Perspective II

I recently read the novel Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe (a longer review is forthcoming), only to find myself unsettled, a little, by some of my reactions to the first part of it. It tells the story of a transitional time in west African tribal culture near the end of the 19th century. It had survived more or less intact from the days of the transatlantic slave trade (or at least the communities in the novel had), but was now facing cultural imperialism by the British. Achebe presents tribal life with hardly any explicit moralizing (one reason it's such a powerful little book), and as he got into Igbo life, my mind kept rebelling--what an unsatisfying way to live! Not, I mean, in terms of abstracts--in those areas, the Igbo peoples had the Europeans squarely beat, even in terms of whitey's own stated secular values. The tribal organization that Achebe describes put modern notions of democracy and egalitarianism to shame. The villages weren't ruled by kings or caste, and titles are awarded through accomplishment and are more tokens of respect than actual authority. The closest thing they had to government were priests (who advised on superstitions), and occasional meetings among decision-making elders. It's presented in the book as ideal a non-authoritarian society as humans have yet produced, ruled for a thousand years by traditions rather than by people. Nor does Achebe communicate that these folks lacked intellectual or emotional sophistication. The book itself, though parable-like, is a walk through that very landscape.

Nope, I was thinking more shallowly in terms of the habitual western quality of life. The Igbo villagers could expect a lifetime of toil, of violent superstitions (infanticide, circumcision, threat of exile, conflict with other tribes), and believing things that are tragically untrue. Their diet sucked--yams are on the high labor and low nutrient side for a staple crop--and outside of domestic labor, they don't have a fuck of a lot to do. Women, like in many cultures, could look forward to lives of drudgery, sexual obligation, and the occupation of lesser social spheres. It's almost enough to make you understand missionary zeal. Those poor bastards live in dirt huts!

The Christian missionaries that sailed up the Niger River no doubt had the best intentions, but they brought their own corruptions, including, as Achebe states it, a government too. The moral argument for the new Christian faith varied greatly with the missionaries who made it, and Achebe appears to harbor some sympathy (as I do) for those inspired to great humanity through faith, and to acknowledge some universality of all belief. The British that came to semi-fictional Umuofia brought in a religion that accepted society's rejects, and although it won converts by refuting local gods through empiricism, it still was a faith (and this is the very definition of faith) that was apart from available evidence. (It's just that Christianity by then had learned to scope itself outside worldly cause and effect.) History tells us that the Igbo would soon fall for Christianity in huge numbers, but was it an improvement? Hard to really say.

You'll have to forgive me here. I've been wrestling with a gigantic post for some time, about 20% of which (the part about life expectancy) came out a couple years ago in one big installment that was boring enough to scare me straight, and yet here I am again, about to liberate another chunk of it. It's trying to address a paradox of modern times: the world has improved, right? But human nature has remained the same.

Improved for whom, you might first ask? And by what measure? And for how long? The global metric I prefer is, more or less, better lives for more people, sustainable for longer—these are things that morally justify our social nature. What else is there, really?

Technology and organization let us achieve more spectacular evil, but they also seem to palliate some burdens of living. In my past blatherings, I've attributed the general condition of the species to population density, resource availability, and the level (or manner) of technological development (for which "improvement" isn't linear, or a given). Modern America may net a better score than the colonial powers of the late nineteenth century, a hideously overrated time if there ever was one. Igbo social taboos arguably existed to accommodate high-impact slash and burn agriculture and to manage a sustainable population (even amidst horrifying infant mortality). However, at least to hear Chinua Achebe describe it, they avoided the iron rule of oligarchy better than most societies (although maybe tell that one to the women), and offered a simple and satisfying life. Could the more egalitarian parts of Igbo tribal culture really survive with modern scientific inquiry, population level, and global communications?

If I had to define "standard of living," I would put in terms of how difficult it is to do the stuff that we want to do. If we have few impediments to performing those things that our minds suggest are fulfilling and feasible (travel, eat, surround ourselves with beauty, enter and exit places freely, accomplish entertaining tasks), then our standard of living is high. If, however, we can afford few of the comforts we can conceive, then it's not so high; if we can't get our hands on the necessities of life (nutritous food, sanitation, optimum health), then things are officially squalid. If we're looking across centuries or across cultures, I'd take a normalized standard of living as a measure of, given the known options and preferences, how much of it a can body hope to enjoy.

As an economic term, it normally refers to, more or less, how much stuff we have. GDP per capita is a measure that is often connected to standard of living, and it's imperfect for the various ways that Wikipedia describes. [If you must go that route, I think energy consumption is probably a better scorecard than currency. Kilowatt hours describe how much we actually do per capita, not like these things aren't correlated.] By this measure, standard of living suffers from inevitable fallacies of small or large numbers; when we are measuring our happiness in stuff, there are rapidly diminishing returns at play. Attainment matters immensely when we have next to nothing, but there's also some threshold at which we don't--or shouldn't--experience a greatly increased standard of living due to additional television inches, or housing square feet, or asset valuation. And of course we're about due for a horrifying lesson in the environmental consequences of overconsumption as well.

In a way, standard of living is always subjective, and based on what we think is possible, that in turn increases with existing understanding, scientific knowledge, and social precedent. Innovations eventually become necessities because we know that they are available. Medical care, for example, wasn't a necessity back in the barbarous days of medieval barbering, but now that medicine is sufficiently advanced to improve health more than damage it, it has become an important component in the equation, as reasonable to expect as shit-free drinking water, which is to say, because we know better. That's not to say that people wouldn't already imagine a better life without cholera (or cancer, or oppression, or aging, or managers, or the aristocracy, or…), but it's another thing entirely to believe existence is without them is attainable. What did the Igbo people think of infant mortality? They imagined life without it, and believed (falsely), that they could reduce it drastically through superstition. Did that wrong belief further reduce their standard of living? (I'd say yes.) Would they have been happier with improved medicine? (Probably if it didn't come with the British district commissioner. It's not so clear the British could have provided it in 1900 either, mind you.) Would a people in possession of improved medicine be wrong to withhold such information (probably), and is it hopeless paternalistic to intervene with it, assuming without nuance what another group of people can and can't imagine, and what they do or don't value? Or, for that matter, is it hopelessly paternalistic to assume that we understand very well what we think we know now? (Please, let's take a moment to laugh at the Victorians again.) Anthropologists must make for terrific basket cases.

