A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
A little late and from an unexpected source, I found support for my idea that the MPAA and the RIAA should be asking why porn survived into the digital age. That was something that I put out in 2010. The answer given in How porn shapes your phone habits, even if you don’t watch it(London Times) to my question is prosaic:
The content was just bait to keep us scrolling and watching, while the traces of our most private desires were harvested and commodified.
More troubling now is this:
...Among the earliest people to craft online personas and compete for algorithmic visibility were so-called cam models: sex workers who already in the mid-Nineties began to vie for attention by selling the kind of parasocial intimacy that would later become a cornerstone of the creator economy. Viewers paid for nudity and sex, yes, but also for a sense of human contact. Influencers play with the same dynamic, offering carefully constructed fantasies in exchange for attention and, increasingly, money....
My reaction was it was a freak show, not reality, another thing to traverse while sight-seeing. But then I was never interested in the subject matter. Guess I was lucky, it may have been another in my group sessions went back to it. Leaving me wondering why. There really is nothing spectacular about looking at/watching naked people. I am left to the conclusion that I am missing the point, that I am out of touch.
Home from church, trying to get through my open tabs. (I am supposed to be making submissions).
What I thought would be quick, quirky reads turned out a lot more.
Especially, Location tracking: ‘I can easily see where 80% of the people I know currently are’ (The Irish Times). I see parents tracking their kids; particularly since I have been dipping into missing person cases on YouTube. When I had stepkids, we gave them a cell phone when they were out trekking by themselves. On the other hand, the idea of tracking one's significant other leans heavily towards the creepy. It might also be the remnants of a bad conscience when, unlike Fats Waller, I was misbehaving.
When Orla Leahy, who is in her 70s, collects her husband from his appointments at the Beacon Hospital in Dublin she puts their dog’s collar, which has a location tracker, on to her wing mirror. “It’s a terrible place to park, so rather than have him waiting in the rain, he can see where I am [on his phone]. It’s a bit stalkerish but it’s a good use of the technology.”
A teenager I know was recently snared having a surreptitious party thanks to the family home’s doorbell camera. Sitting with his parents at the time, we watched all the youngsters coming to their door on his father’s phone before the event was shut down. I couldn’t help feeling it was a bit of a shame.
Someone else describes a friend whose girlfriend kept track of his every movement via location sharing – constantly ringing to ask questions about why he was where he was and who he was with.
We live in a world of surveillance. Our phones track us. Our apps track us. Security cameras on houses and businesses track us. Our data is circulated and shared and sold and hacked and leaked. Increasingly, assisting this process for the corporations who profit from it, we also voluntarily track each other.
Overprotection or rational lifeline? A surveillance state incubated by ourselves or a lack of self-consciousness about privacy? Not sure, but it sounds like an idea for a speculative fiction story.
But then my brain keeps thumping up against real safety concerns:
How I Became a Lock Picker is from The New Yorker and behind a paywall. Having watched too many crime shows, lockpicking always looked cool. That it is also a hobby surprised me.
One day, I tried to open an old mailbox on the first floor. There were six slots, but I had only five keys, each of them as small and toylike as the key to a child’s diary. In an effort to open the last slot, I watched a video about lock picking on YouTube and ordered a set of picks from Amazon. Then I spent an hour unsuccessfully poking my new tools into the keyhole. In the end, I called a locksmith, defeated. A shifty young man turned up and, without even giving me his name, broke the lock with a drill. Before he left, though, he told me that there were groups of people who got together to study locks. I looked into it and found the Open Organization of Lockpickers (TOOOL), which originated in Amsterdam. Its members practice something called locksport.
***
TOOOL has a rigorous code of ethics. To form an official chapter, members must pledge that they will pick only those locks whose owners have given permission. Locksporters should not pick locks that are actively in use, because of the risk of breaking them. They should also be careful about whom they teach. Weyers turns people away when they seem suspiciously eager. Barry Wels, a co-founder of the Dutch chapter, has a security company that opens safes for clients, but he leaves the room when his work is done. “We are never interested in what is inside your safe,” he says on his website. “It is just not our business.”
Hobbyist lock pickers are not burglars, Weyers said, but people who want to master a practical and tactile skill. Once, a local television station profiled TOOOL and asked its members to dress in black turtlenecks and gloves. “That was not going to happen,” Weyers told me. If you truly wanted to get into a locked space, he pointed out, you would probably break a window or destroy the lock with a drill or a crowbar—unless, that is, you are dealing with certain American doorknobs, which Weyers considers inferior. “You will be able to open them after tonight,” he told me.
I never finished reading Thomas McGuane's Ninety-Two in the Shade. Why is beyond my memory. I had read a couple of his short stories and I liked them. It may be that the last story I read in Playboy was one of his. He is one of those guys I know I should pay more attention to as the time gets away from me. Therefore, I am using my time and the space here to suggest you do what I haven't done enough of.
McGuane’s subtle wonders work because of their brief length. Novelists in the Trump era combat the daily sturm und drang with extended responses defined by their reach and, at times, their inability to grasp. The novel must develop; nobody wants 250 pages of stasis.
