Within the last few months there have been at least five people who have accused me of intentionally inflating my speech, vocabulary, diction, writing, whatever in an effort, they say, to sound impressive or smart or important &tc. I do a lot of stupid and immature things, but deceiving people with pompous language isn’t one of them. Suggesting someone simplify their sentences for clarity or for aesthetic reasons is one thing; assuming and saying that their complex speech patterns are consciously crafted hypocrisies is quite another.
The way I communicate is in fact pretty much the way I think. Most people are okay with it. An annoying few are not. Well, I’m hardly constructing what I’m typing here right now; I do think in semicolons. This for me is genuine and authentic communication. Because I recognize that many people construe the way I communicate as pretentious, I have tried in little social settings to screen everything I say before I say it in order to render my sentences more informal — to earn a better score on the allegedly important scale of how well you’ve conformed to the conventions of normalcy and tradition and small talk. During those experiments I sounded completely devoid of affect because, guess what, I wasn’t being sincere.
I am not well-informed about the rules of charade which govern much social interaction, rules that apparently tell you how not to rock any boats. So I go about sincerely communicating in the way that’s most natural to me, and people time and again criticize it for not being colloquial enough. I had a professor once tell me that lyrical or odd prose is immoral, whereas plain prose is moral because it supposedly doesn’t talk down to readers. This is the “Style is Morality” crowd. What the hell? You’re an ethicist and you don’t have other problems to worry about?
If you’re like those five people I mentioned earlier, probably you’re thinking: Gee, why did he use the strange word ‘affect’ above? Because I don’t know what it means. That’s why he’s so pretentious! Instead of thinking that, you should try using a dictionary. It’s not that hard. C’mon. You can do it. Really.
This has all been so frustrating to me for a very long time. Look, you get a verbose person when he comes from a background of:
Studying Latin & Greek instead of European languages; my vocabulary became less Anglo-Saxon gutsy and more Latinate baroque. Whoop-tee-do, deal with it, get a dictionary.
Spending enormous quantities of time alone reading instead of socializing. I’m not saying this makes me superior. In fact much of it was probably a gigantic waste of time; I should have sought out more friends.
I could go on, much further, but aside from smacking of LiveJournal whining (stereotype alert), such a bullet-point list would be bad for biz, it might get me in trouble with people, and we all understand just how important biz is, right, because it’s more important to produce goods/services than it is to be honest, sincere?
For me this rant is closely related, emotionally, to my disgust with many science fiction & fantasy readers’ refusal to empathize with protagonists who are anything other than Freytag-problem-solving reliable narrators. I’m not sure what the connection is. But that’s for another post.
Digest the Fifth. Some items are several days old; others are fresh. For my next digest I plan to post a wikileaks special edition rounding up links about them. For now, have fun! Or not, as the case might well be. Some of this stuff is pretty bleak, folks. Any comments from y’all on how I should or shouldn’t post digests differently are welcome; this is still unfamiliar, and somewhat awkward, territory for me.
The BBC reports that a tech security expert demonstrated the possibility of creating booby-trap websites that, as I understand it, imitate your (local) computer asking your router for its Media Access Control (MAC) address; once the website successfully acquires your router’s MAC address, the website couples it with geolocating info from your browser and then with Google Street View database info. In short, the booby-trap website now knows where you live, down to “nine metres” in at least one case.
“This is geo-location gone terrible,” said Mr Kamkar during his presentation. “Privacy is dead, people. I’m sorry.” [...]
“The thought that someone, somewhere on the net can find where you are is pretty creepy,” [Mr Hypponen] said.
“Scenarios where an attack like this would be used would be stalking or targeted attacks against an individual,” he added.
“The fact that databases like Google Streetview [...] can be used in these attacks just underlines how much responsibility companies that collect such data have to safeguard it correctly,” said Mr Hypponen.
If there’s one thing with the Net that by now should be obvious to everyone, it’s that, uh, it’s really easy to copy stuff digitally. All that data mentioned above, I think, just plain isn’t going to be safeguarded successfully against the human element in the long run. You know those periodic news stories about hackers stealing portions of credit card companies’ databases and the like? What do you think happens to that copied information, even if the hackers are eventually arrested? I think we can presume it’s copied again, and again, and again. Probably resides on darknets, and will eventually make its way out to the public; we’ll all be astonished — until non-privacy becomes the new norm. The sooner you adjust yourself to this forthcoming reality the better off you’ll be. Read science fiction to prepare, e.g. William Gibson, Cory Doctorow.
Were you too once a middle-schooler sequestered in a computer lab forced to play The Oregon Trail to kill time? Then watch this trailer on YouTube for an (hypothetical? imaginary?) Oregon Trail movie.
“We think that the crowd can innovate, providing new and specific solutions to broad social problems, such as those related to our need for energy.”
To test this conjecture, Nickerson and Sakamoto will perform a series of graduated experiments. First, members of the public will be asked to generate, evaluate and modify ideas, without any interaction with each other. Next, members of the public will interact with each other while creating the ideas. Finally, the public will be asked to design its own unique creative process and pursue its own problems.
“Now, you could even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, way of life, cult whatever you want to call it,” Ramsey said. “Now certainly we do protect our religions, but at the same time this is something we are going to have to face.”
Republicans are calling for hearings on repealing the 14th amendment, which gives automatic birthright citizenship: if you’re born in the United States, you’re automatically a citizen, regardless of your parents’ legal status. About the Republican idea of hearings, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrat, said:
The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed citizenship to all people “born or naturalized in the United States” for a reason. They wished to directly repudiate the Dred Scott decision, which said that citizenship could be granted or denied by political caprice. [...]
Then Reid said of Republicans pushing the issue, “They’ve either taken leave of their senses or their principles.”
