Recently, a reader wrote to ask about the image used as a header for this blog.

It is a scanned and photoshopped cover from a 1958 ACE pulp science fiction paperback.  The paperback includes two short novels by Poul Anderson.  The side above shows an illustration for War of the Wing-Men.  The verso has an inverted illustration for Anderson’s The Snows of Ganymede.  The text of the two novels meet somewhere in the middle of the book and then flip upside-down (or right-side up, depending on whether you are reading from front-to-back or back-to-front).

Here is a short summary of the plot from the insert to War of the Wing-Men:

Only three humans survived the wreck of that space-ship on the little known planet of Diomedes.  One was the beautiful ruler of a distant colonial world; another was the fat, slovenly owner of a great Solar trading company; the third was a handsome, blue-eyed engineer.

The survivors had food for only six weeks, for the native food was one hundred percent poisonous to people.  So in that limited amount of time they had to gain the trust of the winged barbarians who held them prisoners, end the terrible war that these Diomedians were engaged in, and persuade the wing-men to carry the three across the thousands of miles of unmapped territory to the single Earth spaceport.

Their desperate efforts to beat that fatal deadline makes WAR OF THE WING-MEN one of Poul Anderson’s most exciting novels.

My wife inherited this pulp novel – along with a hundred more like it – when Walter G. Steblez, her father, passed away a few years ago.  Walter had collected sci-fi, mystery and horror pulp novels from his childhood and later became a collector as an adult.  His tastes were eclectic, and ranged from books of poetry in Latin (he was a classics major in college) to the complete series of The Saint novels by Leslie Charteris (though he was also a keen advocate of the mystery writings of S. S. Van Dine).  Walter’s book collection also included the books belonging to Nikolai Elenev, a distant relative and Russia scholar who was part of the Russian émigré community in Prague during the 20’s and belonged to a circle of friends which included Marina Tsvetaeva and Sergei Efron.  We also have correspondences between Nikolai and Walter, though the majority of Nikolai Elenev’s correspondences are archived at Amherst College.

Walter George Steblez was born in Germany in 1945 on the road between an Auschwitz labor camp for Osterlanders and Hanau, where his family was able to make contact with Allied Forces and eventually arranged passage to America – having escaped both Stalin and Hitler.  His family was originally from Mariupol, a city on the Azov Sea, but left for Germany during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine in the hopes of a better life.  This may seem strange, but it should be remembered that they had lived through the revolution, the famine in the Ukraine, and had watched Avraam, Walter’s grandfather, be dragged away to the Gulag with no expectation of ever seeing him again. 

Walter grew up a bilingual speaker of Russian and English and was fluent in French.  He later picked up classical Greek and Latin in college.  He worked for the State Department in the 70’s and was well known for hosting soirees in Washington, D.C.  He later moved to the US Geological Survey and ultimately to the U.S. Bureau of Mines where he was an expert in Central and Eastern European minerals.  A Bing search will bring up his publications for the USGS.

Richard Levine, one of Walter’s longest friends, wrote this about the childhood collector of War of the Wing-Men:

I knew Walt Steblez as a best friend and colleague with whom I spent either the entire day at work or talked with after working hours almost every day for 30 years.  I could go on and on with stories about Walt’s humor, philosophical insights, and varied interests, but the one overriding thing which informed everything he did was his sense of righteousness and the courage he displayed in acting according to his beliefs. If a person was ever being treated unjustly and needed a defender to stand up for them despite any personal consequences there was no better person than Walter Steblez.

I should also add that Walt was the Union Steward where we worked so he did this not only for his friends but for everybody in need that he was in a position to help and he would even go against his politics if he felt it was necessary to help people. For example, although Walt often sided with Republicans in their fiscal views, he voted for Walter Mondale over Ronald Reagan in 1984 because he told me he thought that Reagan’s policies were adversely affecting the homeless and disabled.

On a personal level I think that one of the ways that he helped exemplifies how he lived his life and what he did for others.

We were in a work situation where we had an unstable supervisor whose many problems I won’t go into, but the supervisor had decided that he could advance himself further if he could get rid of me and promote Walter to my position who he thought would be a loyal minion. He proposed this plot to Walter, even lamenting that because I did a good job it would be more difficult.

This would have meant for Walter a promotion and a chance to do a job which may have given him more personal satisfaction and fully employed his unique bilingual abilities in Russian and English.  Rather than being tempted, Walter found the person despicable, and without any authorization physically moved his office so that he would not have to look at this person.

