Two nice responses to my book via email. Both come from people with the name Philip, which must have some sort of profound significance. Looking it up, Philip means “Horse lover,” but I knew that – ergo Horselover Fat = Philip K. Dick.
Incidentally I also received an email this week from Anne Dick, PK Dick’s third wife, who I sent my novel to, and who I interviewed. She hasn’t read the novel yet, but a gracious note from the wife of Philip K. Dick restores some of my faith in the future.
Your book is a page-turner. I burned through it in three days -finished it last Friday, which is really fast for me.
I found it both highly entertaining and plenty smart, with doses of humor. The Winchell family especially made me laugh, the way biting satire does -with fangs of truth.
For whatever my humble opinion is worth, I’d say it is a classic in the genre.
In the beginning… Oops. I didn’t mean to be so Biblical. I meant to say that as I started reading, I was very interested in how you were going to maintain, let alone, resolve the ambitious conceit that seemed to be your foundation. Little did I know that you would weave conceit into conceit.
The hyper-self-consciousness of the narrator’s narrative was the most problematic to me at the on-set and what I ultimately found technically the most pleasing in its resolution.
Since Philip K. Dick still remains on my super-sized to be read bookshelf, I was unable to appreciate any kind of homage there. But I did get a whiff of a little Brian Aldiss in a scene or two. Whether that was real or imagined, I do not know.
It is a complicated piece of work and as I’ve said interwoven. But what propelled me forward was not just the story line. It was your confidence. Your writing has strength of character. Even when the voice is insecure and afraid, the self-assurance of the writing moves the story forward powerfully.
I blasted through the book. I wasn’t quite sure whether or not I was enjoying the W Redux so soon after the damage was done. But I found it a great read.
About Simon Johnson: Prof. Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., a co-founder of BaselineScenario.com (a widely cited website on the global economy), and a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisers.
Fraud is built into the system. Those with any moral sense leave while those who remain are bottom feeders:
Meanwhile, I reviewed American Apocalypse, an apocalypse novel about a financial meltdown – which is irritatingly prescient, and basically confirms what these guys are saying.
The world is insane. One of the horrible things unleashed by random killers like John Patrick Bedell, Joe Stack, or Amy Bishop is that it defines insanity in terms of “killing people.” Of course these people have all had a psychotic breakdown, but collectively the culture is having a psychotic break , which does not get the same kind of attention. We are bombarded with inane and subtly destructive images that over time tend to…make people stupid. Just as damaging to the planet as greenhouse gases because it hypnotizes people into believing mindless things, and turn away from things that might matter. Mind pollution is still pollution.
This is not a new thing – mainstream culture has always been stupid. If you look at the top sellers in any given year vs. what has actually endured over time, it’s pretty embarrassing. The lowest common denominator is always pretty low. It’s just that we’re reaching a point where if people don’t actually sit up and pay attention to what matters, the system could break down.
I’ve written two books about Hollywood. One’s about a celebrity stalker who writes letters to “the Golden Calf,” a movie star who sells superficiality to the world. The second novel, North of Sunset, is about a similar type of movie star who starts believing so devoutly in the power of celebrity that he starts killing people, thinking he exists in a different moral universe. I switched gears somewhat for The American Book and wrote a book about fundamentalist religion and the end of the world. Not that big a switch, though, because I think the influence of pop culture is as damaging as the influence of corrupt religion. In fact, it might be more so, because not everyone has religion, but just about everyone watches TV. And it’s worse because this kind of fundamentalism doesn’t get the same amount of attention.
Just found this immense quote from David Foster Wallace on Andrew Sullivan:
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship….
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.
The premise of North of Sunset is that the movie star becomes so addicted to celebrity that he needs to take it one step further – so murder becomes real power compared to the fleeting worship of celebrity. The irony is that those who call themselves atheists on a place like Daily Kos are worshipful of the political process, as if fixing the schematics of government will fix our problems – that takes some amount of faith. Setting aside the argument that atheism is a kind of worship, people will find other things to believe in. “Belief” doesn’t equal “in God.”
