Althæaphage.
I got an email here. Uh, “Rush,” uh, “now that two of our own have been tortured and murdered by the terrorists in Iraq, will the Left say that they deserved it? I’m so sick of our cut-and-run liberals. Keep up your great work.” Bob C. from Roanoke, Virginia. “PS, I love the way you do the program on the Ditto Cam.” [Laughter.] I read… no, I added that! He didn’t, he didn’t put that in there. [Laughter.] You know, it—it’s—I—uh… I gotta tell ya, I—I—I perused the liberal, kook blogs today, and they are happy that these two soldiers got tortured. They’re saying, “Good riddance. Hope Rumsfeld and whoever sleep well tonight.” I kid you not, folks.
Do I even need to tell you that not a single liberal kook said anything of the kind?
It’s not that they lie. It’s not even that they lie so brazenly, so completely, so shamelessly. It’s that people believe them. It’s not that if only we were speaking out against their lies with more volume and vigor and vim. The indisputable fact of us, being where we are and doing as we do, is enough to give them the lie direct. But the people who believe them don’t pay any attention, and if they do happen across us, they don’t listen. They don’t have to.
Go, Google Abu Zubaydah. Read up on how important he was: a top Bin Laden deputy, al-Qaeda’s top military strategist, their chief recruiter, the mastermind behind 9/11. He’s thirty-five. Two years younger than me. We caught him in 2002. He’d been keeping a diary for ten years, written by three separate personalities. His primary responsibility within the foundation was to make plane reservations for the families of other operatives.
“I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied.
So we tortured him. We tortured him, and he told us all sorts of things about 9/11, and over a hundred people we’ve since indicted on the strength of his coerced word, and “plots of every variety—against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, ‘thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each… target’.”
And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
At least the president didn’t lose face.
As above, so below: the self-similarity of the wingnut function; string theory for echthroi. Too much has been swallowed ever to turn around and come back up; it’s basic human nature to prefer being wrong to ever admitting one might not have been right. (The sort of human nature one is supposed to outgrow, yes, but.)
“Ignorance is a condition. Stupidity is a strategy.” Cliché? Hell, it’s a shibboleth: Welcome to the Reality-based Community. —Ignorance we can deal with, with the talking and the listening and the reasoning and the debating and the citing. Stupidity requires a different approach. Pathological liars so epically insecure they’ve made up their own network called “Excellence in Broadcasting” and call themselves “America’s Anchorman”? That shit writes itself, but our real fight’s altogether elsewhere.
Neither the first word nor the last on profanity, disputation, anger, and civility for bloggers.
The Dragonlord held the blade up, and said, “I was given this weapon of my father, you know.” He studied its length critically. “It is called Reason, because my father always believed in the power of reasoned argument. And yours?”
“From my mother. She found it in the armory when I was very young, and it is one of the last weapons made by Ruthkor and Daughters before their business failed. It is the style my father has always preferred: light and quick, to strike like a snake. I call it Wit’s End.”
“Wit’s End? Why?”
“Well, for much the same reason that yours is Reason.”
Piro turned it in his hand, observing the blade—slender but strong, and the elegant curve of the bell guard. Then he turned to Kytraan and said, “May Reason triumph.”
“It always does, at the end of the day,” said Kytraan, smiling. “And as for you, well, you will always have a resort when you are at your wit’s end.”
“Indeed,” said Piro with a smile, as they waited for the assault to commence.
—Steven Brust, The Viscount of Adrilankha
The problem with Manicheanism.
In a world with Abercrombie & Fitch, American Apparel must necessarily represent the force of good, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.
Something to keep in mind (Jupiter drops).
It’s maybe, what, fifteen blocks from our house to Salon Bédé? We usually walk it. And if I am for whatever reason walking by myself, I take my iPod. I take my iPod whenever I’m walking anywhere. It’s nice to have on the bus—that and a book and you’ve got your isolation bubble firmly in place (you and maybe half of everybody else)—but when I’m walking, I can hear it better. When I’m walking, I’m not doing anything else.
Last night, around about 42nd, something, I don’t remember what, but let’s say it was “Cyberbird” for the sake of argument, it fluttered to a stop, and then that rising ghostly hum-chord began, and crawling up out of it that unearthly backwards guitar, and maybe it was because it was a chilly night and I’d only grabbed a light jacket, but you know how Robert Graves goes on about poetry and the shaving mirror and the hairs on your chin? It was like that, only all the way down to my toes, and I stood there hanging between one step and the next until he began to sing, and it’s not the first time that’s ever happened.
And yet it isn’t the song, is it? Just? I’d play it for you, and you’d say maybe that was nice, or huh, but you wouldn’t hang there, unstuck from the moment-to-moment. (Unless.) —It’s everything I’ve put into the song, everything that unfolds when I hear it begin to play, a key only I can use for a lock only I’d want to open. —It’s all so very, very big. Without the song, where would I put it?
Here’s an alternate take on “Ubiquity is the abyss”; a polished remix of the earlier rough demo track. “Songs are fascist immigrants,” says Momus, elsewhere; “conquistadors who’ve come, inevitably, to slay indigenous sound wherever they find it.” —Well, yes. But not just slay. And not just sound.
Jupiter drops (four).
Where were we?
Opening fanfare, check. The basic theme; motives, episodes; the countersubject—
I’m beginning to be dissatisfied with the idea of CDs, the way they make all music so available to us, the way that all musical experiences are supposedly able to be shrunk down to fit this little plastic disc. I’m beginning to think it should be as difficult to hear music as it was in the Middle Ages. Imagine just hearing a concert once a month, how amazing it must have sounded!
What a strange thing to say. —“I’m beginning to think it should be as difficult to read as it was in the Middle Ages. Imagine just seeing a book once a month, how amazing it must have seemed!” Imagine a glass of wine just once a year—the taste! (The anticipation of the taste; the concentration brought to the tasting; the memory of the taste—a whole language constructed to better remember that taste—) Imagine: sex, but once in your lifetime. What an amazing experience!
What a terrible price to pay, for such fleeting evanescence.
It’s a strange thing to say, isn’t it, for an airport musician, a furniture musician, a knife-and-fork musician?
The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces—familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner. Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention.
Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambience, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.
—Brian Eno, “The ambient music manifesto”
To say that an airport musician has said?
