SRF Heavy Industries

What has me worried is that these guys typically hatch out of an egg case with literally hundreds of brothers and sisters. Are the rest of them simply hanging out under the bed?

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Sometimes I feel like an animal, some kind of clever monkey maybe, scurrying up out of the forest and slipping into an abandoned manor house. There are dishes and furniture and clothes and tools and beds and all kinds of domestic accoutrement lying around. I slip into a bedroom and play in the dressers and closets until I find stuff I like to wear, then I slide down the banister, swing along a series of chandeliers and wall sconces, grab armloads of whatever looks fun from the pantry and fridge, grab a plate to put it all on, and head for the formal dining room. I sit crosslegged on the table and chow down. Afterward I grab a brandy bottle from the liquor cabinet and a cigar, both too complex for my palate, snatch an incomprehensible book from the shelves in the library, and drape myself across an overstuffed chair, drinking and smoking and pretending I can understand the book in my hands, where I am, what I’m doing.

I’m not alone in the house for all that it’s abandoned. There are bunches of other monkeys in here, screeching and flinging things around and sitting calmly and doing whatever else they think will make them look human. Monkeys come and go, scampering out into the woods and coming back, bringing friends, making messes, tracking in dirt, grabbing mops to swab ineffectually at the carpets…. It’s chaos, but charming and goofy, like those apes in the TV shows from the early 70s, dressing up like people and trying to do people things.

This is what it’s like, having no history, no culture, no race, no story of which I am an undeniable continuation.

Thanks to literature, history is all around me. Thoughts and impressions and experiences and stories and fables and myths. Bunches of everything, all in a jumble. But none of them are mine. I can dress up in any of them and pretend that they fit. All I’m doing, however, is offending the actual owners, who are all, like, what’s that ape doing in my tuxedo? and wishing they had better locks on their doors and windows.

Sometimes I don’t particularly feel like a jumped-up chimp in a stolen tuxedo, but I sure as hell get looks from other people, particularly those who own some history and culture, that tell me that’s how they picture me.

It wears on me a bit.

Everywhere I go, I get the “you don’t belong here” look. Or people try to sell me drugs. Or people watch me like a hawk in case I decide to shit in my hand and fling it at them. And I’m not the only one they’re watching. But the other baboons in my troop, we’re hardly a family, a culture. We’re marauders. From the French word for tomcat. More competitors than comrades.

Is there any compensation for being rootless, you think? For having no history, no culture, no tradition, no people among which you’d instantly fit in on sight and be welcomed?

Maybe if you plan to milk it. If you want to buy in fully to being an invader, a foreigner, an alien, a virus. A clever monkey.

I’m reading a book that reinforces these feelings. This book, published post-Gulf War I but pre-Gulf War II, discusses the collapse of the intellectual movement in Arab civilization in favor of the fundamentalist revolution. I’m reading the events and forming my own conclusions, and those conclusions don’t give me the warm fuzzies.

Without spending too much space on it here, I can see it as possible that a similar fundamentalist revolution can happen here in the US and in the Western World for the same reasons it happened in the Arab world.

There are a bunch of links in the chain of reasoning. The summary is, though, that as resources dwindle and fear increases, people turn more and more to thoughts of comfort and defense. The unknown is not comforting. Outsiders are not comforting. Belief in a God that will take care of you is comforting. Ritual is comforting. Warfare is comforting, because you know that there are brave souls out there defending your resources and guarding the borders from raiders and marauders. Revolution is comforting, because under the old batch of rulers there was fear and uncertainty….

I’m afraid, too, but I have no wagons to circle. I’m on foot. I’m not a member of any culture that has behavior modes to force on me so I’ll be recognizable as friend instead of foe. Are three militant southern writers that will burst into my house periodically and make sure there are empty bourbon bottles stacking up?

I wish.

The “what if?” people, the speculators, the ones who are more aware of what they don’t know than sure of what they couldn’t possibly know, these are the ones that get locked up as dangerous, the ones that get exiled or killed.

It’s not that I predict that an anti-intellectual revolution is going to happen. It’s not that I predict that if it does I’ll be one of those up against the wall. I just see that conditions are ripening and I’d hate to see it happen here. And how can you make me believe it couldn’t happen here when everywhere it’s happened there were people who believed that no one could bring an army through town that would break into museums and smash statues and break into schools to burn textbooks?

Just ask yourself, not whether, but where that kind of thing could happen. Ask yourself who would have to be in charge so that that kind of thing would get nothing more than a slap on the wrist or not even that, because “community standards” are what dictate what’s obscene and what isn’t. And then ask yourself, what happens if it happens once and people get away with it? What laws would uphold sanity? What courts? What judges? Where would it happen next? And where would it happen after that?

All this makes me wonder how to found a tribe of militant intellectuals that’ll sweep through backwards rural hellholes and erect museums and universities and drag veiled women out of their houses and put them into schools, that’ll survey a neighborhood to see what religions aren’t represented and build the missing churches and temples and mosques and bus in their believers, that’ll have an armed party member in every Sunday School and elementary school making sure the curriculum includes exercises in logic and debate and critical thinking and a reading from at least one science journal every session.

