THE CHARLIE CHRONICLES VOLUME 2
Correspondence between Charles Dillingham and Ken Cashion.
(Ken's comments in italics.)
>I have occasionally flown model airplanes in areas
where, that day, gravity was a lot stronger than usual.
Gravitational anomalies ... they may be related to worm holes ... who knows?
Remember you're health in the long run may be improved by exercise, but in
the short term the risk of cardiac failure, ventricular fibrillation, and all that goes
up. Exercise is bad for you. At least, that's the
excuse that I use.
>And today, while swimming, my lap times were way down. The only thing I can
think of is that some way today the water in the pool was a lot thicker.
Anomolies of viscosity -- they have to do with flickering clusters, I think.
>Oh, by the way...that King Charles was Charles the Vee. I should have said. There
were a lot of Charleses. And among other things, he was the Count of Aragon...which is the
Catherine of Aragon link to Henry 8.
The pope problem was both Clement and Paul...I forget their suffixes.
There is only one Charles...St. Charles.
They named a street after him. Did I tell you that the author of my novel is
Suzanna Bechard?
Listen, it just ain't right for a MAN to write a love story.
Even if it does occur after the end of time.
Later, but sooner than later, or ... whatever ...
Charles the Final
> Therefore, why were you using a walker?
>Why were you in a coma?
>An acceptable answer all the way around is, "Cashion, it is none of your
business." See how easy it is to bring closure?
I was walking on Charles Avenue. I was carrying a pistol because I
wanted to keep my money and credit card away from all the neighborhood Negros. I got
arrested for possession of a concealed weapon because I didn't have a permit to
carry. I thought it was legal, stupid me. I had a seizure while at the
jailhouse and ended up in Charity hospital, and I have no damn idea to this day why I was
in a coma. They intubated three different times.
The first time, while in my coma, they intubated me at Charity. The
second time they intubated me again because they had to copter me to Alexandria LA because
Katrina had knocked out all the power and the power generators had failed and there was no
food or water and the nurses were feeding all their own food to the patients while the
homeboys were firing pistols at emergency helicopters trying to land on the roof to
evacuate people, and the hospital was flooded deep and the water was rising to the second
floor. I was comatose, so I missed all this. Then the next hurricane came and
they had to intubate me again and fly me to Lafayette.
When I got there they gave me a tracheotomy. I was in the
hospital(s) for four months. When I came out of my coma, in
Lafayette, I could not walk at all (atrophy), all of my joints were in such terrible pain
I could almost not move at all (no idea why), and they told me I had silent aspiration and
that I would never be able to eat again -- this was complete bullshit but I didn't know it
at the time -- they were telling me I would die, and I was too weak to stand up and
fight. I had no one there; no one even knew where I was.
There were four people (x-boss,
x-wife, niece, and a close friend) who were communicating by email from four different
cities trying to find me. (My niece in Memphis finally did.) So they
surgically inserted a stomach feeding tube in me. I kept getting infections again
and a again which required IV treatment (hey, it's a fucking hospital, the most dangerous
place on Earth to me except Baghdad). The PT guy got me to where I could finally
barely walk with a walker, slowly and feebly. And there were other things were wrong
me (bed sores, etc.) After four months of lying there not knowing what to do -- I
had no phone to make long-distance calls and had nobody's phone number. (The N.O.
cops kept everything.)
Then one afternoon a nurse and a
doctor came into my room and said in a sort of panic that I had to be out of the hospital
by tomorrow morning. Someone in hospital management discovered I had been there for
four months and sent down the word.
I said, "Hey, I can barely walk at
all, I have no money at all on me, not even a nickel, I know no one anywhere near here, I
have no street clothes, my car is parked in New Orleans, if it is still there at
all. I have no way to get transportation and no way to get a hotel room. And
you say I'm leaving tomorrow morning?"
I left the next morning
with my walker.
The doctors and nurses were
so terrified of the word from upstairs that I had to leave. My endurance had become so low
that when I tried to walk just a few steps I was so winded I had to stop and gasp for
breath.