As usual, Brian Eno was the first person I’m aware of to sound a warning note. In an interview he gave around the time he moved to St Petersburg, he said (I quote from memory)—
Yadda yadda concert but once a month amazing. —So I went and poked around for an interview given by Eno around the time he moved to St. Petersburg, in which he expressed his dissatisfaction with CDs. I wanted to see his own words, not Momus’s memory of his words; I wanted to get closer to how Eno had squared this particular circle. And I did find the column he wrote around the time he moved to St. Petersburg, in which he said:
I was in a big art gallery in Los Angeles once. There was a Frank Stella painting about 60 feet long, and next to it a tiny, jewel-like eight inch square collage, and a little further along a Boltanski piece using framed black and white photos and table lamps and boxes of old clothing, and next to that a Nam June Paik sculpture made of working TV sets. I found myself envying visual artists the endless range of forms their productions could take—big, small, 2D, 3D, 4D, colourful, dull, glossy, rough, smooth, figurative, abstract—and I compared it in my mind with making a CD. Suddenly that seemed like a narrow bottleneck through which all music had to be squeezed. Imagine if you said to all the visual artists of the world: “Okay guys… from now on the only way that people are going to see your work is in magazines—on 11" x 8" colour pages.” What would happen to painting? Well, Frank Stella probably wouldn’t bother with making his things 60 feet long—he’d make something that looked adequate at the 11" x 8" scale. Similarly all the others…. because if the final format is only capable of certain things, that’s what you’ll end up regarding as your working palette.
So what I find exciting now is discovering music that hasn’t obediently designed itself to slot within the constraints of this arbitrary medium—recorded music—and which is somehow bigger than it, overflowing at its edges, extending beyond its horizons. Yes—I want to feel the music is too big to fit on a little old CD, that there is more to it than that, that it has a separate life from my hi-fi—a life I can imagine and add to my aural experience of the music.
Not a word about the ubiquity of music. Just the ubiquity of CDs. Not a word about the Middle Ages, or concerts once a month, but more, much more, and other and better and bigger and different. —And I don’t want to suggest that my search was in any way exhaustive. There could well be another interview or column somewhere about St. Petersburg that I missed, which starts with dissatisfaction and ends up with self-denial. There could be a remark somewhere else entirely, taken out of its other context, conflated. But I don’t want to suggest that Momus misspoke, or misremembered; he has as much Google as the rest of us. Nor do I wish to imply that he made up an authority to cite, the better to drive home his point. (The lurkers support him in email!) But I do want to remind you of his current gig: he’s the Unreliable Tour Guide for the Whitney Biennial.
And anyway, it isn’t the ubiquity of music that Momus is railing against, any more than it’s the fornication and the silk and the wine and the musical instruments that will lead Allah to let the mountain fall.
Jupiter drops (some further context).
Bunk has suffered through Gram Parson’s “Streets of Baltimore” on a hillbilly bar’s juke, just as Herc has been forced to police West Baltimore amid the throbbing bass lines of what passes for rap these days. Which is the point, perhaps.
“In real life you don’t get to punch the button on the song that you want to be playing when you get into the bar fight, when you’re in a car chase,” said Simon.
And so we have these buttons being punched on The Wire: 1972’s “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” by Looking Glass, played on a beat-up radio in the stevedore’s pierside shack when Frank Sobotka was worried about a can of contraband languishing on the docks; the Tokens singing that ridiculous, everything-that-Bob-Dylan-is-not folk song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” as Jimmy McNulty and sons follow Stringer Bell through a city market; prosecutor Rhonda Pearlman, stuck at home doing paperwork, listening to the plaintive poetry of Lucinda Williams.
Yet one rule is strictly observed: All of the music has to be ambient, meaning it has to be justified by a source in the scene, either a boom box or a stereo or a car radio or a band belting it out in a bar that doesn’t even have a stage.
—George Pelecanos, “The Music of The Wire”
Might as well go with the flow of it. Jim puts on his “Supertragic Symphony,” a concoction of his own made up of the four saddest movements of symphonic music that he knows of. He’s recorded them in the sequence he thinks most effective. First comes the funeral march from Beethoven’s Third Symphony, grand and stirring in its resistance to fate, full of active grief as an opening movement should be. Second movement is the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the stately solemn tune that Bruno Walter discovered could be made into a dirge, if you ignored Beethoven’s instruction to play it allegretto and went to adagio. Heavy, solemn, moody, rhythmic.
The third movement is the third movement from Brahms’s Third Symphony, sweet and melancholy, the essence of October, all the sadness of all the autumns of all time wrapped up in a tuneful tristesse that owes its melodic structure to the previous movement from Beethoven’s Seventh. Jim likes this fact, which he discovered on his own; it makes it look like the “Supertragic Symphony” was meant to be.
Then the finale is the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique, no fooling around here, all the stops pulled, time to just bawl your guts out! Despair, sorrow, grief, all of czarist Russia’s racking misery, Tchaikovsky’s personal troubles, all condensed into one final awful moan. The ultimate bummer.
What a symphony! Of course there’s a problem with the shifting key signatures, but Jim doesn’t give a damn about key signatures. Ignore them and he can gather up all of his downer feelings and sing them out, conduct them too, wandering around the ap trying feebly to clean up a bit, collapsing in chairs, crawling blackly over the floors as he waves an imaginary baton, getting lower and lower. Man, he’s low. He’s so low he’s getting high off it! And when it’s all over he feels drained. Catharsis has taken place. Everything’s a lot better.
—Kim Stanley Robinson, The Gold Coast
Jupiter drops (three).
Momus—that creepy Scottish guy? world’s smartest pop star?—Momus wants to take your iTunes away.
That’s not an apt comparison, because literature is not a time-based medium that hogs bandwidth and restricts the other things you can do with sound while it’s “playing.” The comparison between an iPod and a book is a slightly better one, and I do note approvingly the iPod’s tendency to “privatize” the listener’s taste.
Well. Not so much take your iTunes away. Certainly not your earbuds. But your Limewire? Your BitTorrent? Your 60-gig hard drive? Your wall of CDs? Your ten thousand songs every one of which instantly sortable by title or artist or key words or album or genre or folksonomic tags or play count? Your Friday random tens? Your MP3 blogs? Your rack of audiophilic equipment capable of reading wax ripples or lit-up bits or magnetic tape and running the signals through knee-high speakers placed in the room just so?
