The Invisible Library

Science Fiction

Fellow LC member, Rivka at Respectful of Otters has a great post explaining why President Bush’s announcement of a future Mission to Mars is the best Science Fiction money can buy.

And that is the really exasperating part. We have the technology, the vision, the manpower, the expertise and above all, the desire to shoot for the Mars and beyond. Just not the money. And Bush knows this. And worse, he doesn’t care. He is purposely yanking on the dreams of sci-fi geeks and future astronauts everywhere, all to garner a percentage point in his bid for reSelection. Then he’ll ignore it for the next four years and let the Democrat that has to clean up after him take the fall for being the spoil sport who cancels the Mars Colony due to budgetary constraints. It’s shallow, crass schoolyard politics at its worst.

The part that breaks my heart and makes me want to scream is that it will probably work. He’ll get the applause, just like he did for the AIDS project that he’s underfunding and for No Child Left Behind and Fill in the Blank. And no one in the media will call him on it.

Welcome to the future, folks. We all thought that 2004 would be just like Science Fiction. Too bad we got our wish.

Candidate Not-the-Mindkiller

Amb. Carol Moseley Braun was on the Daily Show last night and in the span of about two minutes, referenced Star Trek and quoted from Dune (she said that “Fear is the Mindkiller” while speaking, in a roundabout manner, about Bush’s use of fear as a tool for influencing the people). She also was intelligent, clear minded and had a definite progressive attitude and a willingness to do the work needed to spread peace and prosperity.

She hasn’t got a proverbial snowballs chance in winning the nomination.

And not because she’s black, or a woman. Frankly, I’d vote for her, even if she wasn’t running against Herr Bush and the Patriot Gang. But she’ll get smeared as being all squishy soft and womanly on Security and Defense and so will be seen as week instead of how she actually is, which is progressive, literate and honest.

Personally, I’d like to see a candidate for president who has taken the progressive attitudes of Star Trek and the great Utopian sci-fi stories to heart. I think that’s a good way to get us into a prosperous future, by embracing idealism and tempering it with judicious thiking and compassion for our fellow mankind. Sadly, it is unlikely that will happen anytime within the next eight to twelve years though. And especially so long as Bush is in office, we’re all stuck in the Black Iron Prison. Help us, Arumcheck!

An Antidote to Book Snobery

Friedrich, one of the 2Blowhards has posted an interesting essay on the subject of Book People and their inherent snobery. He begins by comparing Book folk to Movie folk, saying, and I think rightly, that Movie people take the good with the bad and love it all. His primary example of the rollicking Movie Person is Quentin Tarantino. Now weather or not you like his films, you have to admit, Mr. Tarantino loves him some movies. All movies. From subtitled French Art House fair to Classics, to Hollywood trash, to grainy Hong Kong bloodbaths, it’s all good in it’s own way, damn the art vs. money debate. And I think Friedrich has a point. I’ll let him explain it:

I find the gestalt of the book world oppressive; it gives me a pain and it makes me grumpy. And I’m often left wondering: how can books people say of themselves that they love books when they look down their noses at 90% of the books that are published? They disdain not just Stephen King but also self-help books, visual books, and trash biographies; they relish intense discussions about what measures up as a “real book” and what doesn’t. (My staggeringly original response to this tiresome issue: They’re all books, for god’s sake.) IMHO, what books people love isn’t books; what they love is their own standards, and their fantasies about what literature should be.

Movie people are usually hearty souls who don’t mind a robust disagreement; books people cleave to what’s been pronounced worthy. Tell a respectable publishing-world person that you like a Jackie Collins novel (and I liked the one I’ve read very much), insist that you see real merits in the book, and watch your interlocutor recoil in chagrin. She feels pity, pain and horror for your benighted soul. Tell a film world person, on the other hand, that you adored the movie version of “The Other Side of Midnight” (and I did), and he’s likely to crack up and start telling you about all the gaudy trash that he loves too.

