Good Night, Reverend Falwell
Isaiah, chapter 40
1 Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.
2 Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the LORD's hand double for all her sins.
3 ¶ The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
4 Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain:
5 and the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.
6 ¶ The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field:
7 the grass withereth, the flower fadeth; because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.
8 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.
9 ¶ O Zion, that bringest good tidings, get thee up into the high mountain; O Jerusalem, that bringest good tidings, lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God!
10 Behold, the Lord GOD will come with strong hand, and his arm shall rule for him: behold, his reward is with him, and his work before him.
11 He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
POLITICS: From Her Lips to God's Ear
Laura Bush made an announcement this morning on the Today Show: "No one suffers more than their President and I do."
No one? Not the kids whose parents have been killed, or the parents whose children have been killed or maimed? Not the double amputee vet shaking from nightmares in a rat-infested VA hospital room? Not the Iraqis whose homes, lives, and country have been crushed into bleeding fragments?
Remember, this is the draft-dodging frat boy who has taken more vacation days than Ronald Reagan -- who has, in fact, spent more than a year of his Presidency on vacation.
Has he even missed a meal?
Thanks to Alan Bostick of As I Please for the link.
Laura Bush made an announcement this morning on the Today Show: "No one suffers more than their President and I do."
No one? Not the kids whose parents have been killed, or the parents whose children have been killed or maimed? Not the double amputee vet shaking from nightmares in a rat-infested VA hospital room? Not the Iraqis whose homes, lives, and country have been crushed into bleeding fragments?
Remember, this is the draft-dodging frat boy who has taken more vacation days than Ronald Reagan -- who has, in fact, spent more than a year of his Presidency on vacation.
Has he even missed a meal?
Thanks to Alan Bostick of As I Please for the link.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
REVIEW: All the Songs of Heroes
Disclaimers: Unlike many of my readers, I did not know the late John Milo “Mike” Ford. I first encountered his work in Neil Gaiman’s blog and in his inimitable contributions to Making Light. If he ever posted to any of the Usenet groups I used to frequent, it’s so long ago that I don’t recall it.
When, several years ago, I picked up The Dragon Waiting, I didn’t even realize that the John M. Ford was the Mike Ford who was so often mentioned by my friends in fandom, nor that he was Elise’s “dear Mr. Ford.” The book looked interesting, and it was on the fiction shelves of Alan and Debbie—a sure guarantee of literary quality.
I devoured it—gulped it down, and read as much of his work as I could find in the succeeding weeks. It was subtle, brilliant, complex, and humane. I wished I could meet an author capable of writing such a dazzling novel in his mid-twenties. Our one chance was spoiled when he broke his foot just before he and Elise were to meet Alan and me in Las Vegas.
Literary criticism can be a touchy business, especially when the late author is widely known and loved. But criticism is the wrong word here; I’ll leave that to Derrida and nagging parents. Call it literary commentary. Worse, this commentary is not even a broad survey by an expert in the field or a definitive summing-up of a career. It’s a brief look at a single facet of a highly complex oeuvre. Death in the work of Mike Ford.
Mike Ford died young, and he spent four-fifths of his life dealing with chronic illness. From age 11 on, he had severe Type I diabetes. Eventually it wrecked his kidneys; a transplant gave him six extra years of life. Many of the people who knew and loved him say he lived a good ten years beyond what he expected, and they all credit his longterm partner Elise for saving his life. (alanbostick also says his writing was just the icing on the cake—that knowing him was even more rewarding than reading him.) Mike would have been fifty years old today.
I returned to Mike Ford’s work because I’ve been trying to whip up a certain rage at encroaching death. If I could feel it on his behalf, maybe I could learn to feel it for myself. Things did not work out that way. I found something infinitely more precious and joyful there.
WARNING: spoilers for The Dragon Waiting, How Much for Just the Planet?, Heat of Fusion and Other Stories
The Dragon Waiting, a subtle, brilliant alternate history, offers a plausible solution to the mystery of the Princes in the Tower. The divergences from history start with the existence of vampires. Instead of dying young, the Emperor Julian the Apostate became a vampire and survived long enough to bring back paganism, which resulted in a cascade of changes: Christianity is a minority religion, and Byzantium still rules most of Europe.
All vampire stories play with death. Ford’s play is both explicit and implicit.Explicitly, his vampires are individuals confronting the ugly realities: some gladly surrender their humanity and revel in bloodlust; others build relationships where occasional blood feeding is a gift for the family vampire, who otherwise subsists on animal blood alone; others confine themselves to animals and perhaps dying soldiers on a battlefield. One spends much of the book close to suicide; he keeps facing the terror of living (almost) forever. Incidentally, the vampire subplots are blessedly free from morbid romanticism; Ford’s chief vampire is an engineer.
