Category: Personal

culture

Tilting At Icons: Christopher Hitchens 1949 – 2011

Unless you’ve been living on Mars or under a layer of primordial loam these past few decades, you know who Christopher Hitchens is. He has died. He was an unapologetic pragmatist, atheist, and iconoclast to the end. For an extended obit, go here.

I only knew Hitchens through his work, of which I’ve become quite impressed and even fond in the last few years. He did not tilt pointlessly at windmills. Rather, he spoke truth in the face of sham, questioned revered assumptions, and generally made us all twitch over some specious bit of received wisdom we thought reliable. And he did it in ways and under conditions that often ran counter to public courtesy. “Speaking ill of the dead” was never something he avoided, especially when death seemed about to bestow what in his opinion was an unearned and poorly-considered status on someone. For instance, Jerry Falwell. When most other commentators were suspending whatever critical commentary they might have indulged simply because the man had died, Hitch continued to go after him, unwilling to allow his death to gloss over what Hitch considered monstrosities of ego and policy. Here he is jousting with Sean Hannity:

He had a talent for giving as good if not better than he got from some of the most practiced mouthpieces in the media, rarely ever being shut down or bested in highly-charged, barbed exchanges with pundits attempting to just shut him up. His language skills matched a razor-sharp intellect and he had no qualms about speaking his mind, usually in a way that allowed little purchase for facile counterpolemic.

Here he is at length, discussing his book God Is Not Great, which brought him into line with Richard Dawkins as one of the most hated of the so-called “New Atheists.”

Before all this he had the temerity to attack one of the most unexamined and misunderstood of our modern icons, Mother Theresa. He got a lot of flack for his unflinching analysis of her cult and her hypocrisies. Even non-Catholics balk at saying much of anything negative about her, which is a curious effect of the kind of image-making Theresa used and was used on her. The rush to beatification had all the earmarks of desperation—the need for a popular public figure of piety to bolster the flagging reputation of Mother Church—and it seems to have worked even for those who would otherwise have nothing to do with Catholicism. Mother Theresa has become the byword for a kind of innocent generosity, a pure aching love for humanity that ignores specifics and embraces the general as if the most simpleminded of approaches to problems has a special sanctity. Hitch was one of the few who dared to actually look at the practice of her organization and present the contradictions and, indeed, the grotesqueness at the heart of her philosophy.

He also baffled many of his supporters by doing something I admire above all else. He held views that he deemed right regardless of the political spectrum along which they fell. So he could be a socialist and a hawk. He could be a severe critic of the military-intelligence combine and a patriot. His politics was all over the map in terms of Left-Right and to me it showed the silliness of doctrinaire positioning. He had no patience with idiocy, no matter the side to which it was attached.

Through all this, he was also a generous and polite debater. In a lengthy exchange with Al Sharpton he was never less than cordial, even if unyielding on his principles. He showed us how to do it and not be a bully.

Unless he felt he was being played.

Even when I disagreed with him I admired him. I would say Rest In Peace, but he would not have accepted the implications underlying the sentiment.

I’ll miss him.

Art

No Politics

Not this morning.  It’s hard, I know, because so much is going on that I could  comment about, but…

The novel revision I mentioned a couple of posts back is done.  Done and at my agent.  I did a top to bottom revision, adding in the new material that desperately wanted to be included, and except for yesterday it all went remarkably well.

Yesterday, though…yes…Murphy was in residence.

We went to the gym and then Donna had an errand to run, so I descended to the dungeon  office and began.  I’d already started the final work on the last chapter a couple days earlier, but I had Other Things To Do on both Tuesday and Wednesday that kept me away.  That was fine, it gave my subconscious time to work out some kinks and so I was more than ready to work on the remainder.

It was good stuff.  I say that because much of it is gone.  I practically rewrote the entirety of the last chapter and I was very carefully laying in the new material and deleting the old as I went.  But I became caught up in the work—it happens—and neglected to hit SAVE as often as I should.  (Yes, I have a timed save, but it was not quickly enough to prevent what happened.)

Revisions complete, I had a large chunk of old text to delete and I proceeded to highlight it for destruction and—

It crashed.  Don’t know why or how but suddenly WordPerfect complained (it never does this!) and shut down.  When I rebooted I found everything intact, but now I had this little box telling me that since it hadn’t exited properly, in order to preserve the back-up I had to open it and rename it, which I tried to do, but something was preventing it from “taking” so I tried cutting and pasting to get the changes into the original and then it crashed again and—-

The long and the short of it is, I lost my revisions on the last chapter.  All of them.

By which time Donna was home and I was fuming.  No, that’s not quite it.  I was in a blood-red, Conanesque rage, stomping around the house, yelling, cursing computers and the spawn that created them, almost but not quite punching things.

We had lunch. I returned to the deeps, sucked it up, and started over.

In all this, I had forgotten the dog.  Coffey still needed her walk and I forgot.  I’m a bad owner.  Donna came down and asked if I wanted her to take Coffey and after a few minutes of guilt-ridden negotiation, she did.

