Tag: 5 Thoughts

Handsful of topical mentations.

5 Thoughts: And On Your Left, the Pons Creamery

THE METAPHORAGER.NET VISITOR LOGS MAKE for interesting reading; it’s fun to see what rough edges of my prose snags on Google and other search engines; it’s nice to count the international flags and know that any Belgian with an iPhone can snatch up with digital fingers (pun) the latest dispatch from whatever lives in my brain. But it also becomes apparent that some items are missing out; thus, a guide to the un- or lesser-‘phoraged pages of This Here Site.

1. Posse Commentatus: It’s long been an observation of mine that the same patterns are exhibited by the institutions and cultures of both the fandom and religious communities (i.e., those religions built around a central text). Posse Commentatus posits that the major difference between Jedi and Jew is about 3,000 years of backstory — and that the text isn’t as important as its message and its inspirations.

2. Clips: A small representation of my journalistic cred. (I mean, I wouldn’t read them either, but I have to put them somewhere; one of this site’s missions is aggressive self-aggrandizement.)

3. A Proposal For The Moon of Earth and/or Lunar Update: Back to the Redrawing Board: Perhaps the idea of looping Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece via lunar projector is a bit crazy after all. If you disagree, pick up a shovel and help.

4. Daily Gasp: This is in the sidebar right under “Wine Country Weather.” It links to NASA’s “Astronomical Picture of the Day” site which, if you haven’t see it yet, you must drop everything to click on. (“NOW, kid.” — Arlo Guthrie) I can think of fewer things more instantly awe-inducing than the view Outside, both for beauty and perspective.

5. Category: Writing See #2 above, except I actually would read these — and I invite anyone who wants to help make me a better writer to click away and start commenting. (On the other hand, if you’re looking for something nice to read over lunch, I’ll see you then!)

5 Thoughts: EthnoReligiUfology

1. IF YOU DON’T READ THIS carefully, you’ll come away thinking that I think “God” is an alien, Moses a contactee and the Event at Sinai one of the humankind’s first recorded UFO sightings.

2. I really really don’t. But I do “believe” (cf. https://metaphorager.net/four-points-of-contact/) that Something Impressive happened in the Sinai desert 3,200ish years ago. Continue reading “5 Thoughts: EthnoReligiUfology”

5 Thoughts: Why (and How) We Write

HANGING BY OUR COMPUTER IS a sheet of paper I look to for inspiration. Sometimes it inspires me, sometimes it depresses me, but always it gets me back on the horse. It’s called “Why (and How) We Write.” If you too find it useful, please hang it by your computer.

1. Do it for the buzz.
— Stephen King

2. Finish what you start. Keep submitting until it sells.
— Robert Heinlein

3. a) Fanaticize yourself
b) Fanaticize something greater than yourself
c) “Sheer delight in what you are doing.”
— Robert Anton Wilson

4. a) Arrange events in linear order
b) Now arrange them in narrative order.
c) Write the story.
d) Revise the story.
e) FINALISE.
— H. P. Lovecraft

5. “Most of the characteristics which make for success in writing are precisely those which we are all taught to repress … the firm belief that you are an important person, that you are a lot smarter than most people, and that your ideas are so damned important that everybody should listen to you.”
— Robert Anton Wilson, reprise

(BONUS: this little tip, courtesy of Anne Lamott, for which I am axiomatically grateful.)

5 Thoughts: From Mix to Memory

1. A TREASURED ITEM IN HOUSEHOLDS of more than 40 years duration is the Mix Tape: an audio cassette of 40 – 60 minutes per side containing music from an LP or radio station which the user wishes to either preserve or make portable via boombox or Walkman. Some content may also come from such late-night performance venues as “Midnight Special” and “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.” This technology was part of a primitive file-sharing service called the “music industry,” which is something like Pirate Bay only more centralized.

2. Perhaps the most evocative of my own seven or 12 mix tapes was made in late 1978 through early 1979, AKA my junior year of high school. It’s mostly punk and new-wave air-taped from San Francisco radio station KSAN (a”h), which means what’s now played as oldies on “modern rock” stations true to their roots (e.g. KFOG, Live 105 and Alice@97.3): Talking Heads, Boomtown Rats, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Ian Dury, The Normal, Cheap Trick, David Bowie, Horslips, Joe Jackson and various artists whose names provoke blankness in the ignorant and bittersweet pangs in the worthy.

