obvious to most, but not to all. There are aspects of the human being which science cannot characterize, penetrate, nor grasp. For science does not provide us with that which we buy TV's to view, except for maybe Nova, for a few people. There's yet the phantom in the machine that inspires people to watch their TV's rather than their microwaves. Science does not inspire laughter within us, nor tears, except for physics exams, now and then. There are no equations for emotions, though that's probably not enough to stop the government from funding projects to find some, as long as a feminist applies for it. Science did not give us the Ten Commandments, and while math helps us count them, it does not enhance their meaning. Nor does science give us the laws which govern society, even though these ideals, like mathematics, are rooted firmly in logic. By words alone do we ask the question, "what does it mean to be conscious, and things?" By words alone do we know the shape of what Melville deemed, "the ungraspable phantom of life."
We here at BeaconWay Press think it's arrogant of Steven Hawking to claim he's seen the mind of God in a mathematical equation, but hey-- it sells coffee-table physics books, and it gives physicists something to do in relatively peaceful times. The theory of coffee-table-physics/consciousness books has been the most successful theory in physics in recent years. The mark of a good theory is that it can be proven by experiment, and the mark of a good experiment is that its results can be duplicated by further experimentation.
So after witnessing Hawking's best-selling physics/bible/hand-waving book work so well, a few more people, like Professor Tippler, Professor Leon Lederman, and Professor Paul Davies, figured that they would test the theory themselves. Tippler wrote a big book and named it, "The Physics of Immortality." In it he proves that we are immortal, even if one doesn't have tenure. Included in the book are pictures of him shaking hands with the Pope. He proves our immortality scientifically, with math. I did not understand the proof, but I am in no rush to. Apparently the proof was so rigorous that in place of royalties his publisher offered to buy him the Bahamas, in a hundred years.
Paul Davies extended the theory to a far deeper level, and he called his book, "The Mind of God." He followed the strict constraints of Hawking's theory, and included in his treatise the obligatory picture of space-time around a black-hole, the mandatory mention of Schrodenger's cat, a few figures outlining the double-slit experiment, and a re-hashing of all the stuff that Einstein figured out, along with a few comments on Hawking's black-hole radiation. Then there were the few chapters that were devoted to the Economy of Mysteriousness Principle, with the required references to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and Chaos Theory, which deconstructionists have grown quite fond of, as the names suggest that these theories can be utilized for obfuscation. Quantum mechanics is mysterious, consciousness is mysterious, and God is mysterious. Thus, by economy of mysteriousness, Professor Davies showed, they must all be the same thing. The book wasn't saying anything new, but that's OK, because physics books for the public are judged by their covers, and Davies had chosen the title with the unparalelled skill and audacity of somebody who lands NSF grants for sport.
And then physicists wonder why projects like the SSC gets de-funded, even though it's supposed to find the God particle. But never fear-- there is always employment for the linearly trained mind. Like it's only a matter of time until some bright, young, freshly-unemployed particle physicist starts a company that manufactures stronger coffee-tables.
Recently Paul Davies won the '95 $1,000,000 Templeton award, which is awarded each year to the person who has best increased the public's understanding and awareness of religion. Former winners have included Billy Graham, and Mother Thereasa. I saw Professor/Deacon Davies speak at a lecture entitled, "Creation and Time," or something. He did a good job in presenting his colorful transparencies with the standard space-time-God diagrams. And he referred to God as a "she," which showed that he was intelligent enough to have been liberated, and caused some in the crowd to titter. He told us that one couldn't ask what existed before the big bang, because before the big bang happened, time didn't exist. But before the lecture was over, I discovered he was wrong, for I overheard the person sitting next to me whisper, "What existed before the big bang?" "$cience," Professor Davies stated, "offers a $urer path to God than does religion."
Yeah, perhaps for a pagan Dr. Davies, but not for the Great Physicist who created that which you memorized to climb to the pinnacle of the contemporary physics bureaucracy. In a speech on Science and Religion, Einstein said, "The highest aspirations and judgements are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives us a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations. If one were to take the goal out of its religious form and look purely at its human side, one might state it perhaps thus: free and responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind." He got the ideal of democracy and the "highest aspirations and judgements that are given to us," from the Judeo-Christian tradition! Not from physics! You would've gotten along well with Karl Marx, Dr. Davies. In the preface of DAS KAPITAL Marx, claimed that the laws governing history and humanity were as exact and definitive as those of mechanistic physics. And with philosopher/scientist king experts such as yourself, there would be no need for God, nor the individual. We could choose our leaders based on the quantitative and analytical sections of the GRE's.
During the question and answer session, I was going to ask Professor Paul Davies how he might apply physics to help decrease today's burgeoning divorce rate, where every other marriage doesn't last. But somebody beat me to it, and they asked him what his views were on morality. Professor Davies said that that question always comes up, and he said that if one had questions about morality, one didn't approach a physicist. This prods one to wonder how well Professor Davies book would have sold if he had called it, "The Mind of God, Without the Morality." And Tippler could have called his book, "The Physics of Immorality."
On the first page of the Bible, which over the past few-thousand years has been considered by many to contain the "Word of God," there is the line, "Let there be light." There're then maybe a couple of more paragraphs which talk about the creation of world, and how it's at the center of everything. But then the authors are done with the subject. The tools by which the Big Bang Theory was developed were not available to them, so those few beginning paragraphs aren't the most accurate, even though "Let there be light," pretty much bangs the nail on the head, in a big way.
But then the rest of the Bible, which is written with words that mean things, is devoted to the human soul. And the printed word, the tool the authors developed to set in stone the eternal order they felt in their ephemeral spirits, did the job just fine. Five thousand years later, there are still Ten Commandments. Physics has not added an eleventh, nor has it reduced them to nine. And nobody has yet found a mathematical equation for laughter, pain, mirth, nor anguish.
Many physicists, as well as scientists in other fields, have embarked upon the quest for a scientific theory of consciousness, and God. But none have found that which they seek.
