Five-Dollar Words
April 18, 1974 | Thursday
Michael
For continuity's sake, there are two communiques from Agent Menos that will come in to Kearny over the afternoon of Thursday, April 18.
A written communique retrieved from Jo's dead drop at around 12:30 pm, detailing Jo's discoveries at Patricia Hearst's apartment unknown—most notably, her art school research into "the Crowd" and her interest in Coppa's (now the site of the Transamerica Pyramid), Patricia's possession of a Cosmopolitan from 1907 with George Sterling's "A Wine of Wizardry" in it, and a xerox of the Chronicle art section front page reaction to/promotion of the poem. I assume Jo will note that she suspects memetics in the Sterling poem. (Finding a copy of both of these texts for Archie and Marshall to review is child's play if they call Sophie for a telefax of microfilm facsimiles of both, may take 15-20 minutes for Sophie to dig them up and send them over.) I assume that Jo won't mention the article on Randolph Hearst that Jo took as a Psychometric connection to Patricia, but if she does that's cool too.
At 2:30 pm or so Thursday, the secure line will ring—we can say Merrick takes the notes on this—with the following one-way message from Jo: Three vans, staged in 20-minute intervals starting at 11PM Friday, Bayview Motel, Hunter's Point in the City. Older vehicles, separate routes to LA. Reliable operatives from the commando units to drive -- competent but quiet, select for counterculture appearance if possible. Provide with plausible cover. Not to interfere with SLA personnel unless attacked, and if attacked, maximum force response, no survivors. Concealed surveillance, audio and video if possible, in the vans, and make sure the drivers note drop locations, especially Tania - likely Watts or Compton squats. I will accompany and be dropped at the Reseda location [Jo's still-empty occult bookstore front]. Immediate debrief with M & A. SLA plans major action in Watts. Bring in Martin if available, very important. No further communication until then.)
I happen to have found the original Cosmopolitan issue in full that "A Wine of Wizardry" appears in that is in Jocasta's hands right now. ToC also includes Jack London on hobo life (!!!), George Bernard Shaw on "American Women," and Bierce's notes column along with his analysis of "AWoW." Issue starts here, AWoW is on page 551 of the original magazine, 512 of the digital file.
After Sophie telefaxes the microfiche of the Cosmopolitan issue to Kearny Street and the Chronicle page, she gets on a conference call with Archie, Mitch, and Genevieve. (Merrick can also be there if you guys want.) Merrick has already gone to the airport to go to LA and interview Jolly West.
This would be the first time Archie, Mitch, and Viv have sat down with "A Wine of Wizardry." If while reading it, you guys want to do any deeper analysis on it—Viv will use Poetry-16 and Sophie can use Literature-15—feel free. And then once they've analyzed the poem, Archie and Sophie can bring their Expert Skill (Memetics) to bear on it, but you have to open the door with an appropriate analysis skill. Archie could use Writing-15, for sure.
What Mitch—canonical reader of fantasy literature—thinks of the poem I'm interested to hear as well.
Viv Poetry-16:
>> SUCCESS by 1
Sophie Literature-15.
>> SUCCESS by 7
Genevieve scans the poem quickly, passing it along to Mitch. "Just sort of typical turn-of-the-century baroque fantasy verse. Trying very hard to be Decadent and succeeding only in being gaudy. It surprises me to see Bierce being so publicly enthused about it. Say what you want about his flights of baroque excess, but at least they had a real sense of cosmic or personal horror to them." After a pause, Genevieve says, "Also every woman in it is either a lithe nymph born of man's fancy or a leprous vampiric witch dripping with venom. Which, I suppose, is at least somewhat interesting. Sterling's and London's histories with women weren't much to write home about."
Sophie remains quiet on the line waiting for Archie's and Mitch's comments.
Jeff
"That's a lot of commentary on thirteen lines... oh, there's more."
Mitch makes a face as he reads it. "Wattled monsters redly gape? I know, it's like eighty years and styles change, but, jeez."
