Sunday, December 31, 2017
Welcome to Kansas City By Night
ADAM THIELEN – INTEGRAL – 2017
A strange book about vampires, magicians, called mages, and a criminal imbroglio in this nocturnal and magic society. Normal people, that is to say humans, are marginal in the story, though they do play an ancillary role now and then. The main characters are the vampires who are all members of an agency in Kansas City that is investigating vampiristic crimes. Mages are locked up in universities that are no campuses but plain prisons and they are trained in their magic but also trained in fighting, close combat and other war-time techniques. We do not know why and this is kept nicely secret within these universities that have their own security system.
Apart from that the story is a crime story in the style of “Person of Interest.” A little bit difficult at first for a few chapters that are dealing with a case that has nothing to do with the main case. This introduction is definitely too long and in fact not needed at all. When finally, we are in Kansas City and confronted to the case that is the main course of the meal we can find some tempo and even energy that creates suspense, expectations, surprises and various predictable or non-predictable developments.
This world is of course completely rotten with corruption. The boss of the investigation service in Kansas City is trying to liberate one seat on the Vampire Committee for himself by having the oldest member assassinated by a mage he has to bring out of campus, which is difficult since these mages have anklets that cannot be taken off, except by some cruel magic.
Rotten with corruption too because some private corporations are inventing drugs intended to be for vampires. These drugs are of course illegal and run underground, but it is a very juicy and profitable black market activity for people who like money.
The security system of the university is just as rotten as the vampire investigation service and society at large, and the boss of the service who is also a firearm instructor is revealed as taking all kinds of grenades out of the armory and selling them on another black market, the black-market of weapons, though the novel does not make much of this, except for the last grenade, a polonium grenade that has the particularity to kill mages, that is to say to go through their skin protection.
It all starts when a mage, in this case a young girl, Sandra, is reported as missing on campus. The campus security service asks for the help of the vampire investigation service. That leads to a complicated story with blackmailing, assassinations, extortions of anything valuable, thefts, robbery, assault of corporate buildings, thwarted digital surveillance and communication, hacking and many other imaginable crimes.
Unluckily the only sympathetic girl of the story is killed by the polonium grenade, the mage Sandra Haulstein, and the survivors get justice against their two rotten bosses, one retires and the other is bluntly killed after trying to kill one of his agents after confessing his corruption. Simple, my dear Watson.
You might find these vampires a little bit too human since they eat, drink and smoke anything they want. Blood is a treat from time to time, especially to regenerate their crumbling bodies when attacked, wounded, or anything worse. The magicians, mages, are not really exploited and you will not get much from and about their magic. Too bad. I would have enjoyed a little bit of pottering.
But as an entertaining reading for adults, it is OK. I guess some late or older teenagers might also enjoy it. It is more meant for male readers than female readers. At the same time the book ends up on an important color-non-invisibility that is reassuring about the USA and their race problem. “A dark-skinned man named Freddy, . . . “Tha’ was nice,” . . . “Might be tha bess I evah had.” . . . “Was that tha body magic?” . . . “If ya say so.” . . . “Ya ‘ave ta miss tha outside,” he said. . . “Tha’s rough.” “Dark-skinned” means black if we believe the language (“N***a ya black!). But that ends up the novel on a touch of black magic because this Freddy is in bed with someone we could consider as dead:
“Sandra Haulstein suppressed the urge to rise and retreat to her room, choosing instead to bask in a warm euphoria of contentment for a bit longer. Such simple moments are not to be trifled, for there may come a time when things are not so simple, and life's story comes to an...”
Let’s just stop on this suspended promise of a resurrection in some not too distant future.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Saturday, December 30, 2017
2018, Redémarrons la psychomécanique, it may be a new start for Psychomechanics.
or
Published on Dec 30, 2017
Abstract:
Linguistics occupies a central place in the field of cognitive sciences. Given the primordial role of language in human cognition, it is therefore unavoidable in much of the work in this field. This is obvious for research in psychology, neuropsychology, neurophysiology, philosophy, etc. which directly study language activity. The psychomechanics of language of Gustave Guillaume proposes theoretical principles which account for the construction and the functioning of language in the context of operations called "memorial of thought". Its founder conceived language as "the fore-science of all science." Cognitive processes related to language are central to this approach, which puts it in line with recent theoretical models based on the neuronal architecture of the brain and aimed at explaining the functioning of thought.
