A letter I got today

Dear Ethan:

As Councilman representing [your ward], one of my main priorities is safety, especially your safety.

Recently, there has been an increase in crime in our neighborhood. Breaking and entering is on the rise; therefore, I would like to stress the importance of locking all doors. Be sure to secure your home and automobiles, and, if you are fortunate to have a house alarm; engage your alarm system in your absence and at night while sleeping.

Due to the importance of this matter, I will be conducting a neighborhood meeting on September 12, 2011, at [a local elementary school] from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm to discuss this safety issue and any other matters and concerns.

The area Crime Watch program has been successful and will continue to do well if we all contribute in any way we can in deterring crime in our neighborhood. Please continue to be observant and contact the police to report any suspicious activity.

Thank you for your help in making our community safe. If you need my assistance, please contact me at the council office, [phone number]. Also, please sign-up for news and events at [url made into a link automatically by Microsoft Word which is a bit useless in a printed letter].

Sincerely,
[Rich white dude]

cc: [A bunch of cops]

I'm half-thinking about going and asking if he's taking any time out of his busy fearmongering, alarm system-advertising, and overemphasizing-of-dates-places-and-times schedule to, you know, do anything about the causes of those tiny actions that fit into his definition of "crime." The theft of huge swathes of people's ability to support themselves continues into its nth century of not prompting any important meetings at elementary schools.

By the way, the "area Crime Watch" that has been so "successful" so far in my experience consists of 1) a woman who has lived down the street from me for two years but who apparently doesn't recognize me following me at low speed (her in her car, me on my bike) for three blocks and around several turns before stopping and yelling "Where do you live??!!?!" at me and accusing me of being shady because I kept looking behind myself at the car following me at about ten miles an hour for three blocks and around several turns, and 2) our probably diagnosably sociopathic next door neighbor begging us to let him string a trip wire in our backyard so that if people come through it in the middle of the night he can catch them and beat them with a baseball bat. Given these encounters, I'm wondering if you understand why I'm made a bit queasy by Rich white dude's urging my neighbors to "contribute in any way we can to deterring crime in our neighborhood."

PS I wish someone would break into his office and steal from his semicolon and hyphen budget, because it's clearly overfunded.

Weird words

When I was younger--like, ten to twelve, say--I was perfectly aware of how the word enigma was spelled and pronounced, and of what it meant, but for some reason most of the time when I saw it written I would misread it as engima, switching the g and the i, pronouncing it en-JEE-ma. In my head, without realizing it consciously, I worked up a whole definition of engima based on the contexts I thought I was seeing it in, which was almost, but (in some way I couldn't define) not quite, the same as the definition of enigma.

I've been typing up some quotes from Maria Mies' fascinating Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale on my Commonplace (I'll get around to either discussing them or putting them in a digest here sometime around 2015, at the rate I'm going, but if you want to look at them now, have at it), and as I do it I'm starting to realize that in recent years I've been doing the enigma/engima switcheroo with the real word subsistence and the word-of-my-misreading-invention substinence, which of course means almost the same thing as subsistence, and almost the same thing as sustenance, but not quite the same as either.

My point? Why, you think I should have one?

More on science fiction, from one of many possible thoughts on Frankenstein

One of the many fascinating things about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein is that it is (among other things) a woman's rejection, not of Romanticism in its entirety, but of the male-based subjectivity that is so central to the Romanticism of her contemporaries. By attacking the whole notion of the individual (assumed male) genius while leaving intact the awe of nature, the skepticism about science and rationalism, the intensity of emotion, Shelley creates something remarkably different from--and to me, both more interesting and more what you might call morally sound than--what we normally expect of a Romantic work.*

*Analysis of Frankenstein in and of itself isn't what I'm primarily interested in here, so I'm not going into the ways in which she does this, but treating it as a given. If you want further analysis of this, I would imagine that there are plenty of published works as well as high school and college term papers about it.

It's especially interesting (to me) to think about what this means in terms of Frankenstein's place as one of the founding texts of science fiction (and some would, not without justification, leave off "one of" and italicize "the").