Which is why pop culture can be a kind of religion, and why it’s effects are as damaging as the idea that the earth is 6000 years old. Except the people who mock that concept might not spend as much time mocking the effects of pop culture, even if those effects are just as damaging to the progression of human intelligence.
An example, one of many. People seem to like Flo, the Progressive insurance lady, but really watch this. She’s talking to an adult like she’s in preschool. It’s demented:
Infantalizing an adult’s intelligence to this degree is treated like it’s normal. Eventually, people start thinking it’s OK to have this level of intellectual rigor.
The Golden Calf
This weekend’s the Oscars (that gold statue is the new Golden Calf – I’m not religious, but if the mythology fits…), where the too rich get together to celebrate themselves. The incongruity here is equal to the lunacy of the teabaggers. The Bush-supporting teabaggers tend to vote against their self-interest, protesting against a health care bill that is intended to help the middle and working class. By the way, remember when McCain and Palin were selling themselves as reformers? Reform means writing new laws – and writing new laws does not equal government takeover. Teabaggers are really moronic.
Same time, while celebrities tend to vote against their self-interest by being liberal and accepting higher taxes, they also promote the idea that being fabulously wealthy and pretty is the pinnacle of success. It’s one very-believed American Dream that dicks the country as much as corporate conservatives. They are corporate America. They are propaganda for money.
More dementia:
This isn’t even that bad, it’s by rote, but the fact that’s by rote is the insanity. I’m not anti-entertainment. I think Steve Carell as Michael Scott is a genius. He manages to be both offensive and vulnerable at once. But so much of Hollywood is damaging – both in the sense of making people feel inadequate, but also that inadequacy is for something they shouldn’t even necessarily desire.
All told, I’m not feeling a whole lotta hope. Stupid messages are sent out into the ether with the same regularity as greenhouse gases. The former likely enables people to not pay too close attention to the latter. They’re both core to how civilization functions, which means they’re both core to how civilization could end. A weapon of mass distraction can reap a whole lot of damage. The insanity of culture in some way allows insane acts, because they’re not far off from what passes for everyday life. It’s not too big a leap to have a psychotic break from a culture that’s permanently on the brink of breakdown. Yeah, there’s a reason I wrote an apocalyptic novel. Weirdly though, the novel’s more hopeful than reality, because the fact that I wrote it at all implies that I still think there might be a future better than this one.
Another week, another lashing out at the government. Though Bedell is dumbly reported as a right-wing teabagger, citing his manifesto, the manifesto was actually published in 2006, during the Bush presidency. Basically, he’s a Zeitgeister:
This seizure of the United States government by an international criminal conspiracy is a long-established reality. The murder of the United States President in 1963, the associated murders and institutional subversion, and the manipulation of official inquiries and public opinion, was effected by individuals within organizational structures that play a central role in the United States government up to the present day. The coup regime founded with the murder of President John Kennedy utilizes a number of mechanisms to perpetuate its criminal rule.
In other words, his worldview, absent the psychotic break, is not entirely far off from my own. What this makes me think about is how much the writing here could look deranged and maniacal if viewed through a certain prism. I always feel this way when an act of violence occurs that mimics something I’ve written. My first novel, The Golden Calf, is about a celebrity stalker who writes hate mail to a college student and a celebrity. Sounds like the maniacal manifestos of any real-life lunatic. If I were every to do anything – hypothetically, please, because I’m a wuss when it comes to actual violence, I get out my revenge on paper – the books I’ve written would seem like clues.
The same could be said for anyone who writes about darker subjects. And one of the damaging things reaped by a person like John Patrick Bedell or Joe Stack is that while they call attention to certain ideas, they also make it seem like certain ideas are the purview of lunatics. Doesn’t do someone like David Ray Griffin any good. So they destroy more than whatever it is they set out to destroy in a violent act. If you read John Patrick Bedell’s blog entries they’re a strange mixture of total clarity and precision while also being unintelligible. Cold and distant, no sense of personality comes through. even if some of his ideas aren’t totally off-base. The guy was plainly mentally ill and used these ideas as a springboard.
