You Know It's Time to Act

 I like post-apocalyptic fiction as much as the next guy, but I've often wondered why there's such an emphasis on dystopia rather than on cooperation as the method for going on. In reality, guns and motorcycles and theft are only going to feed you or keep you safe for so long, and it won't help your contributions to the future, i.e., children. The term I often think describing these kinds of novels or movies or TV shows shouldn't be dystopia but nihilist. 

Recently I read The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson and I'd call it an excellent example of what I think is the proper way we need to think about anything like a post-apocalypse. Published in 2020, it presents a world facing the certainty of climate change with nothing having been done to slow it down or even address it. After a devastating heat wave kills millions of Indians over a course of weeks, the UN recognizes something must be done and empanels a ministry designed to focus on both the future and the development of ways to be certain there is one. Various countries, starting with India, decide to ignore the richer nations and their do-nothing procedures and jury-rig a program meant to help themselves first of all and benefitting all other nations secondarily. 

Not to spoil a 500+ page book, but this jump-starts a series of escalating programs and laws that manage to keep the earth turning for the near future. The reason I applaud this "science fiction nonfiction" (as Jonathon Lethem dubs it) and I suppose a reason it was named one of Barack Obama's favorite books of the year is because the solution doesn't lie in guns and marauding bands and white American individuals making heroic sacrifices but in the subtle use of economics, policy, and science to come to terms with our reckless disregard for responsible use. The world finally discovers it needs a Plan B.

What was it? Big parts of it have been there all along; it's called socialism. Or, for those who freak out at that word, like Americans or international capitalist success stories reacting allergically to that word, call it public utility districts...Public ownership of the necessities, so that these are provided as human rights and as public goods, in a not-for-profit way. The necessities are food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, health care, and education. All these are human rights, all are public goods, all are never to be subjected to appropriation, exploitation, and profit. It's as simple as that.

Democracy is also good, but again, for those who think this word is just a cover for oligarchy and Western imperialism, let's call it real political representation. Do you feel you have real political representation? Probably not, but even if you feel you have some, it's probably feeling pretty compromised at best. So: public ownership of the necessities, and real political representation...

[There] still has to be money, or at least some exchange or allocation system that people trust, which means the already existing central banks have to be a part of it, which means the current nation-state system has to be part of it. Sorry but it's true, and maybe obvious...It is what we've got now, and in the crux, when things fall apart, something from the old system has to be used to hang the new system on, hopefully something big and solid. Without that it's castles in air time, and all will collapse into chaos...It's like being hypnotized; you have to agree for it to work. So we are all hypnotized in a giant dream we hallucinate together, and that's social reality...

 [The] current order is so unequal, so unfair. Old story, of course. Biblical; detailed in Genesis; it's the oldest story, inequality, and never much changed from the start of civilization. So how can we change that? What do we do now?

Now, everyone knows everything. No one on the planet is ignorant of the real condition of our shared social existence. That's one real thing those stupid smartphones have done; you can be illiterate, many are, and still have an excellent idea of how the world works. You know the world is spinning toward catastrophe! You know it's time to act. Everyone knows everything. The invisible hand never picks up the check. The money is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed. Which is to say properly distributed. So now things have broken. We broke them; we broke them on purpose! Riot, occupation, non-compliance, general strike: breakdown. Now it's time for Plan B. Time to act...

The Thunder of Butterflies

I'm certain I can't be the only one feeling as if he's living the aftereffects of Ray Bradbury's magnificent story, "A Sound of Thunder," can I? 

 Eckels stood smelling of the air, and there was a thing to the air, a chemical taint so subtle, so slight, that only a faint cry of his subliminal senses warned him it was there. The colors, white, gray, blue, orange, in the wall, in the furniture, in the sky beyond the window, were . . . were . . . . And there was a feel. His flesh twitched. His hands twitched. He stood drinking the oddness with the pores of his body. Somewhere, someone must have been screaming one of those whistles that only a dog can hear. His body screamed silence in return. Beyond this room, beyond this wall, beyond this man who was not quite the same man seated at this desk that was not quite the same desk . . . lay an entire world of streets and people. What sort of world it was now, there was no telling. He could feel them moving there, beyond the walls, almost, like so many chess pieces blown in a dry wind .... 

But the immediate thing was the sign painted on the office wall, the same sign he had read earlier today on first entering. Somehow, the sign had changed: TYME SEFARI INC. SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST. YU NAIM THE ANIMALL. WEE TAEK YU THAIR. YU SHOOT ITT. 

Eckels felt himself fall into a chair. He fumbled crazily at the thick slime on his boots. He held up a clod of dirt, trembling, "No, it can't be. Not a little thing like that. No!" 

Embedded in the mud, glistening green and gold and black, was a butterfly, very beautiful and very dead. "Not a little thing like that! Not a butterfly!" cried Eckels. It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. 

Eckels' mind whirled. It couldn't change things. Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important! Could it? His face was cold. His mouth trembled, asking: "Who ­ who won the presidential election yesterday?" 

The man behind the desk laughed. "You joking? You know very well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that fool weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts!" The official stopped. "What's wrong?" 

Eckels moaned. He dropped to his knees. He scrabbled at the golden butterfly with shaking fingers. "Can't we," he pleaded to the world, to himself, to the officials, to the Machine, "can't we take it back, can't we make it alive again? Can't we start over? Can't we­" He did not move. 

Eyes shut, he waited, shivering. He heard Travis breathe loud in the room; he heard Travis shift his rifle, click the safety catch, and raise the weapon. 

There was a sound of thunder.

I just like it

I've enjoyed comic books since I was a child. Hardly a revolutionary or unique statement, you can find any number of blogs and websites devoted to reading and appreciating them. You probably grew up with them too. But I have a special set of memories for the comics of the 60s and 70s, when I was most impressionable. They say the music you loved when you were 14 (David Bowie, in my case) is the music you'll love the rest of your life.

Because I read not just the comics of that period but reprints of earlier comics, strips, pulps, I enjoy the mystery around the Alan Moore League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series. The mystery comes from the sense I get reading a panel and trying to work out who is being referred to, who is being depicted, what situation is being faced. It's a little harder (and thus more thrilling) to me because most of his references are from British comics and media, which I'm not always familiar with. When I was a tween, I bought a stack of Punch magazines from the 70s, and tried understanding the references and satires of political figures. It was the progenitor of what Graydon Carter and Kurt Anderson wanted to make Spy for 80s and 90s America (and to a large degree succeeded). But what I mostly understood from Punch were the comics.

