"Ian McDonald - Some Strange Desire" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

Grandmother had been a gifted spinner of tales and his graphic descriptions of
the terrible, enduring agony of jhash left me nightmarish and seriously doubting
the goodness of a god who would deliberately balance the good gifts he had given
us with such dreadfulness.
The bomb-sites have given way to the tower-blocks of the post-war dream and
those in turn to the dereliction and disillusionment of monetarist dogma and I
no longer need faith for now I have biology. It is not the will of Pere
Teakbois, Pere Teakbois himself is no more than the product of ten thousand
years of institutionalized paranoia: jhash is a catastrophic failure of the
endocrinal, hormonal and immune systems brought on by the biological mayhem of
tletchen.
It can take you down into the dark in a single night. It can endure for weeks.
None are immune.
Let me tell you the true test of caring. We may be different species, you and I,
but we both understand the cold panic that overcomes us when we first realize
that we are going to die. We understand that there is an end, an absolute end,
when this selfness will stop and never be again. And it terrifies us. Horrifies
us. Paralyzes us, in the warmth of our beds, in the dark of the night with our
loved ones beside us. The end. No appeal, no repeal, no exceptions.
You are goi and I am tesh and both love and life are different things between us
but this we both understand, that when we contemplate the death of the one we
love and it strikes that same paralyzing, cold panic into us as if it were we
ourselves, that is caring. That is love. Isn't it?



20 November, 9:15 P.M.
Vinyl Lionel's Law: Everyone is either someone's pimp or someone's prostitute.
By that definition, Vinyl Lionel is our pimp, though he would be quite
scandalized to think that the word could be applied to himself.
Vinyl Lionel subscribes to the roller-and-tray school of cosmetics and wears a
studded leather collar. Studs, in one form or another, characterize Vinyl
Lionel's personal style. Studded wristbands, studded peak to his black leather
SS cap, studded motorbike boots pulled up over his zip-up PVC one-piece with
studded thighs and shoulders.
I remember PVC from the Swinging Sixties. You sweated like shit in those boots
and raincoats. Vinyl Lionel maintains they are trying to remix the Sixties for
the Nineties. Vinyl Lionel should know about the Sixties. He has an old-age
pensioner's free bus pass, but he won't show it to anyone. If the Nineties are
anything like the Sixties, it will be that whatever is happening is always
happening somewhere else. My memory of the Swinging Sixties is that they may
have been swinging in the next street or the party next door, but never swinging
in your street, at your party.
Strangefella's is the kind of place where advertising copywriters and the
editors of those instantly disposable street culture magazines like to convince
people they party all night when in fact they are at home, in bed, exhausted by
their workloads, every night by ten-thirty. If the Nineties are swinging, it is
somewhere else than Strangefella's. Vinyl Lionel has a customary pitch as far as
the architecture will permit from the AV show and the white boys with the deeply
serious haircuts doing things to record decks. He is always pleased to see me.