|
Dark Windows Archives Index
|
Subscribe
|
|
| << May02, 2008 - Dark Windows #17 - May 1, 2008 |
June02, 2008 - Dark Windows #19 - Jun 1, 2008 >> |
|
DARK WINDOWS #18 - May 15, 2008 ===== ===== ===================> INTRO I was reading chunks of the Condon Report (of all things) this week. That was the 1,400-page report given in 1968 about the UFO investigations done by the U.S. Air Force (Project Blue Book, etc). The whole thing is now online: http://www.ncas.org/condon/text/contents.htm Ufologists consider the report to be a sham, because, although about 30% cases were left as UNIDENTIFIED, the overall conclusion was that it wasn't worth the effort to keep investigating these reports. Upon reading it, I have to say it's a fascinating document. If nothing else, it shows what it would take to do a comprehensive investigation on this tricky subject, and the huge variety of reports received (both in content and quality), although one can argue whether their choice of featured cases was biased. It organizes reports by type, and for each type, they try to make as much sense as they could of the reported events. Trace evidence is divided into categories, the limits of the evidence discussed, the physics of radar reflections and other handy science is there, photos are analyzed in detail ... it's all very down to earth. For the curious, the whole Blue Book archive is here: http://www.bluebookarchive.org/ Thousands of pages of documents and reports. I love the forms that were developed over the years to try and get good information from witnesses, and how elaborate they got by the 1960s. You can see how vague many reports are, and how detailed and weird others can be. You can see signs that the investigators are real human beings -- my favorite is one report where, under "Source", someone wrote "Amazing Story agent (ugh)." Overall, I find the whole UFO thing is more cult/lore than science, but I won't preach about it. I just thought you'd appreciate pointers to some original source material. Strange, dark history for all. = scott ===================> POEM Crashing... --- Through the shimmering darkness of a sleep-laden mind, I hear the roll and crash of mad highway metals so far away so clear; Cars of life screeching into silence seeping slowly into myself. My senses hurl forward into the awake stunned void ... I hear the rustling of wounded leaves, I feel the tug of nightcold fingers, I smell the damp earth on my sill. I pray that I am truly in bed now, Not laid out insensate under midnight freeway flies. --- = 7/87, published in Expressions newsletter (10/01) ===================> ODD CLIPS: (clips from old "factual" sources) A curious story is connected with Iollan. After his death [in 506] the Leinstermen were so convinced of his efficacy in war, that in their battles against the Hy Niall, they put his dead body in the royal chariot, and made it precede them to battle. [1] [St. Budoc:] Once, when their master was absent, a demon which the Britons call a Tuthe appeared before them in the form of a marine monster. They told Maudetus, and one day shortly after, seeing the creature in the waves, he threw a stone at it, knocked it over, and the Tuthe never again appeared. [2] Before his death, Budoc bade his disciple Illtyd cut off his arm, so soon as he was dead, and take it to Plourin, where he had been so ill received, and had excommunicated the inhabitants. Illtyd (Hydultus) did so, and halting on the way at Brech, in Morbihan, he put down the box that contained the arm, on the floor. A man inadvertently sitting on the box became paralyzed. The people of the place, convinced that the miracle was performed by the relic, refused to permit its removal. Illtyd begged to be allowed to kiss it, and when this was permitted, bit off one of the Saint's fingers, and carried it away in his mouth. This finger is now preserved at Plourin, in a silver reliquary formed like an arm. [3] 1. Sabine Baring-Gould and John Fisher, Lives of the British Saints (4 vols) (Cymmrodorian Society, London, 1907), p.I.275 2. same, p.I.329 3. same, p.I.336 ===================> STORY Maze Curtains (Part 1 of 2) ---- 1 Awareness awakeness now, I watch the curtains blowing billowing, catching at the early morning motions of air. Pushed toward me they clutch, I feel the outside air reach across my face. Then the window inhales, sucking the curtains against the always-cold glass. I've heard it said that glass is neither liquid nor solid, that though it seems solid it's always so slowly slipping downwards in paneglass, downwards like the thickest puddings in overturned bowls. 2 Downwards like me. As soon as I feel the peace of being here, I feel the turmoil-despair of being here alone. Perpetually it seems, always to share my deepest need-feelings with the unliving uncaring blank walls and spaces of my apartment. My heart feels like the vacuum of space, a universe shell-only, expanding on starfire shockwaves to no place. For nobody to understand. The curtains don't understand me. Nobodyunderstands stars. 3 Strange. The curtains are scraping now when they move, moving more slowly as they scrape. Everything feels slow, unreal waxy unnecessary, dreamlike. Apathy life. Again work, always work, another day WORK, the same day WORK! I had to go to {hate} work soon, whatever time it is now. For I have worked {hated} for so long I have become conditioned to awaken on the same minute (6:44) every day, like one eternal day in grotesque parody. 4 Clang. The still curtains are beginning to show luster. I don't wonder why they're turning to metal. My throat tastes like copper, my emptiness is lead in my head. I got out of bed. Metal floor, cold. My world was turning to stone, but these were the 1980's and stone is obsolete. It is the age of metal. I feel neither deserving nor surprised. CLANG. Metal curtains shade our lives from the world, shade ourselves from each other. 5 My despair must have reached some threshold, now becoming physical. The environment which had crushed me for so long is being warped and altered. Vague curiosity absorbs me at the thought of what it's becoming. Is it just me or the whole world? Why do I care? I am, after all, alone. I start my day now, and I want to go to work, suddenly, to spread my insane glorious petrifaction and be free. I open the bedroom door and stand stunned staring at the metallic maze beyond. 