Posthuman Blues

Mac Tonnies

Description

Posthuman Blues, Vol. I is first volume of the edited version of the popular weblog maintained by author Mac Tonnies from 2003 until his tragic death in 2009. Tonnies' blog was a pastiche of his original fiction, reflections on his day-to-day life, trenchant observations of current events, and thoughts on an eclectic range of material he culled from the Internet. What resulted was a remarkably broad portrait of a thoughtful man and the complex times in which he lived, rendered with intelligence, imagination, and a wickedly absurdist sense of humor.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 20 mai 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780991697540
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
POSTHUMAN BLUES
Mac Tonnies



Praise for Posthuman Blues, Vol. I
“Mind-stretching!”
- Clifford Pickover, Ph.D., author of A Beginner’s Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Alien Brains, and Quantum Resurrection
“This book has the inventiveness and prose of a novel, but it’s good, honest observation and speculation. From lambasting fakery to closing in on the true paranormal, Mac Tonnies takes us on a wild trip. He was mysterious, maybe because he always had an eye and ear for the mystery underlying our strange existence.”
- John Shirley, author of Gurdjieff: An Introduction to his Life and Ideas and the A Song Called Youth trilogy
“ Posthuman Blues is of a piece with the Lost Generation of the 1920s and the Beat Generation of the 1950s. Tonnies spoke for his generation with passion, eloquence, and a rare insight. If this is your first exposure to his work, welcome: you’re in for a treat.”
- Aaron John Gulyas, author of Extraterrestrials and the American Zeigeist
“I was changed. You will be changed. Listen to Mac Tonnies as he mutates your preconceptions. Who knew all this strange stuff was so intimately connected?”
- Greg Bishop, author of Project Beta and host of Radio Misterioso
“ Posthuman Blues is an important document of the first decade of the 21 st century, written by a complex and thoughtful man who dared to confront his life and times head on with no compromises.”
- Paul Kimball, filmmaker and author of The Other Side of Truth



Publisher Information
Posthuman Blues, Vol. 1 (2003 - 2004)
Published by Redstar Books, a division of Redstar Films Limited
www.redstarfilmtv.com/books
2541 Robie Street, Halifax, NS B3K 4N3
Digital edition converted and distributed in 2013 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2012 Redstar Films Limited
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder.



Dedication
For Bob & Dana Tonnies



Acknowledgments
Greg Bishop, Nick Redfern, Mark Plattner, Dia Sobin, Sarah Cashmore, Rita J. King, Joshua Fouts, Mike Clelland, Kate Sherrod, Karen Totten, John Shirley, Elan Levitan, Greg Taylor, Tim Binnall, David Biedny, Errol Bruce-Knapp, David Peeples, Bryan and Andrea Ring, Lane Van Ham, Harold Washington, Becky Jackson, George Noory, Michael Garrett, Michael MacDonald, Rob Walker, Aaron John Gulyas, Christina Cuffari, Linda Wood, Reg & Betty Kimball, Clifford Pickover, Katie Martin, Patrick Huyghe, Zorgrot, Spook & Ebe.
And of course Natalie Portman and Morrissey!



Editor’s Note
Paul Kimball
Mac Tonnies was one of my best friends, a fellow traveler and a kindred spirit. If I ever arrive at the gates of Valhalla, I know that he’ll be there waiting for me.
That makes editing his blog Posthuman Blues into a series of books both a true pleasure, and a daunting challenge. The pleasure comes from knowing that my friend’s work will find its proper place as a significant document of life and thought in the early 21 st century. The challenge is to find the best balance between his ideas and his experiences, all while avoiding the repetition and cultural driftwood that inevitably creeps into a journal (whether in print or on-line) over a period of two years, which is the time frame that this first volume covers.
Inevitably, choices had to be made. Mac’s blog was a pastiche of many things, which can be grouped into three very broad categories: (1) his original work, (2) his reflections on his day-to-day life, and the world around him, and (3) his posts of an eclectic range of on-line material that he found interesting, from news items and music videos to photos of famous models and sci-fi comic book covers of women in test tubes. The first two categories are the ones that I have focused on, although some of the commentary he offered on the links he posted (many of which are no longer active) have also found their way into this collection when they represent Mac’s responses as opposed to the original material.
The books that Mac cites can be found in the bibliography, not in the footnotes, which I have tried to keep to a minimum (and which are written by me, and not by Mac).
As Aaron Gulyas notes in his insightful foreword, the Mac Tonnies that you will meet in Posthuman Blues might seem different than the one that you heard on radio shows, or even the one found in his books After The Martian Apocalypse and The Cryptoterrestrials . I knew him as well as anyone, and even I have discovered new things about him as I’ve revisited his early blog postings. He was a complex individual, living in complex times, who dared to confront life head on, with no compromises. We should all be so courageous. I hope I’ve done him justice, and presented as complete a portrait of my friend as one can glean from the material.
In the end, it’s impossible for any editor to not inject himself into the story, if for no other reason than the choices he makes of what to include or not include will naturally be subjective. But as Mac was part of my story, and I was part of his, it seems only fitting that there is an echo of me in this work, even as there will always be a very real echo of him in my own.
- Paul Kimball, 20 October 2012



