Category: blog

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Hank

He did not care for his name, either his given one—Henry—or the nickname he ended up being known by, Hank. At his last job, he became known as Hank the Crank. It was an affectionate sobriquet. He managed a department full of engineers and took care of them. One of the first things he did when he took over was get them all raises which had been long overdue.

He flourished in that job. At the end of decades of struggling, moving from one place of employment to another, seeing opportunities die, usually in the mismanagement of others, he came to a place where all his unique and quirky skills and proclivities came together. For the years he managed that department, he was, as they say, in his glory. It was good to see him so enthused, all his faculties engaged. He would have worked at that till he died given the chance, but once again forces beyond his control took it away.

But he retired with his wife, my mother (though it was a few more years before she left the working world), and they bought a new house and settled into a suburban neighborhood (to my surprise, actually) to enjoy each other. I think they did. For a couple of decades they were able to be with each other in a way they might only have imagined possible.

Then the health problems began. Little by little, this man I had viewed as a kind of superman began to diminish. He had always been a private and often reticent man, so complaining was not part of his repertoire. It must be said that had he complained a bit more, things might have been easier for him. But he had difficulty admitting he needed help and for most of his life he had always been the one to be relied upon by those around him.

Compensation for his willingness to Be There had never been a consideration

My parents’ romance was the stuff of movies. They certainly didn’t see it that way, but when you hear the way it happened you can’t help but be charmed. He was in the army, stationed at Fort Leonard Wood. After basic training, his original unit was set to ship out to Spain, but he was pulled at the last minute because of his teeth. On his first leave, he and a buddy came up to St. Louis. They were at the Hilands, which used to sit on the ground that now supports Forest Park Community College. The Hilands was an amusement park, right on the edge of Forest Park. After a day of enjoying the rides and attractions, they were about to try to find a hotel. At  the bus stop, they spotted two girls. They approached looking for directions and ended up riding the bus with them down town.

Dad must have been immediately smitten. Soon enough they were exchanging letters. Mom told me he very quickly wanted to meet her parents. At some point, she became smitten, too.

They decided not to marry until after his service was done. He was cognizant of the possibility of injury and had scruples about burdening her with an invalid, but the fact is he never saw combat. He ended up on Hokkaido across a stretch of water from Korea and never jumped off into the fray. He came home intact and they married on New Years Eve 1953.

I was born in October 1954.

From all I have gathered, dad did everything he could to make a fine and nurturing home. He had come from domestic circumstances that were far from ideal, from an alcoholic and abusive father and an apparently resentful if dutiful mother. He had been a late baby for her, giving birth to him when she was 40. While that is less uncommon today, in 1930 that was not only unusual but entailed more risk. There was a considerable age difference between Henry and his siblings and he ended up the last to leave home, which he had to do under fraught circumstances. It seemed that he was determined to do better for his own family.

And he did.

It has taken me a lifetime to appreciate what he did.

When you grow up in a bubble it never occurs to you to examine the surface of the bubble. As with most people probably, I underappreciated what my parents were like and what they did for me. In the last few years, I’ve been having longer and deeper conversations with my mom and I’ve been learning things about dad I might have suspected but never knew. I always knew, for instance, that he’d had a rough childhood, that his father was bitter and often cruel, but I never knew quite how deep the ambivalence ran with his mother and some of the details about his siblings…

All that to give context to the fact that he did a phenomenal job of breaking a nasty cycle. I was cherished and nurtured and provided with a wonderful example of a mature relationship because it has always been obvious that my parents were crazy about each other and also best friends. They shared a true partnership. In the context of the times, this is a remarkable thing. Dad insisted that mom have her own credit card and have her own car. He fostered her independence.

The biggest source of friction between my dad and me had to do with that. Independence. He wanted above all to be sure I was prepared for it. It seemed he often despaired of that since I seemed not to Get It. He was a Depression Baby, I was raised in a comfortable home and need was kept at bay to give me room to be what my dad had never had much chance of being—a kid. So our apprehension of the world conflicted. Even so, he did not back off from care and sustenance and respect. He suffered silently for the most part and hoped things would come out right.

