Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Cory, you've seen the rehabbed Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln at Disneyland,
right?
  

    
You mean *heard" the new GMWML, right? I actually don't like it nearly as
much. The old Lincoln bot was c-c-c-c-c-coooool, and his speech was deeply
subversive:

>At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?
>
>By what means shall we fortify against it?
>
>Shall we expect some transatlantic giant to step across the ocean
>and crush us at a blow?
>
>Never!
>
>All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined could not by
>force take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue
>Ridge, not in a trial of a thousand years.
>
>At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I
>answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It
>cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must
>ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we
>must live through all time, or die by suicide

Google tells me that this comes from the Address Before the Young Men's
Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838, but you could just as
easily imagine Honest Abe berating the Dreaded Real Admiral Poindexter at a
powerpoint boredomfest about Total Information Awareness with it.

I'm not enough of a conspiracy nut to think that they took it out because of
the subversiveness (after all, you can just as easily read it as what it was
probably intended as, in 1964: a condemnation of hippies and anti-war
demonstrators), but I miss it. It always made me feel righteously smiteful
and ready to kick against the illegitimi non carborundum.

3D audio is keen, but hell, I can get that with a decent set of cans and a
walkman. Really trailing-edge once-were-advanced androidal presidents, OTOH,
are really and truly a location-based entertainment.
  

    
BTW, as of midnight last night, the book had been available for download for
exactly a month, and over 75,000 copies were downloaded from my site, plus
untold d/ls from the various mirrors, mailing lists and P2P sharepoints.
Color me chuffed.

Before you ask, I *still* don't really know how the book is selling. It's
charting well on the Amazon and BookScan sf bestseller lists, but
translating that into copies-sold is a mug's game. We'll know how the book
is selling in 13 months when the accounting's done, or when the print-run
sells out -- whichever comes first.
  

    
I'd never thought of Lincoln's speech as subversive. I like that.

I was asking because the new version reminds me of your Hall of Presidents
in DaO: the whole "you are not only there, you are someone else" thing.

Animatronics are expensive as hell and a bitch to maintain, but they are an
essential part of the Disney experience. Unfortunately, Disney seems to be
very reluctant to make new ones these days, which is a shame because the
fourth-gen animatronics are quite a ways from the old winkin' blinkin'
Lincoln style. They seem to be going more and more for video, which is cheap
and easy to make and maintain, but also lessens and cheapens the experience.
They haven't built any animatronic-heavy attractions in years; the most
recent animatronics I can think of are just add-ons, like Jack Skellington
in the Haunted Mansion or (ugh, ick, ptui) Iago and Zazu in the Tiki Room.
There's Dinosaur in Animal Kingdom, but I don't count that because the
movement of the dinosaurs isn't important. (This only applies to the
American parks; I haven't seen Tokyo DisneySeas.)

What I hear of Mission: Space, Epcot's newest attraction which will open
later this year, makes it sound like an amped-up version of Mission to Mars.
Again, it's video, not animatronics.
  

    

This viral marketing thing's out of control.
  

    

You forgot the tiki goddess in the new tiki room, which is actually pretty
cool, unlike the new birds.
  

    
Oh, she's OK, but damn, they completely fucking *destroyed* the WDW Tiki
Room with the new show. In my novel, I reverted it to the original show
(*with* the Offenbach number, thank you). Every time I visit that
attraction, my blood boils. What a waste.
  

    
>I can get that with a decent set of cans and a
 walkman.

You know, I must be looking at too many of the wrong websites, because I
totally misinterpreted that at first.
  

    
not having read the book yet, i have a possibly dumb question: is the
word "bitchun" in Bitchun Society cognate with "bitchin'"?
  

    
Yes -- in fact, it's an alternate spelling.
  

    

A couple of spoiler questions I'm going to post hidden -- maybe the answers
can be hidden too.
  

    <hidden>
  

    <hidden>
  

    
good questions.  

now don't look if you haven't finished the book.
  