The next morning I
received a check from FEMA which my neice had got for me, but I couldn't cash it. I
had to go to a bank (by taxi -- the nurses collected money for me) and fight for two
hours. I finally got a lttle bit of money, went by taxi to the only hotel room
available in the whole city, and they wouldn't let me in because I had no driver's
license.
I called the head
nurse on my hospital floor and she -- literally -- shouted in the phone "I have done
everything I possibly could to help you, and the hospital has done everything it is
supposed to do, so if you can't get a hotel room, for the love of God go back to the
emergency room and SLEEP IN A CHAIR!"
Then she slammed the receiver down. (I already knew this
nurse was crazy anyway.) So I went back to the emergency room and they gave me a
bed. Next day the social workers, whom I had been trying to talk to for over a month
to no avail, showed up and figured out that there was a hospital problem there and they
fixed it.
I went to a hotel room, and got in, and had to stay there ten
days waiting for my angel niece and her fine husband to drive all the way from Memphis to
Lafayette, then to New Orleans to get my car (which he fixed for me and drove for me) then
back to their house in Memphis where they let me stay.
(Right after Katrina, April had eleven
people in her house, nine of whom were friends and relatives. My brother's comment
was, "Damn! I'm sure glad they didn't try to come to MY house!") The
first thing I had done when I got to that hotel was took a taxi to buy $15 dollars worth
of fattening junk food, then went back to the hotel and ordered a large pizza. (I
had lost down to 118 pounds.)
I said, if eating by mouth will kill me, then so be it. I never
stopped eating and drinking by mouth, and later had the stomach tube removed. I am
still alive. (Hey, I later had a tumor in my large intestine that had to be
removed. That was fun.)
The saga goes on from there, but that's enough for one day. By
the way, I was on the train heading for New Orleans to appear in court for
concealed-weapon charges, and my attorney called me and said "You don't have to come
here."
I said "Why?" He said, "They dropped the
charges." I said, "Why?" He said, "All the records got
lost in the hurricane."
I went ahead and rode to New Orleans anyway, because I missed her so
much.
There's lots of other stuff too which I could tell, but you've probably
have had your fill. Besides, I would rather forget it all. I already told you
about the apartment fire and all my instruments getting hocked. Geeze, as Mike West,
my lost New Orleans producer (who was from Australia), sang: "New Orleans is a
dangerous place if you know what I mean."
Then I'm on the CIA list of people to watch. I made about four
phone calls to the CIA to find out how to get a letter to Shannon Span -- remember her,
the wife of the first man killed in Afghanastan (sp???) -- I wrote a song about her -- to
her (she's very pretty). Every CIA person I talked to on the phone said, "Now
what is you name again? You live where? Is this your permanent phone
number?" Finally I found a nice woman who told me gravely "I cannot verify
for you that Shannon Span is employed by the CIA. But if you send me the song
lyrics, I'll see to it that she gets them."
This ignorance is starting to weigh on me. I am appalled at
people who are supposed to have a good education doing some of the stuff they are
doing. And they are supposed to be politically correct.
The last one I heard is that 20% of U.S. high-school students think
that the sun goes around the earth (they don't know the word "orbit") and that
45% don't know that an atom is bigger than an electron. And 65% did not know what
half of the nineteenth century the Civil War occurred in. My nurse friend talked to
someone he works with whose husband had decided that he is a Muslim (as in Black).
Turns out, neither he nor she had ever heard of Mecca.
I'll have to tell you some time about the extremely long dream I had
while comatose and probably drugged.
The dream was extraordinarly vivid and real. I met the King of
England and three nuns who were all in their 90s -- he slept in the back of an old
converted dungeon -- and he died with his head in my lap. It took me a week after I
woke up from my coma to realize that I could not have just been in England, and that
England does not have a king. I also thought in my still-drugged stupor that I had
called you and told you about meeting the King. You seemed very impressed.