He served in the army, came home, married my mom, and then landed a job at Remington Rand as an office machine repairman. At the time it was a well-paid job. During that time he and mom converted to Mormonism, which in hindsight was weird. Then came the first major break in what I eventually realized was my dad’s inability to compromise on certain principles. The church abused his fidelity and suggested going around The Rules so he could take on work they wanted him to do. When he called them on it, their response drove him to sever ties. I learned eventually that he was what I came to call a 110 percenter. He committed, he gave more than his all, but there was an implicit understanding that the thing he committed to must be just as committed as he was. He walked away from jobs, a church, a business he loved because it had become compromised and soured for him. If he felt his integrity was at stake, he walked away.

He taught himself machining and worked for many years as a journeyman machinist. This led to better money than he had been making and things got easier. During this period, he became a Freemason.  One is never not a mason, so while his ardor cooled, that tie was never broken.

We did not quite Get each other. He tried. He tried harder than I knew. When I found something new, he was interested. The closest we came to sharing a passion was photography. He simply did not have time to get into it the way I did, but he always supplied me, and it led to a career. When I made my first few forays into writing fiction, he took an interest, but we both realized quickly that he would not be a useful critic, but he was clearly proud of me when I published my first stories and then novels. He would brag about me to strangers.

For all that he was a gregarious man, he was intensely private. As the world changed around him, many of our conversations took on a tone of bewilderment, sometimes anger, but he always tried to understand. Always. That willingness to try set him apart from so many people I have known. That he succeeded as often as he did amazed me. I can only hope I returned the courtesy.

He lost he eyesight and his hearing. Arthritis took his ability to get around and he began falling. Finally, one night, mom called me to come help. She could not get him up. We spent a few days until finally she called 911 and they took him to the hospital. From there, he went to a care facility. We were very lucky in the quality of the place. They cared, they gave a damn, and he became, as so often happened with him, popular with the staff, even though he could not communicate very well.

He was there two-and-a-half years and for most of that time he was stable. Last week he stopped eating. We saw him one day and he was clearly struggling, but there wasn’t anything specifically wrong with him. This past Friday he passed. The staff gave his body a surprising send-off.

I am a child of the whole self-analysis era. I learned the hard way, though, that leaving things unsaid is both unnecessary and harmful, so dad and I had had our “final” conversations. We had no unfinished business. That in itself does not secure one from pain. But it is not, for the moment, the raging pain of someone who failed at important exchanges. Dad and I were good with each other. No regrets.

But I am sad. Not that he’s no longer in an absurdly unpleasant situation—he had been vital and active most of his life, to see him unable to walk down a hall was difficult—but that he is gone from everything but memory. He mattered to people who came to know him.  He was a Presence.

I love him. He was a great dad. And a good man.

 

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A Word About The Loyal Fan Base

CNN aired its town hall with Trump and received some criticism for it. But it had been scheduled for a while and since the Right likes to accuse the Left (which CNN is at best only an honorary member) of Cancel Culture, the question to air or not to air doubtless prompted them to err on the side of not canceling. Nevertheless, opinions about the man on the stage notwithstanding, I have no carp about that. The only downside to something like this is that it took up space where something else of presumably more value might have been aired. As that seems rarely a consideration in the board rooms of media companies (what is value? what is worthwhile? what is meaningful? ratings) I’m fine with them going ahead. I am fully capable of exercising my prerogative to not give him any oxygen or eyeballs (mine) and attend to something else.

What I do find useful is the polling afterward and as reported during the audience response. Applause, cheers, enthusiastic support from his supporters. After all the demonstrated toxicity inhering to the man and even after the just-finished libel case that did not go his way, he has followers who bathe in every insipid utterance that falls from his mouth. We have, the rest of us, been scratching our heads and asking why since 2015. What seems obvious to us appears to be grounds for adulation for them and we are profoundly puzzled.

When stripped of all the polemic and rube-goldberg extrapolation and analysis, this tells us something about populist politics that is very useful to recognize. Hard to accept, yes, but real nonetheless, and I think it time we deal with it directly. Going all the way back to the Founding, we have heard warnings about it. Many of the Founders did not trust democracy. We keep hearing that and consider it an aberration, but in truth they recognized something basic about the relation of government to the governed that we are now seeing in full cinematic glory.

What do people want from their government?

