Aspect Reflections on R. Scott Bakker’s 'The Three Pound Brain'

The great beauty of R. Scott Bakker’s The Three Pound Brain, and this will hold true for you, the reader, if you could hold this as a real book (not that you can: it’s a blog thing) in your all-too incarnate hands, is the author himself. 
The author, R. Scott Bakker, who writes the captivatingly protracted family resemblances and worlds of the Darkness that Comes Before: Book One of the Prince of Nothing and the extant Aspect Emperor books (I bought all of them at once, after I began reading them on my iPad because, the beauty of books on an iPad or Kindle, like angels in metaphysical debates, the ones medieval philosophers take as seriously as Bakker does, meaning analytic medieval philosophers as these are the ones Bakker knows: all the angels and all their dominions, spheres and hierarchies, all of them, like all the books, would fit) also writes “three-pound brain” weight reflections. These are mostly cog sci and other pop sci “we-have-a-brain” musings, but still: there’s truth in naming.

Some part of my reflections on Bakker are reflections on his reflections, his concerns, themes, aspects and these tie into his novels and intellectual interests. Arguably, I might have had more to say about this but the themes beyond his concerns have turned out to be worth just a little more attention. 

Thus my reflections here concern what makes a sci fi or fantasy author part of popular culture — yet, have no fear, like Dr. Smith on 60’s television series Lost in Space, Bakker is well and already here or arrived — and a bit more elliptically, I consider a version of David Hume’s question (one of them), concerning what it takes for popular culture as such to take these authors and so to make, for example, a Game of Thrones series of the kind that sets an author up for life. 

And part of this question concerns what it takes, but I doubt I will get there, for some authors (like Neil Gaiman) to get their own advances (in Gaiman’s case: for American Gods, the very idea of such), before the writing of the book itself, a predestination saga vouchsafed to only the in-authors.  Like R. Scott Bakker.

But I get ahead of myself.

It is relevant in any case that, like most blogs, R. Scott Bakker (he who does not offer his novels in that forum) freely offers us his more intellectual musings. Unpaid content producer, like any Facebook user, like most academics when it comes to publishing.

With all the talk these days and last decades (and actually forever since Dewey, longer still, were we inclined to read Plato) of philosophers and others as 'public intellectuals’ one can perhaps consider Bakker’s efforts a kind of thought experiment on the experiment of publicizing thinking and the eternal truth, inasmuch as, so it seems, one cannot even give it away. 

Dark Truths
For me, reading Bakker turned out to be the first and the only time I have cottoned to an (analytic) Aristotelian telos and related telic thinking. I have had allergies to the same ever since I was instructed as a young biology student that all, but all, talk of thinking of purpose would be out of place in a well-designed (or even mediocre-minded) lab experiment.  For my part, I would leave biology owing to my sensitivity to the contradictions of studying beings by techniques requiring and deploying heartlessness, which turns out to be more of a prerequisite for biological science, doing it, practicing it, as opposed to the theoretical exclusion of purpose or end from the biological sciences.  

What bothered me, then, sorry to reminisce but it matters to the point: was perfusion, using the animal’s own heart to pump out its own blood, replacing its blood with colored plastics, the better to see anatomical details 

— the advances in science mean that now the same technique is used to render the mouse a translucent jelly of itself, to the same end using the same mindless cruelty. 

On the moronicism of the questions in science (and there is a lot, just factually speaking, of moronicism in science, Nietzsche did not repeat the word: Dummheit 3 times over to make his point with respect to science for nothing): do animals kept on metal plates slowly heated to red-hot show more of the kind of agitated “behavior” (no purposiveness intended) that could (note the modal optionality here) indicate what we might call “pain”? 

Or: do babies taken from their mothers and deprived of any contact with them (or just to heighten the stakes, any comfort at all) thrive just the same?

All these years later the scientists are still at, much more so as they practice xenotransplantation research to produce human kidneys for mass-consumption (hey, human-swine bacon anyone?) the practice of this same “grinning” sadism. 

The elegant counterpoise is all Bakker.

The point it matters to is solely mine.  