Music’s availability, streamability etc seems to be liberating, but when other people have the same access to, and control over, music that I do it can lead to a kind of sound hell. I’d say a parallel situation is cars: sure, if I get a car I get more mobility, more freedom of movement. But if everyone has a car, not only do we all end up in horrible conflictual gridlock, the environment suffers. We are now reaching car saturation, and music saturation, car gridlock and music gridlock.
Well, not quite so much them, either. Not as such. There’s rhetoric, and there’s praxis. —But still, puritanical trickster that he is, he’s after some way to pull music back to a one true only—
But for whatever reason, Steve and Rupert and the others have squeezed music into every blank bit of space in our lives. We are rapidly reaching the limits of our own ears (tinnitus, my headphoned friend?) and the saturation point at which music becomes utterly unremarkable, and thus, effectively, inaudible.
As usual, Brian Eno was the first person I’m aware of to sound a warning note. In an interview he gave around the time he moved to St Petersburg, he said (I quote from memory) “I’m beginning to be dissatisfied with the idea of CDs, the way they make all music so available to us, the way that all musical experiences are supposedly able to be shrunk down to fit this little plastic disc. I’m beginning to think it should be as difficult to hear music as it was in the Middle Ages. Imagine just hearing a concert once a month, how amazing it must have sounded!”
current music: “Alegria,” Kirsty MacColl
Jupiter drops (two).
There’s this co-worker I no longer share an office with which is probably for the best, since she didn’t really like my music. (Still doesn’t. Except the Ella.) She’d mutter about those fake Russian lesbians or that creepy Scottish guy (I think it was “Scottish Lips” was how she knew he was Scottish) and the Bollywood (though the Bollywood was okay, maybe a little funny, and you never know what they’re singing about), and maybe she had a point about how hard it was to work to Muslimgauze. (Before her, before I ripped our entire collection to a 60-gig drive the size of my hand, the guy I used to share the office with brought his CDs and I brought my CDs and we’d trade off and that’s how I learned about RJD2 and Sigur Rós and how he learned about Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Robin Holcomb, maybe.)
But the thing she really hated was the mashups. —She didn’t like covers in general, really; she wanted the platonic ideal, the ultimate Joe Meek effect, the one you hear on Akashic radio, and I can sometimes see her point: I’ve never been so disappointed as when I sat down to listen to Vladimir Ashkenazy’s rendition of Sibelius’ Fifth and found the sombre joy in the face of the inevitable that builds to those staggering, heart-stopping beats at the end of the third movement transformed to something nameless, brusquely middle-management, impatient to be done and up and on to the next. (It’s Lorin Maazel and his Wiener Philharmonik you’ll be wanting.) —But the mashups really got her goat: the look on her face, say, when Kelis starts rapping about her milkshake over Brian May’s crunch?
I believe I’ve mentioned these days I work in a document coding shop? Back when I was still out on the floor, back before iPods and iTunes, or at least their ubiquity, somebody set up a tinny little radio and left it tuned to this soft rock station day in, day out to help us get through the tedium of day in, day out data entry. —I still get this uncontrollable tic whenever I hear the opening bars of “Drops of Jupiter.”
Jupiter drops (some context).
It is told to us by a long and unbroken isnaad of men of good character, known for their memories and their precision, that the Prophet (may the blessing and peace of Allah be upon him) has said: “There will certainly be those among my ummah who will allow fornication and silk, wine, the playing of musical instruments. Some of these people will stay at the side of the mountain and they will keep flocks of sheep. When a beggar comes in the evening to seek alms of them, they will say to him, ‘Come back to us tomorrow.’ And during the night, Allah will let the mountain fall down upon them, and others he will transform to apes and swine. They will remain as such until the Day of Resurrection.” —This is found to be neither odd nor faulty.
The fact that listeners hear the same emotion in a given musical score is something a Neanderthal crooner might have exploited. Music can manipulate people’s emotional states (think of liturgical music, martial music or workplace music). Happy people are more cooperative and creative. By fostering cooperation and creativity among bands of early, prelanguage human ancestors, music would have given them a survival edge. “If you can manipulate other people’s emotions,” says Prof. Mithen, “you have an advantage.”
—Sharon Begley, “Caveman crooners may have aided early human life”
Early in the twentieth century, however, the new science of industrial efficiency management was electrified by the discovery made at an indoor bicycle race held in 1911 at the old Madison Square Garden in New York. A brass band was part of the entertainment, and statisticians clocking the race discovered that cyclists’ average speeds shot up by about ten percent during the band’s sets. Five years later, a commercial laundry experimented with playing ragtime records; productivity increased dramatically when ironing was done in time to the music. In 1922, the Minneapolis post office tried playing records in its night sorting room and found that sorting errors fell.
By 1930, many American factories provided some sort of music, either live or phonograph, and the numbers of workplaces where music was supplied increased steadily…
—Nick Humez, “Muzak,” the St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture
The important thing about music from an Islamic view is that music expresses, or seeks to express, emotion. The purpose of music, when performed or recorded, is to produce an emotion, or emotions, in the listener—to affect the listener.
Islam is concerned about music because : (1) Islam believes that human emotions should be controlled because this control of our emotions is demanded of us by Allah (tabarak wa’tala)—it is what makes us human, and civilized, and enables us to remember Allah (tabarak wa’tala), and so access and maintain the numinous (the sacred) in our own lives; (2) listening to or playing (or re-producing) music on instruments or musical devices involves a lack of control because the music is the product of someone else’s mind and/or emotions and in the vast majority of instances is un-numinous: that is, it is profane, and seldom if ever is a remembrance of Allah (tabarak wa’tala); instead, music mostly conspires to distance us from Allah (tabarak wa’tala): it is mostly entertainment; distraction; frivolity; and mostly, in the modern world, a representation of what is Shaitanic—lust, greed, self-indulgence, pride, arrogance, loss of self-control.