A compendium like this is wonderful for figuring out who is who, what image is being suggested, how an otherwise dissociative series of events (say, the voyages of Gulliver and the fascism of Big Brother) might lead to one another. It's as if Moore took The Avenger from the pulps, images from New Yorker cartoons, Major Hoople, Egghead, Angio Maggio, Dorothy Gale, Richard Diamond, Percy Dovetonsils, and slammed them all together in William Burroughs' Freeland. (Here too, I loved Philip Jose Farmer's Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life whose family tree of the Wold Newton universe was an early example I devoured with pleasure.)

All told, I'm sorry to see that the series is ending, but all good things of course. And this essay is a good wrap-up of the wrap-up.

Dick's Trump

I'll admit it, I've been overwhelmed by events to the point where it's nearly impossible to keep up. The speed with which the Trump administration is unraveling is dizzying. Every day brings with it another eye-opening, jaw-dropping revelation that the citizens of the United States actively brought ourselves under a would-be oligarchy's diktat. Our only saving grace is that it was unprepared and is led by an undisciplined sufferer of affluenza.

Make no mistake: I'm glad for that. It's to our advantage that Trump is more Berlusconi than Putin. That it will implode is a given. It may not end in the bloodless coup in which the entire crony crew and family depart on Air Force One for asylum in the Ukraine in the middle of the night with only the clothes on their backs that I hope for, but that it will end ignominiously is certain. America doesn't imprison our wealthy so we won't see that. But oh how satisfying that would be.

The end of the last year saw me reading Philip K. Dick. That Dick is a writer for the paranoid is a truism that's reached the point of pointlessness. But it's still worth remembering that, while he saw filaments of his own chaotic anger and mistook them for the culture's, they were nonetheless wide-ranging enough to be understood as cultural as well as personal.

Radio Free Albemuth is, I think, the fourth Dick novel I've read, and fits so snugly into the narrative of a President Trump to fuel suggestions not only of Dick's paranoia but his prescience. I'm hardly the first to note the similarities between Ferris Fremont, his version of Richard Nixon, and Trump, and frankly the differences are more disturbing because of what it says about the American people. While Trump's ascendence to the presidency is not as planned or controlled as Fremont's--he didn't arrive in the wake of a mandate, for instance, although his supporters were and are seeking something outside the political norm, which is a kind of unifying position (but not capable of being acted on, the equivalent of rallying behind someone holding a sign that says "Follow Me!")--the effects after he takes office are as disturbing.

No one had put a pistol to Ferris Fremont’s head. He was the pistol itself, pointed at our head. Pointed at the people who had elected him." 

Is there a better descriptor for Trump than a pistol held to the brows of his own supporters?

A little Friday morning reading

I've enjoyed Neil Gaiman's writing for years, and I'm interested in trying to binge-watch the new series American Gods after it's gotten good and going. (I've tried several times to binge-watch shows--The Man in the High Castle, Penny Dreadful, Dark Matter--but I couldn't watch any past the first season; they always disappointed.) Anyhow, I really liked American Gods my first reading and intend to reread it before watching the shows as I don't remember many details (and the trailers remind me I've forgotten more than I'd thought), and I want to get in on this binge-watching thing that everyone, including my wife, has been doing.

I've been reading much about how several TV shows now are especially relevent as they give insights into Life Under Trumpism, and especially American Gods and The Handmaid's Tale. But for the Gaiman book, I read a very good interview in which he says the following:

I have this mad theory about American elections. There is a reality-TV quality to them, in that they tend to go to what people think would probably be the most interesting story. “Who’s more interesting? Who’s a better story? Bob Dole or Bill Clinton? Let’s go for Clinton, it’ll be more interesting!” And there is that point where you’re going, “Okay, so is it Hillary, who still feels kind of like a rerun? Or is it Trump?” Even articulating that as a theory means that people are going to mishear what I’ve said. It will turn into a clickbait headline and people will be going, “You said that Trump was a better story!” No. I think Trump is an out-of-his-depth idiot. Who is possibly criminal. And certainly incompetent. I think that, actually, having a sane and functional right wing is a good thing. Having what we’ve got right now is a bad thing.

When the novel was written, it was written about America as a country of immigrants, of people who either came here of their own free will, or escaped here, or were brought here against their will. And what that meant — talking about the religious traditions and talking about the cultural traditions and talking about what that became. And having a lead character who was racially — and in all other ways — a melting pot. That, when I wrote the novel, didn’t seem to me to be particularly problematic, difficult, or even praiseworthy! Things that I did not think were praiseworthy or sensible included writing about indentured servants and transportation. Writing about the slave trade. Writing about a gay, Muslim salesman encountering a genie who drives a cab in New York.

I wasn’t doing it for the credit. I was doing it because it all feels right if you’re talking about America. Suddenly, Trump came in and now I’m reading articles in Vanity Fair about, “This is the most political stuff you’ve ever seen.” Well, I guess that’s all true, but it’s not like we sat down and went, We are the opposition. We simply started telling our fucking story and then the world changed. It would be like telling a pro-Jewish story in Berlin in the 1930s, and suddenly you’re looking around going, “We’re apparently doing something big and important.”

 Oddly, this theory of his comforts me, as the idea that we love a good, juicy story is a lot more appealing than that we like chaos and incomepetence. It's certainly played out at times in American electoral history (although it's important to remember we never had Presidents Bryant or Long), and if it's true it suggests that, like all the other times, most of us will get through it. Of course, some of us won't. And it's for those the rest of us must act up.

merging

This past Sunday I visited the Unitarian Univer-salist church in Mequon, the nearest congre-gation to our new home in a new hub. I have been processing-although that word is overused in my profession it still means something important-my experience since then.

I struggle in some ways to articulate it. It was uniformly positive and I am certain I will join the church. But it was also disturbing in some ways, how comfortable and peaceful I found it. This is the part I have difficulty articulating.

I arrived early, earlier than anyone else except the member and her daughter responsible for preparing the sanctuary. I talked with them a while and then with an older woman who was chief greeter for the day, then with one of the church's two (!) ministers, then with several others as they walked in. My wife refers to this as my funeral director mode, when I wander around introducing myself to people, sometimes introducing them to each other.

