Bring him a penny, that he might see it.
Okay, see, there’s this drunk guy, right? He’s out there on the corner yelling at himself about what a farken idjit he is and goldurn those goldurn fockruckers and spit, as he’s bent over peering at the sidewalk and sweeping his head back and forth like he’s about to carve chunks out of the concrete as soon as he remembers how his eyeball lasers work. Anyway, he’s loud enough he attracts the attention of a beat-walking cop, a real central-casting type swinging his billy-club nonchalantly as he whistles a jaunty tune. (For this was when cops walked beats, on sidewalks, and whistled.) —What are you looking for, sir? asks the cop.
My fershlugginer keys, says the drunk guy. Bracken frazzle dropped ’em getten into my fuggle marpen car.
And the cop frowns, and the nonchalant swing of his billy-club falters as he looks up one side of the corner and down the other. (Even in those days, you couldn’t be too careful.) —The nearest car is half a block away, parked in front of a disreputable dive. That your car? says the cop, pointing.
Yes, says the guy, like he’d almost figured out the trick with the eyeball lasers, only the cop had to go and distract him with a stupid question.
So if you dropped ’em getting into your car, why are you looking for ’em all the way up here? says the cop.
The drunk guy looks up then, and points to the streetlight, and says, well, fugget, light’s better here, y’know?
Our moral? —Be careful before you answer. Parables are not their dim shadows, allegories, with each sign firmly affixed to its signified, scrawled in white chalk on a dark suit-sleeve (as in some political cartoons). They are wild and tricksy—labyrinths instead of trees; encyclopedias, not dictionaries—and they lead inevitably to divagations. Especially if you’re been reading Vollmann again. I could read him aloud all day (ask the Spouse), but will content myself with a brief morsel:
In regard to this cell, it should have been observable to Krupskaya that the walls were incised with Hebrew letters which seemed almost to flutter in the luminescence of the guttering lantern. Of course she was so long past her religious days as to be blind to the uncanny. And yet anyone can read in her memoirs that her heart had literally pounded with joy when she first read Das Kapital, because Marx had proven there, with scientific infallibility, that capitalism was doomed. Well, what might constitute uncanniness to a devout Bolshevik? The presence of a Social Revolutionary? But why seek the uncanny out? Motivations lie nested in motivations, like the numerological values of the letters of the Hebrew parables. If, as the Kabbalah posits, the most secret meaning is also the most precious, then we must sink into hermenuetical darkness. Krupskaya needed to prove herself to be so excellent, so above vindictive personalism, that she could forgive even the one who would have killed her husband-god. And forgiveness need not exclude contempt. Within the coils of this rationale hid a second craving which she hardly dared read, a lust for reassurance about her Revolution. But even this did not explain the intensity of Krupskaya’s attraction to Fanya Kaplan.
I think sometimes the dizzying games of qabalah and gematria were originally devised to simplify things, to tie them down. Words are slippery, tricksy things, signifiers that point ever and always to other signifiers; what the hell does any of it ever mean, in the end? Who knows? —By spearing each letter with a number and each shape with a meaning we tried to fix each word, define it as nothing more than the sum of its discrete parts, and by setting those numbers and those meanings down we tried to encompass who in the end might know. But the dictionary turned in our hands; all we did was impose another layer of signs between us and intent; signifiers that point our signifiers ever and always. Every word become a labyrinth; every text, an encyclopedia. —Who’s the first guy? Who’s the second? (Who’s that killjoy, the third?) Who’s the snake? What were the legs supposed to represent, again? The sword, the stone? Who got smeared into steak tartare?
In the fictional post below, “Digby” is a stand-in for the Democratic Party in general, and “Bruce” is a stand-in for frustration with the media-pundit-two-party one-way broadcast that seems to be a world of its own without the awareness, or care, to realize it.
Which makes “the pier” I think a stand-in for frustration with pettily puritanical politicking and circular firing squads, right? —Do I get to say stuff like “Oh, grow up” and “No, no: revolution before you purge”? Do I get to make like if it weren’t for the people who are doing that stupid dumbass thing over there then we could really get something done around here, you just see if we don’t?
(Whose back? Whose dagger? Who’s Siegfried? Who’s Hagen? Which was Hugin, again, and which Munin? —What day was it in November?)
