Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Orwell is the man. Nobody writes against the totalitarian left quite like a disappointed socialist!

One thing that I note, while reading 1984, is that most commentators completely overlook the Proles. That’s incidentally a good way to tell the difference between someone who’s actually read the book and someone who’s just absorbed its broad strokes from Cliff Notes or cultural osmosis. Just ask them about the Proles, or listen to them assume that all the citizens of 1984 Oceania have telescreens (they don’t) or are under constant watch by the Thought Police (they aren’t, at least not to the extent of the Party).

But in many ways, since the destruction of all but a few of the old, monolithic Communist evils, it’s the Proles who represent some of 1984‘s most compelling and timely material circa 2012. After all, the Proles don’t have the overt, draconian surveillance imposed on the Outer Party; instead they’re kept satiated with prolefeed, a constant stream of low-quality, mind-numbing entertainment (and of course “Pornosec”).

I wonder what Orwell would think of a few hours of US/UK “reality TV” or supermarket tabloids in that context? It certainly is mindless stuff, on the whole. But you have to ask yourself if our proles–or us, the proles–are simply heaving down our prolefeed either at the behest of an oppressor or, perhaps more chillingly, the behest of no sinister agency at all. To borrow another dystopian metaphor, could the clamshell earphones of Fahrenheit 451 exist if there were no oppressive, external force driving them–nothing but the free market?

Maybe we are have all made proles of ourselves, and no one will realize it until someone or something steps into the vacuum to become Big Brother.

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A few years ago, as a fresh young professor straight out of graduate school, I was excited to be arriving at my new job just as we it was hosting a presidential debate. One of my co-workers at my old job had made me promise to get one candidate’s autograph for her if I met him, and I’d made the same promise to my parents for the other.

To my disappointment, though, many of the events were restricted to students, and faculty were not eligible to participate in the raffle for debate tickets. It seemed that my sole memories of the debate would be the traffic snarls, the high-security cordon set up around the performing arts center, and the endless stream of news media personalities talking about the civil rights era as if nothing had happened at the university in the interim.

Then, a stroke of luck: one of my friends, who was a grad student with Health and Nutrition, told me that the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease needed volunteers to work the “Evening with Tom Brokaw” event in late September. The Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease might just be the least objectionable, least controversial charity ever—who in their right mind is actually in favor of chronic disease?

Best of all, volunteers would get free tickets to the event if there were any left.

So I donned the provided purple-and-white Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease t-shirt, one size too small, and took up a plastic placard with the Partnership’s URL. I worked the Brokaw line in the muggy dusk, urging anyone who would listen (and many who wouldn’t) to Fight Chronic Disease and flashing the placard for good measure. Most people agreed that there was merit to Fighting Chronic Disease; a few even asked to get involved. All I could do, as a mercenary draftee volunteer, was lamely point them to the URL.

I like to think that peoples’ awareness was piqued, if not about the need to Fight Chronic Disease then at least about what Chronic Disease was (I explained several times the difference between chronic and acute diseases as best a former English major could). And my friends and I were given tickets to see Brokaw, still clad in purple-white and clutching placards. His talk was illuminating, and it was the closest I’d come to seeing someone of importance during the debate. Neither candidate cared to spend more than the minimum time necessary for the debate in town or to waste even one iota of their precious time meeting anyone from the community.

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This post is part of the July 2012 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “independence and slavery”.

Like a river winding from its headwaters to the sea, you come from whatever little burg gave you your spark and shake off its dust on the threshold of the city. The big city. The biggest city. It’s always been there, open, inviting, but you’ve only just now taken the time to meet it for longer than a visit.

You’re in the city to stay.

It’s like declaring your independence from circumstance and geography. “I don’t care that I was born in a place where nothing substantive has ever happened,” you’re saying. “I don’t care that it’s impossible to earn a living here as a writer or an artist or a singer. I’m moving to a place where things happen and talent can be rewarded.”

And then you go. You take everything that you’ve been given, from your parents, your friends, your school, everything. You take it and you go.

Suddenly you don’t have to worry about finding something to do tonight. The night is lit up, always, forever with a thousand neon signs and peals of hushed laughter. You’ve declared your independence from boredom, from shyness, from envy: if you feel those here, it’s your own fault for not taking deepest advantage, for not inhaling the sweet acrid city vapors to their fullest.