3. Listening to the same tape for 30-plus years builds up a close patina of memories and associations — not only of its making and subsequent hearing, but of individual songs as well. “Warm Leatherette” I first heard with two friends driving to San Francisco; “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast” was recommended to me by a mad crush; “Changes” and “Ziggy Stardust” were two of my all-time favorite Bowie songs even before this tape. On the other hand, I can’t hear either today on radio, CD or MP3 without “overhearing” the version on “the KSAN tape.” (And “Harmonia” just doesn’t sound right without that two-second burst of static).

4. Extended listening also implies/shows/initiates a change of tastes, or at least of understandings. The suburban punk who cheered the frantic teenpocaplyse of “Rat Trap” has traded in, so to speak, for “Sultans of Swing” (which once seemed to me just a mellow bass line and amazing Knopflerian guitar run rather than a paean to everyone like “Harry (who) doesn’t mind if he doesn’t make the scene / He has a day-time job, he’s doin’ all right / He can play the honkytonk like anything / But he’s savin’ it up for Friday night”); “Walking In The Rain” is no longer anthemic, but “Surrender” is; the once-defiant dabbling of “Walk On The Wild Side” has given way to a bemused nostalgia.

5. It’s tempting, very tempting, to say that “they don’t write ’em like this anymore” — that today’s “modern rock” either takes itself too seriously, or ironically, or breathily[1] to be much fun — and to lament that the music of one’s own youth is co-opted to sell blue jeans, lifestyles and safely manufactured rebellion. Such is life among the short-spanned; things will always be both better and worse than they were in one’s youth. But remember this, o my fellow middle-aged punks: When the world gets as grim as it seems to be right now, the most brazen act of defiance is happiness.

_ _ _ _ _
[1] Really. Some of these people need to quit smoking or gargling with cotton balls or whatever it is they’re doing and leave the tentative whispering to spies and other lovers.

5 Thoughts: Fiction- v. News-Writing

1. YOU STOP WRITING A NEWS piece when you run out of facts. But when do you stop writing fiction? When you run out of story, I suppose.

2. In news, the most important information goes up top. In fiction, it’s in the reader’s head — at least with genre pieces. There has to be some connection between the reader’s mind and the writer’s expression in terms of shared assumptions or expectations. A science fiction author knows his readers are unfazed by three-headed alien bankers, so doesn’t need to waste valuable real estate on justifying same beyond adhering to strict internal consistency. Someone writing for a general audience needs to adjust their bankers, but touch not the consistency! Continue reading “5 Thoughts: Fiction- v. News-Writing”

5 More: Am Erica I?

1. BUT WHAT “IS” IDENTITY?

2. One empirical definition: a synergetic syncretism — specific, all-encompassing perspective resulting from every experience particular to a localized body-consciousness (i.e., “me”) — not so much the part which says “I” as what completes the sentence “I am ___.”

3. “All encompassing” and “localized” are the key terms here. E.g.: I have been enculturated with a linguistic, ethical and conceptual toolbox through which I can manipulate and “make sense” of the world of my senses, intuition and reason. To the observer, however — and exclusive of certain mindstates — this toolbox is largely indistinguishable from the thing it serves/describes: it resembles in every detail “just the way things are.”

4. But identity can also change with circumstance or with conscious choice — thus changing the observer’s “reality.” The experience of a self-identified “American” will be different from that of a self-identified “Pakistani” or “Celt” or even another “American” — the more so if the self-identifications are mashed-up or tinkered with — but may at least be more immediately comprehensible to other affiliatees. (Thus too is culture consensualized, strengthened and spread; it may begin with a specific spacetime event whose down-the-road permutations often become unrecognizable to the original witnesses/provocateurs — sort of a backwards-incompatible open-source project. “Nobody wants to feel left out, but t’ain’t like it was in my day.”)

