Our very own zombie apocalypse virus

Greetings supposedly healthy people of the interwebz. 

Thought I'd jot down some thoughts on the coronavirus going around right now. Well, for starters, let me say that we finally have our very own zombie apocalypse virus! World War Z! Book of Eli! *Insert any random apocalyptic movie!* This is good news for people who love bad news. [Modest Mouse reference]

The one good thing about the virus is that it will bring the world down to Earth, humble them, before everything is turned back to normal. Also, and this is a great good, it just might bring down the entire Trump Presidency. It isn't that the virus is singling him out, it's just that his administration is handling the whole thing very badly. As the late-night comedians joke, "If Trump is in charge of the coronavirus we're all gonna die." Probably the truest and most dark joke I've heard in a while. At least it's funny. I like dark comedy and satire. I'm a Voltaire fan. 

But in all seriousness, the virus will make the world great again. Right now people are stupid, ignorant, and as long as they have their TV, streaming, video games, porn, sex, and beer/liquor, they're content to live their happy little lives not giving a shit about the state of affairs of the world. I'm talking about the average idiots, the biomass. Sitting on their lounger chairs with their potato chips, weed, and beer. This is their only life away from work. Something akin to what Green Day sang about on their critically acclaimed hit album American Idiot.  

The virus will completely decimate the biomass and bring them to their knees. It will humble them. And the entire world. This is just what the world needs in what I would call one of its darkest hours. Ironically what will save them will hurt them and the economy. We don't get to save the girl. Instead, we'll get something like the flu. 

Welcome to the New Dark Ages. This is something of a divine comedy. Somebody should write a book about this period in the world. It will sell like hotcakes. After this period passes the world will be a better place. We will change the world. Or rather the virus will.

Floating Worlds

Floating Worlds is a terrific science fiction novel from 1975. Written by historical fiction writer Cecilia Holland, this is her first and only science fiction novel. The book is about a biracial woman named Paula Mendoza, who at the beginning of the book gets tired of her lame boyfriend, dumps him, and gets a job working for The Committee, a group of Anarchists who help manage Earth's government. This all happens thousands of years into the future by the way, where pollution has decimated the Earth, resulting in humans living protected in domes. 

Enter Styths. Paula's job is to get the Styths to agree to a treaty, which lasts ten years. The Styths are descendants of the first humans on Uranus, except they've changed, they're mutated. They're eight feet tall mutated humans [aliens], that speak a different language, live in a patriarchal society, are disgustingly racist [use the n-word all the time], and are complete savages who raid Mars and enslave thousands of people. They are described as black skinned mutants with long mustaches. Paula's means of getting the Styths to sign the treaty is a bit scandalous. She seduces their leader, Saba, and has a Styth baby by him, goes to live with him on his home planet, and engages in the politics from there.

Saba is a brutal alien. He beats Paula and at one point even rapes her. However, Paula comes back to him in order to do what she wants, which is whatever she wants, whenever she wants it. She's the idea of the female man, she's the perfect anarchist because although she's working for the Committee, she's also working for herself, and for the Styths, all at the same and sometimes different points in the novel. In a sense, we never get to know whats going on in Paula's head, but we can infer from the prose.

Floating worlds has two very important quirks. First, the prose is very short and simple sentences. Second, Holland never explains anything. There's no legendary or epic grand science fiction exposition here. This isn't Man Plus, with its eloquent and long exposition, a book I read recently. She doesn't explain how any of the technology works, the world of the space opera itself, the psychological state and/or feelings of the characters. Instead, we get a point of view of the character told from these short simple sentences that explain whats going on, and the dialogue between the different characters. It's a unique way to write, a very inspiring one as well when you realize that sometimes all you need is to be simple and straight to the point. In a way, this book taught me a new way to approach writing. I realized that technically, I don't have know the scientific facts that exist in the world of science fiction. You could just have incredible technology and just have it work, that's what Holland does here. None of the tech is explained, the characters just use these advanced computers and they work fine without any fine details.

There's space combat, tribal duels to claim the Styth throne, romance, lesbian sex, lots of sex in general, seduction, betrayal, politics regarding gender, race, and class, war, a fallout Earth that feels like the 1970s, contemporary. The ending itself is almost the same as the ending for Schismatrix, which came out ten years later, which is the main character walking away from the entire space opera in a state of experienced zen-bliss? Perhaps something like describes it.

There are many reasons why this novel is important. The biggest reason is that this is a science fiction novel with a powerful female protagonist. Another important female protagonist I can think of is Lady Jessica, of the Bene Gesserit Order, from Dune. Also, this is a space opera on a grand scale that takes place over twenty years. You're going to be going through long reading sessions to finish this novel [465 pages]. However, you get in a rhythm, pacing if you will, when you learn to enjoy the simpleness of the sentences, and the uniqueness of the prose. I can see how the 80's of writers like Bruce Sterling may have been influenced by this. If not influenced then at least definitely aware. Schismatrix Plus comes to mind especially. Lastly, because of the writing style and lack of psychological detail and exposition, this is a very unique science fiction novel, which makes it worth reading, dusting off the 1970's dust and brought into the light of 2019.

I liked this book so much that I ended up buying a used copy from a third party on Amazon for eight bucks. This is going to be one of my prized SF novels on my book shelf. It's so good that I'm planning on reading Holland's historical fiction at some point in the future too. This is a work of great lost art from the '70s, it deserves to be on anyone's book shelf. 

