Entombed!

As you all know, I’m an avid game player and spend man

Technorati Tags: accessible gaming,Entombed!,game dev,roguelike

y precious life hours on such things as killing goblins and looting the laboratories of evil wizards.  Back when I still had functioning eyes, I used to play a game called Nethack.  Nethack is a species of game referred to as roguelike, after Rogue, the game in the early 80’s which turned a million college students like me into craven junkies after our next fix of orcs and heroism potions.  Then optic neuritis hit me and I could no longer play.  There was  a set of instructions floating around the Net about how blind people could, after a lot of baffling rigamarole, get NH to work with a screen reader, but it was difficult and not very much fun anyway.  You can’t really enjoy a game if you’re stuck struggling with basic game mechanics issues.

 

Now something miraculous has happened.  A talented blind programmer named Jason Allen has created a roguelike game for blind players.  It’s called “Entombed, and it’s powers to divert and distract from my ongoing task of writing a novel border on the supernatural.  In addition to playing the game, I am an enthusiastic member of the development community around the game and have made a number of suggestions which I expect will find their way into future versions.  Right now, Entombed is in beta testing, but the full version will sell for about $40.00, –in my opinion a steal of a price, given the time, effort and genius it has taken to develop this game.

 

Multi User Dungeon?  What’s that?

 

 

 

 

Entombed!

Of Hells and Sky Daddies

 

 

It’s now been a few years since I bailed out of the Catholic Church, and today during the season of Advent, I’m doing just fine.  There are things to miss about the Church, at least the little corner of it with which I was involved.  St. James Cathedral is a beautiful and a holy place, and I always feel safe and welcome there.  Father Ryan, as I think I may have noted before, is a wise, funny, humane priest;  the sort of priest they try to portray on TV and always get wrong.  And I really got into the ritual of Mass.  In many important ways, in fact, I haven’t broken my ties with those aspects of my Catholicism. They represent the more grounded, human aspects of churchgoing with which I have no conflicts. 

 

The trouble comes when I start cranking up the theology and let it bounce off things in my soul.  What I’ve decided is that I don’t want any part of some blanket insurance plan for the human soul.  I simply don’t think it’s necessary, and I certainly don’t buy the story of Original Sin any more, if I ever did.  For a while, I found it to be a useful shorthand for talking about the fact that human beings are flawed, often tragically so, and that we need as much mercy and forgiveness as we can get our tragically grubby mits on. But I never really bought the economics of Christian salvation, which in its essentials is blood magic and Bronze Age hostage trading. Make no mistake, blood magic is real and its powerful mojo, but I don’t think its something with which I need or want to involve my 21st century soul.

 

Having said all that, I am paradoxically very comfortable with aspects of pagan spirituality.  I love the winter holiday season, and sing the carols of the infant Christ with great joy and verve, if sorrowfully off pitch. But I am not celebrating the birth of the Christian Messiah as much as I am grooving on the Birth of the Sun and the hilarious truth of the Winter Solstice, the truth of renewal, the grave necessity of we human beings to be generous and forgiving with each other.

 

I think there is a great Mystery at the cosmic core, a field, being or energy who is old and wise and yes, even loving.  But I don’t conceptualize it as some kind of anthropic Sky Daddy.  My idea of god is more that of a wise and sapient ocean, through whom we swim, sometimes in joy and sometimes in a kind of terrible amnesia, like minnows.

 

Christmas, then, is a time set aside for breaking through that amnesia and waking back to our cosmic fishhood, and the crucial awareness that we travel, not alone,  but in schools.

 

Merry Christmas.  Happy Winter Solstice.  Kundun.

 

 

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: Christmas,Kundun,minnows,Sky Daddy

Frustration and Feral Cats

 

 

Recently, I’ve had a certain amount of frustration in my digital life in that interfacing with Jaws, the screen reading software which allows me to write novels, email, this blog and surf the Webhas been difficult to manage.  Ever since I loaded Office 2007 onto my XP system, Word 2003 has disappeared, forcing me to deal with the new ribbon interface which is decidedly blind-hostile.  It was clearly designed by some arrogant prick at Microsoft who doesn’t care that millions of people were working comfortably with the classic menues interface and don’t want to migrate to some other wild goose scheme.  Happily, someone has written an add on which enables you to use the classic menues with Office 2007.  This will provide an acceptable stopgap measure until my new Dell comes in the post sometime this week. 

 

Besides the problem with menues, I was finding that Jaws would simply refuse to echo menues properly.  I’ve  bitched about this for about three weeks when it suddenly occurred to me today that I have both JFW 5.1 and JFW 9 on my system.  When I bailed out of the earlier version and lit up Jaws 9, I had no more problems –at least, no more of THAT problem.

 

Finally, I applied for a loan from the Washington Assistive Technology Fundso that I could secure the Dell without paying outrageous interest after nine months have elapsed. The very kind and gracious Andrea there helped me with the application process and gave me some hope that the loan might well go through, even though my credit history is, to put it nicely, a little bit on the wobbly side. This morning, she called with the delightful news that I had been approved for the loan and that we just have to complete some paperwork to make it final. 

 

This is crazy wonderful news for my productivity.  My Dell, which is about four or five years old, is acting more like it’s nine or ten years old.  It’s kludgy and slow and I think the file system is zonked.  It’ll be nice to keep around as a spare, and it’s served me well in my writing life.  But it’ll be nice to break in a new computer that doesn’t act like it has to CONTEMPLATE every command before executing it.  A computer should do what you tell it to do as soon as you tell it to do it.  If I wanted a Zen master, I’d learn Japanese.

 

Oh yeah, and feral cats are in the title because my reality was starting to seem like rounding up a herd of feral cats.  But today, it’s seeming more like marshalling a little squad of handsome German shepards.

 

 

Technorati Tags: WATF,Dell,Zen,digital reality

Sailing with Captain Varney

 

 

As of two days ago, I’ve reached page 120 of my second novel, which is tentatively titled “Dragons and Angels”.  My hero, Pol Dairre, has learned that sorcerors have imprisoned the Archangel of Light and are draining him for energy with which to fuel the kingdom of Ryze.  Through the device of a gem called sangold, the King learns that Pol has discovered the plan and imprisoned him in the Spyre  --rather like the Tower of London.  Pol has escaped, has visited his wife Vyessa and is now going abroad.  He seeks the dragon Akloganzurrat who, the angel has told him, holds the key to the angel’s freedom. Having taken some money saved by his wife, Pol meets Captain Varney, who offers to take him on board the good ship Fortitude to hunt a sea monster called the harrowfish, or simply Harrow.

 

Well and good.  All of that sounds really meaty.  And I’ve written the hell out of those first 120 pages.  The thing is, I know nothing about sailing vessels of the 16th and 17th century, the general time frame in which my novel is set.  Very often, I can parley what is effectively a scant handful of facts into a believable tale, but that is simply not going to fly here.  People are going to insist that I know the difference between a scupper and a mizzenmast  --and why a square-rigger is called that, and what a spanker is, and what the crew on such a ship consists of and oh just name your poison. The fact is, I’ve been dreading this for some time.  I hate being stalled to do research when what I want to be doing is writing, writing, writing.  You know, talking about sea monsters and terrifying storms is much more entertaining than learning what a focsle is.

 

But oh, it will all be worthwhile once Captain Varney jumps into the sea with a knife clenched between his teeth for a climactic confrontation with Harrow. Call Borders and put your orders in today, kids, because –once the bleeding research is done—this is going to be lightning in four hundred pages.

 

Neil who?

