This morning I put on sandals and shorts from the first, instead of starting with jeans and running shoes and changing later. I'm facing reality: it's gonna be hot.
I realized that every summer, I delay doing this because of a kind of magical thinking -- that if I put on warmer clothing in the morning, that will fend off the heat.
Now you must excuse me. There's a voodoo doll calling for my attention.
Thanks to an online discussion about TV ads for homeopathic remedies (a.k.a. “remedies”), a way to make money from the manufacturers of these scams suddenly occurred to me.
Okay, forget the “scam” part. This only applies to those manufacturers who believe that their products actually work – that the theory underlying homeopathy is valid instead of absurd.
It occurred to me that such manufacturers should be willing to pay for commercials that aren’t aired at all.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. The unaired commercials will only work if they are properly prepared. Let’s call this process of preparation the dilution phase.
First, a commercial is scripted and filmed. Then it’s integrated into the TV program in preparation for broadcast. Let’s say that a complete video of the program, including the commercial, is shown on a TV set in the … lab. Let’s call it a lab. This version isn’t aired. Instead, the length of the commercial is cut and the video is shown again. This step is repeated until the length of the commercial is reduced to zero minutes. Clearly, the commercial’s message remains embedded in the TV program by way of its effect on the program’s vibrations – the TV signal. An electromagnetic field has a memory that’s even more powerful than that of water.
As you can see, this is already sounding more scientific and technological than homeopathy.
But that’s just the first step. I can offer something even better. If those manufacturers pay me enough, I will guarantee not to broadcast their commercials at all on the TV station I don’t even own. Clearly this would make the effect of their commercials even more powerful. These ultimately diluted commercials would drive consumers to buy those homeopathic medicines in huge numbers. My fee for pulling off this powerful effect would be only moderately exorbitant.
As an aside, it occurs to me that both the manufacturers and the retail outlets should be able to increase the income from sales of homeopathic remedies even more by stocking the shelves with those medicines and then, a few packages at a time, removing them till there’s no visible sign of them. The vibrations will remain in the shelves’ memory. Surely if water, a fluid, has a memory, then a solid should have an even stronger memory, or at least a more stable one.
In any case, it’s clear that, soon after I begin not broadcasting their commercials on my non-station, the manufacturers will be rolling in dough. They might want to experiment with increasing the potency of their newfound wealth by opening new bank accounts, then closing them down, and returning any checks from distributors, wholesalers, and retail outlets.
However, since I know that homeopathy is bullshit, I won’t start not airing their commercials on my non-station until their actual, physical checks clear my actual, physical bank.
Let's use that name for Sarah Palin's followers. Has anyone suggested that name before?
I like the "drone" part, and I like how close it is to palindrome, since they don't seem to know face from rear.
Some accurate, some not:
http://www.money.co.uk/misc/technological-prophecies.htm
The article misses here and there.
It mentions Vannevar Bush and the Internet but not H. G. Wells’ prediction of the Universal Encyclopedia, which was sort of Google, made some decades before Bush.
It also refers to a woman in the background in an old movie, holding what appears to be a cell phone. That one has been debunked.
It's not a horror story.
A while ago, I set about writing an essay/blog post about the ways I think self-published e-books are changing not just the business of publishing but the nature of published fiction. It's the latter part that I think is important and long-lasting.
The essay grew and grew. I ended up publishing it as a shortish (okay, short) e-book. Which seems appropriate to me, given the subject matter. That's an experiment for me. Everything else I've published as an e-book was standard book length. Short e-books at even lower prices than standard-length e-books seem to be popping up more and more. That's an interesting development in itself, I think.
Details here: http://www.dvorkin.com/stifle/
Imagine the reaction if some mischievous time traveler had dropped this paragraph, from today's Eurekalert, into a popular science magazine fifty years ago:
Oxford Nanopore will collaborate with Harvard University for the development of graphene for DNA sequencing. Graphene has remarkable electrical and physical properties; it is a single atom thick sheet of carbon with very high conductivity. By piercing a nanopore in graphene it may be possible to use this material to analyze DNA at a very high speed and low cost.
You’ve probably run into these people. You may even be one of them.
