Category: Literature

Yum. Mac and cheese.

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One of the hippest places in San Francisco when I was there was (is?) the Virgin Records store on Market Street, just across from the Apple Store. On the third level, with big windows facing Market Street, was (is?) a small café. They had lunch specials there, and sometimes the lunch special was “mac and cheese.” I, not being hip, had never heard it called that. In the context of food, “Mac” meant entirely something else to me. But with my clever skills of discreet cross-cultural observation — watching the natives — I figured out what it was. It was macaroni and cheese. They let me order some. It was good.

So macaroni and cheese, then, is an all-American phenomenon, not just something that we white-trash Southerners eat. I wouldn’t give you two cents for quick-made macaroni and cheese stirred up on a stovetop. Proper macaroni and cheese is a slow food. It must be baked. You will not be surprised to hear that I baked this batch in my new Cuisinart steam oven, using the the “steam/convection bake” mode. It was very good. For all its carb-iness and comfort-food qualities, it’s actually a fairly low-glycemic food. One must, of course, use good pasta, eggs laid by Helen and Fiona, organic milk and butter, and good cheese.

I figured that I had earned the comfort food, because I got back to writing this weekend after more than a month of slacking. I’m not sure why I hit a block. It may be my feeling of obscurity owing to the fact that Fugue in Ursa Major sells only in a trickle. Why work so hard on the sequel? Or it may be that I was faced with a couple of difficult scenes — turbulently emotional scenes, Jake’s last day on earth before leaving on a long trip.

But this weekend I got Jake shuttled up to a deep-space cruiser operated by the galactic union. Jake, forlorn, dropped his book and fell asleep in his posh bedroom, and in the morning he will meet the mysterious galactic ambassador at breakfast.

What a team. No wonder we earthlings blew ourselves up. The ambassador will probably call the whole thing off after he actually meets us. What is this, Jake? Search your feelings. It’s shame. That’s what it is — shame. Shame for the planet I come from, shame for the state it’s gotten itself into, shame for the pathetic crew who are supposed to find a cure for their pathetic planet, and shame because my even being here is some kind of mistake.

Poor Jake. It is difficult being cruel to characters we love, but sometimes we must. But he can have comfort food at breakfast.

The sin of asyndeton

dune-cover

As every science fiction fan knows, this year is the 50th anniversary of Frank Herbert’s Dune, first published in 1965. I am pretty sure that I read it long, long ago — so long ago that I’ve forgotten. But the 50th anniversary seemed like a good time to read it again.

The writing is driving me crazy. I don’t know why I am so sensitive to quirky writing styles, and so intolerant. I fling many books against the wall after five or ten pages because either the writer doesn’t know what he or she is doing, or because the writer wants a unique “style” — which really just means quirky.

Frank Herbert’s quirk is asyndeton — the omission of conjunctions between parts of a sentence. Now, lots of good writers (and speakers) use asyndeton sometimes. I believe I did it once or twice myself in Fugue in Ursa Major. But a writer — even if he’s now dead — deserves to be strangled if he pretty much omits conjunctions altogether and gives you sentence after sentence, page after page, chapter after chapter, of asyndeton, asyndeton, asyndeton. (Can you espy the asyndeton in the previous sentence?)

It’s like watching a speaker who’s being pestered by a fly, and every so often he slaps at it. Or it’s like listening to a speaker who has the hiccups. Pretty soon, all you can think about is when the next slap or the next hiccup is going to come, and you’re completely distracted from whatever the speaker is trying to say.

Here are some examples from Dune, just from the first few pages:

Paul sensed his own tensions, decided to practice one of the mind-body lessons his mother had taught him.

When dawn touched Paul’s window sill with yellow light, he sensed it through closed eyelids, opened them, hearing then the renewed bustle and hurry in the castle, seeing the familiar patterned beams of his bedroom ceiling.

He studied the tallness of her, saw the hint of tension in her shoulders as she chose clothing for him from the closet racks.

Paul sat up, hugged his knees.

Jessica crossed to the window, flung wide the draperies, stared across the river orchards toward Mount Syubi.

Jessica’s hand went to Paul’s shoulder, tightened there.

Had enough? All those examples come from just two pages, and it’s not even all of the asyndeton on those two pages.

