Ah, but that last one … and here we return to the Suozzi letter. It
sings the praises of competition. Great. I’m all for it. But what force
today in the United States is crushing competition? It’s not the
Democratic Socialists of America. It’s not the government. It’s not
Zohran Mamdani.
It’s the billionaire class, or “the Epstein
class,” if you prefer Jon Ossoff’s acerbic locution. You call yourself a
capitalist, Tom Suozzi? Well, monopoly is the most grotesque perversion
of capitalism that exists. There’s a reason Adam Smith hated monopolies. Centrist Democrats should familiarize themselves with that history, if they don’t know it.
Before that I listened to this interesting interview about monopoly and privacy. I got a shock
that the Paramount-WB merger will leave the company in $80 billion worth
of debt. They shackling themselves for what purpose?
Out of my many sins neither playing the victim nor blaming others for my lack of success can be counted. Blaming myself, punishing myself for my errors were to the point of encouraging self destruction.
The feeling of abandonment is my strongest memory from that time. My
world became tiny and that’s where my dependence on the online world
grew. None of the content I was consuming was overtly harmful; I wasn’t
looking for dating advice or tips for the gym. I understand now that it
was the subtle thread of misogyny that wove its way through the content
fed to me by the algorithm. I watched videos of people criticising
feminist voices like Abbie Chatfield and found myself agreeing with
them. My political beliefs started to change. When things fell apart at
work, I blamed everyone but myself. It felt like the world was out to
get me, that I was being punished for being a man. I was angry, lonely
and stuck in a cycle of victimhood. The content told me someone else was
to blame and I believed it.
Misogyny affected me in high school. Girls did not like me, and I had a bad habit of falling in love. But I finally got lucky, I found someone loved or close enough to salve my heart. The old bluesmen were right: the ain't nothing like a woman.
That I would later attract crazy women, maybe always did according to my father, was not always a bad thing.
Crazy is not always a perjorative.
I see the danger of these online voices for young
men and I understand the lure of victimhood, the attraction of blaming
external forces for your own suffering. But it’s not real. There is a quote
attributed to film producer Franklin Leonard: “When you are accustomed
to privilege, equality feels like oppression. It’s not.” I understand
that for a lot of men, who perhaps don’t feel particularly privileged
beyond the fact of their gender, this can be a difficult idea to
understand.
But rather than shaming these men,
we need to sit alongside them, understand their pains and frustrations,
and guide them to take accountability for their own lives, happiness
and impact on others. I am lucky to have had two women who did this for
me. It is so often women and gender-diverse people doing this work, the
groups most likely to be harmed by men’s behaviour. As a man and a
father, I believe it is now my responsibility to model this for the men
and boys in my life. And that starts with these conversations, as
shameful and uncomfortable as they can be, about how men can end up in
these spaces in the first place and how they can get out.
What a would where such children masquerade as men. Where whiners hold high office.
I was taught the world owed me nothing, you 've got to make your own way. What has changed?
Find the worth in yourself, not in something stupid like status. This is a democracy, not an aristocracy. Doing gets you further than being.
Brush your teeth, learn to make women laugh, do not think you deserve a damn thing from them, and then you might just get lucky.
I went to the hospital to check on whether there was paperwork I needed for the pre-op. Also, I paid a bill. Then I decided to run up to Enterprise to get a car. No car. So, I ate at Burger King. I think for the first time since I got home.
I went out about 9 and got back home around noon, to a steam room. I had put in a repair order for the air conditioning on Sunday. No one had come. Why not I found out later.
A bath to make the heat and humidity tolerable.
Then it was time to head back to Enterprise. I got a little Nissan, then off to the property management company. I did not want the car towed. While there, I found out the work order had been cancelled. That got fixed.
I did a little drive around Muncie, ending up at the west side Payless. The car had air conditioning.
That got me back here around 6:30. Mierable, I must remember not to eat solid food. And the closeness of my rooms did not help. I cannot remember what I did after 8:45. Then, too, I am not sure what I did before!