Qualitative changes exist though, differences in kind, not number, that really do improve the game at a basic level. Incremental technical innovations can be oversold, but there are a few that really did change the human experience: agriculture, air travel, telephones, washing machines, that sort of thing. It's grown, and increasing the options for human happiness might be a good argument for increasing accurate knowledge in general. Better to devote energy to understanding how electricity works than to appease the proper gods, right? But there's more too. A counterargument is that technical progress has always increased the options for human misery as well. Another is that it rules out simpler, more isolated options.

Mostly we Americans accept obligations for all of the other things, continuing to do so even as productivity (measured per unit American anyway) increases. There is an ideal where productivity shoots to infinity (zero man-hours to make all the shit we feel we need), in which people would at least not want for things, feeling free to waste their days wreaking their philosophical havoc. Let's posit infinite energy, and look at fun literary experiments from Player Piano (suggesting it's deeply unfulfilling to violate our natures like that) to The Diamond Age (or that we'll find other ways to ensure inequality) to Steel Beach (or maybe find new ways to be a bunch of useless gadflies, so long as we can prevent our nearly omniscient helper from being too much like us) to The Cassini Division (when the means of production is trivial, Communism will finally work). I love reading this kind of stuff.

Modern America, Europe, Japan, all look great in terms of standard of living, at least if you take the self-affirming view that those regions tend to, and exclude people who don't fit the story. Here in modern America, a young black man was killed--a sadly unremarkable fact in itself--last week in a manner that managed to highlight, even in our cynical times, a class of people that half of this allegedly Enlightened country would still prefer to exile. (There's little doubt that the arrest, investigation, and the interpretation of "self-defense" would have been different had Mr. Martin been white.) A small wealthy group consolidates its power at the expense of most of the rest of us, fighting hard to define obligations which preserve their financial wealth, and dismantle any state mechanisms that share the wealth. And even the reasonably well-off waste their lives unhappily in front of a computer instead of in front of a hoe. As well, the U.S. is doing its level best to recreate the British experience in Afghanistan, inspired as much (and as little) by revulsion at their backward religion as the colonial British were. Even our staple crop, maize (which Igbo people also grew at the time of the novel), is another nutritionally inferior one, no matter how much we can creepily over-engineer the stuff. Our own times tend to overestimate themselves.

Happiness, satisfaction, contentment--these things are what really matter. Forming gigantic social groups may have allowed the technological development that has improved our chances of finding these things. On the other hand, advanced civilization also takes happiness away just fine.

The Future Stinks

I don't wish to alarm you, but I believe I've uncovered a massive conspiracy to change the very substance of the future, and it's going on right under our noses. Not just the path of the future, but the substance and savor of it, the very chemistry of our air. Their agents have been subtly tagging the world for decades, and I can only believe that their goal is the chemical control of our psychology (possibly working synergistically with fluoridated water), probably for engineered complacency. I mean, no one knows who Mr. Clean really is, but the signs of his agenda are there in plain sight. I bought some of his eponymous product last month, and it says right on the cover that he's now in league with "Gain," which you may have long assumed, like I did, was nothing more than a second-tier laundry product, but I now realize is a secret organization dedicated to remaking the world in its own stench. The Gain mafia is everywhere, laying the moon landings over with an artificial miasma, freshening up suspicious suicides, laying a scented cloud over the ruins of downtown Manhattan.

I bought some of the stuff for an experiment, what has so far passed for science in the new job, a quickie study to acquaint the ("senior scientist") noob over here with some of the materials and tests. It pitted me against the agents of Gain in a small enclosed room, and I had no chance over it. I left dizzy, sore-throated, and ready to do what they told me. (Gain has taken over air fresheners too, and there was a can of next to the toilet when I got home.) I've noticed it in other name-brand (not-Gain) laundry detergents too, and the smell of "clean" has clearly changed since I last remember accidentally slipping into the world of name-brand home scents. There's something more thin and acridly (instead of sweet and cloyingly) floral about it. More hops going on, and less lilac. More raw, wet wood and less sun-warmed dead plant matter. And yet even if it's considered on that spectrum, it's not any of those things, a creature entirely of its own that is far more revolting than any natural aroma I can pick out. It's a product (or at least a formulation) that's the vogue of the American chemical industry as it exists in 2012, and not in some other remembered time, and not anything very real.

It's well understood that characteristic smells are strongly associated with memory, and I can close my eyes and recreate, say, what my grandparents' houses smelled like. [For me, it's something that I tend to get more with places than stunning events (but there are a few there too).] The human tendency to do so is, I assume, the motivation of associating branded products with characteristic smells (and this Gain shit is extra nasty) in the first place, with teams of engineers and marketing pukes toiling to tie your sense of "clean" with their shitty prouct, with the product landscape evolvoing as they forever seek to differentiate themselves in the existing perfumatory space. But if stale beer and musty fruit and ancient house unfailingly makes me think "college!" such individualized reactions shouldn't be confused with collective ones. The interior of your first car is like the weather of scent memory, while the Gain mafia is trying to shift the olfactory climate. The fuckers.

Sometimes I try and imagine what the world smelled like before I lived in it. It must have gotten bad in crowded environments. I have the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as redolent with horseshit, tobacco, coal smoke, rot, and unwashed human ass. What was human company like when smokers munched cloves to cover themselves up, and before people believed in halitosis? It sounds appalling, especially as the decades wore on and the cities got crowded, and flushed of any plant odors at all. I was reading recently, how the misguided Gilded Age public moralists would roll through the New York slums and, based on their primitive understanding of hygiene and health, would spray entire neighborhoods down with carbolic acid. It's a chemical that comes up in the literature of that time, but I don't really know what carbolic acid smells like, and struggle to imagine what it's like to have the whole street reeking of it. And yet, I find some comfort in the antiseptic smell of hypochlorite bleach, I like the aroma of iodine, and ammonia doesn't offend me too much either.