Foreword
By Aaron John Gulyas
“There’s an itch in my mind, but I can only find it occasionally.”
Paul Kimball has done historians a great service by assembling this collection of Mac Tonnies’ writings from the Posthuman Blues blog. What you are holding in your hands is a valuable resource for understanding the early twenty-first century. That’s a pretty massive statement, I know, but it is within the context of history that I tend to examine Tonnies’ writings - which is why, I suspect, that Kimball asked me to write this Foreword. Professionally, I’m a history teacher first, and a devotee of the paranormal only incidentally. My treatment of the paranormal, in print or in conversation, tends to focus on placing “The Weird” within the larger context of the human past.
What this has to do with a collection of Tonnies’s online writing may not be readily apparent to some. To the thousands who think of him primarily as the man behind the “Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis,” or the person who offered the sanest approach to alleged Martian anomalies, much of this book will be a revelation.
It was the Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis with which he was, for good or ill, becoming increasingly identified at the time of his death in 2009. [1] The essence of these ideas can be found in The Cryptoterrestrials , which was published posthumously This Posthuman Blues collection, however, is an entirely different beast, for Tonnies had a wide-ranging intellect. He was an artist and a writer of fiction as well as a critically aware devotee of design and music. Most importantly for the historian, he was also a product of his times.
Tonnies and I were born within a few months of each other in 1975. We shared many of the same interests. We went to similar small, Midwestern liberal arts colleges. In 2003 and 2004 we were both trapped in jobs that we did well but didn’t fully utilize our talents or training. From the beginning of my readings of Tonnies’ work, I identified with him. We both existed at the tail end of Generation X, struggling through the ennui of a world which failed to meet our expectations.
“What the hell is this? My psyche eviscerated? An extended confession for never-committed crimes? An elitist soapbox? A simple plea for attention?”
Within the stories of reading, blind dates, workaday dead-ends, and endless amounts of caffeine ingestion, a thread of anger and frustration emerges. Tonnies clearly found himself frustrated by the middlebrow trappings of life in the American Midwest. Often, he comes across to the reader as more misanthropic than a man in his late twenties should be. While he is always engaging and erudite, Tonnies is not always nice. There’s an edge to his tone, as he vents his frustration at a world in which he doesn’t seem to fit.
Like many of our generation, he comes across as nostalgic for a world which never was and, indeed, never can be. His laments on the moribund nature of the American space program, for example, are partly a function of his age, as he watched the space vehicles of his childhood worked far beyond their limits, slowly disintegrating with no future in sight. In many ways, this dismay about human space exploration is a reflection of his dismay with other aspects of American and Western culture.
Taken in the context of the 1990s, Tonnies’ diarizing would have been an obvious companion to the Douglas Coupland’s late twentieth century works such as Generation X or MicroSerfs . Tonnies, however, was writing in the twenty-first century. Specifically, he was writing after the watershed moment of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States, an event that changed everything.
“Your mind is a battleground. And I’m not talking about aliens.”
This first year of Mac’s online blogging is deeply enmeshed in the post-9/11 world. As the United States and its allies fought one war in Afghanistan, the Bush administration began making a public case for a concurrent war against Iraq. The invasion of that country began on March 20, 2003, and the war would continue until finally ended by the Obama administration in December, 2011.
Throughout the run-up to the invasion, Tonnies’ disdain for the Bush administration’s warmongering is apparent. Also clear is the unease with which he viewed the wider