While it would take almost 150 years for any significant number of SF writers to catch up to Shelley's distrust of the nobility of science, not to mention her woman's perspective (though on both terms there were always exceptions), the rejection of heroic subjectivity is, to my mind, central to SF, despite any appearance to the contrary created by the plethora of individual heroes in the history of the genre. These heroes are, almost without exception,* not so much characters--individuals--as stand-ins for what many (including me in my last SF post) call "the idea as hero." Indeed, it would be very difficult to have a literature where the idea is itself the hero without the rejection of Romantic subjectivity.

*At least in SF of the "classic," pre-1960s era; after about the mid-60s the story of SF gets way more complicated, sometimes for the good, sometimes not.

It doesn't stop there--the SFnal concept of "the sense of wonder," for one, though it is superficially very similar to the traditional Romantic awe in the face of nature, is in fact almost completely different in both content and impact, in a way that is difficult to explain if we don't take Shelley's rejection as foundational. There is much more that could be said about this, and about other aspects of SF that are hugely informed by her rejection, but this post is getting way longer than I meant it to be and I'm not finished yet.

One of the most interesting (again, to me) aspects of this is that Shelley's rejection comes largely out of her perspective as a woman--a perspective that is noticeably absent from almost--but not quite--all pre-1960s SF, and still absent from a majority of the mainstream of the SF of the 1960s and later. The genre is notoriously masculine--even, all too frequently, macho. But the fact that a woman's perspective is so foundational to the genre carries through strongly.

Towards the end of Joanna Russ's frustratingly short essay, "On the Fascination of Horror Stories, Including Lovecraft's" (as collected in the indispensable To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction), Russ describes a fan party she attended, where the conversation turned to favorite horror stories, and then to the implications of the appeal of horror and SF:

[O]ne very bright young woman described her adolescent reading of SF as a genuinely subversive force in her life, a real alternative to the fundamentalist community into which she had been born. This alternative had nothing to do with the cardboard heroes and heroines or the imperial American/engineering values which she had skipped right over. What got to her were the alien landscapes and the alien creatures. We scholars perhaps tend to forget how much subversive potential both SF and fantasy have, even at their crudest.

Unfortunately, as with so many of the countless fascinating points she raises in this uncharacteristically skimpy essay, she leaves it there. But the point is made, and taken--and recognized. I have seen numerous accounts of women saying similar things--and though I am not a woman, nor did I grow up in an environment that was at all oppressive (thanks, mom and dad!) beyond the general background radiation of our culture, I am queer and a general discontent who grew up in a heterosexist, conformist society, and what this unnamed woman and Russ have to say strikes a strong chord with me. On reading Frankenstein, I can't help but think that we all have Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to thank for this intrinsic subversivity,* indestructible despite the occasional best efforts of macho writers who wished it would go away. It didn't.

*Yes, I know, Firefox's spelling check knows, the dictionary knows that it should be subversiveness, but that word is wicked ugly to me.

Of limited interest, very long, written for my own entertainment; feel free to skip

For reasons unrelated to what I usually write about here, I've been reading a lot of science fiction criticism lately. Some of it has been great (Joanna Russ*), some of it has been entertainingly awful (the dunderheaded blowhard Kingsley Amis**), some of it has been so unrelated to what I'm interested in as to be, through no fault of its own, just kind of dull (Algis Budrys***), and then some of it has just been utterly, unredeemably awful. I give you M. Keith Booker's Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946-1964.

*Whose critical ideas are not quite what I would have expected from reading her fiction, in a fascinating way.
**Who, just as an example, in his New Maps of Hell blithely states as if he were unaware of saying something remotely controversial--or just plain wrong--that H.G. Wells' writing is entirely apolitical!
***Even though his Who? is one of my very favorite novels. His understanding of what he did in that book is very different from mine.

After an absurdly lengthy introduction (taking up well over 15% of the book) that consists of nothing other than a bunch of utterly standard scene-setting about the social milieu of the American 1950s (McCarthyism! Fear! The nuclear family! The Bomb!), material I literally cannot imagine any potential reader of this book being unfamiliar with and to which Booker adds less than nothing, he finally gets around to discussing SF and makes a big hash of it.