There is a basic conflict in the world today between the power of organizations and the liberty of individuals. The greatest achievements of human societies have historically been linked to the freedom of individuals to pursue their unique course. Human liberty has a spiritual benefit for individuals that can easily be overlooked, but it also has a profoundly beneficial economic effect for societies. Ample historical evidence, supported by economic insights, demonstrates that the economic and cultural progress of free societies with secure property rights is unparalleled by that produced by other forms of government.
His writing is really hard to get your head around. Makes enough sense sentence by sentence, but also seems to be missing a circuit. Of course that may be hindsight.
What this also brings forward is what celebrity means in the digital age. People have always committed crimes to be famous (Mark David Chapman). But now that fame is both more instant and more permanent. In an instant, his Youtube video is getting views, people are going to his Sourceforge page, even looking at his Amazon wishlist (I realize I’m helping these go viral). It is profoundly eerie that I could get more attention for my writing in an instant by doing something horrible than I could ever do by going a more-human route. Again, that’s a hypothetical and worth a short story in itself.
There’s no reason to think these things won’t start happening with more and more regularity – with each new one giving an extra license for the next. Even mainstream personalities like Michael Moore decry the corporate takeover of the government. Does that make him a lunatic? No, it’s not a minority view, and it’s growing on both the far left and the far right. If the current structure is actually leading to the demise of the planet and entire societies, it’s not lunacy to try to stop that from occurring. So far, though, it’s the lunatics who have taken action with totally self-defeating and purposeless events. All they do is increase the sense of breakdown.
The media sucks so much that the right has been given the “outrage” mantle, when the left is just as outraged at the state of government. Maybe if the left and right could see where they overlap and not devolve into hyperbole (Obama is Hitler) a true populist movement could emerge. And maybe these acts of violence wouldn’t have to happen because the outrage would have a targeted voice, and wouldn’t just come off as a tantrum. So far these violent acts have the intellectual weight of the stupidest of teabagger signs:
or
I find someone who writes a sign like that a low-grade lunatic. They’re a reflection of the dissolution of the country as much as the government they’re protesting against. Not holding my breath for these protest movements to suddenly get reasonable.
Yesterday had a couple of conversations with my brother and dad about Obama and the state of things. I’m the dementor of the family with my enduring belief – or at least interest – in UFOs, conspiracy theory, and the like. They’re left-leaning Democrats, but not the kind of radical I can be in certain areas.
We talked about how Obama’s been a disappointment and how maybe he’s not unable to get things done because of the climate, but basically he’s getting what he wants. So while he is to the left of Dick Cheney, there is still indefinite detention, the Patriot Act was quietly extended another year last week, the big Pharma deal, the lack of new financial regulation, on and on. For some reason, those in highest power are right-leaning corporatists – Clinton was basically a Republican president and Obama’s of the same mold. A “progressive” these days is just what a regular average Democrat used to be and the Democratic party has gone rightward. For all the talk of a Democratic majority, it’s a ridiculous assertion, as there are only a handful of true Democrats and then a bunch of Republican-style corporatists.
Me, as the conspiracy theorizing sort, sees the possibility of a nefarious plot in all this – that there’s some purpose to all this pro-corporate anti-humanist legislation being passed. I just cannot buy the assertion that it’s just for profit. My brother mentioned that the Rubin crowd thought they were doing good: with the regulations stripped in the nineties via complicated derivatives equations, they thought they were giving the economy a good boost. Makes enough sense, except regulations are put in there so people don’t abuse the system. So you strip the regulations and abuse is a given. Were they really that short-sighted that they couldn’t see the obvious? Or is this a nefarious plot to bring down the financial system to usher in something new?
