Some February

 

 FEBRUARY IMAGES

February is now defined by the events of February 24, 2022, the invasion of Ukraine, 2 days after the numerological event, 2/2/22.

In February 1998, the Clinton sex scandal was always above the fold. It seemed almost poetic that the film Wag the Dog was contemporaneously released. A conflict between Iraq and Israel was heating up, and there was fear that Saddam would use WMD on Israeli cities if provoked by the US. Clinton's order of surprise attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan was suspected of diverting attention away from the Lewinsky scandal.

Jesse Ventura arrived on the scene as a new kind of grass-roots politician in February 1999.

Climate change, which was called "global warming" in the 90s, started to become more evident to me or could be that I was in the habit of keeping a diary and started to notice it more. It seemed both amazing and unnerving that there were long stretches of warm and sunny days in January and February in the late 90s. Conversely, there were years when it was unseasonably cold for long periods. This became known as the Polar Vortex which occurred in February 2019, as well as a sizable blizzard by Chicago standards in February 2011.

The Beatles were in the studio recording tracks for Rubber Soul in February 1965, while Brian Eno was in Cairo, Egypt in 1995. The New York Philharmonic was doing concerts in North Korea in February 2008.

As to the diaries that relate to characters in 2046, their entries are in the context of the story as was written in 2013. I haven't revised it, and thus the world that they inhabit emerges from that state of the world. To revise Reset 2046 would mean that their lives would need to be changed and the diaries would have changed accordingly. Ideally, works of science fiction should be updated constantly, which means the characters would change as well, and that is not even remotely feasible, although an interesting idea: If life has a fixed narrative, how is it that personal narratives can change?

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Future editions of the InSum series will include real characters from the past, say, in the 19th century, in which case life narratives are fixed and based on where they are placed chronologically will make for interesting juxtapositions, such as the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the things that happened on April 14th, for example, over several hundred years.

This month I've interwoven entries from the diary of Anne Frank because of the parallels with World War II with a looming World War III.

Keith Haring was in Brazil in February 1987:

"Sitting outside in shorts on a porch painted yellow and blue with blue tables and chairs with lots of flies trying to make myself start to write. I've been to Brazil for three weeks already and haven't written anything yet. I read Neuromancer by William Gibson and The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Extermination by Bill Burroughs and re-read Brion Gysin's The Last Museum. I painted a few paintings on the walls of Kenny's house on the beach outside of Ilheus. And then I found out Andy Warhol had died. Since then it has been hard to think of anything else. This sort of changes my schedule.