Michael
Mitch makes a face as he reads it. "Wattled monsters redly gape? I know, it's like eighty years and styles change, but, jeez."
Viv gestures silently to Mitch as if to say, "Thank you!"
"You've got a guy who has set up some beakers with chemicals or stuff, and is staring at his monsters through them, also he's very sweaty? I think? Then there's a girl who has, sorry, had a bracelet which a bunch of fairies are dancing around, and also this bracelet is a magic 'painted lizard' repelling bracelet.... it's not my style, I can tell you that much.
"Gertrude Atherton sure liked it, though. 'It's too bad this poem isn't about some kind of Annunaki-inspired city on the site of San Francisco' isn't the criticism that would have leaped to my mind, but..."
Michael
Sophie pipes up from the phone, "Yes, Mitchell! I had noticed all the blurbs on that Chronicle page speaking of 'ancient civilizations,' 'strange craft,' and so forth. The overall effect of the stories on that front page, well, Archie, I rather think we'd need to crack into a memetic analysis of both the poem itself and the, er, overheated prose from the Hearst-and-Bierce public relations machine as well."
Genevieve says, looking at the Chronicle page and the Joaquin Miller column, "It's certainly something to see a major newspaper heralding a poem as an object of national pride. The past is a foreign country."
Rob
Archie scans the poem and the Examiner page, furrowing his brow. "Lots of red, ruby, scarlet, lots of five-dollar words... 'Some red city of the Djinns,' hmm."
"I like the baseball parody," he concludes.
Then: "The sales pitch is almost more interesting than the poem, isn't it? Beirce shilling for Sterling, all this coverage in Cosmo and the Examiner. It can't just be the Bohemians going to bat for each other. Got to be some kind of memetic op. Is this how they engineered their alternate history, or some kind of pragmaclast it left behind?"
And then, yes, Archie will definitely do some memetic analysis, both of the poem and the Hearst-Bierce praise for it.
Writing-15.
>> SUCCESS by 5
Memetics-18.
>> SUCCESS by 8.
Michael
Archie picks out the two big questions—"what's with all the red in the poem?" and "which history did this poem and its memetics actually come from"—expertly from all the background noise. (Sophie may have some specific angles to add during this analysis but her Expert Skill (Memetics) roll wasn't better than Archie's.)
First things first: the sales pitch. Those parts of the Chronicle page are light on memetics but not entirely lacking in them. After having talked with and gotten the vibe of Ambrose Bierce—in person, no less—Archie pegs the "read this poem!" content on the Chronicle page as Bierce's work, 100%. It's a low-power (Power 2 or 3), source code-laden package: done clumsily and awkwardly, Archie notes. Not that this format and style of newspaper prose is unusual for the era, but it all does come across as a little too desperate, all things considered.
Now to the poem itself. Archie detects two distinct memetic packages in the poem. The first meme(plex) is embedded in the rhythm, meter, and fanciful imagery of the poem. "Come away," it seems to say, "Come away to a world that does not exist. Fly away with Fancy by your side." The verbs of motion that Sterling imparts upon Fancy's journey—"wings in sudden dalliance her flight," "hastens she," "...flies to a violet headland," "Fancy still is fugitive, and turns..."—make it clear that this first level of memetics is a clarion call for the world to follow Fancy and return to the way it once was, a desperate cry on the part of Sterling, a plea to the readers of Cosmopolitan and the Chronicle to believe again, to rebirth the timeline Sterling had been kicked out of. And the deployment of the first meme itself, well, the source code (at Power 5 or 6) appears to be again 100% Bierce's—it's got that same sort of curdled ironic sickness Archie now realizes was in "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "An Inhabitant of Carcosa": "alas, but it was all a dream"—but the mood and the vibe of the verse is all Sterling's. Archie can almost sense pity here: pity on the part of Ambrose for his poor addled friend, gamely giving him a venue and a lever to try and move the masses, to no avail.
