Children of the grave

Where has all the militancy gone? The youth of today are docile and weak-spirited. Lured by the forbidden fruit of pop music, clubbing, alcohol, marijuana, video games, Netflix, and pornography. That's where they've gone. Instead of being out there on the front lines being [fighting] as people of means, respectability, and importance. 

You know what I think of most young people my age? As Susan Sontag said of her day in the 1960s, they're a bunch of barbarous yahoos. They don't read, they go out in packs, they buy alcohol at the check out line every day, they drive mommy and daddy's nice expensive cars, depending on them even in their late 20's.  

What we really need is a return to militancy. We need to set some guidelines. There are requirements. People need to do real things in the real world and not be so obsessed with the internet. We need more people to spend less time on the internet. They need to be more productive in the real world instead.  Productive in hobbies, work, and relationships.

The internet has become a master tool of the elite [the tech industry] to make the young docile, weak, creatures of a low nature. All the things that are addicting about the internet are not good for people, yet everybody still thinks its the greatest thing ever made. News flash, it's making you, your family, and all your friends stupid. 

There's a caveat of course. We still need online news for example. That 24/7 news cycle would be ruthless without it. But don't use the internet for everything. Millennials have become so stupid because of their reliance upon this newfound, so-called, great tech. Have you ever heard of something called books? 

You've got to read actual books of substance. Classics of the western canon, philosophy, history, fiction, nonfiction, technical manuals, maps, those sorts of things. Just random articles about things you're interested in are cool but you'll never be satisfied with one article about one particular subject, so what you're going to start reading tons of articles all the time in your free time? Leaders read books. Keep that in mind. 

People might think this is tough and I'm cruel for saying most of the entire youth to thirty age gap in this country are all mindless babies but it's damn true. Without militancy, their minds are easy prey by their parents, their bosses, and their sick, twisted Republican-controlled government. 

The youth of today, if you don't change, you're completely fucked. For some of you its already too late. 

All you children of today are children of the grave.

2020 in our sights

Greetings, readers of the interwebz. 

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I'm glad 2019 is almost over and that 2020 is about to begin. A lot of the chaos stems from political turmoil in America. Mainly, that the President is using the highest office of the land for his own personal political gain. It's infuriating and it's despicable. We have one party in government that is completing undermining American democracy just because the President is 'their' guy. Simply put, it goes without saying that if Obama got caught doing the quid quo pro, he would've been impeached by now. Democrats would've defended him but they wouldn't have defended him to the death like the Republicans are clinging to Trump? Why? Because they have values still whereas the Republicans today lack that. 

The division and spread of hate via politics have become mainstream. People are identified by what 'tribe' they are in. Trump's base versus Americans who think he's undermining American democracy. There is no in-between. We'll have to wait until Congress comes back from their holiday recess to see what will inevitably end up happening regarding the Trump impeachment. Merry impeachment, happy new year, new year, new President? Something along those lines would be nice. 

I got a lot of reading time this year. According to my Goodreads account data, I read 26 books over 11,000 pages. I've spent more and more time each day reading rather than playing computer games or hanging out with friends. Also, I can finally play through Sequenza for guitar by Luciano Berio [though not that well or fast]. That took me about a year to do that. Also, I've finally adjusted to a diet where I eat less food at night and eat less overall, while not starving myself or doing complete fasting. Rather its an overnight fast, fasting when I'm sleeping. I've been playing in a straight-ahead jazz duo for a year straight and I've learned a lot about jamming, jazz, and improvisational music through all those performances and recordings. I've accumulated all my best sound recordings on my Soundcloud and put it out there for the world to hear. I've been working nonstop at the same place for seven years straight. These are great accomplishments. 

When I think of what I was missing out on there are a few things I can think of. In 2020 I want to play more guitar, learn more songs, hang out with more new people and friends, who are more into art/music/literature, as well as write a lot more. I mainly want to write more short stories and develop a short story collection as a novel. I'd also like to finish up on my novella, my memoir, which I started a year ago and sort of finished but didn't edit very well. I want to learn more about technology and science to use that knowledge in my own science fiction stories. Things like that. 

