Gene Stewart

Welcome Aboard

2011-11-14T09:44:00.001-08:00

Cruise ships and closed luxury resorts of the Club Med model offer the illusion of travel without exposure to other cultures. Insulated vacations for bigots? Safe zones for uneducated, uninterested human hamsters? Or is it more about scarfing every penny for the corporation and not letting profit escape into the host economy?

Science fiction as a genre works on the same model.

Choosing a book the cover of which proclaims it to be science fiction ensures the reader an experience of a certain kind. They’ll know from the first page that it’s science fiction. They’ll be kept supplied with ideas and action. Embedded lectures will be fascinatingly scientific. Plausible will be a watchword for every event, opinion, or speculation.

Best of all, human foibles, other than glaring character flaws necessary for plot twists, will be emphasized by their absence. There will be no ambiguity or irony. The strong reliable captain really is strong and reliable. What is said is meant literally. They say what they mean and we know why they do everything; motives are kept clear as empty space.

No messy human stuff, in short, will stay this story’s courier from the swift completion of its plot points.

Science fiction is the literature of ideas, we are told. Repeatedly. Science fiction fosters a sense of wonder about such things as the scale of the universe, the vast sweep of human ambition, and technology’s potential to transform everything. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Sir Arthur C. C. Clarke told us in Profiles of the Future, 1961. Magic is full of a sense of wonder. Big ideas and the scope of far-flung adventures in futures where technology can do for us what wishful illusionists could only dream of, that is science fiction.

Science fiction is for ten year old boys, someone once observed. He shall remain unnamed to protect him from the fen with Dixie cups of cold vomit who may wish to throw it on him. Despite anonymity, however, this observer of science fiction had a telling point. Boys of that age are interested in precisely the mix of things comprising science fiction. They are also uninterested in girly crap like relationships, how people get along together, and all that touchy-feely emo stuff. Cooties repel them.

This harsh observation is made in reference to the original readership for science fiction, which were indeed ten year old boys and engineer types with arrested development. Many will hasten to point out that science fiction has moved on, grown up, and learned to embrace almost all literary traits from a wider world. They’ll point to the New Age, which transformed the Golden Age of Science Fiction by infusing arts and humanities into the breadboard circuitry and Estes catalog trope and topos. They’ll congratulate themselves with swelled chests and speak of science fiction being as good as any other genre and better than most, hastening to add that literary is just another genre, so take that, academic snobs.

Examples can be found to prove any point. Yes, there are literate genre tales and moronic literary crimes. Yes, there are works that span the range and exceed all limits, even in the science fiction idiom, even as there are fumbling pilferage of science fiction’s refined notions by clumsy literati desperate to seem bright even as their inspiration and ability wanes.

A good story well told is a writer’s goal and a reader’s joy, and good writing does not depend upon idiom, genre, or form.

And yet.

And yet, science fiction in aggregate tends to be insular. It resists change, generally speaking. Space opera routinely dominates awards, notable exceptions aside. In recent years, juvenile has become a term that seems to add cachet to a science fiction story’s chances at winning an award or being liked, bought, read, and discussed by the science fiction readers. Does this mean they seek to rediscover the frisson of novelty experienced when they were kids first finding science fiction? Are they sense of wonder junkies flailing for a fix?

Some dismiss such questions, saying they are outdated. Science fiction has grown up, they assert. It embraces all styles, approaches, and qualities of writing in the wider sense, they claim.

Countering these objections requires an explanation for why, then, science fiction continues to be recognized as distinct from other genres. Despite expansion and undeniable growth, science fiction has retained hull integrity.

Which returns us to the initial image of cruise ships and closed luxury vacation resorts. There are in fact things science fiction does differently. Other genres do not focus on technology, for example. In an April 1975 essay for Natural Science, Isaac Asimov wrote, “Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.”

Some say science fiction predicts the future. It is more accurate to say it explores potential futures, some more realistic than others, some more solidly rooted in known science than others, but all considered possible. Thus came the proposed new appellation, speculative fiction. This came in with the New Wave writers, who had studied humanities perhaps more than science, and who wanted to free themselves from the picayune reliance on straight extrapolation from some science nugget. Yes, science fiction speculates, sometimes from informed perspective, other times more like a grizzled geezer panning for gold in random streams.

Editor, writer, and bearded prospector Damon Knight defined science fiction as what ever he pointed at when he said science fiction. His finger has written and, having written, has moved on, so we’ll have to rely on our own finger-pointing now, each of us. Name calling is popular, too; feel free to join in.

Case in point, Margaret Atwood. She hit it big with The Handmaid’s Tale, a grim dystopia featuring harsh ideological rule in a North American society gone evangelical Christian with a Taliban-like intensity. Terrifying, harrowing, and all-too-feasible -- listen to the Dominionist-dominated GOP politicians if you doubt this feasibility -- this extrapolation of a bible thumper’s wet dream was pure If This Goes On and What If.

It won literary accolades as well as selling well, and Atwood, asked about science fiction, made statement the science fiction guardians of ideological purity took offense at. They called her names ranging from Clueless and Ignorant to A Literary Snob, Thief, and worse.

Seems only science fiction writers doing it “properly” are allowed to “use science fiction’s ideas” and when Perceived Others do it, well, it’s an affront, and outrage, and a sacrilege. Insularity was threatened by such a breach in science fiction’s hull.

A wide-ranging pattern was noticed by science fiction defenders. Literary types, bereft of ideas, lacking inspiration, and unable to be creative on their on merit, pilfered science fiction ideas they did not even grasp, and wrote fatuous nonsense that did not qualify as science fiction but was, of course, awarded literary honors and promoted into bestseller status. How galling for all those On Board.

This in turn brought charges from academics against science fiction’s insularity, its determinedly low brow addiction to Mere Plot, and its insistence upon arbitrating Real from Fake. Harold Bloom’s choleric tirade against genre when Stephen King was given a National Book Award is the low water mark for literary snobbery, bigotry, and sheer idiocy.

Consider science fiction as a vacation guaranteeing integrity of experience, though, and all becomes fair and clear and warmly sunny.

So write, and read, what you want.

Just remember, please stay on the ship and do not leave the compound. We need the money. And you do not need the aggravation of encountering Those Others.

/// /// ///

Florida Move's Gestation

2011-11-08T09:42:00.000-08:00

How to avoid jumping into the genre box with the rest of the toys.

Instead of building a story out of what seem to be cool ideas, focus on one person and see what they're doing.

Or tell a story about a specific person.

I had this idea once that most parents would gladly change places with their kids to spare the kids suffering or trouble.

That is the tidy white bread notion.

Truth is much darker and more mixed.

But anyway, I wanted to show that urge to change places in a story.

Instead of building a story on that, which would be genre.

I focused on one guy.

He was poor.

Lived in a trailer, in fact, in FL.

Just a little window AC long since broken down and inadequate.

Eats fast food because he's unable to afford much else.

drinks a bit, to ease things.

He's retired/unemployed.

his personal space is a rat's nest.

he wears sloppy sweats because he's run to fat.

he's a heap, but barely struggles on, fixed income and social security.

And his wife has died.

And all he has to care about at ALL is his son.

But his son is far away, going to college up north.

Kid never hardly calls, and seems changed each time.

Almost my whole focus so far is on a very real guy and his situation.

Then two guys knock on his door.

Cops.

Seems there's been a problem.

His son's involved.

Killed a guy.

May have to do hard time up north.

Cops wonder if he's seen his son, or heard from him.

Truth is, he hasn't.

As soon as they leave, largely in disgust at him and how he is forced to live by depression of both sorts, he sits down and has a panic attack.

He desperately wants to find his son, hear from him, find out what's going on.

He wants to make sure the kid's okay, safe, innocent.

He urgently wishes this, and falls asleep drunk, and dreams he goes up north.

Dreams he finds the kid, and the kid is indeed in trouble, but was framed, and the old man offers to cover for him while the kid takes off down south, to FL, to hide.

When he wakes up, he's in the kid's body, of course.

Here is the rub: The kid wakes up in his FATHER's body.

And we find out the kid is a sociopath who was guilty as fuck.

Only NOW he is literally trapped in an aging, abused body about ready to give out, with no money, and no hope for much...

So by focusing on the real, I wrote what I hope is a compelling story that still manages to feature my silly idea about parents being willing to change places to save their kids.

Offered as an example of how to work without jumping in the box.

Let Me Tell You About Mother’s Day

2011-05-09T20:56:00.000-07:00

My mother, in her early 50s, thought she had the flu so she went to the doctor and promptly had a heart problem sitting on the exam table. Valve flutter, something she’d been told of, and ignored, her whole life.

She had the misfortune to undergo a valve replacement operation. Worse, her body refused to give up the heart-lung machine. The longer someone’s on one of those, the more brain damage accrues.

When she came off it she wasn’t herself and, after a huge amount of needless stress put on her by a sociopathic bitch my brother inadvertently married, my mother died.

I’m reminded of the beautifully delivered, subtle line delivered by Brion James in BLADERUNNER: “I’ll tell you about my mother.”

Blam.

I’m reminded, too, of something my mother told me on the ‘phone once she got off the heart-lung machine. She was still in the hospital and a bit bleary from drugs, speaking to me across the Atlantic. She was in South Carolina, I in Germany. She described a journey she’d taken on a star ship of some kind, outward through the cosmos from Earth. She said it was something like the Enterprise from STAR TREK, but more complicated and real, and also more futuristic, bigger, a star ship with proportion. She was enthralled to observe all the wonderful sights offered by planets, galaxies, and nebulae, even by deep space itself. She loved it and said, “I didn’t really want to come back but I thought maybe I should.”

It felt like a good-bye, although she never said it that way, and this reminded me of the last time I’d seen her.

My wife and kids had stopped by to visit my parents before shipping out to Germany. My mother kept touching her chest, and I kept having the impression she had Kleenex stuffed in there, so that the shirt, a crew neck tee shirt, bumped out to about tennis ball size. It was odd and I mentioned it to my wife, who said, “There was no bump.”

My mother, after her operation, described the trouble she’d had on the doctor’s examination table as “a bump in my chest, like my heart at moving wrong.”

Premonition? Who knows.

So now it’s 2011 and I’m in my fifties and it’s Mother’s Day again and although my wife is a mother, and so am I for that matter, I tend to think of an outward journey of the soul set free because my mother, after she died, never came back to say hi. My father did, and still does, often, but I never see my mother.

My own little mother, so small and sturdy and sure.

Now I’m crying so I guess that’s enough.

/// /// ///

Think Twice, Write Once

2011-01-01T13:00:00.001-08:00

Current fiction, perhaps due to short attention spans, tends to deal with each story point as it arises, in sequence, rather than waiting for later resolution. This makes for neatness, perhaps, but is untrue to life. Next time you’re writing, try to remember to leave resolution of at least a few major story points for the end. Yes, a few readers might accuse you of being fancy or tricking them, but most will appreciate the delayed gratification and perhaps even admire your plotting -- whatever the hell that is.

I'm fascinated, too, by how "concise" is so often translated to "simplistic". In writing advice, in how-to books, and even in the revered Strunk & White, writers are told to be brief, leading to most choosing simplistic, that being the easiest lowest common denominator to reach by way of brevity.

Short and sweet, they think. Hemingway wrote good. He wrote short. Short is good.

Concise, though, means to the point, with complex aspects condensed to the most efficient delivery. “I’m sorry this note is so long,” Lincoln once wrote to Grant; “I did not have time to make it shorter.” He meant it.

Boil things down, is another way to say it. Reduce them to their essence. From many ingredients, soup. Cut to the chase, movie directors say. State the gist and get out quick, briefers are advised. (This stands somewhat in opposition to “Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em; tell ‘em; then tell ‘em what you just told ‘em,” but one must use bullet statements in each phase, so the gist becomes gristle for them to chew on and mull over.)

Oh, the metaphors.

Yet it is the same regardless how it’s said: Be concise. Not brief to the point of underinforming. Not short the way Procrustes shortened things. You can saw off what doesn’t fit but you then lose those parts. Concise includes, brevity can exclude.

So being concise is not always the shortest way of saying something. Efficient delivery of everything you wish to communicate is the goal.

Clarity helps. Being clear means using correct terms, the right words, and the proper vocabulary. One does not wax erotic by being clinical. For each notion there is a set of words best suited to express it. Find those, use them, and avoid reiterating unless it serves the purpose.

We have all suffered from Triplicate Syndrome. That is when a writer uses three synonyms rather than picking the best. It is both lazy and a habit, the kind of crutch that reinforces the injury instead of letting it heal. “His writing leaped, danced, spiraled from the page.” Which was it? This image seems, at first glance, vivid, alive, vibrant, but upon another look we see it is actually confused, muddled, cloudy. Ahem.

Pick one.

Pick the best one.

Cut the rest.

Watch this: “Don’t be negative,” he said, striving to be as brief as possible. “State things in a positive way,” she retorted, being longer but clearer.

Phrasing things in a positive manner makes them stand out as clear actions. Negative phrasing sets up a mental image in which an action must first be imagined, then nullified in some way. It is complicated, which obscures the point.

Thou shalt not kill, we’re told, but not a word how to avoid it. Frustration results.

In order to be concise, we must think through what we wish to communicate, reduce it to a clear image, find the right words to express it, and state it positively. This requires time and work, and practice improves the needed skills. Making fewer errors, and honing things to precision, reduces the need for rewriting, too; a bonus.

Finally, once we know what we are setting out to do, and how best to do it, we can play with it by, say, delaying resolution of a point or two until the end, gratifying ourselves and rewarding the astute reader.

Think twice, write once.

/// /// ///

MMX: Walk Away

2010-12-31T13:36:00.000-08:00

“MMX: Walk Away”

“He had slept, so perhaps this was some feverish nightmare, a dream-place where men killed and died for no reason he could see and each minute was spent in a starved, sightless silence, like animals far under the earth. Perhaps the moment of change had happened before then. Some other occasion when he fell asleep. Waking to the crimson sky of the drought. Waking to his new, hellish Memphis, ruined and gutted by a grief caused in the space of a day, an hour, a second. It seemed then that the world was a terrible, wounded place whose revolutions were driven by panic and madness more than love or reason. A directionless freefall toward something, maybe toward nothing. He no longer knew. That night as he lay on the damp ground he wondered for the first time if there could ever be any return from this.” -- Robert Jackson Bennett, Mr. Shivers, Chapter 13, p.141-142, ¶5.

Burn the body to free the soul.

Bury the body to return to the soil.

Preserve the body to return to the world.

Display the body to return to the sky.

Sink the body to return to the sea.

Inhabit the body to experience time.

Last week the lunar eclipse fell on Winter Solstice. It won’t do that again ‘til 2094. That’s grandchildren’s time. Skies were clear; my youngest son and I saw Totality through bare tree branches. From darkness, light.

Yesterday afternoon, on a drive to stock up before a major storm might hit -- presuming they will prompts many such minor adventures -- I listened to the local classic rock station and it happened to play a quality list. “Levon”, “The Pretender”, and “Maybe I’m Amazed” -- song after song was a genuine classic, not merely a nostalgic gleam. Further, they were all serious in tone, with regret the most common theme. It seemed calculated to make someone my age look back in sadness at missed chances and sabotaged dreams. It also made me wonder how such young songwriters and performers had been so perceptive about what time would bring.

Surely music is better out from under corporate thumbs. It is probably that simple; those songs, primarily from the 1970s, were written by poets and artists who neither sold out nor came up through a mechanical Tin Pan Alley or Brill Building system. Today we see thugs like Simon Cowel drag music down to a financial and cynical story of promotion, exposure, and the crassest competition. To his ilk it’s a product for an industry to sell and exploit, nothing more. Expunged is artistry or individual expression that fails to serve the demographics research.

Sure, there remain real people making real music, but we don’t hear them much any longer, unless we attend local gigs all over the country, and who can afford that? We’re watching music go the way of poetry, into a state of near death in which its feeble pulse is maintained by a dedicated few who refuse to give it up. And even they write damned few of the old forms to any legitimate literary end.

Short fiction and probably soon novels, too, are also going the way of poetry. As fewer read short fiction, it becomes the new poetry, with anthologies and collections specialized and themed to appeal to prepared audiences. This has quite a few writers militating against it; Neil Gaiman and Stephen Jones recently released Stories, a large anthology of just plain good stories, well-told and of no particular type. Great idea, superb fiction, and no one much outside the short story community noticed, despite a brief tagging of the bestseller list.

As for novels, they still sell, at least commercial novels sell, but genuinely quirky novels, never easy to place in the first place, are becoming impossible to find unless one can spot them disguised in genre costumes. Series, particularly movie tie-ins and franchise fiction, dominate; people want what’s familiar, not what’s new.

It is said a hack gives readers what they want while an artist gives them what they need. The former is focused on sales, the latter on artistic expression, and always the twain meet in commerce, where books are actually published, distributed, and sold.

We’re seeing this all change, however, with the advent, still small but growing, of digital reading platforms and digital fiction delivery systems. Suddenly the benefits of a publisher -- production of a competitive item and distribution through brick outlets and mortar shell flack advertising -- leap into each writer’s lap, or at least as far as his or her home computer.

A writer today can publish online, without benefit of copyeditor, literary editor, printer, packager, cover artist, designer, or any of the other hundreds of people who used to go into producing a physical book. Now, a writer can convert a manuscript to PDF and post it online, sell on one’s own web site, and accept the payments via PayPal. Advertising is limited by imagination only; go on Facebook or Twitter and chat up your new work, link the Amazon page for it to all your acquaintances’ web pages, and make a cool You Tube promotional video to get out the word. Soon self-publishing may be the main route for writing seeking readers.

We are returning to the days of individual, rather than corporate, imprints, when Caxton, Gutenberg, and Kelmscott were the only sources for what readers wanted. This makes it a free-for-all aspects of which troubadours would likely recognize. Strolling players, selling poems and satires by the line, peddling their stories by the telling, are about to begin wearing out their fingers instead of their feet. We’ll know them by their colorful camps as reliable word encourages like-minded writers to clump for mutual support and safety.

Soon we’ll go online and sift through fiction as we gradually fix upon our favorite sites so we can visit them more frequently and get the kind of writing we most want to read. The standard genre categories are likely to be used, but almost certainly local variants will imprint themselves upon styles and types. We’ll see the equivalent of generic rock become grunge or thrash metal, and we’ll see the basics such as Mystery, Science Fiction, Horror, Romance, and Erotica divide into coastal variants, perhaps, or city-specific tales, or new sub genres such as steampunk written expressly for left-handed blonde blue-eyed lesbian chefs who own rescue animals, or, more realistically, xtian right wing liberal-bashing science-hating revelation millennialism geared toward fat old white men afraid of shadows but addicted to the smell of money.

When the short story magazines began croaking in ever-increasing numbers, it was observed that one trend helping to kill them was specialization. Magazines had become so laser-beam focused on splinter audiences that any kind of miscellaneous fiction magazine simply struck too wide a stance. No one wanted to “wade through” stories they might not like just to find a few they might like well enough. Way safer to stick with publications entirely devoted to precisely what one likes: Overheated descriptions in purple prose of pale yellow pumpkins with stems curled with an Elvis-like panache, or kitten stories featuring only calicos with green eyes, snub noses, and curled, feathered tails.

Thing is, human beings are not as individual as they like to think, so the good news is, if you like something, chances are good others will too. With the gate keepers banished, the field is free to anyone who wants to run in and pitch a tent. By sheer luck others like you may well spot your flag and waddle over to hear your tales.

From darkness, light.

/// /// ///

Steambunkery

2010-11-03T17:11:00.000-07:00

Charles Stross on Steampunk: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/10/the-hard-edge-of-empire.html

Yuki Onna’s retort: http://yuki-onna.livejournal.com/616832.html

Amberite's take: http://amberite.livejournal.com/

My take: It strikes me that this is precisely where SF has been heading all along. SF, especially Hard SF, the stringent kind afraid to stray too far from the periodic table of science elementalism, craves control out of fear. “No rules?” its adherents thunder, outraged. To them, if it ain’t scientific, it’s just senseless meandering.

Talk about fearful old grannies: It has always been a truism that no one is more conservative than SF writers, especially the hard sf writers. Fred Pohl reminisced how they wrote centuries ahead of contemporary times but dressed, talked, and voted decades behind.

Well, what do such conservatives always want? Safety. They demand deballed kid-lit safeness in their storytelling; plain, by-the-Strunk & White writing; controlled imaginary worlds where their spavined notion of science prevails and where irrationality is a sin.

Many liked this kind of cringe fiction. It masqueraded as forward-thinking. It strutted out its futurists. It bragged about its prophecies and awarded its seers, its prognosticators, and its imagineers. It had all the earmarks of geeks and nerds huddling with hurt feelings in their world-haters clubhouse, agreeing fervently that they were the elite, and the rest mere mundanes.

Trouble was, not all the clubhouse members were engineers and scientists. Could non-elite drones write SF too?

The debate has raged behind the walls of the world for decades now, incorporating such concepts as the Golden Age, the New Wave, and Cyberpunk. Utopia, dystopia, and other topos imprinted themselves on SF’s collective memoryhole event horizon. FTL, ETI, and TNSTAAFL joined GAFIA, FAFIA, and the Moscow Mafia as terms of the trade.

And lo, along came Tor's conception of Steampunk as a genre.

You KNOW a movement's dead when some corporate schmuck company makes a market category out of it.

///

Tor publishing is currently working hard to make Steampunk not description but market category. To this end, Tor is pushing second-rate crap as the genuine article. This is true to form for corporate thinking but makes some upset. (Think Pat Boone singing Chuck Berry or other examples of Gresham’s Law where bad latecomers push out good innovators.) Of those upset by Tor’s strong-arm move to force good fiction out with bad, some factions object that romanticizing the Victorian Age is to glorify imperialism, monarchism, and oppression of underclasses.

This is all part of Doyle’s Holmes appeal, too, incidentally. Some of us are nostalgic for a version of the bad old days that never existed. It’s like the movie version of the Old West, fun if you know it's malarkey, dangerous if you're all hat and try to make it real like that goofy cowboy President we had awhile ago.

Any time a new flavor of fiction is made by corporate interests into a market category -- as opposed to genre, which arises naturally and unplanned -- it is likely moribund.

There is usually a prime example, quintessential and pivotal, seminal and famous. It sets the tone and parameters. What follows is response.

That is what we’re seeing now from Tor, response.

The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling was probably the progenitor of Steampunk as a market category, having been a best-seller and a lightning rod for much discussion of literary theory at the time, circa 1990. Yes, there are older examples, dating back in fact to Wells and Verne and running through K. W. Jeter’s Infernal Devices, James P. Blaylock’s Homonculus, and Tim Powers’s The Anubis Gates, but The Difference Engine coalesced all the features of a market category’s prime exemplar.

This does not affect me, by the way. I write what ever it is I write, which I’ve chosen to call Ficta Mystica, having looked back over my life's work and spotting certain themes. I am instructed, though, and entertained, by the debate over Steampunk because the whole process smacks of typical corporate bubble-and-bust promotional capitalism paralleled by deadly serious literary chit-chat aimed ultimately at making writing better. Tant mieux.

In short, Tor’s ploy is a scam for selling more books, sure. Of course it is, why else does a publishing company exist? No shame there.

However, the debate surrounding this is asking a deeper question: Is this good for writing or even for -- gasp -- literature? Once again, it is argued, writing genre fiction is shown to be absurd if one’s goal is anything beyond serving corporate commercialism. Sad but true; art is subsumed by commerce. It may delight and fulfill one to to write genre fiction but all publishing the stuff serves is Big Publishing.

Quietly, a few writers produce solid, quirky, individual work in the unnoticed, and unexploited, shadows. That is where true advances arise.

And sometimes such advancements inadvertently achieve big sales and much attention. When that happens, market categories may be spawned. The last big one stemmed from the del Rey invention of the “trilogy” when an old professor’s outdated book, so big it had to be published in three fat volumes to be easily manageable, hit it big. That was called The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, of course, and spawned what we now call the Epic Fantasy market category.

Will Steampunk be as big a boon to the corporate publishing coffers?

As one of those quiet writers in the shadows, it doesn’t much matter to me. Steampunk’s fun. It cannot be genuinely serious, for reasons covered very well elsewhere, though that needn’t matter to any reader or writer. If Steampunk floats your dirigible, go for it.

The rest is Steambunk.

Or Zombies. Or Sparkly Vampires. Or...

/// /// ///

War Talk on Election Night MMX

2010-11-02T18:03:00.000-07:00

Nowhere to go, no place to be.

On the seventh episode of the superb BOARDWALK EMPIRE on HBO, a soldier turned gangster, whose Princeton education was interrupted by WW I service, goes to a VA hospital for his wounded leg. He meets a guy with half his face shot off, who had served as a sharpshooter. Leg is reading so face offers him a book his family sent. It is a Tom Swift novel.

“Don’t you want it?” leg asks.

Face says, “Can’t read fiction anymore.”

“How come?”

“It occurred to me, the basis of fiction is that people have a connection. They don’t.”

It is a strikingly cold existentialist statement. It puts one in mind of Hemingway. Not that Hemingway ever showed such naked cynicism, but it was there, just under his ironic tone.

Turns out face lost his eye and half his face just after shooting and killing a German soldier, whose own bullet got lucky and hit the sharpshooter’s rifle. Further, face can still shoot, as a later “return of favor” scene shows.

BOARDWALK EMPIRE is based on a chapter from a history of Atlantic City, New Jersey. It focuses on the Prohibition days when the Volstead Act allowed gangs to flourish. Hard, cynical, and greedy men made war for as much as each could grab from the others. As usual, the people suffered while being told how blessed, patriotic, and exceptional they are. They swallow it every time.

A generation later, the deep cynicism of returning WW II vets would move post WW I’s hard-boiled fiction into noir cinema, where lost men in a totally corrupt world tried to stick to a personal code of honor for no good reason they could articulate. It was a kind of formula for producing tough prose: Go to war, be shattered, see through the bullshit, and come back to write as bluntly as possible. No more decadent excess to keep minds off reality. Those guys wrote to kill or be killed.

This is why the fiction of the Lost Generation and that of the Forties Film Flatfoots resonate today. We are like them. In both cases the veil of lies was torn and we got a glimpse of how bad things are when scum prevail, as they do so very often, being prone to cheating and theft, thuggery and murder. They operate in a landscape where politics is gangsterism and the rest is up for grabs. See that clearly and the toys get put away so the tools of economic and cultural war can be handled more effectively.

Plain writing for clear communication stems from writers who have seen where pretty distractions and cringing escapism allow the scum to go -- straight into power -- and take us -- straight to hell. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Sleep with one eye open. We know the watchwords. Why lull ourselves with nonsense when reality is so hostile?

It has always been this way. Go back further and you’ll find Twain and Bierce favoring direct writing over flowery crap. Twain was a deserter from and Bierce a veteran of the Civil War, which created cynics as fast as it created widows and orphans. Go back further still and you’ll find more wars. There is always a war of one kind or another, thanks to the sociopaths always harrying us. We each have a war that shapes us.