Now, he admits that this is a bit of a generalization and maybe so, but it gives you a snapshot of the dichotomy between the two worlds. Now, I for one don’t know any true Book Snobs. Personally, I think the Book Snob is a rare creature, found only in academia and perhaps New York, where the publishing elite mingle incestuously. Though I recognize the tendency in my own tastes to know what he’s talking about.

It’s no secret that I don’t like Stephen King’s writing. And Mr. King is considered, well, the King of Middle of the road fiction. And even I admit, he can tell a story. But this is my problem: he’s so thoroughly middle of the road. Friedrich hits on this point as well, that most people who love Movies, books, and food, love the visceral thrill of watching, imagining and eating, and what we really like is anything with flavor and color and texture. What we hate is the bland, steak-and-potatoes-every-night diet, the marketed-to-death Blockbuster that we�ve all seen a hundred times, justwith different actors and diffeent settings. We cinematic and literary hedonists love anything that isn�t boring and bland. And Stephen King�s writing, for me at least is bland. It has no poetry, his stories do not wrestle with any Big Ideas. They’re just good yarns.

Now, This doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a good bit of trash writing every now and again. There’s nothing finer than plowing headlong through an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. I love the Warlord of Mars Books for their adventure, barely stifled sexuality and old fangled, pre-space age notions of science and science fictionality. Sure, Burroughs was a racist and a little too enamored with the eugenics movement but he wrote some finely plotted stories and at least tried to grab that old brass ring, and show a glimpse of the Big Picture of It All. But if we can judge by the Literary Darlings of the month (and I’m not saying we should but indulge me a moment) we are to believe that Burroughs, King, all those romance novels and everything in between from pot boiler sci-fi, to noir crime dramas are just so much stuff; not really anything to be read and certainly nothing we shuld seriously considder the writerly merrits of, oh no, certainly not, unless it’s from the end of an upturned nose.

I, and Friedrich, disagree with this literary Conventional Wisdom. But, as Friedrich asks, “What might a more earthy, worldly, and pleasure-centric view of reading and writing be like? I’ve seen very few signs of such a thing so far.”

He�s got a point there, too. Luckily though, he offers a potential solution:

How might a more roughhousing conversation about books and writing get started? I’m not sure, but I do have a hunch. One of the many things about the books world that that took me by surprise was that it hasn’t gone through a guilty-pleasures phase. Remember what a kick it was when movie people started admitting that the lousy movies they loved gave them as much pleasure as they got from their art-movie faves? Books people, bizarrely enough, almost never allow themselves such indulgences.

His suggestion, and mine, is to be proud of your guilty reading pleasures. Carry them around with you. Sit on the train, reading Harry Potter, or, if you must, Jackie Collins or Stephen King. They may not be my tastes, but they certainly are someone’s and with a well placed mass market, who knows who’ll you’ll meet and strike up a conversation with?

As for me, I’ll be the guy at the front of the bus, his nose buried in a tattered copy of Tarzan.

Off to the Salt Mines!

So tomorrow, I start my new job as Webmaster for a project page at the University. The best part of the job is that it’s a Graduate Assistantship, which means I get some of my class credit hours paid for, as well as a stipend (Yeah! Money! I get to eat this semester!) I’m looking forward to the challenge of the new job and a new semester. So a more substantial post tomorrow, I promise.

An Orcish Perspective

Experts in source-criticism now know that The Lord of the Rings is a redaction of sources ranging from the Red Book of Westmarch (W) to Elvish Chronicles (E) to Gondorian records (G) to orally transmitted tales of the Rohirrim (R). The conflicting ethnic, social and religious groups which preserved these stories all had their own agendas, as did the “Tolkien” (T) and “Peter Jackson” (PJ) redactors, who are often in conflict with each other as well but whose conflicting accounts of the same events reveals a great deal about the political and religious situations which helped to form our popular notions about Middle Earth and the so-called “War of the Ring.”.

***

This tendency to distort the historical record recurs many times in T. Indeed, many scholars now believe the so-called “Madness of Denethor” in T (which depicts Denethor as a suicide) is, in fact, a sanitized version of the murder of Denethor by Aragorn through the administration of poison (possibly distilled from a plant called athelas ).

