Let’s imagine the conflict known as the Civil War. It had been brewing since before the Constitution was ratified. The issues were marrow deep in American society, so much so that any attempt to address the issue of slavery was, in effect, a deal breaker for the new nation. The South made it abundantly clear that any action on the part of the North to write into the new guiding document the idea that black slaves were somehow deserving of the liberty being claimed for their white owners—and thereby signaling the end of slavery among the Thirteen Colonies—would be met with absolute refusal to play. …
Category: Life
Music On A Saturday Night
Storms apparently kept a lot of people away. A shame. The monthly gathering at the New Covenant Methodist Church on Bellerive happened anyway, a St. Patrick’s Day session complete with a pot of corned beef, and the limited audience enjoyed an evening of good music delivered by people who were having an enormous amount of fun.
More fun than I’m used to having inside a church.
I’ve been attending these now for almost five years. Maybe longer, someone would have to check. When I began, these open mic sessions offered nearly 80% karaoke, of variable quality. Rich and Annette (Annette more forcefully—though Annette’s “forceful” comes across with the glee of a 12-year-old wanting to share a puppy) had been on me to come play. …
Noir at the Bar
There is, in University City, which is attached to St. Louis with Washington University as a buffer, a cool little coffeehouse/restaurant called Meshuggah’s. They play host to a literary event called Noir at the Bar, which my friend Scott Phillips and a gentleman named Jedediah Ayres manage. Primarily it’s all about crime fiction, which apparently includes a vast range of macabre material.
They had me in their line-up on February 28th. I am the first science fiction writer to perform at this event and I think it went rather well. It was recorded for podcast by Booked and the link to my reading is now up. …
Bunk
One of the downsides to the information super highway is the amount of bunk that disseminates faster than ever before. It has always been with us, though, so we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that it’s the fault of the internet. All the internet does is make this nonsense available faster, in more formats, and about more things than ever before, but the basic impulse has not changed since, well, forever.
Consider one of the earliest bits of nonsense that still gets some juice from time to time: Nero played while Rome burned.
Nero (Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, C.E.…
The Chance of Failure
Watch this TED video from economist Larry Smith, then continue.
I have done almost all the things in his presentation to excuse my failure. I have done them (except for having children of my own) and then fought like the devil to get out of the trap in which they’d ensnared me.
I’m a procrastinator. I’m doing it now. I have a novelette open right now that I should be working on, but here I am, writing about my terrible penchant for procrastination instead. Why? I have never figured this out. It’s as if there is a subroutine in the deepware of my brain that presents as continual distraction, like one of those little bugs on the internet that no matter how hard you try to get to this page, it always takes you to that one.…
Thirty Two
We cleaned part of the garage today. Put up shelves, threw stuff out, made new room for more stuff. A chore, sure, but it was a pleasant day.
Oh, and it was our anniversary. Thirty-two years ago Donna and I went on our first date. We saw 2001: A Space Odyssey (which she had never seen before) and ate Chinese (which was new to her). At the end of the evening, she agreed to go out with me again. Little did she know. Or me, for that matter.
More about that later.…
Any Time They Want
I sometimes wonder who Rush Limbaugh is speaking to anymore, but the evidence suggests someone tunes in. I wonder how many think it’s a comedy show, sort of a political version of an old Andrew Dice-Clay routine. (Remember him? No? Well, there’s hope after all.)
In the wake of Rush’s remarks about Sandra Fluke he has been losing sponsors, a few Republican politicians have been condemning him, and everyone seems to want to keep as far from him as possible. No one but a few academics are talking about this in historical terms, though, and I think that’s a mistake. Because this is so typically male-dominant behavior, the kind that feminists— the ones Rush has had it in for lo these past decades— point to when describing cultural oppression that someone should be raising a banner and saying “See? …
Narratives and the American Landscape
I watched the Bill Moyers interview of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt with great interest. Haidt tried to describe what has essentially become what might be called the Two Nations Problem—that is, that America, the United States, has become in many ways two very distinct countries.
At its simplest, what this means to me is that people, using the same documents, the same laws, and the same presumptions of national character, have created two very different narratives about what it means to be an American. Quite often these beliefs overlap, but at the extremes such instances are ignored or treated as anomalies or expressions of hypocrisy.…
Moyers & Haidt On Moral Psychology
I have a lot of things to say about what is discussed in this video, but first I’d like people to give a listen.
Jonathan Haidt Explains Our Contentious Culture from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
As a teaser, let me say that what Jonathan Haidt has to say needs to be heard by both sides of current political divide in this country before we completely screw ourselves out of a functioning community. More to follow.…
About How I See It
This pretty much sums up my feelings about the subject.
This was polite. The way I’d say it would be, smoke whatever you want, but don’t blow the smoke up my ass. It may be psychically carcinogenic.…