Just got back from Alchemy, my regular first Monday of the month poetry fix. Some good, some bad, as usual. Actually, I felt it was a bit above average in some ways.
The featured speaker was a Czech kid, well, kid to me, I’m pretty sure he was under 30, who wrote Science Fiction novels, and is actually published, so I was kind of jazzed about that, because I really like science fiction. But when the hero keeps a pistol and a watch on his nightstand, and everybody calls him Admiral, it’s hard to believe they are 6,000 years in the future. A bit heavy handed on the military stuff, and probably came across better on the page than on the stage.
Basically, I cringe at novels and short stories at poetry readings, because they take too long and everybody feels they need to do the voices, and almost nobody does them well.
Then, one guy who usually does the most horrifically morbid short stories got up and read a poem, a rhyming poem, and it was still all about death and violence and disgusting stuff, but it was actually powerful and good.
There were a few other pieces that had both power and comedy in them.
I just read 3 poems, but I thoink all of them were well received.
The high point for me, though, was a conversation I had during the break, about how everybody is connected to the internet group mind and as such we are the guiding force behind the new, hybrid, artificial intelligence which is coming into being, emerging into tangible existence, it is what was once known as the noosphere, but it is about to cross the boundary, if it has not done so already, because how the hell would we know, between theory and actual, honest-to-God existence, perceivable on the physical plain, and the beauty of that is this: the territory which we are mentally colonizing, this brave new world, did not actually exist until we populated it, with our fevered fantasies and our warped versions of reality. It was not just virgin ground, it was non-ground.
Som property values are low and access is high.
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