AmRev2 - Rise Up and Change the Culture

Kohi, Hai


AmRev2 - Rise Up and Change the Culture.

Tee shirts, bumper stickers, and graffiti proclaim it, and slogans on school book covers carry the word: AmRev2 is here. Rise up. Change the culture.

Make things better than Greed Is Good. Improve corporate sociopath lying by telling the truth. Buy organic, support local arts and crafts, and eat food grown in the ground near you. Plant gardens, grow windowsill herbs, and drink free trade coffee and tea. Go veggie. Go green.

Each change starts inside, with an idea that grows into willful purpose. Decisions are all it takes.

To abandon corporate consumerism is easier than you’d think. Avoid the big chains. Boycott McDonald’s and WalMart. Shop local when possible, and always choose unmarked and original items. Why advertise for a corporation that would crush you without blinking, by wearing its logo and spreading its presence everywhere you go? That is giving them your life as a billboard. To hell with that.

Gain ground on the future by inventing your chunk of it. Discover or rediscover the joys of self-expression. Why let multinational corporations bully you into saying their slogans? Why let political hacks tell you what to think?

We’re caught right now in a cycle of greed, destruction, and violence. Intolerance and politically-expedient hatred are watchwords, and the resultant strife and, in some cases, famine and genocide, is hurting us all.

It needn’t be like that. What is wrong is a culture of corporate sociopathic profiteering. When a corporation answers only to its shareholders, profit is all that counts, and human issues, and humane behavior, are crushed and tossed aside. When zero sum thinking dominates, forcing the other guy to lose is the only way to win.

Such thinking is mental illness. A culture embracing such sick thinking becomes a self-destructive society.

We need an intervention, and it won’t come from outside. No one’s there. They’re all too busy facing their own demons.

The only way to change things as they are is for those with the power to influence change to want it. And that, turns out, is each of us.

Be the change you would see in the world.

Support clean air by doing more than breathing heavy; how about insisting on electric cars? Buy a hybrid for now and demand they lower emissions to zero: It’s been done before, they can do it again. This is one of a million examples.

If you’re a celebrity, you’ll have more exposure, but it is those average, uncelebrated folks who make a real difference. They create the aggregate we call community standards. They decide, en masse, what is tolerated, and what is taboo. Right now they’re influenced by liars, spin doctors, and propagandists.

They could, and should, be influenced by you. And by me. And by each and every one of us, if this is truly a nation of, by, and for the people.

Recycle, sure, but follow up on what the municipality does with recycled material. Are they just throwing it all into one big dump and laughing? Why aren’t they mining it for useful material? Why aren’t they making a fortune for each community, instead of taking your money and worsening things for everyone?

Keep track of polluters in your area and pressure them to stop. Boycott, protest, and write to Congress. Do you even know your congress critter’s name? And if you’re cynical and think it won’t help, remember the Terror, when the people of France rose up and took down the smug, arrogant aristocrats and royals?

And France was just doing what we Americans had done earlier; deciding to stand for liberty, equality, and brotherhood. Or truth, justice, and fair play. Independence, self-determination, and a government of, by, and for the people.

Why is that so little remembered these days?

We must raise our children to be kind, considerate, and just. We must give them ideals instead of trust funds, ideals instead of despair, and ideals instead of a lack of hope for a better future. Can anyone right now truly say things will be better in the future, given the way things are going?

We could, if we changed tracks. If we cultivate a culture of intelligent discourse, instead of crass shout-downs. If we insist upon rationality instead of superstition and religious bigotry. If we embrace the ideals of the Enlightenment, rather than the low points of the Dark Ages.

It can be as simple as refusing to repeat jingoism. Stop joking about ragheads and start learning about Arab, Middle Eastern, or Islamic cultures. Instead of America, Right or Wrong, insist that it be right, and realize that a true patriot is one who most harshly criticizes the wrongs.

You can be a rebel, and kick off AmRev2 this instant, simply by thinking for yourself.

You have nothing to lose but your gold chains and everything to gain that comes with a brighter, more humane future. Why live in Hell when Paradise is your free and easy choice?

AmRev2 - Rise Up and Change the Culture to one we can all live with, in peace and plenty.


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In the Dark?

Kohi, Hai

In a suspense or horror movie, there must come, early on, a brutal, graphic scene of violence to establish the threat, to show what the villain is capable of.