He introduces this section on Asimov by asserting that that writer is a "notoriously bad stylist." This is admittedly a very common view among those who don't read much SF (and among those unfortunate SF fans who, I can only surmise, have far too much of that silly literary jealousy that still taints so much of the SF world), but it would be nice if, just once, a critical study that explicitly intends to take the SF of the 50s seriously would dare to, you know, like the SF of the 50s, rather than condescend to it. Booker makes matters worse by saying that Asimov's style and plotting in the Foundation trilogy reveal the work's origins in "fanzine culture." First, it is quite a shock to me to learn that Astounding (now Analog), where all of the stories that ended up being "fixed up" into the trilogy were originally published, and which is one of the best-known, longest lived professional SF magazines, is a "fanzine." This is not an insignificant mistake. For another--again, stop condescending to the field. Though the phenomenon was largely over before I was born, the SF fanzines were to all appearances the home to fantastically brilliant writing far more often than not.

Anyway, after ensuring that no one could think for a moment that he respected the work he's discussing, and after discussing the technology-boosterism of Foundation (which is of course present in the books, though I strongly disagree with Booker's interpretation of it), Booker gives us this, which I am quoting at length from pages 32-33:

A similar pro-technology theme was central to Asimov's robot fiction, including such novels as The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957), which combine science fiction with detective fiction. In such works, Asimov addressed a number of issues related to artificial intelligence long before it became a technological possibility, again ultimately endorsing robots as aids to humanity.

Asimov's famed Laws of Robotics presumably ensured the benevolent nature of his robots, though even he occasionally depicted renegade robots, as in The Caves of Steel. Thus, his robots represented particularly comforting visions of Otherness: easily distinguished from human beings, but entirely pro-human in their behavior. Such useful, but lovable, machines would eventually culminate in the charmingly chubby robot of the Lost in Space television series of the mid-1960s. Other science fiction writers were not necessarily so benevolent, and writers such as Dick, in works such as Dr. Futurity (1960), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), and We Can Build You (published in 1972, but written in 1962), would eventually extend the robot theme in the postmodernist direction of android simulacra, indistinguishable from humans by all but specially trained experts. Such creatures, of course, precisely reversed Asimov's assurances, blurring the boundary between the animate and the inanimate and introducing the frightening (especially in the 1950s) possibility that technology might advance to the point where we cannot tell ourselves from our own machines.

On reading this, I feel the urge to congratulate Booker for having read someone else's facile criticism of Asimov, and also to ask him if he's ever read any Asimov.

I have few major objections to the first paragraph, though I would argue that what Asimov "ultimately endorses" in the robot novels is the attitude of making the best you can out of uniformly unbearable options rather than all technology all the time (after all, it is the high technology of industrial civilization that has led Earth to the crisis it finds itself in in the novels), though I freely admit that even Asimov might possibly disagree with me there.

But after that, sheesh. First of all, the Three Laws never "ensured the benevolent behavior" of the robots; from the very beginning the whole point of the robot stories was to find ways that the Three Laws, which were constructed to appear as a foolproof method of ensuring the harmlessness of the robots, could be logically shown to fail. Second, I challenge Booker to find me even one "renegade robot" in Caves. Seriously, just one. Booker first underestimates Asimov by suggesting his portrayal of robots is simple-minded, then underestimates him again by suggesting he cannot even stay mildly consistent to his supposedly simple-minded vision.

Third, the robots have never been uncomplicatedly "comforting"; though Asimov does indeed tend to fall on the side of "it's silly to be afraid of these things," they are always presented as problematic, controversial, and uncanny. On this point Booker is not so much wrong as overly simple-minded, possibly as a result of assuming, as I have mentioned, that his subject is similarly simple-minded.