The point is that music is a human construct, a human creation, and when we respond to music we are responding to or being influenced by this human attempt at creation. This applies even if a piece of music is an attempt at some sort of “communication” rather than an overt, obvious, expression of emotion; the music is still a human construct, and it is still an attempt to convey something fallible: someone else’s ideas, concerns, beliefs, notions, limited understanding or whatever. This also applies even—particularly—if the music is considered “religious”: that is, it is an attempt to re-present something of the sacred, the divine. In this case, there is a reliance on someone else’s perception or understanding of the sacred, the divine, and this is and always will be imperfect, error-prone and ultimately unnecessary. For Islam believes that the perfect perception, the perfect understanding of the sacred, the divine, already exists—in the Holy Quran, and the example of the Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam). Thus, music—of whatever kind—is itself at best irrelevant and unnecessary, and at worst, a distraction, a path away from Allah (tabarak wa’tala), and a denial of that self-restraint which makes us human.
—Abdul Aziz, “Why Music is Haram”
When I was thirteen, I had a friend who was in his twenties. He began helping my father, who was in charge of our youth group. The music he listened to was wrong, and as I became closer to this guy, I began to listen to his music and began to get deeper into it. Finally, it was to the point that it no longer satisfied the flesh and I wanted more. So I then started to listen to regular, secular rock music, and it caused moral failure in my life.
I would warn anyone who would experiment with “Christian rock” not to do so, or it is likely that the same result would happen to them. Thank you!
—a 16-year-old student from Michigan
She checks out Mozart while she does tae-bo—
Jupiter drops (one).
I used to work in the Rax in Oberlin, Ohio, and one day I went to the manager to complain. I pointed to one of the factoids printed on the paper placemats they used to line the cafeteria trays. “It says you play soft rock, or jazz, or whatever.”
She looked at it. “Yeah,” she said.
“Not muzak.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“It specifically says you don’t play muzak.”
“I see that,” she said.
“You’re playing muzak,” I said. It was true. They were. I can’t remember what song was playing because that was the point, or it used to be the point. You know what I’m talking about.
She shrugged. —I got the skinny later: you subscribe to Muzak, like cable television. Literally pipe it in. The Rax had taken over the building from some other fast-food brand, Arby’s or some such, and the muzak system was already in place, wired up, switched on, chirping away. Nobody knew which particular service and nobody knew where the controls were and it would have been too expensive to rip the speakers out and anyway the stuff was bland and inoffensive and nobody ever got a bill, so why not? We’d close for the night, mop up, wipe down, just two of us and the echo of some airless afternoon in Van Nuys when some Nelson Riddle second-stringers phoned it in for a little mad money. We’d shut off the lights and lock the doors and leave the syrupy strings to serenade a dark and empty restaurant.
And, being troubled with a raging tooth,
I could not sleep.
I’m telling you right up front: I have no idea what this means.
Apparently, oneiromancers find it to be (by far) their most popular request: tell me what it means to dream of losing my teeth. They fall out, she says, and I try to catch them in my hands and I can’t. I start to say something, he says, and they turn to dust and blow away. He kisses you and they shake loose in your mouth and you swallow one and it catches in your throat. I spit them out one by one onto an empty plate and wake up in a cold sweat. —Wouldn’t you?
“Teeth represent our ‘bite’ or our aggressive/assertive nature. When we can’t get our teeth into something it suggests we have little control. Please contact me so we can discuss this matter further. If you dial +1866 286 5095, follow the prompts, and dial in PIN code 032, I shall assist you.”
I always feel a little guilty for not liking China Miéville more than I do. Maybe it’s because I’ve only ever tried to read Perdido Street Station, which comes off like Clive Barker on a Warhammer bender? —I should really try to read more, I think to myself, at least finish the thing, so I pick it up again after having set it aside for a good long while, ignoring for a moment the piece of paper that flutters out (I’m always using odd bits of paper as bookmarks—receipts, bus transfers, that sort of thing), and read “The hovels that encrust the river’s edge have grown like mushrooms around me in the dark,” and I sigh, heavily. (Oh, to rise above this to not smell this filth this dirt this dung to not enter the city through this latrine but I must stop, I must, I cannot go on, I must.) Well, ought, maybe. —That internal monologue comes to a stop soon enough, thank God, and the book settles into a third-person past tense that’s, well, redolent of Imajica. Sigh.
But I did pick it up just the other day, in an attempt to refresh my memory on certain points to be made later, and a piece of paper did flutter out, one of those things I’d tucked into the book when I’d last been reading it, and I picked it up and had one of those moments when the world cracks, when you’re presented with evidence of something you’d not so much forgotten as never bothered to think about again when thinking about the things around it. (Comes to much the same.) —I got on the train and went to work and heard the news and stood there, stunned, and shook my head; and then I went to the dentist. I had an appointment, you see. —Later, we bought newspapers.
Planes?
“Beware, not all tooth dreams are symbolic. Once in a while a tooth dream is telling you to get yourself to the dentist’s chair.” Sure, fine, but I’m telling you: I have no idea what this means.
Bring him a penny, that he might see it.
Okay, see, there’s this drunk guy, right? He’s out there on the corner yelling at himself about what a farken idjit he is and goldurn those goldurn fockruckers and spit, as he’s bent over peering at the sidewalk and sweeping his head back and forth like he’s about to carve chunks out of the concrete as soon as he remembers how his eyeball lasers work. Anyway, he’s loud enough he attracts the attention of a beat-walking cop, a real central-casting type swinging his billy-club nonchalantly as he whistles a jaunty tune. (For this was when cops walked beats, on sidewalks, and whistled.) —What are you looking for, sir? asks the cop.
My fershlugginer keys, says the drunk guy. Bracken frazzle dropped ’em getten into my fuggle marpen car.
And the cop frowns, and the nonchalant swing of his billy-club falters as he looks up one side of the corner and down the other. (Even in those days, you couldn’t be too careful.) —The nearest car is half a block away, parked in front of a disreputable dive. That your car? says the cop, pointing.
Yes, says the guy, like he’d almost figured out the trick with the eyeball lasers, only the cop had to go and distract him with a stupid question.
So if you dropped ’em getting into your car, why are you looking for ’em all the way up here? says the cop.
The drunk guy looks up then, and points to the streetlight, and says, well, fugget, light’s better here, y’know?
