Saturday mornings Wifely Kate and I go to the Cowtown Farmers Market (Twitter) for much of our week’s groceries. Kate looks at tomatoes and squash, and I eat free samples and look at Kate.
Beautiful Day, Beautiful Girl
The food at this market is grown locally; the vendors, who’re actually informed, can tell you about what you’re purchasing, how they grew it, what goes well with what, and so forth. Like many in the Fort Worth of my background, I grew up on Brinker Inc. & SpaghettiOs & Kraft. But! Even here, there’s arugula and okra and all sorts of real food. Pro tip: food is often an acquired taste; try alien food (asparagus?) several times, across several days, and you’ll grow to like it. Everyone admits beer is an acquired taste, right?
A Good Sign
Cowtown Farmers Market is on the Weatherford traffic circle: 3821 Southwest Blvd, Fort Worth TX 76116. Wednesday and Sunday, 8am to noon.
They sell fair trade organic coffee & tea. Kate told Rupert I prefer bold coffee, whereas she prefers more mild stuff, so he suggested their Black & Tan blend, designed to please all palates. After a good smell of the package, we bought it — I’ll let you know how it turns out, okay?
This post would be remiss without a shout-out to Artisan Baking Co. (Twitter), which makes great bread that feeds me frequently. And the various cheeses from the happy goats of Latte Da Dairy cannot be forgotten!
Yesterday, partly in a quest to be more sociable — and partly in a quest to save (improve?) the universe — I volunteered, phonebanking, for Democrat Bill White‘s campaign (Twitter; Twitter) for the Texas governor’s office.
Some bullet-points about Bill White:
The Houston area led the nation in job growth during Bill White’s years in office. It added more jobs than 37 states combined.
Houston voters returned him to office as Mayor with overwhelming re-election margins of 91% and 86%.
Bill White’s parents were schoolteachers, and he calls “education the most important business of state government.” He pledges to work toward increasing public education’s share of the state budget and toward making two- and four-year colleges more affordable.
He helped Houston free up an additional $80 million for parks and $40 million for libraries.
His main opponent, incumbent governor Rick Perry:
Perry opposes consensual oral or anal sex between anyone, gay or straight, as does the 2010 Republican Party of Texas; both want those acts to be illegal.
In 2009, with Texas unemployment at 8%, Perry expressed disbelief when others said Texas was in a recession. Earlier, that January, in the middle of Texas-record job losses, Perry turned down half a billion in federal stimulus funds targeted toward unemployment benefits for Texans.
Perry-appointed chairperson for the current Texas State Board of Education, Gail Lowe, removed Thomas Jefferson from the curriculum standards’ list of world philosophers, making space instead for 16th-century theologian John Calvin (among others); according to Max Weber and more, much Calvinism, if not Calvin, considered great success in money-making to be a sign that a person is one of the elect going to heaven.
Sarah Palin is endorsing Rick Perry’s gubernatorial run. The two appeared together at the Super Sunday with Sarah! event along with Ted Nugent, where Perry said: “Sarah Palin was a great person to put on the [Republican Presidential] ticket.”
I had a lot of fun phonebanking. Most of the time I was just leaving answering machine messages or marking numbers as disconnected (“or no longer in service”); when I did get a person on the phone, most all of them were very polite, even the Perry supporters. I got the hang of it quick, and definitely talked a few people into yard signs or text-message updates or whatnot. ;-) If you’re able to volunteer, I bet you’ll get the hang of it quick, too. Find out how to volunteer for Bill White!
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!
This post starts a new type of entry that I hope to make regular here at Babel Krieg. Possibly you’re familiar with blogs that largely serve as aggregators — Boing Boing and to a lesser extent Maud Newton‘s site are two examples. Aggregating is sort of the blog equivalent of anthologizing. Since I already bombard a targeted group of friends with link-excerpt-snark emails, several have encouraged me to replace those emails with blog posts instead. I was reticent to do so because typically when I visit someone’s blog, it’s to read their original content, not to follow a chain of links leading to someone else’s original content. On the other hand, like anthologizing, aggregating is a useful service for many reasons: my idiosyncratic interests might take you down fresh roads, my excerpting might enlighten you or dismay you at my intelligence or lack thereof, etc. As I often do, I sought a compromise solution, and found one: occasional one-post digests of online content I’ve been reading that day, primarily selected from my Google Reader account (RSS FTW), Twitter, emails, etc. Without further prolegomena:
an image displayed too quickly to be seen by an observer can be detected if the participant first hears the name of the object. [..] “This research speaks to the idea that perception is shaped moment-by-moment by language,” said Lupyan. “Although only English speakers were tested, the results suggest that because words in different languages pick out different things in the environment, learning different languages can shape perception in subtle, but pervasive ways.”
The single study is part of a greater effort by Lupyan and other Penn psychologists to understand how high-level cognitive expectation can influence low-level sensory processing
Might go a ways toward explaining hallucinations in psychotics suffering delusions, perhaps if research can, ala Libet, time the latency between the high-level cognitive expectation and the low-level sensory processing.
Awesome science fiction writer Nancy Kress mentions on her blogJudith Merril‘s autobiography Better to have Loved which includes a “lengthy chapter” on Merril’s relationship with Theodore Sturgeon.
“[Pohl] sanitized everything [in his autobiography The Way the Future War]!” [Merril] said [according to Kress]. “I’m going to write those years the way they really happened!”
I have yet to read Merril’s autobiography, but anything on Theodore Sturgeon, one of my favorite writers, makes my mental radar beep loudly.
In Fort Worth a twelve-year-old boy, CBS 11 reports, is not only volunteering for Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White (will I meet the boy?) in this city, but also founding his own political party (The United Party — he’s filing with the Federal Elections Commission soon. Totally awesome.
