Reading DeLillo's Cosmopolis Through Ayn Rand


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I am presently working on reading Cosmopolis through Ayn Rand for a symposium on DeLillo and a panel on Cosmopolis. Right now I'm falling asleep though. Tomorrow is another day.

Nite Scarlet...

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If you provided some concrete examples and explanation it might be possible to know what you're referring to here.

I know that DL is a novelist and I have an unread book by him on my shelf but what "reading Cosmopolis through Ayn Rand" refers to specifically, I haven't a clue. Nor any reason to know if he's a -good- novelist, let alone how you'd connect him to Rand. (Please don't tell me the critics and academics like him. That's as likely to be a negative as a positive.)

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Philip it has taken many years for the critics and academics to come to him in adulation. Perhaps because he has an uncanny clairvoyance concerning Events in the US that seemingly predict Events that come upon in some form of catastrophe.

In this respect he is like Rand, a forerunner of things to come. For starters why don't you link to my work here and if you continue to be interested we can take this further here.

http://cosmopolisfilm2.blogspot.com/2011/09/reading-eric-packer-through-ayn-rand.html

It's just that I have reached the point of redundancy on this so it is easier and time saving for me to link. Hope that's OK with you.

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Philip - to answer your kind of question about understanding "reading through". It's a method post modern thinking uses to interface two different texts.

For example, many religious people, and I am thinking of Jehovah's Witnesses in particular, tend to take everything you say and relate it to some quotation or other in the Bible. I am sure you have experienced this.

Instead of doing lit crit in the dialectic, comparing and contrasting, interpreting, looking for origins and idealistic outcomes, the post modern reader and writer reads one text through another. One could read Rand's Objectivism non-fiction through von Mises or through Rothbard. Take a passage of Rand's and quote it and say following through Rothbard and quote Rothbard. Each text enlightens the other that way. You don't pit them against each other in some kind of voting race. You just let them shed light on each other without saying which is right, which is wrong, which you agree with, although you can offer those thoughts if you wish. It's a much more free way of writing about someone or something. Just as Nietzsche's aphoristic writing disallows any formal presentation of his philosophy. It refuses and resists being pinned down and put in a box.

When Rand follows Nietzsche in her fiction, it is then she is most original, most engaging, well just.....When Roark dynamites the Cortland Project and Dodmdinique helps him, they are destroying, imploding and this is Nietzsche. Both are acting in excess. Dominique is so excessively perfect, or perfectly excessive she almost dies. Roark risks imprisonment. This action fictionalized by Rand reads through Nietzsche and it can be seen how interfaced Nietzsche's thinking is with that of Rand. Also Wynand's destruction of his newspaper, The Banner. And Rand's destruction of NBI.

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Or you can read the Gospels of the New Testament through Isaiah, the ministry of Jesus through Isaiah. Then you can read jesus through another text. I am reading DeLillo's Cosmopolis Eric Packer also through Jesus as he implodes the global currency speculative market.

I know along time ago I used to read, act, think everything through Atlas Shrugged. Relationships, things I studied, people's behavior, just everything. It enlightened me in many ways and constricted me in others.

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I know along time ago I used to read, act, think everything through Atlas Shrugged. Relationships, things I studied, people's behavior, just everything. It enlightened me in many ways and constricted me in others.

Ms. Abbey:

That is the deadly Objectivist cult trap that destroyed too many True Believers. When I attended NBI in Manhattan, I would stand with my lover off to the side of the front of the room where I had a great "side view" of Ayn or Nathaniel speaking to the acolytes assembled before them.

The glow in many eyes was truly a huge red flag for me. My basic skepticism also helped. I was able to accept the ideas and challenge them as I grew. Many of the folks that I knew in the Objectivist groups in NY City in the '60s did not. In particular, I had several Objectivist women tell me that they just did not mesh well with other Objectivist men that they were attempting to have a relationship with.

Adam

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I went to grad school in psy at Delaware in the fall of 62. Just days before I left a woman friend who was friends with a couple who were insiders in Phila was told that Peikoff was interested in me. BUT he said I didn't smile enough. I was so Randian that if I didn't have a reason to smile then I didn't. I still don't most of the time and smiling is in right now even when you talk about disasters, or a fake concern mask on your face. But I remember thinking damn, if I had only known sooner I would have checked him out. Glad I went to grad school now.