When you break it down, it doesn’t matter. Whether or not the Bilderberg/Trilateral Commission decided to destroy the economy and told Robert Rubin to do its bidding, or it was accomplished due to blind, abject stupidity, the result is the same. The attraction of conspiracy theory is that it gives a purpose to society’s breakdown, which actually feels better than the realization that there is no grand purpose to civilization’s demise – it’s just that humans are fuck-ups and given the opportunity to fuck up (deregulation) they’ll take it. Greed is just such a boring reason for the financial meltdown. Really, people just wanted more money? They’re just a bunch of addicts? Maybe – and that makes me think even less about the human race than if there was some kind of machination behind all these recent events.
Except there still might be. Even if all the recent events are totally arbitrary and not planned beforehand, it’s still leading to systemic collapse. So there’s still a conspiracy to destroy the system – even if it’s unconscious. In my novel I pontificate about humanity’s seeming death wish and how this plays into prophecy. Although the battles in the Middle East, the decline of the financial system, the melting of the environment, et al. aren’t necessarily proof that the Book of Revelation is real, it is very curious that world events seem to be mirroring end of the world prophecy regardless if it’s intentional. Either way, we’re heading towards collapse – our current structure is unsustainable, and it’s eerie that we seem to be acting out prophecy, even if that prophecy wasn’t a literal prediction.
I take a more esoteric approach to the possibility that people are bringing these events to life – an unconscious conspiracy that is acting out a grand “design,” whether it’s bringing a Jungian archetype to life or something else, is as valid as a secret meeting at Bohemian Grove. People might not know why they’re doing it, but they’re still doing it. The shadowy group in control might just be the unconscious. In that sense, the New World Orderites might be taking things a shade too literally.
I take a similar leap with something like crop circles. It is possible that even hoaxes are revealing some kind of coded message. Couldn’t an advanced alien race – conceivably – act through hoaxers to create the same messages as they could do themselves? We’re talking a race a million years more advanced than ourselves – why not? What made those hoaxers decide on that particular design? Even a hoax has possible meaning. Whatever the case, they’re beautiful, and shouldn’t be laughed off just because they’re so cool:
There’s still a lot we do not understand about consciousness, and the potential of collective consciousness, so people may be creating an apocalyptic future without total intent. Just as it’s eerie that our world seems to be acting out 2012 prophecy, it also seems to be acting out New World Order conspiracies (Patriot Act, globalization…). Whether it’s a literal plot to end the world or a plot comprised of humans’ worst instincts may not actually matter.
On the heels of bickering about money between two consciousness researchers, I recently came across a lawsuit being filed against David Jacobs regarding his alien abduction research. I was disappointed that Daniel Pinchbeck cites David Jacobs as a credible authority on alien abductions because I always thought his research was so slanted. Anyone who calls his book The Threat: Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda (click to read PDF):
…has got an agenda of his own. John Mack’s theories about space brothers guiding us into the new age millenium may err on the polar opposite side of the debate:
It doesn’t seem likely that the alien story is all bad or all good. It may not even be a case of anything alien at all, but possibly a literal manifestation of our psyches. When you add hypnosis into the mix, in which the hypnotist’s worldview can be imprinted on the subject – even telepathically without any aural cues – it makes the whole enterprise fairly dubious, even if it’s totally fascinating. Like the rest of the UFO debate, something is happening, and until we know what that something is, we should never cast it aside.
I was disappointed as well to see Budd Hopkins cite David Jacobs work as credible in his recent memoir Art, Life, and UFOs. Really, an incredible read, one of my favorite UFO books, along with Jacques Vallee’s journals, because Hopkins is so erudite and courageous about covering this issue knowing he could (and did) damage his reputation. A good primer on Abstract Expressionism as well. I knew little about his art and mostly knew his UFO research – but he’s obviously the real thing in every way. I want a Budd Hopkins piece on my wall:
The main issue may be that Budd Hopkins is an authentically decent guy and I’m…not. That is, he sees people as basically decent so ripping people from their bedrooms and studying them is totally invasive. Me, I see humans as basically primitive and that possibly we’re being studied in the same manner we study mice. And I’ve been involved in animal rights activism – I don’t (generally, sometimes) eat meat and much animal testing is cruel and unnecessary. But I am not so blind that I cannot see that medical research has some real value for humanity’s future health. Alien research could fall under the same category – we’re too primitive to understand why it’s being done, but it’s being done for a purpose that is not as nefarious as the research itself.
