Category Archives: ‘Culture’

Writing, Writing, Writing

So a few updates on where I am with fiction writing, since it’s been over a year since The Water Lily Pond dropped.

  • The Water Lily Pond is available for free download just for today. It’s gotten a couple of very kind reviews and has had a couple of hundred downloads. That’s about as well as I could expect, all things considered. I have been toying with creating a paperback, which Kindle now has easy tools for. However, putting it onto dead tree is a bit intimidating. I would like to make one more pass through the book. And I’d like to get more comments as I suspect a lot of people would have issues with the liberties I’ve taken in describing New York and the art scene therein.
  • In terms of novels, there are two I’m tinkering with. Penumbra is a novel I wrote most of a decade ago and then abandoned when it became clear it was a shadowy reflection of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. But I’m not terribly worried about its commercial prospects, so I will probably resume it and either publish it cheap through KDP or serialize it here. Most of my novel time has gone into Umbra, its sequel. But that too has been sidetracked now that a similar story is showing up in the highly successful The Expanse.
  • Much of my recent effort is on Oddish, a seven-part series of short novellas that tie together. Part One (Ben Olson’s Restless Leg) is mostly written, Part Two (Rachel Thorson’s Late Period) is partially written. But I will not put it out on this site until all seven parts are written. In the middle of working on it Stranger Things came out, which has some overlapping themes. But it’s still on the front burner.
  • I have four short stories in the can. The first — Highest Noon — I liked enough that I plan to submit it to a science fiction magazine. I have little hope but you can’t get shot for trying. It will show up here if it is rejected. The second — Perfect Justice — needs a lot of work to not stink. But it and a companion post on “Rationalia” will show up soon. The third is a three part story — Dreams in the Long Dark, Co-Orbital, and Table Manners. It is done and I like the first part. It will show up on this site once it has been cleaned up. The final one — Lost by Translation — may or may not show up. I’m kind of mixed on how I feel about it. At the very least, it needs heavy revision.
  • I know this sounds like excuse-making but, honestly, I’ve written more in the last year than I have in any previous year. That’s almost 40,000 words written in a year when I have been very busy with work and family and probably wrote a couple of hundred thousand about the election. So the purpose of this post is to just let you know: you’ll see the results soon.

    Update: After writing that, I had some second thoughts on Perfect Justice. The story is the first I’ve written in epistolary form. But … this being the internet … I’m thinking of getting creative in its presentation. Hyperlinks and readthroughs might make it a little more fun for the reader.

    Stay tuned.

    Quick Review: Stranger Things

    So I’d been resisting the temptation to watch Netflix’s smash hit of the summer, Stranger Things, since everyone I knew was watching it. But I was going to cave eventually. And with a lot of code to run and a lack of interest in this year’s movies, I finally caved. If you want to know whether I liked it or not … I’ll just tell you that I binge-watched it in two days.

    The series is very good. I’m curious to see how it will watch a second time without a binge, but I found it to be moving, tense and thrilling.

    The series has become most famous for its 80’s nostalgia and I will admit that this aspect of the series is done very well. It’s not just that it has oblique references to 80’s pop culture; it’s that it feels like the 80’s. The music, the title sequence, the color palette, the set decoration, the homages to films like E.T. and Alien. Sans the CGI, this could easily have been something made by Spielberg or Cameron (after you watch it, you can check out this video which goes through some of the more direct 80’s homages).

    But 80’s nostalgia will only get you so far, as Hollywood is finding out right now. What really makes the series good is that it’s just … good. It lays its foundations down in strong characters who are well-written and well-acted. Ryder and Harbour are particularly good but all the actors do well. It has a decent and intriguing plot*. And it shrouds this all in metric tons of atmosphere. I give it a strong recommendation, even to people who are not necessarily fans of sci-fi or horror. I was hooked by middle of the first episode.

    This year has been awful for movies. Almost every big blockbuster has been a disappointment. But television — particularly shows produced by the “other studios” like HBO and Netflix — has been getting steadily better and better. And Stranger Things is definitely one of those good shows. I’m looking forward to Season 2.

    (*The plot bothered me because for the last few weeks I’ve been sketching out a similar plot for a new story. The story — working title Oddish — takes place in a college town not a million miles different from State College. It focuses on residents of the town who find things happening that are not scary or alarming (at least at first) but just odd. I don’t want to give away too much since it may never be written or may go in a different direction. But any writer will understand why I was both elated and saddened to see that Stranger Things shares a lot of elements with Oddish.