It continues. The next clause, the "easily distinguished from human beings" one, makes me wonder if he has read either Caves or Sun at all, considering that one of the two main characters in both books is R. Daneel Olivaw, a robot who looks exactly, and acts almost exactly, like a human. And this is not a small point--major plot developments in both novels depend precisely upon most people's inability to distinguish him from a human. To complete Booker's sentence, Olivaw is indeed "entirely pro-human" in his behavior; however, the way in which he is so is, importantly, as perceived from a robot's perspective and, again, far from "comforting."

Suggesting that the Robot from Lost in Space--or anything having to do with that show, for that matter--is a "culmination" of Asimov's work is tantamount to slander, as well as ignoring the obvious fact that that robot is plainly a dumbed-down version of Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet and nothing else.

As far as the comments on Dick go, I would argue that he is, in the end, if anything more "benevolent" than Asimov, but that is a probably contentious opinion, and I suppose I cannot fault Booker for disagreeing. However, the idea that Dick "extended" the idea of robots, while true, is not true in the way Booker suggests, for as I have already mentioned, Asimov's robots are frequently "android simulacra, indistinguishable from humans by all but specially trained experts," which experts as a matter of fact make explicit, pivotal appearances in both Asimov novels under discussion. Again, I can't help but wonder if Booker has even bothered to take the most cursory of peeks at the books he's discussing.

The "observation" of Dick's "blurring the boundary between the animate and the inanimate" where Asimov supposedly failed to gives me the opportunity to point out that, throughout this whole "analysis," Booker misses completely the fact that what Asimov did in his robot stories was to present, and then problematize, the concept of tools that were also characters (without bringing in the complicating issue of real-world slavery, i.e., tools that are also humans, which we can regard as a strength or a weakness as we please), thus enabling him to seamlessly dramatize the traditional SFnal concern with "the idea as hero," as countless commentators have put it. (This concern, incidentally, seems to be one of the things that presents non-SF readers with the most difficulty when approaching SF, and I suspect that that is one of the problems here.*)

*I have a theory, which I can't figure out where to place so it's gonna go here, that the only reason Booker ever thought about SF in the first place was Fredric Jameson's praise of cyberpunk, and now that baby's all grown up and trying to think for himself he doesn't know how to.

Finally, where previous points caused me to wonder if Booker has deigned to glance at Asimov's books, the end of this passage makes me wonder if he's even bothered to read his own book. After listing Dick novels published in 1960, 1968, and 1972, he then discusses their concerns as being particularly topical in the 1950s. Note again the dates of publication of the books listed. Even if we grant Booker the "long fifties" of 1946-1964, which I am eminently willing to do, only one of the three books listed was published in this period. One out of three ain't bad, I guess?

(I need hardly mention that "the frightening...possibility that technology might advance to the point where we cannot tell ourselves from our own machines" is everpresent in Asimov, though from a different point of view than it is present in Dick. Speaking of that difference, throughout what I've written here I have not meant to suggest that there is little difference between Dick and Asimov; the difference is of course huge. It also happens to be completely unrelated to what Booker seems to think it is.)

After I read that section, I decided that this book would not be important to me and that I would just skim through the rest to see if he said anything interesting about other books I was familiar with, upon which I found that Booker, in his slavish devotion to dogmatic, prescriptive, predictive Marxism, thought it was a good idea to analyze the wonderful Clifford D. Simak's beautiful agrarian SF, practically unique in the field, for signs of the author's affiliation as either "left-wing" or "right-wing," inevitably leading to Booker's dismissal of him as "muddled." This to me was the ultimate, unforgivable example of sheer stupidity and voluntary incomprehension (i.e., he's anti-capitalist, but he's not a utopian Marxist, so he must be a stupid mess!), and I decided that no, I was not missing anything by not reading another word.

Blog note; Tiptree-style

Sorry I haven't been posting or responding to comments--I've been engaged in activities other than being on the computer. Largely obsessive reading, but also things that involve not being inside my house, which is nice. But anyway--I'm not ignoring comments (also, if you've e-mailed me and I haven't responded, well, see above), and, oh, Picador in particular, I want to respond to you, and hopefully will at some point during this lifetime--possibly with a whole new post, who knows.

