Sign of the Times
The Oakland Public Library is so strapped for cash they have an Amazon wish list .
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The Oakland Public Library is so strapped for cash they have an Amazon wish list .
Last Friday I finally saw a live production of "The Man of La Mancha", whose soundtrack is one of my favorites.
I really believe that
...the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars,
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star.
A lot of people, not without justification, lambast Hollywood's romanticizing mental illness, giving us countless examples of good craziness contrasted with sane evil. "The Ruling Class," "The Fisher King," "Don Juan DeMarco." And these are all cut from the same cloth as the story of Don Quixote.
Despite the objections, I'm still a sucker for these stories.
And I know
If I'll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart
Will lie peaceful and calm
When I'm laid to my rest
Tilt at a windmill today.
OK, not really .
An Aspen mountaineer who was pinned by a nearly 1,000-pound boulder for five days in a remote slot canyon in eastern Utah cut off his arm with a pocketknife, rappelled down a rock wall and hiked until he was found by a search helicopter Thursday afternoon.
Damn.
(Thanks, Geoff!)
It’s Free Comic Book Day ! Find a participating shop near you.
And today and tomorrow is the Berkeley Free Folk Festival which I’m having some difficulty not thinking of as the “A Mighty Wind” reality show.
The [U.S.] State Department report on global terrorism for 2002 suggests that while Canada has been helpful in the fight against terrorism, it doesn’t spend enough on policing and places too much emphasis on civil liberties. It says “some U.S. law enforcement officers have expressed concern” about Canadian privacy laws. The U.S. officers feel those laws, as well as funding levels for law enforcement, “inhibit a fuller and more timely exchange of information and response to requests for assistance,” the report says. “Also, Canadian laws and regulations intended to protect Canadian citizens and landed immigrants from government intrusion sometimes limit the depth of investigations.”
(Via Circadian Shift )
I was lukewarm about the first X-Men movie, but found myself really looking forward to the secord. And I really liked it. I hated The Matrix but find myself looking forward to its sequel. And the Hulk. And Bulletproof Monk which didn’t even register on my radar when it was released. And the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Pirates of the Caribbean. The Charlie’s Angels sequel (though I skipped the first one.) The Tomb Raider sequel. Kill Bill. Maybe even the third Terminator.
A preview on a video I watched last week was for Mortal Kombat, and I wanted to see that, too.
What does it all mean?
That I’m so frustrated and angry at the state of the world, so sick of feeling powerless to stop encroaching fascism, that I’m drawn to escapist power fantasies? Or am I just giving up and lining up at the trough for my bread and circuses, fiddling while the Constitution burns? (Don’t try mixing metaphors like that at home.)
Damned if I know.
And damned if I don’t.
A woman placed this personal ad :
Before I turn 67 — next March — I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.
She followed up on the 63 replies and has written a book about it.
(Thanks, Bonnie)
At Wondercon a week and a half ago, one of the books I picked up was a Too Much Coffee Man collection, Too Much Coffee Man’s Parade of Tirade.
In one non-TMCM-related sequence, two friends are talking in a cafe, and have this exchange:
Hey, listen, they’re playing that Brown-Eyed Girl song you like. You know what that song is really about, don’t you?
It’s about an interracial relationship.
Nope. It’s about butt-sex! …behind the stadium… down in the hollow, playing a new game… hiding behind the rainbow’s wall… slippin’ ‘n’ slidin’…
What’s the old man with a transistor radio mean?
I don’t know.
I refuse to believe that that song is about that.
It doesn’t matter what you believe, because now every time you hear that song you will think of…
That was one of my favorite songs.
It still could be.
It gets much worse. I looked up the lyrics . That old man with the transistor radio? No such beast. The line is “going down the old mine with a transistor radio.”
Did Wheeler know that, and in a pique of evil genius set readers up to make that discovery, further cementing this notion in their heads? I have no idea, but had to share.
You’re welcome.
Every so often I’ll see a house in a color whose name I imagine to begin “fuck-the-neighbors”, e.g. fuck-the-neighbors purple or fuck-the-neighbors green, the result, I imagine, of shutting up neighbors complaining the house needed painting.
In this guy’s case it’s fuck-the-historical-society green and purple.
With a large smile, he told gawkers at the lime-green house that he’s amended his list of chores to next include scattering old toilets, filled with geraniums, around the front yard.