We at BeaconWay Press have. It is called The New Literature, and we have all purchased new sports cars, for we feel assured of the Nobel Prize in Physics as well as Literature. By the time we're sixty it will be a white American male's turn to receive the latter coveted prize. Physicists invented the religious book without morality, and now we've invented the physics book without math, which we feel to be an equivalent accomplishment to physicist Alan Lightman's innovation on the novel without a plot (EINSTEIN'S DREAMS-- another cunning title). Prior to our startling insights I considered becoming a biographer of the great biographers and text-book writers, like Abraham Pais and Halliday and Resnik, but I am now too busy with The New Conservative Literature. And it's a good thing that I have it, because instead of giving my advisor a grant to develop an artificial implantable retina to aid the blind, NSF gave Leon Lederman $50,000 to make a PBS TV show to depict physicists as normal people, so that people won't mind funding their noble searches for God in sixty-mile long underground tunnels in Texas. Lederman should get together with Davies, who's got the cash to hire maybe Burt Reynolds, and film Pulp Physics.
And so I here dedicate my Ph.D. physics dissertation, "Science Sonnets from The New Literature," to all the poor NSF bureaucrats who're losing their jobs in the cut-backs as well as the physicists who wrote the coffee-table books like Paul Davies' Superforce and inspired me to become a physicist so that I might too gain a glimpse of, "The Mind of God." Without their combined commitment to science, I would not be here writing this.
All the Best, Drake Raft
SCIENCE SONNETS FROM THE NEW LITERATURE (Scientists feel free to count the syllables, along with liberals who try to deny my Greatness.) ccclix.
Physics pervades the beauty of nature, But it can't touch the mechanics of poems, Strings and fields can not describe our rapture, And love can not be found on a genome. And yet I am drawn by the cold theories, Because I 've learned the fallacies of love, In love one flounders in passion's rough sea, Flying free of flesh, physics floats above. Oh! Let physics be religion for me, For it is holier than words and poems, Words can be twisted, from meaning set free, While physics is frozen in the starred domes. But don't be fooled by this holy pretence, Physics, not poems, makes the bombs of defense. xxviii.
Oh, Einstein, couldn't you see tragedy, In the search for the ultimate order? While from Hitler's perfection flowed a blood red sea, Couldn't you tell what would lie at the void's border? Remember Hamlet's outrageous fortune? Did you see what they did to Socrates? And how Ahab's quest led him to ruin? How consciousness was lost by good Nietzsche? Did you not expect, the ultimate law, would show that there is no law to be found? Oh, Einstein, it's nothing new, quantum's flaw: At the base of man's monuments there's no ground. For the highest order is orderless, Tragedy is there's naught behind greatness. cxl.
Now suppose we have a hole in a slate, A photon from a source passes on through, And it darkens a grain on a film plate, To say it went through the hole would be true. Several photons pass through, we wait a bit, And quite a simple pattern we do see, A bright spot directly behind the slit, Fading away as you move outwardly. We choose to add an additional slit, The photon seems to have a decision, It must choose one of them through which to fit, For photons are not allowed to fission. But now there are fringes, common to waves! In this manner, can particles behave? cxli. What's seen is an interference pattern, Which is common to every type of wave, On the vast ocean or from a lantern, This is the way every wave does behave. Though you think particles blacken the spot, Between the source and plate light is a wave, As to its whereabouts we can say not, Such is the way reality behaves. These ghostly facts are true of all matter, Electrons and protons and you and me, We're but empty waves that somehow matter, Striving to comprehend reality. Wavy winds blow, our consciousness is lit. It makes up our mind, our minds make up it. cxlii.
"The question is to be or not to be, Whether it is nobler within the mind, To believe in indeterminacy, Or refute that God plays dice in the wind. Are there many worlds, or only just this one? And is Schrodinger's cat alive or dead? Of p and x, can we only know one? And of Wigner's good friend, what can be said?" He smiled and said, "no question, no answer, This above all, science holds to be true, Love is in the mind of the romancer, And the kind of love determines the view." He looked up to the sky, a sky few see, A sky filled with a child's curiosity. xlviii.
I was studying the workings of a star, Quantum mechanics, nuclear fusion, From which is borne all life from afar, This reality of dreams and illusions. But there was no magic to the physics, The cold, hard equations of description, Couldn't convey the feeling so mystic, To be living with her in a fiction, A dream it must have been under the stars, Her eyes closed, and her wet hair swept on back, Oh, lost in reasons we fight all our wars, So just give me a piece that's free from fact. I no longer care what makes the wind blow, There are things that a child should never know. cdxiv.
Night owl, experimental physicist, With the frontiers of nature in his hands, Some wires conduct, other wires resist, These are the tools leading him to new lands. Tower of instruments probe an atom, He's the first to coordinate them, He sees a depth that we cannot fathom, The riches of curiosities' gem. For larger than all the electronics, Beyond the oscilloscope, TTL's, There's the pursuit of the complete physics, Unraveling of nature's magical spells. All the hardware arises from passion, As the quest for knowledge becomes action. cdxv.
Have you seen the laughing wave function? Ah! But laughter physics cannot explain, For it ignores the spiritual passion, Reducing love to chemicals in the brain. The equations of physics constrained me, To realms where these feelings could not be said, Out the window, spring blossoms I see, On the board I see a description dead. All these symbols and numbers ignore me, My poetry the scientists don't need, Oh, we are all victims of entropy, Regardless of the descriptions we heed. Long before we described what we see, Poems and physics inscribed us in reality. lxxxvi.
Marie, I wonder if you think of me, As much as I 've been thinking upon you, Nothing I 'd like better than you to see, But I 've got exams and homework to do. But nowhere in quantum can I find truth, Nor the feeling I find talking to you, Only in your brown eyes do I find proof, And inspiration for the things I do. And so for the moment I turn away, But it's only so I can turn again, Of these things that to you I 'd like to say, I 'll set my thoughts down for you with my pen. At this moment I wonder what you do, Are you thinking of me, or someone new? cliii.
