ANDROID MEME'S XENOCHRONY

PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5 | PART 6

PART 7 | PART 8 | PART 9 | PART 10 | PART 11

Jan.22/98 (Los Angeles)

AArtVark (editor for Flipside): Bob, you're not going to be a cover feature in the magazine anymore. You're going to have a regular column each issue. What do you think?

Dobbs (New York): Well, I've been the only constant thing on the cover for the last two and a half years, and X-day is coming up on July 5 this year for Rev. Stang and his gang. That'll be it for them! So, sure, I can start releasing the real files on July 6.

AArtVark: We'll need a name for the column.

Dobbs: Let me think about it. I'll get back to you in a couple of days.

Aug.15/71 (Montreal)

Randy: What's new, Connie?

Connie Dobbs: Here, try this. We call it D-cell water. It's purified water. It seems to slow down the aging process.

Randy turned off his television set and took the glass in his hand. He trusted whatever Connie said.

Dec.4/63 (Dartmouth, Nova Scotia)

Bob walked up Portland Street with Flaps, who was only 14 years old.

Dobbs: We and all our activities are pills for the gaping maw.

Flaps: I don't think Oswald killed Kennedy.

Dobbs: Oh yeah, he shot Kennedy.

Flaps: Are you sure?

Dobbs: Yes.

Feb.22/56 (Toronto)

Dobbs slammed Ted Carpenter up against the blackboard.

Dobbs: McLuhan says that we, each of us, are a pattern of information. Well, who is patterning Ray Birdwhistell?

Carpenter: Yeah? Well who blacklisted Dorothy Lee?

May10/36 (Paris)

Ezra Pound stared at the very young-looking fourteen-year-old Bob Dobbs.

Pound: Go for the higher hypothesis. Forget Joyce and his Aristotelianism, think like Plato.

Dobbs: What would Plato have made of modern communication?

Pound: That's what I'm working on in my Cantos - mating poetry and the newspaper!

Bob looked away, saw a headlight of a Ford Model-T, and out of it an image of a politician riding in the back seat of a car getting his head blown off flashed at him. A sign nearby spelled out Dealey Plaza.

Oct.8/69 (Seattle)

Dobbs: What is my purpose and direction?

David Worcester (in trance while lying on a couch): This Awareness indicates this within the previous message, that your action in relation to the symbolic language is that which is extraordinary; this also will aid in relating higher abstractions within the psyche in a manner which creates the circumstances by which you may speak through more than one symbol simultaneously in a series of well-chosen words. This, at a level of transpersonative interaction.

April22/35 (Paris)

"Crowds are all that's left," James Joyce muttered to Eugene Jolas. As Bob walked into the studio, Joyce turned to him and whispered "Television kills telephony in brother's broil". "Television? Mr. Baird was with my father last year after the fire at the Crystal Palace. Is the telephone related to television?" "They're both electric forms of communication. Hence, the simultaneity factor." "I always thought, when reading Eliot's The Wasteland, it was like eavesdropping on a telephone conversation." "For such a young man, you say remarkable things. The underlying image that guided me through the book was a telephone party line that everyone had access to. I wonder if the language of my book will predict your life." Bob was distracted by a view of a lake through the window. A sign on a building said Banook Canoe Club. B-A-N-O-O-K. Bob looked at it in his mind's eye. Ban...the...book. "Well, television will certainly murder the book!" "Not my book!" Joyce glared. "When you know the inevitable cycle of technological effects, from speech to television, you can anticipate the problems. It's probably happened before." "You mean, like Atlantis?" "Perhaps. Yeats would see it that way, but he didn't think anthropologically - more, psychospiritually. He was greatly impressed with the same ideas that influenced Aleister Crowley." "There's a man I'd like to meet."

