‘books’

Tom Ellard: Pilots Hate You (2009 Obama Mix)

Friday, March 5th, 2010

Cheesy robot pilots battle for the planet and disco nightlife. You have seen these pilots massed outside travel agents – you know they move when you’re not watching – here the awful truth is revealed at last in high definition. First made in 2004 in standard 4:3, now regenerated at great personal cost from the original source files, extra string and leeches. Special note – the last version had a different president. The choice of current president is simply a matter of accuracy and pilots have no political bias – they hate everybody equally.

Another video that has me thinking of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick.

Trevor Blake: Philip K. Dick

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

On 2 March 1982, author Philip K. Dick died.  It was in 1982 that a friend recommended I read Valis, which I enjoyed enough to read all the rest of PKD’s books.  Eventually I collected around 70 titles by and about PKD.  This was after the film Blade Runner but before Total Recall, which started a wave of interest in his work.  Most of the PKD books I had were first editions I’d bought for next to nothing.

Among the books was Divine Invasions, a biography by Lawrence Sutin.  I read Divine Invasions around 1994.  A detail in this book (confirmed by Search for Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982 by Anne Dick) inspired me to box up all my PKD books and sell them at a loss just to get them out of my house.  PKD loved to get married but didn’t like staying married.  To get one of his wives out of the way, he drugged her then had her committed to a mental hospital.  That freed him up for the next marriage.  This fact overshadowed all the enjoyment I had taken from his books.

This fact hasn’t lost its impact for me, but in 2010 I can also remember my enjoyment of his books.  What puzzles me is something that puzzles me about author H. P. Lovecraft.  Why is PKD forgiven for acts that other authors would not be forgiven for?  It isn’t hidden that PKD did this – why are forward-thinking fans accommodating to him for this while being up in arms over much less from other authors?  Readers (especially those on the left) will rail night and day against an author that uses certain words, or was once a member of a certain group, but who harmed no one.  PKD harmed someone, but, well, he’s so cosmic!

The Chemical Brothers: Let Forever Be

Friday, February 26th, 2010

This video is why director Michel Gondry should be the one to adapt The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Phillip K. Dick to film.

Trevor Blake: Islam in the News

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

The hole where a 16-year-old girl was buried alive by her relatives in Adiyaman, southeastern Turkey.

Robert Tait, Turkish Girl, 16, Buried Alive for Talking to Boys:

Turkish police have recovered the body of a 16-year-old girl they say was buried alive by relatives in an “honour” killing carried out as punishment for talking to boys. The girl, who has been identified only by the initials MM, was found in a sitting position with her hands tied, in a two-metre hole dug under a chicken pen outside her home in Kahta, in the south-eastern province of Adiyaman. [...] A postmortem examination revealed large amounts of soil in her lungs and stomach, indicating that she had been alive and conscious while being buried. Her body showed no signs of bruising.  The discovery will reopen the emotive debate in Turkey about “honour” killings, which are particularly prevalent in the impoverished south-east.  Official figures have indicated that more than 200 such killings take place each year, accounting for around half of all murders in Turkey.

Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Anti-Islam Book Launch Cancelled:

The book launch was scheduled for Thursday at The World Forum, but was cancelled because the director of the venue does not believe he can guarantee the safety of his guests. The book in question is Islamofobie? (Islamophobia?), written by Islam critic and PVV supporter Frans Groenendijk. The PVV, or Freedom Party is an anti-Islamic opposition party led by Geert Wilders. Green Left party member Tofik Dibi, who was to receive the first book at the launch, says he regrets that the conference centre acted out of fear.

Mahmood Delkhasteh, Rapists in Iran’s regime:

Sexual assault against men and women is being systematically used in Iran in an attempt to stifle opposition.

Justin Penrose, Rapist Jamaile Morally in Boiling Oil Jail Attack:

A jailed killer poured boiling oil over another inmate because he refused to convert to Islam. Jamaile Morally, 26 – sentenced to life as part of a gang that raped, tortured and murdered a teenage girl and left another for dead – led two other inmates in carrying out the attack.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Burqa-Clad Robbers Hold Up Post Office:

Two burqa-wearing robbers have held up a French post office using a handgun concealed beneath an Islamic-style full veil, court officials said.