“I work at least 60 hours each week,” they brag. “Sometimes I work 12 hours a day, seven days a week. I never take a vacation. My kids don’t recognize me. The dog thinks I’m a stranger and barks at me.”
The subtext is, “What a stud I am!”
The reality is, “What a sucker you are.”
It’s the modern, corporate version of machismo. (Is there a machisma flavor, too? I assume so, but I haven’t encountered it.)
Dig down, and there’s something much more sinister than machismo. These workers are exhibiting the mentality of the medieval serf who thought he was in the role that God had intended for him and that his noble masters deserved to live in a castle and profit from his labor because that was the role God had ordained for them. His noble masters agreed.
Some of these modern serfs think the system is fine because if they work hard, adhere to most of the rules while bending the right ones, play the game, and have just a bit of luck, then some day they’ll be living in the castle themselves. Indeed, a few of them will ascend to the halls of the nobles. Even in the Middle Ages, there were rare cases of people rising from the lowest rungs of the social ladder to the upper ones. It was rare, but it did happen. But that didn’t make the institution of serfdom any less evil.
Of course modern times are different from the Middle Ages. After all, we don’t have inherited titles, and today’s serfs aren’t legally tied to the land.
I’m sure the plutocrats are working on that.
I’d like to suggest an alternate meaning and etymology for a familiar word:
liber – ation n : Freedom achieved by way of a book or books. From Latin liber, book.
This could be used in at least three ways:
I don’t care about the Oscars, but if I did care who wins what, I think I’d still be perfectly satisfied to read the full results online once the awards ceremony is over.
Obviously, zillions of people disagree. Some may watch the show to see the actors and actresses in their getups, but many, I gather, like the tension and release of waiting for the announcement of each award.
This puzzles me. It’s akin to my problem with sports. If I cared about which teams win and lose, I’d read the scores online after the games were over. However, I know that most people prefer the tension and release/elation/disappointment of watching it happen live. I’m not talking about people who like the game itself. I’m talking about people who care most of all about the outcome but who nevertheless want to watch the outcome while it actually develops.
I love figure skating and gymnastics, and I used to go to bodybuilding competitions. In all those cases, I’m pissed when I disagree with the scoring and outcome, but that outcome is very minor compared to watching the performances themselves. Here again, if scores where all I cared about, or most of what I cared about, I wouldn’t want to spend time watching the performances. I’d look up the scores and order of finish afterwards.
In keeping with the above , if Black Swan wins anything, I’ll be very annoyed because it was such an awful movie.
I just got this e-mail:
Greeting From Tina
How are you today? and how about your health? hope fine and you are doing well, My Name Is Miss Tina, I am looking for a very nice man of love, caring, honest, matured, understanding, and of good character, then after going to your profile on this site (www.bwa.org) i pick interest in you, so i will like you to write me with My E-mail address is ( tinababy_9@yahoo.com ) so that i will send you my picture and tell you more about me
Miss Tina
Now, here’s the odd part. The place where she says she saw my profile, www.bwa.org, is the Web site of the Boulder Writers Alliance, an organization of tech writers, marketing writers, etc. in the Boulder-Denver area. My profile there has really titillating stuff on it, such as that I’m experienced in FrameMaker and API documentation.
Oooh, baby! FrameMaker!
Who knew that that was a turn on?
Sorry, Congressman Ryan. The layer of smarm wasn't thick enough. The evil soullessness and heartlessness of the modern GOP showed clearly.
Throughout its history, the United States has struggled to deal with the presence in its midst of a people who, while externally and superficially resembling normal Americans, are fundamentally and dangerously different in terms of their culture, habits, thought patterns, and religious beliefs. This subpopulation is known as the Conservatives. The problem of preserving the freedoms, tolerance, and equality on which we Americans have long prided ourselves, albeit often without full justification, while at the same time tolerating this quarrelsome, hostile, alien people amongst us has been termed by some of our best thinkers the Conservative Question.
The urgency of this problem has grown rapidly in recent decades.
