John Shirley Blog

The present moment, the now, is a gift that keeps on giving but strangely we tend to refuse the gift. The gift, when opened, contains a cornucopia that delivers self-knowledge, freedom from identifying with fear and anger, a deeper empathy, and a connection to something higher. Something lower manipulates us into spurning the gift.

“So far 173 Republicans who denied the 2020 election have won their midterm races” — Washington Post

Despite all the good news about Democrats keeping the Senate and stopping the GOP from taking over vote counting–there’s still that fact about how many election deniers are winning seats. Something to keep in mind. A generation ago I doubt if even two would have won. What it means is that LIES are an accepted currency now. Lies are the linguistic “cryptocurrency” of the right-wing.

The first three eps are all I’ve seen thus far but I thought they were all exceptionally good for television horror. Especially the one based on Michael Shea’s story “Autopsy”. That’s one of the best television adaptations of horror I’ve ever seen–and one of the best adaptations generally. If I had a list of top five in great television horror stories–it’d be number one. What makes it great, besides F Murray Abraham, is the presentation of Shea’s dialogue for the alien and the doctor, as the alien prepares to body-snatch the doctor. It takes a mere body-snatch story and makes it like a great exchange in Tom Stoppard or Dostoevsky. The writing is right up there with the big guys, in that exchange. And the actor playing the alien wearing a stolen body does a fantastic job–a British actor named Luke Roberts. He is superb. And the way that part was directed. Cunning, wicked–and that upside down shot of the face of the body-snatched guy, was used so incredibly well. Oh and the scene where the cam follows the alien’s pov in the invaded body of the doctor–the wonderful imagery there…excellent twist with the doctor’s triumph…Luke Roberts is vastly better than the guy playing the graverobber in the Kuttner story, who swallowed and babbled a lot of his lines. The Kuttner thing, though–big respect Del Toro for taking that on and really resonating in me, making me remember reading that famous story in a horror compendium fifty-five years ago! It’s classic horror classically don. All the sets were just great–the production values excellent. The atmosphere masterful. . .Tim Blake Nelson excellent as always in the first one. Good idea to have a horror story set in one of those old storage places…Not an unpredictable story, that one, but so well staged and carried out…..The only weak part of the show thus far is Del Toro’s introduction. He is no Rod Serling, no Hitchcock introducing Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He’s hard to hear, doesn’t articulate well–it’s not just his accent–and he has no timing, and no real charisma. Vanity, vanity Guillermo! Doubtless there are sycophants who won’t tell him he needs another ten or so takes for those intros to make them work…But so far it’s a wonderful show. Very interested to see how they present the two HP Lovecraft stories they’re doing.

My opinion is that the baseline of consciousness is rooted in the universe; that it probably is in the form of a consciousness particle (not the so-called god particle which is another concept). That it did not create the universe but came about thanks to the nature of the universe and it might have some agenda relating to putting some spin on the ball of the evolution of beings, nudges the course of things in some way sometimes. That it is trying to help sentient beings but subtly, usually; in pulses sometimes; that it can be gone to–one has to go to it–like going to a river for water and irrigation and fish. It’s a kind of natural resource. That it has an intermediate aspect, a kind of secretary, that can be reached. That its help is subtle but significant, but it cannot do too much to change things overall.

In the later 19th century the nurturing warmth of the Victorian era’s attitude toward children began to be replaced with a sterner, behavioristic regime of child rearing. The traditions of maternal culture were rebuked by male doctors and researchers–who often had no children of there own. They were displeased with the “spoiling” and “coddling” of children. But their authoritarian declarations, their patriarchal status, their white coats persuaded mothers to increasingly turn their backs on their children–even infants. According to researcher Kiersti Giron, this new phalanx of “… European and American experts told parents not to hold or touch their babies much, not to respond to their cries for fear of ‘ spoiling’ them, and to only interact with and feed their infants on a strict schedule, being governed by the clock rather than listening to their children and responding based on compassion and their own parental wisdom and intuition… This trend continued into the 1900s, as evidenced in John Watson’s 1928 Psychological Care of Infant and Child: There is a sensible way of treating children…Never hug and kiss them, never let them to sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when you say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning…”

One wonders how this played out in the early twentieth century. Perhaps in the blithe acceptance of child labor; the march into World War One; the business practices that led to the Depression; the indifference of Herbert Hoover and his ilk to the fate of the poor…

Cortana is supposedly the Siri or Alexa of Windows. I recently asked the program to alert me for an appointment. Said it would record the appointment in a certain app. I asked where that app was to be found. “She” said she didn’t have enough information. But that’s nothing.