Why do I see three spatial dimensions, Does something intrinsic lie underneath? Or is it but an invention's invention? Like all facts founded on flesh's beliefs. Can math define the entire universe, With no equations for laughter and love? It's but a cold, grey beauty, with no verse, That's too solid to describe what's above. But math led us to the fourth dimension, Dislodged us from the cosmos's center, Of quantum fields words can make no mention, Without math, time's secrets one can't enter. But with words and math, walking hand in hand, We approach the day we will understand. cxc. In but a few years we'll have forgotten, The November day we walked through the woods. From the purple skies fell leaves of autumn; I would walk back there through time, if I could. On a dune we played king of the mountain, Remember how we both won at the top? Time saved us from drowning in youth's fountain, I wish I could grasp it, and make it stop. But these days flow by me, the past grows small. All is for naught, but from naught I was born, Who am I to deny that naught makes all? With precious words, one way time I won't scorn. If my days with you were but quantum fluff, Then I 'd say nothing was more than enough. ccxliv.
The foundations of a pedant's power, But the remnants of yesterday's fashion, She played unfair to rise to her tower, Forever tainted for my father's bashing. True power lies with the vitality, The vitality in Princeton's youth's truth, Where there lives love, there lies reality, A young thought needs but to be young for proof. Now I see! We'll start a society, To honor all those who are today the young, For come tomorrow we will not be free, Enslaved by the music we once sung. The rarer action's in virtue than vice, To forgive that which is but quantum dice. cclxxviii.
Oh, so soft and vivid is tonight's dusk! Oh! Forever these purple clouds shall hang, As shall the magnolia blossom's musk, And the good night the mourning doves just sang. Now I feel that these actors were fated, By biological scripts, by quantum's Fortune-- significance of free will's abated. To useless logic I 'm comfortably numb. All spoken words, actions, where are they now? Where's goes sculpture's sculpting? Writer's writing? Out of past actions we sculptures did grow, Now adult, we fade in the benighting. But all action's recorded in evolution, As offspring are closer to perfection. cccxxxviii.
On that great day the clock starts unwinding, You've become, the rest is unbecoming, The rest is spent searching, never finding, The day you first heard the soft spring humming. What a humming! A boundless symphony, Running parallel with reason, you were God, Language acquired meaning, you felt to be, Youth's dream, as all illusions, was a fraud. For the next the morning, the world was all strange, You couldn't like what you saw in your soul, You realized the pain of the downward change, Direction's but falling in a black hole. It's fate, to be erased by entropy, The second law life's spent trying to flee. cccxxxix.
Feel time oscillating, it is a wave, Propagating at c relative to, The three dimensions we consciously brave, Energy's in the fourth, expanding through, Spatial dimensions at the speed of time. How can photons, a bouncing ball, be me, We evolved to distinguish things by name, It's but as capricious as our eyes see. Matter is a wave on the quantum scale, We describe it with math, we think we know, But knowledge eludes ahab-- this white whale, So it is this empty chase makes life's show. Physics seems less likely with every day, What makes us, math nor words, just feelings say.
2. HOW EINSTEIN AGREES WITH US, WHILE PRESIDENT $HAPIRO AGREES WITH HIS LIBERAL GULAG OF RESENTNIKS & ALSO OUR SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY OF A BRAND NEW USE FOR LIBERAL EDUCATIONAL BUREAUCRATS-- ENTERTAINMENT. --By Elliot McGuckenPresident Shapiro
Office of The President
Princeton University
President $hapiro,
We're off to a bad start. It's been almost a month and still I have no offer from you for a job teaching poetry at Old Nassau. Apparently you think it's cool to be an indifferent fund-raiser while the souls of my peers continue to be bludgeoned with multiculturalism, perforated with feminism, blunted with nihilism, and trashed with that, "I'm OK, you're OK, twenty-five-grand-and-give-me-my-A-and-I'll-say-I'm-gay," attitude. Lately I have been pondering what intellectual function the modern liberal university administrator serves, and my mind can only conjure up a blank. It is a good way to relax. I was hoping that corresponding with you on a deeper level might unfold the mystery, but without your gracious response to my dazzling and insightful, exalting letter last month, I began to fear that you refrain from indulging in intellectual activities. I realize that these days it is ever-increasingly dangerous for the liberal to contemplate Reality. My fear was realized when I saw your disposition immortalized on the cover of last month's Chronicle of Higher Education. You stated that during your summer vacations in your house on Lake Michigan, which my parents helped pay for and I still owe on, "I read and write and read and write and look out over the water." Maybe if you thought, perhaps when looking out over the water, you might write something people would want to read. Thus the mental pomposity that you sport along with your expensive suits could be justified.
Being that the Princeton poet and scientist must perpetually be committed to the Princeton Mantra, "In the nation's service," I have found it my duty to utilize my linear, scientifically-trained mind to assist you in your dilemma. I have taken it upon myself to grant an intellectual purpose to your position. I am a man of Compassion. Because your intellectual faculties are insufficient to allow you to capture the wondrous irony of the modern liberal intellectual in a work of Art, I have unselfishly volunteered my highly-acclaimed-by-some and feared-by-the-rest services. Using a search program written in C++, I have located all the speeches given by the university president in my novel, THE DRAKE RAFT FIELD TRIP (http://sunsite.unc.edu/owl/ADFBCH1.html ). You will find these speeches at http://sunsite.unc.edu/owl/ssspeech.html. Your comic Spirit, president $hapiro, is going to entertain the world. Someday you shall be quoted as often as Polonious.