Am I the only philosophy nerd for whom that last statement’s specificity — “their senses or their principles” — sounds as if Reid’s been brushing up on his 17th-18th century Western philosophy? =p
More on those Republican 14th Amendment attacks. The Service Employees International Union says that not only would calls for mass deportation of illegal immigrants remove “12.6% of the US population” (where do they get that 12.6% stat, I wonder?), but also putting an end to birthright citizenship would have meant the following Americans never would have been citizens: Olympic Gold Medalist Henry Cejudo; Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; Republican National Hispanic Assembly Minnesota Chapter Chairman Rick Aguilar; USA NASA Astronaut Jose Hernandez; more. Talking Points Memo points out that without the 14th Amendment, people could be born without citizenship with any country.
Wifely @cckaty82 found this NYT note on lima bean cooking. Actually I was showing her a NYT post on something — probably wikileaks? — and she pointed to the sidebar with the lima bean link and told me to click there.
“The research shows that if you can match the ethnicity and race of teachers and students, teachers tend to be more effective,” said Ed Fuller, associate director of the University Council for Educational Administration at the University of Texas at Austin. “It’s important for role modeling and pushing those students to go to college. Of course, you want to make sure teachers are well-qualified and not just thrown into a classroom because of race or ethnicity.”
For sociology statistics, it’s important to remember that there always individuals who for whatever reasons break a trend, e.g., a minority student who seems to perform better with majority teachers. But humans, as for any other animal, plus human cultures, exhibit patterns in behavior, including in response to environmental influence. And so many people deny how much the environment contributes to their makeup; acknowledging it would make them feel less in control. It’s important to take charge of yourself, but also important to acknowledge the influence of your environment — and to acknowledge both in political decisions, too. Yes, this is an axe I like to grind. Honestly, though, it’d be useful for anyone uninformed (including me) to read good material on how sociological statistics work … Labeling, for instance, can give rise to excuse-making (rightfully and wrongfully).
What is clear is that Iraqis’ expectations of a reliable supply of electricity and other services, like their expectations of democracy itself, have exceeded what either Americans or the country’s quarrelling politicians have so far been able to meet. [...]
The United States has spent $5 billion on electrical projects alone, nearly 10 percent of the $53 billion it has devoted to rebuilding Iraq, second only to what it has spent on rebuilding Iraq’s security forces. It has had some effect, but there have also been inefficiency and corruption, as there have been in projects to rebuild schools, water and sewerage systems, roads and ports.
Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the dust-up both “silly” and “troubling”; Wikipedia has a First Amendment right to display the seal, she said.
“Really,” she added, “I have to believe the F.B.I. has better things to do than this.”
Matt Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the administration had “fundamentally reformed immigration enforcement using our resources to focus on identifying and removing criminal aliens who pose a threat to public safety.”
Critics said the administration’s numbers were misleading.
“It is a misrepresentation to say that these are criminal aliens,” said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, an immigrant-advocacy group in Los Angeles. “Many are just regular workers driving with broken tail lights or stopped and don’t have a license,” Ms. Salas said.
I was up at 5 AM, working by 6 AM, and dead tired by noon, but it was a tiredness I could live with and not the mental fatigue that I experience as a college professor. I learned about farming by farming. I believe that all Californians and indeed all Americans could learn about the value of small, organic farms by going to farms to plant, weed, cultivate and harvest. It’s just what our society needs – ordinary citizens getting away from their computers and into the outdoors to work with their hands alongside farmer workers.
I have to admit that I’ll stick to cutting vines out of my crepe myrtles. The vines have grown back quickly, by the way, as eerily as plant-monsters in a Stephen King story. Think I’ll now have to go after the root of the problem, pun intended. Maybe I’ll present Wifely the root/trunk like a head on a platter.
Indonesia tries to censor Internet porn, but one technical worker trying to implement the government demands finds it “almost an impossible task” — welcome to the Internet. Apparently in response, (horny?) hackers managed to broadcast porn for 15 minutes into the Indonesian Parliament while they were in session. I have some jokes, but I’m trying to keep Babel Krieg PG-13 or so, although parental discretion is always advised.
Rachel Maddow, in the context of racial and gender segregation in the military, lectures on the difference between inalienable constitutional rights and mob democracy (originally via Sociological Images):
Google has just made it possible to have multiple accounts running at once without complex rigging; for instance, you can have your personal Google Reader account open at the same time as you’re using you and your Wifely’s joint Google Calendar account to schedule a dinner party with cooked lima beans. LifeHacker explains how, and hopefully I’ll soon get around to implementing what for me would be a very useful option. Because someday the lima beans are coming, I bet.
Iran’s Supreme Leader says “promoting and teaching [music] is not compatible with the highest values of the sacred regime of the Islamic Republic”; apparently he’s been reading Book X of Plato’s Republic. And by the way, I often link to Boing Boing instead of directly to the source article because 1) you can click through Boing Boing if you want, and 2) the comments on Boing Boing are worthwhile — usually pretty amusing.
I’m not an atheist, not really, and I don’t like militant atheism, but this xckd comic is excellent:
Yay for xkcd’s Creative Commons licensing allowing me to easily figure out I could embed the cartoon without running afoul.
because the devices are simply too difficult to monitor. It’s as if the Bush administration had come right out and confiscated our home phones because, really, wire-tapping was such a pain. The announcement is a hard-line statement of authority that also sounds oddly like an admission of incompetence.
One of the more troubling aspects of the story was that the U.A.E. made little attempt to conceal the reason for the ban
Don’t forget your Fourth Amendment, folks:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
It’s unreasonable for governments to surveil the Internet, as they do, regardless of a few people living in caves who sometimes succeed with terrorist attacks. Why? The chilling effect that turns necessary freethinking into thoughtcrime is more destructive of democracy, not to mention individuals; and, remember those databases in the first bullet-point above? What happens when governments’ surveillance of citizens spills its way to the general online public, if unredacted? Furthermore: America, in conformed, frightened obedience, seems to be ditching the notion of warrants altogether. Uh, people? Didn’t you read 1984? The goal of terrorists is to terrorize; victory over terrorism means not being afraid; destroying civil liberties means we’re afraid; ergo, cutting off civil liberties means the terrorists win.