So I was at ease when I sat in the sanctuary to listen to the pianist and watch the bulk of people filter in. It's a UU church, after all, so most of them showed up at 9:56 for a 10 o'clock service, with another 30 or so arriving after the welcome and first hymn. The second part of that sentence carries a measure of something that surprised me. Although there is another, larger congregation in Milwaukee, the church has a couple hundred members, probably 25 of them black or Latino, and nearly 125 to 150 were there that day. The speaker was the retired minister from the Milwaukee church so some were undoubtedly visitors from there to hear him; but at 100 were congregation members who generally showed, I figure.

The retired minister was a good speaker and had a good sermon about UU beliefs I couldn't argue with. But what I was most absorbed by was the feeling I had surrounded by the people. I felt outside myself, emptied into the sea around me. I loved the image from Star Trek: Deep Space 9 of one character's people as an ocean (beginning about 6:40 in) into which they subsume, every particle mixing, and what I felt was something like that. To call it feeling "at home" seems banal but nonetheless accurate.

Here is the best I can say: I felt as in family, as among my tribe, as comfortable as I do in my best times with the Rainbow Family or with vagabonds. A friend of mine calls it being accepted in one's integrity, a statement I think is good as any and more accurate than most. I was taken in not only for who I am, but given my anonymity, in spite of who I may be. As if all my sins, rather than being washed clean, simply have no place there. Unconditional love. Acceptance without boundaries. I felt comfortable leaving because I know it will be similar when I come back.

what the sun said

To help me deal with this winter, I've been reading several books that lie for at least part of their narrative on extremes of weather, whether cold or heat or rain or whatever it might be. One of these books is a science fiction novel from the mid-90s called Evolution's Shore.

It takes place in the early 2000s, specifically 2008, six years after Saturn's moons are observed winking out of view. A year later a meteor strikes Mt Kilimanjaro and immediately grows a vegetation no one can identify but that serves to fully cover the mountain and grow at an exponential rate. It immerses everything within in and nothing that enters returns.

So it's said. There is one person who has left. Peter Werther is an early victim of the meteor, a member of a hang-gliding group that was thought decimated by the landing. It turns out, however, that the vegetation, which has come to be called The Chaga (named perhaps for the ubiquitous chaga mushroom?), had kept him alive in a manner of speaking for five years before expelling him. Gaby McAslan is a reporter for SkyNet (based on BSkyB rather than on the developer of the Terminators) who has been put into contact with Werther and has come to hear his story.

But what has struck me best and is the reason I am transcribing some of McDonald's novel here, is that the group Werther has been staying with since his "release" are called the New Millennium Travellers and are a perfect complement to what the Rainbow Family can become in an international manner. Werther's reason for being with them, too, resonates clearly with me.

The Travellers' camp was only a few miles beyond...,down a long dirt road that turned off the track to the Safariland Lodge and meandered along the shore of Lake Naivasha. Their wagons were pitched in the shelter of a stand of flame trees. Some were propped up on cinder blocks, wheels removed, a final surrender to the fuel shortages. There would never migrate along the world lines again. A beautiful hand-painted wooden sign stood over the entrance to the settlement. WHAT THE SUN SAID was its name.

What the sun said was dust. What the sun said was flies. The sun said heat. The sun said melanomas.

Tents and awnings billowed limply in the slow, hot air. Wind chimes set on ornamental door-posts barely tinkled. Japanese fish kites hung open-mouthed, stirring their streamer tails. Stranger fruit hung from the branches of the flame trees: things like cracked leather cocoons bound with steel wire. There were three of them, each about five feet long. They turned slowly anticlockwise to Coriolis force. A long generator chugged, most of the camp's power came from silent solar panels. All the vans had small steerable dishes on their roofs: the economics of techno-nomadism was that the information revolution had made it not only a desirable lifestyle, but a necessary one. You followed the sun and lived the lifestyle in harmony with the planet until one day the fuel ran out and left you stranded in the heat and drought of Africa's Rift Valley. With the Chaga approaching.

The Kilimanjaro Event had made East Africa the social navel of the planet. International Bright and Beautiful, and those who clung around them hoping that brightness and beauty were contagious, followed the planetary media circus to the plains in the shadows of the mountains. Most had moved on when Africa and things African slipped out of fashion. Some remained. They found room for their humanity to resonate in Africa's great spaces. They made their camps under the big sky and settled into sun-warmed introversion and the evolution of white-boy ethnicity. The men of What the Sun Said were bearded and sat about with their hands dangling loosely over their knees, watching what was watchable. The women, naked to the navel, carried their babies slung at their waists and intimidated Gaby with the firm upturn of their breasts. Children in beads, feathers and zinc oxide war paint on noses and cheekbones came running to greet the visitors. Their skins were tanned hard brown, there were flies around the corners of their eyes and mouths.

"Are you the people come to talk to Peter?" they asked. "We're here to take you to him. Come on." They pulled Gaby...along...In one of the big, billowing saffron tents, someone was playing a thumb piano...

This was what a man come back from the heart of darkness looked like. His face was tanned that dark brown peculiar to Teutons gone native. His hair was blond, long and worn in the community style; shaved at the sides, plaited at the back...He had the palest eyebrows she had ever seen. He did not effect the white-boy ethnic chic of the Sun-Saiders. He was dressed in a relaxed linen suit over a simple white T-shirt. No jewelry. No tattoos or ritual scarification or body piercing. His only idiosyncrasy was a leather biker's glove on his left hand...A swirl of warm wind set the black pods hanging from the trees swaying into Gaby's peripheral vision.

"They are into rebirthing," Peter Werther said, observing Gaby's distraction. "Spiritual metamorphosis."

"There are people in those things?"

"In sensory deprivation. They let them out after three, four days. The thing seems to be that they don't tell you how long they are going to leave you hanging, or even if they are going to come back at all. Face the fear and pass through is the experience. I think that after three days upside down in this heat, you will believe anything you are told about yourself. There are always willing volunteers, and not just from the community."

...[Peter Werther continued,] "I am sure you are wondering, why this place, why these strange people with their strange rituals? Well, they are a good people, it is a good life they lead, but the real reason is simpler. They were the first people I met when I came out of the Chaga. I walked, you see. I was brought to the edge, and told I must leave now, and I just walked north. They do not ask questions, you see. They accept...[These] people, in their months of travel, gave me the time and space to learn about myself, and what I have been changed into, and what it is I must do. And now I think I know, and I am ready, and these people have let me bring you into their peace and calm because they agree with me that the world needs to hear what I learned, back there."