Remember, JAWS opens with the girl being shoved around in the water, and eventually pulled under. The water’s demonstrated right up front as a threat.

This is how suspense works. Once the threat is established, though, you don’t show it again, directly, for a long time, if ever. In BLAIR WITCH PROJECT we never saw it at all, just bloody teeth and other hints of dire threat.

Playing with the established threat is what cranks up the tension in the audience. Once you know the water is dangerous in JAWS, you cringe any time anyone’s shown in the water. And that kid with the shark fin strapped to his back, just fooling around, what a joke that is, when it panics Roy Scheider into trying to get everyone out of the water. It doesn’t take much, once the threat is established, to instill cold sweats.

A little reminder of the threat, or a quick glimpse of its effects, suffices to rekindle the fear left smoldering by the comic relief. And that relief, those periods of rest between scares, is important, too, in order to let the audience relax again. Constant, gnawing fear wears thin after awhile, and ends up numbing us.

Better by far to jolt us now and then, and let us develop a false sense of security in between shocks.

In between reminders; that’s what we’re talking about. Reminders of the big threat, the dire consequences, the horrible destruction and mutilation, pain and loss, that’s been established as real, within the story’s framework.

And with each jolt, we rush back into clenched fists, closed eyes, and maybe the protective -- if entirely impotent -- arm of your date for that movie.

#

9/11 happened. Those buildings came down and those people died. Shocking images, terrifying results.

After that, all it takes is a reminder now and then.

Carrot and stick, folks.

#

So what do you think is happening when, during mid-term elections not going exactly their way for the neo con scum, there is a trumpeting of a thwarted plot to blow up dozens of airliners flying from neo con scum collaborator UK to cities all over USA?

The only question is: Will you be manipulated by such crude and obvious tactics yet again?

Judging from how popular horror movie scare machines are, the answer is, sadly, appallingly, probably yes.

You’d be better off renting or buying a copy of V FOR VENDETTA, out now on DVD. A clearer movie depiction of how things are has yet to be made, and a more hopeful rally cry has yet to be sounded.

So remember, when the threat is mentioned, they’re trying to make you jump in the dark. And they keep you in the dark for a very good reason: So their tissue-thin lies are convincing for that moment when they need to be, in order to do what they want done, which is make us all afraid, so we’ll clench up and let them move on to the next non sequitur scene of profitable carnage and theatrical mayhem.

The threat’s established, and it wasn’t 9/11.

See the fear-mongers for what they are.

Stop being jerked around in the dark.


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Listen

Kohi, Hai

Last night we, the Omaha Beach Party, had another of our writer dinners, or Picnics, and, during the discussion, the topic of making sense came up. Let's see if I can make sense of it.

Too much current fiction relies on non sequitur to subvert meaning, in order to thwart criticism. If one dares to mean something, then one has taken a stance, and that is seen as leaving one vulnerable to attack and ridicule.

This leads to unsatisfying stories. Well, no. Not even stories: Writing. Daring to tell a story reduces one to genre, the literary snobs tell us.

One can see how literary snobbery is rapidly rendering literary fiction irrelevant.

Style over substance.

It’s the kind of error that keeps people away.

In part, this literary self-destruct stems from seeing the text as an artifact -- a thing that one can remove from context and manipulate at will. This notion came from the moronic and ego-mad deconstructionists, whose goal was to remove all responsibility for a manuscript from the writer, in order to give full credit to abstracts such as Market Forces or History. They tried to steal writing from the writer.

In fact, one deconstructionist dictum is that the writer is the least qualified of all to speak about the writing.

Idiocy?

Yes, but this got taught in schools. Academia embraced it, because it offered a cheap way for bullshitters to gain and bullies to hold tenure.

Then, to get critical notice and praise, writers who’d attended these schools began writing to conform to these models.

That’s why Don DeLillo, a darling of the self-appointed literary arbiters and fellow-traveler literary academics, can’t write a clear paragraph or coherent book. Of course, deconstructonists ejaculate over his “style” and foist any “meaning” they wish onto his work to support their claims.

There is a literary backlash, though. Clear, direct stories well-told are beginning to return. That is to the good, because the readers have little patience with self-impressed prose sculpture that confuses them on purpose.