In contrast to T, the PJ redaction of Aragorn is filled with self-doubts and frequently rebuked by PJ-redacted Elrond. Probably this is due to PJ’s own political and religious affiliations which seek, in particular, to exalt the Elvish claims to supremacy against Numenorean claims.

***

we can only guess at what the Sauron sources might have revealed, since they must have been destroyed by victors who give a wholly negative view of this doubtlessly complex, warm, human, and many-sided figure. Scholars now know, of course, that the identification of Sauron with “pure evil” is simply absurd. Indeed, many scholars have undertaken a “Quest for the Historical Sauron” and are searching the records with growing passion and urgency for any lore connected with the making of the One Ring.

~From LOTR: A Source-Criticism analysis by Mark P. Shea.

I had a similar thought while watching the movies. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see some of the Orc or troll material? Find out what the Orc chieftain thought about all this fuss over jewelry? Perhaps further elaboration is deserved, when I haven’t just spent ten hours driving across three states.

Link from Making Light

Political Fever Dream

“Mother of twelve bastards, imagine it, the president and the poet laureate all in one man. Washington wouldn’t know whether to shit or go blind. This is a country incapable of acknowledging a leader with the ability to blow up the world and beautifully describe it. We demand specialization and strong drink.”

~An impressive simulation of Hunter S. Thompson, as done by an anonymous e-mailer known only as “Steve,” posted on Neil Gaiman’s Blog, commenting on the ontological scuffle over who really wrote some bit of doggerel attributed to President G.W. Bush.

But seriously. It raises an apocalyptic point: Were G. W. to be the much touted Poet Dictator of Plato’s feverish Republic, we really would be in it then. When he had liberated the city of Fiume from Yugoslavia, Gabriele D’Annunzio, The Anarchist poet turned necromancer and fascist would rise every morning, after celebrating the sun�s setting the night before with debauchery and fireworks, to recite verse from his balcony. Given what we know of G.W.s proclivities, all you�d need to do in order to dress the image appropriately is scatter the flaming carcasses of napalmed Mohammedans about the Rose Garden, dangle the heads of Democrats from barbed poles greased with the entrails of liberals, add in the occasional random flyover of Stealth bombers dropping hand grenades disguised as Bibles into the arms of children, while G.W. looks on the whole scene with glasy eyes and that infinite smirk Then the earth would shake and the sky would belch brimstone as the great and terrible He read from his book of favorite poems (bound in the skin of the last baby snow owl):

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

~W.B. Yeats, the Second Coming

Surely it would be The End.

“Le Roi est Mort”

On this day in 1880, Norton I, Emperor of the United States died.

Born in London, England on February 14, 1819 to John and Sarah Norton, Joshua Norton was a failed businessman living in San Francisco when, on September 17, 1859, he proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.

During his reign, Emperor Norton broke the Federal monopoly on currency by printing and distributing his own money, usually in 50cent denominations. These were accepted all over San Francisco by bar keeps and tavern owners. His various proclamations were published in the San Francisco Herald, though it is now suspected that some of the proclamations were written by the newspaper’s editors for satirical purposes. One proclamation, though, is known to be authentic:

PROCLAMATION.

Norton I., Die Gratia, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, being desirous of allaying the dissensions of party strife now existing within our realm, do hereby dissolve and abolish the Democratic and Republican parties, and also do hereby decree disfranchisement and imprisonment, for not more than ten nor less than five years, to all persons leading to any violation of this imperial decree.

Norton I.

Given at San Francisco Cal., this 12th day of August, A.D. 1869

Known for his progressive attitude towards the city’s large Chinese population, The Emperor once halted and dispersed a lynch mob by standing in the street, head bowed and praying.

His majesty was also a forward thinking civil planner, suggesting on September 21, 1872 that a survey be made to determine if a bridge or tunnel would be the best possible means to connect Oakland and San Francisco. This led to the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge.

On January 8, 1880, Norton I fell dead on the corner of California St. and Grant Ave. He was on his way to a lecture at the Academy of Natural Sciences. Emperor Norton I was buried at Masonic Cemetery. The procession was two miles long and more than 10,000 people turned out for the funeral.

