Hawking Up Hairballs

Where You Been, Chuck?

2010-08-11T05:44:00.002-04:00

Call me lazy. Better though to call it a hiatus, but I haven't been here for a while. I haven't got a real excuse. I just didn't feel like messing with it, and I don't know how consistent I will be in the future, but I got tired of bitching and moaning about the state of the world, of the economy, etc. I think I'll refrain from that in the future, though I've said that before.

I thought I might pass along a couple of writing exercises that I ran across in a book entitled, "Naming The World". This book consists of a series of exercises for the creative writer. These exercises have mainly been contributed by writers and teaches of creative writing in universities.

One thing that struck me as I perused the book was just how different writers can be. There's a tendency to think that the creative process is pretty much the same for everyone. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, I remember hearing an interview with Richard Powers. He was talking about how he had written his latest novel with speech recognition software. In other words, he had spoken into a microphone, and his software had converted it into type in his word processing program. He felt that it was more natural to compose his novel that way. I believe him, but with this reservation. It's more natural for him, but not necessarily for others.

I could never write like that. I'm too much of a brooder when it comes to writing. I have to put down some ideas, impressions, metaphors, etc. on the page before I even think in terms of phrases, and sentences, not to mention whole paragraphs. Only then do I type it out in my word processor. I do read my work out loud after having composed it, in order to get a sense of the music of my language, but that's at the end of the process. Like I suggested above, it's different strokes and all that.

There were a couple of exercises in "Naming The World" that intrigued me. The first one suggested listing all of the things that a character touched, handled, or used in a story or novel, this by way of coming to a greater understanding of the character. I'll have to try that. I don't know if it will work for me, but I'll see. It makes sense though. We are what we do, and the same goes for fictional characters. Doing means using or handling objects, so the objects that the character interacts with should give me some insights into the character.

The second exercise was a suggestion on how to write the dialog of non-native speakers of English. Take a number of English sentences and translate them into the character's native language using something like Google's translate function. Then, take the resulting sentences, and retranslate them into English. (You have to actually retype the resulting sentences. If you click the button that translates it back, you just get your original copy.) You will find some awkward constructions showing up, and it is just those awkward constructions that non-native speakers will tend to use. I tried a few sentences, and it seemed to work. Unfortunately for the purposes of this exercise, these translation functions keep getting better and better, and those awkward constructions are bound to disappear over time.

Sometimes The Truth

2010-04-01T06:59:00.000-04:00

“'We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,' said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who became the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan last year. His comments came during a recent videoconference to answer questions from troops in the field about civilian casualties.”

The above comes from an article in the March 27 edition of the NY Times. As some have pointed out, that amounts to a de facto admission of war crimes. Not that anything will ever come of it. In a better country, in better times, the public would be outraged that its military engaged in such practices, but not now, not in the age of the American imperium.

A Nation of Nut Bags?

2010-03-31T09:49:00.002-04:00

We're a nation of nut bags. How else to explain numbers like these. A Harris poll taken between March first and eighth came up with this little gem. 14% of those surveyed think that Barack Obama is the Antichrist. That's right, the Antichrist. Now, I have no use for Obama. Like all but a handful of high office holders these days, he's a tool of the oligarchs, but come on. I find it hard to credit that 14% of people even believe in a mythical figure like the Antichrist, and that's the 14% who don't like Obama. I'm sure there are also those who support him who also believe in this boogeyman.

Here's some other numbers from the same poll that are equally mind-boggling. 32% of respondents said Obama is Muslim, 29% said he wants to turn sovereignty over to one world government, and 25% said he wasn't born in the USA and wasn't a citizen. These sorts of things are just plain denials of fact. Maybe we should go ahead and change the name of the country to something like the Disney States of America. We could get Bruce Springsteen to sing, “Born in the DSA” and replace the bald eagle as national symbol with Mickey Mouse.

As Chris Hedges points out in his excellent book Empire of Illusion, we Americans are the most deluded people on the planet. Given the power of modern media, particularly television, we're probably the most deluded people ever. Quite a distinction, that.

Speaking of Chris Hedges, he feels that we're a people who are yearning for fascism. Here's a link to an article where he talks about it. I'd say it's a must-read.
http://www.alternet.org/news/146226/hedges%3A_is_america_yearning_for_fascism

The Health Care Bill

2010-03-23T07:10:00.001-04:00

So, the health care bill has passed, and I suppose there are those of a liberal persuasion who are celebrating. Just what they are celebrating, I can't say. It's in the executive suites of the insurance industry that the champagne corks are really popping. They pretty much got everything they wanted in the bill.

This health care bill represents a massive transfer of wealth from the besieged middle class to the insurance companies. Here's what I mean. For a family making $66,000 a year, annual premiums will amount to more than $8,000 a year. In addition, they will be responsible for over $5800 in out of pocket expenses a year before the benefits kick in. Some coverage that is. It means that there will be people who won't be able to afford to use their health insurance because of those out of pocket expenses.

Some might say that this is a first step. Apparently, the likes of Paul Krugman believes that, but I see no evidence of it. If anything, experience teaches us otherwise. Take the prescription drug insurance for those on Medicare. As one who is availing himself of it, I have to say that it is wholly inadequate. It saves you some money on prescriptions, but not much. At the time it was being discussed in Congress, organizations that claimed to advocate for older citizens, organizations like AARP, supported the bill. When criticized, they said that they were getting behind it because it was a first step. I won't be holding my breath until that second step comes. The same goes for this health care bill. It's the one we're stuck with for at least a generation.

There are a few sops for the public in the bill, but the benefits that come from them are illusory. For example, insurance companies will be prohibited from dropping individuals when they become sick. However, the bill does not empower any regulatory body to enforce this provision of the bill. What then is to stop the insurance companies from ignoring it?

The fact is that, to quote the site that I'm linking to below, “This bill is almost identical to the plan written by AHIP, the insurance company trade association, in 2009.” So, with President Obama and his changes, it seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The wealthy and powerful continue to wage their class war against the rest of us, and more and more wealth is still being transferred upward.

Here's a link to myths about the health care bill. http://www.scribd.com/doc/28632876/Fire-Dog-Lake-Health-Care-Bill-Myths

Factotum

2010-03-03T06:30:00.001-05:00

The other day, I watched the movie Factotum on the Independent Film Channel. It's based upon the Charles Bukowski novel by the same name. It wasn't much of a movie. The protagonist, Henry Chinaski, bounces from one shitty job to the next. He never keeps any of them for long. He gets fired from each and every one of them, either because he gets fed up and tells the boss to fuck off, or because he goes on a drunken binge and starts missing work. The story's a grim one, and the movie's failure to fully commit to that view of the world is one of its big weaknesses.

Matt Dillon plays Chinaski, and he tries his best. It's obvious that he's done his research. He's got the same way of speaking that Bukowski had, and the same way of holding himself, but that's not enough. In Bukowski's books, the Chinaski character is so down and out that he is beyond despair, and he just doesn't care anymore. Dillon fails to communicate that, probably because it's not something he's ever been familiar with. Then there's the casting problem. Dillon is too much of a pretty boy. Like Bukowski himself, Chinaski is ugly. They should have chosen an actor with more of a downtrodden manner.

As for Bukowski himself, I would argue that he was the last of the Beats. He's of a different generation from guys like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, but the literary project is the same. Not only that, I would also maintain that Bukowski's work represents the deadend of Beat romanticism. What happens if you devote yourself completely to writing, refuse to compromise, and hang with it no matter what? If you're lucky, and you have to be damned lucky, you'll have some success and find a way to earn a living on your writing. If you aren't lucky, you'll end up like Chinaski, leading a skid row sort of life as you bounce from one soul-sucking job to the other. Bukowski saw this too, and embraced it, though he was one of the fortunate ones in the end. In the closing scene, Chinaski talks about how you have to give yourself over to writing, and keep on with it no matter what, even if you end up on the streets, sleeping on park benches. That's a hard road to walk but Bukowski was a man who was prepared to walk it. That's what separates him from his imitators.

An Update

2010-02-22T15:21:00.001-05:00

No requests for my manuscript as a result of that first chapter. What kind of conclusion should I draw from that? Not much of one really, since few people read this blog, and I know that to be a fact because hits are monitored by Sitemeter.

It doesn't help that I go for long stretches of time without posting. If you want to build up a readership on these things, you pretty much have to post every day. However, this time I have a good excuse. I've been making pretty good progress on my new novel whose working title is “Getting What You Need”, and I'm pretty well written out for the day after putting in time on the novel.

I've decided to stay away from political posts as such. There's nothing positive that I can think of to say, and other sites do a much better job of making the points that I would like to. On that note, I'm linking to a piece on the Smirking Chimp web site. I really like it, and there's very little in it that I don't agree with.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/26932

Buster Bungle's Big Top

2010-02-03T18:14:00.001-05:00

I'm posting the first chapter of my novel, “Buster Bungle's Big Top”. Who knows, maybe someone who's an agent or is associated with a publisher will stumble upon it and request the manuscript. Stranger things have happened.

The Hellcat was a big, fire-engine red bike that was built for speed. Neal Bobwhite was bent down over its handlebars pushing it to a hundred miles an hour in the HOV lane of the expressway. He leaned into the left turn ahead and cursed when he blew by the highway patrol car that was parked hard up against the concrete barrier that ran down the middle of the highway. Neal shot on over to the rightmost lane and slowed to the speed limit as he took the first exit. He glanced into the rearview mirror, but the cruiser wasn’t following. They rarely did. The bike was too fast and maneuverable.

He turned onto a four-lane street in a rough neighborhood, but it was a neighborhood that he recognized. He had lived there as a small boy, back before his mother had remarried. The Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise on the first corner had been one of his favorite places to eat, but it was now a rib joint called Daddy D’s. The McDonald’s wasn’t new, but the Checkers was. Another block down, a check-cashing business advertised payday and title loans. It occupied the yellow-brick building where his mother had worked as a receptionist for an insurance agency. Neal could remember the way the women who had worked there had doted on him, stuffing him with cookies, candy, and cake.

Just ahead, a homeless man was sprawled face down on the sidewalk. The way he lay, he seemed broken, as though he had fallen from a great height. Another unkempt man was bent over him. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then eased a half-empty pint of whiskey from the pocket of the unconscious man’s pants. As Neal rode past, the man held the bottle up in front of him and grinned like he’d hit the Cash 3 in the lottery.

Neal slowed for a light and came to a stop. On the right was a convenience store that Neal had known as a Seven Eleven. It was now called H&H, and it had become the kind of place where the cashier had to work behind bulletproof glass. Neal could recall going there to buy bottles of Coca-Cola and small bags of peanuts back when he was a boy. He’d pour the nuts into the bottle with the Coke. They would float to the top, and he would eat one or two with each sip that he took.

An emaciated, white woman was out in front of the store talking to the young, black men who were in the tricked-out, yellow SUV that was parked there. Her hair was a tangled mass of greasy, blonde curls, and she had on a tattered dress of the sort that might once have been worn in a wedding, though it was now dirty, gray, and ripped. The men in the SUV were having fun with her, teasing and taunting as though she were witless or mad. She reeled away from them, throwing a hand in disgust.
She was so frail and wasted that she looked like she might just collapse to the asphalt and expire, but then she saw Neal staring at her, and she drew herself up into a sober posture while smoothing the dress against her body. The light had changed, but Neal had pulled over to the curb. He didn’t know why, but she had something to say, and he wanted to see what it would be. He lifted the visor of his motorcycle helmet.

“You wanna party?” she asked.

Her eyes were bloodshot and her cheeks sunken. Her skin had a pallid cast, and her breath was so foul that it smelled as though she were rotting from the inside out.

“Here? On my motorcycle?”

She flung a skinny arm toward the intersecting street. “There’s a park up there.”

“I don’t think so, not today.”

She licked her top lip and her eyes lost their focus. She swooned momentarily, then caught herself before falling. “Maybe you can let me hold ten dollars.”

“So you can get something to eat?”

“I need me something to eat,” she said.

She wouldn’t eat. She’d buy dope instead, and Neal wasn’t going to give her a ten for that, but then he looked her over again. Who the hell was he to judge? His parents would have scorned the woman. That right there was reason enough to give her the money. If she used it to buy dope, then so be it. He pulled his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans. He didn’t have a ten, so he took out a twenty. She snatched it from his hand as though she were afraid that he would change his mind about giving it to her.

“Are you sure you don’t want to party?” she asked. “I could give you a BJ.”

“No, just keep the money.”

She nodded, though it seemed more like she’d just let her head fall. When she brought it up again, she raised her arm and pointed it in the direction he was traveling. “Are you going down there?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“No, no, no,” she said, throwing her head from side to side. “You don’t wanna do that. That’s where the devil cats are.” She leaned closer, her foul exhalations making Neal breathe through his mouth. “You should hear them at night. They’ll steal your soul away.”

“Steal my soul, huh?”

“And they won’t give it back.”

With that she was gone, waving wildly to someone in a car that was behind him. Neal dropped his visor and engaged the transmission. The light had changed, so he let a few cars pass, then shot out into traffic in front of a semi that was downshifting to grind up the rise ahead. Neal topped the slope and descended into to what had once been a hollow, and a dark one at that, judging by the stand of pines that still shadowed the land on the right. To the left a circus had been set up between a supermarket and a strip mall. The mall was unfamiliar, but Neal remembered the supermarket as a Winn-Dixie, though it now bore the name of ValuCheck. A row of paper signs in its display windows advertised collard greens, pork chops, corn on the cob, and ground beef.

Neal slowed to read the sign that hung from the motor home that was parked out in front of the circus, but the semi behind him was building up speed as it came downhill, and the driver let him have it with his horn. Neal popped the throttle and the Hellcat jumped ahead, shooting across the oncoming traffic and into the strip mall.

Neal parked, and got off of his bike. The circus was a shabby affair. There was a one-pole tent with a short vestibule extending out from the entrance. Its broad, red-and-white stripes had weathered to ugly shades of pink and gray. The battered motor home from which the sign hung apparently served as the ticket office. On the far side of the lot were a ferris wheel and a merry-go-round. Both had seen better days. A couple of the wheel’s spokes were bent, and overall it looked so rickety that it might well collapse the next time it was started up. The merry-go-round was tilted to one side, and the whole thing just seemed to sag, as though it had succumbed to gravity and would never move again.

Only now that he had stopped did Neal realize just how brutally hot it really was. He took off his helmet and shook his head. Beads of sweat flew from his brush cut. He ran a hand over the top of his head, then put the helmet down on the seat of the bike. His pulse was pounding at his temples, and he needed a cold drink, but first he wanted to see that sign, so he walked on over for a look.

“Buster Bungle’s Big Top” ran along the top of the sign in black, block letters. In a smaller cursive below was another line, “Featuring Selena Sable and Her Cats”. This Selena had been rendered beneath in a top hat, tails, fishnet stockings, and knee-high boots. Her hands were in the air in the manner of a choir leader conducting her singers. Three black cats in a row were leaping over her outstretched arms. The technique was crude, like some cartoonist’s version of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Selena’s legs were too long, her arms too short, and the features of her face distorted. The cats had been portrayed in primitive and abstract fashion, like stylized Sumerian lions on a stone wall.

Devil cats, huh? They were probably toothless relics that were too old for a real circus, and that Selena was undoubtedly some old hag who was just hanging onto a performing career as best she could. Neal turned from the sign and cursed himself for a fool. It was time to get home, and into the pool.

He paused to stare up into the sky, where the sun was beating down on him like a hammer on red-hot metal. Maybe he hadn’t been drinking enough fluids. It could have been a bug or a virus. Whatever it was, the pulse was still pounding in his temples, and he suddenly felt lightheaded as he walked back to his bike. He was telling himself that he needed to stop for that cold drink when, all of a sudden, a loud boom came from out of the sky. He jerked and went all to jelly inside. His arms and legs shook like the limbs of a tree in a gale. He sank to his knees and then, as his head began to spin, went down on all fours.

The next thing he knew, he was staring down at the red clay beneath him. There was vomitus on the ground between his hands. He grimaced at the sight of it, and spit as he tried to expel the taste of it from his mouth. What the fuck had that been all about? He rose up onto his knees and took a deep breath, then climbed back up onto shaky feet. Shielding his eyes with his hand, he peered up into the sky again. He saw a few puffy, white clouds, but nothing that could have caused a lightning strike. His eyes went back to the circus. He brushed the red clay dust from the knees of his jeans, then peered into the sky one last time. He was no epileptic, so it had to have been lightning. He’d heard of it striking from a clear, blue sky. Though he was still unsteady, he walked briskly back to his bike.

More On Agent Queries

2010-02-02T03:45:00.001-05:00

I sent out several more agent queries last night. Here's how it works. A site called Preditors & Editors has a listing of agents. There are quite literally hundreds of them. A very small number of them are specifically recommended by the site. Another small number are blackmarked. A few of these blackmarked agents are out and out crooks. A couple of them are even under prosecution for fraud. Most just engage in unethical, but not illegal, practices. The biggest one consists of charging a reading fee for reading your manuscript. No legitimate agent will do that.

That still leaves hundreds of agents to consider, the overwhelming majority of which the site is neutral about, so I write down the names of forty or fifty and start searching for them on Google. If they don't have a web site, I don't bother with them. That eliminates a lot, though most of those who don't have web sites are no longer in the business or are agent wannabees who are operating out of their homes. At the end of it all, I'll end up with anywhere from a couple to a half dozen to whom I will email a query. The actual emailing is the easy part. It only takes a couple of minutes.

Pretty much all of the agents want the same sort of information in your query. However, they all seem to want it in a slightly different format. Maybe I'm hurting my chances of acceptance, but I refuse to compose a different letter for each agent I query. They all get the same one.

One agent's site pretty much gave the game away. It had a FAQ and one of the questions there asked what made for a successful query letter. The answer was that the querying process should be viewed as a job interview, and that, as such, it helps if you come with a reference. This site suggested that if someone the agent knows recommended you, then you should include that in the first sentence of your query. Ah, yes, like everything else, it helps a lot if you know someone. That's not good news for a misanthropic, old recluse like me.

Novel News

2010-02-01T15:41:00.001-05:00

Well, in regards to my novel Buster Bungle's Big Top, I've sent out 39 queries to literary agents and I've received twelve rejections. Of course, there might be more unknown rejections. Some agents don't reply to queries unless they're interested. It's really quite discouraging. You know, if they were looking at the manuscript and rejecting it, I could tell myself that perhaps the novel wasn't that good, and I could put some more work into it, but they aren't even asking to see the manuscript.

I've realized that I have a number of things going against me, other than the sheer crush of numbers. (The better agents claim to get fifty to sixty queries a day.) For one thing, I had assumed that most agents were people who loved good books, but had to deal in trashy commercial fiction in order to make a living. How naïve of me. The impression I've gotten after viewing over fifty web sites is that most agents aren't truly literate. In their spare time, they probably read the kinds of books that they represent.

Then there's my age. Agents are looking for authors that they can have a long-term relationship with, so they aren't likely to be interested in someone who's sixty-five years old. Add on to that, the matter of genre. They all want you to slot your work into a predetermined genre like mystery, romance, scifi, literary, etc. However, the best descriptive phrase for Buster Bungle's Big Top is Southern Gothic, but that isn't one of their categories. In fact, Southern literature in general seems to be out these days.

On a brighter note, I'm starting work on a new novel. I don't have a working title yet, though it too is Southern Gothic. I tried something different this time. I took a lot of notes and plotted it out in detail before actually starting to write. I ended up with some 30,000 words of notes and I'm pleased with the results. Now that I've started writing, it's going very smoothly. Since I know where the story's going, I only have to concern myself with the writing, and that's making things a lot easier. This is definitely the way I'm going to do things in the future.

