Why gay rights is one of the most important issues going right now.  It’s not just a fight for equality, it’s a fight against fascism:

No different than the many stories like this – Pakistani couple face death by stoning threat after conviction for adultery – or American lynchings.

Yet when you see a video of the guy holding the sign, he’s not some demon.  He’s a confused, repressed gay man parroting things his pastor told him.  Weak thoughts come from weakened minds. Though the message is powerfully offensive, it’s coming from powerless people. Put a bunch of powerless people together, though, and it can become dangerous.

Let’s imagine for a moment what would happen if something like this could be said about someone in Obama’s family:

George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.  The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism….

The debate over Prescott Bush’s behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the “Bush/Nazi” connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis’ plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler’s rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

Dan Brown writes at a third grade level.  That also doesn’t matter.  All of the reviewers making fun of Dan Brown’s writing are overlooking the main purpose of a Dan Brown novel – the subject.  The Lost Symbol is a seriously transgressive book, as was The Da Vinci Code.  Putting aside the reality of the Priory de Scion, or the reality that the Freemasons are in charge of guarding the secrets of Ancient Mysteries, there are some seriously counter-cultural ideas in Dan Brown’s writing, which is why I love the books, even if I wish he were a better writer.

The strength of his writing becomes a problem because his lead character, Robert Langdon, is supposed to be a Harvard professor brainiac, and his dialog isn’t any better written than the prose – so the Harvard professor sounds like he’s talking to third graders when he’s talking about supposedly the most important subjects in human history.  But I forgive that – because I love the subjects Langdon is talking about.  And The Lost Symbol is basically The Da Vinci Code meets “The Secret.”  Every book about these subjects can’t be Umberto Eco, and these sorts of ideas are better disseminated in this sort of pop prose.  Frankly, it’s pretty amazing that these books are so popular and aren’t met with more controversy.

The book is full of interesting facts that I’m sure many of the snobs who revile his writing didn’t know.  Like the etymology of the word “sincere,” why Moses is depicted with horns in art, and other fascinating bits of information. And there are paragraphs like this:

From the Crusades, to the Inquisition, to American politics – the name Jesus had been hijacked as an ally in all kinds of power struggles.  Since the beginning of time, the ignorant had always screamed the loudest, herding the unsuspecting masses and forcing them to do their bidding.  They defended their worldly desires by citing Scripture they did not understand.  They celebrated their intolerance as proof of their convictions.  Now, after all these years, mankind had finally managed to utterly erode everything that had once been so beautiful about Jesus.

Say what you will about the hokiness of some of this book – but that message just rules.  There are many moments like this – taking stabs at fundamentalism, Mormonism, and revealing how religious figures have whitewashed certain ideas throughout history.  Beyond the codebreaking and cliffhangers, there’s a lot of relevant and truthful information.  Of course, it helps if you believe to a certain degree in Brown’s spiritual outlook – a Gnostic take on spirituality.  The potential for science and religion to overlap.  On these topics, I’m pretty much a believer.

One of the things that irritated me to a very strong degree was Robert Langdon’s incredulity and skepticism.  While I understand having the lead character be a skeptic because it makes the ideas seem more plausible – hey, even the skeptic believes in them – this book’s written as if Robert Langdon exists in a vacuum.  He just spent an entire book traipsing around Europe, deciphering codes, and proving the myth of the Holy Grail.  You’d think that maybe he’d be a little more open to some new evidence of codes and ancient knowledge.  Just believe, man, the book would be a lot more fun.

All told, I enjoyed The Lost Symbol as much as The Da Vinci Code, for the same reasons.  The book basically parallels many of the same ideas in The American Book of the Dead – that human consciousness is set to expand where we are able to control reality with our thoughts.  What The Lost Symbol doesn’t cover (SPOILER) is just how this new society would work.  My premise in TABOTD is that – perhaps – the human population has to be reduced and easily-controllable in order to unleash this power.  And so, the evil Cheney-esque despot hatches his plan to reduce the population via World War III.  From The Lost Symbol:

“The Apocalypse is not the end of the world, but rather is the end of the world as we know it. The prophecy of the Apocalypse is just one of the Bible’s beautiful messages that has been distorted…”

Basic premise of my novel – except it occurs after a literal apocalypse.  What exactly is the alternative?  Supposing we all were given the power of the “infinite.”  There are some seriously deranged and dangerous people on the planet.  Give these people the power to affect reality with their thoughts and – who knows – reality might disappear.  You’d then have wars of the mind.  In other words, it wouldn’t be that much different than what we have now – disintegrating and adversarial.