(Via Cogito Ergo Sumana)
Draft2 (“Second Draft”), my writers group, established a minimum submission requirement. It’s very modest: three submissions a year (or equivalent — a novel satisfies a year’s requirement.)
I just submitted my first story of the year, the Prometheus retelling I mentioned before. I may have skimped a little on scene-setting toward the end. And, you know, characterization and literary merit.
But it resembles a story and it’s done.
To bed with me.
You do realize you could have just knocked on the door and we would have wheeled Jessica down to you, don’t you?
Be nice to get something we could be confident was the straight story, some day. I tend to doubt that’s possible even in theory, though.
(Via Left Coast Dementia )
Katy St. Clair asks what’s more punk rock than being fat? , offering this delightful slogan:
We’re here, we’re spheres, get used to it.
But in a world that lionizes unhealthy habits, I find fitness a more radical lifestyle than obesity.
Jon Carroll writes about the survivors of the Columbia explosion:
The good news: There were survivors of the crash of the space shuttle Columbia after all. The bad news: Said survivors were not humans but worms. The good news: The worms were Caenorhabditis elegans, one of the most beloved worms in all of Nematodeville.
Hundreds of C. elegans were on board the shuttle as part of an experiment to test a synthetic nutrient solution. Because the worms were found alive in the wreckage, it is probably fair to say that the experiment went pretty well.
Technically, the rescued worms were not the worms that survived the shuttle disaster. These worms are the great-great-grandworms of those original worms. They were found in their original container (along with some dead moss), so presumably, they were breeding before and after and perhaps during the disaster.
Imagine, your world is going to hell around you, you're falling out of the sky from 10 miles up, there's a fireball and explosions and flying debris, and you're the size of the tip of a pencil and you're thinking, "Better get on with the breeding."
(Via Sore Eyes)
Ebert reviews The Matrix Reloaded :
“The Matrix Reloaded,” […] plays like a collaboration involving a geek, a comic book and the smartest kid in Philosophy 101.
I’d note that for the last of those, the emphasis is on the 101, not the smartest.
Like I said , I wanted to see some ass-kicking. Walking into the Matrix Reloaded with my standards that low, I actually enjoyed it, even as I snickered along with most of the rest of the audience at how bad some of the dialogue was. The action sequences are beautiful (but the modern cliche of pointless slow motion/fast motion/freeze framing must die.)
My mind boggles that there are actually people reading depth and significance into the Matrix. Phil Dick was examining these themes with 100 times this depth 50 years ago. With 1000 times the depth in his later career, 20 years ago. Not to mention all the literature he inspired.
But, of course, one has to have actually read science fiction to know that. Even if you haven’t… c’mon… “what if we’re just brains in vats?”, “what if we don’t have free will?” — these aren’t exactly exciting and new questions. And the Matrix doesn’t offer anything interesting in considering them… it just raises them and hopes the audience will confuse special effects with sophistication.
And I’ve got to hand it to them: largely, it seems to work.
Bookfinder provides a list of the most requested out of print books . I’m surprised to find Heinlein’s Time for the Stars on the list — it’s one of my favorites of the Heinlein juvies. Of course, half of Heinlein’s juvies are among my favorite Heinlein juvies, with Have Spacesuit Will Travel, Tunnel in the Sky and The Star Beast in the top tier, with The Rolling Stones, Time for the Stars and Red Planet in the next. The others I haven’t read since I was a juvenile, but don’t seem to have left much of an impression.
One reason I haven’t blogged much lately is that I’ve been spending more time reading books than the web. One of them was John Varley’s Red Thunder, whose existence I noted some weeks ago. I like Varley’s writing a lot, chiefly for his short fiction — some of the stories collected in The Persistence of Vision and Blue Champagne are some of the best in the genre. I haven’t liked his novels as much. I read the Gaia trilogy recently and found it to have aged badly — I probably would have enjoyed it much more if I’d read it when it and I were younger. The Ophiuchi Hotline was interesting; Steel Beach was good, and one of the best things about it was its talking back to Heinlein.
Cory’s raving about Red Thunder, calling it the lovingest, bestest Heinlein tribute evar pushed it to the top of the stack. And it was a hell of a lot of fun — thoughtful good old-fashioned science fiction, with engineering problems to be solved, and all the rivets showing. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Varley’s just plain a better writer than Heinlein (in matters of prose and character.) I could have done without the persistent implication that animal rights activists, environmentalists, and pretty much anyone who had ever protested anything was an idiot, but, hey, it was consistent to the oeuvre to which Varley was paying homage.