James Lee Burke

2010-01-26T05:09:00.002-05:00

”On the burnt-out end of a July day in Southwest Texas, in a crossroads community whose only economic importance had depended on its relationship to a roach paste factory the EPA had shut down twenty years before, a young man driving a car without window glass stopped by an abandoned blue-and-white stucco filling station that had once sold Pure gas during the Depression and was now home to bats and clusters of tumbleweed. Next to the filling station was a mechanic's shed whose desiccated boards lay collapsed upon a rusted pickup truck with four flat bald tires. At the intersection a stoplight hung from a horizontal cable strung between two power poles, its plastic covers shot out by .22 rifles.”

James Lee Burke is the finest writer among those who currently publish in the crime genre in the USA. Whoever is number two isn't even close. As they might say in the sports world, there ain't a one of them who could carry Burke's jockstrap. In a way, it's a shame that he writes in the genre. He could have really done some damage as a serious novelist had he chosen to do so, but he just keeps churning out a book a year, and it's remarkable that he's as good as he is with that kind of production.

The above passage is from his latest book, Rain Gods. It's a sample of why he's so good. That paragraph really sets the scene. And how does he do it? With details, my friends, with details. “On the burnt-out end of a July day in Southwest Texas” tells us that it's deep summer and the adjective “burnt-out” suggests the desolation that is characteristic of that part of Texas. Burke doesn't just tell us that there's a shut-down factory in the town. He gives us the details. The car without window glass is another nice detail, suggesting that the young man driving it is one of society's losers. The collapsed mechanic's shed is nicely described, and instead of just saying that the stoplight's plastic covers had been busted out, Burke tells us that they'd been shot out. That reminds us that this is a place where gun violence just might come easily.

Not all of Burke's prose in Rain Gods comes up to that paragraph, nor is it realistic to expect it to, given the way Burke churns out his novels. And a couple of turns in the plots made me groan a bit. They were just too expected and cliched. He didn't seem to want to let any of the “good guys” get killed, when the logic of his narrative seemed to dictate that they should have been. His main villain is over the top as well, but that's something that's to be expected in this genre. If one's a fan of crime fiction, this one isn't to be missed.

An Exercise In Futility?

2010-01-21T16:19:00.001-05:00

I've been getting busy with querying agents for my novel Buster Bungle's Big Top. It's tedious work but thankfully most of them now take email queries. That saves a lot of time and money. Still, I must confess that it feels like an exercise in futility, sort of like trying to fund your kid's college education by playing the lottery. According to the agencies themselves, they get around fifty queries a day and they only accept a handful of new clients every year, so you can see the kinds of odds that a new author faces.

Some of you are undoubtedly thinking that I should perhaps consider self-publication, whether of a traditional book or an e-book. That's a hypothetical option but, from a practical standpoint, it's a no-go. You'll drop a couple of grand on a traditional book and end up with boxes of unsold books in a back room of your house or apartment. And, yes, I'm aware of the print-on-demand services, but they turn out not to be substantially cheaper. As for e-books, there's not much cost in offering them for sale on a web site. However, the fact is, in either case, that most novels will be lucky to sell fifty copies through such outlets. I would hope for a bigger audience than that.

So, the question is, what to do? I guess I'll keep sending out the queries, though I feel like an idiot for doing so, given that I'm not the sort of person who plays the lottery. I know when the odds are stacked against me. In the end though, I'll probably self-publish an e-book and set up a web site for myself, though the thought of having to resort to that really angers me. But, you know what they say about beggars.

Ranting On

2010-01-13T04:15:00.001-05:00

In my previous post, I confessed to hating greeters. I've been thinking about that and I've decided that the truth is that I just plain hate the human race. I'm a damned misanthrope. It's the reason I've come to live such a reclusive existence. People just aren't worth the trouble. My two cats make better companions.

Upon reflection, how can one not be a misanthrope? Just look at the track record of the human race. There are wars, racism, genocide, all of which lead to indiscriminate killing on a wide scale. And remember, those of the Book, like Christians, Jews, and Islamists, say that we are made in the image of their God. That right there is reason enough for atheism.

Now, most people are pleasant enough one on one, but it's been my experience that, at best, people disappoint you and, at worst they use you or stab you in the back. Even in marriage, which is supposedly the most intimate of relationships, people disappoint. As a college friend of mine said upon getting divorced, marriage is just two people, each trying to get his or her own way. A lifetime of observation tells me that this is true. In any intimate relationship, one of the partners will assert his or her dominance and the other partner will accept it, or the relationship will be dissolved.

All that said, I can't say that I wish the worst for people, and I take no joy from events like the earthquake in Haiti. The poor bastards. Not only have they suffered under US imperialism, but now the just and merciful God slaps them with a horrible earthquake. Just and merciful, my ass.

Just Leave Me Alone!

2010-01-07T05:46:00.001-05:00

I hate greeters. You know who I'm talking about, those people at the entrance to various stores who are there to greet you as you enter. As far as I'm concerned, they're more annoying than anything else. I mean, for Chrissakes, I'm going to the store because there are things I need to buy, not because I want exchange pleasantries with some grinning fool.

I'm guessing that these stores think that greeters make for a positive shopping experience. A marketing firm somewhere probably did a study that shows people buy more when there are greeters at the door. Then again maybe not. In a lot of these stores, if you're leaving with an item that is too big to fit in a bag, like a large container of cat litter, they ask to see your receipt as you exit. You don't have to show them your receipt, and I always refuse to do so. What's the point of it then? It's just an annoyance.

Perhaps they think greeters deter shoplifting. Or maybe they deter those who might make a dash for the exit with their arms full of goods that they haven't paid for, though I can't imagine the people who work these jobs stepping in front of an escaping thief. Most of the greeters seem to be elderly, and they would just get run over.

I'd like to be rude to greeters, but I just can't do it. If the job were a career choice, that would be one thing. If it were something you could take an associate's degree in, like those offered by those bogus schools that advertise on late-night TV, then I'd really lay into them. That's not the case though. I suspect that greeters are the most poorly paid of the people who work in the stores. They're probably on the lowest rung of the employment scale, so I can't bring myself to be nasty. For the same reason, I always make a point of tipping generously at restaurants. Why make the lives of those who have shitty jobs any more difficult than they already are?

Lest I Needed More Proof

2010-01-04T05:46:00.002-05:00

For a few hours there the other day, I thought that I might have been wrong. I thought that there just might be a God. And what would make me incline toward that conclusion? It was the news that Rush Limbaugh had been taken to the hospital with chest pains, and that he was listed in serious condition. When I read that on the internet, I slid on out of my chair, and to my knees. I put my hands together, looked skyward, and I prayed. Yes, I did. I actually prayed. Please, please, God, cast him down into the perdition that he deserves, and without a supply of oxycontin to get him through.

I should have known better. No one was there at the hospital to drive a stake through his black, black heart, and the darker spirits stirred themselves to help him rally. The next thing I knew, the news was that he was resting comfortably. They didn't know what had caused his chest pains, perhaps the spasming of an artery. Or, perhaps the bitter bile that flows through his veins in place of blood.

Not long after, there was Limbaugh, standing before a microphone after being released from the hospital. He was proclaiming that he could say from personal experience that there is nothing wrong with the healthcare system. What can one say in response to that? Of course, there isn't, not if you're a man of Limbaugh's means. He undoubtedly has one of those boutique medical insurance policies that guarantees first-class service.

That's one of the truly sad things about life. There is no justice in the world, nor can one expect it in some hereafter. The bastards prevail, and the masses suffer.

You Could Be Next

2010-01-03T14:02:00.001-05:00

"If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear." Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008.

The above quotation comes from an article in The Nation about America's immigration prisons. Along the same lines, a poll showed that 58% of the people felt that the Nigerian who tried to blow up that jet should be tortured. Just how stupid can people be? As Chris Hedges pointed out in a recent piece, due process is gone in the USA, for citizen and non-citizen alike. If the executive branch declares a person an enemy combatant, he can be spirited away to some secret prison without access to a lawyer or to the protections that once applied in this country. It doesn't matter whether or not he's a citizen.

It's ironic. These right-wing assholes are always railing about the government but, at the same time, they have such faith in the various police agencies. If government is corrupt and oppressive, what makes them think that the police agencies are any different? And they do trust the police. That's why they don't mind the restrictions on our civil and human rights. They believe that if the police think you're guilty of a crime, then you must have done something wrong.

All I can say is, good luck, folks. The Great Recession is nowhere near over. The Wall Street scum may be doing all right, but the average person is still suffering. Sooner or later, they're going to feel the need to take action, to demonstrate and protest. Wait and you'll see it, those demonstrators and protesters will start being designated as enemy combatants.

Human Sandbags

2009-12-28T12:29:00.000-05:00

Was there any indignity that wasn't visited upon blacks in the days of slavery, and then later during the segregation era? One wonders. Check this out, a New York Times item from 1912.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9E0CEFD6143CE633A25752C1A9629C946396D6CF

An Odious World

2009-12-24T09:46:00.001-05:00

”One is not superior merely because one sees the world as odious.”

The above comes from Francois-Rene Chateaubriand, who is credited as the founder of French Romanticism. I had to laugh upon reading it. I found it right on the mark, for I have to admit that I am often guilty of thinking myself a superior person simply because I look upon the world with a cynical eye.

Just recently I was thinking that I am of an age where I really should write a will. Not that I have financial resources that amount to much, but it might save my family members some hassles when I die. That got me to thinking about what I wanted in the will. I definitely want to be cremated. Fuck the Christians and their resurrection of the flesh. Besides, cemeteries are just good parks ruined.

Then there's the matter of what I want done with my ashes. Oh, I know what I'd dearly love. I'd love to have them scattered on a garbage dump. That's how odious I think the world is. I'd rather that my ashes mingle with the world's detritus than with anything else.

I won't do it, of course. It would upset the surviving family members, and what would be the point of that? There is an alternative though. Perhaps if some hot, young beauty could be found who would agree to rub my ashes all over her perfect body. Yeah, that right there, that's the ticket. She could start with her breasts, move on down to her belly, ash-dirtied hands going right for the sweet spot, and, and,...

On Obama's Leadership, Or Lack Thereof

2009-12-22T08:23:00.001-05:00

I'm linking to a great article about Obama's approach to leadership. The following quotation from the article sums it up. “He (Obama) can't seem to muster the passion to fight for any of what he believes in, whatever that is. He'd make a great queen -- his ceremonial addresses are magnificent -- but he prefers to fly Air Force One at 60,000 feet and 'stay above the fray.'”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/drew-westen/leadership-obama-style-an_b_398813.html

The Great Recession

2009-12-21T02:13:00.002-05:00

I was watching the Bill Moyers show on PBS yesterday when he did a profile of this guy who started a community organizing group in Boston, with the purpose of preventing foreclosures and forcing the banks to let people stay in their foreclosed homes as rental tenants. I wish I could recall his name, but I was doing other things when the piece was on and I wasn't playing close attention. He's an admirable fellow though. He doesn't organize his group in a top down fashion. The purpose of the group is to get people to take control of their lives by fighting back. It's the only way to do things and expect them to work.

So, I was only half watching the show when something struck me. They were talking about how the group was demonstrating at the home of someone who was being foreclosed on. A representative of the bank was there and he told the group that it wasn't personal, that it was just the market.

It's just the market. That got me to thinking. I sometimes find myself shaking my head at the ideas that are put forth to justify the actions of the banksters and others. They're so obviously wrong. What I forget to think about is that these wrong ideas have consequences. These flawed ideologies empower those who work for the real villains, the bank employee, for example. I'm sure he doesn't like what he's doing to people, but he can console himself with the idea that it's just the market at work, which is like a force of nature that we messs with at our peril.

I also watched a segment of 60 Minutes. It was about Wilmington, Ohio, where Airborne Express had been headquartered. Airborne employed 10,000 people there, all of whom were laid off after Airborne was acquired by DHL. The reason I mention it, is this. I've been wondering what the powers that be will end up calling the current financial crisis. It's obviously more than a garden variety recession and they're allergic to the use of the “D” word. Well, the reporter who was doing the segment called it the Great Recession. Bingo! I think they've found it.

Broken Americans?

2009-12-13T10:22:00.001-05:00

Are American's a broken people? That's the question asked in the article to which I link below, and the answer is in the affirmative. The author thinks that's why we see so little active protest against the anti-people policies that have been coming out of Washington for quite some time.

http://www.alternet.org/politics/144529/are_americans_a_broken_people_why_we%27ve_stopped_fighting_back_against_the_forces_of_oppression

Money-Laundering Banks

2009-12-13T04:20:00.003-05:00

How about this, ladies and gents. According to the Guardian, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime claims that the global banking system was saved from collapse at the height of the financial crisis by billions of dollars of drug money. Is it any surprise? Not to me, but if I'd written it before this statement from the UN official appeared, there are people who would have accused me of being a conspiracy theorist.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved-un-cfief-claims

Oh, The Disney Horror!

2009-12-11T10:19:00.001-05:00

Mickey Mouse is reportedly in tears. Goofy is wandering the streets of Disney World in shock,and Donald Duck has fled south to join his avian cousins in warmer climes. And what has spurred this uproar in the world of Disney? Well, it seems that one Patrick Disney Miller, Walt's 42-year-old grandson, has been arrested for “possession of a firearm by a felon”.

So, the Disney scion was strapped and he's a felon. How rich! According to the article that I read, the nature of the felony is not currently available. Disney fans are probably praying that it's a drug charge. That's almost to be expected of the offspring of the wealthy and famous. The worst probably has them lying awake at night. What if the man is a pedophile? Or, horror of horrors, what if he was caught getting a bit too intimate with the Disney fauna? What if it was something laughable, like distributing Disney porn? You know, comics of Goofy on Donald sex, or Daisy on Minny. The public wants to know for God's sake. Where is the National Inquirer when you really need them?!

Torches And Pitchforks Watch

2009-12-11T03:01:00.001-05:00

Oh, yeah, ye banksters. Be afraid, be very afraid.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/12/pitchfork-watch-vigilante-justice-against-banking-interests-rising.html

Getting Ideas

2009-12-10T17:11:00.002-05:00

I've been telling myself that I wouldn't write so much about politics. It would probably be healthier if I didn't, but I can't stop. It's all just so outrageous. However, in this entry, I'm going to get back to the topic of writing.

People occasionally ask me how one gets ideas for writing. They seem to think that this is a difficult thing to do. I perused an article on just this topic by Dan Simmons, a successful scifi novelist. He says that he frequently has people come up to him at parties and such, telling him that they've got a great idea for a novel. They suggest things like, why don't you write the novel and we'll split the proceeds. They seem to think that coming up with the ideas is the hard part. Simmons, of course, politely declines. The fact is that ideas are easy to come by. It's the implementation that's a bitch.

So, how do you go about it? Well, there are certain exercises. Here's one. Take three unrelated words and turn them into a story. I'm looking at an example now. It's in the book Immediate Fiction: A Complete Writing Course: albino, pistol and strawberry. An idea immediately comes to mind, admittedly not a very good one, but a viable idea nonetheless. You see, there's this hit man who has a passion for strawberries. He munches on them while waiting for his victims, and he always leaves one in their mouths. There's this police detective who is assigned to catch the hit man. He's an albino who is so without pigment that he is almost invisible by the light of the midday sun, and he catches the hit man when the hit man fails to see him at high noon. Like I said, not that good, but viable.

However, I generally get my ideas in the form of a character in a certain situation. Here's one that came to me recently. I was thinking of those guys who propose to their girl friends at baseball games and such. That's pretty mundane, but what if the girl turned him down? That's a little more interesting, but it's probably happened a number of times. However, think of this scenario. The proposal comes up on the message board between innings. The stadium camera is on the couple. When the proposal is made, the woman gets a shocked expression on her face. Once she gets over the initial shock, she jumps to her feet and says, “No! No! No! This is our first date!” She then flees the stadium. Now you're getting more interesting. However, that's not something I'm going to follow up on. The kind of character that would pull such a stunt isn't of much interest to me.

In the end, coming up with story ideas boils down to the same thing, no matter what the technique you use to get yourself going. It's directed daydreaming and, like anything else, it takes a certain amount of effort to learn, but it starts to come naturally soon enough. Unless you fight it, which some people do. They fear where the demons of the imagination will take them. You can't worry about that though. You've got to kiss your demons, then kick them in the ass, and tell them to get to work. You've got a story to write!

Contempt For Obama

2009-12-10T12:05:00.002-05:00

As I've made abundantly clear, I'm no fan of Obama. However, I have been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt in regard to his motives. I thought it quite possible that he meant well, but has been caught up in the constraints of the office and the political realities in the USA. However, I'm no longer willing to give him that benefit of a doubt. I now have contempt for Obama. He's a moral degenerate.

What pushed it over the line for me? It was some things he said in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, a speech that he gave just a few short days after announcing an escalation of the war in Afghanistan. He justified that escalation by saying that sometimes nonviolence doesn't work. As an example, he gave Hitler and Germany. He's right. A nonviolent campaign wouldn't have stopped Hitler. He had to be opposed with military force. But look what Obama's doing. He's comparing the war in Afghanistan to the war to stop Hitler. However, the comparison isn't apt. In this war, we're more in the role of the Nazis than anything else. We're the country that's invaded Afghanistan, the country that has forced a government on those people run by a CIA asset whose brother is a drug lord, the country that's made it clear that we're going to stay until we've bent them to our will.

Politics is said to be the art of the possible. Okay, I'll go along with that. But what was possible in regards to Afghanistan and the Peace prize? If Obama really feels that the war in Afghanistan is necessary, then he should have declined the prize. That would have been the honest thing to do. It is even possible that, had he handled it right, he could have accrued some political capital. But, no. He had to have his prize, so he conflated war with peace, just like every other president before him. Of course, that implies a definition of peace that is quite different from what you would find in the dictionary. When American politicians talk, peace is a state where the other nations of the world passively accept the dominion of the USA.

More On The Obama Administration

2009-12-09T17:30:00.001-05:00

The link below will take you to an article critical of the Obama administration. It first appeared in a British socialist publication. I think it's right on the mark. I liked the following in particular, “The saddest thing is that Americans are cultivated like mushrooms from birth to death, kept in the dark and fed horseshit. Consequently, they haven't the slightest idea that there is an alternative to the system in which they labor at the pleasure of corporate and financial elites who own both their government and their every waking hour. That alternative is democratic Socialism. Self governance for the broadest common good.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/bageant12092009.html

Lame Duck Obama

2009-12-08T05:42:00.001-05:00

I've never been an Obama enthusiast. I don't see how anyone could have been, given how the political system works. At this particular point in history, you can't be nominated for the presidency in the Democratic or Republican party unless you are bought and paid for. Obama was bought and paid for. Why else do you think he has Wall Street insiders like Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner setting his economic policy?

As it is shaping up now, Obama is the black Jimmy Carter. For all I know, he's well meaning but, if he is, he doesn't have the desire or strength of will to push his agenda through. Take Pakistan, for example. He caved in to the generals there. He's caving on health care. He's caving on creating jobs. It's almost like he's already a lame duck. He certainly doesn't seem to have any more clout than a lame duck president, and I don't see how he can expect anymore than one term.