Our moral? —Be careful before you answer. Parables are not their dim shadows, allegories, with each sign firmly affixed to its signified, scrawled in white chalk on a dark suit-sleeve (as in some political cartoons). They are wild and tricksy—labyrinths instead of trees; encyclopedias, not dictionaries—and they lead inevitably to divagations. Especially if you’re been reading Vollmann again. I could read him aloud all day (ask the Spouse), but will content myself with a brief morsel:
In regard to this cell, it should have been observable to Krupskaya that the walls were incised with Hebrew letters which seemed almost to flutter in the luminescence of the guttering lantern. Of course she was so long past her religious days as to be blind to the uncanny. And yet anyone can read in her memoirs that her heart had literally pounded with joy when she first read Das Kapital, because Marx had proven there, with scientific infallibility, that capitalism was doomed. Well, what might constitute uncanniness to a devout Bolshevik? The presence of a Social Revolutionary? But why seek the uncanny out? Motivations lie nested in motivations, like the numerological values of the letters of the Hebrew parables. If, as the Kabbalah posits, the most secret meaning is also the most precious, then we must sink into hermenuetical darkness. Krupskaya needed to prove herself to be so excellent, so above vindictive personalism, that she could forgive even the one who would have killed her husband-god. And forgiveness need not exclude contempt. Within the coils of this rationale hid a second craving which she hardly dared read, a lust for reassurance about her Revolution. But even this did not explain the intensity of Krupskaya’s attraction to Fanya Kaplan.
I think sometimes the dizzying games of qabalah and gematria were originally devised to simplify things, to tie them down. Words are slippery, tricksy things, signifiers that point ever and always to other signifiers; what the hell does any of it ever mean, in the end? Who knows? —By spearing each letter with a number and each shape with a meaning we tried to fix each word, define it as nothing more than the sum of its discrete parts, and by setting those numbers and those meanings down we tried to encompass who in the end might know. But the dictionary turned in our hands; all we did was impose another layer of signs between us and intent; signifiers that point our signifiers ever and always. Every word become a labyrinth; every text, an encyclopedia. —Who’s the first guy? Who’s the second? (Who’s that killjoy, the third?) Who’s the snake? What were the legs supposed to represent, again? The sword, the stone? Who got smeared into steak tartare?
In the fictional post below, “Digby” is a stand-in for the Democratic Party in general, and “Bruce” is a stand-in for frustration with the media-pundit-two-party one-way broadcast that seems to be a world of its own without the awareness, or care, to realize it.
Which makes “the pier” I think a stand-in for frustration with pettily puritanical politicking and circular firing squads, right? —Do I get to say stuff like “Oh, grow up” and “No, no: revolution before you purge”? Do I get to make like if it weren’t for the people who are doing that stupid dumbass thing over there then we could really get something done around here, you just see if we don’t?
(Whose back? Whose dagger? Who’s Siegfried? Who’s Hagen? Which was Hugin, again, and which Munin? —What day was it in November?)
—End of the day, I pitch my tent in the moonbat camp. Clinton was a fine Republican president who pissed me off on a daily basis; the Democratic party as it’s currently constituted would make an acceptable right-wing opposition in any sane, late 20th c. democracy; the system’s broken, crippled, cracked; we were robbed blind in ’00 and ’04; I’m still not over it, thank you (or ’02, either, or ’06, you betcha); our bright light casts some terrible shadows, and anyway blinds some folks without sunglasses; I do not think I know where we will be in ten years, not anymore, and that scares the ever-lovin’ piss out of me; there isn’t a clusterfucker inside the Beltway media or politico or apparatichik who isn’t up to their swimming pools in somebody else’s blood, I mean, look what’s splashed on me, for Christ’s sake; everybody knows the fight was fixed, everybody knows the good guys lost, and sometimes it’s all I can do not to pack it all in and to hell with it.
That’ll learn ya.
Except.
(And it’s not even that “time” is “wasted” by triangulating diatribes against the clay we see on the feet of good soldiers when South Dakota’s locked and loaded the Joe Lieberman Memorial Rapist’s Rights bill. We hardly measure any sort of hourly productivity on this score, and anyway, I think some variation of Goldman’s Conditional applies.)
It’s this post from Henley that won’t leave me alone, and if you’re looking for someone to blame for this particular divagation, he’s your man; I mean, it surely isn’t my fault.
So “we” didn’t do jack shit to accrue affirmative responsibility for what happened. And the notion, which I’ve entertained from time to time, that if I or other doves had only tried harder—made better arguments; marched more; wrote more; pestered more of our neighbors—we’d have stopped the war itself, or extraordinary rendition, or the Gitmoizing of Abu Ghraib, or the Gitmoizing of Gitmo, or any of that—well, that notion is simple narcissism.
To which The Editors respond, in paraphrase: You paid your taxes.
I think what he means here is more subtle than his readers give him credit for. One immediately points out that refusing to pay your taxes is no so easy to do. (The Montana Freemen; the Branch Davidians—the original raid was just a tax case; etc.) And, again, the idea that a bunch of us engaging in tax protests, or hunger strikes, or emigration, or quitting our jobs and yelling at people on the subway with our pants around our ankles would move our rulers and such rump of support as they still enjoy; well, that’s not just fantasy but self-flattery. And violent protest would be useless and, more importantly, evil in itself.
Here’s the thing, though: the certainty of failure may be no excuse. Once you know you’ll fail to stop the idiocy and cruelty, you still have to decide what you’ll do to fail.
What am I willing to do to fail? What does failure look like? What’s failing? —What does my life look like if I genuinely believe there’s no hope, that engagement with whatever part of the broken system I can get my hands on in an attempt to set it right is nothing more than “drilling ragged, weaponless troops in the prison yard, while their captors look on, laughing, from the guard towers”?
It would look very different than it does. (Wouldn’t it?) —Thus with this weak tea do I keep myself, misanthropic introvert though I might be, riding the bus head down iPod cranked every morning into my paralegally clerical job, bootstrapped nonetheless into what scraps are left of the commons-as-they-are, increasing the us to the extent I can, and not waiting altogether elsewhere for enough of us to come around to the commons-as-they-someday-might-possibly-be-if-only. Quod erat demonstrandum; thus, I suppose, do gormless 16-year-old revolutionaries become heartless 30-something liberals.