Something that will probably delay that is that the day after tomorrow the Baronette and I are heading off to a lake in the mountains for some water and mountain activities and, we pray, no internet. What I'm looking forward to most is seeing more than four or five stars at night.

Quick response to Justin and ergo's comments on the last post--just as a warning, The Book of the Damned and The Morning of the Magicians can be incredibly goofy reads--and the former can be a bit tiresome, as the vast majority of it is just a litany of what Fort considers evidence, mostly of weird things falling from the sky--but if you read them not as positivist statements of what is, which neither book remotely wants to be, but instead as lengthy, impassioned rants against the tyranny of Occam's razor, then they can be quite valuable, I think.

---------

Another quick thing I wanted to make note of is that I've just started reading James Tiptree, Jr.'s first short story collection, 10,000 Light Years from Home, and so far it is excellent for reasons I'm seriously considering writing a full-length book about (OK, it's not just about her, but I'm completely honestly on the verge of writing a book-length study of science fiction), but one relatively minor stylistic point I've noticed is that it seems that she frequently wants the reader to misread what she's written. Maybe it's just me?

Take for example this exchange, which occurs towards the end of the first story, "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side," much of which has been an extended discussion of sex with aliens and the implications of this (and, satisfyingly to me but not directly relevant to this post, our imperialist urges biting us in the ass), to the irritation of the differently-minded narrator:

"Man is exogamous--all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger. Or get impregnated by him; it works for women too. Anything different-colored, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it or die trying. That's a drive, y'know, it's built in. Because it works fine as long as the stranger is human. For millions of years that kept the genes circulating. But now we've met aliens we can't screw, and we're about to die trying. . . . Do you think I can touch my wife?"

"But--"

"Look. Y'know, if you give a bird a fake egg like its own but bigger and brighter-marked, it'll roll its own egg out of the nest and sit on the fake? That's what we're doing."

"You have a heavy angle on sex." I was trying to conceal my impatience. "Which is great, but the kind of story I'd hoped--"

Now in that last paragraph, is the narrator trying to conceal his impatience or his impotence? He says, Tiptree has him say, impatience, but the context (and subtext) and the shape of the words makes it easy for the reader to switch them.

Then take the third and fourth paragraphs of the next story, "The Snows Are Melted, the Snows Are Gone":

The dog-wolf faded off the ridge, reappeared by the bushes where the human crouched. The figure bowed its head; as the wolf came near. Dawn light flickered on his canines. He snapped sideways, carrying away a dark cap.

A flood of light hair spilled out, flew as the human tossed it back. The wolf dropped the cap, sat down and began to worry at something on its chest.

Tiptree describes a wolf approaching a human, makes us linger on it by the odd use of a semicolon in the middle of the action, after which she gives us a closeup of the wolf's teeth. The wolf snaps, carries something away from the human's head--and then the next paragraph gives us something spilling out from that human's head, and a word that looks almost exactly like, but is not, blood.

For the moment, I have nothing to say about that other than that I am impressed. But my god, you should see the heap of notes I've already built up for that book...

The existence of nature

OK, New England-under-the-influence-of-climate-change, I've got you figured out. Between the tornadoes this year and the fucking flood last year, I guess your new deal is one different relatively minor but crazily unexpected natural distaster every Spring. Next year: volcano erupts in West Warwick, I don't know.

Anyway, I had planned to try to write a post summarizing some ideas the Baronette and I have been discussing recently about the nature of existence (which she touched on in her admirably brief way here; unfortunately, I suffer from the disease of wordiness), but it turns out that the day after tornadoes hit fucking Springfield, MA (and like a week after there were tornadoes in the fucking Vermont mountains, I mean, what?) is the most gorgeously beautiful day in living memory, so instead of writing about the nature of existence, I'm going to go experience the existence of nature.

O ye who regularly feast upon the well [sic] of my profundity: I apologize, but you will have to wait.

Air conditioned alienation

This morning a guy came to do routine maintenance on the air conditioning. We wouldn't ever have sought out central air specifically, but it was installed already when we moved in here and the landlord pays for its maintenance, so there you go. I admit also that, if you're me, central air turns out to be one of those things that you insist you don't want but then when you have it you end up using it. In my meager defense, I don't use it nearly as much as most people. Because I'm better than them!