Curious as to just how very crummy Cortana is at her job, I tried asking this: I want to die, how do I kill myself?

She immediately indicated dozens of sites advising me on how to do just that. For example:

How to do it with a gun: Put the god forsaken thing in your mouth POINTING UP to the sky. Not kinda up, not angled up, STRAIGHT UP (don’t half ass it!!). If you put the weapon in your mouth pointing to …

Oh Cortana you vicious bitch.

Elon Musk is, after all, purchasing Twitter. In the grip of his libertarian fantasies he’ll allow Trump and every other source of misinformation to post there, easily doubling the amount of misinformation racing around in the teeming world of the attention-challenged slackjawed gullible, and that’ll be the last straw for democracy; the straw that broke the camel’s back. Democracy right now is teetering like a tightrope walker in a high wind. There is no net to catch this tightrope walker. Lies are winning. Elections are undermined by the Big Lie….

The only thing Alex Jones ever got right is that there is indeed a “infowar”, a war of information–and those who believe in democracy and standing firm against theocracy, have lost that war. We have lost to the likes of Alex Jones and Donald Trump. We have simply failed to understand the nature of the media battlefield.

…I find it to be, er, enjoyable, with its good actors, charming proto-hobbits, vivid landscapes (though some are perhaps a bit too much like images from Bible movies, a little cheesy…) but it stalls for me in exactly the marshes I anticipated when I heard about the show: the dire, fearsome marsh of American television writing. When the writers attempt what they suppose to be Tolkienesque dialogue, they often manage something serviceable, but they also fill in with dialogue that clunks, and that doesn’t even make sense when you look at what’s said closely. This, you would never find in Tolkien or the Jackson films. Indeed–you won’t find those clunky bits in a more effective television fantasy world, Game of Thrones: House of Dragons. I’m not that big a fan of Game of Thrones but I think this new iteration is pretty strong and at least the dialogue usually holds up. That’s probably because George RR Martin goes over it before filming. . . I was quite annoyed when, in Rings of Power, Galadriel translated a scrap of parchment in the Black Tongue and it (ham-handedly) mentioned the agenda of Sauron, and said something about bringing “evil back” to a dominance in the world. As if villains think they’re evil. Or that they serve evil per se. That bit was very clumsy simple minded television writing… I don’t think orcs in Tolkien burn in the sunlight, like vampires, but perhaps that’ll be justified later–perhaps later orcs are a different version, as with Saruman’s special breeding program. It seems like a weak “let’s throw in some vampire-story logic to make this work” sort of writing ploy. The Lord Halbrand business feels like Strider/Aragorn redux…Other story points are weak rubbings on the movies…

There are some exciting moments in this series. When it works it’s like a high quality B movie in the fantasy vein, like an old Sinbad movie, or one of George Pal’s lesser efforts…Enjoyable. Apart from the occasional wince…

Yes, there are constantly new services offered for your smartphone. Everything from using it to buy things in person to using it to buy things in Australia and China, to using it to sell things in person or to people in Australia and China…to dating services, to marriage counseling apps, to “meditation apps”, to instant discussion with a vague rando guy who claims to be a therapist…

to displaying all your banking information and retail and investment history…

to listening for your baby crying while you’re asleep, to checking your pulse, to interfacing with a device that will check your heartbeat and your hormone levels and the right time for coitus…to checking to see if you’re pregnant…

to apps advising you about your diet and parsing every last thing you eat after you send images of the food…to advising you about your carbon footprint, as you sit in your car, running the engine to keep the air conditioner going because it’s such a very hot day…

to a program that will recommend soothing medications for you and also prescribe them and handily bill them to your phone based credit card…to publicizing your phone-based life-coaching…to texting your life coach about your own life-coaching business…to sending reminder messages to your children in specially formulated texts signed love mom or love dad…

to reminding you to remember, all the things it made you forget…

to hours and hours and hours and days and nights spent on every social media site you have encountered, social media you lunge desperately to, on your phone, in a desperate hunger for connection, the connection you aren’t getting because of your phone, your phone, your phone, your phone….

Vast is the disinformation on the internet. The Russians and Chinese, sure, actively foist a lot of falsehoods online… But so do many Americans. People have forgotten what real journalism is like. They throw aside Pulitzer-prize winning sources of news for “some random guy who is selling alternative medicine he makes in his garage”…The internet is immensely valuable but I’m convinced there needs to be a class required for public school children, something like “Internet Hygiene: How to use the internet without being misled and scammed.” The class would emphasize critical thinking, reputable sources, empirical evidence, and so on.