Wednesday, May 29, 2002

Gleanings: "... simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions. The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tapdances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an 'exhibitionist.' How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, 'Wow! were you ever drunk last night!'" -- Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard 5:16:17 PM    comment []

Despite obsessive internet surfing over the past 2 years, a whole bunch of things went right by me.  Fortunately, there is a mail list called 'word-up' that nicely collects all the things I missed.  This is a guy, Adam Shand, who  obsessively collects information & rumors, mostly about American things. He took the "best of" and  compiled them. The reading beats all the web logs I've ever read put together.  Mostly things I've never heard before or new twists on things that have been around.  There is also a 2001 file of the same mail list. 12:13:22 PM    comment []

This is from the Pynchon List Serve: I am currently reading Tim Powers' latest novel, the thoroughly excellent book "Declare." (For those of you unfamiliar with Tim Powers, he is an extremely imaginative writer of speculative fiction -- I hesitate to call it "fantasy," as Power's work is miles ahead of the dwarf and goblin pack. His books "The Stress of her Regard" and "On Stranger Tides" are two of my favorite genre novels.) "Declare" concerns itself with secret agencies and political intrigue, and ranges from the 1880s to the 1960s, with a cast of spies hailing from all kinds of agencies-within-agencies -- the OSS, SIS, SOE, CIA, KGB, GRU, NKGB, Mossad, and so on. Locales include the Arabian desert, occupied Paris, postwar Berlin, and London during the blitz. The book revolves around the presence of powerful supernatural beings and various governmental attempts to either control or destroy them. For those of you familiar with Powers' fiction, you know that he can seamlessly weave the most outlandish elements of the occult together with science and politics in a remarkable way -- indeed, this novel links atmospheric radio wave distortion to the presence of elemental beings, generating a unique system of control and communication relating to, of all things, djinn. (Who may or may not be fallen angels....) Anyway -- international Great Game "sub rosa" intrigues, nation- and time-spanning interconnected characters, messing around with atmospheric distortion, contact with supernatural entities, mucking about in postwar Berlin, London during the blitz.... Oh Pynchonians, as Burroughs would say, You connect the dots, you pick up the pieces.... 8:20:22 AM    comment []