What are likely to see after Obama? A nasty, right-wing figure, I'm afraid. If they have any political sense, and the right seems to have plenty of that, they'll use Palin as a stalking horse. She'll pave the way for a very right-wing candidate who isn't as outrageous and flamboyant, but who is just as toxic. The moderate voters that the Republicans hope to win will be turned off by the likes of Palin, but will then embrace the “more sensible” candidate, just because they're sick of the Democrats.

As far as Obama goes, I saw what was coming right after he was elected. He and his wife were on some talk show. The host asked them who the boss was in the household. Michelle Obama spoke right up and said, I am. Obama kind of sighed and agreed. Oh, shit, I thought, we're in trouble here. It's not that I believe that the man is supposed to be the dominant figure in a relationship, but you have to be strong-willed to be a president if you expect to get anything done. And you see what's happening. Perhaps it was Michelle who should have been elected.

Tell Me You Don't Believe This

2009-12-03T05:13:00.002-05:00

I'm linking to the followin because I think it is of the utmost importance. It concerns additional stimulus and tax breaks for the economy. I urge everyone to read it.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/12/administration-considering-additional-subsidies-and-tax-breaks.html

Paradigm Shift?

2009-12-02T05:37:00.002-05:00

I'm not going to comment on the article to which I link below. I couldn't add anything of substance. It's a summary of the position of the economic historian, Robert Brenner, and I like what it says. His basic position is that the world economic system is not just suffering from a particularly bad economic slump, but that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift not unlike that from feudalism to capitalism. The article's a bit long, and it requires close attention, but it's worth it.

http://www.japanfocus.org/-R_Taggart-Murphy/3265

Star Trek

2009-12-01T12:32:00.002-05:00

I never understood the appeal of the Star Trek television series. The sets were so obviously fake, the acting poor, and the plots uninteresting. In other words, it was no better or worse than the typical TV fare. Likewise for the various Star Trek movies. However, I recently watched the newest Star Trek film and I was impressed.

It was a fun bit of entertainment, with lots of characters from the original TV series for the aficionado. (The were played by different, younger actors, of course.) With a few exceptions, like Blade Runner and the original Terminator, I've never been much for science fiction movies, mostly because the worlds that they created were not visually believable. However, that has changed in recent years. The computer graphics have become so good that it has become easy to suspend disbelief when it comes to the visual aspects of the worlds created in these movies.

I wonder how long it will be before the techniques become so sophisticated that they won't even need actors anymore. They currently use focus groups to test the endings of a lot of movies, and they will change an ending if the members of those groups react negatively. Can't you just see them choosing computer-generated actors based upon the reactions of some focus group?

Yeah, it's a brave, new world that's a-coming, folks, and it's all a part of the neoliberal version of the capitalist project. Computer-generated actors, fully automated, robotic factories, online stores that have no need for stock clerks or sales people, that's what they're up to. Make the workers obsolete, as in the world of Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano. Those what have, will have. Those without, which means the overwhelming majority, will have to beg for scraps. Imagine a worldwide version of the worst of Indian poverty. That's what we're looking at. Unless, unless...

Bankers and Guns

2009-12-01T04:10:00.001-05:00

Now, isn't this rich. For fear of an angry public, Goldman senior executives are applying for permits to carry handguns. No, I'm not making that up. The link below will take you to the story from Bloomberg. I love it. You can't put the fear of God in the bastards, but it looks like you can make them fear the masses. Torches and pitchforks, I say! Torches and pitchforks! We march on Wall Steet at dusk.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=ahD2WoDAL9h0

Starting Out In The Evening

2009-11-30T11:12:00.002-05:00

As I've mentioned before in this blog, I love Netflix. My queue of movies and TV shows to be watched stays at sixty to seventy DVD's. So sometimes, when a movie pops up to the top of the queue, I find myself scratching my head, wondering what caused me to chose it. In most cases, they're undoubtedly DVD's recommended by Netflix because they fit the profile that they've generated based upon my previous choices and ratings.(When you return a Netflix DVD, they ask you to rate it on a scale of one to five.) However, I can't recall being disappointed by one of these recommendations.

In any case, Starting Out In The Evening was one of those films. One day, there it was I the top of the queue. It didn't seem that interesting, judging by the synopsis on the Netflix web site, and I didn't watch it for more than a week after the DVD had arrived. When I did, I wasn't disappointed. Not that it was a great film, but it was all right.

Starting Out In The Evening is about Leonard Schiller, a New York City novelist of about seventy. When he was young, his first two novels were well received, and he was a member of the crowd of New York intellectuals that included writers like Saul Bellow. But he only wrote two more, both considered inferior to the first two. At the time of the movie, he's trying to finish a fifth one, but he's depicted as something of a has-been. His books have long been out of print, and few in the literary community have even heard of him. As the movie opens, a young woman in her early twenties is introducing herself to him. She wants to write her master's thesis on his works, and she fancies that she's going to one day publish a critical biography of him that will put him back on the literary map. From there, the story ensues.

Starting Out In The Evening was adapted from a novel of the same name by Brian Morton. The movie was interesting enough to make me want to read the novel, which I did. The film was more faithful to the text than most are but, as I expected, it took some of the edge off. In the book, Schiller is seventy pounds overweight and has to use a cane to get around. He later has a stroke, which makes it necessary for him to use a walker. In the movie, Schiller isn't anywhere near that fat and he gets around just fine. After suffering the stroke, he has to use the cane. The young woman is physically attractive in the movie. She's not in the book. There are other changes, all apparently aimed at making a fundamentally depressing story not so grim.

I say a depressing story and that might put some off, but it's depressing only in the sense that it takes an unflinching look at reality. The truth is that most novelists end up like Leonard Schiller, out of print and forgotten, or never much acclaimed. In terms of what most of us imagined for ourselves when we were young, we lead disappointing lives that end with the inevitable decline before death. It's nothing to get all upbeat about, but one doesn't end up pitying Leonard Schiller. He will leave this mortal coil with dignity and a certain nobility for having pursued his passion to his last breath.

I recommend the book because I've never read a story quite like it. I didn't much care for the writing itself. Morton isn't as precise as he could be and I found some of the writing to be sloppy. However, the story makes it worth the effort. As for the film, it's all right. Frank Langella plays Leonard Schiller and he does an excellent job. As for the rest of the film, there's nothing much remarkable about it.

White House Crashers

2009-11-29T09:55:00.002-05:00

It used to be that the U.S. was thought of as the place where you could get rich by dint of a bit of good luck and a lot of hard work. Of course, that's never really been the case, but there's a sliver of truth there. These days, it's different though. The opportunities just aren't there, and we've become the nation of the big score. Win the lottery. Go to Vegas and play in one of those poker touraments. Get yourself on TV. That's how you get rich in the twenty-first century.

And so we have Tareq and Michaele Salahi, the couple who crashed the state dinner for the Indian prime minister at the White House. In D.C. social circles, they apparently like to project the image of a wealthy and well-connected couple, when they are, in fact, a couple of bankrupt freeloaders. They're trying for their big score though. Lady Michaele has been angling for a spot on the Bravo reality show, The Real Housewives of D.C., and the couple have reportedly cancelled an appearance on the Larry King Show because they have decided to take bids for their first TV interview. The New York Times reports that they are seeking a fee in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It's too bad that this pair of assholes didn't try their stunt during the Bush administration. They wouldn't be negotiating to appear on TV for big bucks. They'd be trying to talk their way out of Guantanamo. And with a surname like “Salahi”, it's a good bet that's where they'd be.

For once, the Bush approach might have been the best one. Why are the media giving these two so much attention? They should be gulping for air in some waterboarding session. All right, I don't really mean that, but you get the picture. Tareq and Michaele are miscreants, and they don't deserve the attention they're receiving. It just encourages their ilk.

Constraints

2009-11-27T19:56:00.001-05:00

There are lots of different ways of writing a novel. Some people just sit down and start banging away at the keyboard. Others, like John Irving, can't bring themselves to write until they've outlined the thing in detail. Irving has said that he doesn't like to start writing until he knows exactly how the story is going to develop. A lot of writers claim that they go where the characters want to take them. I'm guessing that these writers would be inclined to say that their stories are given to them by their muse, their unconscious, or whatever. Vladimir Nabokov scoffed at that approach. He said that he made his characters do exactly what he wanted them to do. I suspect that he said that because he constructed his novels in much the same way that he put together the crossword puzzles that he liked to compose. It was primarily an intellectual exercise for him.

When I first started writing fiction, I did it in much the same way that I wrote my poetry. I'd start writing, letting my imagination take me where it wanted to go. As when writing my poetry, I took great care with the language. It wasn't the best way of doing things, and it led to a lot of wasted effort. I'd put in all this effort trying to get things just right, only to find myself bogged down in the middle of the novel with no way of getting myself out. All that carefully written prose went in the dumpster.

I've finally figured out the best way for me to write a novel. I start out with an idea, usually something quirky and off-beat. For example, in the novel I'm currently working on, I had the following idea. What if there was a good, old boy who lived next to a stunning young women who he wanted so badly that he could almost taste it. However, she doesn't have the least bit of interest in him. Suppose, though, that she started visiting him at night while sleepwalking. Where would things go with them? Other ideas started coming to me, and I began to write. However, I've learned that it's initially best for the imaginative processes to just bang away, not worrying about grammer inconsistencies in the narrative, etc. What I end up with is something that's midway between a rough draft and an outline. Once I've got the whole story down, I'll start writing in earnest.

Now, as I've said, this method works for me. However, with this new novel I'm again bogged down in the middle, but with only a couple of months work behind me, and I think I can write my way out of it. The problem is the constraints. In the beginning, I could just let my imagination run wild and have a lot of fun with it. However, once the characters were developed, I had to start concerning myself with exactly how such a person would behave in different circumstances. I'm not as free to just let any crazy old thing happen. At this stage, composing the narrative becomes something like trying to solve a mathematical problem.

This character-driven approach is what comes naturally to me, so I'm stuck with the difficulties inherent in it. I'd love to write a crime thriller or some sort of post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel, just for the fun of it, but I can't. Such stories are plot-driven and I can't fit myself in that mold. Character is what's important to me and, as they say, character is destiny.

Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T13:29:00.002-05:00

So, here it is, Thanksgiving, the official beginning of the holiday season. It makes me want to crawl under a rock somewhere and stay until it's all over. Not only are we continually bombarded with commercial messages, but during this season they kick into overdrive. It's enough to make one want to become a terrorist or recluse. Given that I'm an old man, I choose the latter.

But, it isn't the commercialism that most drives me crazy. It's all the bullshit about the family. What is it about the nuclear family that is so sacred? Anyone who is the least bit familiar with history understands that families can be horror shows. Cain killed Abel, but he had nothing on some of the monarchic dynasties down through history. Take the Byzantine emperors, for instance. When the emperor died and his son ascended to the thrown, he executed his brothers so that there wouldn't be any dynastic competitors. Nice, huh? There were a few who were merciful. They just blinded their brothers and banished them to the monasteries that were built into the cliffs that were across the straits from Constantinople. That's just the stuff that makes the history books. There are millions of ghastly stories that few have even ever heard about.

When I hear someone, usually some bozo athlete or other of dubious accomplishment, say that he's done something thanks to the support of his family, I'm truly confused. What does he mean by that? To be quite honest, my family was just a bunch of people that I grew up with in the same house. It really wasn't much more than that. I've become close to one of my brothers, but that didn't happen until we were adults.

Now, I know why the right-wing makes such a big deal of the nuclear family, in spite of the fact that a disproportionate number of them seem to do some fooling around on the side. Family responsibility is one of the chief ways in which the masters keep us in thrall. When you have to worry about feeding, clothing, and housing the kids at home, you're going to take a lot more crap from your boss without protest. It's also a lot easier to instill fear in those with family responsibilities so that they will support repressive laws and practices.

The fact is that the more natural form of human association is the extended family. It gives the individual more space to breathe. The anthropologist Margaret Mead reported that there was little teenaged rebellion among the South Sea Islanders that she studied. She attributed that to the fact that teenagers who got into conflicts with their parents could find mentors in the form of their aunts and uncles of the same sex. I'm not saying that the extended family is any kind of utopia but it's a hell of a lot better than the claustrophobic households lauded by the powers that be here in the States.

So, anyway, enjoy your turkey, and say hello to Santa Claus for me, though I suspect his bag of toys will be kind of light this year, given the economic situation. As for me, I'll be under a rock somewhere, reading and writing and grumbling like a bear. Hell, I might even watch a few Lady Gaga videos.

Writing Update

2009-11-25T16:11:00.001-05:00

Well, it's been awhile, dear readers. If there are anymore readers of this blog. I have no excuses. I just plain haven't been keeping up with it. However, I'm back. For how long, who knows? Since I've been away for a while, I thought I might start with the begin important thing, my writing.

I've finally started trying to place my novel "Buster Bungle's Big Top". I sent queries to four agents. That's not many, but I'm mostly testing the waters right now and, given that it's the holiday season, I didn't think that it would be best to send out a lot of queries at this time. I'll shoot out a lot more after the first of the year. Got to get the book published before 2012, you know!

Anyway, two of the agents sent back quick rejections. The other two have yet to reply. One nice thing about a lot agencies of these days is that they take queries and manuscript submissions by email. Some of them only accept them by email. I love it. Snail mail queries and submissions are not only a pain in the ass to put together, but they're expensive as well, what with postage, paper supplies, etc.

I didn't grow up in the South. My father was a career Air Force officer, so we moved around some, though not as much as a lot of military families. From the fourth grade through high school, I lived near Dayton, Ohio on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. So, during my formative years I grew up in the Midwest. However, I've lived in Atlanta for over thirty years, and it appears that I have actually become a Southerner. Okay, you might be asking yourself, what's he getting up to here. Well, these agents all want you to tell them what the genre of your novel is. After thinking about it for a while, the only one that fit was Southern Gothic. It's not one of the genres on most of their lists, but it's the one that I'm using because it's the most descriptive. It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that I'd written a Southern Gothic novel. The next thing you know, I'll be looking into the Sons of the Confederacy.

I'm not just sitting around waiting for responses to my queries. I'm well into another novel. The working title is "Riley and Perfect Peaches." Anything more than that I'm not going to say. This one is more of a comic novel than "Buster Bungle's Big Top", but it too would best be described as Southern Gothic.

A Jobless Recovery

2009-10-27T14:55:00.001-04:00

It seems to be widely agreed among those who should know that we are in for a jobless recovery. I love that terminology. It's just another way of saying that we're going to have a recovery for the affluent, but the same old economic distress for the rest of us. There's only one way this can play out and that's in a stratification of society like that in so-called Third World countries. There will be very small clique of the very rich at the top, a small managerial middle class, and the great teeming and increasingly impoverished masses below them.

This has happened so far without much open rebellion at all. I think it's because there are a lot of people out there who still believe that, no matter how bad things may have gotten, this is just a cyclical thing and things will eventually improve. There has been an increase in class warfare though, in the form of crime. There have been a number of high-profile armed robberies of Georgia Tech students, and a recent such incident at Emory University. These are elite universities and the robbers apparently think that's where the money is. There have also been a rash of smash-and-grab robberies here in Atlanta in recent months. These sorts of crimes are a manifestation of class warfare, albeit of an ineffectual and unfortunate sort.

A time will come though when it will be widely accepted that nothing even approximating the good times will be coming back for a very long time, if at all. Then the shit will really hit the fan, and it won't be pretty. Given that there is no real, vital Left in the United States, I expect that the first thing we'll see will be increased right-wing militancy. There will probably will be shootouts with the police, and perhaps even with the army. A lot of these guys joined the Army to get training, so they'll know how to fight. Don't think it can happen? And what makes the United States so special? It's happened elsewhere. It can happen here. Hell, it's already happened here. Remember that little dust-up called the Civil War?

For The Greater Good

2009-10-25T06:06:00.001-04:00

You know, I sometimes wonder how the rich sleep at night. They just keep right on plundering the world's economies, sending the overwhelming majority of the rest of us into ever more misery, and they scarcely even miss a wink. Are they all a bunch of psychopaths who just plain don't give a damn? Maybe some of them are, but I'm inclined to believe that most of them are just like everyone else. They have their reasons for behaving the way that they do. They just don't bother telling the rest of us what those reasons are, perhaps for fear that we would call them out.

Well, along comes one Lord Griffiths in Olde England. That's right, it's "Lord" Griffiths, like I'd ever call the man "Lord" if I came face to face with him. Anyway, this Griffiths, who is vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International and former advisor to the Dragon Lady, Margaret Thatcher, told the Guardian newspaper that, when it came to the outrageous bonuses paid to Goldman executives, the British public should "tolerate the inequality to achieve greater prosperity for all."

The "good" Lord goes on to explain that if such bonuses weren't paid to bank executives in Great Britain, the banks would relocate and everyone would be worse off. I've heard that one before. Back in the Sixties, I recall a Harvard economist trotting it out to explain that a certain amount of poverty was necessary in order to ensure the greatest common good. I may not be brandishing the fashionable little red book of Mao anymore, but I still don't buy that argument. It was specious then, and it's specious now, in particular when it comes to the financial industry. That particular industry, and especially its trading sector, does nothing to create wealth or value, but continually tries to come up with ways to scam money from those who do.

Maybe it's time for a little old-fashioned class violence. Look what the deaths of some fifteen hundred French aristocrats did for the people of that country. It still has a tradition of economic egalitarianism, at least relative to the US. Yes, it would be a shame if some of the Wall Street boys ended uphanging from lamp posts, the hangman's noose being the American populist version of the guillotine, but it's like Griffiths said, sometimes one should tolerate a bit of suffering to ensure the greater good in the long run. You see, that kind of argument cuts both ways.

Italy and the Taliban

2009-10-16T07:21:00.001-04:00

Ah, the Italians. You've gotta love them. The Times of London reports that they paid off the Taliban in 2008, so that they would have peace in the area of Afghanistan that is patrolled by their soldiers. What an eminently practical idea. There's no real sentiment among the Italians for the war in Afghanistan, yet the Italian government probably feels compelled to participate. No doubt the US government has bullied them into that position, so they have responded in a thoroughly reasonable fashion.

What else can you expect though? This is the land of the Medicis, the land where double-entry bookkeeping was invented. They understand they value of money, and though corruption is everywhere, the Italians seem to have made an art of it. One may not approve of such corruption, but what the hell? We Americans are as bad. We're just damned hypocrites is all. I will never forget a 60 Minutes segment from the 1980's. I don't recall the topic that was being addressed, but it involved corruption in Washington DC. They reported that a Japanese diplomat said that doing business in the United States was like doing business in Indonesia. You just had to know who to pay off and how much. The politicians interviewed by the 60 Minutes folks were outraged by that remark and it probably seemed controversial to a lot of folks back then. Subsequent history though, it's been a bitch. The proof of that statement can't be doubted by anyone who observes politics in the United States with a clear eye.

Italy may be the land of the payoff and the 18-year-old girl friend. (That's right, Prime Minister Berlusconi who would qualify for Medicare in the US, has an 18-year-old girl friend.) However, the US is the land of the deluded prig. I watched this documentary called The American Ruling Class. It was pretty tame and I don't particulary recommend it. However, in the course of the film, they interviewed James Baker. He sat there with a straight face and said the world was better off with the US as the dominant military power, a power that our government wasn't afraid to use. In other words, he was saying that we are the good guys and, when we engage in military action, it's because it's the right thing to do. It is to our misfortune that a very large segment of the US population agrees with that opinion.

So, what to do about Afghanistan? I certainly wouldn't like to see the people there abandoned to fanatics like the Taliban. On the other hand, I sure as hell wouldn't want to see their fate in the hands of the puppet Karzai and the American military. Unfortunately, it would seem to be the case that, no matter what happens, those folks are well and truly fucked.

