#877 Kafka’s Last Stand- Vagabond

#877 Kafka’s Last Stand- Vagabond

This opens up in New York during a protest on Wall Street. The writer does a great job painting a picture of the intensity and emotions of a real-life street protest. Being at more than my fair share of NYC protests, I immediately recalled all the sounds and smells of such an event.

                     

“The protestors stood their ground, shouting their demands. Some of them shouted because their lack of voice had been building in them, some because their patience had finally run out, some simply because they found that the sound from their throats converted fear into courage.”

Our protagonist was beaten within inches of her life and woken up inside a hospital after three days, only to find she was arrested and facing three years in jail. In the story’s reality, the seventh version of the Patriot ACT she was:

“…charged with 680 counts of seditious conspiracy to overthrow legitimate business interests.”

Without her consent or input, the court appointed lawyer took a plea deal and she is sent to prison and a life of prison-sponsored slave labor. There is a lot in this that is outright hilarious, like calling the prison: Sunny Day Prison, or the punishment program Corrective Retail Operation Confinement (CROC). The latter is a program where those that protest against capitalism are required to work retail jobs to rehabilitate their wayward minds.

Like I said there is a lot of hilarity in this, but then there is a lot of outright terror in them as well. As much satire that is in here, there is an equal amount of truth. These programs and laws, and punishments aren’t all that far off from what happens now in our criminal justice system. Protecting commerce over human rights is nothing new of course. When the world equates capitalism with democracy, being against harmful commerce becomes treason.

Notable Passage: “As long as you could find a way to laugh at the madness, they couldn’t reach you. And if they couldn’t reach you, then they couldn’t beat you.”

Rating: 7-8-8-8 Total= 31

#214 To Hell With Dying- Alice Walker

#214 To Hell With Dying- Alice Walker

This is the final story in this great collection- In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Woman. Reading these slowly, space-out over the course of several months, I appreciated the subtle beauty of her prose in a way I wouldn’t have if I consumed them all at once.

“Mr. Sweet was a diabetic and an alcoholic and a guitar player and loved down the road from us on a neglected cotton farm.”

He liked to play with the children from the area and they loved to play with Mr. Sweet. “Toward all us children he was very kind, and had the grace to be shy with us, which is unusual in grown-ups…his ability to be drunk and sober at the same time made him an ideal playmate, for he was as weak as we were and we could usually best him in wrestling.”

Such a sweet and touching love story, a perfect way to end this collection.

Rating: 9-9-10-9 Total= 37

#32 Minority Report- Philip K. Dick

#32 Minority Report- Philip K. Dick

I have always been a fan of sci-fi but never a true SCI-FI FAN.  What I mean, is that I’ve always liked what I read but was far from knowledgeable about the genre, or its  deep history and influence over culture and technology.   For example, when I was in high school I volunteered to do a verbal presentation about the history of robots, but I still have never read nor seen genre classics like Dune…gasp, I know! 

BTW, here’s a fun fact I remember from that 10^th grade report: did you know that Czech Sci-Fi writer Karel Capek invented the word Robot in his 1920 story Rossum’s Universal Robots (of course the concept of robots came much earlier). "Robot" became only the 2^nd Czech word to enter the English language. Can you name the first? *see answer below

This past year I’ve been reading many SF authors new to me, and of course P.K.Dick is one of those legendary names. For this project, I begin with a collection of short fiction called Minority Report.  I will not compare or mention outside of this paragraph the movie made from this tale, one of three huge blockbusters based on Dick’s work.  Not that this Tom Cruisiest of Tom Cruise movies doesn’t warrant a watch, just that this is a blog about the written word. So by all means have at the film if you wish.

Minority Report posses a classic moral discussion, and one played out in law enforcement and military engagements throughout time…the difference between preventive and pre-emptive action. If you could view the future and see someone commit a crime before it happens, is that person guilty of that crime deserving of punishment?  The world of the MR amazingly has a pre-cognitive program with time-viewing abilities and has answered that question in the resounding affirmative. And it works! 

“In our society we have no major crimes…but we do have a detention center full of would-be criminals.”