    Oh well. Maybe I’ll turn my attention back to Dreams in the Long Dark.)

    Pokemon Go

    Until a month ago, I had never played Pokemon in any way, shape or form. It was a little after my time. I knew of it and could maybe identify one or two of the creatures from simple cultural osmosis. But the nostalgia value the franchise had for me was basically nil.

    So I am somewhat surprised to find that I’ve become a pretty consistent player of this summer’s answer to the Macarena: Pokemon Go. In early July, everyone was talking about it so I decided to give it a whirl. I had just given up on two games I’d been playing for a couple of years, so needed something to fill the boredom*. And Abby was into Pokemon anyway because her best friend is into it, so it seemed like a reasonable lark. And so here I am, a month later, with about 70 of the silly creatures in my phone, past level 20 and going for daily “pokewalks” or “pokerides” with my daughter.

    That, to me, is the key to Pokemon‘s success: the social aspect. The game itself is kind of fun. It’s nice to walk around collecting little monsters. The gym aspect, where you fight other pokemons, is OK, if a bit a clunky. There’s a little thrill in finding pokestops and collecting items. The game is well designed to be addictive. But in the end, that’s all swamped by the social aspect: playing with my daughter and occasionally running into other players.

    It’s just fun to walk around with Abby playing the game, occasionally catching a monster or attacking a gym together, but mainly hanging out and talking. We’ve gone walking all over our area and discovered new paths. We’ve hung out on campus. I’ve ridden a bike for the first time in thirty years. And even when we aren’t playing together, there’s a thrill in showing her what I caught today. Hell, even my wife now approves of the game (although she’s a bit dubious about us occasionally running out of the house to find a rare Pokemon in our area).

    (It’s also occasionally allowed me to share some of my obsessions with Abby. Recently, during a tough fight at a Pokemon gym, I shouted, “I WILL kill him!” which led to a discussion of Dune, another of my little fixations.)

    On Facebook, I gave my initial review that the game was OK, but playing it with my daughter was awesome. I stand by that. I expect the popularity to fade a bit as the novelty does. In fact, it already feels like I’m seeing fewer people out playing it (although now that the students are back in town, that should change). But the game has significantly expanded the scope of gaming, becoming the first really popular app where interacting with the real world is part of the game. I suspect more will follow. Some will suck. Some will be good. But it’s a good future to be tumbling into.

    (*The game I quit was Boom Beach, which is made by the Clash of Clans folks and quite similar. It’s fun but I’d built everything and was to the point where simply maintaing my rank — at one point, I was one of the top 250 players in the US, which is even less impressive than it sounds — would have consumed hours of my time every day. I simply didn’t see the point of running that kind of treadmill indefinitely, so I let it go.)

    Why Mourn?

    The year has been a terrible one for celebrity deaths: Alan Rickman, David Bowie, Merle Haggard, now Prince. The last one hit particularly hard with me. Prince was the music of my difficult and lonely teenage years. I admired him. I loved his music. I thought and think he was a musical genius on par with the historic greats. And it’s been cathartic and touching to see the tributes springing up all over the world and know that I wasn’t alone in thinking that; that millions of people did get how great he was.

    Every time the world mourns a celebrity, however, people ask why we do so. After all, it’s not like we knew them personally. Why shed tears — even metaphorical ones — over a stranger?

    This tweet explains it better in 140 characters than I will in many more words.

    In one of Stephen King’s non-fiction books, he describes writing as an act of telepathy. When you write a piece of fiction, you are using words to put what’s in your head into the reader’s head. If I write, “There was a room with table” you get an image in your head. And, if I’m a good writer, you get something close to the image I had in my head when I wrote those words.

    This act of telepathy applies to more than just writers. Artists, musicians, actors … all of them perform acts of telepathy. It’s a bit more subtle since they work in a visual or auditory medium. But it’s the same principle: trying to evoke images or feelings or ideas through an act of telepathy.

    We let artists into our head. We have, indirectly, a very intimate relationship with them. People will talk of books or songs or movies that spoke to them. And that’s true in a very literal sense. And if an artist is particularly brilliant, they will sometimes reveal things about us we didn’t know or put us in touch with feelings or ideas we were unfamiliar with. And we share this intimacy with everyone else who has felt spoken to.

    So no I don’t think there’s anything wrong with mourning an artist or an actor who has died. Because sometimes we really are very close to them in a way that truly matters.

    Disney Post

    I don’t watch a lot of TV. This is not from any hippy-dippy hatred of TV; I just don’t have a lot of time for it. Apart from Game of Thrones, Doctor Who and sports, I’d rather spend my limited spare time reading or watching movies. And this is particularly true of sitcoms, which I’ve slowly grown less tolerant of.

