End of November again. Must be time to update the blog.
I finished the novel I was working on last November, not in time for the 2014 NaNoWriMo cutoff, but before the end of 2015, which seems like a victory of some sort, anyway. I still think Talk Therapy would have been a good name for it, but it's a definite desk-drawer novel for now, anyway -- it would have to be completely re-written before anyone would want to read it, and I learned more from writing it than I would from re-writing it. Example #1 of things that I learned from it: Writing novels takes a long time. Time is valuable; I'm not putting any more time in on a project that neither I nor anyone else is going to enjoy.
It was good for me, though. I learned a lot about grief, recovery, and forgiveness. I've always been pretty good at forgiving other people; it's been harder to forgive myself, or indeed even to recognize the ways I fuck myself up. That's something to keep an eye on, next time I have a grain of self-awareness available.
But I got no time for that noise now. I published one of the other projects I was working on, a poetry book called Forgotten Phone Numbers, available on Kindle and in trade paperback from Amazon and Createspace. I could conceivably make royalties off of it, someday, but so far I've spent $25 on proofs and $40 on a new word processor, so that should eat up all the profits for the next 100 years or so. That makes writing more a hobby than a profession. I'm lucky I married rich.
Moreover, I've made a lot of progress on another project that will likely be titled Walking on Daggers. It has the potential to be a novel -- but it has two natural breaks in it, and my attention span is much more novella than novel, so I'm aiming for making it a trilogy. Kids like trilogies, I hear (that "Star Wars" thing was pretty successful).
At that point, it's hard not to think of writing as a big piece of your life, with one book of poetry and three of sword-and-sorcery (although the protagonist wields a dagger and his only other useful skill is being a seamstress, so I guess that makes it knife-and-knitting). If I'm going to write, I gotta blog, too -- blogging is what all the writers say keeps your fan community engaged; it's key to marketing. I don't have a fan community and I don't like marketing, but what blogging really does is keep writer's block at bay. Blogging is writing for the days when even if you don't have a huge interest in writing what you're supposed to, you need to be writing.
I haven't updated the blog since summer because I let myself not write much since summer. It's time to be conscientious for a while, which I think is somehow easier in the winter. It's easier to be motivated to take up good habits when it's close to your birthday, anyway, and mine's coming up.
Don't buy me a copy of Forgotten Phone Numbers, though. Somebody already spoiled the ending for me.
http://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Phone-Numbers-Del-Greer-ebook/dp/B018O729PO/
https://www.createspace.com/5820303
Sunday, November 29, 2015
Sunday, June 14, 2015
Happy birthday, Dad
I hadn't talked to him in a few months.
I would say I've been busy; I started a new job, wrote a new book, and have been learning all about being a first-time publisher and a first-time employee. Zoe's nearly diaper-trained; Kayla's driving; Sage's mother's home life has been a hot mess, and mine hasn't been too peaceable, either. There are plenty of excuses. None of them are quite enough to mask the fact that, in my life, I haven't always been good at staying in touch with the people who love me, the people whom I love. Stuff hasn't always been great with Dad, but he's always been Dad. He's never been a stranger.
But I hadn't talked to him, probably not since the New Year, not until tonight. His sixty-fifth birthday was yesterday, and he sounded well, healthy. Kind of.
I am afraid that he's got early-onset dementia, or maybe an Alzheimer's variation of some sort. It's hard to say from talking to him, and I don't even really know if it's early-onset when you're sixty-five, but he's a lot more forgetful than I expect him to be. He told me that he had eleven grandchildren (including my five), and that all were girls, and can you believe that? Which was a reasonable thing to say, in that I was discussing some of mine, but two minutes later, he repeated it, and can you believe that?
I could believe it. I could also feel it in the pit of my stomach. A bit later, I said something in passing about having a sleep study done, and he asked why, then asked what sleep apnea was, then asked me to explain about the CPAP in detail, which I did. He sounded surprised that there was such a thing, and he wondered if he had it, too. I told him he should have my step-mother listen to him while he slept sometime to see.
I've been wearing a CPAP since 2011. It changed my life; I know I told him about it, and I know it's come up in the past four years. It's scary to me.
I've never been afraid of meteor strikes, ice ages, nuclear wars, or any of the other apocalyptic ways you can die; I've never even been bothered by germs. If I can't see it in front of me, I usually don't pay it any mind. But Dad is 65 now; he's 27 years older than me, and I can see that from here. I do get scared when I see a speeding bus heading my way, and I have noticed that, as I get older, my body is taking on the same shape as his, the same overweight, the same hair. I'm following in his footsteps in a lot of ways, physically.
I've understood for a long time that the corpus that conveys me around will fail on me eventually; it's been trying to, in various syndromes and complexes, for nearly 20 years. But it's always been a pretty abstract threat; I'd never seen it fail. I'm worried that Dad is going to fail, and I want to be very particularly specific about this part, I am about 1% worried for Dad. I'm writing much more out of a pure, sheer, selfish fear about what'll happen when it happens to me.
He asked how old Zoe was, having held her the second or third day she was alive on this planet, not quite three years ago. Birthdays are scary things. I always used to expect him to forget mine was coming. He usually remembered, but I was always afraid he wouldn't.
It would probably be better, at this point, if I spent more time worrying about his....
I would say I've been busy; I started a new job, wrote a new book, and have been learning all about being a first-time publisher and a first-time employee. Zoe's nearly diaper-trained; Kayla's driving; Sage's mother's home life has been a hot mess, and mine hasn't been too peaceable, either. There are plenty of excuses. None of them are quite enough to mask the fact that, in my life, I haven't always been good at staying in touch with the people who love me, the people whom I love. Stuff hasn't always been great with Dad, but he's always been Dad. He's never been a stranger.
But I hadn't talked to him, probably not since the New Year, not until tonight. His sixty-fifth birthday was yesterday, and he sounded well, healthy. Kind of.
I am afraid that he's got early-onset dementia, or maybe an Alzheimer's variation of some sort. It's hard to say from talking to him, and I don't even really know if it's early-onset when you're sixty-five, but he's a lot more forgetful than I expect him to be. He told me that he had eleven grandchildren (including my five), and that all were girls, and can you believe that? Which was a reasonable thing to say, in that I was discussing some of mine, but two minutes later, he repeated it, and can you believe that?
I could believe it. I could also feel it in the pit of my stomach. A bit later, I said something in passing about having a sleep study done, and he asked why, then asked what sleep apnea was, then asked me to explain about the CPAP in detail, which I did. He sounded surprised that there was such a thing, and he wondered if he had it, too. I told him he should have my step-mother listen to him while he slept sometime to see.
I've been wearing a CPAP since 2011. It changed my life; I know I told him about it, and I know it's come up in the past four years. It's scary to me.
I've never been afraid of meteor strikes, ice ages, nuclear wars, or any of the other apocalyptic ways you can die; I've never even been bothered by germs. If I can't see it in front of me, I usually don't pay it any mind. But Dad is 65 now; he's 27 years older than me, and I can see that from here. I do get scared when I see a speeding bus heading my way, and I have noticed that, as I get older, my body is taking on the same shape as his, the same overweight, the same hair. I'm following in his footsteps in a lot of ways, physically.
I've understood for a long time that the corpus that conveys me around will fail on me eventually; it's been trying to, in various syndromes and complexes, for nearly 20 years. But it's always been a pretty abstract threat; I'd never seen it fail. I'm worried that Dad is going to fail, and I want to be very particularly specific about this part, I am about 1% worried for Dad. I'm writing much more out of a pure, sheer, selfish fear about what'll happen when it happens to me.
He asked how old Zoe was, having held her the second or third day she was alive on this planet, not quite three years ago. Birthdays are scary things. I always used to expect him to forget mine was coming. He usually remembered, but I was always afraid he wouldn't.
It would probably be better, at this point, if I spent more time worrying about his....
Saturday, April 18, 2015
On criticism
I thought at one point that I wanted to be a critic. It was (get ready for big laffs) right after I took ENG 601 - "Introduction to Literary Criticism." Now, five or six years later, I think I'm coming to realize that it's not for me.
Renata Adler, who was a book critic, author, and revolutionary badass in the 70's, was quoted in an interview in Vice magazine talking about one of the ugly problems of writing today -- she said, "I've actually met some great young writers... [but] They've never read anything. I remember saying at the beginning of the year, when I taught at Boston University, 'Is there anything you all have read?'"
And the answer is no, of course, because comprehensive literacy is hard and getting harder. A century ago, somebody made up a list of books that purported to be the greatest hits of all the literature needed in the Western World. You could read that list, manage to comprehend it, and any liberal arts education would be a waste of money after that. The list was published as a collection and people bought it, apparently not ironically, so I assume this was a proposition that could be presented in front of people who would not laugh you out of the room then. I can't imagine taking it seriously today. Adler, for instance, wouldn't have made the list, and then where would you be?
(Adler, by the way, wrote one of the most crushing book reviews I've ever read, about one of her co-workers at The New Yorker. The great quote from it, "and it is, to my surprise and without... exaggeration, not simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless," makes you so glad you've never written anything that she has read.)
No, I'd never heard of her before tonight, either. And I don't consider myself culturally illiterate. But how do you cover everything? How do you cover everything from last week?
There's more quality, valuable literature being produced today, and in the past 100 years, than at any time in the history of the world, almost certainly because there are more people with thorough liberal arts educations than at any time in the history of the world. And I should emphasize that I don't necessarily mean formal or strict liberal art educations -- if you read every romance novel you could get your hands on for two or three years, you'd have read more books by more professional authors than the entire population of the planet Earth read in some years in history. And if you wrote based solely on that, maybe with a few how-to guides on the internet or motivational TED talks, you could just as easily turn out a novel that would have been a best-seller in 1930. If you were lucky, you could turn out Fifty Shades of Gray. (E.L. James studied history in college, didn't start writing till her mid-30's, and has sold 100 million copies of her books in the past four years. Those books aren't for me, but it's just silly to say they aren't important literature today.)
Criticism seems like a fun job; you're basically reviewing stuff you're reading, and you were going to be reading anyway. But criticism is about drawing connections, defining a literary dialogue, identifying connections in this work to themes in that work, allusions to this other thing, and shout-outs to the classics.
And I'm coming to realize that I'm never reading all the classics. I've had at least one copy of the Bible for 35 years now; I still have the one they gave me the first time I got baptized (more than a quarter century ago). Never read the thing. I mean, I've read parts, but never the whole thing. Same for Les Miserables, or Don Quijote de la Mancha, or Ivanhoe, or Ana Karenina. How can I write a review on something and say, "Wow, that scene in the middle where the guy kept referring to derpy windmills was pretty lame," and not realize I missed a reference to Don Quijote? I would have people cancelling their subscriptions. I would have people calling the paper and ordering a subscription, just so they could immediately cancel it.