Here's to bright colors!

The night didn't bring any real coolness, but at least it took the edge off the heat. From about six or seven the company split up into little groups...Semyon and I occupied the large balcony on the second floor. It was cozy in there; with its comfortable wicker furniture, the breeze blows through--the perfect place for hot weather.

"Number one," said Semyon, taking a bottle of Smirnovskaya vodka our of a plastic bag with an advertisement for "Dannon kids'" yogurt.

"Do you recommend that?" I asked doubtfully. I didn't regard myself as a great specialist on vodka.

"I've been drinking it for more than a hundred years. And it used to be far worse than it is now, believe me."

He took two plain glasses out of the bag, a two-liter jar with little pickles floating in brine under its flat tin lid, and a large container of sauerkraut...Semyon deftly twisted the cap off the bottle and poured us half a glass each. His bag had been standing on the veranda all day, but the vodka was still cold.

"To good health?" I suggested.

"Too soon for that. To us."

I drank the half-glass without even shuddering and was amazed to discover that vodka could taste good after the heat of a summer day, not only after a winter frost.

Semyon chuckled.

"There was one time this foreigner I knew invited me to go around to his place," he began.

"A long time ago?" I asked, playing along.

"Not really, last year. He invited me around so I could teach him how to drink Russian-style. He was staying in the Penta hotel. So I picked up a casual girlfriend of mine and her brother--he was just back from prison camp, with nowhere to go--and off we went."

I imagined what the group must have looked like and shook my head.

"And they let you in?"

"Yes."

"You used magic?"

"No, my foreign friend used money. He'd laid in plenty of vodka and snacks; we started drinking on April thirtieth and finished on May second. We didn't let the maids in and we never turned the television off."

Looking at Semyon in his crumpled, Russian-made check shirt, scruffy Turkish jeans, and battered Czech sandals, I could easily imagine him drinking beer poured out of a three-liter metal keg. But it was hard to imagine him in the Penta.

"You monsters," I said in horror.

"Why? My friend was very pleased. He said now he understood what real Russian drunkeness was all about."

"What is it about?"

"It's about waking up in the morning with everything around you looking gray. Gray sky, gray sun, gray city, gray people, gray thoughts. And the only way out is to have another drink. Then you feel better. Then the colors come back."

Semyon poured the vodka again--this time filling the glasses a bit less full. Then he thought about it and filled them right up to the top.

"Let's drink, my man. Here's to not having to drink in order to see the blue sky, the yellow sun, and all the colors of the city. Let's drink to that. We go in and out of the Twilight, and we see that the other side of the world isn't what everyone else thinks it is. But then, there's probably more than one other side. Here's to bright colors!"

I am a great fan of Russian writing. I almost always read it in the winter, primarily because their stoic, controlled fury way of looking at life corresponds with how I look at it in the depths of snow and ice and cold. I especially like Russian genre writing. I've read my Tolstoy and Pasternak and Doestoyevsky and Turgenev and Soltzinitsin and Bulgakov and Nabokov, my Akmahtova and  Brodsky, my Mandelstam and Mayakovsky, my Yevtushenko and Pushkin and Ratushinskaya and Tsvaeteva. (I have a collection of Babel stories I haven't cracked open yet.)

But I think what I appreciate even more is Russian genre writing. I read Gary Shtyngart's farce The Russian Debutante's Handbook this last year and the science fictions Mir: A Novel of Virtual Reality by Alexander Besher a few years ago and much Stanislaw Lem in the 70s (I remember Solaris best), and I am finishing Nightwatch by Sergei Lukyanenko today. I often have issues with translation with most of them, as genre seems to require the least capable translators, so that their phrases often fall flat ("A hero! Oh, what great heroes we all are! Clean hands, hearts of gold, feet that have never stepped in shit. Have you forgotten the woman who was taken out of here? And the crying children, have you forgotten them? They're not Dark Ones. They're ordinary people, the ones we promised to protect. How long do we spend on getting the balance right for every operation we plan? I may curse our ananlysts every moment of the day, but why are they all gray-haired by the age of fifty?"), odd combinations of formal and informal inflection, wordiness and pithiness, strained analogies and quick cultural asides. Nightwatch is no different. Andrew Bromfield, who does not fit the role of writing hack, nonetheless does not seem very comfortable moving between the relaxed writing that I presume Lukyanenko can do well (and Bromfield displays in better moments: "The only movement was the trembling of the blue and red spots in the windows--the TVs were switched on everywhere. It had become a habit already, when you were afraid, when you were suffering--switch on the TV and watch absolutely anything, from the shopping network to the news.").


But decades ago I told myself I would find something worthwhile in everything I would ever spend reading to the point that for years I typed those passages out on index cards and taped them to my kitchen door. I have discovered the same in Nightwatch.

"There's one thing you've got to understand, Anton," said the magician, crunching on a pickle. "You should have realized it ages ago, but you've been tucked away with those machines of yours. Our Light may be big and bright, but it's made up of lots and lots of little truths...Anton, I'll tell you what the problem is. You're a young guy, you join the Watch, and you're delighted with yourself. At last the whole world is divided up into black and white! Your dream for humanity has come true; now you can tell who's good and who's bad. So get this. That's not the way it is. Not at all. Once we all used to be together. The Dark Ones and the Light Ones. We used to sit around our campfire in the cave and look through the Twilight to see where the nearest pasture was with a woolly mammoth grazing on it, sing and dance, shoot sparks out of our fingers, zap the other tribes with fireballs. And let's say there were two brothers, both Others. Maybe when the first one when into the Twilight he was feeling well-fed; maybe he'd just made love for the first time. But for the other one it was different. Some green bamboo had given him a bellyache; his woman had turned him down because she claimed she had a headache and was tired from scraping animal skins. And that's how it started. One leads everyone to the mammoth and he's satisfied. The other demands a piece of the trunk and the chief's daughter into the bargain. That's how we got divided up into Dark Ones and Light Ones, into good and evil. Pretty basic stuff, isn't it? It's what we teach all the little Other children. But who ever told you it had all stopped?"

Semyon leaned toward me so abruptly that his chair cracked.

"That's the way it was, it still is, and it always will be. Forever, Antoshka. There isn't any end to it...Do you have a truth of your own, Anton? Tell me, do you? Are you certain of it? Then believe in it...Believe in it and fight for it. If you have enough courage. If the idea doesn't make you shudder. What's bad about Dark freedom is not just that it's freedom from others. That's another explanation for little children. Dark freedom is first and foremost freedom from yourself, from your own conscience and your own soul. The moment you can't feel any pain in your chest--call for help. Only by then it'll be too late."