—End of the day, I pitch my tent in the moonbat camp. Clinton was a fine Republican president who pissed me off on a daily basis; the Democratic party as it’s currently constituted would make an acceptable right-wing opposition in any sane, late 20th c. democracy; the system’s broken, crippled, cracked; we were robbed blind in ’00 and ’04; I’m still not over it, thank you (or ’02, either, or ’06, you betcha); our bright light casts some terrible shadows, and anyway blinds some folks without sunglasses; I do not think I know where we will be in ten years, not anymore, and that scares the ever-lovin’ piss out of me; there isn’t a clusterfucker inside the Beltway media or politico or apparatichik who isn’t up to their swimming pools in somebody else’s blood, I mean, look what’s splashed on me, for Christ’s sake; everybody knows the fight was fixed, everybody knows the good guys lost, and sometimes it’s all I can do not to pack it all in and to hell with it.
That’ll learn ya.
Except.
(And it’s not even that “time” is “wasted” by triangulating diatribes against the clay we see on the feet of good soldiers when South Dakota’s locked and loaded the Joe Lieberman Memorial Rapist’s Rights bill. We hardly measure any sort of hourly productivity on this score, and anyway, I think some variation of Goldman’s Conditional applies.)
It’s this post from Henley that won’t leave me alone, and if you’re looking for someone to blame for this particular divagation, he’s your man; I mean, it surely isn’t my fault.
So “we” didn’t do jack shit to accrue affirmative responsibility for what happened. And the notion, which I’ve entertained from time to time, that if I or other doves had only tried harder—made better arguments; marched more; wrote more; pestered more of our neighbors—we’d have stopped the war itself, or extraordinary rendition, or the Gitmoizing of Abu Ghraib, or the Gitmoizing of Gitmo, or any of that—well, that notion is simple narcissism.
To which The Editors respond, in paraphrase: You paid your taxes.
I think what he means here is more subtle than his readers give him credit for. One immediately points out that refusing to pay your taxes is no so easy to do. (The Montana Freemen; the Branch Davidians—the original raid was just a tax case; etc.) And, again, the idea that a bunch of us engaging in tax protests, or hunger strikes, or emigration, or quitting our jobs and yelling at people on the subway with our pants around our ankles would move our rulers and such rump of support as they still enjoy; well, that’s not just fantasy but self-flattery. And violent protest would be useless and, more importantly, evil in itself.
Here’s the thing, though: the certainty of failure may be no excuse. Once you know you’ll fail to stop the idiocy and cruelty, you still have to decide what you’ll do to fail.
What am I willing to do to fail? What does failure look like? What’s failing? —What does my life look like if I genuinely believe there’s no hope, that engagement with whatever part of the broken system I can get my hands on in an attempt to set it right is nothing more than “drilling ragged, weaponless troops in the prison yard, while their captors look on, laughing, from the guard towers”?
It would look very different than it does. (Wouldn’t it?) —Thus with this weak tea do I keep myself, misanthropic introvert though I might be, riding the bus head down iPod cranked every morning into my paralegally clerical job, bootstrapped nonetheless into what scraps are left of the commons-as-they-are, increasing the us to the extent I can, and not waiting altogether elsewhere for enough of us to come around to the commons-as-they-someday-might-possibly-be-if-only. Quod erat demonstrandum; thus, I suppose, do gormless 16-year-old revolutionaries become heartless 30-something liberals.
(Wait. Which bit was it, got demonstrated?)
Value-added blogging.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
—Clarke’s Third Law, which immediately grabs you by the lapels and demands the answer: what is magic? You may think you already have it, but better minds than ours have struggled, to no avail. Best we’ve got, and I’ll paraphrase: Magic is what we mean when we’re not pointing to science or religion. Note the dual exclusion, there: we aren’t dealing with a simple dialectic. (We usually never are.) Let me quote at some little length from The Bathhouse at Midnight; it’s the nearest thing to hand that says what I want it to say:
In general, the many attempts to define and classify magic and religion can be put into two categories. The first is the belligerently rationalist, paradoxically allied in this with the eclectic “New Age,” and the views of some anthropologists, in which magic and religion are regarded as essentially the same phenomenon—a good proportion of Soviet writing fell into this category, as do many “New Age” effusions, albeit with a different emphasis. The second is the more common binary approach in which magic is seen as “alternative religion,” the “other side of the coin” of religion, or as a corruption of it, or as parasitic to it, or as a deviation from a spiritual or social norm, or as a semiotic system of oppositions. A recent thoughtful attempt to defend a qualified binary approach remarks ruefully, “Scholars in earlier decades of this century were luckier: they knew both what magic was and how to find it. They simply opposed its characteristics to those of either science or religion, which they knew as well.”