This questions is at the heart of this phenomenon and it’s time we faced it and recognized its consequences. We can point to examples throughout history in which the same issue has so distorted a nation’s social and political landscape as to cause dismay and horror at the result. What were they thinking?

To my mind, this question can be answered by three related but distinct apprehensions.

For most of us, here, we want government to reflect our values. By this we implicitly acknowledge that sometimes our choices in how those values manifest may be off the mark and we presumably put in place people who can parse the complexities and do what is proper according to the basic ideas inherent in those values.

For others, we want government to validate our values. That is, we want government to reassure us that we feel and believe that which is right and beneficial. We may not be entirely certain what our own values are. We might have a good sense of them, but what does that mean? Does everyone else feel the same way? In this we wish our representatives to reassure us that yes, we are part of a community that shares what we feel.

Then there are those who want government to validate their prejudices. What we dislike, disapprove, disdain takes the place of a positive set of values because all we can see or feel is that which makes us distrust or resent. Maybe we feel that if only all those things we think do not belong can be gotten rid of, things will be all right, and by that I mean things will go to our benefit. This leads, if unchecked, to a policy of discrimination, of segregation, of injustice, of hate. You can see this in political movements the sole purpose of which is to take things away from certain people.

This latter group is what we see in Trump’s base. He has from the beginning validated their resentments. Nothing he says or does matters other than as a target for the kind of response from those they scorn. He has told them, by word and deed, that they’re right to feel besieged and that who they feel they are is fine. In fact, more than fine, it is what being an American means.

They love him because he validates their resentments and prejudices and fears of the Other.

Trying to reason with them repeatedly fails because the rest of us always start with the wrong set of assumptions. In aggregate, they do not want to be more inclusive, but the opposite. When he made fun of the disabled journalist, most of us were horrified. His supporters reacted against our horror by doubling down on their presumed right to make fun of who they want, to laugh at things rather than grow any empathy, to find humor in tasteless reductionism, and to ultimately sort people into Us and Them camps based on nothing but an unwillingness to extend themselves to consider that intolerance is shameful and destructive. Much of this is aesthetic.

So I’m okay with seeing this aspect of our culture on display where we can come to terms with the irrationality and pettiness of it. I just wish more of us would get over our reluctance—a reluctance often born of those values most under threat—to call it what it is and then take steps to counter it. Effectively countering it, though, necessitates dealing with it as it is, not as what we wish it were. Many of us resist seeing others in such starkly unflattering light. We tell ourselves there must be deeper causes, more complex meanings, that it can’t be that base and simple. Well, the circumstances in which this thrives are deeper and more complex, certainly, but the people rushing to cheer on the evil clown are not. They have lived by stereotypes and clichés—such things have allowed them to feel good about themselves in their immediate surroundings—and they want their government to tell them they have been right about all that.

And then…there are those who know perfectly well what this is and are willing to take advantage of the chaos to gain power and/or profit. They aren’t at the town halls cheering. They are watching and checking their ledgers and waiting for the rest of us to do nothing.

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…And In Other News

A new look.

I know, important things happened, yesterday, today (someone got fired) but here is mine. New website.

Today is the release date for my new novel, Granger’s Crossing, and I feel like being symbolic. There are things I’ve wanted my website to do for a long time and never got around to actually figuring it out. Well, I didn’t this time, either. I must give a tip of the hat to Danielle, who has done this, and will from time to time help me tweak it to make it even more…what I want it to be.

With this book, I’m stepping outside my usual comfort zone. Historical fiction. Oh, I intend to continue doing science fiction, I love it too much, and the last couple of years have seen a renewed presence of my short fiction. But I’m excited about the possibilities going forward.

In time there will be better access to my photography as well. And maybe some other things will pop up. There’s sorting to do.

But in the meantime, please—treat yourself to my new novel. I’m already working on the next one.

Welcome to the new digs.

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New Stuff

So I had to replace my old phone. I am still a bit ambivalent about cell phones and I remain nonplussed at the gismos and gadgets (otherwise known as apps) available and the possibilities, but I now can’t really get along well without one, so…

I bit the bullet and bought a high end. One of the things I was always disappointed with my old one was the camera. I’m a photographer. I have standards. I suppose I could have learned to work with it eventually, but it never inspired me.

