Ernest Hogan's Blog, page 58

SAN FERMÍN 2015: DANGEROUSNESS AND ALTERNATE UNIVERSES

The first encierro looked out of control. More like a riot than a staged event. Like the scenes in old monster movies where crowds are running through the streets, trying to escape a gigantic monster. Only wilder. 
The encierros, or runs, during the the Fiesta de San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain are scored by Time (Duración), Corenados (Gorings), Tramatismos (Injuries) and Peligrosidad (Dangerousness). Oddly enough, Time isn't as important at the rest. Dangerousness is what makes a good, or great encierro.

This is not sport as practiced in Western Civilization. This ritual is more like religion. Like the pre-fiesta protests where PETA beauty contest winners wear plastic horns, take off their clothes, and smear themselves with fake blood. See Richard Wright's Pagan Spain: It is the conquering of fear, the making of religion of the conquering of fear.
Why not a Church of Tauromachy? Isn't America supposed to be all about freedom of religion?
In that first encierro, a woman, after making it to the corridor into the arena, stopped running, and covered her ears. She had reached a personal limit. I watch for people like her, who are facing their fears. Sometimes it reduces you to a pile of quivering jelly, but what you gain from it is the courage of self-knowledge. There is a heroism in it.

This is a truer thing than America's “horror” culture, where fake blood and gore are mass produced and celebrated. Sometimes you need to reach out of your artificial consumer environment and touch the gooey mess of reality. It will teach you about your place in the universe, and the food chain.
It does cause visions of alternate universes to dance in my head: What would Hemingway think of what San Fermín has become? How and when did bullfighting become illegal in Aztlán? What if the Spanish influence was stronger and bullfighting was part of the cowboy/beef culture? Where would the running of the bulls be held in America? Would MacDonald's and Burger King be sponsoring bulls?
There's a Burger King along the encierro route. And a space that is for rent . . .
I really need to find time to finish that science fiction bullfighting novel.
And even though I'm stuck barbecuing my brain in Phoenix, I can enjoy San Fermín at my computer thanks to SanFermin.com, SanFerminTV Online, and San Fermin Encierro's YouTube Channel.

How I enjoyed the high-Dangerousness – it got an 80! – encierro on Saturday! At one point, a bull named Finito had three men pinned to a wall. Finito charged into the arena with blood on his horn. Later, he threw Iván Fandiño, who had been gored in 2013. With blood on his face and no jacket, Fandiño killed Finito.
On the last day's encierro, the bulls from Miura made history for being the fastest in history. It set a new record at two minutes and five seconds. It also rated a 60 for Dangerousness. The real action was at Dead Man's Curve.

The bulls were muy bravo, and pretty badass, this year. A speed record, 10 gorings (8 were Americans, we're number one!), and 27 injuries. One bull even refused to run.
But it's all over now. Back to the alternate universes that are America and Arizona. Comic-Con? Really? And there's all this political turmoil, racist rhetoric, violence, and fighting over flags. So civilized.

CHICANONAUTICA GETS SUMMER DELIRLIUM IN ARIZONA

Chicanonautica gets Arizona summer delirium over at La Bloga. Even politics is getting hallucinatiory. Or maybe it's the heat.
In case any of you didn't believe this was possible:

But then, the sacred datura is in bloom:

The peyote, too:

There's even an old song about it:

KEEP ON DREAMING, AMERICA!

CHICANONAUTICA GOES BEYOND LUST FOR A WHITE PLANET

Chicanonauticadiscusses the infamous racist novel The Turner Diaries, over at La Bloga.
Of course, this sort of things goes way back in America:

And Europe, too:

Young Nazis have been getting hip:

And look what's happening on the cutting edge of electronic pop culture:
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LUST FOR A WHITE PLANET

I was reading a crazy book, when the craziness started spilling over into the real world:
Donald Trump annouced that he's running for president, and mentioned Mexicans: “They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” 
A young man named Dylann Roof told a group of black people in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, most of whom were women, “You're raping our women and taking over the country,” and killed them.
On Facebook, Ishmael Reed said the The Turner Diaries were “Required reading. If you want to know what motivated this church killer read this book.”
The crazy book? The Turner Diaries , the infamous novel written by Nazi William Luther Pierce, under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald. It inspired Timothey McVeigh to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
I had wanted to read it ever since I read Ishmael Reed's essay about it, in his book Another Day at the Front , and  The Turner Diaries can be downloaded for free on Internet Archive.
I'm happy to report that it doesn't work as a manual for guerrilla warfare. Developments in communications, surveillence, and military technology have made the practical advice in the book obsolete. Whew.
The Turner Diaries is not a literary masterpiece. It's not even good fiction. Pierce tells more than he shows, avoiding drama for monologue. There isn't much dialogue. The one attempt to show “the negro dialect” is pathetic. And all the characters are one-dimensional.

