Category — IDEAS

As the new year arrives, I found that the fascinating annotated bibliography for truth-seekers, compiled by the late R. T. Gault has vanished from the web.   Therefore, as both tribute to compiler and hopeful olive-branch extended to the next generation, I am resurrecting most of Gault’s website, including the entire Absolute Elsewhere section and research bibiographies.   Fortunately, I took the precaution of saving them all several years ago, and only had to move them from the secret magneto-crystal vaults in the ice-caves over to the public website.   So take a word from the old wrinkled alien qi-gong master, and reject all negative influences you have involuntarily recieved!  Further, do what thou wilt and enjoy the knowledge transmitted from your inadvertant gurus!

**LINK**

(As time allows I will try to piece together the Order of the Twilight Star Pages from Wayback Machine.)

see also:

Retorno de los brujos (Morning of the Magicians) en español.

Pleasantly surprised to discover Indoctrinaire, the first novel by Christopher Priest, a tale of strange foreboding and paranoia, wrapped up in altered states of consciousness and alternate realities.   The protagonist, Dr. Wentik, finds himself forcibly recruited from his scientific research post beneath the South Pole, and whisked away to the Planalto District of Mato Grosso in Brazil.  Both of these places are so far off the beaten track and outside of the ordinary world of human affairs that the novel begins with an eerie sense of dislocation, which is only accelerated into total disorientation as soon as Wentik begins to trek into the strangely deforested zone of Planalto.  His guide, a tight-lipped man named Musgrove, shows signs of mental illness as the story progresses and Wentik finds himself an occupant of “the jail,” under interrogation by an equally opaque antagonist named Astourde.
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This panel, moderated (with immoderate gusto) by James Patrick Kelly, featured Scott Edelman, Eileen Gunn, Gene Wolfe, and Catherynne Valente.  John Shirley was scheduled to participate, but got stuck in San Francisco, where I can picture him flailing savagely around in the airport trying to get on any flight to anywhere!  The premise of the panel was based on Michael Swanwick’s contention that “modesty and a reasonable awareness of one’s limitations have no place in a writing career.”  Yes, that’s the same Swanwick who declared at Readercon one: “With the possible exception of Gene Wolfe, I’m the best writer here today.”  Thus egocentrism…

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It is hard for me to imagine, but I am more than forty years old, indeed very close to fifty years!   I know, dear reader, you will be startled to hear such a thing, since all you encounter on my blog are absurdities, and many seemingly juvenile links to old comic books and science fiction artists.   But there is reason encoded behind the screen of disconnected trivia that you find here.   In fact, I am arranging these posts into a secret code; nor would it especially please me to know that you have figured it out…the news is not pretty! These are clues, do with them what you will.   But mind you, time and decades are flashing past like lightning!   Like a cinder snapping out of a burning log in the fireplace, ride this moment like a rocket…

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At first, the survey of political systems in Mack Reynolds‘ interstellar spy novel, Planetary Agent X, seems quite whimisical and superficial.  There are planets full of anarchists, and planets crawling with feudalism, nihilism, socialism, and what have you.   There are some playful jabs at democracy, individualism, and even the tyranny of the uninformed voters (a la John Stuart Mill).  The tone is not as playful as Ron Goulart, but definitely not very serious either.   So it came as a pleasant surprise when the protagonist, Ronny Bronston, is given a sarcastic lecture by his handler, the mysterious Tog Lee Chang Chu, on the disasters brought about by “industrial feudalism.”   How strangely familiar!

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The topic of Skinner’s rural-urban continuum came up in a staff meeting today, where my colleague Sumeeta referred us to a recent column by Steven Strogatz in the NYTimes.   The idea is along the lines of Christaller’s central place theory, in which the demand for goods and services drives the spatial distribution of human settlements.   In the article, Strogatz draws a parallel between Zipf’s law as it has been used to show the relative size in cities, and the ways in which biological organisms develop into holistic systems.    There is a self-determining economy of scale that occurs, whether in the exfoliation of leaves on a tree, the distribution of tissues in a human body, or the amalgamated infrastructure of a modern metropolis.   It turns out that the efficiencies gained by hiving together are a natural driver which brings all us living beings – kicking and screaming in defiance, to be sure! — together into super-organisms.   So we are basically just cellular automata, after all, which is sure to make Rudy Rucker happy.

When I am able to blank out the last thirty five years, during which I have continuously despised and fought against the automobile (even when I owned one myself…yes, I’m talking about that rattling death-trap of a 1967 Ford Falcon!), when I can forget all that, it does my heart good to hear people talking about Ecocities.   Richard Register has a decent column in Foreign Policy in Focus this week, advocating for more sustainable cities built around better transit systems and less automobile traffic.  His points are well taken and straightforward, building upon his books on the subject (from 2001 and 2006):

• Switch to a pedestrian and transit-oriented infrastructure, built around compact centers designed for pedestrians and transit;
• Roll back sprawl development while vigorously restoring nature and agriculture;
• Integrate renewable energy systems while using non-toxic materials and technologies and promoting recycling.

Which he follows immediately by pointing out the major obstacles to achieving this dream:

A major difficulty in moving toward ecocities is that cars have influenced urban design for 100 years. Many of us caught in this infrastructure find it extremely difficult to get around in anything but the car. The distances are just too great for bicycles, the densities just too low to allow efficient, affordable transit.

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While randomly grazing the sweet grass of the intertubes, and reading about such things as the Comic Salon Erlangen and looking at Andy Konky Kru’s photos of the 2006 Salon, I stumbled across Skip Williamson’s recent post on the history of Underground Comics.  Not only did this remind me of my first major comic book convention (at the Playboy Towers in Chicago) where I met Skip Williamson, but also of Skip’s terrific “Class War Comix,” published about five years later in Snappy Sammy Smoot (1979).   In addition to the classic newstand headline: Agnew Breaks Wind, Thousands Die! this comic featured a paranoid schizophrenic Richard Nixon being replaced as President by an even more freaked out long-haired capitalist, Amphetamine Arnie.

