Author: shawn

A while ago, I was having a comment conversation with i from squub.

We were chatting about religion and such. He had lots of good things to say: so much so, that I was really at a loss as to how to reply. I’m still feeling vaguely disjointed and at a loss about it.

I get this feeling sometimes, like the other night in particular, that I have difficulty formulating or crunching together coherent ideas built around logical arguments and evidence and etc. (Do I feel more comfortable over on the right side? You bet.) Perhaps it’s evidence of a lack of intellectual rigor, on my part or maybe I just have too many contradictory pieces and bits floating around in this noggin of mine. Whatever the reason (and maybe it’s a false conception of mine: maybe I have a decent idea formulation brain-widget?), it’s sometimes a difficult stumbling block to get around.

So I’ll try to take a stab at it anyway. i’s comments about religion struck a deep chord with me for several reasons, mostly having to do with my OWN ambiguity about religion:

1) My mother is and has always been deeply religious (catcholic then protestant then catcholic again). In a way that I don’t particularly understand. For example, the churches that I grew up in were speaking-in-tongues, prophesying, laying-on-of-hands style of churching, which I always, even as a child, felt vaguely uncomfortable around. Perhaps sadly for her, none of us, her children, are particularly religious in the same way.

2) I wouldn’t, now, consider myself deeply religious at all, though at one time I did (ah, those heady (pre) and adolescent days). Have I just mellowed out or is it something that I’ve “lost”? Regardless, I’ve never felt particularly comfortable around religious people. Why? Hard to say. But I’ve always enjoyed the company of the ir- and anti-religious…

3) In spite of my current ambivalence towards religion, I still have (and have always had) a deep (non-intellectual) yearning? desire? need? for some kind of deeper mystical or emotional or transcendant connection to something bigger than myself. This causes some conflict within my own self. And it’s not really something which is easy to talk to anyone about, because I tend to surround myself with people who don’t seem to have much interest in talking about it (see number 2).

4) Is religion good or bad? It’s almost a meaningless question, except that I think that the goodness or badness of any institution or individual can be measured and held to account. And yes, I do feel as though you, i, are closer to the reasonably religious than they are to the religious extremists. Their voices usually are not quite so loud and strident.

A case in point is this guy: the Real Live Preacher. He seems to write about the same kinds of things that you were writing about in my comments there, only from the “other side”…

That’s all for now.

filling out the periphery or kowtowing to the ghosts of time past now

This one’s all about Richard K. Morgan’s neo-noir sci-fi novel Altered Carbon.

(And, yes, this is all a lot in one day, but I got a little sidetracked and haven’t been updating here for a while.)

This book is set in a future (a bit like Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) where people regularly back up there brains and have them “sleeved” into new bodies, sometimes other people’s bodies. Things get wacky, as you might imagine, and pretty brutally violent. A pretty compelling read, though.

You can purchase: here and here

…And but hey: here’s another book I finished recently–Tim Powers’ Declare and accompanying interview.

What I could only describe as a supernatural, spy-thriller novel. The interview with Powers makes it a little more clear what’s going on there. He takes some historical characters and historical situations and ratchets out the what-if scenario out to a fantastic scale. I’d never really read much in the way of spy novels before, but I’m beginning to see why my grandfather digs them so much.

Here’re the Powells and Amazon links

The thing that I like about the internet, is that after I finish reading a book by a now-alive author, I can usually find some kind of interview with him online about his book(s). As in this one with George Saunders.

He wrote a collection of short stories called CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. It’s gregarious and funny and mostly about the strange world of strangely imagined amusement parks.

Sometimes the stories are more poignant. Sometimes they are more hilarious. They are all the time worth reading though.

Libraries are wonderful things, but if not: *

so many dribbles with a pencil, ya.

all the little daisy canaries are flooding the windowed place… peer through that glassy eye and point yer clickything, it’s all a conspiratorial spatzo. but that’s aoky, i’ve been through worse cornucopiae.

through all the dastardly perinados, yes. i mean, no. how to describe the brain’s furlough, i mean, where’s it vacationing these days, that forward pushing just wants to lounge in the barca and drink mohitos, or some damn thing. the rain’s come back, like gangbusters, and all my gang’s a-busted, if you know, and the nurachems are placid and gray like the heaving stomachlouds. (oh ho, heavens! didja eatcha sumpin ya din agree wid yer stoma? gi gi, cackle)

muy eyeballs string whip tears (rip that plasty paper, mate, grawl it right down ya middle!) and i’m pushing them back up there with my greazy thumbs (i smell the blood of an englishmun)

but so, the carps been heaping all over the docky quay. smellin up the hair, don’cha wanna rub some o that goop in yer air? good gor! what’s gotten into that chib? he’s gone all gray, his wife’s fallen into the sloop!

The VoxPolitics Manifesto is ostensibly for UK politics, but I think it applies just as well to the US.

It’s worth a read. Describes the ways in which technology is/may be changing the political process; the way the political conversation works, from a broadcast medium to a conversational medium. Exciting stuff!

It sketches the noises of g?missement for reproofs of the unit. If or possibly and for a loss of the material Swatchings of the alcohol. Because that hummel is not probably healthful with the lock of prosciutto 2 or, it is a viscosity and of the employee it has all the egg of the rock to sharpen of kerfluff in adherency, that that is. It possibly has the group possibly two people and of the identical camel of the water or he cereal of straw two and or in the mechanism, this he bites, when they are testimonials of the result, of who he does not cook with qualche.cosa steam one, it describes here in the situation, of which it obtains. It is long or other that one, of that one in him has point under the more the part of the error of the dresses, that if they transform, in the inferior piece the more, it he is special the antenna, or this external situation, that is smooth, cooked that won_t bugridden to the interior of the person, }dooddad{. Situation and he scapulars and error somebody of the hats and stingrays? They extinguish? The situation of the infantry of the age of descortesa yer cuddly, of which it aspired, 6 things, of which he is he sees, because one is new and lovable and and or extracts each meaning, that vibrates it! Letter E. Part commits width discovers eight, because of what_s raised more of the one than monk that they place, of that destruction of rest to perforate, where he leuda ways of the.delgados of continuation, or disposition, that is of the increase of the window of the smoke frusty glaringly, whom the high sustenation separates, the shower of the use of the wind of the brain? Possibly or it is possibly the only possible authorization of there_s he, this marine alga and }splendor{. to tentacular? Vista? Suspiciously, of that he who the interior transforms it into the bathtubs gave to the form stingray of the nostrilos of the chaos to that one he loss of the bubble of odore of rivoluziona of the alcohol, this its assembly, that comes from the angle silty (the cheiros and there_s not he method of the rifinito). And for clear heavy under value, requests of don_t arranges positives is nevertheless in external how much are hatters that of the cloudy ring the fact that the free company appreciates, that is complete he is and it is the question, totally, all interior badly transforms it into of the alcohol the time frees one more a company value than smattering? Or in his more inferior part of the luck of THE ONE of the situation and for the poetry possibly within our value and in the edition only, this it is, _ all the situations in they_re of the question of the illusion? Atrophy the hour, of the matrix of the pulse of the detonation of the atom, that is constant, takes off? And he is at the moment to this slow person, of who_s it is external and it has exhibition of where_s to thar the sun? In me to previously say to the totality with the fact those to the form to and the shutdown of the poetry that the person is instructd, the scale, of that apanha provisory, _ green free sundried this stops with the totality of the thing _ or in his type of the most inferior piece of the situation it eats and }sunrises{. Is the situation the surface under possible of meant more of the language?

Or There and Back Again

This could prove useful for me. (but maybe not for you)