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: research,persistence,novel writing,chutzpah

Post Turkey Blues

 

 

 

Actually, it just made for a decent title;  I don’t really have the blues that much.  I’ve been trying to reach my friend Todd Washkoska for a week and a half, ever since he got out of the hospital after having a minor stroke.  I’ve been worried about him, and worried more since he hasn’t been returning my calls.  But today he called and other than sounding a little bit tired, he sounds okay.

 

In other news, I’m buying a new Windows 7 tower from Dell, even though I vowed not to do business with them several years ago after they royally fucked up with a laptop order.  But it’s hard to get a decent warranty out of someone like Frye’s or Office depot so I got squishy about it.  I’m pretty satisfied with the item, though.  Three years warranty and three years of McAfee protection for a reasonable amount of money, plus Worx Plus, which has a version of Word without the accursed ribbon system devised by Microsoft for Office 2007.

 

Now my only area of concern is my novel.  My hero, Pol dairre, is going on a sea voyage on a whaling vessel –and I know nothing about whaling vessels, except what I was able to glean from Melville.  I expect I’ll need to stampede someone into reading a book for me and spoon-jfeeding the details to me so I can write a halfway convincing chapter.  I did post relevant questions to Yahoo, and got a snarky answer from some asshole who obviously knows something about whaling but couldn’t share it without being a prick.  For some people, it’s always tempting, isn’t it, to be superior about something when they could just as easily be gracious.  That’s the psychology of the Internet in a nutshell.

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: snark,grace,Moby Dick,sailing

Down the Drain

 

 

Tonight, I had what amounts to a domestic catastrophe.  ON Sunday afternoon I made an enormous pot of chicken noodle soup.  It had noodles, onions, garlic, carrots, celery, pepper and four pounds of chicken.  The first bowlfuls, ladled out Sunday and Monday,  were delicious.  By tonight, though, the remainder was beginning to smell like a pair of old sweatsocks.  It probably wouldn’t have killed me, and might have gone down fine, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat it.  So shamefully, in the middle of this recession when people are going hungry, I had to pour half a kettle of chicken noodle soup down the drain. 

 

As I say, it was smellling quite bad, but I still feel terrible about it.  It was supposed to last through tomorrow at least, and maybe, if I was lucky, until the day after Thanksgiving.

 

I knew I was going to do it by this noon, since I went out for a bowl of pho instead of ladling something from my pot.  i have to say, though, that although I feel guilt, I also feel tremendous relief that I’m not going to eat a sixth or seventh bowl of chicken noodle soup in less than half that many days.  A day or two of savory, nicely spiced soup is a grand thing for a day or two, but do it for four days in a row and it begins to feel like prison slops, even if the soup is good,and mine was turning into something evil.

 

This is another example of the way in which, though I am poor by American standars, I am almost unspeakably wealthy in relative global terms.  Probably two thirds of the world’s six and a half billion people wouldn’t have turned their noses up at what I threw down the drain tonight.  But though I am in the bottom rungs of the American economic scale,I am surely near the top in global terms.

 

Beyond that, I have enough to buy pho and pay rent while writing a novel.  Hundreds of artists in Seattle alone, to say nothing of the United States, would like to be in my position, though I daresay none of them would like to lose their eyesight to get here.  And that brings me exactly to the reason why, though I have some uncomfortable feelings about it, I can bring myself to waste that much food.  Simply put, I’ve lost half the things which once gave me joy.  I can’t read books the way I used to, or watch movies or participate in a thousand activities which used to round out my day.  I don’t complain about that very much at this point.  But I am simply not going to add unpalatable soup to my list of sufferings. A large part of dignity in my situation, I find, is the ability to draw lines, to say:  only this much and no more. Some things, I find, are more precious than food ethics, which are very precious indeed.

 

Technorati Tags: food ethics,poverty,rationing,chicken noodle soup

ON Being Poor

 

 

It’s fairly common for me to hear otherAmericans talk about their poverty.  Well, I know a little about this.  I live on less than $15,000 a year, and when I need something I often have to wait and save for it out of my monthly SSDI check.  I am more fortunate than some, in that I have a good friend with a higher paying job who helps me out if things get really rough.  IN general, though, other than my DSL connection, I live pretty close to the ground.

 

But unlike many of my fellow countrymen, I almost never bitch about it.  Because while I am poor in terms relative to other Americans, I am quite wealthy when I understand myself as a citizen of the world.  I can walk eight feet to my kitchen sink and get a cup of cold clear water, clean and free of pathogens.  Also relevant to the water issue are my bathtub, shower and toilet.  I can stay clean from day to day, and my life is thusly more healthful and pleasant than it is for people in many parts of Africa and Asia, for whom personal hygiene and sanitary waste disposal are major public health problems. 

 

And I can eat inexpensively too.  I can drink clean cold milk, or buy fresh vegetables cheaply, wonderful greens, tangy onions and  ripe red tomatoes, with which I make cheap nutritious salads. Finally,while I can’t go overboard on the more select cuts of meat, I can enjoy hamburgers and inexpensive fish fillets.

And though I’d rather that certain people in various State agencies aren’t aware of this, I can afford to go out for some cheap pho and even the occasional helping of sushi, if I mind my quarters.

 

It took me years to come to this understanding of things. And I wish this blog had more clout, because I’d love to counsel people that you can get along without seemingly crucial things –money, a car, your eyesight— and still be reasonably happy. It’s not so hard.  It just requires the deeper part of yourself that doesn’t have anything to do with bank accounts or credit offers.  You have to get wiley and you have to get grateful.  It’s Poor Punk, capiche?

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: Poor Punk,thrift,poverty,coping with the recession

On Color Blindness

 

 

Now that we have an African American president, I want to say something that's been bubbling in my liberal head for a few years. Namely, I strenuously object to other white liberals who say that they are "color blind". What is that supposed to mean, exactly? It seems to me that what they're saying is that in some uber-perspective we are all the same color. But I think that's presumptuous,the view from the Throne of God. Of course there is only one human race! But our humanity is instantiated in the particulars of our being, not in some kind of oatmeal aggregate.

 

Also, it seems to me that for a white guy to say to his black neighbor that he's color-blind is at least potentially dishonest. It's as if he's trying to erase a history of suffering and degradation through the sheer force of liberal goodwill.

 
I have to be honest here. I don't know many black people very well. Maybe I'm also wrong-headed in this. But I'm willing to bet that many African-Americans hear the color-blind dodge and roll their eyes. And I wouldn't blame them. A white guy who lays claim to this pecuiar vision impairment, whether he knows it or not, is also saying that he doesn't know anything about the Middle Passage, Jim Crow, lynchings or segregation. And he's also refusing to acknowledge the truth of black genius in art, literature and music. James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Zora Neal Hurston were all brilliantly triumphantly black. I think it's fine to recognize the African American struggle for equality as part of the larger human struggle for liberation from suffering, ignorance and control. But to deny the truth of black experience, black suffering and black genius through some liberal sleight of hand --that's just racism by another name.

 

Technorati Tags: racism,liberal jive,righteousness,Miles

Mud Manifesto

 

 

Apropose of last night’s post about my current mud-home, I’m posting this thing from the old Workpad site.

 

 

---

 

 

First, let me get something out there. I said in my resolutions post that I was going to give up online games. Well, that is not going to happen. I'm moderating my online time, but having no television set and little vision my avenues for entertainment are limited. I am not going to give up the one or two opportunities for idle fun left to me, that would be lunacy.

 
So.