At one time, Conservatives could be divided into Not Overly Conservatives, Strong Conservatives, and Utterly Wackadoodle Conservatives. For many years, the Utterly Wackadoodle branch was the smallest and most easily ignored. There was reason to hope that the Not Overly Conservatives could eventually be fully integrated into normal American society. It even seemed possible that the Strong Conservatives would moderate their beliefs in the face of reality, or at least that they could be marginalized and rendered harmless. But in the mid–1960s, the Utterly Wackadoodles began a strong resurgence. Over time, they managed to purge their ranks of all Not Overly Conservatives and most Strong Conservatives. It’s fair to say that now Conservative is nothing more than a synonym for Utterly Wackadoodle.
At the same time, Conservatives merged with the rising tide of religious insanity welling up from America’s mental dark places. Clearly this has not diminished the subrace’s utter wackadoodliness. Instead, it has led to constant attempts to rewrite American history. For example, Conservatives frequently advance the wackadoodle claim that America was founded on religious principles by religious wackadoodles. As their rantings increasingly drown out the sane voices of normal Americans, Conservatives have gone from being amusing zanies to a serious threat to American civilization.
Legally, of course, Conservatives have the same rights as normal Americans. For example, they must be permitted to live where they please, to vote in our elections, and even to marry our people! Understandably, despite the law, normal Americans are outraged at allowing Conservatives such freedoms and have sometimes reacted hostilely. In response, Conservative spokesmen have complained of a “blood libel” being used against them and a “pogrom” being waged against them. While such talk is typical of the absurd hyperbole to which Conservatives are naturally inclined, it is nonetheless true that normal Americans are becoming ever less tolerant of Conservatives, and it conceivable that this unhappiness could some day erupt violently. Thus the presence of Conservatives in America creates a danger to them as well to our national institutions, to which they have from the time of the founding of our nation expressed fundamental hostility.
Nominally, Conservatives worship the same god as the Monotheistic Majority. However, in practice they spend much of their time supplicating and bowing to an aspect of this god unknown to normal Americans: Invisible Hand. In the Conservative religion, Invisible Hand is the most important and powerful of God’s aspects. Invisible Hand controls almost every aspect of daily life, and blind, unquestioning worship of him is the way to solve even the most dire of mankind’s problems — peace, war, hunger, disease, global warming, etc.
This belief system leads to a combination of fatalism (humans can do nothing about such problems because Invisible Hand will either correct them or exacerbate them, and attempting to interfere with his will is presumptuous at the least, and Socialistically European at the worst) and feudalism (the strong must rule because clearly Invisible Hand favors them). This attitude is — or at least ought to be — anathema to all normal Americans.
While paying the same lip service to egalitarianism as do normal Americans, Conservatives are culturally and psychologically inclined toward worship of the strong man.
In politics, this causes them to constantly yearn for the semi–divine Messiah who will save them from the hordes of savages who surround them. This Messiah, they believe, will give them dominion over the nations of the earth. As shown by the examples of Ronald Reagan and George the Lesser Bush, the blanker the slate onto which they can project their poorly disguised homoerotic yearning, the better.
In the social and familial realm, Conservatives stick to their own kind. They are by nature insular and strive to isolate their children from outside influences that could lead them to question the faith and folkways of their parents. Needless to say, they strongly, even violently, disapprove of their children socializing with — or worse, dating or marrying — outsiders. So strong is their aversion to what they deem corrupting influences, that they even clamor to remove such influences from the wider society. Thus they oppose the teaching of certain areas of science in the public schools and the depiction in movies or on television of behavior their narrow–minded morality considers immoral. They hope to see public schools eliminated entirely, replaced by private academies in which children would be exposed only to the narrow, blinkered, provincial view of the world and of history favored by Conservative parents.
In the economic realm, Conservatives idolize the rich, who are clearly Invisible Hand’s favorites, and despise the poor, who must have offended Invisible Hand in some way. In their theology, no man occupies his position on the economic ladder because of forces beyond his control. The strong man they worship climbs to the top of the economic ladder by means of his own vigorous exertions and inner superiority, thus earning the approval of Invisible Hand. Therefore, the richer a man is, the worthier he is of respect, admiration, and emulation. His opinions on any subject at all are worth more than the opinions of anyone else in the same degree as his worth in dollars is greater than theirs.