Unless…the “revelation” was that we were “all one” etc. and so killing someone would lose its purpose.  Still, a world in which thoughts became reality would be fairly chaotic.  An interesting topic, and really the entire impetus behind TABOTD, so whatever criticism I have of Dan Brown, the writer, I’m glad he gets these ideas out into the open.  It’s good news that he’s so obscenely successful.

(Note: this may include spoilers)

“Inception” was fucking incredible, but not entirely what I was hoping for. I was hoping for more of a “Matrix”-style exploration of “What is reality?” – if dreams are as tactile as reality, then maybe reality is no different than a dream. The movie does that somewhat, but the rules of the dreamscape are pretty straightforward. You enter a dream, walk around, then wake up, where you don’t have the same kind of manipulation of reality as you do within the dream. Where Philip K. Dick would take this is to suggest that there is no difference between our waking and sleeping worlds – but “Inception” doesn’t really explore these implications.  This is not a polemic about consciousness, it’s a spy movie.

I also think that the world of dreams as portrayed in “Inception” isn’t quite realistic. Put another way, by portraying dreams as another realistic world no different than waking reality, it’s actually a less realistic depiction of what it is to dream. Dreams actually seem to be fairly chaotic. I’m sure most people have the experience in dreams where suddenly the dream is in a totally different locale, about a different subject entirely.  It’s rare when a dream takes on a realistic narrative where I wake up and think – I was just told the plot of a novel (this has happened).

Of course, if you were to lucidly enter a dream, you might have control over this kind of chaos, so maybe that’s moot, but what would have made “Inception” more psychedelic is if the dreams themselves were more unexpected and imaginative. It does that somewhat by showing how Leonardo DiCaprio’s relationship with his wife enters the dream world, but if he’s truly entering his subconscious, we’d also see talking rabbits and other things totally separate from our flat reality.

To do that, though, would have been another movie – and six hours long – so Christopher Nolan stuck with this premise, which is really just a spy movie, where you’re spying on the mind. He calls attention to this very much in the James Bond sequence in the snow at the end. So the movie’s a bit about the fantasy of moviemaking – the inherent unreality of movie fiction. The death bed sequence in the end is reminiscent of this scene from “2001″:

The snowmobile sequence is where the movie actually lost me – you enter the world of dreams and all you get are thugs with machine guns? There’s also a moment where a guy’s shooting a gun – the “forger” steps up to him and says something like “dream bigger” and the machine gun turns into some kind of grenade launcher.  If that’s the case, why weren’t they doing this over and over again? Why couldn’t they “imagine” the thugs away?  Maybe I’m missing one of the core rules about what you’re allowed to do in these dreams.

These criticisms are sort of a nitpick though for a movie that’s hugely imaginative and more entertaining than most movies coming out of Hollywood in last ten years, maybe ever.  I just wished it spent some time covering the mystical implications of the different levels of dreams.  What’s it mean for our waking life – what else can be extracted from the subconscious?  Because if we’re eventually able to enter dreams and all we use it for is corporate espionage, then we’re pretty fucked.

A must-watch about the WikiLeaks release on Democracy Now:

We host a roundtable discussion with independent British journalist Stephen Grey; Pentagon Papers whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg; former State Department official in Afghanistan, Matthew Hoh; independent journalist Rick Rowley; and investigative historian Gareth Porter.

Democracy Now is why the web was invented.

Just received an email from a reader saying that he wanted to put his review of my novel up on Amazon, but he chose not to, so as to not alienate potential readers of his own books. So I’m posting it here. He titled it “A Wake-Up Call.”