 
I'm still looking for the ideal mud, and I haven't found it yet. I look for certain things in one of these games. One of them is hard to communicate. It's the look and feel, or rather, the sound and feel, a text game that works well with my screen reder and doesn't sound like it was written by a delirious eight year old. Most of them have bad grammar and otherwise fall apart in the writing area. Others are organized visually and simply provide audio hash for the blind player. And probably my least favorite are games based on the Diku codebase, especially those which haven't been rethought and still use the capital city of Midgaard and its streets full of beastly fidos.

What I want is an online text RPG that an adult can play. I want a large map, currency which involves more than one coin, systems for fishing and hunting game, and a crafting system for player created weapons, armor, medicine, herbs and magical items. I want a multiplicity of guilds and races that are genuinely different from each other and actually provide different modes of play. I want room descriptions that are concise and even poetic, but not flowery or overblown. I want a general sense that a thoughtful human being or beings are in charge of the game system and that problems will be attended to quickly and sanely. I want a game with automated quests, and one which provides bells and whistles when you gain experience, when you level and when you achieve goals, from the creation of a magic ring to the landing of a prize fish. In short, what I want is an online reality in text, free of graphics and full of adventure for blind and sighted alike.

 

Several gamesI have played come close on many of my requirements, but none that I have ever played do it all. If after another month of searching I don’t find what I'm looking for, I am going to roll up my sleeves and code the damn thing myself.

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: muds,games,grinding,Diku

Merentha

 

 

I’ve finally discovered a mud which fulfills many of my admittedly persnicketty requirements.  There’s crafting, certain sense of mystery around each of the 22 classes, each requiring very different styles of play.  There’s a certain amount of crafting, an active  lively player base, and though there are levels, experience also must be spent on appropriate skills, so that characters of the same class are not simply cookie cutter droids.

 

This mud is so good that I’m having to tear myself away in order to get my daily pages done.  Given that I am 43 rather than 23, this is not so harde as it once was, especially given that the rewards of completing my novel, quite apart from publication and any dreamed-for paydays, will be enormous, and very likely exceed those of getting a paladin to level 90, however inviting that prospect might be. 

 

Also, I think it might be important for me to be involved with some kind of gameplay while I’m working on “Dragons and Angels”.  My protagonist is a middle-aged toymaker with a marked insight into the lives of children.  Though I’ve only completed the first quarter of the book, His understanding of gameplay may well have a great part to play in the denouement.

 

Plus, I just like to smash goblins.

Technorati Tags: games,muds,goblins,toymakers,writing a novel

Today, taking a break away from my novel, “Dragons and Angels”, I spent hours and hours figuring out Windows Live Writer and using it to post on this site. For that task, it is very well suited and as it is similar in feel to Word, with which I am very comfortable,I will be using it exclusively. The writing frame provided by Blogspot is impossible for a blind writer to use without suffering the sort of pain in the ass with which you become terribly familiar when you are visually impaired.

 

As I write this, I am a little annoyed that the lines seem a little short, but I assume they will fit the standard Blogger page, so I’m not going to sweat it. Also, WLW doesn’t provide a way for me to enter tags while I’m making the post, so I’ll have to publish, then back into the blog with Internet Explorer and unload any tags I might want.  Once again, a pain in the ass.  But the ease with which I can write and edit apost is so great compared to the old way of doing it, that I’m willing to suffer.

 

I realize that this is all unspeakably dull, and will now be returning to the sort of kvetching, bitching and philosophic maundering with which CN readers have become so terribly familiar.

 

Excelsior, pilgrims!  

Bob Is Dead

I'm always loathe to slam someone else's good time. If you're into crafts or homemade root beer or some television show, I'm all for it. We have a boundless supply of leisure time here in America, and I love the idea that folks can indulge any weird little demon they might have, as long as it doesn't hurt somebody else. But I'm about to go against this usual ordinary rule of thumb and slam the Church of the Subgenius.
I'm sure you've heard of it. The Church was started in the early 80's as a snarky joke religion whose messiah is the ubiquitous pipe-smoking J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, whose cosmic connections can swing you an extra helping of SLACK if you just send in $30.00 for your license as a bona fide Subgenius minister. If you buy any of their publications, like "The Book of the Subgenius" you get lots of hilarious doubletalk and eye-catching hipster graphics. Maybe for those things alone, the thirty bucks could be worth it.
But, and I say this with regret, I'm sorry but the joke is stale. All the talk about zombies, alien overlords and cosmic conspiracies is over. It's all been done, and done to death. Check out alt.slack, the Usenet newsgroup dedicated toSubgenii and their rantings. You want to poke your head in there and catch some wit, some subversive mohjo, something sharp and cunning and unexpected. But what you get is easy irony which even twelve year olds had mastered and discarded by 1995. It's all so easy: the pop culture quotes, the references to consumer products, the facile world-weariness, which is ugly enough in those who have earned it and is utterlly ridiculous on a twenty- or thirty-something. Look, I caught HIV and lost half my eyesight twelve years ago, and I'm not a tenth as bitter as these cats sound.
Back in 1982, they were funny and necessary. Now Ivan Stang, the founder, really ought to close up shop and think up something else. Cuz I'm tellin' you: Mistah Bob? He DAID.
　

Slack Sermon #23

Twelve years ago I was struck down by the Plague which bit off the head of the 20th century and spat it into a medical waste container. I lost many friends, lovers and the better part of my eyesight. Friends, to put it gently, I was eating turd pie and asking for seconds.

Then Slack entered my life. I applied for SSDI and aftrer some memorable epistolary battles wih the slope-headed government droids whose job it is to keep public hands off the government stash,I was awarded a monthly amount which is keeping me alive. I have enough to pay rent, sparks, phone and Internet and a little left over for pho and sushi every month. I have written one book and am in the middle of my second, and one day I will have a literary career, as the current book is going to be print Godzilla. Then I will come back here and get you all coupons for ten percent off the sale price.

I'm telling you, cowboys and cowchicks, there IS Slack in the Cosmos and you don't have to lose your eyes and friends to get it. Don't let them floss their yellow teeth with your deepest dreams. Don't let them make media puppets of your heroes. Fuck them in the left ear, and when you come, come a stream of liberation jazz till they're drowning in it.

Who's this talking?

I am Captain Crunch.
I am the Last American Saint, except for you.
I am Lazarus risen from the dead.

Eat the stars and shit poetry.
Be bop a loo bop a wop bam boom.
Peace.

Tiny Mercies

Today, I discovered a person of uncommon stature and quality. I was getting a latte at Victrola on Pike Street, one of Seattle’s valorous non-global coffee joints. I was going to order a latte, and discovered that I was nineteen cents short of the $3.19 cost of the beverage. The barrista –who, though I can’t see very well I am inclined to believe is unspeakably handsome—has often served me before, and with unique aplomb, and offered to cover the shortfall. The latte, which I’m drinking right now, tastes like it was steamed in one of Heaven’s own cafes.

An act of generosity like that, seemingly so tiny and so rare, is worth a lot to me, and should be worth a lot to anyone in these straitened times. He could have said no, and it is very likely that I would have taken it on the chin and bought more coffees from him in the future, as he is, even without little acts of charity like this, an extremely talented barrista. But the point is that he made the world, for this one customer, just a little more welcoming and warm on a crisp October day. And that little gift of nineteen cents –which I will feel delighted to repay in tips and business in coming months—might as well be a check for a thousand dollars. All hail the noble barrista. Because of him, this October day it is summer in Seattle.

Jane Austen's Pragmatic England

Right now, I’m listening to jane Austen’s novel, “Sense and Sensibility”, and enjoying it very much. It’s very interesting to note that although we’re separated by nearly two centuries, Miss Austen’s prose is fresh and lively, and makes the concerns of early 19th century England seem utterly contemporary.

