Lost in the Lunatic's Library

So here's my list of ...
Books that should be read, but probably won't be, due to the fact that either they A) were never written, B) were written but never published, or a somewhat more remote possibility, C) were written and published, but in a parallel universe, rendering them for all intents and purposes inaccessible.
(The upside of parallel world publishing, by the way, is that a writer can pad his or her resume with a hefty list of books he or she has successfully published, at least in theory, without having to worry about some anally obnoxious fact checker proving him or her a blatant liar.)

One of my favorites: The Erotic Adventures Of A Quantum Mechanic.
Right off the bat we're drawn to the clever play on words in the title. The story follows a young man's path of sexual awakening in an indeterminate, irony-laden world. Think of sex on the subatomic level. Can the sexual urges of an electron be anything more than virtual? Is third party observation the key to a fully actualized sex life? Written in the first person, both narrator and reader are continually forced to confront the paradoxical intersection of imagination and reality. Is the imagination a function of reality, or vice versa? When, for example, the young Quantum is seduced by his best friend's older sister, can the reader attest beyond a reasonable doubt that the sex depicted is anything other than a quantum fantasy? And more to the point, does anyone, with the possible exception of Quantum himself, really care?

"He was lured by her savory softness, the sway of her firm female buttocks ascending the stairs, the highly stylized way in which she removed the stuffed animals from her bed. Fortunately, the Barbie doll on the bookcase was wearing sunglasses. Better, he thought, that there be no witnesses, but then again ..."

Best title ever for a novel:  Lycanthropy For Flute & Oboe (already copyrighted, so don't get any ideas).  Which begs the question, can the title of a novel be so good that the book should be published on the basis of it alone?
Read the title, loved it. Don't really give a crap on content. Could be a cookbook for paranoid schizophrenics for all I care. Let's move on this fast, before the vampires get wind of it.

Richard Rorty, the late American Pragmatist, said that it's the poets and novelists, rather than the philosophers, who have become the primary interpreters and re-inventors of modern/postmodern culture. How we say something, in other words, is often more important than what we say. So think before you speak ... no, wait a minute, don't think.

Still, one has to wonder if Rorty ever read anything by the madly prolific genius, David Foster Wallace.
Bringing to us to acclaimed novel, written and published, reputedly a bestseller, but nearly impossible to read:  Infinite Jest.  Compared to Wallace, Proust was the ultimate minimalist. Think of James Joyce on methamphetamine. This is a guy who could go 50 pages describing a single game of tennis; brilliantly, for sure, but the casual reader, overwhelmed in waves of magical, maniacal language, should not underestimate the potentially deleterious affects upon his or her own continued mental well being.

Hence our offer: This blog will pay a total of $1.00 to anyone who can read Infinite Jest within 3 months, without skipping any pages. To claim this reward the reader is obliged to submit a brief book report (maximum 1000 words) describing the various themes of the novel, providing examples of its metaphorical wit and subtle black humor, as well as taking a position (yea or nay) on the book's status as an postmodern masterpiece.

Finally, the book we're all looking forward to reading:  The Big Baby Book Of Ingrid Mayflower.
Ingrid M, already being described as the cutest baby born thus far in the 21st. Century, lives in a pouch, chirps in English and Swedish and apparently spends a lot of time sleeping, during which, it is surmised, she is busy outlining the story of her weird and wonderful life to come.

Welcome to crazy planet Earth, little Ms. Mayflower.

Myopia in the Land of the Millepedes

Another whacky day on planet Earth, punctuated by a persistent growling rumble from an unspecified external source, although some sort of inner ear malfunction in progress cannot be entirely ruled out.

Outside, despite a sudden snow storm and continuing sub-zero temperatures, signs point to a seasonal shift. For the next 30 seconds, at least (30 seconds of visual ecstasy), the cherry blossoms are in bloom, the sheer swooning luminosity of which can literally blind a man. Whatever you do, don't look directly at them. Mass communal blossom viewing parties are arranged, in which thousands sit around happily averting their eyes. Paramedics in tinted goggles stand by, just in case.