The smell of the present, with its disturbingly tailored chemicals, from Gain, to Axe body wash, to McDonalds' propriety French fry reek, will look barbaric by future standards too, whatever standard they reach by then. It's barbaric even to my memories of the recent past.

Update (a week later): I didn't realize that carbolic acid is the same chemical as phenol. I know that one pretty well: it's vile, burny, stinky, and toxic. (Fuck you, the Gilded Age, buncha sickos.) It was a scent memory that tipped me off, too. I was working with the stuff yesterday, and realized it smelled like the "cow ointment" the old farmer up the street from my parents used to use, and I was led to wonder if it was the same stuff.

Review: The Ophiuchi Hotline, by John Varley

The Ophiuchi Hotline is one of John Varley's "Eight Worlds" novels, which share a common setting in which humanity has been exiled from earth to populate (gradually, and with difficulty) the moon and surrounding planets. The novels and shorts tend to focus on related themes: the meaning of life when it is indefinite; the meaning of sexuality when the body becomes easily reconfigurable; psychological exploration when boundaries of brain and body are expanded; of species survival in a hostile world; of the relationship between culture and the individual. Varley consistently does a difficult thing very well: creating social thought experiments in a society that is convincingly complex, with only the necessary minimum of sf kludges, and comprised of people who act like people, and he does it with interest and humor, with a real joy in the details, pointing out weird but sympathetic variations on human behavior. He's a bit less good at creating a setting which is consistent among the various stories, and even though the backstory and themes are very similar, The Ophiuchi Hotline has some big issues of chronology and emphasis with Steel Beach and the other books he wrote in the nineties to make the meaning very different, but maybe given the long intermission he took in writing, we can consider the later ones sort of a reprise.

It's a few centuries after human technology (and terrestrial humanity, very nearly, as a consequence) has been eradicated from the home planet. The marginal Lunar settlement was able to survive for awhile, but things only really started moving forward for the species when they were able to intercept and decode a broadcast, apparently from a good 70 light years out, beaming out endless technical information to get the hairless apes up to speed. This novel, quite unlike the others (in fact, I think the hotline isn't a feature of any of the other stories at all), puts a focus on the various extrasolar denizens of the universe, a brief light on what they're like, and what they want. The invaders, never observed but in this one, are cetacean-like species, incomprehensible consciousnesses that perceive the universe in some fundamentally different ways, endemic to gas-giant planets (including Jupiter), and the motive for wiping out people was sympathy for their ocean-dwelling cousins. The broadcasters of the hotline are different kinds of beings, and the mechanics of the plot are driven by a sudden change in the message: after 400 years of free information that got the last shreds of humanity to thrive across the solar system, they are now presenting us with the bill. I won't spoil the resolution very much, except to say that it kind of maps an ecology of life and culture in the broader universe, but not in a very resolute way, and it's not as satisfying as in the usual Eight Worlds story, where the invaders are mostly considered a fait accompli, and humanity is left to be its own worst enemy.

The plot itself is plenty people-centric. We're introduced to convicted felon Lilo, a scientific pioneer whose research has run afoul of the few hard and fast rules of the Eight Worlds society. The science of cloning and memory recording is a serviceable way to extend life of the individual, but the society has strict population rules, and even when everything goes, where outward morphology and internal plumbing hardly matters anymore, people remain squeamish about the philosophical consequences of duplicating yourself, and of losing whatever genetic heritage makes us uniquely human. Normally, death of the body gets you reset at an earlier point, from whenever you were last recorded, more or less like a video game death. For her crimes, however, Lilo faces a grim sentence, execution of her body and erasure of the record of her mind, and the opening of the book, presents the first of her desperate evasions of fate. The first dodge is sacrificing an illegal (fully sentient, fully Lilo) clone in her place, and it starts the exploration of lives bifurcated, survived, and lost. Outside the law now, she's conscripted to join a team of similarly shanghaied individuals to work on (it turns out) the mystery of the changed message from mankind's benefactors. The trip's a compelling one, and it presents plenty of details to explore a strange, but familiar world.

For someone who's presented with a strong sense of individuality and will to live, there must end up six or seven Lilos by the end, each, convincingly a little bit different in character (or differently influenced by her surroundings). It's a little bit cruel of the author to do this to her, and it makes for a disjointed reading experience as well, making it hard to connect to the character or the story, especially as she changes subtly. An intentional irony, and Varley emphasizes it further here and there by jumping the style: sometimes a point of view is presented as a journal entry, and occasionally as a deposition (but these don't distinguish a different Lilo, as is only very clear near the end). Some Lilos meet the respective interfering cultures, and the kaleidoscope of her character is also meant, in part, to tie in to the unexplainable way that Varley tells us the invaders experience time. For the confusing style, and for the more outward-looking (and, strangely enough, consequently weaker) emphasis, and for the unsatisfying resolution, I rate The Ophiuchi Hotline lower than most of the stories I've read in this setting, but it's still a thought-provoking read.

The Devils We Know

It gets to the point of cliché to observe this, but through every new election cycle I've tried to stay awake for, it's that much more obvious that we're meant to judge our candidates by some kind of cultural shorthand more than by their positions and views, or the historical evidence they present for pursuing them. [Would we have a beer with this guy is the dumb shorthand, but it's not like I'm a special flower, above all this. For me, I found that George Bush's dumbfuck fake cowboy routine made my teeth grind, but I was occasionally susceptible to more mature poses, such as Al Gore's or Barack Obama's ability to patiently speak in complete sentences containing polysyllabic words. It's not less an act, it's just one that is meant to appeal to knowledge-worker tools such as myself.] Expectations are justifiably low. The human concerns that most desperately require collective action (such as looming environmental crises, resource management plans, egregious class inequality, and the well-being of the non-elect) require a serious disruption of the existing power structure to achieve, and I have a cynic's faith that that it won't be achieved using that structure. Which isn't to say that any of these guys, when elected, won't turn that machine toward making things actively worse for the species. That cynic in me expects new and expanded wars as a matter of course, but the boundaries of the in-group, who is included and who isn't, is given as a sort of wildcard, and that's the place where our votes may actually help. I don't think the dominant ideologies will push any other big issue forward much, but if some of our would-be leaders really believe in turning back the clock on equality, then that's all too feasible.