In 2004 sportscaster Mary Carilloreally showed how to fill dead air time, improvising a very clever and surreal imaginary story about backyard badmitton.
Whereas at one time teachers recommended students to these programs, today entrance to both public and private schools for gifted children is dependent entirely on test scores. [...]
The owner of Bright Kids confesses that “the parents of the 120 children her staff tutored [this year] spent an average of $1,000 on test prep for their 4-year-olds.” This, of course, makes admission to schools for the gifted a matter of class privilege as well as intelligence.
Though most customers say they reward service, Lynn reports that quality of service has less than a 2-percent effect on the actual tip.
Instead, he found that waitresses with larger bra sizes received higher tips — as did women with blonde hair and slender bodies.
Joan McCarter at the DailyKos says almost every state faces forthcoming, budget-cutting teacher layoffs, some facing layoffs of between 2000-5000 teachers. But Republicans haven’t signed up to vote for a “modest health and education funding bill” that’d help, and neither has conservaDem Ben Nelson.
A NYT article discusses the perils of statistically analyzing differences between generations, and some of the consensus that has been reached about my generation (sort of; born in 1982, I’m at a threshold), the Millennials, also known as Generation Y — the current crop of twenty- and thirty-somethings.
In recent years some have sketched a portrait of the current crop of twenty- and thirty-somethings that is low on greatness and high on traits like entitlement and narcissism. [...]
the Millennials are more tolerant of people of other races and different sexual orientations, research suggests. They appear to be more likely than previous generations to do volunteer work [...]
[But] researchers tend to work with samples, like college students, that are not representative of the generation at large. Nor is it even clear that outside events can alter a person’s fundamental traits by much. [...]
In short: Generation Y’s collective personality, if such a thing exists, is not likely to be much different from other generations’. Still, small differences may matter.
A seventh-grader and her genealogist grandfather discover that all USA presidents except one — Van Buren — are distantly related and have a common ancestor: John “Lackland” Plantagenet, a king of England and signer of the Magna Carta. What Van Buren did wrong (or right?), the KSBW article does not say.
Matt Zoller Seitz at Salon.com says that though many online anonymous comments are terribly vicious, at least they expose us to the full range of humanity instead of social masks.
The Huffington Post interviews James Hynes (Twitter), the novelist behind NEXT. I found this part helpful:
Hynes: Right from the beginning, I knew Next was going to be a day-in-the-life novel (which, I only just learned, is also called a “circadian novel”), and I knew I’d finally have to read Ulysses all the way through, if only so I could answer questions like this one. I’d tried two or three times before and failed–but manfully, even heroically, with no shame attached. I was the Ernest Shackleton of Ulysses readers. But finally, with the help of a couple of books about Ulysses (one of which was Anthony Burgess’s Re: Joyce, which I recommend), I made it all the way through.
Northwestern University, Brain Mysteries says off a press release that “when researchers knew in advance specifics of the planned attacks by the [role-playing] ‘terrorists,’ [the researchers] were able to correlate P300 brain waves to guilty knowledge with 100 percent accuracy in the lab.” I’m not a terrorist, but since this stuff freaks me out in general, pardon me while I go stock up on tin foil.
The NYT says students’ perceptions of plagiarism are blurring in the digital age. Maybe for some, but having worked at a university writing center, I don’t buy it, litcrit about intertextuality notwithstanding … not for most students — except maybe undereducated freshmen. In my admittedly limited experience, students plagiarize because they’re short on time, maybe because of outside employed, but what I not infrequently observed was nothing more than kids wanting to go out and get drunk and party and call that higher education. Meanwhile we have this aggravating piece of barely-disguised bragging from Salon: “I will write your college essay for cash: I’m a broke writer who can’t find a gig in the recession, so I decided to save myself — by helping students cheat.” I cannot abide by this. JuliaCollier has wise, and impressively empathic, words in the Salon comments:
I know what it’s like to struggle as a freelancer but what you do is dead wrong on so many levels. If you want to stay in the middle class, give up on these $100 cheat fests that are bad for your soul and bad for your clients and bad for your portfolio. Living and working in bad faith is wrong. As a longterm strategy to stay economically viable it’s a waste of time since it will pay for a few days’ rent but can’t be leveraged into progress in your field. Find another career and fast. It’s not going to get better for you as a writer in the years ahead; on this path, you’ll end up broke and soul-sick when you need to have money and a clear conscience when you’re older.
If you aren’t up to speed on Wikileaks news, try here and here and here, and watch this:
Now that you’re up to speed:
There is this goofy card game one of my brothers likes to play; to my knowledge, he invented it. The dealer (typically my brother!) passes out one face-down card to himself and one to each other player. At his signal, all players raise their cards to their foreheads facing out such that no one can see his or her own card, but everyone can see everybody else’s. The players then place bets as to how valuable they think their own cards are in comparison — a total guess, of course, but by this time everyone’s laughing from holding poker cards against their skin. After betting, the players reveal their cards, and the random results release laughter …
Here’s my version of the game, which so far exists only in my imagination. People find themselves seated at a dinner table, clutching their one card tightly to their chests, looking down at their stated worth — “7″ or “3″ or “10″ — a value that is calculated according to all the good and the bad they have caused in life, according to all the secrets they know, according to all the things they wish they hadn’t said or they wish they knew how to say.
At this imaginary table of mine the players are making small talk, some of it happy, some of it sad; all are nervous about their value, and what the other players would think if their card were seen. After all, this player Sue’s card reveals that she said to this player Bob that this other, wealthy player Jorge’s a jerk, and now that Bob and Jorge are pretty good friends, does Jorge know what Sue once said about him, and if so, how does that affect who’s gonna pick up the check?