We have a trinity on our hands, a trio, a triskele. (When Ryan says “qualified binary approach” above, he’s leaving out science. But we all have to stand somewhere.) —Clarke, I think, is making the signal error of conflation, boiling our triad down to mere dualism, either/or, with magic as essentially the same phenomenon as religion; he’s as Soviet and New Age as the next fellow. But that doesn’t make his Law any less true. Ryan goes on to cite David Aune’s working definition:
Magic is defined as that form of religious deviance whereby individual or social goals are sought by means alternate to those normally sanctioned by the dominant religious institution.
It’s not what I’m getting at, not quite, but it does square the triangle nicely, don’t you think?
Spin got much better by about page 150—
Have you read Spin yet? If you haven’t, well, I’m probably going to spoil it a bit, so maybe you might want to skedaddle. Up to you. I’d recommend, and this is nothing against Messr. Nielsen Hayden, but I’d recommend you also avoid this post until after you’ve read it; it doesn’t, you know, spoil much, but still, there’s stuff in there I think it might be better to be surprised by. Here’s what I took away from it, which doesn’t spoil the book at all:
Many of the genre’s classics are in essence carefully-tuned machines designed to attract readers whose primary conscious loyalty is to rationalism, and lead them by a series of plausible contrivances to a sudden crescendo of mystical awe.
And oh, I see; oh, I get it. —Most of what spoils in the post is quoted from the flap copy, so you might want to avoid that, too. (Buy the paperback.) Maybe you won’t. Me, I’m not a fanatic about remaining unspoiled or anything, but I do tend to avoid the coming next week bits on shows I really like. (Whichever, I’d definitely recommend you avoid the Washington Post review everybody’s citing, which is some of the most egregious Whoosh! Zap! Science fiction isn’t just for geeks anymore! boosterism I’ve read in quite some time. “The long-anticipated marriage between the hard sf novel and the literary novel,” which finally presents “insights into the human condition as rich as those contained within any mainstream mimetic fiction”? Please.)
Still here?
Okay.
Spin got much better (for me, you should understand, of course) by about page 150, when we fire the first blast of shotgun ecopoiesis at the planet Mars.
Then the ocean was ablaze with firelight as far as the horizon.
No single one of those rockets would have impressed a local crowd even in darkness, but this wasn’t one column of flame, it was five, seven, twelve. The seaborne gantries were briefly silhouetted like skeletal skyscrapers, lost soon after in billows of vaporized ocean water. Twelve pillars of white fire, separated by miles but compressed by perspective, clawed into a sky turned indigo blue by their combined light. The beach crowd began to cheer, and the sound merged with the sound of the solid-fuel boosters hammering for altitude, a throb that compressed the heart like ecstasy or terror. But it wasn’t only the brute spectacle we were cheering. Almost certainly every one of these two million people had seen a rocket launch before, at least on television, and although this multiple ascendancy was grand and loud it was remarkable mainly for its intent, its motivating idea. We weren’t just planting the flag of terrestrial life on Mars, we were defying the Spin itself.
The rockets rose. (And on the rectangular screen of the TV, when I glanced at it through the balcony door, similar rockets bent into cloudy daylight in Jiuquan, Svobodnyy, Baikonur, Xichang.) The fierce horizontal light became oblique and began to dim as night rushed back from the sea. The sound spent itself in sand and concrete and superheated salt water. I imagined I could smell the reek of fireworks coming ashore along with the tide, the pleasantly awful stench of Roman candles.
A thousand cameras clattered like dying crickets and were still.
The cheering lasted, in one form or another, until dawn.