You'll recall that when I tried to broaden my horizons and apply my linear mind in a creative writing workshop, all in the name of multiculturalism, I was kicked out. I was booted for creating in a highly unorthodox manner which had never before been witnessed upon the pristine Princeton campus. I was told I ought to to concentrate on physics-- for by pursuing $cience I could make the skin-color scholars better laser printers for their miserable manifestos to be printed on. At no point in my entire Princeton education was it ever required that I read the Declaration of Independence, the Bible, Shakespeare, nor listen to Limbaugh. In my younger and more vulnerable years you and your thugs robbed me of a hundred grand and attempted to rob me of an education, but you failed in the latter, for I read books at night. Einstein would be appalled at your blatant delinquency. The Great Spirit once said:
EINSTEIN: EDUCATION FOR INDEPENDENT THOUGHT: THE NYT, Oct. 5, 1952
"It is not enough to teach man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise he-- with his specialized knowledge-- more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow-men and to the community. These precious things are conveyed to the younger generation through personal contact with those who teach, not-- or at least not in the main-- through textbooks. It is this that primarily constitutes and preserves culture. This is what I have in mind when I recommend the humanities as important-- not just dry specialized knowledge in the fields of history, science and philosophy." -- Albert Einstein.
In order to satiate your macabre will to have an equal number of all skin colors and genders represented in the Princeton faculty, it has required that the truth and those who speak it be massacred. You allowed a lot of power-hungry wackos to whip up a bunch of feel-good crap because they couldn't grasp Shakespeare's wondrous subtleties and profundities. For quite a while now you and your willing accomplices in the liberal media machine could get away with murdering the Greats, but with the miraculous advent of the WWW, the turning of the tides has quickened. It's high time your vessel started showing some respect for Reality, for the hull of the liberal ideology is so full of holes that it is beyond repair. "O Captain my Captain-- your hull's a hole, it can't be filled by the postmodern soul."
Einstein, as you know, was the most famous intellect to grace the pristine Princeton campus this century, perhaps ever. The pictures of the Great One (Not Rush, though that'd be cool) adorn the halls of Palmer and Jadwin, along with bits of wisdom spoken by the Noble Spirit. Waiting for class I used to puruse his writings, and by them was kindled a deep respect and admiration for his moral philosophy. Einstein, like Paine and Jefferson, said his ideal of government was democracy, and he contended, "The state is made for man, not man for the state. . . I regard it as the chief duty of the state to protect the individual and give him the opportunity to develop into a creative personality." Einstein believed in the Truth-- I will quote him shortly, but I need not. For find me a man who would search so hard and so long for nihilism. One does not exist. For the nihilist gives up before she/he has started, for in her/his mediocrity she/he has nothing to lose.
The tragedy of the current institution which you are President of, and which you claim to have absolutely no control over, is that Einstein's moral philosophy has been expelled from Princeton. Ironically, it has been incinerated in the name of,"relativity." Do you know what irony is $hapiro? I ask this because if you possessed the depth to harbor two thoughts in your mind at once I would expect that more of your President's Columns would be devoted to the paradox of somebody who considers themselves an Intellectual Leader and yet is Intellectually Indifferent. But I $uspect you do under$tand-- and you enage in willing $ubterfuge$.
Now you know that a twenty-six year old Einstein came up with the theory of relativity in a 1906 paper entitled, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," in which he showed that the time and space coordinates employed to describe a physical event were "relative" to the particular inertial frame of the observer. Two different observers observing the same event from different frames of reference would disagree about the space and time coordinates describing the event, and yet both would be right. Hence the name relativity-- what observed was relative to one's frame of reference. The moronic postmodernists, who Hate the Great Science that gets them to their miserable jobs as well as the Great Literature that provides them with their jobs by giving them something to spit upon, borrowed Einstein's term and applied it to literature, with the same effect of Paul Tippler applying Schrodenger's equation to God. This seems to be just fine with you, as I've yet to hear you distance yourself from these intellectual criminals by calling them what they-- morons. Here is why Einstein would not be impressed with the modern University President.
He once remarked,
"The great moral teachers of humanity were, in a way, artistic geniuses in the art of living. In addition to the most elementary precepts directly motivated by the preservation of life and the sparing of unnecessary suffering, there are others to which, although they are apparently not quite commensurable to the basic precepts, we nevertheless attach considerable importance. Should truth, for instance, be sought unconditionally even where its attainment and its accessibility to all would entail heavy sacrifices in toil and happiness?"
Well now, $hapiro. Do you think he's going to be like you and say, well, there are no truths? Is he going to be a wishy-washy waffling liberal about it? Einstein continues--
"There are many such questions which, from a rational vantage point, cannot be answered at all."
