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Nine Inch Bride
Literature & Fiction
Book Synopsis: In this timely and penetrating political fiction we meet Ken, a young Wall Street analyst thrown out of work in a major market crash, facing financial and emotional ruin in Empire City, the private corporation Manhattan has become some decades in the future. As high strung Ken spirals down, battling and succumbing to desperation and despair, he is rescued by a uniquely talented young woman with a dedicated revolutionary agenda. Together they form a most extraordinary partnership in a mission to change the world. Sahar, or Sa for short, is the individual's individual in many ways, with talents that enable her to spy on the machinations of the world's richest and most powerful. Living wild and free on a wilderness estate has transformed her into a fiercely independent athlete and warrior, while the Net, a future amalgam of current technologies, has made her a sophisticated seductress and dissembler, living virtual lives online in the wider world. Written mostly in the form of riotous dialogue among an unusually intriguing cast of characters, this is the wry, symbolic tale of a consummate revolutionary hell-bent on co-opting Wall Street to transform the world. The present and future, real and unreal fuel a serious and delightful bonfire of corporate political culture in America. Note: Originally published under the title "Conundrum" in 2012.
Book Bubbles from Nine Inch Bride
"There's always time for suicide..."
Some have said this scene is too dark, too morbid for their taste. But we do live in a culture of wrack and ruin. In 2012 suicide topped vehicle accidents as a leading cause of death in America, add in the countless attempts that fail, the virtually universal contemplation of it that is not acted upon, the exposure to it in the media that is ignored, and the case is made for this scene, particularly when the circumstances are related to unemployment.
Debt is the Gateway drug...
Learning is hard work. You're asked to pay attention all day, do homework all night, and stretch your brain. So-called 'higher' education should be free in this age of surplus, but why stop at 'free' when in reality free is not free at all, unless you go well beyond tuition. Students are required to be paying guests at the college Hilton, a huge and often prohibitive expense. Education is a duty in a democratic culture, and as such it is insane to make parental ability to pay, or student indebtedness, the primary criteria for access to it. Would we learn better if remunerated for this labor instead of being stressed to borrow and gamble on a job to pay back loans? Of course we would. And parenting, beginning with pregnancy and giving birth, cooking, cleaning, worrying, caring, educating--this is all labor of the utmost importance to every child and to society as a whole. Would parenting be better if remunerated? Of course it would! We all have a stake in good parenting and in the real work of learning.
What does not smack of King in capitalism?
This, I believe, is self-explanatory.
Terror revisited...
Today the marathon bombing in Boston brought back scarred memories of 9/11 that are painful for me still. It is no accident Ken confronts the Freedom Tower and 9/11 Memorial in the opening scene. In a way, these are symbolic characters drawing and repelling him again and again. "We are none of us innocent." Sa says to Ken atop Freedom Tower in a chilling later scene, which I will not divulge here. But as a New Yorker who witnessed the first air strike through the apartment window, and the second from the building's roof through the lens of a camera, 9/11 is always there waiting to come vividly alive again in memory, with its long lingering aftermath of smoke and smell and terrible awe that cannot be erased. I have to believe that attack was not knowingly exploited. To believe otherwise, would not any sane person have to recognize they are in a state of war with their own government? At whatever stage of activism one stood, short of war—the sacrifice of all—could activism ever be enough?
A lovers strike...
It is unfair to feel how ill our work-a-day lives compare with the bed of love we leave for it? Surely, lovers cannot say, 'No, today we declare a lovers' strike, and will not go.' What would the world come to? Or... What could the world come to!!