And it’s not (just) the enormous spectacle and it’s not the heroic scale and it’s not the collective celebration and it’s not the defiance (though I’m a sucker for that stuff, to be sure); it’s not even (just) the delicious way “shotgun ecopoiesis” rolls across your tongue. It’s what comes next:
“Bear with me. You understand the Spin ratio?”
“Roughly.”
“Roughly isn’t good enough. One terrestrial second equals 3.17 years Spin time. Keep that in mind. If one of our rockets enters the Spin membrane a single second behind the rest, it reaches orbit more than three years late.”
“Just because I can’t quote numbers—”
“They’re important numbers, Diane. Suppose our flotilla just emerged from the membrane, just now, now—” He ticked the air with his finger. “One second, here and gone. For the flotilla, that was three and a fraction years. One second ago they were in Earth orbit. Now they’ve delivered their cargo to the surface of Mars. I mean now, Diane, literally now. It’s already happened, it’s done. So let a minute pass on your watch. That’s approximately a hundred and ninety years by an outside clock.”
“That’s a lot, of course, but you can’t make over a planet in two hundred years, can you?”
“So now it’s two hundred Spin years into the experiment. Right now, as we speak, any bacterial colonies that survived the trip will have been reproducing on Mars for two centuries. In an hour, they will have been there eleven thousand four hundred years. This time tomorrow they’ll have been multiplying for almost two hundred seventy-four thousand years.”
“Okay, Jase, I get the idea.”
“This time next week, 1.9 million years.”
“Okay.”
“A month, 8.3 million years.”
“Jason—”
“This time next year, one hundred million years.”
“Yes, but—”
Yes but nothing. One hundred million years, just like that! This is the aching genius heart of Spin: to take all that dizzying powers-of-ten billyuns and billyuns of cosmic grandeur and with a deceptively simple macguffin boil it all down not to something we can understand, no, but experience. We—you, me, him, her, us—we get to touch and taste and hear and see what happens next. One year passes, and Mars is terraformed and ready. Launch some hardy colonists, and ten hours later there’s an ancient Martian civilization to talk to. Decades pass, and the galaxy itself is a different shape, the sun grown red and bloated, and we get to see it all—
Magic.
Which sits me, I think, on the lonely end of the critical spectrum regarding this book. I found the cosmological speculation more compelling than the humanstuff (rather than vice versa, or middlin’ each)—which is not to say the book is without its rich insights into the human condition; just that those are more usually found in the general, than the specifics of Tyler Dupree’s lifelong—dalliance? relationship? obsession?—with the Lawtons, Jason and Diane.
A triangle? Yes, and no, and it’s not like that. Jason is science, and technology: the Newton, the Einstein, the Hawking of the Spin, as we’re told. He cares about nothing but the Perihelion Project, and comes complete with an engineer father who builds a labyrinth from corridors of power and all but fixes the wings to his back. But Diane isn’t religion, or even a credible evocation of the religious impulse, for all that she’s the spiritual seeker of the two. But she’s not running toward so much as away; she ends up tumbling into the first thing she sees: the arms of Simon, devout Christian, her opiate. Not so much God. —So it’s hardly a fair fight: Jason’s apotheoses underpin and are exalted by the apotheoses of the book itself; Diane’s, or rather Simon’s, are glimpsed at second and third hand, by vaguely embarrassed narrators, rendered stiff and strange by technically correct words like “chiliasm” and “Parousia,” alienated from the Plain People of, well, whatever. (I kept thinking of Robin Wright in Forrest Gump, always skulking away from the plot to wallow in the mythic excesses and shortcomings of the Boomers while we wait so very patiently with Forrest for her one day to see the light.)
Then, it’s not supposed to be a fair fight. There’s never (really) a question that the Spin is a phenomenon of science; that science is the only way we can engage it. (This is a science fiction novel, after all.) Religion’s a response, and the shapes religion takes in that response are background details, and only occasionally plot points: as interesting as the highway piracy, say, and rendered in about as much detail. (And did anyone else wonder if maybe Wilson’s played his share of Car Wars? —Just asking.) Diane isn’t supposed to uphold one leg of the great epistemological debate, anymore than Tyler’s supposed to make it a tripod (Tyler? Magic? Ha!), or even play a hapless shuttlecock batted with his readers between the two. He’s just this guy, you know? His job is to live and tell the tale.
