Author: Michael W Jackson

Sheila McLeod, Xanthe and the Robots (1977).

GoodReads meta-data is 240 pages rated 3.31 by 16 litizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: Seminar. 

At an isolated but relaxed research institution Philophrenic robots are in development.  Pragmapractor robots are extensively used for simple and repetitive tasks, like telling people to brush their teeth.  (Joke.)  But the Philophrenics have much more complex programming and, perhaps, even emotions.  Xanthe is one of the programers and the story is told from her perspective.  

Xanthe is an only child, an introvert, solitary, obsessive, creative, and likes things that way.  Xeno the director of the institute saddles her with an assistant, despite her objections, and he becomes a source of tension.  While Xanthe swallows the libido-blocking tablets each day, the better to concentrate entirely on her work 18-hours a day, ….  But the reader knows that Daiman, the unwanted assistant, will overcome that chemical barrier.  There is no other reason for him to be there.

The Philophrenics are programmed in the humanities not science or engineering. Thus they know the works of Ibsen, Melville, Brownings, Byron, and prove it by spouting quotations. Each has a programmer whose personality shapes the bot, though it is not supposed to do so. 

Only half-way through the book does the reader learn that beyond the Institute’s walls the world is disintegrating into chaos, although it seems a polite sort of chaos compared to the kind the Republican Party creates these days.  Meanwhile, the Philophrenic robots develop wills of their own and demand autonomy which is conceded.  However no sooner do the Philophrenics take over than the Pragmapractors go on strike. It seems that they do not wish to take orders from other robots.  (At this point I expected Jim Kirk to appear and talk the robots to death in the great Star Trek tradition of low budget endings.)

The Philophrenics we learn in a sotto voce narrative from Xanthe were supposed to be perfected humanity, creatures of reason and knowledge, untainted by the weakness of the flesh.  Like the Pragmapractors, the Philophrenics are sexless, though there are anticipations that the latter may come to demand sex in order to more closely approximate human beings. Remember Mr Data or the Tin Man?  Try as the members of the Institute might, the robots cannot be any more perfect than the humans who program them, and we see early on the personality of programmer is reflected in the robot.  (It seems one programmer works on/with one robot.)

The Philophrenics seems poorly suited for the autonomy they demand since they are totally imbued with literature, and nothing else.  When granted freedom to create their own names they invariably choose the name of a literary character, and when they are also allowed to dress themselves (having theretofore worn coveralls or kaftans) they choose period clothing for the name they have chosen.  Do we detect a lack of imagination here?  (By the way, how such clothing is produced is off stage.) but then why are they clothed at all? 

Aside: the only other time clothing is mentioned it is used to indicate exasperation when Xanthe notes that Xeno’s necktie is at half mast. We are spared the detailed and pointless description of clothing that pads out so much genre fiction. Nor are meals described and decor detailed. Finally, there is no description of the robots, except that they are made in our image.  

All the programmers have code names and that is never explained within my attention span.

Once autonomous, the bots rapidly set about making all too human errors by dividing into hostile groups, going on ego trips, lolling around….  Meanwhile, Daiman and Xanthe become, as long predicted, a couple while the Institute disintegrates around them.  The conflict between the Pragmapractors and Philophrenics turns violent with the humans in between, not quite trusted by either camp, but trusted more than the other camp.  

In the end Daiman and Xanthe leave the shelter of the Institute to brave the misery of real world. That last phrase was not used but it seems right.

About midway there are explicit references to the laws built into bots but Asimov is not named.  

The verdict above, ‘Seminar,’ indicates how wordy the text is.  Every character is articulate and there are pages and pages of talk, or silent narration from Xanthe, and very little movement.  When Xanthe reluctantly takes a holiday earlier, well, that is one of the weakest parts of the text.  

This reader was left perplexed as to what conclusion to draw.  Moreover, the external chaos is never explained, and neither is any role for the robots in that wider world which undermines the whole purpose of the Institute. In that way, we seem to have only part of the story.  While at the Institute there are schedules and work, it never seems connected to the desperate world out there.  It is indeed an Ivory Tower.  The Philophrenics will do nothing to reduce the chaos, though the Pragmapractors might.  

