HOW I KILLED PLUTO AND WHY IT HAD IT COMING

 

This REMARKABLE LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT -- combining popular science, memoir, history, true crime and THE SURE AND CERTAIN HOPE OF DISCORD -- bears International Standard Book Number 978-0-385-53108-5.  Mike Brown is the author.  Took me forever to get to this one.  I APOLOGIZE, PROFESSOR BROWN!

ERIS FLICKED ME ON THE HEAD AGAIN AND AGAIN AS I SOUGHT OUT THIS BOOK.

I went to my library's online catalog.  The site said the book was currently available and allowed me to put a hold on it, informing me that it would be waiting in the NO-CONTACT BOOK HOLD AREA.  That's one of the local artifacts of the pandemic.  In 24 to 48 hours, the book would be mine to borrow.

I went in after 24 hours, and behold, it was not there.  I knew that due to nationwide understaffing and shorter working hours, there might be a delay.  So I patiently waited for 48 hours to pass and went back.  

As if by magic...the book had not appeared.  I asked at the desk and the librarian looked it up.  "It's in transit," she said.  "But it says on your website that the book is here in this building."  "It says it's in transit," quoth she, ensconced in her government bureaucracy and thus safely protected from HAVING TO EXPLAIN ANYTHING TO ME.  I understood IMMEDIATELY that I was safe in the arms of Discordia.  The book might be on its way.  Then again, it might not.  There was nothing I needed to do -- or indeed could do -- to change the course of events. 

THE BLESSINGS OF GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRACY ARE ALL PART OF THE DEAL IF YOU'RE A DISCORDIAN.

ON THE THIRD DAY IT CAME TO PASS.  A different librarian noticed me stumping away from the NO-CONTACT ON HOLD AREA and shouted out "WHAT HOLD!?" (I never heard librarians yell until I moved here.)  "Who, me?" quoth I.  "Yes, I'm processing some holds now," she said.  I named the book and she happened to have it in her hand.  She said it looked very interesting and she might want to check it out herself.  I encouraged her to make this move, then checked out the book and brought my quarry home.  Sure enough, the book was NOT from my local library but had been shipped in from Hamtramck, Michigan.  I DIDN'T EVEN ASK.

I dove in immediately, AND OH, THE WONDERS I BEHELD.

The author of this book proves to be the guy who's discovered MORE NEW HEAVENLY BODIES THAN ANYONE IN HUMAN HISTORY.  And, frankly, he makes it sound like a real GRIND.  It seems that most of this task involves searching out MISFILED PHOTOS OF THE SKY and squinting at them in dimly-lit rooms, hoping that one of the dots of light in one of the photos will have visibly MOVED between, say, 1957 and 1992.  He gets to take new photos of his own, of course, but that's kind of a crapshoot and if you want one to use of the better telescopes, you have to write a proposal to the dark overlords, then TAKE A NUMBER AND WAIT.  So he relied quite a bit on existing photos.

But soft!  Here's how he described the very first hint that something was up:

"But after a few minutes, I stopped my quick flipping through images, because I had found one that confused me." (Italics mine.)   

He hadn't found Eris yet at this point -- this was a different space rock entirely -- but he was already starting to feel confused, am I right?  THIS SPACE ROCK WAS ONE OF THE HERALDS OF ERIS.  THERE WERE SEVERAL in the course of this story, changing not only their visible positions in the sky but their names and their intellectual ownership.  Pluto, of course, wasn't KILLED as stated in the title of the book, but in the eyes of his followers DEMOTED in the course of this book, from a true PLANET to a mere Kuiper Belt Object.  You can still buy T-shirts complaining about this change:

And there was much more going on here than confusion and job changes for space rocks.  There was TRUE DISCORD in the shape of what may amount to theft of an intellectual property, or space-rock poaching, or SCIENTIFIC ESPIONAGE.  Right before he was about to announce the discovery of one of his new rocks, someone else announced having discovered the same item. It's a long story and I'll let you read the book yourself to find out about it.   Mike Brown took the role of Detective Lieutenant Frank Columbo and found out some very interesting fingerprints at a very unexpected crime scene.  YOU'RE GOING TO LOVE THIS PART.