My war was cultural and economic, in the 1970s, in the Laurel Highlands of Western Pennsylvania. Back then it was called coal country. Mountain hick gnomes with immigrant names and often accents, too, who dug the deep seams for steel in Pittsburgh, were scraping out a living in the most depressed region of the country. Then big steel moved overseas and the railroads were no longer needed. Everything dried up. Bruce Springsteen’s album THE RIVER summed it up so the nation could move on in good conscience, having shed a crocodile tear for us.

We who were stuck there were left strangely uncomforted.

An economic war against the people, waged by corporations with no national or human allegiance, devastated our lives. It destroyed my father and so many others. We learned then economics was a war, with weapons, killings, and deaths. Consequences of greed, short-term profit frenzy, and zero-sum cutthroat business-as-usual haunted our every moment. Poverty dogged us.

My scars run deep.

My writing tends to be terse.

Now that I and my family have once again voted the connection between war and how one writes makes sense to me. I write this as I watch the latest economic and cultural war again devastate the people for the benefit and amusement of the corporate rich and I only hope to stick to my code of honor, craft, and art. The connection now makes clear for me where my abiding anger comes from, as it builds toward fury at what the scum have done to us, and how I must use that tempered steel. I will write.

Write to kill or be killed.

Nothing less counts.

/// /// ///

War World Discovery - An Alert

2010-10-09T12:38:00.000-07:00

Just published by Pequod fine books: War World, Discovery -- the start of the series as it was meant to be. Includes a short story and a novella of mine, with more of my work in subsequent volumes. Collector's take note, this is a quality hardcover edition. http://warworldcentral.com/cargo_bay.php#discovery

The War World Central web site, warworldcentral.com, was created to provide information about War World and the re-launching of the War World series by John F. Carr and Pequod Press. Learn the origins and history of War World and the CoDominium/Empire of Man.

Grab a Copy Today: http://warworldcentral.com/cargo_bay.php

Decadence Lost

2010-10-04T13:13:00.000-07:00

An article in THE GUARDIAN asked why this second Gilded Age has not spawned a flowering of decadent fiction to satirize its excesses. Certainly TV and film have done so but written fiction has not. People seem to cling to realism and naturalism. Can this be due to literalism infecting so wide a swath of society? Is it sub- or post-literacy giving us too few writers with sufficient verbal chops? High-verbal flourishes are crushed, mocked, and left for dead in genre fiction; this could be insecurity from pulp days prompting a purple prose backlash, and the innate hostility toward mainstream and literary fiction among the genre guardians and gatekeepers to force editors to expunge anything smacking of literary ambition or the fancy. Diversion rules, entertainment is allowed, but venture beyond genre basics into serious intent or layered idiom and wham, the boom will be lowered.

Ah, but where are the one-off literary novels? Why is there not another would-be Wilde stalking London or NYC?

They may exist among the unpublished. Such work stays safely in drawers and trunks, although usually an inkling often glitters in the slurry of short story collections and anthologies toppling off the corporate fiction tipple. So far, precious few hints of a reflourishing decadent movement are sprouting in the gob pile.

Doing high-verbal writing or venturing into the purple is rare in part because Thackery won. Vanity Fair remains the essence of brilliant high-verbal gloss, while Oscar Wilde owned the rest of any claim on decadence. ‘Art for art’s sake’ gave way, as 10CC sang, to ‘money, for god’s sake’ as commerce forced everything individual into corporate molds. And since appealing to masses requires simplicity, complexity is jettisoned to make wallets, and brains, roomier. And since nature abhors vacuum, in rushes a tsunami of cartoonish product.

Extruded plastic plots and vacuum molded characters compete in the grand parade of lifeless packing Peter Gabriel and Genesis warned about. Gray flannel fiction results and the novel is, as usual, dead or thrashing on a low-battery life support system.

Pictionary now comes as a card game needing no drawing. May well be fun, sure, but is drawing a clue such a burden? Merchandising demands it, though; otherwise you’d need only a pad and pencil to play and what would they sell?

Apply the same logic to fiction. If corporate does not control the product, they cannot control its merchandising and sales.

Then there is the stress of being pressured. Feeling rushed and impatient could be another reason no one bothers with decadent, lush prose and layered irony. Decadence requires indirect, lazy, and self-indulgent meandering, digression, and ornamentation. People today want it now, they want it blunt, they want it boiled down to bullet statements and talking points. Get to the point, they demand, already glazing over, their flooded minds churning over a hundred other things insisting on attention, decision, and action.

Conversation has died for the same reason. No one wants to take the time to talk things out anymore, except for endless, pointless meetings that ensure productivity is kept to a snail’s pace so no one gains a march on the well-ensconced CEOs.

But wait, someone cries. Neal Stephenson and China Mieville both write a Baroque, even Rococo style. An analysis reveals not decadence, though, but details layered on basics for the sake of appearing dense, important, and intellectually weighty. Decadence requires a light touch, and this is Germanically heavy, even burdened, a technique used as a ploy. Worked, too. Briefly.

In such ploys there is so much thus crowded out that is never addressed, from basics such as characterization to more subtle aspects, such as allegory, human feeling, or the aforementioned irony. Such higher level curlicues are important if fiction is to go beyond the fifth story toward skyscraping pinnacles.

Most popular fiction is published at a fourth-to-sixth grade reading level, as determined by complexity of vocabulary and sentence structure by such indexes as Flesch and Gunning-Fog. Most is written consciously to that level. Keep It Simple, Stupid, is less advice than description these days. Lowest Common Denominator is the way to gain a wide stance in the Bell Curve of American readership. Hollywood routinely dumbs down its remakes from subtle, sophisticated imports, pandering to a perception that Americans are too stupid to deal with such complications as, say, subtitles or characters with ambiguous identity. Hand-holding is necessary as audiences cross that dangerous street from real lives constrained and controlled by corporations and thuggish governments, into the cartoonish, simplistic, and patronizing world of Hollywood dream factory extrusions.

Make the product bland and sweet and salty and never too spicy except for the macho asshole niche market. Keep things middle of the road, non-threatening, and “family safe”. Make sure you get an R rating, though, because otherwise you get only Disney audiences, and we know how sticky they can be.

Current fiction, perhaps due to short attention spans, tends to deal with each story point as it arises, in sequence, rather than waiting for later resolution. This makes for neatness, perhaps, but is untrue to life. Next time you’re writing, try to remember to leave resolution of at least a few major story points for the end. Yes, a few readers might accuse you of being fancy or tricking them, but most will appreciate the delayed gratification and perhaps even admire your plotting.

Decadence can make a comeback. There is so much to satirize, so much excess to be disgusted by, and so much idiocy passing as normal these days it may in fact be almost inevitable. One novel and story at a time a new insouciance must develop about conforming to the corporate publishing list of acceptable elements and aspects. One novel and story at a time writers must strike out into electronic publishing seeking to do new things for a new audience, one not delivered to them by publishing’s marketing but a readership built up the old way, one set of eyes at a time among people who like what’s being written.

If you write it, they will read. Let your inner demons have full rein. Write from the deepest, most personal, and unruly core of your being. Produce any kind of fiction you really want, the kind you’ve always dreamed of but never dared put in fixed form. Show it around online and start a new rebellion against the new Gilded Age. Decadence lost can be found again; it never went anywhere but inside each of us, in our Wilde-est dreams.

Set them free.

/// /// ///

Demon Dream

2010-09-22T09:20:00.000-07:00

My wife and I were at some sort of art class, standing at big tables in a big room, many people bustling about or working at their projects. We had to make a false shirt front, a dicky, out of paper, and cut a few button holes and sew around them. We weren't sure why.

We came up with something, a kind of red sash false shirt front with a small crest of arms or badge of some sort lower down -- I remember thinking it would not be visible if I wore my jacket buttoned over it -- but it had only one button hole. A teacher said it had to have three and took scissors and stabbed our work, piercing it and going down into the table's wood. Noticing the teacher had once been a member of Monty Python, perhaps Michael Palin or Eric Idle but serious now, I remarked, "Yeah, the heck with the table, damned wood, growing all over the place."

There was no reaction to this mockery and we were told to get to work. I was quickly frustrated trying to sew around a button hole by hand, to reinforce it. I remember it kept resembling an eyeball and I was sewing around the lids, not to shut the eye, but to surround it with reinforcement so it wouldn't rip further when it opened. Failing at this, I was shooed away by some older women, who took over the sewing, and instead given a task.

I was to take to take a child of about 8 or 10 to fetch something in his apartment in the building across the street. The child was swarthy to the point of being burnished, and I was wary of him, but agreed to go along because the kid seemed to be okay with me. I got the impression he was somewhat hard to handle, maybe a trouble maker, but it seemed I was able to keep him generally reigned in.

We crossed a cobbled street, on a warm day, bright sun at the top of the buildings but us in shadow. I got the impression we were in Italy, probably Rome but not necessarily.

We entered an older but nice apartment building and climbed stairs. The lobby was old marble flooring and the stairs were mahogany and some creaked, but it was sturdy. The railings and corner pieces were carved nicely, again obviously old but still sturdy and serviceable.

At the third floor we paused and I unlocked the door with the key I'd been given, and in the boy scampered. I followed more slowly, wary of the place. It was big, with many rooms and halls, and the air was warm but not really stuffy. No scents of mildew or other older apartment smells. The boy proved to be demonic, making eerie statements far too creepy and mature for his age. He first alarmed, then scared me, and I remember humoring him to stay on his good side, not wanting to upset or anger him.

As we looked for what ever it was, he kept showing me things, like toys or various items in the apartment. All unsettled or alarmed me. Some gave me the willies, others dizzied me, and some just plain revolted me. The boy himself was matter-of-fact about most of the things. "We have one of these," or "look at this," or even, "how do you like my...?" I remember catching glimpses of a demon inside him; every now and then, for an instant, I spotted a kind of dark blur, or overlaid image, and his eyes and smile were terrifying. It was as if the demon in him was taunting me, knowingly drawing me deeper into some kind of trap.

He kept looking for something, and saying he had to get something, and I pretended to help him look while being nervous about entering the apartment deeper. Finally I'd had enough and tried to leave, only to discover the hallways were like a maze. I paused, calmed myself, and got my bearings, then tried again, and finally found the door.

It was closed and locked. I tried the key, and it did not work. I was locked in, and sensed with low key panic something coming up behind me.

It was the boy.

I cringed, wondering if he would grow claws or fangs and pounce, but he simply walked up and said, "Okay, we can go back now," and the key worked this time when I tried it. As I stepped out of the apartment he slipped past me and scampered down the stairs, while behind me all the lights and appliances and so on switched on and off rapidly, over and over, and things in the apartment moved as if in an ecstasy of dark delight.

Scooting forward, I slammed the door and hurried down the stairs with the feeling I'd narrowly escaped something. I followed the boy, who waited for me down in the lobby, where the light came through opaque white windows to give things a kind of aquarium glow. His eyes watching me come down the staircase looked huge and ancient.

We went out into the sunshine and warmth, crossed the cobbles, and I awoke feeling as if I'd dodged a demon of some kind. Am I haunted? Am I under demonic attack? Am I ridiculous to ask such questions?

Am I ever really awake?

/// /// ///

Dream Poem

2010-09-03T08:14:00.000-07:00

I awoke with a poem.

Interestingly, in my dream, I found myself an adult visiting a school, and a teacher I knew, and she actually helped focus the poem as I worked on it with chalk on a playground. "Make these active verbs," she told me about the second and fourth lines. It opened the poem, I realized, and thanked her. She continued prowling the playground, supervising kids.

Later I approached the school, following her. When she disappeared around a corner I thought she'd jumped in through a window and lifted a curtain, surprising another teacher. "Sorry," I said, and went into the school to find the teacher again. Once inside I got lost in a maze of corridors and classrooms.

In one of the classrooms, though, I encountered my cousins, and the smallest one was standing there in a red dress, looking ill. I knelt down to ask her what was wrong and she said, "A thousand bones in my arms and legs hurt."

Standing, I told her mother, my aunt, that a thousand bones in her arms and legs hurt, which we both found cute and also distressing, so we tried to take her to see the school nurse.

Then I was somehow with my Aunt & Uncle not in Germany, as I once had been in real life, but in Africa, walking in a nice residential area. We were coming up a hill when we spotted a huge male lion strutting arrogantly along a sidewalk up ahead. We scrambled and I saw my relatives had gone up stairs and were being allowed into someone's house as refuge from the lion.

I tried to join them but I was separated when the huge lion wandering through residential streets came near. I scrambled and found a house where a woman was waving me inside quickly, where I ducked. There I was given broth and told the best way to avoid lions was to stand still. Then I left to find my relatives.

I ended up on the edge of town and being chased out into the bush, where I dashed through a section of trees and found myself on a veldt with lions and so on.

I got past that and fell afoul of mercenaries, who forced me to shoot, using an old rifle and one bullet, a springbok, which I did, and the I was given another single bullet and told to shoot a guy, which I did not want to do. As I hesitated, and they grew angrier...
odinz9
A small herd of elephants came charging through. I was able to escape notice by pressing myself into a mud mound beside the road. Carrying the rifle, I went to a hut, where I found no help, then made my way across another field to a hill, muddy as hell. I began climbing.

There I encountered my uncle, who handed me a bowl of tar like the one he carried. We walked along atop the mud on plywood, onto which we threw chunks of tar at random, on any bare spot we wanted. "This is how roads get made here," he told me, and I asked where we were going. "We're two hours from Paris, here," he said, and I laughed.

He then said, as we climbed a steep, muddy hill, "look behind you." When I did, I saw a huge jet seemingly suspended at about our height and coming right at us. It passed overhead with only a few feet to spare, and then I reached the top of the hill, and my uncle was gone, but I saw a smaller plane, twin engine, coming in. It barely made it but managed to land.

I spotted my uncle in a crowd trying to get onto the plane, waving for me to hurry.
We both got on and the pilot said, "Hang on, folks, and welcome to the wildest ride in Africa." He then taxied an overloaded plane off the runway and began gathering speed going down the steep hill we'd climbed.

Then he skewed sideways in the thick mud, still gaining speed, and I figured that was it, we're crashing. But somehow he manhandled it into the air at the last moment, and off we flew, for the roughest, most upsetting flight ever. We landed in a skid at a bigger airport and I was saved; my uncle and I flew to Paris.

And through all that I retained my poem.

///

The poem:

"Ginger Girl's World"

Spring and summer
Open windows.
Fall and Winter
Close them.
The moth craves
Fire’s magic
Inside or outside,
Consistently ardent,
Always free.

/// /// ///

Haunted Thoughts

2010-08-08T16:35:00.000-07:00

I come from a haunted place. I was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where truckers still spot extinct Logan Indians in green prowling the edges of woods as early morning mists rise and fade. I was raised in Munster, Pennsylvania, where there are ghosts roaming the glens, dirt roads, and farmhouses, from the famous White Lady of the Elmhurst Estate to the lesser known that haunt houses less grand, places less storied.

Elmhurst, a Tudor mansion built by coal- and railroad-tycoon William Thaw’s wild son Harry K. Thaw, hosts both ghosts in the 20 room house and legends of a white lady drivers on nearby route 22 occasionally pick up. She asks to be taken home, directs drivers off the highway, over a railroad bump, and along a long dirt road that leads to Elmhurst, but mysteriously vanishes just as the car pulls up.

She’s supposed to be Evelyn Nesbit, Harry K. Thaw’s mistress over whom he murdered architect Stanton White in the rooftop restaurant at Madison Square Gardens, as memorialized in E. L. Doctorow’s book Ragtime, and the subsequent movie. Nesbit, a Gibson Girl, was known as The Girl On the Red Velvet Swing, and why she’d choose to haunt Elmhurst is unknown. Most likely the ghosts have nothing to do with more famous names.

I stopped by at Elmhurst once and talked to the then-owners about ghosts. They said that, aside from shadows and lights in the windows at times the only thing they’d seen was a misty figure standing down by the barn. They’d seen this several times, usually from the porch, and neither footprints in snow or mud or any other sign that anyone had been there ever showed up when they investigated.

We walked down toward the barn along a dirt path made up of two ruts created by truck tires. It was a warm summer day toward evening and as we walked and talked the light began to fail.

I got a distinct feeling I should not continue toward the barn. It wasn’t fear, just a sense of warning.

Deciding to turn around, we headed up toward the house again and as we did I glanced at an upstairs window in time to see someone gazing down at us. I pointed this out and the curtain twitched and the figure was gone.
“That’s what we see,” the owner said, smiling, assuring me there was no one in the house.

If you want a glimpse of the Elmhurst estate and a nice write-up, check:

http://www.post-gazette.com/homes/20011027hauntedhome8p8.asp

#

So yes, I’ve seen ghosts. Yes, I can sense presences sometimes. Yes, I can be sensitive to place, so much so that I have broken leases to get away.

What ghosts are, I have no idea, but I know they differ from hallucinations. As Kingsley Amis pointed out in his ghostly novel, The Green Man, you can induce hallucination with drugs, but not the same one in groups, and not the same one over decades or centuries.

Some swear ghosts are spirits. Ghosts certainly often look like people known to be dead; a link seems sensible until we ask why only some people, or why an action is repeated mindlessly.

Ghosts do not seem alive. They seem more an echo of a past life. The video tape comparison makes sense.

Some in fact call ghosts recordings. The theory that places might take impressions from strong emotion only seems persuasive until you ask what place is, or why one place differs from another in any objective way.

Ghosts ignore such questions and don’t often interact with people. They tend to repeat one brief set of actions, such as descending a staircase, walking along a road, or pacing a castle’s ramparts. As we’ve seen, though, some are livelier, such as a White Lady who wants a ride home, only to melt away.

Very few, in fact, make a sound, Marley’s chain-rattling and moaning to one side.

There are more complicated hauntings, though.

When my cousin first married she visited my paternal grandparents in haunted Munster, Pennsylvania. This is a tiny hamlet only a mile or so from the Elmhurst Estate, by the way.

That night, as she slept restfully beside him in a bed in my great-grandmother’s old room, her husband was tormented by pokes, prods, and blanket-snatchings. He heard hateful whispers next to his ear, too. By early morning he’d had enough and insisted they leave just after dawn, refusing even an offer of breakfast.

This house, several years earlier, was the setting of a sighting by my sister and me. We were children, she about 8, I about 10. It was the Fourth of July, afternoon. A family picnic had the lawn filled with relatives but the house was empty. My mother, wanting to buy something from a relative, asked my sister to fetch her purse. Being competitive, I tagged along.

In fact, we raced. We slammed into the house, through the porch, through the kitchen, and stopped shoulder-to-shoulder in the dining room doorway. I’m not sure what stopped us but that is where the oddness began.

When we heard the stairs behind the wall across the room creaking, as they always did, we waited to see who was coming down.

An old women, perhaps in her 70s, heavyset, with grey hair in a bun and wearing the kind of floral dress my great-grandmother -- who was out on the lawn -- wore, came down into the doorway framing the bottom landing. She looked up as she turned toward us to enter the dining room, smiled at us in a calm, reassuring way, with much kindness, and in no more than three seconds faded first to a mist and then away.

My sister and I continued behaving uncharacteristically. We looked at each other, raised our eyebrows, then crossed the dining room. We walked past the bottom landing where she’d vanished and we entered the living room to fetch my mother’s purse, all without a qualm.

Neither of us said a word about what we’d seen until much later, in the evening, as we were driving home to bed. We never really talked it over until days later. We’d both seen it and neither of us had any kind of fear. Our surprise was even muted.

Note that in this sighting there was, or seems to have been, at least minimal interaction; the ghost looked up, saw us, and smiled at us. Or so we interpreted it.

Now, it’s possible we only thought she saw us, but the feeling of warmth and kindness, almost of affection, convinced us otherwise. She saw and liked us.

In either case, we looked into a few things over the years after that glimpse. My great-grandparents had built that house and no one had ever died in it. For many years it served as a restaurant; it stands on what is now Old Route 22 at the top of Munster Hill, beside the old truck garage my great-uncle Art ran.
They’d had a nice dual business back in the days of broken truck drive-chains and overheated engines.

No structure and no known grave ever stood on that property prior to the house and garage. It is, as mentioned, close to Elmhurst Estate, which was built in the robber baron era when the rich wanted places with fresh air where they could escape from city pollution. Back then Pittsburgh, PA was known by Andrew Carnegie’s famous phrase: Hell with a lid on.

So where do the ghosts along that killer old Route 22 come from? Crash victims?

My grandparents’ house on Munster Hill offered another haunting; it chased my grandfather out a year or so after my grandmother died. He fled, selling the house at a loss to a neighbor, who had changed my great-uncle’s garage into M & M furniture, an antique and junk shop supplied by estate sales. Last I heard, the house is used as overflow storage for excess furniture.

My grandfather told me he’d been hounded from the house by my great-grandmother’s ghost, upset, he thought, because he’d failed to protect my grandmother from death. He said she poked, prodded, and pestered him, yanking at blankets and hissing angrily at him night after night. She followed him around the house and wanted him gone, he said.

I suspect he mistook the ghost my sister and I saw for my great-grandmother. They looked very similar, but we’d seen the ghost while my great-grandmother sat outside alive and well.

In the years since, I’ve heard that another cousin, one who lives in Cresson, one town and only five miles or so from the house, has been visiting and talking to the ghost on lonely nights. Yes, my family’s like that. How she gets in, knew about the ghost, or what she says I don’t yet know, having fallen out-of-touch with her branch of the family due to deaths and world travel courtesy of the military. I’ve got inquiries in via other cousins and hope one day to learn more.

Hoping one day to learn more is where parapsychology, or ghost hunting, has stood from the beginning. It’s where we all stand as we think about the shadowy corners of life. Hailing from a haunted place puts me perhaps more at ease standing here, even if no better informed. I can’t wait to find out more.

/// /// ///

How the Hypocrites Live

2010-08-06T13:38:00.000-07:00

This is excellent, and shows how bizarre, absurd, and out-dated religion is. Rooted in superstition and all about control, it's junk we really can't afford to be carrying around as we scramble to survive.

///

An engineering professor is treating her husband, a loan officer, to dinner for finally giving in to her pleas to shave off the scraggly beard he grew on vacation. His favorite restaurant is a casual place where they both feel comfortable in slacks and cotton/polyester-blend golf shirts. But, as always, she wears the gold and pearl pendant he gave her the day her divorce decree was final.

They're laughing over their menus because they know he always ends up diving into a giant plate of ribs but she won't be talked into anything more fattening than shrimp.

Quiz: How many biblical prohibitions are they violating?

Well, wives are supposed to be 'submissive' to their husbands (I Peter 3:1).
And all women are forbidden to teach men (I Timothy 2:12),
wear gold or pearls (I Timothy 2:9)
or dress in clothing that 'pertains to a man' (Deuteronomy 22:5).
Shellfish and pork are definitely out (Leviticus 11:7, 10)
as are usury (Deuteronomy 23:19),
shaving (Leviticus 19:27)
and clothes of more than one fabric (Leviticus 19:19).
And since the Bible rarely recognizes divorce, they're committing adultery, which carries the rather harsh penalty of death by stoning (Deuteronomy 22:22).

So why are they having such a good time?

Probably because they wouldn't think of worrying about rules that seem absurd, anachronistic or - at best - unrealistic. Yet this same modern-day couple could easily be among the millions of Americans who never hesitate to lean on the Bible to justify their own anti-gay attitudes.

-~Deb Price

A Great Moment for Writers

2010-08-06T09:16:00.000-07:00

(the following was sparked by a discussion with writer Valerie Douglas)

It's very rare to promote learning over, or at least on par with athletics, yes. Papa Joe's old school, and also just plain old.

The notion that "men don't read novels" has been circulating in publishing for some time and I find it both ridiculous, given my experience and acquaintanceship, and also somewhat typical of the long series of self-defeating stances publishing has adopted over the decades. This is why I'm not at all freaked that soon Big Publishing will either change drastically or end entirely, as post-paper or digital publishing, and the independence and power this hands the writer, kicks in, as it already has, given that electronic sales have now outstripped hard-copy sales.

Seize the day, writers. At last you will not be held hostage by editorial gatekeepers, overhead costs of printing, or access to distribution. At last you'll be able to sell directly to the reader.

Of course, with freedom comes responsibility. You'll now have to make sure your work is professionally copyedited, edited, and laid out. You'll have to ensure it's up to scratch. You'll have to do all the scutwork of legal vetting and release forms and permissions. You'll have to come up with attractive covers, and any illustrations or charts you may want to include. And you'll then have to advertise, and not only create but maintain an audience, which requires your participation with them.

In short, the burden for making a professional product, and for being a professional presence in the marketplace, falls now on you, but the payoff is, no more being nickel-and-dimed, no more being cheated, and no more being misunderstood by promotional departments, etc.

Grab the chance while it's here, it's a unique moment in history. Wake up to it.

(for Gene's next motivational speech, please stay tuned...)

America's Story, A Tragic Debacle

2010-08-06T08:57:00.000-07:00

America was not always an anti-intellectual torture-addicted war-mongering bully. Scholar-athlete used to be the American ideal, even into the 1950s. A can-do attitude and astronaut-level boldness combined with innovation, productivity, and a manufacturing base the envy of the world.

Then came the core right wingers who have skewed our society toward anti-intellectualism and all the other low-end qualities that have been nascent in America all along, but kept in check by accomplishment, achievement, and progress. With roots in the Aristos of yore, and the Whigs, terrified of the masses and effete in their certainty of entitlement, these money minions in the 1930s founded the Federal Reserve System and fought FDR, who they called a traitor to their class.

These envious, fearful little losers plotted ways to steal all the wealth and power for themselves, and shape USA into Morloch land, with themselves as Eloi. (See both H. G. Wells in The Time Machine and modern Mexico for examples.) In short, the in-bred, (and in-bread; ever seen one go hungry?), elitists and their wanna-be lackeys formed a cabal. (cool narrative touch, eh?) And it gradually took control of ever-larger and more important aspects of our society and culture, until in the late Sixties they were powerful enough to crush the Flower Power movement that might have curbed the War Pigs and Profiteers.

And from Nixon's basement they, the C-student flunkies and resentful little mama's boys and hateful repressed gays and open sadists and other Dicks Like Cheney, slithered, sociopathically to subvert, undermine, and detroy anything benefitting We the People, in order to steal the greater good for their Top Percent Rich corporate masters.

Here we stand, then, oppressed by rednecks, rubes, and teabaggers, hammered by hatred from the fearful bigots and the deep-rooted old white racists, and harangued by religious fanatics to whom extremism is but prelude for their Taliban-modeled Amerika. The 19% who should be inmates are running the asylum, and the rest of us gape and drool and do nothing as the place burns down around us.

How will the story end? Up to you, this is a do-it-yourself narrative.

/// /// ///

The Voting Machines Story

2010-07-28T09:49:00.000-07:00

My one time inside The Old Weird Harold, on a tour with my eldest son Scott, we were ushered into a room and spoken at by "a real reporter" and, at the end, asked if we had any questions "about current news items or topics".

At the time, replacing paper ballots with electronic voting machines was a big topic of discussion, and I raised my hand and asked, "What do you think about replacing paper ballots with voting machines?"