So I think I'm going to do what I have been doing, occasionally writing a review for something I really like on Amazon, and staying fairly incognito. And I'm going to write, and I might even publish, and maybe some poor hapless fool will review me some day.
Brave heart. Better him than me...
Renata Adler, who was a book critic, author, and revolutionary badass in the 70's, was quoted in an interview in Vice magazine talking about one of the ugly problems of writing today -- she said, "I've actually met some great young writers... [but] They've never read anything. I remember saying at the beginning of the year, when I taught at Boston University, 'Is there anything you all have read?'"
And the answer is no, of course, because comprehensive literacy is hard and getting harder. A century ago, somebody made up a list of books that purported to be the greatest hits of all the literature needed in the Western World. You could read that list, manage to comprehend it, and any liberal arts education would be a waste of money after that. The list was published as a collection and people bought it, apparently not ironically, so I assume this was a proposition that could be presented in front of people who would not laugh you out of the room then. I can't imagine taking it seriously today. Adler, for instance, wouldn't have made the list, and then where would you be?
(Adler, by the way, wrote one of the most crushing book reviews I've ever read, about one of her co-workers at The New Yorker. The great quote from it, "and it is, to my surprise and without... exaggeration, not simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless," makes you so glad you've never written anything that she has read.)
No, I'd never heard of her before tonight, either. And I don't consider myself culturally illiterate. But how do you cover everything? How do you cover everything from last week?
There's more quality, valuable literature being produced today, and in the past 100 years, than at any time in the history of the world, almost certainly because there are more people with thorough liberal arts educations than at any time in the history of the world. And I should emphasize that I don't necessarily mean formal or strict liberal art educations -- if you read every romance novel you could get your hands on for two or three years, you'd have read more books by more professional authors than the entire population of the planet Earth read in some years in history. And if you wrote based solely on that, maybe with a few how-to guides on the internet or motivational TED talks, you could just as easily turn out a novel that would have been a best-seller in 1930. If you were lucky, you could turn out Fifty Shades of Gray. (E.L. James studied history in college, didn't start writing till her mid-30's, and has sold 100 million copies of her books in the past four years. Those books aren't for me, but it's just silly to say they aren't important literature today.)
Criticism seems like a fun job; you're basically reviewing stuff you're reading, and you were going to be reading anyway. But criticism is about drawing connections, defining a literary dialogue, identifying connections in this work to themes in that work, allusions to this other thing, and shout-outs to the classics.
And I'm coming to realize that I'm never reading all the classics. I've had at least one copy of the Bible for 35 years now; I still have the one they gave me the first time I got baptized (more than a quarter century ago). Never read the thing. I mean, I've read parts, but never the whole thing. Same for Les Miserables, or Don Quijote de la Mancha, or Ivanhoe, or Ana Karenina. How can I write a review on something and say, "Wow, that scene in the middle where the guy kept referring to derpy windmills was pretty lame," and not realize I missed a reference to Don Quijote? I would have people cancelling their subscriptions. I would have people calling the paper and ordering a subscription, just so they could immediately cancel it.
So I think I'm going to do what I have been doing, occasionally writing a review for something I really like on Amazon, and staying fairly incognito. And I'm going to write, and I might even publish, and maybe some poor hapless fool will review me some day.
Brave heart. Better him than me...
Friday, April 17, 2015
Poetry night
I took a month off. It happens sometimes; life's like that. I wasn't being very literary; I was being caught up in the world of prosaic pragmatics. Life without art isn't as enjoyable as life with, but sometimes you make bad decisions. You re-commit, re-dedicate, and you jump back on the horse, treadmill, wagon or blogspot, whatever it is you've fallen from, and you try again. I'm trying again.
I went tonight to a poetry reading, which was a first for me. Andrea Gibson and Amber Tamblyn were playing at a synagogue-qua-arts center in DC, Sixth and I -- and if I was a better blogger, most of the nouns in this sentence would be links to things, but I'm not and you can probably find the google button without me. They were both spectacularly fantastic, and I ordered both of their books on Amazon as soon as I got home.
I can't overstate how awesome they were, both of them. Amber Tamblyn, who apparently started off life as an actress and built some level of success before crossing into poetry, knows what it's like to be a sexy woman in a world that commoditizes them; she knows what it's like to have lifelong dreams swept aside because a trend or a fad or your eyebrows are suddenly passé. She dreams of the dead actresses she grew up wanting to be, and she eulogizes them with the terrifying empathy of one who had boarded Charon's ferry to follow them. I hope I learn to talk to my daughters the way her father talks to her; I hope I am as comforting, faithful, and inspiring a husband as her husband is to her. She delivered panegyrics that made me fall in love with people I'd never meet, which I think is sometimes harder than crushing the bastards who need crushing.
Andrea Gibson crushed some bastards that needed crushing. She's a feminist queer poet who writes, chants, and sometimes sings the grieving of her people, and I am not ashamed to tell you she made me cry tonight. She talked of coming out to her family, being sent to psychiatrists, fighting suicide, and going to a Catholic school to be taught natural history by a nun who didn't believe in dinosaurs, "and what I learned about extinction is when your family stops calling." If you don't know what that feels like, there's no way to express it better than that.
But she also talked about the role of art in the community, which is a topic that I've been thinking about a lot lately, and I guess she has, too. She discussed the death of Matthew Shepherd in 1998, a victim of anti-gay violence, how she'd cried when she heard he'd died, how she remembered exactly where and when she heard the news. She talked about James Byrd, Jr., who had died a few months earlier in 1998, a victim of anti-black violence, and about how she didn't remember when she'd heard that -- and what that meant to her.
She thought about it particularly in the wake of several killings lately, killings of black men by white cops, killings that reflected an abject and systemic racial bias that seemed irreversibly entrenched -- even in her own audiences. She talked about how she'd posted about the recent killings on her Facebook and her own fans, her own people who were at least nominally against oppressive regimes, at least when they were oppressive to white gays, her own fans were responding with racist hatred. And when she thought back to James Byrd, Jr., she realized that she hadn't been part of the solution.
As an artist, she felt her job was to comfort the disturbed, and to disturb the comfortable. She looked back at her shows, at her books, at her performances over the past 16 years, and realized she hadn't comforted many of the disturbed, many people who needed it, and she was going to make it her mission to do better from now on. Nobody's going to see a show with her anymore, she said, without her saying her piece on this before they make it out the door.
I don't know if that's the right way to go. Speaking reasonably and logically, fixing all the world's problems is a lot to do -- Jonas Salk focused on solving polio; he didn't beat himself up for not figuring out the common cold, too. It's very reasonable, in a world with so much injustice, to pick one part of the shitstorm and focus on that. I do not envy my feminist queer poet friends; they have a lot of uphill battles to fight, and I could never blame them if racism never cost them sleep at nights.
But reason and logic don't have a lot to do with making a concerted life effort to change the world with poetry, and they are not the sorts of things that Gibson and her ilk are likely to let stand in their way. They tilt at windmills; there's no telling them that they should be selective about the windmills.
I don't tilt at anything; I mostly sit back, surrounded by white, masculine, heteronormative privilege and swim around in Scrooge McDuck-style piles of money. But I admire them; I admire their talent, their grace, their indefatigable courage, their relentless charges.
I hope they skewer a bunch of the motherfuckers.
I went tonight to a poetry reading, which was a first for me. Andrea Gibson and Amber Tamblyn were playing at a synagogue-qua-arts center in DC, Sixth and I -- and if I was a better blogger, most of the nouns in this sentence would be links to things, but I'm not and you can probably find the google button without me. They were both spectacularly fantastic, and I ordered both of their books on Amazon as soon as I got home.
I can't overstate how awesome they were, both of them. Amber Tamblyn, who apparently started off life as an actress and built some level of success before crossing into poetry, knows what it's like to be a sexy woman in a world that commoditizes them; she knows what it's like to have lifelong dreams swept aside because a trend or a fad or your eyebrows are suddenly passé. She dreams of the dead actresses she grew up wanting to be, and she eulogizes them with the terrifying empathy of one who had boarded Charon's ferry to follow them. I hope I learn to talk to my daughters the way her father talks to her; I hope I am as comforting, faithful, and inspiring a husband as her husband is to her. She delivered panegyrics that made me fall in love with people I'd never meet, which I think is sometimes harder than crushing the bastards who need crushing.
Andrea Gibson crushed some bastards that needed crushing. She's a feminist queer poet who writes, chants, and sometimes sings the grieving of her people, and I am not ashamed to tell you she made me cry tonight. She talked of coming out to her family, being sent to psychiatrists, fighting suicide, and going to a Catholic school to be taught natural history by a nun who didn't believe in dinosaurs, "and what I learned about extinction is when your family stops calling." If you don't know what that feels like, there's no way to express it better than that.
But she also talked about the role of art in the community, which is a topic that I've been thinking about a lot lately, and I guess she has, too. She discussed the death of Matthew Shepherd in 1998, a victim of anti-gay violence, how she'd cried when she heard he'd died, how she remembered exactly where and when she heard the news. She talked about James Byrd, Jr., who had died a few months earlier in 1998, a victim of anti-black violence, and about how she didn't remember when she'd heard that -- and what that meant to her.
She thought about it particularly in the wake of several killings lately, killings of black men by white cops, killings that reflected an abject and systemic racial bias that seemed irreversibly entrenched -- even in her own audiences. She talked about how she'd posted about the recent killings on her Facebook and her own fans, her own people who were at least nominally against oppressive regimes, at least when they were oppressive to white gays, her own fans were responding with racist hatred. And when she thought back to James Byrd, Jr., she realized that she hadn't been part of the solution.
As an artist, she felt her job was to comfort the disturbed, and to disturb the comfortable. She looked back at her shows, at her books, at her performances over the past 16 years, and realized she hadn't comforted many of the disturbed, many people who needed it, and she was going to make it her mission to do better from now on. Nobody's going to see a show with her anymore, she said, without her saying her piece on this before they make it out the door.
I don't know if that's the right way to go. Speaking reasonably and logically, fixing all the world's problems is a lot to do -- Jonas Salk focused on solving polio; he didn't beat himself up for not figuring out the common cold, too. It's very reasonable, in a world with so much injustice, to pick one part of the shitstorm and focus on that. I do not envy my feminist queer poet friends; they have a lot of uphill battles to fight, and I could never blame them if racism never cost them sleep at nights.
But reason and logic don't have a lot to do with making a concerted life effort to change the world with poetry, and they are not the sorts of things that Gibson and her ilk are likely to let stand in their way. They tilt at windmills; there's no telling them that they should be selective about the windmills.