Part of Mike Brown's stated quest was to get a firm answer to the question "What is a planet?"  He'd harbored doubts about the question for ages and he returns to it again and again in these pages.  I'm pleased to report that he NEVER CLEARED THIS UP and in my opinion SPREAD MORE CONFUSION ABOUT THIS QUESTION THAN EVER.  He also reported the casting of SUBLIME DOUBT on the definition of a moon, and a number of other pretty basic definitions about space terminology.  

Here's another quote from much later in the book which I think captures a great deal of the gist:

"Sure, perhaps I was a bit on the exhausted side at this point and inclined to believe that the secret committee had also conspired to assassinate President Lincoln, Archduke Ferdinand, and Julius Caesar, but just because I was being paranoid didn't mean I was wrong." 

If that's not straight out of the Book of Discord, I don't know what qualifies.

I don't want to tell you too much about this Galilean-in-scope quest, but suffice to say that this is a WILD RIDE for a science book, very well written and at times hilarious.  And Eris finally made her appearance.  And the author was the one who chose the perfect name...

NO DISCORDIAN SHOULD MISS READING THIS ONE.  FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, YOU GET TO MEET ERIS IN THIS BOOK!

DISCOVERING SCARFOLK

 

This little gem of a book -- ISBN 0091958482 -- is the edited odds-and-ends collection of a man who, very unfortunately, did discover Scarfolk and put together what he could to make sense of the place, despite HEAVY BRAINWASHING, the erasing of large sections of his memory and the replacing of his sons by a couple of badly-damaged adults who dressed and acted like children.  The town itself is a combination life-threatening OBSTACLE COURSE, re-education camp that is bound to remind readers of what China is currently putting the Uighurs through at the moment, and Orwellian THEME PARK in which your every move is being recorded for an obscure religious cult called the Officists, who apparently worship office supplies, leaving their calling card -- hole-punch paper dots and spilled staples -- wherever they pass through.  The other theme -- CRUEL BUREAUCRACY -- is unmistakable.  It's a remarkably paranoid, delightful read. DON'T MISS THIS ONE!

Thought For The Day

SAYS HERE in Tom O'Neill's new book, Chaos (ISBN 978-0316477550), that...

"I knew I WANTED to believe him -- and that put me at risk of falling into the great trap of conspiracy theorists, who believe in grand plots simply because they make the world a more fascinating place."

NOW LET'S THINK ABOUT THAT FOR A MINUTE HERE.

Does that really make sense?

Consider your run-of-the-mill SCHIZOPHRENIC who is often bursting with conspiracy theories that TERRORIZE the poor sap.  He or she believes (for instance) that the FBI is hot on the patient's trail, inserting unbearable thoughts or reporting them all to the Vatican or some damned thing.  Is that an attractive idea at all?  No, not to the owner of those thoughts nor to the other poor saps who waste endless time and energy trying to talk him or her OUT of believing it.  

No, that schizophrenic created this set of ideas and CLINGS to them with a fanatic's desperation because, as loopy as they are, they seem to make SENSE of the circumstances of the person's life.

They are a way of imposing Order on the Chaos, see?  A schizophrenic has bitten that golden apple and is in a state of extreme discord, so troubling that even that bizarre story seems to make more sense than the mismatched pieces they're struggling with.  They'll tell you RIGHT UP FRONT "I know this sounds crazy and you won't believe me, but..."  and then they launch into that theory, often so complicated they, the authors of the wretched story, can't even keep it straight themselves.  

Even the wildest story is usually a SEARCH FOR ORDER AMID CHAOS.

That's what O'Neill's book is all about, in fact.  I'm in the middle of it now which is what led me to write this entry.  It's a gripping read.  EXCUSE ME WHILE I PLUNGE BACK DOWN THAT RABBIT HOLE.

Disorderly Ponderations

What follows is not an excerpt from the book above, but it is a quote from the author and hey, what a cool jacket design, am I right?  (And I obviously mean "jacket design" in both senses here.) 

Ruth Kinna Speaks!  (The whole discussion can be read here.