Which brings us to Rick Santorum. There is much about that vindictive cracker that seriously bugs me, but I can't tell if he's only offering cues to a tribe that's not mine, or if he does in fact contain an extra level of evil in his tortured soul. It's not like he lacks for insincerity, and the anti-intellectualism isn't exactly unusual from what you get from team Republican, but when it comes to religious types with a taste for power, it can be hard to tell where the scam ends and the conviction begins. In the puckered little sphincter of Rick Santorum's mind, any belief is automatically justified because he sees himself as a godly sort. Last week's soundbite about the theology of radical environmentalism ("not real theology" says Rick) gets me to the core, as if any kind of theology should dictate environmental policy. Mixing religion and politics buys a super-secret mystical threat to underline every statement and action he may pursue: if you don't support this guy, if you believe anything other than what he says, then you don't just disagree with him, you sin. When it comes to Santorum, the froth doesn't even stop at vague righteousness. He's doubled down on the usual evangelical language, named names, called out God and the Adversary to perch on his shoulders and look down at you. Maybe it's the natural progression of all this "under god" shuck and jive, the crumbling wall between church and state has let through a refutation-proof justification for anything and everything when someone professes loudly enough that they have the big bearded dude on their side. Scary to consider Santorum a would-be theocrat.

Here's Rick back in 2008 (via, which got it from the Drudge report, of all places, which I ain't gonna link). Tremble in holy fear:

“While we all see all this as a great political conflict in warfare between the Obama camp and the McCain camp and culture wars, what Bishop Aquila put his finger on and what I think, I suspect those of you who are here understand, this is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war.”

“And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country, the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost 200 years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.”

The thing is, I know this schtick. And I am a little resentful for the experience. I'm a little surprised to find it rendered as a Catholic thing: Guilt? The (negotiable) threat of hell? Those as Catholic menaces I know of, but Satan walking among us, tricking the naïve out of their souls, that's a lot more like the televangelist grift I grew up with. It was the early eighties, okay? And there was an active hysteria about corruption of young minds through rock music,* which took some purchase among the minds of worried church parents, and those lessons filtered down to us kids, about how Satan might be invited into our lives unknowingly: how participating in innocent-seeming secular rituals might be a subversive form of witchcraft; how the wrong music might subconsciously turn us to the dark side, through overt irreverence or secret backwards messages; how we might mutter the wrong figure of speech and actually end up selling our precious soul for a donut.

And y'know, it's funny. Although you'd routinely pray for sick people and so on, the best that the personal relationship with Jesus was really supposed to afford you was a sort of meditative serenity, a knowing of some kind. It was implied that Satan, meanwhile, if you gave up enough, could actually accomplish stuff in the material world. It was an insidious superstition to a little ambivalent type like me,** considering that (a) I had none of the private epiphanies that were supposed to be the route to Christian salvation, and (b) I did occasionally, more or less, accomplish stuff--did every step forward in my life come at the expense of some portion of my soul? Neither of these conditionals coule be disproven. There was no promise of miracles if I did believe, and no way was I going to take the gamble of dealing with the big red feller on purpose (although an attempt would have no doubt been instructively futile). Effects to my invisible soul from these purported bargains were ineffable by definition, and I could always fail any test with insufficient faith, which for me, was inevitable.

The most insightful thinking on obsessive-compulsive disorders that I've read (or heard about--I think it was an NPR segment actually) is that they are essentially a bodily expression of mental anxiety, and not centered on beliefs that compulsive actions will influence things. That seems like a correct understanding to me. It makes sense that concern about your kids' rebellion could get you obsessively overturning rocks to find a reinvented Satan living under them. And it made sense that an 11- or 12-year-old could find mortality such a cosmic affront that he'd resort to superstition, especially when the nicer adults I knew had bought in and sold it to me as pure truth.

As things scale up, I am undecided on whether puissant pissants such as the guiding stars of the Christian Coalition, or Rick Santorum, are merely in the business of transferring their doubt and superstition to the public because they're in a position to do so, like parents worried about their kids' music habits or if they are exploiting the religious fears of the little peaople. Are they cynically assuaging the legions of OCD-style moralists out in the world to make them follow, or are they simply speaking the language of shared anxieties? Maybe paternalism is just a viable route to power, and god knows it's been tried. I am not sure those things are exclusive, or whether the reasons matter. It'll be hell on those of us who have grown up.


*I actually must have been around 14 or 15 for this anecdote (my daughter's age!), which tells me that the desire for belief went on longer than I prefer to think. I can place it because my brother had a Guns n Roses T-shirt on, skulls on a cross, which puts him at about 13 and the year about 1987. The poor kid ended up being the perfect person from the crowd to draw out and shame. The lecture was in a church basement somewhere, and we were brought there out of a very sincere concern that some kids from the youth group didn't quite bring themselves to renounce Led Zeppelin, etc., who were, we were told, indeed proselytizing on behalf of Satan himself. Until this point, the faithful people that I'd encountered had been very honest and well-meaning, good examples, and this con artist might have been the first person in my consciousness to finally cross the streams of Selling Something and Good People, and it was a big turning point. To this day, the motivations puzzle me, but most likely, it was a paid seminar, and this fuckhead was the spiritual equivalent of the unaccountable consultant uselessly instructing corporate drones to think outside the box or some other such happy horseshit.