If you’re not a death-cult end-of-days fundamentalist but notice that they’re increasingly and bombastically in our midst, you will easily buy into the terror that informs Henry Baum’s contemplation on the near future suicide/genocide they would like to spring on the world. Done up as a dystopian time-travel apocalyptic dream-state genre-busting journey narrated by a failed novelist and perennial victim who ultimately controls the destiny of the few tens of thousands of survivors of the death cult’s Armageddon, Baum’s compelling work gives eerie voice to what a growing number of Americans must be feeling when they notice that politics and government are being frozen in place and wrested from all other hands by conmen and nutbags posing as the only true Christians. The American Book of the Dead is a wake-up call. It’s good fiction and it’s fun and it seems over the top. But ultimately it describes a plausible end-of-days scenario should the shrinking shadow of effective government and the public commons fall completely to those whose rocket ride to Paradise takes precedence over all that humans can know for a certainty and thus hold dear in this life.

One of the reasons I didn’t send the book to my agent and chose to self-publish was because I knew traditional publishers would be made uncomfortable by the premise – thinking that it’s anti-Christian, when it’s not. It’s anti-Palin Christianity. It’s anti-fundamentalism of the type who says that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to set up shop in New York City b/c people in the “heartland” are against it.

Heartland, Uber Alles. The American Taliban. The constitution-spouting “patriots” are fundamentally un-American.  There’s a strange and insane irony that the anti-Mosque activists are the same as strict Islamists who protest pictures of Mohammed.  This country’s built on freedom of press and religion.

Anyway, publishers don’t take a lot of chances – even if the 70-million selling Left Behind series needs a counter, and maybe there are people out there who want to read that too. Strangely though, reviewers so far haven’t focused on my take on fundamentalist Christianity, focusing instead on the dream aspect, meta-fiction, or general dystopian themes. So I’m glad to have this review.

Jeffrey Goldberg:

Palin has this week argued vociferously against the building of a mosque near the site of Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. She calls the idea of a mosque there a provocation. But it is her opposition to the building of a mosque that is provocative. The organization that hopes to build the mosque, the Cordoba Initiative, is a moderate Muslim group, striving for better relations between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. It is in the direct interest of American national security to strengthen those groups that argue against Islamism. Palin’s opposition to the mosque — and by extension, to the enfranchisement of moderate Muslims — is a gift to Islamists, proof to their potential followers that America is as intolerant of Islam as Europe is, proof that it is America, not Islam, that wants to see our civilizations clash. We as a society should embrace those Muslims who want to live the American dream; their lives, as free, devout and proud Muslims in a diverse country, are a refutation of the radical notion that the West is forever aligned against the interests of Muslim believers. Opposing the building of mosques by anti-jihadist Muslim groups in this country is perhaps the best way to radicalize American Muslims not otherwise prone to radicalization.

Strangely enough, since I just bought an iPad, this may be the last book I ever buy in print:

I’m perfectly aware of this edition. I haven’t actually read it yet, as I didn’t want anything from this book to make it into my own, though I’m sure there are parallels, as my book’s also about death:

This contemporary and uniquely American interpretation of the timeless Tibetan spiritual classic, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, is an invaluable resource for anyone undergoing a spiritual crisis, preparing for death, or wishing to honor loved ones. Gold inspires readers to transform their attitudes toward death so that–ultimately–they learn to live. Illustrations.

My novel doesn’t follow the structure of the Tibetan Book of the Dead as something like Jacob’s Ladder.

Nice post about EJ Gold’s book here.

Everyone else is doing this, so:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I put in the first chapter of TABOTD.  I actually did this last week, and it came up as Dan Brown.  I was too ashamed to post it then, and just tried again.

I like Dan Brown, but I don’t think I write like him.  Subject, maybe. I’m actually in the middle of reading The Lost Symbol, and liking it (more to come on that), on my shiny and amazing new iPad.  I might just be a cross between Dan Brown and David Foster Wallace.  At least that’s what I’ve intended.  A very much less heady DFW with a more-heady DB.