Later,
Charlie
There is a street band on Royal Street and
they are all acquaintances of mine. Boy, New Orleans photos put me right back there
again.
Note: One of the many washboard players in the New Orleans street bands (not
this one) was a girl named Randi. She was six feet tall and pretty.
First time I saw her she was wearing a short skirt and playing while gazing
up at the sky, rocking her head and singing along with the songs. Her legs and arms
and face were sprinkled with random blobs of white paint. Cute. I walked up to
her between songs and said, "I wanna ask you just two things."
"What?" she drawled with a sweet southern accent, smiling.
"First," I said, "Why are you covered with white paint?"
She said, "Cuz I was paintin' ."
Oh," I said.
"So what's the second question?" she asked.
I said, "Will you marry me?"
She laughed and said she would have to think about that one for a
while.
(Later I tried to get her out of jail with no success. But when she
found out about it later while she and some other guys were recording in my home recording
studio, I got a hug and a kiss out of it.)
These were great guys -- the people in all of the street bands.
Really decent people. They just chose to live on the edge. I bet they're all gone
now after Katrina. The few times I have been back to N.O. since Katrina, I have
never seen a steet band playing.
Charlie
Date: 12 Mar 2008
From: Charles Dillingham
Subject: Re: Comas, Walkers, and Cars
To: Ken Cashion
>Charlie, a lot of misfortune we bring on ourselves but
old friend, no one, (NO ONE!) deserves the experiences you had. That is amazing. And you
are writing fiction? Your imagination cannot match your reality.
I sincerely hope that my imagination does match my
reality, but I am always plagued by doubt. But, I mean, my 11 characters span 1000 years
on three continents, and I have one of my heroins caught up in a terrible Viking war
(which she started, and must flee for her life) and I have several main charactrers who
are part of a futurist terrorist underground, walking on the streets of NYC with
futuristit weapons and HOGPUDLS (HOloGraphic Portals to Universal Data Linkage --
hand-held electron-spin supercomputers with holographic displays) and cell phones that
fold up like a thin piece of paper (hey, it's in the rechearch labs today!), and with
rabid, mutant, starving dogs in packs in minus-20-degree terrible storms, and a homeless
madman-poet who is a descendant of the Line of the Sacred Seed and who lives in the train
tunnels underneath Manhattan and is a friend of the terrorists (the line of the Sacred
Seed dates back to the supernatural meeting of Kazupalkuli and Dylla the Viking goddess in
the 11th century on the Carribean), and a church called the Church of the Just in Case
which meets at Club Hell, a cavernous club in the Lower East Side whose pagan goddess is a
cow with an unpronuncable name ...
>I am so sorry all this happened to you. Really, guy.
Thank you. Without the help a few great people, I
probably wouldn't be typing now.
>"So there I was walkin' down the street with my
pistol, mindin' my own business when..." it would make a good movie, too. Not
"good" as in "funny" but "good" as in
"provocative."
Yea ... Maybe I'll make that movie after the first
one I and a friend of mine want to make: "Drinking World" where, in a future New
Orleans everyone drinks all the time. The cops in their squad cars toast other passing
cars, which are swerving into trees. There are a camera zoom-ins on people's faces lying
with their heads lying sideways at the bar looking at each other, mumbling,
"Drin-nking ish a soch-ocial lubbrienk." (The movie within the movie plays in a
theater where everybody is sitting sideways staring at the walls and ceilings, spilling
drinks on themselves. We've even gotten permission of the owner of the Prytania Theater to
film the scene there, and Patrick still has the key to the front lobby of the apartment
building I lived in on Saint Charles Avenue -- we want to shoot the opening scene from the
second story of the building, looking down on Saint Charles) "Drinking World"
has a preposterous love story in it which ends with the girl being chased by a huge mob of
people, while she flees holding her broken minature guitar ... too much to explain.
My fingers hurt. This is guerilla cinematography.
>And all I had was three oak trees on the roof, $34,000
in damages, and then shoulder surgery and one miserable night in a hospital...but
remember, I did say I wasn't complaining at all.
