was an excellent cook and made preparations for the State Department. Poker was British; working-class.
"Okay, I’m sorry, I don’t see it.”
"The point is that these people are all ‘Nietzscheans.’ They invent their own value-systems and then live by it; everyone else—or rather many others—are just sheep. Followers.”
"I’m sure everyone in their own head thinks of themselves as a Nietzschean. It’s only that some people really do break new ground.”
"Your analysis is kinda correct for Jihadist and Poker, maybe to the slightest for Turnkey, but I think everyone is just going to go off and live normal lives.”
"But you would be wrong. For Jihadist is already original in the way he acts and Poker is more likely to turn to crime than get a mortgage.”
In truth, SEATTLE knew what she was talking about; it was just that she was demanding too many specifics too early. These people, who existed at the intersection of Japanology and literature, understood things quite well—with their understanding to get even better as time passed—but as the Dean of the College said, ‘eventually all subjects converge.’ The fifty year old engineering major was much the same as the fifty year old drama student; they had just gotten to that place (that silence!) through different routes.
"Let me characterize our department more formally. We have eight hundred undergraduates in total. 20% are overlapping with History or Classics. 20% have vague Global/Comparative Lit sympathies. 5% each are Victorian, Medieval, Joycean, Germanic, Philosophy, Theater, or Sociology/Feminist. There is a distinct category of creative artists and a distinct category of marketing/business management people. Things overlap far more than one would like.”
"Okay, I agree.”
"The Classics-end of the English department are elitist, naturally. One is from Deep Springs; another claims to be initiated in the Eleusian Mysteries. But ultimately the department as a whole is about a slow process of specialization. Our first year classes are attended by as many as one hundred students (Shakespeare); the second year and third year classes are thirty or forty. Then the senior seminars are—at times—as few as two or three students, mostly ten or twelve, attended strictly by application. To write a senior’s thesis takes a special relationship with one professor and total specialization in one topic—Joyce, Blake, Austen usually; sometimes Nabokov or modern lit. So, we can see, concentricity; specialization.”
"Wrong; you concentrate on the academics, but the overlap is where the action is. Here.” SEATTLE drew circles on a piece of paper. “We have English lit intersecting with ‘people who fly to London.’ These people, who have separate lives in both circles, play the two off each other and generate a whole greater than any part.”
"Who the heck is flying to London regularly?”
SEATTLE reeled off a steady stream of names.
"Oh god, why don’t you just say, ‘people who have far more money than academic discipline.”
TUSK visited SEATTLE in Seattle once; to see her great big house, her Mercedes that she always had either her foot on the accelerator or the brake pad. Her father, who had flown helicopters in the Vietnam War, was now a Boeing executive, now had heaps of money, and that was another nice thing about SEATTLE, she was rich, she was privileged, she would probably never work a day in her life.
"But that’s a lie. I did work one day.”
She had worked one day at a bakery; she had refused to sweep the floors.
In that Seattle trip, TUSK had drunk civet cat coffee, two hundred distinct flavor notes, so complex, so utterly mellow that he would finally get the concept of coffee; he would finally seek out better kinds. He stared out to the waters of Puget Sound which seemed distinct and unreal; he rode the public train to the Mission District; he argued with SEATTLE about the proper treatment of animals. Both despised law students. That final category of the English department, those who took words and made them apply to reality, were the great enemy; this was one conclusion on which TUSK and SEATTLE saw completely eye-to-eye. Poor A.J., who was so eager and so heralded; poor Dr. Ohning, who had two PhDs and finally one J.D. The fall into law school was a capitulation; worse than traitoring over to Morgan Stanley. But it only mattered when it was people you knew. If in later days you were to meet lawyers, you met them on an equananimous basis. Indeed, if you really wanted to finesse things, you hired them.