The MAGA faithful, on the other hand, take pride in their intractability. In McGuane’s hands, this other “half of the divide” become ideal subjects for the short story. His characters confront moments of reckoning—some comic, others karmic, often both—where self-belief collides with a buckling status quo.
Which might make A Wooded Shore terribly outré at a time of incipient fascism. (As outré as using the word outré.) But if we engage with McGuane on his terms, our engagement with fiction will extend both our reach and our grasp. What else is a literature for?
One more time for Marcel Proust.
Eight Writing Secrets:
Alan Moore's writing advice is a little strange, enough so that I think I need to come back to it to make sure I am correct about this: he takes a different approach to make points long-standing.
I have heard of Pachinko, but knew nothing of Min Jin Lee until this video. Now, I am a fan after hearing what got her writing and what she wants to do with her writing and her life in general.
I cannot recall the last time I read either Rudy Rucker or Bruce Sterling. Longer for Sterling, and I came to Rucker after I had read William Gibson, Sterling, and Neal Stephenson. It had to be before prison. It is harder to find Rucker's books but do look for them. His cyberpunk is more surfpunk; that is more humorous. Check out Rudy's Blog's for Blog Archive Podcast #119. Writing Cyberpunk. Rudy vs. Bruce.
Read A Writer’s Life: A Life if you are a new writer. One thing I did not know when I was younger was what it was like to be a writer. I wish I had this collection of examples.
A woman has been arrested after allegedly pointing a gun at restaurant staff during an argument Wednesday morning.
According to court documents, the Muncie Police Department responded to a fight at Mac’s restaurant in the 1100 block of W. McGalliard Road. Police arrived around 10 a.m. Wednesday morning and were greeted by a Mac’s employee.
I have not read enough of Philip K. Dick and he is not my favorite science fiction writer, but I understand his reputation. And I find Ted Gioia a person worth listening to, so check out My Favorite Philip K. Dick Novels by Ted Gioia. I did. Maybe I can find time for them.
Kate Atkinson’s latest, hugely enjoyable, novel Our Noble Selves is so stuffed full of head-spinning whodunnitry and has such a enormous cast of suspects that you can’t help but think that somewhere in her Edinburgh house there must be an enormous whiteboard with all the characters’ names on it, different coloured lines for each, and all of them twisting together and pulling apart before coming together in one great, final explosive denouement.
I have put my research project into Indiana's Bill of Rights on hold as I await feedback. One issue that arose is originalism. As I see matters, Indiana has silently adopted the United States Supreme Court's theory on originalism. What is the problem with originalism? Selecting the source for the original meaning determines the outcome. It does not mean that the court has roamed through the whole of the historical record. In Indiana, the court went looking for abortion in The Debates of the 1851 Convention. A legislative subject not one for constitutional debate. I argue what should have been looked for was the meaning of liberty and the pursuit of happiness; the words that were actually debated as being rights.
It is also disingenuous at both the federal level and in Indiana. At the federal level, the amendment process is so arduous that it is easier to pack the court with ideological judges. When the Indiana Supreme Court suggested abortion should be put to the people as a constitutional amendment, it ignored the amendment process needed the cooperation of the very legislature that passed the abortion ban.
Cute. Not to be taken as a cure-all.
Now, about judicial review, the power of a court to determine a law unconstituional. I have a problem with Who Is Supreme, the People or the Court? (Los Angeles Review of Books). Maybe two. The first issue is the focus on the federal level.
Just as the folk story of Brown is simple enough to state, so too is the basic thesis of Supremacy.Bowie and Renan take on the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review, meaning the court’s power to decline to enforce federal laws. Bowie and Renan contend that judicial review, so defined, is fundamentally inconsistent with the republican, democratic foundation of the Constitution, and also that, in practice, judicial review has been weaponized for antidemocratic, illiberal ends. Indeed, judicial review has consistently been opposed on those grounds by abolitionists, labor organizers, and other progressive groups. It would be impossible to recount the entirety of the story that Supremacy covers, so I will merely highlight some of its key claims (while begging readers to get the book as soon as they can.)
The states might have given a different answer - the amendment process is easier at the state level and there are states still electing their appellate court judges. An Indiana Supreme Court case held that judicial review was meant to protect citizens rights against a despotic legislature. That opinion emphasized the final judges of natural rights were the people.
However, I cannot argue with this.
Would a ban on judicial review—or even targeted restrictions on judicial review—fix everything at the Supreme Court? No, and I don’t take Supremacy to suggest otherwise. For one thing, I’d bet almost anything that this Supreme Court, which is full of judicial supremacists, including Chief Justice John Roberts, would invalidate any federal law that attempted to limit the court’s power.
And yet, Bowie and Renan make a powerful argument against judicial review. Don’t let this review displace your own review—you should dig into their case.
Okay, foreigners cannot vote. In Indiana, there are people from the precinct who can challenge voters; the voter registration office requires driver's licenses; the ID needs to come out when voting; and so I just do not see why the Republican candidate is retailing MAGA scare tactics. Unless he thinks we are as dumb as MAGA politicians seem do do.