I don't tilt at anything; I mostly sit back, surrounded by white, masculine, heteronormative privilege and swim around in Scrooge McDuck-style piles of money. But I admire them; I admire their talent, their grace, their indefatigable courage, their relentless charges.
I hope they skewer a bunch of the motherfuckers.
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Warning: This post slightly involves sports
My goal was to aim for higher things with this blog, for deeper philosophies, for things that people will think are worth reading some day. I'm dropping all that tonight, because I hate Dick Vitale and he's gone and pissed me off again.
If you are amongst the blissfully ignorant of college basketball -- or, more pleasantly, if you live in a more enlightened time when there is no more college basketball -- you may be unaware of Dick Vitale. He is a majordomo, a shouting man who stands in front of the attraction and promotes it, a professional commentator and attention-getter. He's a hundred and seventy years old (okay, Wikipedia says he's 75, but that's not always reliable), and he has a funny sound to his voice when he shouts. He invariably shouts. It's a put-on -- I've heard several times that people call him at home and he'll answer, sounding like a normal person -- but it's an invariable one; if Vitale's going to talk, he's going to shout.
His field, college basketball (and moreover, all of college athletics), is at an odd juncture in society today. There aren't any other cultures in the world, possibly in history, where institutions of higher learning are expected to provide entertainment for the masses, but they do here, and they make a metric butt-ton of money doing it. It creates several odd juxtapositions -- college students who don't study college, but hone skills to become professional athletes; a college culture (traditionally liberal and subversive) having to include an athletic locker-room culture (traditionally neither of those); deans and college presidents disciplining students based not on academic record or potential but earnings potential. Maybe most jarring, you have top-rank coaches -- men driven to win, to earn championships, to earn money, and to produce elite athletes -- dictating policy to deans, provosts, presidents, and academicians. The effectively illiterate dictating policy in the temple of education.
Most of them have not abused that trust; for every Joe Paterno, there are many, many Pat Summitts. But I don't want to kill the coaches -- after many years in the business of management, I am hesitant to blame someone like Jimbo Fisher for the repeated shenanigans of Jameis Winston; if one of my employees shoplifts crab legs in his spare time, I don't want to be held responsible. (Paterno is different -- he could have called the police when told about a man raping children, and he didn't, allowing the baby rapist to rape again. There's no room for debate on that one.) For the athletes' inappropriate behavior, I don't think you can blame coaches; you have to blame the athletes. It'd be nice if the culture told them that their behavior was unacceptable, but culture's not always great at communicating.
It communicates through its icons and idols, mostly -- if I want to know what the culture that I live in thinks about a topic, I can look up what Lady Gaga thinks, or maybe Jay-Z. President Obama speaks for part of it, for the academics and the elites. Sarah Palin tries to speak for the anti-intellectuals. Fonzie speaks for the ultra-cool (maybe he doesn't anymore and I'm dating myself a bit -- I've been wracking my brain over here, though, and I can't think of anyone else who is in second place, so I'm leaving it the Fonz for now).
Well, ESPN speaks for the sports community, and the highest-paid voice at ESPN is Dick Vitale. And tonight, on live television, he kissed a clearly unwilling and unable-to-escape Ashley Judd, joking that it was for "good luck" for a team about to play a game. Ashley Judd, who was probably too embarrassed to punch him either because of the cameras, the crowd, or the fact that he's an embalmed mummy, has not been reached for comments.
Spoiler alert: Kentucky won. Arkansas, Ashley Judd, the very ideal of consent, and every woman who thought she had a choice of whose lips were smooshed against hers lost, no contest. Kentucky and the sexual assault identity of college sports remain undefeated.
If you are amongst the blissfully ignorant of college basketball -- or, more pleasantly, if you live in a more enlightened time when there is no more college basketball -- you may be unaware of Dick Vitale. He is a majordomo, a shouting man who stands in front of the attraction and promotes it, a professional commentator and attention-getter. He's a hundred and seventy years old (okay, Wikipedia says he's 75, but that's not always reliable), and he has a funny sound to his voice when he shouts. He invariably shouts. It's a put-on -- I've heard several times that people call him at home and he'll answer, sounding like a normal person -- but it's an invariable one; if Vitale's going to talk, he's going to shout.
His field, college basketball (and moreover, all of college athletics), is at an odd juncture in society today. There aren't any other cultures in the world, possibly in history, where institutions of higher learning are expected to provide entertainment for the masses, but they do here, and they make a metric butt-ton of money doing it. It creates several odd juxtapositions -- college students who don't study college, but hone skills to become professional athletes; a college culture (traditionally liberal and subversive) having to include an athletic locker-room culture (traditionally neither of those); deans and college presidents disciplining students based not on academic record or potential but earnings potential. Maybe most jarring, you have top-rank coaches -- men driven to win, to earn championships, to earn money, and to produce elite athletes -- dictating policy to deans, provosts, presidents, and academicians. The effectively illiterate dictating policy in the temple of education.
Most of them have not abused that trust; for every Joe Paterno, there are many, many Pat Summitts. But I don't want to kill the coaches -- after many years in the business of management, I am hesitant to blame someone like Jimbo Fisher for the repeated shenanigans of Jameis Winston; if one of my employees shoplifts crab legs in his spare time, I don't want to be held responsible. (Paterno is different -- he could have called the police when told about a man raping children, and he didn't, allowing the baby rapist to rape again. There's no room for debate on that one.) For the athletes' inappropriate behavior, I don't think you can blame coaches; you have to blame the athletes. It'd be nice if the culture told them that their behavior was unacceptable, but culture's not always great at communicating.
It communicates through its icons and idols, mostly -- if I want to know what the culture that I live in thinks about a topic, I can look up what Lady Gaga thinks, or maybe Jay-Z. President Obama speaks for part of it, for the academics and the elites. Sarah Palin tries to speak for the anti-intellectuals. Fonzie speaks for the ultra-cool (maybe he doesn't anymore and I'm dating myself a bit -- I've been wracking my brain over here, though, and I can't think of anyone else who is in second place, so I'm leaving it the Fonz for now).
Well, ESPN speaks for the sports community, and the highest-paid voice at ESPN is Dick Vitale. And tonight, on live television, he kissed a clearly unwilling and unable-to-escape Ashley Judd, joking that it was for "good luck" for a team about to play a game. Ashley Judd, who was probably too embarrassed to punch him either because of the cameras, the crowd, or the fact that he's an embalmed mummy, has not been reached for comments.
Spoiler alert: Kentucky won. Arkansas, Ashley Judd, the very ideal of consent, and every woman who thought she had a choice of whose lips were smooshed against hers lost, no contest. Kentucky and the sexual assault identity of college sports remain undefeated.
Sunday, March 8, 2015
Lilo and Stitch and Good and Evil
Traditionally, I think, in most children's storytelling, you gotta have a bad guy, and it helps if you have at least one or two good guys. I mean, traditional narrative only allows for four basic conflicts:
So Zoe has been on a Lilo and Stitch kick lately, and I hadn't seen that one before the past few weeks. (I still haven't, strictly, seen it. Most of my exposure to it has come while I was driving and she watches in the backseat. I've probably missed an awful lot of visual stuff.) It's struck me as a very odd Disney movie in a lot of ways, and I figured out why today: There are no bad guys. More than that, there is arguably no one in the whole movie who does anything actually bad even once.
The closest counter-argument to both of those assertions is Dr. Jumba, the mad scientist whose illegal genetic experimentation creates Stitch, a creature immediately identified as an "abomination." But as to whether he's bad, I would point out that he sees a little girl in danger toward the end, and doesn't even hesitate to be persuaded to help her out. His other arguable sins are pretty easily explained away, too -- he lies before the court, but he does that to save his skin; anyone would do that. He creates an abomination, but the abomination is not exactly Frankenstein's monster; it's a mischievous little cuddly guy. He tries to shoot and possibly kill the abomination -- but killing an abomination is usually not considered a bad thing, and he was ordered to do by his lawful government regime.
Stitch does some naughty stuff, but is it really stuff that can be considered bad? He attacks and damages a few people, but generally those people are causing trouble for him in the first place, and his attacks are not debilitating. He's a baby, he's superpowered, and he's got a posse chasing him down; some collateral damage seems pretty likely. He breaks some stuff -- but he does not damage Lilo's precious picture of her mom, and he only physically attacks other aliens.
That's a significant point, too, and I'll bring that up to excuse the actions of Captain Gantu and the Grand Councilwoman -- as soon as they found out that the escaped abomination was going to Earth, they asked their expert about the planet, and he described Earthlings as both unintelligent and extremely delicate ("Every time a meteor hits the planet, they start over from scratch"). They choose not to gas the planet because they don't want to hurt an endangered species, and they at no point damage any earth people. They batter each other, and at a few points discuss their comparatively denser molecules; which Stitch chomps on the skull of one alien or throws another through a wall, it's not actually terribly violent behavior. Gantu was a little fierce -- but he was never more or less than a cop, following his orders to capture a fugitive.
The ridiculously named Cobra Bubbles, of course -- the CIA agent-turned-social worker -- is the same way. He's a little gruff and ridiculously intimidating, but his motive is to protect a little girl from a clearly unsafe home. You can't blame him for that. You can't blame Nani for the house being unsafe; she's just a big sister trying to carry on after her parents were killed. You can't blame Lilo for being a godawful kid; she's just a little girl trying to adjust to her whole world being taken away.
Every single character in the entire movie, as far as I can tell, is a person trying his or her best to live up to his or her responsibilities. No bad guys. No bad intentions. And ridiculous amounts of violence and explosions. And, despite the suspension of disbelief you need for some of the sci-fi and fantasy elements, the characters all ring pretty true.
It's important to remember stories like this when you have violence, explosions, resentment, anger, or fights in your own life. Even when some sonofabitch is trying to wreck your shit, even when you're tempted to call him your worst enemy, even when you're trying to do the best you can and you're being frustrated at every turn, you have to remember that the bad guys aren't trying to be bad guys. In their own heads, they are very likely seeing you as a sonofabitch trying to wreck their shit, unable to see you aren't a bad guy. From their perspectives, with their objectives, they're probably just doing the best they can.
Communicating changes perspectives and objectives, and that, along with the hokey-pokey, is really what it's all about. When you're surrounded by bad guys, sometimes it's a good idea to try to drop as many barriers to communication as you can, then try to align your objectives... and, you know, sometimes it's a good idea to pull out a baseball bat. Listen to your conscience; go with what feels right.
- (Man vs Man
- Man vs Society
- Man vs Nature
- Man vs Self)
So Zoe has been on a Lilo and Stitch kick lately, and I hadn't seen that one before the past few weeks. (I still haven't, strictly, seen it. Most of my exposure to it has come while I was driving and she watches in the backseat. I've probably missed an awful lot of visual stuff.) It's struck me as a very odd Disney movie in a lot of ways, and I figured out why today: There are no bad guys. More than that, there is arguably no one in the whole movie who does anything actually bad even once.
