Thoughts and Prayers (they say) ...

[gary webb]

Having grown up in Dayton OH I shouldn't be surprised, and there are
violent occurrences in Dayton on a fairly regular basis, some just as
horrific, but the assailants don't typically rampage in certain
neighborhoods, and we should mourn all loss of life... but nevertheless, I
do have many fond memories, all them gleefully hazy, of the Oregon
District, and now this foul miasma hangs over our country like an
impenetrable fog, nothing is sacred...

I've been reading a lot of fantasy lately. I don't know if it's a good
thing and I've never been too fond of the genre, particularly the
Tolkien-esque reactionary element ( but I do have a certain juvenile
fondness for the Hobbit... especially the Japanese/American cartoon... and
I must say if ever the aetheroc winds conspire to deposit you in the middle
west burgh of Kalamazoo MI there is a pizza joint called Bilbo's decked out
in accoutrement one would find in only the finest 1970s stoner van
caustically blaring Zep II down a dead highway to nowhere...) but having
discovered Gene Wolf's The Book of the New Sun  it's style while typical of
the genre nonetheless illuminates it like nothing I've read before... In
particular this passage about the city of Nessus, the metropolis of the
story, ... "No more do I, Torturer. No more does anyone. Every attempt to
count them has failed, as has every attempt to tax them systematically. The
city grows and changes every night, like writing chalk on a wall. Houses
are built in the streets by clever people who take up the cobbles in the
dark and claim the ground - did you know that? The exultant Talarican,
whose madness manifested itself as a consuming interest in the lowest
aspects of human existence, claimed that the persons who live by devouring
the garbage of others number two gross thousands. That there are ten
thousand begging acrobats, of whom nearly half are women. That if a pauper
were to leap from the parapet of this bridge each time we draw breath, we
should live forever, because the city breeds and breaks men faster than we
respire."

There is something about these shifting cities Massive and organic, they
seem like some out of control organism, writhing in the primordial ooze...
I also have picked up China Mieville's Perdido Street Station... and the
city of New Crobuzon is one of the more strange and beautiful evocations of
disturbance: "The city tossed uneasily through its nightland, as it had for
centuries. It was a fractured sleep, but it was all the city ever had. But
the next night, David performed his furtive task in the red light zone,
something had changed. New Crobuzon night had always been a chaos of
jarring beats and sudden violent chords. But a new note was sounding. A
tense, whispered undertone that made the air sick."

In these dark days I;ve also spent an inordinate amount of time play the
Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past which having somehow missed this game
in my childhood have found it to be simply a masterpiece. It has this whole
bifurcated reality to it, and you as the player have the ability to travel
back and forth between the Light World and the Dark World, which though 16
bits, is intricate and fairly complex. Another fantasy epic,  another
bifurcated reality, and the inter-relation between the two realms, or
co-dependency.

Early inhis film Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World Werner
Herzog alludes to this strange phenomenon of networks, the larger the
network the more predictable... that the best analogy is something like a
casino... it made me think of the casino Herman Goering in GR. Whilst the
world burns, and those temporarily safe from the daily deluge, continue to
subsist in our habitual illusion and roll the dice or pull the slot...