Conservatives are true believers in natural aristocracy, class stratification, and the importance of bloodlines. However, they are ashamed to admit to this and pretend to be champions of a classless society, probably in part to make themselves more acceptable to normal Americans. This constant hypocrisy is bad for the health of Conservatives. The solution to the Conservative question proposed below will free them from this constant inner tension and will thus improve their mental and physical health, enabling them to live more pleasant and fulfilling lives — or at least, as fulfilling and pleasant as life can be for a people so inherently mentally and emotionally cramped, embittered, and poisoned.
Conservatives worship authority figures. They listen in rapt and worshipful attention to the ravings of hate–mongering zanies on radio and television, even if the hate–monger is a cigar–chewing walrus or a babbling crying man. They treat as gospel the rambling writings of a blonde female zombie or a sexy but deranged Filipina. This is clear evidence that they are utterly out of place in America and must be isolated to keep the rest of us safe.
One thing must be said for Conservatives: they’re good with money. Perhaps that’s because they think about it so much more than normal Americans do. Or it could be built into their genes, thanks to a long process of selection by means of in–group marriage. Unfortunately, they haven’t used this ability to benefit their country but rather to enrich themselves and add to their power and influence. Normal Americans suspect, with very good reason, that Conservatives quietly control the government and especially the economy. For example, a very brief examination will reveal that throughout its history the Federal Reserve has been dominated by Conservatives. This power is used by Conservatives in the interests only of other Conservatives, for Conservatives always take care of their own.
Of course this only increases the resentment and anger normal Americans feel towards Conservatives, increasing the chance that the isolated incidents of vandalism and assault that we see today will spread and exceed the government’s attempts at control — attempts that Conservatives grumble are halfhearted and insincere.
Normal Americans have many reasons for their anger. In addition to the financial and political control that Conservatives already exert far out of proportion to their numbers, it is widely suspected that the economic and social texts sacred to Conservatives — written in an obscure language understood only by a small number of Conservatives who constitute a virtual priesthood — assert that Conservatives are inherently superior to normal Americans and are destined to rule them. As mentioned earlier, they believe that Invisible Hand will send a Messiah who will lead Conservatives to dominion over all the earth. Many normal Americans are convinced that this has already happened without the help of a Messiah.
The situation has almost reached the boiling point. A solution must be found to the Conservative Problem. Interim solutions — e.g., isolating Conservatives in certain sections of our great cities — will not answer in the long term. No, a final solution is required.
The Final Solution to the Conservative Question is clear. It will be difficult, expensive, and long term, but it is the only humane answer to the question that has been plaguing America for so long. We must start with the following declaration, which is a general statement of purpose: “The United States government views with favor the establishment of a national home for the Conservative people, and will use its best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.”
To fulfill this objective, we must decide on the location of the new homeland.
Conservative leaders with whom this project was discussed proposed choosing some landmass where the number of Conservatives is sufficiently low among the natives and quickly and brutally depopulating the place. Western Europe was high on their list. That some Conservatives would inevitably be among the dead is, in their view, an acceptable price to pay. They assured us that the dead Conservatives would ascend to their version of Heaven because “Invisible Hand will know his own.”
However, while such cold–hearted bloodlust is normal among Conservatives, it is unacceptable to the majority of normal Americans, or at least it should be. Therefore, the humane version of the Final Solution requires a massive, full–bore Manhattan–Project style undertaking to build a large island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, to be called Handlandia, which will serve as the new Conservative homeland.
Some have suggested that Handlandia should be anchored to the sea bottom, first so that it stays in place and cannot float toward and thus endanger with cultural pollution any civilized country, and second so that Conservatives can be provided with a final lesson in the reality of global warming and rising seas. However, this would require the kind of cruelty and callousness, so common among Conservatives, that should not be exhibited by normal Americans.
The removal of Conservatives to their own homeland means that strict regulation of industry for environmental purposes will finally become possible in the United States. Inevitably, in Handlandia there will be no regulation of any kind for any purpose other than sexual repression.