When I think of the world/country/city/general life in general as opposed to my own personal well being/job/friends/family/hobbies/life I would say 2019 had more downs than ups. But I'm an optimistic guy. "It's getting better all the time. Me used to angry young man..." As the Beatles sang life does indeed get better. I get really down on my luck regarding the job and the rising inequality of the middle/lower classes in America but I'm still very hopeful of a better America. Maybe not in 2020, maybe not in five or ten years, but in a future where I'll be older, smarter, and hopefully working an office job. 

I think progressive politics scares a lot of people still because it's associated with the 'dirty' word socialist. However, the way things have gone down in America it only makes sense to start using more socialist policies. In a way, I feel that capitalism has run its course. Of course, it could never be completely abolished. Rather, there would be a future where there are fewer capitalistic systems and more socialist ones. In five-ten years down the line, I could see a guy who has similar policies as say, Andrew Yang, get elected. The old school Republican versus Democrat has just got to go. 

So 2020 is in our sights. Let's all make these last few days of 2019 good. Remember how tough it was this year. For the world in general. And look forward to things getting better.

The Proletariat Christmas

The last two weeks have been pretty rough at the retail gig. The holidays have come and gone, save for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. It's been rough. That's a phrase I've been saying a lot at work. I'm just a little stressed. That's another likely quote. How do you fight back against this stress, this holiday frenzy, eating away at the core of modern American society? 

Well, the thing is, you just have to rise above like the Black Flag song. Inevitably every little thing in our lives affects us at least somewhat on somewhat of a scale. One of the best pieces of advice my manager at work gave to me was, "no matter what happens, just go with it." At first, this sounded to me like a plea of defeat. But then you put it to practice and see how useful it really is. 

There are two kinds of customers in retail work: assholes and friendly people. There is no in-between. You might think you're a tough guy and that nothing anybody says to you can ever affect you but in reality, every interaction we have affects us in some way, however small, or large.   

Think of all the people you've met in retail work [if you work in retail] that you've ever had contact with.  Most of it is overwhelmingly positive, at least for me. I'm pretty much something of a celebrity at my job, just for the sheer fact that I'm a unique personality [I talk a lot to people about books, music, guitar] that people never forget me and want to talk to me more the next time they come in. I think that it just shocks people that I'm a big black dude that shreds the guitar like Hendrix and reads Heidegger. They will never meet a black man quite like myself ever in their entire lives. In that sense, I'm something of a novelty. The other side of it is the depressive, melancholy that comes with the retail experience. 

A large chunk of that melancholia would be bad interactions with customers. Customers who are overwhelmingly rude, customers who want to take advantage [return things with no receipt, demand cheaper prices, yell if it doesn't go their way, etc], upper management that tries to tell you how to do your job even though you've been working there longer than them, and the rest is just low-level grunt work that gets old fast.

There's also a sort of late-night depressive side of retail. When you work 430pm-1am 5 days a week for seven years straight you start to find that you're thinking more about the darker side of life at the later hours of the shift. Ironically it's at these hours that I feel the most awake, the most alive, in a sense. When I come to realizations. 

But wait. Here's the good news. This is happening to other people too. Not just you. The modern American workers need to rise up in solidarity. The middle-class, upper-middle-class, and rich people with their nice cars, their mocha frappuccinos, their office jobs, and their gym memberships know nothing of the true struggle of the proletariat.  If it were up to them they would stay rich and you would stay poor, indefinitely. And if you don't recognize this truth, then you aren't one of us. 

This is why it is so important to have a worker's movement in America. The modern American worker is losing so much right now. The rich are so happy with their fancy video games, their pornography, binge-watching their favorite Netflix TV shows. They know nothing about what it's like to be a true proletariat. 

The next worker's revolution is coming sometime. There will be no video games, pornography, or Netflix in it. 

The revolution will not be televised. Say goodbye to the bio-mass. 

Hainish Cycle [Trilogy]

Finally getting back to more book blogs. I just finished reading the third book in Ursula K LeGuin's Hainish Cycle, or trilogy in this case. Her other novels in the Hainish universe are much different from these, her first three novels. I'll describe each novel's plot and simply tell you my thoughts on the works in and of themselves, and then what I think of them as a whole. 

Rocannon's World

Rocannon's World is Ursula K LeGuin's literary debut. It's a science fiction space opera with heroic fantasy elements. Other alien races are similar to fairies and gnomes, who wield swords and axes. The word "ansible" for a faster-than-light communicator, was coined in the novel. The term has since been widely used in science fiction. 