And how perverse is a literary theory when it equates popularity with lack of quality? That is the very definition of snobbery. Saying that only fiction written to an obscure model, for a tiny, prepared audience, is nothing but exclusionary. It goes well beyond elitism and is, as stated, snobbery, pure and simple.

And how dare they say that any work people find understandable on a human level is somehow common, or déclassé? It’s absurd to so hate our common humanity. It is the sick little mind game of the chronically insecure.

Is The Odyssey great because only five people each generation can grasp it, or because it speaks to our basic humanity across the ages? Would anyone keep reading it century after century if it was smug, obscure, and confusing on purpose?

Look to the perennial classics for what is good in writing. If it lasts, there is something valuable there.

Hemingway got this. His first book was The Torrents of Spring. Each chapter satirizes and pastiches the style of a then-praised writer.

Then he published The Sun Also Rises, and set his stripped, spare, and thoughtful style down as a “There, damn it,” to the others.

It was a bravura move, and it worked.

Hemingway brought home the oral tradition. He was Nirvana saving rock from disco-techno-pop banality. He was a demonstration of Homer’s continuing power. He cited Huck Finn as the book from which all modern literature flowed; the river of oral tradition.

Basic storytelling matters. It is prime among literature’s virtues.

Nowadays we have Chuck Palahniuk trying to re-grab the public’s attention using bluntness, but his narrators are a bit too slippery for most, and his achronological approach to story pattern confuses many.

There is no clear, calm, plainspoken storyteller of genius among us.

Or, rather, those here are not dominant. Maybe it’s fashion. Maybe it’s a glutted market. What ever the reason, we wait.

So what alternatives are there?

If one would be remembered, write in aphorisms, Nietzsche advised. Short, pithy sayings are easily memorized. That’s the bumper-sticker approach.

Vonnegut writes jokes. He uses the setup / knockdown rhythm of jokes to keep his work crisp. The joke form works well. It teaches one to include only what serves the punchline, and to write towards a punchline. In other words, know your point and don’t stray from it. Know where each paragraph is going, and why.

This is not to say one should avoid subtlety or artfulness; just the opposite. Complexity simply expressed is high art indeed, while simplicity complicated is just frustrating.

There are also TV and movie patterns. These work, too. Any basic three-act play device is fine: Setup, complication, and solution. First, get the leads into a pit or up a tree. Next, throw rocks at them, and have branches break. Finally, get them back on solid ground somehow. This is psychologically gratifying.

Some suspense writers follow an even simpler pattern, that of sex: Tension and release. A series of smaller tensions and releases builds to one big tease and climax. James Bond is more or less sex, often with a first act seduction or bout of foreplay.

Such work is often presented as a string of cliffhangers. There is nothing wrong with ending a chapter on a cliffhanger, but it’s wise to realize that there are many kinds, from blatant to subtle; from physical to emotional to psychological.

Variety’s a spice.

The thing is to write clearly. Write as you speak. A good story well-told is still the main thing.

So, what to write?

Finding the right story to tell, one that speaks to us all, is the hardest part. For that, the Muses.

Listen to the Muses as if your life depends on it. Your writing life does.

As Ray Bradbury has said, it is only when a writer hears his own voices, and writes her own voices clearly, that he or she produces original, worthwhile work. Aping another’s style, mimicking another’s voice, or chasing another’s dream does nothing positive. It’s better to listen to a tiny inner voice than a chorus of others’ workshopping, no matter how brilliant.

Be ready, though. If it comes, you get one chance only.

Sophie’s Choice was like that. So was Portnoy’s Complaint and Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-5 and Gravity’s Rainbow and Gone With the Wind and Fight Club --even Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code; all the pivotal and popular books came because their writers were ready to receive them.

The Muses are generous to those among us who stay open and ready, who hone our skills, who keep our hearing sharp.

Listen, then write plainly what you hear in yourself.


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Bloodsuckers

Kohi, Hai

So why have vampires, of all monsters, caught on so?

Vampires are bloodsuckers. They feed on our lives and live by killing us. Draining us dry is their goal. Vampires are the perfect image for the ruling elite. The rich who run things and benefit from war and poverty are nothing more than vampirish.

This began with Bram Stoker’s Gothic-tinged action-detective epistolary novel, Dracula.

Stoker wrote Dracula during the Victorian industrial revolution, and just prior to the Gilded Age, when wealth was celebrated. The character of Dracula fit perfectly -- he was of old aristocracy but corrupt, and his instincts were feral and base. Harker in the novel compares Dracula to a lizard when he sees him climbing the castle’s outer walls.