And I finished the last chapter.

Then I went on to make the final corrections to the epilogue, saved the puppy, and sent it to my agent.  (And then another weird thing happened to it, but that’s all straightened out now, so never mind.)

When I began the revisions, the manuscript was just a hair under 90 thousand words.   It’s gained 4,000 and a lot more cohesion.  In my humble opinion, it works now, whereas before it merely sufficed.

You might get the impression from the foregoing that I don’t enjoy my work.  Quite the contrary, the reason I tolerate these little instances of Murphyesque meltdown it because I love it.  I slept the sleep of the righteous last night, and this morning I am thinking back over the work and smiling.  Though I know I have at least one more pass to get through with it, when Stacia gets done making all her notes and edits, at this point I am pleased with the product.

What I now have to do, which is long, long overdue, is clean the dungeon office.  I have piles of stuff everywhere.  It’s been a few years since I’ve done a really thorough cleaning in here, which includes new bookshelves, sorting through notes that have lost all significance, finding things I’ve forgotten I misplaced, and just generally making the room livable.  When I work on a novel, there is a kind of conservation of chaos at work—as order increases in the story upon which I labor, a commensurate increase in disorder occurs in the immediate environment.  So as the novel nears completion, its maximum point of order, the room falls apart in near ruin.

In the last few years, I have written one and a half new novels and rewritten two from top to bottom, without pause.  You can imagine the task before me.

So…is Gingrich still the GOP frontrunner?

culture

Poll Positions

Comes a point when it is obvious that one’s sympathies lie in a particular direction, whether we want to admit to them or not.  Politically, I tend to try to find something worthwhile across the Left-Right spectrum.  I am, in some ways, a conservative guy.  I’ve never had much issue with a sensible fiscal conservatism, but it has grown increasingly difficult to find anything supportable in the Republican Party.  The kind of conservatism I found sympathetic at one time is such a minor part of the public face of conservative politics these days as to be almost gone.  It is not enough to say to me “Well, it’s still there, once they get in office that will come to fore.”  I don’t see it.  What is more, I don’t care.

Mitt Romney may yet be the GOP nominee and that wouldn’t be a completely horrible thing, but in order to get there he may find himself agreeing to push platform positions he might otherwise fine offensive.  In the meantime, look at the list of alternating absurdities who have been swapping places for the last few months.

Herman Cain.  I have always felt, honestly, that someone from the corporate world—think Ross Perot—would make a mediocre to terrible president.  The structure of the two environments is utterly different.  The priorities are significantly different, often in subtle ways, and the mindset that makes for a successful CEO I think would be like a fish out of water in the realm of federal politics.  But Cain demonstrated a lack of empathy and a lack of understanding about how taxes play out across varying economic lines.  His “999” proposal was absurd on its face, but a little calculation shows it was just one more gimme for the corporate sector at the expense of everyone else.

Michele Bachman is an embarrassment.  If it hadn’t been made clear before, at the debate where she criticized Cain’s tax plan by saying “if you flip 999 over you discover that the devil is in the details.”  Some people may have thought she was joking, but based on the rest of her “philosophy” she was quite serious.  It is very hard to explain how this woman has achieved her political position other than to accept that she is acceptable to people I certainly don’t see eye to eye with on almost any level.  The insulting way she told a high schooler that “gays have the same right to marry as anyone else in this country—as long as a man marries a woman” not only completely sidestepped the point the student was making but tried to sell a facile bit of social legerdemain as if it was a valid point.  She keeps harping on the bankrupt line that gays are somehow demanding a special privilege when that is flatly not true—they are demanding the same right all Americans assume is our birthright, to be who we are and have the laws of the land apply equally to us.  To the Bachman’s of the nation, “being who you are” is only acceptable if who you are meets a specific criterion.

She’s the prettier face of Rick Santorum, who is so obsessed over other people having sex that any kind of policy position he might have on any other topic gets totally drowned out by his raving about sex.  (We should by now realize that generally people who go on and on about how other people are obsessed with sex are themselves far and away more obsessed with it than the people they’re complaining about.  In Santorum’s case, his obsession borders on the macabre.)

Now we have Newt Gingrich, who has the virtue of being insulting to just about everyone in turn.  Poor kids have no habit of work?  Please.  Some of the laziest people I’ve ever met were young adults from moneyed families, usually freshly-minted out of a college they got through as an alumni student.  They are privileged, spoiled, arrogant, and utterly unable to conceive of what work actually is.  Now like all superlatives, this is clearly not true for all of them.  But if you acknowledge that, you have to acknowledge that anything that comes out of Gingrich’s mouth along these lines is almost always a superlative and therefore always false.  But this is more that that “the unemployed are that way because they choose to be and the rest of us shouldn’t be required to pay for them” bullshit the GOP has been pushing since Reagan.

