At Aussiecon I, where Ursula got the Hugo for The Disposessed, I asked her if she called herself an anrachist. She replied with a question back: "Can a middle-class housewife and mother be an anarchist?" (paraphrase!)
"all that’s left now is the actual move", he says.
. . . "all" Patrick, you may need your meds adjusted.
Congrats on coming through so well, so far, and the very best wishes&luck with the move, but it's Non-Trivial.
BTW, are you acquainted with Craig? I don't recall where in fandom I met him, but we were already acquainted ten years ago when he'd just moved to the Bay area, and decided to start a listserv to gain some notoriety . . . and now he gets his picture in the back of Juxtapoz.
I re-confirmed my unwanted gift as a Cassandra on 9/11 by saying, "I hope this isn't our Reichstag fire." Whether it was is still an open question.
I recommend Wilhelm Reich, Communist and psychoanalyst, who was there, and wrote _The Mass Psychology of Fascism_. (Germanic professorial style-warning) Re-reading it clarified a lot of things for me, but, alas, didn't give me any (hoped-for) countering tactics.
If Reich is obscure to you: he's the only person I know of whose books were burned (bonfires and incinerators, not rhetorical flourish) by the Communists, the Fascists, and the United States government. He had at least his share of warts, but is still indispensible.
Mayor Junior, who is usually not as fluent and glib as his father, said "gay and lesbian, transgender and transsexual community" without turning a hair. There is some sort of serious political calculation here somewhere. He's made (and flubbed) entire speeches with fewer syllables than that phrase.
When I heard the clip on the radio, I was stunned.
(For non-acquaintances, I'm a native Chicagoan. Chicago, not the greater six-county whatever.)
It's worse than that.
The Internet "is" a set of technical specifications/standards. The great opening we are envisioning threatens most major powers, and though they can be slow to awaken, they are implacable. One of the best ways for the stati (is that the plural of 'status'?) quo to roll over us is to take control of the specs.
After having arrived at this opinion on my own a couple of years ago, I just ran into a link to a detailed essay by John (Autodesk) Warner, The Digital Imprimatur, listing what's going on now.
If we don't fight ver yard, very soon, we've lost.
Oh, "RUMMY"! At very first glance I took it for "Jalaluddin Rumi", and it just didn't parse.
>From Mary Kay,
>posted on September 9, 2003 12:09 PM:
>
>So maybe someone should do a poster of Georgie as >Mickey Mouse, Condi as Minnie, Cheney could be >Donald Duck. I like Ashcroft for Goofy, but I'm not >sure about Rummy.
I sold the underground paper in Chicago from mid-69 until its death at the beginning of '73.
The single issue I ever did the best business with was a cover of a classic Mickey Mouse flaunting a Spiro Agnew wristwatch. (something like 115 papers in 90 minutes at Union Station at evening rush hour.)
Timothy Burke said
. . . many fandoms, whether the kind you're describing, or the kind I'm squicked by, intermingle and intertwine with the texts, performances and practices to which they are devoted . . . . Science fiction is an especially good example of that: the fecundity of fandoms (both the Klingon costume stalking-James-Doohan wearing your Starfleet uniform to a jury selection process kind, and the "bohemian network of affinity groups" kind, clearly has had an enormous, mostly positive, effect on science fiction.
I'll try to make this as simple and clear as I can:
Words can have more than one meaning.
Words can accumulate meanings through drift and misunderstanding.
Several current usages of the word "fan" derive, eventually, from the way Patrick and I and most of the posters here use it.
The people using the word in these several other ways probably significantly outnumber us.
Timothy Burke appears to be using the word in some of those other senses, without quite grasping that he isn't talking abbout us (ot that we were here first, which is a bot off the point).
Timothy Burke said
. . . is fandom necessarily and intrinsically social, a "network"?
Yes!
I am acquainted with almost every Big Name Writer who's been named in the conversation (as are several other people, whjich is the point), and on a first name relation with most. When I check in with Robert Anton Wilson, I want to bring news about a neurology article I just saw, or another thought on Orson Welles. He's got all the conspiracies he needs.
Timothy Burke said
You're at a barbecue fishing through the trash can full of ice and soft drink cans, looking to see if there's any Diet Coke left, when all of a sudden you look and say, "Oh, my God, is that JOHN TRAVOLTA over there?! Holy crap, it is!"
An odd choice of illustration: I have several anecdotes about raiding the Bridge parties at LA Worldcons, but if I'm namedropping I talk about how Marvin Minsky complimented me on the jellybeans at my party, and passed on remarkable gossip about Somtow.
Timothy Burke said
I thought that was one of the points of the wonderful movie "Almost Famous." The groupies in that movie had a rich and vibrant little community. The bands they worshipped had become almost incidental and unimportant - they were no longer the REASON for the community's existence, they were an EXCUSE for the community to exist.
I was a Grateful Dead fan for over twenty-five years, and I watched exactly that suck the atmosphere clean away.
Don't go there.
I'ts pretty wierd reading about "Mr. Kupferberg" and "Mr. Sanders" (I still remember seeing The Fugs do 'Saran Wrap' at the Avalon), but for over-the-topness, try Ken Weaver's "Texas Crude", which some helpful soul has put on the Web!
http://www.humboldt1.com/~barkndog/gray/crude01.htm
Can't recall the source, but I read a couple of years ago that Cuba has one of the world's highest per capita rates of gun ownership. I've been teasing gun nuts about it ever since.
re: helicopter gun ships
They were rumored to be just above the clouds here in Chicago in August '68 . . .
re: kids
"When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will accidentally shoot their kids."
1) Ghandian / American Civil Rights tactics are specificly appropriate to an opponent who can be shamed.
2) "You can't blow up a social relationship."
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| 2003 | 8 |
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