I’m trying to decide whether to keep reading or not. Herbert’s heirs and publishers ought to come out with a revised edition — with conjunctions.

An aside: Frank Herbert, like me, used to work for the San Francisco Examiner. Herbert worked as an editor on the copy desk during the Dune years. Many of the Examiner old-timers remember him. I ought to ask some of those old-timers if they remember how Herbert felt about conjunctions.

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Frank Herbert at the San Francisco Examiner, sometime in the 1960s

Update: I posted a comment in the Facebook group for San Francisco Examiner alumni, asking why someone on the copy desk didn’t teach Herbert the value of conjunctions. One of the responses I got from someone who knew him was: “I think ideas and invention concerned him more than literary style. Particularly his interest in ecology.”

Someone also posted the above photo of Herbert.

Some doubts about the new “Poldark”

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Ross Poldark and Demelza from the old 1970s series

I’m certainly not giving up on it after the first episode of the new “Poldark” was broadcast on PBS on Sunday. But I have some doubts about how well the screenwriter, the directors, and the cast really understand this story. I’m going to claim some standing to complain, because I’ve watched the old series from the 1970s many times. I’ve read nine of Winston Graham’s “Poldark” novels. I’ve even made my pilgrimage to Cornwall.

My biggest concern is that the new production is flirting with being a bodice ripper, aiming to capitalize on the success of the “Outlander” television series based on Diana Gabaldon’s books. (I’m aware that Gabaldon’s readers probably would not agree that her books are bodice rippers. I haven’t read them. But I did watch a couple of episodes of the American television production, and it sure looked like a bodice ripper show to me.)

Winston Graham was a different kind of writer. He certainly got involved in his characters’ personal lives, but romance was not really his theme. Nor are Ross Poldark’s relationships particularly romantic (though the new series is trying to make it seem so). There is never anything resembling real romance between Ross and Elizabeth. They bicker. They torment each other. But it’s not romantic. When Ross brings the young waif Demelza home as his kitchen maid, lice and all, that’s not very romantic either. One night some years later Ross gets exceptionally drunk, and …. But that, and Demelza’s confusion, are not very romantic. Nor is his marrying Demelza out of a sense of duty and responsibility very romantic — nor their struggle to make their marriage work with no social support, brutally hard times, Demelza’s temptations from the young Dr. Enys, and Ross’ going off to London after he was elected to parliament.

Graham does write very strong and complex women characters, but romance generally eludes them. The extraordinary Demelza character, whom the novels follow from the age of 13 to middle age, is a fine literary exploration of growth, complexity, and transformation. Elizabeth’s life is tragic. Verity, the embodiment of feminine modesty and virtue of that era, is too plain to be a romantic heroine, though she does find some happiness. The elderly and frail Aunt Agatha remains very much involved with life from her exile in an upstairs bedroom. Even the servant Prudie is a woman of many dimensions.

But “Poldark” is not a story driven by romance. Its themes are justice, inequality, social ossification, the rich, the poor, economic interdependence, the problem of aristocracy, the unfairness of life, the constant hope for a change of fortune. Winston Graham was a serious historian. I think that one of the questions that fascinated Graham was why France had a revolution (and nearly exterminated its aristocracy) while England did not. I think Graham’s answer to that question would have been: Because England’s aristocracy was decent enough (perhaps just decent enough) to not push the lower classes too far. There was no English equivalent of Marie Antoinette, no English version of Les Miserables.

One of the factors that makes “Game of Thrones” such extraordinary television is that the cast know their characters extremely well. I am wondering if the cast of the new Poldark have even read the books. I Googled for cast gossip in Britain (where the series has already been shown), and the gossip was pretty low-brow. If you watch the behind-the-scenes videos of the “Game of Thrones” cast, you’ll see that they love to sit around and analyze their characters. Whereas I get the impression from the new Poldark that the cast just parachute into Cornwall for a hasty shooting schedule.

I also question whether Aidan Turner knows his character very well (though it could be the director who is causing the problem). At times in the first episode, Turner’s Poldark comes across as mean or menacing, as though he struggles with a repressed demon. But Ross Poldark was not that kind of person. When Winston Graham’s Poldark was angry, it was almost always because of injustice or brushes with real wickedness (such as the wickedness of the Warleggans). The plot puts Ross Poldark’s man-of-the-Enlightenment character to every imaginable test.