A New Dark Ages? Part 2

2009-09-14T15:43:00.001-04:00

And the hits just keep on coming. Since we're on the topic of a new Dark Ages, Creation is a recently released British film biography of Charles Darwin's life. It is reputedly a good movie and was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival. However, it cannot find a distributor in the USA. According to the film's producer that is because it has been deemed too controversial, since it deals with evolution. Oh, happy day! See what the Lord has wrought. I can only shake my head and reach for the Jack Daniels.

A New Dark Ages?

2009-09-14T06:40:00.001-04:00

Could this be a sign? Is a new Dark Ages upon us? Being of a cynical bent, I'm prepared to believe it. In any case, it's a cause for alarm. The Philadelphia public libraries are shutting their doors because they're bankrupt. As is usually the case with such measures, it is the poor among us who will suffer most from this, since they do not have the financial resources to purchase books. Unfortunately this is going to become a trend, and not just because of the current financial and economic crisis.

There was a time when rich philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie endowed public libraries. Not anymore, not in the age of the rise of the ebook. Yes, devices like Amazon's Kindle are intended to make readers pay for the right to read a book.
Why do I say that? It's because of the business model. I'll use the Kindle as an example, though there are other ebook readers as well. First of all, you have to pay $300 to purchase the Kindle. Then, when you purchase books, you aren't really buying the books, not in the sense that you've traditionally understood it. You are merely purchasing the right to read that book on that particular Kindle. You cannot transfer to another Kindle, not to mention another ebook reader, which means that you can't give it or loan it to anyone else. In other words, you are just purchasing reading rights on a particular Kindle. When ebook readers finally catch on in a big way, which I'm afraid that they will, public libraries will become a thing of the past. Those who do not have the financial resources to purchase an ebook reader and the books that he might want to read will just plain be out of luck. And you really believed all that bullshit about the PC revolution ushering in a new age of online democracy and public access? No, folks, it's the same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was...

Nowhere With Obama

2009-08-11T05:51:00.000-04:00

"The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end torture or 'extraordinary rendition,' restore habeas corpus or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless and costly weapons systems."

The above is the first paragraph of an article by Chris Hedges on the Truthdig web site. I say, amen to that. It gives me no real pleasure to say this but, when it comes to Obama, I told you so. People I know of the liberal persuasion were filled with hope at the election of Obama. They really believed all that bullshit about change. This, in spite of the fact that Obama's record suggested that he's a centrist. In today's political climate, that makes him right of actual center. Or, as Hedges says, the main difference between Bush and Obama is a matter of branding. I don't see how anyone could argue otherwise.

U.S. Fascism?

2009-08-08T05:47:00.002-04:00

I'm linking to this article from the Alternet web site. It's entitled "Is the U.S. on the Brink of Fascism?" The author cites the historian Robert Paxton as the preeminent expert on how countries become fascist. Whether he really is or not, I have not idea. However, he apparently identifies five stages that countries go through on their way to fascism. According to the author of this article, we have entered stage three. That's when the conservative elites become willing to work with fascists. We're certainly seeing that sort of thing in the Republican Party now. If this guy Paxton is to be believed, that's the turning point. Once a country reaches that stage, he thinks they're in for the whole ride, that there will inevitably be a big struggle for control of the country and its institutions.

We can only hope that he's wrong but, given the dire economic straits that we're still in, and the fact that the administration is doing nothing to address the real causes of the problems, it's hard to disagree. Yeah, the administration and the finance boys have been conducting a PR campaign to try and convince us that things have bottomed out and are turning around, but the facts say otherwise. Most ominous, to my mind, is something that was reported on the naked capitalism web site. The alleged function of all the bailouts was to save the banking industry by reducing overall debt in the economy. However, according to the piece I read, overall debt has actually increased somewhat since all this started. The main source of the problem is that Wall Street and the banks are trying to play the same game they were playing before, and thy're doing everything they can to prevent any sort of true regulation. It's a recipe for disaster and you know what that means, don't you? Sarah Palin, come on down!

http://www.alternet.org/politics/141819/is_the_u.s._on_the_brink_of_fascism/

My Inner Redneck

2009-08-06T06:11:00.002-04:00

So there I was last night, listening to the Jamey Johnson CD for the third time, when it hit me. Damned if I don't have a pretty significant inner redneck. I actually like the CD, even though it's really that corny, cry-in-your-beer type of country blues. And, yeah, I admit it, the lyrics are full of cliches, but at least he doesn't use the word "baby". Thank God for that. And if that isn't proof enough, there's the protagonist of my new novel. He's a good, old boy and he's a heckuva lot more interesting than the vanilla suburbanite that I chose for Buster Bungle's Big Top.

How the hell did this happen? I wasn't raised like that. My family was solidly in the middle class. I made good grades in school, finished third in my class in a demanding, all boys Catholic high school, was Phi Bet Kappa in college. That ain't exactly what you'd call the inner redneck career path, but here I am thinking about going out for a six-pack of Bud and a pouch of Redman.

I'm thinking it must be genetic. I got it from my daddy's family. Mama was from Ohio and her family was German immigrant on both sides. They fled the troubles in Europe in 1848 and, though they were of working-class stock, they weren't exactly what you'd call rednecks. Hell, they didn't even fight in the Civil War, which was quite remarkable, given the way that war reached into most people's lives at that time. No, it was definitely my daddy. My paternal grandmother's family was from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and they were redneck through and through, though they had pretensions and would have bristled to hear themselves talked about like that.

Now, the Oliveros family. They were Minorcans. You wouldn't know about Minorcans unless you came from the vicinity of St. Augustine, Florida. The town was originally settled by the Spanish, many of whom came from the island of Minorca, and everyone who was descended from those settlers eventually came to be called Minorcans whether or not they were originally from the island. A lot of those folks still look like they came from the Mediterranean. They have black hair, brown eyes, and swarthy complexions. My paternal grandfather was one of them. When he was young, he looked like a bullfighter. The racial hierarchy in St. Augustine was a little bit different than it was in the rest of the South. The whites were at the top, of course, then came the Minorcans, and finally the blacks. The Minorcans were the rednecks in St. Augustine and, during the Civil Rights protests in the town in the Sixties, they were the ones who harrassed and attacked the marchers.

I wasn't raised with any of this history. Through high school and the first few years of college, I pretty much lived in the north, particularly Ohio. So, where did my inner redneck come from? It has to be in the blood, or the DNA, thanks to Crick and Watson. In that case, there's no fighting it. Hmm. When I finish with this Jamey Johnson CD, maybe I'll go looking for George Jones or old Bocephus. But at least I'm not tempted to buy a pickup or watch NASCAR.

Jamey Johnson

2009-08-05T02:23:00.001-04:00

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a sports writer who covers the Braves. He also maintains a blog about them on the paper's web site. This writer is also a big-time music buff. At the end of each blog entry, he will usually include the lyrics of some song by a musician that he likes. His tastes run toward rock and country. Last week he included the lyrics to "That Lonesome Song" by the country singer, Jamey Johnson. I liked them, so I sampled a couple of his songs on Amazon and ended up buying his CD of the same name.

Johnson is firmly in the tradition of low-down, country blues, something which he himself recognizes. For instance, the last song on the CD is entitled "Between Jennings and Jones". For those of you who may not know, that's Waylon Jennings and George Jones, and Johnson is somewhere between those to men in musical style. He's also between them in the record bins, a coincidence that he exploits in the song. As I said, he's typical country blues, and all the themes are there. There's a short track right at the beginning of the album where he's supposedly being released from prison, the conceit being that the songs that follow describe his life after leaving prison. I say conceit because he's apparently never been in prison. There's also heavy drinking, women doing him wrong, and him doing women wrong. There's mama, of course, and pickup trucks. The only thing missing from the classic scenario is the dog. It doesn't sound like Johnson has him a dog.

I enjoyed the album, as corny as it is in spots, and it is corny. For instance there's the first song on the album entitled "The High Cost of Living". One of the lines in the song is, "I tell you the high cost of living ain't nothing like the cost of living high." I don't know what it is about country music and this kind of corny wordplay, but it seems to be a part of the tradition. Here's some more of the same from Johnson. He's got a song entitled "Mary Go Round" about a woman who's running around town on him. There are some lines on the CD I like too, at least for what they are. He's got one song called "Angel" about a divorce. I like this line from the song, "...now it's so hard to tell, am I shaking a demon that's after my soul, or sending an angel to hell." Classic country stuff, that. And how about this, "That morning sun made its way through the windshield of my Chevrolet. Whiskey eyes and ashtray breath on a chert rock gravel road. What the hell did I do last night? That's the story of my life, like trying to remember words to a song nobody wrote." Now, that's just plain fine.

Weapons 'R' Us

2009-08-01T14:31:00.001-04:00

I just had to share this link. As is pointed out there, at this point, the US economy manufactures almost nothing but weapons. That should have come as no surprise to me, but I hadn't quite thought of things in those terms before.

http://jontaplin.com/2009/08/01/national-security-state/

Pitt's Wisdom

2009-07-31T07:36:00.001-04:00

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

The above quotation comes from William Pitt in 1783. I ran across it on a site that I frequent, and I liked it, so I thought I'd reproduce it here. We Americans have embraced this creed with a vengeance, and it's made us a nation of slaves. Don't believe me? Here are a few, quick examples. How many people objected when the Busheviks curtailed personal freedoms after 9/11? Not many, because they bought the alarmist claim that those measures were necessary to prevent terrorist attacks. They've embraced it again in this economic crisis. Billions and billions of taxpayers monies to bailout rich bankers? It's necessary to save the economy. More bullshit. And the need to let the insurance companies get their fat, greasy fingers into a national health care plan. It's necessary, you see. There's the market, and capitalism. And who wants socialized medicine anyway? You don't get to pick your doctor. You don't get any say in your treatment. Blah-blah-blah, but the know-nothing American public is all too willing to buy it.

Steelworkers in northeast China aren't so prostrate. On the 27th, The Guardian reported that, when workers at one of the country's largest steel plants were told that 25,000 of them would lose their jobs in a takeover, they killed the messenger. That's right, they beat to death the firm's executive who gave them the news. The deal was subsequently cancelled. Maybe people shouldn't kill executives, or maybe they should. I don't much care one way or the other. However, there's definitely a lesson to be learned here. No real change takes place until people decide to take things into their own hands. The only thing the masters really fear is mass social disruption. Individual acts of terrorism they can handle, and at times they're even welcomed, because they can be turned against those who seek change. Social upheaval is a horse of an altogether different color, a coal-black horse, a stalking horse that scares the crap out of them.

And since I've mentioned China, welcome to the new boss, he's the same as the old boss. On the 25th, the Straits Times, which is a newspaper that is published in Singapore, reported that 90% or more of China's billionaires are the sons and daughters of high-ranking government officials. Is that really any surprise?

Health Care Bill

2009-07-30T06:26:00.002-04:00

This short piece by Matt Taibbi, political reporter for Rolling Stone, sums up things regarding the health care bill that is currently working its tortured way through Congress. In particular, I like the following sentence from his article. "Our government doesn't exist to protect from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters." Indeed. I doubt that the US government has ever really been anything like "of the people, for the people and by the people," but it's transparently the polar opposite of that right now.

http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/07/28/the-health-care-bill-dies/

Rorschach

2009-07-29T12:21:00.002-04:00

Well, it looks like the clinical psychologists have all got their panties in wads. They're up in arms because Wikipedia is publishing the Rorschach blots. I guess they're afraid that all the nut jobs out there will now be able to cheat. It's hard to believe but, according to the New York Times, thousands of journal articles have been published on the interpretation of the blots. But what's to interpret? Why not read the patient's tea leafs? It makes about as much sense.

I suppose they have some diagnostic value, but you'd probably do just as well with one of those word association tests. Psychologist says, "Mother". Patient says, "Knife". Psychologist says, "Father". Patients says, "Pistol". You get those kinds of responses from a patient and you know it wouldn't be a good idea to send him home. There isn't really any sophisticated analysis involved. It's the same with those blobs of ink. A real candidate for a rubber room will make oddball associations no matter what you show him, but I defy anyone to demonstrate how these Rorschach associations have any value at all when the responses are common or mundane.

One of the many reasons that health care is so expensive is because of the proliferation of pseudo professions*, which clinical psychology comes close to being. I say "comes close to" because they do perform one good function. Since they cannot prescribe drugs, they act as a counterweight to the psychiatrists whose solution to every condition is to medicate the patient up to his eyeballs. For that alone I would give them a hand, but I can't, because these are the guys whose professional association endorsed their role in what the psychologists would probably call "enhanced interrogation". The rest of us know it as torture.

* Want a truly pseudo profession? How about nutritionists? People get degrees in that and get paid professional salaries. What nonsense. Anything a nutritionist could tell you that has any value at all could be put down on a couple of sheets of paper, and the print wouldn't have to be all that small.

Socialized Medicine

2009-07-28T12:12:00.002-04:00

In the discussion of health care in this country, the right wing often goes on and on about what horrors the proverbial "friend of a friend" experienced with the health care system of countries like Canada and the UK. Here's a link to a woman's direct account of her experience with universal, government-administered health care in Finland. By the way, in case you haven't seen it, Michael Moore's movie "Sicko" makes the same case as this piece.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/28-9

Update

2009-07-12T23:03:00.002-04:00

As those few of you who occasionally check this site know, I haven't been blogging lately. It hasn't been because of sloth, though I confess to being somewhat lazy about it. No, it's because I've started another novel. After finishing Buster Bungle's Big Top, I thought that I would relax for a while. As it's turned out that hasn't been the case. I immediately started on another one, and I've already got 35,000 words of a first draft. There have been a number of times when I thought of composing a blog post, but decided that I'd rather expend the time and energy working on this new novel. Right now, I'm in a lull and have been away from it for a few days, though I plan to start banging away again tomorrow.

I've read a couple of interesting books since I've last blogged. The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley was one. He's a damned good science writer and I was intrigued by this book. A lot of people, particularly those of progressive inclinations won't like it. That's because the rightwingers have no monopoly on the denial of reality. Us lefties deny the inconvenient facts as well, like the influence of biology on human behavior. Certain leftists, like Mao said that there is no such thing as human nature, that we are who we are purely as a result of cultural forces. The role of nature is insignificant in relation to nurture. Modern genetics and evolutionary science puts the lie to that.

Take sexual roles as a case in point. Men seek sexual partners that are young and beautiful. They compete with other men for the most desirable women, though this competition may take other forms. For example, there's this remark from the wealthy shipping magnate, Aristotle Onassis. "If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning." On the other hand, women seek out partners who have status and power. Men will indulge in polygamy if given the opportunity. We all know the stories about the emperors and despots who have had harems. Where circumstances don't permit that, men take concubines or lovers on the side. Women tend to more monogamous, and centered around family. I'm not aware of a single woman ruler who's had multiple partners on the scale of the extravagant despots.

There's an abundance of evidence to support the contention that this sort of behavior is largely a part of our biological heritage. In the first place there's the pure logic of evolution. Those species which have maximized their reproduction have been the ones that have survived. In the case of males, especially among the more highly evolved mammals, that means spreading your seed as far and wide as you can. Since females among the mammals carry their young for so long, they can only maximize their number of offspring by make sure their young survive, which generally means one of two things. They seek the company of other females who band together to raise the young or, as the case with humans, they seek to bind a male to them so that he can help raise the young.

Now, as Ridley is quick to point out, none of this is to suggest that there is an inevitability about certain behaviors. Culture certainly plays a role, and it's impossible to separate the contributions of nature and nurture. To use a nice, little description provided by Ridley, if human behavior is like the area of a rectangle, then nature is its length and nurture is its width. You need both to compute the area of the rectangle.

What this suggests is that we ignore the innate biological differences between men and women at our peril. However, it does not imply that the differences are such as to prevent both from fully participating in all aspects of society. Allowances must be made though. To take an extreme example, there's the question of women in combat. That might not be such a good idea. As has been pointed out, rape is common in battle or, more accurately, in its aftermath. There are also not a few instances of rape by one's own forces in such situations. It's a biological imperative, folks. The logic of the raid is at work. The men band together, go kill the members of a competing tribe or troop, take their women, and impregnate them. Chimpanzees do it, aborginal tribes do it, and so-called civilized men will do it in combat. That doesn't make it right or acceptable, but it is inevitable. All the more reason to make certain that no more wars.

The Daily Show

2009-06-15T00:21:00.001-04:00

I like to watch The Daily Show on The Comedy Channel. At times it is truly funny, and nobody in the mainstream skewers the right like John Stewart and his ensemble. However, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, one of the primary functions of the media in America is to define the limits of permissible discourse. The Daily Show performs that role by defining the limits of acceptable dissent on the left. Go to the left of them and you're looney tunes, or dangerous and perhaps even terroristic.

There was a clear example of this not long ago, when Stewart said that President Truman had been guilty of war crimes in dropping the atomic bombs on Japan. At the very beginning of the next show, he apologized for that remark, pointing out that Truman wasn't a war criminal. Bullshit. He was right the first time. I personally don't believe it was his idea to apologize. That undoubtedly came down from the executive offices of whatever media conglomerate currently owns The Comedy Channel.

There was an example of a different sort one night last week. The Daily Show is divided into three segments. It is customary for Stewart to interview a guest on the third segment. On the show in question, the guest was the producer of a clone of American Idol on TV in Afghanistan. That's right American Idol, and this fool was talking about his show like it was some great exercise in democracy because the contestants were expressing themselves and the women weren't covering their faces. This is just the sort of thing that Stewart usually skewers, but not this time. He was taking this guy seriously.

What a crock. Is this what American-style democracy has wrought, the right to appear on a stupid TV show? I would think that this kind of thing would play right into the hands of the Taliban and other Islamist extremists. All they have to do is say, is this what the Americans would give you? They've bombed your country, killed you children, and destroyed your economy, and this TV show is what they're going to give you. Hell, if I were a young Afghani man, it just might send me straight to the nearest madrasa.

As I said though, The Daily Show can also be truly funny. Last week, they also did a segment in which they made fun of those who are afraid to have convicted terrorists jailed near their homes. Like they pointed out, just what the hell would one of these guys do if he did manage to escape a super maximum security prison? At the conclusion of the segment, John Oliver, who was playing the reporter, said that he had a way to protect yourself if an Islamist terrorist escaped from a jail near you. He then showed the camera a pork chop hanging from a rope necklace. Yeah, I know, but you had to have been watching. I got a good laugh from that.

We Humans, We Fools

2009-06-03T04:01:00.002-04:00

I'll never understand human nature. Not that I'm meant to, but it still boggles my mind on occasion. Last night, I watched part of an Independent Lens documentary on the local PBS channel. The topic of the documentary was the Jehovah's Witnesses. It left me shaking my head, though I don't think that was the reaction the filmmakers meant for me to have.

At the center of the documentary was a 23-year-old man who needed a liver transplant in order to survive. Finding a liver was not to be a problem. His father was a suitable donor. However, Jehovah's Witnesses are forbidden to have blood transfusions, and liver transplant patients have need of lots of blood. There was the problem. However, this young man's family managed to find surgeons who would use an experimental procedure that didn't require transfusions. The surgery was successful and the young man's life was saved. Okay, happy ending and all that, but answer me this. If a Jehovah's Witness's faith prohibits him from getting a blood transfusion, how is it that he is permitted to receive an organ transplant? Both amount to the same thing, the introduction of foreign tissue into the body. This question wasn't asked in the documentary, though I thought it should have been.