Yesterday a couple of centipedes were spotted in the bathroom, a definite indicator of something.
Bug invasion imminent, residents hunker down, clutch cans of insecticide, pray to Jesus for a bug-free afterlife.
Hard to see the evolutionary point of a centipede - truly ugly insects, and seriously, who the hell needs a hundred legs?  Good thing they don't have to worry about finding jeans that fit.

Meanwhile, legions of elderly amblers have taken to the streets, culturally cajoled into believing that slow-as-a-funeral-procession walking can prolong life indefinitely. Oddly enough, statistics tend to bear this out. Hardly matters that it takes half a day to walk around the block. It's not as if these people have a whole lot else to do. Problem is, some of the ancient travelers leave their homes, start walking and almost immediately forget where they live.
 One neighborhood woman admits that she hasn't seen her grandfather in five days. I'm guessing she's sixty if she's a day, so you can understand the strain on my already overtaxed faculties trying to imagine how old her grandfather must me. I attempt to explain the fugue phenomenon to her, but she insists her musical aptitude is next to nil, so why bother?
"Just how old is your grandfather?" I ask her.
"I have no idea," she tells me. "But if you really want to know, we can go inside and ask his father."

In other news:  Talked to one of the kids, via Skype, whose connection was typically murky, a jittery, time-delayed jumble of sounds, mostly incoherent, highlighted by howling banshees simulations in the background. (for those of you who have never heard the howl of a banshee, consider yourselves lucky)
Think of trying to talk to someone in the Andromeda galaxy, using two Dixie cups and a very (very, very, very) long string.
Actually, if you did try to call someone in the Andromeda (aka M 31), it would take 1.5 million years for them to pick up the phone (or cup, as the case may be), and 3 million years for you to hear them say hello.
Not to suggest you shouldn't make the call, only that you should be prepared to be patient.

Note: The Andromeda galaxy is scheduled to collide with our own Milky Way galaxy in approximately 3.75 billion years. Probably too soon to add this cosmological certainty to our list of things to have anxiety about. Very little chance that any of us - with perhaps the exception of a select group of senior citizens from my neighborhood - will be around to see it happen.

Anyway, I couldn't be exactly sure what the kid was trying to tell me. There's a chance she was intentionally filtering her voice through one of those homemade fish aquariums. She either said that her new boyfriend works with plants, or believes he is a plant.  She either saw Chris Isaak in a San Francisco restaurant, or believes that the ghost of Issac Newton is currently haunting the San Francisco subway. As improbable as that would be.  But hey, San Francisco, right?

Mostly Brainless and Armed to the Teeth

 By now hopefully everyone (and by everyone I mean all six of you who occasionally read this blog) has had a chance to see the most recent propaganda video courtesy of North Korea (if you haven't, it's definitely worth tracking down). The basic plot line is that the vast majority of American people are impoverished and desperate, forced to live in leaky tents, drink melted snow from styrofoam cups (provided free by the government) and eat small birds to survive.

Close up of a barren tree: The narrator, curiously enough some guy speaking in a deadpanned Brit accent, says, "Look at this tree. There are no birds in it because Americans have eaten them all."
 Cut to another tree, as barren, but with two sparrows perched on its branches.  Narrator says, "Two birds have suddenly arrived in this tree. They will be eaten by the Americans on Wednesday." 

Doubting my credibility on this?  Here's the link to the actual video.


http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/alleged-north-korean-propaganda-video-americans-live-today-215322616.html 

As propaganda, it clearly leaves something to be desired - apparently even the 27 North Koreans with Internet access aren't totally buying it; the remainder of the population only wishes it had some small birds to eat - but as one more pathologically creative element in the Theater of the Ridiculous that the North Korean regime increasingly represents, it's nothing short of brilliant.
Call it Parody Propaganda from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.  PP/DPRK, for short.