Not content with slandering a whole class of people with whom he clearly has no experience, Gingrich then went on to trot out the old canard that Christianity is “under siege” by virtue of the nation being awash in paganism.  Firstly, he doesn’t have his facts right—the fastest growing segment in the country in terms of religion is the non-religion group, both people who have stopped self-identifying with any denomination and outright atheists.  I know it is common for people who don’t know any better to mischaracterize atheists as pagans, but Gingrich doesn’t have that excuse—he is a smart, educated guy.  So I can only assume that he’s playing to the paranoid proselytes, just like the others.

Who does that leave?  Poor John Huntsman, who doesn’t have a chance, but is the only one of the bunch who is avowedly pro-science and at least is reasonable about tax reform.

Here’s the problem with the current GOP line.  It is soaked in denial, it is retrograde, and it is mean.  This is possibly not all their fault—the party has been dominated for decades now by people who are steeped in social paranoia and resentment and the fear that all the things they think are important are losing meaning.  They don’t understand why so many people have no use for their values.  Many of them don’t like women in power.  A lot of them are homophobic.  And all of them are blinded by the false association between freedom and capitalism pushed by the last three Republican administrations into a state of assuming that anything—anything—that hints of socialism will doom the country.  But mainly they are driven by resentment and antagonism to anything that makes them feel ignorant and provincial and irrelevant, somehow not seeing that they manage to do that to themselves.

I would like to see a healthy Republican Party, one that would serve as a sensible counterweight to the progressivism that has characterized their opposite numbers—a progressivism that is all but gone from the public view because of a spineless attempt to mollify the increasingly vitriolic Right.  We don’t have that.  And I can’t in good conscience vote for any of them.  Every time they get someone reasonable, they either ignore them or drive them out of the Party.  The GOP has been doggedly destroying itself for thirty years.  This was the Party of Lincoln—progressives that ended slavery and advanced the cause of civil rights.

They wouldn’t even let Lincoln speak at the conventions these days.

culture

Payment and Positions

I have been assiduously working on the rewrite of the book I mentioned in the previous post and not much else has gotten done.  I’m 3/4 through and into the difficult part, where the plot actually veers, and I’ve been thinking about game changers as a result, which brings me in a painful arc to…

Newt Gingrich?  Are you serious?

I have no idea who the Republican nominee will be by the end of August 2012.  It’s too soon to make solid predictions.  One thing has been clear, once again, the sensible candidates will not have a prayer.  (I say that ironically.)  Oh, it’s possible Huntsman could be a dark horse that comes on strong in the final weeks before the Convention, but it is also quite obvious that Party as it is currently configured has no use for him.  He does not speak for the GOP base.  He is not enough of anything they currently value.

But then again, Newt isn’t, either.  He’s made a bit of a deal about how he worked with Clinton—and this is true, he did; compared to the current menagerie in Congress, Newt led a House that was a model of bipartisanship —but that is not usually something the GOP base wants to hear.  Cooperation with the antichrist is a Bad Thing.

And his claim is a smidgen disingenuous.  After all, he did lead Congress into a government shut-down that cost his Party seats in the next election.  That may, paradoxically, work in his favor this time, since GOP orthodoxy today is that, above all, get Obama out of the White House.  They will hold their collective noses, it seems, and back any candidate that looks capable of achieving that.  The vitriol among the Party faithful spewed at President Obama is worse than the worst aimed at Clinton, and some of that was pretty awful.  Alien acid-blood awful, with the power to eat through steel deck plating.  This year’s version of the GOP is establishing new levels of the kind of ideological obsession that has gripped them since Clinton beat Bush One, namely a pervasive, near-pathological hatred of all things (A) Liberal and (B) Democratic.

I hasten here to say that there are many conservatives who have a very hard time with this.

There are many liberals who are still stumbling around, shell-shocked from the last 30 years of being a punching bag for a Right Wing that has beaten them so badly about the head and shoulders for being, you know, Liberal, that they seem unable to recognize that we haven’t actually elected a Liberal president since Carter.  In a recent Thanksgiving Day conversation with an older gentleman, he was adamant that Obama was a far Left Liberal if not an outright Communist.  When I ran down the list of things that make him Center Right, I was met with a kind of blank stare.  He agreed singly with each point but, like a tape loop, kept insisting Obama was a Liberal.

Obama’s policies are geared directly toward alleviating the difficulties of the rich, only with some mollifying rhetoric to make it seem he’s about fiscal equality.  He sells it with a somewhat more worker-friendly line of patter, but I’m still waiting for any kind of financial regulatory policy with teeth.  In spite of his avowed revulsion as a candidate for the abuses at Guantanamo and the anti-civil rights policies of his predecessor, he keeps renewing the Patriot Act and Gitmo is still open and he has just signed off on a policy of holding enemies of the state without limit.  He has backed down on his support of Net Neutrality and I’m still trying to make sense of the whole health care package—which, except for one provision, is an essentially Republican proposal from over a decade ago (which they now repudiate rather that give Obama a win on anything) and even that he has sold badly to an electorate that would have backed him had he gone to the mat for single payer.  This is not a Liberal.

And yet.

What is it the GOP wants?