(Wait. Which bit was it, got demonstrated?)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
—Clarke’s Third Law, which immediately grabs you by the lapels and demands the answer: what is magic? You may think you already have it, but better minds than ours have struggled, to no avail. Best we’ve got, and I’ll paraphrase: Magic is what we mean when we’re not pointing to science or religion. Note the dual exclusion, there: we aren’t dealing with a simple dialectic. (We usually never are.) Let me quote at some little length from The Bathhouse at Midnight; it’s the nearest thing to hand that says what I want it to say:
In general, the many attempts to define and classify magic and religion can be put into two categories. The first is the belligerently rationalist, paradoxically allied in this with the eclectic “New Age,” and the views of some anthropologists, in which magic and religion are regarded as essentially the same phenomenon—a good proportion of Soviet writing fell into this category, as do many “New Age” effusions, albeit with a different emphasis. The second is the more common binary approach in which magic is seen as “alternative religion,” the “other side of the coin” of religion, or as a corruption of it, or as parasitic to it, or as a deviation from a spiritual or social norm, or as a semiotic system of oppositions. A recent thoughtful attempt to defend a qualified binary approach remarks ruefully, “Scholars in earlier decades of this century were luckier: they knew both what magic was and how to find it. They simply opposed its characteristics to those of either science or religion, which they knew as well.”
We have a trinity on our hands, a trio, a triskele. (When Ryan says “qualified binary approach” above, he’s leaving out science. But we all have to stand somewhere.) —Clarke, I think, is making the signal error of conflation, boiling our triad down to mere dualism, either/or, with magic as essentially the same phenomenon as religion; he’s as Soviet and New Age as the next fellow. But that doesn’t make his Law any less true. Ryan goes on to cite David Aune’s working definition:
Magic is defined as that form of religious deviance whereby individual or social goals are sought by means alternate to those normally sanctioned by the dominant religious institution.
It’s not what I’m getting at, not quite, but it does square the triangle nicely, don’t you think?
Spin got much better by about page 150—
Have you read Spin yet? If you haven’t, well, I’m probably going to spoil it a bit, so maybe you might want to skedaddle. Up to you. I’d recommend, and this is nothing against Messr. Nielsen Hayden, but I’d recommend you also avoid this post until after you’ve read it; it doesn’t, you know, spoil much, but still, there’s stuff in there I think it might be better to be surprised by. Here’s what I took away from it, which doesn’t spoil the book at all:
Many of the genre’s classics are in essence carefully-tuned machines designed to attract readers whose primary conscious loyalty is to rationalism, and lead them by a series of plausible contrivances to a sudden crescendo of mystical awe.
And oh, I see; oh, I get it. —Most of what spoils in the post is quoted from the flap copy, so you might want to avoid that, too. (Buy the paperback.) Maybe you won’t. Me, I’m not a fanatic about remaining unspoiled or anything, but I do tend to avoid the coming next week bits on shows I really like. (Whichever, I’d definitely recommend you avoid the Washington Post review everybody’s citing, which is some of the most egregious Whoosh! Zap! Science fiction isn’t just for geeks anymore! boosterism I’ve read in quite some time. “The long-anticipated marriage between the hard sf novel and the literary novel,” which finally presents “insights into the human condition as rich as those contained within any mainstream mimetic fiction”? Please.)
Still here?
Okay.
Spin got much better (for me, you should understand, of course) by about page 150, when we fire the first blast of shotgun ecopoiesis at the planet Mars.
Then the ocean was ablaze with firelight as far as the horizon.
No single one of those rockets would have impressed a local crowd even in darkness, but this wasn’t one column of flame, it was five, seven, twelve. The seaborne gantries were briefly silhouetted like skeletal skyscrapers, lost soon after in billows of vaporized ocean water. Twelve pillars of white fire, separated by miles but compressed by perspective, clawed into a sky turned indigo blue by their combined light. The beach crowd began to cheer, and the sound merged with the sound of the solid-fuel boosters hammering for altitude, a throb that compressed the heart like ecstasy or terror. But it wasn’t only the brute spectacle we were cheering. Almost certainly every one of these two million people had seen a rocket launch before, at least on television, and although this multiple ascendancy was grand and loud it was remarkable mainly for its intent, its motivating idea. We weren’t just planting the flag of terrestrial life on Mars, we were defying the Spin itself.
The rockets rose. (And on the rectangular screen of the TV, when I glanced at it through the balcony door, similar rockets bent into cloudy daylight in Jiuquan, Svobodnyy, Baikonur, Xichang.) The fierce horizontal light became oblique and began to dim as night rushed back from the sea. The sound spent itself in sand and concrete and superheated salt water. I imagined I could smell the reek of fireworks coming ashore along with the tide, the pleasantly awful stench of Roman candles.
A thousand cameras clattered like dying crickets and were still.
The cheering lasted, in one form or another, until dawn.
And it’s not (just) the enormous spectacle and it’s not the heroic scale and it’s not the collective celebration and it’s not the defiance (though I’m a sucker for that stuff, to be sure); it’s not even (just) the delicious way “shotgun ecopoiesis” rolls across your tongue. It’s what comes next:
“Bear with me. You understand the Spin ratio?”
“Roughly.”
“Roughly isn’t good enough. One terrestrial second equals 3.17 years Spin time. Keep that in mind. If one of our rockets enters the Spin membrane a single second behind the rest, it reaches orbit more than three years late.”
“Just because I can’t quote numbers—”
“They’re important numbers, Diane. Suppose our flotilla just emerged from the membrane, just now, now—” He ticked the air with his finger. “One second, here and gone. For the flotilla, that was three and a fraction years. One second ago they were in Earth orbit. Now they’ve delivered their cargo to the surface of Mars. I mean now, Diane, literally now. It’s already happened, it’s done. So let a minute pass on your watch. That’s approximately a hundred and ninety years by an outside clock.”
“That’s a lot, of course, but you can’t make over a planet in two hundred years, can you?”
“So now it’s two hundred Spin years into the experiment. Right now, as we speak, any bacterial colonies that survived the trip will have been reproducing on Mars for two centuries. In an hour, they will have been there eleven thousand four hundred years. This time tomorrow they’ll have been multiplying for almost two hundred seventy-four thousand years.”
“Okay, Jase, I get the idea.”
“This time next week, 1.9 million years.”
“Okay.”
“A month, 8.3 million years.”
“Jason—”
“This time next year, one hundred million years.”