A larger issue was also addressed in the documentary. This family apparently had ancestors in Germany who were also Witnesses and were sent to concentration camps by the Nazis. Jehovah's Witnesses were apparently tortured horribly in an effort to get them to renounce their faith. Very few, if any, did so. What were they, nuts? They weren't like the Jews to the Nazis. They weren't race enemies, so all a Jehovah's Witness had to do in order to be released from the camp was to sign a document renouncing his faith. Why wouldn't one do such a thing. There are those who think that such people are courageous and to be admired for adhering to their beliefs in the most difficult of circumstances. Christians, for one, love their martyrs and think they are deserving of praise. But why? The sensible thing to do would be to say, okay, I renounce my faith. You can then go your merry way and believe whatever the hell you want. That's what many Jews did in the Middle Ages. In places like Spain, they even converted to Christianity, but continued to practice their faith in the privacy of their homes.

That said, I hope we continue to live in a society that permits beliefs like those of the Jehovah's Witnesses. Live and let live is what I say. No one should be made to suffer for what he believes, even when that others find those beliefs distasteful.

Creative Writing Programs

2009-06-01T14:00:00.003-04:00

I came across this article about creative writing programs on The New Yorker web site, and decided to pass along the link. I don't agree with everything in it by any means, but it's well worth reading.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/06/08/090608crat_atlarge_menand

Pity The Poets

2009-05-26T15:19:00.002-04:00

How low we have fallen. The spirit of the age has even infected the world of poetry. This month, one Ruth Padel became the first woman ever elected to the Oxford University chair of poetry. This is a big deal. The chair has been in existence for 301 years, and is second in prestige only to the poet laureate position.

As it turns out, Padel has resigned the chair after just ten days. Her chief competitor had been Derek Walcott and, as it turned out, she had sent emails to a couple of reporters as part of a covert campaign to smear Walcott. She apparently reminded them of Walcott's age, 79, and of his alleged poor health. She also reminded them of the charge of sexual harassment that had been brought against him in the mid-'90's, a charge that was settled out of court. Padel's defense was the the information was all in the public domain, so it couldn't be said that she was really talking out of school. However, her former supporters weren't buying that, and many of them insisted that she resign.

This is yet further evidence, if it is needed, that poetry is now so beside the point that poets are scrambling for crumbs at the academic table. If it were still a truly vital art form, poets wouldn't be resorting to this sort of chicanery and they wouldn't be seeking refuge in academia. They'd be making their livings from the sales of their books and the proceeds from their readings, but poetry as an art form has been in decline for a long time. Back in the 1960's, when I was of college age, the sensitive souls among my contemporaries often looked to poets when seeking meaning and consolation. That doesn't seem to be the case today.

Padel's admission of bad behavior could be seen as a sign of a great family in decline. You see, the woman is the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin. I'll bet there are more than a few anti-evolutionists who are chuckling at that.

Socialism Vs. Capitalism

2009-05-24T13:48:00.000-04:00

I liked this article about socialism versus capitalism, and decided to post a link to it.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/24

Cats

2009-05-24T06:58:00.001-04:00

I love cats. I always have. I don't really know how that came to be. Even as a very small boy, I was fascinated by them. Dogs have never held the same appeal. It's not that I dislike them. I can remember an incident from when I was three years old, where I was playing with a neighbor's black cocker spaniel. That was an awfully long time ago, and the memory may not be all that accurate, but it does indicate that I've never had an innate aversion to dogs, but there's something about them that irks me. I don't like the way they're so damned eager to please.

Some people seem to think that cats are sneaky and unlikeable, but I've alway found them to be mysterious and they seem to have a spiritual dimension, some more than others. I have no trouble whatsoever understanding why the ancient Egyptians thought that cats were household gods. Not that this is much different from our modern-day attitudes toward our pets. Just because we don't think of them as gods per se, that doesn't mean that we don't cherish them in exactly the same way as the Egyptians cherished their cats. Yeah, I know that the Egyptians mummified their cats for burial, which says something, but we have our pet cemeteries here in the twenty-first century. Hell, there are even folks who have taxidermists stuff their dead cats and dogs.

It's amazing how attached we can become to our animals. This past March, I lost two cats that I'd had for a long time. One was fifteen years old, the other seventeen. They died within a few weeks of each other. Much to my surprise, that really hit me hard. It was like losing a couple of good friends, which was what they had indeed become. I didn't wait long to get another cat though. I went to the Humane Society shelter and got one there, a year-old, black male. I was walking along this wall of cages, and the little booger reached his paw out to me. I asked the attendant if I could hold him, and she fetched him from the cage. He snuggled up close to me in my arms, then reached his head up and rubbed it against my cheek. What could I do? He had chosen me, so I took him home. His name is Maurice, and he's a real sweetheart.

There's a tradition that associates cats with the diabolical. Black cats were once thought to be the familiars of witches, and many people still consider them unlucky. It is probably for this reason that animal shelters find it harder to find homes for black cats. And what if that old superstition is true? Then, so be it and I guess I am, in the not so immortal words of that character who used to be on Saturday Night Live many years ago, as doomed as doomed can be. And wouldn't you know it. Just as I typed those words, Maurice jumped up on the table, demanding my attention. It's as good a reason as any to end a post.

Take The Purgative

2009-05-14T18:47:00.002-04:00

Last week I had a colonoscopy at Grady Hospital, which takes the Medicaid cases here in Atlanta. The most difficult thing about the colonscopy is the purgative that you have to take the night before to clean out the colon. It's no fun at all. So anyway, there I was first thing Wednesday morning, daydreaming about alien visitations as I awaited my turn for the anal probe. During that time, I saw three people get rescheduled because they had failed to take the purgative. Now, I'm a social democrat. I'd like to see true radical democracy, but that doesn't seem possible. Social democracy seems to be the only practical left-wing alternative, at least at this particular point in history. That being the case, I'm all for universal, single-payer health care. However, the conservatives are right about one thing. The individual has to take responsibility for his own life.

Those people who failed to follow instructions regarding the purgative were getting virtually free healthcare. One would think that they would appreciate that fact and come prepared for the procedure. One might object that they were poor and uneducated. Perhaps they were illiterate or mentally impaired, since two of them were elderly. That's no excuse. One can always ask someone to explain the instructions, a family member, a neighbor, or even a fellow member of one's church congregation. The fact is that people like that are adding to the cost of affordable healthcare for the poor at a time when it is under attack by right-wing and corporate interests, and they should hold themselves responsible.

Some might say that I'm blaming the victim. Bullshit. That's one problem with political positions. They tend to drift to the extremes. Those on the left tend to view matters social and economic through the lens of historicism. For example, they might say that poverty causes crime, which is a sociological fact. But then some of them argue that individuals who are guilty of committing crimes shouldn't be punished because they come from impoverished backgrounds. That's patent nonsense. The language of the sociological is not the same as the language of personal responsibility. One cannot say anything specific about one from an impoverished background who commits a crime just because one knows that poverty causes crime. Take the Somali pirates for example. It's been said that they turned to piracy because the Europeans have fished out the waters along their shore so that they don't have a way to make a living. I don't doubt that, and I don't doubt that a lot, perhaps a majority, of those who turned to piracy might not have done it had they a way to make an honest living. However, I'm certain that there are individuals who are involved in that piracy who are stone-cold criminals, and would have become criminals under any conditions. Life isn't as simple as our ideologies.

On a related matter, the local PBS station is showing a series based on the secret relationships between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. They portray Stalin as a tyrant who was responsible for the deaths of millions. Now that is true. It's a simple historical fact. However, I can't watch shows about Stalin because they all seem to use his atrocities as a way to smear the very notion or a workers' or peoples' state. Maybe such a state is possible, and maybe it isn't, but neither Stalin's Russia nor Mao's China are particularly relevant in the discussion. They were both Leninist states and Lenin's conception of Marxism was a gross distortion. For one thing, Marx claimed that true socialism wasn't possible until all of the countries of the world had become fully developed capitalist states. The reason for that is that true socialism requires an economic base where it is possible to produce all that is needed without finding it necessary to turn anyone into a wage slave. As Marx put it, from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. It's a nice dream. Perhaps it will be true in the future.

Well, here I am, babbling on like a professor with incipient Alzheimer's who's forgotten the subject of his lecture. The students are getting restless and muttering among themselves. The blonde in the front row who likes to show me her legs in the hope of getting a better grade is talking on her cellphone. It's time to go, so I'll toddle off and go stare at a wall for a while.

Awkward Family Photos

2009-05-11T14:11:00.002-04:00

I just had to share this web site. I found it to be very funny. In particular, check out the photo entitled, "Your Body is a Wonderland".

http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/

The Danger of Drugs

2009-05-10T05:40:00.002-04:00

I've posted before about the shenanigans pulled by the pharmaceutical industry. The article to which I link below is important in that regard. It's not long. I suggest that everyone read it. The lesson one should draw from it is that, when it comes to taking prescribed drugs, one should be very skeptical. If you are not familiar with a drug that a doctor prescribes, research it before you agree to take it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/09/bad-science-medical-journals-companies

We're All Monkeys On This Bus

2009-05-05T07:14:00.001-04:00

I was watching this show on TV called Gangland. Well, okay, I wasn't actually watching it in the sense of sitting there on the couch watching it. I was doing something on the computer at the same time. I do that a lot, have the TV on while I'm doing something else. It's a kind of company. This is especially true in the evenings. I rarely have the TV on during the day. It must have something to do with the remnants of my workaday schedule. Of course, it also reminds of this claim that I read somewhere a long time ago. It seems that the mental hospitals calmed down a lot when they first got TV's. The patients stopped raising so much hell in favor of watching the tube. Of course, my hellraising days are long over anyway, so I guess I really am part boob, just like all this rest of peering idiots.

Anyway, I got off track there. So, I'm watching this Gangland episode. They're profiling this supposedly notorious motorcycle gang whose name I don't recall. As part of demonstrating what bad asses these guys were, they showed the photos that they had taken of themselves, posing with their guns. One thing came to mind right away. In Ken Burns' documentary on the Civil War, he shows these soldiers, both Union and Confederate, posing with their guns for photographers. But for the more extravagant posturing of the gangbangers, they looked remarkably the same. It's interesting that you don't see such photos of soldiers in World War One or Two. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that the photographers were permitted to set up shop right in the military camps during the Civil War.

Men, especially young men, congregate together in fraternities of violence. The chimps do it and so do we humans. Militaries have always exploited this. Ex-soldiers are continually writing that they don't fight for their country or out of any sense of patriotism but for the guys in their unit. They often claim that the relationships they form in their units are the strongest they've ever experienced. Likewise, gangbangers maintain that the gang is like a family, that its members are their brothers.

It all reminds me of a photo I saw recently. It was of this chimp in a zoo somewhere. He was some kind of genetic freak in that he had no body hair. It's one thing to watch footage of hairy chimpanzees running around in an African forest. To hell with what the geneticists say, those damn apes don't look all that much like us, but that hairless chimp. He was spooky.

The Flu

2009-04-29T12:28:00.001-04:00

Well, the media is doing its best to turn the flu situation into a panic. I guess that's what happens when the news is a form of entertainment. You've got to get the suckers into the tent. Nothing seems to sell quite like fear, and the news outlets specialize in it. On the national level it's things like fear of another 9/11, fear of another Great Depression, and now fear of another flu pandemic. On the local level, it's fear of crime, and fear that the damned flu will come to our town. Listen to these folks and you'd be afraid to step out of your house or apartment. Watch them enough, and agoraphobia just plain makes good sense.

Let's look at the facts. Sixty people have died of this flu in Mexico. But who were these people. If they were already weak and ill, that's unfortunate, but it's no cause for alarm. People in such a condition die of many diseases that are no more than an annoyance to the healthy. Sure a newborn has died in the US, but what kind of shape was that newborn in? What we do know for sure is that the cases in the US have been mild. I read a question-and-answer session on the Boing Boing site with a so-called science writer. One of the questions asked why those people died in Mexico while the flu has been mild in the US. The reply was, "Baby, if I could answer that, my pay grade would be a LOT higher." Well, baby, I guess we know why you're doing journalism instead of epidemiological research. You can't friggin' think straight. The fact is that we don't know that the flu hasn't been just as mild in Mexico because we have no real idea just how many people have caught it there. What if it's a million, or five million, or more, and those sixty were among the most vulnerable of that number? Suddenly those sixty look almost like bad luck, not evidence of virulence.

What say we assume the worst though. What if this strain of the flu really does turn out to be virulent; what can we expect? In the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, 28% of Canadians and Americans contracted the disease. Worldwide 2.5% died. That means that something like seven out of every thousand Americans died of that flu. Now, that's nothing to laugh at, but I'd always gotten the impression that people were dying left and right from that infection. Seven out of a thousand means that there were a lot of people who didn't know anyone who died of the flu. And we have to remember. This was before we had the public health system we have now, and before we had antibiotics to treat the secondary infections, like pneumonia, that the flu caused.

I'm not saying that this emerging strain of the flu is nothing to worry about. It's something that should be studied and watched. However, we need to have some perspective, especially given the way the usual right-wing assholes are trying to use it to gin up xenophobia. One-time Fox News hack Michelle Malkin, and hate-radio jock Michael Savage have already started blaming illegal immigration for the spread of the flu. Their argument is basically, that's what we get for letting those illegal Mexicans into our country. What patent bullshit. If you want to play the blame game, try the American-owned pig farms in Mexico. The conditions in those places, where the pigs are all crammed together and wallowing in each others' shit, couldn't be better for creating new strains of the swine flu.

Keep yourselves informed, folks. That's what I'm going to do, but don't fall for the media panic. It'll just make you stupid.

No, You Can't Sit On My Lap!

2009-04-27T15:55:00.001-04:00

The Naked Capitalism site is speculating on whether or not the knives are coming out for Geithner. It bases this speculation upon a long article on the front page of the print edition of today's New York Times. As the lead-in to the article says, "During five years as head of the New York Fed, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner built unusually close relationships with Wall Street executives." To back up their claims, they reproduce Geithner's appointments calendar from 2007 to 2009, while he was working at the Fed. They apparently obtained it through the Freedom of Information act. Of course, it's not news that Geithner is "a creature of the financial establishment" as Naked Capitalism puts it. They also speculate that Obama may be getting ready to dump Geithner, but they're not optimistic about a replacement given that Larry Summers is still the chief economic advisor to the president.

This weekend, Billy Moyers' PBS show focussed on the Pecora hearings during the Great Depression. For those of you who don't know, Ferdinand Pecora was Chief Counsel to the United States Senate Committee on Banking and Currency in the 1930's during the Depression. He conducted the Committee's grilling of banking executives over their business practices. Pecora was a populist by temperament and he apparently put on quite a show. He was also a bulldog and he kept at the executive he was questioning until he got the answers he wanted. Not like the lapdogs we have in Washington today. Though Pecora didn't really get at the causes of the Depression, he stoked up a good deal of popular anger against the banking establishment that paved the way for the reforms that were enacted, like the Glass-Stegall act and the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

An interesting episode took place during the Pecora hearings that highlighted the difference between those times and today. Carter Glass, who was one of the senators responsible for the Glass-Stegall act, objected to Pecora's methods. They had a very public clash during the hearings in which J.P. Morgan testified. Glass said, "This is a circus. All we need is peanuts and colored lemonade." A promoter for the Ringling Brother's Circus heard the quote and thought that it would be great to have a picture of Lya Graf, alleged to be the shortest woman in the world, sitting on the lap of the richest man. Graf was brought to the hearings and Morgan let her sit on his lap while a photo was taken. The link below is to a site that contains the photo. Can you imagine anything like that happening today? No way in hell would a Wall Street executive let a circus midget sit on his lap. If he did, the advocates for "little people" would be going nuts. Image is everything these days, folks.

http://www.quasi-modo.net/Lya_Graf_2.html

Musings on the US Civil War

2009-04-24T06:51:00.001-04:00

One of the PBS channels that I get is showing the Ken Burns' documentary on the Civil War, an episode each week on Thursday night. In the one I was watching last night, they were talking about the composition of the Union army. If the numbers cited by the film are to be believed, there were 100,000 soldiers in the Union army who were fifteen years old and under. The youngest known soldier to be wounded was twelve.

In recent years, we have been scandalized by the child soldiers of Africa, and rightfully so, but it appears that the same phenomenon has occurred within our own history. Sure, those child soldiers that we've heard about in Africa have tended to be parts of renegade military units, and the youths in our Civil War were serving in a conventional army. That makes little difference. Of course, it wasn't just the United States that engaged in such practices in the past. Those youngsters who would have careers as officers in the British navy in the 18th and 19th centuries were apprenticed aboard warships between the ages of twelve and fourteen. And they participated fully in any combat that their vessels took part in. Perhaps this shouldn't be all that surprising. In traditional societies, boys went through manhood rituals in early adolescence, and to be a man in many of those societies meant to be a warrior. That doesn't justify the use of boys in the military, but it does serve to give it context.

One thing that really has changed since the US Civil War is the treatment of disease. Most of us don't realize what a huge factor it used to be, even in the lives of the young and healthy. During the Civil War, a soldier had a one is sixty-five chance of dying in battle. He had a one in ten chance of being wounded, but he had a one in thirteen chance of dying of disease. Such has been the impact of vaccines, antibiotics, and sanitary practices that we find such death rates from disease to be outrageous.

Fools For Advertising

2009-04-17T15:08:00.002-04:00

We've all been brainwashed by the advertising industry, some of us more than others. That's something that most of us know, but sometimes little things will really bring it home to you. This morning I was at a nearby Kroger market. They're pushing the idea of bringing your own bags to take your groceries home in. Not a bad idea. All of those paper and plastic bags are a big waste of resources, not to mention the product packaging, like cereal boxes and such. For those who don't have bags of their own, Kroger is selling them. With a Kroger logo on it. Let me say that again. They want you to buy a bag with a Kroger logo on it. And I'm willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of people who pass through that store see nothing wrong with that. I do, and you'd better believe it. That's advertising for Kroger and I, for one, am not going to pay to advertise for Kroger.

Of course, they're really pikers when it comes to this kind of marketing. Here in Atlanta, we have the World of Coca-Cola. It's a museum about the history of the Coca-Cola company and its products. They charge an entrance fee of fifteen bucks for adults and ten bucks for kids. In the first place, I can't imagine why anyone would want to visit such a museum, even if it were free. Coca-Cola is not a food product. It's little better than a drug and I'm not saying that from a supposed height of moral superiority. I drink a helluva lot of Diet Coke myself, but I don't delude myself as to what it is. The real stuff with the fructose or sugar in it is even better. But it's still dope. If they're going to have a museum like this why not the World of Cocaine or the World of Heroin? And speaking of cocaine, there was a time when there was cocaine in Coca-Cola. I remember my grandfather, who lived all of his life in St. Augustine, Floria, telling me about the people who would line up waiting for the store to open in the morning so they could get their Coca-Cola fix.

Well, all that be as it may, I suppose Coke isn't as bad as cigarettes but, in the World of Coca-Cola, they have a retail shop where you can buy all kinds of items with the Coke logo on them, from tee shirts and jackets to cups and glasses. Again, I ask you, why the hell would anyone pay for the "privilege" of advertising Coca-Cola? A nice, bright red tee shirt or hoodie might be nice with that white logo on the front, but it should be a freebie, Jack. But no, there are plenty of fools who not only pony up to enter the museum but to carry away some memorabilia. When people have no more sense than that, it's no wonder we're awash in consumer debt.