I don’t honestly think they know.  They have characterized the Democratic Party for a long time now as a Party that only ever reacts, never actually steps up and says what it stands for, but I wonder if that hasn’t become the problem with the GOP.  After all, what do they stand for?

There’s a standard set of positions which are becoming strained and a bit threadbare, but still play well to the base.  Some of them are best characterized by Rick Santorum, who also hasn’t a prayer for the nomination but they like him running because he says right out there all the ugly little social things the rest of them are finally beginning to realize don’t play well with independents and moderates (which both sides need in order to win).  The GOP actually does seem to believe women are second class citizens who should be remanded to the custody of the home—which is probably why they have yet to produce a single credible female presidential candidate who is not a basket of lunacy in a nice wrapper.  Where’s the GOP counterpart to Hilary Clinton?  While their rhetoric may allow for one, their actual policies won’t.  (What sane, educated, intelligent woman with any self- esteem could back the systematic war on womens rights the GOP has been tacitly waging since Reagan?  Well, obviously some do, but I wonder how they make that work.)

The Santorum faction simply doesn’t want anyone to be Different.  (He also doesn’t want people to have sex.  I mean, really.  Have you ever listened to any of his interviews when he gets on that subject?)

Now the GOP has decided to take a hardline position on immigration, so much so that the amnesty plan Bush Two proposed would be anathema today, so they have even turned on their own heroes.  (Seriously.  When you go back and listen to Reagan’s comments on wealth inequality and unions you wonder if he would even be let on the stage today.  He sounds like a Liberal!)

Via the Tea Party faction, the GOP has concretized around a kind of do nothing for anyone unless they can afford to pay for it agenda.  The almost criminal assault on collective bargaining that occurred in Wisconsin has backfired a little, but I don’t hear any of the candidates (except for the sensible ones who no one will have to worry about) repudiating Governor Scott’s tactics.

Yes, I know, he had a budget shortfall.  But he didn’t when he took office—the money he claimed he needed to save was money he gave away in three huge tax cuts to corporations.  He established the tax cuts, which created the fiscal problem, and then tried to blame the unions.  This time, a lot of people were paying attention.

But no one in the GOP (except Christie, but he’s not running for president) said he was wrong.

So the GOP seems to have, in practice, a platform that is anti-union, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-blue collar, anti-immigrant, and anti-serious tax reform.  They are opposed to so much I can no longer discern clearly what it is they stand for.

Family values?  Then what’s this wink-and-a-nod stuff over Herman Cain’s sexual harrassment issues or even over Newt’s track record of divorce-and-marry-the-mistress?

Fiscal responsibility?  Then what is with the continued coddling of large corporations that are clearly removing wealth from this country and the repeated evisceration of every pro-consumer bill brought to the floor?

I don’t know what else there is.  Under Bush they demonstrated how little regard they have for science and education.  (No Child Left Behind is a farce and the blatant interference with environmental impact studies was endemic.)  All they care about, it seems, is some kind of Thomas Edison view of entrepreneurs that quite honestly never really existed.

What they actually stand for is the principle that their constituency doesn’t want to pay for anything.  Not through the government, in any case.  They do not wish to pay for education.  They do not wish to pay for keeping the environment clean.  They do not wish to pay for the unemployed, the elderly, the sick.  Hell, they don’t even want to pay for the damage done to soldiers with combat disabilities.  (To be fair, that’s not a strictly Republican problem—we have always had a problem paying for our broken soldiers, no matter which Party is in power.)

All you hear from them is spending cuts and tax cuts.  Cut cut cut.

What do they want this country to look like when they get their way?  I haven’t heard that.  Not in any real way.  They talk about individual self-reliance, but come on, does anyone anymore believe that happens without a lot of, ahem, community support?  Oh, but it should be voluntary, not mandated.

Well, sir or madam, if you don’t want to pay for it and I can’t pay for it, where does that leave us?

I need to get back to my book now.

career

The Wrong One

So…I’m again rewriting the historical mystery.  Thought I was done with this draft and had only to await the edits from my most excellent agent, but alas, I have this impish ethical streak that won’t let me just slide…

Basically, I came up with a minor, almost throwaway, solution to a tiny plot problem as part of the whole revamp and happily sent the novel forth.  But then that solution began to grow in my imagination, like a tumor, until I realized that I had a much bigger problem arising from the solution.  Not to worry!  It would form the basis for the next book in the series!

That settled, I went about doing other things.

Only my unconscious kept churning on it and wouldn’t let me drop it like that.  I had created a growing organism within the body of my novel that had to be dealt with.  Argh!

Yes, I said argh!  because I wanted to get on with other things.  But.  Not to be. The coup de gras came last weekend over an excellent dinner with my friend Carolyn Gilman (who has a new novel out and you really ought to go get it and read it ’cause it’s really, you know, good).  Carolyn works for the Missouri History Museum and her current project is the Revolutionary War in the West—exactly the place and period in which my novel is set.  In the course of the conversation we stumbled on some little-known—no, that’s an understatement—some previously unexamined aspects of the Battle of St. Louis and George Rogers Clark and all that which irritated my tumor into full-blown eruption and I realized that I had to do this rewrite now!