You would have thought I had accused him of sucking the Pope's cock during high mass. It was incredible. The guy became livid instantly, and called me a crackpot and a conspiracy theorist and so on. He raved, literally. And during the rant he let slip the fact that he KNEW FOR SURE the machines were ABSOLUTELY TRUSTWORTHY because he'd reported on them extensively AND, it just so happened, his brother-in-law and others in his family owned a company that MADE them...

Well, I stood then and calmly said, "You said you reported extensively on the machines, but just said you were related to someone who makes them; isn't that a conflict of interest?"

He glared at me, opened his mouth, shut it, then strode out of the room, leaving everyone in the group floored.

And of course they all then shot ME dirty looks for "ruining" their tour and for being such a crazy liberal trouble-maker... As they stood and wandered from the room, some muttered what a jackass I was, and yet, all I'd done is ask a question and a sensible follow up question.

I was astounded, still am. I'm also now more cynical about how people prefer conformity and orthodoxy to facts, truth, or even to probing for such things. Better not to make waves, better not to rock the boat, than to find out useful, important, and interesting facts, is how they live. They being society, the collective group. The hive mind, the herd, call it what you are taught to call it, what's familiar to you. Better that way. Won't upset you if you reduce it to cliché.

They want answers, regardless if they're lies, and detest questions, regardless if they're revealing, insightful, or trenchant.

Later, I laughed about it, and said, "You know, it fucking figures. I can't even ask ONE innocent question without being buzz-sawed by the right."

The right, meaning the approved, the sanctioned, and the allowed.

///

Hooked For Life

2010-07-27T08:45:00.001-07:00

There are many reasons why people write, and why they might quit.

My parents are dead, for instance.  I'm evidently not writing to prove anything to them.

I discovered writing out of a love of stories, and a realization one day that hey, omg, I can write them too!  holy shit!

I was 7.  It was in summer, between first & second grade, at 402 W. Triumph Street, Ebensburg, PA, at the bottom of the hills the town was built on, down by the railroad tracks. I sat on the green couch by the east window in the living room in a striped tee shirt, jeans, and black Keds. My hair was pretty well buzz cut.

I wrote a story, The Big Fish, in a Tom Brown's Notebook, in pencil, using my knees as a clipboard. The story was about an imaginary adventure I and three friends had. Along with Scott Coons, my best friend, there was Marvin Hudson, who did a hilarious spazz creature at the Lyons Pool in Cresson, where I learned to swim when the teenaged bullies threw us in and told us we'd drown if we didn't learn fast, and Craig Weaver, who tried to act grown up all the time, much to our puzzlement. Craig had walked up to me first day of first grade, when I was terrified, and had punched me in the stomach. Then he said, "Now you punch me and we'll be friends." He was as good as his word, despite the bizarre logarithms by which he operated.

My story was about us going fishing together, of course, and about how we caught a fish too big to get into the boat. Our line breaks and the fish gets away. We are disappointed but also think it was cool how close we came, until Craig starts practicing the story he intends to tell about it. He plans to lie and say it was bigger than the boat. Scott and Marvin and I don't like this. So we tell him to shut up.

It was a great story, to me. Seemed both realistic and compelling, with elements of fantasy, even myth. It even included profanity; Craig had said, "Shit," at one point, something he really would have done.

I was so thrilled at the freedom, and the realization that I could make those pictures in my head come to life, that I ran to show my mother. I read it to her, "shit" and all, and she liked it. "But what can I do with it now?" I wondered. Even then, just writing it didn't seem enough somehow.

And she said, "Well, maybe you can get it published sometime." And I realized, with naive amazement, that the stories in all those books I loved so much had been written by people like me, and that is how they got into the books.

I was hooked for life.

/// /// ///

Order and Chaos In Genre

2010-07-27T07:08:00.000-07:00

Genre fiction relies on order and chaos in many ways to define itself.

All mystery is about restoring order after chaos. Any variation of that moves away from the form to the point of failing the audience.

Horror often moves from order toward or into chaos. Schlock and camp horror even celebrates the chaos.

SF is about lecturing each other in detail how imaginary order works.

Fantasy is about escaping strict order to imaginary realms where emotional and mental elbow room can be found. Taken to extremes, fantasy has so much mental room that it becomes inadvertently chaotic.

A hero ventures forth from order to fight threats to that order, usually monsters. To do this the hero will die, be reborn, vanquish the threat, and thus redeem or save the order he can never then return to. He becomes an outsider as a sacrifice to the order he defends. A hero does all this selflessly and often reluctantly.

A villain threatens order, or undermines it for his own ends.

Genre fiction succeeds or fails to the extent a given story varies from established pattern. Fulfilling a pattern in a clever way earns accolades, thwarting a pattern, even in a clever way, risks audience rejection. Maintaining a pattern's order helps a story succeed in genre terms.

Order and chaos also apply to tone. The more orderly narrative, the more a genre audience likes it. Add any level of chaos and genre readers will either be confused by it and put it down as amateurish, or see it as literary and reject it bitterly.

Too much narrative chaos strikes genre audience as abstraction, which makes a genre reader feel as if something is being put past them, and this riles anger and resentment.

However, if you can make order look chaotic on the surface, and manage not to lose the order required to fulfill a given genre, it is possible, rarely, to prevail as "brilliant" or "a genius". Examples of this are Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man and the Zen influenced mysteries of Janwillem van der Wetering.

Strict attention to order and chaos defines genre and helps a story fulfill expectations and thus succeed in the market.

/// /// ///

Drama, Melodrama, and Soaps

2010-07-26T09:33:00.000-07:00

Good drama is based on interconnections, which is another word for relationships.

Soap Operas draw them with big fat crayons and oversized Sharpies in neon colors. This is the reason we can all get hooked into them but also feel at least a mild contempt for them, if not outright allergic detestation; they're blatantly manipulative of our vulnerability to relationship shifts.

It borders on cheating; in the worst of them it IS cheating. It parallels taking a sledgehammer to a kitten or feeding a puppy into a meat grinder. It is guaranteed to make us react, and everyone knows it's a cheap shot.

This is melodrama, the cartoon of the dramatic world. Actual drama is more refined in many ways.

More refined drama addresses both more serious relationship subtleties and deeper emotional scars. It also factors in ethical considerations and other real world expansions of personal problems.

The best drama enhances real life. It shows recognized individuals, not types, engaged in situations we can relate to, doing things to cope we have all done in one way or another, and it also reveals the complexities and subtle shadings involved in the process of living life with others.

Next time you write a story, figure out if it's melodrama or drama and adjust accordingly. It will strengthen your fiction no end to be aware of these things.

To Congressman Lee Terry Regarding DADT

2010-06-14T08:27:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Lee Terry,

As one of your constituents from Bellevue, I'm writing this to let you know how let down I am about you standing against repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

How can you oppose treating all human beings the same? How can you set aside categories for less-than-equal treatment? You are a privileged rich white man in a control position, so you're not affected by such unfairness, but huge numbers of people are, every day. Why perpetuate unfairness, prejudice, and bigotry?

What do you fear about GLBT folks? Do NOT try to tell anyone they fight or die differently for their country, nor that they adversely affect morale. Such nonsense has been disproven from the Spartans' stand at Thermopylae on down to now.

Do you, as a privileged rich white male, have to hide any parts of yourself in order legally to do your job? Are there aspects of Lee Terry that others' would shame you with, were they to find out? Or do you live free, unafraid, and dignified by personal liberty in an open society?

Why can't everyone? Why can't ALL American citizens? How can you possibly justify a Separate, Unequal set of rules for certain categories of American Citizens?

Please use the brains that must exist behind your charisma and glibness to re-think this important, pivotal matter and support complete equality under a Rule of Law for the GLBT among us. You have a chance with the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and other bills.

Instead of towing an out-dated, fearful line of prejudice, think your way clear to supporting ALL your constituents and ALL American citizens.

Thank you for your attention.

Oh, and a thought: Please spare us both a franked letter merely expressing the party line. I've seen it so many times it haunts my bathroom hours. Use the franking privileges to support Freedom, Liberty, and Equality for ALL.

Sincerely,

Gene Stewart
1710 Dianne Avenue
Bellevue, NE 68005

Writing Late At Night, Questions Arise

2010-05-31T23:23:00.000-07:00

Is writing communication,
the marking of territory,
or merely jabber to stave off loneliness
in this closed cranial cavern?

When words leap the gap we call time,
voices of people long dead speak again.
Is what they say more than
a waving hello between islands,
so we know we are sharing
experiences common to us all?

When we read, do other members
of our lonely species link through us
to each other, across a spectrum of
writers, writing, words, and voices?

Does writing bind the literate
into a greater experience of an
unknowable, isolated, yet somehow
elevated status of being?

Are each of us, those who
call themselves writers
because we write words
into sentences, stories, and songs,
seeking communion with
others like us from all times,
past, present, and future?

Write it once and it is always.
Read it once and it is yours.

Cogent Points On Christianity by Christopher Hitchens

2010-05-30T10:25:00.000-07:00

Let’s say the consensus is that our species, we, being the higher primates, homo sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Richard Dawkins thinks perhaps a quarter of a million, but I’ll take a hundred thousand.

In order to be Christian, you have to believe that, for 98,000 years our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25, dying of bad teeth, famine, struggle, vicious war, suffering, misery... all of that for 98,000 years, heaven watching with complete indifference and then 2000 years ago thinks, “That’s enough of that, it’s time to intervene. The best way to do this would be to condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate part of the Middle East. Let’s not appear to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization; let’s go to the desert and have another revelation...”

This is nonsense. It can’t be believed by a thinking person.

Why am I glad this is the case, to get to the point of the wrongness in the other sense of Christianity?

It’s because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral.

The central one is the most immoral of all, that is the one of vicarious redemption. You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating -- in fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert.

I can pay your debt, if I love you. I can serve your term in prison, if I love you very much. I can volunteer to do that. I can’t take your sins away, because I can’t abolish your responsibility, and I shouldn’t offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There’s no vicarious redemption.

There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It’s just a part of wish thinking, and I don’t think wish thinking is good for people, either.

It even manages to pollute the central question, the word I just employed, the most important word of all, the word love, by making love compulsory, by saying you must love. You must love your neighbor as yourself, something you can’t actually do, but you’ll always fall short, so you can always be found guilty.

By saying you must love someone who you also must fear, that is to say, a supreme being, an eternal father, someone of whom you must be afraid, but you must love him, too; if you fail in this duty, you’re again a wretched sinner -- this is not mentally or morally or intellectually healthy.

And that brings me to the final objection, which is that this is a totalitarian system. If there was a god who could do all these things and demand these things of us, and who is eternal and unchanging, we would be living under a dictatorship from which there is no appeal, and one that could never change, and one that knows our thoughts and can convict us of thought crime and condemn us to eternal punishment for actions that are condemned in advance to be taking.

I could say more, but it’s an excellent thing that there’s absolutely no reason for any of it to be true.

--Christopher Hitchens, speaking off the cuff

True Violent Crime R Us

2010-05-28T12:39:00.000-07:00

Violent crime, all the time.

Do we as a species have something wrong, or is it that violence should be accepted as natural? Maybe, like childhood, our aversion to violence is an artifact of our society. We make it worse by repressing a natural urge.

Oh, but then war becomes therapy, or at least a necessary venting, an outlet for roiling urges we can’t contain.

That would suck.

Might also be true; it rings true. There is surely an urge to kill and destroy in us. It is surely irresistible. As a species, we end up self-destructive every time we try to do anything.

We generally consider it allowable or at least constructive to sublimate our dark urges into art. It might even be the one thing keeping us from complete suicide. Species suicide is strange to contemplate but so many species have boiled off into extinction that, for all we know, it’s a common event. One almost thinks this could be a blessing if it would stop all the suffering we cause each other and the world, all the destruction.

Then we reconsider, or forget, and in forgetting neglect to take any positive steps to eliminate or even mitigate our own ferocity.

Humanity is a true crime.

/// /// ///

What I Want Is Simple

2010-05-26T08:06:00.001-07:00

I want such illegal, unlegal, and extra-legal crap stopped right now.

I want fascism crushed.

I want sociopaths to be isolated from society permanently.

I want corporatism crushed. I want a well-regulated, sane free market system based on rational and responsible behavior enforced by real inspections with clout behind them.

A return to the Rule of Law.

The elimination of the P.A.T.R.I.O.T.A.C.T. and RICO laws and other fascist instruments of tyranny and debasement.

I want votes to count on a one-for-one basis, meaning we must rid ourselves of the ridiculous College of Cardinals, oh, I mean the Electoral College.

I want to see the USA become a Constitutional parliamentary democracy with as many political parties as can qualify by votes participating, not this fake two party divide-and-conquer Punch & Judy Show we have now.

I want very simple, direct, concrete changes for the better, such as shrugging off Big Energy and going for tessellated, multi-grid green energy sources operated at local levels.

I want to see government of, by, and for the people, not corporations, which should NOT be considered living entities, nor be granted the rights of same in perpetuity.

I want an end to pollution, to tolerating pollution, and to ignoring pollution for profit's sake; it is not profitable to make money while destroying our habitat. Make companies responsible for doing it cleanly, or not at all. Period.

I want to see us relax our war mongering into a defensive posture in case anyone figures out how to wade armies across either pond to attack us; otherwise, end Empire now.

I want universal single payer health care for ALL US citizens, period. Free universal health care paid for by the taxes and other revenues freed up by dumping the Military-Industrial Complex, which right now spends more of our money than all else combined.

I want an end to the Cult of Secrecy and transparent government doing what government is supposed to do, promote the general welfare and provide for the common good.

Simple.

Oh, and I want a sandwich, it's lunch time. Which reminds me: No more GMO or High Fructose Corn Syrup-infused crap should be allowed to be called, or sold as, food. We need to return to real food, a wide variety of local foods grown locally, and a huge variety of other foods shipped seasonally, all organic, all tasty, healthy, and sustainable.

Unburnable Books

2010-05-07T22:17:00.000-07:00

Well, the iPad has come and it has not killed off Kindle. Far from it, and for a simple reason: Each occupies a separate niche. The Kindle features electronic paper made to read with the same ease as ink on paper. It does not carry the eyestrain of reading a lot of words on a glowing screen.

The iPad offers a screen, so it’s excellent for surfing the web, email, texting, and other computer activities. And all those apps make it amazingly fun and versatile, too. Anyone with an iPod Touch knows how addictive and even indispensable they quickly become; an iPad is an iPod Touch writ large.

A Kindle, on the other hand, is meant to snuggle in with for a long stint of reading. It’s not about those other flashier entertainments and distractions. It delivers words for reading, and it does this remarkably well. With added features, such as on board dictionary, the ability to search for words and phrases throughout the text, note taking, and archiving, it makes reading potentially more rewarding, or at least handier.

How many of us actually put a book down, get up, grab a dictionary, look up an unfamiliar word, say, “Hmph, how about that?”, put the dictionary back, return to our reading chair, pick up our book, find the page we were on, and keep reading? More likely we’ll make a mental note to look up an unfamiliar word while guessing at it from context, then forget about it, or frustrate ourselves later trying to remember how to spell it or find the exact spot it occurred. They’re never where we thought they were, either, as if they slip and slide around to evade us.

Reading on a Kindle, if you encounter one of those odd words -- and of course there are precious few among such brilliant readers as us -- you can immediately find out what it means, in the dictionary of your choice, and continue reading, all without disturbing yourself. With a few flicks of finger or thumb, the press of a couple buttons, and some lip-reading as you sound out the grotesque diphthongs involved, or worm through the etymology, you’re free to keep reading, this time knowing what is being talked about.

A Kindle allows a reader to carry up to 3600 books in a slender, light, and comfortable-to-use unit about the size of a clipboard. If you read a book a day, that’s about a decade’s worth right there. Do the math. And imagine the clutter you won’t have.

Remember when CDs began fading in favor of MP3 and other digital download formats? Kids wonder why their parents own all those silver disks or bother with trying to store and find them. That’s books now, too.

A single battery charge for Kindle, which takes under 4 hours, lasts up to two weeks. It operates on a G3 network, too, so you can download more reading material, or browse the Kindle store at Amazon, pretty much where ever you might be. You can also receive updates of your favorite periodicals, too, no matter where you roam. In many instances you can also start reading books on Kindle before they’re available in the dwindling number of brick-and-mortar stores.

Oh, and yes, some books are free downloads, and others, especially classics, come a remarkable bargains, such as the complete works of Charles Dickens, over 200 works, for under five dollars. Yes, they’re in public domain and available free at various sites online, but a token payment for formatting is not too much to pay for such convenience.

Please note, you can read or listen to books downloaded onto iPod Touch or iPhone, or other phones, these days, too. Someone I know uses low contrast at night to read on an iPhone, and reports no trouble. This is fine, but the topic here is digital readers, electronic paper, designed so that you’re not squinting into the glare of a backlit screen.

Not being familiar with all platforms, I will not debate the merits of Kindle versus Sony Reader or Nook. I will say any electronic paper book reader is probably better than being left behind as the world of books goes digital. Adjust now and save time later.

That this will affect publishers goes without saying. Suddenly writers wonder what publishers can offer that they can’t either do for themselves or do without. Copyediting can be accomplished by sufficiently determined groups of friends and supporters. Layout and format can be done on any desktop computer. Printing, binding, storing, shipping, and distribution, as well as wheedling shelf space at retail level, all becomes obviated by using electrons instead of atoms. Advertising, which, face it, publishers do only for planned Best Sellers, and then mostly grudgingly, ineffectually, and in the lamest, most decrepit ways possible, can be accomplished by viral buzz and various online social networking campaigns. Word of mouth was always the best way to sell a book anyway, and these days it’s possible for a Tweet or Face Book status update to reach millions within a few minutes.

What’s left? Royalties?

Kindle reportedly offers 70% royalty if a writer puts a book into PDF or other Kindle-friendly format and sells it directly through them. At that rate, no publisher can compete, and has nothing much to offer anyhow.

Oh, sure, you can still deal with publishers for the hard copy editions you may want to sell, but that suddenly looks like the second tier consideration, as far as making money and a splash is concerned. Agents take note; you need to calibrate your sales pitch accordingly.

It is not there yet, of course. Considerably more hard copy than electronic books sell, but it is changing fast, and it won’t be long until the headlines trumpet e-books as dominant. It will be for good reasons.

Kindle and Sony Reader are the leaders right now. Who knows what might come along to dazzle readers? Until we find out, Kindle and Sony Reader are the best bets, and they are well worth a look.

Can you OCD types carry a few thousand books every time you leave the house? Now, yes you can. Easily.

Oh, and fascists please note: These new kinds of books are unburnable.

Give an electronic reader a try soon.

What have you got to lose but the need to find more shelf space?

/// /// ///

Our Words In a Clear Sky

2010-04-26T11:12:00.001-07:00

“Words are the birds that break cover and show your enemy where you’re hiding.”
--Mike Carey, The Devil You Know, page 51, ¶2.

#

Writers know this.

Readers sense it. Glimpses and sometimes whole torrents of truth keeps them reading. Addictive as gossip, sweet as revenge, the soul writers spill in their words comes alive each time a sensitive reader spots it. Sporadic immortality is better than none.

Who is the enemy?

Anyone wishing harm to the writer. Anyone wishing to use words against freedom or truth. Anyone seeking to ignore, distort, or destroy truth. Liars. Undemanding, indifferent, and indiscriminate readers. Marketers, advertisers, and politicians. Lawyers. Lazy librarians who categorize carelessly. Critics. Editors. Publishers. Profiteers.

There are so many enemies it’s a wonder words are tools of choice for so many. Except that’s all we’ve got. Words, to brick out the changes each day and year and century brings. Words, to record ourselves for our children’s children’s children. Words, to chip at time’s implacable stomp.

Words to leave a mark.

Grooves in stone.

Worm trails.

Hollow places where once we curled, quivering.

Where once we stood proud.

Where once we lived.

Words are all of life that might stick.

Choose your words well. Remember, they’re going to let your enemies know where you’re hiding, and where and how you hid. Words signal not surrender but defiance.

Words are strength when used well.

May at least some of your words fly free to reach an untroubled sky. A clear sky on some future day of bright calm, not an enemy in sight.

/// /// ///

Making Marks

2010-03-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

Storytellers speak, journalists type, and academics agonize and struggle to justify every word. All wrestle with personal demons, distractions, and defeats. A writer’s approach, as informed by attitude and artistic adjustments, seems shaped by training and experience.

Reporters learn form first, then learn how to fill it in efficiently. Fiction writers tend to learn form last, if at all. This is an interesting contrast revealing emphasis. What is important to each kind of writer, and reader? In reporting, facts are paramount. In fiction, a range of considerations apply, from character and plot to theme and meaning, from social milieu to social commentary, from atmosphere to voice and tone.

If reporting is like taking photographs, fiction writing is more like drawing freehand.

Smarter artists sketch from life. They use models, even set up tableaux, or work from photographs and reference trips. They introduce as much that’s real as possible. In this way they can get on with the job at hand and not have to waste time researching how shadows fall on such a complex figure, or which position a limb might be in after a fall. They have what they need before them, having assembled their materials beforehand as they work toward a known goal.

Other artists work in other ways.

Some simply put pencil to paper and make it up, letting lines and shadings flow straight from imagination onto paper.

Some shape squiggles and doodles into what ever their eye discerns emerging from the chaos.

Some capture the outlines and fill in details only as needed, even as others block in general shapes and rely on impression more than texture or nuance.

Then there are the adventurous who explore other mediums, from pastels and colored pencils to acrylics, oils, and even collage or modeling clay.

The important thing is making marks. Cartoons or words, put then on paper. That gives you something to work with, raw material with which to fashion a work of art that might just please others and, if you’re really lucky, last the ages.

/// /// ///

The Ploughshares War

2010-03-10T14:10:00.000-08:00

“If they pounded their swords into ploughshares, they’d just pick up the plow blades and hit you with them.” -- John Shirley in conversation.

#

Most news reports said something close to this: “Vice President Joe Biden was sandbagged by Israel’s hard-right, proving once again Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is not interested in seriously addressing the Palestinian problem except through genocide.”

#

To sandbag means to hinder progress, as if by tying bags full of sand onto someone’s legs.

Obstructionism, in short. Endless talk of no substance toward no end, intended to stave off action.

This is the same strategy the Republican party has chosen toward President Barak Obama, both as a person and as a President. Block any and all proposals he may make, even if he takes them verbatim from GOP proposals. Threaten to filibuster if anything nears a vote. Lie shamelessly and without cessation. Sacrifice anything and everything as long as it frustrates Obama or his policies. Nothing is out-of-bounds or off-limits, nothing is held back. It is all-or-nothing culture war.

Why?

A general lack of substance to counter the Democrat’s proposals leads to such a strategy.

Same as Israel. Can anyone in all conscience defend genocide? Can anyone in all conscience defend profit over people? Untenable positions lead to extreme coverups.

All the craziness we’ve seen on both fronts is nothing but a smokescreen with which guilty parties hope to mask their indefensible crimes.

Won’t and doesn’t work.

But having Ploughshares Wars is the humanoid primate’s way. Weapons don’t matter, only aggression.

Rather than swords to ploughshares we need to find a way to change ourselves toward peace, light, and love. Remember that trio? Can you think of it without cringing or sneering or mocking or laughing aloud?

If you can’t, the Republican and Likud parties will welcome you with open arms. And hidden blades.

/// /// ///

Druidry's Seven Blessings

2010-02-25T10:21:00.003-08:00

Find at druidry.org

We Are A Signal

2009-11-13T14:04:00.000-08:00

We are a signal. Our bodies are radios, our brains antennae that resonate the signal to manifest our being. That's why it's important to stay in shape, the better to manifest being physically. Damage to the radio or antenna results in partial loss of signal or, in rare cases, a change in channel. Each signal's manifestation of being affects the others, and goes on in many ways after the radio goes off by breaking or wearing out. Some play music, others chat, and some a mix. Some issue nothing but static. Each receiver unit, or person, adds to the message that is existence. What are you playing?

Notice, too, that when the radio goes on or off, it does not affect the signal at all. Signal is eternal.

--Bu Xan Da, Tenshin Monastery, "Talks"

In the Woods

2009-10-06T09:47:00.001-07:00

The woods I grew up in were clear cut during the years I spent making my way in the world. By the time I came back to where I’d been raised, to look it over and size up it’s importance to me, it looked, and was, so different as to be irrelevant. This led to my memories of growing up being the only link I had to the past and, being intangible, they were all the more easily enshrined.

Nothing remained as a touchstone. Gone were the trees, the long days running among them, and the animals my friends and I occasionally startled from the undergrowth, or whose nests we’d find and investigate, or whose spoor we’d track, pretending to be on safari. Gone, too, were the streams we’d leap over or splash through, and the tall ferns we’d lie down among to imagine ourselves back in dinosaur days. Gone were the deer paths, the rabbit warrens, and the bushes dense with berries where we’d find a snack that stained us inside and out, tongues, lips, and fingers, shirts and jeans.

So my childhood woods were internalized. What else could be done with those memories but to swallow them? And naturally, over the course of further years, as I handled them, they rounded and smoothed and began to fit together better into a coherent story, because that is what we do, we make up stories to cover the gaps in memory, in knowledge, and in experience.

In this way we build a life, and yet, paradoxically, also end up lost in our own inner woods, in an artificial landscape of our own devising, one that teaches us perhaps more about our wishes than our lives, and more about our fantasies than our hard knocks. Those cuts and bruises of being a little kid, those gulps of cold water on hot summer days when you come in panting and smiling fresh from laughter and running, those clear moments of pure joy fade into just another twinkle of fairy dust in a tale told by an idiot who should for once know better.

Gold into lead; it is an alchemy of disappointment and diminished expectations, hopes, and dreams, and it leaves us wandering in the woods with a handful of electroplated junk metal and shiny plastic slag extruded from our hopes and dreams, the pieces of potential we fashioned into a real live life, and eventually these replacements, these transformations, and these ashes of fizzled magic weigh us down.

That’s when we try to go home, to find more of the good stuff, and that’s when we usually find home gone, itself shrunken and changed and unrecognizable. And that’s when we realize we’re lost in the clear cut woods and, worse, we’re alone there.

Alone with the shadows.

/// /// ///

I Kneel A Sweet Command

2009-09-29T17:04:00.000-07:00

“I Kneel a Sweet Command”
by Gene Stewart

I can’t believe in kneeling down
Men demand we kneel, not gods
I’m not a man who bows my head
It matters not if I am owned

Forced obeisance mocks respect
Fear breeds hate to murder love
Dread is predator to joy
Free is nothing that’s released

A truth once taught is only man’s
Intrepid reach finds perfect height
Thought is father to a life
Light makes warmth a sweet command

/// /// ///

Why Are Writers the Only Stupid Artists?

2009-09-21T12:57:00.000-07:00

Did Michaelangelo need help carving David? Did Beethoven need help composing his symphonies? Did Da Vinci need help painting the Mona Lisa? Did Schulz need help drawing Peanuts?

Why do writers, then, “need” editors?