The most compelling stuff in Budd Hopkins’ research is when there’s physical evidence by those who don’t claim to be abducted – so there are witnesses to “lights” at the same time someone claims to be abducted. Other cases of abduction by several different people in which they all tell a similar story are eerie – but again this could be a case of the hypnotist imprinting not only his view of the subject, but also what he’d learned from previous subjects about the same encounter.
It’s interesting that John Mack and David Jacobs both find subjects that confirm their theories about the abduction experience – though John Mack does report on the scarier, more-invasive encounters, which is why to me he’s more credible. Basically, you have one researcher citing that hybrids are here to help usher us into the Age of Aquarius, and one who thinks hybrids are here to enslave us.
The latter has gotten into some trouble. Emma Woods, one of Dr. David Jacobs’ subjects, has this to say on her site:
1) I was Dr. Jacobs’ research subject between 2004 through 2007, and he investigated my anomalous experiences using hypnosis.
2) During that time, Dr. Jacobs told me that he was in danger from “hybrids/aliens” because of his “alien abduction” research, and in my opinion, his behavior became quite bizarre and paranoid.
3) Dr. Jacobs also believed that those “hybrids/aliens” could read my mind (and the minds of other abductees) because it is well documented that the communication that abductees remember having with “aliens” (whatever the actual cause of the phenomenon is), is primarily telepathic.
4) Consequently, while Dr. Jacobs had me under hypnosis, he planted suggestions in my mind that I had Multiple Personality Disorder. He did this ostensibly to try to fool the “hybrids/aliens”, not because he really believed that I had MPD.
5) Dr. Jacobs ostensibly believed that the “hybrids/aliens” would read my mind, see that he had a new theory ‘that everyone telling abduction stories was actually suffering from MPD’, and that the “hybrids/aliens” would therefore loose interest in him.
6) Dr. Jacobs told me that he actually believed in “alien abduction”. He said that he believed that his life was in danger from the “hybrids/aliens” because he knew that they had a “secret” program to infiltrate Earth by using “hybrids” to blend into human society.
7) Dr. Jacobs was ostensibly trying to use my mind as a shield to protect himself from “hybrids/aliens”, whom he said he believed would use mind control on him, or even possibly kill him, to stop his “alien abduction” research.
Read on…All in all, not that surprising. But it’s really damaging to the future of abduction research. And it can give rise to sites like Alien Abductions Incorporated:
When you choose an AAI Abduction Experience our doctors, hypnotists, and memory implant technicians work with you in pre-abduction orientation sessions to customize one of our hundreds of stock abductions to suit your personal taste. You can even pick one of our fetishist’s specials—interspecies breeding, medical experimentation—it’s all up to you. Whether you select a solo abduction or one of our special Group Abduction packages (great for corporate retreats, school groups, and theme parties), AAI gives you the best abduction for the lowest price.
There was a nice review of the novel yesterday on Amazon, which singled out the porn section as giving him pause, before realizing that I was after making a larger point. It actually only takes up two chapters of the novel, but it gives me pause as well. The reason is pretty significant: I have a daughter. The novel begins with a writer discovering his daughter doing porn on the internet. When I initially wrote the chapter, my daughter was a baby, which is much more abstract then the person she is now, with language and closer to being a young woman.
So I now have to think about my daughter one day reading this story about her father fearing her doing porn. There’s no doubt this could creep her out, and perhaps I was being careless not foreseeing that scenario where she’d be old enough to read what I’d written.
But the point of the chapter is to illustrate how the lead character’s world is disintegrating in a way that mirrors the world at large. Sort of like the rats at the beginning of Ralph Ellison’s Native Son – the novel opens up with rats crawling around a slum apartment and kids screaming. I read an interview somewhere that he wrote the chapter last and he wanted a kind of archetypal situation to set up the rest of the story. So that’s where I was going with “Gentleman Reptile” – something to typify the lead character’s worst fears.
