Dead Writers - Famous Last Words

Ernest Hemingway

Spoken to his wife before he killed himself.

 Voltaire

When asked by a priest to renounce Satan.

 

George Bernard Shaw

Hunter S Thompson

Henrik Ibsen 

This was his response to a nurse who said he was a little better.

 Dylan Thomas

 

Hans Christian Anderson  

Jane Austen

Jean Cocteau

 W.C. Fields

 “Carlotta” was Carlotta Monti, actress and his mistress.

 

 Leo Tolstoy

 James Joyce

H.G. Wells

 Edgar Allan Poe

'They're made out of meat' by Terry Bisson

They're made out of meat."
     "Meat?"
     "Meat. They're made out of meat."
     "Meat?"
     "There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
     "That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"
     "They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
     "So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
     "They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
     "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
     "I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat."
     "Maybe they're like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
     "Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take long. Do you have any idea what's the life span of meat?"
     "Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."
     "Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."
     "No brain?"
     "Oh, there's a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat! That's what I've been trying to tell you."

     "So ... what does the thinking?"
     "You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat."
     "Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
     "Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?"
     "Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
     "Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
     "Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?"
     "First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual."
     "We're supposed to talk to meat."
     "That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there. Anybody home.' That sort of thing."
     "They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
     "Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
     "I thought you just told me they used radio."
     "They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
     "Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
     "Officially or unofficially?"

     "Both."
     "Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
     "I was hoping you would say that."
     "It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
     "I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
     "Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
     "So we just pretend there's no one home in the Universe."
     "That's it."
     "Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You're sure they won't remember?"
     "They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."
     "A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."
     "And we marked the entire sector unoccupied."
     "Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"
     "Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again."

     "They always come around."
     "And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone ..."
  


The end


By Terry Bisson


This story originally appeared in Omni April 1991 and was nominated for the Nebula Award. It is taken from the collection 'Bears Discover Fire'. You can find out more about Terry Bisson on his website, http://www.terrybisson.com/ .

Stanley Kubrick's photos of 1940s New York

Before becoming a legendary director, Stanley Kubrick was a poor kid from the Bronx who did photojournalism for Look magazine in the 1940s in and around New York City. He shot on the sly, often times his camera concealed in a paper bag with a hole in it. Of the some odd 10 000 black and white photographs he took while working at the magazine, VandM chose a total of 25, which have now been made available as prints.

These images were appropriated from mashKULTURE.net
http://english.mashkulture.net/2011/11/30/stanley-kubricks-photos-of-1940s-new-york/

Rupert Murdoch: The Next Tyrant to Fall?

On the 20^th October 2011, the world watched on YouTube as Libyan dictator General Muamar Gaddafi was pulled from a storm drain and beaten before the self-proclaimed ‘King of kings’ executed corpse was dragged through the streets. The Arab Spring uprisings brought about the fall of the last of those iconic, brutal political leaders that came to power in the 1970s and 1980s in the region. 

These are horrible images but, unsurprisingly, for a man who instigated massacres of his own people, supported international terrorism and protected the chief suspects of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, the occasion was met with little sympathy. Similarly, little sorrow was shown in the international media community for the death of other such larger-than-life tyrants of those times such as Idi Amin, Pol Pot or Saddam Hussein. These figures dominated the media of the 1980s and 1990s and their passing marks the end of an era. 

Well, almost. There is one more tyrant who could soon be the next to fall, Newscorp International founder, Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch. Comparing Murdoch to those despots mentioned above may seem unfair but for the past twenty years, Rupert Murdoch has commanded more power and influence over the western world than the others combined. Admittedly, he has never ordered someone’s execution (so far as we know) but his methods of control are more insidious. It has been speculated that Murdoch owns close to 40% of the western global media market and has used this power-base to affect control over both the British and American media and political systems for two decades.