A Literary Note

2009-04-16T10:53:00.002-04:00

As I mentioned earlier, I'm rereading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. I'm taking my time about it too, only reading ten pages or so a day. Right now, I'm about a quarter of the way through the book. It'll take me a couple more months to complete it.

I'm reading other books in the meantime, of course. Just recently I finished How Fiction Works by James Wood. It's an interesting little work that's worth reading, even though there's a lot I disagree with in it. Wood espouses the New Yorker school of fiction. He dislikes the tag of realism, but that's what he embraces as the best of fiction. In order to make his points, he will quote passages and deconstruct them. There are some, and one by Philip Roth comes to mind, that just leave me scratching my head. (I would reproduce the passage here, but I've already returned the book to the library.) He enthuses over the passage. He really likes the way Roth jumps from colloquial speech to an extraordinarily pedantic phrase within the spaced of a couple of sentences. To Wood's mind, this brilliantly illustrates different levels of diction, and how it enhances the passage in which it occurs. I read it over several times. The passage just seemed forced and, yes, pedantic.

Wood is also fond of David Foster Wallace. I don't understand the appeal of Wallace. I've read small bits of his work and they've all left me flat. I've not been inclined to make the effort to read one of his books. Anyway, Wood quotes a rather long passage from Wallace that is nothing but colloquialism, slang, and cliches. He says that Wallace goes on for two pages like that and, to Wood's mind, it illustrates the shallowness of the character whose perception of the world it represents. Bullshit. It read incredibly sophomoric to me in that it's such an cheap literary trick, the sort of thing you would expect from a somewhat precocious high-school senior who aspired to become a writer.

That said, Wood makes a comment about Gravity's Rainbow in one of his footnotes. He says that it has less in common with modern realism and the character-driven narrative than it does with the 18th-century picaresque novel. I don't know why, but that hadn't occurred to me before, even though it is obviously true. It may also explain why some of Pynchon's novels, like Vineland and Against The Day don't really work. Pynchon's characters lack depth and his novels aren't driven by their development. Hence, as Wood points out, Pynchon's villains, like Captain Blicero in Gravity's Rainbow, aren't truly frightening, though Blicero should be, given what he represents. Pynchon's best work is driven by sheer rhetorical brilliance, and when that's lacking, his work suffers. Gravity's Rainbow has it in spades though, and that's why I keep going back to it.

Writing Update

2009-04-13T14:37:00.001-04:00

I thought I might post an update on my writing efforts. My novel Buster Bungle's Big Top sits there requiring about a half day's worth of polishing. I've been procrastinating though. It's the old fear of failure thing, I suppose. When it's completed, I'll have to start trying to sell the manuascript, and that's a daunting task. The odds against me are so long as to approach the impossible. I've thought of self-publication, but the people on the Writers' Beware site don't recommend it, and I can see their point. At best you can hope to sell a couple of hundred copies, and that's with a lot of hustling. There are stories of self-published authors who attract the attention of the publishing companies, but the Writers' Beware folks say they only know of two authors who did that, and that was after hiring PR firms to pimp their books for them. That's not an option for me. I don't have that kind of money.

I've been pondering a couple of new novels. I spent about a month making notes, about 10,000 words worth of them, on a science fiction novel, a contemplation of what it means to be human, but I've put it aside. There are just too many degrees of freedom. Reality doesn't put enough restrictions on you. I don't feel like I can make a plausible story out of it. I may change my mind later, but I've put it aside for now.

About a week ago, I started making notes for a black comedy that is loosely in the Southern gothic tradition. I'm finding that I'm much more comfortable with that kind of story. The trouble is that I don't know much about the world of country music, and one of the lead characters makes a Faustian bargain to secure herself a career as a country singer. I need to read some background on the world of contemporary country music. If anybody out there knows of any books, please let me know, even if they're trashy gossip accounts. Hell, those might be the best in terms of research for the kind of book I'm thinking about writing.

Bottomed Out II?

2009-04-10T12:42:00.001-04:00

Well, I guess we can all rest easy. On the heels of the Wells Fargo results, Time magazine has announced that the banking crisis is over. Gee, why doesn't that fill me with cheer? The link to the article is below.

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1890560,00.html

Bottomed Out?

2009-04-10T06:10:00.001-04:00

The stock market has been surging and Wells Fargo has reported positive quarterly results. Could we have bottomed out? Are things going to get better from here on? Not so fast, kemosabe. That's a mule you're riding now, not some flashy palomino stallion. There are questions about the Wells Fargo results. Some seem to think that there are smoke and mirrors involved. I don't fully understand their arguments, nor do I care to educate myself enough to understand them. However, it appears that Wells Fargo had a suspiciously low figure for charge-offs against bad loans.

Meanwhile, the right-wing nut bags are flailing about as they try to find something which will give them a hook with the public. It seems that they keep throwing things out there, hoping that they can stumble upon something that will scare people enough to give them some political traction. Michelle Bachmann, who is apparently the new, more acceptable Sarah Palin figure, said that Obama was planning to send the youth to re-education camps. Others continue to push the notion that Obama is a cryto-Islamist. When the President told the Turkish parliament that the US would never be at war with Islam, and later bowed to the Saudi king, it really got them stoked up. How do these people make such bullshit come out of their mouths? There's a constituency for it though, the constituency that frequents gun shows. There's been a surge of gun buying and it isn't because of a surge in hunting and target shooting.

It all just gets to be too much. I myself am getting tired of blogging about it. I read an item a few weeks ago. It expressed surprise that movies seem to be doing relatively well. Duh. The same thing happened during the Great Depression. People want to escape the grim facts for a few hours. And the Depression was a great era for comedy with the likes of the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields and the Three Stooges. Hollywood can't seem to come up with funny comedies of its own, so they're remaking three shorts by the Three Stooges and packaging them in a single movie. Jim Carrey as Curly? I don't care if he does put on weight for the role. I'm not buying it.

Bishop Berkeley on the Beam

2009-04-02T13:44:00.000-04:00

To those who might think that this is a unique era, here's a quotation from the 18th-century philosopher, Bishop George Berkeley.

"I imagine that thinking is the great desideratum of the present age; and the cause of whatever is done amiss may justly be reckoned the general neglect of education in those who need it most, the people of fashion. What can be expected where those who have the most influence have the least sense, and those who are sure to be followed set the worst examples?"

It seems to apply, doesn't it. I'd contend that it applies, to a greater or lesser degree to all eras. Which is why Plato's republic, with its philosopher kings, is a pipe dream.* It's not the wisest and most educated who rise to power. It's the most ruthless and ambitious.

*Speaking of pipe dreams, I wonder if the old Greeks smoked a little weed. I could just see Plato lighting up a pipe before one of those dinner parties where they chewed over matters philosophical. It would stimulate the imagination. The scribe would have to remain straight though, so he could write it down, leaving out the giggling and laughing as he made it all sound properly profound.

The Winter of Our Discontent

2009-04-01T17:35:00.001-04:00

John Steinbeck is another writer who I've neglected. I read his Grapes of Wrath years ago, but that's it. While going through the blogs I frequently read, someone recommended The Winter of Our Discontent as germane to the current economic situation, so I went to the library and checked out a copy. I'm not that far into it, so I can't say a lot so far. The writing is somewhat sloppy. It doesn't look like Steinbeck did too many rewrites, if any at all. Also, the protagonist's wife is so far too good to be true. She seems to be the ideal of the good and faithful spouse. Not that she should be fooling around, but she's just too steadfast and doubt-free when it comes to being a wife. The novel was published in 1961, and that's the Saturday Evening Post's notion of what a woman should be in those days.

One thing's apparent right away, class is a salient factor in Steinbeck's world. In that sense it's more realistic than most of the fiction that purports to be true to everyday life these days. Steinbeck also seems to have nothing but contempt for religion. I like the following remark about Puritanism. The protagonist is reflecting upon his ancestors who he thinks may have been pirates, as well as whalers. "They successfully combined piracy and puritanism, which aren't so dislike when you come right down to it. Both had a strong dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for other people's property." It isn't just the Puritans either. Other Christian sects are just as bad. Need I mention anything other than the Crusades?

Inside AIG

2009-03-31T14:00:00.003-04:00

I thought that I would include the link below for any of you who might be interested. It's blog entries and letters from a few folks from inside of AIG, or so this site maintains. They're not terribly enlightening, but they are interesting, in a let's-watch-the-soaps sort of way. There's only one entry on this page, but there are links to a few more at the bottom.

http://www.businessinsider.com/blogging-from-inside-aig-exec-says-everyone-else-is-lying-2009-3

Two Books

2009-03-31T07:27:00.001-04:00

I haven't read much by Michael Chabon, just The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It's a fine novel, and I've meant to read more of his fiction, but I haven't gotten around to it. Somehow, though, I found a book of his essays, Maps and Legends in the library. I say "somehow" because I didn't run across it while browsing. I went looking for the book and checked it out, though I don't recall how I learned of it. In any case, I found it interesting.

There are three basic topics that he dwells on in these essays. First, there's comic books, of which he's fond. In fact, the protagonists of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay become comic book artists upon immigrating to America. Then, there's the golem. That's interesting too. Something I hadn't thought of before is that the Frankenstein monster story is a gloss of the myth of the golem, and Chabon likens a novel to a golem that the author animates and sets loose in the world. I can see his point, but it doesn't resonate with me in that way.

The most interesting topic that Chabon discusses in his essays is genre fiction, which he likes. As he points out, genre fiction is looked down upon by literary critics and by writers who take themselves seriously. Here's how Chabon puts it. "A detective novelist or a horror writer who made claims to artistry sat in the same chair at the table of literature as did a transvestite cousin at a family Thanksgiving. He was something to be allowed for, indulged, pardoned, excused, his fabulous hat studiously ignored."

That pretty much sums it up, though there are lots of reasons to be disdainful of most genre fiction. As Chabon puts it, "A genre implies a set of conventions -- a formula -- and conventions imply limitations (the argument goes), and therefore no genre work can ever rise to the masterful heights of true literature, free (it is to be supposed) of all formulas and templates." He goes on to add that this is mostly the fault of publishers, who use genre as a marketing tool. I might also add that, in most genre fiction, the writing is just plain bad. It pains me to read it.

However, it's not as simple as all that. So-called literary fiction isn't as free of formulas and templates itself. Take a look at a book of short stories by an author who is acknowledged as someone to be taken seriously. As Chabon points out, they are likely to be mundane and plotless, with a moment-of-truth epiphany at the end. He's right on the mark there, and Chabon admits that he himself has written many such short stories. Of course, he's the product of an MFA program, so he probably didn't have much choice.

I finished another book a few days ago. It was a novel called The Resurrectionist by Jack O'Connell. It's a nice piece of work. I read an earlier novel of his, The Skin Palace, that I didn't much like, but I'm glad I gave him a second chance. The Resurrectionist isn't what you would call a conventional novel. It's about this guy by the name of Sweeney, who has a six-year-old son who is in a coma as a result of an accident. He's moved the son from the care facility where he'd been staying to the Peck Clinic, where they are supposed to be doing cutting edge work on treating patients who are in persistent coma states. Things get weird from there.

There's a parallel story that's going on at the same time. You see, Sweeney's son loved a series of comic books called the Limbo comics, about a traveling band of circus freaks, and Sweeney reads aloud from these books to his comatose son. As soon becomes clear, the events in the comic book parallel those in the real world in a strange, surreal way. I use the word "real" advisedly, since the book is, and I'm using a genre term here, a fantasy. O'Connell would probably prefer the description "magical realism", since fantasy often implies unicorns, busty witches, and imaginary realms. In any case, it's a damned good book, and worth a read.

The Coup and the Rapture

2009-03-29T06:42:00.002-04:00

The article, "The Quiet Coup", which appears in The Atlantic and is linked to below, is an interesting take on the current economic crisis. Its thesis is that there will be no solution to the crisis until we overthrow the financial oligarchs who have seized effective control of the government and economy over the last thirty years. The author of the article was chief economist at the IMF in 2007 and 2008, and is currently a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, so he doesn't state the thesis in such stark terms, but that's what it comes to.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice

It's interesting though. Not so long ago, anyone who proposed such a thing would have been condemned as a commie or ridiculed as a woolly-headed utopian. Now it's MIT economists. Could this be a sign? Perhaps the damn fool Christians are right, and their Rapture is just around the corner. Did you know that there's actually a "Rapture Letters" web site?* Here's how it works. If you are a believer in the Rapture and you want your non-believing friends and family to know what happened should you suddenly disappeared, you just send their email addresses to this site. When the Rapture occurs, emails will automatically be sent to these people, letting them know what happened to you and encouraging them to get right with God before it's too late. Now, you might ask, since the web site's owner presumably thinks that he will be one of those who will be taken up into heaven, how will the letters get sent? Well, you see, it's a dead man's switch situation. He resets his program everyday and, if he fails to do so, off the emails will go. And the guy who runs the site and is in his late forties is convinced that the Rapture will occur in his lifetime. These poor folks, they're so afraid of their own mortality.

*I refuse to link to such a site. If you want to see it, you can search for yourself, but it's pretty unremarkable as web sites go.

Hey, Paul Krugman

2009-03-24T19:30:00.001-04:00

I ran across this cute little political tune called "Hey, Paul Krugman". It's catchy too. Upon watching the video, I couldn't help but wonder at how times have changed. Back when I was young, the political singers, guys like Pete Seeger, sang folk songs to acoustic guitar accompaniment. Now we have videos and synthesizers. Some changes are indeed for the best.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOYAuk809fY

On Trash for Cash

2009-03-24T05:07:00.000-04:00

This is a great summary of the current financial situation, and of the so-called solution that is being implemented by the Obama administration. I found it on the Naked Capitalism site.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/03/guest-post-hedge-fund-socialism.html

Things Turning Around?

2009-03-23T19:08:00.002-04:00

I get DSL from AT&T, so my home page is Yahoo! I know, I could change it, but that's where my web mail is, so I'd have to visit the damned page anyway. That being as it may, one of the headlines there says, "Wall Street rally reignited, stocks soar". The article under the headline, which comes from AP, says,

"Analysts who have seen the market's recent false starts are still hesitant to say Wall Street is indeed recovering from the collapse that began last fall. But the day's banking and housing news bolstered the growing belief that the economy is starting to heal, and that is what had investors buying."

So, what do I take from that? First is what it reveals about those who are calling the shots. They seem to think that this is nothing but an ordinary recession writ large. If that is the case, then we're simply suffering a crisis in confidence. Restore confidence and things will start to right themselves. Sounds good, if the analysis is correct. There are those, like Paul Krugman, who say it isn't. As he says in today's New York Times,

"If the reports are correct, Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, has persuaded President Obama to recycle Bush administration policy — specifically, the 'cash for trash' plan proposed, then abandoned, six months ago by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

"This is more than disappointing. In fact, it fills me with a sense of despair."

Who is one to believe? Well, I don't know, but I'm inclined to disbelieve the AP article. In the first place, it is not the case that the stock market necessarily reflects the strength of the economy. For one thing, it's all too easy to manipulate, particularly by the big institutions. We don't know whether or not the Treasury and Geithner's pals on Wall Street are manipulating the stock market in order to put a positive spin on the "cash for trash" plan that the Obama administration is implementing. If I had to guess, I'd say that's a large part of it and then there's a coattails effect. If word gets out among Wall Street traders that the Treasury is pumping funds into the market, traders will buy in the hope of riding the upsurge and getting out with a tidy profit before the rally collapses.

The National Association of Realtors' reported an increase in existing home sales. That's the good housing news that the AP article referred to. There's a caveat here though. One needs more details about those sales. Here's an example. According to another AP article, a "truckload of investors" have descended upon Detroit, where the median sales price for homes has fallen to $41,000. These investors aren't people who plan on living in those homes. They plan on fixing them up and moving them back onto the market when it recovers. If it recovers. I don't call sales like these a positive or negative sign. They're pretty much neutral, yet we don't know what percentage of existing home sales are of this type, so how can one call it good news?

The banks need to be nationalized and cleaned up. Glass-Stegall needs to be reinstituted. Other forms of regulation need to be implemented and rigorously enforced. Unless that happens, I have to agree with Krugman. There's cause for nothing but despair.

Apres Moi

2009-03-22T07:38:00.001-04:00

I'm linking to an article from the Rolling Stone. Its basic premise is as follows. "The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations."

Amen to that. What I particularly like about this article is that it discusses the economic crisis in plain, in-your-face language with a minimum of the buzz words that the financial types like to use to obfuscate the issue. I would like to say that it offers some hope, but it doesn't. It merely documents in some detail what others have said, that the Treasury Department has become a branch of Goldman Sachs. Hank Paulson was a Goldman boy, as was Geithner and his chief assistant. The claim is made that AIG is going to get even more money because it owes Goldman. Oligarchy at work, man.

I hate to say it, but I see my worst fears being realized. Obama talks a good game and he's got the common-man touch with his very public college basketball brackets and his appearance on the Jay Leno show, but he's a captive of Wall Street. He's not going to be able to do the things that will turn things around, namely nationalize the big banks, sell off the parts of them that have some value, and deep six the rest. Once people see that his promises have turned empty, they're likely to turn to more extreme figures, figures like Rush Limbaugh, or at least someone with his stamp of approval. It's a depressing prospect. The oligarchs are determined to hold onto their money and power at all costs, even if that means fascism, and if they go down, they intend to take us down with them. Apres moi, le deluge.

I found the link for this article on the Naked Captitalism site, which I'm now including in my list of sites. It's often wonky and heavy going, but it's also informative.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/1

Harlan Ellison

2009-03-18T05:44:00.001-04:00

The writer Harlan Ellison is pretty much a hack, but he is an outsized personality. As one example of that fact, consider this. He once flew from LA to New York just to punch out some guy who had unsuccessfully hit on his girl friend decades before. And Ellison is only five-four. Well, he's apparently suing Paramount and the Writers' Guild West over some script he wrote for the Star Trek TV show. I don't know much about the merits of the suit itself, nor do I much care, but this rant of his is wonderful, so I had to reproduce it here.

"And please make sure to remember, at the moment some Studio mouthpiece calls me a mooch, and says I'm only pursuing this legal retribution to get into their 'deep pockets,' tell'm Ellison snarled back, 'Fuckin'-A damn skippy!' I'm no hypocrite. It ain't about the 'principle,' friend, its about the MONEY! Pay Me! Am I doing this for other writers, for Mom (still dead), and apple pie? Hell no! I'm doing it for the 35-year-long disrespect and the money!

"The arrogance, the pompous dismissive imperial manner of those who 'have more important things to worry about,' who'll have their assistant get back to you, who don't actually read or create, who merely 'take' meetings, and shuffle papers -- much of which is paper money denied to those who actually did the manual labor of creating those dreams -- they refuse even to notice...until you jam a Federal lawsuit in their eye. To hell with all that obfuscation and phony flag-waving: they got my money. Pay me and pay off all the other writers from whom you've made hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars..from OUR labors..just so you can float your fat asses in warm Bahamian waters.

"The Trek fans who know my City screenplay understand just exactly why I'm bare-fangs-of-Adamantium about this.

"They maintain fortresses staffed and insulated with corporate and legal Black Legions whose ability to speak fluent bullshit is the ramadoola of gyrating, gibbering numbers via which they cling to every dollar. And when you aren't getting paid for the marvels you helped bring forth -- fine, hard, careful artifacts that are making others pig-rich -- at some point any sane person knows he has three, and only three choices: the first is to sit around dinner parties and ceaselessly whine over your sushi about how they screwed you, boo hoo, but you can't beef about it Out There in the World or they'll blacklist you; the second is to pick up an Uzi somewhere, crash your SUV through a Studio gate, and just run amok; and the third, last, choice is this one -- to act like an adult, to take 'em on in Federal Court and to make the greedy, amoral bastards blink blood out of their eyes. What they do is tantamount to common street-thug robbery...just add the pig-rich Madoff-style smoothyguts attorneys.