This basic image carries over to today in the paranoid works of David Ickes, who tells us our leaders are reptoids from another dimension wearing people suits so they can feed off us.

It’s the same imagery, updated.

And these days vampires are sympathetic. People see them as cool, no longer scary, and even romantic. It’s bizarre, until one realizes that this identifying with the monster has its roots in power exchange.

The weak both hate and adore the powerful. They resent the oppression yet dream of oppressing.

Human nature, which gives us vampires, is what gives us poverty, war, and intolerance, too. Fine gifts, all, if we control them. Nightmares, if they control us.

#

Werewolves represent the wild in us. A man’s inner beast bursting forth was considered scary. That it came out only sometimes, at roughly regular intervals, they linked it to the moon. A full moon brings the hairy stuff out.

So both berserkers and serial killers were explained with a gloss of myth. Animism’s revenge, perhaps.

These ideas came about in ancient times. Shamanism helped, and sympathetic magic, such as dressing in animal skins, seemed to improve the hunting. Transformation seemed reasonable, in the shadows around a fire.

Of course, vampires are ancient ideas, too, but the ancient Greek ones were not aristocratic nor particularly human. They were more like psychic vermin or natural forces that drained children, young mothers, and people who had diseases.

Interestingly, the idea of the dead coming back to be vampires on the living came to Ancient Greece only after contact with the Slavic nations. This is a good indication that revenants as vampires is a Slavic idea. The target was the same, though, for the blood is the life.

Life force in the west, qi or chi in the east, it’s what oppressed people don’t have much of. We call it being dispirited, and this is a clue. It means our souls are drained, the same way batteries get drained.

#

Ghosts are revenants of spirits. They are either impressions made by vivid lives, and deaths, or they are mischievous forces that throw things, shake beds, rattle dishes, and tilt tables.

Rarely are ghosts reported as draining the energy, or the life, out of people. There are a few cases on record of this, but mostly ghosts just scare and bemuse us.

So, while ghosts are common, they don’t have the cachet of vampires. No one really wants to be a ghost, once they outgrow the friendly Casper cartoons. One wonders if Harveytoons were ever sued by a dead child’s parents for encouraging ghostliness.

#

Only vampires carry the weight of the ruling elite, power exchanges, and even sex. The sexual allure of Dracula is evident when he seduces Mina to be his vampire bride. The scene in which he offers her his blood, to begin changing her, is one of the most erotic in all literature.

Power exchange makes it that way. We witness a member of the elite bestowing power upon what had been, only moments before, mere prey. It is as if a beef cow were to be granted human-like mentality and speech and offered a job in Congress.

Caligula might have been onto something with his senatorial horse, if only he’d actually had the power to grant the horse everything such a position promises.

And yet, for all his power over mortal humanoid primates, Dracula is also strangely dependent upon the lesser beings, such as Renfield, the mad eater of spiders and flies. This is to say, the serfs, the peasants who work a ruling class noble’s land, actually shoulder the burden of supporting the elite’s life. He relies on their work. There is little or no mutual benefit.

In the novel, such tasks as moving his coffins, changing his nests’ locations, buying and selling property, and all else keeping him safe and undiscovered, fall to Dracula’s damaged, overworked underlings. Ruling class needs peasantry.

Where’d the middle class go? It threatened the elite and so was drained. Underclasses are fine but a middle class demands more and more of the luxuries, the very things that set the elite apart. And the elite can’t have that.

And so a vampire is tied to his working drones.

Worse, he is tied to his homeland and must even carry coffins of his grave dirt with him; can the symbolism of the landed gentry be any clearer?

Territory becomes land becomes dirt in boxes. Earthly power becomes unearthly and vitality becomes a lust for blood, for other life forces. Dracula embodies a symbolic view of society and, as a novel, transcends analysis to speak to us as a modern myth.

#

Look to the bloodsuckers. If you would battle them, and defeat them, a symbolic reading of Stoker’s Dracula is in order.

Harker, after rooting out Dracula’s secret nests, his refuges, and his boxes of earth, chases him back to his point of origin. This is like tracking a contagion to its Zero Patient. The source of a plague is the first carrier.