This one, though…

I went for a walk the other day and did a few images and played with them. I’d like to share. I’m more than slightly pleased with these.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Eyes Open, Mind Engaged

To me, that is the definition of Woke. I’ve been bemused by the backlash of people who, without too much interpretation, are obviously complaining about something else loudly hurling “Woke!” as if it is a pejorative. It’s not that they have a legitimate argument, it is that they are discomfited by the implications and wish to go back to pretending there is nothing to be woke to. It’s not even subtle.

Consider one of the consequences of the backlash—the attempt to ban books. Now, this is nothing new. Banning books that unsettle the comfortable is a long American tradition, quite often less political than the kindred forms of censorship practiced elsewhere. We don’t usually protest books here because of political ideology so much as out of a reflexive defensiveness of cherished myths. Some of these are family stories left unquestioned for generations, some of them are the kind of origin stories surrounding the establishment of this or that institution. In most cases, people have embraced these stories and incorporated them into their sense of self, their identity, and when the story is challenged, their apprehension of Who They Are is called into question.

Somewhere along the way the practice of review has either been abandoned or was never inculcated. It comes as a shock that perhaps they should never have accepted uncritically all the things they were fed as children.

But I suspect the most violent reactions are coming from those who perhaps sense the truth beneath the myth and simply do not want to accept it. They do not want to feel responsible. Maybe their concept of a Good Life depends on those myths. Whatever.

Once, in conversation with acquaintances who were very proudly Catholic, the question was raised (by them) “just what was the Reformation all about?” I took it at face value and said, “Many things, but the trigger was over Indulgences.” “What are those?” When I explained what a Plenary Indulgence was, they regarded me with the blank expressions of the never-before-informed. They didn’t believe me. I had to be misinformed. Why would the Church do that? Why would people believe these things would work?

The facts opened a shelf-full of cans of worms that required a profound revision in their understanding of the institution in which they had invested a great deal. Delving into all that threatened their sense of well-being in their self-identification as Catholics. The fact that, as members of that institution, they not only did not know about significant parts of Church history but strenuously did not want to know, dismayed and saddened me, but it served as a good example as the kind of mindset we encounter in those most stridently condemning Woke-ism.

But I have rarely seen a clearer example of “getting it wrong” than this. It is sharper, more clearly delineated, than its predecessor, the rejection of so-called Political Correctness, which was also misunderstood, mostly by those who simply did not want their assumptions about history and culture and politics and personal identity called into question. They did not want to be reminded, held to account, called on the carpet, or simply be required to do the work of realignment necessitated by an acceptance of realities not in evidence in their own lives.  Political Correctness devolved at times into a game of constantly revising what things were called. That, of course, should have been merely a consequence of revising our understanding of relationships, taking into account the realities of others, but that’s complicated and tedious and hard and for people who never internalized actual learning but skidded by on doing well on tests and knowing how to interview successfully and going along with those in power just to get along, it was a slog and often resulted in long periods of just feeling like eggshells were everywhere in their path.

Woke—and, more to the point, being Anti-Woke—is less ambiguous. Woke is a requirement to not privilege ignorance over reality and Anti-Woke is a demand to enshrine specific kinds of ignorance in order to maintain privileged conditions. Every time someone stands up and opposes being Woke, I hear someone insisting on being callous and stupid.

Except for those in leadership positions. They are not stupid. Callous, certainly, but not stupid. (Clever, but not very intelligent.) They know their audience. They’re just venal. In order to attain power, they’re playing their supporters for saps.

The more you know, the more you can know. The more you can know, the less power demagogues can wield over you. The less power they have, the freer you are. The freer you are, the less you have to fear.

So wake up.

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Have I Mentioned…?

Did I mention I have a new book? It launches in April, the 25th to be exact, and I’d like to tell you something about.

Granger’s Crossing is a departure for me. At least, at first glance. After decades of writing and publishing science fiction, I took a shot at historical fiction.  In fact, this novel came directly out of another project, which was science fiction.

Quite some time ago I had an idea for an alternate history. I poked around for a good departure point and settled on the Louisiana Purchase. What if, I asked, it had never happened? What if Napoleon had never sold it to the United States? What if the continent had remained divided between France and the United States at the Mississippi?

