MSR Summer 2005
Features:
Who Is David Barringer
Interview by Nathan LeslieEssays
He Who Controls the Search Controls the Future
by Norman BallFiction
Curious Creatures by C.A. Rogers.
Route 346 by David PlumbReviews by Anne Barnhill, Mike G. Cole, Andrea Quaracino, S. Craig Renfroe, Jr., Richard Allen Taylor, Julie E. Townsend.
of the following work:
Kafka On The Shore by Haruki Murakami, Driftland by Michael Macklin, Whispers, Cries, & Tantrums by Jay C. Davis, Hairstyles Of The Damned by Joe Meno, Bulletproof Girl: Stories by Quinn Dalton, Book Of Resurrection by Mark Hartenbach, The Language Of Sharks by Pat MacEnulty.Poetry by Norman Ball, Judith Behar, Michael Casey, Glen Chesnut, David Chorlton, Michael G. Cole, Jennifer Columbus, Barbara Cranford, Taylor Graham, Brad Davis, Carolyn Gregory, Jennifer Gresham, Jay Griswold, Scott C. Holstad, David Lawrence, Jason Irwin, Joan Payne Kincaid, Nancy Tripp King, JC Lee, Mary Soon Lee, Michele Leavitt, Linda Lerner, Lorraine Loiselle, Brad Maxfield, Neil B. Newton, Daniel Polikoff, Randy W. Pait, Nicole Lynskey, S. Craig Renfroe, Jr., Paula Savoy, Lianne Spidel, Lindsay Smith, Caren Stuart, Melinda Thomsen, Scott Tucker, S. Brady Tucker, Gerald R. Wheeler, Wendy Wilson, Sara VanderClute
Cover Art: Draining the Hillsides, photo and enhancement by Doug South.
Images by Kerry Dale Long, Mitchell Marco, Cheryl Townsend-Grimm
Norman Ball, Herndon, VA
He Who Controls the Search
Controls the Future
The future—as we’ve come to know it— may soon be a thing of the past. That’s if the computer industry gets its way. By most accounts, Google is out front. ‘We realized early on that fortuitous happenstance played havoc with our algorithms. The only way to sustain our nosebleed valuations was to control the course of human events.’ So said Google spokesman Dash Balder at a recent industry trade show. According to Balder, Google plans to begin staging reality as early as 2006. The cost advantages are compelling. “Manufacturing information out of thin air IS the future. Wall Street is thrilled with our new strategic direction and cost structure.”
Industry watcher Max Pariah concurs. “Google’s developers are devouring the summation of all human history at the staggering rate of nearly a century every four months. Soon they will exhaust even the most arcane data. The search industry is months away from hitting its version of the sound barrier.” Already, competitors are gearing up for what promises to be a bruising battle. “Google decided the only way to remain one step ahead of MSN Search was to create the steps in advance,” Pariah explained, “the past cannot support a forward PE of 130 all by itself. Either you gotta start making things up or expand into stuff that hasn’t happened yet. We feel seizing the future is the only way to press ahead.”
Loathe to live in the past and having long since ceded the present to effete French existentialists, the future appears determined to recover lost ground. Google’s Product Manager for Senseless Acts, Jack Ripper has noticed an up-tick in the future’s activities: “We’re already seeing a six-month backlog of serial killers. Frankly, there’s a shortage of shallow, unmarked graves.” Said one exasperated psychopath in an apparent desperate cry for advance notice “please index me so I can begin my grisly trail of carnage.” Colin Ferrell has already agreed to play the killer, “I think the movie will offer a riveting glimpse into the mind of a developing sociopath,” he beamed. Google will allow Oliver Stone to begin pre-production simultaneous with the killer’s deadly toll of human destruction. “Our madman is literally frothing at the bit. We’re really excited about doing a movie based on a looming heinous crime spree,” Stone said. Meanwhile the critics are poised to rave. Roger Ebert has signaled his intent to offer one thumb up. Unfortunately, the late Gene Siskel’s replacement was unavailable for comment since no one could remember his name. Oddly enough, a Google search for ‘the late Gene Siskel’s replacement’ came up dry.