Ahoy! I hear you heave a sigh of relief, for Einstein's a liberal! There are no answers! "There are no TRUTHS!" screams the feminazi, and then she uses this adolescent insight to massacre the souls of all the young scholars who came to Princeton looking for some! All is darkness, all is terrible, words mean nothing, America is corrupt! Thomas Jefferson's a dead white male! So don't be liar and write about truth in creative writing class! No! Run parallel with reality, and say nothing! And thus those who have absolutely nothing to lose if all Truth and Beauty is eradicated from Literature and the Human Soul, the postmodernist, the multiculturalist, and Andrew Ross, jump onto the purely political bandwagon like white on rice. And where there's no truth, then all that's important is Gender and Race! This grotesque context gave you a license to become a sexist and say upon your return to Princeton after further liberalizing the University of Michigan, "most important was the exciting feeling of seeing so many women students and faculty members in Princeton's libraries, laboratories, colleges, and classrooms. Indeed the broad increase in the diversity of the student body, faculty and staff demonstrated that Princeton had indeed responded to national imperatives." Shouldn't you be caring about the eternal elements-- the fabric and fiber of the thoughts and ideas which are getting taught-- but no! It's easier to be a superficial sexist and racist! And as if you care about National Imperatives! With a greater than 50% divorce rate, you're still employing Elaine Showlwater as the chairman-- I mean chairwomyn-- of your sorry English Department. Check this chick out! She said, "Female singleness no longer has to mean celibacy; and, the shame and dire social perils for the fallen women who conceived when single. . . no longer haunts the sexual encounters of unmarried and sexually active women. Moreover, single motherhood is a real option for those who desire it and, increasingly, a standard family pattern among black women. Single women may not be odd at all in the future but rather the majority, as they are already in some cultures and some countries. . .but they are clearly a part of a new sexual system emerging at the fin de siecle." WHAT THE %@#$$%#@$ DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH LITERATURE, $hapiro? WHERE'S THE SHAKESPEARE? And the thing is, Elaine's not just commenting here, she thinks this is PROGRESS! She continues: "Unlike the odd woman, celibate, sexually repressed, and easily pitied or patronized as the flotsam and jetsam of the matrimonal tide, the sexually independent New Woman criticized society's insistence on marriage as woman's only option for a fulfilling life." Did your wife remain faithful to you $hapiro, and did she bring up your children while you raised $$$$? Ah! Free her from her $hackle$, you violent bigot! $he could have been a femini$t $cholar and contributed to civilization had you not impeded her, and con$trained her to ho$t dinner guest$ with lot$ of $$$$$! You could have $et her free and given your kid$ midnight basketball in$tead! Why is your wife not Pre$ident of Princeton? Why did $he $acrifice her career to bear your children? In all your glorious magnamity, $en$itivity, and compa$$ion, how come we don't see you $tepping down to give your job to an ethnic minority? How about some affirmative action for university presidents? Again I have utilized my uncanny foresight to imagine this event. I have recorded it in my contemporary classic, The DRAKE RAFT FIELD TRIP ( http://sunsite.unc.edu/owl/ADFBCH1.html ). At a speech which a University President delivers to my old secret society, The Princetonians After Dark, the President announces that he is stepping down and giving his office to a feminist creative writing instructor. http://sunsite.unc.edu/owl/ssspeech.html . Don't flatter yourself $hapiro-- the character is not you. Being a poet of the highest caliber, I seek but the classical elements. I mean really there's nothing personal in all my letters to you. I mean you probably don't even read them, as I'm just one more right-wing wacko who thinks words mean things. I don't even know you-- I only met you a couple times when you ruined the dinner conversation when you sat at our table in Forbes. I only know what you represent, which is nothing, and that makes good entertainment, because irony is the backbone of both comedy and tragedy.
And $hapiro-- it was simple enough to murder the Thought of the Dead White Males, but then what happens when the living, breathing poet shows up in the feminazi's class? It's not a pretty scene, big guy, and also Einstein wasn't a flaming liberal, like all the resentniks who you employ and who in turn employ you in your indecipherable, symbiotic, stealth relationship. I wasn't finished with Einstein's wondrous quote, yet. The Great One concluded:
"Yet, I do not think that the so-called "relativistic" viewpoint is correct, not even when dealing with the more subtle moral decisions."
Avast! And so it is that the same Great Dead White Male, when confronted with the whimsical and seemingly meaningless universe implied by Quantum Mechanics, chose to refute the physics he had helped to father rather than compromise his belief in a benign God. "The Lord does not lay dice with the world," Einstein said. "The Lord may be subtle, but He is not malignant."
Ahoy! And here we have sighted the crux and heart of the postmodern fallacy (off our Port bow)! Do you glimpse the White Whale here, $hapiro? Like Rush, Einstein believes that morality is not something that is ultimately arrived at by everyone interpreting it in their own way! When it comes to formulating a civilization, the commandments are written in stone! Now humans may not be as perfect as the stone, but these are the Ideals that we should Strive for! That's why our ancestors conceived of the two different words-- ideal and real. Where else does infinity exist but in man's mind? If he cannot count it elsewhere in the world, should he eradicate it from his consciousness? Should he never dream of romance unmarred by crass pop-culture because the feminist says it does not exist? I know that history demonstrates that mankind has not always been faithful in marriage, but at least once upon a time it was considered an option. Along with fleeting sexual pleasure there once came the idea of the bonding of the eternal pieces of two humans-- their souls. And the miraculous creation that resulted from the bonding of the spirit and the flesh-- a new life-- was to be valued and raised by the two who conceived this new consciousness. This subtle, glorious social contract was expressed in words that meant things, that were passed from generation to generation. The moral imagination was not trashed by feminist bigots and Hollywood, and people were allowed to write about subtle, endearing and enduring romance without getting disappeared from creative writing class. The moral man who possessed character was not marginalized as a sexist power-mongering right-wing wacko bigot, as you certainly would be if you ever gained the moral courage to step forth and say that the Western Canon should be the touchstone of a liberal education. As the minister and the Rabbi are humble before God, the University Professor should be humble before the Great Ideals which he exists to teach. The Scholar should stand upon the shoulders of the intellectual giants so that he may see further, not so that he might cut off their heads.
Ahoy $hapiro! Look at how the Great minds of Literature and Science are united! The tragic artist perceives life as tragic, but what does he do? He makes art of it! While the resentniks make tragedy of the art! Sisyphus yet rolls his rock up the hill as we speak, and Socrates never gave up looking for the truth, inspite of the fact that in his seventy plus years of continuous searching he never found it. Stroll into the magnificent Princeton Chapel on one of these glorious Autumn days, and you shall see Socrates up high, emblazoned in the stained glass! He's even labeled, if you don't know what he looks like. And yet Joyce Carol Oates will attempt to command a nineteen year old to give up right there and then if he wants to walk away with one of the transcripts you sell for a living! Ahoy! She hated me, for she perceived within me a voice that speaks from within, and I say the aging pedant hath no greater enemy. It's probably got something to do with why you don't write me back. But again-- this letter was composed to exalt, educate and entertain the sober spirits of 994 fellow pirates, which it will do, independent of liberal permission. Ahoy then! In the face of the whimsical nature he majestically uncovered, did Einstein ever once stop and say that there is no truth? Did he light up a joint 'cause you might as well now that there's nothing to know, now that it's shown all rational pursuits lead us into the void? No! He yet stayed faithful to his ideal of a higher purpose, until his dying day. After Neitschez had declared God dead, Einstein arose and said, "God does not play dice with the universe." This statement was from the man who helped to foster the theory of Quantum mechanics-- the theory that insists that the most fundamental equations of nature show all is chance! Do you not see the noble human element here against nature's whimsical backdrop? Man dreams of order, $hapiro, and he sets out to find it, and although Ahab never captured the White Whale, look at the beauty he left in his wake. Although Einstein never found a more fundamental theory to describe nature than that of Quantum mechanics, look at the beauty left in his wake! A beauty that led to the computer on which you are reading this, somewhere upon this shrunken globe. And yet you and your liberal thugs would destroy the wonderful force which sets Honest Men apart from this whimsical universe, and gives him his dignity in the face of the inanimate matter! Who would deny that Sisyphus, the eternal failure, has greater dignity than he who has never attempted? Who would deny that Melville, who died a poor man with billy Budd in his top drawer was a far, far, far Greater Man than Russel Bank's with his posh Princeton office and his Miami-Vice screenplays and 100 grand a year? Back off you postmodernist pedant punks! Let us look into the void, let us gaze into the unfathomable mysteries of life, and let us arise each day humbly before God, and let us attempt to create a glory equal to that which we perceive. I exist, $hapiro. You have chosen not to.