I'm sorry for you too. I don't even want to try to
imagine what those torn ligaments felt like. I bet you were glad to get the morphine. Did
insurance cover the tree damage, or was it the insurance Moloch-worshipers write it off as
an act of God?
By the way, you tell some true-life stories that
are good, too. Like knocking that guy down the staircase to protect the girl.
Gotta run,
Charlie
- Date: 16 Mar 2008
From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion
Subject: Miscellanea
>I did not write the hospital because I talked to the head nurse at another
hospital and she said I could write that letter about most any hospital in the south.
From the samples I've seen, I believe that must be true. It's pathetic.
Your hospital experience sounds as horrible as mine, only not nearly as long. I know
exactly what it feels like to be lying there with multiple things wrong, with no one to
help, and the nurses are wind-up bots who talk at you but don't listen (they're the
Caucasians), or else they are hostile, surly, don't speak English, and won't even
acknowledge that you are calling, "Nurse, excuse me, nurse?" and they turn and
walk out of the room, never even looking at you (those are the Negros). Of course, there
are exceptions to both cases, but it's the horror that sticks in your mind.
Wow. I wondered many times what had happened to your house and yard
after the Bitch came. I was afraid it might have been worse that it actually was. I had
heard that Picayune got tore up pretty bad. Glad you recovered smoothly.
>I would just tell the guys helping recover from Katrina, "Give me what you
think the current situation is worth, I have cash and I do not have to wait on insurance
to pay you." They were out in the hour to give me a quote. And his was when they were
driving under cut out trees and slowly driving over big power lines across the roads.
It's nice to be rich. I know, I used to be. I told you, didn't I, that
I let Jane walk away with a quarter of a mil and I took about 30 or 40 thousand or so?
That's all spent now because I am unemployable in the computer trade (the technology
changes so fast that 24-year-olds know more than I do, and they are 30 years younger
– age discrimination is ubiquitous -- and I am unable to work physical labor, and
besides, no one can live on minimum wage -- even the homeless people say that they
panhandle because they can actually make more money that way then by working a min. wage
job).
>This would be like "wind, rain, hail and flood." They are covered against
wind, rain, but not hail without flood or flood without hail. They must be both at the
same time.
They aren't supposed to do that. A comma between hail and the "and" would have
made the contract legal.
Yes, that is true. The disgusting thing is the punctuation in your
example is not considered an "error". The majority of (not all) "usage
guides" (which are written by conformist, mentally challenged people with no ear for
the language) instruct that to write "a, b, and c" is incorrect -- that you
should leave out the last comma. Your example is one of the main reasons that you SHOULD
include the final comma.
Another reason is that the final comma reads (sounds) inside your head
the way people actually speak it. The British, too, have standard comma usages, very
different from that of the U.S., which do not read the way people speak it. It's one of
the few complaints I have about British English.
Did you know that it used to be in the U.S. -- and I think it still is in
England -- considered correct usage of the period to write: Everyone refers to John as a
"mensch".
In recent decades in the U.S. it has become universal and considered
correct to write: Everyone refers to John as a "mench." However, the U.S.
dumbasses say, on the other hand, that the following is correct (note final punctuation):
Does everyone think John is a "mench"? and: "He called John a
"mench"! This usage of the ! and the ? are perfectly logical. The usage of the
period is utterly illogical and ugly. You know why they started putting the period INSIDE
the end quote even though it makes no sense? Because (this is true) the typesetting people
decided that it was too hard to keep track of when the period should be inside or out
(poor dumb typesetters), so they said it must always go inside. I just love it.
Another example of dumbing down. (Sometimes putting the period
inside the quote is correct -- as in: "I think that John is a mensch.").
>Charlie, are you OK physically now?
Not really. I have been in the hospital two other times I have
not mentioned, and I have something systemic wrong with me. Sometimes can barely walk, and
have a number of other strange and probably serious problems.