There are two ways laws generally work.  They’re either coercive or punitive.  If you refuse to talk to a grand jury for example, you are locked up until you do. That’s coercive. If you steal somebody’s car you are also locked up as punishment, that’s punitive.  The pre-cog program, by its mere existence is somehow both purely coercive and purely punitive.  This world has rid itself of 99.8% of all violent crime, but still has a prison full of people locked up. How can you punish someone for a crime if it was stopped before it happens? That’s where the fun begins.

Since the precog program KNOWS that someone will break the law, that person already HAS broken the law.  The concept of space-time is always fascinating, and making crime prevention the centerpiece of this mind experiment is brilliant.

Unfortunately, readers wanting an in depth discussion into metaphysics are distracted by the story of a power struggle between the two entities that share the precog information. The military wishes to prove that by telling the future criminal the details of their future crime, they change the very existence of that crime.  More importantly, that even the precogs can get it wrong sometimes, and if you can’t actually predict the future 100%, you can’t doll out punishment absolutely…what a concept?  (heavy sarcastic tone)

There are obvious large holes in this story. Precogs can predict someone cheating on their taxes but not the chief of police being framed or a massive military coup? Pre-crime has gotten rid of all violent crime but guns still exist? With the two parties who can see the future fighting it out, shouldn’t the future-reading abilities spin off into some crazy feedback loop of prediction?

I would have loved to see more discussion about preemptive vs. preventive law enforcement, or seen a larger look at The Theory of Multiple Futures which outlines the concept of the Minority Report.

The largest cloud looming over this story, or at least should be is this obvious question:  Why not just lock people up for the period when the future crime was supposed to be committed, then let them go? I guess we're supposed to assume this society has already had this discussion. Fine, then how does a society that allows for zero tolerance on thought-crimes, let the one guy who did commit an actual murder NOT get locked up in the end?

The concepts here are amazing, the story engaging, and the legacy of this work is clear, but in pure story-crafting terms, the execution was somewhat lacking. But that shouldn’t take away the impact that it has had on the genre.

Notable Passages: “Perhaps he was trapped in a closed, meaningless time circle with no motive and no beginning.” 

Been there!

“With eyes glazed blank, it contemplated a world that did not yet exist, blind to the physical reality that lay around it.”

Yup…been there too!

Rating: 7-9-6-10 Total =32

*Answer to question: The first Czech word to enter the English language is Pistol.  Although minor etymology disputes sometimes claim the word arises from French or German words, most historians side with it originating in the Czech language.

#31 Runaway- Alice Munro

#31 Runaway (2004)- Alice Munro

“It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But every once in a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was still there”

Of all the beautiful writing in this piece, this passage stuck with me.  I’ve never read a more poignant description about what its like to be in an emotionally abusing relationship, painfully breathtaking.

And with that, I am introduced to Alice Munro.  A legendary Canadian author, her name is at the top of nearly every list of best short fiction writers, and for good reason.  Runaway, the title story of this collection I cant wait to read more of, is a seamless literary tapestry, emotional but not pushy, grand but no flamboyant.  It’s a piece that stays with you.

Life is hard.  Changing that life, no matter how uncomfortable, unfulfilling, oppressive it may be, is possible the hardest thing we can do.  Carla is the victim of just such a life, but she like many, can’t see the world beyond. She’s poor and lives in a trailer which she philosophically thinks:

“Some people live in trailers and there’s nothing more to it.”

That’s her feeling on most of her life. This is just how it is.  When they were first married and starting a horse farm, she not unhappily saw herself as one of her husbands horses as “a captive, her submission both proper and exquisite.”

The pastoral nature of this piece softens the level of angst for the reader, as her own pastoral setting probably softened her own suffering sometimes.  Their lost goat, Flora, who was put in the stables to calm the hoses was very much representative of Carla, there to calm her angry husband.  But to her husband, Flora was a symbol of freedom he didn’t want Carla to see.  Carla even dreamed about Flora with an enticing Eden-like red apple in its mouth.

There is a lot to this story, themes about anger, about family, about freedom.  Great, great short story!