But even in this independence, deep and full, new chains take hold where the old scars have scarce begun to heal.

Even the city runs on money, on gossip, on superficialities concealed behind bright and inviting smiles. You must still make the rent, only it’s harder now with a thousand hands in your pockets. What so and so did with such and such is exchanged as freely and tenderly as the most bitterly mundane comings and goings back in your small town. People smile more here because it’s expected of them more, at least if they want to get noticed and get ahead. But the dagger in the small of the back is just as sharp when it connects.

The subway, the bus, the tree-lined parkways…in many ways they are new chains, shackling you as surely as distance and time and indifference do in cities that are small enough to walk across. The expectations are still there, hemming you in, only they’re different this time. You must still move a certain way, act a certain way, be a certain way if you want what others have to give. Disappointment is perhaps all the keener because there are so very many opportunities.

The city is independence and slavery made one, just as is the village.

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
knotanes
meowzbark
Ralph Pines
randi.lee
writingismypassion
pyrosama
bmadsen
dclary (blog)
Poppy
areteus
Sweetwheat
ThorHuman
Tex_Maam

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The Cascadia Company had had plenty of accidents over the years, and much as the tried to maintain a high standard for community theater some mishaps were bound to occur.

There was the time that the fire escape set had collapsed during dress rehearsals for West Side Story, largely thanks to Debbie Hannover’s insistence that it be made out of real metal. No one was injured, but the scene wound up being played on a stepladder opening night.

Then there was the Cascadia Festival performance of Twelfth Night where the swordfight between “Cesario” and Sir Andrew Aguecheek ended with Bryan Culbert getting swatted with a blunt prop sword and breaking his nose. To his credit, he delivered his subsequent lines even as fresh blood soaked through his white gloves and even worked references to the injury into his dialogue. The show must go on, after all, even if you must be rushed to the hospital afterwards.

And who could forget the time that the pyrotechnic charges in Godspell (don’t ask) accidentally caught Harry Plover, playing Jesus Christ, on fire. They stopped the performance for that one, even though Harry escaped with only second-degree burns and managed to get off a very funny line about knowing how the burning bush felt.

Those had all entered the lore of the Cascadia Company, passed down as older members retired and new high school seniors or starry-eyed Osborn University undergrads rose up to take their place. No matter how badly someone missed their cue or how sour that last note of Oklahoma! sounded, they said, it could never get any worse.

Of course, that was before Carl Weisschrift died of a myocardian infarction onstage as King Lear.

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Vic Savage was born into a prosperous merchant family in a major regional center. However, his parents’ business was ruined by an outbreak of plague and they were essentially forced into the street, winding up with relatives in the bad part of town. He spent a large part of his late childhood and adolescence on the street, running with urchins and impromptu thieves’ gangs. Those pursuits resulted in an athletic and dexterous temperament, while his family’s fall from grace meant that he slipped easily into the role of a rogue and sometime thief, though their former station means that he prefers to steal from people he believes deserve it.

Somewhat impulsive, Vic tends to speak before he thinks, and often rushes into situations as well. While he’s quick to claim that he has a silver tongue he actually stumbles somewhat with words and has a hard time convincing anyone of his point of view. He’s also easily distracted and prone to daydreaming. His prosperous background means that he had a relatively good education as a youngster; he also tends to prefer gaudy and expensive clothes for that same reason.

Vic wears his dark hair short (to keep anyone from getting a handhold) and tends to be unshaven despite his pretensions to a more noble appearance. He is of average height.

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Gravelines link all cemetaries, charnel-houses, catacombs, mausoleums, ossuaries, and tombs, and are the primary method by which the Pale travel from place to place. Be they Pale of substance, like ghouls or ghasts, or Pale lacking substance, like ghosts and banshees, all Pale may use the gravelines by their very nature. To the living, they represent a mystery that cannot be plumbed.

Travel is not instantaneous, and the Pale may be tracked or the course of a particular graveline mapped (though they tend to be difficult to follow, proceeding ramrod-straight through bush and earth, rock and house). The most reliable way is to obtain a togdove, a bird only born in a textile fire that claims at least one life. Togdoves by their nature are half of the Pale and are sensitive to the charnel smell and lambent ectoplasmic glow of a graveline. One may provide a trained togdove with a bit of the Pale to be tracked or simply turn it loose and hope that the graveline it follows be the correct one.