“Yes, but—”
Yes but nothing. One hundred million years, just like that! This is the aching genius heart of Spin: to take all that dizzying powers-of-ten billyuns and billyuns of cosmic grandeur and with a deceptively simple macguffin boil it all down not to something we can understand, no, but experience. We—you, me, him, her, us—we get to touch and taste and hear and see what happens next. One year passes, and Mars is terraformed and ready. Launch some hardy colonists, and ten hours later there’s an ancient Martian civilization to talk to. Decades pass, and the galaxy itself is a different shape, the sun grown red and bloated, and we get to see it all—
Magic.
Which sits me, I think, on the lonely end of the critical spectrum regarding this book. I found the cosmological speculation more compelling than the humanstuff (rather than vice versa, or middlin’ each)—which is not to say the book is without its rich insights into the human condition; just that those are more usually found in the general, than the specifics of Tyler Dupree’s lifelong—dalliance? relationship? obsession?—with the Lawtons, Jason and Diane.
A triangle? Yes, and no, and it’s not like that. Jason is science, and technology: the Newton, the Einstein, the Hawking of the Spin, as we’re told. He cares about nothing but the Perihelion Project, and comes complete with an engineer father who builds a labyrinth from corridors of power and all but fixes the wings to his back. But Diane isn’t religion, or even a credible evocation of the religious impulse, for all that she’s the spiritual seeker of the two. But she’s not running toward so much as away; she ends up tumbling into the first thing she sees: the arms of Simon, devout Christian, her opiate. Not so much God. —So it’s hardly a fair fight: Jason’s apotheoses underpin and are exalted by the apotheoses of the book itself; Diane’s, or rather Simon’s, are glimpsed at second and third hand, by vaguely embarrassed narrators, rendered stiff and strange by technically correct words like “chiliasm” and “Parousia,” alienated from the Plain People of, well, whatever. (I kept thinking of Robin Wright in Forrest Gump, always skulking away from the plot to wallow in the mythic excesses and shortcomings of the Boomers while we wait so very patiently with Forrest for her one day to see the light.)
Then, it’s not supposed to be a fair fight. There’s never (really) a question that the Spin is a phenomenon of science; that science is the only way we can engage it. (This is a science fiction novel, after all.) Religion’s a response, and the shapes religion takes in that response are background details, and only occasionally plot points: as interesting as the highway piracy, say, and rendered in about as much detail. (And did anyone else wonder if maybe Wilson’s played his share of Car Wars? —Just asking.) Diane isn’t supposed to uphold one leg of the great epistemological debate, anymore than Tyler’s supposed to make it a tripod (Tyler? Magic? Ha!), or even play a hapless shuttlecock batted with his readers between the two. He’s just this guy, you know? His job is to live and tell the tale.
The extent to which the humanstuff is celebrated, I think, is the extent to which the book’s about lives lived in these extraordinary circumstances, and not adventures had. (The spirit of a recent manifesto, if not so much the letter.) And to that extent, my glass is as high as anyone else’s. But the life that is lived—Tyler’s life—is such a dreary one, full of empty apartments and distant relationships that do nothing but foil his unrequited love for Diane. To his—and the book’s—credit, Tyler’s aware of how thin and dreary it can be, and certainly the great existential irruption of the Spin excuses his disengagement, much as its glitches and hiccups excuse his and Diane’s nominal infidelity. But the mean and frustrating paucity of Tyler’s perspective is a drag on the book; his fixation on the Lawton siblings rendered thin and strange without the excuse of an epistemological proxy fight; I can’t help but think it all deserved a voice as interested in the immediate world and the people in it as Jason was in the glory of the Spin. (Molly: perfidious Molly: we could have used more of her, and more like her.)
(And: I have yet to encounter anything more dreary, to use the shibboleth one last time, in all the mimetic fiction that I’ve read, than Carol Lawton’s anachronistically Sirkian off-stage tragedy, revealed to us at the very end not in a flash of insight or melancholic epiphany, but thrust almost as an afterthought into Tyler’s disengaged hands with a flat and emotionless and artless monologue, rounded neatly enough, I suppose, by a homily.)
So Jason is science, for what it’s worth, and religion’s a reflex. What about magic, then?
Well, Jason’s the magician, too. In both the Clarkean and Aunean sense. —The technology of the Spin (and what comes after) emerges from the sluggishly simple science of the Hypotheticals, out there eating ice and shitting information, and all these billions of years later it’s become too big to need an explanation, indistinguishable from magic. But that only gets us so far as Langford’s application of Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad-hoc plot device.”
Religion may be a reflex—a response—but it was shaped by a very real need; a sometimes surprisingly sophisticated salve for an appalling and unspeakable ache. (Actually, a number of them, but let’s conflate.) —The genius heart of Spin is to make the cosmological personal by so suddenly and drastically shifting the flow of time, and this can’t help render the personal cosmological, as all these deaths—of you, of me, of the ecosystem, the planet, the species, the Sun, the galaxy, the universe—all collapse toward the same dull point in the not at all distant enough future. No wonder Tyler turns away, numb! No wonder Diane runs as far as she can! No wonder Jason gives up everything to the effort to understand! And it’s from that effort to understand that Jason (and the Martians, and the Hypotheticals) pulls his great act of magic, gifting us all with world enough, and time: individual and social goals realized by means alternate to those normally sanctioned by the dominant religious institution. (Rationalists may despise magic, and lump it as essentially the same phenomenon as religion, but theocrats hate it, too; it is a hacker’s art, a tinkerer’s art, above all a troublemaker’s art, and theocrats count them all as essentially the same. —For centuries, “magic” was all we had of science, and technology.)
That this great magic trick is almost entirely accidental, incidental to the attempt to understand—this grace is but an epiphenomenon—well, that helps explain how this deus ex machina doesn’t feel like a cop-out, which may well be the book’s great magic trick.
(That the book’s initial faith in technocracy is almost touchingly naïve—whatever else it says about us all, the relatively sane and measured response to the Spin insists upon an America healed of the grosser excesses of Bush fils; and the boiling frog reads less like an explanation than an excuse [for after all, those Danish cartoons had little enough effect on the daily round of Muslims everywhere when they were first published last September, and yet months later all it took was a few opportunistic hackers muttering about how much hotter the water had gotten for riots to erupt]—that’s a allowance I’m happy enough to make. That the similarity of the book’s structure to Rapture and Tribulation and chiliasm may be little more than the fidelity of both to iron laws of storytelling—well, it doesn’t make the parallels any less wicked.)