June18/67 (New York)

"June 18th," mumbled Marshall McLuhan. "So?" asked Lyndon Larouche. "Paul McCartney's birthday," continued McLuhan. "Yeah, the Beatles are going to have the first live satellite broadcast in a week from today," added Dobbs. Frank Zappa finished sucking on his cigarette, tapped it into the ashtray on the wobbly table, and interjected, "It's also Sugarcane Harris' birthday today. For me, that's more significant." "Who's that guy over by the long bench?" Mae Brussell asked Dobbs as she sat down with her drink. "Garrett Deane. He's an old friend of mine from Nova Scotia. Quite an actor, did a lot of Broadway in the forties and fifties. He's not working much now, the last thing he did was interview the woman who played Hazel on TV. I'll introduce you later, but he's leaving New York soon. He's moving back to his parents' home in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia in a couple of days. He doesn't like what Nelson Rockefeller has done to the city." They were all sitting around at Stanley's in the East Village waiting for Jiddu Krishnamurti to come and meet them for the first time. Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone came on the jukebox and LaRouche frowned and shook his head.

LaRouche: These hedonistic concepts spell trouble for our culture, I guarantee you.

McLuhan: Well, Lyndon, the percepts are far more dangerous than any concepts.

LaRouche: What are "percepts"? You mean, our sensory life?

McLuhan: Yes, but I'm referring more to the new percepts - their mechanical, environmental extensions.

Just then, Dobbs stood up as he greeted a short Middle Eastern-looking man approaching the table. Bob introduced him as the next governor of West Virginia - Dr. Peter Beter.

Zappa: The kids today are going to be different. They're going to allow things to happen. Perhaps even have their cake and eat it too.

McLuhan: But wait until they discover books.

Zappa: When will that occur?

McLuhan: When they get into their thirties and forties.

Dobbs: We and all our activities are drugs for the gaping maw.

Connie walked over to Bob and whispered in his ear, "He's on the phone again. I can't calm him down." Bob went into the back room, picked up the telephone, and put the Well-known American Businessman (name deleted to protect Flipside) in his ear. "Dobbs, Jim Garrison's getting close. You've got to go down there." Bob returned to the table and noticed Zappa, with eyes akimbo, leafing through Connie's copy of Finnegans Wake that had been left on the counter. Dobbs then drew Frank's attention to the song on the radio right then - I'm Sorry by the Impalas. Bob then noticed Mark Lane passing on the street in front of Stanley's, probably heading home to his flat in Murray Gross' building. Murray was a lawyer who worked in the DA's office and had carved out an expertise in the new field of securities-laundering by the Mafia.

Beter: "Is this Krishnamurti fellow we're meeting a Buddhist or a Hindu."

Brussell: "I've heard he's neither - a kind of mystical atheist."

LaRouche: "Well, whatever, he's still a gnostic. Mae, what do you think Jim Garrison's going to do next?"

Brussell: "I don't know, but I'm going down to New Orleans next week to help him."

Nov.22/63 (Dartmouth)

Randy turned down Slater Street and headed for the road hockey game. He marveled at what a great song Cry, Cry, Baby by Garnet Mimms & the Enchanters was. He couldn't get over how much he loved the radio. He puzzled over how hard it was to keep up his interest in hockey. As he approached the game, he laughed to himself as Mike Kroger slipped on the snow and collapsed on Gary Reid's stomach while Gary's stick just missed Ross Short's head. Once he started playing, he forgot about the music and was happy he had already scored two goals and got one assist. Then it happened. Penny Peters and Judy MacLean came bustling by saying something about the President of the United States being shot. He immediately wondered if this would affect the party at Steve's that night. It was going to be a farewell party for Reid whose father had been transferred to Bathurst, New Brunswick. This game was being played in front of Gary's house where they had had some good sleep-over parties. That wouldn't happen anymore. Randy hoped Gary's girlfriend, Janet Stevenson, would be at the party tonight. Then the tennis ball slapped into his thigh. OWWWW!!!!

March14/54 (Toronto)

McLuhan: "My procedure is based on the identity, the identity, of the processes of cognition and creation."

Dobbs: "Yes, but then that identity is applied to mapping that process on the machines of communication."

McLuhan: "Yes, as extensions of our unconscious."

Dobbs: "And my father and his people realized that what Joyce was demonstrating in Finnegans Wake was a means of being conscious of those stages of apprehension."