    But there is one exception: my daughter has gotten heavily into Disney channel TV shows. They are always on when she’s in the room (and we allow the TV to be on). So I’ve become very familiar with their shows and I thought I’d write a few words about them. Because reasons.

    Continue reading Disney Post

    The Latest Plagiarism Kerfuffles

    Over the last few years, a number of reporters and writers have turned out to be serial plagiarists. Oh, they don’t admit this. They’ll say they forgot to put in quotemarks or that rules don’t apply to them. But if you and I did that, we’d be kicked out of school. Or maybe not.

    The most recent accusation is CJ Werleman. His excuse has crumbled now that researchers have dug up over a dozen liftings of text from other people. But I want to focus on his excuse because it is illustrative:

    The Harris zombies now accuse me of plagiarism. From 5 books & 100+ op-eds, they cite 2 common cliches and two summaries of cited studies

    This sounds reasonable. After all, there are only so many ways you can state the same facts. And when you look at the quotes, if you were of a generous disposition, you might accept this response. The quotes aren’t completely verbatim. Maybe he did just happen to phrase things the same way other writers did.

    But I find this excuse unlikely. In a great post on plagiarism, McArdle writes the following:

    A while back, Terry Teachout, the Wall Street Journal’s drama critic, pointed out something fascinating to me: If you type even a small fragment of your own work into Google, as few as seven words, with quotation marks around the fragment to force Google to only search on those words in that order, then you are likely to find that you are the only person on the Internet who has ever produced that exact combination of words. Obviously this doesn’t work with boilerplate like “GE rose four and a quarter points on stronger earnings”, or “I love dogs,” but in general, it’s surprisingly true.

    I’ve tested this and it is true. With a lot of my posts, if I type in a non-generic line, the only site that comes up is mine. In fact, verbatim Google searches are a good way to find content scrapers and plagiarists.

    Whenever I site anyone on the internet, I will link them, usually quote them and then, if necessary, summarize or rephrase the other points they are making. I try hard to avoid simply rewriting what they said like I’m a fifth grader turning in a book report. So when you hear someone using the excuse that similar ideas require similar phrasing, it’s largely baloney. If two passage of text are nearly identical, it’s very likely that one was copied from the other.

    I’ve become more sensitive to plagiarism since I’ve become a victim over the last ten years. I’ve had content scraped, I’ve had my ideas presented as though they were someone else’s and I’ve had outright word-for-word copying (on a now defunct story site). It’s difficult to describe just how dirty being plagiarized makes you feel. I even shied away … at first … from making accusations because I was so embarrassed. Here’s what I wrote the first time it happened:

    Plagiarism is not just stealing someone’s words. It is stealing their mind. It is a cruel violation. The hard work and original thought of one person is stolen by a second. The people who have lost their careers because of plagiarism have deserved everything they’ve gotten and I am now determined, more than ever, to make sure I quote people properly and always give credit where it’s due.

    Plagiarists need to be called out. Words are the currency of writers and, for many, how they make their living. Plagiarizing someone is no different than stealing their car or cleaning out their bank account. In fact, I would argue that it’s a lot worse.

    The Return of Linkorama

    Linkoramas are getting rarer these days mostly because I tweet most articles. But I will still be occasionally posting something more long-form.

    To wit:

  • A fascinating article about how Vermeer used a camera obscura to enable his paintings. Yet another example about how people were pretty damn clever in the supposedly unenlightened past.
  • This is a couple of months late, but someone posted up Truman Capote’s christmas story. The recent death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman reminded me of this little gem.
  • This is the second and by far the largest study yet to show that routine mammography is basically a gigantic waste of money, being just as likely to precipitate unnecessary treatment as to discover a tumor that a breast exam wouldn’t. Do you think our “evidence-based” government will embrace this? No way. They already mandated mammogram coverage when the first study showed it to be a waste.
  • I don’t know even know if this counts as mathematical malpractice. There’s no math at all. It’s just “Marijuana! RUN!”. Simply appalling reporting by the MSM.
  • This on the other hand, does count as mathematical malpractice. The gun control advocates are hyping a Missouri study that shows a rise in murder rate after a change in the gun control laws. However, in doing so they are ignoring data from 17 other states, data on all other forms of violent crime and data from Missouri that showed a steep rise in the murder rate before the laws were changed. They are picking a tiny slice of data to make a huge claim. Disgraceful. And completely expected from the gun-grabbers.
  • I love color photos from history. Just love them.
  • This is old but worth reposting: one of the biggest feminists texts out there is loaded with garbage data, easily checked facts that are completely wrong. This was a big reason I distanced myself from third-wave feminism in college: it had been taken over by crackpots who would believe any statistic as long as it was bad. In college, we were told that one in three women are raped (they aren’t) that abuse is the leading cause of admission to ER’s (it isn’t), that violence erupts very Superbowl (it doesn’t). I even had one radical tell me — with no apparent self-awareness, that murder was the second leading cause of death among women (it’s not even close). As I seem to say about everything: reality is bad enough; we don’t need to invent stuff.
  • The Shakespeare Project: Richard III