For his part, R. Scott Bakker is far too tough-minded (to use the Rortian language of the philosophical coteries of my youth) to have a problem with the niceties to which I am too, too viscerally sensitive – Bakker’s heroes or at least their spawn (note that blood will always out in the tables and scores kept by metaphysical balance books of science fantasy) simply fling cats for the hell of it. Indeed, we get that and worse in the White Luck Warrior, Book Two of the Aspect Emperor from the living embodiment of Polemarchus’s paragon in Plato’s Republic in the latter turns of his aspect emperor trilogy, a little boy, a princeling twin, Anasûrimbor Kelmonas, to help us catch the parallel, born with a matched brother, but because uncalculatingly good, stupidly, childishly good, unmatched where the one so excelled in guile and the depravity of the vile (and with Bakker and this depraved or decadent spawn, hard to find a context where such a term is precise: I can even use a favorite of Nietzsche’s decadent: and the older the boy gets, the worse it gets). 

But to the little princeling’s mother, to anyone not privy, as the author lets us be privy to the boy’s own mind, and even the boy is not fully master of whatever daimon whispers to him, the boy is simply the appearance he gives of sweetness and light, played just as Polemarchus says he must be played, in such a way that from and to the judgment of an external perspective, he is just as just as what he seems: such a perfectly good, if vapid (but understandably vapid: he’s a prince after all) little boy.

Somewhere along the line in reflections on fantasy fiction, Harry Potter style, but even more science fantasy fiction, Jack Vance style, there is the need to consider the picaresque transmogrified: everyman as hero, better in truth than anyone else, the celebration of the uniqueness of the unique, a character we all treasure because we are all Harry Potter, and in our bemused moments, we are all of us, Cugel the Clever on this, because all men die (will George R. R. Martin ever finish?  can those failed historical novelists who write books on his alternate finishes be stopped?) and does it matter, HBO, Adorno already called this one in advance, has a season to finish, with new series jamming for space. So if they do not cancel, as they cancelled in grievous stupidity, Carneval, followed by the Shakespearean purity of Deadwood, replaced with the Dragnet spareness of Justifed, all our suns are dying suns. 

Medieval Plays and Analogies

But who counts details where riches abound? Bakker builds a world, and he does build it: I gave the book to Tracy Strong, my husband, a political theorist and fiction afficionado. I actually went so far as to read to him: he confirmed that the world, Bakker’s world opened up as I read. Finding oneself in a new world,  all one would want to do is wander further: get to know a little more, a little better. But as one goes, the thinker – and this is the point of The Three Pound Brain – still thinks.   

So there will be the representation of women (nothing for it, as I will have to come back to this: this is a pulp fiction standard thing, Rider Haggard still rides). 

And of course, I already noted this,  animals get as short a shrift of it, to unpack colloquial usage for my own part, as Bakker does philosophy: as he takes it apart, deploys it and uses it for nothing less than his philosophy.  

The mischief is, that you cannot really read this wonderful Canadian voice without philosophy, never mind the question of exigence, this way or that way.  

So (just to use the particle par excellence of today’s usage, characterizing advanced youth, but I refuse to forget Nietzsche’s demonstration that that too, that realization of being longer in the tooth than one had supposed, that too: was still youth), so the terms can lack precision, can seem to be used in a more incantatory than discursive fashion?  This does not make one a Waterbug and the threat of the Canadian cafard lurks in the choice of the term, in Bakker’s words almost like a water strider, like some of the representatives of sliding evil in Bakker’s books, his waterbug is almost charming and I remember watching them being dissected when I was an undergrad researcher at Stony Brook under the hands of a beautiful male grad student (Dave was his name, I never caught his last name, long hair, brown hair – I would have preferred blond, but I am not complaining).

What’s also good about Bakker is that he aestheticizes his males, a desirable and rare thing I already write about in The Hallelujah Effect. 

I’ll go back to male fantasies below (with a bonus disquisition on the eros of evil) but first we bring you, this blog post violates all blogging rules, this interlude, or better said: this writerly fit regarding the difference between pulp and fiction and science fiction and science fantasy (there is little science in science fiction and homeopathic amounts in science fantasy, unless we count medieval hierarchies and ontological ladders and chains) or reflect on the general run of academic books that are note read, just because the younger and not so young generation of academics do read less and less so that nonread state seems to have arrived at its endpoint. 
 

http://www.amazon.com/Hallelujah-Effect-Ashgate-Popular-Series/dp/1409449602

I cannot stave off this fit, except to note that it is indulgent. But then again, I was invited to write this and then disinvited when it became clear that I would not write in a standard scheme. Thus forgive this interruption of a blog post on a set of reflections on the great R. Scott Bakker.  Other authors have other problems. 