The extent to which the humanstuff is celebrated, I think, is the extent to which the book’s about lives lived in these extraordinary circumstances, and not adventures had. (The spirit of a recent manifesto, if not so much the letter.) And to that extent, my glass is as high as anyone else’s. But the life that is lived—Tyler’s life—is such a dreary one, full of empty apartments and distant relationships that do nothing but foil his unrequited love for Diane. To his—and the book’s—credit, Tyler’s aware of how thin and dreary it can be, and certainly the great existential irruption of the Spin excuses his disengagement, much as its glitches and hiccups excuse his and Diane’s nominal infidelity. But the mean and frustrating paucity of Tyler’s perspective is a drag on the book; his fixation on the Lawton siblings rendered thin and strange without the excuse of an epistemological proxy fight; I can’t help but think it all deserved a voice as interested in the immediate world and the people in it as Jason was in the glory of the Spin. (Molly: perfidious Molly: we could have used more of her, and more like her.)
(And: I have yet to encounter anything more dreary, to use the shibboleth one last time, in all the mimetic fiction that I’ve read, than Carol Lawton’s anachronistically Sirkian off-stage tragedy, revealed to us at the very end not in a flash of insight or melancholic epiphany, but thrust almost as an afterthought into Tyler’s disengaged hands with a flat and emotionless and artless monologue, rounded neatly enough, I suppose, by a homily.)
So Jason is science, for what it’s worth, and religion’s a reflex. What about magic, then?
Well, Jason’s the magician, too. In both the Clarkean and Aunean sense. —The technology of the Spin (and what comes after) emerges from the sluggishly simple science of the Hypotheticals, out there eating ice and shitting information, and all these billions of years later it’s become too big to need an explanation, indistinguishable from magic. But that only gets us so far as Langford’s application of Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad-hoc plot device.”
Religion may be a reflex—a response—but it was shaped by a very real need; a sometimes surprisingly sophisticated salve for an appalling and unspeakable ache. (Actually, a number of them, but let’s conflate.) —The genius heart of Spin is to make the cosmological personal by so suddenly and drastically shifting the flow of time, and this can’t help render the personal cosmological, as all these deaths—of you, of me, of the ecosystem, the planet, the species, the Sun, the galaxy, the universe—all collapse toward the same dull point in the not at all distant enough future. No wonder Tyler turns away, numb! No wonder Diane runs as far as she can! No wonder Jason gives up everything to the effort to understand! And it’s from that effort to understand that Jason (and the Martians, and the Hypotheticals) pulls his great act of magic, gifting us all with world enough, and time: individual and social goals realized by means alternate to those normally sanctioned by the dominant religious institution. (Rationalists may despise magic, and lump it as essentially the same phenomenon as religion, but theocrats hate it, too; it is a hacker’s art, a tinkerer’s art, above all a troublemaker’s art, and theocrats count them all as essentially the same. —For centuries, “magic” was all we had of science, and technology.)
That this great magic trick is almost entirely accidental, incidental to the attempt to understand—this grace is but an epiphenomenon—well, that helps explain how this deus ex machina doesn’t feel like a cop-out, which may well be the book’s great magic trick.
(That the book’s initial faith in technocracy is almost touchingly naïve—whatever else it says about us all, the relatively sane and measured response to the Spin insists upon an America healed of the grosser excesses of Bush fils; and the boiling frog reads less like an explanation than an excuse [for after all, those Danish cartoons had little enough effect on the daily round of Muslims everywhere when they were first published last September, and yet months later all it took was a few opportunistic hackers muttering about how much hotter the water had gotten for riots to erupt]—that’s a allowance I’m happy enough to make. That the similarity of the book’s structure to Rapture and Tribulation and chiliasm may be little more than the fidelity of both to iron laws of storytelling—well, it doesn’t make the parallels any less wicked.)
So, anyway: yeah. I read Spin, and I liked it, quite a lot. Now, up and on to the next—
Whiskey, tango, foxtrot.
Ariel Schrag is a staff writer for The L Word? (—Hat tip to Sara, who looked just as befuddled.)