The dealer — a voice from the sky? — suggests the players lay their cards down on the table, face-up, on condition that they all, unanimously, forgive one another and love one another regardless of the cards’ value. The players agree, make their promises, and lay the cards down face-up. Angry yelling (“Jorge has the hots for both Bob and Sue?”) soon turns to laughter (“Jorge has the hots for both Bob and Sue!”) as people discover everyone’s a mess inside …
Except what if the players at the table included polarizing figures such as (take your pick) Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Julian Assange, or heck, even that driver yesterday who cut you off when you really needed to get over a lane? Would we the powers-that-aint agree to forgive they the powers-that-be permanently if they’d lay down their cards and their guns?
I would. I would, to get the cards on the table so everyone could be safe.
There are of course several things my card-game scenario doesn’t address. For instance, it seems radical transparency and privacy can come into conflict, and privacy is I presume often preferable: if you’re surveilled to death, your creativity is chilled (partly because honest creativity requires engaging in thoughtcrime) and also under surveillance you can’t experience as fully the fun premium privacy can add to events (e.g., sweet nothings can be more meaningful when expressed without others around). Further, logically there are possible worlds where security is unjustly threatened by radical transparency, and I am uncertain as to how such situations, when they do arise in this actual world, should be handled, although I am tempted to say, well, let the chips cards fall where they may, because 4000 years of trading our rights away to leaders whose trustworthiness is unproven in return for promises of security hasn’t worked out so well.
I’m not going to talk about the photograph above much, and here’s why.
Starting late, late August of this year until — presumably — August 2011, I’m going to write a novel, not just to appease friends who keep suggesting it (as opposed to my continuing to write short stories), but also because by late August 2010 I will have had submitted out in the mail a simultaneous total of ten short stories, four poems, and two nonfiction pieces. Time to do something different.
Already I’ve begun thinking about the book (especially the characters and the setting), but I’m not going to talk much about the actual content of the novel on the blog or anywhere else really. William Gibson, Stephen King, Jeff Guinn, and Hemingway (this post’s title is a quote of Hemingway’s) are four of the many writers who advocate the same policy. Always I’ve wondered why authors encourage silence; Stephen King gives some reasons in his book On Writing, but unfortunately I don’t remember them at the moment. I came up with my own satisfactory reason, though, finally.
Some have told me I’ve shown in-progress work to too many people too often as a way of seeking approval and reassurance. I think that’s partly true, but I don’t think it’s the full story. I think the main reason is my mind frequently works by bouncing ideas off people, and gauging my reaction to their responses — a kind of transference thing. Rarely do I take other people’s advice on artistic stuff anyway! Also, I love to share things I’m passionate about. So what’s my reason I came up with to stop (for the most part) talking about (early drafts of) in-progress work, particularly something as lengthy as a novel?
Because I think sharing with or talking to someone about in-progress work (or at least early-stage in-progress work), can really dampen my (and your?) enthusiasm. It’s like when you go on an awesome vacation, and afterward you tell friends about it. The first five times you tell the story of your trip, your voice is full of excitement and your anecdotes are fresh. By the twentieth time, however, you’re sick of talking about it and you’re recounting boilerplate. You don’t want your work to read like boilerplate, do you?
There are of course exceptions. The research question you ask an expert, the impossible plot boggle you talk out with your friend who skillfully repeats back what you said in a way that gives you another perspective without imposing too much on your artistic turf. The revision stage, too, is not what I’m talking about here; there, you do want some other eyes to read what you write. But again, these are all exceptions that don’t prove the rule.
One overarching solution, though — I’m always looking for compromises, when it seems to me many other people just want to shove their “correct” ways down your throat yesterday — is what I did at ClarionWest2008. There, writing my story Glenn of Green Gables, I periodically wrote enigmatic phrases on the markerboard outside my door. So classmates saw the markerboard say: “A dolphin perhaps”; “Arnold Schwarzenegger”; “Montreal and ultimately Quebec”; “globe-shaped lights brighter than Christmas.” These phrases didn’t really give anything away, and kept it fun — sharing, as some tried to guess what in the heck I was writing about.
With that being said, go look at the photograph again. I put these sixteen pieces of jacket art up partly for inspiration and partly to keep me company as I write the novel (August 2010 – August 2011, inclusive!). So c’mon, guess! What do these books have in common, artistically, story-wise? What’d you expect to come forth from them swirling in a writer’s subconscious? Here’s a list of the books, just in case the photo doesn’t work for you:
Godbody by Theodore Sturgeon
More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
Bless the Beasts & Children by Glendon Swarthout
1984 by George Orwell
Valis by Philip K. Dick
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Air by Geoff Ryman
The Celestial Jukebox by Cynthia Shearer
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Best of H.P. Lovecraft
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Yes, that’s Yoda atop the door. And I will say I enjoy all these books, of course. Fire away!
My fourth digest linking to what I’ve recently been reading online. First, the customary now-playing and now-reading: Computer Love by Kraftwerk, and actually, I’m between books at the moment; wifely Kate put Gone with the Wind on a reading list for me, so I think I’ll take up that one next.
There are approximately 230,000 people [in Japan] who almost constantly shut themselves in their rooms except to go to nearby convenience stores, according to a survey conducted by the Cabinet Office. [...] the statistics have raised questions about the future of Japan.
Hikikomori are defined as those who shut themselves in their homes for at least six months but are not involved in child care or housework even though they are not sick.
Problems involving shut-ins have been pointed out over the past 15 years, but only experts and nonprofit organizations have worked on the issue, with little public support.
Requisite rightwing lunacy: former Republican Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo, once a Republican presidential candidate who’s now stated his intention to run as the Constitution Party’s Colorado gubernatorial candidate, has advocated the impeachment of President Obama for “wanting to destroy the Constitution,” calling him “a more serious threat to America than al Qaeda” — that’s from his op-ed in the Washington Times, where he says:
[Obama's goals constitute] the utopian, or rather dystopian, reverie of a dedicated Marxist — a dedicated Marxist who lives in the White House.
Because of the power he wields over budgets, the judiciary, national defense and even health care, his regime and his program are not just about changing public policy in the conventional sense. When one considers the combination of his stop-at-nothing attitude, his contempt for limited government, his appointment of judges who want to create law rather than interpret it – all of these make this president today’s single greatest threat to the great experiment in freedom that is our republic.
