Maggot MoonSally Gardner
YA
I used to say I was a closet case trekkie, but this is my second post about a story with a scifi bent in less than a year. I think I've trekked out of the closet...in a Dr. Who sort of way. But that's another story.
Maggot Moon, truth be told, is less science fiction than alternate reality (along the lines of
Vaterland). Basic premise - England (or something very near it) has been taken over by an fascist authoritarian regime that wants to put a man on the moon to prove its prowess to the rest of the world. Snag - the moon is too radioactive. Any possible human visitors would fry in orbit. It's a minor technicality for the Motherland. One easily solved with good old-fashioned smoke, mirrors, and Egyptian brutality. However, they don't count on Standish Treadwell (oh, the symbolism in that name!) to stand in their way.
I enjoyed Gardner's mash of alternate reality, conspiracy theories that the United States' moon landing was a hoax, and flawed, painfully human main character. She does an excellent job of building foreboding, of making sure the reader knows this cannot end well without, however, knowing how the story will end. Writing genius.
The chapters were also amazingly short, reminiscent of Kevin Henke's
Olive's Ocean. The effect was, for me, choppy. However, both author and main character are dyslexic, and that much white space can be a godsend to a struggling reader. So, my discomfort may actually be a struggling reader's greatest comfort.
The additional illustrations throughout the book of the rat and fly give visual reinforcement to the decadence inherent in the world in which Standish is caught.
The issue that's kept me mulling is Standish's character and his development. I like Standish. He's real. He has real problems. He doesn't seem to have any real personality flaws, however. Yes, Standish has all of these problems - parents have disappeared, dyslexia, different eye colors, outcast of society, grandfather who's been reeducated, evil, brutish teachers - but they aren't personality flaws per se. He struggles with them because the world around him sees them as issues that make him less of a person. He is basically the good guy fascist systems destroy, not the conflicted protagonist whose personality shortcomings lead to destruction and, out of that, growth, such as Sara Louise in Paterson's
Jacob I Have Loved. Ah, characters. They come in all shapes and sizes!
For a cornucopia of fall delights, check out
Barrie Summy's website.
Answers from Elena Ornig
New age music; new age religion; and conspiracy theory?
In the Oxford English References Dictionary (OED) – New Age is defined as a noun because the combination of these two words has the meaning of a singular thing – a movement. The movement has particular characteristics with descriptions. Apparently, the term New Age was borrowed from astrology and referred to a meaning of “Age of Aquarius”, a point of time when the world had entered, or was close to entering, a period of harmony and therefore peace. In Astronomy, it is referred to as a special event when the sun crosses the celestial equator, moving from Aries into Pisces and approaching Aquarius; it is called “First point of”.
Let us comeback to a description and to the characteristics of such a significant movement. In the OED (Oxford Dictionary) it is described as a broad movement of an alternative approach ...
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Sarah, Intern
Daniel and Jason Freeman have written a groundbreaking new book defining paranoia’s impact upon not only the mentally ill but the population at large. Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear describe how exaggerated anxieties regarding terrorism, crime, and 
illness distress one out of four individuals today. In this excerpt from Paranoia, the Freemans look at several social issues that have instilled paranoia in society throughout the century.
In the late 1980s the psychologists Jerry Mitchell and Arlyn Vierkant discovered a battered cardboard box in a store room of Rusk State hospital in east Texas. The cardboard box turned out to contain details of more than 500 people who had been admitted to the hospital in the 1930s. Around 150 of those 500 were suffering from severe mental illness.
Mitchell and Vierkant decided to compare the stories of those 150 patients from the 1930s with the stories of 150 patients with similar problems from the 1980s. In so doing, they were exploiting a rare and fascinating opportunity to compare paranoid thoughts across half a century.
What they found was that, to some degree at least, people’s paranoid fears reflected the times they lived in. So patients from the 1980s believed they were under threat from the Secret Service, the Mafia, the Soviets, or—a little bafflingly—from lesbians. Telephones and houses were bugged. Radar and computers were being used to control people from afar.
