SILENT BOOMER BEATNIK GOING TO THE PIIF

Drove into Portland this morning to buy tickets for 10 films during the Portland International Film Festival. For me starting on the 9th thru 23rd September some of my writing time will be interrupted by the Festival and the required dislocating travel to and from Portland at odd hours. I especially look forward to two 10:30 pm films at the Bagdad theater for adults only. Lovely experience to come out of theater magic into the nighttime Portland streets and feel all alone creepiness. These foreign films will have subtitles and that allows me with my bad hearing to enjoy films at theaters that don't have captioning devices for old codgers like me. Sometimes when my schedule is so disrupted, writing time gets scramble too, but I'm anticipating great viewing experiences ahead. Mertie who works will go to one film with me on Sunday the 12th. She's okay with this since she likes her routine even more strongly than I like mine. This PIFF extravaganza has become a routine with us. It will be great when she can retire too and join me, but, of course, I'll be in my 90s then...as long as cancer doesn't come back to get me.

A PASSAGE FROM GHOUL WORLD ABOUT OUR ROBOTIC NATURES

The following passage is from Chapter 16 of Ghoul World, my scifi novel. It concerns free will. 

On the sidewalk outside Color Me Coffee, Charley Manning watched Beaunita’s Elec2Go disappear out of the Pearl District. The rain had drizzled out, but clouds still formed an unbroken ceiling above. As the PI turned his attention from Beaunita’s departing cab, he suddenly and forcefully perceived himself as "waiting to feel" what he must do next. Would he wire for an Elec2Go cab for himself or take a trolley or walk home? He remembered the first time he’d consciously experienced the sensation of ‘waiting to know’ what he should do next, of waiting for a feeling to tell him what to do.

During a similar momentary pause one morning nineteen years ago, Manning had first caught himself being a robot, a biological one. He’d recently quit the PPB and had awakened feeling exceptionally refreshed and pushed himself into a seated position against the headboard. He had nothing pressing to do that morning. The anxiety that was normally his condition when he was involved in police work was gone. He was luxuriating in that sensation of untroubled repose when a thought appeared out of nowhere. He abruptly realized that he desired to go drink a latte and read the history text about Roman legions he’d recently downloaded from the internet. But it wasn’t the awareness of what he wanted to do next that intrigued him; it was the fact that the thought about what he would do next came out of nowhere. Something beyond his control, he realized, had informed him what he would do next.

Immediately following his first awareness of what he was going to do next, his brain without any direction on his part began to produce thoughts about one coffee shop after another where he might go to drink coffee and read. The list was a set of fleeting impressions about each of the coffee shops he most frequented. These impressions entered and passed swiftly through his consciousness, and he experienced faint negative and positive sensations about the individual coffee shops that presented themselves to his consciousness. At that moment he became aware that he was consciously waiting for his emotions to tell him which coffee shop to go to. He—or, rather, his consciousness—was waiting to be told what to do. That awareness immediately led to another astonishing moment.

As soon as he experienced the awareness of “waiting to be told what to do,” Manning was overcome with euphoria, a skin-tingling whole body feeling of exultation. Never before had the PI felt so untroubled. So free? That word “freedom” had sailed unbidden into his consciousness obviously attached to the euphoric feeling, just as each feeling and word that morning had arrived without any consciousness on his part of their being requested.

Manning still struggled to understand the paradoxical sensation of being free that was connected to an awareness that the ghoul species, every man jack of them, was a species of biological robots whose free will was an illusion. From then on Manning explained his behavior to himself—only occasionally to others—as the actions of a biological robot who knew itself to be a robot. Manning frequently speculated if self-knowledge of his automaton existence meant he had one foot out the door toward a real freedom, unenforced by evolution’s dictates. As he put it to close friends: “Maybe self knowledge will set us free.”

PLODDING AL'ON'G THE ROAD

I have little to add in this post to the last post. Let me tell you that the 5th or 6th rewrite of any long piece of fiction is a bore. The plot's in place, the story told. The rewrites continue to be attempts to strengthen the language and appeal by simplification and straightening out the complex sentences that political debating all my life have imposed on my sentence structures. Rhetorical writing is quite different from writing fiction. It calls for complex sentence structures. Lots of clauses and phrases piling up the proofs and facts, lots of qualifiers to make one's arguments specifically clear.

Copied from...

This makes me think of the conservative politician and novelist Disraeli and, perhaps [trying to come up with his name.....trying to come up with....................aha....] Gore Vidal. Long ago I tried to read a Disraeli novel. It's name has escaped me, and it was not bad. I've read two or three of Vidal's novels of political life and I enjoyed them.

The critic Robert O'Kell [writing about Disraeli seems in my opinion to speak to both Disraeli and Vidal], "It is after all, even if you are a Tory of the staunchest blue*, impossible to make Disraeli into a first-rate novelist. And it is equally impossible, no matter how much you deplore the extravagances and improprieties of his works, to make him into an insignificant one."* As to an interesting read alone, I give the nod to Vidal, but perhaps I'm prejudiced by my liberal nature.

*Note how O'Kell piles up the phrases and clauses to make his statement clear. 

*Note the British assignation of "blue" for conservatives.

THE THAW

Mr. Sunlight peeking in.......

Starbucks on 162nd Avenue, Vancouver Washington. A cold day at 3:47pm, but Mr. Sunlight is beginning the thaw that a rainy tomorrow will complete. If not tomorrow, the next day at least when the rain will pour. Speaking of pouring, I'm back on track with rewriting Ghoul World, and I see ahead after the Ghoul World rewrite several projects that I've mentioned in the past: (1) putting together the chapbook Up Your Ass about the prostate cancer experience [hopefully in the past], (2) putting together the best of my short stories into a book Many Voices One Head for sending to writing contests and (3) gathering a collection of poetry from all the "periods" of my life together for contest entries. And after that (4) I see myself writing some movies and plays. On another hand, getting back to sketching intrigues me. When I'm not doing any of the above, you can find me with mechanical pencil in hand—eraser on the end—working crossword puzzles or Sudoku. Yesterday I watched from a distance a professorial type older gentleman working away at a crossword puzzle with a pen.

ASIDE: Finished Saturday's Sudoku in two tries. The tiny slip ups of concentration can raise hell.

BEATNIK ON HOLD, PURRING

Another rainy day in the Greater Portland Area, i.e. Vancouver, Washington. Monday noon and I'm sitting in an extremely loud and very busy Starbucks on 162nd Avenue in Southeast Vancouver, wishing I wanted to want to get back to work on the umpteenth rewrite of my novel Ghoul World and happily anticipating the February appearance of the 40th Portland International Film Festival. I'm absolutely certain my psyche has been rearranged by my 8 month cancer journey; that and the burden of a lifetime of hoping for financial success of some kind, that is a job as poet in residence or a best selling novel that is turned into a movie. The bucket gets ever closer; the list remains the single wish to find someone other than myself to publish a novel of mine. My state of mind wasn't helped much last night when wife and I were watching the movie Solace. In that movie Anthony Hopkins as a psychic says something like this about cancer, "Eighty percent of the time cancer returns, then it's a bugger to deal with."

Weekly I work the NYTimes crossword [takes all week a little at a time] and the Saturday Sudoku that requires much concentration to do correctly. Took five tries to come out right on Saturday evening. You know? I had great fun writing my scifi movie last year and felt I was better working with dialogue than writing descriptive passages. That may be my next project—another movie script. I think that's enough for this entry. Now what picture ought to accompany it? I know—a photo of self in the loud Starbucks with my Gonzaga Bulldog hat on. Wow! 15-0.