The togdove will soar along the graveline as best as it is able, and is often bound by a fine and flameproof chain around one leg. It will signal that the destination has been reached by bursting into sudden flame, which (again due to their nature) is neither painful nor fatal.

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I even tended to refer to him with the informal pseudo-affectionate nickname “Teddy” even though I knew through a little bit of research that he’d hated being called that by anyone who wasn’t a close family member. Then again, Theodore Marlowe was the sort that knew the value of a name: born John Theodore Marlow, it had taken the judicious dropping of a too-common first name and the addition of an unnecessary vowel to make his a name fit for literary immortality.

Deerton held its annual Marlowe Days events at the same time as the county fair as the only vestige of tourism a tiny burg like that was able to eke out. After all, Teddy had been born at what was then Deerton General (now Infrared Health Systems Mid-Michigan Campus no. 27) and attended what was then Deerton Elementary (now John T. Seymour Elementary) until the age of 10, when his family had moved to Grand Rapids and thence to Detroit. He’d been shortlisted for a Nobel, his novels and stories were still in print, and film adaptations had made millions of dollars over the years.

I prickled a little under the management role I had in Marlowe Days, though, for the simple reason that Theodore Marlowe hadn’t been all that find of Deerton at all. Biographies tended to give us a sentence, if we were lucky, before going into exhaustive detail on Marlowe’s days in Grand Rapids and Detroit. I had been through reams of interviews, and all the man ever had to say about us was negative. There was the CBS interview from 1969 where he talked of “escaping the stultifying atmosphere of small-town mundanity,” for instance, or the 1978 radio talk where he said “everything that made me who I am is of the furniture and automotive cities.”

As in not Deerton.

After moving away, he hadn’t visited once despite plenty of Marlow and Higginsfield relatives. Invitations to speak at DHS commencements or other events were returned unopened. His books, powerful as they were, spoke to the salad days of Michigan industry giving way to the rust belt.

Big city problems.

Only in death, it seemed, did Teddy have anything for us. His estate agreed to Marlowe Days less than two months after the author died in 1980.

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The old Segumbi empire had, before its destruction, employed a group of warriors called the Kersaati to protect the royal family and the nobles in charge of each of the empire’s seven traditional provinces. They had led the fiercest resistance to the encroachment of outsiders; most of the Kersaati had been wiped out in the Battle of Quri in 1677 by the Portuguese. In a sign of how closely fought the battle had been, the Kersaati had actually made it to the musketeers firing on them and engaged in melee combat; the Portuguese had lost 110 musketeers, while the entire company of Kersaati, over 1000 warriors, was slaughtered.

After the old Segumbi heartland gained its independence from France as la République de Côte d’Ébène, the first president attempted to link the tradition of the new state to the old, forming the Kersaati Guard and stocking it with the country’s most experienced soldiers, many of them veterans of World War II. The Guard were to form not only the official bodyguard for government officials but also the nucleus of the new state’s army. A link both to the past and a prosperous democratic future, much like the constitution that was based in equal parts on the US Constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Two years later, in July of 1964, the Kersaati Guard murdered the president, who had suspended the constitution and declared himself in office for life, and seized power for the military.

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The Volodnes call themselves the Deigra (“who lives here”) and their language is called Deigrap (“of who lives here”). Deigrap is a language isolate that has attracted intense study of the few (less than 10) remaining speakers.

Linguists are especially intrigued by the fact that there are separate number systems and declensions for physical and metaphysical concepts. The Deigrap word for “many physical things” (“proticu”) and “many spirits” (“epsych”) are completely different, for instance. This distinction extends throughout the language; Dr. Andscun of the Broughton Institute for Comparative Linguistics has even made the controversial claim that Deigrap is essentially two languages, one for the mundane world and one for the spiritual.

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“They found a greenish residue all over the place, though.”

“Greenish? What…what did the lab work say?”

“You’re not gonna believe this.”

“Not if you don’t tell me. What did the lab work say?”

“It’s…cornstarch, water, and food coloring. Someone was messing with us, chief.”

“Is…is that all? Don’t scare me like that. I…just don’t.”

“What’s the matter, chief? Expecting it to be something else? I hate to tell you but chances are the perp isn’t a giant snail or a ghost.”

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