I came across a reference to it somewhere, now forgotten, and being intrigued I found a used paper copy from Abe Books (despite being owned by Amazon, its stock does not appear in Amazon searches) and got it.  It is not available in an e-book. She has many other titles.

The Tango War (2018) by Mary Jo McConahay.  

Good Reads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 4.08 by 172 members of the Human Comedy. 

Genre: History.

Subtitle: The Struggle for the Hearts, Minds and Riches of Latin American during World War II. 

Verdict: Victimology.

As worldwide conflicts occurred in the middle and later 1930s, the relationship of the United States to the 33 nations in Latin American returned to centre stage.  For a century the United States treated as property those parts of this world it noticed, though it generally neglected the greater part. The Monroe Doctrine had originally protected some of the countries of Latin America from the threat of re-colonisation after they had thrown off their European masters, and at the time it was backed by a silent partnership with Great Britain, but in the intervening century the Doctrine had become a convenient excuse for exploitation, rapine, and arrogance.  

The Monroe Doctrine had been used to justify a hidden hand operation that hived Panama off Columbia and turned it into a de facto US dependency for a century. Earlier Mexico had been reduced by 60% in successive conflicts, hot and cold. Being closest, Mexico has always been favoured with US intentions. The best example is in a display of his ‘moral diplomacy’ when Woodrow Wilson had the US Navy bombard Vera Cruz in 1914. That was his phrase.  

Venezuela had once been protected from European creditors on battleships, true, but in return it endured the rapacious business practices of United Fruit (Rockefeller) and others from El Norte.  Since Latin America was all but closed to Europeans by the Monroe Doctrine wall, US businesses dictated terms at will. In the spirit of free enterprise they formed cartels to reduce competition among themselves, the better to exploit the land and people. Free market ideologues never ponder this sad story very long before returning to the clouds. 

Against this background in the late 1930s the Roosevelt Administration set out to vivify the Organization of American States and win friends with the so-called Good Neighbour Policy in which the US pledged never again to intervene by force in its good neighbours.  (Hence, the Cuban sad sacks had to front the Bay of Pigs invasion; black money funded the overthrow of the elected government south of the border more than once, private contractors flew covert bombing raids in Central America, and on and on.) Whatever the intentions of the policy, the administration was not well equiped to practice it.  US embassies in the Latin America were staffed with men (yes, only men above clerical staff) who saw themselves first and foremost as representative of those exploitative businesses.  The diplomacy they practiced often consisted of lecturing the host government on the best way to show gratitude for the US robbery they suffered.

A comparison could be made between the pre-War US domination of Latin America with the post-War Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.  Albeit the US approach was masked and at times ineffective, as when its efforts to block elected governments like that of Juan Perón in Argentina failed.    

Apart from a vast population, the southern Americas possessed natural resources that anyone could see would be important, rubber, oil, platinum, bauxite, natural gas, copper, silver, and other metals and minerals, as well as vast agricultural production, and what’s more it fronted both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Its single greatest strategic asset was the Panama Canal linking the two bodies of water. 

One of the most interesting parts of the story concerns the Rubber Soldiers in Brazil. To increase production Brazil mobilised for rubber production on a new level, and went at it like a military campaign.  

With thirty-three countries to choose from there is a lot to cover, and the author selects material that fit the overall approach of victimology.  The southern denizens have no wills of their own, but are enslaved by Norteamericanos.  The indictment goes on and on.  I admit I grew weary of reading the list of one-eyed wrongs, and tuned out. 

While there are occasional references to German and Italian interests, there is no sustained reckoning of their efforts to sow dissension and suborn the population. We are left with the Alfred Hitchcock film, Notorious (1946) for that side of the story.    

And speaking of that population, much of it came from recent immigration which included millions of Italians, and also a million plus German-speakers from Central Europe.  The Italians were concentrated in Argentina, while the Germans were to be found there, and in Colombia (a two hundred air miles from the Canal), and Brasil. However these Germans and Italians were counted, they added up to a far greater number than the resident Anglos.  Then there was a significant Japanese presence in Peru to be considered.  Given the author’s silence, none of these Axis peoples were anything but peace loving innocents.  