All articles continue at links.  Part of a series that never ends… [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] and etc.  What sort of emotive debate can occur about honor killings?  I fail to see it as an issue with two valid perspectives which can come into harmony through compromise.  I am similarly too morally stunted to support the trial of Geert Wilders for – killing children?  Islamic theocracy-backed rape tortures? Prostelytising with boiling oil?  Robbing a bank?  No, Geert Wilders is on trial for making a film.  Maybe Wilders is lucky – some filmmakers who were critics of Islam in the Netherlands didn’t get to go to trial.  Violence and threats of violence to filmmakers and book authors, multicultural understanding for pedophiles and murderers.  That’s what Islam brings to the table in the 21st Century.  What do you bring?

Karl Popper: Tolerance

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive , and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

- The Open Society and Its Enemies

Robert Spencer: Rushdie Death Fatwa Turns 21

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Most people associate Valentine’s Day with romance, but for Salman Rushdie, I expect it has vastly different associations. On February 14, 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie for writing his book The Satanic Verses – and this death sentence has been perpetually reaffirmed by Iranian leaders, though no assassin has yet carried it out.  It was the first salvo in what has become an all-out Islamic war against the freedom of speech.

Rushdie did not invent the “Satanic verses.” The term actually refers to an incident, recorded in Islamic tradition and referred to in Sura 53, in which Satan, not Allah, spoke through Muhammad’s mouth. The verses that the devil gave to the Prophet of Islam have been known thereafter as “the Satanic verses.”

Article continues.  See also Sura 53, Wikipedia.

Trevor Blake: Passive Cryonics

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

Wikipedia:

Cryonics is the low-temperature preservation of humans and animals that can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine until resuscitation may be possible in the future. Currently, human cryopreservation is not reversible, which means that it is not currently possible to bring people out of cryopreservation alive. The rationale for cryonics is that people who are considered dead by the current legal or medical definitions will not necessarily be dead by future standards – the most stringent standard being the information-theoretic definition of death – and that such people could be brought out of cryopreservation in the future.

Two recent articles at the remarkable lesswrong.com reminded me of cryonics.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, That Magical Click:

Yesterday I spoke of that cryonics gathering I recently attended, where travel by young cryonicists was fully subsidized, leading to extremely different demographics from conventions of self-funded activists. 34% female, half of those in couples, many couples with kids – THAT HAD BEEN SIGNED UP FOR CRYONICS FROM BIRTH LIKE A GODDAMNED SANE CIVILIZATION WOULD REQUIRE – 25% computer industry, 25% scientists, 15% entertainment industry at a rough estimate, and in most ways seeming (for smart people) pretty damned normal. Except for one thing.

During one conversation, I said something about there being no magic in our universe. And an ordinary-seeming woman responded, “But there are still lots of things science doesn’t understand, right?” Sigh. We all know how this conversation is going to go, right? So I wearily replied with my usual, “If I’m ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself; a blank map does not correspond to a blank territory -” “Oh,” she interrupted excitedly, “so the concept of ‘magic’ isn’t even consistent, then!”

Click.

She got it, just like that.

There is a wonderful episode of the radio program ‘This American Life’ on cryonics titled Mistakes Were Made. + I first encountered cryonics around 1979-1980 in the book Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson.  Currently I practice passive cryonics.  My scattered atoms and memories will not necessarily be considered dead by future standards, with no effort on my part necessary.

Andre Breton and Paul Eluard: The Original Judgment

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

Reprinted without permission. From The Immaculate Conception (1930), quoted in What is Surrealism? (1978).

Don’t read. Look at the designs created by the spaces between the words of several lines in a book and draw inspiration from them.

Give your hands to the others to keep.

Don’t lie down on the ramparts.

Take back the armour that you took off when you reached the age of discretion.

Put order in it’s place, disturb the stones of the road.

If you bleed and you are a man, erase the last word on the slate.