By contrast, Microsoft has been much more low-key about its plans. Reached at his Redlands office, Bill Gates was cryptic at best, saying only, “I knew you were going to call. Would you care to review the transcript of our pending conversation?” As it turns out, Microsoft has copyrighted large swathes of the 21st century. In fact, 2035 has been set aside in its entirety as a General Protection Fault. At a recent trade show, Gates conceded, “It [the future] was a natural horizontal integration for us. Having thoroughly ransacked the past, stealing the future was our next logical step.” Industry kingpin Larry Ellison was equally boastful: “We knew an arbitrary and capricious future would one day concede the inherent superiority of the relational database model. Why do you think we called ourselves Oracle?”
Seeking to avert the Betamax/VHS debacle of the 1980’s, the industry has pledged, publicly at least, to support the interoperability of all competing visions of the future. But Microsoft’s Sr. VP of Foreknowledge, R. Eddie Thayer sees great promise in what he calls a ‘split-screen’ rendering of events: “We’ve always been a nation of second acts. In a two-search world, everyone will get a second chance. The industry is merely confirming a venerable American tradition.”
Independent industry watchers are more sanguine however. Media prognosticator I. C. Roughly warned, “I think we could be moving towards a bifurcated future branded across search engines. Increasingly, imminent historic figures will license their pending achievements to one database or another. History will become just another cable channel.” When reminded there already was a History cable channel, Roughly got all flustered and ran out the room.
In a sure sign of trouble ahead, the legal establishment is positively elated at the prospect of a shiny new tollbooth. The ABA’s Director of Fresh New Deep Pockets, Bill Liab pointed out, “Technology is fueling a trend that should lead to cascading billable hours. As people opt for double lives, we will enrich ourselves commensurately.” Liab sees a world where lawsuits will one day collect treble damages—twice. When pressed to elaborate, Liab threatened to sue.
But he may not be too far off the mark. Already one man is fighting bigamy charges on the grounds he exclusively licensed his second set of vows to Lycos. Separately, John Hinckley is petitioning the courts for unsupervised visits on the grounds he only shot President Reagan in Google. Reached for comment in his psychiatric cell, Hinckley explained, “In MSN Search, I’m a horticulturalist with a penchant for collecting butterflies. Where’s the crime in that?”
Even the Justice department is taking notice. Recently it announced the formation of a Quantum Physics group to analyze the anti-trust implications of corporate prescience.
Indeed cultural ethicists predict no sphere of human endeavor will escape unscathed. Already, the ripples are being felt in traditional family circles. One distraught man, unable to find himself on Google, conceded that, in all likelihood, he’s barely here. A minor celebrity in his own hometown, he opined, “I’m hopeful the upgraded Microsoft product will find me. Otherwise I don’t know what to tell my wife. Maybe I should just read the writing on the wall, bow to the future, and disappear.”
C. A. Rogers, Norfolk, VA
Curious Creatures
Clare walks down King Street in the heart of Charleston every morning at 7:20. She is exhausted, content, subdued—not easily attained states for Clare. She crosses Broad Street and continues past the antique stores, past any number of coffee shops in the more fashionable center of the shopping district. She’s headed to Calhoun Street, to the crowded little Café on the shabbier edge of King, because the coffee is better there, because she’s attracted by all aspects of the low-country’s shabby side, because she needs to walk a step or two beyond the night’s addiction, which still holds her relentlessly.
Not quite half-way, past Saks and the old Riviera Theater, she wonders if she’ll see him this morning. He’s of medium height, medium build, probably not old enough to drink in a bar. He has straight brown surfer hair, a round, boyishly sensual face, perfect lips, brown eyes six feet deep, red-rimmed and glassy. Five mornings in a row he’s stalked past. She feels she knows his every disjointed thought, desire. She knows the mercurial glaze that an addiction leaves behind the eyes, across the soul. Honey child becoming something of a regular on old King Street, Clare muses.