“On the other side of the aisle,” as the phrase goes, Van Jones, former White House green jobs special advisor, tells the netroots — pretty much the progressive blogosphere — to quit beating up on Obama.
“I can’t stand it. President Obama volunteered to be the captain of the Titanic after it hit the iceberg,” Jones said at Netroots Nation [...]
“This is harder than it looks. Having spent six months in the White House, it’s a totally different experience when you’re sitting there and the missiles are coming over the horizon at you,” he said. [...]
Jones said the netroots need to realize they are up against an “epic” force with the conservative media movement, which is trying to “bury everything you fought for everything you believe in,” and comparing it to the Lord of the Rings.
Much as I wish for more progressive results, I have total sympathy for Van Jones’s view: it’s easy to backseat quarterback and complain when you don’t have the full view of entrenched interests and whatever other enemies Obama faces. On the other hand, acknowledging that can slippery-slope to a “just trust the President you like” position, and since that isn’t viable overall, government should be more transparent. And really, if you aren’t activist-ing in some way (e.g., How to Call Congress, How to Snailmail Congess), your cynicism probably isn’t getting anyone anywhere.
For his part, the President asked Netroots Nation via a video address to seriously credit his Administration for its accomplishments so far:
No? You don’t want to do anything for the mid-term elections because they’re not as dramatic as the Presidential ones? Here, read this CBS piece about Minnesota Republican Representative Michele Bachmann, who “said yesterday that if Republicans [win] the House in November, ‘all we should do’ is subpoena and investigate the Obama administration.” She’s also called for “100 percent repeal of ObamaCare” and the “big mother of all repeal bills.”
A College Board study ranks Texas as one of least educated states, with only 27% of Texans holding university degrees. Actually, that’s a higher figure than I would’ve guessed. No disrespect.
How nervous are liberals about the November election and how angry are they at conservatives? Plenty, to judge from this year’s Netroots Nation gathering of 2,000 liberal bloggers and activists.
General background on the Clarion West Writers Workshop can be found here. Check back with us in September for more information on next year’s instructors and on applying to attend the 2011 session.
An account of a military contractor’s corruption has made many rounds already, but it’s so offensive it bears linkage (NYT) and excerpting:
more than $6 million in personal expenses [were paid out] on behalf of [contractor] Mr. Brooks, covering items as expensive as luxury cars and as prosaic as party invitations, Ms. Schlegel testified.
Also included were university textbooks for his daughter, pornographic videos for his son, plastic surgery for his wife, a burial plot for his mother, prostitutes for his employees, and, for him, a $100,000 American-flag belt buckle encrusted with rubies, sapphires and diamonds.
many other ways to organize time exist in the world’s languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.
In addition to space and time, languages also shape how we understand causality. For example, English likes to describe events in terms of agents doing things. [...]
if you change how people talk, that changes how they think. If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world. [...] if you take away people’s ability to use language in what should be a simple nonlinguistic task, their performance can change dramatically.
Research published in the British Medical Journal found that patients trained in Alexander technique, which teaches proper posture and everyday movement habits to reduce strain, experienced an average of 18 fewer days of back pain over four weeks
BlackBerry was operating “beyond the jurisdiction of national legislation,” the U.A.E.’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority said in a statementi ssued on Sunday.
“As a result of how BlackBerry data is managed and stored, in their current form, Certain BlackBerry applications allow people to misuse the service, causing serious social, judicial and national security repercussions.”
The home ministry, which has time and again shared with DoT its concerns over the security agencies’ inability to de-crypt messages shared over BlackBerry, has now asked DoT to sound out Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadian firm that makes the BlackBerry device, that its services in India will face shutdown if its e-mail and other data services do not comply with formats that can be monitored by security and intelligence agencies.
Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother uses phone encryption in its plot a great deal.
The Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, which will be administered either by a state or by the Department of Health and Human Services, will provide a new health coverage option for Americans who have been uninsured for at least six months, have been unable to get health coverage because of a health condition, and are a U.S. citizen or are residing in the United States legally.
Created under the Affordable Care Act, the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan is a transitional program until 2014, when insurers will be banned from discriminating against adults with pre-existing conditions, and individuals and small businesses will have access to more affordable private insurance choices through new competitive Exchanges. [...]
In order to give states the flexibility to best meet their needs, HHS provided states with the option of running the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan themselves or having HHS run the plan. Twenty-one states have elected to have HHS administer the plans, while 29 states and the District of Columbia have chosen to run their own programs.
Starting today, the national Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan will be open to applicants in the 21 states where HHS is operating the program. [...]
The Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan will cover a broad range of health benefits, including primary and specialty care, hospital care, and prescription drugs. The Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan does not base eligibility on income and does not charge a higher premium because of a medical condition. Participants will pay a premium that is not more than the standard individual health insurance premium in their state for insurance that covers major medical and prescription drug expenses with some cost-sharing.
Business Insider discusses the destruction of the American middle class; the article has an anti-global perspective I don’t like (because building walls around yourself isn’t a long-term answer), but the article’s worth the scary read:
no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker ten times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. [...] the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new “global” labor pool. [...]
The truth is that most Americans are absolutely dependent on someone else giving them a job. [...]
36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings. [...]
Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975. [...]
For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together. [...]
More than 40% of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying. [...]
The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
That’s all I can manage for today; for the news I’m a few days behind, but hopefully this digest will let you catch up on some good items you might have missed. Tschuss for now!
Deciding on a sticker or a wall hanging or even a T-shirt takes me a long time. I have to intuit whether the motif-y object will influence me the way I want. When I saw this red sticker, though, I decided in only a few minutes that it belonged on my laptop (my constant companion!) as a reminder for how to live life. You have to take risks, but first — some backstory.