Let’s you and him fight.
Okay, see, there were these two students? And they were terribly jealous of each other. (Does it matter why?) Their master was old and infirm and had not one bum leg, but two. Withered, pale, stick-like things. Poor circulation. Feet like two blocks of ice in the morning. And each student was given charge of a leg, to rub and pinch and powder and clean, and every day they’d set to it, glaring all the while at each other over their teacher’s lap.
And it came to pass that one day one of the students had to get up and leave during the who leg-rubbing foot-massaging bit. Maybe to get a glass of water, maybe to take a leak, maybe they were out of talcum powder. And while that first student was gone, the second student took up a rock and bashed away at the opposite leg, the one the first student had charge of. Just beat it until it snapped in three or four places. Shattered.
When the first student came back and saw what had been done, what do you think? That first student picked up a stick and laid into the opposite leg, the one the second student had charge of. Blood flew. Bone splintered.
Our moral? Beats me. Something about the Mahayana and the Hinayana. You figure it out, let me know. My question: why the fuck didn’t the teacher get all Pai Mei on that second student’s ass the minute he picked up the rock? There was a perfectly serviceable sword sitting right there.
Okay, see, there was this snake? And one day, this snake’s tail speaks up (for back then, the tails of snakes could speak), and the snake’s tail says, you know what? I’m sick of this shit. (It’s speaking to the snake’s head.) You get to go first in everything you know? You just lead and lead and lead and drag me around through the dust and I’m sick of it. We’re gonna try things my way for a bit. And the head’s all, like, what? Is there an echo in here? Somebody say something? And the head just keeps on keepin’ on.
Anyway, the tail of the snake is so pissed it does the only thing it can do, which is coil itself about an opportune tree. And the head pulls and pulls, and the tail holds on and holds on, and there’s a lot of hissed swears leaking back and forth until finally, exhausted, the tail lets go, and, exhausted, the head can’t keep the snake from rolling into a firepit and burning to death.
Our moral? It’s a toughie: that opportune tree is none other than the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the tug-of-war shook loose a fateful apple. I don’t have to tell you what happened next. —Aren’t we much better off these days, when nobody talks out their ass anymore?
Okay, see, there’s these two flesh-eating demons, right? Or maybe they were superheroes. Anyway, they’re fighting tooth and bloody nail over a chest and a stick and a ratty-ass pair of sandals. Just that: these epic killer combos unleashed over a wooden box you maybe saw on a shelf in Target in the World Beat Home Furnishings aisle, and a stick that, okay, might make for a nice walking stick if you ever went on walks anymore, and a couple of sandals too far gone to even make it as dumpster chic. Somebody’s already walked too many miles in them. But these two demons don’t show any signs of letting up. Biff! Pow! Blammo!
Until this guy walks up and he somehow manages to get their attention and he yells whoa, whoa, and they manage to stop, glaring at each other, taking these big deep panting breaths, wiping the sweat off. And the guy, he’s just this guy, not a demon or a superhero, he says, wow, I mean, this is incredible, but why are you fighting over this junk?
And the first demon says, that trunk isn’t junk; it contains everything you might ever possibly need in this world. Put in your hand and pull out gold, books, food, a house, beautiful paramours, the ear of the king. And the second demon says, the stick isn’t junk. You hold that in your hands, all your enemies are subdued. And he’s glaring at the first demon. Who says, those sandals? And the second demon says, yeah, those sandals. Look like crap. But, says the first demon, you put them on, and you can fly.
Okay, says the guy. I see. But still. You’re both such amazing fighters. It would be a damn shame to see you kill each other over this stuff. Just back up a minute, let me get in there, and I’ll split it up for you. Okay?
So the demons, reluctantly, backed away, and the guy leaped in and picked up the stick and shook it at them both, then scooped up the trunk and kicked into first one and then the other sandal, and he swooped up into the air. And he laughed and laughed and said, see? Now you no longer have any reason to fight!
Our moral? Demons can fly, too. So can superheroes. The guy was so scared when he saw them coming that he dropped the stick, and they totally smeared him into steak tartare and spread him on a loaf of bread they pulled out of the trunk.