I’m also very interested to read in Austen of the lucid way people of her time dealt with money and marriage. There was plenty of romance, but it seems that everyone was quite aware of what everyone else was worth, and angling for a financially advantageous marriage was deemed quite respectable, even necessary. Austen’s people are constantly talking about other people’s incomes, and relating it to the cost of living. And it doesn’t strike me as mercenary, in the mean sense of the word. Rather, it’s utterly refreshing to read of people who are aware of their interests and capable of talking about them without a lot of masking and euphemistic language. Everything is above board. The people with the money are aware that, whether they are attractive in any other way, the size of their estates are quite candidly a bargaining chip in the game of finding and keeping attractive mates.

Americans, it seems to me, could learn a lot from Jane Austen. Here, everyone wants to be wealthy, and are quite willing to talk about that desire in regards to their career. But in regards to marriage, nobody speaks of it at all, except for the occasional girl chat and the recommendations of wise would-be mothers-in-law. IN America, putting romance and money together is always read as prostitution, rather than what it is in part: a perfectly respectable business arrangement. . Will we be able to buy a reasonbably comfortable home on your income? Will we be able to send our kids to college? Can we afford medical care in the case of catastrophic illness?Will we be able to afford the little nothings which grease the skids in what can sometimes be a very rough life under the best of conditions? Austen’s characters are thinking about these things while, I fear, Americans are mostly thinking about what they can tell their buddies at the gym, or the bar or over coffee. If they were wise, clergy men and other such persons should read and reread “Sense and Sensibility” in order to help our young women sort out the noble Colonel Brandons from the feckless Willoughbies.

John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom

With John Updike's reputation as a master novelist in mind, and having admired some critical pieces of his in the past, I recently undertook to read his Rabbit Angstrom novels. If you are unfamiliar with it, the series consists of four books, "Rabbit, Run", "Rabbit Redux", "Rabbit is Rich" and "Rabbit at Rest". I was perfectly happy to begin the project, knowing as I did that they would be the product of a basically conservative, if imaginative consciousness, and did not expect to see myself represented in the Angstrom cosmos at all. I'm postgay and post-ironic, raised in the 70's and a survivor of the great plague which ended the 20th century, as well as the lives of many friends and lovers. Mr. Updike was raised in the 50's, his consciousness of human frailty is more shaped by polio than by AIDS,and he reached adulthood having to either defend or surrender his topdog status as a heterosexual white male. So I was not expecting the Rabbit Angstrom books to be some triumph of enlightened liberalism over the narrow values of Mr. Updike's youth. I'm not sure what I expected. MaybeI just wanted to see how that conservative 50's consciousness battled and then bloomed in succeeding eras. something like that, I don't know. What I didn't expect to read was more than 2000 pages devoted to the selfishness, chauvinism and moral calcificationof the protagonist.

In the first book, it's all up for grabs, and I enjoy reading aboutlife from the standpoint of a consciousness radically differennt from my own. I don't expect a white protagonist, to say nothing of a white protagonist coming of age in the 50's to have heroic liberal attitudes about race and sexual identity. When, at the close of "Rabbit, Run", Angstrom once again flees his responsibilities to his wife, it reads like an amusing picaresque. Ah, that undependable Rabbit Angstrom! Just gotta love him, don't you?

And in the seconde book, Rabbit's narcissism and philandering are intercut with his efforts to understand Skeeter, the untrustworthy black revolutionary who takes up residence in Rabbit's house, and whom Rabbit both hates and wishes to satisfy.

But by the third book, "Rabbit is Rich", Angstrom's consciousness is still focused on gratifying Angstrom. His son, who is probably in the closet, has become hooked on cocaine and snorted away $200,000 of the small fortune left to Rabbit by his father in law. His wife Janis, numbed by Rabbit's constant betrayals, struggles to help their son and hold the family together. But all Rabbit can think of is using the wife of an acquaintance, a woman who --I can hardly figure out why-- is deeply in love with him.

I don't know why, after three books chronicling the basic depravity of Harry Angstrom, I expected the fourth to be any different. Probably, I have a deeply classicist streak that wants to hold out for some grand turnabout in the third act. But Mr. updike, I guess, is a Modern Novelist, and we can't expect anything so backward. Having suffered a massive coronary, Rabbit ignores his doctor's orders, wilfully feasts on the fatty foods his doctors have proscribed for him, and dies alone on a basketball court, having played his last game with a young African-American. One could see this as a hopeful political gesture on Mr. Updike's part, I suppose. Perhaps he's saying that Patriarchy, its arteries clogged with2000 years of moral plaque, is destined for an imminent death. But damn it, I spent hours on this series. I followed rabbit through his affair with the spiny Ruth, the accidental drowning of his daughter Becky and his innumerable trysts and evasions. What I was hoping for is not some facile political statement about the Death of Whitey, but something elegant --and Mr. updike was more than capable of elegance-- about transformation and transcendence. Couldn't he have learned to love his son? Couldn't he have learned to love his wife? Couldn't he have learned to love something or someone more than he loved Harold "Rabbit" Angstrom? No, and he had to die alone on an abandoned basketball court to prove it.

Now, I can see ending a series this way, the pressure an artist might feel to bring forth this kind of message. But if that's all there is --narcissism, depravity and death, why do you need 2000 pages to do it? I know these books are viewed in many mainstream literary circles as triumphs of the art. But to my own understanding they represent a complicated failure, and as I contemplate the second book of my own semiautobiographical series, a very clear primer on what not to do. Goodnight, Mr. Updike. I'm sure I'll see you in heaven, but the Rabbit Angstrom books are going straight to hell.

Crank Radio

AS anyone who knows me will tell you, and like many a liberal during the eight years of the Boy Emperor, I had a very grimn view of the American republic. Especially, I was grieved by people like Rush limbaugh and Ann Colter, who are not just conservative, which would be respectable enough, but simply mean-spirited and bloated with darkness. I don't have much use for the self-serving pundits on Fox News, either, and when I heard Sean Hannaty in one of his addled rants or his friend the grackle-voiced Mark Levin, I would grind my teeth down to the gums.

But now, in these Golden Years, I listen to these guys and I LAUGH. They fulminate, thunder and burble their threadbare lies and I chortle because just a few years ago they were talking seriously about a permanent Republican majority in both House and Senate. But now? They're clowns, out of power and out of favor if not out of air time. Obama has welcomed a delegation of LGBTG folks into the White House, Al Franken has won the Senate seat in Minnesota, it's the Fourth of July and all is well. God bless America!

Out With the Girls

So, Goebbels, Goering and Himmler all blew into town last week and the Feuhrer was busy so I had to entertain them. I showed them the night spots, and of course Leni dropped in. Then all of us girls went to the salon and had our hair done, nails, foot massage and oh just everything. Then Goering and Goebbels had a fight over who was the prettiest and I had to break it up, since Himmler is notorious for not getting involved unless there's some man she wants in the deal. I thought we had it all ironed out and we were going to a show at the Jewel Box, but the three of them got in a knife fight over a diamond tiara and who was the prettiest, and oh it was ugly. And it wasn't even real diamond, it was cubic zirconium. I finally got Goebbels and Goering to make up, but Himmler wouldn't stop crying and we ended up missing the show because her makeup was smeared and she wouldn't think of stepping outside until her mascara was perfect again. And of COURSE it could never be perfect, what with that ghastly green shade she prefers and has all the boys mad for, or so she thinks. Even with the two G['s swearing that she looked divine, Miss H. couldn't be budged, the stubborn attention whore. And then who should drop in but Alger Hiss and...