I remember that the course opened with a quote (from Nietzsche?), that I've since been unable to find. Something about how if you wish to control a people, you first must control their music. It's an aphorism that I'd in fact prefer to locate, because like much that's used to mislead, there's an element of truth to it. Revolutions and movements have all had their theme songs, as do nations, and the twentieth century tapped some of that stuff intentionally. It's an interesting theme to riff on, but there was, to the point of the talk, no devil that was whispering in the ears of rock and roll musicians to further his nefarious ends. This guy played us kids on a great big false syllogism.

Not to say there wasn't explicitly anti-Christian music out there at the time, not that I'd expect any promoter putting himself on the side of Jesus H. Christ to address very honestly the various reason that it was written or would sell. The thing is, he drew that kind of iconography down so far as to include anyone who'd ponder spirituality at all, lumping in any reasonably honest disagreement or question or disillusionment, and, because no countervailing discourse could be tolerated, everything not on the overt God list got lumped in with Slayer. (Seriously, Hall and fucking Oates was one of the bands he tried to make us worry about.) Call it guilt by association maybe. Even the most negative stuff, my adult self realizes, was probably only ever meant ironically, or as sincere criticism. And what wasn't those things was most likely a marketing gimmick, those bands manipulating their audience's irreverence just as cynically as this guy who was peddling Christian angst. I love me a heartfelt dissent, but I tend to remain unimpressed with rebellion that's done without honesty or humor or artistry. Those fuckers are making a different buck, but they're grifters too.

At the end of the seminar, we were all asked to close our eyes. Everyone who's accepted Christ raise your hands. I wonder, as he counted, what he thought. Probably it was just gauging success of the lecture, how long could he keep up the racket. Maybe there was some personal satisfaction at conversion, thinking he had worked the audience, maybe turning them to what he saw as the good. My own eyes were shut tight, and I was trying hard, but not succeeding, to accept this line of crackpottery, almost certainly for the last time. I wonder how many of my peers kept 'em open. I wonder what they thought as they did, if they were wise enough to realize the crowd was getting played. I wonder who raised their hands.

**Even today, I tend to view the world with a great deal of ambivalence, coming to conclusions only after a very lengthy devil's advocacy (so to speak). Eventually, it gave way to a naturalist perspective, and I hope I've become the right sort of skeptic as a result. I had an ear for profundity as a kid too, a need to find deep meaning in existence, and I really wanted to believe in a higher order of things. In those days, Middle Earth was even more compelling than Christian salvation, and it's maybe a good thing no one was telling me that was real. I am fortunate that I had some good anti-authoritarian influences, but there was no one at that age to really show me how beauty and depth is compatible with empiricism, and I think it's kind of a shame that I didn't find any of that reading until much later.

Ilium

Like everything else imbued with human associations, geography is a funny thing: we have ways of sowing it with little landmines just in the course of living our life, nostalgic deathtraps that seem to grow in power the longer we ignore them, especially in those places that struggle to ever change. I had a trip to New York the other week, to the Saratoga Springs area, near which my current employers operate a mill. It is a stretch that is not by any means The City, but is also not upstate in a meaningful sense, and while New York has plenty of nowheres to find yourself in the middle of, it is close enough to a handful of somewheres to almost count. And there’s something additionally lonely in the nightlife of a tourist town off-season. Everything’s open, but no one’s there.

If you ever need to drive from Massachusetts to eastern New York, you can’t do better than to take the length of route 2. Even as a guy who resents every motherfucking minute of my life that I waste piloting a motor vehicle, I love this particular drive. It’ll take you up through the Berkshires, around the quasi-famous hairpin turn, descending into artsy Williamstown, and up again through mountains in New York. The vistas feel local and private, not open, made up of imposing tree-covered grades across which the road is compelled to switch back and forth in order to ascend, each turn opening up to find you in the thick of more wooded slopes. Where a view does open up on the peaks, it’s inevitably affixed with the quarter-century-old ruins of motels and kitsch shops, abandoned from a time when people did more budget sightseeing. I guess even the leaf-peepers can’t be arsed to go across that way, and something in that appeals to me. If I was in a field where I could make a living while avoiding people, then, if it wasn’t the Green or White mountains, or the Litchfield Hills, then I’d live in a place like this. It’s the trees and the hillls.

It’s a lovely way come back from the Saratoga area, especially in a solitary mood, but I couldn’t return along 2 without traversing the old minefields. I went to school in Troy NY, and while on one level I enjoyed it, and although it felt like one of the few life decisions I was able to make that was right, I also managed to plant a disproportionate number of depth charges there, and that town changes slowly enough to keep nostalgia alive, even if the university continues its quixotic effort to "improve." The trip took me right through the heart of memory, and I went so far as to stop at the student union to take a leak and hopefully steal a couple minutes of wireless access, but apparently the latter privilege only comes with a thirty thousand yearly subscription. Relieving myself is harder to prevent, I guess. The trip went badly, emotion-wise, dredging up regrets that I hardly knew I had in the day, and I am in a mind to take a big old piss on the place, instead of one discreetly within its borders, as if it bears some fault for how my life has gone.

In his books, Kurt Vonnegut often referred to the town of Ilium, a sort of Mecca of American innovation and urbanity that has evaded its actual namesake for at least a century. Real-life Ilium is that rare university town that suffers little of the prestige of the couple or three institutions within its borders. Up the river there’s the Schenectady where Proteus Steinmetz worked to define electrical engineering, where even now, GE still hasn’t outsourced its R&D headquarters. Down the river, there’s the goddamn capital. In between, you got a whole lot of depressing Trojanness, as if it were rebuilt, but only just barely, after the last time it burned down 150 years ago. Back on the Fray, I had a conversation a few years ago with a guy who went to RPI fifty years before I did. Troy was, he recalled, a shantytown then too, and it must have been quite a defiant one to suck so thoroughly in the middle of a technological hotbed in boom times, supplying it with engineers even. I mean, Wikipedia tells me that it was a prosperous town once, but that was over a century ago, sometime way back before Big Steel went to Pennsylvania. It’s been sliding inexorably since. It’s got to be why Vonnegut felt he had to code-name the place, to fictionalize the Capital District enough to write out its problem middle child.