Not that the pathological and the ridiculous are strictly confined to Northeast Asia.
Back in the land of leaking tents and homeless bird eaters, the gun debate sputters on, more or less incoherently.
 Kudos to the psycho-Conservative Right, by the way, for providing the American people with yet another example of how, with a skillful blending of banality and cynicism, an issue can simply be talked to death, thereby removing the need to shoot it.
 The basic conservative plot line is that since the vast number of American gun owners are normal, mentally healthy, law abiding citizens, only interested in hunting and/or self defense, there is no logical reason to deprive them of their military type assault weapons and high capacity magazines.
And the spineless Liberal Left, as personified by, among others, CNN's Piers Morgan, who may actually be an exotic species of British waterfowl (and possibly the narrator of the North Korean video), lets them get way with it.

It bears repeating: There is nothing either normal or mentally healthy about a person who hunts and kills animals for sport.

Ancient Hindu proverb: A man who slaughters a family of deer today is as likely to slaughter his own family tomorrow.

 Lacanian therapist, Fritz Klepperwitz:  "Contrary to common belief, any member of an advanced, consumer culture who continues to engage in the primitive ritual of hunting cannot be regarded as a rugged individualist resisting the forces of socially-induced conformity. Rather, such a person must be viewed as emotionally and intellectually undeveloped, almost certainly tormented by a deep-seated sense of emasculation, attempting through acts of violence against animals to sublimate feelings of sexual desire for the mother and an irrational hatred of the father. The typical hunter's conflicted self is frequently expressed in secretive behavior which glaringly contradicts his projected tough guy persona; for example, cross-dressing, having pedicures and, at the extreme end of the spectrum, watching Gossip Girls."    

Admittedly, the self defense thing does make a bit more sense, since, as we all know, hordes of potential evildoers roam virtually every street in America, day and night, seeking out vulnerable, unarmed households to loot and plunder. Sure, they may resemble girl scouts out on a cookie drive, or vaguely disembodied Jehovah's seeking the mother ship, but don't be fooled. These people have nothing but mischief on their minds.

A recent survey asked conservative gun owners to rate the likelihood of the situation depicted on the popular TV show, Walking Dead, actually happening.
Here's a breakdown of the results:
43% - Could possibly happen
31% - Very likely to happen
26% - Has already happened

Maybe you want to wake up some morning in a gun-free house only to find a mob of the crazy undead trying to break down your front door, but not me, pal.

Note: During a zombie attack, always aim for the head.   Shoot the head, kill the Undead.

And finally, this juicy tidbit from one of those States that most of us could probably find on a map but would not particularly ever want to visit.
A man walked out of his house at 4:30 in the morning and fired his gun at a tree. The bullet hit the tree and ricocheted back into the man's chest.
The news headline read: Man shoots tree, tree shoots back.
Talk about a normal, mentally healthy gun owner. And why, if you're going to shoot a tree, would you decide to do it at 4:30 in the morning?
Local law enforcement is apparently investigating the tree, trying to determine if it is perhaps an overly aggressive species, possibly non-indigenous to the area, although an anonymous police source admits that proving premeditation will be a serious challenge.
In the interim, a group of local conservative lawmakers have issued the following joint statement:
It is precisely this type of random violence, inflicted upon unsuspecting individuals by an unruly and ungodly nature, that justifies the right of all law-abiding Americans to arm themselves, the more firepower, the better!

Amen to that, brother!

Nothing Says I Love You Like, Well ... Nothing

Paul Dirac, one of the 20th Century's science superheros - proved the existence of the quantum field, antimatter and those spooks of the cosmos, better known as virtual particles, among other things - was by all accounts a very weird bloke. For one thing, he rarely, if ever, spoke. In the Dirac biography, The Strangest Man, a 'friend' recounts a 'conversation' he had with the physicist in a London restaurant over lunch. He, the friend, was jabbering on about the politics of the day, art, women, current trends in science, the London theater scene, the rising prices of haberdashery, etc. After an hour or so, Dirac looked up from his soup and replied, "Hmm." Thirty minutes later, having finished his lunch, Dirac stood up, perhaps contemplated saying goodby, decided against it and walked out of the restaurant.

Niels Bohr, another of the quantum mechanical masterminds, once said, "This Dirac seems to know a lot of physics, but he never says anything."