“You have to file a statement of organization,” he explained, “That way we’ll be able to raise money, and expand from there.”
What were you accomplishing at twelve?
In the NYT Brian Ladd gives a mixed review of Peter Watson‘s The German Genius, a “lengthy compilation of essential German contributions to philosophy, theology, mathematics, natural and social science and the arts since 1750.” Watson discusses, Ladd says, the great pantheon of creative Germans ranging from Kant to Goethe to Haydn. Two notes from Ladd’s review:
“German Romanticism and German erudition placed truth and creativity firmly inside the human mind” [...] “Germany invented the modern university, combining teaching with research in both humanities and science.”
Sounds to me like a Babel Krieg.
With a NYT article on the young duo behind USA Twitter statecraft, “The Internet will save us” scores a half-point on the scoreboard against its perpetual enemy, “The Internet will ruin us.” (It’ll do both.) The duo discussed gives credit to Hillary Clinton for opening the doors to cyber-statecraft; in the article she reminds us that half of humanity is under 30. One of the duo’s cool ideas is to set up a virtual clearinghouse to help NGOs get a directories of who’s helping with what (education, clean water, etc.) in countries such as Kenya. But when one of the pair — the guy closer to Bush, not the Obama campaigner — comes down on wikileaks, which I suppose makes sense given the duo’s direct employer, they run afoul of me. You, of course, should be following @OpenCongress on Twitter, as well as the @EFF and @wikileaks Don’t miss the quote from NYU’s Clay Shirky in the excerpt below. Meanwhile, Chinese ‘net censorship continues.
On Twitter, Cohen, who is 28, and Ross, who is 38, are among the most followed of anyone working for the U.S. government, coming in third and fourth after Barack Obama and John McCain. This didn’t happen by chance. Their Twitter posts have become an integral part of a new State Department effort to bring diplomacy into the digital age, by using widely available technologies to reach out to citizens, companies and other nonstate actors. Ross and Cohen’s style of engagement [is] perhaps best described as a cross between social-networking culture and foreign-policy arcana [...]
[Evgeny] Morozov no doubt voiced the concerns of many when he wrote [in the WSJ]: “Diplomacy is, perhaps, one element of the U.S. government that should not be subject to the demands of ‘open government’; whenever it works, it is usually because it is done behind closed doors.” [...]
Clay Shirky, a New York University professor who has engaged in an ongoing debate with Morozov, has given [...] advice to members of the State Department. “The loss of control you fear is already in the past.” [...] “You do not actually control the message, and if you believe you control the message, it merely means you no longer understand what’s going on.”
This stuff will continue changing the world like mad, in my opinion, though it’s easy to underestimate the importance of the ‘net’s physicality; the danger the ‘net faces from, say, power grid loss, for example.
Has anyone else noticed that Salon.com is growing more and more contrarian? Maybe I’m imagining things.
Due to social psychology or personal guilt, many work-from-home types end up dishing out more hours from home to clients than they ever would have at the office. It’s still an exciting challenge, but consider what you’re getting to get away with at the office before you curse it too deeply.
I’ll add that others, however respectful of your work they might say they are, tend to expect you to attend to errands, etc., while you’re working. I think this is partly because they don’t get to see anchoring signals that you’re going to work — no briefcase, no tie — and partly because they see you goofing off a little while working, which people do in offices, but less visibly.
Wikileakstweets that a far-reaching story comes out Monday in the Washington Post that will initiate “real change” by the end of the year. Especially with the midterm elections in November, I’m eager to see what’s revelead about the men behind the curtains. Meanwhile, Boing Boing is curious where WikiJulian — as I call Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks — is, especially in light of Wikileaks tweets that USA federal agents were hunting for him Saturday. The TV show The Good Wife will, TV Fanatic says, soon will feature a guest-star for a season premier:
Jacob Pitts [...] He’ll come aboard as the owner of a Wikileaks-type website who faces a murder charge.
The guest-starring: Coincidence? Technohip show writer? Disinfo/scare campaign? In a democracy people need to know the truth about the issues they’re voting on. I say we all promise to forgive each other, then show all our cards, and let the chips fall where they may. I don’t think others will agree to that, though, nor might it be beneficial — dunno!
I’ll cap off this post with a note that I’m listening to REM’s “Shiny Happy People” and reading Nancy Kress’s novel Beggars in Spain, which uses the conceit of children who’ve been genetically engineered so as not to need sleep — and therefore, to work later hours — as a way for Kress to explore the contrast between Ayn Rand’s laissez-faire capitalism and Ursula K. Le Guin’s communism.
This is what to do with the remnants of vines you chop out of crepe myrtles. Those vines were so overgrown, by the way, that they effectively destroyed my hedge clippers — by the end of the afternoon, I’d wound up swinging the clippers like an axe.
Listening, I kept imagining the guitarists as making for us in the audience conversations with their guitars, and I was pleasantly surprised at how closely their personalities and their playing seemed to match. Will Douglas struck me as a fun guy whose performance resembled kind, pleasant talk — especially I’m thinking of the piece he played by Johann Kaspar Mertz, “Lied Ohne Worte”; Michael Dailey gave small benevolent smiles at the conclusion of each piece he played, all of which sounded effortlessly articulate, fluent, and well-spoken, filled with the neat nuances artful speakers include when they converse; and, Emma Rush brought an enigmatic, mysterious, almost secretive touch to her playing that became most exciting when she dazzled us with Jose Luis Merlin‘s “Suite Del Recuerdo.” I’d enjoy hearing any of these three perform again. When it came to a close, I realized the concert had made my world seem to brightly open more widely than before.