The implicit playing with death is more subtle and almost lost in the conventions of alternate history. But Mike Ford not only works through the changes of history that his hypothetical situation entails, he also grants Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, a life that does not end on the scaffold—and the kind of lover he deserved. Rivers, a scholar and parfit gentle knight, may have been the only sympathetic Woodville. He was certainly the most literate of them.
The textual complexities of The Dragon Waiting are not an adequate preparation for How Much for Just the Planet? Nothing short of a PhD in popular culture and a large canister of nitrous oxide could possibly prepare the reader for this book. Try to imagine a Star Trek novel that starts with an inflatable rubber spaceship. Or one that combines the French farce of Georges Feydeau and the hometown nostalgia of Ray Bradbury. Or one that simultaneously riffs off Shakespeare, Gilbert and Sullivan, The Maltese Falcon, and half a dozen other cultural icons. Or one that finishes, as Dr. Strangelove was supposed to, with a cream-pie fight and the end of the world as we know it.
Now try to think of them all at once.
That’s the magnificently silly gift Mike Ford gave us in How Much for Just the Planet? I can’t compare it to any other Star Trek novel, because I’ve never read any other Star Trek novels. If they’re all this good, I have to catch up on some reading. But I doubt it. Very few writers of any genre are as skilled, inventive, playful, and profoundly humane as the author of this romp.
Also smart. He must have had a mind crammed with trivia and a library full of obscure and fascinating books and movies. Even as I laughed over allusions to “Peppermint Soda” and “Animal House,” I knew I must be missing a dozen allusions to every one I got—an experience positively Silverlockian. Clearly he was having fun: several well-known SF authors appear as characters, and he plays endlessly with the conventions of the genre.
How Much for Just the Planet? is a relatively early book, but its splendid foolery contains a key to the rest of the novelist and poet’s work. The settlers of a small, beautiful planet have made the place home, despite being there only one generation. Unfortunately, their planet has enormous dilithium reserves, which the Klingons and the Federation both need. And so our hero plots his roaring farce, recruits almost everyone else on the planet to participate in Plan C, and plays ringmaster to the comedy that greets the inevitable invasion of dilithium seekers.
He knew the life he loved couldn’t last. So he greeted the end of that life with a pie in the face.
The stories and poems in Heat of Fusion and Other Stories deal variously with death. In the title story, a scientist in a post-apocalyptic world is dying of radiation poisoning. The government urges him to write down his notes on the fusion experiments to create a new bomb, but he has arranged that any successful fusion will destroy the lab and everyone near it—including himself. His last words are “light. triumph”—an extraordinary greeting for death.
“Shelter from the Storm” returns to themes and tropes familiar from How Much for Just the Planet? A small planet, caught at a moment of vulnerability, must defend itself against attack by overwhelming forces. It’s classic hard SF, but it’s also a nuanced, tender love song to a home, a long life, a marriage, and a family Ford knew he would never live to have. The protagonist, Marshall Kinbote, is married to a calm and beautiful woman. “I would have been dead without Elise thirty years ago. Even if my body continued to breathe, I would have been dead.”
Knowing they cannot win in straightforward battle, Kinbote discovers that his daughter’s fiancé has been trained in a kind of guerrilla warfare: carefully targeted sabotage that so disrupts the plans of the attacking enemy that they must give up the attempt. The fiancé explains that he has been shaped into something like a werewolf—and warns the daughter that only someone who loves the werewolf can ultimately slay him.
“Dateline: Colonus” brings Oedipus to small-town America, where he and his daughters stop at a roadside café run by the Kindly Ones, Theseus is sheriff, and the self-blinded old man is able to end his life in peace, leaving great blessings for the place where he dies.
“Dark Sea,” one of the long poems in Heat of Fusion, sends an ancient Greek poet into space with modern Stellar-Namers and Readers of Earth. And in that poem, Ford states his lifelong theme clearly—though with characteristic doubleness. “All the songs of heroes are songs of Death.” All the songs sung by heroes, all the songs sung about heroes. “We sing because we die; the song goes on.”
Mike Ford was a hero. All his life he saw the dragon waiting, and he teased it, played with it, danced with it, told it stories, and pulled rabbits out of hats to entertain it. When he finally mounted it and rode away, he was kind enough to leave us some poems and stories to amuse us while we wait our turn.
Disclaimers: Unlike many of my readers, I did not know the late John Milo “Mike” Ford. I first encountered his work in Neil Gaiman’s blog and in his inimitable contributions to Making Light. If he ever posted to any of the Usenet groups I used to frequent, it’s so long ago that I don’t recall it.
When, several years ago, I picked up The Dragon Waiting, I didn’t even realize that the John M. Ford was the Mike Ford who was so often mentioned by my friends in fandom, nor that he was Elise’s “dear Mr. Ford.” The book looked interesting, and it was on the fiction shelves of Alan and Debbie—a sure guarantee of literary quality.
