Gary Dale Mawyer
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Macaque’s Progress

10/5/2020

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The first three stories in The Casebook of Reese Macaque, P.I., the sequel to The Adventures of Reese Macaque, Private Investigator, are now up on Amazon Kindle. They’re up as individual stories for those who may have bought the first two stories separately, and also as a three-story collection, Macaque’s Progress, on offer for the lowest price allowed (99 cents). I recommend the collection because the first two stories (“President Nero’s Golden Palace” and “Two Terrible Weeks in Tedboro”) have been thoroughly rewritten again alongside the third story, “Danger Is My Alibi.”

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 The rewrite monkeys. Oh please not again!!!!!
The Macaque tales are science fiction detective stories. Detective stories are generally tales of manners. Science fiction detective stories, then, are about social manners in a future world.

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Beautiful cover by Alex and Pohakea.
As an aside, I’d love to see an anime version of the Macaque stories. We don’t ask for backstory in film. As viewers, we tend to accept what we see. Readers, however, have different needs and expectations. We have to be negotiated into accepting what we read. It’s not the same part of the brain.

The Adventures takes the sudden immersion approach and contains little backstory, leaving the reader to absorb details and draw conclusions about the America of the 2300s along the way—including the important question of not just who but what our detective, Rhesus A. Macaque, is. Rhesus says his mother named him after his blood type. He is not a Rhesus, despite the hide, tail and the prehensile feet.

The answer to Reese’s identity, to give the thing away, is the incredible genomic diversity of his Dad combined with his Mom’s full set of robust primate genes. Obviously a case of Planned Parenthood. Reese Macaque and his many, many siblings are not an accident at all.


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Macaque’s real Dad, Euler. (source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30918973).
The Casebook of Reese Macaque, P.I. begins with a three-story arc containing lots of references to the immediate past, orienting the unexposed to the new world of Macaque. Gosh, that makes it political. The deconstructed post-Secession-Era America of The Adventures is not just genetically unstable. It’s unstable in every other way too. Yet we easily recognize many things fundamental to American culture or directly descended from Classical Television, the golden era of the Imperial past that the Americans of the 2300s try furiously to base their own societies on.
 
To some extent the “Tedboro” arc of stories asks, indirectly, What is government? Where do governments come from? Also, where do they go when they disappear? Just to state a fact, whole governments do regularly blink out of existence, some quietly, some with a bang.
 
It’s a question I keep reverting to. Rockfish bothers to describe at least some aspects of the rise and fall of various political regimes in Virginia and the U.S. over the period of the novel, from the 1750s to 2001. How various forms and levels of government change, at least at the local level, is never neglected. Since it is about groups of people, Rockfish never escapes the question of how groups regulate themselves and how they are regulated by other groups. All individuals in society live in just such webs. Fiction describing this could maybe be called social-realist fiction, and I guess that covers me, for lack of a better critic. The same impulse toward social realism is more obvious in The Southern Skylark, which seems to be about American Slavery in the Romantic Era, and Exemptions, about college life in 1969-1970, a year of revolution. The Macaque saga, in its undercurrents, is in the same vein.
 
But there’s no reason to be unamusing. I’m told that these new stories are a bit darker than the Adventures, less freewheeling and more serious. It’s 2020. I’m not deaf, dumb and blind, like the three monkeys. I hope the stories are still funny anyway.

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Macbeth in the Garden

10/2/2020

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Is this a trowel which I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. Shakespeare is often horticultural, something that leads to the countless creation of Shakespeare Gardens and Elizabethan Gardens around the world. Macbeth, however, is not usually considered a top horticultural play despite containing the largest mass transplantation in literature, Birnam Wood to Dunsinane.
 
Not long ago I was complaining about heat. But now my way of life is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf. Well, not quite, but Autumn is here in Central Virginia. The leaves are just beginning to change and fall. Some parts of our garden succeeded and other parts did not succeed very much. Certainly everything had its day. The esthetic pleasure, sense of accomplishment, and occasional exhilaration justified our efforts—at least in the philosophical sense brought to light in Wolfram Eilenberger’s freshly-published Time of the Magicians, which I earnestly suggest for your must-read list—and yet for the small creatures and every least sprout, and for the soil itself, teeming with nematodes and bacterial types, existence remains Darwinian to the core. The voles lost to the cats. The moles thought twice and retreated beyond the cat fence. Birds were hatched and fledged and flew away. Other birds died, though not by cat—most often by hawk or owl. Lizards scurried, privileged by all the rockwork around here. The larger insects, a fine meal for birds, precariously depended on their camouflage or other defensive measures but luck was maybe their best ally.
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Early fall is dahlia time.

A garden is an acculturated space. The human tendency to anthropomorphize the things in the garden is natural. We are aware of our own consciousness. We extend our theory of consciousness to the things around us because for all we know, maybe they are. The hardest thing is to set aside the cognitive echoes of our own self-awareness and, in the words of Ram Dass, who died in Maui last year aged 88, “Be Here Now.” The creatures in a garden are just trying to scrounge a meal and lay eggs without being eaten in the process. They have no hope of survival, personally. But they have no commandment to survive. Their commandment seems entirely to Be Here Now, both proactively and reactively. In between, for all I know, it’s possible they meditate. But tranquility is a state of mind, not a state of nature. Thus one of humanity’s primal functions since the beginning has been brushing off, slapping, and getting bit. If you’re not having that experience you must be Somewhere Else Now.

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Karen and mosquito.
As Shakespeare wrote, “Virtue? A fig! 'Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners. So that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many—either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry—why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills.” And, while on the subject of figs, figs are a real success this year.

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Figs—a grand supply this year, figs upon figs. Our first harvested winter squash behind it.

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A location both sheltered and sunny for this tender shrub.

Meanwhile, in Don’s Covesville garden, the raccoons spared the Looney corn. It grew so huge and off-the-ground that maybe the coons didn’t know where the cobs were. Looney is a late 19th century hard corn designed for the whiskey industry, especially local whiskeys, but the Covesville chickens love it.

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Chickens like fresh raw corn on the cob a lot. (Photo by Donnie Mawyer).

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Newly sprouted kale.

Autumn is a good time to plant some things. Kale. Collards. Lettuce. We won’t get much from these plantings until March. They will suffer through the winter, use each warm spell to revivify, and then take off in 2021 before anything else.

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Shorter, cooler days for dahlias.

I ended the last blog with photos of iris beds being rebuilt. Time passes. The job got done. It went faster and faster.

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 You’d think this would kill you.

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A rough, rude collation of stones badly in need of the inevitable moss and decay.

My evocation of Be Here Now at the beginning of this essay seems less obvious looking at this picture of a raised iris bed. In gardening everything is done for later. Hardly anything is for now. Nothing is ever really ‘done’ at all, merely ‘worked on.’ To get to Now, you have to stop doing things for later. Upon arriving at Now, shall I meditate upon this wall? I shall. This could be a better wall. Every rock in it could be a better rock. Some of the individual rocks seem misconceived for this purpose and others seem misconceived for any purpose. These are not the rocks they could have been. The builder was not the builder he could have been. The irises themselves will, I believe, never know they’re living in correspondence with an imagined iris bed in my mind. Consciousness! The thing’s hilarious.   

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Passiflora incarnata, a terrific weed around here. Some of the best things happen by accident, but you have to give an accident a chance.

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    Gary Dale Mawyer, a Central Virginia native, has over 40 years of publishing and editing experience and lives with his wife Karen and two cats in Albemarle County. 

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