Sounds sort of ideal.  A friend who never speaks. Could be some kind of a genius for all we know. Given the benefit of the doubt, and all, because, let's be honest, isn't it when people start talking that the disappointment tends to kick in?

Hey, you want a friend who don't talk? Go get a dog.
I already got a dog.
So get another.

I knew a guy who only dated mutes. Claimed it enabled him to better control the conversation. Then one day his girlfriend said  "            ."    He took it hard, hid her notepad when she wasn't looking, considered reading a book on Existentialism.

On the other hand, Hank, the paradigmatic, alter ego, homeless guy, a deranged genius of the first magnitude, has a different slant on the issue; he being of the opinion that to stop talking is nothing less than a surrender to the harsh and, not to put too fine a point on it, irreversible contingencies of non-existence. 
"We all ooze nothingness," Hank says. "Close your eyes and the world disappears. Embrace the vacuum, moron. As scary as the nothing is, it's all we've got to ride home on."

I love it when Hank almost makes sense.

Then there's Hank's take on the ultimate cosmic mystery:

"Something, maybe the void, maybe a truly whacked-out God, burped, or hiccuped, or possibly farted,  and the Universe popped up, out of nothing, the ultimate free lunch, but not for long, see, cause for every particle there was its exact opposite, an anti-particle. The two cancel each other out. Pop, pop. Universe, no Universe. It's happening every single second. You say hello, I say goodby. But not this time, this time there's a discrepancy, a so-called quantum fluctuation. For every one-hundred-trillion or so particle-anti-particle pairs, there's one extra particle, a loner, riddled with uncertainty, like some homeless guy staring down the barrel of infinity. The entire universe and everything currently in it is based precisely on such a mind-altering misunderstanding. You, for example, are nothing more than the byproduct of an infinitesimal quantum discrepancy. So go meditate on that, wise-ass."

Sounds crazy enough to almost be true. Too bad I stopped listening after 'Something.'
"Say again, Hank."
"Fuck you! You are NOTHING!
"I love you, too. You may be a crud-covered foul-smelling doppelganger, but you're my crud-covered foul-smelling doppelganger."
"Tell me something I don't know."
I quote Max Planck.  "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die."
"Blah, blah, blah," Hank wheezes. "I'm a lot more dead than not and I still ain't buying into your eerie evil rap."

I decide to pepper his severely depleted brain cells with a little Bukowski:
" We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus. That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."

"Much better," Hank says, drifting off into a quasi-psychotic muttering session. "Pluck a flower, move a distant star."
"Wait a minute, didn't Dirac say that?"
"Hey, you just spent the better part of an excruciating day trying to convince us that Dirac never spoke."
"Okay, then he wrote it."
"So write this," Hank says, somehow finding the strength to raise his middle finger and jab it in my direction.
"They denied Jesus, too," I tell him.
"Yeah, well, you ain't him."

 

Crazy Talking Hominids

News as Noise:  (part one)

Some guy walks up to the house of Harry Holcomb (sic), Colorado's Director of Prisons, rings the doorbell, and when Harry answers the door the guy shoots him in the head.
Cops have no leads, although CNN reports Breaking News in the case:
"Police are now seeking a speed walker, who may have been a witness to the crime."

Okay, first of all, what's a speed walker? And when did it become an agreed upon designation for, presumably, a human? Does it perhaps reflect some sort of neurological condition, compelling a person to walk much faster than, say, a normal person?  How fast, exactly, are we talking about? What is the upper velocity range of an air-breathing, bi-pedal humanoid walker, assuming no external power source?  Would such a person passing by your house be little more than a blur of speedy light fragments?

And even if a speed walker was passing the Holcomb house at the time of the crime, what are the chances that he or she had the time to see anything?
"Did you get a good look at the suspect?"
"A very good look. He, or possibly she, appeared to be a fuzzy blob, possibly with horns, rapidly vibrating in a bluish-grey fog."
"Good enough."