The Rhyme of Hannibal Lecter

Your head is made of paper,
Your head is made of straw,
Your head is made of little men
Who break the law.

Your head is made of murder,
Your head is made of law,
The world is made of little men
Who break your jaw.

The world is made of people,
The world is made of straw,
These words are made of paper,
And paper makes the law.

The law is made of paper,
The law is made of straw,
The law is made of murder words
That break your jaw.

Break the jaws of murder.
Break the men of straw.
And break the world of people
Who break your perfect law.

In Case of Falling Astronauts Break Glass

I.

o heavenly desert for a wandering tribe, nazareth to astronauts;
cradle of prophets with mirrored faces, our mystics of absolute zero,
striding through hells of kelvin heat or leaping lead-footed for joy.

we knew no domes of glass nor wise antennaed
mayors would meet our traveling boys, flown so far
from the roiling blue, flung so far into darkness and dust.

but if a desert, still a place of birth, you anvil moon: like silver
minted fresh, we’d shine our lives by the pure silent hammers of sol.
this was our dream, our all-american dream of astronauts

grave and poetic: faces full of infinity, minds on plans
for compassionate cities, angelic hands at work in the vine-
yards of science. the rocket packs and rayguns were toys,

dolls in the hands of scheming boys we never thought they’d keep.
what we were after, as always, was space: another place to go
when nowhere was left
a heavenly desert to a wandering tribe,
second bethlehem to a dream.

II.

I wonder what plagues we gave to the Indians of the Moon,
I struggle to remember which treaties we broke with the Lunar Sioux,
the precise year of that famous ambush so successfully sprung by
the cavalry of the American Third Orbital Marines upon the Lakota
living by the shores of the Sea of Tranquility.
And I forget exactly how many chiefs we lashed to the coils
of fusion drives, or swung from rocket gantries
or tumbled into void with a one two three.

I get all the dates mixed up, but from where I’m standing
I can still smell the silicate smoke of tipis burning on lunar prairies.

III.

When I still played hopscotch,
when i knew just how to throw the stone
and what these lines are for,
I read about Laika, the dog in space,

How the Russians loved their doggy cosmonaut
(a snapshot from some grade school primer:
white coated men and a scrappy mutt
with a lolling tongue) and how she loved her cozy Sputnik, just enough room for her race.
I imagined the husky steering her tiny craft:
Adroit Captain Laika, the dog between worlds,
equal parts Egyptian goddess and loyal pet;

the constellation, drawn in the sky with
stars of chalk, the constellation given life,
the Hunter’s Dog unleashed to gambol and howl
fully enfleshed in the backyards of night.

When I still played hopscotch, and knew
the counting rhymes, and how to get through the game
without hitting the lines, I read about Laika:
but not how her husky fur must have burned

in a blaze when her tiny cage returned to earth,
nor a word for her terrified yawp as the Sputnik
crashed through a ceiling of air, splashed down
in the southernmost part of the Indian Sea.

I know she died before I was born, and how.
But I learned it late, and now I call her:
here girl, come on down now and lick my hand;
and brief me on dreams brought low,
dogs in space, these chalk marks
whose use I used to know.

The Gunslinger Followed

Last night I read Stephen King's autobiography and writing manual "On Writing". The early stuff about coming of age in the 60's and the sales of his first novels was wonderful reading. I'm still staggered by the fact that he got a $400,000 advance for "Carrie" way back in 1973. I'm staggered because that would be a nearly unthinkable sum for a debut novelist even now, when an advance for a first novel from a major publisher tends to be in the low six figures.

But unlike many as-yet unpublished writers, I don't have any issues with Mr. King. He's written some fine novels and penned some lines which I especially admire. My favorite is the opening sentence of his Dark Tower series:

"The man in black fled over the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

As they say in "Sweeney Todd", God that's good! It has such majesty and poetry in it, and yet is so elegant and simple. And ensuing paragraphs reveal what the sentence is really about: King the perpetual craftsman in pursuit of King the true artist. I have to reread that series again in order to find out if Roland succeeds. As King has written a few novels which I greatly admire --especially "Firestarter" and "Misery"-- I want to believe that he does, although I seem to remember hearing that things turn out quite badly for the hero.

But more affecting than anything else in that book, maybe, is King's description of his near encounter withdeath. He was taking a walk along a country road when a truck veered into him, nearly ending his life. As someone who has nearly died three or four times myself,I find this stuff very compelling. I know that my experiences have tended to sharpen my sense of my own mortality, and thus quite directly affected my habits and attitudes surrounding the production of daily pages. I am mostly grateful for my thanatic encounters, though, where King is obviously furious about his. I hardly blame him. My experiences came as a result of madness and my own carelessness about certain things, whereas King was creamed by a grinning lunatic.

Still, for all of our differences as writers and men, I recognize in King's account the story of one who has returned from the dead. Once you've been near that border, your spirit and your art change for good. He announced several years ago that he has retired. But I hope that he will draw something mighty from that dark well, and vex everybody who dismisses him as ahack. Well, what do they know, Mr. King? I still say you've got your best novel ahead of you.

Apocalypse and Childish Things

To faithful longtime readers of Cinema Nocturne, I beg a little indulgence. I've been posting "Greatest Hits" from the old Workpadsite. I'm trying to drum up new business through Zimbio and other blog exposure sites, so I've been porting overfavorite posts from the old blog which I think might ring bells for a wider audience. I'm still thoroughly committed to thoughtful new content, though, and promise that CN will not become some kind of blogulous TV Land.

Anyway, here's a post from a couple of years ago. I've freshened it up in little ways, and edited in a more satisfying conclusion.

---


I subscribe to a few email discussion lists which most people would characterize as "New Age". In general, the people on these lists are intelligent and kind. But a number of the most vocal folks believe that some cosmic reckoning is going to take place on December 21, 2012. They have different ways of expressing it, but the most common story among them is that an army of angels, ascended Masters and benevolent aliens are going to descend on Earth on the fateful day and haul our sorry asses into the fifth dimension, where everyone is enlightened and noone is thinking of kicking a retired couple out of their home because they can't pay the mortgage.

I wish I could join them. But in the reality I inhabit, God, while eternally present, doesn't seem to operate with cosmic bailouts of this kind. Itt's been two thousand years since Christ went to the cross, and for all I know, it will be another two thousand before he comes back. Except in the way that he is present when we toiling mortals show some character and love one another even when it is the most difficult, when the incoming checks don't seem to match outgoing expenses and the people who run the country are evil or deranged. I don't doubt that somewhere in the richness of third dimensional reality there are at least helpful entities of all kinds: whether they be spirits, faeries, Ascended Masters, angels and what have you. But they're not waiting for some Grand Opening, some orchestra hit and calendrical spotlight to be focused. They come to us in our dreams, our walks in the park, our quiet reflective moments. In a sense, I suppose they've always been with us. But almost always, and even, Id bet my head, on December 21, 2012, it's we who will have to do the heavy lifting.

To some, I fear, this will seem a painful, even a spiteful thing for me to say. But in the exact center of my mortal years, I have very few truly mean bones in my body. It’s not my intention to burst balloons or pickle dearly held dreams in brine. All of these angelic aliens, the Ashtar Command and the wise benevolent Pleiadians I think of as beautiful, poetic. Why not frame redemption in the language of contemporary speculative fiction. It’s a damned site more enlivening than stories of women being stoned to death or the decapitation of saints.