This means that Handlandian industries will produce copious pollution of the air and runoff into the surrounding seas. This air pollution and runoff must be kept confined to Handlandia. The simplest way to do this is to surround Handlandia with some sort of bubble, a force field that can keep undesirable chemicals from getting out even while permitting desirable chemicals, such as atmospheric gases and rainfall, to enter. Developing the technology to make this bubble possible might sound daunting, but surely Yankee ingenuity will prove to be up to the challenge — especially once it is freed from the cold, dead hand of Conservative interference.
To prevent any possibility of Handlandia creating its own colonial empire, the United States Navy will maintain a large fleet of ships around Handlandia and will monitor all Handlandian communications.
Of course the cost of this undertaking will be immense, but history has shown us that the cost of continuing to tolerate the presence of Conservatives amongst us will be even greater. As it is, after they have been removed, America will face decades of hard work before the damage they have already done is repaired. Moreover, much of the cost can be covered by simply requiring Conservatives to leave their immense wealth, with the exception of their gold (see Principle 5 below), behind them. After all, it’s not as if they really earned it.
Based on consultations with Conservative leaders, the Constitution of Handlandia will be founded on these principles:
Pesky genes from hidden or forgotten or unknown ancestors can have surprising effects.
Inevitably, from time to time, even the most alabaster–skinned of the founders and their descendants will give birth to babies with very dark skin and hair, possibly even curly hair. These babies will not be granted Handlandian citizenship at birth. However, they must not be harmed and must be sent to the United States for adoption. Ensuring their safety will require careful monitoring by the United States of all of the citizens of Handlandia — their communications, their speech, and their activities. This is a good idea in general. We have learned the hard way that it’s never a good idea to turn one’s back on Conservatives or to take one’s eyes off them. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
Provision must also be made for emigration of adult Handlandians.
Some children, despite their genes, will come to reject Conservative ideas as they grow up. Indeed, growing up and rejecting Conservative ideas are closely linked processes. Others will experience a philosophical conversion during adulthood, perhaps due to observing the results of Conservative theory converted into practice. We anticipate that the number of such people will be small initially but will increase steadily and rapidly. The naval fleet mentioned earlier will be ready to transport such emigrants away from Handlandia and back to the United States.
However, these refugees will not be automatically granted permanent residence and citizenship in the USA. They will be watched carefully for a number of years and will be required to pass very stringent written and oral exams on the United States Constitution, United States history, basic science, and the fundamental importance of secularism, freedom of speech, and gun control to a civilized and peaceful society. If they fail these exams, they will be returned to Handlandia. If they pass, they will still be watched carefully for the rest of their lives. After all, there is some truth to the old saying, “Once a Conservative, always a Conservative.”
In time — probably a short time — these measures will humanely solve the Conservative Problem once and for all.
Praise God from whom
All blessings flow.
When bullets are flying,
He is a no-show.
When an earthquake
Is shaking,
A day off
He’s taking.
When a hurricane
Is roaring
He says,
“That’s so boring.”
When hate radio triggers
A dangerous loon
He says, “I can do nothing
To stop those buffoons.
“I can’t make them shut up
Because of free will.
They must have the freedom
To spew out their swill.
“And if a few children
Are killed in a rampage,
To quote some half-human,
That’s collateral damage.
“Now, as for the innocents
Drowned in a flood,
It’s really their free will
That’s the source of the mud.
“They shouldn’t have lived there.
They should have just moved.
With nonsensical logic
Is my innocence proved.”
“But you could have stopped it!
You control even the seasons!”
“Oh? And just who are you
To question God’s reasons?
“God loves all his creatures,
The feathered and finned.
So when people suffer,
Well, maybe they sinned.
“And here is the best part,
My favorite by far:
No death is my doing,
But all escapes are.
“If disaster kills millions,
No prob for God’s fandom.
‘It’s awful, it’s tragic,
But, ya know, it’s just random.’
“But if someone alive
From the carnage should crawl,
‘That’s all the proof needed
That God loves us all!’
“When human skill and human pluck
Preserve a life against all odds,
My fandom sob and raise their hands
And say the credit is all God’s.
“So here, at the end,
Is the name of the game:
I get the credit
And you get the blame.”
