Nothing to do with IP addresses

I have few fears and obsessions over the apocalypse, but there is one thing that I have been genuinely worried about: 2012. Maybe it's because I trust the Mayans quite a bit. I studied them a lot in the second grade - they were a truthful and intelligent people, and I surely trust them a whole lot more than the hundreds of christian seers and prophets who have predicted the same thing numerous times in the past.

The Mesoamerican calendar (given to humans by the Mayan god Quetzalcoatl, pictured above in human form) is divided into eras, and our current 13th baktun era is set to end on either december 21st or 23rd, 2012. Now, many people have disseminated this theory as "the end of the world", including at least one John Cusack movie, and one website which has finally set my fears to rest. It's called the 2012 Official Countdown, and it's just the kind of propagandist "truth" that makes me believe exactly the opposite of what it says.

The truth about 13.0.0.0.0. It has nothing to do with IP addresses and everything to do with your future... and life as we know it...

The Mysterious Planet X will shift into earth's rotational path and collide with our planet! All life that isn't immediately destroyed will be flung from the surface and into space

A meteor will hit the earth, causing concurrent massive tsunamis . The impact will make the bombing of Hiroshima look like a ripple from a pebble tossed into a lake.

Who could possibly know all of this? No professed member of one line of thought could ever claim to know so much about the future. No, it would take a much wider plane of knowledge.
The internet, of course.

Mr. Sayer is a respected Internet scholar with a concentration on the topics of history, spirituality and exposing untruths. He is known for his laser-targeted revelations on the complicated Mayan calendar system used to determine the true nature of 2012. Conspicuously silent while most of the ferver over 2012 raged... Sayer ended his self-imposed media boycott in late 2009 because as he put it... “I could no longer stand back and watch as the general public was lied to.” Sure, theories and theorists come and go... But James Michael Sayer is among the few “doyens” to stand firm and true. He never wavered from the truth no matter what kind of pressure he has been put under. And he's seen plenty of pressure.

“But... this stuff isn't in the bible. And if it's not
in the bible, it just ain't true!”

Who said this wasn't in the bible?
Which bible are you reading?
Because... I promise you, it's in there. And I'll show you where.

But when you boil it down, there is one truth to this entire tirade:
In 2012... something will happen. Because... to say nothing is going to happen, means you're just not paying attention.

Personally, I'd like to see things happen in 2012. I hope you'll be strong and smart enough to see them happen for me, too. That is, if you don't burn up the second Planet X hits Earth

Going up

The past summer has been full of books for me, and few have sated my thirst after reading the Pevear translation of Anna Karenina. I've searched all of my standbys and classic writers, Fitzgerald, Forster (and others not beginning with "F"), but none have kept my attention after Tolstoy. That is, until I opened up Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist.

It's about elevator inspectors, and it's exhilarating.

Two warring factions in the Department of Elevator Inspectors vie for dominance: The Empiricists, who go by the book and rigorously check every structural and mechanical detail, and the Intuitionist, whose observational methods involve meditation and instinct. Set in a dirty, working class, mob-run American metropolis sometime after the civil rights movement, the book focuses on Lila Mae Watson, the first black female inspector in the country.

The book quickly unwinds form this initial novelty (elevator inspectors? really? how quaint) into a dark and hyper-realistic city with heavy suggestions of Film Noir, while going off on philosophical excursions into Lila Mae's educational life, and delving into her struggle with racism and politics. Blade Runner comes to mind, and much of the descriptors of the book I can think of come from film, rather than literature. But the writing is incredibly artful, not only the prose but the structure as well.

And while the book is going in what seems like one hundred directions at once, it's all headed upwards. The elevator provides not only the organizing content, but melds all of these ideas and themes into one focus. Never before have I considered the theoretical, psychological and even social implications of these metal boxes, but this work of art has given me new eyes onto the dark chutes we so depend on.

The book is a thriller, a philosophical investigation of culture and fear, an excursion of dark humor and is an entirely rich, full invented world in it's own right. From a vivid flashback to Lila Mae's final inspector's examination to the random mentions of Lift magazine, the world unfurls without pretense, each one accomplished with a whip-crack.

From the book:

"'If we have decided that elevator studies - nuts and bolts Empiricism - imagined elevators from a human, and therefore inherently alien point of view, wouldn't the next logical step, after we've adopted the Intuitionist perspective, be the build an elevator the right way? With what we've learned?'

'Construct and elevator from the elevator's point of view?'

'Wouldn't that be the perfect elevator?'"

The Intuitionist is just such a thing: a piece of steel constructed from air, a book separate from book-ness. Frankly, it's an ascension.