Research Interests:
Intellectual History, Philosophy of Mind, Languages and Linguistics, Mental Representation, History of concepts, Linguistics, Concepts, Phylogeny, Mental Models et Psychogenesis
Wednesday, December 27, 2017
Racism still raging in the USA
TA-NEHISI COATES – BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME – 2015
This small book is a pamphlet but this pamphlet is so strong that it will give nightmares to everyone who has in anyway been dependent on someone else who domineered them, harassed them, sexually or not, exploited them in all possible ways. The author described the black side of this dependence and he keeps in mind – and starts from – the crucial declaration of the most racist white Southerner I know, John Calhoun who wrote: “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black. And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” This clearly means the blacks are neither poor nor rich, hence are not human. More openly racist is not possible. Calhoun thought the two classes in society were the humans, necessarily white, and the chattel, necessarily black. And we have to remember a black person is less valuable than a horse. An escaping horse will never be put to death. They definitely do not shoot escaping horses. But an escaping slave will probably be put to death by a band of dogs sicked onto the slave who will be literally dismembered by the dogs and probably abandoned to die slowly in some ditch or in the middle of a road to be used as an example to other escaping candidates.
Ta-Nehisi Coates very rightly identifies this racism as the possession of the bodies of the slaves who could be – by principle and by white privilege – tortured, raped, maimed, exploited, whipped, let to die buried to their shoulders in the sunshine for three or more days if necessary, and many other monstrous treatments advocated by the very famous Jamaican Lynch who came to Virginia at the beginning of the 18th century to explain to Anglo-Saxon planters how a black man could be turned into a black slave by implanting in all the blacks the fear of slow violent extremely painful death exemplified to them by the quartering of one male slave by four horses tied up to his four arms and legs. This Lynch monster is unluckily not mentioned as such by the author, but he is behind the whole pamphlet.
This possession of the body of the slave is transformed after the Civil War into the same possession of the same body of the same slave now ex-slave but with new means to impose that constant control of the flesh of black people in everyday and every night life. That used to be lynching, today practically extinct. That used to be the KKK today revisited and re-energized by white supremacists who are raising their heads out of the manure pile of racism thanks to the victory of populism in the USA. That used to be segregation and this one still exists. That has become the slavery of imprisonment: there are more black people in US prisons than there used to be slaves in the USA in 1861. That has also become the free rein on all police forces, white or black, to shoot to kill in any situation any black male who is deemed by the shooter a danger to his security, and you can imagine what it becomes at night with no witnesses. That has become more difficult nowadays with smart phones because those racist police officers, men and women alike, black and white alike, are confronted with the filming of their heroic racial cleansing. Yet that does not bring the slightest penal or criminal prosecution not to mention conviction of any of these killing cops in any court whatsoever. At the most a few of them have deemed it more reasonable to resign and go continue their careers under some private flag. They will continue killing but with the best lawyers imaginable to protect them.
The author is thus totally justified in considering race and racism as the central piece of US heritage, and changing this fact will take more than two or three generations and probably more than two or three more presidents after the nincompoop that is in the White House today.
But the author who writes this pamphlet for his son when this son of his is seventeen does insist on the body, on the flesh of this body, on the suffering imposed to the flesh of this body via the suffering imposed to the mind and soul of this body via fear. But he is discreet enough not to insist as much as he should on the sexual dimension of this racial hatred among racists. Lynching is often reduced in the public sphere to hanging, burning, alive or not, beating to death. But very often before coming to such final stages the black man who was going to be lynched was emasculated, probably raped by a few KKKlanners like a last drink for the road, and other sexual acts and mutilations these lynchers could invent including breaking their knees on logs, eviscerating them before hanging them, amputating their fingers, their toes, their feet, their hands, and any other part of the bodies they could reach and cut off. All those acts on men were of course direct sexual acts, not simply symbolical but perverted into any form of amputation.
Women – few were actually lynched – were the direct victims of rape. For a long time and still even today if the occasion presents itself, they were raped at any encounter possible. Rape was a daily activity of all white males after twelve and still is. The white females concerned by these white males then could satisfy their sexual drives by having the concerned black females tortured in any possible and horrible way. That has been going on in northern America since the arrival of the first black slaves delivered by the Dutch from New Amsterdam to the tobacco planters in Virginia in 1619, John Rolfe being the first planter to buy these black slaves. And be sure if the white supremacists and the white KKKlanners and the white racists have today the opportunity to rape a black man, woman or child without any possible criminal investigation, they do it and often in bands, hence practicing gangbangs against any black person available when they feel the surge and impulse to do it.