In the novel, Harker kills Dracula with a combination of bravery, weapons, and exposure to light.

This is how the ruling elite may be brought to heel. Find out their secret lairs. Root them out, and hound them. In place of the stake, pointed journalism will do. Keep up the pressure of truth; in the book, the weapons are blessed by holy water. What is holier than the truth?

And once the target is driven back to the source, expose its true nature, its secrets, to the light of day. By doing this, you will kill its power, and it will be seen as the dust it has been all along.

And a new dawn may arise, even in those accursed mountain regions, where so much evil was done.

Now you know.

Now you’re a new Van Helsing.

Now you’re part of the myth’s abiding power.

/// /// ///

Shine A Light

Kohi, Hai

In London, on 7 July, 2005, bombs killed 54 people, wounded many others, and sent the rest of us back into worry, dread, and fear. Does it matter who did it?

Regardless of who planted and detonated the bombs, it is the control freaks in the governments of the targeted countries that are strengthened. If terrorists want to weaken or even bring down governments, they’re going about it ass-backwards.

Truth is, blowing up innocents accomplishes nothing and, in fact, only increases the target people’s resolve to resist, to fight back, and to seek revenge. It becomes an endless, senseless cycle, as Northern Ireland’s Troubles shows, as the Israeli - Palestine idiocy underscores.

If these shadowy, possibly fictional groups want to bring down governments, bombs aren’t the answer. The way to do it is simpler, and potentially more dangerous, than suicide bombing.
What is it that governments fear the most?

Exposure.

What is it their crimes and manipulations cannot exist without?

Secrecy.

If you want to bring down a government, shine a light on its cockroach soul. Expose its crimes, detail its horrors, and show the world the unadorned truth about it.

Brave people willing to infiltrate would be needed. Patience, too, would be vital, in order to gather indisputable evidence. Long-term planning, tight organization, and a worthy goal at the end of it all would be mandatory. People brave enough to face facts and speak out about them would serve higher causes without having to resort to violence.

Better yet, it would accomplish something, rather than reveling in death and destruction. It would sow order, not chaos. It would make a Rule of Law, with Equal Recourse By All, difficult to ignore and much harder to break.

Funding for muckrakers and investigative journalists is effective use of money to fight governments. Bombs are childish idiocy that only strengthen the supposed opponent.

The neo con scum, warmongers, and control freaks’ best friends are suicide bombers and violence. Their worst enemy is the plain truth about them. Remove the shadows in which they hide, tear away the tissue of lies behind which they maneuver, and expose the truth their propaganda twists and obscures, and you make it impossible for them to continue with business as usual.

Shine a light on their cockroach souls and governments may finally be of, by, and for the people.

If you’re serious about bringing down a corrpt, criminal government, throw a light, not a bomb.

/// /// ///

Corporate Sociopaths R Us - Unless We Change

Kohi, Hai

Corporations fulfill all criteria to be diagnosed as sociopathic. Many psychologists have pointed this out, as if it weren’t obvious.

As corporations dominate, society itself becomes sociopathic. All is focused on gain, profit, and private dividend. Nothing humane or compassionate counts. Ideals are for suckers and altruism for fools. Zero-sum game theory controls every encounter: To win, another must lose. There is no such thing as mutual benefit or shared gain. The only way to get is to take.

Greed is good, as Ivan Boesky said. Benefit the stockholders and that’s all that counts, and they keep track in dollars, in value, in monetary worth. Life becomes abstracted to numbers on ledgers, to the point that even cooking the books works.

Owning, quantifying, controlling, and profiting monetarily from literally everything in existence is the corporate goal.

The human embodiment of a corporation is a sociopath.

The extreme form of a sociopath is a serial killer.

That is why serial killers are today’s emblematic monster. They represent everything bad about sociopathic corporatism. They embody the simple fact that these behaviors are killing us, literally and figuratively.

It’s the literally that should concern us most, now that global warming may be past reversing. Humanity surviving depends on everything anathematic to sociopaths.

Put another way: If we don’t rid ourselves of sociopathic culture, we simply won’t survive much longer, either as a species or as individuals. This means you and I will die, soon, unless we change things. Our children will die. Our loved ones.

If we have any.

Sociopaths don’t. They put only self-aggrandizement first. Gratifying their whims drives them; consideration for others is nonexistent.