I never spent any time with any of them. They asked such stupid questions that I was glad when Rand got impatient. I would have been worse. I used to listen to Barbara's answers and think that's exactly what I would have said. It is such a closed system that if you read Atlas you knew. I do remember a question about child incest that she was asked that I did not have a ready answer for. Barbara said it was wrong because the child did not have the choice of saying no. That seemed fine to me and later in life when a child very subtly was seducing me I thought of it when I distracted the child.

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They asked such stupid questions that I was glad when Rand got impatient.

Ms. Abbey:

Now, let's be a tad kind here. Many of these folks were in search of self esteem. To be publicly eviscerated by an idol was, frankly, cruel. I can remember my lady by my side at NBI sensing my tension when I saw the effect of one of Ayn's or Nat's savaging.

Huge red flags for me.

We would spend time that night before falling asleep discussing what would cause a great mind to chose to relate to folks in a cruel manner. Made no sense and was in fact part of the reason that Ayn destroyed herself.

Whenever I would look into her eyes, even from twenty or thirty feet away, behind the raw intelligence was real pain, little girl type pain.

Great woman.

Adam

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When I was getting certified in Behavior Therapy, the real meat of it was assertiveness training. LIstening to the intent and the content of the question. Now I think Rand heard the intent but didn't know what to do with it.

In analytic training of the modern psychoanalytic school, again it is the intent of the question. I love Foucault on this as he names it for what it is: interrogation. An attack. Of course when you are a practicing analyst you really get it. You can mirror it. A softer way is to say: "Are you asking that because".......and then put in the intent, the motivation, the reason etc that you want to explore for the person. Most of the people there really needed a good therapist. I never heard Branden being mean and Barbara was never impatient at all. I didn't think she was cruel but it was Phila and not New York. New Yorkers are more aggressive.

I just think she knew when a question was not asked in "good faith" and that made her mad. And she had no idea how to work with the resistance that lay just behind the question. Barbara always addressed herself to the content. With Rand she suspected the question was an attack, an invitation to bait her.

the truth is she was very paranoid.

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Philip it has taken many years for the critics and academics to come to him in adulation. Perhaps because he has an uncanny clairvoyance concerning Events in the US that seemingly predict Events that come upon in some form of catastrophe.

In this respect he is like Rand, a forerunner of things to come. For starters why don't you link to my work here and if you continue to be interested we can take this further here.

http://cosmopolisfil...h-ayn-rand.html

It's just that I have reached the point of redundancy on this so it is easier and time saving for me to link. Hope that's OK with you.

Uh, Janet,

"When she entered his bedroom, she found it was not the place she had seen photographed in countless magazines. The glass cage had been demolished. The room built in its place was a solid vault without a single window. It was lighted and air-conditioned, but neither light nor air came from the outside."

--Brant

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Instead of doing lit crit in the dialectic, comparing and contrasting, interpreting, looking for origins and idealistic outcomes, the post modern reader and writer reads one text through another. One could read Rand's Objectivism non-fiction through von Mises or through Rothbard. Take a passage of Rand's and quote it and say following through Rothbard and quote Rothbard. Each text enlightens the other that way. You don't pit them against each other in some kind of voting race. You just let them shed light on each other without saying which is right, which is wrong, which you agree with, although you can offer those thoughts if you wish. It's a much more free way of writing about someone or something.

Seymourblogger,

I have been pursuing a train of thought very similar to this recently. I have been looking at story.

My original purpose was to try to figure out why the fundy Objectivist mindset (which I used to have) results in such lousy storytelling. Then I discovered that stories put us into a kind of trance. And then I discovered all kinds of different things. And on and on it went.

I finally started getting a glimmer of an idea I called the "story concept." And I believe this is just as important to epistemology--even from an Objectivist viewpoint--as Rand's idea.

But there are two types. The first is a full blown Rand-type concept that works algebraically. The second is a kind of half-concept, more of a concrete, but it serves as background for making all kinds of cognitive and normative judgments--for making Rand-type concepts to be exact (or better put, for providing conceptual referents with a lot of the selectivity done on autopilot).

I'll try to be clearer. A "story concept" of the algebraic kind would be "boy meets girl" or "the hero's journey." It is a basic mold you can pour all kinds of details into. Different particular stories can follow the same pattern.