I devoured it—gulped it down, and read as much of his work as I could find in the succeeding weeks. It was subtle, brilliant, complex, and humane. I wished I could meet an author capable of writing such a dazzling novel in his mid-twenties. Our one chance was spoiled when he broke his foot just before he and Elise were to meet Alan and me in Las Vegas.
Literary criticism can be a touchy business, especially when the late author is widely known and loved. But criticism is the wrong word here; I’ll leave that to Derrida and nagging parents. Call it literary commentary. Worse, this commentary is not even a broad survey by an expert in the field or a definitive summing-up of a career. It’s a brief look at a single facet of a highly complex oeuvre. Death in the work of Mike Ford.
Mike Ford died young, and he spent four-fifths of his life dealing with chronic illness. From age 11 on, he had severe Type I diabetes. Eventually it wrecked his kidneys; a transplant gave him six extra years of life. Many of the people who knew and loved him say he lived a good ten years beyond what he expected, and they all credit his longterm partner Elise for saving his life. (alanbostick also says his writing was just the icing on the cake—that knowing him was even more rewarding than reading him.) Mike would have been fifty years old today.
I returned to Mike Ford’s work because I’ve been trying to whip up a certain rage at encroaching death. If I could feel it on his behalf, maybe I could learn to feel it for myself. Things did not work out that way. I found something infinitely more precious and joyful there.
WARNING: spoilers for The Dragon Waiting, How Much for Just the Planet?, Heat of Fusion and Other Stories
The Dragon Waiting, a subtle, brilliant alternate history, offers a plausible solution to the mystery of the Princes in the Tower. The divergences from history start with the existence of vampires. Instead of dying young, the Emperor Julian the Apostate became a vampire and survived long enough to bring back paganism, which resulted in a cascade of changes: Christianity is a minority religion, and Byzantium still rules most of Europe.
All vampire stories play with death. Ford’s play is both explicit and implicit.Explicitly, his vampires are individuals confronting the ugly realities: some gladly surrender their humanity and revel in bloodlust; others build relationships where occasional blood feeding is a gift for the family vampire, who otherwise subsists on animal blood alone; others confine themselves to animals and perhaps dying soldiers on a battlefield. One spends much of the book close to suicide; he keeps facing the terror of living (almost) forever. Incidentally, the vampire subplots are blessedly free from morbid romanticism; Ford’s chief vampire is an engineer.
The implicit playing with death is more subtle and almost lost in the conventions of alternate history. But Mike Ford not only works through the changes of history that his hypothetical situation entails, he also grants Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, a life that does not end on the scaffold—and the kind of lover he deserved. Rivers, a scholar and parfit gentle knight, may have been the only sympathetic Woodville. He was certainly the most literate of them.
The textual complexities of The Dragon Waiting are not an adequate preparation for How Much for Just the Planet? Nothing short of a PhD in popular culture and a large canister of nitrous oxide could possibly prepare the reader for this book. Try to imagine a Star Trek novel that starts with an inflatable rubber spaceship. Or one that combines the French farce of Georges Feydeau and the hometown nostalgia of Ray Bradbury. Or one that simultaneously riffs off Shakespeare, Gilbert and Sullivan, The Maltese Falcon, and half a dozen other cultural icons. Or one that finishes, as Dr. Strangelove was supposed to, with a cream-pie fight and the end of the world as we know it.
Now try to think of them all at once.
That’s the magnificently silly gift Mike Ford gave us in How Much for Just the Planet? I can’t compare it to any other Star Trek novel, because I’ve never read any other Star Trek novels. If they’re all this good, I have to catch up on some reading. But I doubt it. Very few writers of any genre are as skilled, inventive, playful, and profoundly humane as the author of this romp.
Also smart. He must have had a mind crammed with trivia and a library full of obscure and fascinating books and movies. Even as I laughed over allusions to “Peppermint Soda” and “Animal House,” I knew I must be missing a dozen allusions to every one I got—an experience positively Silverlockian. Clearly he was having fun: several well-known SF authors appear as characters, and he plays endlessly with the conventions of the genre.
How Much for Just the Planet? is a relatively early book, but its splendid foolery contains a key to the rest of the novelist and poet’s work. The settlers of a small, beautiful planet have made the place home, despite being there only one generation. Unfortunately, their planet has enormous dilithium reserves, which the Klingons and the Federation both need. And so our hero plots his roaring farce, recruits almost everyone else on the planet to participate in Plan C, and plays ringmaster to the comedy that greets the inevitable invasion of dilithium seekers.
He knew the life he loved couldn’t last. So he greeted the end of that life with a pie in the face.
The stories and poems in Heat of Fusion and Other Stories deal variously with death. In the title story, a scientist in a post-apocalyptic world is dying of radiation poisoning. The government urges him to write down his notes on the fusion experiments to create a new bomb, but he has arranged that any successful fusion will destroy the lab and everyone near it—including himself. His last words are “light. triumph”—an extraordinary greeting for death.
