Well, I half-saw it; so maybe it was only half-awful.
As an English major I was painfully aware, sometimes, of how dreadful some stories could be. Directionless and pointless drivel which seemed of interest primarily for historical value, but certainly not for literary quality, was regularly heaved across my palate. I was subjected to the contrast of Nadine Gordimer versus Ayn Rand1; I was forced to read Sarah Grand2 while at the same time trying to appreciate George Eliot; I was subjected to Moby-Dick and Emma3 as though they were equals.
For recreation I indulged many casual tastes. Generally these were of the SF nature. Not Asimov — Foundation is too facile, too easy; not Bradbury, though I still love Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine; not Burgess, though Clockwork Orange is still just fucking amazing. No, for recreation I indulged instead the works of Philip K. Dick, Italo Calvino, Stanislaw Lem and Samuel R. Delany.
I became, in short, an SF literary snob.
And what amused and amazed me, in a good way, was how brilliant some SF really was; not just in the written realm. Babylon 5 was terrific, since it had a well-planted and -planned story arc and indulged the heresies of Lovecraft; Lain and Cowboy Bebop satisfied my craving for good animé coupled with my need for a solid, cogent story; and the very first time I saw Firefly — its premiere episode on Fox, when the series aired out of date and out of order — even then, I knew I was seeing something that would not last, could not persist; for it was far too good, far too deep, and far too original.
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I wrote this in 1999, a bit after Wisconsin Winter.
It is a lovesong for a cat.
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Hard to imagine it’s been that long.
Tuesday, 11 September 2001, America got a hell of a wake-up call.
I’m not going to recap what’s happened since then.
I just have an image that might be worth considering.
As a PDF.
Most of this is lifted directly from a comment I posted at Pam’s place regarding a “youth ministry” that recently offered a “free” Bible to anyone willing to send in five bucks to cover shipping costs.
Guess what?
They ran out of Bibles!
Allegedly.
Hmm. Wonder where all those Lincolns are going.
Anyway, a commenter there mentioned the Youth Bibles of the 1970s, which I actually remember. They were a Zondervan-style production done up in ways that would appeal — presumably — to the disaffected boys and girls living in a post-Beatles America, trying to make sense of how the Summer of Love had gone so terribly weird all of a sudden.
That reminded me of a specific Bible phenomenon of the 1980s: The Book. This was another modernized Bible done up in language accessible to late-20th-Century readers. Overall, not a bad idea necessarily, since knowing the one book that dictates so much about American culture isn’t a bad thing; however, there was a much more popular extrusion called The Story, which was given away for practically nothing ($2.99, if memory serves).
This was a very condensed form of The Book, was released as a pulp-sized rack edition, and was covered in yellow-colored stock that featured a hologram of a dove. (It was the 1980s. Printed holography was Teh Kewl then.) It was 300 or so pages long, written in novel style, with dialogue in quotes, and skipped over a lot of the begats to sort of get to the point, which was of course that Jesus is the Light of the bla bla bla.
Well, it seems the most current edition is something called the Teen Extreme Bible, which reminded me of the time, a couple years back, when the Bible was released as a pair of magazines.
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Tens of Millions Dead
China’s been in the news more and more lately, and not just because of contaminated pet food.
That was bad enough, of course — the idea that feeding your dog or cat a regular part of its regular diet might end up killing the poor animal is awful for any pet owner to contemplate. But it’s not just limited to pet food; medicines, toothpastes and even human foods have been indicted as contaminated. It eventually became so bad that Zheng Xiaoyu, former head of China’s State Food and Drug Administration, was killed for his extreme negligence and outright corruption.
But it’s not really getting better over there, is it? Mattel has had to recall something on the order of 9 million Chinese-manufactured toys because of high levels of lead in paint, and because, apparently, small but powerful magnets used in some toys represent pinch hazards.
This is pretty significant. There’s a history of corruption that clearly did not end with either the removal — or the killing — of Zheng Xiaoyu. It’s a very safe bet that what we’re seeing here is a more or less literal iceberg’s tip.
Why this should matter is the Three Gorges Dam project.
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I am an atheist. There is no god. I’m sure of that, as sure as I can be. I want to make that completely clear.
Still, this one makes me oogy-soft-warm-fuzzy.
I remember hearing this as a child and being deeply moved by it. I didn’t really grasp the references, but the music incised me and left its mark forever.
Unlike the current cult of hate-fanatics being raised to die or kill for a god that is not there, the children of the 1970s had a sense that god, if he existed, might not even be a he; and that was okay; as long as we could run through the fields and roll in the grass, as long as Mom and Dad loved us, we were doing all right.
It’s so beautiful, this song. It’s unabashedly worshipful; and yet, I love it so. It reminds me of summer in Nebraska, of my mom, young and pretty, smiling at me; it reminds me of endless seasons of bottomless, innocent love.
How sad I was then, only five and just starting to taste life, to think that people might die; how terrible it seemed to me that anyone could ever end. Never to see a fragrant summer’s day again. Never to wonder at the rain. Never again to hear Mom say, I love you.
Listen.
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Fifteen years ago Douglas Adams wrote a book called Last Chance to See. Unlike his Hitchhiker’s and Dirk Gently series, this was nonfiction; in it he chronicled the plight of a half dozen or so extremely endangered species — imperiled by human encroachment on their territories — and penned a beautifully-done memoir of desperation.
He wrote the following of the Yangtze River dolphin, a freshwater porpoise that was even then reduced to a population of perhaps 100, when contemplating the lives they must now be leading in the silty, polluted waters of one of the most industrialized rivers in the world:
As I watched the wind ruffling over the bilious surface of the Yangtze, I realised with the vividness of shock that somewhere beneath or around me there were intelligent animals whose perceptive universe we could scarcely begin to imagine, living in a seething, poisoned, deafening world, and that their lives were probably passed in continual bewilderment, hunger, pain, and fear.