Now what about the future, what about life for his son when he is an adult and he was in 2016? Can the blacks go on living on that Post Traumatic Slavery Stress Syndrome and can the whites go on living on that Post Traumatic Slavery Stress Syndrome? It is the very same “heritage” but in the former case from the experience of slaves and in the latter case from the experience of slave owners. We can easily understand the problem for black people who live in constant fear, if they are males, to be shot to death or imprisoned at times for life, and if they are females to be raped by any band of white hooligans who could have the opportunity to do this in full criminal exoneration. But we do not seem to understand that this PTSSS is active among the whites, maybe not all of them, but at the level of the federal state without any questioning. That’s probably the worst part of Obama’s heritage. He has not changed one iota in the racist functioning of all police forces, of the war on drugs and of the imprisonment of as many black males as possible in prisons where they are forced to work for practically nothing, and their earnings will only be delivered to them when they get out in several dozen years or more, if ever. It will take more than one white Senator to change this situation, even if he/she is as persistent as Bernie Sanders. Right now a campaign is being launched by the media against sexual harassment of women by men, but there is no campaign launched about the sexual harassment of men by men or women and certainly not any campaign launched by the media against the racial harassment of blacks by the state, the police, the school system, the dominant culture, etc.
That’s where the debate is slightly twisted, distorted, pushed to the side, out of the way. At best some activists, white or black, attack Donald Trump. But Donald Trump did not set up the basically racist American society. He only used the bigotry mainly of white people to be elected and to go on being approved, even when betraying his own electoral promises, because he cannot change the system that got him elected and the only personal change he introduces is a secondary stress and emphasis on immigrants, both Latinos and Muslims. But basically it is the same bigotry that is at play in such side issues when compared to the case of blacks.
There is unluckily another element Ta-Nehisi Coates does not consider. All human societies since the emergence of Homo Sapiens 300,000 years ago or so have inherited and kept a hierarchical division of labor that enabled them to emerge and to survive the Ice Age. This division of labor developed into some subservient dependence that could be slavery among the agricultural and herding workers of the farming and animal husbandry that developed after the Ice Age some 17,000 years ago onward. All human societies have to have a hierarchical division of labor that enables them to improve, innovate, develop new solutions to the basic question of survival of the people. The problem we are ALL HUMANS EQUALLY facing is to keep this hierarchical architecture fluid enough not to produce any sort of segregation and rejection. (check the poetical extension at https://medium.com/@JacquesCoulardeau/nigga-ya-black-87a8051b0706)
With modern technology developing at light speed we can wonder if tomorrow the top layer will not be reduced to a very small number of people controlling the various media that would control all our needs and actions. Are we on the verge of the emergence of a “Person of Interest” society in which half a dozen people could control the whole world with computers and cameras? That’s the real challenge and it concerns absolutely everyone in the world, in the USA among many other countries, and it is by far wider than any racial approach which is the basic element of bigotry in the USA. These white supremacists are just blind in front of the real danger today. But the blacks, if they keep centered on these white supremacists, will also miss the real challenge of the next twenty years, the two decades during which the USA will lose their leadership in the world. Next year India will overtake France as for their economic power. China is not the only challenger and the use of traditional force and violence shows in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Syria, in Yemen, even in Palestine, that this violence is doomed to fail. After a few million casualties for sure but nevertheless fail it will. The real danger then in the USA is that an ever smaller minority of white supremacists or state supremacists, which is the same thing, who are the same people, takes over all control and imposes on the vast majority, mostly black, Latino, ethnic, Muslim or whatever is not White Anglo Saxon Protestant, utter alienation and exploitation, with or without a universal minimum income enabling them to survive without working pending their own suicide for and by boredom.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Monday, December 25, 2017
Delusional fantasy
STEPHEN KING – OWEN KING – SLEEPING BEAUTIES - 2017
This is a lot more than ONE novel. It is a saga in the most extensive comprehension of the term. It is enormous and it mixes various genres and styles. It is difficult to differentiate the style of the father from the style of the son, though the very detailed story always based on the psychological vista and understanding of the various moods and moves of the characters is quite typical of the son. The father often centers his story-telling on the action more than on the psychological or psychic contradictions of the characters.
This novel embraces the problem that is erupting right now in our society: the fact that women in spite of all their improvement and progress are still secondary people in society as compared to men who have all the rights they want to take all the time, at least some of them all the time and some more from time to time. Sexual harassment it is called. In fact, it is a lot more prosaic. It is pure sexual domination and possession, even of strangers, completely unknown and never met before women. As soon as they are in front of some males they are their possessions, their sexual rattles and toys, and the only thing these males can think of is taking them, possessing them, penetrating them, using them till their impulses are gone and till later and next time when their impulses start again. Take, discard, take again and discard again, forever and ever. The identity of the taken and then discarded object is totally unimportant.