"It’s very difficult for political theorists to think about anarchism in any other way than negative, because it seems to contradict everything that politics is based on: the idea that we need a constructed and defined order, and that we can’t coordinate our actions unless somebody helps us do it. Anarchists come along with the idea that anarchy is order, and what exists is disorder. That frightens people."

 Does it ever!  

And that's one of the things I like about it!

BLACKKKLANSMAN: Not Just A Movie Title Any More

This has been a tough year when it comes to chaos and its practitioners.  Boris Johnson, not in the spotlight for a couple of years at this point, is STILL IN THE RUNNING because he's the guy who led the charge for Brexit, which has the relative peace, abundance and cooperation of the European Union travelling some VERY CHOPPY WATERS this year.  Bob Mueller hasn't come across yet, and there are only a couple of days left of this year, so there's NO SOAP THERE.  Donald Trump has been ENDLESSLY entertaining, with his tweets about how Finland prevents forest fires by raking up all the leaves and America should do a better job of cutting down forests so they won't catch fire...but he hasn't really produced much in the way of chaos other than a partial gummint shutdown.  Ho hum.

Just as I was starting to despair that we would ever have a clear winner for the Apple Roller of 2018, I saw this posted on a social-media site:

'I live in Kentucky & I'm black but a couple months ago I found a KKK flyer on my porch that said that "blacks & whites should fight together against the dirty & diseased invaders polluting or neighborhoods"...

It was very strange.'   

YEAH, I AGREE.  On the day the KKK is out trying to recruit blacks to beef up their ranks in the fight against nonexistent Mexican invaders...

 

 

So it's official.  We have a winner!!!  This perennial spreader of destructive chaos has finally pulled something MORE LIKELY TO FALL OUT OF OUR CHAIRS LAUGHING, the finest possible use of their, um, communications skills. 

 

Apple Roller of the Year 2018 goes to the KKK! 

 

 

THE UNBEARABLE BASSINGTON

This is just a quote from Saki's only novella-length publication, drawn from Short Stories And The Unbearable Bassington, ISBN 978-0192831699.  He is one of our great Discordian writers, and this quote, about the dynamic between two cousins, could not be any more Discordian:

"No quarrel of any description stood between them and one could not legitimately have described them as enemies, but they never disarmed in one another's presence.  A misfortune of any magnitude falling on one of them would have been sincerely regretted by the other, but any minor discomfiture would have produced a feeling very much akin to satisfaction.  Human nature knows millions of these inconsequent little feuds, springing up and flourishing apart from any basis of racial, political, religious or economic causes, as a hint perhaps to crass unseeing altruists that enmity has its place and purpose in the world as well as benevolence."

Indeed it does, Mr. Munro.  Indeed it does.

 

BITING THE SUN

Wow, what a great read this was!  

Tanith Lee's novel of a future dystopia (available under ISBN 978-0553581300) is a gaudy vision of human society that's been placed under firm orders from their robot masters to ENJOY THEMSELVES ANY WAY THEY WANT, IN A CONSEQUENCE-FREE ENVIRONMENT.   This world has no crime, no want, no danger.  If you want it, and if you can imagine it, you get it.

What are you frowning about?  Doesn't that sound dystopic enough for you?   It should.  With no challenges to overcome, no meaningful connection with anyone, no conflict, and not even a job to slouch off to in the morning -- in short, NO DISCORD -- people in this society , hemmed in by Order, spend a whole lot of time KILLING THEMSELVES.  Not just once, but OVER AND OVER.  And why isn't once enough to finish the job, you ask?  The robots have figured out a way to rescue you from death and they just slot you back into a new body.  Then you go back to Square One.  Welcome back to despair!!!

The story really begins when one of these people starts to seriously CHAFE, wondering how life could somehow become, I don't know, maybe the right word is MEANINGFUL.  The protagonist's efforts to find anything to do that is really worth doing starts the story rolling.  

And oh, the wonders we get to see!

This book is a wonderful process of CLEARING AWAY THE COBWEBS and walking away from everything you know.  If everything you know is 100% PHONY, you can hope that the new territory you're entering somehow turns out to be REAL.

Sighted along another axis, this is about discovering that your perfect, universal Order is screwing you up six ways to Sunday, and what you need is a serious dose of Chaos to make it right again.