So, anyway: yeah. I read Spin, and I liked it, quite a lot. Now, up and on to the next—
Let’s you and him fight.
Okay, see, there were these two students? And they were terribly jealous of each other. (Does it matter why?) Their master was old and infirm and had not one bum leg, but two. Withered, pale, stick-like things. Poor circulation. Feet like two blocks of ice in the morning. And each student was given charge of a leg, to rub and pinch and powder and clean, and every day they’d set to it, glaring all the while at each other over their teacher’s lap.
And it came to pass that one day one of the students had to get up and leave during the who leg-rubbing foot-massaging bit. Maybe to get a glass of water, maybe to take a leak, maybe they were out of talcum powder. And while that first student was gone, the second student took up a rock and bashed away at the opposite leg, the one the first student had charge of. Just beat it until it snapped in three or four places. Shattered.
When the first student came back and saw what had been done, what do you think? That first student picked up a stick and laid into the opposite leg, the one the second student had charge of. Blood flew. Bone splintered.
Our moral? Beats me. Something about the Mahayana and the Hinayana. You figure it out, let me know. My question: why the fuck didn’t the teacher get all Pai Mei on that second student’s ass the minute he picked up the rock? There was a perfectly serviceable sword sitting right there.
Okay, see, there was this snake? And one day, this snake’s tail speaks up (for back then, the tails of snakes could speak), and the snake’s tail says, you know what? I’m sick of this shit. (It’s speaking to the snake’s head.) You get to go first in everything you know? You just lead and lead and lead and drag me around through the dust and I’m sick of it. We’re gonna try things my way for a bit. And the head’s all, like, what? Is there an echo in here? Somebody say something? And the head just keeps on keepin’ on.
Anyway, the tail of the snake is so pissed it does the only thing it can do, which is coil itself about an opportune tree. And the head pulls and pulls, and the tail holds on and holds on, and there’s a lot of hissed swears leaking back and forth until finally, exhausted, the tail lets go, and, exhausted, the head can’t keep the snake from rolling into a firepit and burning to death.
Our moral? It’s a toughie: that opportune tree is none other than the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the tug-of-war shook loose a fateful apple. I don’t have to tell you what happened next. —Aren’t we much better off these days, when nobody talks out their ass anymore?
Okay, see, there’s these two flesh-eating demons, right? Or maybe they were superheroes. Anyway, they’re fighting tooth and bloody nail over a chest and a stick and a ratty-ass pair of sandals. Just that: these epic killer combos unleashed over a wooden box you maybe saw on a shelf in Target in the World Beat Home Furnishings aisle, and a stick that, okay, might make for a nice walking stick if you ever went on walks anymore, and a couple of sandals too far gone to even make it as dumpster chic. Somebody’s already walked too many miles in them. But these two demons don’t show any signs of letting up. Biff! Pow! Blammo!
Until this guy walks up and he somehow manages to get their attention and he yells whoa, whoa, and they manage to stop, glaring at each other, taking these big deep panting breaths, wiping the sweat off. And the guy, he’s just this guy, not a demon or a superhero, he says, wow, I mean, this is incredible, but why are you fighting over this junk?
And the first demon says, that trunk isn’t junk; it contains everything you might ever possibly need in this world. Put in your hand and pull out gold, books, food, a house, beautiful paramours, the ear of the king. And the second demon says, the stick isn’t junk. You hold that in your hands, all your enemies are subdued. And he’s glaring at the first demon. Who says, those sandals? And the second demon says, yeah, those sandals. Look like crap. But, says the first demon, you put them on, and you can fly.
Okay, says the guy. I see. But still. You’re both such amazing fighters. It would be a damn shame to see you kill each other over this stuff. Just back up a minute, let me get in there, and I’ll split it up for you. Okay?
So the demons, reluctantly, backed away, and the guy leaped in and picked up the stick and shook it at them both, then scooped up the trunk and kicked into first one and then the other sandal, and he swooped up into the air. And he laughed and laughed and said, see? Now you no longer have any reason to fight!
Our moral? Demons can fly, too. So can superheroes. The guy was so scared when he saw them coming that he dropped the stick, and they totally smeared him into steak tartare and spread him on a loaf of bread they pulled out of the trunk.
Okay, there’s these two guys, see? And they walk into a bar. And the first one turns to the second and says, my dick is so big—
In which Our Hero is once more forcibly reminded just how annoyed he can be by Spider Robinson.
Butler: I’ve wondered, and this may be the audience to put this question to, what the likelihood is of a future in which reading is no longer necessary for the majority of the people. I don’t much like the look of that future, but I wonder if when computers, for instance, can be addressed verbally, can be spoken to, whether it will still be necessary for people to be able to read and write. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Burstein: Well one of the things that I was recently reading was an essay by Spider Robinson which points out that reading is actually difficult. He was walking along the street in his hometown, and I think it was in Vancouver, where he saw that somebody had written on a piece of sidewalk and immortalized in stone a nice big heart with the names “Tood and Janey forever.” He couldn’t believe that anybody in this society would go to the lengths of naming their son “Tood.” So his only conclusion was that young Todd didn’t know how to spell his own name, and what he found to be worse was that this is somebody who is old enough to have the hots for Janey and possibly produce progeny and yet he cannot spell his own name.
There’s a lot that annoys in Robinson: his glibly superior voice; his tin ear for moral tone; his deplorable attitudes toward sex and gender; his overindulgence in appalling puns. But the failure of imagination involved above? —Perhaps our graffitist, known for the rather large chip on his (or her) shoulder, perfers to spell their nickname as Tood rather than the more grammatically correct ’Tude? Perhaps, unused to the medium of wet concrete, Todd shaped the first “D” poorly, and didn’t stick around to fix it because he was scared of getting caught? Perhaps the light was failing as Robinson took this particular constitutional? Perhaps he leaped from under a looming deadline to an otherwise untenable point he needed to fill out his Y Tood Kant Reed column for the Globe and Mail?
Lacuna.
I haven’t yet read any Octavia Butler, and now her œuvre’s set in stone with a short sharp shock. (This is why I can’t keep up with the here and now: I’m always trying to shore up my foundations—)