Anyway, I hope I’m just being sentimental about the old series and that after a few more episodes of the new I’ll be hooked. It can take time for a cast to learn to work together. We’ll see.

new-ross-and-demelza

Seveneves: a review

Seveneves

It’s difficult to write a spoiler-free review of Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, but I will try. It’s not really a spoiler to say that, in the first paragraph of the novel, the moon blows up. What follows is a long saga of survival — 866 pages long.

Stephenson always provides a hot read. I devoured the book in six days. Stephenson also always provides a feast for nerds. Reading Seveneves is like taking a course in orbital mechanics. Stephenson is not the best at character development, character conflict, and character intimacy. But he seems to be aware of that weakness in his previous books and has made a strong effort to do a better job in Seveneves. Still, he writes some of the least hot love scenes in science fiction.

I give Stephenson high marks for giving the reader a lot to think about. His novels do seem to stick to the ribs over the years. But after about a week’s reflection on what’s worth remembering and worth keeping in Seveneves, I can’t say that I come up with much. One could ask the question, “What is Neal Stephenson passionate about?” I’m pretty sure that, after reading Seveneves, the only solid answer would be technology.

I don’t accuse Stephenson of being a techno-utopian. I think he’s too smart for that. He also has some criticism for those who might put too much faith in technology, and at one point in the book he uses the phrase “techno-mystical ideation.” Yet it seems pretty clear to me that technology is his passion. This is clear just from reading his acknowledgements.

The bottom line, for me at least, is that Stephenson writes must-read science fiction. However, I’m getting stronger and stronger whiffs of an arrogant and elitist attitude that can spoil fiction if it gets out of hand. Stephenson is most comfortable with characters who have big egos, lots of admirers, and Ph.D.’s. If you read the acknowledgements or check out his personal web site, it’s pretty clear that he runs with the gazillionaires of the tech industry — the lords of the universe — and that he can’t much be bothered by us mouth breathers.

Stephenson probably will get a movie deal for this book. It’s the kind of space spectacle that Hollywood loves, and I’m sure that Stephenson knew that when he wrote it. I’d give it four out of five stars. Unless he does something completely different with his next book, I’ll have read enough Stephenson.

Brochs

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I don’t want to drop any spoilers to the plot of the sequel to Fugue in Ursa Major (which is in progress and which I hope to have in print sometime next year). But Jake does set out on a rather dangerous journey of what I would call cultural recovery.

I have put countless hours of thinking and research into imagining what the world would be like if Christianity had never existed. The church, of course, automatically supposes that it has improved the world. I beg to differ. The church really was just Rome, entangled in the theology of what, except for accidents of history, would have been an obscure (and theologically ordinary, for its time) Middle Eastern cult. The church systematically drove all the magic out of the world. It saw nature and the rest of creation as just resources, with no other inherent rights or value, for humans to exploit. It used the nastier parts of its theology to wipe out time-tested bottom-up social structures (which worked) and replace them with top-down social controls (which exact a huge toll on the human psyche, because people aren’t aware of any other systems and thus don’t even know what’s wrong with their lives). I could go on and on.

Thus I am fascinated, as a storytelling proposition, with what might happen if you took a contemporary young man like Jake Janaway and set him down in the middle of a culture untouched by Christianity. I chose Scotland as a key setting, partly because I love and am somewhat familiar with the British Isles. It’s also the culture of Jake’s ancestors, as it is mine. The Scottish coast also is only a few days’ travel, by sea, from Gaul (France), and hence the Scottish elite are aware of, though at a safe distance from, the turmoil of Rome’s clash with the more pastoral cultures of North Atlantic Europe. Rome called them barbarians, not least because they wore trousers (which popes and some clerics still don’t wear). But I would argue that Rome was much more ruthless and violent than the barbarians.