The story begins with a prologue titled Semley's Necklace, which is about a woman who travels to a primitive planet to recover a family heirloom. However, her husband and daughter aged so much while she was on the trip, that when she got back they were dead. It combines Rip Van Winkle fairy tale [a person goes off with dwarves for a short bit, only to find that generations have gone by] with modern [the 1960s] science fiction elements.   

Rocannon is an ethnologist space operator turned warrior turned mystic god. The story has fantasy elements, especially the dialogue of the alien races being similar to the dialogues of fairies and elves in fantasy novels. Also, the idea of the impermasuit, a suit that makes the wearer invulnerable as long as he's wearing it. This seems like a now-classic fantasy trope. The characters ride on flying winged beasts. Rocannon learns how to Mindspeak [Le Guin's idea of telepathy in the Hainish universe], calls his human allies from the League of All Worlds to help him destroy the enemies' base, but because he's telepathic he feels the death of hundreds of his enemies, making him sorry and traumatized.

The first Le Guin novel is stunning. It's short, simple, straight to the point. The writing is simple but not too simple. It's still got the deep meaning behind the text. In this case, we're talking about Le Guin's primary ideas coming out for the first time in novel form. The idea of anthropology for one thing. One great civilization from outer space comes to some other faraway planet, only to find primitive aliens living in the Bronze Age. The idea of the cargo cult. Some evildoers are enemies of the League and then there are good guys like Rocannon, and then there are all the gray areas that would naturally appear. Considering this came out in 1966, I would say its an important book to read in the science fiction canon. Must read science fiction actually. 

Planet in Exile 

Planet in Exile also came out in 1966. The story is set one Werel, the third planet of the Gamma Draconis system. The planet is about to through its long winter. The planet has an orbital period of 60 Earth years. Wold, a chieftain and his daughter Rolery are humanlike aliens indigenous to the planet. Jakob Agat is a young man from a dwindling human colony. Although both races have human genes, the differences between them are enough to prevent interbreeding. The main point A to be B here is that the two races have to come together despite a dispute between Rolery getting involved with Agat, which is forbidden to Wold and his people in their culture. There are invading alien creatures, the Gaal, that aren't hilfs [LeGuin term meaning high intelligence life forms] that take them to war. 

Planet in exile plays back on the action that is at the forefront of Rocanon's world. In fact, the siege part where they're defending their city from the invaders doesn't focus entirely on the action and fighting. There are a few gory moments and descriptions but it's downplayed heavily considering they were at war. 

What Planet of Exile does bring more to the picture is the extension of the LeGuin aesthetic; anthropology, space opera, and believe it or not in 1966, feminist overtones. This novel focuses more on the ecology of the planet itself [something science fiction fans got for the first time from Frank Herbert in Dune]. There is a lot of exposition about the native animals, plants, and races here. 

Also, this is the first time that Le Guin writes a powerful sympathetic female character. Rolery isn't as powerful or as important as Agat, rather it's something of a Pocchahantas story. However, it was a push in the direction she would inevitably take. To write feminist science fiction space operas like The Left Hand of Darkness where she goes more into female identity, gender, sex, and equality. Sure, Planet of Exile is sort of conventional in terms of female characters, but it's also so early in the science fiction canon that it can't go unmentioned how important Le Guin's female characters were even as early as her second novel. 

City of Illusions

City of Illusions came out in 1967 and lays the foundation for the Hainish universe, where most of Le Guin's novels take place. 

The story takes place 1200 years after the Shing has broken the power of the League of All Worlds and occupied Earth. Humans are alive, living as nomads and in small tribes. The Shing suppresses human civilization with Mindspeak, telepathy, and the ability to mind-lie. A descendant from the characters from Planet in Exile is involved in a spaceship crash. The Shing mindwipe him, leaving his mind a blank slate, tabula rasa. They throw him in the forest left to die as practically an infant. He develops a new identity and tries to find out who or what he is. 

I finished this novel today and find it to be the weakest of the three in terms of plot but the strongest in terms of character identity. Falk is a powerful sympathetic character. This novel is primarily about the inner psychology of the main character. Not unlike Frederic Pohl's masterpiece, Man Plus. It's not about action, it's about the soul. That's what matters here. 