The only element missing here (apart from one or two very discreet allusions) is the fact that some women are exactly the same with men, particularly young men. They are called cougars and they are ever present in any society that reaches a few thousands. This consideration makes the story limited. We are dealing here with a human trait in all human societies: some people cannot but dominate and it is not a question of gender, gender orientation, age, social position, education, or whatever. In fact, the reduction of this human trait to a complete and full opposition between men and women is a caricature that excuses at least half the crime because that domineering attitude is a crime against humanity. An extremely spread and perfectly shared crime but a crime nevertheless/
The story, magically or miraculously, by magic or by some divine entity, one day decides to open a door between two worlds. The real world in which all women, as soon as they fall asleep, get wrapped up in a cocoon of some white tendrils growing from them and their living being, semblance, or doppelganger moves beyond the gate represented by a tree to another version of their city, a version that has aged tremendously but in which they can rebuild some kind of a world or life without any men from the other side though with the few male babies they give birth to as soon as they have crossed. Note those babies are the sons or daughters of men on the other side – and they carry their genes, so that they will never be totally new. In the same way the mothers, the women on this magic side of things come with their culture, their psychology, their impulses, their wants and desires, etc. This is by far neglected. It is too easy to say that only men have sexual impulses that force them to be domineering baboons. Women do have the same impulses and that makes them submissive and at times conquering female baboons too.
In fact, this fundamental element is dealt with on the side, in the margin. Since the city has a female prison many of the women who go to sleep and cross to the other side are inmates from that prison, or their officers and administrative controlling personnel. Some of the women are also beaten women who cross with their past and memory. One inmate kills the other inmate she is in love with and who is in love with her. She kills her because that’s her instinct and then she kills herself because that is justice, or so she writes in her suicide note. Another woman, a divorced mother, is totally unable to step over the mistreatment she got from her ex-husband against whom she had successfully rebelled and whom she had divorced, and in the name of her daughter also present on the other side she wants to block any possible passage back to the normal world in spite of the clearly expressed desire of the daughter to go back because she misses her father. A man can be a divorced husband but he will never be a divorced father for his kids. And this is true for women too. A woman can be a divorced wife but she will never be a divorced mother for her children. In fact, this is alluded to at the end with the fact that most women want to go back because of their sons. The artificial division of the world between men and women is just that: artificial.
The novel is a beautiful action novel but it is based on this assumption that if you separate women from men, men will become even worse than before and women will be able to build a new life for themselves in the new circumstances in which they find themselves. This is purely absurd and difficult to accept. Not to speak of long distance social running: the sons born in these conditions will only be a few if not even only few and then what will happen? They will build a crazy inbred society that even cows refuse naturally: a bull does not naturally impregnate his own daughter. That question is never even raised. So these women decide to go back on totally fake arguments because they do not consider the real materialistic, biological arguments they should consider. In fact, that could bring up another story of another sort in which women could be world-crossing cougars (or amazons) who would cross the divide to capture some men or young men or boys from the other side and bring them to the female side of things for human biodiversity. Obviously that kind of slave capturing and slave trade and slave owning would show how brittle the hypothesis of this novel is.
The most interesting part or dimension is that this magic happening is the result of some extra-cosmic decision from who knows who, who knows what. This decision is carried out by the opening of a door between the real world and the other world, and the transformation is “controlled” – and this word is by far too strong – by a certain Evie Black, a “supernatural being” that is captured after she destroys a meth lab in the forest and kills a couple of men there. She is deposited like some asset and evidence in the women’s prison of the city for her own security and protection. And the sleeping cocooning of women can start. She is a perfect liar who will try all along to provoke the males of the community into drowning in more violence. All the violent ones will naturally get on that path and a few characters are essential for the plot. All evil minds will try to prosper on the situation and they sure will. They will be motivated by the haunting desire to capture Evie Black and destroy her in a vigilante lynching operation. The bad ones in the community who are not real criminals just extremely angry people will find in this situation the perfect occasion to let their anger run freely. That will lead to a real scene of civil war around the women’s prison in order to take it or defend it.
But Evie Black has convinced most people she has to be killed to bring normalcy back again. This is a lie and only one person, the prison’s psychiatrist, has understood. Evie Black is the go-between and as such she has to bring the women back from the other side by going there herself and convincing them they have to come back. But this very twist in the fabric of the tale is extremely debatable. It negates the absolute right of any individual to take any free decision they want. Women have to decide they want to come back but if only one refuses it becomes impossible. This is a monstrous blackmailing pressurizing unacceptable duress typical of any police state. Any individual has no personal freedom that goes against the decision of the majority. It is majority ruling rights with no majority duties: and the first duty of any majority, no matter how big, is to respect the rights of the minority. In this tale there is no right for no minority at no moment in no place. The authors do not seem to see it destroys the ethical value of the tale. Nothing can be considered as good when it is based on something wrong, bad, evil. I am surprised with this element because I always considered that Stephen King, even in the most far-fetched horror stories of his always kept that ethical credibility without which there is not humanity. Even in his very first novel, Carrie, the main character is justified in her fury that kills a lot of people because she is the sole direct victim of her mother’s religious terroristic fanatic fundamentalist bigotry. Evil always produces evil, and in this present case evil is overlooked just as if it were nothing at all.