Notable Passage: *see above

Rating: 10-9-10-9 Total =38

#30 Spew- Neal Stephenson

#30 Spew- Neal Stephenson

I’ve only just stated reading Neal Stephenson this year, having just finished his impressive Speculative Fiction (SF) novel, Anathem. I found Spew in a collection of his notes, speeches, and short writings called Some Remarks.

The Spew is some version of the internet. Like many SF pieces, this deals with human interaction with machines and privacy in some undetermined future reality, or in an alternative current reality (current at least for 1994 when this story was written). In this world our protagonist is a rookie Profile Auditor 1, monitoring people’s lives through their consumptions, trying to win a promotion to Profile Auditor 2.

He ends up profiling a woman who appears to be too normal and follows her to the Hotel where she works. It appears her “normalcy” is as he expects fabricated, as she turns out to be some kind of mid-nineties hacker.

Its reads like one of those Kurt Vonnegut sketches where he delves into human’s meta-relationship with technology.  Just by talking about what we watch on TV, we are in a way studying our own psyche.  There is a fun moment when he is monitoring the front desk clerk monitoring his minibar activity.

This doesn’t really break any ground in the genre, but its still a decent read. Like a lot of Sci-Fi conceptual pieces, once real technology catches up to where the story is, half of the story is lost.  The questions over internet privacy, and some nebulous entity knowing our entertainment, and consumer trends is, of course still very much relevant…and in fact for 1994 is pretty ahead of its time (at least for the non SF community).

The story has no conclusion and doesn’t really feel completed. Like I stated earlier it feels like something from a Kurt Vonnegut notebook, which is praise enough.

Rating: 7-6-6-5 Total =24

#29 The Coming Out of Maggie- O.Henry

#29 The Coming Out of Maggie- O.Henry

It’s O.Henry-Friday again, another week has passed.  I’ve almost spent a month on this short story project, so far so good.

It’s Saturday night in O.Henry’s New York and that means the weekly dance at the local Irish social and athletic club.  Dance night for the ladies and usually fight night for the gentlemen.  Maggie, usually a third wheel for Anna and Jimmy Burns, has finally announced that she has a fella to escort her this week.  The tall strapping young man, Terry O’Sullivan, being a stranger to the club is immediately the envy of all the woman and a target for all the men, especially the Club’s machismo leader Dempsey Donavan. How about those names for turn of the century NYC Irishman? Naturally the two men square off.

“They were enemies by the law written when the rocks were molten. They were each too splendid, too mighty, too incomparable to divide preeminence. One only must survive.”

Turns out that the outsider, having given himself away by breaking the Irish cub’s code of fight ethics by brandishing a knife, is actually an Italian. Gasp.

Word of the day: Encomiums: noun-formal- a speech or piece of writing that praises someone or something highly.

Notable Passage: "And though our tropes of fairyland be mixed with those of entomology they shall not spill one drop of ambrosia from the rose-crowned melody of Maggie’s one perfect night."

Rating: 7-7-6-6 Total= 26

#28 Peg- Sam Shaw

#28 Peg (2006)- Sam Shaw

OK, this is an odd one.  At first it seems like a melancholy story about a young couple failing at marriage after 3 years. “Peg” is a made up fling he creates to make his wife jealous and hopefully kick start a passionate renewal of their relationship. He’s dis-illusioned, she’s closed off, etc. Sure, we’ve seen this before, but then it takes a wild turn to the bizarre and gory.

While out for a walk deciding whether to actually pursue cheating on his wife instead of just pretending to, he comes across a car accident that left the driver decapitated. Feeling helpless himself to do anything useful at such a scene, he couldn’t stop himself from staring at the severed head.  Approaching the head, he looked at its face for a sign of what to do:  “its as if the head had something to impart to him.”

So he takes the head with him…yup.  Suddenly it seems that our protagonist is a psychopath.  I realized it might be time to start reading with a different mindset.  I’m sure I can come up with some parallel or link to what the head represents…his failed relationship, the disappointment in himself. But really I think he’s just carrying around a severed head. 

Well, Mr. Shaw…you have my attention, this wasn’t exactly a home run, but it was memorable. I’ll look for more to read from you.

Notable Passage: I didn’t find anything to post here…but did I tell you that the main character carried around a severed head?!

Rating: 7-7-6-7 Total =27