The closest counter-argument to both of those assertions is Dr. Jumba, the mad scientist whose illegal genetic experimentation creates Stitch, a creature immediately identified as an "abomination." But as to whether he's bad, I would point out that he sees a little girl in danger toward the end, and doesn't even hesitate to be persuaded to help her out. His other arguable sins are pretty easily explained away, too -- he lies before the court, but he does that to save his skin; anyone would do that. He creates an abomination, but the abomination is not exactly Frankenstein's monster; it's a mischievous little cuddly guy. He tries to shoot and possibly kill the abomination -- but killing an abomination is usually not considered a bad thing, and he was ordered to do by his lawful government regime.
Stitch does some naughty stuff, but is it really stuff that can be considered bad? He attacks and damages a few people, but generally those people are causing trouble for him in the first place, and his attacks are not debilitating. He's a baby, he's superpowered, and he's got a posse chasing him down; some collateral damage seems pretty likely. He breaks some stuff -- but he does not damage Lilo's precious picture of her mom, and he only physically attacks other aliens.
That's a significant point, too, and I'll bring that up to excuse the actions of Captain Gantu and the Grand Councilwoman -- as soon as they found out that the escaped abomination was going to Earth, they asked their expert about the planet, and he described Earthlings as both unintelligent and extremely delicate ("Every time a meteor hits the planet, they start over from scratch"). They choose not to gas the planet because they don't want to hurt an endangered species, and they at no point damage any earth people. They batter each other, and at a few points discuss their comparatively denser molecules; which Stitch chomps on the skull of one alien or throws another through a wall, it's not actually terribly violent behavior. Gantu was a little fierce -- but he was never more or less than a cop, following his orders to capture a fugitive.
The ridiculously named Cobra Bubbles, of course -- the CIA agent-turned-social worker -- is the same way. He's a little gruff and ridiculously intimidating, but his motive is to protect a little girl from a clearly unsafe home. You can't blame him for that. You can't blame Nani for the house being unsafe; she's just a big sister trying to carry on after her parents were killed. You can't blame Lilo for being a godawful kid; she's just a little girl trying to adjust to her whole world being taken away.
Every single character in the entire movie, as far as I can tell, is a person trying his or her best to live up to his or her responsibilities. No bad guys. No bad intentions. And ridiculous amounts of violence and explosions. And, despite the suspension of disbelief you need for some of the sci-fi and fantasy elements, the characters all ring pretty true.
It's important to remember stories like this when you have violence, explosions, resentment, anger, or fights in your own life. Even when some sonofabitch is trying to wreck your shit, even when you're tempted to call him your worst enemy, even when you're trying to do the best you can and you're being frustrated at every turn, you have to remember that the bad guys aren't trying to be bad guys. In their own heads, they are very likely seeing you as a sonofabitch trying to wreck their shit, unable to see you aren't a bad guy. From their perspectives, with their objectives, they're probably just doing the best they can.
Communicating changes perspectives and objectives, and that, along with the hokey-pokey, is really what it's all about. When you're surrounded by bad guys, sometimes it's a good idea to try to drop as many barriers to communication as you can, then try to align your objectives... and, you know, sometimes it's a good idea to pull out a baseball bat. Listen to your conscience; go with what feels right.
Rockin out on bath salts
I have an epsom problem; admitting it is the first step. I stayed up late tonight, reluctant to go soak in a bath full of the stuff, but knowing it would help if I did. I did. It helped.
I put myself in the unnatural position of having abused my physical corpus too much today entirely because of a defect in my character, which actually pleases me in a perverse way -- I think a lot of the time, our intellectual patterns and personalities, the way we think, has an effect on our actions that is less than you'd expect. Most people think they're brave; most people in battle freeze up and never fire a shot. Most people think they're generous, but they ignore panhandlers and think the cops should do something about them. I think I'm an egotistical showoff... so, when a chance came to show off, it's a little gratifying that I actually dove in over my head.
There's a boy named Jake who was diagnosed with brain cancer a few months ago -- I don't know the lad; I've only seen his father a few times, never exchanged a word with him. However, his father is a senior instructor at the kung fu school I have been studying at for more than two years now, and I have a lot of mutual friends with him -- more specifically, I have a lot of people that I really respect that really respect him. Last time I saw him (the father), he was earning his third degree black belt, and part of his test was breaking a cinder block. With his forehead.
Why do you study kung fu? So you can do stuff that looks cool. Breaking cinder blocks with your forehead, as absolutely ridiculous and impractical a skill as it might be, looks pretty darn cool. So, without having met the guy, I'm a fan.
I live in one of the world's more backwards countries, unfortunately; we have a system here where, if you get sick, the culture would like to see that drive you into total bankruptcy and ruin your life. The legal system is set up so that, if you have a kid that gets sick, not only do you get to deal with the massive nervous breakdowns that are the logical result of that, but you get the massive nervous breakdowns that come with being massively in debt for the rest of your life, as well. Every other country in the world, of course, has figured out that this is no way to live, but here in cavemanland, I mean Amurrica, we're still working on it. So the kung fu school has come together to help out, and part of that is running some fund-raising events. And one of those was a board-breaking marathon.
Donate ten clams, break five boards. Donate twenty clams, break ten boards. And my old friend Mike said that he'd top anyone else who bought boards... when I heard about it, he had donated seventy and was planning to break thirty-five boards. So I had to do him one better.
So, skipping some back and forths, today Mike, me, and a bunch of other board-breaking enthusiasts got together to break some boards. Most people had pledged for five or ten boards. I had seventy. Mike, persistent to the end, had seventy-five. Which is, I want to point out, kind of a lot.
I have been told there are some cool pictures out there somewhere, one of me kicking through one board with each foot simultaneously, and maybe I'll get a copy of those eventually. I also did some speed breaks (which are breaks where the guy isn't holding the board tightly -- he just sort of has two fingers on them, and you have to hit them with a lot of speed and force or they'll go flying away), and one from a dive roll, and another from a half-backflip. Mike did a couple of cool things I don't know how to do -- including, yes, a forehead break, and he also did a cinder block, although he used his hand for it. He also did a Bruce Lee-like zero-inch punch -- the one where you put your hand solidly against the board, then break it without pulling it away, with total disregard for all laws of physics. Importantly, we looked super-cool in some pictures; more importantly, the school raised a significant amount of money for Jake.
And I have bruises on both elbows, my hands, my knees, and my feet. I soaked in the tub an alarmingly long time -- from about 1.45 to almost 3.30, which is less alarming when you realize daylight savings time happened tonight. And I drank about a bottle of wine while I was in there, so I'm drunk as a wheelbarrow now, so this whole entry is probably full of rambling and typos.
But it was a good day, a productive day, and I learned how to do some things that I couldn't before. And I looked cool doing it. And I drank a lot of wine. Hard to have a better day than that....
I put myself in the unnatural position of having abused my physical corpus too much today entirely because of a defect in my character, which actually pleases me in a perverse way -- I think a lot of the time, our intellectual patterns and personalities, the way we think, has an effect on our actions that is less than you'd expect. Most people think they're brave; most people in battle freeze up and never fire a shot. Most people think they're generous, but they ignore panhandlers and think the cops should do something about them. I think I'm an egotistical showoff... so, when a chance came to show off, it's a little gratifying that I actually dove in over my head.
There's a boy named Jake who was diagnosed with brain cancer a few months ago -- I don't know the lad; I've only seen his father a few times, never exchanged a word with him. However, his father is a senior instructor at the kung fu school I have been studying at for more than two years now, and I have a lot of mutual friends with him -- more specifically, I have a lot of people that I really respect that really respect him. Last time I saw him (the father), he was earning his third degree black belt, and part of his test was breaking a cinder block. With his forehead.
Why do you study kung fu? So you can do stuff that looks cool. Breaking cinder blocks with your forehead, as absolutely ridiculous and impractical a skill as it might be, looks pretty darn cool. So, without having met the guy, I'm a fan.
I live in one of the world's more backwards countries, unfortunately; we have a system here where, if you get sick, the culture would like to see that drive you into total bankruptcy and ruin your life. The legal system is set up so that, if you have a kid that gets sick, not only do you get to deal with the massive nervous breakdowns that are the logical result of that, but you get the massive nervous breakdowns that come with being massively in debt for the rest of your life, as well. Every other country in the world, of course, has figured out that this is no way to live, but here in cavemanland, I mean Amurrica, we're still working on it. So the kung fu school has come together to help out, and part of that is running some fund-raising events. And one of those was a board-breaking marathon.
Donate ten clams, break five boards. Donate twenty clams, break ten boards. And my old friend Mike said that he'd top anyone else who bought boards... when I heard about it, he had donated seventy and was planning to break thirty-five boards. So I had to do him one better.
So, skipping some back and forths, today Mike, me, and a bunch of other board-breaking enthusiasts got together to break some boards. Most people had pledged for five or ten boards. I had seventy. Mike, persistent to the end, had seventy-five. Which is, I want to point out, kind of a lot.
I have been told there are some cool pictures out there somewhere, one of me kicking through one board with each foot simultaneously, and maybe I'll get a copy of those eventually. I also did some speed breaks (which are breaks where the guy isn't holding the board tightly -- he just sort of has two fingers on them, and you have to hit them with a lot of speed and force or they'll go flying away), and one from a dive roll, and another from a half-backflip. Mike did a couple of cool things I don't know how to do -- including, yes, a forehead break, and he also did a cinder block, although he used his hand for it. He also did a Bruce Lee-like zero-inch punch -- the one where you put your hand solidly against the board, then break it without pulling it away, with total disregard for all laws of physics. Importantly, we looked super-cool in some pictures; more importantly, the school raised a significant amount of money for Jake.
And I have bruises on both elbows, my hands, my knees, and my feet. I soaked in the tub an alarmingly long time -- from about 1.45 to almost 3.30, which is less alarming when you realize daylight savings time happened tonight. And I drank about a bottle of wine while I was in there, so I'm drunk as a wheelbarrow now, so this whole entry is probably full of rambling and typos.
But it was a good day, a productive day, and I learned how to do some things that I couldn't before. And I looked cool doing it. And I drank a lot of wine. Hard to have a better day than that....
Friday, March 6, 2015
Closure
I wasn't really sure what it meant to heal from grief until I took some time to think about the word "closure." What does that even really mean?
It doesn't have to mean anything; lots of words don't; that doesn't make them bad words. How many times has someone told you about a rough situation and you've answered, "It is what it is"? Or, the one I like even better, "Life's like that sometimes." You want to talk about two sentences that mean less than nothing? I used to think that whenever I heard a sentence like that said aloud, I should find a tree and apologize to it for wasting the oxygen it had worked so hard to provide me on such a ridiculous sentence.