The second memetic package in here is obvious upon Archie's recognition of the "red" imagery. It's a blood-filled tick, a parasitic leech living off of this poem's belief energy: it's Their work, all the way. And it is quite simple: viral in the sense it's like a primitive life form that seeks only to reproduce and find purchase in a vulnerable, disturbed, fantasy-prone mind. That's important here: an ordinary reader wouldn't necessarily pick up on this memeplex. They'd have to be already inclined towards Sterling's poetry and its vibe; the Red memetics are built out of Sterling's poetic DNA.
Archie's eyes grazing over the poem note high concentrations of Anunnaki memetic quanta around the five occurrences of "blood" and the instances of "venom," "poison," in all that obscene fuming and frothing. They seem to say to Archie, "Kill. Shed blood. Revel in it. Use the quick poison. Kill others, then yourselves." It's a Power 7 or 8 meme, and if Archie remembers his Granite Peak training on the Annunaki use of memetics back in '68, it's the šedu who would be inserting this kind of a direct command as a piggyback on human-contrived culture.
But here's the really interesting bit. It's not as if there was a šedu sitting on George Sterling's shoulder, putting this Red viral content into the poem. It's as if the Anunnaki memetics are embedded in Sterling's memories of the old timeline themselves. Inseparable, ineluctable. The place Sterling wanted to return to was tainted, and he never even consciously knew. For the next 20 years, his friends poisoned themselves, trying to get back to Bohemia, ending with Sterling's ignominious end at the hands of Lady Cyanide at the guest room in the Bohemian Club in 1926, all in vain.
(If Marshall and Roger want to pop back into this meeting, figure the memetic analysis and discussion over the phone between Archie and Sophie would take 10-15 minutes—highly technical babble, and so forth—and then there would need to be some time where Archie and Sophie explain the ramifications to Mitch and Genevieve, which we can do in-character before Marshall and Roger return, or we could just get everyone back together to talk about what we've got to report.)
Jeff
"One thing that this...I know I'm a half-step behind, here," Mitch says awkwardly. "I think though that when we've been talking about, uh, changing the game, we've been thinking in terms of alterations we can make by mundane means that would throw history off its current track into something new and strange.
"I mean 'mundane means' in a really, uh, inclusive sense, but it doesn't include whatever the Bohemians did. You might look at their example and say hey, let's try that, it looks like it got them dramatic results, but if we want to go down that road instead of the, uh, slower methods we've been tacking to... methods that still seem pretty revolutionary, thinking differently, you know..
"If we want to try something more dramatic, setting aside the question of how, exactly...then we definitely want to know what went wrong for them, and why.
"Again, I'm sure this is something y'all have already figured out and I've been distracted."
Michael
Genevieve says, "It seems it would behoove us to know what literally happened to create Sterling's and his associates' history instead of trying to piece it together from fragmentary images in a poem. The dividing line between mundane and extra-mundane... maybe that line isn't apparent to us from our current ontological perspective? Is getting an anarchist to shoot President McKinley using memetics 'mundane'?"
Viv pauses for a second, pondering her own hypothetical while looking at Archie's memetically marked-up photocopy of "A Wine of Wizardry." "It gets me thinking of the shopping list in A Canticle for Leibowitz, you know?" Viv says to Mitch. "You've got this inscrutable document from another world, and maybe you can make some assumptions about the author, but not much more than that. Maybe all these djinni and vampiresses and gnomes aren't literal at all, they're just garbled memories or metaphors Sterling was trying to fitfully convey under duress. He puts it all in the poem to try and inspire people to remember his lost world the way he does... and as a result the memetics just don't work. Maybe the twenty years 'Bohemia' existed were actually... just really boring!" Genevieve admits, "I'm playing devil's advocate, I know. I'm sure for there to be a big reversal of history like this, something weird had to have been up."
"I know I'm diagnosing a man who's been dead nearly 50 years with narcissistic grandiosity, but..." Viv gestures at the poem as if it's self-evident. "I guess what I'm saying is I wish we could sit down with Sterling the way we can with Ambrose Bierce."