So it goes. I'll just wait and see if it gets better.
>Do you have a car?
It's dead. And I cannot get a license in any of the 50 states.
Wanna know why? It's a really good one.
Something like eight years ago I got a DUI in Pennsylvania.
So I took care of it. They suspended my license for whatever
period of time, I paid the fines, and went to their BS PC mickeymouse classes. Got my
license back. Renewed it at least once, got it replaced at least once. No problem.
I was legally squeaky clean. Then when Katrina and the cops ate my
unexpired license, I went to get a replacement license. (Note: This was AFTER 9/11 and
"homeland security", whom I call "Schutzstaffel", implemented their
national data base of everything about everybody in the country).
They told me that I could not get a license until I fixed
some problem I had with Pennsylvania (I lived in Philadelphia for a couple of years). I
called the 800 number they gave me, and was told that I had gotten a DUI many years ago
and that my license had never been suspended for the mandatory time. I said, yes it was.
They said no it wasn't.
The deal is this: I got the DUI in
Mississippi just a few weeks after I had moved there, and I still had the PA license.
That's what MS suspended. The woman in PA told me that that didn't count. I had to have PA
suspend my license, not MS. I said, why didn't anyone inform me of this?"
She said, we notified you by mail. I said, I never received it,
and all my mail was being forwarded to my new address in MS.
She said, Oh, they don't forward mail like this kind of mail. I said,
well I'll be! I'll just bet that's why I never received it, you reckon?
She told me there was absolutely nothing I could do about it
except come IN PERSON to PA and REQUEST that they would me grant me the favor of
initiating the one-year suspension of my PA license, and pay some fee of a few hundred
dollars. I will, of course, not do that. The only thing I know to do, since I cannot
afford an attorney, is to write to or call the attorney general of PA, as well as both
senators in PA and both senators in MS, LA, and GA (where I now reside) and my current
representative in GA and try to get them to fix this bureaucratic idiocy on the part of
the webfooted brachycephalic cretins who run the government of PA.
This is one of the most idiotic violation of a person's obvious
rights that I ever heard of. Meanwhile, if I must drive, I drive illegally, in someone
else's car.
>Do you have a real address?
Yes, I will send it later.
>What are you doing about a telephone? Do you have a number?
This will be sent later, as well -- usually you have to
leave a message, or at least try calling twice in a row. I often cannot get to the
phone before it quits ringing. (The answering voice is a female voice.)
>Are you living with someone?
A once-very-close old friend that I had not
seen or heard from for literally thirty-three years. We worked together at Sanitorium, MS
at a deaf-blind-retarded children's camp. I made some of the best friends I ever had at
that place. I rediscovered her.
I'm now staying here, finishing my novel and spending my savings.
>A lot of competition isn't a team unless you are on the men's team. A school may know
some of the football players are drinking a bunch but they are drinking with each other
and they know they are a team. They cover for each other and the school knows it.
>And that is the difference in men and women sports. The women act like bitches and
they are in competition with each other all the time – on and off the field.
The boys are frat buddies, look out for each other, and only compete between the times
that the whistle blows. The women never stop competing with each other and will rat
on a team mate if it will improve the "ratter's" (the rat's) position.
I don't know women's athletics, but I
know women (and girls).
I think your observations and assessments are, sadly, right on the
mark. I like it so much, I think I'll save it to disk to plagiarise some time in the
future.
I'm very very glad (and relieved) to hear that you and Bettie are doing
so well.
Back to the novel now. Cheers.
Charlie
-
Date: 18 Mar 2008
From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion
Subject: Re: Good Morning
>Petty minds talk of people, Mediocre minds talk of events, but Great minds
talk of ideas.
I thought it was Mediocre minds talk of "things"
>He was Falstaff in the Shakespeare plays –
And I didn't even know that that was an English beer!
I guess I'll have to try it again. Last time I had it, back in
highschool, it tasted like horse pee. Very weak for an English beer.