An example of the second kind is Atlas Shrugged. Or the stories in the Bible. Or even powerful events in a person's life. What elevates these to a status above a simple story is that they become the mental glasses through which a person sees the rest of reality.

You are calling this for reading literature reading one work through another. This looks like a different way to say the same thing I am saying.

Note that often, when we get too wound up about something, we say we have to step back and look at it from a different angle. This basically means switching to a different background story and looking again. For example, we see the inconvenience a stranger causes us by bumping into us. And, if we are in a hurry, that makes us really mad. But we are in our story. And we overreact. But if we step back and get into the other person's story, we see that he just lost his job and found out he had cancer, so he was distracted. That story changes everything.

We live our lives in narratives, so it only makes sense that narratives would be our perspective premises. I just made up a very tiny example, but often this is called world view or even context. That's why reality looks so different to a Muslim than a Christian. They have different background stories (in this sense I mean here) to fit reality to. And it really changes when the background story is Atlas Shrugged. (Or Nathaniel Branden's affair with Ayn Rand as NBI grew. :smile: )

Anyway, I'm just thinking out loud.

I haven't tried taking an offbeat narrative and using it as a background story except to create fictional characters. But it looks like fun. The best part is you can step into it and step right back out at will.

I've been studying some neuroscience and I wonder what neural pathways develop.

Er...

I just had the coolest thought. I have been studying neuroscience from a marketing perspective. Note the background story: offer stuff to people, they become interested, they crossover from inner resistance, they buy it.

And from a personal development story: note something you don't like about yourself, decide to fix it, find out how the brain works with respect to that problem, develop a system to train that part of the brain, learn the respective skills for that system by practicing, eliminate the problem.

I could go on. But these are more abstract (algebraic) kinds of story concepts. It would be a piece of cake to flesh them out.

For example, let's look at marketing: We have Mick Marketer who has a lovely wife, house, two kids, a dog, etc.. He has a business promoting widgets people can use but are not too excited about. He spends his time developing strategies to call attention to life problems related to the widget because people don't buy it otherwise, but so far has had limited success. Then one day he picks up a book on neuroeconomics...

From that point, everything I learn in neuroscience (during a spell) can be related to what Mick needs, what would make him fail and how this pisses his wife off, how his widget can be positioned to appeal to, say, the limbic system's automatic monitors for status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness, what copy Mick can write that helps bypass the rational filters in the prospect's neofrontal cortex and appeals directly to his underlying "move toward/move away from" system (often called the reptilian brain), etc.

Depending on how interesting I make Mick Marketer's story and how I jazz it up--maybe throwing in a little suspense, sex, violence, greed, celebrity gossip and mayhem--I can plow through all kinds of excruciatingly boring stuff and make it seem like an ice cream party.

Hmmmmm...

(More thinking out loud... :smile: )

btw - Another powerful background is metaphor, but that's another train of thought...

Michael

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Michael - This is heavy and dense. You are pretty much in the Order of Production. This is Rand's problem with her non-fiction. Fountainhead is in the Order of Seduction. So is Zarathustra and most of Nietzsche. Being in the Order of Production forces you tino the dialectic, which is the Discourse you are expressing yourself in above. Endless ping-pong.

This goddamn toshiba won't let me do anything my apple just does naturally. Steve Jobs where are you when we need you.

We live our life linearly, but we remember it in clusters. - Josephine Hart in The Reconstructionist

Story concept, story template, This is structuralism: pure Levi-Straussian Structuralism. I have been working on Twilight through this as Twilight is structurally the legend of Tristan and Iseult. All the cuts are there. This dates from the 12th century, and makes a "Foucauldian CUT" into the history of sexuality IF and only IF one does a genealogy of sexuality. This "cut" brought in the Dominating Discourse of sexuality that lasted for 800 years until the "pill" CUT arrived in our time. Stephenie Meyer is scraping the scar off the old cut and it is bleeding again and the PC Feminists don't like it. I know you are aware that Rand had issues with them also, especially about Dominique's "rape by invitation".

As Baudrillard says about rape, " The classic definition of rape it to force a woman to experience pleasure." Of course that definition has morphed like all other definitions, and I include capitalism among them.