Another bothering problem is the racial status of most characters that is not specified. An essential character is Frank. We only learn, on the side and incidentally, he is black half way through the novel (page 364). What we know about him is more than disquieting about the racial vision that should be clear and is not. This Frank wanted to be a cop in his city. He was refused and made a dogcatcher. He is systematically described as angry, violent, terroristic even, when the welfare of an animal, wild or not, is at stake. Several examples are given and dramatically amplified by his ex-wife who divorced him because he could not control his anger though he never was violent with her or their daughter, Nana. He is also shown as a control freak in the crisis that engulfs the city. He Volunteers himself, though he has no legitimacy to do so, into the second position after the deputy sheriff who becomes the acting sheriff when the sheriff herself goes to sleep in a cocoon. He manipulates that acting sheriff into drinking himself into unconsciousness and he will manage it so well that this acting sheriff will commit suicide before the end because he is unable to control this Frank and the urban civil war he is leading in the city. And this monstrous control freak is black. What other black characters are there in the novel? We do not know. The only other black character will be finally assessed as black when the sheriff, who is a white woman in a cocoon hence living on the other side, shoots her on that other side as a fast reflex because this black woman has a gun and is menacing a woman who is planning, unknown of the white sheriff, to burn the tree-gate between the two worlds. This fire starter is the “ex-wife” of Frank and we could assume she is black too though it is never said. The white sheriff, once back on the normal side of things will resign from her sheriff position because she will never be able to decide why she shot dead a black woman who was in fact innocent, though an inmate in the prison, and was protecting the tree-gate, hence the escape of everyone from this illusionary phantom exclusively female world. We learn about this only page 691, eight pages from the end: “. . . the names of white police officers who had shot innocent black civilians (like Jeanette Sorley).”
I have already condemned such color-blindness in other books supposedly written for old male teenagers and young male adults (“Color Blindness is Evil White Supremacy,” about Connie Corcoran Wilson — The Color Of Evil Trilogy Series — 2017, https://medium.com/@JacquesCoulardeau/color-blindness-is-evil-white-supremacy-96e70f170478). Color blindness is for white people the sign of the Post Traumatic Slavery Stress Syndrome all whites inherit from their previous generations and ancestors and it is the absolute symmetrical mirror image of the Post Traumatic Slavery Stress Syndrome of the descendants of slaves in the USA. These two diseases are typical of the USA today and it is this color blindness of politically correct white people that explains the resurgence of racial bigotry in recent years in the USA, and the systematic killing of young black males by the police here and there and over there in the USA. In the book it is the black version of this PTSSS that explains Frank’s constant anger and control freakiness. This dimension is regrettable and it is high time people start speaking about it. We could and should expect from the great writers, white or black, of the USA to embrace the problem fully and responsibly. If that had been done before, racial bigotry would not be what it unluckily still is in the USA. (See Charlottesville for one example).
So many more things could be said. Just one about the two parallel worlds, one under the other, or behind the other. This was used in The Talisman, and of course vastly used in The Dark Tower by Stephen King. There is another similarity with the latter in the first and last sentences which are identical in The Darker Tower and similar here. “The moth makes Evie laugh. It lands on her bare forearm. . . “ is the first sentence. The last one is “A moth flutters from the branch of the old oak tree and settles on her [Lila’s, the ex-sheriff’s] hand.” And this moth is in the text identified as a sign of the invisible presence of Evie. Such a trick in the story leads us to wonder: what has been achieved in the seven hundred pages? And that’s where what I have said before and so far resounds in my mind as meaning after all, apart from the entertaining story, nothing. Such a catastrophe is common in Stephen King works but it is very far from The Stand. The several allusions to the dysfunctioning of social services and the foster system are also in phase with many allusions to the problem in other books. But the deepest evils of US society that are the very causes of the overexploitation of women in our societies are just ignored, I specifically mean religious bigotry, racial bigotry, white supremacy and naturally in our present time national US-centeredness that is the source of all American vanities that could lead us to a Third World War.
