| Saturday,
September 21, 2002 It is really time to get to work. I am
up and about but not much mental energy. That's probably something I can
fix with a day of hard work: nothing gets you out of mental sloth than
accomplishing something.
Roland sent this:
Socialism in one country.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/
09/21/russia.massgrave.ap/index.html
which is about mass graves from the work of Stalin's execution squads.
Most of this was known, of course. Most Western intellectuals knew it was
happening. But if one tried to point it out, that was bad form. Eventually
it took public authority like the Senate with Senator McCarthy to get
anyone to listen at all -- and that resulted in McCarthy's censure. Well
deserved, but why were none of those involved in the cover-ups censured?
We still have new documentaries on the horrors of the McCarthy era -- and
very little about why he and some others were horrified and excited , why
they became shrill because they thought they say dangers that everyone not
only ignored, but made those trying to warn of the dangers into the
monsters, the "real" enemies of Western Civilization.
I recall at the University of Iowa in a philosophy class in the 1950's
being solemnly assured that while Hitler and Mussolini were way outside
the traditions of Western Civilization, Marxism and Stalin were misguided
but still headed in the right direction, continuing the Western tradition.
I respected the professor who told me that. I believed it. And if I did,
how many others did?
Joseph Alsop once accused McCarthy of collecting guns in the Senate
Office Building with a view to organizing a coup against the government.
This was absurd, of course, and I am sure that Alsop must have realized it
even as he was saying it; but it was the kind of thing that stemmed from
the "Marxism and Stalin are in the Western tradition" views that
were widely taught. And understand that Alsop was an anti-communist in
most respects, and less of an anti-anti-communist than most journalists
and intellectuals of that era.
We lived in interesting times in those days.
So perhaps it is well, once in a while, to realize the consequences of
"Socialism in one country"...
And we have a PhD thesis. I put this up without
comment:
GEOGRAPHIES OF THE (M)OTHER: NARRATIVES OF
GEOGRAPHY AND EUGENICS IN TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY BRITISH CULTURE (FRANCIS
GALTON, BRAM STOKER, FLORENCE MARRYAT)
Author(s): DAVIS, K. OCTAVIA
Degree: PH.D. Year: 1998
Pages: 00262
Institution: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO; 0033
Advisor: Chair: BRAM DIJKSTRA
Source: DAI, 59, no. 05A, (1998): 1581
Abstract: This study examines how the cartographic terminology employed by
British territorial and urban geographers was used by scientific and
literary writers to delineate an imperialist, eugenicist conception of the
feminine and "effeminate" body as a colonized territory in
service to the evolving white middle-class male. Mainstream geography
claimed to be consistent with evolutionary theory, but rejected
unpredictable change for teleological visions of British hegemony. While
it espoused the inevitability of British superiority, geography worked
conservatively to prevent the slippage of the empire and the body of its
(male) citizen into the "effeminate" natural past through
degeneration.
In my reading of Francis Galton's works, I
show that geography, eugenics, and criminology map land and bodies in
order to eliminate in blood the "effeminate" characteristics
they imagined manifested themselves on the surface of "other"
bodies. The analogues of earth and body, nature and woman make mothers the
targets of projects that work to conserve middle-class white hegemony and
empire. In geography and eugenics, the body of the colonized woman is
sequestered for maternal use, to produce future citizens whose bodies and
morals will not degenerate, but will conform invariably to the imagined
masculine ideal.
Bram Stoker's Dracula, I argue, utilizes
discursive practices similar to those employed by geography and eugenics
to show that Dracula transforms into a vampire because of geographical
conditions and random evolution. Dracula's invasion of England proves the
need to use geography and eugenics as necessary but inadequate barriers to
the transmission of degenerate blood to the parasitic mothers of the
motherland. Dracula's existence expresses fear of spontaneously (de)generative
nature and parasitic feminine and effeminate bodies.