Longtime readers of this blog will notice a recurring fascination I have with New England’s midlist factory towns, as I’ve lived or passed through them, trying to piece the cultural character based on its vintage industry. It seems like I always end up in or around one of them, and I give you the likes of Waterbury and Torrington CT (brass), Willimantic CT and Lowell MA (textiles), Leominster MA Naugatuck CT (polymers). They’ve all as good as left, the industries, and the cities are filled with a different selection of immigrants servicing the different economic niches that are available nowadays. They’re similar enough historically, ethnically, and geographically, and make for interesting compare and contrast exercises. Do the cultural differences come from the nature of the work? Or maybe it’s the titans that once governed it. I still can’t answer that question well. You find all these old mills still perched on their now-less-polluted riverbanks, anti-jewels set in pastoral velvet, monuments in smoke-scorched red brick (America is only so old) to more barbarously productive ages. The rivers were convenient as drains or raw materials or (depending on how far back you might go) power, but the surrounding areas stayed rural for a long time, and you can head out to the outskirts of any of these places, and find, even now, a couple farms that aren’t quite given over to burbclaves. The vogue for the factories themselves is to renovate them into designer lofts, and the attendant railroads have been dismantled for scrap and landscaping.

My immediate and lasting impression of Troy was as a mirror of Waterbury, which is more or less where I grew up. (In one of the suburbs, itself an old factory town. I am more familiar with the edges of Waterbury, where my grandparents lived.) And although they’d look pretty comparable in a slide-by-slide comparison of their greater and lesser parts, there’s something about Troy that makes it seem so much more fundamentally shabby and depressing, like it just stopped trying. (I mean, it does have the universities, which is an incredible point in its favor, and eastern New York is almost as nice as eastern Connecticut, but these assets don’t seem to buoy the place up.) Maybe a technical college town just invites weary cynicism, because after all, who’s more grouchy and depressed than your average engineer? Waterbury, if you read the local paper, supports some sort of vindictive, authoritarian pride of place, but at least it’s something. The area is churchier, which helps the architecture some, and it has a downtown stretch that you’d be tempted to stroll around. When you drive past Waterbury, you go past the hospital, the iconic brick clocktower, and then, across the river, the south end of town manifests as white houses popping up through the trees. Troy, on the other hand, crouches on the side of the Hudson like a surly pile of rubble, like a rusting hulk, sucking away your hopes before you even cross the bridge. Yes, the alma mater rises tastefully on the hill, a pearl on the midden, and for reasons of its own, it’s been dwarfing the iconic green copper roofs with a succession of 1970s-style brutalism and zippy 1950s-style sci-fi palaces. The town itself has some notoriety for its preserved 19th century buildings, but not, like these towns east of the Berkshires, in the form of big, imposing industrial cathedrals, and more of the closed-in and oppressive variety that recalls the squalid living in old New York City that you couldn’t escape even with great wealth. Troy is a shithole’s shithole.

Although I have to say that to this day, I have never known a place in Waterbury where I’d like to get a beer, and those little niches of mordant hospitality were my absolute favorite part of living in Ilium. The place wasn’t so far gone that there weren’t places of peace and humor if you needed them, and there’s something satisfying and personal about being one to get that. And sure, the outskirts got interesting in one or two directions. It often occurs to me that maybe I’m the reason the place made such a weird impression. God knows I’m better tuned to love/hate than to uncomplicated love. Fucking regret. Seriously.

Review: Jack of Kinrowan, by Charles De Lint

Jack of Kinrowan is an omnibus edition containing Jack the Giant-Killer and Drink Down the Moon. They’re urban fantasies set amid the greener corners of Ottawa, following the adventures of Jacky Rowan, who, along with a few other twentysomething types, weaves in and out of the parallel faerie dimension to face an assortment of its more unpleasant denizens, and nudge the fair folk from their habitual fecklessness in the pursuit of a quest or two. The plot of Jack the Giant-Killer is nearly revealed by the title: it has Jacky and her more pragmatic friend Kate barge rather recklessly into a serious political situation among the magical people, but they manage, with timely help, quick judgments, and an amazing dose of luck, to confront and prevail over the darker hordes. In Drink Down the Moon, Jacky and Kate, now promoted to official guardianship roles, come in late to assist against a new threat to the unaligned faeries of the Ottawan Elsewhere, which has already dragged in human musician Johnny Faw, and has robbed the wild sidhe of a leader for their life-sustaining full-moon wander.

So. As a personal bit of background, I recall Giant-Killer, getting some informal praise on the science fiction circles I lurked back in the early 90s, to the extent that I thought it might be worth reading at some point or other. The first of the two was published in 1987, at a time when urban fantasy was gelling into something of a sub-genre, but a good decade and a half before it took off deeply into teen fiction. Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks, for example, came out in the same year, and I read that one based on similar acclaim from that group; John Crowley’s Little Big, which is one of the most brilliantly endearing books ever, came out just a couple years before (and if it didn’t define the genre, then it should have retired it). Authors were still busy updating the world of fairytales to modern times, and reclaiming them for adult readers. Meanwhile, one of my real-life friends enjoys Charles de Lint, and for this reason alone, I am inclined to find out what’s good about these particular stories.

The de Lint stories are both quick and economical reads, and I take them as quality little escapes. They’re not especially heavy on inner psychological drama, but they offer just enough depth of character to make the people interesting, just enough personal challenge to get us on their side, just enough threat from the mages and goblins to worry about them making it out of it. Jacky’s had some bad luck with relationships, and we catch her feeling sorry for herself at the end of one, but her strength is credible enough, something that people with better judgment can readily see. It’s fun to put an independent woman in a fantasy quest role too, without ever once turning her into an action hero or giving her a savior complex. Johnny we find facing the recent loss of his grandfather and musical mentor, and uncovering the inherently tragic relationships the old man had in his life. The human characters are all young and single, and if their world-wide-open mindset, and the mild romantic subtext that doesn’t neglect to pair off the attractive people appropriately at the end, tends to be a little much for my old jaded self right now, then I’m at least assured that all the characters are pushing 50 here in 2012.