To recall, I already paralleled the excellences of Neil Gaiman, although, apples there, oranges here, in Bakker’s case the adorable fiction is that here we have a successful author of the kind of fiction people pay to read (yes! with legions of fans who have happily signed up for whatever he chooses to write) which famous author mysteriously wishes he were an academic (albeit, but that is why it is a wish, without having to do the exigent bits). And to be an academic means that, for the most part, and this includes ones colleagues, folks do not read what one writes.  I speak as an academic, just to limit the example to the case I know (cannot but know) because I suffer from it. Note that this non-reading holds even when those texts are freely available (I ensure that this is so in my case by sharing them) and it may also be (concession, confession) that some of what I write is effectively impossible to read. 

(Actually my kid brother, Tom Babich, managed, so, I mean, really...even if he did, charmingly I find, use dictionary techniques to have at it... --- I’ll quote his review -- he wrote a review! -- way, way, way, down in the comments at the end...)

What is certain in the case of a book about Leonard Cohen, k.d lang and the culture industry, plus Nietzsche and Beethoven, i.e., three books in one, The Hallelujah Effect, folks did not buy enough of the hardcover copies that my publisher published at an impossibly overpriced – did I mention this was a popular music, popular culture book? –,  more than 100 bucks a pop, before  any chance of a paperback – as if the distinction, production speaking, matters, charging the same price for an ebook PDF, so who cares? (little fit on publishing prices follows in a bit). 

Thus when one thinks of a trade author, like R. Scott Bakker, who nonetheless has his mind and heart captured by the rigors of  postgraduate work (he has a master’s in English), one cannot but contemplate the difference between academic and trade publishing.

Academic publishers are seemingly specialized in fulfilling their own convictions that scholarly books will not sell, whereby they price them so that books will not sell.  

The price for my own book (yes! yes! yes!: little dance here) has in the interim been lowered (and lowered by nearly two thirds but this only happened because the publisher despite (or because of) overcharging, Ashgate, found themselves going out of business (overcharging as Kant pointed out tends not to be a good business model, unless you are in the US and can manage to get a government contract or in either the US or the UK and can privatise such a contract, like trains or utilities and the like).  As of 2016 there is paperback version, physically, phenomenologically vastly better than the hardcover, take it in your hand and see for yourself) issued in 2016 by Routledge who acquired Ashgate’s titles.   Routledge wanted to raise the price (because all publishers are the same), but I argued with them and they only raised it a bit. Being an academic, I consider that minor increase a negotiating success on my part.


Academic books do not sell (though I buy academic books, so someone is buying them), they are obscenely overpriced, and the authors are paid, usually in any case, not a dime. Trade publishers set prices in accord with what does sell, and thus and ergo (s’economics, ya know) trade authors get paid for writing.  

Not paying academic authors and overpricing the books academics buy (academics individually, or via course assignments by those same academics in their classes, or via their university libraries, are the audience for academic books) is the oldest mystery of the academic author – ah, go figure the world – and academic authors are complicit. Who else can they blame but themselves? Go read Gary Hall’s Pirate Philosophy (you can true to the title, find it online – I link to it on the blog for my course Philosophy and Digital Media – and have the thrill of downloading it for free) and get illuminated.

Thus Simon Critchley made the move to trade publishing and never looked back (one can take, so it seems, peer review and shove it).  But not everyone can follow, it takes social capital and not too many footnotes to begin with.  Plus people have to find your books readable so only stuff written for the average reader and the average mind sells...  

That includes a lot of authors, mercifully.

Still and yet the digital age serves academic authors and R. Scott Bakker’s non-trade book ambitions alike. 

One can post anything: there are blogs, twitter accounts, I myself have two even, one just for academic experimentation, or one might follow blogs religiously (RSS feeds are there for that) or just dust in for a while (I publish my own on the same rhythm and don’t keep up with my own blogs but I would still regard them as my own version of the TBB. Especially the midnight musings I have not visited in years). 

