Category: Life
Denial of Agency and Being Off Base
Recently I participated in a brief exchange on Shelfari that annoyed me. On a science fiction thread a commenter said he (or she) had recently read Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and had enjoyed it even though the fictional conceit was off base. I asked why and the response was “His worldview is off-base because it is humanistic – it excludes God.”
That annoyed me. Actually, it pissed me off. The exchange ran a little while and then I suggested it be moved or abandoned. The admin allowed that it was a troublesome thread and it would be better to just stop it. …
It’s Not About Sex
Rick Santorum answered a question put to him by a serving gay soldier about what he would as president do with the new policy and Santorum did not go off-script. But he did make two mistakes that seem to be endemic in this kind of thing.
Here’s the video:
Firstly, he makes it sound like gays have been asking for “special privileges” in this. Why is this so difficult for people to understand? They have not been asking for special privileges, they have been asking for the same privileges. Of course, there’s a secondary problem in even that—we aren’t talking about privileges, but rights, and I hate it when politicians so smoothly degrade rights into privileges for the purposes of making points with constituents.…
Time For A New Photograph
Long time ago, when I was but a teen, maybe right on the cusp, just getting interested in photography, my father and I sat up one evening to watch a PBS thing about Ansel Adams. To this day I cannot find that film—it included a project of his photographing a Hispanic family living on a scrub farm, very rural, lots of kids. He was working with both 4X5 and a Hasselblad. It was a detailed film, taking the viewer through the whole process, from shutter-click to processing, to printing. It had a substantial impact on me and I would like to find that film again, but I’ve even been to the Ansel Adams Museum in San Fransisco and they profess not to know what I’m talking about. …
The Final Solution
No, this isn’t about The Holocaust (capital H) but about something more gradual, systemic, and pernicious.
Georgia is about to execute Troy Davis. He was convicted of killing a cop. There are irregularities in the case, namely a majority of “witnesses” have since recanted their testimony. The rest of the evidence is circumstantial at best, but the state of Georgia is going to kill him anyway. He was tried, found guilty, sentenced, and his last appeal was denied.
I have a simple, unsentimental reason for opposing the death penalty. You can’t take it back.
Here is a list of the people exonerated from Death Row since 1973. …
New Directions
I’m attending Bouchercon this week, here in St. Louis. In the last few years I’ve been drifting toward crime fiction, partly in an attempt to cultivate new fields with a view toward getting my rather stagnant career moving, partly because I’ve always written something like it.
The Robot Mysteries were, as advertised, mysteries of a sort. Crime was happening in them, investigators investigated, macabre stuff occurred. There was a bit of it in Metal of Night and a couple of major thefts (and murders) were integral to Peace & Memory. Certain Remains was a mystery, even with noir elements, and the one, poor orphaned Terminator novel I wrote, Hour of the Wolf, was very noirish in tone.…
9/12
I didn’t write anything for yesterday’s commemoration. Many others, most far better suited to memorializing the day, said a great deal. My paltry mutterings would add little to what is, really, a personal day for most of us. Like all the big anniversary events, the “where were you when” aspect makes it personal and maybe that’s the most important part, I don’t know.
Instead it occurred to me to say something about the element of the disaster that puzzles most of us, even while most of us exhibit the very trait that disturbs us deeply in this context. One of the most common questions asked at the time and still today is in the top 10 is: how could those men do that?…
Fiction Matters
What I do puzzles some people. Always has, even before I was doing it. All those jokes about bookworms have a solid basis in real experiences—a great many people in our lives do not understand the importance of reading. Worse, they have no clue about the pleasures of reading, which often makes me very sad.
I was followed around the play ground at school once by three of my classmates who were determined to stop me from reading. I don’t even remember the book anymore, only that I had finally found a way to enjoy recess, one that took me out of the rough-and-tumble of schoolyard hierarchical nonsense. …