Would this tribe accept me, even? Or would I just be another ape in a beret wielding a machine gun I happened to find lying around, smoking stolen cigars and secretly wearing my Chimp Guayabera shirt whenever I thought I could get away with it?

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So I have three business plans to write. I’ve downloaded a handful of templates, ranging from sixteen pages to more than twice that, and, of course, they’re mostly blank. When I’m done they’ll be mostly blank anyway, so that’s okay.

I decided to let them sit there and get blanker for a moment while I took a break to read Project Gutenberg’s somewhat spastic copy of “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” by Mark Twain.

God Bless Project Gutenberg, but there are some things that don’t render well to straight 8-bit ASCII. Also you should never trust any optical character recognition software to produce a text file without adult supervision.

With that as a caveat, I’ll sum up my impression of Twain’s work by saying he goes on for a bit about how Cooper, specifically in Deerslayer and other works of his “leather stockings” series, demonstrates an execrable ignorance of how to tell a story, how to devise and represent a character, how people actually talk, and how to choose the right word to convey his meaning. Cooper also, according to Twain, lacks any knowledge of or respect for Native Americans, woodcraft, watercraft, guncraft, marksmanship, and battlefield technology and operations–for all that his stories plots hinge on and revolve around such fields of knowledge–and obviously felt research to be either a waste of time or beneath him.

In fact, Twain himself can be summed up by the phrase “goes on for a bit.” Not that he’s not amusing. He’s just unfortunately dated by his assumption of literacy and attention-span in his readers. Or maybe things haven’t actually changed all that much since Twain’s time and he was just hopeful. Or not inclined to shut up no matter what he thought of his audience’s capacity to keep up. Or, like many others of his era, paid by the word, not the work.

It’s one of the reasons poetry is no longer published in magazines, that “paid by the word” thing. Speaking as a future publisher of poetry, I hope to find a better model for paying contributors. Speaking as a scientist, I’d much prefer to strap a handful of representatives of the target audience into MRI machines and pay contributors based on the amount of difference between before and after brain scans, regardless of the length or format of the piece contributed.

If a piece can’t change your mind even a little bit regardless of the wordcount, what’s the point of me showing it to you? What’s the point of you seeing it? But if it is capable of changing your mind, why should I pay less for a poem than for a story that’s a longer diversion but of lesser importance?

Why not pay full price for the best novel Hemingway ever wrote (according to himself), of which the text, in its entirety, is the following: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” That has some impact, doesn’t it? If so, then what’s wrong with paying $25 for a hardback edition? $15 for a trade paperback? $8 for a mass-market edition? $5 for the Cliff’s Notes? $10 for the movie starring George Clooney and Scarlett Johansen?

Because if we’re not paying for impact, for what you carry away from the experience, then we’re paying merely for the length of time we don’t have to think about something else other than what we’re reading. We’re paying for the escape from ourselves.

Not that an escape doesn’t have some value, I admit it, but as commodities, escape versus impact … well, one of them is sadder than the other. I’m just sayin’.

Maybe for poetry, I’ll just drop in enough blank pages to stare at afterward so readers can think about what they just read without having to put the book down, and I’ll pay the poet based on the thinking space the work warrants.

Or maybe I’ll just put in those blank pages from my business plans.

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Anti Thoughts    Dustin Grovemiller

There’s a great deal of iconography associated with the Easter holiday, but what happens when icons get crossed with basic food stuffs?

Gently With A Chainsaw    Leigh Sholler

Leigh’s off to camp! Yay! What? It’s an army camp? Oh… uh, okay. Maybe not “yay,” then… and it’s Japan? Geeze, this is really not what we signed up for.

Just the Right Bullets    Adam P. Knave

And now, perhaps, do we see the inner workings of Adam’s desire to write?

Keep Out of Direct Sunlight    Shannon Bayleff

Quite surprisingly, this is one only two pieces on this update that has to do with April Fool’s Day. That alone should encourage you to read it, but as extra incentive, there’s also nudity.

Letters from Heck    Laszlo Xalieri

As the other half of the April Fool’s Day duo, Laszlo soberly provides a list of things that aren’t all that funny.

Pure Lard D.J. Kirkbride

It’s been years in the making, but finally we see the results of D.J.’s most honest, up front, and true-to-form work.

Reality Is What You Make It    John Belden

Herein lies a discussion on the topic of awareness — just because we’re aware does it mean that we pay attention?

Tales of the Workin’ Girl    Krystal Thompson

Krystal makes a entry into her diary, airing all her feelings about her unusual house guests.

The Truth of the Matter    Ryan Dilbert

Dude, that’s some awesome ink — where’d you have it done?

Spoiler Warning    Banter about movies

Whitecliff and The Kirk — our own answer to a wacky 70s buddy vehicle — take a look at Wonder Boys.

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