Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Close enough!
  

    
"So--you've arranged for Tim Powers' new book to be about Kim Philby?"

"Yes. He doesn't suspect we planted the idea. But we'd better increase
the money to Blaylock. He's beginning to doubt it's all 'for the best'
he says."

"Central is wondering whether Powers reaches enough
readers--insinuating ideas into the cultural overmind through writers,
planting doubts about the old status quo, making them see the occult
connections so that they...well, you know. Best not to say it..."

"Best not."

"Anyway--I'd think that agenda would be best served with a...a Michael
Crichton, say, or a Stephen King."

"We've written all Crichton's stuff for him for awhile...the
suggestions are all very oblique, of course...the prose quality suffers
when we use that kind of direct control--people are starting to
notice. Whereas with Powers we only plant suggestions and leave the
writing alone. But you see he reaches a target audience--a niche that's
bigger than a cult, and growing, and they are seminal people. Lots of
them participate in the Well--we've always found that a useful place
for the verbal-memes project..."

"But Staussmeyer thinks Powers suspects and is using it against us
somehow..."

"Nonsense. Though it's true that our mind-readers can't get through
that odd cloud around his mind--"

"I thought he quit drinking?"

"Not that kind of cloud. More like...a sort of shimmer from
something--a kind of protection. Probably just some odd, Dickian
psychological phenomenon--"

"You're mentioning Philip Dick to get to me, aren't you. Because we
used those bunglers who left so many traces...He began to guess--he
guessed all the wrong things but he knew someone was--"

"No, now you're being paranoid."

"Am I? This whole conversation could be a sub-intra-project..."

"Could it? Put that gun away, Larry...."
  

    
Heh!
  

    

John, I believe you are channeling Phil Dick!
  

    
Channeling...Phil Dick? Oh NO!
  

    
     Blaylock broke down and told me all about it.  I'm onto their
filthy schemes now, and I've burned all the notes and drafts of the
book I was working on -- a vast novel based on the notion (I see now
that it was never my own) that Fulton the steam-boat man was actually
the Vegetation King.  I think they've got Kevin J. Anderson working on
it already, in my stead.

     From now on I'm writing nothing but cookbooks, in rhymed
couplets.
  

    
We've got it all backwards.  The one-celled organism is actually the
most spiritually evolved lifeform.  Having a big brain is "cheating"
at the game of life.  At best, it's like training wheels.
  

    
So i'm playing the game of life right!
  

    <scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 21:36>
  

    
Others of us will check in, insisting that all knowledge received
through channeling is, by definition, True. 

Stay tuned.
  

    <scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 21:36>
  

    

Whew, for a second there, I thought you were going to say you ran into
Powers!  

Particularly because Trader Joe's has been a recurring thread over the
years.
  

    <scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 21:36>
  

    

Given that "Total Recall" is also based on Dick, I'm not surprised
that a series based on "Total Recall" would be Dickian.
  

    <scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 21:36>
  

    
Those black choppers were testing a mind control device on you,
"silly"--there were actually *ten* choppers. 

I was walking the dog, our slavering, brutish, six pound yorkie, when
I heard a middle aged neighbor talking to an elderly gent about the
criss-crossed jet con trails in the sky. He said he'd heard
*online*--you know, where the really *reliable information* is--that
such a pattern indicates they're testing mind control sprays hidden in
the contrail or planting disease organisms for secret military black
ops testing. The old man said, "Well no, I was in the Air Force,
actually they fly those grids because they're training for search
patterns or--"

"You're not hearing me--I read this in black and white on the
internet...!"

Serious. There's a whole trip about Evil Contrails that's sucked into
the same militia-fomenting stewpot seething with exaggerated stuff
about Waco, how the Columbine killings were carried out by the UN as
part of its government takeover plan (Oh yes! I've HEARD that one) and
etc, the sorta stuff that will lead to thenext equivalent of the
Oklahoma City bombing...lots of good stuff like this at
www.sightings.com - some of the most widely read and radically
irresponsible stuff on the web. I got into a long thread of arguments
with the guys who run the website about it...Modern superstitions...
  

    <scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 21:36>
  

    

Now I'm worried.
  

    
Today is Powers' birthday.  He has finally reached the age of 12 and is
seriously considering what kind of career field he should go into.
  

    
A leap preteen!
  

    
Facing the dangerous puberty years. Luckily I've read up on the
subject.
  

    <scribbled by castle Mon 6 Mar 00 13:35>
  

    

Posted in wrong topic.
  

    

Tim Powers will be appearing at the following locations to discuss and
sign copies of his new book _Declare_ which he described to me thusly:

"It's about British and Soviet spies in the Middle East in the 1960s.  And
genies.  And Kim Philby."

Here are the reviews from amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0380976528/o/qid=979945421/sr=8-1/ref=a
ps_sr_b_1_1/105-5516192-3387111

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com 
This supernatural suspense thriller crosses several genres--espionage,
geopolitics, religion, fantasy. But like the chicken crossing the road, it
takes quite a while to get to the other side. En route, Tim Powers covers
a lot of territory: Turkey, Armenia, the Saudi Arabian desert, Beirut,
London, Paris, Berlin, and Moscow. Andrew Hale, an Oxford lecturer who
first entered Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service as an 18-year-old
schoolboy, is called back to finish a job that culminated in a deadly
mission on Mount Ararat after the end of World War II. Now it's 1963, and
cold war politics are behind the decision to activate Hale for another
attempt to complete Operation Declare and bring down the Communist
government before Moscow can harness the powerful, other-worldly forces
concentrated on the summit of the mountain, supposed site of the landing
of Noah's ark. James Theodora is the |ber-spymaster whose internecine
rivalry with other branches of the Secret Intelligence Service traps Hale
between a rock and a hard place, literally and figuratively. There's
plenty of mountain and desert survival stuff here, a plethora of
geopolitical and theological history, and a big serving of A Thousand and
One Nights, which is Hale's guide to the meteorites, drogue stones, and
amonon plant, which figure in this complicated tale. There's a love story,
too, and a bizarre twist on the Kim Philby legend that posits both Philby
and Hale as the only humans who can tame the powers of the djinns who
populate Mount Ararat.
This is an easy book to get lost in, and Powers's many fans will have a
field day with it. The rest of us may have a harder time. --Jane Adams 

Dean Koontz 
"DECLARE is a tour de force, a brilliant blend of John le Carre spy
fiction with the otherworldly, packed with historical fact, dazzling
flights of imagination, and wonderful suspense." 

Thursday, January 25, 7PM
University Bookstore
4326 University Way, NE
Seattle, WA
(206) 545-4363

Friday, January 26, 7:30 PM
Powell's Bookstore
1005 Burnside
Portland, OR
(503) 228-4651

Monday, January 29, 5PM
Dark Carnival
3086 Claremont Avenue
Berkeley, CA
(510) 654-7323

Tuesday, January 30, 7PM
M is for Mystery
74 E. 3rd Avenue
San Mateo, CA 
(650) 401-8077
  

    <scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 21:36>