�Everybody understands Mickey Mouse. Few understand Hermann Hesse. Hardly anybody understands Einstein. And nobody understands Emperor Norton.”

~Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C.

Supply-Side Jesus and the Sermon on the Hill

The reckless liberalism of Jesus Christ cannot be allowed to take hold of the Christian values this great country has fought so hard to preserve.

~A message From Pat Robertson and the “Vote No on Jesus” Campaign

(Thanks to And Then… for the link).

Signals Through the Distant Void

Over at the Gamer’s Nook we find startling evidence of Life on Mars!

OK, not really. But it’s a fun bit of humor inspired by the Spirit Mission and based on what, just a hundred years ago, people really did think we would find on Mars. Back then we assumed that, because every inch of the Earth is inhabited by strange and exotic species, that likewise, every inch of the solar system would be as well. It’s a nice bit of Edwardian parsimony, if a bit naive this late in the day. But just such startling notions gave rise to some of the greatest works of imaginative literature ever so it isn’t a complete loss. But alas, it just is not true. Which is not to say that we won’t find life out there eventually. I for one, think we will and soon. Heck, we may even find residual evidence of life on Mars but it certainly won’t be the fecund Red Planet we dreamed it to be a hundred years ago. It might however, give us a sign of what to look out for, and anything that gives us incite in to how to prevent the Earth from becoming a deserted ball that some other species sends robots to study for signs of life one day in the future, the better.

The Secret Name of Things

Listen all you Democrats and Independents, all you week kneed liberals suffering for a sign; all you angry homos and wonton harlots; All you polibloggers, pundits, digital dream smokers; all you pixies, witches and suicide girls; all you black flag wavers� Listen:

Humanity has always invested heavily in any scheme that offers escape from the body. And why not? Material reality is such a mess. Some of the earliest “religious” artefacts, such as Neanderthal ochre burials, already suggest a belief in immortality. All modern (i.e. post-paleolithic) religions contain the “Gnostic trace” of distrust or even outright hostility to the body and the “created” world.

~Hakim Bey, The Information War

It is this �Gnostic trace� that guides our current regime in Washington D.C. So befuddled by the religious rhetoric of Spirit over Body are our leaders, that they threaten to kill us all. In order to save our souls, of course. What Bey calls the Gnostoc trace is the long and supremely held belief in one Big Lie: that there is a separation between body and soul. Well I�m here to say, there ain�t no such thing.

They are one and the same thing. We are whole beings already. Undeliniated. Uncleaved. The lie that there is some glowing ball of light, somewhere in our gut that is from another planet where they don�t sit down to take a crap (or even take a crap at all); the lie that says that once we die, that little ball of pure white, non-crapping, non-fornicating light will drift up into the sky and return to the cosmic fun house where it came from� Don�t believe it. I don�t know what happens when we die, or where we go when we�re through feeding worms and rotting in the ground. But if fairy tales about invisible Sky Fairies and Red Faced Boogie Men are the best thing they can offer, then I say shut the fuck up. I�d rather go no place and be nothing forever after than spend the rest of eternity in church. The fact of the matter is this: Once you believe that whopper about heaven and hell and living in a fallen world full of sin, you�ll believe any old thing they tell you, because every other lie, from the one about the �Evil Doers� over There in that cold, foreign and dirty land to the �Faith Based Public Works� are all based on that first big Lie. The one even they believe.

But who cares? It’s all “relative” isn’t it? I guess we’ll just have to “evolve” beyond the body. Maybe we can do it in a “quantum leap.” Meanwhile the excessive mediation of the Social, which is carried out through the machinery of the Media, increases the intensity of our alienation from the body by fixating the flow of attention on information rather than direct experience. In this sense the Media serves a religious or priestly role, appearing to offer us a way out of the body by re-defining spirit as information.
~(ibid)

Shrub a Dub wants to be totally, intimately and carnaly aware of your Information. He wants to lick you up and down with his electronic eyeballs, to measure your soul-weight and body-surface and know your secret body-soul desires. He and uber lawgiver Crisco Johnny love the Big Lie. It gets them off and gives them your power, your vote. And if you think they won�t scare you into giving up your power-vote to them by shaking monkey masks and terror juju sticks come next fall, think again. Fear is their tool, just like lies and war and prison death camp violence. All violence is a sin against the body-soul. I may not believe in God but that one commandment, He got right.