We definitely need an Evie BLACK as she is called in the book that could alleviate our fate of nationalistic, supremacist, racist vanity and freak control. I am sorry to say but I feel trumped by the book, poker-wise since the real master cards are not actually in the hand of the authors.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Thursday, December 21, 2017
Before getting into "Sleeping Beauties"
Stephen King is the antidote of all bad things in this life. I hope Trump is reading "Misery" to see what the future is promising him since he believes he is the nurse of the world. Welcome to Hell on earth.
And I hope the devilish extreme right authoritarian anti-immigrant Marine ( an armada just in her name) Le Pen (and it is all in the color of the ink of this pen, black, black, black), I hope she will tell the world that the extreme right did not win in the Netherlands, and it did not win in France, and it did not win in Greece, in Italy, in Spain, in Portugal. It won’t win in Germany. Only England (and northern England at that) is falling for the new Tudor Queen that some call Kim Jing May.
So get to Stephen King and enjoy the defeat of evil that is alas never forever defeated and will always resuscitate even from the hot pit and oven of burning hell.
I dedicate this “review” to my own son, Annunzio COULARDEAU,
and to those who certainly are my fellow travelers,
I have read the books of this author since the first one came to life, Carrie, 1973. I have not missed one. I have followed his films and TV series and mini-series all along. I became and still am the chairperson of “Association La Dondaine Stephen King” and we organized in the north of France a cycle or two of monthly fantastic events centering on horror, bizarre and frightening arts. We also published some fan-comic-magazine with original comic strips, stories, poetry, art of various sorts. We were still young or just young and we loved doing things that could make plain standard normal middle-class baboons fell sick in their stomach, their balls crawling up to their throat.
We were just a band of Jacques Brel’s and we could not get one song of his out of our minds: “Les Bourgeois,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCHi5apc1lQ.
Les bourgeois c'est comme les cochons
Plus ça devient vieux plus ça devient bête
Les bourgeois c'est comme les cochons
Plus ça devient vieux plus ça devient c- [con]
Plus ça devient vieux plus ça devient bête
Les bourgeois c'est comme les cochons
Plus ça devient vieux plus ça devient c- [con]
Sorry, guys, I can’t translate that. Ask Google. And it is time to shift to the trilogy I have announced. Especially since I have lived too long, too old to forget another song today, “Les Vieux,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-nyLvIuHDU.
Old people don't die, they fall asleep one day and sleep too long
They hold each other by the hand, they're afraid to lose each other but nevertheless do so
And the other one remains here, the better or the worse, the sweet or the severe
This doesn't matter, the one remaining out of the two finds himself in hell
Perhaps you'll see it, you'll see it sometimes dressed in rain and sorrow
Walking across the present, already apologizing for not being much further,
And avoiding in front of you, one last time, the silver clock
Humming in the living room, saying yes, saying no, telling them: I'm waiting for you
Humming in the living room, saying yes, saying no and then waiting for us.
Let’s be nostalgic about the future that is coming little by little and slowly. And yet Stephen King still moves me, even if he does not frighten me anymore and give me the pleasure Trump is castrating in my ripped off, through and up mind.
Olliergues, February 15, 2017
THE BILL HODGES TRILOGY
At the end of his life or at the beginning of a new career, a third career of sorts, Stephen King is courting and wooing new genres intensely. Not new genres that did not exist before him, but new genres for him, genres he had never or very rarely dealt with before in his first and second career. And it is clearest in this trilogy.
A second element appears and it is the fact that he works with his two sons in collaboration a lot more than he did before. He is going through the syndrome of the father looking for his next generation heirs. We all do that. If we have a son or a daughter we try to make that blood heir more receptive and prepare him or her to having to carry their father’s heritage in the world. If we do not have such a blood descendant we select a young man or woman in our surrounding environment and make him or her the spiritual heir or heiress we need before moving on because it is absolutely true that we will not take anything along and I don’t think any angel would be interested in our baggage, especially Stephen King’s.
This trilogy ends thus positively since the evil man is destroyed but also negatively since the main character is also put to sleep by cancer. Nothing dramatic but everything sad and bleak. This Bill Hodges had chosen a partner, Holly Gibney, in his last Det-Ret phase of his life, and she is the heiress who will carry his heritage. She will have to select a partner of her own too and she will, a natural partner since he was Bill’s partner in the police.
Yet Stephen King will remain in this trilogy the creative mind who exposed the world after the Big Recession of 2008-2009 and celebrated the young black man who saved him and his partner Holly at the end who of course is like Barack Obama, the last resort in the situation when all seems to be going to hell, the Deus Ex Machina of the past-present-future flow of time.