It seems to me that you are trying to figure out something within the dialectic and that doesn't work. For science it is a good Discourse, but if you read Crick's article on Strong Inferrance he writes about the spiral of DNA coming in a dream, the solution of the problem. Of course Leonardo did this same spiral a long time ago on staircases running up to the ramparts while under siege to carry amo etc up and bring stuff down without bumping into each other. Had he listened to Leo Steinberg and been steeped in Leonardo it would have hit him a lot sooner!

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...if you read Crick's article on Strong Inferrance he writes about the spiral of DNA coming in a dream, the solution of the problem

Ms. Abbey:

Crick's article, or Platt's?

Adam

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Michael - This is heavy and dense. You are pretty much in the Order of Production. This is Rand's problem with her non-fiction. Fountainhead is in the Order of Seduction. So is Zarathustra and most of Nietzsche. Being in the Order of Production forces you tino the dialectic, which is the Discourse you are expressing yourself in above. Endless ping-pong.

We live our life linearly, but we remember it in clusters. - Josephine Hart in The Reconstructionist

Seymourblogger, what is your take on this quote from ATLAS?

"Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no matter how small or in what form, the sense of an activity going step by step to some chosen end across a span of time. The work of cooking a meal was like a closed circle, completed and gone, leading nowhere. But the work of building a path was a living sum, so that no day was left to die behind her, but each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow. A circle, she thought, if the movement proper to physical nature, they say there is nothing but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end. The cooking of meals, she thought, is like feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make?"

Thanks in advance.

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The phallic versus the circular ovum is a pretty obvious interpretation...

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Seymourblogger,

As I've said, I don't understand your jargon. If you could put some of these ideas in plain English without name-dropping, that would help me oodles in understanding. But if you're stuck in that particular habit (and I've known some people who are too addicted to it to break it), I'll just have to eat the elephant raw.

Be advised, though, that is not meant as snark. I am interested. But I will still have to eat the damn thing one bite at a time. So slow it is.

I assure you I have no dialectical intentions. My primary interest is in understanding how the human mind works. I have this notion that you should identify something correctly if you want to have a decent shot at evaluating it correctly.

For some reason, this is not a very popular epistemological approach. Not even in the Objectivist world. Especially at condemnation time. But it's all I've got that makes sense to me and works when I encounter new stuff. So I try to keep to it until I get my bearings about something. Then I let my imagination soar.

Note: I'm not against making loose associations, even if they are normative, before correctly identifying something. In fact, I do it all the time. That, to me, is part of the way you are supposed to do it, especially if you want to create something good. This is one of the reasons I am not turned off to looking at the post-modern approach, even as I come from an Objectivist culture where I should bash it sight unseen. PM looks to me right now like loose associations on steroids.

I'm not sure I know what you mean by Order of Production and Order of Seduction, but on the surface, it sounds like my real interest comes way before chopping my head off from my heart like that. What you saw as a ping-pong feels more like 3D pool in a space as large as the Milky Way to me. I was just thinking out loud and my fingers can't keep up with the speed of my thoughts. Good thing, too. Most of that stuff is not for public viewing. Imagine if it happened. What a way to lose all your credibility and reputation in one whack! :smile:

Some of the recent developments in neuroscience (borne out with fMRI scans during experiments under controlled conditions and some other indicators) is informing my speculations, even on narrative. The philosophical part is there only because that's where I started from. I'm intimate with Objectivism and some other select philosophical works, but I'm new to neuroscience and, frankly, I find many of the studies I have looked over as boring as watching paint dry on a shack in a backwater town on a hot afternoon.

(As an aside, what's worse is that I can imagine some situations where I would find watching paint dry in Bubbaville as fascinating. :smile: )

We are blessed to be in the 21st century with a blossoming expert industry--which is where I am headed professionally. An expert in this sense takes complex information and the ever growing information overload we have all around us, sets up narratives and metaphors, then pile-drives a few cognitive stakes into his presentation in such a manner he can hang excruciatingly boring information on them and people "get it" without going into a coma. He gives the 30,000 foot view, of course, but unless you are going to specialize in a field, you don't need to get closer to the ground. You take the patterns, mix them with the patterns in your head and keep on flying.

Whether this results in "production" (how-to systems and so forth) or "seduction" (spiritual enrichment, contemplation, narrative qua narrative, etc.) is up to the person who listens/reads/views the expert.