Male Fantasies -- or the bits unnoticed in The Hallelujah Effect

So still and still, there’s too little male beauty as it is, too little celebrated, too little described (this is the downside of subjectivity for the subject, for being the subject, the centre of things, the center of consciousness, desire, pleasure, is not in the picture; not thematized). No one but Lacan (and Žižek) talks about the phallus, no one but Bakker and he gives it the old college try: he has them in a round, almost furry abundance:  arching, physical, ‘pendulous’ how nice to read the word deployed in a novelist’s toolbox for something besides a woman’s breasts (what age will she be), Bakker’s phalloi are always, when they are not mentioned to let us know about the evil that dwells, tend to be, are liable to be pendulous: how can that be bad?  I shouldn’t say that, as whenever we hear about them in Bakker’s books they nearly always are a harbinger of evil to come, inasmuch as, simply because the same Bakker who shockingly, thoughtlessly has his evil crunch the tiny teethed spitting angers of a whole litter of wildcat babies, kittens (this is far worse than Jack London’s “To Build a Fire,”) it happens to happen upon in the snow, all in one appreciative mouthful (the thing is evil: this is how you know this) also has such mindlessness and evil gets off on what it does, all fifty shades of it.  Tell me what turns you on, and I will tell you who you are.

Now to the troubles in houses, and Bakker is excellent as good as George R. R. Martin in his Tolkienien fashion of the ‘Gaming’ of Thrones, the building of houses and peoples, histories and antiquities, down even to the long alien eons of silence needed for the death of gods, just to mention Nietzsche again, dead so long they no longer stink but simply exhale dust, and yet he cannot track the houses of the philosophers.  

I use houses here to echo a philosophical commonplace (more Northrop Frye than Stanley Cavell, though this may not have been the intent: every standard philosopher chooses a Harvard reference over Toronto) in the title deployed by one Canadian author, G. Carlos Prado, a Cartesian, analytically minded enough, who could not believe that there were troubles between philosophical kinds, kinds of philosophers that is to say and who got Richard Rorty to write for his collection A House Divided, forgetting that the analysts had already decided that he who had led them, been top philosopher, president of the Eastern APA and all, all of that, was effectively dead to them.  Too much pragmatism but even more too much conversation with the likes of deconstructionists, a tribe that could only stand to be mocked (we’re not done with that, Derrida’s death and now Heidegger’s most recent, still ongoing auto-da-fe makes that a permanently undone deal: we know who to blame, lets invoke the postmodernists and flail about until our verbiage hits something more or less solid).  

<Hommage to the late Leonard Nimoy posted in advance.>  So Bakker worries that, supposes that it must be Ray Brassier’s continental being, but Bakker is not here referring to the real kind, the kind that shares the other wing of the same divided house as analytic philosophy.  Not fairly (to this reader’s mind, but she always considers an author’s formation, and given his teachers): for Ray Brassier is an analytic philosopher's continental philosopher, of a style devoted to the advancement of its own philosophical kind, which is to say to lay claim, to language and concepts.  

Thus the reason for Ray’s disappointing withdrawal from the current intriguing project may have had, so I suspect, nothing to do with his being what he is not, even if his fellow analytically formed philosophers would prefer to count him out of analytic philosophy, jobs in philosophy being almost as vied for as claimants, hither and yon, to George R. R. Martin’s sovereign’s throne of swords, lent for permanently Hobbesian safekeeping and just as permanent enmity/power: the war of all against all.

Where Martin’s white walkers are naked zombies (beats the Salvation Army reject couture of the Walking Dead), permafrost in fantasy that is as much on the move as permafrost is in reality, and airbrushedly, conveniently enough for HBO, are missing any and all the pendulous bits, unless of course they are ladies, Bakker’s figures can be naked enough, moving through Robert E. Howard style carnage, a Frank Frazetta drawing, or nigh onto it, in words, a nice achievement given the limits of pulp fantasy fiction these days, they are not airbrushed enough.  It is not a matter of the continental (and Brassier isn’t one, except by the standards of analytic philosophy, the same strangely self-referred and self-pleasing standards that let Brian Leiter describe himself, like Brassier, as ‘continental’).  