    Richard III is the polar opposite of Henry V. Whereas Henry is one of the few full-throated heroes in Shakespeare, Richard is a completely unrepentant villain. And Shakespeare is clearly fascinated with both. He earlier explored the heights of Henry’s character; now he plumbs the depth of Richard’s.

    And what a plumbing it is. Richard is a fantastic anti-hero: crafty, amoral, and completely unprincipled. His soliloquies allow him to take the audience into his depravity. The first three acts are a whirlwind of intrigue, verbal sparring and conniving. The funny thing is that, once Richard has power, he gets kind of boring. In the first three acts, he had an underdog thing going for him. But in the fourth act, his actions are just cruel and arbitrary. And Shakespeare seems to tire of him. It’s quickly onto Bosworth field and the dramatic finale.

    This is Shakespeare’s second longest play, but it felt shorter than some of the less approachable tragedies and comedies. Despite the many machinations (I read the play on my iPad while having a book open to the beginning to make sure I knew the characters were), I was rarely lost.

    Next Up: Henry VIII

    The Shakespeare Project: Henry VI, Part 3

    Well, that was a bit of a whirlwind.

    Summing up the complicated War of the Roses in a manner that would be amenable to Shakespeare’s Tudor rulers must not have been an easy task. As a result, Henry VI, Part 3 has a tendency to get confusing, even for the author himself (the character of Montague seems a bit confused as to which side he is on). Just in the span of Act IV, Edward is king, exiled and king again. Nobles change sides seemingly on whims. The few strong moments — the scene in the French King’s court for example or the murder of Rutland and its echoes throughout the play — tend to disappear into the dizzying plot turns and twists. By the time it was over, I really felt that it was this play that suffered from “middle chapter syndrome”, killing off masses of characters from the previous two plays and setting up the epic Richard III, which looms over this play like a thunderhead.

    While I found this play to be one of the lesser of the histories, I have to disagree with the critics as to why. They usually talk about the amount of action on stage, citing classical tendencies to have action off-stage. I actually think the battles work pretty well (I mean, it was the War of the Roses, not the Polite Chat of the Roses). The action also sets up one of the play’s few iconic moments when Henry VI laments the father killing his son and the son killing his father. It also enhances the play’s running them of violence begetting violence and England descending into a chaotic state of barbarism in the absence of a strong king. No, I think the play’s weakness is the one I identify above: trying to squeeze too many historical turns into too short a time.

    That having been said, I still am finding the histories easier to follow than some of the comedies and therefore, as a group, more enjoyable. And I’m so excited about the next one that I’ve already started Richard III, whose opening soliloquy is already one of the best of the canon.

    The Shakespeare Project: Henry VI, Part Two

    Henry VI, Part Two could never be accused of “middle chapter syndrome”. Starting the end of Part I, it advance the story in leaps and bounds, dispatching character after character and plowing through the early battles to set up Part III and Richard III. By the end, you really feel that England will never be the same.

    I found this play to be a bit of a tough read. It’s very good, keeping the characters sharp and the intrigue furious. It covers a huge amount of ground and takes us a long way through the War of the Roses. The scheming and conniving of the characters, the slow decay of Henry’s rule, the loss of all honor and loyalty — it all works.

    But, Lord, is it depressing. The only worthwhile man in the entire play — Gloucester — sees his wife fooled and shamed and is then murdered. By the time the play ends, the floor is slick with the blood of dispatched rivals and the vile York is in ascendance. I can only imagine things will get darker.

    Next Up: Henry VI, Part Three

    The Shakespeare Project: Henry VI, Part I

    Wikipedia tells me that Henry VI, Part I was one of Shakespeare’s earliest histories. It shows. It lacks the verbal fireworks and beauty of his later works and there is little, if any comedy. It’s workmanlike and bases a lot more on action and more direct drama than his later works.