Now, while there is no separation between body and soul, there should always be a separation between Church and State. While these convenient social fictions (Church and State are nothing more than ideas that we have all unconsciously agreed to believe in for the sake of Civilization), they can be seen as manifestations of Body (State) and soul (Church). They shouldn�t be but often are. State and the Church are just further abstractions, meta-ideas created to give some tactile reality to an idea that must be conveyed, from mind to mind like some mental virus (a meme, in Info jargon). For if not conveyed, the idea disappears. The gods only exist so long as there is one person who believes in them. Stop believing in the gods and they die. Likewise, stop believing in the dirty memes that say your spirit is not your body and you no longer are complacent. When you aren�t complacent you become nervous. Suspicious of those in power.

Hay, what are they doing to the environment? My body-soul has to live here! Quit dumping all that shit into the sky, motherfucker!! That�s my sky! My river! Stop telling me what I can�t put in my body-soul! That burning herb makes me glow from the inside out and if I want to glow all night long, to giggle and bark at the moon, that�s none of your business, so long as I show up for work on time and punch your fucking clock, earn my minimum wage, what do you care if I get high on the weekends? If I choose to dress up in fishnet stockings and all shiny beetle black leather, to dance and dream about love and death on a Saturday night and call it my religion, what�s it to you?

As you read these words, the Information Age explodes … inside and around you - with the Misinformation Missiles and Propaganda bombs of outright Information Warfare.

~(ibid)

Wake up. The powers that be are lying to you. Not just about your body-soul but about the sacredness of your world-temple and your scripture-freedom.

�Oh you don�t need all those trees and all that free space to move around and dance and sing in. let us take it for a while, abuse it for a bit. We�ll give you the illusion of safety and some pretty speeches about a bunch of shit you don�t understand because we�ve made all your gods into demons and talked them to death already.�

~ George W. Bush (translated via Secret Decoder Table I found in Poor Richard�s Almanac)

Get nervous when you hear them lie. Then get angry. Then protest and rant and rave. Especially rave. Jump up and down and holler like you�ve got spiders walking up your buttcrack. Jive all the way to New York next September. That will be our big rave. A party in the streets. Just because they�re calling it the Republican National Convention doesn�t mean it�s all black ties and armbands. They call our love-making a sin, so what do they know about the secret name of things?

Traditionally, war has been fought for territory/economic gain. Information Wars are fought for the acquisition of territory indigenous to the Information Age, i.e. the human mind itself … In particular, it is the faculty of the imagination that is under the direct threat of extinction from the onslaughts of multi-media overload … DANGER - YOUR IMAGINATION MAY NOT BE YOUR OWN … As a culture sophisticates, it deepens its reliance on its images, icons and symbols as a way of defining itself and communicating with other cultures. As the accumulating mix of a culture’s images floats around in its collective psyche, certain isomorphic icons coalesce to produce and to project an “illusion” of reality. Fads, fashions, artistic trends. U KNOW THE SCORE. “I can take their images for reality because I believe in the reality of their images (their image of reality).” WHOEVER CONTROLS THE METAPHOR GOVERNS THE MIND. The conditions of total saturation are slowly being realized - a creeping paralysis - from the trivialisation of special/technical knowledge to the specialization of trivia. The INFORMATION WAR is a war we cannot afford to lose. The result is unimaginable.

~Information War

There, in the streets of New York City� our holiest place, our Sodom-Gomorrah-Babylon-Jerusalem, we�ll dance and shake our body-souls, and let them know: we aren�t afraid. We aren�t nervous. We�re angry. And we aren�t buying their lies anymore.

__________
Update: Link added, fnords vanquished.