I also would argue that, had Rome been less violent and less ruthless, Rome and the barbarians eventually would have come to terms. Even in the first and second centuries B.C., the barbarian tribes were turning away from raiding as the centerpiece of their economies and were happy to produce things of value and trade with Rome instead. The tribes wanted Rome’s wine and luxury goods. Rome wanted commodities like tin and copper — and slaves. Rome required a constant input of slaves by the tens of thousands to drive its economy. Calling them barbarians made it much easier to excuse slaughtering and enslaving them. Even in the 19th Century United States, the church split over slavery. The evangelicals of the Southern Baptist Church, a major supporter of today’s Republican Party, split again in the 1960s over Civil Rights. It is only one of many of the moral failures of Christianity and the Roman politics that tends to revolve around it.

Anyway, if you lived on the coast of Scotland in 48 B.C., and if you were very lucky, you just might live in a broch. The brochs were fortifications, certainly, intended to protect the occupants from raids. They marked status. They almost certainly were watch towers and beacons. The brochs were situated so that a beacon fire at the top of a broch could be seen from the next broch, which could relay the signal onward. A system of flags, I suspect, also was used.

Not a great deal is known about the interior of the brochs (the timbers long ago decomposed), and it’s hotly debated by archeologists. They might have been roofed — or not. There were no exterior windows, so I am skeptical of how wise it would be to roof the entire broch, since it would always be dark inside. If I built a broch, I’d roof it partly, to let in some light. The double stone walls were mortarless. Between the walls there were stone stairs, and, depending on the size of the broch, chambers. There were windows in the inner walls facing the enclosed courtyard.

Obviously Jake is going to spend some time in a broch in the sequel to Fugue in Ursa Major. There will be a thriving community around this broch. Jake will be able to learn quite a lot from them about what life was like for the Scottish Celts in 48 B.C. Much of this, of course, will of necessity be a project of imagination, but a great deal of it is based on a good two years of research and stacks of books that I don’t have any shelves for. Jake also will get swept up in what is going on in Gaul.

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Poldark is returning to PBS

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If asked to name my favorite Masterpiece Theater series of all time, it would be “Poldark.” The series started in 1975. It starred Robin Ellis as Ross Poldark and Angharad Rees as Demelza. Rees, unfortunately, died in 2012 of pancreatic cancer. Robin Ellis, now 73 years old, lives in France and has an excellent web site and blog.

The Poldark series is based on a series of books by Winston Graham. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, I read at least nine of the books. Graham, who was English, died in 2003. He was a fine historical novelist. He has a cinematic, masculine style, and yet his novels rival the novels of women writers in that Graham is able to explore and exploit the emotional entanglements of his characters.

The Poldark story is set in Cornwall right after the American Revolution. Ross Poldark returns to Cornwall after fighting in America. Everyone had thought he was dead. His father had died, and his family home had fallen into ruin. The woman he loves had become engaged to a cousin. He was broke and in debt. The story revolves around his trying to put his life back together. Poldark is a man ahead of his time. He is a man of the Enlightenment, but all around him it’s still the Dark Ages in many ways.

The new Poldark casts Aidan Turner as Ross Poldark. It is, like the 1975 series, being filmed in Cornwall. Where else do you get those romantic cliffs overlooking the channel? Turner, now 31, who is Irish, played Kíli in “The Hobbit.”

British viewers started watching Poldark on March 8. In the U.S., the series will start in June, on PBS’ Masterpiece.

The books have been re-released, apparently with cover images from the new PBS production. There also are Kindle editions.

Watch out. If you read these books, you’ll become obsessed with visiting Cornwall. On my first trip to London in the early 1980s, I took a train to Truro.

By the way, Winston Graham wrote another novel set in Cornwall, The Grove of Eagles. As far as I can tell, that book is out of print, but it is one of my favorite historical novels, and this reminds me that it’s time to read it again.

A new Neal Stephenson, May 19

seveneves

I wish the list were longer, but there are only two science fiction writers whose books I eagerly await and buy the day they’re released — John Twelve Hawks and Neal Stephenson. Stephenson’s new novel, Seveneves, will be released on May 19. I’ve pre-ordered the hardback version from Amazon.

By the way, the Kindle version is $16.99, and Amazon discounts the hardback at $21.04 with free shipping. Not many authors can command Kindle prices that high. If I’m paying that much, I want something that I can hold in my hand. So there’s another thick book that I don’t have shelf space for.