By the way, one time I was sitting at a bar -- THE bar -- in
Hattiesburg, MS. The bartender had left a copy of "Das Kapital", which he had
been reading, lying on the bar.
The guy sitting two stools down from me looked at it and saw that the author's name was
"Karl Marx", and he hollered in Mississippi pidgin English, "Daey-amm! Karl
Marx! I betcha ayt's a fuunny book!"
FYI:
An e-mail or two ago I talked about how fucked up I was with some kind
of systemic disorder. Actually, it comes and goes, and it has gotten much better the last
couple of weeks. I think I know why. I don't think I'll ever be 28 years old again, but
for the time being I'm OK enough to get on. My biggest problem is finding a job that pays
more than $8 an hour. Who can live on that?
Anyway, I just thought I sounded a bit morose in that e-mail. Just
wanted you to know I don't have multiple sclerosis or spina bifida or Mad Cow disease or
anything like that. But still, it is worrying, because something ain't right ...
Must go to novel now. I'm just setting up the situation
where Kozepulkuli is about to meet Dylla -- but then I break to chapter 2 (yes, I have
written way past chapter 2, I'm just inserting) and jump right into the middle of New York
City on Christmas eve 2046. I'll come back to Koz and Dylla in a later chapter and pick up
-- next time from her viewpoint.
Charlie
From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion
Subject: Re: oh my god oh my god
>She is a marriage counselor. Really.
Ah, I should have known.
I would go to a "counselor" only if he or she
were one-up on me. There aren't very many people that are one-up on me, thank god. That
means I'm not very likely to have to go to a councellor.
The sister of a ladyfriend of mine called her a couple of
weeks ago, and they talked for about two hours because one of her sister's co-workers had
slighted her at work, which hurt her feelings. See, if men were only as sensitive and
caring as women, there would be no war in the world.
(And if you believe that ... allow me to notify you that you
have just been chosen the lucky winner of a free trip to Florida! All you have to do is
...)
>But being a woman, she would continue with the female nagging
with..."and another thing....."
Oh yea. You get it.
For almost four centuries, men constructed models of
physical reality using linear equations. If you wanted to come up with an equation that
predicts the length of an Earth day, you started out by saying stuff like, "Let us
assume that Earth is a radially symmetric, perfectly rigid sphere, and that other bodies
-- in particular the moon, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, and Mars -- have no perturbatory
effects on the earth's motion, and that there are no frictional forces between ocean,
Earth, and atmosphere, and that ocean tidal forces are negligible, and that ... and so on.
And you come up with the nice, tidy equation of an ellipse.
It is now recognized that this is not reality. Not at
all.
Almost everything that happens in the universe is nonlinear.
Almost all processes, from the formation of galaxies to the
folding of protiens, are nonlinear -- often highly nonlinear. When the system is poised
precariously on the dividing line between order and chaos, you have "weak
chaos". Examples weak chaos include the beating heart, the interactions between gene
sites in DNA, the neural network of the brain, all weather phenomena from dust devils to
cloud formation to hurricanes, volcano eruptions, earthquakes, the breaking-out of riots,
love-hate relationships between men and women, and many others.
OK, to make an outline of a novel before launching into
writing it is linear. That's one way to do it. It's a good way to generate a
"Pilgrim's Progress" or a whodunnit WallMart novel.
But if you want to write a Celene or Pincheon or Faulkner or Hugo or Joyce piece, you have
to do it just like a protein folds, or like a chlorophyl molecule takes the spacially
distributed wave of a single photon and searches all possible energy minima simultaneously
so that the photon collapses to the lowest possible energy state thereby maximizing the
transfer of energy to the formation of ATP, the energy molecule.
To write the kind of novel I am writing, you have to do it in a
nonlinear, self-organizing fashion. It creates itself as it goes.
I'll tell you something. I have had some of my characters
inside my head for over twenty years. They sat there and dawdled, drank, cried, fucked ...
whatever they were doing when I wasn't looking. But once this novel (by inexplicable
nonlinear self-organizational spontaneity) burst into bloom, these characters evolved
rapidly into whole, complex, unique people. They started coming to me and saying,
"Hey, Dillingham, I want you to make me do so and so, I want you to make me kiss
whoese-it."