The literature I have been devouring in neuroscience is of this "expert" nature. You can see the scientific experiments in the bibliographies of all of the books. Here is a small sampling--at least so you will have a notion of what I am talking about. Note, the approach in these books tends to use a mix of neuroscience with psychology and sociology experiments as foundation. But the writing is generally interesting and for non-specialists.

Your Brain at Work by David Rock

Willpower by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney

Mindsight by Dan Siegel

Sleights of Mind by Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

I am only just now starting Sleights of Mind, which is the neuroscience behind magic tricks. Also, The Shallows is extremely interesting because it probes how we humans are physically rewiring our brains with the Internet. There is a butt-load more I could give you (Dan Ariely, Daniel Pink and Malcolm Gladwell immediately come to mind but there are plenty of others). I have read much and still have much to read. (Your Brain at Work is by far the best I have read so far for what I seek--and I'm only in the middle of it.)

From this standpoint, maybe you can see that when I am talking about narrative, I am coming from a totally different background context than dividing up perception of the world through virtual dialectics and one-size-fits-all categories like production and seduction.

But there are universal components to the human mind and those, actually, are one-size-fits-all. I believe narrative (stories) is foundational to human thought. In some of the literature I have been studying, the authors claim story-telling even preceded language.

(Heh. How would your own approach jive in the prelanguage human era? I wonder I wonder... The only names you could drop would be Ogg or Grot or Ungha Ungha, but you could point with your fingers up a storm. :smile: )

I wouldn't be so quick to look down on story templates, either. Some of the basic ones work. After all, we have to have time in a story, space, and some character or group that occupies that time and space. There's your first template right there. (I do agree that overuse of template thinking leads to hack writing, but that's outside the scope here.) However, I'm far more interested in how story bypasses the critical mind and gets you into a trance. And why it works so well as a memory aid. And things like that.

(And I even write narratives once in a while. Here's a recent short-story, for instance: Lethal Guilt. If you try to read that "through Atlas Shrugged," you might think bad thoughts about me. My purpose in that story was definitely not to present the perfect man. Anyway, it's short and punchy and a bit vulgar, but if you don't read it, that's OK. It's my baby and it's a good true vision and I am content in that conviction.)

Oops, I gotta run. There are miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep.

Boy do I run on when I get on a roll...

Michael

EDIT: What's wrong with a Toshiba? It beats the hell out of a horse-and-buggy for typing. :)

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Michael - This is heavy and dense. You are pretty much in the Order of Production. This is Rand's problem with her non-fiction. Fountainhead is in the Order of Seduction. So is Zarathustra and most of Nietzsche. Being in the Order of Production forces you tino the dialectic, which is the Discourse you are expressing yourself in above. Endless ping-pong. We live our life linearly, but we remember it in clusters. - Josephine Hart in The Reconstructionist
Seymourblogger, what is your take on this quote from ATLAS? "Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no matter how small or in what form, the sense of an activity going step by step to some chosen end across a span of time. The work of cooking a meal was like a closed circle, completed and gone, leading nowhere. But the work of building a path was a living sum, so that no day was left to die behind her, but each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow. A circle, she thought, if the movement proper to physical nature, they say there is nothing but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end. The cooking of meals, she thought, is like feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make?" Thanks in advance.

Aside from that smartass Freudian below......

She is rebelling and defying Nietzsche's Eternal Return and Zarathustra's despair over it. After all she was so young when she first studied Nietzsche, and not in conjunction with her formal studies as he had been purged as she would later purge him in the US. Deleuze has answered Nietzsche in his Repetition and Difference, an ingenious response to Nietzsche. Accepting Nietzsche and making Nietzsche "even more so" which is the post modern way. Not to disprove but to affirm to extreme and excess, and thereby to dissolve all the negativity out of it. In Deleuze's case he is making Nietzsche's ghost and Zarathustra happy again.

The quote is linear. We are no longer in linear time, progressive time, historical time, the Hegelian dialectic. Rand is opting for linear and the dialectic which in her time was understandable as the work had not been done by Foucault. Destroy linear time, historical time, substitute genealogy, and without firing a shot at Hegel, Marx, Sartre, you have destroyed the structure they were all standing on. So Foucault has ended Marxism, Lacan ended Freudian developmental theory the Americans favored and cast in stone, so Freud is dead.