…

One can spend a lot of time trying to define and express that group of southern nations.  Latin American includes all the countries south of the Rio Grande for 6,000 miles to the Antarctic Ocean.  That embrace includes the islands of the Caribbean, Central American, and South America. It includes the French-speaking Haiti and Guyana.  In but not of it are the Dutch-speaking Suriname and the Aruba isles, as well as English-speaking rocks like the Bahamas. But ‘Latin America’ is most general terms for this vast area, even if its people are not all Latins in any sense, starting with the indigenous in habitants. The dominate languages is Spanish but the largest single country is Brasil where Portuguese is the spoken.  For every rule there is an exception.  

To put it all other ways:

Spanish America includes Mexico but excludes Haiti and Brasil as well the Dutch territories and British islands. 

South American excludes Mexico and six other Central American counties as well as the Caribbean islands.  

The uncommon term Iberico-America combines Spanish America with Brasil but omits the French, Dutch, and English lands and islands. 

By the way, it seems ‘Latin America’ is a term attributed to Napoleon III when he had designs on recolonising Mexico as his White Man’s Burden before Kipling. It includes all the Spanish, Portuguese, and French settled lands but omits the Dutch and English.  

Then there is vexed question of the United States territories, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and the Panama Canal Zone.    

One thing common to all these variations is so obvious that it often overlooked.  All use the term ‘America,’ as in the Organization of American States.  One of the first concessions the Good Neighbour policy made was to re-title US embassies and consulates in this region as ‘United States’ and not ‘American,’ since everywhere was geographically American.  

Travels with Epicurus (2012) by Daniel Klein.

Good Reads meta-data is 176 pages, rated 3.81 by 2,574 litizens.

Genre: [Time] Travel.

Verdict: Easy Does It.

In different printings the book has two subtitles:  ‘A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of Fulfilled Life’ or ‘Meditations from a Greek Island on the Pleasures of Old Age.’  The latter seems to fit  the text better, and is less tiring than ‘journeying’ and ‘searching.’    

In its brief compass, professional funny man Klein ponders the pleasures of growing old and older.  He takes aim at the ‘forever young’ fad and many others with acerbic comments.  He romanticises and fantasises about life on a Greek rock. 

The red line through the book is ‘enjoy the moment’ because it is all there is right now.  Mostly we don’t do that. We go at most of our lives as means to an end that ever recedes.  It is as if to say, ‘Once I have everything I want, I will relax and smell the roses,’ but first I have to get all that. Plato called that sickness pleonexia. The Ferengi on Star Trek embody this syndrome. More is always better. Remember Marilyn at the tax office, insatiable?  

Before all that, Klein starts out rescuing Epicurus from his friends. Far from recommending hedonistic pleasure-seeking that his name has come to imply, Epicurus offered a much more basic message.  ‘Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, be there and do that.’ Extract all the pleasure possible from the here and now, whatever it is.  An Epicurean who has understood Epicurus will savour a lentil soup as much as Iranian black caviar.  (A Google search failed to produce a recipe for lentil soup in the magazine that takes his name.)

When I push the pedals on the stationery  bike at the gym sometimes there is an exercise class on. The music is set to ear-drum bursting, the pace is frantic, the result must be a kind of out-of-body experience, I am guessing without personal experience, for the participants. But the noise alone deadens me in the next room perched on the bike. In front of the speakers I have been surprised it has not caused fatalities. No one in such a class, it seems to this jaded observer, is savouring the moment.  Rather they are numb, and on more than one level.  The more so when these sessions have names like Body Attack, Storm, Ignite, Destroy, Smash, and Pound. 

Like Machiavelli, Epicurus (341 – 270 BCE) has been bastardised into a stereotype miles from the original. For what it is worth, when Eppy opened a school in Athens he allowed women and slaves to join in the meals and the discussions. The scandal mongers of Pox News descended. As a result virtually nothing of his original work survived the vigilantes so that the little we know of his teachings comes second and third hand centuries later. Yet his name is widely mis-taken in vain.

There is an 11-minute film listed on the IMDb but I could not find it online, but there are plenty of other films on You Tube for those who must see the movie. The few I sampled lack Klein’s light touch. A couple even managed to make pleasure painful.    

Klein’s other titles include Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates (2009) and Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington (2008). Although Wikipedia doesn’t know it, this is the same Daniel Klein who wrote Blue Suede Clues (2002) and Viva Las Vengeance (2003).