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One of the great satirical classics of Science Fiction is surely “Space Merchants,” by Fred Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, which skewers the American traditions of corporate greed, deceptive advertising, and the treatment of consumers as stooges, suckers, retarded fools, and miserable cattle. The story accomplishes this in a slick, almost effortless Science Fiction setting, which is fast-paced and chock full of sadistic irony.   It’s important to remember the context of American society at the time of publication — 1953 –  when the Cold War was in full swing, and the complete subservience to the Capitalist credo was not only the mood of the times, but was enforced by psychological warfare, not the least of which were accusations, blacklists, and finally the foaming-mouthed lunacy of McCarthyism.

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Reading Clay Shirky’s latest thought-piece on the demise of newspapers poses for all of us the interesting question:  what sort of social / professional / technological model will we develop to replace print newspapers when they all go belly up? Shirky makes a pretty solid demonstration of the facts regarding the transition from those inky presses (thrashing out miles of newsprint every morning) to a new paradigm, but he is careful not to speculate too precisely about what form that future paradigm will take.  Indeed, the whole point he is making is that we are now living through a revolution in which print media is being overthrown.

During these last five hundred years, the cost of print production and the profits made on the distribution of printed objects was tightly bound up with dissemination of knowledge, art, technology, and of information of all kinds.  Now, with the advent of the Internet and the speedy exchange of digital objects of all kinds, the flawless reproduction of information-laden media objects is no longer bound to the burdens of physical products that must be moved through space.  The near-frictionless pathways that our digital infrastructure provides, has creatively destroyed the entire centuries-old paradigm of manufacturing, selling, and regulating the rights for commerce for media such as books, recordings, images, at least in the material manifestions that we have come to know and love.

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Watching the Republicans flail around in psychotic convulsions at the CPAC finally seemed to have convinced some Americans of what I have observed for most of my life, namely that the GOP is the party of the criminally insane.  The recent bile-spewings of Rush Limbaugh and Alan Keyes, are nothing new.  It is rather sick to watch, though, as if we are viewing the inside workings of a really lunatic fringe cult, played out live on national t.v.

There are more than a few sociological parallels to the cult that figures in the book I just finished, Imaginary Friends (1967), by Alison Lurie.

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Philip Jose Farmer, one of the great SF minds of our times, passed away in his Peoria, Illinois home.   The tributes and obits are flowing in from all corners of society.   SF Site has posted a great 1975 interview conducted in Minneaopolis by Dave Truesdale, (editor of Tangent fanzine), which primarily deals with the identity of Kilgore Trout.

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From a series of socially provocative cartoons by Tom Gauld, it was really hard to choose one to represent the lot.  They remind me vaguely of Ron Cobb (who was incidentally the author of the very first poltical cartoon book that I bought, Raw Sewage), except that Gauld’s cartoons  have a more distant, metaphorical humor.   I found the image above,  “evolution of the poetry receptacle,” to be irresistable.   With a few simple lines, Gauld has captured our trajectory perfectly:  tablet > scroll > bound volume > chapbook > laptop > potato viewer > potato mutant > wireframe.   Presumably when we get beyond the wireframe of the poem, we can just zap consciousness around by telepathy… either that or we will be eating termites out of dust-heaps, or both probably.

Attending Antonio Di Mambro’s lecture last night at Boston Public Library, it was amazing to see the giant crowd that packed Rabb Lecture Hall.  Who would have thought that an urban planning talk — stoked with dire warnings and gloomy facts — would bring out such a vibrant cross-section of the city?  It is almost as if, after thirty years of vapid hand-wringing and self-gratifying acts of “green” living, the mass of architects, planners, designers, and technocrats are beginning to realize that if they do not actually change the way America is built starting immediately, that our cities are literally going to fall apart.   Cities can only take so much pillaging by the greed heads, then they go belly up.

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This year’s Boskone had a stellar line-up of artists, including the likes of Donato Giancola, Daniel Dos Santos, Omar Rayyan, Dave Seeley, Bob Eggleton, Ruth Sanderson, Alan Beck, Margaret Organ-Kean, Stephan Martiniere (Artist GOH), and others!  (Greg Manchess participated in many of the demos and panels as a member of the audience.   Greg Manchess and Rick Berry were also hanging around.  Sophisticated crowd!)   Art Director of Tor Books, Irene Gallo, was a Special Guest, too.  This made for a really art-centric program, which, in my opinion, was excellent!   Not only were there five art demos, but there were three panel discussions about art techniques, one dedicated to graphic novels, one about science fiction cover art design, one to care and restoration of original art, one about this year’s Master Class workshop, and another panel in which the artists interviewed the art director.

As Gallo pointed out in one of the panel sessions, “it’s amazing when you consider that these artists are in high demand in painting workshops, where memberships cost hundreds of dollars and are always sold out.   And yet, they are all here at Boskone, for three days straight, teaching, painting, and sharing knowledge at a fraction of the cost.  Someone really needs to get the word out!”   If this trend continues, Boskone will be the premiere low-cost concentration of SF artists, that’s for sure.  Considering next year’s slated Arist GOH is John Picacio, things are still looking pretty good…

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Thinking about Master Sheng Yen prompted me to run back over my own history of attempts at meditation, which dates back to the early 1970s and takes a ragged course up to the present day.  It occurs to me that even without touching on the teachings themselves, just a brief note on the course of events might be an amusing trip for those of us who took similar journeys, or who might not have been born yet.

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