ATDDTA(10) Journey To Aztlan [277-278]

[mikebailey]

On Fri, 1 Jun 2007, Keith wrote:

> flashbacked states of irrationality. This book has insomnia. Reef was
> sleep deprived after Jeshimon.[214] Lake and Mayva had insomnia.[264]
> Deuce had no sleep, or too little after Sloat departed.[272]
>

and the children in the first Chicago scene who couldn't sleep;
and the all night revelers in electric-lit Telluride, and
Deuce and Sloat returning from the Pig-Bodine-Dennis-Flange-like
first binge after Deuce and Lake's wedding with their eyes
"dark" from lack of sleep...

>
> The possibility of cannibalism is an increasingly considered theory:
>
> "What happened? Why did the Anasazi clear out as though vaporized,
> leaving a treasure trove of worldly goods behind? Christy G. Turner
> II, bioarchaeologist at Arizona State University and author of the
> controversial book _Man Corn_, has been on the case for more than 30
> years. After looking at some 15,000 sets of butchered, broken and
> burned bones, his verdict: cannibalism.
>

there's a character in Neal Stevenson's _Cryptonomicon_ who's
fascinated with subsistence lifestyles - the amount of kilocalories
available to hunter-gatherers as a strict limit on their activity -
and Pynchon's use of windigo in "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna"
also alludes to the phenomenon of hunger and cannibalism
among Native Americans.

It's plausible for the Anasazi
to have fallen prey to either endogenous or immigrant cannibals
and would have been disturbing enough for Wren the anthropologist,
but, as somebody has already mentioned on the list,
traces of evidence that the people-eaters might have been
extraterrestrial tie in with the unsettling discovery of
the Vormance expedition too.

I want to also link Wren as a sort of anti-Margaret Mead,
finding in primitive cultures not a freedom from repression,
but something frightening enough to drive her into
tortuous, escapist sexuality in her own free time.