Einstein's next as DeLillo says in Cosmopolis. On page 1 or 3.

Cosmopolis begins the day in the dialectic, in the Foucauldian grid metaphored by the traffic grid of NYC streets and avenues. It ends the day with the world willing Eric Packer, the dialectic destroyed, and only Events, Destiny, risk, challenge, reversibility....

Somehow I don't think you wanted this.

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Adam thank you. It's Platt on Crick. I get so angry using my Toshiba and it doesn't do things the way my apples do so I get angry and can't remember shit when I get angry. I haven't thought in the research mode for a loooooong time. It's like a software program you haven't used in forever. I can't even spell inferrence can I?

Phallic and ovum is very funny.

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I HATE THIS FUGGIN TOSHIBA!

I had a long thought out response to you Michael and now it's gone.

Post evey few paragraphs with the message, preceeding, "editing." Avoid using the spell checker until last.

-Brant

That's "preceding" Brant.

A rare chance for me to bitterly enjoy a minor skill which modern tech has rendered useless.

Carol

lifelong superb speller

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In your other comment you mentioned Muslim and Christian.

The Islamists, as opposed to muslims, are operating within a sacred order,the Order of Seduction, much like our early religious colonists. The US is secular, in the Order of Production. Both extremes feed into each other in dialectical discourse. Both extremes are necessary for the system. Why female genital cutting is not gonna fly on the basis of human rights. Human rights are in the secular, genital cutting of young girls ins in the sacred.

Your story.

Jake and Scott, two American soldiers, pulled their Jeep to a stop on the side of the dirt road. They looked at the plain white Afghan hut sitting alone a slight ways off. There was a pretty little girl with long black hair playing out front. It was a beautiful day, but something didn't look right.

"Check that out," said Scott. "Where are the adults? God, I'll be glad when we're done with this damn country."

They both got out of the Jeep and looked around, squinting.

"Be careful," whispered Jake. "I don't see any place to hide except that hut, but those Taliban suckers are sneaky as all hell."

Crouching and zigzagging, they approached the hut. Jake was bigger than Scott. Taller. Thick muscles. But clumsier. The little girl, hearing a noise, suddenly looked up. They were about 15 yards away. Her eyes widened in surprise and fright.

"Boo!" said Jake, right before he stumbled. The girl shrieked.

Jake tried to get his grip back on his M-4 rifle as a shot came from inside the hut. It slammed into the rifle's stock and spun the weapon right out of his hands. Both Jake and Scott hit the ground seeking cover.

This is as far as I got with it. First, it is linear and that makes it belong to a past time. Second, it is composed of one ready-made sound bite after another. One cliche after another.

I'm sorry but you challenged me to read it, and I am supposing you want to know what I think of it. It's a plot story, and I have a good idea where it's going to go with maybe some unforeseen twists. I no longer read for plot. I am only interested in how the writer got there.

If you want to be a better writer, then you must - must - feed yourself with better books. When I used to go to writer workshops around here, that's all I could ever say when someone read what they had written.

Do you like this poem?

OH Atlas

With your glistening finger

Bore a hole

Through the earth

So man may die

And the animals live in peace.

Avery Gosfield 7-8 years old in 1967

She's a musician now.

She could have been a writer also. Maybe she is.

Or this one: On we trudge into the dying dimbers of tonight! Mila Holt, 8-9 years old 1967

Said as she was taking giant steps down the sidewalk of NYC on the way to seeing the Klee retrospective. Her father had been reading Dylan Thomas to her. Evidently her imagination was interfaced with him.

On interfacing, the changes in our mind from computers and the digital age: Cronenberg's entire work in film has been on this theme. Foucault through Nietzsche on The Inscription of the Body (mind). And DeLillo inCosmopolis on Eric Packer: http://cosmopolisfilm2.blogspot.com/2011/10/reading-eric-packer-through-surfaces.html?zx=4ad682d758b6cb5f

Fiction has been writing about this interfacing for decades now. The neuroscientists are just catching up. I spent some time in this field in the study of perception. I used to be able to tell you all the neural pathways and sequences picking p a carrot and chomping on it traveled on their way to the brain and your perception of it. I liked it at the time.

NOthing wrong with a Toshiba. It's just not an Apple, that's all.

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