After digging around I found what I considered a reasonable justification for this scenario and then went on to flesh out the novel, which took me in some fascinating directions.

One thing it gave me was more than a passing appreciation of early St. Louis history. After completing the first novel, I thought (quite arrogantly) hey, I could probably write a halfway decent historical novel.

On such unexamined assumptions surprising things are born.

This is NOT the alternate history. This one is the historical, though that doesn’t mean it is any less speculative.

One of the most under-attended periods of American history seems to be the Revolutionary War in the West. The eastern seaboard draws all our attention. That, after all, is where all the myth-making occurred—Philadelphia, Boston, New York, the Chesapeake, Baltimore. The prominent names are all  there—Washington, Hamilton, Greene. The West seems less important, but the Mississippi River was important and the proximity of Spanish Territory played into strategic equations more than is taught in the average high school history class. 

Even in my home I was surprised at how few people knew there had been a major battle. 

Looking into it led me into a deeper exploration of that whole period of St. Louis history and the shape of a story began to coalesce. 

I have never understood the general indifference toward history, particularly among people who otherwise love good stories. Pick up a volume of history and give it more than a little attention, and stories are everywhere. 

In constructing the plot for Granger’s Crossing, I found a cast of characters almost begging for attention. I had no shortage of actual people living in St. Louis at the time to fill out the substance and flavor of the village. 

At some point in the alchemical process of creating fiction, my hero, Ulysses Granger, took form. Step by step, I found cause for him to be there. I felt comfortable using a murder mystery template, at least to start the action, and once I found The Body, the plot began to take on a life of its own.

Given the circumstances—the Battle of St. Louis, known then as L’Annee du coup, in 1780—I had to establish a reason for my Continental soldier to either stay or return to St. Louis, which led to further research. The issues around the rivers at the time and the various interests involved, American, Spanish, French, British, provided the canvas on which to depict my characters, their motives, the challenges. 

Somewhat to my surprise, the world of young Ulysses Granger took on the familiar attractions of the worlds I had explored in my science fiction. In that, I find historical fiction mirrored by science fiction. In a way, both are history and both require an attention to detail and an ability to imagine displacements from the present. Halfway into the writing, it felt familiar, at least in the sense of examining places and people wholly unfamiliar to me.

(One of the curious things I found is that of all the things one might expect the “Americans” to have brought to the region, the one thing they did provide was record-keeping. A lot of it, although most of it appears to be a byproduct of, essentially, title searches.)

This is exciting. This is one of the chief pleasures of fiction, the chance to see life through eyes other than our own. This is a culture we can only assume to be familiar, but really it is in many ways quite alien and in that quite exotic. 

It took a few years to get this “right,” and by right I mean a satisfying narrative experience. Finding the beginning histories of my home town proved a delight and a pleasure. You can look at this place, where cultures met and intermingled in curious ways, and wonder how we came to be. As the population changed due to immigration and the long-distance decisions by powers not present on the ground, I found this period a kind of oasis in time, a singular setting for an evolving identity. Granger himself is very much an outsider, giving him a vantage point from which to see St. Louis as an observer. Though with Martine, the woman who takes center stage in his life, he is more intimately connected. 

It will be interesting (to me and hopefully others) to see how Granger changes at time goes on. Yes, that means I have more stories about him to tell.

I am delighted that Blank Slate Press is publishing the novel. Their enthusiasm has been infectious. My thanks to them all.

The official release date in April 25th. There will be a bookstore event at Left Bank Books in St. Louis. Call them for details (314-367-6731) and please consider attending.

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Revisiting

Nostalgia can be a narcotic. Lately I’ve been going through the accumulated evidence of 50 + years and wondering why I kept it even as each bit triggers memories I’m glad to have. Do I really need this gew-gaw? This piece of paper? This book or album? Part of me can’t bear to part with any  of it, but the practical side of me is starting to sort and allocate in anticipation of the time I just have no more room, no more interest, and no further use. I’m already cutting back on acquiring more. I have enough music on my shelves to last another couple of decades, by which time I could start all over. I don’t need any more. I’m trying to figure out how to arrange my days so I can hear more of it. As for books, well, good lord…

But getting rid of it?