This made me a bit nervous, as Stacia, my agent, has had what we thought was the second to last draft for a few months now and I had no idea how deep into it she’d gotten and I had to tell her to hold off—

The revisions will make this a much better book and when I described them to Stacia she was not only supportive but excited and so now I’m a hundred pages into a new draft.  I’ll just give you a little hint as to what was wrong and if anyone remembers this after the book comes out you can ask me about it and I’ll recount the tale.  Basically I had the wrong murderer.

Embarrassing, I know, but hey, not even the historical facts I learned from Carolyn are particularly well known and the interpretation she’s putting on them are unique, so I don’t feel like a total slacker.

Anyway, if I’m not posting here much in the next few weeks, this is why.  So have a happy, healthful Turkey Day, everyone.

culture

Harassment

Herman Cain is having a problem, and it won’t get any better by telling reporters that he won’t discuss it.

I don’t want to get into a big analytical thing about sexual politics here, but from the descriptions so far of what Cain did, he made an assumption that I think is all too common among men of a certain mindset.  Cain apparently made inappropriate comments to women in the context of a working situation.  I have no doubt he shrugged it off and forgot about it until it came back to bite him and probably wondered what the big deal was all through the negotiations of settlements.  “I mean,” he likely thought, “I was just talking.”

Whatever the actual events, this is something that is not hard to understand and is no doubt misunderstood.  I worked with a man who indulged this kind of behavior constantly and couldn’t understand why the women were getting all upset.  In that instance, they were customers and he was the retailer.  He would flirt, make suggestions, even proposition women, and could not fathom why many did not come back or why they would be upset in the least.  After all, he was joking.  He didn’t mean it.  And lastly, well, they didn’t say anything—in fact, some of them laughed.

Partly this is a cluelessness that infects many people.  But this was a dynamic I was able to explain to him in fairly straightforward terms.

If you’re at a party and you proposition someone or make an off-color remark or whatever, everyone is completely free to just walk away.  The behavior may be offensive, but there is no coercion, no one is put into a lousy situation against their will, no one has to listen to you if they don’t want to.  (I’m assuming a party for a party’s sake here, not a party where people from the office are getting to know each other—that’s different because there is less freedom to walk away.)  In this context if you offend someone she can either throw her drink in your face and leave, tell you what a shit-heel you’re being, embarrass you some other way, join in the tastelessness, or whatever.

But in any kind of business context, that freedom does not exist.  Even as a customer.  And this is hard for some people to understand because we’re very informal in many business dealings.  Why isn’t the customer free to behave as she would at a party?  Because as a customer she wants something and she has to deal with you to get it.  It may be a loose constraint, but it is a constraint nevertheless.  So if you come on all boorish and macho, she has an uncomfortable set of compromises she is forced to make.  Either put up with you until she gets what she came for, give up on what she came for and hope she can find it somewhere else, or be offensive right back, souring the cordiality of the interaction.  For the duration of the transaction, server and customer are bound together in an unspoken contractual arrangement that limits the range of response.

Any questions?

Yes, it’s a power situation.  Waitresses understand this very well.  They put up with all kinds of nonsense because they could lose their jobs if they respond as they would on the street with a stranger.  Situations in which people must work together also limit the possible range of reactions.

For the ass hat acting like the reincarnation of Maurice Chevalier, it may not be a big deal—verbal games, fishing for possibilities—or it may be a more insidious game of power plays and sexual predation, but in either event there may well be an obliviousness that leaves the impression that since she didn’t dump a pot of coffee in his lap she must be enjoying the interaction.  Or they may very well know that the woman having to put up with him is in a constrained situation.

Either way, it is not a simple matter of “just funning.”

Guys often just don’t get this.  Guys who have been sexually harassed often do.  They realize that it’s a power situation.  It’s not fun and games, it’s not “innocent”, it is not voluntary on all parts.

The term Privilege applies.

So Herman probably stuck his mouth out there and made inappropriate remarks to women who did not have the freedom to tell him to go fuck himself and probably wondered what the fuss was about when they threatened action.  He had probably behaved that way countless times with no blowback and told himself that these women were aberrations.

On the other hand, he may very well understand that this is a power game, but still not see what real harm there is in it.  He sees the world from a perspective of privilege—the privilege of being in a position from which he need never tolerate unwanted intrusions of this kind, the privilege of being able to respond with a “fuck off” and not worry about the consequences—like losing a job or having a business deal fall through.

It’s a lack of empathy.

Now, after having made it a policy to reject race card politics, he’s claiming these attacks are racially motivated.  No no.  This kind of behavior is colorless.

I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt that what has been reported is all that happened.  If it turns out there’s more, well. ..

But I wanted to explain at least this small aspect of sexual harassment that seems so byzantine to people.  It’s really not.  We’ve all seen the “boss” who abuses his employees.  If it were elsewhere, among strangers, and he acted like that, someone might punch his lights out, but his employees are constrained by fear.  We recognize this kind of boss as a bully.

