The Pearce Sisters

The Pearce Sisters

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The Dreaded Facebook Warning

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

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Incubus Dream

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

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

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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

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.

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Mothers' Day is About Stopping War

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

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?

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