And at the same time, King goes a lot farther than a simple parable of the first black president of the USA . Holly Gibney will pick his heritage but this woman is autistic and Stephen King is so modern in his approach to autism, in fact, it seems the Asperger syndrome of autism. He shows how good she can be within her clear-cut capabilities and how tense she can be when dealing with human and physical contact. She sees through any personality and can ask the very question that leads to the heart of the matter, but she is irreversibly unable to accept physical contact. She is blocked in bad habits like smoking and yet she is able to get over it and drop it. We will never know if it is genetic in her or not. But one thing is sure. Stephen King insists in the first volume on the cannibalistic attitude of her mother that locks her up in her neurodiversity as if it were a crime and a stain on her, the mother’s of course, reputation.
That’s what is most visible in this trilogy. Stephen King kind of reflects on the world and states we can improve it if we have the guts to change our bad habits and stand against the individuals who are the forces of evil.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Wednesday, December 20, 2017
Pour Noêl réfléchissez aux va-t-en-guerre qui nous gouvernent!
WE ARE BEING TRUMPED OUT OF THE GAME
Dr. Jacques Coulardeau follows H.G. Wells, T.S. Eliot, and C.S. Lewis on the
roads of perdition: WW1, WW2, and COLD WAR.
H.G Wells got lost between eugenics and Josef
Stalin.
T.S. Eliot got puzzled between historical
necessity and peace.
C.S. Lewis got called to the fantasy side of
our life.
THREE ETERNAL MODERN GOSPELS IN TIME OF WAR
H.G. WELLS – T.S. ELIOT – C.S. LEWIS
TRUMP DENIED SALVATION
A Series In One Introduction And Five
Parts
THREE
ETERNAL MODERN GOSPELS IN TIME OF WAR
H.G.
WELLS – T.S. ELIOT – C.S. LEWIS
TRUMP
DENIED SALVATION
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE: GOD’S DEATH AND SUBSEQUENT
RESURRECTION
PART TWO: H.G. WELLS, THE TIME
MACHINE
PART THREE: T.S. ELIOT, MURDER IN THE
CATHEDRAL
PART FOUR: C.S. LEWIS, MARTYRDOM
VERSUS EUGENICS
PART FIVE: C.S. LEWIS, THE
CHRONICLES OF NARNIA IN SHADOWLANDS
Monday, December 18, 2017
Predictable and yet rather fascinating
AMAZON PRIME – GOLIATH – SEASON ONE – 2016
You may say “One more justice series.” In fact, it is not really a film about justice but a film about the judicial system, rotten to the core in the USA. The extreme authority of a judge, the only master of the whole procedure of a criminal case from before the trial to the verdict itself. The only interest of a criminal case is the presence of a jury. The jury is in many ways the counterbalancing actor in the trial, the actor who can keep some equilibrium between the judge, the lawyers of both sides and the witnesses. They are silent but they take the basic decisions: guilt, damages, etc.
Yet this justice system is absolutely unpredictable. Each side can call for a witness at any time provided the judge accepts to summon the said witness. Any side can bring up any piece of evidence they want provided the judge agrees. Any side can ask any question from any witness provided there is no objection from the other side and the judge does not sustain the objection. That brings up now and then a witness or a piece of evidence that the judge considers as unacceptable after it has been presented in court. The demand from the judge for the jury to forget about it and not consider it in their own deliberations is just vain and absurd. The witness or the piece of evidence has had an impact on the jury members and it cannot be erased from their memories even if they do not mention it in their deliberations that take place behind closed doors.
But all that is not about justice. It is about the judicial system.
The worst element is that both sides have to do their own research and their own investigations if they want to go to trial. It is true if the accusation comes from the District Attorney and his prosecuting service. But it is also true in the case of a plain citizen suing another plain citizen that may be a company. The suing side does not sign a complaint which is then dealt with by the police and other investigating services and then eventually the prosecuting services of the DA. In other words, a citizen who is the victim of any act that is discriminating in any way from anyone, this citizen has to sue and assume with a lawyer the fill procedure of investigating and collecting evidence. This is wrong.
In this series we are dealing with armament companies that have contracts with the Department of Defense, the Pentagon. They produce lethal weapons that have to be tested. Their normal way of testing some new weapon is to use it in a war here or there. These companies also work on forbidden substances or equipment. They have to test them but they can’t legally do so. They may use these substances or equipment in a war episode somewhere but it may bring up some backlash. So they are doing it clandestinely offshore and at night particularly. They also use lawyers who become their cover since these lawyers can invoke various clauses or rules to refuse to unveil something due to the highly classified nature of the concerned equipment. Lawyers are then opaque, if not plain obscure.
