ORP: KW Jeter’s “Noir” part 3: Hoping this prediction for the Church doesn’t happen.

Here are a number of excerpts from a lengthy passage that is incidental to the story, but I thought a very controversial concept:

He turned away from the moldering stacks of papers, and looked over the bishop’s shoulder. On the terminal screen appeared a low-rez image of a stylized human face, without identity or gender. Then a dialogue balloon with tail, straight out of the ancient comic strips, and the words Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
Mechanically, the bishop went about his pastoral duties, hand shifting back and forth across an old-fashioned clickpad, hitting the download-confession button on the screen and waiting as the communicant’s compressed file zipped over the wire. McNihil wondered where it went from there; maybe to the bishop’s storage unit, or passed along some fiber-optic trunk line to the Vatican bunkers. Surely nobody actually read or listened to these monotonous litanies of transgressions. Maybe the anonymity of the confessional booth was maintained by the wire terminating nowhere, the PVC sheath exposing bare metal at the end, connected to nothing, coiled or slackly dangling in the waste-flow conduits below the Gloss. Maybe, thought McNihil, that’s okay, too. A ubiquitous deity would be able to listen in the sewer as well as anywhere else.
The rest of the communion clicked by. On the terminal screen, the bishop moved the chalice icon over to the cartoon face’s open mouth, then the consecrated-host icon. A final tap on the blessing button—log off in peace—and the communicant’s face disappeared, replaced a split second later by the next one in the queue…
He looked away, over to the terminal screen. The confessional and altar-rail images had been replaced by numbers. Percentage statements, in a column headed TRAN and another headed CON; as he watched, the numbers following the decimal points shifted, TRAN going up to fifty-three, CON dropping to forty-seven.
“That’s the direct line from the College of Cardinals,” said the bishop as he scrubbed his fingertip. “Well, except that anybody really can log on and vote. The church has gotten very democratic that way. You have to change with the times.”
McNihil nodded toward the screen. “What’s the big debate?”
“Oh, the transubstantiation versus consubstantiation thing.” The bishop held his index finger close to his eyes, dabbing at it with the wet part of the rag. “It’s been going on for a while.”
“Yeah, I guess so. It was on the last time I was here. And that was years ago.”
“Well, the doctrine of the E-charist is a big issue. Personally, I think the consubstantialists are coming pretty connectin’ close to being Protestants; I mean that’s essentially the Lutheran doctrine of the Real Presence. To say that the body and blood of Christ are present ‘in, with and under’ the electron moving down the wires…” His voice had risen to anger, before he managed to calm himself. “I suppose you can see where I stand on the issue. I mean, it has to be transubstantiation. The electrons are changed into the holy substance, and the communicant is downloading the actual body and blood of Christ.” The bishop waved the solvent-damp rag in his excitement. “If that’s not the case, then really, it’d mean we were just connecting around here.”

ORP: KW Jeter’s “Noir” part 2

Mr. Jeter has reached a skillful level in his writing; I was especially struck by his excellent powers of description. Check out this excerpt:

An Asian storm-front, edge leakage from monsoons on the other side of the circle, drizzled under his jacket collar. He thrust his gloved hands deeper into his pockets as a show of irritated impatience. He’d left a black Daimler do Brasil repro of a 1936 Mercedes-Benz 540K Special Cabriolet C, a one-off historic Sindelfingen design, hunkered down at the mouth of the alley, the machine a top-of-the-line product of the maquiladores on the other side of what had once been the Mexican border. They did good work in that arc of the Gloss; the vehicle’s finish, rubbed to a deep brilliance by the nimble hands of ten-year-olds, glistened as though it contained infinite space, as though a piece of the night sky complete with stars had fallen there.

Or how about this bit of description:

Downscale consumer goods, effluvia from the cheap-‘n’-nastiverse, glittering with an enticing pseudo-life. Which was already dying, even before the tiny microbatteries, lightsucks, and other power sources could be exhausted. McNihil looked at the bright things that he had carried down here, and saw them visibly fading, the little dancing figures hobbled in their paso dobles and quadrilles, slowing down and going inert in hunched-over postures, like a miniature galley of terminal osteoporosis.

Or how about this one side of a dialog:

“Regular enough,” conceded Harrisch. “It’s not just an issue of managing the corporation; you have to manage the customers as well. Which in our case is the world. Or at least the Gloss—not that there’s any other part of the world that matters. What some people at DynaZauber believe, is that if it isn’t L.A., it ain’t shit. That language is a little more colorful than what I’d use. But the agreed-upon principle is the same: the Pacific is the new Mediterranean. The omphalos, the middle of the earth. It has been for a long time. The great middle ocean, the navel, the solar plexus. Who cares what goes on in Kansas or Ulan Bator? I mean, if there is a Kansas or an Ulan Bator any longer.”

Social Philosophy: Comrade Palin (but I like her)

Here is a picture meant to be insulting, but I like the picture and I like Sarah Palin:

ORP: KW Jeter’s “Noir” part 1

Before I move on to Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums”, I thought I’d jump into KW Jeter’s novel, “Noir”. The book has been sitting on my shelf for awhile and since I have enjoyed the cyberpunk subgenre for some time since discovering William Gibson, it was time. I’m still on mind-candy mode in my reading projects before I get back into Dostoevsky’s short stories for my Literary Group for the fall quarter. Another thing that encouraged me to try this author is that when I was reading Philip K. Dick’s biography I noted that he used to encourage younger writers and KWJ was in a circle of writers that spent some time with him. Critical acclaim seems to be positive for Mr. Jeter, so I shouldn’t be disappointed.

The setting of the book is the semi-near future after the Pacific becomes metaphorically an inland sea do to trade, development of Asia, etc. The population has grown and the cities around the Pacific have become so huge that they run into each other and the Pacific Rim connection of cities all gloss together (and are called the Gloss). This story has all the elements of cyberpunk—huge intrusive Mega-corporations, large dichotomies in living conditions between the average poor person and the elite with their corporate minions. Add to this high tech, suspense, industrial murder and espionage, and mercenaries and—you get the picture.

Inside of this setting, the protagonist lives in a film noir world because of the simulation overlays implanted on his eyes. Since I like film noir, I am really digging this book, plus I like high tech and computers, so this is a cool book. The last time my time machine worked I visited 1932, so I like living in the fiction of that era sometimes.

ORP: Jack Kerouac part 6: Some final impressions.

You have got to dig this impression of humanity as Sal and Dean and Stan drive down to Mexico City:

…driving across the world and into the places where we would finally learn ourselves among the Fellahin Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from Malaya (the long fingernail of China) to India the great subcontinent to Arabia to Morocco to the selfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico and over the waves to Polynesia to mystic Siam of the Yellow Rove and on around, on around, so that you hear the same mournful wail by the rotted walls of Cádiz, Spain, that you hear 12,000 miles around in the depths of Benares the Capital of the World. These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore—they had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it. The waves are Chinese, but the earth is an Indian thing. As essential as rocks in the desert are they in the desert of “history.” And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment. For when destruction comes to the world of “history” and the Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before, people will still stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where it all began and where Adam was suckled and taught to know. These were my growing thoughts as I drove the car into the hot, sunbaked town of Gregoria.

And here is an excerpt from the final paragraph of the novel, “On The Road”:

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old,…