On Amazon (Kindle) and Smashwords (various formats). Barnes & Noble, Sony, Apple, etc. should follow during the coming weeks, as Smashwords distributes to them. I’ve also submitted a PDF version to Google for their e-book store. That’s my first attempt at getting a book included there. If that one’s okay, I’ll start putting all of my others on Google, as well.
Links for ordering, the cover image, and a bit of info:
Black Swan is a very, very earnest movie about a very, very good but very, very mentally messed-up ballerina, played very, very earnestly by the usually very, very good Natalie Portman, who unfortunately isn’t quite on her toes for this one.
Portman’s character is given a chance at a career-making role, dancing both the white (very, very good) swan and the black (very, very bad) swan in an odd-sounding version of Swan Lake created by an egomaniacal choreographer (is that redundant?). Who is also very, very sleazy. And slimy.
However, she’s very, very repressed, so while she can dance the white swan with technical proficiency, she can’t let her inner black swan come out and be all evil and seductive on the stage. She also has to contend with a very, very domineering mother (well and creepily played by Barbara Hershey) and a very, very (very, very, very) hot rival (well and deliciously played by the very, very (very, very, very) hot Mila Kunis).
The rival has black wings tattooed on her back. Look! A symbol!
Portman’s character is a sick puppy. She has bizarre hallucinations, can’t separate dreams and fantasies from reality, scratches herself till she bleeds, and thinks there’s a real black swan inside her that, from time to time, comes out – e.g., black feathers poking out through the deep scratches she has inflicted on herself, her neck lengthening into a swan’s neck, black wings growing from her back. She wants to destroy the black swan inside her. She wants to liberate and become the black swan inside her. Everything ends messily.
This is psychodrama as filmed by very, very earnest young film students. The movie works so hard at being arty that it fails at being art. Or entertaining.
There is a fair amount of dancing. Unfortunately, it’s almost all scenes of Portman dancing. She’s a fine actress but only an amateur dancer.
There’s a lesbian sex scene, less than convincing, as is usual in movies, but elevated to hotness because Mila Kunis is in it. (Kunis has one of the few good lines in the movie, and she delivers it with verve.)
Don’t waste your time. If you want to see an entertaining dance movie, rent the delightful movie Center Stage, which starred actual professional dancers who turned out to be excellent actors. I think I need to watch that one again to wash away the black taste of swan crap.
Shrieking zanies on my screen
Make this viewer want to scream,
Make this viewer want some booze.
Endless sports on the nightly news.
How they obsess over injuries.
Mangled elbows, damaged knees,
A ruined back or a shattered hip.
“These could cost us the championship!”
Other news is second rate
When compared to our team’s fate.
Wars and floods and all the rest
Matter not if our team’s best.
Skip the news. The weather, too.
Our team’s coach said something new!
Something stupid, something dumb.
There are no depths he cannot plumb.
Shrieking zanies want to claim
Insight into next week’s game.
Coach’s tactics, players plans,
Braindead mouthings from the fans.
I don’t learn the vital stuff.
Will the drive to work be tough?
Will the roads be wet or icy,
And the drive home tense and dicey?
Did the Dow Jones take a dive?
Is democracy still alive?
Has the Middle East exploded?
Have our rights still more eroded?
Might as well just change the name.
“Mindless babble about every game
“Every night on every station
“And that’s it for information!”
Sure, a title that is snappy
Makes a TV exec happy.
In any case, the fact remains:
Sportscast zombies want your brains.
Oh, if I were but in charge
The solid news I would enlarge
The sports “reporters” quickly fire
And proper journalists I’d hire.
No pretty faces mouthing fluff
Smirking at you, all that guff,
Endless babble, wasting time,
While repeating right-wing slime.
They’d all have brains and be well read,
With politics from pink to red.
They’d read the news and analyze.
They’d be Democracy’s prying eyes.
They’d tell the truth and pay no heed
To plutocrats and all their greed,
Their lawyers and their paid-for tools,
Their Limbaugh pigs and Coulter ghouls.
We’d know what’s what,
Who sold, who’s bought,
What deals were made,
What rights in trade.
All that would show
Upon your screen
In this sweet world
Of might-have-been.
But cash controls the info flows
And plutocrats know what to ban.