The truth about me is that in certain moments I’d like to have faith in some Galactic Alliance, some archangelic paratroopers to blow the lid off this five and dime reality and give us a roaring good show of an apocalypse. But I’m a little like Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, the leper messiah who couldn’t believe in mystic healing and had to suffer depravity and death before the blasphemousLord Foul could be toppled from his dark throne. I have diabetes and HIV, and taking a daily regime of finely honed poisons tends to rob you of that kind of fantasy entirely --if it doesn’t do exactly the opposite.

Besides this basic intransigence, I think there’s something elegant in the human spirit surviving the End of the World, as it does every Winter Solstice, every Harmonic Convergence (remember that one?), every Millenium and every passing comet. I say: trust in the real power –your own-- not these endless anniversaries of terror and hokum. Don’t go into the Light, Carol Anne. Put away your childish things.

Big Sky and Ballyhoo

I wrote this after breaking with the Catholic Church last year. In many ways, I was a happy Catholic, but as a gay (or postgay) man and a freethinker I was starting to feel squashed and didn't much like the sensation.

---


In the hours since I've decided to break with the Church and once again investigate a broader spiritual landscape, I've had a feeling of exhilaration. I feel as if I've been standing in a room with a low ceiling for five years and I've just stepped outside to discover that there is a big sky, with stars and planets above. I'm not looking for another religion to join. I think that God is bigger than religion. Religions provide a structure,a model of Heaven to contemplate. But theologies, and especially Catholic theology, is so concerned with being self-consistent that I fear it makes up stuff just to fit the program.

For instance, I might buy the proposition that Jesus was born of a virgin. Well, why not? It strikes me as very mythological, like much of what is reported of the life of Jesus. But I'm willing to grant that in one, maybe even a few cases, the miracle of a virgin birth happens. Some sources also claim something like a virgin birth for the Buddha. But when I inquired of a friend who is a Jesuit priest whether Mary is still a virgin, he replied that she is eternally virgin. He didn't explain why such a thing would be, what decree might have been handed down to an adolescent Jewish girl by a mysterious God, he simply stated with finality that she is eternally virgin. That's systematic theology for you. I haven't read the books studied by my Jesuit friend, but I'm willing to bet that one of them frames virginity as an eternal metaphysical affair rather than the simple integrity of a mortal hymen: thus the Virgin Mother. Can't have Mary happy in Heaven, getting it on with St. Francis of Assisi, she's got to lay off the boys FOREVER.

I think it's like this. Sometimes I think of God as a great elephant of a being, unknowable and wild. And religion wants to put that elephant in a tent and charge admission. Some religious paint the elephant in garish colors and tell the marks terrifying stories about him. Some try to make the elephant stomp on their enemies, or haul logs, or build castles with its trunk. But the elephant is not for taming. The elephant can't be bought and sold with ballyhoo. The elephant is free and wild and ultimately unknowable and if I'm going to find him, I'm going to find him somewhere beyond the circus tent.

Holy Tobacco

Except in a few cases --heroin, cocaine, perhaps alcohol-- I reject the whole addiction model of abuse. And that is because I don't experience substances that way. I drink very occasionally, and enjoy it when I do, as when I have a glass of red wine with pasta at a Italian restaurant. Or when I smoke one or two French cigarettes after sushi. But sex? I used to have lots of sex with people I didn't know, and now I don't, and I didn't have to go to Sexual Addiction meetings to stop, although something somewhat more drastic did happen to me. I used to overeat, but now I don't, because I don't like the way I feel afterwards. This will seem very backward and annoying, very 14th century, but I mostly don't believe in addiction: I believe in gluttony.

Gluttony, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, will seem a surprisingly moralistic way to look at things, but I don't view people who overindulge as being either sick or depraved. Instead, I see "addicts" as people who consistently make bad choices. Actually, I see them as making one bad choice over and over again, and contrary to the rubrics of the 21st century, they're choices which they could choose not to make. Instead of glutting on tobacco, or sex, or whatever it is, they could turn the habit into something holy. I guess that what I'm really saing is that I don't believe in contemporary schematics of the soul, with its dependencies and co-dependencies, its addictions, its Big Books and its relapses. I prefer to accept the full responsibility for my behavior, not shunt it off onto some weird medical abstraction. I hate the way the language of contemporary medicine, with its zeal to enclose every human habit in its narrow envelope, has tended to pathologize every human pursuit. Oh, I'm addicted to sex. I'm addicted to alcohol. I'm addicted to Speed Racer. Shut the fuck UP.

I know the model has helped millions of people, and that's cool. If you want the addiction model, its yours and I won't try to take it from you. But don't push it on ME.
The most active ingredient of tobacco, nicotine, is said by many to be among the most addictive in the world. But I've never smoked more than three cigarettes in a row, usually not more than one, and that one about every other month or so. I bought a pack of Marselles roughly six months ago and it was just today that my sister bummed the last one. Vive le smoking!

Moreover, not only is my relationship to tobacco not the flower of some sinister pathology, I say that it is holy. It engages me in the sacred element of fire. As I walk down Broadway, I hold my lit cigarette as an emblem of my office as magician, and bless bus stops and doorways with the smoke.

So all your uncles died of emphysema and you're scared that you're following them into the grave. Man, I'm hip. But there are other issues to consider. I speak here of power, I speak of choice and I speak of enchantment.

Montel Williams Interviews Gollum

Montel:

Gollum, you've struggled with the ring for centuries. What was it like to lose it all instantly during that climactic confrontation on Mount Doom?

Gollum:

You know, Montel, I hated Tricksy Baggins at first. But I've really come to respect him.
I’m so sorry I bit off his finger, man.

Montel:

Really? You respect Frodo after biting off his ring finger and plunging into the volcano?

Gollum:

From where you're sitting, it might be hard to see. But it's all part of the healing process.

Montel:

Really? Do you think Frodo feels the same way?

Gollum:

I don't know. I send him letters. I pray for him, man. But he's, like, in the Grey Havens.
You don't write back once you're kicking it in the Grey Havens.

Montel:

So you're bitter.

Gollum:

Yeah, I'm bitter, man! I walked a hard damn road to get where I'm at.

Montel:

Don't you think Frodo walked a hard road?

Gollum:

Jesus, man. It's always Frodo this and Fellowship that. I'm not saying he doesn't deserve it. I'm just saying there are other angles.

Montel:

What would you say if I told you we had one of the Fellowship backstage?

Gollum:

Oh my Valar. You're kidding me.

Montel:

Come on out, Fellowship member.

Gollum:

Tricksy Baggins? You found Tricksy Baggins?

Montel:

We couldn't get Mr. Baggins. But we think we have a special treat for you.

Gimli:

Hey Gollum.

Gollum:

I never new your name. I knew they had a dwarf.

Gimli:

Well, I knew your name, bud. You're famous! Come here!

(They hug awkwardly.)

Bo Knows

Bo knows who's got what. Bo knows where you're coming from. Bow knows why you hate that guy and why he's going to die of a heart attack next month. Bo knows where you've been and why you went there and why you're making sure nobody finds out.

Bo knows secret milks you can drink that will make you grow mighty. Bo knows the three little words that will stop the mouths of your enemies like clay. Bo knows what you did to the dog back then and what's buried in the garden. Bo wants you to win. Bo wants you to get ahead. Bo will tell you how, if you would just listen.

Bow is talking now. Bo says that you just have to sleep under thorns for three nights. Bo says you have to drink the secret milk. Bo says you have to find some things and bring them into the lunchroom with you, where all your workmates are stuffing themselves like swine. Bo is waiting for you. We're all waiting for you.