“Shelter from the Storm” returns to themes and tropes familiar from How Much for Just the Planet? A small planet, caught at a moment of vulnerability, must defend itself against attack by overwhelming forces. It’s classic hard SF, but it’s also a nuanced, tender love song to a home, a long life, a marriage, and a family Ford knew he would never live to have. The protagonist, Marshall Kinbote, is married to a calm and beautiful woman. “I would have been dead without Elise thirty years ago. Even if my body continued to breathe, I would have been dead.”
Knowing they cannot win in straightforward battle, Kinbote discovers that his daughter’s fiancé has been trained in a kind of guerrilla warfare: carefully targeted sabotage that so disrupts the plans of the attacking enemy that they must give up the attempt. The fiancé explains that he has been shaped into something like a werewolf—and warns the daughter that only someone who loves the werewolf can ultimately slay him.
“Dateline: Colonus” brings Oedipus to small-town America, where he and his daughters stop at a roadside café run by the Kindly Ones, Theseus is sheriff, and the self-blinded old man is able to end his life in peace, leaving great blessings for the place where he dies.
“Dark Sea,” one of the long poems in Heat of Fusion, sends an ancient Greek poet into space with modern Stellar-Namers and Readers of Earth. And in that poem, Ford states his lifelong theme clearly—though with characteristic doubleness. “All the songs of heroes are songs of Death.” All the songs sung by heroes, all the songs sung about heroes. “We sing because we die; the song goes on.”
Mike Ford was a hero. All his life he saw the dragon waiting, and he teased it, played with it, danced with it, told it stories, and pulled rabbits out of hats to entertain it. When he finally mounted it and rode away, he was kind enough to leave us some poems and stories to amuse us while we wait our turn.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Women with PTSD: The New Sex Symbol?
Laurie and Debbie at Body Impolitic ask: Is PTSD Sexy? The context is the sexualized, Madonna/whore photographs accompanying a fine, thoughtful New York Times article on PTSD in women soldiers.
My answer to their question:
Of course women with PTSD are sexy.[1] They're damsels in distress. The classic damsel in distress is being held prisoner by a monster (usually male, but sometimes an older, sexually rapacious/repressive female), and the first thing the rescuer does is take the monster's place in her affections, then in her bed. Stockholm Syndrome in action.
Women with PTSD are scared, they're helpless, they're easy to comfort/victimize.And nobody will believe them if they say they didn't want sex, because they're already defined as crazy.
Yes, genuine nurturing and protective instincts can be expressed sexually -- by people of all genders and in all life situations. I've been known to grow rapidly attached to people in pain. I've sought and given comfort with my body. And I'm not even willing to say that all the times I did that were innocent and harmless.
I don't know what the right answer is. I do know that presenting people with PTSD as pin-ups is the wrong one.
[1] For the record: I have complex PTSD, which I have written about extensively.
Laurie and Debbie at Body Impolitic ask: Is PTSD Sexy? The context is the sexualized, Madonna/whore photographs accompanying a fine, thoughtful New York Times article on PTSD in women soldiers.
My answer to their question:
Of course women with PTSD are sexy.[1] They're damsels in distress. The classic damsel in distress is being held prisoner by a monster (usually male, but sometimes an older, sexually rapacious/repressive female), and the first thing the rescuer does is take the monster's place in her affections, then in her bed. Stockholm Syndrome in action.
Women with PTSD are scared, they're helpless, they're easy to comfort/victimize.And nobody will believe them if they say they didn't want sex, because they're already defined as crazy.
Yes, genuine nurturing and protective instincts can be expressed sexually -- by people of all genders and in all life situations. I've been known to grow rapidly attached to people in pain. I've sought and given comfort with my body. And I'm not even willing to say that all the times I did that were innocent and harmless.
I don't know what the right answer is. I do know that presenting people with PTSD as pin-ups is the wrong one.
[1] For the record: I have complex PTSD, which I have written about extensively.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
We Have a Winner!
Julie Phillips’s powerful biography of Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr., has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography—a signal honor, and one thoroughly deserved.
I scrolled back through the winners, and it looks like this is the first SF-related book to win in any category. It’s possible some of the collections of criticism addressed SF, so I can’t be too dogmatic about that statement. Given the prestige of the National Book Critics Circle, I’m hoping this award is a portent of things to come.
Julie Phillips’s powerful biography of Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr., has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography—a signal honor, and one thoroughly deserved.
I scrolled back through the winners, and it looks like this is the first SF-related book to win in any category. It’s possible some of the collections of criticism addressed SF, so I can’t be too dogmatic about that statement. Given the prestige of the National Book Critics Circle, I’m hoping this award is a portent of things to come.
Friday, March 09, 2007
The Freedom of the Mind, The Cost of Alzheimers
"There is only one freedom of any importance: freedom of the mind." The late Iris Murdoch said that before she was attacked by Alzheimers disease.
