Tim Powers is cool

A while back, I made the acquaintance of Tim Powers, because he writes terrific stories, and I am hopelessly inept as a fiction writer, but filled with a quixotic hope that I might try my hand at it. Powers, for them that don’t know, has a genius for concocting tales of occult intrigue, mixed a sort of noir-ish world of gamblers, spies, strange supernatural powers and–what interests me most–real historical characters with odd and anomalous moments in their lives (as we all have).

He makes it a rule to always slavishly conform the events of his stories to the known data about those historical characters, while ingeniously “explaining” that data by showing what they were *really* up to and what they *really* meant when they said or did this curious thing. Result: stories in which British double agent Kim Philby is actually the servant of a might fallen angel, or Einstein and Charlie Chaplin are somehow involved in a time travel experiment, or Bugsy Seigel was murdered by an evil expert in tarot who used the power of the cards to switch bodies with helpless victims, or a kid in LA accidently inhales the ghost of Thomas Edison and finds himself on the run from a whole underworld of nasty ghost huffers. Great fun!

Yesterday, I dropped Powers a line when I read that Obama had repeated the oath of office (due to Roberts’ “muffed” administration of the oath–or at least that’s the official story) and suggested that this is the seed of a new Tim Powers novel, especially when the story says:

ABC’s Terry Moran adds, this has happened twice before: Chester Arthur in 1881; Calvin Coolidge in 1923.

I told Powers:

I think the connection between them and Obama and occult forces involving, er, mastery of the Novus Ordo Seclorum symbol on the dollar and, um, Kenyan shamanism in a grand bid for immortality and limitless power is subtle, yet clear. The only question is: how did they rub out the Kennedys? 🙂

So, this morning he writes back:

The important thing probably is what that particular section of the oath means in some other language, if just considered as phonetic syllables. It’s essential to deviate from the standard text, as if by accident, so as to pronounce certain syllables in a certain order. Then once the covert invocation is read, they can “catch themselves” and go back and say the phrase the way everybody expects.

This implies that the oath was deliberately written in such a way as to
permit this unevident occult move. Probably the Masons set it up.

Also, it’s worth noting that the second oath was not said on the Bible. So there you are!

Hey! You think these things just happen?