But meaning is kind of overrated. Words don't have to carry a lot of meaning to bind people together -- or to serve any number of other purposes. My favorite on-screen romance that I've seen lately is a really ridiculous one -- Mike Wazowski and Celia, from Monsters, Inc. They call each other "schmoopsie-poo" and "googley-bear." Serves a purpose without being encumbered by a lot of meaning, doesn't it? Sometimes we use closure like that, in news casts or play narrations where, for pragmatic purposes, we're going to close that segment or movement and move on to the next thing. Hurricane Katrina moved in and crushed hundreds of thousands of lives, but FEMA came in, so now we'll start to find closure on that story -- now, sports!
After an injury, on a superficial level, you'd think closure meant healing. But injuries, real ones, usually don't heal all the way -- they heal to the point of literal closure sometimes, which is to say, they aren't spewing internal bodily fluids on the floor, but a serious injury doesn't get really resolved for years. I sprained my thumb last summer; I still can't close my right hand as tightly as my left. In the most literal sense imaginable, there's still no closure to that.
But closure serves a purpose for people on the outside of the situation, because at some point, they'd like to treat you again like the most important thing wasn't how damaged you were. So they talk about closure, congratulate you on your healing, and on some level, expect you to get back to normal.
Especially from grief, because we don't teach people what to expect from grief in life, it can be a little disorienting. I say a little, because grief itself is so massively disorienting, it's hard to imagine much more confusion on top of that. Having people expect that you're going to get better sometime eventually, that you're going to reach closure, that's just the cherry on top of the WTF sundae.
You do heal -- the way that a guy with an amputated limb heals; eventually, the imminent threat of death by blood loss is alleviated, and he learns to cope without the missing limb. Maybe he gets a wheelchair or a cane, or he gets a hook or a prosthetic, or his buddies start calling him Lefty, but somehow he figures out how to adapt. Not like a guy with a broken finger heals, where eventually he can type again -- like a guy with a missing limb heals, where eventually he learns to face every situation in his life while at the same time coping with missing his limb.
Closure. That particular situation doesn't close, does it? And it's only bearable because, when it happens to you, you realize that it puts you in an exclusive club of everyone whose ever lost someone he or she loves forever -- welcome to the entirety of the human race for all time. After a moment or two, you realize that it's a much more exclusive club that comprises the people who haven't known that kind of loss, and you want to hug one of them, because you know what they're almost inevitably going to have to go through soon enough. You'll find them pretty easily -- they're the people who are waiting for you to find closure.
Unrelated: I finished CS Lewis's The Great Divorce earlier, and I was really fascinated by some conversations about hurting and pity. Sympathy, etymologically, means feeling someone else's pain, and there's some philosophy about how there can be no joy while any yet suffer. It's a cool idea, because people do seem nice when they're sympathetic, but ultimately, Lewis felt sympathy or pity had to have its limits. If you've found great joy, how can you ignore that joy because others -- from foolishness, weakness, or determined attachment to their misery -- haven't joined you yet?
I grieved for B when I lost her; in my heart, I wondered often if she grieved for losing me, too. Lewis would suggest that she couldn't, that she wouldn't have had time -- she was too busy being immersed in the holiest joy and the purest love, the True Things of which the love and joy that we shared in life were just pale reflections. It's an ineffable question; no one can ever really know till you get there, of course, and then you've probably got other stuff to worry about.
Maybe that's the best way not to grieve -- you put aside the hurt because you've got other stuff to worry about. It would explain a lot of the decisions I made instinctively; I threw myself into bad decisions so that I'd have other stuff to worry about. I don't remember spending a lot of nights staring into the abyss; I mostly remember having stupid problems and getting drunk at bars. If it ever happens again, God forbid (sorry, Kimmy... I'm punching out first this time; you're going to have to outlive me)... well, if it does, I'm going to spend a lot less time anesthetizing myself over it. I'm too old to abuse my innards that much again...
It doesn't have to mean anything; lots of words don't; that doesn't make them bad words. How many times has someone told you about a rough situation and you've answered, "It is what it is"? Or, the one I like even better, "Life's like that sometimes." You want to talk about two sentences that mean less than nothing? I used to think that whenever I heard a sentence like that said aloud, I should find a tree and apologize to it for wasting the oxygen it had worked so hard to provide me on such a ridiculous sentence.
But meaning is kind of overrated. Words don't have to carry a lot of meaning to bind people together -- or to serve any number of other purposes. My favorite on-screen romance that I've seen lately is a really ridiculous one -- Mike Wazowski and Celia, from Monsters, Inc. They call each other "schmoopsie-poo" and "googley-bear." Serves a purpose without being encumbered by a lot of meaning, doesn't it? Sometimes we use closure like that, in news casts or play narrations where, for pragmatic purposes, we're going to close that segment or movement and move on to the next thing. Hurricane Katrina moved in and crushed hundreds of thousands of lives, but FEMA came in, so now we'll start to find closure on that story -- now, sports!
After an injury, on a superficial level, you'd think closure meant healing. But injuries, real ones, usually don't heal all the way -- they heal to the point of literal closure sometimes, which is to say, they aren't spewing internal bodily fluids on the floor, but a serious injury doesn't get really resolved for years. I sprained my thumb last summer; I still can't close my right hand as tightly as my left. In the most literal sense imaginable, there's still no closure to that.
But closure serves a purpose for people on the outside of the situation, because at some point, they'd like to treat you again like the most important thing wasn't how damaged you were. So they talk about closure, congratulate you on your healing, and on some level, expect you to get back to normal.
Especially from grief, because we don't teach people what to expect from grief in life, it can be a little disorienting. I say a little, because grief itself is so massively disorienting, it's hard to imagine much more confusion on top of that. Having people expect that you're going to get better sometime eventually, that you're going to reach closure, that's just the cherry on top of the WTF sundae.
You do heal -- the way that a guy with an amputated limb heals; eventually, the imminent threat of death by blood loss is alleviated, and he learns to cope without the missing limb. Maybe he gets a wheelchair or a cane, or he gets a hook or a prosthetic, or his buddies start calling him Lefty, but somehow he figures out how to adapt. Not like a guy with a broken finger heals, where eventually he can type again -- like a guy with a missing limb heals, where eventually he learns to face every situation in his life while at the same time coping with missing his limb.
Closure. That particular situation doesn't close, does it? And it's only bearable because, when it happens to you, you realize that it puts you in an exclusive club of everyone whose ever lost someone he or she loves forever -- welcome to the entirety of the human race for all time. After a moment or two, you realize that it's a much more exclusive club that comprises the people who haven't known that kind of loss, and you want to hug one of them, because you know what they're almost inevitably going to have to go through soon enough. You'll find them pretty easily -- they're the people who are waiting for you to find closure.
Unrelated: I finished CS Lewis's The Great Divorce earlier, and I was really fascinated by some conversations about hurting and pity. Sympathy, etymologically, means feeling someone else's pain, and there's some philosophy about how there can be no joy while any yet suffer. It's a cool idea, because people do seem nice when they're sympathetic, but ultimately, Lewis felt sympathy or pity had to have its limits. If you've found great joy, how can you ignore that joy because others -- from foolishness, weakness, or determined attachment to their misery -- haven't joined you yet?
I grieved for B when I lost her; in my heart, I wondered often if she grieved for losing me, too. Lewis would suggest that she couldn't, that she wouldn't have had time -- she was too busy being immersed in the holiest joy and the purest love, the True Things of which the love and joy that we shared in life were just pale reflections. It's an ineffable question; no one can ever really know till you get there, of course, and then you've probably got other stuff to worry about.
Maybe that's the best way not to grieve -- you put aside the hurt because you've got other stuff to worry about. It would explain a lot of the decisions I made instinctively; I threw myself into bad decisions so that I'd have other stuff to worry about. I don't remember spending a lot of nights staring into the abyss; I mostly remember having stupid problems and getting drunk at bars. If it ever happens again, God forbid (sorry, Kimmy... I'm punching out first this time; you're going to have to outlive me)... well, if it does, I'm going to spend a lot less time anesthetizing myself over it. I'm too old to abuse my innards that much again...
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Till We Have Faces musing...
I've been reading a lot of CS Lewis the past few days. When I was a young lad, maybe thirty years ago, he was my favorite author because the Narnia books were among my favorite books. (Side note: I remember thinking at one point that all the loser writers probably took pen names that started with "L" so they'd be next to Lewis and L'Engle on the racks, because the discriminating readers would start their trips to the library there -- I had a pretty limited idea of how marketing worked back then. But it seems like it worked for that hack, Robert Ludlum, anyway.)
He aged well alongside me -- in my teens, the science fiction trilogy rocked my world, although That Hideous Strength was definitely too hard for me until I got a little older. His non-fiction works, starting with Mere Christianity, came within reach, and I devoured them as I grew old enough to understand them, and finally I picked up one that looked scary, fictional, and exciting -- maybe a fantasy to match the sci-fi of the trilogy. It was called Till We Have Faces.
Somewhere near Oxford University, there's a pigeon sitting on a gate, looking in, admiring some of the pretty trees and flowers that probably grow there. And within the university gates, there's a greater beauty, minds growing and conversations flowing and philosophy blossoming; there's magic that is completely beyond that pigeon's scope of understanding, even beyond his perception. When I read Till We Have Faces, I felt like that pigeon. It's rare that you can read the words of a book, be completely aware that it is talking about stuff that is utterly beyond your grasp, and still be fascinated by its beauty.
I re-read it again in my twenties a few times, and I've been re-reading it again this week. But this time, I'm coming into it with an education, with a background in literary criticism, and with some miles on my tires -- some actual life experiences, some knowledge of grief, some small amount of emotional maturity. I'm starting to see some depth to the shadows of this book, some dimensions that I wasn't able to perceive before.
The second hardest trick in writing that I'm aware of -- and probably the hardest one that people actually have the guts and skill to pull off regularly -- is probably the unreliable narrator. The unreliable narrator is the one where the person telling the story doesn't tell you all the bits of it, but the author intends you to be able to piece it together and at least suspect it yourself. The trick that is one step harder than that, the one that only true masters even attempt, is the ignorant narrator. The ignorant narrator is the one where the writer knows something and he communicates it to you, the reader, but the narrator through which he communicates it remains unaware. Nick in The Great Gatsby doesn't ever come out and tell you, in so many words, that he was gay and in love with Gatsby; he probably never even suspects it of himself. (Some people think that he's an unreliable narrator and he just tells you that he's straight -- I prefer to read it that he really likes Jordan and his other girlfriends; he just never realizes why it doesn't work out, and he thinks Gatsby is just a really admirable friend, a Great Man.) The ignorant narrator is a story told through allusion and implication; it's a message encoded for the reader, a more sophisticated person than the protagonist.