William Carlos Williams, one more of those free-verse poets who sucked, used his utter ignorance of physics as a license to use Einstein's theory of Relativity as an excuse for sucking so bad. "Relativity applies to everything, like love," he once said, "if it applies to anything in the world." He stated this in his Poem as a Field of Action lecture. "Thus from being fixed, our prosodic values should rightly be seen as only relatively true." No William. You're a moron, you say things that aren't true, you are artistically impotent, and thus in all ways possible for a man to suck, you suck. But what sucks even more is that there now exists a whole industry of lock-stepping nihilists who believed you and now kill trees to publish nothing. I shall offer further empirical evidence as to your utter idiocy, William. You said, "It may seem presumptive to state that such an apparently minor activity as a movement in verse construction could be an indication of Einstein's discoveries in the relativity of our measurements of physical matter is drastic enough, but such is the fact." Not only did you write your poetry in free verse, but apparently you also wrote your sentences in free verse. Free from thought. I know these wimpy, inane sentiments exist in harmony with your institution, $hapiro, but the Great Spirits who encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds were never satisfied with those who muddied their waters so as to appear deep. No-- from high up on the center-mast in THE JOLLY ROGER'S CROW'S NEST, I look beyond the spires and gargoyles of your campus, to the BeaconWay lighthouse. (http://sunsite.unc.edu/owl/ )
Einstein said that all great art and science is inspired by the mysterious. Melville knew this too. He believed that all art was conceived in pursuit of the, "ungraspable phantom of life." Ah! But do you see it now Shapiro? What must be done to educate a university president? The crimes that your liberal hit-men and thugs are committing against the more noble elements of human nature?! Restrain them from yelling so loudly in the young pupil's ears that there are no truths! Hold them back when they assault the most noble calling that a youth ever hears-- to capture within words or within math the reality he feels, he knows-- the reality that is him! To be honest! You can't go on legislating against the nobler elements of human nature, and sacrificing the independent thinker and the deeper spirit for the resentnik bureaucrats and the skin color scholars! If you do, your institution will suffer the same fate that you are attempting to secure for Greatness. For the thing about the classics are that they are Immortal. The omni-present battle against deceit, ignorance, and tyranny is underway, as it always has been and always will be, so rise now, and seize the helm of your institution, and steer her as Einstein and Melville would steer her! Find a crew that can instill the passengers with a faith in the immortal pieces of their souls. Rid your crew of the sinister, immoral elements which would tack against the Truth and throw overboard the Great Works along with all passengers caught reading them. Let the great physicists and great poets up in the crow's nest lead your vessel-- not the ruthless barbarians who tax the students and intimidate them into compliance. Heed Einstein, who said, "To me the worst thing seems to be for a school principally to work with methods of fear, force, and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys sound sentiments, the sincerity, and the self-confidence of the pupil." And was not that the feminist's goal? To destroy the piece she perceived in me which she did not have, so that the playing field might be leveled? Your motley crew attempts to convince the honest man that the words he writes are impertinent. And you know? I was just a midwestern kid fresh out of a public high school were words meant things, and when I showed up at Princeton words were about all I had. And then you told me they didn't matter. The weak attempt to erode your faith in your ability to depict the truth, so that you might too become mired in the liberal misery, stranded from taking to the wide open sea of all which has not yet been created. Intellectually and morally impoverished pedants who Detest Thinking seek to destroy the individual, so that brown-nosing the bureaucracy becomes central to advancement, and thus the unthinking, corrupt machine they and their likeness control is perpetuated. You traded all that makes the intellectual life worth living for $$$ and the empty respect of those who detest Einstein, Shakespeare, and Mellville.
And here I return to the paradox of Princeton. Institutions never change from the top down. They always change from the bottom up. 'Tis the same way in science, as Drake quoted Maxwell above. Thus the title President is a spurious one, and it is not the teachers of the texts so much as the creators of the text who instruct the World. Einstein said, "The intellectual honesty of the author makes us share the inner struggle in his mind. It is this which is the mark of the born teacher. Knowledge exists in two forms-- lifeless, stored in books, and alive in the consciousness of men. The second form of existence is after all the essential one; the first, indispensable as it may be, occupies only an inferior position." Princeton relies upon the independent work of individuals for its name and reputation-- not upon indifferent bureaucrats. The church cannot exist without God, and thus a good minister is a humble one. F. Scott Fitzgerald never finished his degree there, but one might obtain a degree by writing their thesises on him.
It is the living artist you should concern yourself with retaining, even though you are unable to because the living artist is a threat to the adherents of the dying ideology who you employ. And so Melville dies with Billy Budd in his top drawer-- 'tis a comedy of the highest order sir, and you are the clown. And the Jolly Roger is an institution inspired by the pure art I must set down, as I am Fated to Follow my Conscience.