I could not sleep, I have been up for three hours now. I went out for smokes and RC Cola. The car had air conditioning, remember? Strange how quiet the town is. I do not think there are any all-night restaurants. It seems I was told the bars close around midnight now. Little traffic, but it is probably safer traffic than before I went away. I do not know how much of the change is due to things like COVID-19, but I think the town is getting old like I am.
Early Migration to Indiana (Before Railroads) goes back to this past weekend and I have not had time to add it on here.
Same with “Copperheads in Indiana” Civil War Roundtable w/ Author Nancy Baxter:
(3) There Are More than Five POVs - by Lincoln Michel explains why I have been having trouble with POV as an idea because I have been focusing on who has the information and how it is conveyed. Five seems like my experience.
Look, I said this was going to be a pedantic and low-stakes post. But
for fun I’m going to offer a different taxonomy of POV based more on
storytelling than grammar. From a narrative perspective, I think there
are three main questions as far as POV goes. 1) Information, aka what
can the narrator know and convey to the reader. 2) Filtration, aka whose
consciousness(es) is information filtered through. 3) Modulation, aka
how is the narrator shaping information for the assumed listener.
Today we’re tackling the topic of
VOICE, otherwise known as perhaps the single most abused word in the
entire craft vocabulary (am I dramatic? No not me). People say voice to
mean tone, style, sensibility, character interiority, the way the prose
sounds, that special je ne sais pas quoi a certain
author might possess. The idea of voice is used to praise work and also
to dismiss it and seldom does it seem to mean the same thing twice.
And
the reason this matters — the reason we’re dedicating pretty much the
entire second unit of this series to voice — is that almost every
failure in writing is a failure of voice.
This ties into the POV essay above.
Alan Palmer1, in Fictional Minds sums it up as follows:
When
you read a discourse and ask “Who speaks?” or “Who narrates?,” you are
concerned with narration. When you ask “Who sees?” or “Who thinks?” then
you are concerned with focalization. Sometimes an agent sees and speaks
at the same time, and sometimes the agent who sees is different from
the agent who speaks.
A
first-person narrator recounting her childhood is speaking as her adult
self, but the narrative might be focalized through the child she was —
seeing a parent’s argument with the limited understanding of a
six-year-old, even as the adult voice arranges those impressions into
sentences.
***
If I wanted to pick one primary takeaway from this, it’d be this: please remember focalization can shift! Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway
slides between Clarissa and Septimus and Peter Walsh within a single
paragraph… the third-person narrator remaining stable while the
focalizer flickers. These moments of transition are where the prose does
its strangest, most beautiful work. Two consciousnesses brushing
against each other through the same syntax.
Focalization is one of the few narrative tools that can carry a metaphysical claim. Liviu Lutas10,
for examples, writes about disembodied focalization — that is,
narratives focalized through a brain in a jar, a forest, a mountain, a
house — what he’s exploring is the idea of whether vision can detach
from a human body.
So much for headhopping, sort of. Shifting without attribution seems to be headhopping.
Walter Mosley: “A Novel is Not a Machine” (Literary Hub). If you have not read Walter Mosely, you might overlook this. You're mistake twice over - not reading Mosely is the first.
All the readers of Dorn have interpretations that come from
their histories, their particular intellects, and desires, and yearnings
they might not be aware of. That’s the beauty of fiction; it is a
continually mutating protoplasm in the minds of readers. This colorless,
almost invisible ever transforming blob of reactions is the party. It
is not a machine. It is not good or evil, bad or boring—it is a cry in
the dark, a hope looking for a harbor, something that pretends to make
sense but, in actuality, is much deeper than that.
And let’s not forget the original definition of the term, the word
novel; it means that you’re about to encounter something original,
different, unique. And so, when the critic in your newspaper, your
classroom, when the editor in your mind, or of your book, tells you that
your novel would make a poor coffee percolator (or potboiler) you tell
them, thank you, because the novel you created (and that is
recreated by each and every one of your readers) is an ever-transforming
document that grants the power to evolve in the minds of the many. From
Conan the Barbarian to Othello the written word has the potential for
transformation no one can predict.
The fewer ideas and perceptions and
influences you allow into the gene pool, the smaller it gets. And the
smaller the gene pool, the weaker the population.