Recently I’ve been cleaning out a closet, partly so wifely Kate can put her work clothes there. Cleaning out this closet entails dealing with old CDs, always a weird nostalgia trip. I ran across in one box the Japanese release of Megadeth’s 1999 album Risk, and the sticker was inside the case, waiting probably a half-decade for me to find this use for it. Glad I hadn’t throw it out. When I look at the laptop now, I really don’t view the sticker as connected with Megadeth — just as an independent artwork.
Risk album cover
About that album, however: with it Megadeth tried to get away from their same-ol’ same-ol’ bellocisty and incorporate some fresh ideas from techno and other musical territory. Aging, they’d realized life wasn’t all about aggression, and further atempts to bring forth art that spoke only of hostility rang false to them; but, on the other hand, they (and, I presume, their biz overlords) wanted to still please the angry-teenager fan base. Trying to please everyone made the new elements sound unsure, just poor compromise. Not a brave enough risk.
A 1999 live version of Risk’s opening track, “Insomnia,” which is quite good, I think:
Alternate music for the frailly eared: the best recording, to my taste, of a particular Bach piece that made it onto the Voyager Golden Record.
Megadeth’s demeanor in the live performance above suits the angry young adults they once were, but in 1999 they were nearing their forties, and by that age I think it’s definitely time to have sequestered anger for release only when absolutely necessary. See as contrast artists such as Sting, whose long career has evolved through many styles, attitudes. Artists can’t force themselves to create once-agains of their past art; they’re no longer the same people. Unfortunately for 2010, Megadeth, currently out of tune with themselves, sound like such parodies of their youthful selves that I won’t embed a representative video. I must clarify, however, that I really enjoy most of their music, including Risk, and I wish that love to be noted.
Judith Butler has a passage about the necessity of taking risks, written in the context of ethical theory (emphasis mine):
… we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human.
Generally I interpret — maybe wrongly — that Butler quote in terms of small and difficult interpersonal interactions. You’re having a longstanding quarrel with a friend, for instance, and you’re not sure what you should say the next time you see them. The real trick is, in the actual moment of interaction — when what [has formed you] diverges from what lies before [you] — simply to risk yourself despite the context of uncertainty (what will happen?) — at moments of unknowingness — to risk making yourself vulnerable — to become undone in relation to others — and try to do whatever the right thing seems to be, fear be damned, consequences subordinate to honesty.
Sometimes I feel I’m not living up to the need to take risks with my own creative writing. Probably that’s just my self-criticism module out of whack, but who knows, maybe it’s trying to tell me something. Here’s perhaps my best story ready to go out in the mail (as multiple simultaneous submissions) once some certain literary magazines open up their fall reading periods:
“Flares” ready for snail-mailing
When I wrote this story, I wasn’t at all concerned with grand ethical notions of risk. In fact I just wrote, wrote, wrote, laying down words like so many bricks on a path across a few months(!). Now I write faster, in more mature ways, even, but few other works of mine quite affect readers as intensely as this one, I don’t think. So maybe, likely, it was just good luck: every so often as a fiction writer you create a 10-out-of-10 story, not an 8-out-of-10. Goes with the work, maybe. But I wonder how I can push myself harder to take risks, to say vulnerable things well…
[Illegal immigration apprehension numbers along the Arizona border] are sharply down, according to the Border Patrol — by more than sixty per cent since 2000 [...] Illegal immigration, although hard to measure, has clearly been declining. [...]
The problem of illegal immigration isn’t a matter of violent criminals storming the walls of our peaceful towns and cities. It’s a matter of what to do about the estimated eleven million unauthorized residents who are already here. The mass-deportation fantasies of some restrictionists notwithstanding, the great majority of “illegals” are here to stay. That is a good thing, since they are, for a start, essential to large sectors of the economy, beginning with the food supply — the Department of Labor calculates that more than half the crop pickers in the United States are undocumented. National business leaders have no illusions about these basic facts of economic life.
There are reasons to be uneasy about illegal immigration. In some industries, dirt-poor newcomers lower wages. State and local budgets suffer when workers are paid under the table. The fact that people lack legal status is itself disturbing. [...] Yet anti-immigrant backlashes don’t always track closely with actual immigration. They track with unemployment, popular anxiety, and a fear of displacement by strangers. They depend on woeful narratives of national decline, of which there is lately no shortage. Scaremongering works. [...]
Projections show white Americans becoming a USA demographic minority in the 2040s. Anyone got an idea what, with present voting trends, that’d do to current Republicans? I think that has a lot to do with the rightwing’s anti-illegal immigration position.
At Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow mentions a £1,000-prize fiction-writing contest that insisted, for the alleged betterment of humankind, that contestants handwrite their entries and avoid science fiction. Nobody entered the contest.
INCEPTION is, in microcosm, the state of much current [science fiction]. It is so complex and self-referential that much time is spent figuring out what is happening, rather than inhabiting what is happening. Is this good or bad? I guess that depends why you like stories. [...] If you want them to be reflections of human experience, then INCEPTION is still good but not as good as it could have been [...] judging from the enthusiastic audience reaction last night, puzzles are what is wanted. People applauded at the end.
Kate and I haven’t seen it yet. Despite Roger Ebert and William Gibson complimenting the movie — those two would make a great movie-reviewing duo — we might not get around to seeing this one at all. And, I have to say that right now I’m really enjoying the Kress novel Beggars in Spain.
The Washington Post publishes its two-year project exposing the Top Secret America surveillance and intelligence industry. In case you’ve forgotten about it, here’s the Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I started submitting stories for publication when I was about 15, but it was many years before I sold anything. I don’t make my living writing science fiction so in that sense I’m still not a pro. Writing for publication was always my goal, but making a living writing science fiction wasn’t. [...]
Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know. When philosophers propose thought experiments as a way of analyzing certain questions, their thought experiments often sound a lot like science fiction.
My Clarion West’08 classmate Carlton Mellick III and the rest of the Bizarro writer army make The Guardian and Boing Boing. Carlton was a fun guy, extremely talented, and extremely sincere in a way that was still informed — not dewy-eyed.
A Boing Boing post discusses The Bechdel Test, a few quick questions that help evaluate the representation of women in any movie.