Although there is some necessary dissection of “the rules,” and a background of how the (even) fair(er) folk immigrated to North America, it doesn’t strive to the ponderous level of Big Idea. The magical characters remain true to their natures, but de Lint doesn’t make them inaccessibly mercurial and fey, or which are convenient for them. They think and reason like anyone else, and have made the concessions to modernity that they have to. Refreshingly, the humans react fairly understandably to discovering them. They doubt it’s real, but de Lint doesn’t take the conceit that the characters have somehow never read the same stuff that everyone has. They know their fairy stories as well as I do. I think de Lint’s aim, and his greatest success, is to capture the enthusiastic spirit of the old characters of the plucky beanstalk climber or the clever tailor and find who they’d be in a modern context. The characters act and react, make their decisions by thinking fast. It makes for a few enjoyable afternoons.

Review: Anathem, by Neal Stephenson

Anathem is a great illustration of how, even when every idea has already been played out, a great author can make it all look utterly new. It’s another story playing out the idea of traveling to an alternate reality, a what-if tale, a close companion of the nerdier genres, but it’s still been around long enough to become a well-embedded trope, one which you’d think (and this is the last time I’ll ever cite it, I swear) should have been killed dead in 1971, with a brilliant little short that illustrated how when all story outcomes are accessible, then none of them mean anything. Well, au contraire, mon frère. There are still great new ways to do it, and like everything else, it all comes down to execution, connections, and character. This is one of the nerdiest novels I’ve ever read, in fact, and it’s unreservedly entertaining as hell. Here, Stephenson applies some real thinking to speculations on the allowed trajectories of how one might traverse one what-if universe to the next, or how you a character might sample alternate versions of reality in advance of the dang wavefunction collapsing on him. He ties the ideas into some fairly legitimate interpretations of quantum mechanics, consciousness, physical cosmology, metafictional analysis, and, of all things, some kind of neo-Platonism in which our many worlds may additionally include ones of pure(r) ideas, because, hey man, number theory and plane geometry will still hold even when your fundamental constants get a slightly different roll of the polycosmic dice. Putting all those things together makes the many worlds interesting all over again.

And if this still doesn’t sound dorky enough for you, then consider that the setting is one such alternate reality in which academic types are customarily, by some three or four millennia of tradition (accounting for the violent vagaries of human nature at that), shut out from society in walled clockwork monastery/colleges (maths, as Stephenson calls them), forbidden from (much) high technology, and left to delve into purely intellectual human pursuits, chasing their tails around philosophies and famous thinkers which, as even this epistemologically limited reviewer will recognize, have rather direct traditional Earthican analogues (in context, Stephenson throws out a multiversal reason for that). And we’re put right in there. Within the walls, formal reasoning and edifying dialogue are the chief modes of expression. With that kind of background, and that kind of purpose, the story just doesn’t sound like it should be this fun, but it is.

Stephenson wisely chooses a younger set of acolytes to flesh it all out, which ends up being handy in lots of ways. It keeps the prose and dialogue from getting too abstract, for one thing, where Erasmas and the gang aren’t quite so far from the outside world to have forgotten it, and the setting is explored effectively as they compare and contrast the reality with their memories. In any case, Neal Stephenson is about the last guy to keep the language on some dry scholarly level, although he’s definitely someone I would expect to play around with what’s, here, basically grad-student style wit. The narration seems to get more colloquial as the novel passes, and I don’t know if it’s because I got used to all the proper names and clever alt-universe word fusions, because the characters interacted more outside the “concent,” or just because he fell back into a familiar American-style writing groove. The characters are good revealers of concepts too: it’s natural for young eggheads to be excited to expound goofily on their newly-attained knowledge, which gives all that philosophical info-dumping the fun vibe of the world’s most Socratic weed-baked dorm room. [It also no doubt lets Neal Stephenson cover his ass as a mere interested layperson. But then again, it seems that science fiction has to be really silly to get scientist readers to object, and the author here appears to be up on his metaphysics just fine.] And of course, they have the analytic tools to decode the conspiracy from scant evidence. One great scene has the acolytes using geometry and a pinhole camera. Centering the story on young learners also offers a few natural arcs to hang the story on: discovery of the external world (and then some), and we get a charming little coming of age aspect too, young goofballs falling in love. Mostly, we follow them along as they try to figure out what the hell is going on.

The novel also draws (and it’s no spoiler to reveal this) on the tradition of a science fiction first contact tale. There’s a ship floating in orbit, and it’s hard to spot from inside the tower, but the entirety of civilization is liable to go apeshit when the information gets out. It’s the meat of it all, it’s the device that drives the plot, but the ship and the aliens are almost anticlimactic when we finally get there. Okay, they come from a different cosmos and all—their matter is fundamentally different--but the (alien) people in there look like us. A character observes that they suffer such disappointingly banal shit as committee meetings, that more cultural variation is observed on their own planet, almost as if the author is taking a potshot at some of the more common genre flaws. It sounds like ideas transposed by some primeval geezers of science fiction into a mediocre short story, or maybe an episode of Star Trek. It’s more philosophically oriented than you’d normally get from this sort of thing, but it almost could be. Instead, it’s a wonderful book. It’s all in how you tell it.