Victoria came to me and said, "I want you to send me to New
Orleans on the train and make me fall in love with Howard, on the train." I said,
"But Victoria, to give a truly realistic description of riding the train from New
York to New Orleans would require that I ride the train myself and take notes."
Victoria said, "Buy the fuckin' ticket, Dillingham."
So I (and this is a true story) went and bought a round-trip ticket,
N.O. to NYC, and rode the train both ways and took notes.
Now I have Vicky and Howie on the train in my novel.
That trip to NYC, by the way, was fortuitous in an unexpected way. I
ran into a meltingly sublime oops, I think that is an oxymoron, otherworldy fox-creature
who was tending bar in an upscale boho bar in Soho. I have two or three pages in my novel
where two people are exchanging – mixed in with English -- are exchanging French
phrases. Yes, it is mostly intelligible, from context, to the non-French-speaking reader.
To get the French right which I do not speak I did a first pass using Babblefish (ha ha
ha), then a second pass by asking somebody who had taken French in school to proofread it
and correct it, and a third pass by going to Aliance France (the French Institute) and
having an instructor from France proofread and correct it ... but I was still wary,
because it was supposed to the colloquial Parisian French, not bookish French ... so by
pure serendipity I ran across this creature tending bar in Soho, and it turns out that
she, although born in America, had spent her entire life in Paris, until she came to NYC.
Hmmm. OK, so it just so happens -- really, I swear I am not making this up -- it so
happens that I had part of my novel in the bag I was toting, including the French part.
So, Cythera the tender got off duty and sat down next to me and proofread and corrected:
"No, she wouldn't have said it quite that way"; ":No, he would have put
this less formally" ... I am now content that I have a passable translation. And as
lagniappe, I got a photograph of her beautiful smile on my cell-phone camera.
So back to the point. My novel unfolds like a
protein folds, for lack of a better metaphor. No linear equation or outline can describe
or create it. It creates itself. Self organization.
Maybe my novel, by self-organizational magic, will turn out as
almost lovely as "The Rainbow" by D.H. Lawrence, or almost as lovely as that
bartender in Soho. Time will tell. (It always does, doesn't it?)
More later ... right now, my nonlinearly unfolding novel
calls.
And Victoria is really being a bitch right now. These women vex
me. I cannot seem to rid myself of them.
Cheers.
Date: 23 Mar 2008
From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion
Subject: Re: Sunday Stuff
>I will not print the book I thought one day I would print, "The
Illustrated Social History of Britain." (250,000 B.C. to 1706 A.D.) No one would buy
it. No matter how good I knew it to be, I am not on an ego trip here.
No, write a book on the histroy of necromancy and pedophilia
from 400 B.C. to A.D. 2005. You can have a bunch of famoust monks and great English
literary figures chasing 13-year-old street hookers around Hyde Park in the rain and
engaging in acts of fondlage beneath the park shrubbery. Now *this* would sell.
>You may remember that I said that my courses were not Sho-n-Tell but
Tell-n-Sho. I would lecture and answer questions and then show slides about what I had
talked about. That is the most effective way to do it. Or maybe do it simultaneously?
>And remember that in archaeological procedures we can identify plant
pollen to determine sun angle and temperature.
Amazing, isn't it. The tree rings tell you to the year when the
stuff was buried or swallowed by the bogs, and then the analysis of pollen tells you what
time of year it was, and the ticks and mites and fleas tell you what their life style was
like and what diseases they had, and the alignment of the paramagnetic iron crystals in
the fireplace tells you what the direction of Earth's drifting magnetic poles was at the
time they last built a fire and heated up the iron crystals ... then you have carbon-13
and all that. Man, they have come far. Many of the greatest discoveries of the last
century or so (Viking war ships, Newgrange, longhouses, etc.) have come from rube farmers
plowing the green fields of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Norway who hit something hard,
and looked at it and said, hmmm ...