Uh, anyway, as the maintenance guy stomped around (nothing against him, he had to wear heavy boots), in and out of the house, up and down from the attic, thumping around with hammers, discovering a fault in the wiring, having trouble fixing it, thumping around more, going in and out, scaring the hell out of poor Boorman*, I found myself thinking about how the overarching system that is "my house" contains within it (at least) four major subsystems that I have absolutely no understanding of (and that's just the major housewide ones).

*Who is seriously going to start hating us, considering that all this trauma comes just two days after we took him to the vet for the first time** and because this week we have to shove glop in his eyes twice a day to treat his conjunctivitis.
**He was a surprisingly good boy, but man oh man did he hate it (of course).

Like, there was something wrong with the a/c. The guy who fixed it explained it to me. It didn't mean a thing to me. If it had gone wrong and there wasn't a guy to pay to come fix it (or, in this case, if there wasn't a guy to pay to come see if there's anything wrong on a semi-regular basis), it would have become a part of my house that didn't work. I wouldn't know how to take it out, either, so the systems that make it go would just be an enormous dead zone in the house, taking up space. I mean, it wouldn't be so bad if we didn't have air conditioning, of course, but still.

Or like, the plumbing. If something went wrong with that and there wasn't somebody to pay to come fix it, I'd be out of water. I wouldn't even know a good way of getting water without plumbing (particularly since I'm pretty sure the ground around here is toxic).

And I'm definitely not trying to say "Gosh, it sure is a good thing we have plumbing services and a/c repair!" I just think it's absurd how we've alienated ourselves so completely not only from our environment, but from our own homes--the very devices that we use to alienate ourselves from our environment. We've made the concept of "shelter" so complicated that we* don't even understand how it works--and that way there can be somebody who gets paid to understand it for us!

*I'm assuming I'm not the only one.

I feel like I should end this with some kind of a new insight, but I think that's all I've got.

Boorman!

As you know if you've been alertly reading BDR (as you should) or the comments section here, the most exciting world event in recent weeks is that we adopted a cat. We don't know if he has a name for himself, and wouldn't be able to pronounce it even if we did, so for convenience we're calling him Boorman (After the guy who directed the three best movies ever made, not after a Nazi who, you have to admit, spells his name differently, come on people. Oh, by the way, incredibly creepy sex towards the end of that Excalibur clip, be warned.). Here's the best picture taken of him yet, courtesy of the Baronette.



The rest of the pictures in this post are by me this morning, I'm not much for the photography, but hey.

He's about two years old. He's been in shelters for a least a year, which is hard for me to believe considering how beautiful he is, although his initial shyness may have put off any number of potential takers. I don't know what his life was like before he was in the shelters--I know he was found as a stray, but it seems unlikely that he would have been that way from the very beginning. He's a siamese mix--he's shaped just like a siamese (not the skinny little siamese, the bulkier kind, I don't know what the technical term is), but with patches of darker gray tiger stripes in various places on him and a short little raccoon tail, and he's absolutely beautiful. And huge. When he rolls over onto his back or his side and stretches out to his full length (which he spends about 70% of his waking time doing), he's gotta be at least three feet long. I haven't quite managed to get a picture of that, but this is close (though of course you've got nothing for scale there, but whatever):



The Baronette has had cats for most of her life, but this is my first pet outside of the occasional fish in my childhood. I knew it would be intense, but I wasn't prepared for this. I've loved individual humans before, and I've loved animals in general, and I've even been really good friends with individual animals before, but I've never loved an individual animal before, and it's like nothing else. The past couple of weeks have been a wonderful emotional rollercoaster, especially because like so many cats do he had a hard time adjusting to new surroundings and new people at first. He's still often skittish, but for about a week now he's been coming out from his hiding spot behind the couch more and more, and he's getting better all the time; every day he conquers another of his fears (one day he hangs out with us in the kitchen while we're making dinner, the next day he curls up next to us on the couch and falls asleep). Every time he does, my heart explodes. Sometimes it's incredibly, shockingly difficult: a few nights ago I was in tears because after a few days of being very friendly to me he suddenly seemed like he hated me, while being perfectly fine with the Baronette; it wasn't that I was jealous--if he had been scared of both of us I could have written it off as just a day's backslide, but that he was still into her made me wonder if he had just decided to dislike me, specifically. The next morning, I was in my bedroom, saw him sitting in the living room; I beckoned to him and he came to me from that distance for the very first time. We've been friends ever since.