Later in the same Breaking News segment, a CNN reporter is questioning police chief Wayland Scruggs (sic) on the investigation:

"I know you said you have no suspects, chief, but do you think it's possible that the assailant may have had some issue with Mr. Holcomb?"
Uh, as opposed to what? Homicidal fury over the absence of an issue?
"Pray to God, woman, that this vicious killer had an issue. The alternative is the R word, as in Random, as in nut job with easy access to firearms shooting the first guy dumb enough to answer his front door. That's the kind of felony headache we do not need!"

I, myself, haven't answered the door in approximately 10 years; not so much out of concern with being killed, randomly or otherwise; more with being driven into a state of apoplexy by some bland-faced, smiling moron jabbering away in a mostly incomprehensible language about something so inane that I would rather be shot than forced to have a conversation about.

From a highly confidential source in San Francisco.  (thanks, Amber)
Two cops overheard at a downtown Starbucks:

cop 1:  "You want green tea? Not coffee?"
cop 2:  "Coffee makes me trigger happy. You know that."

Talk about the eroding confidence in law enforcement. One can almost hear the CNN Breaking News:
Cop in California guns down group of Chinese tourists crossing against the light. Claims Starbucks made him do it. A possible speed walking witness asserts that the crosswalk itself was alive with swirling heat demons, and the traffic light had just gone supernova when the shooting occurred.

"Those blurry, levitating stick figures speeding through the intersection on the legs of a million glowing centipedes never had a chance."
"Good enough."


  

Is the Postmodernist Lifestyle Really for Everyone?

It, in the sheer, elegant vagueness of the other, mutely resonant, a thing, by meaning nothing,  a deceptively smooth emptiness, suggesting furthermore the improbability of itself. 

If the above sentence makes any sense at all to you, read on.
The church of latter day post-structural chaos is currently recruiting, and could be just what the doctor ordered.
Assuming, of course, a doctor can be found with the requisite darkly ironic, self-referential bedside manner.
Example:
Patient: "Not feeling so good, Doc; shooting pains up both arms, difficulty breathing, fuzzy short-term memory."
Doctor: "I, on the other hand, feel fine, but then why wouldn't I, what with the access I have to a wide variety of powerful narcotics. Not that I'm so stoned at this moment as to be unable to treat you, although, frankly, I am having some trouble coming to terms with your actual existence."
Patient: "It's my existence, in particular, that concerns me. It's as if I can sense myself, you know, fading out."
Doctor: "Most likely an impending stroke. Crazy, huh? I, myself, have the cardiovascular system of an 18-year-old bodybuilder. I'm so healthy, in fact, it's sickening."
Patient: So, Doc, am I ... dying?"
Doctor: "The question strikes me as somewhat impertinent, but then what do I know? I lose patients at about the same rate I misplace my car keys. Oops! There goes another one. Which reminds me of a joke. Want to hear it?"
Patient: "Not really."
Doctor: "Two guys in a bar commiserating over the recent demise of their friend. First guy sucks on his beer and says, 'I'll tell you what I think. That wife of his drove him to his grave.'  Second guy sucks beer, nods and says, 'Yeah, but in the final analysis, at least he was spared the ignominy of having to walk.'"

At this point a second, competing text fragment is randomly inserted into the narrative: 

 Sorry to say, Mr. Lee, but short of a total body organ transplant, your days are numbered.

How many days, exactly, would you say?

Did I say days? Sorry, I meant day.

So what, I have hours to live?

If you're willing to entertain an extremely optimistic mindset.

Sort of depressing.

Perhaps you'd care to speak to one of our in house therapists.

Only if it's someone you hate and wouldn't mind finding murdered in his or her office.

A member of the clergy?

Dead even before he gets his Bible open.

In that case, drugs?

I'm listening.

 Testimonials:

"By no means easy, but once I was weaned off the concept of objectivity, I was able to wallow in total subjective bliss, without having to feel guilty about it all the time. "

 “God is out of the picture, my friend. The relevance of metaphysics has shriveled like an old man's scrotum. What other choice do we have but to embrace the carnival sideshow of the postmodern?”

"A writer is writing a story about a writer trying to write a story about a writer who can't write."

"Talking about absolute truth is like saying you're dating the perfect woman. For a time you can trick yourself into believing it, but sooner or later the lie is revealed."