    Of particular note is the character assassination Shakespeare renders on Joan of Arc. She starts out reasonable enough but then tries to sell her soul to demons for help, begs for her life and tries to lie and deceive her way out of the stake. Given what we know of Joan of Arc — even after hefty English rewriting of the historical record — this is pretty far from the truth. By all accounts, Joan was a smart woman who met her accusers effectively and died bravely. Had the French listened to her and protected her, the Hundred Years War might actually have finished in a hundred years. This one of the rare times when the Tudor propaganda aspects of the histories really jumps out (and possibly a bit of misogyny as well). I’m told that in some performances, Joan is more of a comic character, as are most of the French. I didn’t find them particularly funny.

    Still, the play has its good parts. The action is easy to follow and the conflicts well-described. Henry VI is effectively portrayed as a bit too innocent, inadvertently dooming his house when he chooses to wear a red rose. It’s a tiny moment that is one of the most important moments in the Henry VI tetralogy. Talbot is the most developed character and the scene where he and his son beg each other to leave the doomed field of battle is one of the highlights of the play. And the theme of the histories — that England is weak when divided — shows most strongly in this play when the rivalries between the English lords destroys England’s occupation of France.

    So definitely a worthwhile read. Hopefully, I’ll finish part II on a time scale of less than six months.

    Next Up: Um, Henry the VI, Part II, of course.

    August Linkorama

    Time to clear out a few things I don’t have time to write lengthy posts about.

  • I’m tickled that Netflix garnered Emmy nominations. Notice that none of the nominated dramas are from the major networks. Their reign of terror is ending.
  • This look at Stand Your Ground laws look state by state to see if murder rates went up. I find this far more convincing than the confusing principle component analysis being cited. Also, check out this analysis of the complicated relationship these laws have with race.
  • Speaking of guns, we have yet another case of Mathematical Malpractice. Business Insider claims California’s gun laws have dramatically dropped the rate of gun violence. But their lead graphic shows California’s rate of gun violence has fallen … about as much as the rest of the country’s.
  • Saturday Linkorama

  • This visualization of the Right of Spring is seriously seriously cool. Seeing the music like that, you start hearing the subtleties that elude you when you just hear it. This is one of the reasons I like to see classical music in performance. There is so much more going on than the ear can take in.
  • This map of linguistic divides in the United States, is something I could spend an entire post on. I match most of the pronunciations from Georgia except for “lawyer” and “pajamas”.
  • This story, about charities that just exist to raise money, should be getting national attention. It’s a disgrace.
  • I’ve used some of these.
  • Roman concrete was apparently better than the shit we’re using.
  • I think this is more or less true: the financial industry has stopped being about enabling economic progress and more about itself. When engineers can make more moving piles of money around than inventing things, we’ve got a problem.
  • Teenage boys killed the sex scene.
  • Late May Linkorama

  • A brief bit of mathematical malpractice, although not a deliberate one. The usually smart Sarah Kliff cites a study that of an ER that showed employees spent nearly 5000 minutes on Facebook. Of course, over 68 computers and 15 days, that works out to about 4 minutes per day per computer which … really isn’t that much.
  • What’s interesting about the Netflix purge is that many of the studios are pulling movies to start their own streaming services. This is idiotic. I’m pretty tech savvy and I have no desire to have 74 apps on my iPad, one for each studio. If I want to watch a movie, I’m going to Netflix or Amazon or iTunes, not a studio app (that I have to pay another subscription fee for). In fact, many days my streaming is defined by opening up the Netflix app and seeing what intrigues me.
  • We go into this on Twitter. The NYT ran an article about how little nutrition our food has. Of course, they have defined “nutritional content” as the amount of pigment which has dubious nutritional value (aside from anti-oxidant value; so, no nutritional value). As Kevin Wilson said according to the graph, the value of blue corn is that it is blue and not yellow.
  • While we’re on the subject of nutrition, it turns out that low sodium intake may not only not be beneficial, it may even be harmful. I’m slowly learning that almost everything we think we know about nutrition is shaky at best.
  • Ultra-conserved words. I am fascinated by language.
  • Wine tasting is bullshit.
  • How the peaceful loving people-friendly Soviet Union tried to militarize space.
  • The most remote places in each state.
  • Porn is not the problem. You are. More on how “sex addiction” is a made up disorder.
  • Meet the coins that could rewrite history. Every time we learn more about the past, we find out that our ancestors were smarter and more adventurous than we thought they were. And some people think they needed aliens to build the pyramids.