She appreciates all the morning regulars along the way. The tourists she doesn’t even register. The delivery guys she ignores too—except a few of the real old-timers who used to work as baggers in her daddy’s long-defunct grocery store. But every morning she greets Mrs. Linton who walks over from the Battery to buy her Post and Courier from the newsstand rather than have it delivered and possibly tossed awry into her prize flower beds. Then there’s Clinton McClellan watering the flower boxes in front of his antique store. There’s that old fart, Judge Humphrey, who carries a broken pool cue in one hand like a relay baton and refuses to smile or even acknowledge her when he passes. There’s Mae Alice Hyman dressed in her domestic uniform; Mae Alice often turns the corner at Queen onto King just as Clare is walking past. They run into one another, lost to their morning worlds. Time and again, they repeat the scene. Time and again, neither is prepared, lost in thought somewhere, and the surprise always makes them laugh at one another and giggle through “Morning” like schoolgirls. There’s a couple of chef scholars, headed to cooking school, with their black and white checked chef pants, their white tunics. Clare nods to them, with an admiring eye to the boxes of cooking paraphernalia they carry.
Clare believes in paraphernalia. Physical reassurances that a junky can actually register—unlike lesser physical forms: people, dogs, food, sleep. You need that odd but intimate physical connection when the impulse is all about corporal intangibles, about psychic aberrations. Paraphernalia don’t judge; they soothe. They are something to take out and shine up or rearrange, to cherish, to mark the miles. She admires her own black bag of paraphernalia a great deal.
She read once that Einstein could get so hooked on his work that his wife would have to break in after fifteen or sixteen hours and say, “Enough Albert. Time to eat now.” And he’d eat and eat. And then she’d have to say. “Enough now. Time to sleep.” And he’d sleep, clear around the clock. The biographer had related this anecdote to illustrate the intensity of Einstein’s mind. Clare doubted neither the story nor the mind. She did, however, doubt that Einstein had gone so easily. More likely he would have railed against his wife for disturbing him and finally risen from his desk not because she asked him to, but because she had spoilt it for him and he might as well go piss or eat or fuck her sideways since she’d wrecked any better options.
Or that’s how Clare would react.
Want the rest of the story?
The conclusion can be read in the Summer 2005 issue which is available direct from MSR for $7 at
The Main Street Rag Bookstore.BACK TO TOP
Judith Behar, Greensboro, NC
THE CRUELEST MONTH
April is National Cancer Month
and National Poetry Month.
As if pinning a pink ribbon on a poem
will grow a new breast.
Or clear a chemo brain.Run for the Cure,
Bike for the Cure
signs bloom in April.
Raise money and pray:
that memory ignites
desire, that out of gray mud
red tulips sprout and rain
greens the leonine grass,
that there will be sunshine
tomorrow; that there will be
tomorrow.
Carolyn Gregory, Jamaica Plains, MA
THE MEDICAL GAME
The king slams his fist into the desk
declaiming, The Rules Committee doesn’t exist!
All the other do-nothing kinds applaud.Talk station pawns name dictators
and diseases, zooming in on ports
and aneurysms, blooming white cloudy flowers.
A nurse slides into a screen,
smiling like the Mona Lisa as she fades.How does anyone get out of here alive,
wheeled on gurneys,
scribbled about and shot at
In a dozen different poses?While motors hum overhead,
a penguin pretends to be a specialist
and waddles in past a clerk
who’s reading prayers on the Web.
Jason Irwin, Astoria, NY
POSTCARDS FROM HOME
Dear Dale, the dog died
again. Mom was crowned
Cornbread Queen in July
and Jenny sang The Green,
Green Grass of Home. Then
It rained for days and days.
Uncle John talked of building an ark,
like last summer he wanted to dig
a bunker to hide from the government.
Aunt Dorothy just bakes pies
and giggles, said to tell you
you’re on her prayer chain.
In August we drove
clear to North Platte.
Mom bought jam and an Indian
bracelet. I got hubcaps and heartburn
from a chicken sandwich.
Good coleslaw, too. Anyway,
it was a wonderful summer.
Hope all is well in Brooklyn. Remember
stay away from those terrorists
and Italian girls. The news says
they’re everywhere.
Write when you’re able.
Love, Dad.
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