He paused the reach into the plastic bag and took out another bottle of vodka. He sighed:

"Number two. I have a feeling we're not going to get drunk after all. We won't make it."

what if, again?

this is an excellent article in which a couple seti (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) researchers comment on exactly the question I've written on previously.  their takeaway:  because humans haven't been at the center of existence for a while, most religious would simply take it in stride and continue.  I'd like to believe that.  unfortunately, that presupposes a willingness to adapt to circumstances that isn't always borne out by history.  would most religious accept extraplanetary bacteria as evidence of a diversity to the universe we can only guess at or as creations of the adversary meant to be destroyed?  my religious mind believes the former; my political mind suspects the latter.

spoiler: a suggestive zombie short

I am amazed at this wonderful short film.  a year ago a short teaser to the game dead island came out, guarenteed to make one lose one's shit.  it did not do that.  (that a little girl will become a zombie is, at this point, such a commonplace that anyone surprised at it never heard of night of the living dead.) this short, however, in its unbearable denuement, made me lose my shit, despite my knowing--or rather, on 1st watching, my being certain of--the ending.  the premise is that, after a zombie outbreak has been dealt with, life will go on, with modifications that include ruthless extermination of potential re-outbreaks.  that makes a great deal of sense.

I'm fascinated by the horror tropes of zombies and vampires because of the suggestion that each is a step between being alive and being dead.  (thomas merton, in an essay on an unrelated point, refers to this existence as being in purgatory, which is a "place" between the 2 states.)  the religious possibilities of what it would mean if something like a vampire or zombie outbreak occured would be enormous.  think on this:  if the supernatural origins of either were true, what kind of god would foist insatiable hunger on someone?  would that be a punishment or, in the case of starving nations, some odd blessing?  and in that latter case, if the infected took their toll on the wealthiest nations, would that be a punishment of the policies of those nations?  if zombies were real, would it suggest that voudon or santeria were the "true" religions?  if vampires were real, would they be worshiped as intermediaries between people and god, sort of angels, and would infection by them be welcomed?

in the case of spoiler, what would a post-infected religion look like?  would infection prove to most survivors that god is a fiction?  would it suggest the truth of a belligerant, angry, spiteful god?  there are suggestions in the short that there is more than 1 type of infection.  would different types suggest different divine intervention?  (that there is more than 1 type is, I think, a sly captip to the incredible diversity of zombie films.)  if someone is responsible for putting down one's spouse or child or mother, how does one reconcile one's place in the world afterward?  to what hope does someone like spoiler's protagonist cling?   is there hope in such a world?  what we see of people's lives in this post-infection world suggests that they go on with their otherwise ordinary lives with grim acceptance that it all could happen again.  in the face of constant fear of a repetition of infection, can there be hope beyond simply living through the day?

varying shades of gray

a few weeks ago I found a copy of bruce sterling's 2002 book tomorrow now: envisioning the next 50 years in the $1 bin at a buns & noodles in the hub and I've been impressed both by the way he writes and the optimism which his book gives me. you'd think the guy who helped define the word "cyberpunk" would be more interested in dystopia, but the world he proposes isn't a utopia either. it's like today, only moreso, and with fewer hypocrisies.

this essay on the ethics of using currently ethically-challenged technology to create more ethical technology caught my eye and strikes me as something in that same optimistic vein. I think most people like me fear that, once we have recognized and admitted our privilege, we need to give it up in order to make the changes we know need to happen. but writers from jon sobrino to karl marx to the gospel authors tell us that's not the case: we need to use that privilege to help other people. as leonard writes in relation to social networks and action, "Just because action is easy doesn’t make it irrelevant." it's easy for me to give a 30% tip to a server at a restaurant and that's certainly not irrelevant.

if it's irrelevant to do the easy action then we're stuck in the spanish prisoner's dilemma of doing nothing because for most of us the harder action is useless too. if I give up my privilege and go to work in foxconn's factories in taiwan, what exactly have I done? have I helped anyone? will I have bettered the life of the teen worker next to me or bettered the life of the single mother who would have gotten the job if I hadn't taken it? will even my life or my identification with the oppressed have been improved? it isn't necessarily a false either-or, of course; a third option is that I could forget it all and ignore both the plight of the workers and my own privilege and go on with my consumption and affluence.

jesus and marx both said that the way to personal salvation is through helping others who aren't doing as well as you are. the bodhisattva takes it a step further and actively refuses his own salvation until everyone is saved. how ironic and perfect if the way to do that is the judicious use of the "like" button.

"we can't always use pandas and tea"

this is the sort of writer I've always wanted to be, not necessarily the voice of a nation but the writer who can direct readers to that voice, the writer who makes note of what the nation has become and points up both its foibles and its beauty. han han, who I had not heard of until I'd read this essay (my link is to the digital new yorker copy from last july and may prove unnavigatable and you may need to go to the paywall at the new yorker website), is publishing in english soon and I look forward to finding his essays, perhaps his fiction. I love too that in his native china he's better known as a racer than an author. shades of buckaroo banzai. I'm currently in a fiction mode, reading novels that make a comment on their times, from les miserables by hugo to neuromancer by gibson. these are the sorts of works that move down the centuries.

the pantisocratic pirates, part 1

"At first it was the Tesrifati's own shadow. Some strage refraction of the nowhere-light had thrown a dark double of his vessel off to port. Then it was his imagination, an image rising out of the silent hypnotic hours, now redoubted and returning. And then it was a black ship bearing down on him out of the fog. Hamit turned and began to shout. A dark form was running alongside his ship, the angle of coincidence so narrow it must have been there for hours. Hamit scrambled down ladders, through hatches, along gangways, shouting, cuffing the heads of the crew. None of the guns were primed. He could hear water rushing in the channel formed between the hulls. Two or three of the men were stirring themselves. Hamit...saw the black ship loom out of the fog to fill the gunport. He was hammering down the powder, tamping the ball. Lining the wales of the black ship from prow to stern were faces withered with age. Two crewmen were pulling at his arms. He pushed them away. The ship was almost on him, filling the sky, blotting out the fog, huge and black as night. He lit the taper. The crewmen were shouting at him, moving backward. Hamit touched the fuse and turned to see them running away from him with their hands to their heads, away from the cannon. The fuse hissed, he heard the first grappling hook fall with a thud on the deck above. Then the cannon exploded.

