Chasing Our Own Tale: From Ouroboros to ISIS

"Hark ye yet again," sayeth Captain Ahab, the following:

"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think that there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth has no confines."

Herman Melville from his/theirs/ours, Moby-Dick.

(T)rump (R)ubio (A)ll (C)ruz (K)asich

I have devised my own system of deciding who won last night's Republican Debate. As I watched the proceedings  I T R A C K E D each actor's character in 26 different categories from A to Z. By this method I have deduced that John Kasich was by far the most rational, mature, and prepared of the four contestants and made of Presidential timber, which probably will disqualify him from winning the nomination.

Using a (T) (R) (A) (C) (K) grading system for each category resulted in the following list.
There is a zero probability of error in this result:

Agonistic (A)
Benighted (T)
Catarrhine (C)
Duplicitous (TRC)
Embarrassing (TRC)
Feculent (TRC)
Guttering (TRC)
Havering (TRC)
Ignominious (TRC)
Juddering (R)
Kaltblutig (C)
Lumpen (T)
Mendacious (TRC)
Nugatory (TRC)
Otiose (TRC)
Peculating (T)
Querulous (R)
Risible (T)
Sententious (C)
Turbid (T)
Unpresidential (TRC)
Vulpine (C)
Wily (C)
Xenophobic (TRC)
Yapping (TRC)
Zealous (C)
 

Joanna Russ: An Amazonian Visionary

Joanna Russ writes:*

Assuming this to be free advertising space, I will now put in a plug for writers, who—with a very few exceptions—are day laborers paid piecework in an industry that is shaky, badly advertised, and poor, largely due not to its choice of books or its editing of them, but to an impossible distribution system for paperbacks (in which the distributors and the retail outlets do not share in the risk and in which books are merchandised like Kleenex) and a vehement confusion between old-style paperback selling (impulse buying) and the emerging reality that soon there ain’t gonna be hardbacks except for specialized books and library sales. Nobody has adjusted to this yet. Nobody knows who buys books where and why. It is a mess.

It is rude and crude to rend the lovely veils of spidery illusion which blow so gently over our work, but for a field that prides itself on being down-to-earth there is an extraordinary reluctance to look at the economic facts. Many Americans seem to be like this—maybe art is supposed to be Above All That.

My own, quixotic dream for the paperback-book industry is a giant Sears-Roebuck-ish, centralized store which will carry remaindered books at lowered (or raised) prices (depending on their bibliographic value and the rise due to inflation) and have wee beautiful catalogs in every hamlet, village, and town where people (now that the movies are too expensive) can go when TV palls and find old Phyllis Whitney gothics (Look! I found a copy of Fear in the Old Castle!) or HPL (Look! Horrible Monsters from Old New England!) or controversial books (How can anybody bear to talk about such filthy things in public? I’ll buy it.), order them (see? No problems with shelf space), pay for them, and get them (quickly). The books would move only when paid for, copies would not be shredded (as they are now when they’re not sold within about ten days). But how would prices on old paperbacks be changed? With a goddamn supermarket stamp, nudnick!

College bookstores (as three of them have told me) always sell SF if it remains on the shelves long enough. The real problems are distribution and information (really identical).

Of course, such an operation would require a vast capital outlay. Or would it? Specialized bookstores do this kind of thing already. At any rate, it points in the proper direction, I think. The first step is for some brilliant sociologist or computer programmer out there (hello, hello?) to get a grant to study just who buys books and why, something about which there are a lot of publishers’ theories and no facts. A big grant. And then . . . ?

Say, why don’t one of you readers . . . ?

*This piece was added following Joanna Russ's short-story, "Existence" which appeared in the SF collection, Epoch: The State of the Art of Science Fiction Now
Edited by Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg
(c) 1975 Berkley/Putnam Publishing  593 pp

Bury the Left at Weak-in-the-Knees

The February 2016 issue of Harper’s has a well-written, informative essay by Garret Keizer, a contributing editor, which brought dulcet memories flooding back to me of the halcyon days of the 50’s through the 80’s when the proletarian-on-the-street was more concerned with the economic forces of good and evil than with the natural and political forces of impending and concurrent doom.

“Left of Bernie: You say you want a revolution”, by turns, describes, reveals, reviles, and reviews the failures of the organized, and for the most part, disorganized, left in the United States. Keizer makes a strong case  for expecting Capitalism, as we know it, to outlive all of us despite our gutiest instincts to want it reformed.