It’s the same thing.

Home

Dressing Up

It’s Hallowe’en.  No news to anyone, we’ve been immersed in it for weeks now.  But this year I’ve been doing a lot of introspective reminiscing and I’ve come to realize that Hallowe’en should always have been my favorite festive occasion.

See, I’ve been wearing costumes all my life.

 

The last time I went out on a Hallowe’en night in costumes I was 14.  A little old you say?  I agree, but I wasn’t doing the trick’or’trreating, I was being part of the security detail accompany a group of littler kids.  Nevertheless, I always liked getting into costume, into a character, and I went as a town sheriff, complete with a six-gun on my hip.  That would be questionable today, especially as the weapon I wore was a Mattel Fanner Fifty, which looked real.  Except for some high-end models, toy guns don’t look real anymore, and I understand the thinking behind it.  Even when I was a kid there were incidents of robberies done at (toy) gun-point, because for over a decade toy companies, following the Mattel model, made more and more realistic guns.  The Mattels were all like three-quarter size, but in the heat of the moment that’s not going to count for much.  So gradually, authenticity yielded to social reality, and now you have all these bizarre looking things out of bad SciFi movies with tell-tale orange tips screaming TOY!

Anyway, I went out for a couple of hours, acting as protector of the smaller children, wearing a beard made from burnt cork, a dime-store Stetson, and my six-shooter slung low on the hip.

I loved it.

But you get older, some things that were adorable at eight are just weird at eighteen.  Going to dress-up Hallowe’en parties in my adolescence and early adulthood were not that common.  Besides I lost all my toy guns.

(I had a double-holster set of Mattel “shootin-shell” pistols, black holsters, silvered with fake ivory grips.  They were wonderful!  You could get bullets for them with pressure-plate releases on the back of the spring-loaded cartridges that, when the hammer struck, launched little plastic shells about five or six feet.  I was rough on my toys, always was, and eventually the grips came off, they broke, they ended up neglected and one day tossed.  Here’s a picture of the set:

 

 

 

 

I loved that set.  Outrageously expensive now.  Here is a site with all the Mattel western toys of the period.)

Even before that, though, I used to get creative.  When first introduced to Hallowe’en, the costumes were less than wonderful.  Basic sized pull-overs, like jump suits, tied in the back, and a molded plastic mask with large eye holes.  The fabric was cheap, the costumes usually ill-fitting, and almost always ending up in the trash.  The last one of those I had was a Superman costume when I was eleven—it was a little embarrassing because they insisted on tricking it out with glitter on the chest sigil and there was no symbol on the cape.  No matter what, you didn’t look like Superman.

(Yes, I know—eleven?  Seriously?  What can I say?  I prolonged childhood as long as I could.  In some ways, I’m still a kid.)

Childhood for me was a series of roles in which I would immerse myself.  Anything, I suppose, to escape the prison of my own self.  Despite my “delicacy” I was really invested in being a soldier.  One year I even had “real” fatigues.  Never had a steel helmet, but I recall the Sixties being a very cool time for toys like this.  I had a G.I. helmet with the mesh for stuffing camouflage in—leaves and the like—which my mother hated because I tracked debris into the house after a hard day fighting Nazis or Japanese.  I had a real cartridge belt with canteen, the envy of the neighborhood, and a couple of very cool rifles.  I had one of the first battery-powered M-14s in the neighborhood.  This one actually made a very neat sound, a heavy thum-thum-thum as the tip of the barrel moved in and out (in what now I can see was a rather disturbing sexual motion, but then it was all about killing bad guys).

I took on a James Bond persona for a few years—my best dressed time in childhood, even my hair was perfectly groomed (lot of Brylcream) and I had a couple of automatic pistols—but never a shoulder holster.  Awkward when trying to carry a replica Luger in the small inside pocket of a sport coat.  It kept falling out every time I bent over.

Much of that faded through high school, but by then I was trying to write.  I look at it now and I see that I never stopped putting on costumes, only now I do it in my stories.  Try on a character, go through an adventure, be the cool secret agent or starship trooper or whatever.

We dabbled briefly in costuming when we started attending SF conventions, but drifted away from it fairly quickly.  That wasn’t the aspect of the community that really attracted us, though I confess to a deep admiration for the skill and dedication some costumers bring to their passion.

But tonight we will sort of dress up for the kids coming to the house to receive their booty and admire and enjoy their glee in being Something Else for the night.  Looking back, I admit that sometimes I got a little weird with some of it, but in the long run it did me no harm and probably a great deal of good to try out different personae.  And I haven’t actually stopped.  Just that the wardrobe is more expensive now—and fits better.

Have a boo-tiful evening.

Art

A Few Thoughts Concerning Margaret Atwood

Actually, just one.  I’d like her to stop trying to be an authority on science fiction.  I haven’t read her new book of essays on the topic, but I’ve heard her in interviews and read some of her thoughts in the past, and based on that she’s pretty much a tourist.  Back when her publisher thought claiming her work was science fiction would hurt her sales, she misunderstood the genre magnificently (“Oh, sci-fi has rockets in it.  I don’t do that.”)  A lot of it reminded me of Susan Sontag’s egregiously off-base attempt to define it.