Once tumbrels rolled. Aristo knows
The danger of the thinking man.
And so they hire pretty critters
A stupid hunk, a vapid fox,
Who, sitting on their well-toned sitters,
Grin vainly from the idiot box.
Their voices loud, of dumbness proud,
They flirt and smirk and pose and preen.
And we are left of news bereft
With shrieking zanies on the screen.
By which I don’t mean “you’re as young as you feel” but rather how one perceives the ages of other people.
When I was somewhere around ten or eleven, I attended some sort of social gathering with people of all ages – most likely some Jewish community event. There was a group of young people there, all in their early twenties, gathered in a group and speaking in their secret generational language and flirting with each other.
I watched them in awe. They were so smooth, so sophisticated, so glamorous, so self-possessed, so in control of themselves and the world. I couldn’t wait to be in my early twenties so that I could be as smooth, etc. as they were!
I’m 67 and I’m still waiting, but never mind that. Now, of course, when I look at young people in their early twenties, I see just barely no longer kids, often trying awkwardly to be smooth, etc. It’s possible that young people in their early twenties now are dramatically different from young people in their early twenties 55+ years ago, but it’s much more likely that the change is in me.
We’ve all experienced this. Throughout most of our lives, “young” is anyone more than a few years, say 5 years, younger than ourselves, and “old” is anyone more than a similar number of years older than ourselves. Look at the photos in your high-school yearbook (You kids today do still have those, don’t you? Why, when I was a lad … ) and you’re astonished at how young and immature those kids look. You don’t remember them that way at all!
Nothing new there. But here’s the thing that’s changed for me. I don’t know when this happened, fairly recently I think, but lately that relative perception of age has given way to a more absolute one. The young aren’t getting younger as I grow older. They’re staying about the same. And “old” doesn’t mean X years older than me. “Old” is a category I’ve moved into myself. Or, on my more denial-of-reality days, am just about to start moving into myself.
I used to be aware of old people referring to themselves and their peers as old people, but that never struck me as odd because to me they were all old people. Now that I’m one myself, officially a senior citizen (What a silly phrase! What if I’d never become naturalized? Would I be a senior resident alien?), I’m speaking the same way.
It seems natural. Although when I think about it, it also seems strange, a bit unsettling.
Rather suddenly, people no longer occupy various positions along a spectrum from very young to very old, with “normal” referring to a narrow band of about 10 years width in the middle of which is yours truly. Now the world is divided into the young and the old, and I know quite well which of those two I’m in.
Years ago, an editor suggested that I put together a collection of my short stories. I thought it would be a rather skimpy collection, so I put the idea on hold.
This weekend, I decided to take a break from putting off writing Chains and see what stories I have. There are a few that have been published and a few more that should have been published. So, given that I’ve already leaped into the brave, new, revolutionary, world-changing environment of self-published e-books, which means that there’s no agent or editor to dump me if my sales numbers are disappointing, I’ve started putting together a short-story collection.
The title is Earthmen and Other Aliens, which is (almost) a line in one of the stories. I had originally thought to title it The Eye at the Back of the Moon, the title of one of the stories. I decided against that, but it did give me a cover idea.
It’s taking time because some of the stories were written on a (gasp!) manual (gasp!) typewriter and now have to be scanned in, and then the scanner’s OCR output has to be corrected. In the case of my first published story, I don’t even have a clean typed copy, only photocopied pages from the magazine. The scanner has been having a fun time making up words to match the marks on those faded pages.
There’s also one story I’ve been wanting to write for a while. I was waiting for a suitable market to appear, so that I could write the story, submit it, be rejected, and feel sorry for myself. I can skip some of those steps and just write the story. Which of course is the way it should work, aahtistically speaking. But that will take some time.
I hope to have the book up on Smashwords and Amazon in a week or two Or three. At most. I hope. Other outlets (B&N, Apple, Sony, etc.) will then follow as Smashwords distributes to them.
And I have a cover for it already:
http://www.dvorkin.com/earthoal/EarthmenOtherAliensCover.jpg
I created a page to show all of the covers I’ve created for my e-books, my wife’s e-books, and a friend’s e-books.
Zowie! They look even spiffier when they’re all together like that.