I think Orual in Till We Have Faces plays that role, the ignorant narrator, on at least a few occasions, and the thing that really tipped me off was the multiple times she almost directly quoted Lady MacBeth. I don't know if you've read MacBeth lately -- I sure as hell haven't -- but Lewis, an Englishman who lived on letters, wouldn't have alluded to her accidentally. I don't know of any character in literature who comes to mind when a powerful woman cries to be un-womaned, to have the qualities of her gender removed from her, faster than Lady Mac. "Come, you spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full/Of direst cruelty."
So Orual had that in common with Lady MacBeth. When you read the book, the mood is desperate, crushing sadness, bitterness, anger at the gods for having mistreated her -- and the mood is those green trees that even the pigeon on the gate can marvel at; it lingered with me from the first time I read it, haunting for years. But Lady MacBeth is not a victim; she's a killer. And, through that allusion, I can see Orual in a different light as well... and, as any good literary critic can tell you, when you first start to see a really good theory idea, you find that the supporting evidence for it starts leaping off every page.
I've seen Orual as a sympathetic figure for like twenty years. It's crazy now, reading the book with the new perspective of years, education, and imagination, but I think she was the monster all along.
The guy wrote like a dozen fiction books, at least half of them targeted for children. And I think this book might be one of the best of all time -- I've read some great ones, but never one with more levels, with more threads woven together, with more literary craftsmanship than this. I'm going to have to re-read it another three or four times just for the literary characterizations, I think... without even looking at the theological narratives he was trying to weave, because that's the easy target. You know how the easy target in Gatsby is the Marxist theory, the narrative about materialism and how no one is really motivated by anything other than money and the joy in waving it in front of other people's noses? The easy target in Faces is about religion -- you are brought up to love a god, you find disappointment and blame a god, then you discover what you are in comparison to a god and how silly it is to rage at them, like throwing celery at volcanoes. That's just the surface layer -- only the easiest of the themes (and even that one eluded me when I was trying to read it as a younger guy). There are at least three or four others that I can see from here, and the deeper I delve, the more I think I'll find.
I probably ought to do a critical paper on it, if I ever write one of those again... I bet most of the theory on it has been on theology in it or the mythology in it, and I think there's a lot more ground to cover. Marxism. Shakespeare. Racism. Queer theory. Maybe I should do three or four critical papers on it...
I've been reading some of The Great Divorce, too, and I feel like I've been shortchanging it, but it's an overt response to Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which I read part of and don't ever want to read again. Reading Lewis is like being a pigeon on the gates of Oxford; reading Blake is like being a pigeon transfixed in the hypnotic eye of a snake. That way, they say, lies madness. I feel like he's the literary Joker in the comic book world of English Romanticism -- much more brilliant and horrifyingly insane than anyone ever had any right to be. I wanted to write a thesis project on his creation mythos at one point, before I remembered that I liked being happy. The Great Divorce will be a pleasant read, less fiction and more parable, and I think I'll enjoy it. But I won't dive deep into it; I certainly won't delve into William F. Blake again for it. There are universes hidden in fiction, and as far as I'm concerned, hidden is a good place for some of those universes to stay.
He aged well alongside me -- in my teens, the science fiction trilogy rocked my world, although That Hideous Strength was definitely too hard for me until I got a little older. His non-fiction works, starting with Mere Christianity, came within reach, and I devoured them as I grew old enough to understand them, and finally I picked up one that looked scary, fictional, and exciting -- maybe a fantasy to match the sci-fi of the trilogy. It was called Till We Have Faces.
Somewhere near Oxford University, there's a pigeon sitting on a gate, looking in, admiring some of the pretty trees and flowers that probably grow there. And within the university gates, there's a greater beauty, minds growing and conversations flowing and philosophy blossoming; there's magic that is completely beyond that pigeon's scope of understanding, even beyond his perception. When I read Till We Have Faces, I felt like that pigeon. It's rare that you can read the words of a book, be completely aware that it is talking about stuff that is utterly beyond your grasp, and still be fascinated by its beauty.
I re-read it again in my twenties a few times, and I've been re-reading it again this week. But this time, I'm coming into it with an education, with a background in literary criticism, and with some miles on my tires -- some actual life experiences, some knowledge of grief, some small amount of emotional maturity. I'm starting to see some depth to the shadows of this book, some dimensions that I wasn't able to perceive before.
The second hardest trick in writing that I'm aware of -- and probably the hardest one that people actually have the guts and skill to pull off regularly -- is probably the unreliable narrator. The unreliable narrator is the one where the person telling the story doesn't tell you all the bits of it, but the author intends you to be able to piece it together and at least suspect it yourself. The trick that is one step harder than that, the one that only true masters even attempt, is the ignorant narrator. The ignorant narrator is the one where the writer knows something and he communicates it to you, the reader, but the narrator through which he communicates it remains unaware. Nick in The Great Gatsby doesn't ever come out and tell you, in so many words, that he was gay and in love with Gatsby; he probably never even suspects it of himself. (Some people think that he's an unreliable narrator and he just tells you that he's straight -- I prefer to read it that he really likes Jordan and his other girlfriends; he just never realizes why it doesn't work out, and he thinks Gatsby is just a really admirable friend, a Great Man.) The ignorant narrator is a story told through allusion and implication; it's a message encoded for the reader, a more sophisticated person than the protagonist.
I think Orual in Till We Have Faces plays that role, the ignorant narrator, on at least a few occasions, and the thing that really tipped me off was the multiple times she almost directly quoted Lady MacBeth. I don't know if you've read MacBeth lately -- I sure as hell haven't -- but Lewis, an Englishman who lived on letters, wouldn't have alluded to her accidentally. I don't know of any character in literature who comes to mind when a powerful woman cries to be un-womaned, to have the qualities of her gender removed from her, faster than Lady Mac. "Come, you spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full/Of direst cruelty."
So Orual had that in common with Lady MacBeth. When you read the book, the mood is desperate, crushing sadness, bitterness, anger at the gods for having mistreated her -- and the mood is those green trees that even the pigeon on the gate can marvel at; it lingered with me from the first time I read it, haunting for years. But Lady MacBeth is not a victim; she's a killer. And, through that allusion, I can see Orual in a different light as well... and, as any good literary critic can tell you, when you first start to see a really good theory idea, you find that the supporting evidence for it starts leaping off every page.
I've seen Orual as a sympathetic figure for like twenty years. It's crazy now, reading the book with the new perspective of years, education, and imagination, but I think she was the monster all along.
The guy wrote like a dozen fiction books, at least half of them targeted for children. And I think this book might be one of the best of all time -- I've read some great ones, but never one with more levels, with more threads woven together, with more literary craftsmanship than this. I'm going to have to re-read it another three or four times just for the literary characterizations, I think... without even looking at the theological narratives he was trying to weave, because that's the easy target. You know how the easy target in Gatsby is the Marxist theory, the narrative about materialism and how no one is really motivated by anything other than money and the joy in waving it in front of other people's noses? The easy target in Faces is about religion -- you are brought up to love a god, you find disappointment and blame a god, then you discover what you are in comparison to a god and how silly it is to rage at them, like throwing celery at volcanoes. That's just the surface layer -- only the easiest of the themes (and even that one eluded me when I was trying to read it as a younger guy). There are at least three or four others that I can see from here, and the deeper I delve, the more I think I'll find.
I probably ought to do a critical paper on it, if I ever write one of those again... I bet most of the theory on it has been on theology in it or the mythology in it, and I think there's a lot more ground to cover. Marxism. Shakespeare. Racism. Queer theory. Maybe I should do three or four critical papers on it...
I've been reading some of The Great Divorce, too, and I feel like I've been shortchanging it, but it's an overt response to Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which I read part of and don't ever want to read again. Reading Lewis is like being a pigeon on the gates of Oxford; reading Blake is like being a pigeon transfixed in the hypnotic eye of a snake. That way, they say, lies madness. I feel like he's the literary Joker in the comic book world of English Romanticism -- much more brilliant and horrifyingly insane than anyone ever had any right to be. I wanted to write a thesis project on his creation mythos at one point, before I remembered that I liked being happy. The Great Divorce will be a pleasant read, less fiction and more parable, and I think I'll enjoy it. But I won't dive deep into it; I certainly won't delve into William F. Blake again for it. There are universes hidden in fiction, and as far as I'm concerned, hidden is a good place for some of those universes to stay.
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Old blogs
I guess that title is a misnomer. A blog that no one else reads isn't a blog; it's a diary. So old diaries would be a better name, but they were made on software called "blogger," and it's such a ridiculous word that it's hard not to use it under any pretext, no matter how flimsy.
I wrote blogs on blogger before, back in olden times when I was in a period of transition and self-discovery. (Spoiler alert: all of life is a period of transition and self-discovery.) I was pretty regular about it, several entries a week. Not every day -- I'm trying to stay every day with this blog, at least for a start, because I read somewhere that if you do something twenty-one days in a row, it'll become a habit, and I'd like to get back in the habit with this one.
Finding those old diaries, though, have really encouraged me, because they've attenuated my expectations a bit. I was younger and probably more immature then -- I didn't use phrases like "attenuated my expectations," in any event -- but there was real value in that writing, sometimes even something that looked like wisdom. And there was garbage, too, lots of absolute junk.
And the junk is inspiring, too! A lot of days, I entered lyrics from whatever song was going through my head, whatever my favorite song was that day, recorded for all of history. Why would I do that? Did I think I was the only chance U2 had for the lyrics of their "New York" song to be preserved for posterity? Some of the old poetry I posted was absolutely unreadable -- and that's valuable, too, because it tells me who I was.
You don't remember "New York," do you? No reason why you should. It wasn't a great song; it didn't get a lot of airplay, and it only had one or two clever turns of phrase to prevent it from being utterly garbage. "In New York freedom feels like/too many choices..." is a great line, though, because isn't that what writing is all about? Probably there are 800,000 words in the English language; you can start the next sentence with most of them. Even if you can only start it with a tenth of them, isn't that an intimidating choice? If you want the sentence to be really good, to be epic, it has to start with the right one, not any of the other half million....
but then you hear "New York," and you remember All That You Can't Leave Behind was a pretty good album. But it wasn't a greatest hits album; every second on the album wasn't the best day they ever had. Some of them were great days; some of them were okay days, and they all added up to a pretty good album. A blog can be like that, too.
Maybe I'll have some really good hits here. Maybe I'll have some okay days, too. The only really unforgivable sin will be if I stop having days altogether -- if I give up and walk away from it without trying anymore. Life's like that, too... the important thing is that you keep on living it.
