Just got finished with Terry Pratchett´s newest Discworld novel Nightwatch
….It´s about Sam Vimes, probably one of the most developed characters in the Discworld saga, this time – with a nod in the direction of Thief of Time – Vimes accidentally finds himself transported back in time; to the day where he became the “copper” we know him as in the Watch Books: Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo and The Fifth Elephant…Commander Vimes is also expectant, Lady Sybil is due to give birth to his son, and one of the worst kind of criminal; a bottle-covey (small rodent like, possessed of an uncanny but highly specialized intelligence and no social conscience) murdering one of his charges causes Vimes to take the chase, ending up on the top of the High Energy Magical Building, in the middle of a thunderstorm… and then the midden really hits the fan.
I am afraid that as a stand-alone novel, Nightwatch lacks some appeal, I do not think I would have enjoyed the book as much, had I not read not one, not two, but all the earlier novels with the Nightwatch time.. while quite a few of the Discworld novels is as good as that, I am especially thinking of Soul Music, Hogfather, Pyramids, Small Gods and… with some reservations Thief of Time…. Since I enjoyed it so much, it was a reading of a week, but I expect I will return to read it many times in the future, like I have with the other Discworld novels…
2.
I am now rereading The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker.
I can´t say I have gotten many new impressions from the book yet…
The Dead Letter Office wherein news of the “other places” leaks into the voyeuristic mind of Ralph Jaffe, the worst possible conduit for such signals.. puts me in mind of the more dark,confused and oblique subsections of the Internet; but do these sites and anonymous posters have access to the mysterious realm, and do they possess insights about the conspiracies silenced or just forgotten?
I know that I wont write a piece with the Internet as subject or object, my old philosophy teacher, Jostein Gaarder, in one of his early short stories, named the future “multinational database” (the Babel library refered to by Jorge Louis Borges haunts this concept) the Pleroma..
As a contemporary Gnostic I cannot vouch for the Internet being a “Fullness”, as the word describes in Greek, nor a Divine Origin and World apart.. as it is conceived to be by the ancient Gnostics….Media, and its victims, are in love with the particular mediums for which such data,information …
Another note on the “Net” is that you seldom, if ever, see a realistic rendition of the use and appearance of the Internet, be it Unix shells, Terminal screens or the common Web Browser or Email Client – in the movies and in the Television series… there´s always some fancyschmancy stuff which is all looks and no functionality..
In the Wim Wender movie “Until the End of the World”, the PI hired by one of the main characters has bought a laptop with advanced Russian underground Internet Tracking technology, and its GUI consists of a poorly drawn cartoon bear in a red beret with a sickle motif, who declares with russian accent english that he is getting “Closer!Closer!”, or Winnie the Pooh imitations “Dum-de-dum” with the same accent…. The Dream Recorder equiptment which stars at the end of the movie has a poetic feel to it, it consists of components which were available to the inventors while pursuing a nomadic lifestyle – a CargoCult aesthetic which mixes the mundane trinkets of late Silicon age effulgence with results out of the realm of dreamers and prophetics.. LoTech seems strangely appropriate for the story.. the ridiculous bear, which were “online”..supposedly HiTech.. No, I do not think so..Anyways, I´ll return to the Dream theme.. The Sea of Quiddity is the realm from which dreams and nightmares originate, the first aboriginal forefather of humanity, learned to reach towards and out from the limitations of the past and the present, through envisioning a tommorrow distinct from today…dreams, however lethargic, has always been man´s tutor, and so it is in the stories about “The Art” by Clive Barker (Great and Secret Show and Everville); Quiddity is the place the dreaming souls go after the womb has refused them further sanctuary from the world, the first night sleeping with the love of one´s life (that idea is quite sentimental, I might add..and not something I´d expect from Barker) and finally,at the time of one´s death.. Birth and Death, and between them, Love…