I can't help it dude.
Where else can a man find himself but within sentences composed of the words your institution has committed itself to destroying? Oh yeah, tough-guy-- I'm on a mission here. They don't call me Ahab for nothing.
There're a couple old friends from days gone by who I owe some favors to. There was this seventeen year old who wrote a short story which moved some of his peers to tears. And one of them, stricken with that pernicious disease of the modern superficial soul that preys on young girls, made him promise that he'd never stop writing. $hapiro-- I care not what your thugs trPrinceton, for this is a free country, and their intents to stifle my passion are not allowed to blossom into action beyond the walls of your anti-intellectual concentration camp, except for in the New York publishing industry. They're afraid to publish my novel, THE DRAKE RAFT FIELD TRIP, because I threw in a couple of Hamlet references, and they know you guys hate teachin' it outside of deconstruction courses, so they think there's no audience for things that mean something, and plus meaning is against the liberal religion. I mean like in my novel the kingdom of Truth is rightfully Drake's, but Joyce Carol Oates (Professor Sycorax) murdered the greats (Drake's father) so she could reign supreme, just like Hamlet's Uncle murdered Hamlet's Father, so he could get the Kingdom and the Queen. You, $hapiro, are the meddling bureaucrat who corresponds to Polonius. In the same way Polonius's profession consisted of brown-nosin' the king and helpin' him tidy up his little messes, you have to brown-nose Joyce Carol Oates and pretend she's not going all out to sever the rational soul from all who possess one. Drake is the Hamlet, who spends the entire novel as the absent character-- he's off living in the woods, feigning insanity and all, trying to come up with a plan for revenge. You know? Justifying revenge isn't easy for the deep and rational man, for to be is not to be-- Shakespeare knew this and he had fun with it, just like I'm doing. I'm running circles around you guys-- admit it. Joyce Carol Oates (Professor Sycorax) murdered this Uncle Walt guy-- an old time cool poetry teacher who was humble before the Greats, and was also Drake's mentor. Hey-- I noticed a couple people from NBC Dateline are signed aboard my fine frigate. Ahoy then! You guys know anyone in Hollywood who would be interested? Somebody who wouldn't royally screw it up in their lofty aspirations to get some? But anyway, the play is the thing, in which I will get the king. As Drake says in the fencing match at the end of the novel, "Classics cannot be kept off of the shelves, they shall forever re-enact themselves." And hey-- if the Truth does not prevail, then how can it matter if I will?
I do sincerely feel you are abandoning your moral responsibility by playing the "hear-no-evil, see-no-evil," administrator, while further crimes against the Human Spirit are perpetuated upon your campus, as the Living Artist is Excommunicated along with the Living Truth and the Great Texts. Einstein said, "Whatever is morally important in our institutions, laws, and mores can be traced back to interpretation of the sense of justice by countless individuals. Institutions are in a moral sense impotent unless they are supported by the sense of a responsibility of living individuals. An effort to arouse and strengthen this sense of responsibility of the individual is an important service to mankind." There you have it-- you heard it from The Captain himself.
Keepin' Her on course through
the fair and the foul.
Sept. 30th 1995
--Elliot "Ahab" McGucken
Drop by our Home Port, BeaconWay Press:
http://jollyroger.com/beaconway/home.html
AHOY! JOIN THE NAS SCIENCE NEWS LIST!!!For all of you fellow hard-working scientists who're worried about your institutions spending tuition and tax dollars to employ new-age-liberal-left wackos like Andrew Ross, sign up with the National Association of Scholars Science News List by sending a message to science@nas.org. They're cool-- they've published us, along with an abundance of factual evidence which incriminates postmodernists in the deepest, darkest crimes against all that is Great. Recently one of Andrew's books on new-age post-modern crap or something was dedicated to, "all the science teachers I never had, without whom the writing of this book was made possible." I wonder if the book was printed with new-age shamanistic laser-printer technology.
READERS RESPOND: THANK YOU, THANK YOU, YOU'RE ALL TOO KIND!
mcgucken@physics.unc.edu Date: Thu, 28 Sep 95 10:54:18 0700 From: Samuel Anderson To: mcgucken@physics.unc.edu Subject: Your work- I want it
Elliot and the crew: Where can I get your literature in full? I love REAL writing, and I really enjoyed chapter one of The Drake Raft Field Trip--- now I need the rest. I'm not joking, so don't laugh at me (because you like to laugh at people) and just tell me how I can get the remainder of your literature.
Soon!
Samuel Anderson
Captain McGucken:Ahoy, Ahab!
I must tell you I've thoroughly enjoyed THE JOLLY ROGER. You and the other RED AVENGERS are doing a great service for us lovers of Great Literature who are held captive in the Gulag (in my case, Stanford University, home of "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture's got to go!"). I had been downcast of late, without hope of escape, but THE JOLLY ROGER stormed the harbor, bearing the banner of TRUTH, and now I will leap aboard her and sail the Seven-Cyberseas, thus ending this run-on sentence.
Thanks for the opportunity to join THE CONSERVATIVE LITERARY REVOLUTION. I, too, love the GREAT BOOKS, and some good ones, as well (by Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, G K. Chesterton, C S. Lewis, J R R. Tolkien, et al, who, of course led me straight to the GREAT BOOKS). Also, I share your disdain of liberals in high places who seem to exist purely to kill the human spirit by first destroying the human spirit's GREAT BOOKS. May God have mercy on them, as we sure won't!
Good luck to you and the other RED AVENGERS!