I know another literate, liberal, original woman whose mind is slowly being destroyed by Alzheimers: Michele's mother Shelley. I was lucky enough to meet Shelley when she was fully herself, and she was extraordinarily kind to me in circumstances when kindness was the greatest possible gift. Now she is still kind, but confused and desperately confabulating to try to explain the inexplicable world she is lost in.
I mourn the loss of her brilliance and wit. I grieve for her husband and daughters, who are watching helplessly as she fades. And I will give what I can to help. For the sake of Shelley, who may well die before a cure. For the sake of the next generation, for those of us who may carry the genes that will take our minds long before our bodies surrender.
Five or ten or a hundred dollars--will I remember in a year what I did with that money? But it will make a difference to the Alzheimers Foundation. They'll use it to fund research, education, and support for Alzheimers victims and their families and caregivers.
You can help too.
"There is only one freedom of any importance: freedom of the mind." The late Iris Murdoch said that before she was attacked by Alzheimers disease.
I know another literate, liberal, original woman whose mind is slowly being destroyed by Alzheimers: Michele's mother Shelley. I was lucky enough to meet Shelley when she was fully herself, and she was extraordinarily kind to me in circumstances when kindness was the greatest possible gift. Now she is still kind, but confused and desperately confabulating to try to explain the inexplicable world she is lost in.
I mourn the loss of her brilliance and wit. I grieve for her husband and daughters, who are watching helplessly as she fades. And I will give what I can to help. For the sake of Shelley, who may well die before a cure. For the sake of the next generation, for those of us who may carry the genes that will take our minds long before our bodies surrender.
Five or ten or a hundred dollars--will I remember in a year what I did with that money? But it will make a difference to the Alzheimers Foundation. They'll use it to fund research, education, and support for Alzheimers victims and their families and caregivers.
You can help too.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
IN MEMORIAM: Jean Baudrillard (June 20, 1929 - March 6, 2007)
Quotes by the late Jean Baudrillard
Psychology
It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.
Terror is as much a part of the concept of truth as runniness is of the concept of jam. We wouldn’t like jam if it didn’t, by its very nature, ooze. We wouldn’t like truth if it wasn’t sticky, if, from time to time, it didn’t ooze blood.
One of life’s primal situations; the game of hide and seek. Oh, the delicious thrill of hiding while the others come looking for you, the delicious terror of being discovered, but what panic when, after a long search, the others abandon you! You mustn’t hide too well. You mustn’t be too good at the game. The player must never be bigger than the game itself.
The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.
If we consider the superiority of the human species, the size of its brain, its powers of thinking, language and organization, we can say this: were there the slightest possibility that another rival or superior species might appear, on earth or elsewhere, man would use every means at his disposal to destroy it.
Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.
Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile.
Depressed moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.
Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
Information
Information...exhausts itself in the staging of meaning...[and leads] not at all to a surfeit of innovation but to the very contrary, to total entropy.
In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.
Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.
Post-modern life
We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
If everything on television is, without exception, part of a low-calorie (or even no-calorie) diet, then what good is it complaining about the adverts? By their worthlessness, they at least help to make the programmes around them seem of a higher level.
It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch it operating like a video game...All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to see our thoughts unfolding before us – and this itself is a superstition.
Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?
Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.
The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It’s the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.
Love
If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.
There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each. This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other’s heart.
Analogies
The surprises of thought are like those of love: they wear out. But here too you can carry on for a long time doing your conjugal duty.
Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.
Every woman is like a timezone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night.
Executives are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an executive away from his business, he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business. He never stops hurtling onwards, making decisions and executing them.
Politics and the US
The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.
Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.
It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.
Paradox: all bombs are clean—their only pollution is the system of control and security they radiate when they are not detonated.
In order to function, capitalism needs to dominate nature, to domesticate sexuality, to rationalize language as a means of communication, to relegate ethnic groups, women, children and youth to genocide, ethnocide and racial discrimination.
Mistakes, scandals, and failures no longer signal catastrophe. The crucial thing is that they be made credible, and that the public be made aware of the efforts being expended in that direction. The “marketing” immunity of governments is similar to that of the major brands of washing powder.
What is a society without a heroic dimension?
What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.
Language
Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.
Aphorisms
Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.
There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.
The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.
Perhaps the world’s second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.
The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.
The order of the world is always right - such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.
The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.
In days gone by, we were afraid of dying in dishonor or a state of sin. Nowadays, we are afraid of dying fools. Now the fact is that there is no Extreme Unction to absolve us of foolishness. We endure it here on earth as subjective eternity.
Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this voyeurism of exactitude.
Something in all men profoundly rejoices in seeing a car burn.
Selections from “War Porn”
Selections from
War Porn
The New World Order will be both consensual and televisual. That is indeed why the targeted bombings carefully avoided the Iraqi television antennae...The crucial stake, the decisive stake in this whole affair is the consensual reduction of Islam to the global order.