Clearly radar and computers weren’t going to feature in the accounts from the 1930s, but neither did the Secret Service, for example. These kinds of powerful organizations or groups were noticeably absent from the fears of 1930s’ patients, though God and other religious figures were often an element (east Texas has always been a heartland of fundamentalist Christianity). One possible explanation for this change is the advent of television, which brought a whole new world—and a whole new world of threats—to a generally poor, rural, and isolated population. Before television, the threats people perceived were likely to come from more personal, parochial sources.
This focus on the ‘fear figures’ of the day is reflected in an account written in 1911 by the celebrated Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler. (Bleuler was the man who coined the term ‘schizophrenia’ and who treated the legendary ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky when he fell ill with the condition.) Bleuler wrote: ‘The Freemasons, the Jesuits, the “black Jews”, their fellow-employees, mind-readers, “spiritualists”, enemies invented ad hoc, are constantly straining every effort to annihilate or at least torture and frighten the patients.’ In the early twentieth century it’s Freemasons, Jesuits, and ‘black Jews’—all groups then rumoured to be conspiring to bring down society. By the 1980s it’s the Mafia or the Russians. Today it’s MI5, the government, or Al-Qaeda.
(Some of our fears, on the other hand, have proved remarkably resilient. Witches, for example, were for many centuries prominent—and malevolent—figures in the popular imagination, as we can see in the quote from Robert Burton on page 21 above. And in the twenty-first century, witches still seem a force to be reckoned with. In one survey, 21 per cent of Americans said they believed in witches. The figure is lower for the UK and Canada, 13 per cent, though this is still higher than one might have guessed. Surprising though these findings might seem, they are as nothing when compared to the hold that ghosts apparently continue to exert over us. In the same survey, 40 per cent of Britons, 37 per cent of Americans, and 28 per cent of Canadians professed a belief in haunted houses.)
Both the Rusk State hospital study and Bleuler’s work focus on the paranoid delusions of people with serious mental illness. But most of us have paranoid thoughts from time to time. Who are we scared of?
If I walk past strangers in the street and they’re laughing, I always suspect they’re laughing at me. Paul, aged 21.
At work, if I’m restocking the shelves and other staff members are nearby, I sometimes think they’re joking and talking about me, but I know they aren’t really. Doreen, aged 58.
I once thought a housemate was trying to steal my possessions because I often caught her in the corridor near my room. I got really wound up about this and ended up locking some of my valuables in the garden shed. I began to have other thoughts—like she was trying to poison me because she was always asking me to eat food she’d cooked and giving me new foreign alcohol to try. Liz, aged 24.
If I’m sitting on the tube and I catch someone’s eye repeatedly, I wonder why they keep looking at me. Chris, aged 30.
These comments are taken from a survey we carried out on a randomly selected sample of the general public. People in the street, as you might say. It turns out that, when it comes to our own personal bogeymen, the range is as diverse as you could imagine. Strangers, workmates, housemates, friends, family—you name it, we’re afraid of them. And sometimes we don’t even have a particular person in mind; instead, we feel a general, non-specific sense of threat.
Incidentally, it might seem from this discussion that there is a clear distinction between the sorts of persecutors conjured by people with severe mental illness and those of us with ‘everyday’ paranoia. The former group tend to worry about external, remote, impersonal threats; the latter about people closer to us. Of course, like all generalizations the reality isn’t so neat. People with, say, schizophrenia are often fearful of family members or neighbours. And many people without mental illness distrust the government or other state agencies. What we can say for sure though is that paranoia will point the finger at anyone. Everyone is a potential threat.
"Everything is some kind of plot, man." - Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Agent Scully: "What makes you think that is a conspiracy? That the government is involved?" Kurt Crawford: "What makes you think it isn't? - Memento Mori / The X-Files
"The paranoid person is in possession of all the facts." - William Burroughs
Conspiracy theories are a particular and salient feature of post World War II America. From McCarthyism to postmodern novels, The X-Files, and gansta rap to feminist polemic, there is widespread suspicion that sinister forces are conspiring to take control of our national destiny, our minds, and even our bodies. Conspiracy explanations can no longer be dismissed as the disorganized ramblings of far right crackpots, the left wing intelligentsia, and the techno cognoscenti.