This would be a great story, not just for Discordians to read, but soto Zen Buddhists, scientolators, chronic drunkards, fanatics, general-purpose hedonists and anyone else who could benefit from a little head clearing.

I want to draw your attention to what the woman in the cover illustration is doing.  She's standing in a garden...

...Plucking an apple off a tree.

That's the whole story in a nutshell.  When she rolls that apple it will change everything.

Another Discordian Lance Saint Lost To Us!

Gene Sharp, good Discordian saint material, has gone to the Great Wherever after a long, illustrious career spent teaching ordinary people to PROTEST. 

Here are a few of his training manuals:

All of his books are GREAT STUFF and there is a big pile of them for you to read.  The principles apply to all issues, from the tall to the small, but of course in THIS country we are all about making sure people have their civil rights, and being sure there's no taxation without representation, no unpopular wars, but also no gun control, and that kind of American protestamenta.  

In fact, no matter WHAT your issue, Gene Sharp will probably have some good suggestions for you.  And see the word "nonviolent" in some of those titles?  He's not suggesting Molotov cocktails or anything else that's going to get you arrested. 

AND YOU STILL MIGHT GET WHAT YOU'RE AFTER.

GHOSTS OF THE TSUNAMI

This one -- ISBN 978-0374253974 -- qualifies as one of the most Discordian reads of 2017.  Nominally a document of the devastation of Miyagi Prefecture by the March, 2011 earthquake and tsunami, it's also a close study of the wavery line they maintain in Japan between Order and Chaos.  

The Japanese are -- understandably -- more tuned in to disaster preparedness than anyone else on earth.  They live on top of a chain of volcanoes situated along the infamous Ring Of Fire, where almost all the world's volcanic eruptions occur.  They're also surrounded by a fairly stormy body of seawater; the word "typhoon" comes to us from their neck of the Far East.  

But wait!  There's more!!!  Japan sits on the meeting point of, not two, but four tectonic plates.  Tokyo itself sits on top of the spot where three of the plates grind together, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes violently.  Japan has about 1500 earthquakes every year.   So next time you see Godzilla striding ashore from Tokyo Bay and laying waste the Ginza, just remember where some of that symbolism comes from. 

The earthquake that led to the tsunami that led, in turn, to the creation of Parry's book, was the fourth-most-violent ever recorded, a 9.2 on the Richter scale.  (The scale only goes to 10.)  It lasted 6 minutes, and at the end of it Japan was 4 feet closer to the United States than it had been that morning.  Because of Japan's excellent anti-earthquake building codes, even the tallest, most fragile-looking buildings were left largely intact and just a handful of people died.  This is a great example of how the Japanese have imposed Order on their extremely Chaotic environment.  

He never goes into it very much, but the author says that he put on a radiation suit and visited the damaged Fukushima Daiichi power plant with its ruptured insides.  He also says that nobody at all has died as the result of the leaky, shattered reactor.  No doubt some people got sick, but nobody has died.  Why?  More Japanese know-how, is why.  They know more about the dangers of radiation, and the prevention and treatment of radiation sickness, than anyone else.  This is an even greater example of how they have imposed Order on Chaos in Japan.  Because, hey, what's scarier than a radiation leak?  This is another major source of the Godzilla archetype.

The tsunami that followed the earthquake had nothing to do with imposing Order on Chaos.  The wave was 33 feet tall and washed away 300 billion dollars in public buildings, people's homes, farms, personal belongings, family heirlooms, cars, trucks, boats, temples, and, of course, the people themselves. 18,500 of them were tumbled to death in a wave of mud, timber and twirling cars ground up by enormous stones.  The final death toll was over 22,000.  This included most of the students and all but one of the teachers in an elementary school that did not have any tsunami-evacuation plans in place, because no tsunami had hit there in so long that nobody thought it was really needed. 

This was where Chaos replied to the Japanese, "Try to impose Order, will you?  Watch this!"