The weakest part of this novel for me was the Shing themselves. They were supposed to be a race of Hitlers but they were portrayed as practically harmless. It was laughable in certain aspects considering that all the humans on Earth live in fear of them and animals have learned to talk because of them. The problem was that they were not convincingly evil. For one thing, they do not kill and have an oath about it. A group of 'bad guys' who don't come off as really all that bad is the death of a novel. Keep in mind that it's very hard to write a group of bad guys in novel form. Most of the time there are one or two bad guys in a novel, but a whole race? That's pushing it. This is why the idea of the literary Satan is usually left for poetry and drama.

LeGuin makes use of her own Tao Ching here. She creates a book for the humans that is basically their bible. It's important and was before and now a staple science fiction trope. I also liked how the humans on Earth 1200 years into the future were all nomads, barbarians, savages, yet there were still some peaceful ones living across the apocalyptic wasteland. It reminded me of Fallout 4. Of course, only in retrospect could someone [a video gamer] say that.  

In short, these three novels got me back into my science fiction readings. Le Guin strikes deep with her science fiction. As a whole, the work comes across as a vast cultural societal experience. Le Guin's work makes me think more about the bigger picture. Who really are the good guys in the world? Who are the bad guys? Who are we? What am I? I've already ordered Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven and The Dispossessed [also in the Hainish cycle]. For now, I'm reading a modern 2013 new verse translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Watch this space.

It's the holiday season

Howdy, yall? Thought I'd write a short post late tonight. I haven't been writing much. Not because there's nothing to write about. I've been sick this whole week straight. I'm actually still sick but am in recovery mode from a serious cold. It started as faint flu-like symptoms earlier in the week and lasted the entire week until today...Sunday. 

Sunday Funday, as they say. I'm going in for a late 1am shift again. But this time I won't be sick. So I'll be more up to it. Have a better attitude and all that jazz. Although I haven't been writing as often I've been busier than ever. 

I've been playing a lot of guitar for one thing. Practicing Sequenza by Luciano Berio as well as my improvising skills. I took a break from the jazz duo jam session this week because I was sick but we will resume this upcoming week. 

For another thing, I finished a book in a single day today on my day off from work. I finished reading Ursula K. LeGuin's second novel, Planet in Exile, the second book in her Hainish trilogy cycle. Her first three novels. I'll probably write a post about all three books when I'm finished. Also, I recently finished reading Susan Sontag's second collection of essays entitled Styles of Radical Will. What a transformative informative read that was. 

I haven't even started on any holiday shopping but I'll get it done on my days off later this week. It's truly the holiday season. This time of year always reminds me of Paul McCartney doing that Christmas song, "Simply having, a wonderful Christmas time." Great tune, Paul. 

The job has been really tough this week with the flu/cold. I really wanted to call out four times in a row but sometimes you gotta tough it out and go with the flow. Especially when you need that holiday pay for Christmas gifts.  

I've been listening to a lot of straight-ahead jazz. That's been my spirit music for the longest now. I've given the 60s rock and roll a break. Too much Mothers of Invention and The Beatles. There's only so much Sgt. Pepper, Freak Out, Revolver, and We're Only In It For The Money I can take.

I've ordered a bunch of great books that I plan on reading soon. The list includes Sontag Under the Sign of Saturn, Dante Divine Comedy, Kant Critique of Pure Reason, Kushner Telex from Cuba, Goethe Faust, and more. I want to read more science fiction as well. Perhaps more LeGuin, say, The Dispossessed, or the Lathe of Heaven, heck, why not both? 

As a result of all this reading, my computer time has dwindled down to maybe an hour a day or just not at all. I don't even really play computer games anymore. There's just not enough time in the day if I want to read, play guitar, and go to work. 

That's the end of this one. Happy holidays!

The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 stories running over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. Chaucer was appointed Controller of Customs and Justice of Peace, and in 1389, Clerk of the King's work. It was during this time that Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales. He was a court poet that wrote for nobility.