Bill
"But you could do that. If his spirit's still around." Roger grins. "I should have figured Mitch was here, walking in on a perfect setup like that."
He walks around glad-handing those in the room, making small apologies for being out of touch, the like. (edited)
Bill
Greetings settled, he explains: "I could try to channel him, be your medium. Maybe not the best idea to do it today..." He looks over at Marshall, shrugs. "I could use a bit of time to sweep out the halls after evicting a squatter." He taps his head as he says it. "But it's possible. You know where he died? Where he might be haunting?"
Rob
"Roger!" Archie greets him cheerfully. "Return of the prodigal," he jokes. "Yes, we know exactly where Sterling died, and they just had a mysterious fire there... but I don't think the Bohemians will be enthusiastic about an impromptu seance."
Bill
“Hasn’t stopped us before, but you make that call. We got time to think it over— I got a deep cover to get ready for, right? Anything I need your personal briefing on… dad?” The riff on the prodigal falls a little flat in Roger’s delivery. He looks like he wished he hadn’t said it.
Jeff
"Betsy and Peter. Betsy, and Peter!"
"Oh, uh, sorry."
Brant
Marshall gives Mitch a look. "It freaks me out when you do that, man."
Jeff
"I said sorry."
Michael
Sophie, after rather shyly (and warmly) inquiring after Roger's health after his being "found" in Charley's lab at Livermore, interjects from the remote phone linkup. "Archie, I think we should prepare countermemetics for both the memes in the poem. I have no doubt that Patricia has been seduced by the Bierce/Sterling memetics, which means there's a very good chance the Enemy memetics may be working away in her mind right now. Let alone whether Miss Hearst has been going on about 'A Wine of Wizardry' in the midst of her own brainwashing at the hands of the Symbionese. It seems the SLA would be receptive to the poison bits of the Anunnaki memetics with their dramatic predilection for using cyanide; indeed, perhaps they were even primed before Patricia's arrival for her arrival... in that inimitable way the Enemy has."
A longer-than-perhaps-is-called-for silence from the phone, then Sophie continues, reluctantly, "I think we also have to perhaps consider the possibility that Jocasta's exposure to the poem may require her to receive the countermeme as well."
Brant
“Let’s not rush to that solution,” Marshall says. “Jocasta resides in a near-permanently liminal emotional and psychic space. Her inherent sense of ‘not-belonging’ makes her susceptible to outside influence but also functions as a sort of bulwark against total corruption — eventually that sense of ‘not-belonging’ kicks in and she turns away from whatever is attempting to entice her. It’s one of her most useful traits: she will always come ‘home’ because she has no home. Anyway,” he says, sniffing, “we will soon have Roger on her for monitoring purposes.”
Bill
"Any chance I could catch this bug? If I'm going into the SLA, or even just monitoring Jo, I'll get exposed, yeah? You got a shot for that?" Roger grumbles something unintelligible in Spanglish. (edited)
Michael
Sophie, in an effort to reassure Roger, repeats the bit from Archie's memetic assessment about the fantasy-prone target audience. "Roger, I do have to agree with Archie here. These memes—both Sterling's and the Red Kings' meme that lives on the back of the verse—will only lock in on a target who's already vulnerable to fantasy. But it wouldn't hurt to work up something to keep you safe, and, indeed, give you something to spread to the SLA as a countermeme, if things go sideways." Sophie says, "I'll put together some possible memetic vectors for you, Archie. If you want to loop in Krane to brainstorm with me, feel free. The SLA is a pretty hermetically-closed socio-memetic matrix but there may be avenues for us to pry it open and throw a spanner in the works."
(So I'll make Sophie's/Andrew's countermemetics roll so Roger will have something by the Friday night op; I'll need to think in-character of what makes sense to kill Sterling's "Fancy" but if any of you all have any poetic ideas I'm all ears.
If there's nothing else to hash out in this meeting—I know we haven't discussed the memetics in-character much, so I'm open to that—we can move on to deciding if Archie and whoever else is going to go to Swede's to meet with the Clampers on Friday lunchtime.)