6 I look back at my bed, it has changed -- now a slight antimonious lump in the floor of the maze passage behind me. CLANG! The curtains' last motion halts them in vibration, and they are welded to the bedroom wall. I hear the sound of the labyrinth building itself toward the horizon. Is it radiating from me to touch the world, or just to join with the mazes of others? I don't want to know. I want out. I begin to run. 7 This is not FROM me, it is GREATER than me! It will destroy me if I don't keep moving. Angle after angle. My feet ache, my knees flare hot throbbing pain. I call out, there is no response. I am all there is. Me and loud shadows pursuing me, but Why? I heighten my pace, as do they. A shadow bursts through a wall, deformed computerized, misses me. Laughing like circuitry it crashes through the opposite wall and is gone. (TO BE CONTINUED) ===================> NOW AVAILABLE: Blank Spaces & other dangers A collection of 27 sci-fi, fantasy and slipstream tales. A new edition by the author, featuring stories originally published in Analog, Space & Time, Steel caves and more. http://tales.scvs.com/bk_blank.php ===================> DARKVISION: (captured dreams) Lava Main ::: Books books! Tired of books, we stepped out through the slishing library door to play in the grass. Spring warming bees buzzing bush to bush, we chased across the green, laughing fresh air. But then he tripped and landed with a windknocking thud. "What's that you tripped on?" I asked. He rubbed his ankle and replied, "A water thing." I looked at the iron pipehead sticking out of the dandelions. I almost dismissed it, but there was a light on it, so I looked closer. "This ain't no ordinary water-thing.," I concluded. It said something on it, raised up on the metal like bus-station braille, but it wasn't in English. It looked like a fake magical rune from a kid's fantasy book, and there was that light. It was flickering and red and beckoning, begging me to peer closer closer until my eye was almost on it, and I could feel its depth. Something bubbled flowed under me, all orange and bright, seen through the little plastic window on the thing. My friend wanted to see, so I let him. "There's a little hole to pry it off with, but I don't think we should." I looked around and the people thought we were picking weeds, so I changed my mind. He agreed. "Oh sure why not, I wanna see it to. But I get to do it, cuz I was the one who found it." So I handed him a stick. He slipped it in the little space and pressed on it, but it snapped. He tried again, and the lid flipped back with a bump. Fire sprayed out, up into the air, everywhere, a geyser a spurt a sight, oh how they turned to watch! It danced in the sky, falling about happily, igniting the world as we tried to put the cap back. But it was too hot now, we had to run. It was a volcano. --- (captured 1/19/86) ===================> MY NEWS: I've sent out more submissions, but not a peep this time. They seem to just vanish into the ether. New book cover designs for Samsdot: - Mystery at Clermont House, by Mark Anthony Brennan - Blood Sampler, by Summers & Zumpe ===================> POEM Shifting a Burden --- The child was never told he could not do it, so he did, Because of the Transformers so recently seen, he twisted his arms askance, snapped sockets, pushed plastic guns through the flesh of his wrists, he sprouted angles and plating, a helmet and box-feet, crunching and extruding his perfect self. Elated, he shambled to tell his mother, But found himself alone. The mother was never told how completely she'd be trapped, Because of the Newlywed Game so recently seen, She had twisted herself into freedom. --- = 7/87, unpublished. ===================> STORY BITES: (clips from old fictional sources) It was a belief very strongly and generally held by the ancients ... that, by absorbing the personalities of a certain number of his fellow-creatures, an individual may gain a complete ascendancy over those orders of spiritual beings which control the elemental forces of our universe. [1] It is recorded of Simon Magus that he was able to fly in the air, to become invisible, or to assume any form he pleased, by the agency of the soul of a boy whom ... he had 'murdered.' [2] It is "set down with considerable detail in the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, that similar happy results may be produced by the absorption of the hearts of not less than three human beings below the age of twenty-one years. [...] The best means of effecting the required absorption is to remove the heart from the living subject, to reduce it to ashes, and to mingle them with about a pint of some red wine, preferably port." [3] 1,2,3. story: "Lost Hearts", by M.R.James ===================> POEM Scratch Pad --- Itching and I looked, Curling up my shirt seeking mosquito bite welts or a stray hair there, But instead I saw red lines, Crossing like celestial diagrams of a place I should see or try to explain, Strange things shifting in my flesh, An encyclopedia in pictographs creasing alien stories or scratchpad arithmetic, Deeper they seeped changing colors, Like urgent spectra from a dying star filaments of supernova or my own veins dancing, but the moment slipped away ... The transmission complete, evidence erased as the message from beyond faded to fingernail marks left over from scratching a spot that did not itch. --- =7/87, pub. in The Ultimate Hallucination (7/01) ===================> ABOUT THE AUTHOR Scott Virtes has had over 400 stories & poems published since 1986. Look for them in Analog, Space & Time, Ideomancer, Dreams & Nightmares, Cafe Irreal, Planet, and more ... My Home page: http://tales.scvs.com?inw=dkw Notice: Odd Clips and Story Bites all come from original sources in the public domain, or are brief clips in the spirit of fair use (a.k.a. free advertising for the source). All other sections of this newsletter are copyright (c)2008 Scott Virtes. All rights reserved. Please don't grab chunks of my work and post them all over the place. If you ask permission, you'll find that I'm pretty easygoing. ;-) ===== this issue: 2,050 words cumulative: 37,400 words |
|
| << May02, 2008 - Dark Windows #17 - May 1, 2008 |
June02, 2008 - Dark Windows #19 - Jun 1, 2008 >> |
|
Dark Windows Archives Index
|
Subscribe
|
|
|
Archives powered by Zinester's Mailing List Service
Details on Dark Windows |
Browse for more newsletters at Zinester's Ezine Directory
Managed by Zinester's Mailing List Management |