Four years ago, I started this blog with a post explaining why I chose the name A Blister to My Eye. I said the function of the blog would be to pressure me to complete the time-travel novel, Time and the Soldier, that I had been fiddling with for ten years.
This evening, Leonore reread that original post and suggested that I post something about what’s happened with that novel and with my attitude toward my writing career.
I finished the novel a while ago. Two years ago, I think. All excited, and convinced that it was the book that would revive my professional writing career, I set about querying agents. I got an agent, a big name with a very big agency. He loved the book and sent it out to a number of editors. There were some rejections and a lot of non-decisions. And then he decided to leave the agenting business and become an editor at a major publishing house.
Realistically, that meant that Time and the Soldier was dead. Reputable agents aren’t interested in representing a book that has already been rejected by some of the editors they would want to send it to. The editors who hadn’t made a decision would be possibilities, but still the pool of possible editors would be too reduced.
So I stewed for a while and felt (very, very, very) sorry for myself for a while. Then I got fitfully to work on the next novel, Chains. I’d finish that, use it to get an agent, and then ask my new agent to rep Time and the Soldier as well. My professional writing career would be revived! Woo hoo!
I worked fitfully on Chains, hampered by self-pity, which was in turn increased by my being laid off in May 2009 and by my realization that there were no jobs to be had and I might never have a dependable pay check again.
While I was laid off, I spent some of my time reissuing my and Leonore’s previously published books as e-books. I found that I really enjoyed designing the covers for them. I had thought that would be a chore because I’ve never had an artistic eye or an eye for design, but thanks to Gimp and then Photoshop, I discovered that I did.
Well, that was fine for the old books, which would otherwise be unseen by the human eye. But Time and the Soldier was a new book and deserved real publication – i.e., a print edition, from a major publisher, that would show up in bookstores and on racks in supermarkets everywhere.
And then, quite recently, I realized that my attitude had changed. I was going to write, in this post, about how that evolution in my attitude happened, but the truth is that I don’t really know quite how it came about. After depression, and then anger, I suddenly came to feel detached from the industry at whose doors I had been hammering for decades.
For a brief time, early in my career, in the 1970s and early 1980s, those doors seemed to have opened for me. I seemed to be inside the room, albeit still standing near the door and looking at the happy crowd at the buffet table near the opposite wall. But some invisible barrier still blocked my way, and then a sinister and ineluctable force reopened the doors behind me and pushed me back out and locked the doors in my face. I.e., my career tanked.
So I was back to hammering at the doors, but the sound of my knocking couldn’t be heard within because of the loud voices of the happy crowd at the buffet table. Extend that metaphor if you really want to.
And then I stopped hammering.
Some time during the last year, the publishing industry became an alien thing to me, a noisy undertaking over there, a crowd of people standing in a field, waving their hands and shouting at each other and pushing and shoving, filled with desperation, trampling each other underfoot. Irrelevant, pointless, foolish, distasteful.
So I published Time and the Soldier as an e-book. I was pleased by my own lack of regret. The book that, for so many years, I had thought of as my ticket back into that room and maybe all the way to the buffet table would now float out there in the ether and be read by … a few dozen people, with luck. I liked that idea!
Then I realized that I was thinking of Chains not as the book that would be ubiquitous in a print edition and would revive my professional writing career but instead as my next e-book. It, too, would be read by a few dozen people if I was lucky. But what mattered was that my change in attitude about publishing changed my attitude toward how I was writing Chains.
I’m writing it exactly the way I want to write it. It may end up being very long. Or not. It will have a lot of dialog about many different subjects not related to the main plot. It will be discursive and recursive. It will have many points of view and will jump about between them. It will have characters ranting about this and that – political, social, and literary rants that will of course reflect my own attitudes. I’m already enjoying writing Chains more than I’ve enjoyed writing a book in a long time. It’s a wonderful feeling of artistic liberation.
I’ve already created the cover for Chains, and it’s pretty damned zowie, if I do say so myself, and I do. There’ll be other books after Chains, all of them with zowie covers. There’ll be a collection of short stories, a horror novel, a fantasy novel, and, and, and ...
I’m a writer again! And it feels great.