Nevertheless, the supervisor thought that Walter would still be in on the scheme and began to carry it out. He laid the groundwork by giving me a lousy performance rating although I had the best year of my career and by giving Walter a superlative performance rating. I of course was infuriated and launched a grievance about receiving too low an evaluation. 

Walter, who knew his game, also launched a grievance procedure, claiming that he gave him too high an evaluation by listing false accomplishments. Walter just as doggedly pursued his grievance for too high an evaluation as I did for too low of one.  Not only that, but Walter went with me personally to the head of our agency to describe what was going on with the supervisor. 

So the result was I kept my job, the supervisor, who had harmed many others, was moved, and Walter stayed doing what he was doing and only much later was he promoted. 

Until Walter’s last day he maintained this blazing sense of justice and would have pursued any just cause as vehemently at whatever cost to himself. If all people, were like Walter, then the Biblical prophesy would come true of let justice roll down like waters. I am not only personally appreciative to Walt for saving my career, but live in awe of his example which I forever hold before me as a standard to which I must always try to live up to. 

… I’m the cat in the hat.

While on vacation in Los Angeles, I received an exciting email from Microsoft informing me that I have been given the 2010 MVP award in Client App Dev.

This is an immense honor and a remarkable vote of confidence from Microsoft which I hope to live up to in the coming year.  Hats off to the members of the Atlanta developer community, my local DE Glen Gordon, friends I have met at conferences and Magenic employees past and present who have challenged and encouraged me to always work towards being a better developer.  Of course, great thanks to my wife for her indulgence and patience those many times I have stayed up all night working through the latest MSDN tutorial, polishing a technology presentation or answering Microsoft forum questions.  I couldn’t have done it without you.

For me, a four day weekend around Thanksgiving is a great opportunity to catch up on work.  On reflection, however, it makes me think that a third section could rewardingly be added to Rousseau’s Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité about our further fall from the mythical natural state and the gentle yokes we place upon ourselves for the sake of both society and financial independence.  Trying to find time to further steal time from my family is clearly a perversion of some sort and I don’t know why it isn’t a pretext for revoking spiritual communion in religious faiths which still take the spiritual realm with a degree of seriousness.

Perhaps it was Hegel (but perhaps it was someone else -- Kierkegaard?) who wrote that the churchmen of today walk around as if God is dead.  No longer in an academic milieu, I’ve lost the habit of striving for accuracy in the archeology of knowledge.  All I know is that someone said it (or perhaps not).  The as if is important. While I was a grad student in philosophy (and before I became a grad school drop out) we often spoke about as if metaphysics, which I took to mean the things we were required to believe in order to have confidence in order and purpose in the physical world.  In truth, however, order and purpose are illusions.  The prevailing philosophy of mind of that time – and currently, as far as I can tell, outside of the brilliant work being done by David Chalmers – holds that consciousness itself is merely an illusion.  That movement in philosophy went back in a revisionist archaeology of knowledge to show that even Descartes never took his arguments for the existence and necessity of God seriously, and so – if one follows this alternative argument read between the lines of the Meditations – neither is the problem of other minds ever resolved nor the ego sum affirmed.

We robots who think we are something more, nevertheless, abide.  I’ll throw in a tentative speculation into the archaeology of knowledge here and remind the reader that robot is a Russian derivative meaning “worker”.

Somewhere in the sediments of unconsciousness that make up our neural pathways we all recognize this Archimedean fixed truth of meaninglessness – we feel it in our bones and experience it in our daily lives.  The secret to success is determined by how we pivot on this truth.

When I was occasionally allowed to teach ethics (so far had academia fallen that we no longer even attempted to teach virtue) I felt a small degree of triumph if I could at least get students to the point of defining ethical behavior as the effort to think about the moral implications of what they were doing before they did something wrong.  It meant they had found the pivot.

So how does one pivot around God – Whom we secretly and sometimes openly suspect to be deceased?  Lucretius the first century B.C. Epicurean posited that the world was made up of chance and freely bouncing atoms – is our modern zeitgeist so different? In a world without order – and consequently without rewards for the good or punishment for the wicked (take the CEOs of our financial institutions as examples if you must have one) – hard work, the cornerstone of Lutheran and Calvinist theology – seems rather pointless.  The common lament of the underachiever is that the bullshitter succeeds while the grunt goes another year without a raise or a promotion.

And so that theology must change.  The theology of election – the notion that there are a set number of souls who will go to heaven – morphed in the 19th century into a doctrine that the elect would be known by their worldly success, for they were blessed by God.  But in a world of pure chance, how does an as if theology make sense of this?