Although Chaucer wrote other works it is Canterbury Tales that is considered his magnum opus. He uses the stories within stories to satirize, and paint a critical and ironical picture of English society of the times. The fact that all the characters in the story are all from a cornucopia of social classes was something fairly new to English literature. Even poorer, more lowly classes could still call out a more noble, character, like a knight, and stop them mid-story, to criticize and tell their own story instead. Because of all the characters here are on a pilgrimage, they are all concerned with everything spiritual. The work itself is considered incomplete especially considering that all the characters didn't get to tell their stories. The work is generally opened to a lot of different interpretations. 

Canterbury Tales is a sort of stories within stories. We have some 30 pilgrims at a tavern. They are all on pilgrimage to St. Thomas Beckett's Shrine. We have our host proclaiming, "Tell your best stories. The one who tells the best story shall have a feast here when we get back and I shall pay for it." Needless to say, everybody from the knight to the parson tells a story. Some are short, some long, some serious, some jokey, some holy, some about love, some about chivalry, some epic like the knight's tale. What's interesting is that other characters interrupt and/or stop some stories by calling them out and criticizing them [regardless of social class or wealth], sometimes thereby starting their own tale.   

I enjoyed the knight's tale the most. It opens the book and gets the reader acquainted with the style of the book. Two cousins, Palamon and Arcite, both knights are in prison and they chance upon a beautiful woman, Emily from their cell windows. They both claim her but they both can't have her. They end up having this epic duel with 100 warriors on both sides. Palamon is wounded by a chance sword thrust from one of Arcite's men, leaving Arcite the victor, but then Arcite is mortally wounded by his horse throwing him off and falling on him, leaving Palamon to marry Emily. The story is epic and intended to be. The next story is an antithesis to this knight's tale of courtly love and chivalry. In the next story, the miller's story, it is about regular people in love and is more lowbrow.

As stories go, none of them are especially terrific or satisfying in my opinion. In fact, I didn't start to thoroughly enjoy the book until at least 150/484 pages. Why? Because I was expecting the stories to be more thrilling. What I found out was that as I read farther on, the stories didn't become particularly more interesting, rather, my thoughts on them changed. I began to find seemingly unimportant yet realistic stories for the medieval time, to be fun. How, why? I'm not even quite sure. Like I said I didn't get into the book until nearly 150 pages in. In fact, I found the constant rhyming going on nonstop to be quite jarring to get used to, especially considering the format is poetic but of an especially non-epic quality. Homer is forgiven for constant rhyme but I wasn't so sure about Chaucer. Consider the fact that most of these archaic works of literature that I've read have been epic, think Aeneid, Odysee, Iliad, Beowulf, Gilgamesh, Divine Comedy, so when you come to Canterbury Tales from all that you just say to yourself, "where's the action?" That was what made Canterbury Tales so hard to get into for me. Eventually, the text speaks for itself and you see how great and important it really is. For me, it took a while to sink in.

It is believed Chaucer got a good deal of his ideas from other literary works. But no other works of literature featured pilgrims telling tales together. In that sense, he's a true visionary. Harold Bloom says the text is mostly original but the idea of the host, a "master of ceremonies" was derived from Dante and Virgil in the Divine Comedy. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio is most similar to the Canterbury Tales than any other work. It features a cast of characters telling stories as they flee from the Black Death. It is believed that Chaucer might have known him.

The tales themselves usually center around a single theme, mostly religious. However, the themes here aren't necessarily all religious or set. They're dependent upon the characters themselves and they don't speak in any sort of hierarchy. The passage of the time, or any traveling what so ever, or even locations along the way, is never mentioned. Rather the stories themselves are all that is spoken of. 

The version I read was a modern English translation, translated by Nevill Coghill. His translation is very smooth, breezy even in the most difficult of circumstances. Considering this is almost a 500-page book, the modern translation reads almost like modern-day. Of course, it really doesn't. What I mean is that it's very smooth as opposed to old medieval English. The words used sometimes can still be complicated and I did still have to look words up online at times. Another thing that must be said about Canterbury Tales is that a lot of the lines rhyme and they are definitely in poetic verse. Sometimes the rhyming gets overwhelming. That's typical for a lot of the 14th-century prose. But overall, for my first Canterbury Tales experience, the Penguin Classics modern translation was very good. I'll try reading it again in the future, but a different translation. I would recommend this book to anyone: students, writers, readers who like the western canon especially. A "do not miss" book.