At GalleyCat, novelist Bret Easton Ellis says writers will make more money due to eBooks, not less, in part because of the decreased costs of producton allowing for higher royalties.
In the first paragraph of Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner writes (in the midst of an infinitely long sentence):
and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege
I think that multi-adjective noun phrase — “grim haggard amazed voice” — and his millions like it are not supposed to convey an auditory percept to readers; they’re not supposed to convey sound data to readers’ perceptual faculties. After all, try to vocalize “William Faulkner” in all of the following configurations:
a grim, haggard, amazed voice
a grim, haggard, and not amazed voice
a grim, amazed, and not haggard voice
an amazed and haggard, but not grim voice
William venn Faulkner
I can’t do it, and if you can, you should post audio clips of the four on your blog. Until you do that, take my point as proven: the noun phrase “grim haggard amazed voice” isn’t supposed to convey an auditory percept. You’re not supposed to hear a specifically grim haggard amazed voice in your head (as opposed to a …). So, what is the phrase supposed to convey?
I think it’s intended to create for the cerebral mind the equivalent of a perceptual feeling-tone.
So far as I know, “feeling-tone” is a vague term out of physiology used to indicate a mood allegedly bundled up with a percept. On the feeling-tone view, you see a snake and you experience a feeling-tone of fright because there’s some fright tied up in the snake percept (perhaps even before it impinges on your awareness).
When you read “grim haggard amazed voice” there isn’t any resulting auditory percept, but there’s a feeling-tone you experience, right, a certain bleak mood? The interesting part is: the noun phrase is not plucking your emotions through your perceptual faculty, as the phrase “a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens” does. Rather, the noun phrase is plucking your emotions through your conceptual one — yeah, percepts and concepts can’t be demarcated cleanly and all that, okay fine, anyway — which in one sense isn’t surprising because of course we have emotional reactions to very abstract words (“freedom” for example), but in another sense is definitely surprising to me as a reader because “grim haggard amazed voice” is so abstract that it feels as though Faulkner is doing a card trick with a tall deck, each wheeling card an emotion-causing abstraction in my left brain … and not many books work that way.
This explication is totally lacking something, and surely some Modernist poetics somewhere explains it in a lot of boring detail, probably written by a poet who needed funding. If you have a better explication than I, leave it in the comments.
P.S. I think William Gibson‘s Neuromancer (written, significantly, as far back as 1984) works similarly in many spots, and some readers who walk away from the book are expecting too many of the noun phrases to be translatable back into percepts. But they’re not; for instance:
He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix
The second digest in my aggregating/anthologizing experiment. Basically, what I find especially interesting in my day’s Internet reading. Here’s the digests category of my blog. Without further ado — oh, wait. The “What I’m reading and listening to” bit: Today I’ve been reading more of Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress and listening to Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love,” Metallica’s “Fixxxer,” and REM’s “Shiny Happy People.”
At ReaderCon 2010, Eric Rosenfield and JF Quackenbush of Wet Asphalt conducted quick video interviews with several big names mostly asking variations of the same questions: What’s the future of publishing? and What’s the future of genre?. In his interview, Peter Straubsaid: Although “people will continue to write books” — of course! — publishing is becoming “less centralized, more electronic” and publishers are “infinitely less willing to take gambles.” Also: “blogging’s going to become an essential element of a brand” and “that’s just the way things are going, you know? Adapt or die.”
The interviewer asks Straub about publishing his latest novel The Skylark through a small press to preserve an artistic vision not chosen by the major press editors of the book’s incarnation as A Dark Matter (unfortunately I’ve yet to read either, though I own ‘em!); the interviewer specifically asks, “Do you think small presses are going to be much more important in the future in taking up the reins of preserving the artistic vision of writers, and that major presses are just going to advocate anything that — lowest common denominators?” Straub answers — it’s hard to hear given the crowd noise — that he thinks “megabooks are going to antiquate[?] the concept of catering to writers of unproven earning capacity; that means small presses are going to reap an enormous benefit [...] and become more commercial.”
Ted Chiangtakes the studied-neutrality view on publishing’s future: “There will be publishing [...] I expect that there’ll probably be something that no one right now can predict” and says that though genre’s boundaries “aren’t going to go away,” they’re “fading.”
John Kessel, asked about the future of genre (particularly with recognition of his efforts toward pushing the academy into accepting genre fiction), comments: “I think there always will be something that presents[?] as science fiction written. [...] As a separate genre, [science fiction] will probably persist still. [...] But also more and more writers seem to be dealing with [*inaudible*] science fiction concepts without being part of the subculture.”
Writer and editor Scott Edelman captured and/or published footage of a recent panel, also at ReaderCon 2010, that focused on Theodore Sturgeon, perhaps my favorite writer. Scott Edelman’s YouTube page offers Part 1 and Part 2 of the footage, and I hope more parts were recorded and will be published. From the YouTube descriptions:
On Sunday, July 11, 2010, Samuel R. Delany, Paul Di Filippo, Barry Malzberg, Noël Sturgeon, and Diane Weinstein appeared on the panel “From Microcosmic God to Slow Sculpture: The Short Fiction of Theodore Sturgeon.”
In time for this coming Tuesday’s 41st anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Ryan Brown at Salon.cominterviewsStephen Pyne about his recent book Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery which starts with “the first sputterings of Sputnik and reach[es] all the way to our recent space shuttle disasters.” Although Pyne is inclined away from manned space exploration, he says:
Science fiction actually preceded [space exploration], and many people involved in the program had grown up reading these books and took the ideas within them very seriously. I think that what made the literary side so potent was that it gave space exploration a sense of story. It helped us answer those big-picture questions: What does this all mean? How can we understand what is unfolding?
[...]
[The Voyager spacecrafts] are each equipped with a gold-plated phonograph record and instructions (if anyone is able to decode them) on how to play it. They’re filled with sounds and greetings in most of the earth’s languages.