This was the world that had erupted; that had fallen to pieces in the intervening year. The North Koreans blew a South Korean frigate out of the water the very next month, and then followed it up with an artillery bombardment of Seoul. Huge sections of the city were set ablaze and tens of thousands died, but it was all covered up by the South Korean media, which was desperately trying to hold the Sixth Republic together. Then a tsunami hit Japan, covering all of its northern half of the main island and most of Hokkaido in three meters of water. The remaining section formally acceded to South Korea and the resulting unified country Korpan deployed nuclear weapons (as ERI had always wanted) and blasted K-pop across the border to starving North Korea. TUSK and JOHANN were there; living it up with the Kim Jong-il clan. They reported their doings to the Red regime and were feted for their cleverness and vicious treatment of the Japanese; TUSK got really excited by 4pm and SNSD (Shojo Jidai). He just wanted more Perfume PVs; the dissonance of the grating undercurrent made their girl-pop voices all the more sweet; it was the one thing he missed about the ‘Free World.’
Everywhere else things began to heat up. Eruptions broke out all over Europe, the Arab World, as students demanded publicly funded education and the Arabs wanted freedom, democracy, the restoration of basic human rights. The Saudi regime fell; so did Iran; finally Egypt, Israel, Gaza, Libya, Algeria, and then the revolutions spread north, Italy fell as did Greece. The French had a coup d’etat, and then one by one all the various countries began skirmishing with each other, it was the Third World War; it was the Mother of all Crises, the infinite noise and exuberance of the Chinese began to make itself felt on the world stage, where stability reigned; the sole place in existence in the universe where economies continued to do well and careers continued to surge ahead. TUSK was promoted; JOHANN missed out a job to a friend no less, yet music was still composed, Korpan began to surge back, the Korpanian’s treatment of its Japanese minority was criticized by the U.N. Security Council, but what outsider observers couldn’t notice was that the Japanese continued to still look down on the Koreans, it would be all of one thing and half again of another; it was synergy and remixes and ‘mashups.’ That was new buzzword of the day; that was definitely it.
TUSK turned to the Voice of Conscience during these times. “Where are we going? What is happening to the universe?”
VoC considered. “Having lived three hundred and seventy years, I have noticed that human beings are constantly making decisions on the margin. Each reform they make is clearly appropriate to that time, but in the end the essence becomes lost.”
"I can’t believe that. Change is inevitable.”
"Once Campbell’s soup used to make extremely high quality artisanal soups. Every day under its first CEO it sought out the freshest ingredients and if one wasn’t available, it simply wasn’t put in. Some days they made two hundred servings other days they made only ten. But the product always sold out. Finally the company moved on to a publicly traded shareholder model. Each shareholder clamored for a slightly cheaper supplier. Each decision was approved and the bottom line incrementally got better. But suddenly one day they were just making red paint rather than soup, and a foreign competitor moved in and wiped them out.”
"I don’t think that’s what happened.”
"It’s just an analogy.”
"Does this apply to politics?”
"Only the sexual. For example, at one point a girl waited for a boy to get to know her over three or four months before he might dare to touch her hand. Today, every girl is guilted into sleeping with every single nationality in the world that feels a twinge of repression; hence you claim AKEMI shoul
d have slept with KANYE, but I think AKEMI should have rejected you all. This is ‘new Japanese person’ problem.”
"Ah screw that analysis.”
"You have been warned.”
Voice of Conscience neglected to notice that intelligence, overall, was on the increase. It was true sexual mores had decayed since 1955, but then people were starving back then weren’t they. If you went back to Heian Japan; if you went back to Stone Age Japan, it was surely a rocking concert free-for-all; that stiff conservative analysis could never be sustained, and moreover, it was provincial and limited anyway.
"Let’s forget the moral temporalizing for a moment and predict outcomes. Will the revolution in Egypt succeed, given that protestors are being crushed under Army tanks?”
"Generally, what you do unto others will flip back onto you. You drove the truck over the innocent protestors; hence one day a giant truck will roll over you.”
"I doubt that. I live no where near such things, and besides, I didn’t give any direct orders for the truck mashing of protestor bodies; I just implied it should be done.”
"Nevertheless, higher vistas could see what you had done and they recorded it in the larger book of karma. The universal law, the practice of yoga; achievement of dharma, artha, kama, moksa, these were