For the arts, homogenization leads not only to stagnation and retrogression, but boredom.
And if you think the pool’s not going to get any smaller, I’ve already witnessed an exclusion from S&S of the preeminent 21st-century
S&S series, the Chronicles of Hanuvar, written by the late and
much-lamented Howard Andrew Jones—who, as writer, editor, and critic,
was the most important figure in modern S&S until his untimely
passing.
To be clear, I’m fine with a definition of
S&S that doesn’t want a lot of SF elements or a lot of grand
fantasy quests or a lot of world-saving or multiverse-traveling. That’s
reasonable. We want people to understand what we mean when we recommend
something as S&S.
And I’m fine reading about white cisgender barbarian swordsmen. I’m currently reading Battlepug: The Compugdium,
an omnibus graphic novel featuring exactly such a character. It’s a lot
of fun—fun that respects and subverts and sends up the trope—and it
embeds its lead, the Warrior, in a lot of weirdness.
What I’m not fine with is having one character type or one identity increasingly foreclose other possibilities.
I saw Supergirl, thought it a good enough movie, and the reviews were generally puzzling. Some wanted a bigger more spectacular follow up to Superman. Some thought it was not clearly enough feminist. The comic book fans decried the divergences from the art. One review in The Guardian is the only one I saw that reviewed it on its own terms.
Why have we become so needy for purity, for clearly defined content that reassures our prejudices against women, against the oddball? Why do we hug so closely to the past and cliches?
As a term, nostalgia derives from the Greek nostos, meaning homecoming, and algos,
meaning grief or distress. It is a yearning for something which no
longer exists or perhaps which has never existed, and, crucially, this
desire is less spatial than temporal, often closely linked to childhood
memories. It is a feeling which Star Trek has often dramatized (think about Annorax in Voyager’s “Year of Hell”
who longs to restore an erased timeline containing his wife and…
<dramatic flash> …wait, what do you mean you don’t remember
him?!). But understanding nostalgia is not just useful for writers.
Knowing more about how it is expressed can also help viewers and critics
when contemplating our situationships with popular culture. Indeed,
when we analyze what I like to call the flavor profiles of nostalgia we
begin to account for why different audiences vibe differently with
different incarnations of contemporary Trek.
Nostalgia bothers me. I think it is the amber into which our world and its cultures are being trapped. But I did learn there is more than only one nostalgia.
First, restorative nostalgia. For Boym, this involves a strong emphasis on so-called “truth and tradition,” a stance which Strange New Worlds emphasizes by positioning itself as the heir to classic Star Trek. Such an approach tends to be anchored in a particular historical moment (or, at least, in a recollection of that moment, for as Boym warns, there is always a risk of conflating “the actual home for the imaginary one”). Consider how Strange New Worlds treats the original Trek
as a kind of sacred text, with the relationship between the old and new
based not on evolution of the material but, instead, on Boym’s
“transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home.” This is evidenced not
just by SNW’s literal recreation of the original Enterprise
(albeit much more spacious given Pike’s smaller crew complement) but by
the recasting of franchise stalwarts such as Kirk, Spock, Uhura,
Scotty, and Chapel. We further see it in the way the series retells
classic stories, for instance how the first season finale, “A Quality of Mercy,” offers what is essentially a cover version of the TOS episode “Balance of Terror” by transporting Captain Pike forward in time from 2259 to 2266 while also sending the viewer nostalgically back in time from 2022 to 1966. Even the title Strange New Worlds is itself nostalgically (and restoratively) Trek, drawing as it does from the credits narration of the franchise heyday.