You can hear the global music recorded on the Golden Record; it includes the best performance of Bach’s 2nd Brandenburg Concerto, 1st Movement — by Karl Richter’s Munich Bach Orchestra — that I’ve ever heard. It’s at a very fast tempo, yay!
With a 9.5 percent unemployment rate reported in June, there aren’t a lot of job opportunities for recent graduates. But the federal government is looking to fill an estimated 50,000 entry-level positions in the next year, according to the Partnership for Public Service, and public sector work is looking better and better to some people as private sector job growth remains anemic.
“President Nicolas Sarkozy proposed what was to have been the world’s toughest crackdown on illegal file-sharing [... yet] not a single warning has been sent out; not a single broadband connection has been cut.”
Like many, my thoughts on digital copyright are mixed and currently not very useful, so here’s some copyleft stuff to read — Cory Doctorow’s nonfiction collection Content — and some far copyright stuff to read — Abjectivist Greg Perkins on intellectual property. Further, there’s the studied, tumultuous-change-is-inevitable neutrality (if I’m not mistaken) of William Gibson and Clay Shirky. Learn more than I have and make up your own mind! I will say, however, that some writers (such as myself) who loudly specify that they don’t write for profit also overly fret about digital copyright, and that seems contradictory to me, unless they’re worrying about publishers/presses affording their costs of production, or about making sure authentic versions of their texts are reliably available to readers as opposed to tampered versions — presumably there’s tech for the latter problem?
This one will probably anger some of my readers especially. The United Farm Workers union has issued a job-offer call to unemployed American citizens as rhetorical defense for immigrants. In response, the NYT opines on immigration:
It is safe to conclude that few if any Americans will take up the [UFW] offer, no matter how hungry they are. The campaign is a sly attempt to draw attention to the push for immigration reform, particularly an effort to legalize undocumented farm workers. With anti-immigrant resentment running hot, many accuse immigrants of stealing American jobs. The union replies: How can immigrants steal jobs nobody else wants?
The [Realms of Fantasy story] also hinted at a parallel with the way western culture often attempts to experience other cultures, stealing bits of the other cultures and incorporating them into their own in a misguided attempt to understand them, perhaps ruining or at least diminishing the original culture as part of the process. “… that was the zombie way. Forever to yearn for new things. Forever to absorb them and turn them into the same old McHuman.”
Of course, this tendency is hardly unique to American, Canadian and modern European culture. I think of the ancient Romans borrowing from Greek culture. Or the Mughal conquerers of northern India (especially Akbar) borrowing from Hindu culture. And I’d also question whether it’s entirely bad.
Most how-to fiction-writing books I’ve read — and I’ve read a bunch — are bad, worse, or useless. A few have helped me tremendously, however, and they don’t fall in either the pathetic HOW TO WRITE A BESTSELLING NOVEL category (an actual title!) or in the John Gardner “Does anyone actually read this?” category. The three I’m thinking of lie in the Woah, this is useful! category that makes it worthwhile to occasionally visit that slightly embarrassing WRITING REFERENCE section of the bookstore.
After opening with an essay on writing about emotion, the book gives 36 short chapters, each focusing on a separate emotion — Anger; Anxiety; Apathy; Confusion; etc. — in a specific pattern: a short essay discussing the particular feeling, bad examples of its description in fiction (with discussion), good examples (with discussion), and exercises. (Myself, I always ignore exercises; I have enough writing projects of my own! So I can’t speak for or against her exercises.)
Here’s ANXIETY.
Excerpt of the first part, the mini-essay:
Anxiety comes from matters large and small. Anxiety is worrying to an extreme.
Excerpt of the second part, the bad examples:
“Would that doctor ever come out? Jon wondered. He bit his nails and tapped his foot nervously.” [...] Nail biting, foot tapping, fingers drumming, sweaty palms, butterflies in the stomach, a trickle of sweat, and pacing are all tired ways to show anxiety.
Third excerpt, one of the good examples (from Thom Jones‘s short story “I Want to Live!”:
“But those people in the hospital rooms, gray and dying, that was her. Could such a thing be possible? To die? Really? Yes, at some point she guessed you did die. But her? Now? So soon? With so little time to get used to the idea?”
Fourth, one of the exercises:
Choose a seemingly minor reason to produce anxiety, such as an invitation to a party, running out of hot water, a rainy day, and write a one-page scene in which a character obsesses on that concern. Be sure the character’s anxiety level rises as the scene progresses. Objective: To tap into the heart of anxiety. Even a small thing can cause great panic.
Too often I see in fiction the “He bit his nails”-type shortcut to expressing emotion — in fact, I don’t think these shortcuts express emotion at all, except for inexperienced readers or for characters with really important nails (what about biting the kind of nails you put into walls?). I think those shortcuts — “He bit his nails” — are, unless the writer’s really trying to speed a paragraph along or some such, simply announcements to readers’ left brains (so to speak) that amount to “Oh, the story is informing me that this character is anxious.” The shortcuts become mere info to process, sort of like a bus route chart: no emotion there.
Whereas a description of anxiety that startles or wounds or points uniquely will force readers out of complacency and keep them engaged in reading which is an active process of creating an experience in the mind. The Thom Jones example above makes readers (me at least) worry about suddenly learning of their own impending deaths. The bad example is just data, better suited to a computer than a person. CAVEAT SCRIPTOR: Don’t ditch all physiological ways of showing emotion, of course, unless you want your characters to represent disembodiment.
By the way, some writers/critiquers subsume the above advice under the precept “Don’t tell readers what to think.” That precept, I think, is imprecise. If a writer says “He wandered the hours away by the bank of a brook, watching the sun on the face of the chuckling water. A bird came to circle him, flew unafraid through the aura of gladness about him. The delicate tip of a wing brushed his wrist with the touch of the first secret kiss from the hands of Bianca” he should first win an award, but anyway, he is, in fact, telling readers what to think — at least to some degree — he’s commanding THINK OF A BIRD; and THINK OF A TIP OF A WING, etc. So drop the precept, people!