McLuhan: "But today it is largely futile to discuss it at all at any level of society."

Dobbs: "That may not be a problem. Does that mean you will become a satirist?"

McLuhan didn't answer as the field pulled them down the hall.

July5/36 (Paris)

As Wyndham Lewis put the book on his lap, he directed the following words to Bob, "Art used to be the teaching machine. Not anymore. We can now see that the mechanical environment is the teaching machine." Bob saw a small shape orbiting around the Earth - this image floated out of the lamp to the right of Lewis's head.

Sept.29/54 (Washington)

J. Edgar Hoover screamed at Bob and his partner: "They've nailed McCarthy and now the Catholics are going to run roughshod over us all!"

Dobbs: Yeah, this joker McLuhan is a Catholic.

Feb.4/58 (Lancaster, California)

Bob slipped into the little club in the Mojave Desert and found a stool. Bo Diddley was taking a break, but a conversation caught Bob's attention. "Frank, you believe the universe has a point of view - tight and tapered. I believe the universe doesn't - fast and bulbous!" The speaker had a babyface but the aura of a woodsman. The Frank spoken to looked like many people Bob had seen around Jean Paul Sartre's scene in Paris. Bob thought of McLuhan and "balbus".

Aug.4/60 (Dartmouth)

Bob sat in Brothers' Lunch and marveled at how close the canoe race had been between Mickey MacGlashen and Gabor Joo. Hugh Boyd and Gary Geddes walked in.

Boyd: "Bob, have you heard they're going to make a movie about the Bounty here in Nova Scotia?"

Dobbs: "Yes, and I think I can get you in it? What do you say to that?"

Just then an older man came out of the washroom, sat down by Bob, but Bob didn't introduce him.

Dec.30/53 (New York)

In a cafe on McDougal Street the English language poured out of the mouth holding court, much of it sculpting a tale about a Russian lady telling off Nazi officers in a concentration camp. Occasionally its audience would purr "Oh, Garrett." Bob thought of Paris, his father, Baron Rothschild and Wyndham Lewis. Bob turned to Marcel Duchamp asking "Why not?" "I'm going to protect my art from the Twentieth Century - this plague of machinery."

Jan.27/55 (Toronto)

McLuhan stood in the hall.

McLuhan: They won't give up their specialism. I can't form a unified team.

Carpenter: And the administration won't pay me back. It's not going to work in the university.

Carpenter stared down the hall corridor.

Dobbs: I can get Bassett to fund an independent issue.

Bob stared down the other end of the hallway.

McLuhan (directed at Dobbs): Balbus is building a wall.

Dobbs: Yeah, Joyce. Is that why you blessed SEPARATENESS in Counterblast last year?

McLuhan: Blake would have been the opposite of holism in this century, too.

Dobbs: Yes, and he would have spelt it "bulbous".

June4/39(Paris)

RHYEE. ELOI. TU. LOFTI. Bob couldn't shake the words out of his head. What did those words mean, he wondered as he wandered into his father's room. Rene sat glowing in his favorite chair. He had just returned from a Priory de Sion meeting, his father's favorite activity. He was holding a book. He held it up for Bob to see the cover. The title was two strange words - FINNEGANS WAKE. No apostrophe - a misprint right on the cover, Bob laughed to himself. "Tim, he's finally finished it!" "Who has? "James Joyce." Bob's father always called Bob "Tim" after a meeting with the Priory. The habit usually lasted about 24 hours. "I don't think I've seen him since he made that recording a while back." Bob looked while Rene opened to the first page. He moved it in to the light and Bob noticed more misprints. Or it wasn't written in English. "This book will be a guide for world government. A kind of operating manual for the next few decades. I'm going to show you how to use it after you've become absolutely exhausted with it."

Nov.2/72(New York)

William Irwin Thompson: There's a new geometry afoot.

Dobbs: Does it retrieve the culture of Atlantis?

Thompson: Perhaps.

Dobbs: Well, I think we're living in the cultural geometry of Lemuria.