Ask any publisher and they’ll say, “Good editors help bring the book to life. They can help the writer shape it, and they know the market so they can make the book the best it can be to go out and meet the readers.”

Ask editors. “We spot errors. We make sure everything’s in the right order. We trim here, cut there, compress elsewhere, and make the book more readable. We get the book in its best shape and make sure the finishing touches are put on.”

Writers must all be stupid, to need editors. Is not editing part of the writing process? So writers -- and all agree on this -- are the last ones you can trust with the work they produce. An outside, objective eye is needed. Writers are too close to their work to see it clearly. An editor provides perspective.

It is incredible to contemplate how good other forms of art would be if they had the benefit of editors.

“Hey, Michaelangelo, maybe instead of their fingers not quite touching, man and God could high five each other on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.”

“Psst. Beethoven. Hey, you deaf or what? Listen, you can’t put a chorus in your Ninth Symphony. You should know better by now the public won’t stand for that kind of stuff. And that poem, what, saccharine nonsense; who wants an Ode to Joy in the middle of their music?”

“Da Vinci, seriously, pick one, smile or frown. This kind of ambiguity will just confuse the public and they’ll never know what the hell La Gianconda’s thinking.”

Yes, editors sure were needed in those other arts, it’s obvious how much better some trained, experienced, and objective advice would have made those flawed masterpieces we all know.

Writers, being stupider than composers, painters, or sculptors, have benefitted and the record shows it. There are so many superbly edited books that no single one particularly stands out. Year after year we see such a consistently high product being produced by editors that it begins to matter not at all what raw material the mere writers hand in.

Were it not for editors, where would writers be?

Standing on their own two feet, apparently, and responsible for what they did, or did not, accomplish in their work. Thank heavens they never have to suffer such an indignity.

Why are writers so stupid? Because they can be.

/// /// ///

Life In Air - poem

2009-09-02T21:42:00.000-07:00

“Life In Air”
by
Gene Stewart

A man’s love enflames
A woman’s sustains
In our drought
We crave the rains
That quench our doubt

A child’s love blames
A pet’s entrains
In our flight
Silence remains
Companion’s delight

Dry ground
Water-laden air
Seeds twitch
A stormcloud’s shadow

Gravid airflow
Skyclad witch
Spiral despair
Sky bound

Ungiven gift of names

/// /// ///

Publishers Must Change the Way Authors Get Paid

2009-08-29T11:00:00.001-07:00

Publishers Must Change the Way Authors Get Paid

Posted using ShareThis

Birth Dream

2009-08-29T10:37:00.001-07:00

A dozen people, me included, in an airport, were separated and herded into a holding room. We wondered what was going on; it was a motley mix, no pattern among us discernible. A door at the other corner of the room opened and we were confronted by a tall, naked person of a golden color, definitely Other, who held aloft a glowing wand. He waved us forward and no one moved, but then there were others like him among us, herding us again.

As each person passed through the doorway, the wand was waved over and around the person’s head a few times, then the person was pushed through. As a big, boisterous woman ducked through, she smiled and swung around to lower her head for more. “Oh, I can feel it,” she cried.

“What’s it doing?” we called.

“It’s shaving away our thoughts,” she said.

This terrified the rest of us, but we were forced through, as if we could not resist or were children too afraid to offer physical resistance.

As I passed through I felt nothing, and found myself shoved into another room pretty much the mirror of the first. We milled around, wondering what had just happened, feeling dazed, and once again, the door we’d entered through vanished and another door on the far end appeared, this time not open, but closed.

That was when we began noticing something horrible was happening to us. We were visibly getting younger, even as we watched. We aged backwards, and it was fast, as if each blink of the eye took off a decade or more. Soon we really were frightened children, and then I remember falling to the floor, a toddler unable to balance. My head bounced on the floor and I saw a baby in front of me, crying. I was bawling too, utterly abandoned, and bereft of anything but craving need, and then I saw the infant on the floor beside me deliquesce into protoplasmic jelly.

Even then, I felt my own body go, too.

After a blink of darkness I opened my eyes and I was again myself, but insubstantial, like a ghost. I saw others groaning and shaking heads, as if hung over. We each came to, pushing ourselves to our feet and staggering to collapse into chairs arranged as if on a bleachers, in rows one over the other. We sat gathering ourselves, no one talking.

Someone, a man I think, yelled, “I can’t stand this, I’m getting out of here,” and charged the door. It opened at his touch and he fell through, and we all gathered at it to see that it was gaping outer space out there. The cosmos, with stars, planets, galaxies, nebulae, and most of all a depth of nothingness.

A surge of emotions -- we can’t let him do that, we should join him, panic, desperation, despair, hope, even joy -- slammed through us and before I knew it I was deciding to join the others as one by one we leapt out of the room into space.

We free-fell, but could still breathe -- or did not need to -- and communicate -- perhaps mind-to-mind. We felt the need to stay together but also to get the hell away from out captors. As we fell away from the room we floated around and gazed back, seeing not only the doorway shining light at us, but a verdant green world of dense foliage, with minaret and breast-shaped domed structures with round windows, apparently our captors’ houses.

We shrieked denial and fear at this otherwise bucolic sight, and drifted around again, gazing at each other, and that was when a pair of us drifted close enough to touch. At once they combined, and the rest of us seemed drawn toward this new person.

Before I knew it I was joining with the others into one sexless golden being, very like our captors, and this one being maintained all our individual thoughts. We were able to converse freely, make suggestions, and discuss our plight. We experimented with this body, and found that we could drift faster if we thought about it. Then we found out how to take galaxy-spanning strides. All of our will focused on getting away from our captors.

When I asked where we might end up, everyone at once thought that we wanted to go back to Earth, to our lives. And as quick as thought we did it, seeing the blue globe approach in one glimpse, in the next standing on the ground.

And here we separated into our individual selves again, and each of us went to our distinct lives, only to find that we were as ghosts to them. We could not be seen or heard, not separately, and something drew us gradually back to becoming a single being again.

And this single being began its own life among people, lonely inside in too many ways to express but also alive on the outside, solid and real.

And then I woke up.

/// /// ///

What ARE These Veggie Burgers?

2009-08-27T10:02:00.000-07:00

Recently I got a rejection that said, essentially, “Good effort in a unique story full of interesting factual details, but I prefer clear concise writing. Some of your sentences were out of order. I could easily rearrange them to make them clearer. Often I realized what you were trying to say but the word order made it awkward and distracting to read. Many sentences rambled too long and there were grammatical errors...“

Wow. Sure didn’t sound like me. So I read the story over carefully...

...and found nothing wrong, aside from a couple typos. How, I wondered, did this editor and I see the same story so differently?

Going back to the rejection, I began to decode. What was it in the story this editor might find out of order? Less than clear or concise? Awkward and distracting to decipher?

What I came up with sat me back in my chair for a gut-punched moment. Was it simply my mix of compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences boggling this editor? Was it multisyllabic words chosen for accuracy over easier, less specific words? Was it the slightly baroque vernacular style chosen because the story is told in the voice and with the references of the protagonist? Was it that this editor did not understand that narration often employs grammatical errors as part of the speech patterns of the narrator, to add the local color of dialect? (Not that I found a slew of grammatical errors, please note: I was hard-pressed to find any.)

Was this editor then demonstrably reading on a lower grade-school level? Or was I writing at in too literary a tone? Did my writing’s fault depend more on my words, or my shelves?

The rejection went on to encourage me to work hard and improve, which we all can certainly do, but added that helping me would take too much time out of the editor’s busy schedule. This same editor who hangs out on Facebook and Twitter for hours each day of empty socializing, as has been both observed by a depressed writer of our acquaintance and also reported by others who know the editor well, cannot spare time to, cue the irony bell, edit my stuff in order to help what is viewed as a writer with promise.

Thank heavens, is all I can say, for Facebook & Twitter.

Editor has come to mean “someone assigned to choose mss” for publication in a magazine, anthology, or in book form. Needless to observe, in many instances an AI program or random selection -- tossing darts or dice, asking a pet to fetch one from the pile -- could do as well, especially if mss first were culled by recognized names.

As to being "literary", that dreaded genre charge seems to mean "Writes in an adult manner any way he or she wants." It is only genre that increasingly insists everything be readable by slow children with lazy eye and ADD.

And look: YA novels clogged the Hugo list this year and one of them won.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that genre fiction is dumbing itself down to juvenile levels, perhaps to hold what little audience it has, or in fear of losing even that, or perhaps because, as genre fiction’s tropes become more popular, the popularity itself dilutes the original formula that isolated the genre in the first place. To have mass appeal, it must give the sucker an even break and begin using fewer specialized terms.

This addresses sf jargon, surely -- “fewer mathematical equations in the prose, folks,” -- but does not account for the childish scrawl that so many editors insist upon.

Sure, there are exceptions, and they stand out like neon in noir. Still, the trend is toward simplistic, unchallenging, safe little stories any kid of 9 could grasp fully on one hasty reading.

Is this a reaction against the big scary changes in publishing? Is it a response against the influx of new influences such as romance and erotica? Is it simply the infant bleat of HAL 9000 as his higher functions one by one are switched off by a wider audience’s acceptance?

Time, and writers willing or unwilling to talk dumb, will tell, and in the meantime it looks like I continue to write deluxe gourmet veggie burgers in a world demanding basic Big Macs and sloppy Whoppers.

/// /// ///

Review of the Bitten anthology mentioning my story

2009-08-26T11:48:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, August 25,2009
Anthology ‘Bitten’ By Love and Lust
Susie Bright’s collection of dark erotic fiction
By Tom Hammer

The Cambridge Dictionary defines erotica as themes that produce sexual desire and pleasure. Bitten (Chronicle Books) delivers all that and more. Billed as gothic, the stories chosen for this anthology by editor Susie Bright range from mild to hard-core in sexual content. Indeed, the book includes tales inspired by classical mythology along with stories that could be described as porn.

The first story, Sera Gamble's "The Devil's Invisible Scissors," launches this book on what may be its highest note. It's a takeoff of the Moerae Clotho, who in mythology uses scissors to shorten or end a life. Gamble's rendition is a fast-paced tale where the scissors were given by the devil himself for harvesting souls. Another standout, "The Resurrection Rose" by Anne Tourney, combines the heinous blood baths of the countess Elizabeth Bthory with the equally evil Marie Antoinette. Eternal life or death is at stake, and survival rests with a vampire rose.

Also included are lighthearted tales such as Allison Lawless' "The Unfamiliar," a more traditional story of an amorous genie found hiding in an elderly aunt's library, and E.R. Stewart's "Cross-Town Incubus," where a young woman finds a sexual spirit in her boyfriend's loft with titillating results, great passion and a lusty conclusion.

Other stories are more arcane, including "Smoke and Ashes" by Shanna Germain, a somewhat confusing tale of a young girl, alone with a dozen young men, who must choose the pick of the motley bunch, and Jess Wells' more gothic "The Rookery," in which a medieval falconer has to choose between a beautiful woman and his love of falcons.

As with many anthologies, there are a few stories that are less artistic. "Half-Crown Doxy" by Cate Robertson and "Pandora's Other Box" by Greg Boyd reek of pornographic sadism and border on the grotesque. The final tale in this collection provides another example: Ernie Conrick's "Get Thee Behind Me, Satan" is at once a morality tale and an epic gross-out of sexual pathology. By turns profound and deeply disturbing, it speaks of the excesses of modern living and the breakdown of society; however, Conrick pulls off a small miracle in that his story is also obscenely funny.

Bitten is a visually stunning book with a beautiful wraparound green viper on the cover and gold-edged pages that invite the reader to plumb the depths of depravity and lust contained within. All in all, Bitten is a study in contrast between love and lust, morality tale and smut, and all the evil and sublime passion that has existed since Eve was lured into eating of the apple of the tree of good and evil. This book is highly recommended for those who love bawdy fun and great writing, and for those who want to peek into the dark side of passion.

http://www.expressmilwaukee.com/article-7745-anthology-lsbittenrs-by-love-and-lust.html

/// /// ///

Replace the Republicans

2009-08-23T16:52:00.001-07:00

If, as is clear, the GOP and right wingers are willing to destroy the country rather than concede an inch to anyone else, especially to liberals and progressives and Democrats -- translation: We the People -- then we need to move on without them.

We have no mechanism better for removing these irrelevancies than voting; vote them out next time and swamp them with angry, specific letters now telling them how sick of their lies you are, and how their ideology is spent and bankrupt and has, over the last decade, proven time and again a debacle, and utterly wrong in all particulars.

Please note, I am not in favor of an all-Democrat government. I would hope a sensible, rational, and reasonable opposition party, with well thought-out alternative views, would fill the vacuum left by the GOP's implosion into madness. Perhaps a Green Party, or perhaps a Libertarian Party, who knows?

But the first thing is to rid ourselves of this GOP cancer. They refuse to participate substantively. All they do is obstruct, lie, and fear-monger. All they do is bluster, threaten, and bully. They have declared in so many words that they hope the USA is hit by a nuclear terrorist attack, so Obama will fail. What kind of childish irresponsible self-defeatism is this? If they do not wish to play by the rules, rules they seek continually to negate and destroy, then they are not in the game.

Time to replace the Republicans with a group not owned and operated by multinational corporations The Repulicans are contemptuous of the people and hostile to the people's health, safety, and security. Time to replace the Republicans with a political party that will abide by Constitutional, democratic checks and balances, engage in honest debate, and strive for a rational government of, by, and for the people.

This is not too much to hope for. It is, in fact, little enough to insist upon. It has only been since Reagan that this strident Neo Con craziness has seized power in the GOP. We can see through their transparent lies and we all have witnessed the harmful aspects of their otherwise useless Friedman / Strauss doctrine. Let them go. Let them fade into history as so many other failed, frustrated groups have done.

Let's move ahead without the GOP. Time to replace the Republicans.

Right after we help everyone with Universal Medicare.

/// /// ///

Must Comedy Be Funny? Apparently Not...

2009-08-22T14:53:00.000-07:00

Prepare to call me curmudgeon, geezer, and worse, but remember: Most of us hate people laughing at them.

Comedians court it.

Is it self-humiliation they seek? Perhaps, but most crave attention and to be liked, and we generally like them.

Do we like them because they let us feel superior?

Some comedians appeal to vanity, others to crasser aspects of human nature, and a new movie’s ads prompted me to think about comedy’s change and what it may mean to society.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s new movie, BRUNO, shows scenes typical of the characters he revels in creating. As in BORAT, there is much humor derived from inappropriate behavior and awkward social situations. Confronting people with absurdity and laughing at their confusion is a standard ploy. A good deal of it is mean-spirited, intended to belittle the real-life gay Austrian TV host on which Cohen based his Brüno character.

Mean-spirited, belittling comedy is not funny in the sense that gain at others’ cost is not humane. It’s a form of usury, a coining of draconian interest burdens on small investments of innocence. Some find this witty, and claim wit is always mean but I disagree, wit being merely intelligence. It is a tool to be applied with, without, or even against kindness.

Comedy need not be gentle to remain compassionate, just as comedy is not wit even as it stems from it. Silliness is the harmless part of the ridiculous, for example. Hurting feelings and exposing weakness is the harsh part. It’s fine if focused on the powerful, especially the evil. They ask for it. It is sick, though, when focused on the weak, harmless, or innocent.

That’s where Cohen goes, gleefully. He minces and prances in order to bully and hurt lesser people who are not in on the joke.

Comedy’s function is to reduce us all to basic humanity. It provides insight and lets us identify with others we might otherwise find strange or distant. What Cohen does accomplishes the opposite by demonizing and setting up as figures of fun the defenseless and the hapless.

He kicks whomever is down and puts down anyone he can, all for a cheap laugh that reveals nothing more than a sadist’s enjoyment of cruelty.

Jim Carrey’s absurd Pet Detective is afforded dignity and humanity. The Three Stooges puncture snobbery and pretension. The Great Dictator reduced Hitler to a laughable idiot, which lessened his dark power and broke the spell he otherwise cast. The Little Tramp could not win but never gave up or lost optimism.

All these are admirable.

The TV show JACKASS, Cohen, and much contemporary comedy is mean and callous, harsh and corrosive, serving no higher purpose -- it functions against humanity, lessens it. It is an exercise in self-hating misanthropy.

Even Twain and Bierce, in their often hilarious misanthropy, never struck at the good or the innocent. They punctured sanctimony and perfidy, revealing hypocrisy and stripping poseurs of their stolen robes.

Today’s worse comedy stomps on puppies, kittens, and baby seals in a desperate attempt to move beyond comedy styles it considers stale. It revels in atrocity because it is offensive, then laughs at our horror, at our being appalled. It is scornful of anything worthwhile in us, all the good, all the innocent. Those are dismissed as Emo and social suicide. Showing weakness is the last thing any of them would dare do, and all once held lofty and worthy is now sneered at.

In the great enemy sense, it is quite literally Satanic comedy, but calling it that would be a drama-queen’s indulgence, so call it vile and be anagrammatically insouciant.

That’d be witty, at least.

/// /// ///

Chew Our McCud

2009-08-17T15:55:00.000-07:00

Some say Obama never intended to push or stand for either single payer or public option. That he mooted them only as bargaining chips, intending all along to pull back on them, in order to move the debate toward a centrist, and ultimately meaningless, compromise. It's how he's operated his entire career, they say. He is not cowardly, it's not feet of clay, it's scripted politics for him.

If so, then how can he ever have been cynical enough to dangle the temptation in front of all those millions who are either uninsured, or who are underinsured? How can he have pulled the rug out from under their feet in a calculated way? Would Obama really have pretended to push for, and to promote, a wonderful gift like single pay universal health care -- medicare for EVERYONE -- when he never really meant it? When he knew he would only be snatching it from their reach and laughing as he played his politics-as-usual?

Or is this what the more subtle liars in the GOP would want us to think? So that we begin to see him as a smooth, slick liar and as a politician, not a human being? Is that their game?

Ask yourself, would any President have pushed for, even mentioned, medicare for everyone, knowing full well he would be jerking it back out of reach?

Would there be any better way to crush the feelings of the disenfranchised? Would there be a more efficient way to humiliate the have-nots? To stir up their hopes and dash them for a laugh? To manipulate them not into voting, not into support, but instead into turning on you?

What kind of self-destructive lunatic politician would do such a thing? None I can think of, on either side of the Aisle of Shame.

No, seems to me Obama really wanted medicare for everyone. He ran into a firestorm of GOP lies and manipulations, not to mention a tornado clusterfuck of spin, and he failed, as General Zinni observed recently on a Bill Maher show, to pre-empt all this nonsense by putting the facts out quickly and clearly. Now we hear he's given up on single payer and will withdraw support from the public option, too.

Meaning no real reform. Meaning Big Money bought the pot again. Meaning we the people -- unlike the scum who call themselves the Congress, unlike federal workers, will be left at the mercy of insurance companies that won't pay when you need it, and that bleed you dry when you don't.

What have we learned, if this happens? We will have learned that we stand idly by and serve ourselves up as fodder for this kind of insulting, inhuman, and deadly destructive greed fest, this farce of a situation where real lives are destroyed every moment of every day simply so the rich 1% can get all the richer, and the middle class can be destroyed, rendering USA into a wage slave region similar to Mexico today.

Yes, it is that serious a fight, this culture war against the racists, against the corporate bigots who view us as Malthusian "useless eaters" in Kissinger's chilling words.

Learn to say either Moo or Baa.

We are becoming Morlochs to their Eloi and we're not even putting up a fight as we chew our McCud.

/// /// ///

Lip-Smackin' Good

2009-08-17T15:53:00.000-07:00

Used to be, not too long ago, a Remote Area Medical setup serving impoverished and underinsured people being needed in Los Angeles, CA would have been not only unthinkable, and intolerable, but world news, some say. It shames us, others say. Well, I dunno. Remember the Watts Riots? Go back further, to when Hispanics or the Japanese were displaced, the latter to concentration camps in WW II. Coolies built, as indentured servant / slave labor, the railroads that met at the Golden Spike, creating transcontinental travel for those who could afford to ride. Need we mention King Cotton and that Civil War contretemps?

My point is, we never treated our unmonied manual labor forces particularly well. Maybe we should have been allowing Remote Area Medical help, and other foreign aid, to come in from other countries long ago. That a wealthy nation like USA allows so many of its citizens to exist in poverty, without the slightest chance to afford basic health care, and with nowhere to turn but foreign assistance for even a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be looked at and helped with poor eyesight, bad teeth, and even minor surgeries; that this happens here is indeed shameful.

Trouble is, the rich have no shame. They have anger and hatred toward the poor and the brown. They rail and scream and throw fits over not wanting to pay for those lazy fat idiots who eat bad take-out food and watch TV every night -- never mind the plain fact that they can afford to do nothing else, the way the whole corporate exploitation system is set up.

These people work hard for a pittance and are spit on when they dare ask for basic human dignity. Why should Mr. brand new Mercedes-Benz pay for Mr. clapped-out 15-year-old Chevy's kid's school breakfast? Hell, a little hunger is a great motivator, don't'cha know? Why should Mr. $2000 Three-Piece Suit pay for Mr. Ripped Up No-Brand K-Mart Wal-Mart Jeans's kid to have glasses so she can see in school, or dental work so she's not in chronic pain, or how about gym equipment and trained teachers and new up-to-date textbooks and -- why go on?

In general, the rich hold the poor in contempt. "They don't try enough," or "They're just lazy" or "They want a hand-out, they don't want to work for what they get."

As if it's not every child's right to good health care and a chance to learn and be healthy and live a good life. Born into the wrong family -- especially if you're brown -- and you, my sons and daughters, are shit outta luck.

At the Forum in downtown Los Angeles, California, USA doctors from all over the world, many of them British, Australian, New Zealander, or even South African, are providing basic care for a brief time for as many as they have time and resources to see. And the lines are long, and orderly, and the need is far greater than they can meet.

Meanwhile, literally across the street, rich and largely white Americans saunter along on easy street with good clothes, clean, healthy teeth, bellies full of healthy food they can afford, heads full of educated reasons why they need not bother giving a shit about those stinky poor folks. It's the same blinders worn by people driving past those endless cattle pens, pig farms, and chicken cages; horrific suffering, torturous fear, disease-ridden death is all ignorable. Why?

Because we want our meat finger-lickin' now, god-damn it, because it's the American way to eat death and pretend it's lip-smackin' good.

/// /// ///

Rambo Redux

2009-08-04T08:48:00.000-07:00

A parable for our times.

So this guy, who hasn't seen his family for the duration of the war, flies home unannounced and rather than disturb anyone, he asks the cab to drop him off at the end of the long dirt road leading to their ranch house. It's very early morning, just beginning to be dawn, as he walks up to the place and he notices several big garbage cans, each five feet high and heavy, standing empty where the pickup workers left them.

He smiles and hefts a couple of the cans and carries them around to the side of the house where they are kept during the week. He makes several trips back and forth. As he finishes this chore he feels a tightening in his chest and has a massive heart attack. He somehow manages to fall into a garbage can and goes unnoticed. Apparently he is then covered by garbage and hauled off to the regional landfill.

The family always wonders what happened to him, and sues the military for lying about having discharged him. His body's never found.

/// /// ///

How's This for a Facebook Warning

2009-07-29T20:10:00.001-07:00

Warning
Warning! You are engaging in behavior that may be considered annoying or abusive by other users.
Sometimes people get these warnings for simply misusing one of our features.

Which of the following links describes what you were trying to do? Clicking on a link will take you to more information on how to use Facebook's features.

Using Applications
Planning an Event
Sharing your Facebook Group/Event link
Promoting a business, product or service
Chatting with friends

Further misuse of site features may result in a temporary block or your account being permanently disabled.

Yet Another Vague Threat From Facebook

2009-07-29T12:00:00.001-07:00

Hi,

Our systems indicate that you've been misusing certain features on the site. This email serves as a warning. Misuse of Facebook's features or violating Facebook's terms of use may result in your account being disabled. Thanks in advance for your understanding and cooperation.

Please refer to http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=421 for further information.

The Facebook Team

The Pearce Sisters

2009-07-29T11:45:00.001-07:00

The Pearce Sisters

Shared via AddThis

The Dreaded Facebook Warning

2009-07-26T19:26:00.000-07:00

From: notification+zv6c61h1@facebookmail.com
Subject: Warning: Your Facebook Account
Date: July 26, 2009 6:52:49 PM CDT
To: stews9@cox.net
Reply-To: notification+zv6c61h1@facebookmail.com

Hi,

Our systems indicate that you've been misusing certain features on the site. This email serves as a warning. Misuse of Facebook's features or violating Facebook's terms of use may result in your account being disabled. Thanks in advance for your understanding and cooperation.

Please refer to http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=421 for further information.

The Facebook Team

Incubus Dream

2009-07-17T11:48:00.000-07:00

So last night I had a very disturbing and weird dream, as follows:

I lived in a neighborhood of 5 storey brick apartments. I was cutting through among the buildings on grass, en route from fetching my mail. Even that had been frustrating because I kept dropping the mail in the breezes and had a hard time getting it all out of the box. So, between the apartments, I was intercepted by a bully. He was bigger than I am, and tormented me mercilessly, forcing me to drop my mail, walking on it, then forcing me to drop my pens, and claiming to have wiped them on his penis, and so on. Typical bully stuff, and I remember wondering why I couldn't rise above this twerp; in real life his type wouldn't have dared bother me at all. It seemed odd to me.

Incidentally, the pens were real ones I own and cherish.

So next thing I knew I was looking up at an aluminum extension ladder propped against one of the buildings, going all the way to the top.

In a blink, of course, I was at the top, and afraid to try getting back down. I feared it would either fall backwards, the feet being set too close to the building, or that it would slide to the left and off the building's wall. I told myself, it's just a dream, slide down, be bold.

Before I could do this, the ladder was flat, as if stretched from roof to roof and I was supposed to back across it. Well, this was worse, and I told myself, it's just a dream, roll off, float down, it's not real height, you can do anything you want.

So I actually brought myself to roll off, a rarity even in a lucid dream for me.

Sure enough, I came down lightly, and thought, wow, I could just float, and fly around, that would be fun.

I thought upward and sure enough bounded up, like a balloon, and so I floated, going up and down, barely making it over trees, as I left the apartments behind and entered a really nice neighborhood of tree-shaded sidewalks and big, beautiful houses. (Somewhat akin to the neighborhoods HOME ALONE moves use in Oak Park or Chicago.)

Here's where it got dark and terrifying for me, as usual. As always.

I bounded over a tree like a balloon and saw a young woman walking along, like a college age girl perhaps. I fell in behind her as she turned into a gate and up a walk to a porch, and I followed to the door, which shut in my face. I recall it was painted pumpkin orange. I actually bonked my head against the door, then thought, no, I can do as I wish, I'm invisible, so I pushed hard and managed to push through the door. And as I came through there was a younger girl than the one I'd followed, and she turned, saw me apparently, and opened her mouth to scream.

Oh no you don't, I thought, and grabbed her head with both hands, and then I put my forehead against hers and pushed, hard, and ENTERED HER HEAD AND BODY.