He concludes his fair and balanced essay of the current state of our painfully "slow Bern" with the following musement:

“As one veteran leftist told me, meaning to deprecate no one but himself, to say that you’re a socialist and be in no party is something of a contradiction in terms. His remark made me queasy, as the word “party” always does. The problem with socialism is not, as Oscar Wilde reportedly said, that it takes up too many evenings but rather that it attracts too many people who don’t know what to do with their evenings. They scare me to death. But if I’m truly serious in my anticapitalism, I need to affiliate myself with some group. I see no way around it. Even a Sanders victory, much as I hope for one, will not let me off the hook. I need to find my own battalion, an outfit I can stomach that can also stomach me. It won’t be the Revolutionary Communist Party, I can tell you that much. But I can tell you this too, that I owe a debt to the Revolutionary Communist Party and, yes, to Bob Avakian, for moving me one paltry millimeter closer to the point of the spear.”*

*”The labor movement is not a revolutionary movement. It’s a reform movement. It’s a movement that throughout its existence has always sought to reform the conditions it’s working under. But in any radical transformation of society, working people are going to be at the point of the spear.”—Michael Eisenscher, former national coordinator of USLAW. (U.S. Labor Against the War)

Soundings of A Cretan Eye / I / Aye

In the introduction to the epic poem and magnum opus, "The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel", by the philosopher-poet-author-statesman-teacher, Nikos Kazantzakis, his translator, Kimon Friar, explains Kazantzakis' elan vital:

Odysseus is the “man of many turns,” which for Homer probably meant the much-traveled man, for his enemies the man of chameleon duplicity, unstable and unscrupulous, and for his friends the resourceful and versatile man, ready for all emergencies. He is cruel yet compassionate, modest yet boastful, cunning yet straightforward, heavy-handed yet gentle, affectionate yet harsh, aristocratic yet public-spirited, sensual yet ascetic, a man of mixed motives in a constant state of ethical tension. Only such a complex and contradictory character could hope to give the Greeks, from ancient days to the present, a sufficiently satisfying pattern of their lives and aspirations, and this is why his myth is no less living today than it was almost three thousand years ago. Only one of the twelve Olympian deities had a character equally complex—she who in Homer was Odysseus’ constant companion and protector, and for whom the Athenians named their city as a tribute to both their involved temperaments: Athena. Kazantzakis and Odysseus are creatures of double vision, of the third inner eye, or the “Cretan Glance” which, caught between two conflicting currents—one ever ascending toward composition, toward life, toward immortality, and the other ever descending toward decomposition, toward matter, toward death—glimpses the ideal synthesis and yearns for its almost impossible embodiment in life and work.

COTUS: "See Something. Say Something"

Those authorities in whom we have invested the public trust have issued the following carefully wrought plan to prevent widespread death and disaster in the future:

They have told us this: "If you see something. Say something."

We are saying that we are seeing that the Congress of the United States refuses to prevent the mass slaughter of innocents by its action of voting down measures to decrease the possibility of suspected terrorists from purchasing assault weapons and ammunition for the express purpose of killing American citizens, any bystanders, and first responders.

We are of the opinion that the first responders to these bloodlettings are not alone in their befuddlement and anger over the asinine, greedy, self-serving behavior of our elected officials.

WE THE PEOPLE URGE ALL FIRST RESPONDERS COME TOGETHER WITH THE VAST MAJORITY OF FREEDOM-LOVING AMERICANS IN REVILING THE POLITICALLY CORRUPT, MORALLY BANKRUPT GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVES WHO HAVE DEMONSTRATED BY THEIR VOTING PREFERENCES THEIR BASE INHUMANITY, THEIR CONSISTENT AND TOTAL LACK OF JUDGEMENT, THEIR LACK OF COMPASSION FOR THEIR FELLOW CITIZENS, THEIR UTTER LACK OF COMMON SENSE, AND THEIR ABRASIVE AND ABUSIVE DERELICTION OF DUTY.

The Use of Force

There is undeniably "a certain blindness" of some human beings in their view of others. In the following, an ending of a short story written by William Carlos Williams entitled, "The Use of Force", the ancient and powerful precept, "First, do no harm," is put to a rigorous test, as is the good doctor who has painfully learned that the means often justify the ends in a life or death crisis.

…But the worst of it was that I too had got beyond reason. I could have torn the child apart in my own fury and enjoyed it. It was a pleasure to attack her. My face was burning with it.

The damned little brat must be protected against her own idiocy, one says to one’s self at such times. Others must be protected against her. It is a social necessity. And all these things are true. But a blind fury, a feeling of adult shame, bred of a longing for muscular release are the operatives. One goes on to the end.

In a final unreasoning assault I overpowered the child’s neck and jaws. I forced the heavy silver spoon back of her teeth and down her throat till she gagged. And there it was—both tonsils covered with membrane. She had fought valiantly to keep me from knowing her secret. She had been hiding that sore throat for three days at least and lying to her parents in order to escape just such an outcome as this. Now truly she was furious. She had been on the defensive before but now she attacked. Tried to get off her father’s lap and fly at me while tears of defeat blinded her eyes.