"From within the confines of his crate, the Internuncio heard muffled shouting, a thud somewhere above, a deafening explosion, more thuds, a terrible grinding sound, and feet running in all directions around him. The ship was being boarded. He heard barrels being rolled along the gangplanks and manhandled out of the well. The hole through which his young friend had fed and watered him allowed a view directly overhead. Useless. Then his own turn came and he braced himself against the 'walls' and floor as the crate was shifted up to the deck, then seemed to hang in space before landing on the deck of the Tesrifati's aggressor. He heared voices speaking in English. The grinding sound came again. The hulls rubbing against one another, he realized belatedly, and then the ships were free of each other. He could hear the crew levering off the lids of the barrels. He raised his head to shout his presence and the sound died in his throat. His crate was positioned directly below the mainmast. Looking up through the feeding hole he saw swirling fog, bare spars, and rigging. At the top of the mast, a tattered pennant flew, and on the pennant was a skull and crossed bones. They were working down the line, staving in the barrels with jemmies. Peter Rathkael-Herbert cowered in his crate waiting helplessly, hopelessly for discovery. Then his turn came. Wood splintered above his head and shattered slats rained down on him as he curled up, burying his head in his hands. The lid was prized off and a croaking voice above him said, 'Aha!' before strong hands reached down to pluck him from his refuge and deposti him on the deck. Crumpled, racked with aches and pains, exhausted Peter Rathkael-Herbert looked up to see an old man, grizzled and weather-tanned, standing over him. The old man reached down and offered the Imperial Internuncio his hand.

"'I am Wilberforce van Clam,' he told the disheveled heap. 'Welcome aboard the Heart of Light.'

"The sirocco began to blow away the fog.

"Aboard the Heart of Light, Peter Rathkael-Herbert saw sunlight for the first time in a fortnight. Looking up into the rigging and around the deck where the crew were making ready to set sail, he could not help but notice the extreme age of the sailors. Not a one seemed to be under fifty. Wilberforce van Clam was at the helm.

"'Take some tea.' He gestured to a pot brewing on an occasional table by his side. 'Wilkins!' he shouted. 'A cup for our guest, if you please!'...Wilkins, a spry sixty-year-old with a long white mustache, jumped to the task.

"'You are...pirates?' Peter Rathkael-Herbert ventured, watching as elderly men leapt up and down the rigging.

"'Pirates? Oh yes, pirates all right, absolutely pirates we are, aren't we, lads?'

"'Oh yes!' came the reply from all quarters of the vessel.

"'But we're Pantisocratic Pirates,' Wilberforce van Clam went on. 'We never really wanted to be pirates at all.' He paused and sipped his tea. 'It's society made us what we is now.'

"'Society?' Peter Rathkael-Herbert was bemused by the notion. 'But how?'

"'Aha!' said Wilberforce for the second time that day. 'Now that is a tale worth the telling. Wilkins! A chair for my friend!'

"And so, seated in a splendidly upholstered armchair and fortified by tea, the Imperial Internuncio listened while Wilberforce van Clam unfolded the story of the Pantisocratic Pirates."

--from Lempriere's Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk

I have been reading this book for a little over a year and a half, having come across it for a dime at a library book sale in rural pennsylvania. I've read a lot of negative reviews but I have to say I am on the side of the faction that argues it's worth the staying with. it's got many red herrings and sometimes lapses into strange digressions in the middle of a sentence, but on the whole it's been worth the time it's taken to read it. the parts I'm posting today and tomorrow are a little better than 2/3s through the novel, and remind me of some of terry pratchett's discworld, and wilberforce van clam himself has made me think of cohen the barbarian.

part 2, the story of the pantisocratic pirates, tomorrow.

did jesus die for klingons too?

this fascinates me and I've started a conversation about it in the past which I will doubtless talk about again.

paperback writer

a couple brothers rent the house across the road from my dad, and while no one seems to know much about them--they're computer wizards, they work for a local lumber company, their mom pays their rent for them as well as financing their cars, none of which information is mutually exclusive--it is known that 1 of them spends most of his days and at least some nights in an upstairs room writing a novel. in an internet age when anyone worth his salt has published at least 1 autobiographical or semiautobiographical piece somewhere on the interwebs, this is still cause for comment here in the thick, with everyone mentioning it at least 1ce in conversation, in the manner of, "don't that beat all, he just writes."

I've never heard any guess as to what it is he is writing about, but I like to think it's a science fiction/fantasy hybrid in the mold of john norman's misogynistic gor novels. I've got no basis for this--I've only swapped "hi"s with either of them--but the writing brother, who has not cut his hair or beard for years while his brother trims his, is a pictureperfect stringy uncomfortable with women type who I suspect is less likely than his brother to have spoken with anyone female other than his mother and maybe a cousin and an aunt.

the story runs, and I know this part is true, that a window popped out of an upstairs window and sat on the porch roof for 4 years before it blew down onto the lawn, where it sat another year until 1 brother, I suspect the 1 who trims his hair and beard, got up the gumption to step outside and pick it up where he leaned it against the house on the porch. it remains there. but the uncertain aspect of the story is that the only reason the screen was eventually picked up was that their mother insisted on it, or she was going to ask my female cousin, who rents to them, to come by and tell them it needed to be moved. presumably, the prospect of a woman besides their mother at the house was enough to prod them to action.

reading while sick (2)

shuffling around all day in one's jammies, drinking herbal tea and watching the birds flit from branch to branch, and being terribly jealous of everyone one knows simply because they can be outside while one is stuck inside drinking tea and draining one's sinuses--this is the time one gives to reading odd things and enjoying that experience. here, the 2nd excerpt, roughly 40 pages from the end of pat cadigan's tea from an empty cup. this is from the perspective of yuki, the alternate heroine of the novel, who has entered artificial reality in search of a friend.

"after a time, the light died down, from blinding to something softer, something on the order of the warm golden glow from an antique lamp. yuki became aware slowly that she was no longer falling, had not been falling for some time. her eyes were closed and she had no sense of her position--had she passed out? was she still unconscious and dreaming?

"she opened her eyes and jumped, startled. she was sitting in an enormous leather chair...pulled up to a large, round, dark wood meeting table. there was a touch on her arm and she turned to find her grandmother sitting at her left.