I wrote blogs on blogger before, back in olden times when I was in a period of transition and self-discovery. (Spoiler alert: all of life is a period of transition and self-discovery.) I was pretty regular about it, several entries a week. Not every day -- I'm trying to stay every day with this blog, at least for a start, because I read somewhere that if you do something twenty-one days in a row, it'll become a habit, and I'd like to get back in the habit with this one.
Finding those old diaries, though, have really encouraged me, because they've attenuated my expectations a bit. I was younger and probably more immature then -- I didn't use phrases like "attenuated my expectations," in any event -- but there was real value in that writing, sometimes even something that looked like wisdom. And there was garbage, too, lots of absolute junk.
And the junk is inspiring, too! A lot of days, I entered lyrics from whatever song was going through my head, whatever my favorite song was that day, recorded for all of history. Why would I do that? Did I think I was the only chance U2 had for the lyrics of their "New York" song to be preserved for posterity? Some of the old poetry I posted was absolutely unreadable -- and that's valuable, too, because it tells me who I was.
You don't remember "New York," do you? No reason why you should. It wasn't a great song; it didn't get a lot of airplay, and it only had one or two clever turns of phrase to prevent it from being utterly garbage. "In New York freedom feels like/too many choices..." is a great line, though, because isn't that what writing is all about? Probably there are 800,000 words in the English language; you can start the next sentence with most of them. Even if you can only start it with a tenth of them, isn't that an intimidating choice? If you want the sentence to be really good, to be epic, it has to start with the right one, not any of the other half million....
but then you hear "New York," and you remember All That You Can't Leave Behind was a pretty good album. But it wasn't a greatest hits album; every second on the album wasn't the best day they ever had. Some of them were great days; some of them were okay days, and they all added up to a pretty good album. A blog can be like that, too.
Maybe I'll have some really good hits here. Maybe I'll have some okay days, too. The only really unforgivable sin will be if I stop having days altogether -- if I give up and walk away from it without trying anymore. Life's like that, too... the important thing is that you keep on living it.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
A letter to Lauren Zuniga
Lauren,
I've been trying to be a writer as long as I can remember. Bursts of bad poetry, endless study of concepts like anapests and chiasmus, trisagion at the feet of Jane Austen and eucharist at the altar of William Blake. I almost made it this year.
I started a NaNoWriMo novel, one of those mindless sprints where you hammer out words as fast as you can for a month, and maybe more importantly, I quit my job and took stock of what I wanted my new identity to be. I think men always have an unhealthy prepossession with defining their identities by their profession; having given up the title of "military dude," I got to look for a new self, a better self. I wanted to be a writer. I always wanted to be a writer. And it was time to embrace that.
But it's hard, and it's dangerously introverted. I'm an unusual intellectual, in that I find pro wrestling to be a form of art actually worth watching, and I envy the artists. One of the awesome things about that mode of performing is that you know, instantly and unambiguously, whether you're delivering the goods. If you clobber your opponent and the crowd pops -- gasping, screaming, booing, crying, whatever -- you know you did it right. Writing is the exact opposite; if you've delivered the goods, you have to keep on delivering until you've spent weeks, months, maybe years, and you'll never know whether it was good till someone's read the whole product. Monstrous.
I made it three-quarters of the way through this damn book, and I know exactly how I want it to finish; everything's done but the actual writing part. Probably another eight thousand words (and then one eternity of editing and revising, but that hardly counts). And I've run into a roadblock. Motivation sapped, confidence eroded, will to live entirely undercut. I bet you know how this feels. I hope you know how this feels... no, on second thought, I hope you don't. It's not great. But I fear it's a natural part of writing.
So Kimberly came to the rescue. She encouraged me to write, not just the book, but anything -- facebook posts, blog entries, e-mails, anything. And it has helped; I'm not dreading the keyboard anymore, and I think I was almost ready to pick the cross back up and try to finish the damn thing, but I was still dreading it. And then she did something amazing, because she always knows what I need, especially when I don't. She ordered The Smell of Good Mud.
I got it today while she was asleep, and I opened the envelope, first surprised, then delighted, then devouring. I sank my teeth into the first pages, sure that I would read it cover to cover before I let the mossy green cover out of my hands. I got as far as "Opening."
"dirty, flawed, and glistening."
That's what I needed. It's what I've needed for months, and I never knew, but Kim always knows. Thank you. Thank you for writing it; thank you for knowing us; thank you for sharing your magic with us. I better get to work.
--del
I've been trying to be a writer as long as I can remember. Bursts of bad poetry, endless study of concepts like anapests and chiasmus, trisagion at the feet of Jane Austen and eucharist at the altar of William Blake. I almost made it this year.
I started a NaNoWriMo novel, one of those mindless sprints where you hammer out words as fast as you can for a month, and maybe more importantly, I quit my job and took stock of what I wanted my new identity to be. I think men always have an unhealthy prepossession with defining their identities by their profession; having given up the title of "military dude," I got to look for a new self, a better self. I wanted to be a writer. I always wanted to be a writer. And it was time to embrace that.
But it's hard, and it's dangerously introverted. I'm an unusual intellectual, in that I find pro wrestling to be a form of art actually worth watching, and I envy the artists. One of the awesome things about that mode of performing is that you know, instantly and unambiguously, whether you're delivering the goods. If you clobber your opponent and the crowd pops -- gasping, screaming, booing, crying, whatever -- you know you did it right. Writing is the exact opposite; if you've delivered the goods, you have to keep on delivering until you've spent weeks, months, maybe years, and you'll never know whether it was good till someone's read the whole product. Monstrous.
I made it three-quarters of the way through this damn book, and I know exactly how I want it to finish; everything's done but the actual writing part. Probably another eight thousand words (and then one eternity of editing and revising, but that hardly counts). And I've run into a roadblock. Motivation sapped, confidence eroded, will to live entirely undercut. I bet you know how this feels. I hope you know how this feels... no, on second thought, I hope you don't. It's not great. But I fear it's a natural part of writing.
So Kimberly came to the rescue. She encouraged me to write, not just the book, but anything -- facebook posts, blog entries, e-mails, anything. And it has helped; I'm not dreading the keyboard anymore, and I think I was almost ready to pick the cross back up and try to finish the damn thing, but I was still dreading it. And then she did something amazing, because she always knows what I need, especially when I don't. She ordered The Smell of Good Mud.
I got it today while she was asleep, and I opened the envelope, first surprised, then delighted, then devouring. I sank my teeth into the first pages, sure that I would read it cover to cover before I let the mossy green cover out of my hands. I got as far as "Opening."
"dirty, flawed, and glistening."
That's what I needed. It's what I've needed for months, and I never knew, but Kim always knows. Thank you. Thank you for writing it; thank you for knowing us; thank you for sharing your magic with us. I better get to work.
--del
Friday, February 27, 2015
That stupid dress...
Everyone in the
twitterverse is all a-twitter about this ridiculous photo of a dress.
Leaving behind the mindless chirping for a moment (which we shall try
not to sound too condescending about, because God knows I spent half the
morning talking with my cow-orkers about that stupid dress, too), I'd
like to examine the phenomenon for a deeper narrative. It shouldn't
take but about a quarter second to find one... ahh, there it is.
The first article I read about the dress was on Gawker, a website I avoid (because, honestly, I don't think those people would enjoy reading the things I write about, either. They're fine, for what they are, but I don't think I'm one of them, and that's fine, too). But what struck me was how very angry they were about the dress. The headline, I think I am quoting accurately here, is "What color is this fucking dress anyway??" The article went on to question how some fucktards were calling it white and gold, when any idiot can see it's clearly blue and black, and WTF is wrong with these sonsabitches anyway, and what is the deal with this mofo dress?
(The deal with the mofo dress, by the way, is obviously that it's a terrible picture, overexposed and badly backlit. Whether the actual subject of the picture was originally black and blue, gold and white, or polkadotted and plaid is near impossible to tell, probably even in the original picture.)
But what's really interesting about the picture to me is that, in the current media environment, I probably saw something different from what you saw. I've actually seen it about six times now, and it looked different every time, because the one way I haven't seen it is the only way I would have been able to a hundred years ago -- printed in a newspaper or a magazine.
I saw it in a dark room and in a well-lit office, under fluorescent lights, incandescent lights, and natural light streaming in through a window. I saw it on two different laptops, two different cell phones, and three different desktop monitors -- all with different resolutions and all with brightness settings at different places. I saw it on facepage a few times, of course, and I saw it on Wired's website, which has an interesting CSS setting so that, when you mouseover an image, it raises the brightness level.
What I'm saying is, I have no idea what the photographer saw when he took it, and the variations of color, brightness, resolution, and even the angles at which I was looking at the monitor when I saw it mean that I never will know. I've seen the image "with my own eyes" a dozen times -- and it's never looked the same twice. And yes, at least twice, it's looked blue and black to me, just for a second.
The deeper narrative here is how frustrating it is to communicate with someone when you've somehow been fooled into thinking you've had a common experience. The internet was supposed to bring us closer, and in a lot of ways it has -- the "global village" is absolutely a thing; I'm able to read things that someone anywhere in the world and most places in outer space wrote within minutes after they've written it. It's a wonderful world for communicating. But our experiences, our backgrounds and environments, are still as different as they ever were.
I'm super rich -- like, ridiculously wealthy. In comparison with probably 5.5 billion people on this planet, I have more material advantages and less concern about being materially secure in my future than they ever will; in comparison with the billions who have lived throughout history, I'm living in another world from most of them just because I can say the following sentence: "I have no fear of ever starving to death or dying from exposure to the elements." Think how many centuries passed where virtually no man living could have said that sentence. But even for today, even for my nation, even for my culture and skin color, I'm fairly well off. I have to work forty-plus hours a week -- but I don't have to work so often that I have to give up blogging, for instance, or seeing my kids.
I can write this blog post and it can be read by anyone with an internet connection within minutes, and I can write it well enough and literately enough that it builds an empathy with people. But I don't share those experiences -- I can't sympathize with so many people; my privileges lie between us. I've never been afraid to walk in a city alone at night. I've never feared a policeman pulling me over. I've never wondered how I'd feed my children. I've never had to decide if I should sleep with my boss or look for a new job.
People on the internet get angry in their fights about values pretty often, because they forget these things -- you're not arguing with who share your environment or your background; you just share access to the same internet right now. And you have to use it not to shout down other positions but to learn about them. #Blacklivesmatter, #Yesallwomen, #Bostonstrong -- they're all hashtags that represent things that are foreign to me. The choice that confronts me, each time, is either to reject it out of hand, ignoring the voices that are so foreign to me, or to try to sympathize with them, to learn their language.
Some bizarre deviant crazy people out there really do see a blue and black dress. The lesson of the dress photo is that you have a choice -- either reject them as bizarre deviant crazy people, or try to see a blue and black dress yourownself.