5. Given all this, and given that we may no more shed at least our sense of identity than we may shed any other perceived part of ourselves, we might at least enjoy the hot dogs and fireworks, or bratwurst and bier, or mamalige and slivovitz, or whatever suits our skills and palates. It’s tempting to argue with the chef — to anguish over our human frailties, bemoan our benightedness — but does that better equip us to solve them than a full belly, good fellowship, and patience?

5 Thoughts: I Am Erica

1. MY FOLKS ARE FIRST-TO-SECOND generation Americans, who (along with my immigrant and immigrant-descended relatives) taught me that, “In America, you can do anything you want as long as you play nicely with the others.” To them, that meant speaking, thinking, building and living as you choose — as well as helping out those less fortunate.

2. It may be hokey, but that philosophy is still the basis of my sense of patriotism, national pride or cultural chauvinism: “Come here and make a life for yourself — and help the rest of us do the same.” It’s also why I vote the way I do; if I think someone/thing will help make life better for everyone, I’m in; if not, I’m out. (Call me a bleeding-heart libertarian, if that helps you any.)

3. Sadly, we have also earned a reputation for poisoning the local air, land and water in exchange for tax credits; polluting the local mediasphere with rank invective, militant chuckleheadness and recreational character-assassination; and waging unnecessary wars. Environmental criminals (who for the purpose of this piece I would define as anyone who values their profit over the happy lives of me and mine) should take a lesson from the second half of my ancestors’ exhortation. It may already be too late to fix their foolishness; it already shames me to admit these bozos live in my conceptual neighborhood.

4. Most of my formative years were spent in the Northeast, where it seemed “ethnic identity” was something taken for granted as an organic part of oneself. Northern California is way different — folks here tend to be more self-conscious about their own and others’ identity. While that’s better than bigotry, I’m not sure it’s entirely good — for the same reason that it’s not good to think too hard about breathing, or riding a bicycle, or making music, or love.

5. The whole “melting pot” idea, where ethnic refugees drop everything to “become Americans,” is obviously not working (neither, thank “God,” did “separate but equal”). (After all, by definition, Americans can live and look like anybody.) What makes America my currently preferred home (or, as Abbie Hoffman put it, why “my last meal would be a burger, fries and Coke”) is the idea that we’re all pieces in a puzzle, looking for a fit. I heartily deplore the stupid things “my” country has done (especially where that stupidity costs lives and slack). But I am glad to live where people want to do something about the crimes which come to light — and to discover the ones which haven’t.

5 thoughts: James Joyce

James Joyce
Fig. 1: James Joyce
IN HONOR OF BLOOMSDAY 2010, five thoughts on the man who made it possible:

1. James Joyce is yet another proof that one man’s mind can be bigger than his skull. (If not, generational banks of Joyce scholars would have quit writing about him long ago.)

2.) Until Finnegan’s Wake, no Irishman had ever beat the Jews for mind-stretching eloquence. (Since the Talmud, the best we’ve done is Groucho Marx and Yehuda Amichai.)

3.) Come to think of it, FW and the Talmud do make two nice bookends for the Western literary tradition: what the Talmud does to Aristotle, Joyce does to Webster. (Said comeuppances piercingly beautiful to see.)

4.) If a man can spend a quarter of his life writing his Perfect Book, there’s hope for the rest of us.

5.) But only if we can manage not to be humbled by such wit-wraps as “Nations have their ego, just like individuals,” “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake,” or “Men are governed by lines of intellect – women: by curves of emotion.” Or: “Agenbite of inwit.” Or even:

O

tell me all about

Anna Livia! I want to hear all

about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now.

(O, now, what’s the use? Another Guinness pour my muse, poor favor, purring kittenkilkenny of katzenjammers … [tape ends])

5 Thoughts: DS9 Reruns

1. SATURDAY NIGHT, STARBASE 33 MINYAN (Ann‘s and my official Couch Potato Lodge) commenced to go where two geeks had lately gone before: the entire seven-season, 149-episode run of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. We first encountered this most operatic of the Trek offerings less than a year ago, about a day after discovering them through a popular online DVD service[1]; despite being raised on the original and animated series and enthralled by the Next Generation, I/we missed most of DS9 after its premiere back in 1993. Seeing it once through only made us want to see it again — the word “operatic” accurately describes DS9’s scope and themes, and this time ’round we also wanted to pay attention to the detail.