It terrified her and she danced around stiffly like a puppet in panic, dashing down the hall into a kitchen where the older girl I'd followed sat with a couple other girls; sisters, I gathered, with a couple friends.

And I slid out of the girl I'd possessed long enough to realize her terror had infused me as well, only it also had me sexually aroused now.

And I zapped over to the older girl, entered her via the head, and stayed only an instant. I then flowed out of her and into the hall, where I saw the staircase and went upstairs.

There I found the parents, two older people, laying on a king sized bed naked, obviously having just had sex, the man on the bed normal, head on pillows, the woman sprawled with one leg up and the other wide with her head facing the foot of the bed.

A younger girl yet, about 8 or 9, had been peeking into the room as I'd come up the stairs and was stepping back from the door's edge as I entered the room. I flowed over the bed and hovered for an instant, then lay down on the mother. Very distinct tactile sensations entered the dream here, and I essentially raped her the way an incubus might, remembering that as I did so I saw her both as she was and as the old woman she would become. Even the sensations followed this pattern; her skin was at once middle-aged and loosely old, tight yet velvety soft. Very creepy.

She lay unresisting, almost unaware but looking directly at me with a slight challenge in her eyes.

I left her, floated up, then flowed like smoke after the youngest girl, who by now had padded down the hall and had taken refuge in her room. She was standing by a low bookshelf in front of a bay window with a window seat in it when I entered through her closed door, and she turned, saw me, and made a move, but I pounced, and we both went dark in a very intense burst of sexuality.

Immediately after the blackness, like a blink, I was in the kitchen, and the girl I'd first possessed, perhaps 12, was lying on the kitchen floor, semi- or un-conscious, her sisters dithering around her. She lay ON her nightgown, even though she'd been in pants and shirt earlier. And she was naked, and I solidified, and the others backed off. I knelt and scooped her up, saying, "Well, little princess, we'll just see," and pressed her to me, face and body, in a harsh passionate kiss-and-grind. I entered her sexually and then awoke feeling horrified.

It was as if I'd become a rapist ghost or an incubus on a rampage.

It was vividly real, as if I were watching something really happen. And yes, part of me worries it might have been a psychic glimpse of a real crime or something. It was surreal, yet made some odd kind of sense.

It is the dark spot from which this otherwise bright day began.

Any ideas?

Liber Al II:3 "In the sphere I am
everywhere the centre, as she, the circumference, is nowhere found."
--Alistair Crowley

SF outsider beats big names to £5,000 award

2009-07-06T20:40:00.000-07:00

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/06/sf-outsider-edge-hill-award

Chris Beckett sees off Ali Smith and Anne Enright to take the Edge Hill short story prize with The Turing Test

Alison Flood
guardian.co.uk, Monday 6 July 2009 11.24 BST

/Users/Eugene/Desktop/Edge-Hill-short-story-pri-001.jpg

Edge Hill short story prize winner Chris Beckett. Photograph: Colin McPherson

A social work lecturer with a sideline in science fiction writing has triumphed over some of the country's best known literary authors, including Booker winner Anne Enright and Whitbread winner Ali Smith, to take the Edge Hill short story prize.

Chris Beckett, who lectures at Anglia Ruskin university, was named winner of the £5,000 award on Saturday night for his collection The Turing Test, 14 stories featuring, among other things, alien planets, genetic manipulation and robots. Beckett said this morning that he was "still pinching [him]self" at the win.

"It was a very big surprise," he said. "Anne Enright won the Booker – two of the other authors [Shena Mackay and Smith] were shortlisted – so I thought I was very small fish compared to them ... I also thought that being a science fiction writer could count against me: a lot of people don't like it, or look at it in some way as less than literary fiction. It's a little blow for the genre, as well as for me – it might persuade a few people that maybe it's worth looking at."

Judge James Walton, chair of Radio 4's The Write Stuff, said that Beckett's win was "a bit of a surprise to the judges, none of whom knew they were science fiction fans beforehand". But once the judging process started, pitting Enright's Yesterday's Weather, Mackay's The Atmospheric Railway, Smith's The First Person and Other Stories and Gerard Donovan's Country of the Grand against The Turing Test, it soon became clear that Beckett's entry had been the most enjoyable – and impressive – read.

"One by one we admitted it," said Walton. "It was Beckett who seemed to us to have written the most imaginative and endlessly inventive stories, fizzing with ideas and complete with strong characters and big contemporary themes. We also appreciated the sheer zest of his storytelling and the obvious pleasure he had taken in creating his fiction."

The win is especially poignant for Beckett, as his publisher, the tiny Elastic Press, is in the process of winding up. He's hoping the win will mean a larger publisher might be interested in his writing. "At the moment you have to be in the know to hear about my books, and I'm hoping that will change," he said. His agent, he added, was "already on the case".

Beckett joins a list of previous winners for the Edge Hill prize – the only UK award for a short story collection by a single author – including Colm Toibin and Claire Keegan. He said the win would give him the time to concentrate more on his writing – the author of two novels, he's currently in the middle of a new story collection. "Recently I thought I should perhaps sit down and write non-science fiction, but actually I don't want to. I like the robots and the bits and pieces – they make it more fun," he said. "It strikes me that most kinds of fiction is about making up characters and plots, so why not make up the world as well – go the whole hog?"

Beckett won £5,000 and a specially commissioned painting by Liverpool artist Pete Clarke, also taking the £1,000 readers' prize. Enright won the second prize of £1,000 for Yesterday's Weather.

Insights Into 2001

2009-06-01T08:13:00.000-07:00

My insights into 2001 after yet another recent viewing?
Here are my notes, from my journal:

Up until "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite", the third section, 2001 is a procedural mystery. All of the film is about the presence of the Trickster Other in our perception of reality, as represented by the plain, abstract monolithic black block. That's the unknown presence we sense all the time, call it God, call it ETI, call it the Unknown. Does its deception, then, lead to rebirth?

Syzygy is alluded to and shown several times. Alignments are significant coincidences -- is Clarke meaning synchroniciy is a sign? That alignments hint at hidden order behind or inside the chaos? Seems so.

2010 is the rest of 2001's mystery plot, where it is solved.

Bowman's experiences through the infinite are shamanic. He is torn apart and experiences space-time shifts, only to live another very compressed life as a guest, then he is reborn as Star Child.

2010 does not deal with this Star Child, oddly; only Dave Bowman's ghostly presence makes itself known. And they suspect him of trickery, note, even as he proves trustworthy in a Zen way. "Something wonderful," he keeps saying, with a reassuring and beatific smile.

The birth of a new star from Jupiter's mass is what he means.

Bowman IMAGINES the Regency hotel suite outside his pod in order to cope with the shattering experience of going beyond the infinite, what ever that means. It is another abstract, the subjective human equivalent of the objective black monolith. He then imagines himself outside the pod, in his space suit, in the hotel room. Next he imagines himself alone and living in those rooms, eating, and when he drops the glass it is a literal shattered illusion, a concrete correlative, and he looks up to see himself dying in the bed, where he imagines the monolith and a new start.

And once he's aging and dying in bed, we're back to the iconic breathing. The breath of life.

From the bed, his last act is to reach for the monolith -- reach for the unknown, as he and mankind have always been doing -- and the embryo appears. It is noteworthy that it appears ON THE BED; he gives birth to his own new beginning.

We're then back at the moon's orbit and the Star Child sees Earth. It is a homecoming, exactly as in the Odyssey. He was lost and found a way home, finally.

We are all thus placed in one man's imagination -- the infinite loop is closed.

We imagine reality, which imagines us right back as we endlessly try to solve the mystery of the unknown. Brilliant movie, and so elegant.

As Clarke once said, it's all there, very simply laid out, and people overcomplicate it. He's right, but they overcomplicate it because it's so mythical.

We are no further from the beginning of Kubrick's 2001 than the distance Moon Watcher throws the killing bone, to our shame. That beautiful myth that could easily have become reality -- that was in fact already planned when 2001 came out in 1969, same year we landed on the moon for the first time -- but we squandered it the same as we squandered the good will 9/11 brought us, through greed, hate, and small-mindedness.

At least we had a brief, shining moment of optimism and vision, if only once.

/// /// ///

Mothers' Day is About Stopping War

2009-05-07T15:27:00.000-07:00

Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation - 1870

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Periodicals Then, Now, and Then Again

2009-04-23T15:56:00.000-07:00

A much wider range of much better and more varied content is, essentially, what we want from periodicals as they move into the new electronic world.

To be avoided is the way too many genre publications homogenize into a single tone, with narrow parameters of taste and style, due to single editors dominating for decades.

Quality becomes harder to sift from chaff as quantity and other factors change established methods and filters. Used to suffice if the ms looked pro. Now it is within everyone's grasp to format properly, check spelling, and so on. Used to be prior publication in semipro zines meant a lot more than it does now, when so many pub their own ish.

Editors now must be all the more alert to the cutting edge while knowing in detail most if not all the history of the genre.

Doing all that on top of editing and sifting slush is a murderous burden. To lighten it, we may turn to rotating or guest editors, even though this solution prompts the problem of producing a consistent product to keep readers' interests.

Seems an impossible mix, doesn't it? Maybe each issue will have to stand alone, more like an anthology. Or maybe subscribers will be able to choose content for themselves rather than rely on an editor's tastes. Perhaps picking among sample openings and allowing subscribers, say, ten choices per month from the loosely categorized pools of content will solve this problem.

Television is an alternative model, with readers choosing one story here, another there, from an array of publications.

No matter what model shakes out as a new industry standard on Kindle or Online, definitely look for more series characters like Sherlock Holmes and more continuing serials like Dickens published. These are how reader loyalty will be encouraged. It only makes sense, once you get past value-added gimmicks. Remember hypertext? Links are taken for granted now and no big draw. Gimmicks will come and go, but a good story well told, and a familiar character that pulls you back, are perennials.

The goal for new periodicals, then, is to become a sole source for something with continued popularity. Think: Dresden Files Emag and so on. This requires editors to develop the skill set not seen since Victorian days. They will want to cultivate a wide variety of writers so they can spot new enthusiasms and trends, new favorites and new popularities. They will also need to keep an eye out for great longer works that can easily be offered in exciting chunks that will guarantee continued interest between installments. Each segment will have to be exciting itself, too. And they’ll have to find appealing characters, as in the Pulp era. New versions of The Shadow, Doc Savage, and Tarzan.

That’s why I mentioned The Dresden Files, one of today’s hottest repeat characters in genre fiction. And yes, Harry Potter comes to mind, too, as the perfect kind of book to have formed the foundation of a new kind of periodical, although it would have been doled out in smaller dollops and stretched over a longer period.

Any thoughts about what you’d want to see as the next phase for periodicals?

/// /// ///

Ridicule As Statecraft

2009-04-22T09:36:00.000-07:00

The right has gone so far into Crazy it's not even funny anymore.

Although mocking them IS funny, yes. What would comedians do without them?

Ridicule, by the way, is what I recommended way back in in the late 1970s as the best way to deal with so-called terrorist groups. See, terrorism is the last-ditch effort of a politically powerless group to gain serious attention, right? That is what they crave, to be taken seriously, to have their cause or concerns addressed by the big fellas in a sober, serious way. They can't rattle sabers the way big nations do, and they can't go to war or threaten nuclear annihilation, so they turn to crime, specifically murder in the form of explosions, hostage taking, and the occasional mass shooting.

Same as Al Capone in the 1930s trying to make an impression on Bugsy Seigel.

So my epiphany was: MOCK them. Make pitiless fun of them. Ridicule them and their pathetic tiny concerns until NO one takes them seriously. At which point you make them an offer: Play nice and we'll stop belittling you and drop the satire offensive. Grow up and act civilized, period, or stay in Time Out.

And you know what? That will work. It'll work a shitload better than any amount of torture, war, or idiocy will. By taking the fear and mystique away, they have nothing left. Make them look small and insignificant.

And there is even historical precedent, by the way. Oh yes. Look up how the Caliphs and Emperors used Satire and Satirists to write plays and poems and songs marginalizing their enemies and keeping them laughable so that no one ever flocked to their causes. It was a standard piece of statecraft 2000 years ago in Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, Byzantium, and so on.

We can and should bring it back in a fully conscious way.

Make Al Qaeda a laughingstock of bumbling idiots, not a cartoon villain only super-Bush can possibly vanquish.

And yes, that's what was really going on. Dicks like Cheney were puffing and bloating their own sad C-student Yale flunky loser reputations by pretending to fight a dragon of their own devising.

Talk about self satire.

Talk about counterproductive, too.

A small group of criminals blew up some buildings. We should have gone after them with law enforcement, and belittled them as desperate stupid nothings over-reaching their station. We should have brushed them off like gnats, instead of giving them attention and making them appear important enough to go to war over. Instead, we react as if they are a sovereign state and pretend to go to war with them, even though they are not a sovereign state and in fact have no real country, etc. And just like other wars against abstracts, such as the one on drugs, it's both indefinable and unwinnable. (Which suits the arms dealers and other endless looters just fine, of course.)

And so we handed them every terrorist's wet dream, to be taken not only seriously, but so seriously that it actually changed their target in drastic ways, and has in fact ended up nearly bankrupting us both financially and morally.

Thanks, Dick.

A real man, an adult, would have brushed it off as a mugging, severe, yes, but ultimately just a criminal act of no consequence to the strength and integrity of our state. We should have built again, ASAP, on the WTC site, rather than leave it as a gaping scar of shame all these years. We should have continued with business-as-usual, to show the world that no two-bit gang of thugs can bring us to our knees.

Instead, what do you do, Dick? You throw a fit, squander the world's goodwill, start a gang war to appease your threatened little ego, institute wiretapping, kidnaping, torture, and a gulag of secret prisons, plus assassination, and in the process jeopardize everything USA ever stood for. Infantile.

We need to go back to being an adult nation with grown-up concerns and mature, considered responses. It will work a lot better than being a fear-driven paranoid panic-stricken infant lashing out at shadows and thrashing in its crib tangled in its blanket of self-induced fears as it wails for its Big Oil bottle and fills its diaper with prejudice, bigotry, and racism.

You listening, GOP? Right wingerss? You are, right now, the most easily ridiculed bunch of buffoons and bozos anyone can think of, a joke without a punch line, a lame duck of a political heritage, a feeble spark of imagined glories that led irrevocably to failure after failure, a howling hollow shell of an echo chamber where lunatics cry and whine and moan and bellow gibberish all day every day. You cannot be taken seriously, and only were because of the harm you did.

You met the enemy and became the enemy in one moronic stumble.

So keep up the geek act, if it amuses you.

The rest of us have grown-up things to say and do.

WTF?

2009-04-20T10:07:00.000-07:00

Still hopeful, but Obama's refusal to reinstitute a rule of law by prosecuting Bush / Cheney crimes is a major misstep, not because the scum deserve punishment, (revenge is beside the point with those revolting morons), but for the good of the country, in order to demonstrate once again, symbolically and strongly, that no one, not even the President, is above the law. Unless and until we do that, we have lost the rule of law and that makes us much less than what we once were.

And what disturbed me most about this was Obama's statement that the CIA torturers, (he didn't mention military ones, or civilian ones such as shrinks and MDs), did what they did "in good faith". Well, I'm sorry, but that's the equivalent of saying "They were just following orders," and that in and of itself is a gaffe insensitive and historically ignorant enough to be worthy of W himself. What is going on? Was the surge of hope Obama was elected on just another bait-and-switch manipulation of our sucker bets all along? Should we be singing, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss -- won't get fooled again?"

Another disturbing thing he did was strengthen the legal defenses for the Bush-era wiretapping. WTF, to coin a phrase?

The people who mandated Oh Yes We Can Obama for Change had damned well better start kicking his ass and taking names and making damned sure he complies with the People's wishes.

///

UPDATE / RETHINK -

Given the legal ramifications and political exigencies surrounding and permeating all this, I can now see why we want to proceed in a deliberate manner, with full process and due diligence.

We want any investigation and subsequent prosecution to stick. We want it thorough and genuine, not a political whitewash. This means going forward at a deliberate pace without panic or prejudice. We do not want to see a few fall guys thrown to the wolves so the majority can escape unscathed. Look how many ex-Nazis still operate at high levels in the French government. If we rush to judgement we may well fail to scour ourselves clean of this neo con scum infection.

A Review of The Gentling Box by Lisa Mannetti

2009-03-20T11:13:00.000-07:00

The Gentling Box by Lisa Manetti
Dark Hart Press, 2008
310pp, ISBN: 978-0-9787318-9-2

Just finished first novel The Gentling Box by Lisa Manetti and wanted to let you know that I was bowled over.

It's a superb story full of unflinching observation, telling details, and breath-taking turns of events, written beautifully with a masterful control of material, pacing, and story structure.

It is set among the Gypsies in Hungary and Romania at the turn of the last century, a time of change, portent, and dark magic. Imre, a horse trader; his wife Mimi, whom he loves so dearly; their daughter Lenore; his friend Constantine; and others among the nomads have their lives changed irrevocably by the dark magic of Mimi's mother, Anyeta, whose dying wish is to see her daughter one last time. A talisman must also be passed on, a kind of Hand of Glory or Monkey's Paw that carries its own kind of twisted temptation for everyone involved. We see curses, lust for power, corruption, ghosts, possession, self-sacrifice, and redemption portrayed with felicity and conviction. It is a remarkable series of portraits presented in a compelling sequence of well-wrought scenes.

The magic in it is as real as horse sweat and ashes, and the reality described as magical as any wild dream. What an accomplishment, to mix such stuff so well and to tell such a brutal tale so beautifully, with such delicacy of feeling and such empathy. There is real life in it, and the unblinking way Manetti portrays it all is greatly to be admired in an era when so many choose to avert their gazes, or to lie, in order to lessen the sting or to avoid offending prudes. This book tells the blunt truth and therein lies it's great power.

One of the best books I've read in a long time, The Gentling Box is strongly recommended.

That it is Lisa Manetti's first published novel bodes well for her career and for us, her readers. And more good news: she is working on a book about deaths on Mt. Everest. Our wait, to gauge by this work, will be well worthwhile.

/// /// ///

What We're Past

2009-03-16T20:44:00.001-07:00

W's endless incompetence and criminality, not to mention W's war on ecology, is all so passé as to be absurd and laughable, except to neo con scum, who are mentally ill, as has been demonstrated conclusively by W's reign of terror.

We're past corporate consumerism.

We're past an Electoral College, and Senators should go back to representing their states.

Congress and the President & Vice President should be directly elected by the people now in a true democracy.

And no-confidence recalls and other Parlimentiary procedures should be instituted.

At least temporary socialization of banking and Wall Street will be necessary for us to regain footing, and obviously tight regulations and controls, with sharp-eyed watch-dogs and full disclosure and transparency of both business and government must be maintained.

The Bush era political prisoners should be released from Gitmo and other gulag prisons and handed over to the World Court in the Hague for independent trials and assessments, since USA has tortured and falsely imprisoned so many of them that no fair trial is possible by USA alone.

The Bush era criminals should be rounded up and first tried stateside, then in the World Court, for treason, war crimes, and high crimes while in office, malfeasance, etc.

We're past a media that propagandizes on behalf of the top 1% of wealth holders.

We're past the attack on the middle class and the class warfare being perpetrated against the people by Beltway insiders, Wall Street, and Big Media.

We're past undeclared, unwarranted, illegal, and unwinnable wars perpetrated solely to keep Cold War era spending levels -- and profiteering -- going.

We're past being 15th overall in healthcare among developed countries and we're well past not having universal free healthcare.

We're past politics sucking right wing fundamentalism's cock and making a war on science on behalf of the mentally ill and the unconscionably cynical who exploit them.

I could go on and on.

Movies, Images, Words, Files, Journals, Speech, Poems

2009-01-25T21:23:00.001-08:00

Movies are easier than books. Images are evocative in montage because viewers tend to make stories of them. Movies are interactive.

Words are speech and render the listener more passive, less apt to do the work of making a story of them.

Files and journals are palimpsests to be excavated like archaeological sites and sifted for their treasures.

Poems are flowering vines of thought.

It Is Enough

2009-01-25T15:24:00.000-08:00

Took a whole work day, due to a headache, to produce 4.5 finished pages of a novel. At least they came alive for me. In patterning this novel I'm sifting details to a greater degree, to keep it concise. Places arise in scenes where entire chapters could be inserted and I have to decide whether the plot's pace can take such an expansion. Digressions cost momentum.

It's about a third finished, this novel. I thought I'd have it done by October 2008. I used to do 100,000 words in 3 months. Here we are 3 months down the line from the projected end run and I'm only now reaching the 30,000-ish page mark. What I have is good, at least.

Then there is another novel I'm working on, an erotic novel. It's coming along, too, but the plot has taken charge. Needing to wedge more sex into an erotic plot is not a good sign. A real novel arose, is the trouble.

The important thing here is the fact that a publisher is waiting for it. I can't let it slide into mainstream. I'm using a fountain pen to write it, having wanted to slow down and think more, but now I'm wondering if that has worked to the detriment of erotica's conventions. Perhaps less thought would help; I might switch to keyboard to gain speed again. Or I may tag-team, switching from novel to novel and from pen to keyboard and back.

If you wonder how much changes when fiction moves from pen to computer, from journal to file, from page to electron -- when a second and subsequent draft goes down, in other words -- the answer is probably less than you'd think, but to more effect and purpose than you'd think. What is changed is important to deepen texture and character, or to highlight plot points or themes.

First draft is spinning the yarn, second and subsequent drafts weave the cloth and tailor the clothes. In an oral tradition, the trick is repetition, honing the effects and tones until the story comes alive and can survive on its own.

That s rarer than you'd think. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is one example. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber is another. O. Henry's stories "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Ransom of Red Chief" have been copied innumerable times. There is The Odyssey by Homer, obviously, and many ancient myths from many traditions. Cinderella, Hansel & Gretel, and Little Red Riding Hood are all ancient tales. Disney understood what his successors so obviously do not about resonating old tales in new ways.

Joseph Campbell is one of the keys to grasping all this stuff about stories and resonance. The Hero With A Thousand Faces is Campbell's pivotal work but almost all his books are excellent for fiction writers. Seeing interactions among story forms and types of heroes and villains, seeing links, repeated patterns, and changing approaches helps you know the materials best suited for your personal stories.

Look at the resonance the best Disney achieved, as contrasted by the shuddersome schlock the worst Disney becomes. Lion King went back to basics and became an instant classic. Lesser works go straight to video and thence to the vaults.

Movies could benefit generally from such considerations as resonance with myth and the ancient story patterns. The original Star Wars actually mined, or at least mimicked, Joseph Campbell's wisdom -- along with much of Frank Herbert's Dune, of course -- but by the time George Lucas made the sequels he evidently forgot anything he'd once known when the aging Campbell spent his last days on Lucas's Skywalker Ranch.

Steven Spielberg's career followed a similar arc. He'd used Hitchcock and Disney as models and produced classics such as Jaws, E. T., and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. When he branched out onto his own ego's limb, however, the results were mixed. Schindler's List and Munich were excellent but the last installment of the Indiana Jones saga left a bad taste in everyone's mouth. A taste we recognized from Star Wars: Episode One.

Failing to remain true to the old stories left them ruins of what might once have been.

Considering movies cost upwards of a hundred million dollars for blockbusters and a third to half that for so-called little films, you'd think the producers would insist on starting with the strongest material possible. Good writing, good stories and strong scripts, are any movie's foundation.

Producers try every way possible to ensure they'd make money with the finished product except the most important and, in many ways, the easiest and least expensive: classic, mythic, deeply resonant storytelling.

And old stories crop up in surprising guises, too. What is The Silence of the Lambs but Little Red Riding Hood painted noir? Clarice Starling is Red, going among the wolves, risking herself in dark woods... and she's even eaten, eventually, in a way, in the books at least. Resonance to our childhood deepens the whole experience and the reciting of nursery rhymes by the Jaime Gum character is unutterably chilling.

Sometimes movies or books catch resonance and are boosted into a higher regard than they deserve. Se7en was an example. It's not nearly as good as it is considered by many, being too artificial in its florid crimes, anything but accurate about police procedure, and hokey in its gotcha ending. It is a ragged plot unsure what it wants to accomplish. But, because it cites the seven deadly carnal sins, and comments on them in modern society explicitly through the Morgan Freeman character's dialogue, the film gets extra credit.

Fallen, from 1998, with Denzel Washington as a cop chasing a demon through several murder victims, almost got a boost from the eerie subject matter, with its hint at fallen angels and the proximity of an embodied Lucifer. Trouble was, the plot did not handle such matters cleanly, and this interfered with the resonance. It did not follow basic patterns and so fizzled into the equivalent of a mediocre X-FILES episode.

Should Clive Barker's novel Mister B. Gone ever be filmed it could easily suffer such a fate because producers will think it too simple. And yet Barker knows the old stories, and keeps to the chords to beautiful effect.

Some of these flawed films could be edited to improve them. Hitchcock could do it, or Welles. Both of them understood which parts of a story to expand, which needs only a hint. Hell, the final scene in Hitch's North By Northwest is perhaps 3 seconds in duration. It needs to be there but needs no elaboration whatsoever, and he understood these facts.

Knowing so well the function of each scene and every part of a story allows you to know which parts to compress or which to cut. What can be implied and what must be explained or shown blatantly.

All this and more are part of the craft of storytelling, and all good writers are lifelong students of this craft.

I've been observing a lot of such thinking as I read Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. Partly it's the graphic novel format, with its comic book conventionalities. Partly it's his concision. You can see choices he made about which panels to emphasize, what to leave off the page, and which key snippets of dialogue or narration are required to keep the story both moving and clearly in focus.

And so here we are back to my headache and all the thinking I did to produce only a few pages. Will readers appreciate all the work? Few will notice and that's as it should be; a fine desk, crafted from tropical hard woods, hand made with years of experience and with quiet but intense care, shows only a perfect whole and is considered a single piece of furniture, both attractive and useful, sturdy and elegant. Despite its many parts and pieces, and its complex design, it, like a good story, is of-a-piece and becomes one thing whole.

If I work right, then only other writers, and few of them at that, will grasp what must have gone into my work. And that's good craftsmanship, and good storytelling.

For now, genug.

Or, as Kant said at the end of his longest story, "Sufficit".

/// /// ///

Rejection City Rubble

2009-01-25T09:56:00.000-08:00

These questions came up on Jay Lake's blog: How many rejections came to you before your first publication, and how many rejections have you accrued?

///

We don’t all keep track. I sure don’t. I just try to send at least two out for every one I get back. It’s a process for me rather than a reckoning or an accounting.

I’d submitted sporadically for six years, starting in 1974.

In 1980 I began submitting regularly. My first sale was “Weal & Woe” to MZB’s in Spring 1990. I’d had many near-misses, including almost snagging 3rd place in the first Twilight Zone contest, won by Dan Simmons.

So, if I had to estimate, I’d say maybe, what, 1000 - 1500 rejections before that first paying sale? Wow, I had no idea. If I had been keeping track I might have been discouraged.

Nah.

I’m not counting unpaid publication or various other things, either. Face it, I just don’t pay attention to much beyond what I’m writing at the time, which explains my lack of business success. As you’ve said, Jay, the business part is what too many of us ignore to our detriment. So true.