Form your eyes by closing them.

Let the dreams you have forgotten equal the value of what you do not know.

I have known a railway signalman, five female gatekeepers, and one male gatekeeper. And you?

Don’t prepare the words you cry out.

Live in abandoned houses. They have been lived in only by you.

Make a bed of your caresses for your caresses.

If they come knocking at the door, write your last will and testament with the key.

Rob sound of its sense; even light-colored dresses can hide muffled dreams.

Sing of the enormous pity of monsters. Evoke all the women standing on the Trojan horse.

Don’t drink water.

As with the letter l and the letter m, you’ll find the wing and the serpent near the middle.

Speak according to the madness that has seduced you.

Wear sparkling colors, it’s not usual.

What you find belongs to you only as long as you hold out your hand.

Lie as you bite the judges’ ermine.

You are the pruner of your life.

Hang yourself, brave Crillon, they’ll unhang you with their That depends.

Bind faithless legs.

Let the dawn stir the rust of your dreams.

Learn to wait with your feet in front of you. That’s the way you will soon go out, all covered up.

Light up the perspectives of fatigue.

Sell what you eat, buy what you need to die of starvation.

Surprise them by not confusing the future of the verb ‘to have’ with the past of the verb ‘to be.’

Be the glazier for the stone set in the new windowpane.

When they ask to see the inside of your hand, show them the veiled planets in the sky.

On the appointed day, you will calculate the lovely dimensions of the insect-leaf.

To expose the nakedness of the woman you love, look at her hands. She has lowered her face.

Separate the chalk from the coal, the poppies from the blood.

Do me the favour of entering and leaving on tiptoe.

Semicolons; you see how amazing they are, even in punctuation.

Lie down, get up, and now lie down.

Until further orders, until further religious orders, that is until the most beautiful girls adopt the cross-shaped decollete: the horizontal beam showing the breasts, the foot of the cross revealing the belly, whose base is slightly russet-brown in colour.

Forgo that which has a head on its shoulders.

Adjust your gait to that of the storms.

Never kill a nightbird.

Look at the convolvulus blossom: it does not allow one to hear.

Miss the obvious goal when you are supposed to peirce your heart with the arrow.

Perform miracles so as to deny them.

Be the age of the raven who says: Twenty years.

Beware of wagondrivers with good taste.

Sketch the disinterested games of your boredom in the dust.

Don’t seize the time to begin again.

Argue that your head, unlike a horse chestnut, is absolutely weightless, because it has not yet fallen.

Gild with the spark the otherwise black pill of the anvil.

Without wincing, imagine swallows.

Write the imperishable in sand.

Correct your parents.

Do not keep on your person anything that would wound common sense.

Imagine that that woman can be summed up in three words and that that hill is a chasm.

Seal the real love letters you write with a profaned host.

Don’t forget to say to the revolver: Delighted but it seems to me I’ve met you somewhere before.

The outside butterflies are trying only to rejoin the inside butterflies: don’t replace, in yourself, a single pane of the streetlamp if it should happen to get broken.

Damn what is pure – purity is damned in you.

Observe the light in the mirrors of the blind.

Do you want to own the smallest and the most alarming book in the world? Have the stamps on your love letters bound and then weep – you have good reason to, in spite of it all.

Never wait for yourself.

Look closely at these two houses: in one you are dead and in the other you are dead.

Think of me who am speaking to you; put yourself in my place when you answer.

Be afraid of passing too near the tapestries when you are alone and hear someone calling.

Wring out with your own hands your body over other bodies: accept this principle of hygiene courageously.

Eat only birds in leaf: the animal tree can stand autumn.

Your liberty with which you make me laugh till I cry is your liberty.

Make the fog flee before you.

Seeing that the mortal condition of things does not bestow on you an exceptional power of lasting, hang yourself by the root.

Leave it up to the stupid pillow to wake you.

Cut down trees if you wish, break stones too, but beware, beware of the livid light of utility.

If you look at yourself with one eye, close the other.

Don’t abolish the sun’s red rays.