This means these words address only those of us not smitten by sociopathic culture. The few of us who resist it, defy it, or fight against it on a cellular level must put a stop to it. We are our only hope.

As to what we must do, there are many things. Small things each can do. Mock the sociopaths. Decry their culture and continually point out its flaws, its idiocies, and its self-destructive compulsions.

This means we must keep up the pressure of criticism. We must expose lies and deceits. We must make the neutral, the distracted, and the duped among us wake up to how corrosive sociopathic culture is.

A change of mindset, a change of culture, is the only thing that can save us. Remember the 1960s? Hippies, flower power, and peace, love, and understanding? Those ideals nearly toppled the military-industrial complex, itself sociopathic corporatism’s main persona. It nearly changed civilization into a more pastoral, less dystopian world of tolerance and mutual support.

Win-win must prevail over zero-sum.

Boycott WalMart and McDonalds. Stand up for public schools. Build Habitat For Humanity houses. Donate to local food banks. Volunteer as mentors. Show local public high schools that you and your business is there to find up-and-coming students and to help those less privileged.

Doing what ever you can at arm’s length to lessen suffering of any kind is how you change the world.

Forget the big things. Forget fund drives and class action suits. Do what needs done at arm’s length.

If enough of us do that, a shift will come. Soon it will become unacceptable to allow trash to accumulate in neighborhoods, or to allow gangs to move in, or to tolerate crack or meth houses, or to exploit the poor. Soon small neighborhoods where it’s nice to live will expand, and link, and form large neighborhoods, towns, even entire cities.

Callousness and greed will become damage or illness to be contained and, if possible, repaired, cured. Sociopaths will no longer be allowed to grow untended, ignored in lonely lives that echo with pain. Kindness and tolerance will remove isolation and bigotry.

Oh sure; ideals, all. Oh sure, been said before.

Been done before, too.

Why not do what we know works? Why not choose to live in a nice world, instead of a cutthroat place of selfishness?

It really is as simple as a choice.

This is not to say it’s easy, or that change comes instantly. It is a process, not a goal. It is a way of living. Choosing to lessen suffering at arm’s length trains people to consider each other. To focus outward on improving things.

It teaches us to live considerately.

We all know someone who makes us feel good just by being close. Their smile lights us, their regard warms us.

We can all be such people.

We can and should extend consideration to all sentient life. All sentient life means animals, humanoid primates included but not prime among them necessarily. Treat all living things with respect, dignity, and kindness. Learn to see the world as yourself, and yourself as the world: All is One, No Separation.

This means no one and nothing exists apart. Just as nothing can be thrown away, only moved or changed, so too one cannot harm another without harming one’s self. Harming the environment hurts one’s self, too. There is no such thing as Their versus Our when it comes to air, water, land, and life.

Make it a game at first. Pretend each day that you will be better off if you help someone or something else be better off. Help those closest. Improve what’s around you.

Soon the synergy will be obvious.

Soon things really could be better for all of us, if we simply choose to let them be, and to help when possible.

Be the change you’d like to see.

/// /// ///

The Prestige by Christopher Priest: A Review

Kohi, Hai

The Prestige by Christopher Priest is an old-fashioned science fantasy reminiscent in some ways of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in narrative tone and conception at least. It's about rival Edwardian stage magicians and how -- and ultimately why -- their feud affects several generations. Nikola Tesla plays an integral part and has an extended cameo, and along the way we learn a good deal about stage magic, Edwardian manners and mores, and the tangled ways in which people accommodate the impossible.

The writing is superb throughout, and a joy to read. It is clear as meltwater and yet, given some of the usages, can be puzzling for those who may have the instinct to mistrust. In this case, trusting Mr. Priest to deploy his phrasings deliberately is rewarded; when he writes such oddities as, "I now interrupt so I can finish this, rather than I," he is winking and having fun in a wonderful game of layering that becomes clear only at the end, when attentive readers understand.

Inattentive readers may wish to move on to a franchise novel or somesuch.

Although the book is told in several major voices, the tone is unflaggingly civilized and urbane, and in truth, it is not voice so much as narrative that keeps one reading. Then again, given the revelations readers encounter, perhaps the voices reflect accurately the different threads of the story. It's an interesting aspect for literary discussions.