"And I learned today that the Actors Guild is having to fight, right now, just to maintain the very concept of residuals as part of their agreement with the Producers. So I am happy as a centipede-with-track-shoes that this infamous behavior, arrogantly ignored for too damned long, is timed to call attention to the degree to which the creative cadres in this business are getting parboiled and served up in a dog-dish! The part of this imbroglio that truly dismays me, is that my once-tough, beloved Guild -- my UNION -- that got massively screwed when it let the Alliance scare the slacker-gen dolts into thinking not losing a job meant 'just bend over and grin,' -- if one's own damn Guild won't help you, – when you've entreated them for months -- then hell, you've got no choice but to raise the skull and crossbones, hone the edge of your demon attorney, and just start cutting off noggins and nuts.

"Cowardice is like parrot fever in this town; I think there are writers and other artists who revel in being bitch-slapped, in being pilfered on a regular basis, as if they were artistic trailer-trash! And if the WGAw isn't going to watch my back -- and I've been their loyal hit-man, pit bull, and go-to guy for 47 years -- I dread the possibility that the timorous Guild won't raise the bloody axe for other artists, writers, actors...saner and less pissed-off than I. So you can tell 'em I'm coming!"

Writer Beware

2009-03-17T19:55:00.001-04:00

My novel, Buster Bungle's Big Top, will be ready to turn loose upon the world at the beginning of next week. I've been looking into publication. In the best of times, it's extremely difficult to find a publisher. Even before the current financial crisis, publishers had begun to change their business philosophies. They had begun to shed their mid-list authors as they took the Hollywood blockbuster approach to publishing, looking for those homerun books that would sell in the millions and make the big bucks. Now it's even worse. Under financial duress, some publishers are breaking contracts and demanding the return of advances that they have paid. Some are no longer even accepting manuscripts until times get better.

The literary world is full of scams and questionable schemes of all sorts. The bogus poetry anthologies are probably familiar to some of you. Some asshole will set himself up as a publisher and ask for submissions to a poetry anthology. He'll accept a poem from everyone who sends a submission, but the poet will be required to buy one or more copies of the anthology at inflated prices. This isn't illegal if properly done, but it's certainly sleazy. Even worse are the phony agents, who demand reading fees and such, then do nothing for their unfortunate clients.

It's no surprise that these sorts of practices exist. There are so many would-be authors out there who are desperate for publication that a certain number of them are bound to fall for these schemes. In the current environment, the problem has only worsened. It is for this reason that I was very glad to find the Writer Beware blog run by one Victoria Strauss. Writer Beware is an industry watchdog group sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Don't let that put you off. The blog is full of valuable information and advice for anyone who might be interested in publication, whatever the genre.

The blog has already helped me in regard to the Authonomy web site that is hosted by Harper Collins UK. At first, it looked like a great deal to me, but not now. After reading about the experiences of others on the Writer Beware blog, I'm not going to bother with it. Here's how the web site works. You register and post 10,000 words or more of your manuscript on the site. Other registered visitors to the site can read your manuscript and critique it. Likewise you can read and critique their work. There's also a forum in which you can interact with others. The manuscripts that are posted on the site are ranked, based on the critiques they have received. The top five are periodically read by Harper Collins editors with an eye toward possible publication.

I liked the idea when I first came upon it but, as is pointed out on the Writer Beware blog, it amounts to an electronic slush pile and it's a sweet deal for the publisher. Harper Collins doesn't have to pay people to work through the pile. The web site's visitors do it for free. It isn't that this is a scam or anything like that. It just isn't what one might think it would be. As a few commenters on the Writer Beware blog who claimed to have experience with Authonomy pointed out, it becomes an exercise in networking. Even worse, it becomes a you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours situation. If you give an author a less than enthusiastic critique, you're likely to receive the same in return, so everyone tends to say nothing but nice things about the manuscripts. That being the case, those authors who work hardest at networking find their manuscripts rising to the top. That wouldn't work for me. I'm not lickspittle enough to thrive there.

The lesson to be learned is one that I've learned many times before. There's no easy road to publication. It's a hard slog, and you can't let it get you down. That said, I'm impressed enough by the Writer Beware blog that I'm including a link to it here on my own blog.

The Media

2009-03-13T12:30:00.001-04:00

The newspapers are dying, or so they tell us. Some have been going under. That's a fact, and others are laying people off. The consensus seems to be that this represents a change of paradigm and that the internet is to blame. I'm not so sure of that.

Last week, I watched some of a video of a speech given by Robert Fisk, the prize-winning Middle East correspondent for The Independent. He was speaking in Berkeley as part of a promotional tour for his latest book. During his address, he spoke to the question of the decline of the print media. He made some points that I found interesting. For one, there's the quality of writing. Fisk read a couple of short pieces by soldiers writing from Iraq. They were quite eloquent and, as Fisk pointed out, you don't read writing like that in the New York Times. Though it's a fair point, I don't think that's any part of the problem with the print media. It wouldn't help the newspapers if they were filled with the best of writing. In the first place, most people have trouble telling good writing from bad. Secondly, I don't think they could care less.

Fisk touched upon the true problem when he talked about how he hated this fetish with giving both sides of everything. When the Israelis recently invade Gaza, they were doing all the killing, and they were making little distinction between combatants and civilians. Yet the media made a point of presenting both sides of the event, as though the question of whether it was right or wrong depended on how you looked at it. Fisk believes that journalists should be advocates for the downtrodden. As he points out, too many journalists, particularly those covering wars, want to be soldiers. He tells the story of a reporter from the Midwest who arrived in Iraq with his shoes painted in camouflage colors. That's how badly the fool wanted to look like a soldier.

I don't think that Fisk went far enough though. If the reporters being sent to the Middle East are soldier wannabes, if they identify with the military instead of its victims, why is that the case? There are plenty of good reporters who would like to do hard-hitting, investigative journalism, but the papers won't put them in positions to do it. The fact of the matter is that, when it comes to the major media, both broadcast and print, the range of acceptable opinions couldn't be much more restricted. Maybe in the case of an out-and-out totalitarian dictatorship, but short of that, you've got Shields on the left, and Brooks on the right. God, but that makes my brain ache, thinking of Shields as a leftist but, the fact is, anyone who proposes anything left of him is seen as a wooly-headed fool who has trouble distinguishing reality from intellectual fantasy, or as an angry malcontent, who is just one step away from terrorism. More leeway is permitted on the right, when it comes to designating someone a terrorist. Imagine what would happen to Rush Limbaugh or Chuck Norris, if they had made their recent statements from a left perspective. The news shows would already be full of videos of their perp walks.

If the media addressed people's real concerns, things might be different, but why go out and pay fifty cents a day for something that doesn't address one's real needs? I live in Atlanta and, for a long time, I bought the local paper mainly to read about local sports. The rest of the paper didn't interest me. The reporting of international and broader national events was poor. The editorial analyses were shallow and lacked real insight. Several years ago, I finally gave up on it altogether and stopped buying it. Were there more hard-hitting reporting, I might have kept buying it, but it's now all about entertainment and distraction. A look at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's web site is instructive. In the center of the page is a list of headlines. This morning there are eleven. Seven of them are reports of local incidents, such as crimes, a court decision on guns at the airport, and kids drinking windshield fluid at daycare, all of which have the effect of convincing one that the world as a dangerous and unpredictable place. One is sports related. There are two headlines related to local political topics, and one about John Stewart's confrontation with Jim Cramer on The Daily Show. If that isn't bad enough, there's a box in a prominent place on the right with the title of "Buzz". Six more headlines are there, and they're all related to gossip about celebrities. If this is the press that's dying, let me throw a shovelful of dirt on its coffin.

Now, John Stewart's confrontation with CNBC slimeball Jim Cramer on The Daily Show. I'm not going to go into it. Stewart pretty much demolished Cramer. There's coverage of that in many places, and I'm not going to try to compete with it. I'd just like to make this point. It's an indication of just how sorry our media has become when a comedian on a sketch show is the most incisive critic of the mainstream media coverage. Just think about it. Stewart doesn't pretend to be anything other than a comedian, but he gets to the truth of things more often than those who would claim that it's their job to do so. Is it any wonder that people turn to blogs and web sites for their information? Maybe we shouldn't be lamenting the decline of newspapers. Maybe we should be celebrating it.

Health Summit

2009-03-05T13:08:00.001-05:00

Obama is holding a health-care summit, so drop your drawers, bend over, and grab your ankles, but it won't be a procotologist who's coming up behind you. (I'm getting a colonoscopy tomorrow and I haven't had one before, so anal insertion is on my mind.) It'll be the insurance industry, gearing up to give you a ream job. Never mind that the majority of the public would like to see a government-run, single-payer health system with universal coverage. Never mind that it works well for Medicare and for our neighbors to the north. It ain't gonna happen, because the likes of the folks who brought us AIG are going to see to it.

Obama has spoken favorably of the Massachusetts health-care system, and that's apparently the best that we can hope for, though a recent Boston Globe editorial piece called it a failure. Here's how it works. Everyone is required by law to have health insurance. If your annual income is up to 150% of the poverty line, your premiums are fully subsidized. If your income is up to 300% of the poverty line, the premiums are partially funded on a sliding scale. Employers are required to insure a certain percentage of their employees. If you are unemployed or aren't covered by your employer, you must purchase insurance through a Massachusetts state agency. Failure to do so could result in fines of up to $912 annually.

There are lots of things wrong with such a system. In the first place, what it amounts to is a regressive, private tax on the public, the proceeds of which go to the insurance industry. Secondly, when you have sliding scales, with segments of the public paying the full premium while others are only required to pay a portion of it, you end up with a massive bureaucracy to handle the health-care system. Thirdly, the coverage is not necessarily all that good. With $30 co-payments for office visits, those with chronic conditions can find their costs mounting, and that's not the worst of it. As the Boston Globe editorial pointed out, someone with an annual income of $31,213 could end up paying $9,872 in premiums.

Think Obama will come up with something better? Think again. As I said, he's has publicly praised the Massachusetts system, and I think it's instructive that he's chosen Kathleen Sebelius as his secretary of Health and Human Services. Prior to her stint as governor of Kansas, she was its insurance commissioner.

Moral Midgets and Class Warfare

2009-03-04T15:13:00.002-05:00

This is too sweet. Remember Rick Santelli? He's the bozo on CNBC who ranted about the government bailing out the "losers" who faced foreclosure. Well, as it turns out, CNBC is owned by General Electric, which accepted loan guarantees of at least $139 billion to keep from going under. So, Santelli himself is living off of a government dole.

Guys like Santelli piss me off so much that I can't even watch the news without my blood pressure going up. Last night I saw Bernanke on the Lehrer News Hour. He was testifying before Congress and he was asked about why they were giving more money to AIG. He said, and I paraphrase, that the idea of bailing out AIG's shareholders angered him, but that they couldn't afford to let the company go under. What a son of a bitch. Like those were the only two choices, bail out AIG's shareholders or let it go under. What about nationalization on terms favorable to the tax payers, not the shareholders. It all makes me so sick. In moral terms, figures such as Bernanke, Geithner, and Summers are just one step below the likes of Adolf Eichmann. They may not themselves be throwing people out of their homes, forcing people out of their jobs, and inflicting misery upon millions, but they are administrators of a system that does these things, and they are culpable. They are damned culpable, and they should be behind bars.

It is often said that politics is the art of the possible. That right there is why politics is a morally bankrupt pursuit. There are certain issues that are moral in character. To take one example, look at what the Israelis did in the Gaza strip. That was an outrage. A legislator who had any moral sense at all would have introduced a bill that condemned the action and immediately cut off all aid to Israel. If anyone in Congress introduced such legislation, it certainly hasn't been reported. On the domestic front, take health care. Anything less than universal, affordable coverage is an abomination. Yet, where is the legislation setting up a single-payer, government-administered health care system like they have in Canada? Nowhere, because the moral midgets who run this country are in the pocket of the insurance industry. They are deserving of nothing but our contempt.

The ordinary people of America need to realize that we are in a class war, and that these people, these politicians and business people are, with few exceptions, our enemies. Until we do, they will continue to walk all over us.

Iceland

2009-03-04T11:29:00.001-05:00

Here's a link to an article in Vanity Fair about the Iceland's bankruptcy by the financial writer, Michael Lewis. If you thought things got out of hand on Wall Street, they pale in comparison to Iceland. The article is long, but I found it worth reading.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/iceland200904?printable=true&currentPage=all

Walking Like A Socialist

2009-03-03T15:44:00.000-05:00

I like this from Paul Krugman. You know things are getting bad when he comes off sounding like somebody who writes for the Monthly Review.

"Every plan we’ve heard from Treasury amounts to the same thing — an attempt to socialize the losses while privatizing the gains. We’re going to buy up all the bad assets at premium prices; no, we’re going to offer the banks guarantees against losses; no, we’re going to let private investors buy the stuff, but offer them de facto guarantees against losses in the form of non-recourse loans [...]

the insistence on offering the same plan over and over again, with only cosmetic changes, is itself deeply disturbing. Does Treasury not realize that all these proposals amount to the same thing? Or does it realize that, but hope that the rest of us won’t notice? That is, are they stupid, or do they think we’re stupid?"

Economics Is Not A Science

2009-03-03T07:33:00.001-05:00

Like many people, I've been reading a lot about the current financial crisis, and one thing that has really struck me is how thoroughly people have drunk the Kool-Aid when it comes to economics. Here's a quotation from the comments of a blog I frequently read. "Even Krugman is coming under fire from his readers for whining about savings rather than spelling out a strategy he thinks will work! If a Nobel Prize winner can't do it, who can?" This commenter apparently believes that economics is a science, and that a leading figure like Krugman should have the expertise to know how to approach the current crisis. Likewise, when Obama appointed Summers and Geithner to their posts in his administration, he was criticized on the grounds that they were among the people who got us into this mess. Supporters responded that, although this might have been true, they were possessed of the expertise required to deal with the current situation. Both of these responses imply the belief that economics is a science on the order of physics or chemistry, and that it's practitioners will best know how to deal with ongoing crisis.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Economics is rife with unsupportable assumptions and faulty reasoning. The Australian economist Steve Keen documents many of them in his fine book Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences. I won't try to summarize everything he says. I'll just give a taste of it. As he points out at the beginning of his book, economic theory assumes "that the best social outcomes result from individuals looking after their own self-interest: the market will ensure that the welfare of all is maximized." When it comes to modeling consumption, economists assume: "(a) that all people have the same tastes; (b) that each person's tastes remain the same as her income changes, so that every additional dollar of income was spent exactly the same way as all previous dollars -- for example, 20 cents per dollar on pizza, 10 cents per dollar on bananas, 40 cents per dollar on housing, etc." As Keen points out, those assumptions are patently absurd but they have the virtue of making possible the smooth demand curves demanded by the mathematics of econometric models. However, there are other consequences that attendant upon this approach. For one thing, by making unrealistic assumptions like these, economists can demonstrate that unregulated markets lead to the best possible outcome in meeting consumers' demands. For another, these assumptions banish class from economics.

I won't try to summarize anymore of Keen's arguments. I will just refer the reader to his book. It really is excellent, though it's tough sledding. I might add though that Keen is not a Marxist or anything like that. He's not pushing a radical agenda and using his critique of economics as a way of realizing that agenda. Rather, he's a university professor who is trying to effect a quantum revolution in his field of study. Addressing the question of why economics has not advanced, here's what Keen says. "There are many reasons for this failure of economics to accept fundamental criticism, and to evolve a different but richer theory. As I discuss later, these include the undeniable complexity of economic phenomena, and the impossibility of conducting crucial experiments to decide between competing theories. But a key reason -- the one which motivated me to write this book -- is the manner in which economics is taught."

Okay, I'll agree with that, but I'll go on to ask the following question. Why is it taught that way? Why don't those economists with a more profound understanding of the subject rise to prominence and thus influence the way economics is taught? Keen doesn't ask the latter question, probably because that's where political ideology rears its ugly head. I would maintain that the Chicago school of neoclassical economics has risen to prominence because it supports the status quo, and I don't see much prospect for that changing.

Here's how I see it working. It is only natural that the government and the large financial institutions are going to hire economists who support their policies and practices. Given their positions, these economists will come to be seen as dominant figures in their profession. When they leave the government or Wall Street, they will take positions in the economics departments of the elite universities like Harvard and Yale. The PhD's who graduate from the economics departments of those institutions will be seen as the most desirable hires by other universities. They will get their papers published in the most prestigious journals, and thus rise to the top of their profession. Next thing you know, the theories that support the status quo end up as the accepted doctrines. I don't believe that this is just the case in capitalist countries. I suspect that something similar happened in the past in the Soviet Union.

The upshot of what I'm saying is that economics isn't a science, not in the sense of physics or chemistry. Back in the nineteenth century, the discipline was called political economy. That was probably more accurate, since it will always have a political component. As for Keen, the approach that he champions is based on systems theory. You don't have to be an economist to believe that it's a much more realistic approach to economic behavior since the world's economies are, in fact, complex, dynamical systems.

Hating Christianity

2009-03-02T11:18:00.002-05:00

I hate Christianity. I really do, and I've said it before. Don't get me wrong. I don't hate Christians. As they like to say themselves, hate the sin, not the sinner. Nor do I think that Christianity should be outlawed or anything of that sort. People believe a lot of foolish things, and it's their right to do so. Just pat them on their little heads, and tell them not to bother the grown-ups.

Why the antipathy toward Christianity? One of the things I really hate about it is that it teaches people to be ruled. Christians will say that God helps those who help themselves, which would seem to imply a participatory democracy, but that's not what Christians believe. Look at the evangelicals. They're always running around calling Jesus "Lord". In fact, one of their favorite exclamations is, "Jesus is Lord!" And what is a lord? According to The Oxford College Dictionary, its historical meaning is "a feudal superior, esp. the proprietor of a manor house." It also means "a master or ruler". So, evangelicals are saying that one's relationship to Christ should be as that between a serf or slave and his master. The language of Christianity is rife with these expressions that imply a feudal relationship between the Christian and God. To take just one example, how about, "God's will be done." This too is feudal, where it is the duty of the vassals to submit to the will of their master.

With Catholics, this master and ruled relationship is even more blatant. Their church an out-and-out feudal organization that makes no apologies about it. The Pope in the Vatican is the king. It is even claimed that his pronouncements on matters of faith are infallible. Yes, boys and girls, infallible. You see, he has a pipeline directly to God, so he can't be wrong. It's just the old divine right of kings rewritten a bit. The cardinals and bishops are the lordly earls and dukes, and the priests are the knights, responsible for keeping the serf-like flock in line. So a few renegade priests pop the cherries on the poop chutes of a few boys here and there, it pales in significance to what priests do for the church hierarchy. That's why the church does its level best to protect those priests from prosecution by the legal authorities.

Now there are those who will say that evangelicals and Catholics aren't representative of all Christians. They will maintain that there are Christians with a more nuanced understanding of the faith. To which I reply, bullshit! These supposedly more liberal varieties of the Christian faith still embrace a relationship between God and believer that is like that between master and ruled. Here's just an example. Even these denominations would say that they worship God. Look at that verb, "worship". It implies an unequal relationship. Remember all those Hollywood movies where people refer to kings and lords as "your worship". Now, I'm not saying that the Hollywood usage of the term is historically accurate, but it does touch upon the understanding of "worship" in the popular mind. Of course, this still leaves sects like the Unitarians, but are they really Christians? I had a roommate in college who was a Unitarian and he liked to say that Unitarianism was for people who no longer believed in God but couldn't break the habit of going to Church on Sunday.