Particularly as evidenced by the popularity of a show like The X-Files, mainstream America became more than willing to embrace the idea that there is a cabal of men planning our futures, that we cannot trust institutions, that the enemy is closer than we were taught to believe. We have lived through grassy knolls, Cointelpro, the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, infiltration and disruption of a host of Chicano groups, especially La Raza Unida Party, as well as CIA-led coups in Chile, Iran, Namibia. Events of the last decade bear witness to this brave new world.
While the major spin on 9/11 identified virulent Islamic terrorist bent on destroying us, there were still news threads that linked the Bin Laden family with the Bush family and the Bush family to international oil interests. We had Dick Cheney heading the shadow government from deep in the bowels of the earth, and FEMA hawking duct tape and plastic sheeting as protection from invisible enemies. Can anyone say "WMDs"?
Conspiracy Culture author, Peter Knight, a lecturer in American Studies in Manchester, attempts to provide his own analysis using such diverse sources as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Don DeLillo's Underworld, Oliver's Stone's JFK, and soon his new flick, W, The X-Files, and a host of internet sites.
He explores how conspiracy theories developed from the 1960's through the 1990's. The focal points of these theories range from the Kennedy assassination, alien abduction, body horror, AIDS, crack cocaine, the New World Order; as well as what he terms "the usual conspiracies...of patriarchy and white supremacy." I found this level of research, its detail, and its scope impressive.
Beyond this, we part company. When it comes to his analysis as to why ideas of conspiracy have proliferated, Knight is completely ahistorical. He posits the growth in the wider acceptance of conspiracy as policy to intellectual inferiority and sloppiness, poverty, and a spiritual paucity. I was astounded at this polemic disguised as dispassionate deductive reasoning. I personally remember when, in the late 70's in Chicago, Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was murdered in his bed by Chicago police - police who were aided and abetted in that execution by moles paid by the FBI through the Cointelpro program of "neutralization."
Semiautomatic assassination appeared to be a fairly neutralizing force in communities and the community of social change as a whole. That level of challenge to the government, to capital, to imperialism and its domestic and international control has yet to be re-created, although perhaps we see the seeds of its rebirth in the resistance to the Iraq war. Rather than Knight's position that a conspiracy theory's popularity is solely due to a lack of sophistication, education, and contemplation, I believe the proponents are literate, distrusting the narrative of authority, and suspicious of the authorized narrative as to the health of the body politic. In a nutshell, what message may be taking root in a deep and irrevocable way is: Trust no one.See Scully, I told you this was coming.
ISBN-10: 0415189780
Bad news:
Journalist Teresa Puente was laid off from the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board Today. She was the only Hispanic on the board and also wrote a twice monthly column. Puente also was the only writer at the Sun-Times that regularly covered Latino issues and immigration.
Also, her colleague, Deborah Douglas, the only African-American writer on the editorial board, was laid off Wednesday. This means there are no people of color on the editorial board any more.
To voice an opinion on this matter please send an email to:
Michael Cooke, Sun-Times editor, [email protected]
Tom McNamee, Editorial page editor, [email protected]
Cyrus Freidheim, publisher, [email protected]
Finally, GOOD NEWS:
The National Museum of Mexican Art celebrates Folk Art Week!
October 17 - October 26, 2008
10am - 4pm
1852 W. 19th Street, Chicago, IL.
For more information, please call 312-738-1503 or visit www.nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org
Artist Demonstrations:
Ceramic Sculptures by Demetrio Garcia Aguilar, Ocotlan de Morelos, Oaxaca
Textile Weaving by Celia Santiz Ruiz, San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas
Huichol Yarn and Beadwork by José Benitez Sanchez, Santa Catarina, Jalisco
Wood Carvings by Jacobo & Maria Angeles, San Martin Tilcajete, Oaxaca
Wooden Masks by Orlando Orta, Tocuaro, Michoacán
Amate Paintings by Marcial Camilo Ayala, San Agustin Oapan, Guerrero
Sugar Skull Demonstrations by Alejandro Mondragón Arriaga, Elvira Garcia Zinzu & Elvira Mondragón Garcia, Toluca, Estado de México
Wishing for more good news,
Lisa Alvarado