This excellent book, winner of the World Fantasy Award in 1996, is soon to become a movie made by director Christopher Nolan, with a screenplay by his brother, Jonathan, the same duo who wrote and directed MEMENTO. Christopher is coming off BATMAN BEGINS, the best Batman movie and one of the best takes on Batman ever. THE PRESTIGE will star Nolan's Batman, Christian Bale as magician Borden; Hugh Jackman as rival magician Angier; and David Bowie as Tesla, with support from Scarlett Johansson, Michael Caine, and many an English character actor.

Only a team who gave us the twists and layers of MEMENTO could do justice to The Prestige, so there are high hopes for the translation of this book to the screen.

It took me awhile to get ahold of the Tor trade paperback edition of The Prestige. No other editions seem to be available in USA. It's worth seeking out, perhaps in a library, although, as I say, it is perhaps not to everyone's taste. I'd imagine those who liked Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell would like this book, too, and anyone who likes immersing one's self in a more genteel, and magical, time will find much to recommend in this beautifully-wrought science fantasy.

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Worms

Kohi, Hai

Right to the bitterest of ends, humanoid primates were a cocky, even optimistic bunch. Well, unrealistically egotistical, is more what they were. Locked into delusions, they daydreamed themselves to death, ignoring problems and pretending everything was, or would soon be, okay, with no effort from them.

What lazy dolts.

Extinction never bothered them, until it started biting their asses. Even then, denial ruled them; they kept thinking they could weather this latest storm, survive this record temperature, or somehow find new water to curb the drought. Crops burned in fields so arid they blew away, and people dropped where they stood. Rotting bodies sprouted plagues, for awhile. Finally the deaths thinned the living enough to cripple the way the bugs were vectored. Lone surviving groups descended into first a kind of benign anarchy, as long as the canned goods held out. When those went, savagery came fast.

From small groups lone survivors staggered forth, animals really by that time. No higher function whatsoever, no cognizance, no self-awareness other than Must Eat. They ate anything they could, and many died choking on poison or puking and shitting from taint. The very, very few who climbed out of that meat pit, well, they were no longer human beings in any recognizable sense.

They were not even animals, strictly speaking. More like predatory robots programmed ceaselessly to scavenge. What started as a civilization ended in tidal pool viciousness.

Eventually those few died off, too. None of the bunkered rich had made it anywhere near this far, their machines having proven unreliable and their security only as good as the guardians’ last meal. Most had been eaten by increasingly-abused slave classes.

So the planet passed into another phase of no higher life forms. Amoeba thrived, as did bacteria. Mold spores, and fungus colonies spread worldwide.

To be honest, some fishes, and a few insects, kept going past the loss of homo sapiens sapiens idioticus, but eventually there was nothing for them to eat and that was about it.

Well, annelids, too, survived. Worms.

No one would have pegged worms for developing brains and, truth is, for hundreds of millions of years, they didn’t. But a mutation here, an adaptation there, and soon, in geological time frames, worms became the dominant life form on what was once Earth. By then, no sign of the humanoid primates remained, even their vaunted stone monuments long since having fallen into dust.

Worm culture was odd, by primate standards. It relied on tubular thinking, and memory of past tunnels. There was much talk of digesting grit, and pressing one’s self into the right crevice. They thought in negative terms, in emptiness, rather than in form. Hollow tunneling, not the walls of the tunnels themselves, supported worm logic.

Worm structures tended to be underground, and tended to be complicated in simplicity, in a sequential way, like German portmanteau words. Endless strings of simple phonemes stretched to amazing lengths.

Not that worms developed a spoken language. Their language was one of tunneling and crawling through tunnels. To express something, a worm tunneled. To “read” what that worm expressed, another worm crawled through those tunnels. Attention was paid to subtle twists, rises, and dips. Even the texture of the soil, and the soil type, could count.

Death was referred to as “going up and out” and consequently the worm culture never did notice the stars, nor the vast cosmos containing them.

This was just as well because the worm culture flared out when the star nearest them, the good old Sun, Sol himself, went Nova and fried Earth into a cinder. When the supernova came, the remains of the planet were blasted into deep space to be absorbed by interstellar clouds and the occasional rogue star.

So ended the neo con scum’s dream, in perfect silence, and he awoke wet and sticky and skipped showering so he could get busy and make it all happen just that way.

#

In other words, the neo con scum are nihilists and the totality of the control they seek is that of extinction. They are literally a death cult, a reconvening of the Order of the Death’s Head. Ah, but isn’t the long slide downward fun?