"'grandmother?'

"'body,' the woman said.

"'whose?' asked yuki, bewildered...'you look and talk just like my grandmother...is this how they use you in the afterlife? they keep your brain running to generate post-apocalyptic ar cities?'

"'if I am your grandmother, I'm dead, I'm past caring why they keep my brain running.' the woman smiled. 'it doesn't matter what they intended anyway. something else is happening, something they didn't bargain for.'

"...'it's all just ar. right now, I'm moving so fast they can't track me, but eventually I'll start to lose momentum and they'll find me again.'

"'actually, they'd rather find you before you lose momentum,' [the woman] said, leaning over to look at the center of the table. yuki followed her gaze but saw nothing other than a vague area that might have been a spot that a dustcloth had missed. 'they've been trying to get up this high for a while now. only one or two managed it in the past--accelerant combined with high adrenaline, nature's own speed cocktail. they want to follow you up. they know there's something here and they want it...old japan.'

"yuki laughed without humor. 'oh, yeah. post-apocalyptic tokyo, the hottest thing yet. please. save the sales pitch. I don't do ar...'

"'no. not a cheap amusement park. the real old japan. and I know who you're looking for.' there was a pause. 'igochi tomoyuki tried to sell his birthright. the one who purchased it was set upon by a demon, who killed him.'

"'sorry, I don't believe in demons,' yuki said sourly.

"'ask tom, then, when you find him, if he believes in demons.'...[the woman's] face became a cold mask. 'he became greedy. he took the catalog, he decided he would sell the high-level access for money, to anyone, non-japanese as well as japanese. greed is a very old, very unorginal scenario, so boring. if we could recover the catalog, the accesses to the higher levels--'

"'if tom's still in here,' yuki said, careful to keep her voice even, 'why can't you find him? or do you already have him--out there--and he just won't talk?'

"'--we would forgive him, we would make him part of bunraku. as you are.'

"'bunraku,' yuki repeated, mystified...

"'the method by which old japan will be remade--awakened--for good. the real, the true old japan. we were bringing it to fruition, we were nurturing it with the life of our blood and tissue and the afterlife of our souls...'

"something rippled through her, like a sensation from someone else's body, as if someone else were sharing the suit with her by some remote access. except this time, it didn't feel hideously obscene, like being invaded by a stranger from within.

"there was a gentle touch on her shoulder and she looked up to see a large doll-woman in traditional japanese costume floating in front of her on the table. it bowed and began to move slowly and precisely, with as much grace as a living person.

"not a doll. a puppet, with several living persons behind its movements. her movements. bunraku. japanese puppet theater. not a children's diversion but the classic puppter theater of old japan, as serious as noh and kabuki, a demonstration of skill and grace, control and cooperation. now she could see the outlines of the people moving the puppet if not their faces. see them and feel them--"

I have to say in closing that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel, so much so I have decided to locate its sequel, dervish is digital. the ending in particular is not slapdash or cartoonish but a solid, complicated ending.

reading while sick (1)

there are worse times to be sick than when one is on vacation, I suppose. the house is warm and from my bed I can see a light snow falling. I've had my coffee and throat lozenge and the dogs are piled on my feet and sides and the cats are settling into the drawers my wife leaves open after getting dressed and hurrying to work.

I've been ill since saturday. it showed up as a sore throat and has progressed steadily until I fell asleep on the couch last night with a cold. this morning I'm in that hazy state where reality is a blurry thing with occasional sharp edges.

I like to read odd things when I'm sick. the weirdness accentuates my feelings of being out-of-control. I'm a person who likes being drunk, who likes vertigo, who likes the sensation of endlessly falling (which is probably why I often dream that). when I have a fever I like to pore over the sorts of science fiction and horror and fantasy that expand that fuzziness with which I see the world.

on saturday I chose an old--well, not so old to me, but published over a decade ago, and because of its subject matter, hopelessly retro now--an old novel about artificial reality by pat cadigan called tea from an empty cup. it takes place in a future easily imaginable to anyone familiar with the look of liquid television and ghost in the shell (the concept of the ghost in the machine is actually referenced by one of the minor characters) or, from my own time, starstruck. there are 2 passages I want to share, one today and one tomorrow. this one is from early in the novel, when the investigator into a real-time murder witnesses the murder in artificial reality from the perspective of the victim.

"shantih love abruptly looked back in such a way that s/he seemed to be looking directly out of the screen into konstantin's eyes. the expression on the unique face seemed somehow both questioning and confident. konstantin steered the detached perspective from behind shantih love around his/her right side, passing in front of the androgyne and moving to the left side, tracking him/her as s/he walked toward the multitude on the shore.

"a figure suddenly popped up from behind the low concrete barrier running between the street and the river. shantih love stopped for a few moments, uncertainty troubling her/his smooth forehead. konstantin tried adjusting the screen controls to see the figure better in the gathering darkness but, maddeningly, she couldn't seem to get anything more definite than a fuzzy, blurry silhouette, definitely humanlike but otherwise unidentifiable as young or old, male, female, both or neither, friendly or hostile.

"the shape climbed over the barrier to the street side just as shantih love slipped over it to the shore. the ground here was soft and shantih love had trouble walking in it. the fuzzy shape paced her/him on the other side of the wall and konstantin got the idea that it was saying something, but nothing came up on audio. shantih love didn't answer, didn't even look in its direction again as s/he moved in long strides toward the crowd...

"the perspective had slipped back behind shantih love. konstantin tapped the forward button rapidly; now she seemed to be perched on shantih love's right shoulder...shantih love whirled suddenly; after a second's delay, the perspective followed. konstantin felt a wave of dizziness and the images on the screen went out of focus. when the focus cleared, konstantin saw that the figure was standing on top of the barrier, poised to jump. shantih love backed away, turned, and began stumbling through the party crowd, bumping into various people, some less distinct than others. konstantin didn't have to shift the perspective around to know that the creature was chasing the androgyne. now the pov seemed to be only inches in front of the creature's face; she had a fast glimpse of bandage-wrapped arms and hand with an indeterminate number of fingers...

"the pov began to shake and streak. as if it were embedded in the pursuer's body. frustrated, konstantin pounded on the forward key, but the pov didn't budge. they called this custom editing? she fumed. even worse, now that she was among the party crowd, almost every attendee was either so vague as to be maddeningly unidentifiable or so broad a stereotype--barbarian, vampire, wild-child, homunculus--that anonymity was equally assured.