I consider Heinlein to have been a very great influence on me, but it’s altogether unclear to me whether he’d be pleased to hear it. While I’ve read all his fiction, I haven’t read the posthumously published non-fiction or the works that have been published about him. Unlike so many people who have read 0-2 of his 45 or so fiction books, I don’t claim to know his political beliefs in detail. When you consider all the books, there’s a lot more ambiguity than they’re usually given credit.
But not so much that I think there’s any great chance that many of my attitudes, beliefs and values wouldn’t have revolted him.
Like half of Berkeley, I was at Cody’s tonight, where Tom Robbins was flogging his latest book, Villa Incognito. When I got there at 6:30 for the 7:30 reading, the seats were nearly all taken. I left my jacket on one and went for dinner. When I returned at 7, I almost didn’t make it back upstairs, and was fortunate my seat hadn’t been given away: there were probably a couple hundred people in attendance, of all ages.
I first read Robbins early last year: Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, what was then his most recent book. And it rocked my world. Phrases or lines or passages I wanted to call my friends to quote on about every page. New ideas every couple of pages. Great characters with wonderful voices. It’s just a wild ride of a book. Robbins had joined the ranks of my favorite authors even before I was done, and I quickly gathered used copies of the rest of his oeuvre.
The next I read, last fall, was his first, Another Roadside Attraction. It was fun, but heavy-handed in places, and the prose only rarely sparkled in the way Invalids’ did so often. His second novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues I read just last month, and it was very good, but still no Invalids (sense a theme?)
And just recently, I read Villa Incognito, and, of course, what I wanted was to be blown away again by pages that just crackled with brilliant language and interesting ideas.
And, by that entirely unfair standard, I was disappointed. There were wonderful turns of phrase, but only intermittently. He has favorite themes, tropes, situations, and character types, and too much of the book seemed familiar to me. Too many notes being struck in the same way again. For instance, in Invalids, our hero, Switters, has a wonderful rant about how it was all over for the American people when we accepted the phrase “genuine imitation leather” without open rebellion, and we deserved anything we got from there on in. And in Incognito there’s almost the same rant from a character who often sounds a lot like Switters, this time complaining about “vine ripe tomatoes” being applied to tomatoes that aren’t even ripe.
It’s a good book, mind you. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it. But not as your first Robbins — I’d still point anyone towards Invalids for that (and maybe that choice will change as I read his remaining four books.)
In person, Robbins is very funny, to no surprise. He quoted William Gibson as having said that book tours made him feel like a ghost, going on to explain that book tours made him feel like Anna Nicole Smith: his brain kept getting smaller, and his breasts kept getting larger. In an interview I can’t find right now, he commented that he used to refuse appearances and interviews, and that approach resulted in college students showing up on his doorstep on a recurring basis. He became less reclusive to protect his privacy — when he began to go to the public in measured doses, they stopped coming to him. And I’m glad he did, and I’m glad for the chance to see and hear him speak.
Here’s a recent interview with him.
The Hokey-Pokey by William Shakespeare :
O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe.
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.
Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke,
A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
To spin! A wilde release from Heavens yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl.
The Hoke, the poke — banish now thy doubt
Verily, I say, ‘tis what it’s all about.
(by Jeff Brechlin)
I’m working on my first ever mystery story, and, to no great surprise, I’ve already run afoul of my ignorance of police procedure.
Premise: successful, affluent man who lives alone, with seemingly everything to live for is found dead in his driveway, apparently having fallen from his house’s balcony above. There’s absolutely no evidence of forced entry or struggle — everything points toward his having simply awakened in the night, opening the doors to his balcony, and jumping off (all forensic evidence is consistent with this.) But there is no history of depression and seemingly no motivation for suicide — everyone who knows him, including his family, remark on his sunny disposition.
So my question is… how long and how hard would the police investigate this? I’m guessing not very, that a coroner’s report that there was no struggle and he died from the fall plus the absence of evidence of anyone else having been in the house would quickly make for a conclusion of suicide, even with a family member insisting that’s implausible. (And while the dead man was reasonably affluent, he wasn’t a mover and shaker who played golf with the mayor or otherwise had any special pull, and his family has even less.)