I’ve never been able to internalize taking a more businesslike approach. And yes, I recognize this as a fatal flaw.

Once you're writing publishable prose, rejections are irrelevant to such things as talent or skill. I've long since concluded they are essentially random. Either an editor likes what you send in the few moments it slides under editorial gaze, or not. Same editor may later buy what has been previously rejected, or wonder what they ever saw in a work after they buy it.

This is why I don't bother with them. Sometimes there are good reasons for a rejection, sometimes not, but either way I have no control over that, beyond trying to conform to each publication's standards or to each editors expressed needs.

To me, rejections are noise, acceptances are signal, and payment is what the signal delivers.

An Interlude At Linderhof

2008-12-10T09:52:00.000-08:00

I sat enjoying the garden at Linderhof in Bavaria on a chill day that later broke warm sunlight over us, writing observations in a journal as I waited for the others to complete a palace tour. A bad heart, although at the time I thought it the flu, had benched me despite there being few stairs on the two-storey interior tour. I had taken the tour on a prior visit and I hoped our guests would enjoy the opulence of this jewel box of a mansion.

In the garden itself, families strolled, children chased swans and each other, and swaths of sun swept across the slope above the more formal fountains and walkways. Forests surrounded all this.

Behind the palace rose steeper hills, into one of which was set an artificial grotto. In it an artificial lake allowed Wagnerian swan boats to sail from amphitheater seats to the stage across the water, where opera would be performed for Mad King Ludwig. Tourists found this grotto only when guides opened a boulder in the hillside; Walt Disney had been inspired by this as much as by Ludwig’s other masterpiece, Neuschwannstein, only a few miles away.

Jotting notes, it struck me that my three children were likely too young to remember much of this. Our guests, my wife’s mother and her cousin, a retired school teacher, would benefit from it but not in any life-changing way. Capturing some of the scene’s charm, and breathing in the slightly warmed German air as wan sun tried to defeat the misty rain, seemed to me the best way to be in the moment, whether or not I used the setting later in fiction.

The day before, climbing 150 stairs in a tower at Neuschwannstein, I had been forced to pause for breath every ten steps or so, and older Germans had stopped, concerned for my heart. I’d laughed them off.

A few months later a heart attack at age 40 would prove them right, but at the time I thought I was merely feeling a bit under the weather from all the travel. My aches and pains were just a flu, I told myself. Had I died waiting in that lovely formal garden my kids would have missed saying goodbye and my wife’s quick smooch would have been our last touch.

For those few moments sitting in Linderhof’s garden, I imagined how it must have been for Ludwig, when the palace and gardens, the trails in the wooded hills, the walks down by the lake, and everything visible in that perfect little Bavarian valley had been his to enjoy in privacy. An interlude, I thought. A moment’s stillness amidst life’s turbulence.

That it still offered as much to those who accepted it made the place special, like an inadvertent last kiss.

/// /// ///

Portrait of a Lady of Will

2008-12-09T13:25:00.000-08:00

What has happened to esoterica?

Consider that the unexamined library of one branch of the Order of the Golden Dawn is at least partly in the hands of a smugly ignorant, proudly bigoted, determinedly closed-minded farmer’s housewife with a sense of entitlement bigger than her hubby’s north forty and a dread certainty in how utterly right she is regardless of how little she knows about any given topic. Don’t ask if she’s read this or that; she does not read, but is occasionally read to, by a devoted husband no doubt eager to control wifey’s head content the same way he approves of her friends and the people he’ll share her sexuality with. Don’t pester her with details or citations, she needs none of that and will in fact blame them, as if they are faults, on your refusal to see her as final arbiter of all things. Nothing ever confuses or unsettles her and if she gets angry at you she will deny it and ask you sweetly why you’re so rattled. She will insist her opinion balances any and all massing of facts and she will deny logic has any place in her thoughts. She’s sure and if you disagree, you are obviously a lesser being condemned to struggle until if you’re lucky eventually you get it right like she did her first time out because she’s special, can’t you tell?

Do as thou wilt she takes as a license for selfishness, for example. Her self-centered prattling and intense disinterest when the conversation wanders from a tight-beam focus on her demonstrate which star bedazzles her. She makes up her mind quickly, she brags, not realizing it never takes long to count to one.

That she never changes her mind is also obvious once one realizes she is the only thing in her world that matters. Enlightenment, indeed; she basks in her own glow, sensing no other, unaware of the cosmos around her.

Every light beam curves to show her only what she wishes to see. All endings are happy and all ponies are unicorns. A bland silliness bogs down anything real that attempts to enter her awareness, stopping it eventually before it even glimpses an event horizon of hope. Superficial be thy name, if you can skim far enough across the vast surface-without-depth to catch her glittering sunset eye.

There is no hatred, nor any strong response of any kind, possible with a Scarlet woman such as this. Professional swooners and masochists desperate for nihilistic humiliation hem her in with a delusion of suitor regard, passionate in their unfeeling devotion to accepting her boredom as their due. Their paltry and wrinkled gifts never delight, their witty-like flirting never rises her silver trout flash to strike, and the dead flies on the windowsills of their pining gazes are the litter of her disregard. Her blessing is an offhand, “Whatever.”

This woman marks a type that has taken over esoteric groups worldwide but especially in America, where the species thrives. It goes far beyond the troll type that disrupts so many esoteric discussion groups online. Her lineage maintains rituals with unimaginative inability to diverge from what she’s learned and dominates ceremonial magick with a magisterial arrogance straight out of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Mundanity has triumphed by wielding its Excalibur of literalism. She is the stasis that murders any living system into mere dogma.

So if you are a student of esoterica and wonder why it’s impossible to find intelligence, innovation, or simply involvement in a community or even in another individual, think of this woman and her oft-mentioned Will. By will she means ego, her pridefulness being evident in the preening she does each time she declares this or that as a manifestation of her Thelemic will. “It is my will to disagree,” or “I’ve focused my will on other things,” or even, “That is not my will.” Beware a little learning, oh ye of too much faith.

And so we students must walk our paths each alone, fleeing, fugitive, banished, and migratory, forsaking not the lesson while avoiding like plague itself this plague of brainless little hausfrau teachers who have confiscated, with their strapping farmer husbands, so many clumps and clots of esoterica’s life’s blood to stir in their pots and pans and cauldrons like so much broth for the brood. From mater familias save us all, no goddess she.

--Frater Profugus, Returned

Com Vs. Code: A Look Into the Future

2008-11-20T14:41:00.000-08:00

“Communication Versus Codes:
A Look Into the Near Future”

Pulitzer insisted on plain prose and established it as standard, to reach the masses. Were, then, prior newspapers and their verbosity aimed to miss the masses?

Did wading through them drag general literacy up? Certainly the average person today can’t make sense of newspapers from yesterday. The virtue of being immediately understood degraded the urge to accomplish more complex and subtle reading.

This means clarity is a mixed blessing and that there can be a use for, and gains to be had by, being indirect.

Was putting plain prose into daily print what allowed American vernacular finally to be allowed into, and viewed as, literature?

Oral tradition predates literary tradition. Speech comes before writing. Returning writing to a speaker’s syntax offers powerful advantages. It shatters the chains of formalism and allows a wider range of topics and voices into literary culture. However, stating things simply seems to have tended to drag thinking into simplicity, too. This is a loss.

It’s evident mass literacy has a major impact on literary culture, forcing it toward plain prose. What is less evident is the impatience plainness plants in us for subtlety and complexity of thought. Cut to the chase, we say; give us the gist, and keep it stupidly simple.

It is perhaps predictable that there is an academic backlash against plain prose. It insists that abstract, fancy prose is superior.

Is this protective snobbery covering up the fact that straightforward prose can accomplish everything maze-like prose can, and more? Or is it an acknowledgment of all the grace notes and lesser points we’ve lost to bluntness?

A debate rages. It’s about clarity of thought and expression versus protection of turf. One group states that complex, layered, even convoluted thoughts can be expressed simply, even if doing so requires sequential presentation with successive points built upon. Another advocates a more oblique approach, claiming that only via cumulative side points can the main point become a worthwhile summation. Ephemeral values must be kept safe at the heart of a tangled garden of words.

Academic prose is but bad taste, say some. It cries for citation and stifles originality. Conformity is academia’s way of clinging to a hollow relevance. Obfuscation is the ivy-covered tower’s refuge for pseudo intellectuals. It is an attempt to exclude the masses in favor of snobbery.

Another group asks, if writing is communicative, should it not be inclusive? Does not democratic idealism require a literature understandable by all? Is not fostering isolated elitism and specialism just another way of shutting down communication?

What of vocabulary? Are big words snobbish? Are plain words always better? How can one choose the right word, and by whose standards, on what scale?

Eschew obfuscation, or be brief? Is concise the same as short, though? Is not the sum of some words greater than the summation of their component parts?

Both sides create extremes. Opposite Dr. Seuss one finds Finnegans Wake. Faulkner called Hemingway a dolt and mocked his 400-word vocabulary. Dickens wrote fat books concisely while Hawthorne wrote as if paid by the run-on sentence. Hugo wrote pages of words that cannot be diagrammed into sentences while Robbe-Grillet wrote lists.

Ideals duel. Invisible prose squares off against the paragraph as sculpture. Deconstructionists sneer at the notion that the writer can know what he or she meant by what’s written, while cyberpunks go binary in a street rebellion of electronic tagging.

Communication fights Codes. Some want any reader to be able to understand, others want only prepared audiences to have a chance to extract hidden meaning.

Both extremes use words like masks.

Masks both hide and show. They conceal and reveal at the same time. What you choose to mask, and what kind of mask you choose, reveal hidden things, even as they cover up others.

On the individual scale, it is a matter of taste. An impatience with gallimaufry and drawn out manipulation leads to a preference for clean, clear prose. An enjoyment of immersion and a fascination with involvement leads to a preference for more baroque writing.

On a social scale, however, a balance must be struck between the blunt and the fine. Intelligence and information thrive, or wither, through presentation. A lecture delivered in rudimentary language may fail to impart anything, while verbosity and high verbal skills applied to a kindergarten lesson may simply baffle.

Consider your audience, journalists are told. Write for the reader. Even in fiction, if you stray too far from reader expectations, reader interest is lost. Sales decline. Publishers move on to someone else.

When Pulitzer focused on reaching the masses, his agenda was to sell more newspapers than Hearst, yes, but his ulterior motive was political. He wanted to move things his way.

Rather than address the well-educated ruling class, he aimed at the semi-educated working class. He went native, in a way, so his influence would be delivered in their everyday language.

Writing fiction sways between giving readers what they want -- diversion and entertainment -- and expressing the writer’s concerns -- personal and political obsessions. It balances between journalism and fine art.

Journalism influenced fiction writing more than the reverse due to numbers. More people read newspapers than fiction.

Today, that may not be true. Today, the news delivery systems of choice are the internet and TV, especially TV comedians. TV news has lost luster due to a shift from informing to entertaining. Drawing an audience matters more than informing the public, so demographics surveys and playing to perceived audience bias slants news away from objective information and toward propaganda. People respond by turning elsewhere.

When an event becomes known, people are apt now to jump online. There they can find multiple sources, from reliable to crazy. They can sift out their own version of what happened from multiple views.

Today’s fiction delivery systems of choice are movies and TV shows. Books that most closely resemble the movie or TV series experience sell best. This includes franchise fiction based on established story lines such as Star Wars and Star Trek.

So audiovisual media are the biggest influence on literature today. Literary culture is, in fact, merging with AV culture in the form of computer games. Video games often provide detailed story lines even more developed than those found in Victorian novels. Reading itself may become obsolete when AV interfaces replace the keyboard model on handheld devices. Replacing the device with implanted subcutaneous chips is a next logical phase, even as WiFi replaces wire and thermal and light sourced power generation replaces batteries and alternating current generators.

It is not far-fetched to envision individuals in the near future mentally involved with a world-spanning web of internet-based sub-realities, pocket universes, and sites without spatial locale. They will have instant global communication and awareness. They will be able to store information for later perusal, or tap into any information source needed, or find someone to help them.

Even then there will no doubt be those favoring code over com. They will seek to corral sectors of the mind-web for private projects or just for the sake of secrecy and criminality. The two may end up being equated.

Privacy, being a half-brother to secrecy, may also end up being equated with criminality, or antisocial tendencies at least. So may ownership, property, and notions of control.

Symbolic behavior, symbols, and other abstractions may end up being the last refuge of individualism. At that point communication will have won, or enclaves of Luddites will have developed to reject technology’s changes. Clinging won’t help, though.

Change, being the only constant, favors open communication.

Knowing this, it becomes obvious that plain prose and clear thought are positive, while obfuscation, obscuritanism, and contrary concealment must be seen as negative, in terms of both individual and social progress.

Aspects of this have the potential to become fascist. Frightened conformists seek to control what they cannot understand. Despite any such setbacks, it looks as if open communication will ultimately prevail.

Right now there is no need to make such harsh choices. Right now there is room for utopia and dystopia. It may not be long, though, before how we communicate breaks the code of human nature and allows us to live as one seething, incredibly varied, and powerful organism.

The fearful will speak of hive mind. The unafraid will see it as a step toward being spiritually united.

All this from how we read and write.

/// /// ///

Genre Evolution

2008-11-14T12:51:00.001-08:00

Genre Evolution:
Establish patterns. Set rules. Debate rules. Break rules. Argue rules. Ignore rules. Establish new patterns. Set new rules. Debate new rules. Break new rules. Argue new rules. Ignore new rules. Romanticize old patterns. Repeat until nothing really changes.

///

Moribund means almost extinct. It means doomed. If something is moribund, it means it is on its last legs. It is dying, fading, going, nearly gone.

Take science fiction, or any other genre you wish, as an example. It’s been moribund since inception. Since first noticed it has been decried as a lost cause.

This means genre evolution happens the instant a genre is identified. It’s inherent in genre itself. Humanoid primates break things, rules prime among them. We are destructive even in our creativity. We set up patterns and rules to react against. Rebels all, we keep asking, “Whatcha got?”

Collective boredom sets in now and then. During the Pulp Era one of the biggest categories was Sports Fiction. It bloomed and withered within a decade or so. Yet Hollywood retains it as a market category, having refreshed it with the simple addition of the phrase, “Based on a True Story.”

Space Opera, a subcategory of science fiction, went through a similar cycle. It faded as harsher views blossomed in Dystopia. Realpolitik kept things grim for awhile. Dystopia is currently waning even as space opera is being revitalized by an injection of romance, of all things. Gone are the days when sf was all male and all females brought to it were cooties.

In mystery fiction, Tea Cozy gave way to Hard Boiled, which paved the streetwise way for Police Procedural. Spenser wore his feelings for hire on his sleeve, much to Mike Hammer’s disgust, while Spade kept digging and Archer kept flinging outrageous arrows against a sea of sorrow.

Philip Marlowe loosened the terse vocabulary of the crime novel and Dame Agatha stripped away the upper crust’s haughty veneer. This led the way for Tony Strong’s GLBT fiction and van de Wetering’s Zen explorations.

Genre reflects current culture, in short. Evolve means change: Genre changes with the times. Attitudes, venues, and crime scenes vary with our world experience. Locked room gives way to locked email files.

We see ourselves in the victims and the detectives; in the space aliens and astronauts; in the unicorns and wizards; in the monsters and survivors; in the Catherines and Heathcliffs. We are what we write and read.

We are genre, despite much academic sneering. Even literary fiction for tiny, prepared audiences forms a genre, after all. Just more patterns and rules. More debate, argument, and ignorance.

As genre evolves our own changes are chronicled. We look inward sometimes, at other times we look outward. Occasionally we lie to ourselves, and most of our fiction remains a way to get at truth mere fact will not support or reveal. Next time you hear someone decry a genre as worn thin, as ready for the garbage heap, as hopelessly dated and ridiculous, remember, it was always that way and always will be. Genre is nothing but change.

/// /// ///

Never Again?

2008-11-12T13:00:00.001-08:00

I agree wholeheartedly that the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews and others must never be forgotten.

I also abhor that W repeated it to the utmost of neo con scum ability, and that neither the entire Afghanistan/Iraq debacle nor the so-called War On Terror and its Rendition Gulag have been documented. It is a calculated lack of documentation so the war crimes will never be known. It was a way of covering up and not reporting actions that no decent human being could possibly have condoned if confronted directly with the evidence.

Did you know the deniers claim Eisenhower's publicity campaign to spread the word about the Holocaust, and what was found in the concentration camps, was nothing but a propaganda blitz? Oh yes, they claim this Big Lie. Karl Rove is just another Goebbels trained at the knee of Newt Gingrich's ideological Go Pac crusaders and there is a long line of such androids waiting to take Lee Atwater's diseased mantle.

Meanwhile, hired guns in the form of mercenaries, who are not answerable to the Geneva Code and other Rules of Engagement, who can ignore the Military Code of Uniform Justice, and who can and do outright crimes on behalf of their secrecy-obsessed masters in undisclosed locations, outnumber the US military. These mercs are paid extravagantly well and outfitted with all the cutting-edge weapons and state-of-the-art equipment they can use, and then some.

Our military is left underpaid, underfunded, and under manned, while being over-tasked and overburdened to crush-weight. They are also kept hidden from the American people, with only tame, ideologically approved reporters embedded with field units, and all reports filtered through a Ministry of Lies so dense no truth could ever get through it. The sacrifice and suffering of these troops, and all the horrors they're forced to perform, are kept hidden by the criminals in charge and by the complicit media.

That the US military allowed itself to be abused like this by such scum is unutterable and should enrage every service member. Instead, service members fall for jingoism and idealoguery. They bow to indoctrination and mouth right wing echo chamber hate speech and Double Speak. Infiltrated true believers in fundamentalist fleece, and implanted ideologues keeping the faith like Fifth Columnists back in WW II, make sure the military is now a "Christian Force" and that dissent of any kind is punished harshly even unto fragging and deaths. Gestapo tactics are employed to keep people in line and the wounded and shell shocked are thrown away and ignored.

And no one knows much about any of this because it's kept from being seen, reported, or discussed. Remember the pictures of the flag-draped coffins? Remember Viet Nam on our TV sets?

No reminders of war's horror and crimes now. And to speak of it is to be labeled "disloyal to Der Fatherland..."

They use Homeland Security -- which is what KGB meant -- openly for their control group of scare mongers and hate spewers. They demand conformity and punish nonconformists brutally.

What can be done? Voting for Obama was a good first move, presuming we haven't yet again been duped and manipulated by false promises and stalking horse candidates.

Holding him to our demands is a good second step. Keep up the pressure to reverse the appalling precedents set by Dicks Like Cheney.

Documentation of every crime and atrocity must be obtained, disseminated, and preserved ASAP; in many cases, it's too late. Fallujah, for example: Anyone really know what happened there, other than a massacre that was part of the near-genocide of "enemy combatants"?

Impeachment, arrest, and trial at the Hague's World Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity should await every high-ranking member of the Bush administration and many lower-ranking members. Nuremberg was but a light scratch of a start toward rooting out these infections.

Yes, it seems impossible that for the past decade or so we've allowed this country to be run into the ground by fascist sociopaths, and it's time to stop tolerating and even rewarding them.

/// /// ///

"Arson" by Gene Stewart

2008-11-08T09:24:00.000-08:00

On the commute to his home stop -- he kept a sharp watch so the bus did not roll past it -- Esche thought about unseasonable darkness, the Enlightenment, and what little things he might be able to do to make things bright again. He was not sure if he could, or would, do any of them, but just thinking about them made him feel a little better about his day, and his weekend opened up for him. In his imagination, he had gone from huddling in his house reading thrillers and watching old movies to getting out a little, taking in a new movie maybe, perhaps strolling through a museum exhibit. Wasn’t there one on Impressionism downtown?

A couple times that weekend, then, and with complete strangers, he started short conversations about the Enlightenment, and how it had been snuffed out. Bold move for him, but a comfort, somehow.

He wondered afterward if that’s all the stranger had been doing. Just approaching people and planting ideas. He’d met the stranger at the bus stop a week ago, on a rainy evening dark as night. The man had spoken calmly but urgently, and his words stirred Esche. While not like a speech given from a bully pulpit, the man’s words carried a good deal of inspiration, somehow.

It would be a slow, inefficient way to spread a cultural revolution, Esche thought. The more he thought about it that way, though, the more he realized there was probably no better way. As in advertising, whisper campaigns ended up most effective.

And so Esche spoke to others of getting the cultural camp fire going again, to push back the darkness. Without a bubble of light and warmth, what were we but desperate animals doomed to be lost? Some dismissed him as a nut, of course; one older man called him a Hippie; but three or four people thought he had a point and said so, and a couple even contributed interesting angles of their own to the general thesis.

Esche wondered how many passersby had caught a few words to carry with them into their own thoughts. He hoped it was a good many.

Whether the stranger had been a modern-day Lucifer, an out-of-context God, or just a wandering weirdo, a kind of Johnny Appleseed of hope, did not matter any more than whether he’d vanished into shadow or had simply walked away, choosing to miss Esche’s bus home. What mattered to Esche was his idea of rekindling Enlightenment ideals. Esche found it increasingly interesting, layered, and useful as he lived with the notion over time.

Maybe it hadn’t been an overthrow or takeover so much as a failure in daily living that had allowed existence to become so dark, so grim, and so unremittingly crass again. The Enlightenment shined like a sunbeam through storm clouds. Were storm clouds our norm?

If so, it might be time to move on.

Esche went back to work Monday morning refreshed as rarely before. His coworkers noticed it, and he let them in on his secret.

“We can spread the light like fire,” he told them, “until it’s everywhere,” and some among them agreed, either outwardly or in the quiet parts of their lives where an impulse toward better things burned like an ember awaiting kindling.

A horizon aglow, Esche thought, smiling.

/// /// ///

Writing Dies, Too

2008-11-07T12:52:00.000-08:00

Writers die. So does their work.

Yes, some work achieves a kind of immortality that lasts at least as long as the culture that produced it. And it’s not always the best or most deserving or most representative work, either. James Fennimore Cooper and L. Ron Hubbard prove that, for differing reasons.

Yes, popularity plays into it. Partly that may be due to sheer numbers. There are so many Stephen King books in print that they have a better chance of being discovered by second and subsequent readers, and generations.

Popularity can lead to discussion, too. Critic chat is not as influential as academic regard, simply because works chosen as school texts are kept in print longer. This doesn’t endear works, though. Catcher In the Rye by J. D. Salinger is forced down the throats of high school kids and this only makes them gag the stronger, both on Holden Caulfield’s whining and on reading as enjoyable entertainment. Another bizarre choice, no doubt approved by Cotton Mather’s horny ghost, is The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel paid-by-the-word-and-bonus-for-convoluted-sentences Hawthorne.

No child left to its own devices, in short.

And no book approved by Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut, either, apparently. Or only books they kicked, chosen as torture.

Some of us were allowed to find our own reading. Most of that group ended up liking to read. Many of us even came down with writing joneses.

Damn.

Rather than pity the afflicted, enable them by buying some of their stuff, wouldja?

Some prominent writers have died lately, and not just Vonnegut. Michael Crichton, Studs Terkel, Janwillem van de Wetering, Gregory Mcdonald, James Crumley, and Tony Hillerman, to name a few offhand, in no order and for no collective reason.

We note their passing often by grabbing up their work. Freshly dead writers often experience a sales surge. Would’ve done them a lot more good had it come before they left, but their estates are appreciative, not to mention their publishers, who can then start the perennial exploitation dance.

Will their work last?

Some will, yes. For reasons touched upon. Some won’t, for unfathomable reasons.

Some work goes away, then comes back.

Tolkien did that. His work was obscure in my lifetime. He published most of it in the 1930s. Thirty years later it experienced a resurgence that saw it, in another decade, become hugely popular and influential. In part this was due to Lester del Rey coming up with the Fantasy Trilogy gimmick, to feed the Tolkien jones once people had read him. A sales trick became a sub-genre and it prevails to this day. Why sell one book when you can hook readers into at least three?

Much talk has wasted air over whether this “trilogy” nonsense has ruined fiction or stretched storytelling to some logical limit. Maybe it’s just reader patience being stretched.

It seems, now, that Tolkien’s work will last as part of Western Culture. We would not have guessed this in his lifetime.

Which brings us to the rub. That’s the narrow part you have to squeeze through. The part the fat can’t do, be they fat-headed or otherwise burdened and slow.

The rub? We can’t know what writing will last.

A quick and dirty scan tells us to bet on storytelling over style. A good story well told has more chance of lasting, people being generally the same through history. Style changes in a way similar to fashion. Many factors come to bear on style, so that one generation prefers indirection and discretion, another demands the harsh and the blunt.

All that falls away, though, when a story proves robust enough to jump languages and cultures. That is when the story itself, and, often, how it’s told matter most. Basics count in writing as in all things. And story is the basis of writing.

And of course often the books we might choose as ones to last are themselves recapitulations of classic stories. Retelling a standard well, or in a new voice, is the same as singing a standard song. If a new version, take, interpretation, or voice appeals, it is likely to work.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman comes to mind, it being a new take on The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling, themselves in part based on Indian folk tales absorbed by Kipling. Patterns repeat.

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier was, as were many books since, a retelling of The Odyssey by Homer. Homer is a mysterious figure whose tales were not even written down for centuries, so who knows how many refinements and alterations came and went during its oral tradition phase. And yet the basics remain intact. They are recognizable even in American Civil War guise.

Beowulf, oldest known tale in English, is a monster of a horror story, a heroic adventure with lots of violence, action, and drama. It is pulp. It is penny dreadful. It is genre. It is baseline appealing to humanoid primates.

Fiction delivery systems tend to remain true to the human voice. Someone tells a story, others listen. If it’s got certain elements it fascinates. Listeners are hooked and come back for more as the camp fire dies low and shadows move in the dark around us.

Writing dies along with writers, sometimes, but fiction is along for the ride with us. As long as we’re hear to receive it, to crave and need and rely upon it, then fiction will sustain us.

Our stories are our lives.

That is what will last, maybe even longer than we do.

/// /// ///

Michael Crichton

2008-11-07T11:36:00.000-08:00

October 23, 1942 -- November 4, 2008

Although it trailed off at the end of his career, the best of his work remains readable, thought-provoking, and fun. His career paralleled that of his favorite writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Studs Terkel

2008-11-01T14:46:00.000-07:00

Studs Terkel, May 16, 1912 - October 31, 2008

He listened.

Education & How To Fix It

2008-10-29T12:30:00.000-07:00

Some say education is broken because people want it that way, that it reflects society's wishes.

Isn't it more that very few of the public has much say, or much concern, about what is included in curriculum, preferring to focus on budgets and on what is kept OUT of the curriculum?

In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann, the Nobel Prize for Physics winning scientist tells of spotting errors in his son's math book. Thinking he'd be welcome, he attended a school board meeting and asked that the texts be changed. He at once learned that fixing errors, even in math texts, is so cost-prohibitive, and so onerous a chore, that no one ever does it. He further learned that school boards had little to no say in text content. And he was outraged to learn that the errors were of no concern among the majority on the board, which was much more focused on budget, and on keeping their pet peeve issues from making inroads.