"shantih love broke through the other side of the crowd two seconds before she did and ran heavily toward a stone rise leading to the sidewalk. s/he scrambled up on all fours, a heartbeat ahead of the pursuer.

"love vaulted the low barrier and ran along the middle of the street, looking eagerly at each wreck...something moved inside each one, even those that were burning. konstantin realized she was probably alone in finding that noticeable, much less remarkable--living in a bonfire was probably the height of ar chic. this week.

"she tried pushing the pov ahead again and this time gained several feet. shantih love looked over his/her shoulder, seemingly right at the pov. the androgyne's expression was panic and dismay; in the next moment, s/he fell.

"the pov somersaulted. there was a flash of broken pavement, followed by a brief panorama of sky, a flip and a close-up of the angrogyne's profile just as the pursuer pushed his/her chin up with one rag-wrapped hand. perfect skin stretched taut; the blade flashed and disappeared as it turned sideways to slash through flesh, tendon, blood vessels, cartilage, bone.

"blood flew against the pov and dripped down, like gory rain on a window. wincing, konstantin tried to erase the blood trails; nothing happened.

"shantih love coughed and gargled at the sky, not trying to twist away from the bandaged hand that still held his/her chin. blood pushed upward from the artery in an exaggerated display. the creature pushed love's face to one side so s/he stared dully past the pov and then bent its head to drink."

tuesday reading

"'boarmus,' [the voice] said softly...one of the female-sounding ones.

"'I have been considering what you said to me last,' said boarmus, putting his hand on jacent's shoulder.

"'there is an unauthorized person with you.'

"'true. he is here as an example.'

"'an example of what?'

"'an example of the awe in which the people of tolerance hold you,' said boarmus. under his fingers, jacent shivered. very good, boarmus thought. let the boy be scared half to death...'an ordinary person of tolerance. not a provost. not a member of the inner circle.'

"'does he hold me in awe?'

"boarmus shook him. 'do you hold, ah...her...in awe, boy.'

"'oh, yes,' jacent shivered. 'yes, I do.'

"'in reverence?'

"jacent nodded and had to be prodded into speaking aloud. 'oh, yes.'

"'what does he think I am?' the voice managed to sound curious...

"'well,' said jacent from a dry mouth. 'some people think you're god. but others don't.'...

"'why don't they?' still curious, not yet angry.

"'well, because,' jacent said. 'god is omniscient. god knows the answers to all questions. if you are god, you'd know the answer to the great question. I mean, people say if you're really god, you'll answer that questions. then everybody will know you're god. everybody will know.'

"'how do you know I haven't answered the question?' another voice, this one edged with anger, displeasure. boarmus held on to the boy's shoulder, keeping him steady...

"'you'd have told us,' said jacent in a firm voice. 'in order that we might work toward our destiny properly. you see, that's how we know all gods before now were false, they never told us what our destiny really was. so, if you do tell us, you'll be the only true one. and the answer will be so self-evident, we'd all agree with it. because when a true god truly answers a question, that's what happens. everyone knows that.'

"'but I am god,' muttered a voice. 'we are god.'

"'of course,' quavered jacent. 'I already believe that. but everyone will believe it when you answer the great question.'

"'I don't need you to believe. I can make you do what I say even if you don't believe.' a sulky-sounding voice, this. 'god doesn't need to prove anything, not if god can make people do what god wants.'...

"'boarmus said, 'that's true. but if people only do what you say, then you'll only get what you're already capable of. gods create beings as tools to explore beyond what they already are and know. to create randomness, chaos, chance. to create discovery. you created man to discover new things for you, and man will discover them, if he knows you're god, if he wants to please you. that is what you created mankind for, wasn't it? after all, you're god, you're very busy. you created man as a kind of tool, to find things out for you."

--from sideshow by sheri s. tepper

hope is a life preserver

this fascinates me, as does this. in each instance, what does hope do? it floats!

some labor day reading

in honor of labor day:

"it's the same every monday, give or take a few details, a few hangovers, a few ghosts who would no longer hail us as we breathed deeply the slaughterhouse reek we no longer noticed. this shit-stink was the stench of work, my job--odor of death, pink burnt flesh, taint of dried blood and shit settling on everything like dust, all mixed up with the photochemical smog of the city pulsing around us. it's in our hair and our lungs and our eyes and I have long since gotten used to it. I did notice it once after I had been away for several weeks, having sliced off the tip of my finger. I noticed it when I returned, and it was like coming into work after first being hired, feeling that fear lock onto my soul anew, hardening inside me until I forgot about that, too. that's what I think people smell when they wrinkle thier noses, catching a whiff of my work clothes. the farmer john pork packing plant, dark blue with a wraparound porky pig mural you can see as you drive by, looming five stories above us as we walked into its shadow. it towered above us like the pyramid of the sun as we drove in on soto from the north, hemmed in by semis as we emerge under the sourthern pacific overpass--I think we checked on it subconsciously, hoping somehow that some major disaster unknonw to the public at large has destroyed the whole plant, the chill room where the mass of our work swings on a thousand hooks, and the cutting lines with wooden boxes full of knives, the sausage rooms and fetid wiener smokehouse, loading docks and animal storage pens out back, steaming pipes rising like conning towers above the yard where semis and 2 to 4 ton delivery trucks pull in and out, smokestacks above the offices and the front gate (with bobo or zack in his box, checking the trucks in). certainly in l.a., where we've seen riots, fires, earthquakes, epidemix, crack wars and the disaster of our everyday lives, we would not be too shocked if somehow the entire city of vernon was removed brom the map over the weekend. subterranean methane build-up, a refinery explosion, fuel leak in the sewer system, nuclear terrorism, something! but every monday there it was, the blue mass of farmer john rising above the l.a. river like a fortress anchoring a chinese wall of fortified industry, its sheet metal and concrete arteries pumping pig blood into the vast urban sprawl--we got a clear view of it as we crossed the river on a soto street overpass, clouds scudding across a blue sky reflected in a river flowing without depth between broad concrete banks, the smooth surface of the water scummy with brown foam that we didn't have to imagine being partly the blood of 6000 pigs dispatched between last friday and today."

--from Atomik Aztex by Sesshu Foster

(I don't know if foster, who's primarily a poet and teacher, has ever worked in a slaughterhouse, but even in my limited experience there--a mere 2 weeks, but that was enough--he has the sense down hot as blood.)