I promised to end this blog a year or so ago, but even then an idea for a magnificent new series had been planted, by what agency I do not know, in my mind, and had been slowly growing, unnoticed by my conscious self at the time. It grew and grew, like an unexpected pregnancy, until the psychic swelling and mental nausea declared itself unto me, and I have been quietly preparing for the birth of: " 19 Fathers: Progenators of My Psychic Litter"
This series will delve into my mental relationship with the writers who spawned my mind, beginning in reverse chronological order with Richard Dawkins, who is the most recent writer who I could not stop reading until I read everything he wrote, almost. I had seen references to Dawkins for many years before I read anything by him, and had no desire to read any of his stuff for a long time, partly because I thought of him as an atheist crank, from the title of his book The God Delusion, which I found eerily similar to the spoof titles referenced in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, "Where God Went Wrong," and "Who is this God Person Anyway," attributed to "Oolin Colluphid," and obviously, it seems to me making a spoof of pompously titled philosophical books. It was surprising to me to find that Dawkins and Adams were friends, and I concluded that the title might have been some kind of ironic play on Adams's original joke titles, but I think that sort of thing is best left between friends, or between Englishmen, perhaps, because the irony is mostly lost on Americans, and the title of The God Delusion always put me off as marketing. Its funny, or should I say ironic, because Dawkins complains about people misunderstanding his titles in several of his introductions to his own books, most notably in my memory in the most recent re-printed Selfish Gene. So I avoided him as an atheist crank, but I mainly avoided his stuff because I kept associating him, uncontrollably, with the game show host and co-star of Hogan's Heroes, Richard Dawson, and with NBA star (from the time of my youth), Darrell Dawkins. It was especially confusing for me because Dawson is British, whereas I would categorize Dawkins as English. This designation will require some explaining, both for those who do not know the standard definitions of British and English, and for those who do know those standard definition and who actually use them, and who will therefore find my use of the terms British and English to be incorrect and confusing. Also of course there is that majority of Americans who have managed to pass their entire life in perfect ignorance of the geography of the British Isles. Since most of those Americans will not have read this blog at all, I will explain the terminology only: British people are technically any people who live on the island of Great Britain. Since Wales, Scotland, and England are all on the island, the Welsh, the Scottish, and the English are all technically British. But no one ever calls a Scottish or a Welsh person British. As far as I have ever seen or heard, only English people are ever called British, maybe because the Welsh and especially the Scottish feel touchy about being ruled by the English. So there really aren't any British per se, just English people. There is a type of English character depicted on TV shows or in movies like Star Wars, which is what people usually refer to as British, and some English people may imitate this character to be appealing to American audiences, who like foreigners to be easily identifiable as Evil or Funny. But there arent really any British people. They're just English. I have always regarded Richard Dawson as this type of TV British (funny, except for those chilling moments when he told someone the actual survey results) and since I could not for a long time separate Dawson and Dawkins, I considered Dawkins to be British, and either Funny, and not much of a writer, or Evil, and a sinisterly persuasive writer of Atheist literature, ie a communist.
The association with Darrell Dawkins, well, I can't explain it in logical terms, but no, that is deceptive, because it implies some kind of intuitive connection, some interesting leap, but there is none. Whenever I saw a book with Dawkins on it, a part of my mind imaged the game show host, while another part executed the synaptic equivalent to background music for the word "thunder-jam" without even internally verbalizing it, and any temptation to buy the sighted Richard Dawkins book was gimped.
Until I saw a used copy of "The Ancestor's Tale" for super cheap at Central Book Exchange. By that time it had recently become clear to me that the author was a different person than the actor and game show host, and I furthermore had ascertained that Dawkins wrote science books for lay readers, which knowledge provoked both curiosity and fear within me, curiosity because I love science writing, fear because I hate bad science writing, and most science writing is really bad. But Dawkins is very good, and after reading a ways into the Ancestor's Tale, past the well written but not compelling introduction and the first bit about canterbury pilgrims and other not that interesting stuff, I came to the really wonderful stuff; which is Dawkins talking about animals and the tooth and fang competition stuff, the details that you can tell Dawkins himself loves to mull over - tactics. Sexual selection. Arms races. You get the feeling he kind of drools over that competitive stuff, and he goes over the interesting mathematics of game theory and competition between genes in very compelling terms and he's a fun read, and when I say "you get the feeling he kind of drools over the stuff," what I mean is that as a good writer he gives you the feeling he's kind of drooling over it when in fact you are drooling over it as you read and the book has executed the prime magic trick that good books do which is to create an illusion of a drooling narrator/ author in the reader's mind, even while they are the one drooling.
And wanting to have fur and claws and fight cheetahs over a juicy gazelle in the forest, which brings me to the second qualifier for this list of 19 writers. The first which I have mentioned is that after reading one book by the author, I wanted to read everything by the author, and I did read everything by Dawkins, including the God Delusion. The second qualifier for this list is that after reading the author a bit, the alteration to my mental landscape effected by the insemination of new ideas from the writer tends by some mysterious process to conceive a novel/ tv series/ motion picture/ comic book in my mind, loosely based upon those new ideas, which becomes more vivid as I continue to read the author, and fades away after I move on to some other writer. In the case of Dawkins, I've titled the inner book "Parkland," a world in the future, where humans have been genetically modified, with fur and claws and antennas for Internet access, to live in the wild in huge national parks, in small family units. It is a personally pleasing picture, with no clothes, no clock but the sun and stars, eating nuts and berries and other animals- especially animals I personally dislike, like bears and large cats. "Take that, mister cheetah! Have a bit of claw." That's one of the lines from Parkland.
I'm not going to recap or summarize or seriously critique Dawkin's works, because that kind of writing is, well it's too hard. I prefer to record fleeting impressions from a few bits of some of the books; The Selfish Gene appears to have been the book that made him famous, which means he wrote it before he was famous, so according to one of my pet theories he probably tried harder when he wrote it than when he wrote the others. Also, when publishers re-print a famous book, they like to get the author to write a preface or introduction, to get people who may have already read it to buy it again. Dawkin's introduction to the re-print, as I mentioned above, contains a hilariously defensive rant on people misunderstanding the title of The Selfish Gene.
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