It's a sobering, chastising story and should sicken everyone. We've fallen to absurdly low levels in education, science, math, medicine, and even art, thanks to government meddling and high-handed textbook publishers.

Why blame publishers? Their outrageous prices for their texts have translated into stagnation for curricula in financially strapped school systems. They need the money to keep the building from falling down -- although most schools are falling apart along with all the rest of America's infrastructure, also thanks to government greed and neglect, and don't get me started on the outrageous spending for football teams, stadiums, and so on, to the neglect of all else-- so they defer and delay buying new texts year after year until you have situations, as I experienced growing up, in which kids are learning from literally the same physical books their parents learned from.

When I went to school we had out-dated maps and had to learn them in order to conform to the out-dated tests based upon those maps. How is this education? It is, instead, absurd conformity to dogmatic, and static, curricula. It is learning by rote without regard to content.

Out-dated texts, out-moded teaching materials, and decrepit equipment all conspire to graduate students ignorant of basics mastered by much younger children in most other countries. Bravo, No Child Left Behind, a cynical and vile program dedicated to ensuring the abject failure of public schools in order to divert public money to private pockets, where the education is biased, partisan, and not only useless, but harmful.

How can we deal with all this?

With the advent of the digital age, there is no longer any cost worth mentioning involved in correcting errors, and no excuse for not keeping all subjects up-to-date and informative, with plenty of interactive multi-disciplinary multi-media links and hypertexts and so on. Replace books with laptops or even iPods and you can attain this easily, and for a one-time cost that is far cheaper than replacing text books.

So there's the simple solution. Oh, and keeping special interest groups out of education would help, too, along with paying teachers as the professionals they should be. Standards can be set and maintained for teachers, and for curricula. It's a simple matter of the public realizing this and insisting on it.

Chemistry of Candles

2008-10-29T09:20:00.000-07:00

--I found this both goofy and interesting.

Mood's Off

2008-10-23T11:29:00.000-07:00

My mood’s off.

I’m riddled by unresolved anxieties; I suffer paranoia that I feel is legitimate, being based on real threats; and I am ridden by worries stemming from imagination and a dark cast of mind instilled by decades of the world’s hostility, from school yard bullies to adult betrayals.

My nightmares are angry, sexual, and political, yet vague, like rock lyrics.

“The Obama campaign has been saying some pretty nasty things about Western Pennsylvania,” McCain said recently, at a stump speech. He paused for booing, then said, “And I’d just like to say I couldn’t agree with them more.”

He went on to try to correct his gaffe but fumbled it every bit as badly as W might have.

The audience waited it out, then obediently applauded anyway, despite the fact that, if he’d said anything coherent whatsoever, it insulted them and patronized their intelligence.

The man is a doddering, surly fuck-up. Palin’s a deranged, delusional beauty-queen religious freak. Of course they’re serious candidates. Of course they may even win.

How can this be?

This is America. We’re all stupid and crazy here. We have an unerring instinct to choose the worst.

And why is America anti-intellectual and opposed to imagination? Goes right back to the Puritans. Their legacy has driven us, as a nation, into self-hating depression and madness.

That dark, ugly street of dread, broken dreams forms America’s mental main street. We all live nearer to it or farther from it, but connected to it always, directly. Its run-offs taint our wells, stain our walls.

Extended Metaphor Theater proudly presents: Puritanism As Sewage -- An American Truthiness. Starring: The Floating Turds Dick, George, Karl, John, Don, Condoleeza, Bomber, and Sarah, and all the others in the Toilet Bowl Ring.

There is already a Palin In 2012 campaign. Only she, it seems, can fix America’s broken soul. Thus is a political genius the likes of Reagan born again among us.

Is Mt. Rushmore ready for boobs? The other kind, I mean.

Anyone who has faced prejudice knows the horror of unexamined assumptions and received wisdom. Yet we allow ourselves to be bashed on the head with our own bigotry every time there is a political campaign. I think it’s apathy more than despair or cynicism that lets us go on like this, even though we all know it’s wrong.

Change -- that jingoistic Pavlovian bell the liars keep chiming -- requires effort and America is long since out of the trying game. If we weren’t all so gluttonous we’d none of us give a shit. Instead, though, we just want more, and more, and more. Paging Mr. Creosote.

My mood’s off and is likely to stay that way.

/// /// ///

Bowl Full

2008-10-22T14:04:00.000-07:00

The only way it matters is intensely
Your weakness is a power over you
Mine eyes have seen the glory hole Calcutta
We blew our load on faces turning blue

Grapple snakes and slither chains
A strangulation cure
Sweet asphyxiation
Keeps the constitution pure

Deploy the guns of shit and shoot
Decry a hundred lawyers lying
Impeach whoever gave the go
Condemn in heaven’s name our buying

The only hay it gathers is without us
Our strongmen are so vulnerable now
Their minds exploded inward at conception
They sucked us dry, we took their final bow

Knife her honey
Knife her whole
Knife her sticky
Fill her bowl

Knife her money
Knife her dole
Knife her tricky
Fill her bowl

Raffle bakes and blistered brains
Exsanguination, sure
Sour postulation
Stops the institution’s lure

The holy day, it shatters with our laughter
The powers gather arguments at dawn
The words employed to seal the deal’s disaster
Are scattered dead and bloody on your lawn

Knife her funny
Knife her roll
Knife her, Dicky
Fill her bowl
Knife and fill her bowl

--Monkey Dogs, "Bowl Full" from TWICE BITTEN

Defy the Genre Embargo

2008-10-09T13:19:00.001-07:00

The notion is childish that certain elements of or approaches to fiction belong strictly to one major camp and may not legitimately be used by any other camp. Yet this stance defines American writing, which has been called “...insular and too much under the sway of its own popular culture,” by the likes of Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Nobel Prize Academy.

How others see us may not matter much to our daily stint, but it certainly affects distribution, readership, and sales. It might offer useful insights, too.

Insular means, according to my on-board dictionary, “ignorant of or uninterested in cultures, ideas, or peoples outside one's own experience; lacking contact with other people.” Provincial, in other words. Village idiots with no concept of a world larger than our own back yards. This view contrasts just slightly with our own view of ourselves as world-striding superpower champions of all we attempt, doesn’t it?

And yet, look what we do to ourselves. Aside from the unblinking narcissism of our culture, and the self-congratulatory tone of our self-criticism, we divide our best efforts into partisan opponents. Mainstream versus genre fiction is the focus here. That dichotomy weakens both sides.

American literature as a whole keeps itself apart from World literature. Genre compounds the error by trying to seal itself off from the mainstream American fiction. This puts it twice-removed from World literature.

Genre fiction wants to be a private club. Mainstream wants an open door policy while reserving the right to sweep out the riffraff when it’s time for a celebration of self. Both squabble as if exclusion is an answer in and of itself.

A palpable resentment shudders through fandom, the loose group of self-identified genre fiction enthusiasts, every time a writer whose work usually appears in mainstream market categories gains praise, sales, and often Hollywood options by using genre elements. That is how it’s perceived: “They” “stole” “our” genre elements. As if only writers whose work is marketed as genre are legitimately allowed to use such elements.

And, the complaint continues, even worse, genre works are never awarded attention, acclaim, or movie money -- despite, they point out salaciously, the top-grossing movies of all time being genre.

Of course, don’t ask them how Hollywood succeeds on those rare occasions when it translates genre works to the big screen. That’s a whole other kettle of bile to be spilled on a separate discussion entirely.

So their shoulder chip is two-tier, a double-cheeseburger of lukewarm resentment; we’re excluded, and they steal from us. This leads to talk of of the genre ghetto, exploitation, and east coast snobbery. And like most such bitterness, there is some truth in it. Yes, genre work is generally ignored by academics, literary award committees, and serious mainstream critics. Yes, occasional genre elements are praised as if new by mainstream critics, who remain willfully unaware of the specifics and contents of genre fiction’s pulp tradition.

When we examine the standards by which works are judged, however, we see a definite emphasis gap. For the most part, novels that have won the top genre awards are more concerned about idea and plot than writing quality, characterization, and exploration of themes. Mainstream award winners, genre readers complain, aren’t about anything; they have no grand ideas; they focus on everyday minutiae; they have no action; they’re boring...

Again, movies may be an instructive example. Blockbusters tend to be laden with stunts, special effects, and action peppered with catch phrases. Characters are sketched in brief, bold terms. Such movies take us away from our everyday world. They’re generally called escapism.

Then there are the so-called serious movies. Many are costume pieces dealing in comedy of manners or courtship rituals from the Seventeenth century. Some are character portraits of people mired in hopeless lives. Some are examinations of the consequences of crisis, or some social ill such as alcoholism or spousal abuse. These movies tend to win awards but no big audiences. Art films, they’re often called. Made for art’s sake, not to please audiences or to allow the masses to escape the humdrum of their daily lives. Hell, some even have subtitles. If we wanted to read, we wouldn’t have gone to the movies, they cry. And who are all these foreigners? Where’s my favorite movie star?

Genre, for the most part, falls into the first category, escapism. This is not to say genre works can, must, or do not address serious themes. Many do. But the main goal is entertainment and, failing that, diversion, in genre fiction. This is a noble art in itself.

Mainstream fiction, for the most part, adds insight and commentary to escapism. Yes, many mainstream works are about taking us away from quotidian reality. Most, however, are also concerned with showing a commonality among humanity’s diverse specimens, or revealing the inner secrets of private lives, or making points about how and why society is decaying.

Vonnegut wrote: “Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

Genre fiction is often the opposite, about how great it is to be a humanoid primate conquering the universe and rearranging things so we’re the center of it all. Optimism is a keynote in science fiction, for instance. As Harlan Ellison once pointed out, even dystopias are optimistic because they mean there is someone left to complain about how bad it is. Mysteries are optimistic about restoring order from chaos. Fantasy and Romance both speak to wish fulfillment, while even Horror deals with the bastards getting their comeuppance.

In modern political discourse -- all the shouting and lying, yes -- it’s common to refer disparagingly to “reality-based” thinking. The 17 October 2004 New York Times Magazine ran an article by Ron Suskind. In it, an unnamed aide to George W. Bush said, “You’re in what we call the reality-based community, people who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we’ll act again, creating other realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

What sort of literature would come from such breathtaking solipsism? Would it not be literature that is insular and too much under the sway of its own culture?

And what of the escapist subset of such a literature? Would it not concern itself with mythic stories of conquest, and examinations of glorious dreams full of wish-fulfillment?

A wider world exists. Noticing it, finding out about it, and exploring it would expand our base of reference. Joining in and participating in a wider world outside this house of cards we’ve built would strengthen the global, which is to say human, appeal of our fiction. This would lead to much larger readership and all that a big audience can bring and bestow.

Isn’t it time to stop hugging the elements of genre so tightly? Isn’t it time to share them not only with our own mainstream, but to trade them with a wider world?

Isn’t it time to defy the genre embargo?

/// /// ///

Rising Above Miscegenation

2008-10-08T15:39:00.001-07:00

Ursula K. LeGuin spoke of miscegenation between genre and mainstream fiction. She discussed briefly how the two are distinct in approach and form. She thought the mainstream benefitted but wasn’t too sure genre gained from such exchanges and mergers.

What mainstream fiction tends to get from genre is imaginative elements. Magic realism for the mainstream critics was what genre critics called fantasy all along, for instance. Such elements can enliven basics seen too many times before.

Genre fiction tends to take realism from mainstream fiction. A grittier sense of presence, a more realistic depiction of behavior or setting results. This can refresh tired ideas and threadbare executions.

In genre fiction, plot counts most. So do ideas. In mainstream fiction, character and setting are emphasized. This simple shift of emphasis has created a gap in American fiction that does not exist as strongly elsewhere in the world. Elsewhere -- Britain for example -- the differences are seen as valid variants, rather than distinctions. Genre and mainstream exist there intermingled. A writer can be considered serious while writing mystery or science fiction, there. Anthony Burgess is an example. In Britain, a genre writer can win serious literary awards for work that crosses or blurs genre lines. Martin Amis comes to mind.

Stateside, fen are upset by writers perceived generally as literary who “pilfer” genre elements and end up being recognized for innovation. Fen grouse about Margaret Atwood for swooping down from her literary heights to scarf up some science fictional insight in The Handmaid’s Tale, which went on to glean much acclaim and, incidentally, became a best-seller and major movie. Fen sneer at mystery writer P. D. James for using science fictional tricks in Children of Men, a book that also won acclaim, sold hugely well, and became a big movie. Mostly the fen resent all the attention the genre elements in such works receive from the mainstream critics, as if such things had never existed before, let alone been pioneered by pre-WW II pulp writers and their literary offspring.

Where, fen whine, is the mainstream or academic praise for Frank Herbert’s Dune or for Johanna Russ’s The Female Man?

Oh, but when Ursula K. LeGuin manages to jump the gap from a start in genre fiction to mainstream literary respectability, some fen wonder if she’s sold out, or if she’s even written “real” science fiction all along?

They pulled the same on Ray Bradbury. “He never really wrote science fiction or fantasy, it was always mainstream fabulism,” fen say, when the quality of his prose and the purity of his voice prompts mainstream recognition.

Of course, they skip over the work of Philip K. Dick, which has become a favorite of academics and has, oddly, been made into many movies since PKD’s death. Hell, it’s even been chosen for the Library of America fancy book gimmick, considered prestigious by collectors.

Suffice it to say that, stateside at least, the standards to which fiction are held vary between genre and mainstream. What are valid variations elsewhere are distinctions keeping groups separate here.

Miscegenation means interbreeding between distinct races. It is an ugly term. It implies purity contaminated. It leads to terms like maroon and mulatto

And sure enough, as fen eagerly point out, genre fiction, particularly science fiction, has been singled out stateside for prejudicial treatment. It’s been the victim of unwarranted slurs, scurrilous lies, and mean spirited analysis. It’s been held in contempt and used as a reason for automatic and universal dismissal from serious contention for major literary prizes.

The very term genre fiction carries a stigma of cookie-cutter lack of quality. Unfairly, all examples are judged by the worst among them. Pulp fiction from 50 years ago continues to define academic response to genre fiction today.

This despite many mainstream writers pilfering genre tropes, fen complain. How come it’s okay when they do it?

It’s how they do it, comes the response from the snob side of the divide. Learn to write better, the mainstream critics sneer.

By whose standards? That should be the question. If it is acknowledged that different standards apply, then it must also be acknowledged that a given work may simultaneously be excellent and terrible, depending on what critic is making the assessment.

Can the standards merge?

In the 1970s, a New Wave hit genre fiction, especially science fiction. Writers brought many new tricks, from mainstream literary writing classes. Purists balked. Pulp standards of writing developed by scientists and engineers, who concentrated on idea and plot, became Golden, while the New Wave stuff was viewed as effete, affected, and ineffectual. Who wanted all those characters cluttering things up; genre fiction required only cardboard cut-outs as place markers for ideas.

And so the debate devolved at once into name calling and posturing. It remains acrimonious to this day, despite decades of excellent work meshing the competing standards.

Which brings us back to Ursula K. LeGuin’s remark about miscegenation. She’s not sure genre benefits from an influx of mainstream elements?

First, consider the source of this comment; the latest issue of LOCUS, the newspaper of science fiction and fantasy publishing. She was speaking to a select audience and perhaps playing to its perceived prejudices.

Second, consider that LeGuin’s work itself represents some of the finest merging -- miscegenation -- available. She has always written pure science fiction with high mainstream standards of prose and character, setting and theme. Her work is neither white nor black but bronze and brown, a burnished alloy combining the best of both.

Third, consider that miscegenation is an old-fashioned, outdated word, long overdue for an overhaul. Perhaps that is what we can learn from her comment, that the new mix, as with hybrids everywhere, is stronger and healthier than either of its parents.

Of the New Wave herself, LeGuin may be looking forward to a time when the only consideration is not genre versus mainstream, but quality of writing. A good story well told is all that matters, in the end. Categorical thinking should be a thing of the past, an embarrassment like racism or any other kind of prejudice and bigotry.

Sure, some of us will always prefer stories with certain types of elements in them; that’s a matter of taste and education. But excluding work, not even giving it a chance, simply because it emphasizes one set of standards over another, or contains one set of elements and not another, is absurd.

It simply does not matter what percentage of what kind of “blood” one carries from one’s ancestry, and it simply does not matter what percentage of what arbitrary literary grouping a story contains.

We need to be better than that, like the best of today’s fiction.

/// /// ///

Ficta Mystica: A Manifesto

2008-09-12T11:31:00.000-07:00

Seeing Through Words

So yesterday I finally had a breakthrough in solving a knotty problem that has puzzled me, and Susie, and some others, for a long, long time. Years, perhaps decades.

The quandary? How to present my work, especially my novels, so the agents and publishers will see them as part of a unified marketable whole. My novels do not tend easily to fall into an established category. This makes it hard for agents and publishers to see a way to promote me, or to isolate an audience my work will appeal to. So I need a kind of market imprint, a trademark, a branding of sorts, so that they can make Gene Stewart your one-stop shopping source for a given consistent experience.

Tough, hm?

Jay Lake, fellow member of the Omaha Beach Party despite being based in Portland, published Mainspring and Escapement through Tor. They are his most visible works. They are both set in a world that takes the Clockmaker's Universe literally -- the planets all move on big brass gears and so on -- so he coined the term Clockpunk to describe this. it's become a sliver genre and he is its main source.

Good marketing. You like this, here's where to get more.

Okay, so Susie and I discussed my novels. What, if anything, do they have in common. And we came up with epiphany. All of them, in one way or another, deal with an individual confronting an unseen, unknown world, or hidden agenda, and having to deal with the consequences of a wider viewpoint. That is epiphany.

Well, okay, fine, but now we need a way to express that, one that looks good or sounds catchy, etc. We were fooling around with the -punk suffix, the blank-punk formula, like Cyberpunk, Steampunk, Clockpunk, etc. All we came up with were the lame Epiphapunk, or the confusing Eurekapunk.

Neither of those were going to work.

Then I dug back into my search for a term to describe my writing in terms of realism. I'd jokingly called it Gothic Realism, but that's inaccurate, as I don't use moldy castles and vampires, even if I do often capture the eeriness. I looked at irreality, noir, and surrealism, and many others both academically formal and otherwise, but none fit my work well.

Words are not story.

Then it struck me: what I'm writing is, always one way or another, mystical. It peers, or leaps, into other worlds, and deals with unseen forces. Mysticism informs the work. Revelations, epiphanies, and the shamanic experience infuse my work. Most of what I write includes such tropes and topos as hallucinatory changes, encounters with strange Others, and so on.

So I dug into all that and also into Fiction as a conceptual term, looking into the academia.

What I came up with is this:

Mystical realism describes what I'm up to most of the time. Mysticism informs all my work, be it writing, art, or music, fine, but Mystipunk sounds too much like Mistah Punk. We can't really call it Mystic Punk, either, because the punk part is a wobbly fit at best, and the term sounds stupid anyway.

I write mystica. I present the Vista Mystica, the mystical vision, or involve my characters in it. Here, then, is the term I've created:

Ficta Mystica.

It is the fiction of mystical realism.

Ficta Mystica includes such mottos, watchwords, and principles as: Nonfactual truth, avoiding facts to reveal a truth, and the notion that In story lies reality. Want facts? Read nonfiction. Want truth? Ficta Mystica. The notion that only by telling a story can a truth be revealed is an ancient one.

I can see sayings pulled from such ideas appearing on tee shirts and used in essays, articles, and reviews. It's a good promotable movement with a commercially sexy & marketable aspect to it, with many evocative, intriguing memes attached to it.

Best of all, it developed without me noticing, naturally, over the course of my 42 years of writing. It’s not a label to be slapped onto any old container, it is an organic result of growth, the grain in my fiction’s wood.

Finally I’ll have an answer when people find out I’m a writer and ask me what I write.

I write to reveal what words cannot say.

Ficta Mystica.

///

Finished Center's Edge

2008-09-09T19:45:00.001-07:00

Wrote 5600 words and finished Center’s Edge today, after having it interrupted on 9/11/01. A lot of years for a 62,000 word novel. A lot of struggle, too. Can’t say it purged anything. Nor what it means, really.

Wrote at it in a relaxed, enjoyable, and also a thoughtful, deliberate way all day, from 9AM to about 5:30PM. It’ll be seen as horror or dark fantasy; that’s fine. Dark infests it. Means a lot to me because 9/11 was a body blow and just to have brought Center’s Edge to a satisfactory conclusion means I’ve made it this far. Maybe that’s all it means, but I doubt it. It’s a very strange story.

Now comes all the worry and impossibility of marketing, all the second-guessing. It’s too short, too weird, and has multiple viewpoint -- all the things viewed as flaws in the current climate. All the things that it’s not, or that it should be. Change this, rewrite that, why bother with the rest of it?

Finishing a novel is celebratory for some and at least a good feeling for most. I just cringe because it means the good part is over and now the bad part starts.

After I cringe I keep working on other novels. Writing I love. The rest is pushing balls of shit that outweigh you up a steep hill for snobs who wait at the top to judge you and who expect you to be spotlessly clean if you get there.

/// /// ///

Old Clothes

2008-08-31T21:39:00.001-07:00

A quilt made by my great grandmother lay on my bed all through childhood and in fact well into adulthood and marriage. On the floor, to keep my bare feet from touching cold floorboards each morning, lay a spiral rug also made by my great grandmother. It consisted of braids twisted from discarded clothes, sewn into a spiral. Her quilts were also made from discarded clothes.

If physical material is infused with the spirits of the people who use them, then those old clothes would have been redolent with family. To live surrounded by such items, made useful again by craft, concentration, and concern; to sleep under the touch and to have one’s warmth conserved on frigid nights by such items; to be encompassed in one’s life by passed-on touch transformed by love was surely a blessing beyond words.

We rarely dwell in such embrace now. Our family’s touch has gone from constant and sure to brief and tentative. Old clothes now are discarded, not made into something useful again in daily ways. Our touch has become impractical and fleeting. I used to have mittens and scarves made by loving relatives and once even a nose warmer made by a caring teacher. I would sled and play in the snow for hours and never feel cold. Now?

Now I am cold even in store-bought Scottish wool. To bring back the reuse of old clothes and pass along a family’s touch, and warmth, would heal wounds I’ve sustained over the years since I last slept under one of my great grandmother’s quilts or stood to face each day on one of her spiral rugs.

/// /// ///

Know Your Rights by the Clash

2008-08-12T11:13:00.001-07:00

This is a public service announcement
With guitar
Know your rights all three of them

Number 1
You have the right not to be killed
Murder is a crime!
Unless it was done by a
Policeman or aristocrat
Know your rights

And number 2
You have the right to food money
Providing of course you
Dont mind a little
Investigation, humiliation
And if you cross your fingers
Rehabilitation

Know your rights
These are your rights
Wang

Know these rights

Number 3
You have the right to free
Speech as long as youre not
Dumb enough to actually try it.

Know your rights
These are your rights
All three of em
It has been suggested
In some quarters that this is not enough!
Well..............................

Get off the streets
Get off the streets
Run
You dont have a home to go to
Smush

Finally then I will read you your rights

You have the right to remain silent
You are warned that anything you say
Can and will be taken down
And used as evidence against you

Listen to this
Run

--THE CLASH

Here's Why So Serious

2008-07-20T16:56:00.000-07:00

How to explain the oxymoron of THE DARK KNIGHT?

The hero must become an outcast in order best to serve his chosen community, while the villain is neither evil nor mad, merely free.

A psychological depth resonates throughout this film. All the characters get to be human, with flaws, foibles, and admirable qualities. All get to make life choices we can relate to.

Joker is getting the attention and perhaps rightfully so, not just because Mr. Ledger died in January of an accidental drug mix and pneumonia.

Heath Ledger's final performance as Joker in THE DARK KNIGHT is being hailed because he so perfectly captures our misery, our anger, and our madness at seeing through the hypocrisy of rules as civilization stumbles and society's controls and controllers enact draconian extremes to keep the reigns of power in their grip. His villain is not evil, and not even malicious. It just wants to clear away the lies and have some blunt truth for once.

His villainy is of a liberating nature, whereas Batman's heroism stands for control, even fascism.

Go figure. It’s all right there for you, if you can count that high while gasping in awe. Moral dilemmas, ethical toss-ups, and even the balance of action with inaction all strip away pretense. Poses won’t do suddenly. That's why an angry man fails and a prisoner and presumed criminal succeeds at one point: only the criminal can think far enough outside the box of imposed rules to do something both perfectly obvious and utterly right. Everyone else is stymied, and this is telling.

There is no room for the free individual anymore. Repent, Harlequin, said the Ticktockman, as Harlan Ellison once put it.

Ledger's Joker is all too sane. That's part of what makes him so scary. He has actually thought it all out and knows full well what he's doing and why, and he understands the rules and definitions he'll be breaking, and goes ahead anyway because to do anything else is to be untrue to himself.

He moves quickly sometimes, but mostly is still or posed, and warily predatory. It's an amazingly complex performance.

He simply is a free individual in a locked-down, fearful world of total control freakism. Which makes him a freak.

His clown makeup says it all: I'm dead to you, hence the whiteface, but I'm just a joke to you, because you've all surrendered already to the fascists. Now watch me burn.

He says at one point: "Everything burns."

Whether it wants to or not, he might have added.

And so THE DARK KNIGHT puts it, too. Lie to the citizens and hold secret meetings to decide how things will be? Spy on 30 million people to find one person labeled a terrorist? Violate rights to cut through red tape and even law? Torture to get information regardless how reliable it is?

Why so serious? Indeed, why such tight collective control? Because we fear the wild creature within each of us, the Free Individual, which is to say the one free from restraints and restrictions, rules and regulations, free from control by others.

Fear of someone doing what ever they want.

And the funny thing is, those at the top, in power, do exactly that, all in the name of protecting us from such people. All in the name of restoring order, which means control.

THE DARK KNIGHT, especially via Joker’s rational anarchy and reasoned chaos, lets us question all this and much more. It is simultaneously a very public and very private kind of movie. Part of it demands yelling and fists raised in strong feeling, but much of it insists upon silent reflection and some deep, hard thinking.

That's Ledger's legacy, a role allowing us all to hope for oblivion while ignoring the pain and courting a final, all-out confrontation with society's extremes.

At one point Joker mutters for Batman to hit him with a speeding motorcycle. He genuinely wants release from the misery of existence, and he knows only when they collide will they touch the essence of the yin-yang dilemma.

Because then light and dark is One. For however brief an instant, that touch, that merging of forces, is all that counts, and will obliterate all the lies and compromises, all the shortcomings and cheats, all the deceptions and hidden agendas that have brought it all to this.

The image of our world may well be a jackboot's heel being ground into a human face, but the spark of life, and the only moment of truth in our world, is when face meets face in equal confrontation at full speed.

Anything less is another loss.

Do we want to settle for letting our outcasts enforce our imprisonment, or do we want to break free and act on our own behalf to change the slaughter to laughter?