Real continental philosophy is as real as Bakker (to say this does not make him ‘continental’ so one need not worry) but it is to say that one has to do with Bakker with an entire realm of philosophy, using and remodeling terms, reflecting on and reviewing that same reflection on good and evil in its conflict, the one with the other and the overarching that sometimes seems to be a necessary presupposition of just such a dyadic universe.

But the unpleasant is also part of the new aesthetic, let us call it an insect aesthetic, allowing the reader to read into what should by rights be required reading for all venturers in speculative philosophy, object oriented ontology, the hidden life of things, faces uncovered in the rinds of stone, whispering in old secrets, part Heidegger’s Being come to life, part Hegel’s own owl of Minerva changed into a crow bird, giant grackle with an old head, a human head, got to have something bigger than a fly and we know that whatever evil is, it always has, even if it just puts it on for show, a human face.

The insect aesthetic is by no means a throw-away reference: the term is already deployed in book form, thanks to Jussi Parikka, and his Minnesota University Press, book: Insect Media, a book grown out of the vermin-viral contamination metaphorics of our means of communication, mediation. 

Though I think it more a matter of metonymic snarl, as if anyone wanted to look at the coils of cable behind, underneath their desks. And who even cares to conceal the nest any longer?

But to return from academic media-theoretic reflections (on academic media) to a master mediator, that is a writer like Bakker, musing that the likely spammer of his woes in his recent Waterbug Blues is likely “some continentalist, same as before” is more likely offbase, and one would be hard put to find an analytic philosopher willing to call what Bakker does philosophy. Heck and hell, they have trouble naming what I do, and I profess the stuff, philosophy so their TQ, their tolerance quotient is spare enough, unless you get in a few fat men, and toss them from various railroad bridges onto various tracks, in permutations of saving this or that number of passengers, in this or that permutation of possible outcomes. Bakker is thus quite right as I also observe in my several takes on the analytic-continental divide, as in my writings on philosophy of science, that “the content of a claim is not nearly as important as the social status of the claimant” and this holds true of Brassier (more social status) and me (less so and I am a woman, so one can just go and take off influence points for that too…). 

And here conceding the fondness for cognitive science that Bakker has and raising it back to my beginning reflections watching my friend Dave decapitate his waterbug, carefully crucify it – the loss of a head is not something an insect notices at least not in the fashion of dying that is the custom for what we call higher animals, starting with mice and going right on up  to primates. 

We cut off primate heads too, have been doing so, this time not since the Nazis in Germany but at least since the sixties in America (dogs in Russia and whatever else elsewhere) just to see if we can, and so to trump the Vulcan mind meld with something that will really sell stock in science: brain (and that means body) transplants. 

Then gay marriage can be yesterday’s news, one can marry one’s new self, a younger lover, arrange for a transplant and skip the worries about legacies and wills and who is covered by whose insurance.

Ray Kurzweil has already shown considerable interest and for all I know, already owns the company. Wetware can be the newest download, or upload, whichever way you wish to take your immortality in the next bright and shiny gym body. (Hat tip to Michael McNeal for this prospect!)

The problem is that scientists are just as uninterested in the analysts as Bakker is in the distinction between analytic and continental philosophers (in favor of the genre he coins, mayhap a sub-Sranc sort, of continentalists).  Nor, in fact, am I arguing/urging that scientists be interested in either tribe.  Scientists too have critical questions, they too have a take on the way things hang together and they are the ones who crucify waterbugs on paraffin beds for microscopic experimentation, the real mind-brain connection.  Oh and primates too wired and strapped into gruesome racks that would excite medieval fantasist’s wildest dreams. And where and how did one think one’s brain info on mirror neurons and such was got in the first place?  None of the primates leave their torture chairs alive, although they might make it through a few sessions of misery, but Ray Kurzweil and co. have great hopes for the results and The New York Times is happy to offer publication.  

Hey: it’s science, our new theology and our new religion and just for good measure, our new philosophy too.  But the critical words, if there are going to be any, that will still come from the continental types, the real ones, not Leiter style, the ones who notice what is done to animals, the ones who ask cui bono with respect to what is and what is not funded (and published).  Welcome to the real: where is Lacan when we need him? 