Okay, there’s these two guys, see? And they walk into a bar. And the first one turns to the second and says, my dick is so big—
What the world needs now—
A couple-three years ago, cruising the net, I found a page with some instrumental MP3s; stabs at what would have been the next Babe the Blue Ox album, in another, better world. There was a note from Tim I think about time passing, and families being raised, and walls stubbornly unfallen even after they’d circled them seven times and seven times again, blowing that horn, and what that felt like; too content to be called resignation, I think. (Boy, turning her back: “I stopped needing to save the world. Saving is what misers do.”) Rose was in law school, or Hanna maybe; time passing. —They were spare and crunchy and beautiful, those MP3s, or the three or four I downloaded; when I went back to get more, and drop some cash in the PayPal slot, the site 404ed, its links all rotted away. Then I lost the songs in a harddrive crash.
Which makes this the saddest and most hopeful thing I’ve read all week, but I’m a fan:
The last time I saw Rose, Hanna, and Tim perform—in 1999 or 2000?—they seemed dispirited, mixing brilliant unreleased songs with fragments that crumbled under their hands, that didn’t end but stopped, just like this.
“Babe may be in a deep deep sleep,” Hanna told me via email in 2005, “but we are all alive and well and in touch with each other too.” She added: “We are the future of rock and roll.”
You were, you are, you will be again. It’s terribly selfish of me to ask, but please: come back. The world still needs to be saved.
Lady Day, Lady Time, and a Big Blue Ox.
“Each Little Thing,” Sharon Shannon; “Above the Treeline,” Jane Siberry; “I Didn’t Know What Time it Was,” Billie Holiday; “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” Benny Goodman; “The Book I’m not Reading,” Patty Larkin; “My Romance,” Bill Evans Trio; “Breathe,” Babe the Blue Ox; “Swingin’ Shepherd,” Ella Fitzgerald; “Mon Chien s’Appelle Stop,” Chenard Walcker; “Any World (That I’m Welcome To),” Steely Dan.
Continuing our tour of other people’s comments—
I know several people who really really wanna get sick, but can’t afford to.
elfranko, ladies and gentlemen! Try the veal! (Yeah, it’s probably pseudo-Al they’re mau-mauing, but isn’t the fact that you can’t tell them apart the point?)
Teleautograph.
Over at Making Light, debcha reminds us all to check out Collision Detection more often. Here’s a bit on how Margaret Atwood is, well, not getting out of the house as much as she used to, thanks to a long-distance waldo. Which includes the following:
First of all, this confirms my growing sense that Atwood is among the biggest secret geeks on the planet. After all, she’s basically a sci-fi author masquerading as a writer of “serious” adult nonfiction. Her “what if” novels are so superb—and so manifestly superior to her other books—that I sometimes wish she’d just give up writing about the usual maundering-around-the-kitchen-moaning-about-your-children/divorce/boring-ass-upper-middle-class-life crap that comprises 99% of all of today’s dinosaur literary fiction, and just throw it down old-skool in sci-fi and fantasy, and crank out a bunch of 4,000-page novels with, y’know, dragons and instellar spacecraft and shit on the covers. I would so pay for that.
Ninety-nine per cent? —Anyway, exuberantly presented point taken.
Over the top.
You dumb shit, it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the levees being overtopped or broached when the end result in either case is catastophic flooding in an unprepared city. You righties’ concern for public safety and the commonweal is really touching, but you know what, you stupid asshole, the unprecedented death and destruction and the bodies they still haven’t gotten around to finding how many motherfucking months later pretty much speak for themselves. Go back into your hole, you stupid conservadick shithead. And don’t bother us anymore. You have to have to be able to correspond with reality at some level for anyone to take your bloviations seriously. You don’t qualify, you stupid shit.
Context? Oh, all right.
In which Our Hero is once more forcibly reminded just how annoyed he can be by Spider Robinson.