The characteristic of this series is that we know from the very start what we end will be. The only thing we do not know is how we are going to reach this end, the peripeteias of the plot. And there are plenty since the lawyer that assumes the representation of the suing minor is off-limits most of the time, off any rule you may think of. He is an alcoholic. He is hardly trustworthy and he gathers around himself people who are hardly decent for a couple of them. But then we are dealing here with social problems like prostitution and that is at times pathetic, at times shocking, at times uninteresting (we could do without some of these episodes).
What’s the final evaluation of this series? It is interesting as a social description of American society with the judicial system in the middle. As such it is worth watching but it will not bring you a lot of enlightenment on what is the next phase in American history. Just entertaining.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Friday, December 15, 2017
Can we have any hope for humanity?
AN – SWEET BEAN – LES DÉLICES DE TOKYO – 2015
This film is very emotional but we must not let ourselves be taken over by our emotions or our empathy. The subject is a lot more complicated and even deeply frightening.
The subject of the film is social exclusion in the Japanese society in the twenty-first century. Several cases are envisaged. The central male character is an ex-con who had to buy his reinsertion in society after his prison time and he had to borrow money, which made him dependent on the lender who turned him into the manager, caretaker and only worker of his small shop that prepares and sells dorayakis (Dorayakis are a type of Japanese confection, а red-bean pancake which consists of two small pancake-like patties made from castella enclosing a filling of sweet Azuki red bean paste). Unluckily the sweet bean filling is industrial and very average. He can thus survive for as long as the widow of the man who lent him money does not decide to get rid of him to install a protégé of her own, a cousin or a nephew. In fact, it could be a lover too, since she is the owner and hence the real boss. Don’t misunderstand me: we are not dealing here with capitalism or whatever you may consider as economic exploitation. We are dealing with the tendency for those who have power and control to impose their decisions, even if they are not the good ones. It would be just the same in a system that would not be based on private property but on collective property that has to be managed anyway by an elite.
The second segregation is typical of Japan, though not only. Leprosy is a phenomenal disease. Lepers have always been expelled from society. They had a rattle in our Middle Ages they had to play all the time to warn people against themselves. In Japan, that exclusion was enforced rigorously up to 1996 when it was repealed, but society remains segregative and continues to expel lepers from daily life and they are forced to live in some kind of ghetto and they are provided for by the state. They do not have to beg for their survival but they have no future, though they have plenty of time to observe society and as such to build a refuge for themselves under the small dome in which they have to survive right through till they die. But once again let me be very clear. We may have very few cases in our countries, in the West, but we have other groups of people we reject in a way or another, be they the gay and other LGBTQ people, or AIDS patients, women or men alike, not to speak of women often rejected because they are too fat, too skinny, too anything that does not correspond to the standard norm concerning them. And I could, of course, add the segregation based on racial criteria, religious parameters, and so many other elements. The rejected end up poor without any future and they will have to move into our modern suburban ghettos of council flats, subsidized apartments or housing, and these “social” projects with choke them to slow decaying and death.
In fact, that segregation can go very far. For example, “The New York Department of Housing Preservation and Development has approved plans for an apartment complex that has separate “rich doors” for luxury apartment owners and “poor doors” for those who live in its fifty-five affordable housing apartments, units the developer had agreed to include in the building in exchange for tax breaks.” (https://www.theonion.com/nyc-approves-apartment-building-with-separate-rich-doo-1819562284). Is it typical of the West, of developed countries, or of humanity? Does humanity always discriminate against some groups of people who become the open scapegoats or the victims of rejection and intolerance?
The film is quite brutal about it. As soon as the rumor has it that a leper is working in the store, the customers who had multiplied before thanks to the work of Tokue, the woman with leprosy, just immediately disappear, not to come back. So the owner is quite justified in firing the “manager” to refurbish the store and give it to her nephew or cousin, her singled-out human pet. Is human society that segregative? Is it that “racist”? Is it that intolerant to any difference or deviation from the norm?
Then the film is showing how even in such a dead-end or even cul-de-sac, the rejected person can help another rejected person who can start anew from scratch. Thus Tokue after dying gives her equipment to make the sweet bean filling to Tenkarô so that he can start working again, if not in a shop, at least in public venues and in parks. Luckily humanity is resilient and the resilience of human beings is very often amazingly limitless. And it is true most men and women need that resilience to just bounce back up after the numerous and successive failures society imposes onto them.
A beautiful film and blooming Japanese cherry trees are very nostalgic for me since, in Roubaix, where I lived 19 years, one avenue was lined on both sides with Japanese cherry trees that were blooming marvelously in April-May.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