I am yours most cordially, James "Captain Redbeard" Harris The Stanford Gulag
* * * * * * * * * * * * * hello,i own an unbound original galley proof of "the drake raft field trip". i love it. it can be a little self indulgent at times but its real ludicrousness and pace keep it cool. your video sounds like a real undertaking. good luck, let me know how you're doing with it.
jill Editor's note: (She's referring to our video entitled "Selling Sonnets," which we're filming at UNCCH and Duke University.) This generation reads! http://sunsite.unc.edu/owl/selling.html (big file with lots of pictures)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * To: mcgucken@physics.unc.edu Subject: BeaconWay PressThe only way to accurately describe the way I feel upon reading this web site is to bring to mind a man clinging desperately to a tiny styrofoam surfboard as the 20-foot swells lift and plunge him, each wave a flirtation with disaster (to quote Molly Hatchet). Just as he's thinking he can't hold on any
longer, he sees a tall ship just a few hundred yards away. He is rescued, and given good food and drink (probably wine and venison, if we want to keep the proper tone going here). As he falls asleep the old sea chanty "Me Wet Feet Are A-Peelin'."
Anyway, congratulations on your superb venture. I have long held many of the same feelings/values about literature/art/politics/everything else as you (all) express here, and, as someone working seriously on his first novel, I, too, share your predisposition for actually WRITING rather than simply TALKING ABOUT WRITING. I wish you much success, and you should know that, when I talk about the web and its potential, I often mention your site as an example of people "publishing" whatever the hell they want to say without any affiliation to the big wig companies out there.
Keep up the good work.
Bill O'Connor
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * To: Elliot McGucken
Subject: Ahab rises again..........had some relatively free time (well actually paying a hell of a lot of money for my time here at good ole Duke U) so I read through a bunch of your web site. Actually, I didn't read through it - I savored it, relished in it, absorbed it like the dry desert sand. I grew up in the shadow of the Great Books, I live a block from the house where Moby Dick was written...Kipling, Tolkien and Chaucer were playmates. I had this silly idea that when I went to school (high, college, grad - whatever) I would continue this track. That the University would help me follow the footsteps of those Greats who had traveled before me and left a brilliant legacy that I could not hope to glimpse all of in my lifetime. Instead I have president Keohane barking down my throat that I am anti-intellectual because I don't spend every waking moment with my eyes bonded to my Orgo book. She sees us "just sitting around", lounging on the quad or in the gardens. What the hell was Thoreau doing at Walden? THE phrase "stop and think" is not one many people use in the right context. I don't have time to stop and think while I am taking an Genetics exam. I am too busy regurgitating formulas and facts within that precious 60 minute time period. I thank the divine that somebody else agrees with me that thinking is not a lost art. I look forward to my next visit to the new bastion of knowledge and to your next visit to the Gothic Wonderland.
Sarah 'The Mic' Flaherty
PS Where can I get my hands on a hard copy of Drake's sonnets (the web site is fantastic - but it is a little difficult to carry around with me).
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * My new and dear shipmates:
I regret to say that the words of my employment could not be arranged in such a way as to describe the feeling that I am taken by now. What a surprise! I have just begun using the internet, and never did I expect to find such a group of men, such a group of heroes! For the past year or so (yes, it is just then since I have discovered the classics and felt my thirst for real knowledge!), I have been engaged in a sort of solitary search. I have manned my little rowboat and set off to sea in search of men, in search of all that is powerful and true. As you well know, this ocean is vast; these men are few and difficult to find (I had some Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo, and Ayn Rand to serve as company and guides). Many-an-island I have passed, my boat riddled by a hail of insults, meaningless aphorisms, and spears from the hands of savages. I have studied, on this journey, grammar, vocabulary (these I have studied on my own, my friends, just as I have done all of my meaningful learning on my own, away from teachers catering to the whining idiots sleeping in the back of the classroom), and all the classic works of literature I could lay my hands on. My journey grew long, much longer than I had foreseen, and my boat began falling to pieces. My rations grew thin; my clothes were rotting away. Finally, I lapsed into a state of reverie: I could not think, I had lost hope, I had lost contact with anything real. Instead of living alongside the classics, I was lost in the classics. Then, as I was floating aimlessly, clutching a piece of flotsam, enveloped in mist, I saw it! A ship stood gleaming on the waters, its huge mass rising and falling on the undulations of the sea. Waving high in the air, attached to the mast, was the flag of reason, the banner of real writing, of real life! Oh, my friends, what an experience! A resurrection! I am eager to join the crew of this ship, my friends, and if you allow me, I will gladly swab the deck until the day when I am able to man the canon! Thank you, my friends, and, if you are real, please write back soon.
Josh
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Ahoy Captains!
First of all, I love your site. I'm as liberal as a man can be, but I know good original ideas when I see them, and I also think you guys have a good sense of fun. I also agree with you on a surprising number of things: I also think Beavis & Butthead, Nirvana, Herman Melville, Plato and Neitzsche are cool, and I also think Joyce Carol Oates and the NY literary establishment suck ...
The main difference between us, I think, is that I cast my love for Melville & Plato and these other cool types in a liberal light, and I also love Jack Kerouac, the Grateful Dead, Mahatma Gandhi, Bob Marley and Bill Clinton -- well, okay, I *like* Bill Clinton (at least as of this writing.) Whereas I imagine you love Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich and those jerks who wrote "The Bell Curve," and I don't even want to *know* what you think about the L.A. Police Department.
Anyway, I've been espousing my own literary point of view on the Web since July of last year, and I'll even expose myself to the point of inviting you to visit, knowing full well that I may end up on your hate list for my leftie points of view. One of my sites is Literary Kicks, devoted to the Beat Generation, and the other is Queensboro Ballads, a work of fiction in the form of an imaginary early 60's folk-rock album. The last piece in this work, actually, is called "Loomings" and is inspired by you-know-who. Anyway ... hope our paths will cross, in both friendly and challenging ways, as the web continues to grow. --Levi Asher
* * * * * * * * * * * * * To: Elliot McGucken
Subject: Re: Review/comments on "The Mind of God"
Elliot, Thanks for the reference to your article (and poetry). I enjoyed it very much - especially the poignant commentary on the current wave of physics coffee table books. I did not know that Davies had won the Templeton prize - personally I'm appalled. I plan to direct several friends from graduate school days to your site - I know they will enjoy it as well.
Jim McWhirter
Union College
Department of Physics
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