I go through periods of expunging my belongings, making the hard decision that I will probably never read that book (again or even once), that I haven’t listened to that album in 30 years, so why do I still have it. I’m starting to be worried about my photographic archives, which are sizeable and I haven’t made much of a dent in digitizing them (too many other things to do getting in the way, time is finite, and so forth). Recently some opportunities have presented themselves that have taken a little pressure off.

The thing is, I’ve never been able to ignore the practicalities for any length of time and pretend everything will simply go on as it is now. I’ve always known I had to prepare for the time when I won’t be here.

Does that sound depressing? It’s not, I assure you. Better, I think, to know where everything’s going to be and manage to have less of it to deal with than leave a godawful mess behind for somebody else to clean up.

There are two writing projects I have on backburners for which I have a lot of research material to hand. One of them is actually written, but I haven’t found a publisher yet. The other I have to find some time to start. I have very practical reasons therefore for keeping all those books. Believe me, I would like to get them off my shelves, many of them are not the kinds of books I would bother to reread for pleasure.

But I have other sets of books about subjects that I have vague notions about using for future projects, and I’m wondering if I’m ever going to get to them. (As I sit here, I can look up at a row of biographies of American presidents. I had a notion once of reading through them chronologically, but I haven’t read a one of them yet, and I stopped collecting them. It’s not that I don’t know anything about these people, but what I have learned I gleaned from histories of the periods, not specific biographies. Am I ever going to get to them?) Part of my conundrum is that I do not read particularly fast. I have the Oxford Histories of the United States on another shelf, each volume covering a specific period and each one a brick. Reading one can take up to a month of my time. (Fortunately I’m usually able to keep four books going simultaneously, but even so…)

And then of course there’s the music and the movies and tv series…

I have a hunger to absorb as much as I can. I never thought about this for years, because there was always more time, but.

Nostalgia combined with dissatisfaction can be genuinely painful.

There was a time I thought—carelessly—that I could do anything. You can go through life thinking that as long as the things you do do are successful. If you never turn your attention to the rest, you’re never confronted with your actual limitations.

But once you are, you have some choices to make. Howl at the injustice, turn inward, resent the short span of life and the confines of your imagination, or—

Or take inventory, acknowledge reality, and embrace what you can. You might be surprised at just how fortunate you have been to do, be, and experience what you have. And that taking life as it comes without worrying about what won’t come leaves you with an open field for the next wonderful thing.

Clearing one’s inventory can make the coming experiences fresher. That whole Zen notion of letting go (more or less) and letting the past remain the past. There is one central question I’ve found useful to ask and answer, providing we don’t take it as some kind of final judgment.

Have we done what we’ve done as well as we could?

Certainly we’ve all left some things twisting in the wind. All kinds of reasons to walk away or, often, we are prevented from seeing something through to some ideal conclusion. But in the moment, did we do the best we could, honestly, and with care? All those things you wonder if you should keep—none of it has an answer other than to remind us of the question.

I’m not advising complete divestment. I love my books, my music, my home, my things. But certain of them I love more and maybe would appreciate better with less competition around them. Many of us use our possessions as markers, extensions of identity, augments to personality. That’s why getting rid of some things is so hard. But it’s not an accurate way to see things. They do not make us more, we make them important. It behooves us to choose carefully what we invest with that kind of authority.

Anyway, it is not my intention to be maudlin. I’m just ruminating n the midst of the archaeological dig of my life to date, and thought I’d share some observations. I’m going to go work on some fiction now.

Oh, and—yes, I think I’ve done what I’ve done as well as I could. To paraphrase Arthur Miller, I’m going with the idea that the goal is end up with the right regrets, the worthwhile second thoughts. Those would be those that add to the achievements not bury you in pointless nostalgia.

Anyway, be well.

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Year One

A year plus since retirement. October, 2021, I left the regular work-world. It was a harder decision than anyone knew, even me. I’d certainly given myself enough advanced notice, letting my employer know eight or so months in advance. Plenty of time to train replacements, let people get used to the idea. Even me.

Now it’s December of ’22 and I wonder at the time.