Nothing that I'm saying here is new. Friedrich Nietzsche was much more eloquent on the subject than I could ever be. As he put it, Christianity is a slave religion. He claimed that the reason it spread so rapidly was because it maintained that the virtues of a good Christian were those of a good slave. Thus, the downtrodden of the Roman Empire rushed to embrace it. Whether or not that's historically true, I don't know, but his fundamental point is correct. Christianity is a slave religion, that lauds the virtues of slaves, which means that a lot of people were bound to love it. The fact is that human beings aren't democrats by nature. They don't want to put out the time and energy that it takes to rule themselves. An interesting book on that point is Fanshen by William Hinton. He happened to be living in a Chinese village during the Communist revolution. In the beginning, that revolution was characterized by a lot of idealism, and attempts were made to implement a radical democracy in the villages of the country. As Hinton shows, the people of the village in which he resided soon grew tired of the constant votes and meetings. That was the beginning of the end for true communism, and the beginning of totalitarianism. The fact is that we're sheep, and sheep we shall remain, but that doesn't mean we need a Jesus Christ or any other half-assed shepherd.

Ain't The Way

2009-02-24T18:32:00.002-05:00

I had to chuckle at this, but it's not what we really need. The police will undoubtedly find this character and he'll probably turn out to be a nut case. No, what's needed is mass action. That's what the powers that be really fear. A couple of thousand people demonstrating outside of these bastards' homes would have made the point a whole lot better.
http://www.dailynewscaster.com/2008/10/23/homes-of-minnesota-politicians-vandalized-for-supporting-the-fraudulent-banker-bailout/

My Novel

2009-02-24T11:44:00.001-05:00

I've pretty much finished my novel, Buster Bungle's Big Top. I'm going to let it rest for a few weeks, then go through it one more time before sending it out into the world. I don't really know what I'll do in terms of publication. I have a number of options, none of them good, but I haven't really studied any of them in detail.

It took a long time for me to write this novel, over five years. That was mostly due to my own personal failings. I haven't written consistently at all. Back when I was writing a lot of poetry, some thirty years ago, I really worked at it. I wrote every day, and without really having to make myself sit down to it. Having failed to find the kind of success that I would have liked, it's now difficult to maintain a positive mind set and keep my nose to the grindstone.

However, it wasn't just a failure to work consistently that made it take so long. My way of working also hurt me. Instead of spending a few months thinking about my characters and how they would interact, I dove right in and started writing. That might make sense for some people, but not for me. I tend to be a brooder by nature. I chew things over.

As a result, it took me six complete drafts before I had something with which I was satisfied. Given that I'm a meticulous writer, those six drafts took a long time to complete. I shouldn't have had to go through that many, but in the early drafts I didn't really understand what I was trying to do because I hadn't spent any time with my characters. It's hurt the final product too. Though I'm satisfied with my novel, if not thoroughly pleased, I can't escape the feeling that it would have been better if I'd done more prep work before I started writing.

I've already started in on another novel, though I've yet to write a word of it as such. I'm making notes and writing sketches, most of which will never appear in the actual novel. As a result, a plot has begun to emerge. I now know how I want the story to end, but I'm not yet sure how to get there. I figure it will take me a few more months of preliminary work before I'm ready to begin writing. I hope to bang out a rough draft first. I want to get the story down without worrying about the language. Then I'll do a serious draft, allowing myself to dwell on the prose. In this way, I hope to have something with which I'm pleased after a single, serious draft.

Sex and Lucia

2009-02-23T12:06:00.002-05:00

Last night I watched the 2001 Spanish movie Sex and Lucia. I won't try to summarize it myself, but here's the synopsis from the AllMovie web site. I've altered it slightly in the interests of clarity.

Lucia is a young Madrid waitress who is devastated to hear of the death of her old flame, the novelist Lorenzo. Hoping to flee her troubles, she seeks out a beautiful island paradise her dead lover often talked about. There she meets and befriends Carlos and Elena who are also refugees of personal tragedies. Unbeknownst to all of them, the three each have a connection to Lorenzo. Years previously, Elena had a spontaneous fling with Lorenzo on the same island on the beach. Nine months later, she bore his daughter, Luna, but unable to raise a child on her own, she enlisted the help of a nurse, Belen. In attempting to reconnect with the child he never knew, Lorenzo had a passionate affair with Belen, one which caused her to neglect Luna, with tragic results. As Lucia slowly learns these details, she recalls the book Lorenzo was writing just before his death, and soon the lines between fact and fiction begin to slip away.

The film was all right, but I wasn't blown away by it. There was a bit too much of the melodramatic romanticism that the Spanish and Italians seem to be fond of, and I'm too old and jaded to do much more than yawn at movies about sexual relationships between the young. That said, Sex and Lucia is an intelligent and complex film.

Watching this movie really brought home to me just how one-dimensional even the best of American films are. Watch them once and you've got all they have to offer. Not so with Sex and Lucia. There's a lot I didn't understand about the movie, and I'd have to watch it several times before I could confidently state that I had a grasp of it. For example, there's some kind of symbolic contrast between Lucia, who is a creature of the sun, and Elena, with whom Lorenzo had sex with one time on a beach under a full moon, resulting in the birth of his daughter Luna. Some kind of dialectic, perhaps a mythic dialectic, is playing out there throughout the movie, but just what it was escaped me.

I liked the shots in Sex and Lucia that alluded to the techniques used in the films of the early Surrealists, though I'm not sure how much of that was intentional. It could well be that those techniques have become part of the accepted repertoire in the world of the Spanish art film. I don't know. I'm ignorant of the tradition.

Sex and Lucia may also be taken as a meditation upon the nature of the narrative. There's an intermingling of events in the novel that Lorenzo is writing with those that take place in the real world. Sometimes it's hard to figure out which is which, and at the end Elena says that in the novel that Lorenzo wrote, in which she is one of the characters, there's a hole at the end through which she can return to the middle of the story. That seems to be what passes for hope for her.

As my remarks make evident, the movie deserves at least one more viewing, but I wasn't enough taken by the basic story to make the effort.

Bill Moyers

2009-02-21T16:40:00.002-05:00

It looks like PBS's resident liberal commentator Bill Moyers is taking it on the chin. According to the Slate piece to which I'm linking below, while working for LBJ, he was involved in campaigns to ferret out homosexuals in government and in Goldwater's campaign. He was apparently also involved in other unsavory practices of the Johnson administration, including bugging Martin Luther King's private life, surveillance of civil rights groups at the 1964 Democratic convention, and planting shills in press conferences. This kind of thing should come as no surprise. He was a special assistant to LBJ for Christ's sake, and when you wallow with the pigs, you're going to come out covered in mud and shit.

Of course, though Moyers is derided by the right wing as a liberal, he is no such thing. He is, in fact, an old-fashioned conservative. As such, he would have adhered to a chivalrous notion of loyalty. LBJ being his lord and master, Moyers would have done his bidding as any good vassal should.

http://www.slate.com/id/2211601/pagenum/all/#p2

New Pynchon Novel

2009-02-18T08:37:00.003-05:00

Hot damn! A new Thomas Pynchon novel is coming out. It's called Inherent Vice. Here's a description of the novel from Penguin's summer catalog.

It's been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that "love" is another of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy," except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.

In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there ... or ... if you were there, then you ... or, wait, is it ... Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon — private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog.

Pynchon is great with names, and he scores again here. Doc Sportello. It just sounds like the name of a private eye. As far as I'm concerned, Pynchon is a hit or miss kind of writer, but when he hits it's a homerun. His last novel, Against The Day, I found tedious, but Gravity's Rainbow is a classic. It might well be my favorite novel. It's certainly in the top five. "A screaming came across the sky." That has to be one of the great open lines of American literature.

Interestingly enough, "inherent vice" is a business term. It's defined as follows. "Hidden defect (or the very nature) of a good or property which of itself is the cause of (or contributes to) its deterioration, damage, or wastage. Such characteristics or defects make the item an unacceptable risk to a carrier or insurer."

"Inherent Vice" comes out in August of this year. I've already preordered my copy from Amazon.

Lincoln

2009-02-16T10:33:00.002-05:00

It's Presidents' Day, so I thought I might make a few remarks about Abraham Lincoln. As is to be expected, over the last few days, there have been a lot of TV shows about the various presidents. I watched one of them last night, something called Looking For Lincoln on PBS. The gist of the show was that a certain mythology has grown up around Lincoln, and that the things that most of us were taught about him in school are false. For example, he is lauded as the great emancipator, but that is something less than the truth. Yes, he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and he was personally opposed to slavery, but he believed that blacks were biologically inferior to whites, so that it was only natural that whites hold a superior position to blacks in society. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. It was a commonly held position at the time, even among those who were opposed to the institution of slavery.

Some people get upset when the warts on their historical icons are exposed. I've never understood that. Gods do not walk among us. We're all human beings with our foibles and weaknesses, so why should the historical figures who we admire be any different? If we're trying to hold these people up as examples, doesn't it make more sense to show them, warts and all? When we portray them as god-like, people are more likely to say something like this to themselves, well, I can't measure up to that, so why even bother trying. Portray them as flawed human beings like ourselves, and I hope that people would think, yeah, I may not be perfect but that doesn't mean I can't accomplish great things.

One person who seems to think that there are gods walking among us is Tony Kushner, the playwright who wrote Angels in America. Steven Spielberg is apparently planning to make a movie about Lincoln, and Kushner is writing the screenplay. He appeared briefly in Looking For Lincoln and he talked about how intimidating the task was because there was no way he could get into the mind of Lincoln. As he said, and I paraphrase, Lincoln was a genius and how can you get into the mind of a genius? He went on to mention a few others like Mozart and Einstein, saying that no one could hope to understand the way they thought. I was struck by his remarks. It seemed that he was conflating genius with divinity. To his way of thinking, geniuses are demigods. This is a common belief in America. For example, I remember reading about a poll. This was years ago, I can't recall exactly when. Anyway, people were asked what it takes to be good at mathematics. The majority of people in the USA said that it takes a certain knack or talent. The majority of people in Europe said that it takes hard work. Not exactly what one would expect.

I don't believe that there are geniuses. There are people who are possessed of certain abilities who are capable of works of genius, but that is not indicative of some essential quality of the person. Einstein published some papers early in his career on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and the special theory of relativity. They were all works of genius. However, he rejected quantum mechanics, saying that God doesn't play at dice, and spent the latter half of his career in a failed attempt to come up with a theory of everything. His fellow physicists were of the opinion that time had passed him by. So, what happened to that essence called "genius"? Had it extinguished itself, or something like that? No, of course not. "Genius" is just a convenient label that we attach to people who have produced works of genius. It doesn't indicate anything that inheres in the person.

I've gotten off my point here. Einstein wasn't a president, nor is Tony Kushner, so I'll get back to Lincoln. One thing that many forget about the man is what a wonderful writer he was. The Gettysburg Address was a masterpiece, and he had a real talent for turning a phrase. "With malice toward none, with charity to all..." is a classic, as is his reference to "the better angels of our nature." Damn, but that's a phrase I wish I had come up with. Lincoln also had a knack for humorous one-liners. Here's one, "Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves." Hmm, tact. That's something no one can accuse me of.

The Suicide Collectors

2009-02-15T14:44:00.002-05:00

The Suicide Collectors by David Oppegaard is the strangest novel that I've read in a long time. It's set in the near future at a time when something called the Despair is ravaging the human race. No one knows what causes the Despair, but it is rapidly depopulating the earth. When the novel opens, people have committed suicide by the thousands, and only a small number of them are left. The Collectors of the title are black-robed people who appear to collect the bodies of the suicides. No one knows where they take them, or what they do with them.

The novel begins when a young man by the name of Norman comes home to find that his wife has succumbed and killed herself. That leaves Norman and an old man named Pops as the only two residents of their Florida town. A drifter comes through and tells them that a Seattle scientist by the name of Briggs has discovered a cure for the Despair. Jordan and Pops head for Seattle in search of this Briggs. They have a number of harrowing adventures on the way and, when Norman arrives in Seattle, he's alone. He finds Briggs, but discovers that there is no cure for the Despair. However, Briggs has come up with a plan to destroy the Source, which is the cause of the condition. Norman carries out the plan, at the cost of his own life, thus freeing the human race from the ravages of the Despair.

The Suicide Collectors has been slotted into the science fiction genre. David Oppegaard sees his book as a literary work. I get his point. His story is haunting and macabre. It's surreal and nightmarish, and it's unlike anything that most people would think of as science fiction per se.

Oppegaard's a good writer. His prose is spare and well crafted, and he writes in such a way as to enhance the surreal quality of his story. There are some flaws in the book though. The most obvious one regards the eleven-year-old girl named Zero. She a major secondary character but, in conversation, she talks more like someone who's twenty years older than her age. I found that most annoying. There are also some flaws in the narrative logic but those I was able to overlook, given the surreal nature of the story. I can't outright recommend the book, but if you're looking for something strange and off the wall, pick up The Suicide Collectors.

In Denial

2009-02-12T18:25:00.001-05:00

"Up until now, people have been pretty resistant to external data about the housing market and have continued to say their homes are doing quite fine," said Stan Humphries, vice president of data and analytics for Zillow in Seattle. "The events of fall 2008 with bank failures and large companies going out of business marked a turning point in many people's heads about what's actually happening. The fact that the economy is having larger troubles makes them more aware of what's happening to home values."

Still, people remain optimists when it comes to real estate's future prospects. More than two-thirds (70 percent) of homeowners believe their home's value will either rise or stay the same during the next six months. That's far more cheerful than any economic forecast, even that of the perpetually upbeat National Association of Realtors.

The passage above is from the San Francisco Chronicle. Seventy percent of homeowners believe their home's value will rise or stay the same over the next six months. Where are these people living, Lollipop Land? I've read a few pieces by those who wonder why people aren't in the streets demonstrating over the current financial situation and the way the Wall Street bandits are screwing them over. It's because they still believe that things are magically going to turn around. We're the city on the hill. Why wouldn't they?

Have you seen those ads after the Superbowl where the unseen announcer says to the winning quarterback, "You've just won the Superbowl. What are you going to do now?" And the quarterback duly says, "I'm going to Disney World." They ought to make ads like that for people who are being evicted from their homes. The sheriff's just finished putting all their stuff on the curb, and the announcer asks them what they're going to do. They can tell him they too are going to Disney World, because that's where they're living in their minds if they think this is all going to pass without real pain on the parts of lots of people.

An Interesting Take On The Economy

2009-02-12T12:31:00.004-05:00

Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist, and is a professor at the Univ. of Missouri, Kansas City. He was also an economic advisor to Dennis Kucinich during his presidential campaign. I'm linking to his take on the current financial crisis. I haven't read anything quite like it, but it makes a good deal of sense. It's quite long, but it's worth reading.

http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson02122009.html

Bailing Out The Ruling Class

2009-02-11T10:11:00.002-05:00

As I've pointed out earlier, Obama is in Wall Street's pocket, so deep in its pocket he can't pull himself up and peek outside. The evidence is apparent and ever more abundant. Here's an example. On Monday, the New York Times ran an article about how Treasury Secretary Geithner prevailed over Obama's other advisors in fashioning a bailout. Those other advisors apparently wanted tighter restrictions on the recipients of aid, but old Tim Boy was having none of that and look what we've got, Bush/Paulson redux. In the words of the Times, "And for all of its boldness, the plan largely repeats the Bush administration’s approach of deferring to many of the same companies and executives who had peddled risky loans and investments at the heart of the crisis and failed to foresee many of the problems plaguing the markets." That's the Gray Lady speaking, folks, not The Nation or The Progressive.

If there's an up side to the current economic crisis, it might be this. It is becoming abundantly clear to all that there is indeed a ruling class in this country, an aristocracy in whose interest the government operates. When they make concessions to the people, as they did in the 1930's with things like Social Security and unemployment insurance, it was only because circumstances forced them to do so. FDR himself was well aware of this ruling class. Here's a remark he made to Colonel Edward House on October 21, 1933. "The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson." When people like me make such assertions we're accused of being conspiracy theorists.

Funny Video From Onion

2009-02-10T09:43:00.001-05:00

I just had to post this link. It's so goddamn funny. You have to scroll to the top. This link takes you directly to the comments.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/10/onion-video-nails-ga.html#comments

In Bruges

2009-02-09T21:53:00.002-05:00

I watched the movie In Bruges last night. A lot of people really like it, but I thought the movie ill-conceived. It's about two British contract killers, Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and Ray (Colin Ferrell). They've just completed a hit for the gangster Harry Waters (Ralph Fienes) and he's sent them to Bruges until the heat's off. That's the story they've been given anyway. As it turns out, while doing the hit, Ray accidentally shot and killed a young boy. This is unacceptable to Waters. You see, he has certain ethical standards, and he wants Ken to eliminate Ray. Without going into detail, Ken can't bring himself to kill Ray, so Waters comes to Bruges to do the job himself. At the end of the movie, Ken is dead, as is Waters. Ray is shot up, but he's going to live. Wracked by guilt over the death of the boy that he shot, Ray has sworn to turn his life around.

There's a lot that doesn't work in this film, and it starts with the two main characters. The middle-aged Ken, as Gleeson plays him, comes off as a kindly father figure. The best way I can think of to describe the way Ferrell plays Ray is to say that he's the boy who was the lovable class clown in school, but has grown up and been turned loose on the world. I just don't buy it. These guys are contract killers. Ray is all torn up by the boy he killed by accident, but he feels no guilt whatsoever about the priest who he hit. To me there's something reprehensible about portraying two such characters as likeable. The message is, yeah, they kill people for a living, but deep down inside, they're great guys. It would be one thing if they were thieves or something like that, but they're cold-blooded murderers.

It doesn't end there either. The climax is thoroughly implausible. Waters is chasing Ray with the intention of killing him. He brings him down with a few bullets, then walks over to finish him off. When he gets there, he sees a boy lying next to Ray, a boy that he has accidentally killed. Quite a coincidence, huh? Well, it gets even more ridiculous. Waters had earlier told Ken that if he ever killed a kid he would immediately commit suicide. So, while looking down at the boy's dead body, Waters says, "Principles, you see." He then puts his pistol in his mouth and blows his head off, thus sparing Ray. Give me a break. I'm all for suspending disbelief, but I'm not buying that, not even for a moment.

I would have liked to have seen more of the French actress, Clemence Poesy, who plays Ray's love interest. She's not a particular beauty, but she's attractive and sexy. I don't know what it is about French actresses. So many of them are sensual in the way that Americans can't seem to pull off. They just seem to be so comfortable in their sexuality. I personally think it's cultural. The French aren't burdened with a puritanical tradition. After all, it's the Americans, not the French, who got all bent out of shape when their when their president got a BJ.

Fibromyalgia

2009-02-08T13:53:00.002-05:00

I recently posted an entry in which I talked about the marketing of prescription drugs to the general public. One of the drugs I discussed was Lyrica. It is being promoted as a treatment for fibromyalgia, though it is not clear whether or not such a condition even exists. Today, the Associated Press released the article below about the marketing of drugs for the treatment of fibromyalgia. It goes into it in much more detail than I did, and gives all sides of the argument.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/AP-IMPACT-Drugmakers-push-apf-14288566.html