More Gurdjieff-inspired writings…

Waking Up – Selections – by Charles T. Tart

I don’t have time to do more than scan this right now. He seems to be saying some interesting things about psychology and spirituality. Hopefully, I’ll read this later.

And…. Alex Burns’ dissertation on Gurdjieff: it’s fascinating and resource rich (just check out all that linkage!). I may have read this before, but it bears linking to and rereading, even so.

Molly Ivins is right on…

“Call Me a Bush-Hater” by Molly Ivins

I like that Molly Ivins. She’s got a nice head on her shoulders; some of that good ol’ Texas straight-shootin’; a good dose of that home-brewed Southern common sense:

It is not necessary to hate George W. Bush to think he’s a bad president. Grownups can do that, you know. You can decide someone’s policies are a miserable failure without lying awake at night consumed with hatred.

Poor Bush is in way over his head, and the country is in bad shape because of his stupid economic policies.

If that makes me a Bush-hater, then sign me up.

hiding the good china…

billowing voluminous rage, or maybe some kind of staccato, punchiness… (i should ne’er started drinkin’ coffee again) i’m finding only a great hollowness where my brain used to be and there’s no sixways about it. contrariwise, maybe my brain’s there, but surrounded by a great absence where my body used to be… feeling these fingers quivering like a nervous mirage, popping out for a beer to avoid the clutchy Old Man Winter.

that being…? how am i tapping out these… mandricles… of… and… where’s…?

felt, some kind of caterwauling, some kind of sea-rage. some kind of fabricated remorse (with patterns like you’d find on those paper towels… for what purpose? porpoises? you see>>>!~?) or rather, finding the limits of my capability of expression.

oh, cackles cackles, ho.

it’s like standing beneath a great heaving waxworks, gearworks, ironworks, heaving and scraping and straining and clogging above, it’s heavy earthenwork tonnage breaking the air… only to find the fucking linch-pin pinching beneath the shoe-sole… a brief second of… recognition? awareness? before the whole thing comes crashing down…

or, maybe, old man coyote’s done tricked me into holding up the whole world all by my lonesome.

feeling that futility. feeling that cold awareness, realizing that it’s all been sort of a waste of time. that that whole world’s been holding itself up forever and a day now. what use is that small part of blood spilled from a stone?

hey, maybe i’m just feeling the cold dread: the year’s dying, and the heaving gravestones are looming louder. and soon the whole clock’s going to tick over, in a slightly meaningless sort of way… feel those new year boddings rattle! watch those bloogyres spin and tortle!

item: the eyes feel pinched and swollen: are they red?
item: feel that warm bloom in the cheeks, the first sign of…?
item: this head is bobbling a bit too freely on its neck; starting at imagined sights at the corners of the eyes; watch this jackanapes gallylogging down the hallway!
item: feel the headhair standing; and all those neck hairs curling at some, slow creeping…
item: that knee just can’t seem to stop bobbing…
item: and why are the feet draining into pools of sweat?
item: feel that burning in the core, torso, self: is this rage? or some heated indigestion? and how does a body tell the physiologickal from the neurochemickally-induced alarums?

i’m no fucking hypochondriack. this is getting more difficult (as I said before): the depth of my feeling versus my disability to express same. feel that yawing gulf, that vasty wall. or whatever pit and pool, or snap and dragon that keeps those skeeving kinds apart. or what. or maybe. it’s more like: my disability to safely expunge or exorcise these things from down there, deep in the belly. anyone have a herd of swine i could run off a cliff?… but i jest, satisfying as that might be…

I’ve still been reading, but I got behind…

I’m guessing it was about two weeks ago that I finished reading The Star Fraction by Ken Macleod.

I don’t know what it is about the UK right now, but there’s a lot of neato-keen science fiction coming out of there these days [well, they came out a few years ago, but it’s taken a few years for those books to be published in the States…], popping out of woodworks in all kinds of ways.

SO…. The Star Fraction: a deliriously weird, post-nation state UK, in which the entire country has been fractured (splintered really) into fringe political groups: religious fundies, anarchists, deep earther conservationists, communists, technophobes, technophiles and any other weird fringe political group that you can think of. Add in the heavy paw of the US/UN and a bizarrely separate “Space Command”, whose sole purpose seems to be to defend against the sudden manifestation and generation of computerized artificial intelligence (that is, willing to nuke the planet to prevent it, etc.). The prose is also startlingly lyrical in places. I liked it. And, apart from its occasionally heavy-handed politicking, I think you will too.

You can read some of Ken MacLeod’s more casual natterings on his very own website: highly recommended.

Here’s a Ken MacLeod fan website: it’s spare and lean and just the kind of low-bandwidth websites that I like to see (for all of my lowbandwidth friends out there).

Here’s an interview: there’s an interesting bit about human longevity and fiction.

Another interview: talks about being a kid and Russians in Space, among other things. Me, I had the Challenger explosion… I can see how it would be easier to have a more glamorous view of the Space Race back then.

Another interview. This one starts out rather dull but gets more interesting in the last third.

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