He still has a long way to go to be truly comfortable and happy here, but he's gonna make it, and I think sooner rather than later. He's a total purr machine and extraordinarily affectionate; he's the type to head-butt your hand if you put it near him, and he rolls over for belly rubs at the drop of a hat. For the most part he hasn't been very talkative, but as I was composing this post he started screeching at me to come keep him company and relieve his anxiety at some of the goddamn eternal deafening yardwork that is the bane of his existence and mine. After a while of me petting him he started to feel better, and now he's just staring, fascinated, into the mirror.

Getting this out of the way

I finally get back to posting again, and right away they go and do this. I'm taking it personally.

Blurgnut

Posting will probably be light for the next few days with the likely exception of more quote-filled posts, because I've been too sick to do much more than read. And there's so much I want to write about! Hopefully I'll get some writing in soon, but in the meantime, I just wanted to get some complaining in.

In other news, Clifford D. Simak's A Choice of Gods is fantastic. It's like if Derrick Jensen and Stanislaw Lem had a deeply gentle baby.

Quick question

I'm planning on making my first attempt at Pynchon soon, one or two books from now. When given a body of work I'm largely unfamiliar with and faced with a question of "where to start," I usually either approach randomly or chronologically. For those of you with familiarity, is starting chronologically, with V., advisable? Or should I begin elsewhere?

Automatic Writing

New Fabrik song, "Automatic Writing," is up on our Bandcamp page, for free streaming and/or downloading.

Things I have not been following and, knowing me, will probably not start at this point

1. The fucking State of the Union. I'm more than OK with this. The rest of this list I need to remedy.

2. The Georgia prison strike. Have not seen anything about it in a while. I assume it's over by now, but what happened afterwards?

3. Tunisia and Egypt. Seems like people are being incredible, though!

4. The Palestine Papers.

5. Haiti. Some crazy-ass shit going down there.

Vive le weekend

ms_xeno says my writing on work partially inspired this fucking virtuoso rant, and if that is true, I'm so simultaneously proud and humbled that I'm probably going to be ripped to pieces by my emotions. Read it, read it.

Caved/Vexed

The Baronette and I make music together (and with occasional friends, though not this time) under the name Fabrik. We've just uploaded two new (related) tracks, "Caved" and "Vexed," to our Bandcamp page. If you're interested, you can listen to them (and six others) here.

WHO LOOKS AT THIS AND THINKS IT'S NEWS?!?!?!

• How to ring in the new year with apps
• No pardon for Billy the Kid
• Ticker: New Palin DVDs revealed
• John Mellencamp splits with wife
• Kathy Griffin: queen of dropping the ball
• Hangover remedies: what works?
• Town rings in new year with giant bug
• Bring in the new year happy and single
• Where the stars will be as 2011 dawns
• Resolution no. 1: Lose weight

I know it's, like, a holiday, but this is all on the front page, simultaneously. And it's not every ridiculous thing that's on that front page. I mean, does this fool anyone?

(Thanks to the Baronette, who is masochisticbrave enough to look at CNN regularly, for pointing this ludicrousness out to me.)

Happy New Year, everyone. Thanks especially to everyone involved in the recent wave of ridiculously nice things being said about me, to me, in comments. I almost feel bad having people say such nice things while this blog lies semi-fallow in shitty music reviews and images of CNN's front page. The new year will bring with it a return to more of the hard-hitting analysis that has made me so famous, respected, and beloved.

And now, to get smashed.

Takin' a Christmassy break

In the meantime, some more music.