The book explains that in the wake of this enormous disaster, ghosts started showing up in large numbers.  Yes, ghosts -- the lyric, phantsmal apparitions experienced by the guilty, the lonely, and the delusional.  The phenomenon that almost everyone -- including almost everyone in Japan -- dismisses as nonsense.  Some people started seeing and speaking with them; others were possessed by them and spoke in their voices, telling their stories.  Some of the spirit possession extended to animals, like the household pets lost in the disaster.  Some people saw one ghost, or had one ghost inside them; others had many, many more to deal with.  This started MONTHS after the cleanup was underway, when the homeless were staying safely in government-issued prefabs, and most of the dead had been found and given decent burials.  Apparently it's still going on today.

"Try to impose Order, will you?  Try this on for size!"

OUTSIDE VERDUN

This is a book I can only describe as the Discordian Read Of the Year!  I later found out this is part of a tetralogy by Arnold Zweig called The Great War Of The White Men, but this novel (ISBN 978-1908754523) stands very well on its own...And after that my thoughts trail off in confusion and I HARDLY KNOW WHERE TO BEGIN.  Let me think a minute here.

The story is nominally about the accidental meeting of a young attorney named Werner Bertin, who's serving at the front lines, with another young soldier named Kroysing, who asks him a favor.  Kroysing is killed the next day, before Bertin can do what he's been asked to do.  From there the story really picks up steam when Bertin meets Kroysing's older brother, who wants to ask Bertin a much bigger favor.  I'm not going to ruin the story for you, but it's basically all about private battles waged against the backdrop of the massive, devastating Battle of Verdun.  In real life, Verdun claimed 262,308 lives, and the story is essentially a race to see if Bertin and the elder Kroysing can do what the dead brother needs them to do before they, too, are vaporized by artillery.

NEVER FORGET that the Great War is the one that brought us surrealism, Dada and all the other artistic forms that deliberately introduce CHAOS and CONFUSION into forms previously characterized by ORDER.  To give a couple of examples, e.e. cummings served in this war, as did the great Discordian Scribe Saki, who died at Beaumont-Hamel, one of the many, many casualties of the Battle of the Somme.

And over here on the other side of the war is Arnold Zweig, talking about their attempts to protect something he keeps referring to as a Pentagon -- the Discordian symbol of Order -- while his characters juggle yellow apples that fell off a tree, for Pete's sake -- the Discordian symbols of Chaos.  This book was originally published in 1933, more than 20 years before Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill had the bowling-alley vision of the Goddess of Chaos that introduced them to the Sacred Chao:

To my astonishment, square in the middle of the book, one of the characters quotes the Assassin's Creed, one of the best-beloved catch phrases of Discordians everywhere:

"Nothing is true.  Everything is permitted."

After that, my brain just trails off into bewildered silence, you know?

FUZZ

Fuzz, by Ed McBain (LOC # 68-12156), #22 in the 87th Precinct series, is a book I wanted to read because it's a police procedural that actually seems to have started a crime wave.  A terrible, terrible movie with the same name, based on this book, was shown on the ABC Movie of the Week not long before someone apparently copycatted a crime from the story in Roxbury, Massachusetts.  As you can see from the book jacket above, part of the plot involves Detective Steve Carella's attempts to capture some young hoods who are pouring gasoline on sleeping hobos and lighting them up.  The same week the movie aired on TV, a woman named Evelyn Wagler was walking to her car one night with a can of gasoline, and some young hoods made her pour it over herself.  They set her on fire and she died a few hours later.  I first learned about this because Stephen King mentioned it in Danse Macabre.  He said that when they caught the killers, the kids explained that they got the idea from the movie.  In fact, they have never been caught, but someone noticed the coincidence and that's still one theory -- not a bad one -- about where these young guys got this horrible idea.  For those of you not alive in the early 1970s, when flocks of pterodactyl still blackened the sky for miles in every direction, in those days there were only about 6 TV stations, not 253 or whatever they have now.  The TV guide was in the daily newspaper, so everyone in the viewing area knew what was showing, complete with plot summaries, so there was always a general sense of what was on the small screen. 

Life really does imitate art.  Apparently, idiots with cans of gasoline have been setting fire to hobos ever since.  This meme is such an institution in American crime that even Hudson Platt, the cameraman character in Cloverfield, mentioned it while the plucky survivors were fleeing the monster through a subway tunnel.  That's just one example off the top of my head.  If you Google "set fire to homeless," case after case pops up -- new and different killings every time you look.  That's a lot of impact for a book and a movie that (if you ask around) practically nobody has ever heard of.