The Atlantic Monthly’s most recent issue posits that mega-churches created the recent economic collapse we are currently all living through.  The argument is that “theology of prosperity” encouraged parishioners to over-extend their credit, to buy homes and cars they couldn’t afford while banks were more than glad to help them do so, because such acts of blind faith in future prosperity constituted faith in God’s goodness.  To act foolishly, and bet one’s future on chance, is as close as we can come to true faith.

I find no immediate reason to excoriate the pastors.  In a world in which we act as if God and rational order are dead and chance rules all, this is sound advice.  Furthermore, for those whom chance blesses, it actually brings souls closer to the absolute.  The recipients of this theologically and fiscally dubious advice were typically the poor, the roboti, looking for ways to improve their stations.  Their pastors used this natural desire to bring them closer to the divine.  As a viewer of reality shows and Lifetime bio-pics as well as a proponent of lottery money as a great source of revenue for education, I have no reason to doubt that this is the future toward which we are all headed.  Why work toward success when all we have to do is wait for it.

Being a software programmer, I have very little sense of history.  I have to look at my resume to discover how long I have worked with a particular language, and I have very little idea where these languages came from.  As an industry, programming always looks to future successes and rarely back at past mistakes.

My spouse, on the other hand, has a rich history she maintains a retells, developing a beautiful tapestry of traditions she freely shares with anyone who enters our lives.  She recently gave several talks at my daughter’s elementary school about the Russian Revolution and its aftermath using her own family narrative as a way to make sense of it.  One great-grandmother was a peasant while the other was an aristocrat.  By chance – and some peculiar contrivance – they knew each other in a private girls school where the poor relative envied the wealthy one for her oranges, which were eaten every day in the gardens of the academy.  Then comes a series of confusing events tied together through rare documents and pictures.  The children of the two schoolmates marry -- there are photos.  The revolution comes.  The poor great-grandmother’s husband is taken away to the gulag – evidenced by a single NKVD document signifying his eventual release after three years servitude.  Letters and a death certificate mark the passage of the relatives who join the White Army as they fight -- and flee -- the Red Army across the broken Russian Empire, eventually surrounded and killed.  The Germans invade the area of Ukraine where the family estates are.  The family leaves Ukraine on the promise of work in Germany, only to end up at a labor camp in Auschwitz for Osterlanders.  They escape when the Red Army liberates the camps and executes the Russians they happen to find there.  They end up at a displaced persons camp (their papers now declare them as apatrie) and eventually make their way to New York, then Washington D.C., where a grandmother works for years at the Voice of America’s Russian Bureau but does not live long enough – none of these émigrés do – to see the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Within the fabric of this narrative there are many more stories, of course, few of which can be verified but all of which are colorful.  There are even more stories lost forever because they were so traumatic no one would speak of them.

The story I want to bring to the fore is of how Baba Neela, the peasant great-grandmother, taught the émigrés the traditions of old Russia which they had either forgotten or never had a chance to learn – how to pray in an Orthodox church, how to pray at home, how to throw a party, how to make traditional meals, how to drink one’s tea, how to enjoy life with one’s family and friends.  Also the lessons embedded in these traditions –that personal rewards only come in the afterlife, while material rewards, in a world dominated by chance, are found in the success and happiness of one’s children.

The problem with long weekends is that it gives one too much time to think.  The aftermath of 9/11 was like a condensed long weekend.  Productivity across the country went down as people realized that there were things more important than work or money.  The roads on Sunday were clogged with people returning to church, realizing that it is the fixed point of consolation in an uncertain world.

We quickly overcame that moment of excited introspection, however.  We returned to more standard patterns of as if theology and as if expectations.

Despite that, my own nagging as if expectations from another time are returning over this holiday.  For the past few months I had been trying to figure out how to get my children into soccer leagues and karate classes, since that is what is expected.  But now I’m stuck on another notion which I imagine to be the traditional education of a well-raised child of the last century.  I want each of my three children to learn a language.  I want them each to learn to play a musical instrument.  And I want them each to be well-versed in poetry and classical literature. 

With languages, they will be able to travel from country to country if required by troubled times.  With music, they will always be welcome at a party.  With literature, they will know how to enjoy their lives.  The public schools, I expect, will get them up to speed on science and mathematics.  And so the XBOX has just been turned off while the TV has been silenced.  I have work to do – promised and as yet undelivered --  but I am picking up a book instead – one by Tim Powers in an attempt to reinvent the lives of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley according to his own peculiar vision of the hidden world.