That is, the Santa Clarita Valley, if you like, or perhaps the cabbage patch south of Salinas the Amtrak train sat in for 6 hours last night.
One of the hazards of wearing all black as a matter of course (well, I don't own much else) is the undesirable interpretability of the choice, especially when the intended interpretation would be, no interpretation. This is especially the case when one is, in a public place, reading a lapsized biography of Aleister Crowley, with bald old Master Therion hisself glaring balefully from the cover. After a few hours, one wishes to have chosen a t-shirt with the slogan “No, I’m not a Thelemite, why do you ask?” (actually thinking about what they saw would make the question pretty redundant, obviously) ... it’s funny, twenty years or so ago I used to enjoy reading John Rechy novels on crowded N trains, it was a great way to keep the adjacent seat empty, but now it’s just kinda embarassing, feeling like your normal behavior is being interpreted as living parody (or threat, or curiosity) by half the people walking past you. At least I don’t have a mohawk, I guess.
Reading the section of the A.C. bio dealing with the Cefalu “abbey,”, it struck me how much the households in Stranger in a Strange Land — both Jubal’s and the nest — read like an idealized version of Crowley’s attempts at community ... Jubal’s philosopher-king-with-harem schtick like a well-funded idea of what Crowley had in the mid-twenties, and the nest what Crowley might have meant to have. (God, I can just hear the folks on rasfw sharpening their cleavers now.) Figuring I’ve never had a random thought that somebody hasn’t thought seriously about, I googled around and came up with just that here, which talks about the relations between Heinlein and Jack Parsons’ circle in the forties (the article seems to have originated from within the Church of All Worlds, a (what shall I call it?) church based in part on Stranger from California; caveat emptor).
But it’s not quite accurate to say that the novel seemed like an idealized version. What it really felt like was, the actual events felt like a brutal reductio ad absurdum parody of Stranger, a demonstration of what all those fine ideal folks would actually be like, if they weren’t in a novel. Sort of like we have all those beautiful descriptions of what an anarchist society would look like, all sharing and consensus-driven, and when we get one in real life, it’s <oops> pre-Taliban Afghanistan.
Think I better stop now.