The definition by science of women as flawed
and parasitic because of their lack of ! evolutionary development and
association with nature worked conservatively as a disciplinary
technology. Florence Marryat, a white middle-class writer, defined herself
in autobiographical accounts as exhibiting vampiric traits identical to
those of her degenerate, mixed-race fictional female vampire, only to a
lesser degree. Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire educates women to
discipline themselves according to the racist and masculinist tenets of
geography and eugenics.
SUBJECT(S) Descriptor: LITERATURE, ENGLISH
GEOGRAPHY
I have this from the president of SFWA:
Robert Lull Forward The intelligent pattern of
protoplasm that had been Robert L. Forward ceased coherent operation on
September 21, 2002.
Robert Lull Forward died at home of brain
cancer at the age of 70. Forward was born 15 August 1932 in Geneva, New
York. After graduation from the University of Maryland in 1954 with a BS
degree in Physics and a Second Lieutenant commission in the Air Force, he
married Martha Neil Dodson and served two years stateside during the
closing years of the Korean War. Upon leaving the service Forward was
awarded a Hughes Aircraft Company Graduate Research Fellowship, which he
used to obtain a MS in Applied Physics from UCLA in 1958 and a PhD in
Physics from the University of Maryland in 1965. Forward was one of the
early pioneers in the field of experimental gravitational radiation
astronomy. For his PhD thesis he built and operated the first bar antenna
for the detection of gravitational radiation under the direction of Profs.
Weber and Zipoy. The antenna is now in the Smithsonian Museum.
Forward worked for 31 years at the Hughes
Aircraft Company Corporate Research Laboratories in Malibu, CA in
positions of increasing responsibility until he took early retirement in
1987 to spend more time on writing novels and his aerospace consulting
company business - Forward Unlimited . During his tenure at Hughes, he
received 18 patents, and published numerous papers on experimental gravity
instruments and measurements, including the first paper on using the
normal modes of the Earth to set an upper limit on interstellar millicycle
gravitational radiation; a paper on the details of the wideband
"chirp" signal to be expected from the gravitational collapse of
a binary neutron star pair; and a method for "flattening"
spacetime over a hatbox-sized region in an orbiting microgravity space lab
to the picogravity level.
Forward also published the first paper showing
that it was possible to build and operate a laser interferometer
gravitational radiation antenna that was photon noise limited over the
band from 1-20 kHz, and that further improvements in gravitational strain
sensitivity needed only more laser power and longer lengths in the
interferometer arms. The broadband gravitational strain sensitivity his
laser interferometer antenna reached in 1972 was not bettered for over a
decade. Forward also invented the multidirectional spherical bar antenna
for gravitational radiation, and the rotating cruciform gravity
gradiometer Mass Detector for Lunar Mascon measurements (which Misner,
Wheeler & Thorne pointed out can detect the curvature of spacetime
produced by a fist). From the time of his retirement from Hughes in 1987
onward, Forward was a consultant for the Air Force and NASA on advanced
space propulsion concepts, with an emphasis on propulsion methods (lightsail,
antimatter, electrodynamic tether, etc.), that use physical principles
other than chemical or nuclear rockets. In 1992 he formed the company,
Tethers Unlimited, with Dr. Robert P. Hoyt. When he reached 70 he
"retired" to part time consulting and writing.
In addition to over 200 papers and articles,
Forward published 11 "hard" science fiction novels, where the
science is as accurate as possible-consistent with telling a good story.
Forward "taught" science through his novels. His first book,
DRAGON'S EGG, expanded upon Frank Drake's idea of tiny fast-living
creatures living on the surface of a neutron star. Forward called it,
"A textbook on neutron star physics disguised as a novel." The
book is often assigned as "extra credit reading" in beginning
astronomy courses. The science in his books has often been novel enough
that many of his fiction books have been referenced in journal
publications as "prior art publications".
Downloads of many of Forward's papers can be
obtained by visiting his web site at: < http://www.ForwardUnlimited.com
>. -
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