[On the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib] These scenes are the illustration of a power which, reaching its extreme point, no longer knows what to do with itself – a power henceforth without aim, without purpose, without a plausible enemy, and in total impunity. It is only capable of inflicting gratuitous humiliation and, as one knows, violence inflicted on others is after all only an expression of the violence inflicted on oneself. It only manages to humiliate itself, degrade itself and go back on its own word in a sort of unremitting perversity. The ignominy, the vileness is the ultimate symptom of a power that no longer knows what to do with itself.
These images are as murderous for America as those of the World Trade Center in flames. Nevertheless, America in itself is not on trial, and it is useless to charge the Americans: the infernal machine exploded in literally suicidal acts. In fact, the Americans have been overtaken by their own power. They do not have the means to control it. And now we are part of this power. The bad conscience of the entire West is crystallized in these images. The whole West is contained in the burst of the sadistic laughter of the American soldiers, as it is behind the construction of the Israeli wall. This is where the truth of these images lies; this is what they are full of: the excessiveness of a power designating itself as abject and pornographic.
This masquerade crowns the ignominy of the war – until this travesty, it was present in this most ferocious image (the most ferocious for America), because it was most ghostly and most “reversible”: the prisoner threatened with electrocution and, completely hooded, like a member of the Ku Klux Klan, crucified by its ilk. It is really America that has electrocuted itself.
Quotes by the late Jean Baudrillard
Psychology
It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.
Terror is as much a part of the concept of truth as runniness is of the concept of jam. We wouldn’t like jam if it didn’t, by its very nature, ooze. We wouldn’t like truth if it wasn’t sticky, if, from time to time, it didn’t ooze blood.
One of life’s primal situations; the game of hide and seek. Oh, the delicious thrill of hiding while the others come looking for you, the delicious terror of being discovered, but what panic when, after a long search, the others abandon you! You mustn’t hide too well. You mustn’t be too good at the game. The player must never be bigger than the game itself.
The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.
If we consider the superiority of the human species, the size of its brain, its powers of thinking, language and organization, we can say this: were there the slightest possibility that another rival or superior species might appear, on earth or elsewhere, man would use every means at his disposal to destroy it.
Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.
Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile.
Depressed moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.
Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
Information
Information...exhausts itself in the staging of meaning...[and leads] not at all to a surfeit of innovation but to the very contrary, to total entropy.
In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.
Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.
Post-modern life
We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
If everything on television is, without exception, part of a low-calorie (or even no-calorie) diet, then what good is it complaining about the adverts? By their worthlessness, they at least help to make the programmes around them seem of a higher level.
It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch it operating like a video game...All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to see our thoughts unfolding before us – and this itself is a superstition.
Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?
Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.
The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It’s the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.
Love
If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.
There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each. This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other’s heart.
Analogies
The surprises of thought are like those of love: they wear out. But here too you can carry on for a long time doing your conjugal duty.
Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.
Every woman is like a timezone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night.
Executives are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an executive away from his business, he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business. He never stops hurtling onwards, making decisions and executing them.
Politics and the US
The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.
Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.
It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.
Paradox: all bombs are clean—their only pollution is the system of control and security they radiate when they are not detonated.
In order to function, capitalism needs to dominate nature, to domesticate sexuality, to rationalize language as a means of communication, to relegate ethnic groups, women, children and youth to genocide, ethnocide and racial discrimination.
Mistakes, scandals, and failures no longer signal catastrophe. The crucial thing is that they be made credible, and that the public be made aware of the efforts being expended in that direction. The “marketing” immunity of governments is similar to that of the major brands of washing powder.
What is a society without a heroic dimension?
What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.
Language
Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.
Aphorisms
Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.
There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.
The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.
Perhaps the world’s second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.
The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.
The order of the world is always right - such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.
The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.
In days gone by, we were afraid of dying in dishonor or a state of sin. Nowadays, we are afraid of dying fools. Now the fact is that there is no Extreme Unction to absolve us of foolishness. We endure it here on earth as subjective eternity.
Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this voyeurism of exactitude.
Something in all men profoundly rejoices in seeing a car burn.
Selections from “War Porn”
Selections from
War Porn
The New World Order will be both consensual and televisual. That is indeed why the targeted bombings carefully avoided the Iraqi television antennae...The crucial stake, the decisive stake in this whole affair is the consensual reduction of Islam to the global order.
[On the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib] These scenes are the illustration of a power which, reaching its extreme point, no longer knows what to do with itself – a power henceforth without aim, without purpose, without a plausible enemy, and in total impunity. It is only capable of inflicting gratuitous humiliation and, as one knows, violence inflicted on others is after all only an expression of the violence inflicted on oneself. It only manages to humiliate itself, degrade itself and go back on its own word in a sort of unremitting perversity. The ignominy, the vileness is the ultimate symptom of a power that no longer knows what to do with itself.