2. Chief among these is the amazing amount of character development: something which the first two series lacked, but without which DS9 wouldn’t be DS9. It’s set on a space station on the edge of civilization, so that unlike TOS/TNG the main characters have to deal with each week’s problems instead of fleeing them at warp speed. (Just like life, at least for those with the courage to live it.) Complex characters call for able actors, and DS9’s ensemble are all Shakespeare veterans of one or another stripe. We don’t have many rules here at Starbase 33[2], but chief among them[3] is that suspension of disbelief doesn’t just happen — even for a well-grounded universe like Star Trek‘s.

3. Apparently, the show’s religious elements — primarily the development and applications of Bajoran theology — honked off a number of otherwise fans. For myself and Ann, the religious elements are some of the most appealing in that they deal with the day-to-day life of “the faithful” without recourse to stereotype (TNG did this when they made Worf a sort of Klingon ba’al teshuvah: he’d been raised by humans and had to learn for himself what it meant to be Klingon). Such characterizations are few and far between (although I’m writing some m’self); religious folks are usually fanatics, and while DS9 has plenty of those (especially among the Bajorans and the Jem’Hadar) the writers are careful not to make that the main aspect[4].

4. One thing that did bother me is the heavy use of homage/derivative stories, especially in the later seasons. We seem to have reached a culutral point where recycled injokery stands in place of creativity. I imagine part of that is due to the intense pressure under which weekly television productions operate, but as a viewer, it just makes me wonder what better line / funnier gag / more interesting effect might have been. In SFnal productions, and DS9 in particular, such homage is hard to spot without the encyclopedic knowledge most fen carry like a business card. Much of DS9’s humor derives from same, in fact — but you don’t need that to enjoy the series.

5. Two must-have, double-bag websites will greatly enhance your viewing experience: Memory Alpha (http://memory-alpha.org) is the online Talmud of all things Star Trek (try this random page if you don’t believe me); Jammer’s Reviews (http://www.jammersreviews.com/st-ds9/s1/) cover TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT and all 11 feature films (if you count Star Trek V). They’re great to read after a strenuous evening’s sedentation.

NOTES:
[1] Name withheld to encourage custom at your local DVD shop.
[2] Three axioms: a) Good science fiction is about ideas. b) Great science fiction is about characters. c) The best science fiction is about the human condition.
[3] Our Prime Directive: If it’s well-written, -directed and -acted, we don’t care what it’s about.
[4] For more on the links between religion and science fiction, see https://metaphorager.net/posse-commentatus/.

5 Thoughts: 21st Century SciFiFlix

FROM SOMEONE WHO WAS 15 when the first Star Wars premiered, and has recently been introducing the companion to the pre-1977 fruits of sfnal cinema:

1.) Though splashier, CGI doesn’t provide half the sense of wonder these days as models. “You mean somebody built that? With their hands? WOW.”

2.) Those films have aged least which most successfully combine visceral message with kitbashed production values. (When’s the last time you saw Silent Running, Soylent Green or even Dark Star?)

3. WHAT’S with all the DAMN VAMPIRES? Robots are less pretentious and, unless they’re C3PO, can be just as scary.

4. As we move into the 21st century — my generation’s cultural event horizon; remember wondering whether 1984 would resemble 1984?) — I’m beginning to understand the truth that the past is an inaccessible country. Once upon a time, there was an unanticipatable future to look toward; today, our dreams more resemble the tools we use to construct them. (Which isn’t bad; after all, we’re still dreaming, and doing so with greater togetherness. And yet I miss the hand-drawn days, free of ironic self-commentary, when men were men and “derivative” was still “seminal.”)

5. I’ve finally gotten over not having a jetpack. And a transfer booth. But foregoing a 100-mile-up HoJo lunch: not so much. (And whatever happened to Space Food Sticks?!?)

HoJo, per 2001: A space odyssey
Howard Johnson, c. 2001

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