Ah yes, just where Kurzweil intends not to be.

I’m not wishing Kurzweil luck, in the head transplant biz.: there’s too much blood on the ground, the cages, pooling in plastic bags in the dumpsters behind the cog sci buildings. But maybe I forget the point of tolerating only one style of critical thinking and only allowing one voice to ask the questions.

Full disclosure, as if needed: 
The author of this manifestly “too long” blog post is not only writing a blog that will likely not be linked to on Bakker’s three pound brain site (it’s there, here, a little tucked into the way down on the page, but there all the same), but an old-school continental philosopher (there are no “continentalists” but maybe there should be and Bakker ingeniously invents them in Brassier’s good name) and I say no throwing of anyone regardless of adiposity, simply because as Kant, already more than two centuries ago, pointed out in the real and contingent domain, all kinds of things can follow from an intervention, not only the hoped for benefit but also an unanticipated side-effect for which side-effect one will be, having tossed the man to begin with, the directly proximate cause.  Or not, but Kant’s point is just that you would not get to call it advance apart from fitting it under a rule that would require skill to work (not much of a rule in Kant’s lawbook), with a hedonist outcome that might or might not be as predicted.

So what do you get in the planned book to be edited by Dan Mellamphy (he it was who invited me to write an alternate preface in the first place), to be titled as the blog is titled: Three Pound Brain, the sequel book, post blog?  Without pretending to write more than a fall-back preface here, the current author also knows better than to compete with R. Scott Bakker: she simply admires him, admires his métier, and recognizes that it draws much more than the bulk of current analytic philosophy would seem to do, on philosophy, its concepts, its histories its scope. After all if J. K. Rowling (about whom Bakker has his own murmuring bone to pick, same as the other high caste ‘authors’) could work to remind young readers that learning Latin might come in handy, if not for casting spells than at least for reading a materia medica and skipping that for medical school and the Merck manuals that let you forget what Rowling taught you, well then, Bakker’s mages are aging metaphysical masters and that is not nothing (although it has to said, as it is striking by contrast, that all the women in the novels are young or young-looking or taunted/lamented for not being so), using reified syllogisms and logical forms to do, well, things, very reified things, with words and to walk between the spheres, and seem almost like Aristophanes’ Socrates to move above the clouds.  

The comedic turns serious, bathos to pathos, and you will find yourself buying the next book, a moving of minds that is the only test of the author.  You know you can write when people cannot help reading, and wanting to read more, of what you write.  Only part of that is the story as any screen writer, doling out plot in weekly or yearly bits, knows all too well: the rest makes genre and Bakker has his own.

Here however Bakker reflects, as a writer who also cannot help writing (but not enough of the Aspect sequels this reader would be happy to read: all of them, bring them on) on DeLillo (I, just because of my name, have my own spammers, very identified ones, who take me as the incarnation of one of DeLillo’s characters. That’s another ingroup and the identification is, I imagine, nice enough but inaccurate: I turn all scientific literal when it comes to incarnation: the name has to match completely, no code). And as expected one also finds the fights, the jousting with the English profs (who take far fewer prisoners with far less justification than philosophers, by which I mean that the species of English prof which once included Tolkein but more significantly, astonishingly, Northrop Frye has disappeared into a signal lack of formation that now characterizes almost the whole of the academic landscape: if R. Scott Bakker had any patience for swallowing (Nietzsche would say eating) his heart, he could go back to school and write reams on that empty landscape of cultural nothingness.  Not because the professors do not have their say but because they have had their way: we give grad students a pass on exams (who needs to know anything when there is Google, we hire on potential and promote still-unfinished scholars who have yet to find a voice and do not know their way around their own field let alone any other and say that the promotion is on promise.  Really? Really.  I am continental and old school and I think a professor at any level should be able, just on the face of it, to take a stab at most problems, I believe they should know their way about the discipline, should be able to teach almost any course in the discipline, graduate, undergraduate and so on.  But we give our grad teaching assignments to our newest scholars, fresh out of grad school themselves, so it would hardly be fair to expect this kind of know-how and thus we cannot be surprised to find the watered down scholar continuing the education of the watered down.