    <hidden>
  

    <hidden>
  

    
> I'm told that a certain senior (*senior*) exec at a certain MPAA member 
> company personally hates my personal guts and sputters and goes purple 
> when my name is mentioned in his presence. 

No, man, that's *E.L.*, not Cory.
  

    

I figured that was the answer, but I just wanted to make certain.
  

    
Relevant to our mind/body conversation a few daze ago...

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00079AC8-53A5-1E40-89E0809EC588EEDF
&catID=2

" These studies are only the latest to deliver blows against the belief 
that mind and spirit are separate from brain and body. In reality, all 
experience is mediated by the brain. Large brain areas such as the cortex 
coordinate inputs from smaller brain areas such as the temporal lobes, 
which themselves collate neural events from still smaller brain modules 
such as the angular gyrus. Of course, we are not aware of the workings of 
our own electrochemical systems. What we experience is what philosophers 
call qualia, or subjective states of thoughts and feelings that arise from 
a concatenation of neural events."
  

    
This is very striking:

>when Buddhist monks meditate and Franciscan nuns pray, their
>brain scans show strikingly low activity in the posterior
>superior parietal lobe, a region the authors have dubbed the
>orientation association area (OAA). The OAA provides bearings for
>the body in physical space; people with damage to this area have
>a difficult time negotiating their way around a house, for
>instance. When the OAA is booted up and running smoothly, there
>is a sharp distinction between self and nonself. When the OAA is
>in sleep mode--as in deep meditation or prayer--that division
>breaks down, leading to a blurring of the lines between feeling
>in body and out of body.

I've been practicing self-hypnosis (which began with visits to a clinical
hypnotist) for six years now, and that sensation is instantly recognizable
to me as a good, autohynotic trance-state.

I've been successfully using hypnosis to break writer's block and especially
to find the answers to difficult story questions that stop me while I'm
writing. The experience of trancing out is immensely cathartic; on rising
from a successful session (about one in five sessions are successful -- more
like four in five if I'm actually under the direction of my hypnotherapist)
I burst with creativity. Solutions to story problems that I've been beating
my head against for days (sometimes weeks or months) snap into focus,
blindingly obvious.

I can get the same effect by shelving a manuscript for six months or a year,
and coming back to it fresh. That's another kind of out-of-body experience,
I think. Having that great time-lapse creates the same kind of discontinuity
that we were thrashing about upstream. I'm a different person (in that my
response to a stimulus is different) after a long break; I'm also a
different person after a disengagement of my OAA (if that, indeed, is what
hypnotherapy evokes -- I'm a very lay practicioner).

Early in my experience with hypnotherapy, I found entire passages
materializing in my mind. When I'm under, my hands float in the air,
seemingly weightless (it's totally weird to open my eyes and push my hand
down to the chair's armrest and then find it rising "of its own accord" into
the air). When these passages appeared, I actually found myself air-typing
them, and I could see them materializing on a screen in my mind's eye.

The brain is fucking weird. Hacking around with it is immensely fun and
rewarding.
  

    
I'm reminded of the afterword to Stephen King's Gunslinger, wherein he
explains that the first chapter was written when he was 17, but the book was
finished in his forties (?), and he describes this as a collaboration with
himself. We are truly discontinuous over time.
  

    
Have you tried meditation, Cory?
  

    
Yeah. I prefer my mind-alteration without hippie-trippy trappings, though.
  

    
hey, whatever gets you into that alpha-state flow
  

    
> I prefer my mind-alteration without hippie-trippy trappings, though.

Well, you don't have to go all newage to do meditation. In fact, the 
newage stuff is... well, I started to say something impolitic. Suffice to 
say that there's a meditative tradition that is distant from anything I 
would call 'hippy-trippy,' though it may diminish yer whuffie with 
some cynical cyborganic neophiliacs who figure the brain is a wet, mushy 
cpu and consciousness is data to be stored and retrieved at will (if we 
could only figure out how!)  However it seems to me that the aspect of 
meditation mentioned in that article points to its most interesting 
aspect, which is about exploration of aspects of consciousness and more 
explicit control of the source.