But I review this well-written page-turner here as a Golden Apple, because if there's a central lesson in this story, it's that random events change everything.  In here you see the police go off on what looks like, and what turns out to be, a wild goose chase related to their attempts to find a master criminal they call the Deaf Man.  The more they investigate, the farther it seems to take them from the man they are looking for, but they proceed because hey, it looks like some kind of crime is shaping up here anyway.  And it has nothing whatsoever to do with the hoods torching winos with gasoline.  But then a random event occurs...other stuff happens...and the fuzz find themselves confronted with an unexpected solution to every crime on their docket.

And here's the ripest, most fragrant golden apple in the whole barrel.  Remember Evelyn Wagler and the hoods who killed her in Roxbury?  She borrowed a friend's car to go somewhere that night, and it happened to be low on gas.  It conked out in a spot that forced her to walk past where these hoods were waiting.  If she hadn't been walking specifically down Blue Hill in Boston on that night, she never would have run into these three guys.  This wouldn't have happened if she had borrowed a different car, or if the car's owner had thought to fill it up earlier that day.  If she hadn't been carrying a can of gas, she would never have been set on fire; the hoods who killed her were not armed.  If anything at all had gone differently, Wagler almost certainly would have lived through the night and gone back to raising her 6-year-old.  And if this ugliness had never happened and been reported around the world -- Evelyn hailed from Germany so the interest was international -- this particularly foul crime would not have spread with it.  When I Googled "set fire to homeless" just now, the first case I found was from Germany.

Life is terrible sometimes.

Evelyn Wagler, 1949-1973

And Now This Bulletin From the Sibyl's Cave

"Before the threshold of hell they passed through a group of beings...forms horrible to view.   The Furies spread their couches there, and Discord, whose hair was of vipers tied up with a bloody fillet..."

 

(Thomas Bullfinch, in The Age Of Fable)

I only want to point out here that the glory of a woman -- and very often a Goddess -- is her hair.  And in mythologies from all over the world, snakes represent WISDOM.

And if that wisdom sometimes has FANGS, well, that's the way the cookie crumbles, am I right?

THE STATE BOYS REBELLION

This intriguing book by Michael D'Antonio, ISBN 978-0743245135, makes clear that despite all the well-meaning statements in the media decrying the violence in places like Ferguson, Missouri and Charlotte, North Carolina, well, sometimes A RIOT IS JUST WHAT YOU NEED.


This book is about a particularly shameful period in this nation's history, when "eugenics" was a perfectly acceptable word to use in polite company. (It mentions in the first few pages that Adolf Hitler considered a book on the subject, published by an American "scientist," to be his Bible.  Wow.)  The State Boys Rebellion is about one of the manifestations of the American eugenics movement. Apparently, in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties in this country, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of children rescued from bad homes -- or just not wanted by their parents for various reasons -- were herded into state-run institutions called "schools" where they were (usually incorrectly) labeled "feebleminded," warehoused, worked like dogs at menial jobs, denied proper schooling (again, because of that incorrect label), beaten, raped and generally exploited.  More than half of these kids were perfectly normal mentally (despite the lousy treatment they were getting!), and they put a lot of energy into against-the-rules learning about the outside world, saving money, and breaking out of the jails their state government put them in with NO HOPE OF PAROLE. 


Now, most of these kids just hunkered down and tolerated what the adults dished out to them, but some of them got really fed up and did what I would count as some very creative RIOTING.  The hijinks they got up to make for great reading, and FILLED ME WITH ADMIRATION.


And here's the thing:  I fully expected the powers to be to react to this by hiring more, meaner turnkeys and making the kids' lives WORSE THAN EVER.  What they did instead was admit that these kids did not really belong here and NEVER HAD.  They starting routing them into a special program to get them ready for the outside world.  Where they SUCCEEDED at living perfectly good lives.


It's an incredible message of hope for people like me, who look at what's going on outside the window and want to SET FIRE TO SOMETHING.  This book shows that sometimes that's the right decision.