These images are as murderous for America as those of the World Trade Center in flames. Nevertheless, America in itself is not on trial, and it is useless to charge the Americans: the infernal machine exploded in literally suicidal acts. In fact, the Americans have been overtaken by their own power. They do not have the means to control it. And now we are part of this power. The bad conscience of the entire West is crystallized in these images. The whole West is contained in the burst of the sadistic laughter of the American soldiers, as it is behind the construction of the Israeli wall. This is where the truth of these images lies; this is what they are full of: the excessiveness of a power designating itself as abject and pornographic.
This masquerade crowns the ignominy of the war – until this travesty, it was present in this most ferocious image (the most ferocious for America), because it was most ghostly and most “reversible”: the prisoner threatened with electrocution and, completely hooded, like a member of the Ku Klux Klan, crucified by its ilk. It is really America that has electrocuted itself.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
IN MEMORIAM: W. H. Auden
A hundred years ago today, one of my favorite poets was born: a splendid fat bugger who, once he became famous, wore carpet slippers everywhere—even with a tuxedo. He loved words and landscape, gave generously in support of the Catholic Worker, and reconverted to Anglicanism as an adult. His friends ranged from Dorothy Day to Christopher Isherwood to Gypsy Rose Lee. His essays and poems were formative for me, and I still love them.
In his own words in honor of another dead poet,
Events for the Auden centenary
Let us lift a glass in honor of W.H. Auden, Christian and queer and poet.
A hundred years ago today, one of my favorite poets was born: a splendid fat bugger who, once he became famous, wore carpet slippers everywhere—even with a tuxedo. He loved words and landscape, gave generously in support of the Catholic Worker, and reconverted to Anglicanism as an adult. His friends ranged from Dorothy Day to Christopher Isherwood to Gypsy Rose Lee. His essays and poems were formative for me, and I still love them.
In his own words in honor of another dead poet,
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
Events for the Auden centenary
Let us lift a glass in honor of W.H. Auden, Christian and queer and poet.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Pleasures
Some things I love, and what to do with/to/about them:
Independent bookstores: Buy some SF from Dream Haven Books, which was recently robbed and trashed by complete idiots.
The Bay Area: Celebrate Valentine’s Day with a pillow fight.
Life: Love things, and people, and places. Animals, too, they’re very important, and also trees, the sun and moon, the smell of good earth, and art in all its manifestations. Love them hard. Love them even when you want to strangle them or pitch them into the bin or set fire to them. Love them anyway.
Science: Badges Badges Badges! I’ve earned these: rejected by the New Yorker (But with an encouraging note from Roger Angell!); gladly will kick sexual harassers’ asses; and experienced with electrical shock, LEVEL II, In which the recipient has had experience with the electrical shocking of a human.
Gorgeous fat women: In Heather's Name - Love your body.
Baseball: Pitchers and catchers, report to spring training!
Some things I love, and what to do with/to/about them:
Independent bookstores: Buy some SF from Dream Haven Books, which was recently robbed and trashed by complete idiots.
The Bay Area: Celebrate Valentine’s Day with a pillow fight.
Life: Love things, and people, and places. Animals, too, they’re very important, and also trees, the sun and moon, the smell of good earth, and art in all its manifestations. Love them hard. Love them even when you want to strangle them or pitch them into the bin or set fire to them. Love them anyway.
Science: Badges Badges Badges! I’ve earned these: rejected by the New Yorker (But with an encouraging note from Roger Angell!); gladly will kick sexual harassers’ asses; and experienced with electrical shock, LEVEL II, In which the recipient has had experience with the electrical shocking of a human.
Gorgeous fat women: In Heather's Name - Love your body.
Baseball: Pitchers and catchers, report to spring training!
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Alternate History
After almost ten years of marriage, three kids, and a couple of moves, Diane is coming into her own. She and her husband Chris (not to be confused with her sister Chris) have built a good life, and they’re finally buying a house. I still can’t understand how churches can exist without a parsonage, but I’m old-fashioned that way.
The wedding was beautiful, of course, and so was Diane when she announced her first pregnancy only a year later. We were all worried about the medical issues of pregnancy. The newer allergy and asthma meds helped a lot; Diane’s asthma is of the dangerous kind, but she has it pretty well under control most of the time now.
So is her depression. She is still in therapy, but with a decent antidepressant and good emotional support from her family and friends, she’s doing a lot better. She talks with honesty and passion about the importance of getting psychological help for Christians with mental illnesses—“none of this bullshit about how good Christians don’t get depressed.” She had one bad spell of post-partum depression, but Chris (her sister) talked her into getting help fast. That was right after 9/11, which hit Diane hard: she spent the last weeks of her second pregnancy glued to the TV watching the disaster. Several of her church members were in the Pentagon; one was badly injured. And Diane still worries about the effect of the stress hormones and her depression on Elizabeth, a dark, quiet girl who looks a lot like her father.