Seveneves is another huge book — 880 pages. One of the things I like about Stephenson is that he is unapologetically and unpretentiously intelligent. He has a weird mind. I suspect that he is fairly far along on the autistic spectrum, because his characters are oddly lacking in affect. Stephenson does not write social novels. His social IQ is probably as low as his intellectual IQ is high. This makes for strange fiction, but in science fiction, strange is good. His characters are nerds. Nerds are good.

Another factor that makes Stephenson’s long tomes a pleasure to read is that Stephenson doesn’t mess around with language. His prose is concise, clear, and transparent. I don’t know whether this is because Stephenson has mastered English or because his books make so much money that he is assigned the best editors. I generally decide within the first three pages whether I’m going to finish — or at least continue reading — a book. If I have to fight with sloppy prose or with a writer’s attempt to cultivate some sort of unique personal “style,” I fling the book and give it a one-star review on Amazon. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall was such a book. How such writers keep from being murdered by their editors is beyond me.

Ancient astronomy

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An illustration from James Evans’ book on ancient astronomy

I’ve mentioned that the sequel to Fugue in Ursa Major is going to involve time travel. The plot requires that I have an understanding of the state of the science of astronomy around 48 B.C. As a source for that, I am reading James Evans’ The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy, which was published by the Oxford University Press in 1998. This is a beautiful, well-illustrated, and fairly expensive book. It has left me greatly impressed at just how much the ancients knew.

We generally assume that modern astronomy began with Copernicus and Galileo as the Dark Ages were coming to a close. In 1633, the church convicted Galileo for following Copernicus in saying that earth is not at the center of the universe. But some of the ancient Greek astronomers figured out that the earth moves around the sun, though it was not a mainstream idea in ancient times. Aristotle knew that the earth is a sphere. Heraclides of Pontos, a student of Plato, taught as early as 350 B.C. that the earth rotates and that the stars are fixed. Greek astronomers were able to make pretty good estimates of the size of the earth and moon, though their estimates of the size and distance of the sun were less accurate. The Greeks understood trigonometry. They had a pretty accurate theory of the motion of the planets. Even before the Greeks, the ancient Babylonians were excellent astronomers who made detailed star charts and kept accurate astronomical records. Babylon’s knowledge was passed down to the Greeks. The Greeks built on Babylonian astronomy, especially during the golden years of Alexandria, culminating with Ptolemy’s Almagest around 150 A.D. After Ptolemy, the Dark Ages began in the West, so Ptolemy remained authoritative for hundreds of years.

So, it’s not really true that, to the ancients, the science of astronomy was barely distinguishable from the myths of astrology. They knew a lot.

So how did they use what they knew?

For one, they wanted better calendars. The daily cycle, the lunar cycle, and the annual solar cycle don’t fit together in tidy ratios, so there is no perfect calendar. Our own Gregorian calendar, an antique which is a refinement of the ancients’ Julian calendar, requires all sorts of adjustments including leap seconds and leap years. In its essentials, our calendar today is the Roman calendar, which relied heavily on Greek astronomy.

Astronomy is critical to agriculture — when to plow, when to plant. This remains true today, and I still subscribe to an almanac, as did my grandparents. Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac was a bestseller in the American colonies. People planted by it.

Astronomy also is critical to navigation, surveying, and mapmaking. Ancient sailors knew how to navigate by the stars. One of the reasons I chose Ursa Major as part of a book title was its importance to the ancients. The constellation of Ursa Major is visible for the entire year in most of the northern hemisphere. Ursa Major includes some easily identified “pointer stars” (the Big Dipper) that make it easy to locate the polar star and therefore true north. An ancient sailor who wanted to sail east at night would keep Ursa Major up to his left. We know that the ancient Celts had excellent seafaring skills and excellent ships and that the Celts also used Ursa Major for navigation.

How about astrology? It would be easy enough to accuse the ancients of being superstitious because they tried to use the stars to predict the future and to make generalizations about human nature and human fate. But we moderns are just as guilty, since horoscopes remain important in the lives of lots of people.

It’s easy enough to reproduce the astronomical observations of the ancients with some simple instruments. A gnomon (which is what a sundial is) will allow you to deduce and measure all sorts of information if you trace the sun’s shadow for a year. If you trace the sun’s shadow for a single day, you can very precisely locate true north. If you have a protractor or an astrolabe and measure the angle of the sun above the horizon on the summer solstice, you’ll know your latitude. Looking through tubes attached to a tripod will let you measure an object’s motion from hour to hour. You’ll need some star charts. And if you want to get fancy, you’ll need to brush up on what you learned about tangents, sines, and cosines in trigonometry class.