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A Tripart Crime

Kohi, Hai

Islandia is a novel of sorts by Austin Tappan Wright, 1000+ pp, written by a Berkeley Law Professor over many years, edited by his wife & daughter after his 1931 death, published in 1942, and considered a classic of Imaginary World creation to rival Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Many editions exist.

#

Islandia was found among the author’s papers, a hidden world abandoned only in death.

Or entered.

It is not for readers. It was for one man alone and is his escape. If others read it, they are merely poking over the ashes of a life fired by imagination.

A life burned down by imagination; if you’re leaving it, why leave anything behind? In a long, slow, careful, painstakingly detailed act of creation, he was destroying. He was using up his own world. He was saying goodbye to the world by making his own.

All this and I’ll likely never read Islandia. How can I, knowing what I know? It would be a betrayal, like doubting a friend’s testimony on an important matter of privacy. I’d rather let it exist as his escape, and not make it my diversion.

#

Saw part of BUKOWSKI: BORN INTO THIS, a 2001 documentary film by John Dullaghan, about Henry Charles “Hank” Bukowski, skid-row poet and a writer with no time for metaphor, as Bono characterizes him. Foul, profane, ribald, sly, coy, and obscenely playful, he was an attention hog always seeking to shock, to hold attention. He wrote crass stories of the low life; mean drunks, slatterns, fat unfaithful wives, unsavory old reprobates, degenerate and desperate paupers, and perverts of every stripe populate his fiction. He wrote like a drunken, bragging bachelor lying to impress a drunk acquaintance who’s buying. It is slumming on paper, a dive into a literary gutter with the head snipe.

And yet, he had a delicate touch. In an interview with a German magazine’s reporter, a young woman who dares ask his definition of love, he said, “Love is the mist that burns off in the light of reality.”

Here is the searing existential yelp of a poem that supplied the film’s title:

Dinosauria, we

Born like this
Into this
As the chalk faces smile
As Mrs. Death laughs
As the elevators break
As political landscapes dissolve
As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
As the oily fish spit out their oily prey
As the sun is masked
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
Born into this
Walking and living through this
Dying because of this
Muted because of this
Castrated
Debauched
Disinherited
Because of this
Fooled by this
Used by this
Pissed on by this
Made crazy and sick by this
Made violent
Made inhuman
By this
The heart is blackened
The fingers reach for the throat
The gun
The knife
The bomb
The fingers reach toward an unresponsive god
The fingers reach for the bottle
The pill
The powder
We are born into this sorrowful deadliness
We are born into a government 60 years in debt
That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
And the banks will burn
Money will be useless
There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
It will be guns and roving mobs
Land will be useless
Food will become a diminishing return
Nuclear power will be taken over by the many
Explosions will continually shake the earth
Radiated robot men will stalk each other
The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante's Inferno will be made to look like a children's playground
The sun will not be seen and it will always be night
Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish
Rain will be the new gold
The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
The petering out of supplies
The natural effect of general decay
And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard
Born out of that.
The sun still hidden there
Awaiting the next chapter.
--Charles Bukowski

#

He was born in Germany and raised mostly in Los Angeles, CA. He had a college education and ambitions to be someone, to stand out from the crowd. At 49 he quit his clerk job at the post office. It was write and starve, he claimed, or work and go crazy. Wrote four stories a week to learn the craft and lived on a Payday candy bar per day; ate it at night, and refused, he said, to let life kill him. He kept his spark alive, and fanned the ember into six novels, hundreds of short stories, and thousands of poems over forty years.

His sparks still fly, and still ignite.

Personally, despite his own writing being boozy, he’s a hero to many of the disenfranchised regardless of their chemical of choice. His tombstone reads DON’T TRY.

That’s a Zen thing. Don’t try, do.

He means, get to it. Now is all you have.

He had his now and although his stuff isn’t much to my taste, it’s got the mark, the spark, and the dark that I like.

#

This has been a scattershot blogging. Blood in snow comes to mind at that phrase. Let’s make it a tripart crime.

#

My novel Alchemist’s Curse, which is actually called Symbolic Behavior, was liked by Walt Hicks at Hellbound Books, and he’d like to publish it. Trouble is, Hellbound’s broke.

Back on the market it goes.

And back to writing other things I go.

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