Of course, being in the same company as Sontag isn’t a bad thing, especially not if you want to remain within the fold of the folks who persistently fail to “get” any kind of genre work.  But it has become obvious that Atwood likes some of the aesthetic possibilities in SF and can’t help using them, and it has become likewise obvious that claiming common cause with SF isn’t hurting her sales, so now she’s a very Out There advocate.

But she still doesn’t get it. In a recent interview she characterized SF as basically religious, since it speaks to the desire to embrace something vast and elemental and be awed—the way one is supposed to be awed by religious epiphany and ritual evocation of spiritual connection.

There are two things wrong with this.  One, it suggests that the only way humans can experience awe and wonder is within a framework that can only be defined as religious.  Two, it ignores the decades-long assault on paradigms that is the core impulse in written SF.  Religion is nothing without the continuity of its paradigms, preserved as they are by the acceptance of their unassailability.  But, like science, science fiction has no reverence for paradigms that fail to explain anything and the tendency is to go at them tooth and claw in order to rip away the caul that muffles genuine transcendence.  This is not religious in the least—it is, if anything, the aesthetic of the newest gadget, a consumer culture variant that says anything done last year is, you know, Last Year.

That said, science fiction is also like an overcrowded antique shop whose proprietors just can’t bring themselves to throw anything out.  Everything that was ever done in the genre since 1926 is still there, used and reused, and that, too, is very much like science.

Because being “wrong” in the overall sense doesn’t mean all the bits by themselves are in error or are useless.  Alchemy and Chemistry are separated by an insurmountable barrier of fact, but some of the laboratory methodology devised in alchemy is still useful in modern chemistry, at least conceptually.  Einstein superseded Newton in ability to explain the universe at large, but we haven’t tossed Newton in the dustbin when it comes to working out simple cause-and-effect relations on the macro scale.  No one takes Doc Smith’s Lensmen series seriously anymore, but we’re still writing about starships, elite cadres of supercompetent heroes, and interstellar warfare with inscrutable aliens.  We just don’t do it with the kind of naivete E.E. Smith used.

But more than that, the points we’re making are different.  We’ve moved on to more sophisticated themes, or even themes that were not considered at all half a century ago.  John W. Campbell Jr. declared in the pages of Astounding that no aliens could be morally superior to humans.  That’s a laughable, pathetic idea today, but we do still wrestle with the potential relationships.

Ms. Atwood should read more fantasy if she wants to find religious fiction.  Science Fiction is all about how the universe is not dependable, reliable, or amenable to petition.  Religion is about finding a way to stability through the assertion of belief over circumstance.  Science is about figuring out how things work.  Science Fiction is about how to live in the universe science shows us, which offers only the most conditional stability.

To be fair, I understand where she might get that idea, that SF is religious.  It’s the awe, the “sense of wonder”, that is difficult to separate from one of the “varieties of religious experience.”  And it may well be that people turn to religion for exactly that thrill of awe.  But that’s not the point of religion.  And the source of the awe is very different.

I’m glad she likes SF now. But I’m less sanguine about the expectations she will provide those just coming to SF after having read her ideas.  I suspect many of them will be disappointed and give up on it.  In this regard, I see her as very much like Harold Bloom, who dumped all over Harry Potter  because he thought it was inferior to what he regards as worthwhile YA, all the while missing the good part of the whole Harry Potter phenomenon.

On the the other hand, maybe it won’t make any difference.  Maybe no one will really pay any attention.  That, too, will be a shame.

career

There Is Contact…

Hey, something of a more lit’rary nature now.  I have a stored reprinted in the new collection Alien Contact  edited by Marty Halpern.  Here is the cover:

 

I am very jazzed about this for a whole bunch of reasons.  One is that I have had very few stories anthologized this way (as a reprint).  Another is the superb company I’m keeping in here—Le Guin, Swanwick, Silverberg, Cadigan, Gaiman, King, Stross, and so on and so forth.  Still another is that Marty took one of my own personal favorites, Texture of Other Ways.  This is a kind of prequel story to my Secantis Sequence.  This is about the big hairy conference that precedes the events in my novel Compass Reach and sort of sets everything in motion.

I would put a link to direct purchase, but I don’t really want anyone to buy it from Amazon.  I’ve been in a real “support your local independent bookstore” mode for some time now, so until I find a better direct link I’d like to ask you all to go order it from your local indie.  Sorry if this is inconvenient, but that’s how I feel just now.

Anyway, I hope y’all enjoy it, especially if you didn’t catch these stories the first time around.

culture

An Age of Wonder and Annoyance

I have two things to talk about that are related by the slenderest of threads. Bear with me.

First I’d like to say something about how marvelous is the age in which we live, at least from the perspective of someone who has now lived in a couple of “ages” since arriving on this planet in 1954.