The first article I read about the dress was on Gawker, a website I avoid (because, honestly, I don't think those people would enjoy reading the things I write about, either. They're fine, for what they are, but I don't think I'm one of them, and that's fine, too). But what struck me was how very angry they were about the dress. The headline, I think I am quoting accurately here, is "What color is this fucking dress anyway??" The article went on to question how some fucktards were calling it white and gold, when any idiot can see it's clearly blue and black, and WTF is wrong with these sonsabitches anyway, and what is the deal with this mofo dress?
(The deal with the mofo dress, by the way, is obviously that it's a terrible picture, overexposed and badly backlit. Whether the actual subject of the picture was originally black and blue, gold and white, or polkadotted and plaid is near impossible to tell, probably even in the original picture.)
But what's really interesting about the picture to me is that, in the current media environment, I probably saw something different from what you saw. I've actually seen it about six times now, and it looked different every time, because the one way I haven't seen it is the only way I would have been able to a hundred years ago -- printed in a newspaper or a magazine.
I saw it in a dark room and in a well-lit office, under fluorescent lights, incandescent lights, and natural light streaming in through a window. I saw it on two different laptops, two different cell phones, and three different desktop monitors -- all with different resolutions and all with brightness settings at different places. I saw it on facepage a few times, of course, and I saw it on Wired's website, which has an interesting CSS setting so that, when you mouseover an image, it raises the brightness level.
What I'm saying is, I have no idea what the photographer saw when he took it, and the variations of color, brightness, resolution, and even the angles at which I was looking at the monitor when I saw it mean that I never will know. I've seen the image "with my own eyes" a dozen times -- and it's never looked the same twice. And yes, at least twice, it's looked blue and black to me, just for a second.
The deeper narrative here is how frustrating it is to communicate with someone when you've somehow been fooled into thinking you've had a common experience. The internet was supposed to bring us closer, and in a lot of ways it has -- the "global village" is absolutely a thing; I'm able to read things that someone anywhere in the world and most places in outer space wrote within minutes after they've written it. It's a wonderful world for communicating. But our experiences, our backgrounds and environments, are still as different as they ever were.
I'm super rich -- like, ridiculously wealthy. In comparison with probably 5.5 billion people on this planet, I have more material advantages and less concern about being materially secure in my future than they ever will; in comparison with the billions who have lived throughout history, I'm living in another world from most of them just because I can say the following sentence: "I have no fear of ever starving to death or dying from exposure to the elements." Think how many centuries passed where virtually no man living could have said that sentence. But even for today, even for my nation, even for my culture and skin color, I'm fairly well off. I have to work forty-plus hours a week -- but I don't have to work so often that I have to give up blogging, for instance, or seeing my kids.
I can write this blog post and it can be read by anyone with an internet connection within minutes, and I can write it well enough and literately enough that it builds an empathy with people. But I don't share those experiences -- I can't sympathize with so many people; my privileges lie between us. I've never been afraid to walk in a city alone at night. I've never feared a policeman pulling me over. I've never wondered how I'd feed my children. I've never had to decide if I should sleep with my boss or look for a new job.
People on the internet get angry in their fights about values pretty often, because they forget these things -- you're not arguing with who share your environment or your background; you just share access to the same internet right now. And you have to use it not to shout down other positions but to learn about them. #Blacklivesmatter, #Yesallwomen, #Bostonstrong -- they're all hashtags that represent things that are foreign to me. The choice that confronts me, each time, is either to reject it out of hand, ignoring the voices that are so foreign to me, or to try to sympathize with them, to learn their language.
Some bizarre deviant crazy people out there really do see a blue and black dress. The lesson of the dress photo is that you have a choice -- either reject them as bizarre deviant crazy people, or try to see a blue and black dress yourownself.
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Rainy Day Women
I live near DC, and I tend to think of a lot of their local issues as my local issues. This works out pretty well for me, as they have some pretty exotic local issues -- the one they had today, for instance, had the potential to turn into a legit Constitutional crisis. It had conservatism versus liberalism, the ruling class versus the working class, some old white men versus a young black woman, and a bunch of people smoking pot. That's a pretty fun news day, in my book.
It all stems, of course, from one of the great social debates of our time at the beginning of the 21st century, which can be further generalized to one of the great social pursuits of all of human history -- namely, people would like to get chemically blitzed out of their minds, and governments tend to be wet blankets. At this point in history, alcohol and cigarettes are generally legal, whereas marijuana is generally not. In DC, there was a public referendum, and local law was passed saying that marijuana would be decriminalized.
Congress is, according to the Constitution, supposed to govern the District of Columbia, and sometimes they even do. More often, they defer to a set of rules in place establishing Home Rule, meaning that DC is allowed to govern itself as long as Congress doesn't notice and overrule them. In the case of a referendum like this, Congress has sixty days to quash the rule before it takes effect. The sixty-first day for the pot referendum was, as it happens, today.
Yesterday made it exciting -- a few Republican congresspersons wrote some threatening letters to Mayor Bowser, and maybe I was the only one who noticed that it was a few old white men that were threatening to throw 42-year-old black woman in jail if she didn't do what her masters told her, but even if the national press didn't report it that way, I'd be surprised if her constituents didn't see a racial component. I heard a guy on the radio (Marc Fisher, a local columnist for the Washington Post) say that this was our first chance to see if Muriel Bowser had a backbone. She's fairly newly-elected; maybe this was her first real test.
At any rate, she didn't back down. She and her staff set manageable rules and published a simple, memorable motto for the District's potheads: "Home grow, home use."
The third portion of the motto, the unwritten portion, seems like it's the loudest today: "Home rule." DC leans hard left, of course, a very liberal, very minority-heavy demographic, and it isn't a comfortable place for the conservative-majority Congress to throw its weight around. Today, they enforced local laws for the locals, defying their effective absentee landlords. Hard to think of anything more American than that.
Chalk up a victory for the little guys, for the local guys. And don't smoke pot, kids; it's more addictive than you think, and it's not great for your cardio system, your lungs, or your social life. If you're going to do it, bake cookies and share with your friends.
Actually, even if you're not going to do it -- baking cookies and sharing with your friends would be pretty cool this weekend, wouldn't it?
It all stems, of course, from one of the great social debates of our time at the beginning of the 21st century, which can be further generalized to one of the great social pursuits of all of human history -- namely, people would like to get chemically blitzed out of their minds, and governments tend to be wet blankets. At this point in history, alcohol and cigarettes are generally legal, whereas marijuana is generally not. In DC, there was a public referendum, and local law was passed saying that marijuana would be decriminalized.
Congress is, according to the Constitution, supposed to govern the District of Columbia, and sometimes they even do. More often, they defer to a set of rules in place establishing Home Rule, meaning that DC is allowed to govern itself as long as Congress doesn't notice and overrule them. In the case of a referendum like this, Congress has sixty days to quash the rule before it takes effect. The sixty-first day for the pot referendum was, as it happens, today.
Yesterday made it exciting -- a few Republican congresspersons wrote some threatening letters to Mayor Bowser, and maybe I was the only one who noticed that it was a few old white men that were threatening to throw 42-year-old black woman in jail if she didn't do what her masters told her, but even if the national press didn't report it that way, I'd be surprised if her constituents didn't see a racial component. I heard a guy on the radio (Marc Fisher, a local columnist for the Washington Post) say that this was our first chance to see if Muriel Bowser had a backbone. She's fairly newly-elected; maybe this was her first real test.
At any rate, she didn't back down. She and her staff set manageable rules and published a simple, memorable motto for the District's potheads: "Home grow, home use."
The third portion of the motto, the unwritten portion, seems like it's the loudest today: "Home rule." DC leans hard left, of course, a very liberal, very minority-heavy demographic, and it isn't a comfortable place for the conservative-majority Congress to throw its weight around. Today, they enforced local laws for the locals, defying their effective absentee landlords. Hard to think of anything more American than that.
Chalk up a victory for the little guys, for the local guys. And don't smoke pot, kids; it's more addictive than you think, and it's not great for your cardio system, your lungs, or your social life. If you're going to do it, bake cookies and share with your friends.
Actually, even if you're not going to do it -- baking cookies and sharing with your friends would be pretty cool this weekend, wouldn't it?
First post
The website Fark used to have an automatic filter on it -- whenever anyone posted the phrase "first post," the software would replace those words with "boobies." I find that I still do that instinctively in my own head, so I'm already starting this blog off in an inappropriate place.
Don't worry. It'll get worse.
Kimberly asked me to start blogging, and it's hard for me to turn down someone as persuasive as her. What she didn't do, of course, was tell me what she wanted me to blog about, or where I was going to find the extra 17 hours a day I need to be an active, reliable, habitual writer. She just said I should write every day. So, the natural and easy topic will be to complain about her, and I'll probably default to that whenever I run out of more pressing matters.
But, as it turns out, there's a lot of stuff in the world to write about, and I guess I can start off with some of those things before I get around to burying her. There's stuff to discuss in the news, in sports, in politics, in science, and even in my own writing. I'm working on two major writing projects right now, one a novel about suicide that is probably 80% done, the other a novel on wicked problems, which is about 0% done. Writing's hard for me. It's what I love, what I feel like I ought to be doing with my life, but it's also the ultimate test of attention deficits -- no matter how little there is in the world to distract you, you can always find something to do when you should be writing.
So my plan is to work on you, my dear blog, first thing in the morning before I get out of bed, before I get distracted. This will keep the entries fairly short, hopefully focused, and doubtlessly entirely incoherent, but they might be reliable, at least. Time will tell.
Don't worry. It'll get worse.
Kimberly asked me to start blogging, and it's hard for me to turn down someone as persuasive as her. What she didn't do, of course, was tell me what she wanted me to blog about, or where I was going to find the extra 17 hours a day I need to be an active, reliable, habitual writer. She just said I should write every day. So, the natural and easy topic will be to complain about her, and I'll probably default to that whenever I run out of more pressing matters.
But, as it turns out, there's a lot of stuff in the world to write about, and I guess I can start off with some of those things before I get around to burying her. There's stuff to discuss in the news, in sports, in politics, in science, and even in my own writing. I'm working on two major writing projects right now, one a novel about suicide that is probably 80% done, the other a novel on wicked problems, which is about 0% done. Writing's hard for me. It's what I love, what I feel like I ought to be doing with my life, but it's also the ultimate test of attention deficits -- no matter how little there is in the world to distract you, you can always find something to do when you should be writing.
So my plan is to work on you, my dear blog, first thing in the morning before I get out of bed, before I get distracted. This will keep the entries fairly short, hopefully focused, and doubtlessly entirely incoherent, but they might be reliable, at least. Time will tell.
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