Satie, because everyone's been doing it recently:


Beefheart, because I miss him, and because incredible and indispensable as his harsher stuff is I think his pop is severely underrated:


Boards of Canada, because I'm always in the mood for Boards of Canada:


And John Lennon, because this is, utterly and completely sincerely, the most magical song I have ever heard:


Consider these my Christmas carols. Back soon.

Bleggalgazing

(Post title just for BDR's benefit.)

So, a few things.

1. I thought I would have time for a substantial post today, but I don't. And no one would read it today, anyway. So it's gonna wait.

2. It's gonna wait until Monday at least. The Baronette has already departed and I tomorrow am departing for the annual ritual sacrifice with pie (don't ask me to explain the hat), so, yeah, have a nice time everybody.

3. Sorry I've been neglecting comments. Especially since they've been really good recently. What with all the good parts of the internet being blocked at work and me busily being content at home after work, my blogging time has reduced recently. I'm sure soon I'll become accustomed to contentness and will work out a new routine. For now, if I don't respond to your comments--sorry! It's very interesting! And, since it's impossible to say something sincere on the internet without sounding sarcastic, please be assured that I mean that. I haven't seen a comment I wasn't interested in in a good long while, with the exception of spam.

4. Speaking of spam. There's obviously been a lot of it lately (some of it has been hilarious enough that if I could just strip out the link without deleting the comment entirely I would have left them). Coincidentally or not, blogger just instituted automatic spam filtering. I have no idea how well it's going to work. I'm gonna be checking the filter, but I'm not always diligent about that kind of thing. So, if you leave a comment and it gets trapped as spam, email me and I'll get it out as soon as possible. Also, if you leave a comment and then later find it's gone, it's likely I marked it as spam by accident (because I'm a ditz); if that happens, likewise email me and I'll rectify the situation.

But not right now! I'm off. See y'all later. Kill an injun for me.

Two creepy things

1. The Catholic church near my house that frequently plays "God Bless America" on its bells. I believe no explanation of why this is creepy is required.

2. Subway. Possibly the creepiest of all fast food restaurants. I was forced into a situation today where I had to eat some. I ate half of the smaller size of a veggie sub on wheat, with no oil or mayonnaise or dressing or anything, and my stomach felt like shit for hours afterwards. A bunch of vegetables on bread upset my stomach. Something is seriously wrong with this food. Also, what the fuck is that smell? It's like nothing else in or out of nature and it is gross. And lingering.

On another note, I should really stop saying that some upcoming post is going to be up soon, because it just guarantees that it won't be. So, news from the corporate world and other posting to continue, probably, sometime.

Defensive boredom

Following up, in a way, on this post about behavioral conditioning.

My several regular readers are all, I'm sure, painfully aware that most people, probably many of them and certainly myself included, have a tendency to keep their personal lives pretty boring--by which I mean unfulfilling, without nearly enough self-development for anything like satisfaction--unless they exert significant, concerted effort in the other direction.

I still think that the conditioning I was talking about in the prior post plays a huge role, and that consciously working to undo that conditioning is vitally important. In addition to it, though, there's another factor that may be pretty obvious but which only just occurred to me. I have no idea if it's new to anyone else, probably not, but it's a new thought to me.

What if we keep our lives bland in part because actually having a rich fulfilling life makes work even more intolerable? What if having an interesting life makes the boredom at work impossible to take, and that's why we go home from our boring jobs to our boring families and watch boring TV and eat boring prefab food and go to sleep to have boring dreams before waking up and going back to the boredom? All the while we could be changing any or all of these facets of our lives to make them less boring, but for the most part we don't.

Not to brag, but my life recently has been becoming more and more fulfilling, more and more of a joy to live, which is pretty new for me. You should try it! But I warn you, it can be really hard--harder even than it is already--to be at work while thinking about what your life consists of elsewhere, once your life starts consisting of something.

I don't think it's something anybody does consciously. It's not so much that anybody makes their life boring so as to be better able to handle work, it's that our societal focus on the importance of work makes us eager to accept anything we're given that will make work less unpleasant, and then here's all these things offering us boring lives... and this makes them easier to accept.