A short while ago I had lunch. While having lunch I like to watch something, so I popped the DVD of The Right Stuff   into my player and settled back to my roast beef and movie.  While watching, it occurred to me how blase I’ve  become at this technology.

See, growing up, movies were a Big Deal.  My parents went every other week at least and took me.  Going To The Movies holds a special, nostalgic place in my memory.  It was a shared event, but more than that it was in fact An Event.  TV was there, sure, but it was crappy and even at age four I kind of recognized the difference.  Movies were Big, they were Special, they were Unique—and they went away.  Though it was dependable.  The first run theaters got the new films and ran them for a week, maybe two.  The next batch were due in and they swapped them out, so the films went to the cheaper neighborhood theaters, usually only for a week.  Plus, these were double features.  You sat in the theater for up to four and half hours to see two movies.  Before I was born, it would be two movies, plus—cartoons, a short subject, maybe a news reel.  Going to movies was a significant amount of time and a major outing.

We brought our own snacks.  Mom would make up some popcorn or put a brown bag of candy together, and we might—might—bring a bottle of soda to share.  The concession stand was more than we could afford usually.

And after the movies left the theaters, they were gone.  If you  hadn’t seen them when they came out, during the three or four weeks they were in town at one or another theater, you were s.o.l.  Some of the bigger hits might be rereleased a year or two later and a few films were perennially rereleased, but the vast majority did not come back.  You had to remember them.

Television changed that somewhat when networks started leasing movies to show at certain low-traffic times, and then in the late Sixites and early Seventies there were a variety of movie programs—Movie of the Week, Thursday Night At the Movies, A Picture For A Sunday Afternoon.  Suddenly all these old films started turning up again, and of course after ten P.M. local networks aired a lot of B pictures or films from the Thirties and Forties, but you had to stay up for them, and you never knew what you would get.  (Some of my favorite memories with my dad come from Friday nights, sitting up late, watching some of these movies, some of which were unintentional howlers at which we’d poke fun.)

A lot of people today probably don’t see the wonder in being able to go to a store or online and buy a film and watch it at home.  VCRs didn’t come in till the late Seventies (and the early models weren’t great), but it ushered in an age of comparative cultural wealth.  The idea, when I grew up, that I could actually own one of these movies, for myself, and watch it when I chose to…

You forget occasionally to sit back and appreciate what we now have.  It is amazing—the technology, yes, but the fact that I can drop a disc in a machine and watch The Maltese Falcon or  Gone With The Wind  or  The Right Stuff  whenever I please is…incredible.

That’s the good part.

The other amazing thing is this vast and complex online community—several communities, actually, some overlapping—that we have with more ease than it used to be to make a long distance phone call.  It’s amazing.  I can communicate with people I would never have known existed in one of those previous “ages” and talk about things only a rare handful of people I ever met face to face would even have been interested in before.  Like-minded, like-enthused, like-whatever people around the globe who can now “chat” online.

And with whom one can trip over an area of sensitivity so fast and so inexplicably that it makes your head spin.  I have recently had this shoved in my face just how easily some folks take offense and how impossible it can be to explain yourself or extricate yourself.  Unless you want to be an ass, it is often better to simply leave the group in question rather than see the crap continually stirred.

But because it is so easy to leave, not to mention remain anonymous, I think many people never learn the nuances of real interaction.  Distance used to serve a vital social function, namely keeping people apart by virtue of the difficulty of communicating.  Letter-writing requires thought—the trouble you have to go through to draft the letter, address it, go to the post office, etc. I think tends to make people more thoughtful and thorough.  It’s not like a casual conversation, which the ease of communication has sometimes turned the most serious conversations into because it is difficult to tell when it is time to stop cracking wise.

Further, though, once a foul has been made, it doesn’t go away.  It perpetuates, spreads, and suddenly people all over may know all about the reputation you have earned through misadventure.

Part of the problem—a big part, I think—is the fact of the words remaining behind after the conversation is over.  Spoken conversation has a half-life, very short, and events carry people past ill-considered phrasing or cliches, aided by the visuals, the body language and facial expression.  But when you write something down, it has weight, and online exchanges acquire significance never intended for a brief exchange.  You can consider the words, read them over again and again, and derive meaning and intent whether it’s there or not.

The wonderfulness of our enabling technologies render us lazy, allow us to take for granted things which in an earlier time, with less speed and availability, would not have been so poorly used.

So instead of a thoughtless sentence being immediately apologized for, brushed aside, and forgotten, the offending sentence lingers, a solid legacy that reminds and continues to irritate.  The down-side of modern ease.

Part of the pleasure of all these things should be from not taking them for granted, from a near conscious recognition of just how cool things are.  On the one hand, we maybe have to grow thicker skins—certainly we have to learn new interpretive skills—and on the other maybe let our skins thin a little so we can sense the amazing gift much of this world is.  Hard to know where to apply what and for a whole generation or two there is the perfectly understandable if annoying question, “What’s the big deal?”

Unfortunately, if you have to ask…