I’m sure most people have plans. Plans. “I’m going to do—.” Sure. And then reality swallows everything and what happens happens and maybe some of those plans survive. I’m looking around an office I had every intention of thoroughly cleaning, rearranging, and updating. Well, the piles are in slightly different places, and some of them are different piles than before, but in the main it doesn’t look like I’ve done a thing.

The same goes for the rest of the basement. Attempts have been made, but frankly I need a month in which nothing else makes demands on my attention.

I have, however, managed to clear some dust off my career (writing) and make some headway in getting it back on track. After my novel-writing period more or less crashed and burned, I finally decided to turn back to short fiction, and to my pleasant surprise things picked up. I’ve written and sold a score of new stories. And now I have a new novel coming out in the spring. (Not science fiction, which is a bit of a surprise, though very welcome. More about that later.) In recent weeks a few things have occurred to give me hope that matters will turn around even more. Allow me to leave that vague for the time being.

I include as an element of any advice I dispense to want-to-be writers that of paramount importance for a career is Persistence. Just showing up is inestimably vital. You cannot succeed if you quit. Persistence does not guarantee success, but surrender pretty much guarantees no success. I’m now of the opinion that this is a matter of playing in traffic. Put yourself out there, in the flow, and eventually something will hit you. Not the most coherent plan, but with few exceptions the one most of us are able to act on.

The thing I did not count on is the fading of desire. I remember the fire, the urgency, the firestorm of optimism, and the excitement at the creation of new work. The impatience with the molasses progress of execution. Why should it take so long to get these words down in the right order? Why did everything take so long…

And now, forty years after making the decision to pursue this thing, that burning eagerness has lessened. I’ve become a bit jaded and quite tired. Partly this is a kind of maturity that counsels me to use myself more efficiently, that the fire never added much to achievement. It still takes so much time to write something, to edit it, to shepherd it through the stages of getting it out into the world, and that now it seems to take the same amount of time as it did when in the grip of the fever. Calmer impulses marshal resources to better effect. 

But more than that, I simply don’t suffer from disappointment and disillusion as much. Rejections still hurt, but not as much, and there’s a muffling kind of acceptance that seems therapeutic now. If it will happen, fine, I can only work the machine the best I know how and wait.

I wonder if this is not just the result of callouses grown thicker and that I’m missing out on something that I once felt to be so significant, possibly even the point.

Still, I’m working. I believe I’m writing better than ever, the work that goes out is better. My impatience is the only thing that seems lacking.

And then there is the rest of life…

I’ve begun reading philosophy again. Once upon a time, I was a casual admirer of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I appreciated some of his approaches to what was known as Logical Positivism, part of the Analytical School of modern philosophy. Primarily, it was his (quite arrogant) thesis that all of philosophy’s “problems” stemmed from misapprehension and misconstruals of language. That if we just figured out how to be absolutely clear, we would understand. Granted, he realized later how simplistic this claim was and embarked on a deeper analysis of language structures and their application to questions of the real. 

I have believed for some time that science fiction is at base the most philosophical of literary endeavors, that the primary assumptions in most of it have no relevance outside an attempt at understanding the nature of reality in a unique way that emerges in the array of speculative presentations against which human struggle might be understood in evolutionary terms. In a way, the very idea of The Future has no actual meaning outside a philosophical framework. The best we can say is that something will follow the Now in which we exist. We call that the Future, but it has no material reality that we can examine. By the time there is something to examine, it is no longer The Future, and from our position Now we can only make assumptions about the Future because Now is the Future of a Past we can cite.

That is the exact sort of proposition that one would find in a good piece of science fiction. It is also the sort of thing that informs philosophical propositions.

It relates here, now, in this, because the day I retired I had a speculative framework of what my Future would be like. Ambitions, desires, expectations. (If you think about, life is a science fiction story.)

I haven’t attended to philosophy as such for some time now. It would be fun to get together a group (again) for regular discussions. The last several years have in so many ways challenged common agreements on causality, truth, and commonality itself, and it seems the only sane responses are either to yield to the impossibility of ordering the conceptions of the world (insanity) or work at better understanding in order to create conceptions that reduce the chaos. Ultimately we can only control our own reactions. 