This chapter was actually released as a self-contained story a couple of years ago by Cloverfield Press:
The woman who accepted the story is a mom and knows my daughter, so that’s some armor. Too much explanation? Just getting down some of the guilt I’ve felt about the opening. I know that as a writer self-censorship isn’t a good idea, and the opening serves a very direct purpose. Not only about the writer’s revulsion about the world, but the fact that he’s working on a story that – within the confines of the novel – turns out to be true in real life. That sets up the other prophetic writing he does later in the novel.
It’s that sense of prophecy that adds another layer of guilt to the whole thing. Am I literally predicting this will come true? No. But one of the ideas in the novel is that “ideas are real” – consciousness can create reality and the dream world is as tactile as the waking world (something I believe is possible). The evolution of the mind is when these different worlds come together and we can travel freely between them. If so, though, what’s it mean for this story? It’s true for the novel daughter, but not true for the real daughter. They’re not the same person.
Long intro to the song I’ve written for the chapter, which was hard to write, considering. The chapter begins with the writer talking to a fellow professor about being attracted to his female students. “I’m adulterous just by looking at them.” So,
I don’t know wrong from right
I cannot let go of a vice
When I sit down to write
I’m unfaithful to my wife
The basic message of the song is that it’s supposed to be sung both from the lead character’s point of view, but also the porn king who takes advantage of the writer’s daughter – as if to say, there’s also a violation in the writing itself, which is something I’ve considered and explained above. The main theme of the song is this one:
I am a lie
Do you need a ride?
All in all, touchy subjects. But I’m happy with how the song turned out. And, for that matter, the chapter.
A fairly stupid lead-in by Alex Jones for what’s an interesting speech by Aldous Huxley about Brave New World and 1984. Obviously, Huxley thought the scenario in Brave New World was possible or he wouldn’t have written it. Doesn’t mean he was writing a literal blueprint for the future.
Huxley, after all, was a drug advocate – in that sense, he’s a New Ager, which inspires an equal amount of paranoia. But Soma is the anti-mescaline. Psychedelics do not make people docile, they seem to inspire upheaval. From Huxley.net:
For a start, soma is a very one-dimensional euphoriant. It gives rise to only a shallow, unempathetic and intellectually uninteresting well-being. Apparently, taking soma doesn’t give Bernard Marx, the disaffected sleep-learning specialist, more than a cheap thrill. Nor does it make him happy with his station in life. John the Savage commits suicide soon after taking soma [guilt and despair born of serotonin depletion!?]. The drug is said to be better than (promiscuous) sex – the only sex brave new worlders practise. But a regimen of soma doesn’t deliver anything sublime or life-enriching. It doesn’t catalyse any mystical epiphanies, intellectual breakthroughs or life-defining insights. It doesn’t in any way promote personal growth. Instead, soma provides a mindless, inauthentic “imbecile happiness” – a vacuous escapism which makes people comfortable with their lack of freedom. The drug heightens suggestibility, leaving its users vulnerable to government propaganda. Soma is a narcotic that raises “a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.”
Bonus: David Bowie singing “1984,” or David Bowie does Andrew Lloyd Weber. Always thought “Diamond Dogs” should be a musical. Question though is how a skeleton has a such a powerful voice.
Someday they won’t let you, so now you must agree
The times they are a-telling, and the changing isn’t free
You’ve read it in the tea leaves, and the tracks are on TV
Beware the savage jaw
Of 1984
They’ll split your pretty cranium, and fill it full of air
And tell that you’re eighty, but brother, you won’t care
You’ll be shooting up on anything, tomorrow’s never there
Beware the savage jaw
Of 1984
CHORUS
Come see, come see, remember me?
We played out an all night movie role
You said it would last, but I guess we enrolled
In 1984 (who could ask for more)
1984 (who could ask for mor-or-or-or-ore)
(Mor-or-or-or-ore)
I’m looking for a vehicle, I’m looking for a ride
I’m looking for a party, I’m looking for a side
I’m looking for the treason that I knew in ‘65
Beware the savage jaw
Of 1984