"Facts are a lot like ghosts that only show up on certain holidays and never bring a gift."

Call now, toll free: 81 22 725-5100.  Our representatives are standing by to assist you.

 

East of no North

Winter has latched on to the northern hemisphere and apparently isn't going anywhere.  Groundhog's Day, an annual event promoted by a town of total morons in rural Pennsylvania, turned out this year to be inconclusive. The groundhog emerged from his lair right on schedule, but did so armed with a semi-automatic weapon and several high capacity ammo clips. According to one eyewitness, he saw his shadow and just opened fire. No warning, no demands, no liberal-inspired animal rights rhetoric, no nothing.
Porky Patterson, local pig farmer, who had wheedled his way to the front of the crowd, was overheard shouting, "Who gave the damn beaver a goddam loaded rifle?"
Who indeed!
Mayor Reggie Stubs, speaking off the record, admitted that numerous death threats against the groundhog had prompted the town council to authorize arming the over-sized rodent,  but no one in his wildest dreams imagined that the critter would actually figure out how to use the darn thing.
A local newspaper summed it up best with the front page headline:
Groundhog instigates latest U.S. mass shooting, six more weeks of winter likely.

Things aren't much better in northeast Asia, where a combination of unrelenting blasts of arctic wind and incalculable amounts of Chinese air pollution have turned winter into a sticky, murky, oozing grey, frozen fun fest. There are apparently places in China where one can step outside and simultaneously experience the burning up and freezing over of one's eyeballs. People are literally throwing away their eyeglasses because a) the rapid accumulation of grimy soot makes it impossible to see, and b) it's so cold that the lenses instantly crack. This perhaps explains recent video footage coming from northern China, in which thousands of blurry people appear to be walking haphazardly, reminiscent of somnambulists or zombies, through falling black snow, bumping into things, occasionally into each other, prompting vague fistfights akin to shadow boxing.  
Meanwhile, during this week's New Year's celebrations an estimated 500 million Chinese are on the move, traveling to their hometowns in over-crowed, under-heated trains, in below zero temperatures and zero visibility. Try to imagine something worse than being in the middle of that. I dare you. Where any of them might actually end up is a matter of pure speculation. One Chinese official dismissed the possibility of mass panic, claiming that if enough of these people end up in the same place, the government will simply construct a prefabricated city around them and put them all to work shoveling soot.

Note: the average daytime high temperature over the past two weeks in Ulaanbaatar has been negative forty-five degrees Centigrade. That's right, -45C.

Of course no visit to winterized Asia would be complete without a stopover on the northwest coast of Japan, officially known as the Yuki Guni, or snow country, which gets more of the white stuff each year than any other civilized area on Earth. The problem, aside from the snow, is that the majority of the population in this area is elderly, i.e. really really old, which unfortunately is not a deterrent to them attempting snow removal. Hence a significant number die from heart attacks each year while shoveling snow. A comparable number also die from falling off roofs (also while shoveling snow), many of them disappearing into deep snowdrifts, where they tend to remain until the first spring melt.

In an effort to forestall this alarming seasonal increase in mortality, one local government came up with the idea of supplying portable snow blowing machines to residents, announcing that, "If you can push a walker, you can push one of our snow blowers ."
Turns out pushing them isn't the problem, slipping on the snow and being sucked into the rotating blades is. The solution: make an instructional video, complete with human facsimile dummy, demonstrating what not to do while removing snow. In one sequence the dummy gets an arm stuck in the blades, body thrashing around on the ground; in the next a leg is being devoured, arms flailing, followed by both legs, and finally the dummy somehow manages to get its entire head wedged inside the machine. It's hilarious in a macabre sort of way, and according to officials snow-related deaths among the elderly have decreased, although there have been reports of people having heart attacks while watching the video.

Alas, winter. I think of it more as a redundant aberration than an actual season. Still, you run across people who tell you straight-faced that winter is their favorite time of year.

"I love winter!"
"Really? Are you by any chance mentally ill? Or is someone paying you to say that?"

Sure you'd like to smack them, but you restrain yourself, and besides it's too cold to take your hand out of your pocket.