That said, I am not talking fiction but Bakker is and that is the genius of it and that is why it is worth reading. He has the challenges of being a contemporary author in a field, fantasy, science-fantasy too that is increasingly gaining respectability.  Thank you Ursula K. LeGuin (ah, alas 1929-2018) but thank you and there is a connection here, Andre Norton (1912-2005) and Jack Vance (1916-2013) (nor will any of these names will see their like again) and so on. So Bakker has awards and accolades, he is celebrated and yet he is passed over, at least so he tells us and he has a point. 

Some months ago, before writing this (non-preface) preface, I wrote to R. Scott Bakker out of the blue, just for the hell of it, to ask why HBO had not come hat and contract in hand to his door to bring him the ultimate success as it had brought Martin for his Game of Thrones.  The philosopher in me (forget the worries Bakker has about my continental colors and I have deep allegiances to all those colors, those as Nietzsche put it my wicked thoughts, which I too paint on the wall, and am attacked in my own turn, hard to take that, no matter what one does: thank you Brian Leiter, thank you uninformed grad students resenting the challenge of reviewing a book – and I never get any other kind of reviewer – they simply cannot read for the life of them), again: sorry for the long parenthesis, but the greatness of an English sentence is that it can be long, that the thought can be sustained, the philosopher in me, prefers Bakker sheerly for the fun of it. One cannot, to be sure, learn philosophy from his novels, fiction, as we remember, but one can enjoy the allusions and the questions. Not to mention the creation of so many beautifully heroic worlds where philosophic questions take the best part of the best dialogues.  When the Homeric cataologing of the destruction of towns and the moving of armies does not claim the field.

I think that the discussions in philosophy class ought to be bigger news on the screen than the cooked idiocies of the Big Bang Theory and saying that I am not talking analytic philosophy because it is dreadfully boring: the more successfully analytic, the more boring.  But the kind with questions about life, death, being, god, logic, truth (oh yes that gets in too) as well as the body and no one beats Sartre on the Mind-Body distinction when he takes his young woman (she needs as I have written elsewhere to be young, not so that the man might desire more than the pleasure of her company but that she might be under the delusion that he is interested in fact in anything she has to say) out on a date for the first time, and talks about the quaintness of a first move and the simple delay, one does this with email, with a text message it is a little too urgent to delay for long, and the aspiring blogger is utterly on the hook for a quick response (got to keep the followers following: heaven knows what will happen otherwise).

What one gets reading Bakker’s  Three Pound Brain is a number of such forays into possible confrontations, some repetition, but that is normal in the world of print and invited lectures, even if his readers write into his comments to point this out (at least as someone who is not much invited — I tend to beg my way in — imagines that this must be: if one has a lot of invitations one has to recycle, and the reader’s mind is to use the TQ image of tolerance once again, fairly inflexible: we philosophers, we writers, know that changing a line, a phrase, changes everything: it is not the same lecture, and you know this to be true because the early version has zero impact and a later version does far, far more at least for your own thinking).  At the same time, Bakker is master of the conjured enemy, created enmity, reaction and indignation (all those academics, never mind their low pay and low social status: professors who teach writing do not outrank writers, and they know it).  You can learn how to think like a writer, the swashbuckling confidence, just by reading this blog/book, even where he errs (as he does and gets to allow himself to do so by the disarming expedient of laying down any claim to expertise and then, because why not have it both ways? insisting that he is right. “All this gives me confidence in my incompetence!”  Kind of a common characteristic that.