Butler: I’ve wondered, and this may be the audience to put this question to, what the likelihood is of a future in which reading is no longer necessary for the majority of the people. I don’t much like the look of that future, but I wonder if when computers, for instance, can be addressed verbally, can be spoken to, whether it will still be necessary for people to be able to read and write. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Burstein: Well one of the things that I was recently reading was an essay by Spider Robinson which points out that reading is actually difficult. He was walking along the street in his hometown, and I think it was in Vancouver, where he saw that somebody had written on a piece of sidewalk and immortalized in stone a nice big heart with the names “Tood and Janey forever.” He couldn’t believe that anybody in this society would go to the lengths of naming their son “Tood.” So his only conclusion was that young Todd didn’t know how to spell his own name, and what he found to be worse was that this is somebody who is old enough to have the hots for Janey and possibly produce progeny and yet he cannot spell his own name.
There’s a lot that annoys in Robinson: his glibly superior voice; his tin ear for moral tone; his deplorable attitudes toward sex and gender; his overindulgence in appalling puns. But the failure of imagination involved above? —Perhaps our graffitist, known for the rather large chip on his (or her) shoulder, perfers to spell their nickname as Tood rather than the more grammatically correct ’Tude? Perhaps, unused to the medium of wet concrete, Todd shaped the first “D” poorly, and didn’t stick around to fix it because he was scared of getting caught? Perhaps the light was failing as Robinson took this particular constitutional? Perhaps he leaped from under a looming deadline to an otherwise untenable point he needed to fill out his Y Tood Kant Reed column for the Globe and Mail?
The Rules for Hearts.
I guess today’s my day to friend-pimp.
The cover of the sequel to Empress of the World, due 19 October.
Der Familienvater.
I’d say this was the apocalypse to Bite Me’s masquerade, but someone would start cracking ultraviolet underworld jokes, and that’s hardly the point. Dylan Meconis is back! Well, her comics, I mean. New ones. That update every Wednesday. That’s what’s back. Except with fewer chicken gags. I think.
Hi rinktum inktum.
Apparently, a big hit in 1937 (along with “I Feel Just as Happy as a Big Sun Flower”) for sparkling duo Lulu Belle and Scotty. Boys, then girls, trade off on the couplets, and watch me for the changes:
Where are you going, pretty little miss,
My little blue-eyed daisy?
If I don’t find me a young man soon
I guess I’m going crazy.
Hi rinktum inktum diddy deedy dum
Hi rinktum inktum doody.
Hi rinktum inktum diddy deedy dum
Hi rinktum inktum doody, how doody.
How old are you, my pretty little miss,
How old are you, my honey?
If I don’t die of a lonesome heart
I’ll be sixteen next Sunday.
Hi rinktum, etc.
Now can you court, my pretty little miss,
My little wildwood flower?
I kin court more in a minnit an a half
Than you kin in a hour.
Will you marry me, my pretty little miss,
Will you marry me, good-looking?
I’ll marry you but I’ll not do
Yore washin’ an yore cookin’.
Then I won’t have you, my pretty little miss,
I won’t have you, my dear-o.
Well, they aint nobody asked you to,
You yaller-headed skeercrow!
Hi rinktum inktum diddy deedy dum
Hi rinktum inktum doody.
Hi rinktum inktum diddy deedy dum
Hi rinktum inktum doody, how doody.
I’ll say this for 
spinooti: you buy a 19th c. treatise on spiritualism and demonology off her, and she throws in the 1937 Alka-Seltzer Song Book for absolutely no charge. (For extra free copies of this song book, for social gatherings, church affairs, banquets, etc., write to MILES LABORATORIES, INC., Elkhart, Indiana.) —Maybe next time I’ll share some of the popular songs of the Hoosier Hot Shots, or the favorite songs of Lucille Long (“From Aunt Dinah’s quilting party, I was seeing Nellie home,” and also “Nita! Juanita! Lean thou on my heart”), or I’ll cough up Joe Kelly’s ode from beyond the grave, “Gold Star Mother o’ Mine.” —If you’re especially lucky, I’ll even tell you what Uncle Ezra saw.
Gimmie a little toot on the tooter Tommy… (horn)
Another little toot on the tooter Tommy… (horn)
The reason we all feel so swell sir—
We Al-ka-lize with Al-ka-seltzer—
Gimmie a little toot on the tooter Tommy
Station E.Z.R.A.
Lacuna.
I haven’t yet read any Octavia Butler, and now her œuvre’s set in stone with a short sharp shock. (This is why I can’t keep up with the here and now: I’m always trying to shore up my foundations—)