[my copy has this book cover, the original book cover, pictured top]

The Beats

The Beats: A Very Short Introduction by David Sterritt is a cute one hundred and twenty six page book about the Beatnik writers and poets from the 1950s. The lives and works of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S.Burroughs are covered with great detail in addition to Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Clellon Holmes, Gary Snyder, and Kenneth Rexroth. I must also mention LeRoi Jones, Anne Waldeman, and DiPrima too, as they are mentioned near the end.

My dad found the short book at the library and thought it would give me a better perspective on the true Hipsters (not the Arcade Fire fans), the Beatniks, as I formed an interest and I've been reading Kerouac's On the Road, which I found out is one of the most important works to come out of this movement.

I learned that the Beats mostly came from middle class and sometimes even bourgeois background, which gave them the comfortable life, which enabled them to becomes Beats in the first place. You can't become an artist and dissident of society if you are struggling to survive or pay rent. They were mostly white males who explored with sexuality, drugs, and religion. Ginsberg and Burroughs were gay in a time where being gay could get you beaten up or possibly killed. The Beats were avid readers of Oriental religious text, and were heavily inspired by Buddhism. Interestingly enough I had a book on Zen Buddhism that I read everyday for a while until I could understand the hermeneutics  of it. I can leave the gay sex and drugs (especially hard drugs) behind though (lol).

Another important influence on the Beats was jazz music, particularly bebop. Ginsberg had a name for Kerouac's improvisational writing style where he would write and write without stopping, creating the sensation of a saxophone player blowing on the bandstand. I like that very much. I'm beginning to see jazz's influence on literature a lot more now after reading this book whereas before when I was just reading about the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a book by George Lewis) and biographies (Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch), I couldn't see that correlation. But now I see that jazz has an even longer extended reach than I previously thought, interesting indeed.

I especially liked the ending of the book where Sterritt makes a bold universal claim; nearly all the movements that sprang up in recent times owe something in part to the Beats. He makes references to the Tea Party Movement, Occupy Movement, Cyberpunk (of which I am definitely apart of) Movement, and more. In a lot of ways I can see that he's right. In order for various movements to be started people have to reject society in a certain way, to create their own form of society through art, in this case through artistic literary works. It's quite wonderful.

All these writers will be legends in the future. The world won't forget them. It seems as society has become more conservative (the Reagan years and now in the Trump years) the ideas of the Beats have never sounded so universal. Sterritt says that there are Beats (in a different sense) in other countries but especially China, where there are people who are different kinds of Beats that might come to important and historical light in the upcoming years. All interesting things to think about.

Its quite a good book and if you want to learn about these great writers, their works, and the Beatniks in general this would be a great place to start. Very informative, engaging, and most importantly fun to read.

Lastly, learning all this stuff about the Beats makes me realize that most of the young people today who believe that are true outsiders are actually quite conservative conformists. The idea of young people today believing that they are 'different', 'cool', outside of the norms of society is quite wrong. Most of them will never truly be outsiders because they will never have to deal with status inconsistency. These writers did. That's the difference.

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/jack_kerouac_119789

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion. -Kerouac 

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/jack_kerouac_119789

Charles Mingus Beneath the Underdog

I finished this book a while ago and I wanted to record some of my thoughts on the book. Its an autobiographical (with some fiction thrown in, probably a lot) work written by Mingus himself and Alfred Knopf. Charles Mingus is a famous jazz musician, a bass player who is known as a composer and working with Eric Dolphy. I know of him more through Dolphy than his own compositions but his works have great artistic merit and he will not be forgotten because of this.

The one thing to note is that although this book is about a jazz musician most of the book has nothing to do with music at all. Rather, its more like poetry through life itself. We start with a young baby Mingus who's mother is fearful for his life because he'd been dropped on his head. Great opener, "I almost died as a baby."

The book goes on to display Mingus' young life as a youth facing off against bullies, learning to fight and stand up for himself, and most importantly finding love and woman. Oh, yes this guy was a womanizer. To the point that as an adult he was pimping for a while. But he had other and more musical desires. The parts about music mostly focused on the fact that although he was acclaimed as a good composer and had found fame, he was still quite penniless at times. Mingus described "what it feels like to be an artist – actually be it, in a world that is not only trying to stop you being an artist but has tried to stop you being human in the first place." (wiki/Beneath the Underdog)

A stand out story was this part where Mingus is up in Mexico and he fucks twenty Mexican girls within two hours. Definitely fake but still a cool story. The human body definitely can't handle that but the thought of it is sort of interesting. This book had tons of sex scenes in it. It was probably just as bad as Fifty Shades of Grey, except probably worse. There was some really raunchy sexual stuff in the book, things they don't even do in porn because it would be construed unacceptable. These parts of the book, although vulgar to a certain degree, has a certain poetic beauty to it. Is sex really all these things and more? For Mingus sex was of utmost importance. And not just the act of fucking. Its the act of making love that was important. I think that was the best thing I learned from these parts of the book.

The women in Mingus' life were numerous. At one point he was living with two chicks who were devoted to him. He pimped them for a while but eventually quit to focus on music. You get the sense that for him its not about one woman, but an infinite number. And all of them could important to you, not just a fuck. This idea was quite new to me although I've heard of men marrying multiple women in Islam so its nothing new. Interesting to see it in the context of a jazz musician.

Mingus' personality shines through well in this book. He is a man of complexity. He could be mean, angry, racist, gentle, forgiving, and loving all at the same time. Although the book focuses more on his anger and troubled issues I like to think of Mingus as a troubled man who found himself (intellect, art, musicality, and social ingenuity) through music.

If anything I found out about what jazz musicians are really like, not just some white guy's (critics) thoughts on them. And for that it is invaluable. 

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