Anyone out there have any familiarity with police investigations of deaths?
When me and me friends gits together to advance our common interests, that’s an affinity group. When any crowd I don’t like does it, that’s a goddam conspiracy.
Whatever you do, don’t get uppity with your federally sponsored stalking :
Steven J. Hatfill, the scientist described as a “person of interest” in the deadly anthrax attacks, suffered a minor injury Saturday when an FBI specialist drove over his foot after a confrontation in Northwest Washington, police said. The episode came moments after Hatfill walked to the FBI employee’s car and attempted to take photographs of the man, who had been tailing him. No charges were filed against the FBI specialist. But Hatfill was issued a $5 ticket for “walking to create a hazard,” police said.
(Via MeFi )
Danny O'Brien writes about the importance of what Cory pegged following your weird in this account of a science fiction convention.
Baycon is a very costume-based convention (or "cosplay" as the young, wide-eyed screaming anime fans are calling it). This means that everyone looks like a freak. Especially people like me, who don't dress up. We look like the weirdest freaks ever. Even the hotel staff look like fairly normal freaks by comparison, because they're dressed up in waiter and maid's outfits.
And some people, look like incredible, dressed-like-Lara-Croft-only-with-chains-on semi-naked babelicious freaks. Not that I stare. Or even look, or think about them, or anything ever. I only know about their existence because when these people walk into a room, all the straight boys nearby give out this universal telepathic deflatory pained sigh. It's like the sound of a wolf-whistle, only backwards, sucked in. Ooohhhhhh.
The sigh has a meaning. All my life, it says, I have been told by my superego that dressing like a Marvel superhero will not get me laid. And, here, here and now in this temporary saturnalia, surrounded by other males who are - at best - my equals in the ugly league division table: here is my perfect woman. But the world knows that this mad girl's flickering eyes craves just one thing. A man dressed as Galactus, Eater of Worlds. And not only have I left my Galactus costume at home. I never made it. Worse, I threw those biro drawings of me in the Galactus helmet away the moment I'd drawn them, ashamed to show them even to (say) Dave. And now I know: I'm not a virgin because I'm a geek. I'm a virgin because I have pursued geekdom with a less than pure, directed gaze. I have faltered, and now I'm just another guy at Baycon. And some other guy in front of me will be Galahad with the Holy Grail because he spent two weeks measuring out huge papier-mache clamps to fit on the side of his head. And I did nothing but stare at my Lara Croft pull-out poster, in the belief that she was not real and that I could not ever meet her.
(Via Boing Boing)
Can you tell the difference ?
(Via Circadian Shift )
I’ve been reading up on Heinlein online, learning a number of surprising things.
Apparently, he had a first marrage immediately after Annapolis, prior to his marriage to Leslyn MacDonald. From this Heinlein FAQ :
Heinlein was first married immediately after his graduation from Annapolis in 1929. This marriage was short and ended in divorce, and few other details are available. Heinlein never spoke of this marriage, and most later friends and colleagues were unaware of it.
and this bio :
Heinlein himself never commented publicly on Leslyn or the later (1947) divorce, but the marriage certificate shows her working in the Music Department at Columbia Pictures in Hollywood. Curiously, it also shows Heinlein’s marital status as “divorced,” and this as his second marriage (her first). Nothing is known about a prior marriage.
He made reference many times to having worked in politics, and having run for the California State Assembly, but he never offered details.
Apparently, he was in Upton Sinclair’s organization :
So Robert Heinlein was not “a moderate Democrat,” as Pournelle tells us; he was actively involved over a period of several years with the movement of a candidate that President Roosevelt refused to endorse, even though Sinclair had changed his registration from Socialist to Democrat in 1933 and then won the nomination of the Democratic Party that FDR headed. The ‘34 campaign, as Mitchell’s book tells us, frightened the rich and led movie studios and other businesses to threaten to leave California if Sinclair should be elected. Earl Warren, the future Governor of California and United States Chief Justice, then a young district attorney, announced: “This is no longer a campaign between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in California. It is a crusade of Americans and Californians against Radicalism and Socialism.”