What to do now?

Just drink the secret milk.
Bring those things, the hot things into the lunchroom.
Count to twelve.

And you will finally know just what to do.

The Eyes of Brax

This is just a short invitation to you, Constant Reader. Because Workpad was such an unwieldy site, Ifound it difficult or impossible to engage readers directly, even when they had made incisive comments about a post. That will change with my defection to Blogspot.

I think you will find it much easier to make comments here, to read favorite back posts, and in general to make the mezzanine of Cinema Nocturne a site you can participate in and enjoy. And empowered by the tools I have at my disposal here, Iin turn look forward to reading and responding to reader comments and in general to being more like a colleague than a prophet declaiming from a mountaintop --though I will keep the staff and sandals on hand for really deserving subjects. So go on whorshipping your golden calves and I'll join you as soon as I've had some breakfast.

Smoke and Mirrors

2. 
   Though it's not so grand as some, I've always prided myself on the fact that the content on Cinema Nocturne is substantial. When I post, I usually have something to say, and while I occasionally repeat myself and have certain recurring themes, I don't have the sort of "This morning I had breakfast!" chaff you read on many blogs.
   
3. Ordinarily, it's not in my nature to be judgmental. But recently, while using the "Nexst Blog" tool here on Blogspot,I found that many blogs, maybe even most of them, don't really have much to offer. Graphically, many of these are astonishing. They've got wheels and whirligigs. They've got Roman candles. They've got ice cream snow and dancing iguanas. If you're new to the Web, and even if you're not, I can see how these would be diverting. Even though I don't see very well, I'm admittedly surprised by the styles that are possible and what can be accomplished through graphics and music. But the majority of these, I find, are smoke and mirrors. if they would put the dancing iguanas at the service of poetry, or a hard day at the plant, or their high schooler's funny graduation, that would be splendid. If, in other words, they were telling you something about their humanity, whether laughing or suffering, THAT would be worth my time.
4. 
   But as for these tricks? What they mostly reveal is that their employer can read an instruction manual and follow directions. Doesn't anyone in this webjoint feel the way I do?

Shadows and Fog

I'm going to write something here which would probably be better left unrevealed, let alone confessed to potential thousands. And that is that tonight, I almost fell victim to a credit card scam.

Upon returning from my picnic, I found an email in my box claiming to be from a secret admirer. There was something ungolden about the email which in my mind lent it some credence, though I was wary. Anyway, I followed the link and entered some information in edit boxes including, stupidly, my card number. Clearly: not wary enough! Well, I was tired and at least half hoodwinked. Once I had completed the form I was lead to a congratulations screen and a "Members" link which, big sodding surprise, didn't work.
Well, I instantly dialed my bank's 24 hour customer service line and cancelled the card. But I followed up with a little email to the supposed yahoo address of my secret admirer, which, again no surprise Sherlock, turned out to be spoofed and bounced within five minutes of sending it.

None of this is in the least mysterious or bothersome. I was curious and flattered, and it is late, and the phony claimed to have an athletic build. It is not surprising that a gay man would go for a secret admirer who claims to have an athletic build. What is a little bit baffling is that the phony claimed to be a brunette rather than a blond, and to be 5 foot 6 rather than, say, 6 foot 4. Now THAT was the really artistic aspect of this little flimflam. If the pretender had claimed to be a Matt Damon lookalike, I would have instantly tossed the email. But 5 foot 6? Well, Christ, of course I had to look into it. I'm still a fool. But after all, who isn't a little bit of a fool for romance?

Picnic

In an hour or so, I will be going to a family picnic with cousins from my mother's side of the family. I love many of these folks, at least the one's I know, and have no strenuous objections to hotdogs and hamburgers. But being blind, even "only" legally blind as I am, can put a terrible crimp in this sort of thing. Ordinarily, a person in a social situation scopes out the space for a conversational opportunity; perhaps someone else who is feeling at loose ends in the situation.

But when you can't see well, when the faces of other people are mostly lost to you except at pornographic range, the scope and advance structure breaks down, and you more or less have to hope that someone else sees how you are and draws you into a conversation. Of course, there is the third option, which was not open to me when my blindness began ten years ago, and that is to be very still inside myself, free of the monkey that jabbers desolation, and listen. This isn't always easy, and it's a little bit sideways from the mood with which you want to attend a picnic, but it's better than the alternative, which is to chew on the tablecloth and sulk. Also, I think I have something more interesting to talk about than a lot of what gets talked about at a picnic, and that is, without being a snob about it, that I have written one book and am writing another. It would probably be more compelling if I had published something, but at least I know that I haven't spent the ten years of my exile weeping.

Well. Not all of them, anyway.

Spiritual Umbrellas

This morning, I started out with the idea of starting a Yahoo group. It was going to have a sort of Subgenius vibe to it, and I tossed McFnord a couple of ideas for themes. At first, I thought I would go with the Alien Overlord thing. I still find it amusing, even though McFnord reminded me that the vein had been mined to death. Same thing with zombies, which I also suggested. And what I found, as I sat there thinking up themes for my group, is that something is going on with me that extends well beyond Yahoo. It's there in the email I sent to Ivan Stang; my break with the Catholic church and a search for a more amenable spiritual umbrella.

One of the conflicts I seem to be dealing with right now is the very idea of rebellion. I've always been an outsider, both for reasons that I chose and for reasons that chose me. I feel like I'm looking for allies and collaborators in my life, although straightforward friendship is welcome, too.

The thing is, I suddenly feel like I've shed so many skins in recent months, that I'm coming to a place where I'm having to reacquaint myself with myself. For at least twenty years, I've thought that I knew myself pretty well. I know what my tastes are and can defend them if called to do so; the same goes for my politics. But that feeling of self-comfort was shattered when my health catastrophe struck and I lost the better part of my eyesight. Suddenly, I was angry at God and furious with myself. Rehashing old behaviors, especially sexual ones, I seemed to discover that I had been vain and silly, or worse. I was baptized in the Catholic church in the middle of this time, and it provided stability when I was one unstable cat.

But now I've stabilized and I can't live with the CC lies anymore. I don't need some red Papa in Rome to instruct me in moral clarity. I want for myself what I want for humanity: liberation from suffering, ignorance and control. For me, the way through all this change has always been to revert to the roles of the magician and poet. But now I think a third identity is in ascendance, and I think it might be the role of the comedian. I've been way too serious about things for way too long. That's why recent posts have been so much about little pranks and games. Also, I'm just so fucking tired of being this serious blind guy. Does any of this resonate with you, reader?

Fairy Stones and Mystic Trains

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attacked ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Watched the glittering of sea beams at the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost like tears in rain..."

--from "Blade Runner"

Like Roy Baty, the christiate android from the movie, I've seen things most people wouldn't believe. There's one particular time when I saw a bunch of things during the course of a day or so. I'm not actually sure how long it was --I lost track of time. No, I wasn't on acid; who cares about acid trips? Everyone sees wild stuff on that shit. I might have been crazy, that I will admit. But this stuff sort of hangs together in a way that you don't expect from the shattered imaginings of the mad.

When did all this happen? Well, I got arrested for a public disturbance and they threw me in the Hole because I wouldn't put on their fucking jail uniform; especially after Seattle PD had tasered me to the ground. So I wound up in a tiny ten by ten cell with a water fountain, a toilet and a hard damned pallet. But I didn't rest.

Instead, I saw things, went places.