You take the third street on the right, then the first on the left, you come to the square, you turn near that cafe you know, you take the first street on the left, then the third on the right, you throw your statue to the ground and you stay there.

Without knowing what you will do with it, pick up the fan that that woman dropped.

Knock on the door and cry, ‘Come in” – and don’t go in.

You have nothing to do before dying.

Trevor Blake: Ethics

Monday, December 7th, 2009

A friend recently asked me for recommended reading on the subject of ethics.  Here’s my reply, along with… “Note well that these are sometimes at odds with each other.  That conflict will help you ask the right questions, which counts more than having the right answers.  I’ve ordered the links from shortest to longest, from one-page comics to entire books.”

“Nice” books…

Tsai Chih Chung: Zen Speaks.
Some examples…
http://www.duke.edu/web/meditation/image/carrying.gif
http://homepage.mac.com/dave_rogers/ZenMtnPaths.jpg
http://c2.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images02/25/l_4c4c6e8e509048599029ac0584e7ec5d.jpg
http://c1.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images02/55/l_370aef5ce1e14275938aff692bae0b58.jpg
http://c3.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images02/66/l_8c90f97ed3d848a99c34f197249d9156.jpg

Julian Baggini: Atheism / A Very Short Introduction.
Chapter 3, on atheist ethics…
http://www.andrsib.com/dt/moral.htm

Epicureanism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism

“Not Nice” books…

Anton LaVey: The Satanic Bible.
Related, but not necessarily in this book…
http://www.churchofsatan.com/Pages/Eleven.html
http://www.churchofsatan.com/Pages/NineStatements.html
http://www.churchofsatan.com/Pages/Sins.html
http://www.churchofsatan.com/Pages/MostPower.html

Ragnar Redbeard: Might is Right.
A sample chapter, the whole thing and where to buy the best edition…
http://www.feastofhateandfear.com/archives/redbeard.html
http://tinyurl.com/ycfb6lx
http://ninebandedbooks.com/?p=329

Egoism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_egoism
http://www.df.lth.se/~triad/stirner/theego/theego.html

Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince

Trevor Blake: My Dream For You

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

Today (25 November) was a special day in the life of Yukio Mishima.  Men, take upon your shoulders now the portable shrine…

When l was small l would watch the young men parade the portable shrine through the streets at the local shrine festival. They were intoxicated with their task, and their expressions were of an indescribable abandon, their faces averted; some of them even rested the backs of their necks against the shafts of the shrine they shouldered, so that their eyes gazed up at the heavens. And my mind was much troubled by the riddle of what it was that those eyes reflected. As to the nature of the intoxicating vision that I detected in all this violent physical stress, my imagination provided no clue. For many a month, therefore, the enigma continued to occupy my mind; it was only much later, after I had begun to learn the language of the flesh, that I undertook to help in shouldering a portable shrine, and was at last able to solve the puzzle that had plagued me since infancy. They were simply looking at the sky. In their eyes there was no vision: only the reflection of the blue and absolute skies of early autumn. Those blue skies, though, were unusual skies such as I might never see again in my life: one moment strung up high aloft, the next plunged to the depths; constantly shifting, a strange compound of lucidity and madness. I promptly set down what I had discovered in a short essay, so important did my experience seem to me. In short, I had found myself at a point where there were no grounds for doubting that the sky that my own poetic intuition had shown me, and the sky revealed to the eyes of those ordinary young men of the neighborhood, were identical. That moment for which I had been waiting so long was a blessing that the sun and the steel had conferred on me. – Mishima, Sun and Steel.

Wikipedia: Yukio Mishima.
Yukio Mishima Museum.
Wax figure of Mishima (where is it now?).
Yukokio (The Rite of Love and Death), a 1966 film by Mishima.
Mishima conducting the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony.
Eirei No Koe (Voices of the Heroic Dead), an LP by Mishima.
Justin Raimondo: Mishima – Paleocon as Samurai.
Stephen Mansfield: A Life Less Ordinary.
… and more.

OVO triumphus for Yukio Mishima for 2008.