Through Murdoch’s close relationship to Margaret Thatcher, his defection to Tony Blair’s New Labour and the recent positioning of Andy Coulson as the Conservative Party Communications Director in 2007, his ability to covertly affect governmental policy-making has continued unabated. The most recent manoeuvrings to ensure that a full takeover of BSkyB was accepted would have offered Murdoch an unprecedented level of control over the British media landscape. 

And for some time this takeover looked inevitable. No political party or famous figure has been able to risk upsetting the media mogul for fear of his political power or the incriminating stories he can release if challenged. Yet it has been this area, the invasive gathering of scandalous information that has finally proven to be the Achilles’ heel to Murdoch’s empire.

The illegal phone-hacking scandal, and in particular revelations on the hacking of murdered teenager Millie Dowler’s mobile telephone sparked a media-storm which the corporation could not escape or bully into disappearing, even forcing  Murdoch to close The News of the World, a tabloid of 168 years and one of the best-selling publications in the world. It is the loss of advertising revenue due to the universal damnation of Newscorp’s activities which has destabilised his and his lieutenants’ positions within the corporation. 

It does not matter that it is financial rather than political pressures that have weakened the business magnate’s position, Al Capone was not finally jailed for his criminal underworld activities but on charges of tax evasion. Rupert Murdoch will hopefully fall due to the universal condemnation of his tasteless and cruel tactics.

We certainly do not want to witness the horrible image of Rupert Murdoch being dragged from a storm drain, beaten then executed, but maybe it would be ok to see the journalistic equivalent? For a man who has presided over the public shaming and ruination of so many, to have his political death played out across the very tabloid newspapers he created might prove a fitting end. 

Deptford (P)Elvis

A gyrating moron twists and turns,

‘cross the dance-floor he mistakenly thinks he owns,

Toward the trio of voluminous beauties collected there

Half-stepping, and laughing, and flicking their hair.

The trio are blissfully unaware of the approaching fool,

Absorbed, as they are now, with reminiscences of school,

Of dancing, as then, to trashy 80’s songs

Older now, inflated, but with more easily visible thongs.

The idiot sidles, pelvic-thrusts, and slides his way

To his faded, nostalgic, and unsuspecting prey,

Takes one final fortifying swig of his J & D

And selects his target from the ravishing three.

He shifts his (considerable) weight and sidesteps into the group

With a dramatic dance flourish; a boogie swoop,

Meant to ingratiate him as one of ‘those fun guys’,

But his ALDI Audrey Hepburn merely rolls her eyes,

Shifts her (also considerable) weight so as to give a surreptitious wink

To her (similarly bloated) friend, the dirigible in pink,

Who laughs, pointedly and uproariously, at the audacity of men

Who think (like the pigs they are) that they’re good enough for women like them.

So she blocks him and with one last, delighted guffaw

Escorts the gaggle away from the dance-floor,

From this Pavlova Cassanova, this interloper

Who dared to stare but did not care for her

So he sucks down his humiliation, drowns the remains of his drink

And returns to the bar; his strut now more of a slink.

Restores bravado with JD, two doubles, both neat

And waits for his next chance to dance; his next crushing defeat.

I'm not dead yet...

A recently posthumous boy sat up and said; 

“Cor blimey I'm slimy but I'm not quite dead, 

I'm certain I was stabbed and I'm sure that I bled,
Hindsight now tells me that I should've fled...

...From that freaky brick shithouse who delivered the blows,
He jumped on my face and broke my nose.
And from my empty eye-socket, black pus now flows,
He took my last breath and left me for the crows.

I apparently made it (though my skull seems somewhat cleft)
I'd be pumping blood from my wounds but there is no blood left
But I’ll gather my courage and take one last non-existent breath
And set off to kill that cunt."

Minimalist film posters

These are quite brilliant

My Badger Hat

I recently bought a fearsome badger-hat
It sits where my school cap once sat.
I was told; "Return that animal to its natural habitat"
But the badger said "No!" and that was that.

It's growing bigger, getting fat
From the people it's eating, my badger hat.
I believe, in its greed, it consumed my cat
And scared away my best friend Pat...