Some of this, for me, comes from having reached a strange place in relation to those past ambitions. I am in many ways more comfortable in my own skin than I have ever been, but at the same time I recognize the world around me as a place I do not know how I found. I’m reading older books, my indulgence in history has increased, and yet I still revel in the new voices I encounter, even while the names on the spines fail to spark the kind of thrill I once had regularly seeing a new work by an author with whom I was familiar. I can see clearly how nostalgia can become a trap, one we may not wish to escape. The familiar has such gravity, increasing year by year, distorting our path.

It’s Christmas weekend. The landscape is punctured by rabbit holes. The people you surround yourself with (and who are likewise surrounded by you) are the only guidons to keep you on the solid plane of vital connections. The deep structures of reality (of perceptions) are anchors to a world navigable to the betterment of the soul. The hypotheses of conspiracy wonks are less than the shadows on Socrates’ cave wall. (I will not call them conspiracy theories—that elevates them above their utility and lends credibility where none exists—but at best hypotheses, at worst con games designed to distract from actual living.) I am still with my partner of over 42 years. Snow fell yesterday. The sun is bright today. I’m listening to some very good music (late period Herb Alpert, if you care to know—he seems to have left behind the heavy reliance on “catchy” tunes and clever hooks that made him so popular in the 60s but he is still one of the cleanest horn players around) and I have the capacity to speculate on matters of moment. The trick is to identify what matters.

Wittgenstein, as I noted, asserted that we need find the clearest way to express ourselves in order to “solve” the problems of philosophy. I have no real quarrel with that idea—after all, I’m a writer, story aside my work consists of trying to find clearer ways to say things that might lead to truth—but I would only add that life does not have A Solution. Living is a process, an evolving set of realignments, relocations, and above all recognitions (re-cognitions). There is no single answer, only the ongoing encounter and construction of an imagination that renders chaos meaningful.

Starting on that path can be as simple a thing as cleaning up one’s office. 

blog

Election

Next week it will be November. Election season.

Voting is already underway and by some reports it is more than tradition would suggest. A great deal is at stake.

I don’t have much to say here. Only that the issue this time around has little to do with what we have come to engage as normal. I do not believe it hyperbolic to suggest that our very way of living is at stake and that voting for narrow interests might be a mistake. The economy will not be fixed by splenetically throwing the majority party out of office. We’re in a fix due to factors beyond the ordinary—a pandemic, a major war in the east, and the aftershocks of certain trade decisions that were not well thought through. It will take time and the appropriate institutions are working on that, mainly the Federal Reserve. The president has little to do with it. Congress can only adjust taxes and approve spending bills. On that note, I think it is clear by now, or should be, that the previous few decades of trying to tax-cut our way out of slumps does not work the way we wish it would. Giving more money to corporations or the wealthy has not worked. Britain is dealing with that in a major way now and they are drowning in the backlash.

We are instead facing an election which will determine how all future elections may be conducted. Those who have decided to push the fallacy that the last election was stolen are allied with state factions that seek to limit who can vote. Spin it any way you want, that’s what it amounts to. We need a national voting law that will override such local attempts and we know that the GOP is not about to back that.

We’re facing an election which may impact what going forward will pass as “legitimate” history, and we know where one faction stands on that because of the books they keep trying to ban and the straitjackets they keep trying to wrap school boards in.

We’re facing an election that may set the stage for the rollback of hardwon rights for minorities and marginalized people, rights that have been mischaracterized as harmful to our civilization. Damned if I can see how. The expansion of rights has marked every period of growth and revivification in our history.

We’re facing an election which will signal whether or not equality has any chance of being the hallmark of our country.

For my part, until the Republican Party begins to repudiate the people and policies exemplified by people like Ron DeSantis, Marjorie Taylor Green, Trump and all the rest of the MAGA horde, they will not get my vote. They have been on the wrong side of history for decades. But that assessment aside, the last few years they have moved legislatively and judicially in such ways that people I know—friends, colleagues—have been put at risk, personally, all in the name of supporting a panic-driven creed of intolerance and powermongering.

I don’t care this time how bad the economy might be (it is such a mixed bag, I’m not sure it is bad, just expensive, which for some people may be the same thing), there’s no point in my mind having prosperity if people cannot live without fear.

Vote against the systemic intolerance of those who would have you believe that being Woke is a bad thing.