The newbie with fresh ideas is also fresh out of interest in the ideas of the oldbies and as a wannabe in place of the oldbie, this is a cuckoo’s game, doesn’t want to bother with learning things others have to say. What one wants is to be engaged, to be read, to be taken seriously, talked to.  What one doesn’t want (not really, not at all, they’re unimpressive, as one imagines the ingroup as a collective of some kind, as ingroup denizens who teach here and there, and whether or not they have an actual appointment, and without respect to where they stand on the salmon ladder. As a fresh outsider one can lump everyone, lecturers and adjuncts in with everyone else, certainly adjuncts skip the whole medieval process of rankings and just call themselves “Professor” fresh out of or still in grad school.  What’s a Lecturer anyway?  Now we can go back to naming Brassier a “continentalist” and proving that his actions suffice to prove that “the continental emperor has no clothes”). Why ever not? Holy Anacreon, to quote Nietzsche, where Bakker’s light does not seem to have strayed, or I should really say: Holy Archilochus!  Lycambes just promised him his daughter who refused him (one sees how badly that goes in the slaughter bath that it took to take out the redoubtable Catelyn on Game of Thrones) and as a result (it would all be their fault) Lycambes and his daughters did themselves in after suffering calumny. It’s how politics works, the issue of status, and all that.  Ray has to be regretting his option to opt out, hardly needful with a book project that is not planned to begin before an astonishingly protracted (all the texts are in, someone really cool must still not have a text and will it be the author I could not, I expect it will be, stand who creatively read what he had and sniffed that there was not more). 

Well The Digital Dionysus was slated to be produced, having been scheduled for Fall of 2013 to begin with (the mysteries of ingroups include a press in the pocket, by delays in publication all the same), until Fall of 2016, same as a possible spin off: Through the Brain darkly. In the same way, bad Ray had all the time he needed (everything depends on some other [more, patently more] essential person, without whom the collection cannot proceed, plus the author himself).

Still I find myself wondering how a man who can think himself into Drusas Achamian’s embarrassing embodiment — but then I remember that for a man this is never a problem and for all the detail of Akka’s grossness to which we are treated, all we are asked to do is to feel for him: once again, Lake Woebgone style, all the ladies are above average, captivating beauties, there are hardly any others and those that are scarcely matter to the author or to us — how this writer of all writers, a fantasy writer, cannot think himself into the minds of his variously numbered five or fifteen or however many combatants he remembers himself having, and losing combatants, he remembers himself vanquishing English Professors.  Here be English Professors (all of them?  All of them).

As if one’s college English Professors were not careful to allow the student to win any argument by the rules of the academic game: trounce your students, as if this were hard to do, and you will have none: let them win and they will write about you and make festschrifts for you and in the case of R. Scott Bakker multiply your numbers to epic levels: who can resist?

Bakker, to be sure, takes his contests as seriously as his contexts and he lives where a number of new writers also live:  in the virtual, the digital, the blog-world, the world of email-contacts, and spam blocking.  One cannot ask for a more entertaining companion to that world and learning the background of his thinking by reading his occasional writings and learning too of his passion for today’s cultural commonality of all commonalities, that is science — and I have never found anyone who is “against” science, not even the Heidegger I have the unfortunate distinction of knowing something about in just this “aspect,” namely on science and on technology. 

Not even creationists are against science — if it is a common liberal conventionality to go all foaming at the mouth contra creationists. Strangely, oddly, all they want to do, like Bakker is to have a word in the conversation, not that we are having any of that. 

Creationists might be far better off decrying science and maybe calling for the construction of condos in the creatively anachronistic style of Game of Thrones, but this they do not do, they simply argue that they have arguments, they argue for their questions, to be part of the discussion.  
And there: it is quite easy to find ourselves on the wrong side of tolerance.

If Adorno and Horkheimer ask us to criticize the culture industry, Bakker shows us what they get right (he is probably not altogether on base about what he supposes they get wrong but that has more to do with branding than — and Bakker is fond of this phrase — the supposed fact that the “System slams the door on his [the reference is to Dom DeLillo’s]  literary fingers.”) 

Not really — do ask aspiring self-publishing authors everywhere).  

All your base are belong to them: to SONY, HBO.

“Aristotle, man. Had to go fuck things up for everybody.” 

Hey, what more could one want (to be invited to this particular Nietzsche party, to give a keynote there?) This is good success but there is always more!

R. Scott Bakker has earned all the confidence he has in spades.  

And for me, fan-prof, writing on the kind of popular literature that professors of popular literature will tell us is not literature, (being fantasy, science or not, and the only science in Bakker as far as I can tell is old-school, and I do mean scholastic, philosophy of the philosophical syllogism kind), I differ (see already above the LeGuin reference, and she herself is well aware of the status thing): I think R. Scott Bakker is epic, great, right up there, part of the pantheon!

I think HBO should come calling, and if they do, can we say that I called it?  

Just for hecks.