...Who ran away, like all the rest
(at least those folks who it didn't digest).
"Would you be rid of the beast?", I answered "Yes!"
But it ate my priest after I'd confessed.

I now bow and stoop just to carry that
Fierce badger, who smells like a sewer rat.
He even looses his droppings upon my back,
How I wish I'd kept my old school hat!

Generation A.D.D.

I would ask you all, if you can manage it, to follow me
As I speak for a while on the topic of attention deficiency.
I promise I will attempt to document this with some brevity
For it is attention, as I have mentioned, that is troubling me.

It is our inability to focus, for periods at length,
On subjects and matters of consequence
That is systematic and endemic of our societal situation
We are become fickle, we the ADD generation.

The factors of the matter in this ongoing decay;
The process of information communication and the way that
We structure (or rather clutter) our waking days
With piecemeal inputs from the bizarre to the commonplace

The evermore indispensable internet provides us, in narcotic drips,
A plethora of diversions from advertisements to video clips
And our mind, though in construction sublime, is nonetheless eclipsed
By the chaotic glut of information at our fingertips

Two clicks and I’ve flicked to a video of a man
With his dog drinking lager from an open beer can,
Or an image of a waterfall, a news article or some interesting facts
But more often than not, shots of gratuitous sex acts

Television is worse, feeding us fifteen minute scraps
Of shows (for they know) by the end that our focus will have elapsed
And though we complain at the interruption to our televised choice
Secretly we appreciate the breaks so we can breathe and give voice

To the exhaustion of concentration (and let it be known)
That I myself am a victim of this troubling syndrome
For whilst working or studying I find that I am prone
To wandering thoughts or the welcome distractions of my telephone

With literature we struggle through tomes but seem hopelessly vexed
Unable to sustain thoughts in trains on the relevant texts,
And return, half a page to a section that was somehow unseen,
Missed during a two-minute reverie; a momentary daydream.

When standing lost in our kitchens, we search for any trace
Of our reason for being there in the first place but
Then stumble back to our seats in defeat with stock certainty
That our purpose will then return to us immediately.

We gaze, impotent and vacant when in Supermarket aisles
Aware that in there somewhere are the items we desired
Just ten minutes before, but as we did not write a list,
We leave instead with unsought-after items and the essentials are missed.

Even as I’ve been talking you have most probably found
That your eyes have been searching the walls or the ground
For a diversion or escape from the continuing sound
Of my voice, of me, and of this topic I propound.

If we could arrest our interest for a moment and remove the blinkers from our face
We would see the feckless, fickle future of the human race
And though we may realise with horror the consequence of this evolutionary trap
We’d probably soon just lose interest and watch a humorous clip about cats.

Lucky

Robert Vain throws the girl a wink
And spots, on the still surface of his drink,
His reflection, smiles, and (to himself) thinks;
‘How lucky she is,
Getting to go home with this.’

The girl says something, to which he agrees,
Not really listening, just nodding absent-mindedly
And stroking his chiselled chin, he can hardly believe
‘How lucky she is,
Getting to go home with this.’

He laughs out loud and scans the bar they’re in
For other girls who will undoubtedly be watching him
But catches no looks (just bad timing), so he leans back in.
‘How lucky she is,
Getting to go home with this.’

She’s saying something, about someone, probably from her past.
Something about ‘not paying attention’ and ‘coming too fast’
And he thinks how happy she must now feel, that finally, at last,
‘How lucky she is,
Getting to go home with this.’

She finishes her little rant and ends it with a list
Then her eyes, across the table, meet with his.
So he leans in further, to give the girl a kiss,
‘How lucky she is,
Getting to go home with this.’

Surprisingly, she avoids the offering and stands up instead,
Removes a large vibrator from her purse and waves it at his head,
And he could only gawp, bewildered, as she triumphantly said;
‘How much luckier she now is,
Getting to go home with this.’