Alas, that struggle has ended. The Yangtze River dolphin is extinct.
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Apparently Mr. Obama has forgotten something very important about the majority of voters in the US right now.
US presidential candidate Barack Obama has said he would order military action against al-Qaeda in Pakistan without the consent of Pakistan’s government.
Hey. Barack. Diplomacy first, last and always. War is the last recourse of a failed negotiator. It is not the first option of anyone but socially-maladapted cowboys.
We have had more than a bellyful of war and killing, and we are getting tired of asshat politicians, who know they will never be personally risking their lives, who seem so goddamned willing to put our boys and girls into harm’s way at a whim.
I’ve been keeping well away from the contenders’ races; I find all the current “candidates” contemptible. Not because they’re horrible people, but because many of them are elected officials now and seem to believe they should spend the next two years not doing the jobs they were hired to do so they can instead seek office elsewhere.
With the above declaration, though, I’m afraid Obama has lost any chance of gaining my respect or support.
It’s strange to learn that someone whom you didn’t know very well has affected you in subtle, slight ways. I met Robin Kornman about half a decade ago; the other members of the Milwaukee Shambhala sangha had good things to say about him and seemed pleased to learn he would be returning soon after a hiatus — I think at Naropa University — during which he was working on a translation of a Tibetan text, possibly the saga of Gesar.
I never had much opportunity to interact or talk with him, but what little I’d seen bode well. He was an energetic man with a puckish sense of humor and a genuine intelligence. He was gregarious, outspoken and possessed of a keen sense of sarcasm and general wit. The night of our first meeting several of us went to a little restaurant after meditation; he and I got into a very low-key argument about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He was convinced the books preceded the radio series; I was just as convinced he had it backward.
I liked him immediately.
He gave at least one talk at MSC, but the discussion — to my recollection — was of esoterica that I didn’t follow well.
Last night I learned that, in the last week or so, he’d had an adverse reaction to an unspecified medicine which was making breathing difficult for him. Soon thereafter he apparently collapsed. It seems he’d suffered a pulmonary embolism. He sank into a coma, was briefly on artificial life support, and then the plug was pulled. He died on July 31.
One of the hardest things about leaving Milwaukee was having to leave the sangha. It’s not a Buddhist church; it’s more along the lines of what Vonnegut might have called a karass. I still miss it, and I know today that some of the people I hold dear are hurting; and their hurt resonates a little with me too, even though I haven’t seen any of them in years.
And that’s probably the lesson I learned from Robin. Connections can be much deeper than we realize; and even though it might hurt, it’s part of our nature. And sometimes they’re too subtle to be felt until they have been severed.
We’re not technologically capable — yet — of literally destroying the world. What we are capable of, however, is rendering its surface utterly inimical to human life. From that rather self-centered perspective alone, then, we should be careful about what we develop, deploy and refine.
It doesn’t matter if we use atomics or fusion weapons. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the form of biotech or nanos. It doesn’t matter if it’s robots or particle cannons. The sick thrust to produce bigger, better and more effective killing technologies has cost us a more or less literal paradise on Earth. We have the power to transform our world into a peaceful place of health, well-being and happiness … and yet we stubbornly continue to choose not to.
For the money we have wasted waging war against one nation that did us no harm whatsoever we could have provided universal health coverage to all Americans and revitalized the education system. We could have and damned well should have been a beacon of hope and prosperity for the rest of the world — and instead we’ve become sad, clownish and self-satirizing.
We’re the most powerful nation in the history of our species and we’re pissing away our grandchildren’s inheritance — in the name of what?
That’s the part that rankles most about all the religious swarms. None of them seems to want to consider the possibility they might be wrong, that they might be killing hundreds or thousands of others in the name of something which simply doesn’t exist.
To behave in the way many of the religious do requires not simply arrogance, but total disregard for the humanity of others and total unconcern for anyone but one’s self. Religions which claim to promote altruism and self-sacrifice ultimately prove to be about selfishness and solipsism.
Religion short-circuits intelligence. Every time.
There is no do-over. There is no undo button. If we fuck ourselves off the Earth, we’re done. That’s it.
Part 4 of 5, continuing where we left off.
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Kurt Vonnegut, in Cat’s Cradle, wrote of the world’s end.
It came through a bizarre molecular structure, a “new” way for water to freeze at room temperature, melting only at about 114 or so degrees Fahrenheit. A crystal of this Ice-Nine fell into the sea, followed by what he described as The Great Ah-Whoom, the sound made by all the waters on Earth freezing solid in one moment.
I don’t imagine a nuclear apocalypse would sound like that. I imagine it would sound a lot more like the accounts we heard from the survivors of Hiroshima: Black rains falling on burned bodies, and the dying begging for water.
It’s simply incomprehensible to a thinking, feeling human being that anyone would want this kind of sorrow to fall on our world — yet apocalyptic Christian cults pray, every day, for such madness. They believe that it will presage the reign of Jesus Christ on his scorched Earth.
Bush has idenitfied himself prominently as being such a believer.
Continuing the series, Reality Check? 3.
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Sometimes the oddest things just irk me.
This sign is present outside of an area where various things are loaded and unloaded in the hospital’s hallway. Some of those things would seem very attractive to certain types of individual. The sign is there, of course, to basically keep honest people honest; a dedicated malfeasant wouldn’t give a good damn about the sign and would simply boost whatever he wanted, figuring — arguably correctly — that the odds of a clean escape were in his favor.
Okay, so what’s the problem?
Well, it seems that — despite the constant video surveillance — someone’s managed to steal our verb.
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