hey patrick,
psssst....does the size of your cerebrum make you shy?
love your lbog
icarus charleston merriweather
well, i always liked sci-fi that didn't take me too far from my reality, but instead injected the surreal or futuristic into it.
trips to other galaxies, strangely syntaxed dimensions, impossible-to-remember names, all these things chilled my appreciation for the genre over the years.
when i did read sci-fi, i was aware that the writing left something to be desired as a rule, but it seemed obvious that the trade off for increased imaginative range was a less textured prose.
the most fun i had with this thread was when i started pretending that SF stood for San Francisco, and reinterpreting it in that light.
a lot of comments gained in meaning....
oh yeah and i went to school with martin amis. remember him well as a 16 year old.
wry, sly and dry, was our martin, as he still is, though back then he hadn't taken up the ponderous pontifex orb.
i find his acidity more entertaing on tv in interviews, than in his books, which are insufferably puerile in their desire to be worldly-wise and precocious, but which succeed only in being shallow and snide.
a one-riff writer, lugubriously, studiedly unfunny and pseudo-jaded. i really don't think anyone would have taken much notice of him, were it not for his father's more merited fame.
he was entertaining in person, though the edge was already fearsome at that age.
an awesome and quite magnetic intellect, no doubt, so far much too blunted by mannerism and a turgid, repetitive, rote cattiness to have done more than hint at its true potential.
i'll bite.....
the two insights this bizarre tale has granted me:
1. this guy's belief-system was a 'final solution' for the overpopulation problem.
2. so that's why so many germans speak excellent english! (after hearing that he believed his english had improved because of the experience, due to the canni-bee having superior talent in that regard)...
WEC
as for the chatty reviews, yes, now that you mention it, there was a whiff of narcissism. never bothered me....
if anything it worked in their favour, as it precluded their having polished their comments to the point of techno-vapidity.
yes it was hippie, in the most complimentary way. if hippies had been more into wec than bell-bottoms, muddy trashfests and bad dope, their philosophy would have garnered much less derision, and more serious consideration, as it would have bent to take care of more real problems on the ground, whether or not they were visible from '8 miles high'.
m4
yup, maybe when we've gone through it too, we'll find them waiting the other side, where corporate malfaisance and global rapine is confined to memory, in a tiny dying fringe publication, slipping into extinction with barely a whisper.
the whole earth catalogue changed my life as powerfully as the tibetan book of the dead, in its own way.
the rawboned nuts'n'bolts approach to 'becoming gods, so we might as well get good at it' appealed mightily to a very young, sunstarved brit, beginning to tire of the effete,narcissistic fatalism that passed for maturity in the circles i yearned to escape.
hitching around, i'd daydream droolingly as i dipped into a cornucopia of mindbendingly written teasers, making me yearn to live in a current of culture so vital, ironically earnest;
so hip, they were way beyond.
combining the best of practical with amazing openness to spiritual movements made them way ahead of their time.
in a different world, these folks would have been funded to design modern public life!
with what they knew, and had the keys to create with, it would have made us energy self sufficient (amory lovins), ecologically aware,(gary snyder), economically numerate,(paul hawken), tool conscious (kevin kelly), system and pattern morphology aware(gregory bateson), i could go on and on.
they were intellectual, but appealingly, reassuringly funky.
what the knowledge they embodied could have done during the last 30 years to enhance social consciousness, bring appropriate technology to the 3rd world, clean up our energy use and conservation, and discontinue the wholesale pollution and despoliation of our habitat, avoid useless illness, suffering and death, beggars belief and boggles the mind.
if it turned out they were from another galaxy and had just dropped in to bring up the level, i would easily believe it.
i comfort myself thinking the memes they sowed are pumping somewhere deep in the collective neural circuits of all of us so impacted, awaiting critical mass, wrench and screwdriver in hand to hook up the clueless millions when peak oil's spell has finally broken.
my first week in california i stumbled into a guy who showed me how to make a solar water heater out of a water-tank, an old refrigerator, a few plumbing parts, and a sheet of glass.
ingeniously, you shut the fridge door at night to keep the water hot!
that day i felt i'd walked right into the dogeared pages i'd been humping and sipping from so many miles.
i eventually parted company with my ton'o'wonder together with a reel to reel, left for the trail devas, climbing up and down coastal valleys in hawaii.
thanks you ragamuffin angels, you really shifted my gears for choices i have never had cause to regret.
w.e.r is dead.
long live w.e.r!
i noticed that peasants and children never use the subjunctive.
educated adults get to go virtual, because isn't that what it's really about?
simplicity is about having less choices, voluntarily or not?
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