In I, Asimov, Asimov attributed his shift in politics to his change in wives :
Furthermore, although a flaming liberal during the war, Heinlein became a rock-ribbed far-right conservative immediately afterward. This happened at just the time he changed wives from a liberal woman, Leslyn, to a rock-ribbed far-right conservative woman, Virginia… I used to brood about it in puzzlement (of course, I never would have dreamed of asking Heinlein - I’m sure he would have refused to answer, and would have done so with the uttermost hostility), and I did come to one conclusion. I would never marry anyone who did not generally agree with my political, social, and philosophical view of life.
Something, I’d dearly prefer to disbelieve — Earl Kemp, the chairman of Chicon III, the World SF Convention in 1962, says :
Heinlein required me, as a condition for his appearance at ChiCon III, to absolutely guarantee him, ahead of time, the Hugo award for Stranger in a Strange Land. (Doing so was easy, only very unethical; the book won hands down; I didn’t have to hassle with myself to see if I would interfere.)
Heinlein’s papers are actually not far away from me, in the UC Santa Cruz Special Collections . I’ll have to make a holy pilgrimage some time.
Some aver that Heinlein was familiar with Aleister Crowley’s magickal beliefs, through association with Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard, and that this inspired Stranger in a Strange Land:
The premise of this article is that Heinlein wrote Stranger as an allegorical recapitulation of Thelema. (The word Thelema is Greek for “Great Will” and refers to the body of philosophy and magickal practices codified by the late Aleister Crowley and continued by many.) This article details Heinlein’s magickal interests, his relationships with the most famous of Crowley’s American disciples, and his many coded references to Thelema in Stranger and other written works. Moreover, we will establish that Heinlein wrote Stranger with the intent of initiating a Thelemic ‘whole systems transition’ in human thought and expression. This means that Stranger cannot be regarded merely as the work of a master storyteller, the product of a literary genius. Rather, Stranger is much better understood as a consciously wrought, carefully considered and brilliantly successful casting — a talismanic spell in itself, still dynamic, with its direct purpose being to spark human evolution along Thelemic lines.
I cannot find a web citation, but Sex and Rockets, a biography of Parsons, says that Virginia Heinlein asserted that Heinlein had never met Parsons. It’s easy to find other assertions they did spend time together, and in Rocket to the Morgue by Anthony Boucher (under the pseudonym A.H. White), a thinly disguised Heinlein character and a thinly disguised Parsons character are depicted as friends. (Naturally, I’m skeptical of evidence derived from an explicit work of fiction.)
There’s a persistent rumor that Stranger was Charles Manson’s favorite book, which apparently originated in an uncredited San Francisco Examiner Story :
Heinlein was medically incapacitated when the Tate-LaBianca murders, an ongoing and gruesome story for four months by that time, took a grotesquely personal turn. Taking its cue from an un-bylined (staff-written) article in the San Francisco Examiner, Time Magazine in January 1970 told America that Charles Manson killed following a “blue-print” provided by Heinlein’s Stranger In a Strange Land. The allegation had no basis in fact, as the District Attorney assigned to prosecute Charles Manson discovered. Several members of Manson’s Family had read Stranger and privately used water-ritual jargon, but Manson later told an inquirer (J. Neil Schulman) that he had never read Stranger.
But without having read it apparently he was influenced by it :
Doubtless, Manson controlled those he attracted, but he also learned from them. For instance, writer Ed Sanders mentions [in The Family] Manson’s fondness for Stranger in a Strange Land, a satirical science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein. Actually, Manson barely read at the seventh-grade level—though certainly he incorporated many ideas when he heard them.
and :
When he started his “family” in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, Manson borrowed some of the terminology and ceremonies from the book. It is reported that his followers held water-sharing ceremonies as well as group sex orgies. He referred to his parole officer as “Roger Smith Jubal,” after Jubal Harshaw, Mike’s mentor. When Mary Theresa Brunner, one of Manson’s followers, gave birth to a baby boy in 1968, Manson named the child Valentine Michael Manson.
Alexei Panshin even suggests Heinlein was remiss in not taking responsibility for Manson’s actions :
While it would be possible for an impressionable reader to feel he’d been given license by the fantasy to ignore conventional constraints, Heinlein would not accept responsibility for any social damage which might take place if the book were adopted as a model. When it was reported that Charles Manson had used Stranger as his guide in discorporating people he found unworthy, Heinlein’s response was to act indignant and say, “Who, me?”
Here are some other interesting links and sources of further reading (I’m making no attempt or claim to be comprehensive):
Nitrosyncretic’s Heinlein Archives