I should take this to His Lord!
>Remember, Charlie, in our arrogant perception that we are the greatest
things to happen in the cosmos and we are put here to use our "infinite"
judgement and morals to evaluate everyone who lived before us.
I think you lost me here ... aren't we the greatest things to
happen -- on Earth, at least -- and aren't we here to evaluate everyone who lived before
us???? As Gore Vidal famously said, "Show me the Swahili Shakespeare. I would love to
read him."
I guess that you are not a Viking. Seek ye the coward's
"straw death"? I shall die with my sword in my hand! Sheart! Death hath no
dominion!
(Do you know if WalMart sell swords?)
Charlie
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2008
From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion
Subject: Re: OK'd Printer
I have decided that we -- U.S., Canada, Western Europe, and
Australia -- are at war with a common enemy, and most Westerners don't even know we are at
war. This is dangerous and scary. Who is that common enemy? Islam. As Peter Hoekstra of
the Wall Street Journal puts it, "What is particularly disturbing about these
assaults against modern society is how the West has reacted with appeasement, willful
ignorance, and a lack of journalistic criticism."
The archbishop of Canterbury says that the implementation of some
measure of Shariah in Britain is "unavoidable" and British Muslims should have
the choice to use Shariah in marital and financial matters.
A German court says that a man has a right to beat his wife
because of Sharia. The only newspaper in the U.S. that printed the Danish cartoons making
fun of Islam, which resulted in riots and terrorist acts in 2005, was Denver's Rocky
Mountain News. These people are cutting off fingers of people that are caught smoking,
cutting off hands for stealing a tomato, throwing scalding water and acid into the faces
of women who show their faces in public, or else they're locking those women in torture
chambers where they are stripped and flogged so violently that permanent scars are left.
These people have stabbed two people associated with Rushdie's
"Satanic Verses", killing one of them. They brought down the World Trade Center
towers. Dutch director Theodoor van Gogh was killed in 2004, several months after he made
the film "Submission," which described violence against women in Islamic
societies.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Dutch member of parliament who wrote
the script for "Submission," received death threats over the film and fled the
country for the United States.
We are at war. I'm tempted to create an Internet e-mail account under a
fake name, using a computer in a library rather than my own computer (so no one can trace
the IP address to me), and start flooding the Internet with declarations of war. If I were
prez,
I would have every Muslim in America searched before he or she were
allowed to enter any public place. I would place draconian restrictions on Muslims trying
to enter the U.S., and most of the ones currently here from other countries would be
immediately deported. And most obvious of all, every airline pilot in the country would be
REQUIRED to carry a pistol (as the pilots flying for El Al have been required to do for
many years), and to know how to use it real good.
If this rule had been in place in
2001, the towers would be standing today, and that's an indisputable fact. (I was telling
people years before 2001 that we should do this. It seemed obvious to me.) Also, if I ever
see another little old lady from Iowa removing her shoes to have them searched in an
airport while some towel-head is shooed right through, I think I will ... hmmm, I don't
know. Not much I can do, is there? Except rant and rave to you about it.
Oh well. Never mind. By the way, I am considering a new career.
It probably won't happen, because it's a real long shot. It's so nutty, you wouldn't even
believe I am seriously looking into it unless I explained at some length. I could make
real money while doing something that matters -- as opposed to maximizing next quarter's
profit for an unethical corporation.
I'll tell you about it another time. Right now I am in the
process of applying for teaching positions at every on-line college in the country -- and
there are a bunch of them. Then I'm gonna try to look into the on-line grading of
standardized tests like the SAT and the GRE. So far I have not had any success finding out
how to do this. But my biggest problem is recommendations, which really should come from
professors that either taught me in college or worked with me at a college. All my
professors are gone -- either retired or booted by Katrina -- and I have not been able to
find them yet. Back to work now.
Later ...
Charlie
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