Once the kids were in school and her younger siblings fairly well launched, Diane started writing seriously. She always wrote—she has a trunkful of old romance manuscripts scribbled while she rode the bus to school or waited in doctors’ offices—but now she has more time to devote to her work. Until her mid-twenties she concentrated on historical romances, but now she is working on grand family sagas: not just brooding men and passionate women, but the ways that families influence each other over the generations. She’s good and getting better. The most recent project is one based on her own family history, since she’s gotten very interested in genealogy. She’s been putting a lot of her faith in her books, but she’s considerably closer to Susan Howatch than to Grace Livingston Hill.
Although she writes under a pseudonym, the people in her church know she’s an author. Luckily, her husband Chris’s congregation is well-educated and liberal. There have been some stresses there—being a minister’s wife is not easy—but Diane’s charm and her musical talent have helped in her ministry. (And I admit it, her dogmatism and stubbornness have sometimes been an issue there.)
Of course she’s still singing. There was some talk a few years ago about her church’s praise band cutting a record, but it would be only for local distribution. I haven’t heard anything about that in a while.
She bought season tickets to the Orioles when she got her first book published. We also gave her a huge party. Every year after the World Series, she and I get on the phone and review the whole baseball season. It takes a few hours, but it’s a great tradition. She and I are planning to meet up this year at Cooperstown for Cal Ripken’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. She bubbles with all the old enthusiasm when she talks about the Orioles.
At 32 she’s still as skinny as a teenager. During her pregnancies she looked like a straw that had swallowed an olive. She started teaching her kids baseball and basketball when they were tiny. Now they play with their cousin Jessica and with all the other cousins. Maybe next year they’ll come to visit me in California.
This is not about grief. This is about loss.
Diane Michelle Thompson
July 10, 1974 – February 8, 1997
After almost ten years of marriage, three kids, and a couple of moves, Diane is coming into her own. She and her husband Chris (not to be confused with her sister Chris) have built a good life, and they’re finally buying a house. I still can’t understand how churches can exist without a parsonage, but I’m old-fashioned that way.
The wedding was beautiful, of course, and so was Diane when she announced her first pregnancy only a year later. We were all worried about the medical issues of pregnancy. The newer allergy and asthma meds helped a lot; Diane’s asthma is of the dangerous kind, but she has it pretty well under control most of the time now.
So is her depression. She is still in therapy, but with a decent antidepressant and good emotional support from her family and friends, she’s doing a lot better. She talks with honesty and passion about the importance of getting psychological help for Christians with mental illnesses—“none of this bullshit about how good Christians don’t get depressed.” She had one bad spell of post-partum depression, but Chris (her sister) talked her into getting help fast. That was right after 9/11, which hit Diane hard: she spent the last weeks of her second pregnancy glued to the TV watching the disaster. Several of her church members were in the Pentagon; one was badly injured. And Diane still worries about the effect of the stress hormones and her depression on Elizabeth, a dark, quiet girl who looks a lot like her father.
Once the kids were in school and her younger siblings fairly well launched, Diane started writing seriously. She always wrote—she has a trunkful of old romance manuscripts scribbled while she rode the bus to school or waited in doctors’ offices—but now she has more time to devote to her work. Until her mid-twenties she concentrated on historical romances, but now she is working on grand family sagas: not just brooding men and passionate women, but the ways that families influence each other over the generations. She’s good and getting better. The most recent project is one based on her own family history, since she’s gotten very interested in genealogy. She’s been putting a lot of her faith in her books, but she’s considerably closer to Susan Howatch than to Grace Livingston Hill.
Although she writes under a pseudonym, the people in her church know she’s an author. Luckily, her husband Chris’s congregation is well-educated and liberal. There have been some stresses there—being a minister’s wife is not easy—but Diane’s charm and her musical talent have helped in her ministry. (And I admit it, her dogmatism and stubbornness have sometimes been an issue there.)
Of course she’s still singing. There was some talk a few years ago about her church’s praise band cutting a record, but it would be only for local distribution. I haven’t heard anything about that in a while.
She bought season tickets to the Orioles when she got her first book published. We also gave her a huge party. Every year after the World Series, she and I get on the phone and review the whole baseball season. It takes a few hours, but it’s a great tradition. She and I are planning to meet up this year at Cooperstown for Cal Ripken’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. She bubbles with all the old enthusiasm when she talks about the Orioles.
At 32 she’s still as skinny as a teenager. During her pregnancies she looked like a straw that had swallowed an olive. She started teaching her kids baseball and basketball when they were tiny. Now they play with their cousin Jessica and with all the other cousins. Maybe next year they’ll come to visit me in California.
This is not about grief. This is about loss.
Diane Michelle Thompson
July 10, 1974 – February 8, 1997
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