this continuum book eyecatching. noticed on hold shelf few days ago. bcs big- thick square binding. and then title gets attn, what are the 7 plots? that all stories reduce to.
Amazon.com: Profile For O. Buxton: ReviewsThis book, which by all accounts has taken Christopher Booker 30 years to write, isn't the first attempt to distil all of storytelling down to a few archetypes. I dare say it won't be the last, either. While it's a fantastically learned, well-read, and at times insightful entry on the subject, it encounters the same problems others like Joseph Campbell have: that that the facts of actual literature tend to sit uneasily with the unifying theory, and that the unifying theory itself tends to rest on an analysis of human psychology which sounds like it might be so much bunk, and a particular world view - moral objectivism - which definitely is.
O. Buxton "Olly Buxton" (Highgate, UK) - See all my reviews 
Both Jungian psychoanalysis and moral objectivity are taken as read by Christopher Booker and as such he spends no time justifying them (perhaps understandably - the arguments for and against each would fill this book many times over). Nonetheless, in my view, he's simply wrong about both of them, and it blows a Big Hole in his Big Idea. Booker's Big Idea is this: when you boil them down, there are only seven archetypal stories in all of literature, and further that if you boil those archetypes down, they are in many ways the same story viewed from different perspectives. This is perhaps intuitively understandable: in the broadest sense all stories are a variation of "there once was a problem, and it got resolved"- but the kicker is this: Booker asserts that any story which fails to follow his prescription is - objectively - flawed.
-yeah, review for My Name Was Judas (recently published in UK) is good too. and, New Zealand. cool.
This terrific novel purports to give an alternative account of the life of Jesus, as witnessed by his childhood friend Judas who didn't, in this telling, hang himself (or even betray Jesus in the first place) being guilty only of skepticism where his fellow disciples were not. My Name Was Judas is beautifully written, thoroughly researched, and gently (and therefore devastatingly) subversive - not because it is blasphemously irreverent (it isn't) nor because it is alleges itself to be true and therefore falsifying of biblical texts (it doesn't), but because the account it gives, even though overtly fictional, is so much more plausible than the traditional story.
The other remarkable thing about this book is that a New Zealander like Stead should be writing a non-domestic story at all, let alone with such elan. New Zealand literary circles, such as they are (we New Zealanders, on the whole, don't go in for reading in a big way), are usually at pains to assert their domestic cultural credentials (what is domestic culture, I mean what are credentials in it?), and New Zealand literature which doesn't is viewed by the defensive Kiwi literati as either worthless or a bit too big for its boots. huh. This "cultural cringe" factor leads to mostly worthy but humourless and dull output, which is probably *why* New Zealanders don't read much, come to think of it. heh. Stead is one of New Zealand's foremost living writers, so perhaps he can get away with it, but in any case such an openly outward looking perspective is to be celebrated, especially when done so well.
- and re Fashionable Nonsense, by Alan Sokal
While the poseurs cited in this book are certainly (for the most part) huh ok maybe phoneys or idiots, I think Thomas Kuhn was neither, and while Paul Feyerabend overplayed the court jester hand, he had some important things to say too.
So, to the first point: Proving that one writer (or a hundred, or a thousand) who purports to adhere to relativism is a charlatan doesn't establish anything about *the idea* of relativism. All you have established is that you have a found yourself a charlatan. Give yourself a star. But while you're pinning it on, remember that postmodernists do not have a monopoly on illogical, bamboozling, balderdash. Example: Sir Roger Penrose (Emeritus Rouse Ball professor of mathematics at Oxford University, no less) and his dreadful, lumpen-headed, and deliberately bamboozling anti-AI tract "The Emperor's New Mind". The very point of the (no doubt correct but nonetheless entirely irrelevant) science deluged on the reader in that book is to obscure the fact that the real emperor was Roger Penrose and his arguments on AI really blow the kumara.
Sokal provides the following account of cognitive relativism: "While scientists ... try to obtain an objective view ... of the world, relativist thinkers tell them that they are wasting their time and that such an enterprise is, in principle, an illusion." Now that, to put it mildly, is a *very* punchy version of relativism, and not one that any credible relativist philosopher I know of (and certainly not Thomas Kuhn, who spent a whole book explaining how and why the process scientific discovery works) subscribes to. ..At the end of the day, properly stated cognitive relativism is no a threat to modern scientific discourse, except that it relegates the scientist from "truth knower" or "person through whom you may have exclusive access to the truth" (sounds a bit like a grand high pooh-bah or - dare I say it - high priest, doesn't it?) to "person whose theory works the best for now" right and who may be in competition for that status with other people in the community whether or not they're scientists.
If science *does* work better than feng shui or healing crystals (and I, for one, think it does) then this shouldn't be a particularly troubling way of looking at the world for a scientist who is at ease right with his views and his value to the community right right.
he's really very good, this olly buxton, isn't he? give yourself a star. but while you're pinning it on... very punchy to put it mildly. at the end of the day.
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