Even today, with an astrolabe, a watch, and a view of Ursa Major, you could throw away your GPS.

How would you do that? Measuring the angle of Polaris, the north star, above the horizon will tell you your latitude. That’s easy. Longitude is more difficult, and longitude bedeviled the ancients. But if you can determine your local time by getting a precise fix on noon (with the gnomon of a sundial, say, or the shadow of a stick stuck in the ground), and if you know what time it is at some distant place with a known longitude (Greenwich is handy for that), then you can calculate your longitude. At night, you can get a pretty good fix on the time by measuring the position of a known star.

To clarify the concept of longitude, keep in mind that the British navy carried accurate clocks on their ships (chronometers) not because they cared about the local time wherever they might be. Rather, the chronometer always said what time it was back in Greenwich. If you determine your local time from the sun or a star, then the difference between your local time and Greenwich time tells you how far you are east or west of Greenwich. After accurate clocks were available for ships, marine navigation greatly improved. This is why Britain’s Royal Observatory at Greenwich was commissioned by King Charles II in 1675. In the U.S., the Naval Observatory is one of the oldest scientific organizations in the country. The Naval Observatory was responsible for the “master clock” that the navy used for navigation. The observatory still is responsible for the master clock! The time used by GPS satellites is determined by the U.S. Naval Observatory.

But before GPS, if you were a ship at sea carrying Thomas Jefferson from Virginia to Calais, you’d needed a star to figure out the local time. The stars most convenient for that are in Ursa Major.

I like to think of it this way: The stars are still up there, raining information down on us day and night. All we have to do is just look up, and measure.

The theory and practice of the calca

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This is not a review of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which was published in 2008 and which I very much enjoyed reading. Rather, this is about the concept of the “calca,” a term created by Stephenson in Anathem.

Stephenson made up a lot of language for Anathem, which is a thousand-page tome about a very erudite order of monks, and he helpfully includes a glossary in the back of the book. This is how he defines calca:

An explanation, definition, or lesson that is instrumental in developing some larger theme, but that has been moved aside from the main body of the dialog and encapsulated in a footnote or appendix.

The monks of Acorn Abbey instantly saw the usefulness of this concept, though we might define it a little differently. Instead of being moved aside from the main body of the dialog, the calca can embedded in the dialogue. The concept of the calca is important to me, because I am highly inclined to write calcas, and I put a considerable amount of research into them.

Calcas can be either magnificent, boring, or somewhere in between, depending on the reader’s interest and the writer’s skill. But one thing is guaranteed. If a reader disagrees with, or is offended by, the content of the calca, then the writer will be accused of sermonizing, pontificating, or speechifying, and a bad review is guaranteed.

For example, here is a link to a very long and erudite review of Anathem with the title “Why Anathem Sucks.” The reviewer says, among other things, “In all of these cases, the math is rushed over in order to get to some speechifying.” Ooof. The reviewer and the writer do not belong to the same school in the philosophy of mathematics.

To my taste as a nerd, calcas are some of the best elements of literature. Isaac Asimov wrote wonderful calcas, which were spoken by his characters as part of the dialogue. The Foundation series would amount to nothing without calcas. Robert Heinlein took some criticism for his fondness for libertarian calcas. Ayn Rand wrote calcas, though of course I see her calcas as sermonizing and pontificating because I disagree with her.

A style of writing that includes calcas is not to everyone’s taste. Many readers would like to just get on with the action. On the other hand, when we like characters in a story, and when we are in accord with the author’s ideas, we generally enjoy a nice conversation with the characters and a calca or two. Yoda is calca-izing, for example, when he says:

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

I’ll leave you with a couple of mean-ass calcas in dialogue from a science fiction writer, Richard K. Morgan:

I have no excuses, least of all for God. Like all tyrants, he is not worthy of the spit you would waste on negotiations. The deal we have is infinitely simpler – I don’t call him to account, and he extends me the same courtesy.

The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here — it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous, marks the difference — the only difference in their eyes — between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people, they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life, and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.