The narrator/hero Earl Turner has no past, no family, no motivation. The mere existence of Jews, Blacks, and other non-Whites is presented as enough for his rage. As for plot, entire chapters could be cut without taking away from the “story.” This is partially due to the details that are gone into about making an ammonium-nitirate bomb (the book begins with all guns being confiscated by Black agents of the government after they are banned by the Cohen Act) and counterfeiting that is done to destroy the American economy (because apparently the efforts of the Jews and non-Whites to do so isn't working fast enough). There's also a Mansonesque/hippie counterculture that sells White girls to Jewish-run white slave rackets.
Dispite the racist agenda – Blacks are shown as criminals/rapists/cannibals, and are killed like vermin – “racism” is often put in quotes, a "lie" that the liberal media is spreading. And though at first the word “patriot” is used, later the U.S. Constitution is sneered at, and conservatives are mocked as weak. Hitler is mourned and defended.
As if all this wasn't enough to boggle the mind, when the Great Revoltuion finally starts, after the Organization gives up on winning over the public and decides that terrorism is the way to go, Jews and race-traitors hanging from every lampost in L.A. are just the beginning. It's a sadistic orgy of bloody vengence. Over and over, we are told that it's all “their” fault. After all, they aren't human, er, White . . .
Refusing to recognise the humanity in others is the core of The Turner Diaries. It's the most single-minded book I've ever read. There are no real characters. No one is human. Mass slaughter is reasonable, if it helps make Earth into the Planet of the White People.
So, what's the appeal? It's feel-good reading for racists.
And it is ridiculous. Like the White teenagers who happily take the place of Mexican migrant workers. (Would Dylann Roof take the job?)  Like the very idea of an all-white planet.
Yet, we hear such ideas being taken seriously.
This book should not be banned, but brought out into the light. Let everyone see how absurd it is.
Chester Himes said, “Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference.”
But if we don't try, we all become absurd, and the Dylann Roofs of the world win.

CHICANONAUTICA LOOKS AT ESTRIDENTISTAS, TREINTATRENTISTAS AND AVANT-GARDE

Chicanonauticareviews a book on the Mexican avant garde, over at La Bloga.
Estridentismo was started by Manuel Maples Arce:

It raised some hell:

¡30-30! took it's name from the rifle that was popular among the revoulutionaries:

And the tradition lives on:

CHICANONATUICA LEARNS ABOUT THE SECRET YAQUI APOCALYPSE

That's thanks to a documentary by Paco Ignacio Taibo II in Chicanonautica, over at La Bloga.
Hollywood has givien us its version of the Yaquis:

They are used in action-packed westerns:

And sexy stars have played them:

It's so difficult to see the real thing:

JOHN WATERS FINDS AMERICA

Riots in the streets. Conflicts spreading like viruses. And a presidential election looming. Looks like it's time to go searching for America again.
It's not that we lose America. It's more like we lose track of it. It's especially easy in this days of social media, when you can fine tune your input according to your tastes – then, oh, the shocks when your step out of your comfort zone onto . . . the road.
That's where you find the real America, on the road. Huckleberry Finn knew it. So did Jack Kerouac. And Hunter Thompson.
And so does John Waters.
His latest book, Carsick , is another fine example of the Great American Road Book. He tells of hitchhiking across America, and more.
Carsickis another work of American literature that straddles the borders between fiction and nonfiction. After an introduction, he presents two outrageous novellas: one presenting the best case scenario, the other the worst. Waters' own twisted utopian and dystopian visions. Magnificently outrageous. The kind of stuff that makes you fall in love with America as the fantastic place where anything is possible, the way it should be, if only so many Americans weren't afraid of everything.
This gets into speculative fiction territory, crashing through alternative universes and all. Maybe John deserves a Hugo award for this.
Then, he goes on to document his real trip. Celebrity hitchhiking in the time of interwebs. Real people that are strange in ways his imagination didn't expect. The amazing, mind-blowing thing is – and I'm fighting the urge to commit spoilers here – it leaves you feeling good, and hopeful about this country.
It's the sort of book we need right now. And it makes me once again think of John Waters as a Great American.

CHICANONAUTICA WONDERS ABOUT CHICANO ART

In Chicanonautica, over at La Bloga, I go from my art at Sector 2337, to the subject of Chicano art:

As in, what is it?

Are we fine art?

And who know's where could this lead?

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEWS CORTEZ ON JUPITER

Here's what they had to say:

Hogan's debut, first published in 1990, introduced the subgenre of Chicano SF to a startled, dazzled American audience. Now, 25 years later, the book's Spanglish prose and freeform plot still amuse. All Pablo Cortez cares about is creating art, whether it's humongous graffiti sprayed across Los Angeles or zero-gravity paint slinging in space. Uncool authorities and timid collaborators can't stop him. When he confronts the alien Sirens of Jupiter, who have zapped the minds of earlier explorers, he takes their overwhelming flood of bizarre images as subject matter for new masterpieces. Hogan keeps Pablo's obsessive rants from becoming too intense by working them into a collage of comments from friends and enemies, along with hefty chunks of Aztec mythology, as he builds a jangling, rambunctious picture of artistic genius. This is tons of fun for freethinking readers who appreciate heroes with cojones. (Mar.)
Note: PW called Pablo "Pedro" at one point, but I corrected the error.
Buy it now!