This movie elevates the super hero movie to serious art and it does so effortlessly, largely on the shoulders of an actor whose work is done. By all means see it on the big screen and come away changed.

/// /// ///

Not This Little Black Duck, or: That's All, Folks

2008-07-14T09:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.alternet.org/images/managed/storyimage_thumb_newyorker.jpg

Here’s what Don Hazen, editor at AlterNet, had to say about the NYer cover depicted here: “The New Yorker magazine hits the news stands today [Mon 14 July 2008] with a shocking cover -- a caricature of Barack and Michelle Obama depicting the presidential candidate in a turban, fist-bumping his wife who has a machine gun slung over her shoulder, while the American flag burns in the fireplace. The cover is shocking in that it depicts the Obamas in bizarre caricatured images and associations which reflect the very stereotypes with which the conservatives, particularly Fox News, have been trying to frame both the Obamas. Thus, instead of satire, the cover becomes a political poster for conservatives to reinforce their messages.”

The article went on to give the Obama campaign’s reaction:

Bill Burton, a spokesman for Obama, said in a statement: "The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree."

So, on the grounds that Americans are too unsophisticated to get satire, and too literal to understand how a literal depiction of the right’s smear of Obama reveals its essential absurdity, they condemn the cover.

This is more revealing than the cover itself.

Why should certain things, such as Mohammed, be off-limits to political satire and cartoons? Should anything be?

What we’re seeing is Obama supporters trying to twist things not to their favor, but toward censorship. Toward political correctness as a weapon to fight free expression of complex, subtle ideas. They are demonizing irony.

If the right takes the cover up as a poster for its bigotry, so what? That merely reflects the right’s core idiocy and vile mean-spiritedness.

If the stupid among us can’t grasp the difference between a pointed political cartoon and a documentary photograph, so what? Perhaps offering actual education in place of indoctrination in America’s schools would eventually improve such a dismal performance.

To penalize the satire is not only willfully missing the point, it is to take one more step toward the fascism that is corroding what was once the USA.

Freedoms and liberty should be precious, not convenient. Are we to stand idly by as liar and lunatics dictate the terms of public discourse? To cite another satire few have ever understood: “Not this little black duck.”

Here’s what Warner Bros. says about Daffy, by the way: “As his personality gained depth at the hands of Warner Bros cartoons’ directors, the little black duck became more self-analytical, competitive, peevish, paranoid, and neurotic... Daffy, like the Greek hero Sisyphus, is a victim of injustice who continuously protests. And it’s his refusal to surrender his will to the whims of the conspiring universe that makes him heroic”.

It’s always like that for satire, and any other intelligent art. The masses never get it, and it’s used against the masses by cynical manipulators with ulterior motives and hidden agendas.

As it was with the Mohammed cartoons in Denmark, so it is now with this NYer cover cartoon. Intolerance and a lack of any sense of humor are being used in tandem to crush dissent. In this specific instance, it is also being used to suppress and condemn the unmasking of a vile right canard.

Does it occur to no one allegedly in the Obama camp, let alone anyone in favor of freedom and liberty of the First Amendment varietal, that taking the cover’s depiction seriously as a literal truth, rather than seeing it for a scathing revelation, is precisely what the right wants? That refusing to see how it explodes the absurdity of the notions it depicts is precisely what the blinkered, ditto’d right does? That embracing the cover’s mockery of the ideas the cartoon so acidly attacks would be exactly the antidote to such prejudicial stereotypes?

So either the Obama side of things isn’t as slick as its PR would have us believe, or it has cynically decided to stand with the right by playing to the Lowest Common Denominator mentality and stirring up fake, distracting controversy rather than engaging genuine issues.

Seem familiar, folks?

Plus ça change, plus c’est la méme chose.

Rush Limbaugh started out as an anti-right satirist, until the right, being literalist and stupid, took what he was saying not as mockery but as confirmation. At that point, he decided to shill for pay and became what is laughingly called a pundit. The creation of the ego-monster, the lunatic gas-bag, the mindless mouth that not even oxycontin can close, came about simply by taking satire as validation.

This failure to laugh is a failure to puncture the pretense, and only worsens the pretentious among us.

The emperor has no clothes, shouts the NYer cover, but before the crowd can laugh and clear away the compliance born of fear and the conformity born of collective silence, the laughter is cut off by shrill accusations that the little boy who cried out the emperor’s nakedness is a sexual pervert who must be punished. And so the crowd falls upon the boy, stones and beheads him, and the oppression of idiocy goes on.

So by all means become outraged that a cartoonist on the cover of a nationally prominent magazine dared to show the plain truth about the right’s nonsensical accusations, in order to emphasize how silly they are. Because your outrage will demonize such revelations of truth, and help ensure the continued fascist dictatorship of fear, compliance, conformity, and willful ignorance and blindness that has made what’s left of this country what it is today.

The One Party of the USSA has spoken and only Big Brother is left smirking in the shadows.

/// /// ///

“A Slim Chance of Mimetic Redemption, or:

2008-07-07T08:32:00.000-07:00

“A Slim Chance of Mimetic Redemption, or:
Fun With Your New Soul,
An Open Letter to
The Now Closed Thomas M. Disch”
by
Gene Stewart

Dear Mr. Disch,

You were, they say, depressive, and prone to the vicissitudes of being gay in a world that was not. White Fang Goes Dingo, indeed. These were things I never knew, although there were probably hints in your elegant stories too subtle for this reporter. You missed your partner, Charles Naylor, and remained kind and generous to individuals with temerity enough to approach you while maintaining a reputation as a cantankerous and often regally vicious curmudgeon.

It has, yes, occurred to me that your suicide may well prove, down the line, to be another of your seamless literary hoaxes.

You wrote and published poetry at award-winning levels and issued theater and opera criticism, all matters guaranteed to confuse this reporter, who liked his opera in space, his theater sf’nal. And it was in those realms you never disappointed. From Camp Concentration and The Puppies of Terra to 334, your work shown with intelligence, irony, and wit absent from the majority of whiz-bang dreams our stuff was made of, and always there were eye-widening ideas offered or subversive, sly angles taken to startle readers into glimpsing what science fiction could, sometimes, aspire to in the literary realm.

Even your horror -- The Businessman: A Tale of Terror for the consumer unit who likes to think about what’s being done to him; The M.D.: A Horror Story, a deliciously dark mockery of what we laughingly call medicine, which first does grave harm; The Priest: A Gothic Romance, touching, dare one say groping, on pedophilia; and The Sub: A Study in Witchcraft of the sort performed on malleable young minds by teachers -- spun new yarn from old thread, and wove it into patterns delightful and dark. Behind the fun, a cynicism breathtaking took wing, darting with the light touch of bats avoiding blows.

You were home-schooled, always advanced, and you were Catholic, always looking back in piercingly critical observations about the church and its ways, as in The Priest. You reserved your loathing perhaps too much for yourself, given how much legitimate contumely you had to spread among the types represented by your horror novels.

Like another well-known curmudgeon mysteriously called Harlan Ellison, you found the Army, and regimentation of any kind, maddening, a fact reflective of the freedom, including of sexuality, found celebrated so well in your book On Wings of Song.

You supposedly once said this: "I have a class theory of literature. I come from the wrong neighborhood to sell to The New Yorker. No matter how good I am as an artist, they always can smell where I come from.” And you were as good as the best of them, those others, the snobs and elite who kept tight ranks in the literary deer park that reserves big money and, more importantly, serious acclaim and the possibility of success that lasts generations for itself, specifically withholding it from the likes of genre writers like you. Bitterness set in, did it not, sir? And your best work was as pearls before swine.

To subvert them by reaching into the delicate minds of their children, you gave us all The Brave Little Toaster, later sending him to Mars, thus luring them into science fiction as well as fantasy. Even the animated version, in a touch of grace, retained your fundamental qualities, brilliantly offering hope even to the mere appliances of a world run by other orders of being, an optimistic, if sarcastic, dream for the useful work-doers such as us. Such work detonates in young minds like 102 H-bombs.

But now we learn you have finally gotten into death, an exclusive club from which you were barred for 68 wearisome years. Your reputation will echo ‘round the bones of your work left for us to gnaw upon, and the genocidal writers among us especially will have no idea how best to remember you, even as their own work shows influences of your elegance, your antic irony, and your dry wit. You died a prisoner of neighboring lives, leaving us only the word of god pinned against the wall of America; we can but hope you have fun with your new soul as we read again and again the words you arranged for us before you left.

Sincerely,

Black Alice (Clara & Alfred Reeve)

P.S. - Mr. Disch apparently used the sounds of the Fourth of July to cover the sound of his gunshot, a courteous celebration of a kind of freedom most of us lack the courage to engage.
--A.R.

Waiting for Better

2008-06-30T12:03:00.000-07:00

“Waiting For Better”
by
W B Kek

We touched the moon a dozen times
Before we fell to earth
Where hunger rots the feast of peace
And war is all we’re worth.
It costs ourselves, our children, too,
To keep the fighting stoked.
We burn what graces sins accrue
As death gods we invoke.
“Forget the heights, explore the depths,”
Our battle cry implores.
And yet a glimmer far above us
Calls to distant shores
The best of us, their spark not dead --
Ambitions unfulfilled.
If few respond, at least those few
May justify blood spilled
And leave behind this legacy
Of taunting every fate
In favor of a higher goal.
The worst comes as we wait
For better lives.

/// /// ///

An Email to a Friend In CA

2008-06-28T17:16:00.000-07:00

Trees down everywhere. I can hear chainsaws even as I write this.

We had 125,000 without power, but I think it's down under 50,000 now, perhaps fewer.

My eldest son left the house scoffing at the email warning I had just received. Five minutes later, as I fumbled to send a Text Message to him, he called and said he was turning back and that we should head to the basement. It was blue sky and calm where I stood in our front yard when I got that call.

I was outside to stop my middle son from driving over to pick up his girlfriend. I asked if he'd do it in twenty minutes or so, after the storm blew over. He was going to ignore me when my eldest son called. He then listened to reason and put his Corvette back into the garage.

As he came out of the garage, I stepped up onto the porch and wham, he, just behind me, was pelted by hailstones. It hit instantly, almost without warning, and there were 100 mph winds.

We ducked, my eldest made it back, and he got utterly soaked running from car to house. Meanwhile, my wife was at Jazzercise, and would be en route home soon. She has no cell phone. So I came upstairs to see how bad things were getting when I spotted large branches blocking the street. My middle son saw them too and ran out to clear the street so my wife wouldn't have to.

He was drenched as if he'd gone through a car wash, of course. He said it felt sort of like that, too. We watched him almost be blown over a couple times.

After this we ducked some more in the basement, and once it rolled over, we came up and my wife got home and we began clearing debris.

Two big van loads of debris from our yard alone was taken to the dump site. They had to establish sites all over Omaha and Bellevue for the incredible amount of stuff that was down.

At the top of our street, on the street intersecting it, in two spots, major branches blocked the street from sidewalk to sidewalk.

Cops announced no one should drive the rest of Friday night and into Saturday morning, so the clean-up crews could clear road and emergency crews deal with downed power lines and so on.

We were lucky, no power outage and no damage to vehicles or house, but all around us are damaged roofs, destroyed trees, and some local flooding.

Thank goodness climate instability is just a liberal myth, huh?

Now how about the fires out your way? Any of them affecting you?

Night Brooding

2008-06-14T23:27:00.000-07:00

Plonk: In drops the heavy thought that we are gearing up to wind down. My wife and I watched 12 MONKEYS this evening. I'd seen it before but had forgotten how good it is. It struck me that it foreshadows M. Night Shyamalan's THE HAPPENING and CHILDREN OF MEN and 28 DAYS LATER and so on, at least in the foreboding sense of inevitable doom. Apocalyptic themes are not uncommon in movies but those like the ones I mention are films with an eerily prophetic feel.

Time and again plague is cited in such fictions. The Stand by Stephen King is his best-selling book and it's a doorstop about a plague bringing about mankind's end and, with it, the final showdown between Good and Evil. Albert Camu's The Plague, by contrast, comes off, despite its bleakness, as elegantly hopeful.

A sentiment that crops up regularly is that mankind deserves to be wiped out or does not deserve to survive. Our excesses, our cruelties, and our general rampage of indiscriminate destruction are cited, and even brief references to specific examples convince us to nod in agreement.

We feel guilty and crave punishment. We feel ashamed and dive into depression and self-negation, dragging the world with us.

I would argue this is quite a serious theme for popular entertainment. Oh, sure, its okay for writers and directors to get artsy but the fact of us eating up morose works like these speaks of a possible universality underlying the sentiment of approaching and deserved doom

That's why I wonder if we are all sensing something that's really looming.

Of course, history shows me any number of examples of millennialism. Crying doom is a lucrative cottage industry and doomsday is a cult-leader's best spiel. It is even religion's cornerstone in many major cases. Shrinks tell us it's just good old personal mortality being projected into paranoid fantasies and perhaps so, for the most part.

Trouble is, these things have a way of being self-fulfillling prophecies. Cults suicide, wars escalate, and science errs in favor of annihilation. It is not difficult to see where straight-line trends lead. Over population plus antibiotic-resistant diseases multiplied by jet travel equals a dead loss for humanity.

And how soon we forget how close we've come before during, say, the Black Death or the 1918 flu pandemic. Perhaps this creeping dread we all feel is ancestral memory of other end times when only small percentages of populations survived.

What we need to do is fight the sense of inevitability and overcome the inertia that keeps us doing the same suicidally stupid things over and over. Breaking the cycle of pollution, of subjugating nature to our whims rather than trying to live with and within it, and of killing and obliteration wars bring us would go a long way toward proving the doomsayers wrong. Let those terrifying visions of what has almost been and what might very well soon be teach us object lessons. Our own actions can turn these dystopias into mere cautionary tales, if we but heed their warnings.

If this goes on the lights go off for good.

Why not stop the stampede before reaching the cliff's edge?

/// /// ///

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, A Review

2008-06-10T15:36:00.000-07:00

This is a documentary about his 1977 arrest for statutory rape. It’s new and highly rated, having debuted at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. It shows how his arrest was based as much on who and what he was as any possible crime, one he denies. His background is interesting in itself, from his mother murdered by Nazis in Poland, his father’s death-camp internment, and his own abandonment to fend for himself to his rapid rise to celebrity in 1960s London based on his early Polish films, his marriage to Sharon Tate, her murder by the Manson Family, and his dalliance with 13 year old Samantha Geimer that led to his status as an outlaw on the lam.

His supporters, including defense attorney Doug Dalton, maintain it was a set of trumped up charges rather similar to the persecution of Michael Jackson, based on the prosecutors’ view that Roman Polanksi was a decadent Eurotrash sicko steeped in perversion. A Mormon prosecutor was assigned the case and it went to a judge who asked for the case because he liked celebrity cases. Judge Rittenband loved the media and ran his courtroom like a tyrannical director. He had Hollywood pals and attended country club parties. He even kept a scrapbook and took telegrams to reserve seats in at the trial.

Polanksi was short, foreign, and spoke with a heavy accent. He was considered perverse due to his weird movies and veiled background. A malign dwarf, he was called. He riled their anti-intellectual, anti-cultural, and anti-European ire while inflaming other, more visceral bigotries, such as success envy.

His trial was scheduled, perversely, for the eighth anniversary of Polanksi’s wife Sharon Tate’s murder. Samantha Geimer, the 13 year old girl who took ‘ludes and allowed herself to be seduced in a hot tub, having been left there with Polanski by her own mother, was called a corrupt little high-school vixen and slutty model wannabe.

The Mormon prosecutor, to find out about Polanski, watched his films at a handy restrospective at a nearby theater. He watched everything from KNIFE IN WATER through ROSEMARY’S BABY and decided all the films had a theme of the corrupt leading the innocent into corruption over water. So he prosecuted on those grounds; that Polanski had lured a 13-year old all-American girl to her moral doom, rape, in a jacuzzi.

No one at the time noticed how surreal this was. Had Roman Raymond Polanski been around in 1947 he might have had the Black Dahlia murder pinned on him.

As it was, Sharon Tate’s death at the hands of the Manson Family was perhaps worse. Polanski was shattered, devastated, and flew from London, where he’d been in talks to direct DAY OF THE DOLPHIN. The papers at once blamed him for the murders, actually claiming he had flown stateside, killed them, then had flown back to London.

Again, no one at the time noticed how surreal this was.

Imagine living through all he had -- the loss of parents in the Holocaust, surviving alone as a preteen in a war-shattered Eastern Europe, the murder of your wife and child and friends by the Manson Family -- without becoming a madman, a drug addict, or a suicide. He dived into society to keep from being alone, one psychologist said, observing how Polanski kept up his social calendar no matter what happened to him. It was his way of staying stable; avoiding too much solitude.

Of course, this led him to earn a reputation as a party animal, one who liked very young girls. He had famously discovered Natassia Kinski when she was 15, affair and all. A psychologist commented that, especially after the loss of his wife, Sharon Tate, and the stability she had offered him, Polanski, a man with no life map, no blueprint for how to live, fell back upon being wary to the point of fear of relationships with adult women.

What ever the case, Samantha Geimer, at 13, was introduced into the social swirl surrounding Roman Polanski, famous director, by her mother, or so the press claimed, and left alone with him as a seduction ploy that was part of a casting couch blackmail scheme. Geimer later testified that she had been nervous after the first photo shoot Polanski conducted for the French edition of VOGUE, when he’d asked her to change in front of him. She said of the incident in the jacuzzi, which took place on 10 March 1977 in Jack Nicholson’s house in Los Angeles, that he had plied her during the shoot with both champagne and quaaludes to relax her and that, once he had her in the water and was pressuring her for sex, she said no several times but finally “gave up on that.” She sounds like a little girl who was pressured for something she was not ready for, caught in a situation she did not know how to escape. Whether it was part of her mother’s plan or not, statutory rape is exactly what it sounds like.

One thinks of Mary Miles Minter, her mother, and the murder of William Desmond Taylor. How dangerous, the fires Polanski seemed to play with and dance among. Is it any wonder that, after ROSEMARY’S BABY, he took on, in the press at least, a Satanic aura?

So, was this a case of tit for tat gone awry? Her mother was an aspiring actress who described herself as “an extra” to Polanski upon first meeting him. Samantha Geimer, grown now, denies it was part of any scheme and considers it just something that happened and that she got over. She is now married with three children and has put the incident behind her. She says it was not what anyone claimed.

Polanski pled guilty to consensual sex with a minor on his lawyer’s advice, based on the fact that no one had been sent to prison on that plea in years. However, the law allowed for a sentence of 6 months to 50 years in a state prison.

The judge ignored a probation psychiatric report saying Polanski was not a degenerate and should not go to prison, and sent him for a 90-day observation period at Chino for a diagnostic study, in order to punish him without allowing him legal room for appeal. The judge then told the attorneys to fake their pleas in court so the press would think it was not worked out in advance. The deal being that, if Polanski got a good report after 90 days, which all expected, then it would end the punishment and he could walk away a free man.

So the lawyers stood in court, faked their arguments, then listened to Judge Rittenband read a lenghty conclusion obviously written ahead of time, all so the media would not lash back at him.

Oh, and Polanski was then granted a 90-day stay so he could finish the movie he was directing.

Polanksi fled the country. Or did he? He was caught at the airport and laughed off suggestions that he would not be back, saying it was a business trip to Europe to talk to his financiers.

A random photographer caught a shot of Polanski in a Oktoberfest tent in Munich sitting between two pretty girls, smoking a cigar, and Judge Rittenband took this as an insult. He issued a growly order for Polanski to return at once to California. All this because no one would hire Polanski except the schlock producer Dino De Laurentis, who had insisted on business drinks in Munich. Absurdity once again stalked Polanski.

Random observation: Polanski sure rode in crap cars more than a few times, back in the 1970s.

He returned stateside and went to the 90-day stint at Chino, where he was afraid the other inmates would get to him and kill him, which they threatened to do to all child molesters. He was kept in protective custody but the danger was real, as others had been killed there in similar circumstances.

Chino authorities on the probation board let him out after 42 days had been served, saying there was no reason to keep him further. Naturally the prosecutor called this a free pass, the press howled for Polanski’s blood, and Judge Rittenband felt personally pressured.

By now the judge could not stand the heat, and announced he was going to go back on his promise to release Polanski after time served at Chino. This was the deal he himself had forced on the attorneys. He literally said a prison sentence must be maintained for the press.

He told the defense attorney that he would sentence Polanski in open court, then, after the press had left, would meet with the attorney in chambers to release Polanski into defense attorney Dalton’s custody. the judge then demanded Polanski sign papers waiving deportation rights.

The lawyer Dalton countered that he wanted a hearing in public so the deal would be on the record and the judge threatened to withdraw the offer.

Neither prosecutor nor defense attorney wanted any part of Judge Rittenband’s plans and the prosecutor told Dalton he would tell anyone at any time what the judge had tried to pull. No one could trust Judge Rittenband now.

Polanski heard about all this, said, “Gentlemen, I’ll be seeing you,” and left the offices. He drove to De Laurentis’s house, where, De Laurentis claims with a twinkle in his eye, “I handed him an envelope with, as I recall, some scripts and notes in it.” Polanski then flew to Paris, France.

He fled an out-of-control judge laying a railroad for him. And France’s extradition laws barred the US from forcing Polanski to return.

When Polanski did not show in court, Judge Rittenband held a press conference on the pending case, which was unprecedented. The defense and prosecution then held a conference announcing all the judge’s machinations, which forced Rittenband out.

Samantha Geimer summed it up well. She said, “the judge was enjoying his publicity and did not care what happened to me or to Mr. Polanski.”

Roman Polanski is 74 and remains wanted stateside.

Recently the two opposing attorneys in the case presented arguments to a new judge, who agreed that, if Polanski came back, he would serve no more time and could clear himself of all charges. He stipulated the hearing would have to be held in public, with TV cameras, no doubt mindful of Rittenband’s secrecy and wishing to avoid all appearances of such deception.

When he learned the hearing that would fulfill his legal obligations to the state of California would be televised, Polanski declined to return, so the case remains unresolved.

Polanski lives in Paris. He speaks six languages, lives a cosmopolitan life of parties and culture, and is one of the most respected directors in movies. France has embraced him, and he has embraced France, his birthplace and his likely final resting place.

ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED (in USA) and DESIRED (in France) is a worthwhile portrait of an interesting man.

/// /// ///

Hoodwinked by Hollywood Again

2008-06-09T10:07:00.000-07:00

Okay, here's my take.

While watching it, it's fun, but a cartoon. Yes, the Tarzan bit pushed it too far but I found the fridge bit perfect -- for a Bugs Bunny Cartoon. The prairie dogs were irrelevant and overly cutesy -- Lucas at his worst -- but more importantly failed as a set-up for the monkeys, one of dozens of instances of writing chances ignored, dropped, or muffed.

After watching the movie, during what Hitchcock called the Refrigerator Logic period, I realized how abysmal the movie is. It's so badly written as to be inept. There are endless set-ups that never pay off or follow through, the FBI sub-plot being but one glaring example. The entire movie is derivative. I was reminded of THE SIMPSONS and their vicious satire of Lucas, in which his character says at one point: "I feel like writing: Quick! To the video store!"

They have him pegged.

By seeing INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULLS, we also saw parts of the movies THE AVENGERS, HITHCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, STALLION GATE, TARZAN, AMERICAN TREASURE, X-FILES: FIGHT THE FUTURE, KING SOLOMON'S MINES, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, and STARGATE, among others. There was not an original moment in the whole thing unless it was some clumsy attempt at humor or some mistimed, poorly phrased punch line.

As for that fridge, by the way: It was the only thing hurled intact from the site, everything else having been vaporized. Okay, Bugs would have made it work. But no refrigerator is lead-lined. And it wouldn't have mattered had it been. So adding that detail was egregious nonsense that shows how far up their own irreality they are. They're trying to convince us of Wile E. Coyote's pain here.

They pulled back from the third waterfall descent -- absurd, by the way, for its passivity and in the movie solely to set up the eventual thrill ride -- to reveal A FAMOUS WATERFALL IN AFRICA. This would be fine had we been in Africa, but we were in Amazonia; or had they altered it sufficiently with CGI to make it unrecognizable; but instead they relied on viewer ignorance. They'll never know, hee hee.

At the end of the destruction of the huge stone machine / temple ruins protecting the saucer, we see an ocean coming in to flood it. Now, remind me, would you? Exactly which ocean is it that's located at the heart of Amazonia? Don't tell me it's another instance of They'll Never Notice, hee hee... There are a lot of such moments in this movie, showing contempt for the audience and sheer apathy on the part of the film makers.

The Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls, by the way, is a huge set of ruins open to the air. This means it's easily visible from the air. And if it's supposed to be on a coast, then even the stone age peoples of 1957 would have found it and cataloged it by now. Here they seem to be using the past as a handy reference meaning Before Anyone Knew Anything, and it's more contempt, or stupidity. Hard to tell which.

The crystal skull used for most of the scenes looked like a molded 2-liter plastic bottle stuffed with crumpled plastic wrap. None of the actors even bothered trying to make it look like it had any heft or weight, as quartz that big sure would have. I was at once reminded of another famous McGuffin, the Maltese Falcon. That was a movie prop you could have crushed some skulls with.

The skull was shown to be magnetic with inert metals, but only when convenient. Other times, nothing. And it was never as wildly magnetic as the one in the hangar. Nor were the skeletons. And please note, the one in the hangar attracted iron, not other metals, according to Indy's dialogue. Despite this, aluminum dog-tags were shown being drawn to it -- and dog tags weren't worn by Russians... and later the skull attracts gold and other non-ferrous metals... and... why bother?

This plot device, this set-up, is yet another in a long chain that adds up to nothing and has no follow-through, or consequences. It's as if Indiana Jones could survive an atomic blast without so much as a bruise or scratch...

And some of the action scenes drew on so long I wondered if they weren't filler. Their absurdity had time to sink in, too: Why stop and fight it out when you can keep fighting and drive headlong at high speeds blindly through uncharted jungle along the side of a cliff? Talk about stacking the deck. Where were the flying dinosaurs? Well, there were monkeys... which were to reference the greasers from the soda shop fight earlier... but which did not because of ineptitude and a breathless rush to get to a piece of schtick that Johnny Weismuller would have refused to bother with.

At the end of the movie the torch is almost passed, then snatched back, as if Harrison Ford, knowing he doesn't have another Indiana Jones film in him, can't stand to see anyone else play the character while he's still alive. Either that, or he was doing Shia LeBeouf a huge favor and saving him from a fate worse than typecasting.

Altogether, it was a pretty concoction of mindless ideas woven into a very loose hugger-mugger plot. If I watched it again it would be too preposterous for me to enjoy and I'd end up taking it apart piecemeal.

Ultimate take on it? Wasn't worth the money it cost us to see it. Typical Hollywood post-literate cheat and knockoff. And I so wanted to like it, too. And yes, I understand it's supposed to echo the 1930s cliffhanger serials. Sad part is, it does, in all the wrong ways. Sorry Steven & George, you guys have both had it.

Churlish bastard, aren't I?

/// /// ///