For instance, the cell became a Maglev train, like the ones they have in France. I could get upfrom my pallet in what had been a tiny cell and walk up and down the aisles and sit in different chairs. I know this sounds crazy, and it probably is, but I was told more or less that this was a train for magicians and that Sir Anthony Hopkins liked to ride on this particular one. I was told not to disturb him with my conjurations or there might be trouble. I met the magician who seemed to be in charge. He appeared to me as a line drawing in the air. He made me agree to certain rules and I shook hands with him in a particular way which sealed the agreement, even though the hand he offered me was intangible. At one point, I offered a sloppy handshake and the image in front of me comically wrinkled its nose.

"No!" he said. "This sloppy hand jive won't do. This is serious business!"

In the end, he told me that I had been on the train before and that he always had a good feeling about me, a sense of trust and seriousness.

It wasn't a dream. It wasn't a hallucination, at least in the way most people understand such things. I was in some anteroom of our bread and butter reality. Dreaming has a certain texture to it, and a certain fragility. When you wake up, the dream fades. But this resides in my memory in the same way a visit to the grocery store or a bowling alley does.

Other things happened to me, many things, and I'm only relating the ones that are the easiest to describe. At one point I rode a floating stone piloted by a fairy sorceress. She told me that it was crucial we make it to our destination and that I must be impeccable. But I failed her test in some crucial but unknowable way and fell from the flying fairy stone. She told me woefully that she had thought I might be the Merlin energy returned to Earth, but that Ihad tricked her and now she would die, powerless and crippled. I apologized, I begged her to tell me how I could fix things. But this sort of test, when failed, is not the sort of thing one can fix and she told me so. She said that I might be a good magician, but that I was not a great one. It might be the purest arrogance on my part, but I can't tell you how this stung. It was as if the Jews hadseen the Messiah approaching but he turned out to be Bozo the Clown.

The last incident I will relate is in some ways the most puzzling to me, though on the surface it was less fantastical than the first two. I rode another fairy stone to a location which was described to me as the interior of a different world than Earth. This time, I didn't fall, but arrived at a location which seemed to be a transformed bversion of my cell. Instead of a toilet and cot in a tiny room, the space seemed to go on for miles and was covered in these tall stone mushrooms. While climbing over one of these, I slipped and fell, bashing my nose. That's when the door opened and a man and a woman came into the room-world. The woman took a towel to my bloody nose and soaked up the mess. When they were sure that I was going to be all right, they left again. And when I finally got home from the jail, my nose was clotted with dried blood.

I had some other adventures, but some of them seem to have faded from my memory and I can only sketch them out in the barest details. For instance, I played some sort of game with a prince of the underworld. When I offended himn in some mysterious way, he left me in a closed stone room from which it was impossible to escape. Obviously, I seem to have done so, but the terror of being walled up alive is still with me to this day.

What's my answer for all of this? I was a little bit crazy, I suppose. But I think it's the madness of shamans and magicians, the crack in the teacup that can open up lanes to the land of the dead. I just know that I have spoken with fairies and stood accused in a court of monsters, and that all, all, all of it was real.

The Ancient Swindle

 

 

I'm against patriotism, at least what passes for it in the USA.  People here do a lot of bullying, a lot of mindless flag-waving, mouth the talking points of Bill O'Riley and Carl Rove and call themselves patriots.  But you can't carry patriotism on a bumper sticker, you can't get it from mouthing the bird droppings of Ann Coulter and you can't even get it from voting for your favorite candidate every two years.  Real patriotism comes from people who spill their lifesblood on foreign soil:  granted.  But the patriots of 1776, who politicians parrot and claim to emulate, were largely statesmen, editors and intellectuals.  They published daily or weekly broadsides in which they voiced opinions about the nascent state and often scandalous reports of their political enemies. They spread the word that a new order was coming, something bright and new and quite separate from England.

 

Today's patriot seems to come by his stripes by beating up queers and swigging beer.  Mouthing Bush and Rush. Trashing their Muslim neighbors.  And so on. The patriotism of today, excluding the service of soldiers whom I honor though I suspect them of being taken into an ancient swindle --that pernicious scheme by which evil old men con young men to do their dying for them--  is ludicrous and cheap. I think we should discard "The Star Spangled Banner" as jingoistic 19th century bollywog and replace it with "This Land Is Your Land" as our national anthem.  Despite all this, I rather like our flag with its fifty stars.  If you tilt your consciousness just a little to the side, it can look like a prophecy of Earth's inclusion in a celestial democracy, just one world of suffering peoples in a universe of many.   

Brainwarp

 

It's bringing on major brainwarp, but I'm gradually learning how to run a blog on this here site. It is much more flexible than Workpad, although I will grieve losing out on the often(if not always)  helpful webmaster there.   

 

At the risk of annoying the readership, folks can always look at my posts at the old site by using the following URL:

 

http://:www.cinemanocturne.workpad.com 

 

I will be setting the Cinema Nocturne  DNS to point to blogger, and in the near future, everyone will again be able to follow the thrilling exploits of Bill the Cranky Blind Poet at:

 

http://www.cinemanocturne.com

 

Notice the name of the actual site is effaced from this address, for your convenience and for peculiar lexical gratifications of my own.

 

 

Salut!  

Summer Reading

If you've followed this blog at the Workpad site, you will have read that I am currently enmeshed in a mad, mad love affair with a new gadget of mine, a miraculous device called the Victor Reader Stream. Previously, I had borrowed exhausted cassette tapes from the Washington State Talking Book and Braille Library. Except for the cassette failures and frequent malfunction of the 1970's tape machines, it was an adequate way to keep abreast of one's reading if you didn't happen to know Braille. But in the end, all those breakdowns and tape failures wore on me and I gave up on books for a few years.

Then I acquired a Victor Reader Stream. This device enables you to download books in digital format and read them at various speeds and volumes, and depending upon the size of the SD card you eploy and the size of the books you read, you can store four or five dozen books. It's a portable Alexandria, and in fact, I have labeled my SD card "Alexandria" in honor of this fact.

This device has saved me hours of time wasting with online multiplayer games. I have read WAR AND PEACE, THE DIVINE COMEDY of Dante and now THE SILMARILLION, Tolkien's mythological basis for THE LORD OF THE RINGS. It's simply an astonishing bit of technology, and once you master the telephone keypad it's practically witless to operate. Besides some newer fantasy titles, including Suzanne Clarke's JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL, my wee Alexandria currently houses BLEAK HOUSE, HARD TIMES, HUCKLEBERRY FINN, THE GREAT GATSBY and numerous other classics.

It almost makes you want to go blind, doesn't it?

Quasi Introduction

In truth, I have been writing a blog called "Cinema Nocturne" for four or five years now. You can see it at:

http://www.cinemanocturne.workpad.com/

Because I seem unable to gain access to CN and the webmaster is not being very helpful at that point, I am seriously considering bringing all of my content to Blogger. Besides, it's time for a change, and though I'm legally blind I've found Blogger to be fairly easy to navigate with my screen reader. Also, referral sites don't seem to capture posts made at Workpad and I'd like to expand my readership which, though smart and faithful, is relatively small.



Readers of Cinema Nocturne can expect to read posts from a progressive postgay perspective with leanings towards the poetical, the magical and outré. Also, I am legally blind and sometimes come at things from a cranky disability angle. Finally, I've written one novel, for which I am currently trying to get literary representation, and am working on my second novel, which for various reasons I think might turn out to be more commercial. In the meantime, I do this blog, and thrive on reader participation. I welcome brickbats where I've got them coming and will cough up apologies when they're called for.



Welcome to the latest incarnation of Cinema Nocturne.