Which is opposed by:
This kind of layered approach suggests a similar kind of “longing for
continuity in a fragmented world” as that exhibited by genuinely
reflective nostalgia. It is something that the post-Burn setting of our
second example, Starfleet Academy, is designed to take narrative advantage of. Nine hundred years beyond Strange New Worlds, this period is a stage for “unrealized dreams of the past” (dovetailing neatly with the show’s use of hauntology as I have discussed on this site before). Starfleet Academy, so, is as undeniably nostalgic as Strange New Worlds,
but while its reflective approach uses similar triggers to the
restorative tendency, the series fashions these into very different
results. Because reflective nostalgia thrives in the act of “longing
itself.” It relishes ambiguities and contradictions (something we will
sadly now not see in a mooted third or fourth season installment which
would have had the holographic Doctor meet the copy of himself from Voyager’s “Living Witness”). Reflective nostalgia calls “truth” into question as several Academy episodes, notably “Series Acclimation Mil,”
pointedly do. Most importantly, it acknowledges that remembrance is an
“imperfect process” (which, as much as anything else, is the crux of Academy’s
first season finale). Along the way it champions an open approach to
history, one in which youth (personified by cadet Caleb) challenges
authority while simultaneously being poised to create its own stories.
This philosophy celebrates the past of Star Trek but still
exhibits a strong longing to forge a new future—via a new ship, a new
crew, and a transformed setting—all while honoring what has come before(most obviously in the USS Athena’s
commemoration wall, something I hold to be an object lesson in
imperfect recollection if only because I refuse to believe that Nog
never advanced beyond lieutenant).
The Death of Robin Hood Brings a Legend Low - Reactor I offer as an antidote to my own opinion that the movie works. The points against my opinion are accurate. It is grim, it does hint at other movies, and it does evade what the reviewer wants. The violence is horror level high. I think the changes in Robin Hood are subtle. I think it may be that he had no other means of escaping his past. His world was too circumscribed by place and rank for reinvention.
I was looking for something I thought I had read by Sir Francis Bacon when I was 18. I did not find exactly what I was looking for, but I want to offer you something that came close.
Novum Organum by Lord Bacon (The Project Gutenberg eBook) is where British philosophy starts and is still worth reading.
XLV. The human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds; and although many things in nature be sui generis and most irregular, will yet invent parallels and conjugates and relatives, where no such thing is. Hence the fiction, that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, thus rejecting entirely spiral and serpentine lines (except as explanatory terms).[12] Hence also the element[23] of fire is introduced with its peculiar orbit,[13] to keep square with those other three which are objects of our senses. The relative rarity of the elements (as they are called) is arbitrarily made to vary in tenfold progression, with many other dreams of the like nature.[14] Nor is this folly confined to theories, but it is to be met with even in simple notions.
XLVI. The human understanding, when any proposition has been once laid down (either from general admission and belief, or from the pleasure it affords), forces everything else to add fresh support and confirmation; and although most cogent and abundant instances may exist to the contrary, yet either does not observe or despises them, or gets rid of and rejects them by some distinction, with violent and injurious prejudice, rather than sacrifice the authority of its first conclusions. It was well answered by him[15] who was[24] shown in a temple the votive tablets suspended by such as had escaped the peril of shipwreck, and was pressed as to whether he would then recognize the power of the gods, by an inquiry, But where are the portraits of those who have perished in spite of their vows? All superstition is much the same, whether it be that of astrology, dreams, omens, retributive judgment, or the like, in all of which the deluded believers observe events which are fulfilled, but neglect and pass over their failure, though it be much more common. But this evil insinuates itself still more craftily in philosophy and the sciences, in which a settled maxim vitiates and governs every other circumstance, though the latter be much more worthy of confidence. Besides, even in the absence of that eagerness and want of thought (which we have mentioned), it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than negatives, whereas it ought duly and regularly to be impartial; nay, in establishing any true axiom the negative instance is the most powerful.
XLVII. The human understanding is most excited by that which strikes and enters the mind at once and suddenly, and by which the imagination is immediately filled and inflated. It then begins almost imperceptibly to conceive and suppose that everything is similar to the few objects which have taken possession of the mind, while it is very slow and unfit for the transition to the remote and heterogeneous instances by which axioms are tried as by fire, unless the office be imposed upon it by severe regulations and a powerful authority.
Having read that, can you really think human nature has changed in 400 years?
Something happened this afternoon. I had this complete loss of energy, feeling like I was going to collapse. Only I did not. Sleep would not come. I ate a sandwich and swallowed some water. I went back to the first section of “After Making Landfall” and have gone no further this evening. I did get a post or two written. That is all.