Why I Have Trouble Following the Narrative of Current Events

"[T]he contents of the Book had been crafted and refined over many centuries to be nonsensical, maddening, and pointless[...] It was a maze without an exit, an equation that after weeks of toil reduced to 2=3. Much harder to memorize and to answer questions about were writings that almost but did not quite make sense; that had internal logic, but only up to a point. Such things cropped up naturally in the mathic world from time to time—after all, not everyone had what it took to be a Saunt. [...] [I]f [these writings] were found to be the right kind of awful, [they were] made even more so, and folded into later and more wicked editions of the Book. To complete your sentence and be granted permission to walk out of your cell, you had to master them just as thoroughly as, say, a student of quantum mechanics must know group theory. The punishment lay in knowing that you were putting all of that effort into letting a kind of intellectual poison inflitrate your brain to its very roots."

--from Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. [I am so loving this book so far.]

Oh, ain't I so smart and above it all. But then again, consider that I'm the guy who finds that following the bullshit narrative, even if it's just to complain about it, can still be more stimulating than the soul-crushing branch of science work where I landed myself. I mean, for god's sake, don't ask me anything about group theory.

Can Anyone Create Jobs? I'll Have To Go With "Yes."

Adam Davidson asks, Can Anyone Really Create Jobs? Now, normally I'd prefer to leave that sort of empty-headed both-sidesism right the hell alone, or at least to the better political writers out there, especially when it's, like, so two weeks ago, but sometimes when you actually make yourself pay attention to a minor irritation like that, next thing you know you've scratched your arm raw, and everywhere else feels itchy too. I note that (1) Adam Davidson is a known economics reporter, one of those ubiquitous NPR presences—presumably they pay him for this sort of thing, which is another fine reason not to send them your donations—and now here's a regular Times Magazine opinion gig wherein he professionally throws up his hands and fails to opine (when the thesis is "nope, can't do it" then remind me why I might consider reading subsequent entries); and (2) some otherwise smart Facebook friends recently congratulated themselves for "liking" this one, and venting out my polemical impulses where no one will actually read it is pretty much exactly why I have a blog. [All right, there's (3) this business of cleaning out my browser tabs while I find myself again able to focus on this sort of thing for awhile. Most of the other tabs are job postings awaiting replies, and this is a break from that. Maybe for fun, I'll try and guess how much government creation was involved in any of them.]

Read the article if you must, but this gist is Davidson observing that—or rather appealing to authority to discover that—neither the Chicago-school approach described as "do nothing" nor the Keynesian approach described as "spending a lot of money" (and only tax breaks or subsidies are feasible, he tells us) to "goad consumers into spending again" does anything. It takes him to the end of his first page to reach the point that the austerity moves of firing government employees in Britain did not improve private job growth, but did directly cause a bunch of losses when those people were suddenly let go. "Wait," you ask, "since the British government had, in fact, created all those government jobs, doesn't that mean that they can be created?" Yeah, well, don't ask me. I don't have a keen economic mind, either. You may further wonder about the simultaneous contentions that Americans can't do things people will pay them a living wage for but still need to indenture the hell out of themselves for more education to get such non-jobs.

Here's the thing. The U.S. currently already does invest a metric fuckton into job creation. It's not just the legions of deputy assistants and other bureaucrats that make up the government workforce. To point out the obvious, our military and defense contractors (including me, for a couple more weeks) are primo recipients of this, and it creates a need for high-dollar industries like lobbying, and low-dollar ones for things like food service and building maintenance pretty much by virtue of its existence. We have a huge program to hire research staff in various laboratories and through extensive grants. Given that the government is powerful enough that it can appropriate—or invent—money and just hire people to do stuff, there's no reason it has to be doing anything special. Commenters on Davidson's article (and on Facebook) note that the Roosevelt-era rural development programs are a bit outdated in modern times, but for fuck's sake, fix the rotten infrastructure, administer medical insurance, get some science on, or do all that teaching that Davidson is convinced we need. If we're doomed to a system big enough to waste so much enterprise on evilly blowing up our contrived enemies, is it too much to ask that it do something useful as well?

The other obvious rebuttal is that the market is a construct, and the government ostensibly has some power over its operating parameters. If the problem is that our delicate corporate persons can't possibly hire Americans at the rates they (the hirees) need to survive in this predatory economy, then the government has the putative power to make foreign (or immigrant) labor more expensive too. Raise some tarriffs, let the dollar fall, things like that.

The government isn't really interested in creating jobs though. The real problem—and let's just call it—is that the people who command the economy don't want to pay people to work, and furthermore don't want to pay the government to pay people to work.

All that's your standard liberal boilerplate, which has merit so far as it goes. As I face increasingly crappy job prospects of my own, I feel a growing urge to take it all a bit further. The above argument grants various assumptions that I don't at all feel like ceding at the moment. It takes as givens, for example, that money and debt are more or less real, as if they're system variables rather than some network of agreements and contracts that will tend to work out better for the people who have the better lawyers. If we turn once more to a black box way of thinking about the economy, then, again, the sum of all the things and services produced (and imported/exported) will get definitionally distributed among the people in it. To take an IOZan turn here, why the fuck does it have to be distributed according to "jobs" in the first place? I mean, sure, there's some ad hoc philosophical justification for this, amounting to a plausible intuition that we should get rewarded relative to our contribution, but hey, the Golden Rule's pretty intuitive too, and that individualist model becomes a little bit, you know, problematic, the second any one of us gets too old, sick, or dumb to contribute, or as technology-assisted productivity (as opposed to the more work/less pay kind) advances far enough down the Player Piano timeline to obviate so much ant labor.

Why the hell not just pass out what we make? There's no law of nature involved in this (and it's a bit horrifying to think that we're basing our economy on 18th and 19th century natural philosophy, which defies even anthropological evidence). It's our society, we can arrange it how the hell we want, right? Why does the idea of getting a benefit for not working blow our minds so much? Ed's got this right in that, well, it depends on what class of people we're talking about. If you already have cornered enough money, then getting more of it gets to be something of an entitlement. The truth is, distributing the economy according to jobs isn't just a somewhat arbitrary theoretical model, when it comes down to practice, it's already something of a polite fiction. Only some segments of the population are expected to work very hard for their money, which is a convenient story for the segments that don't. I mean, in a society where monster effort was what got things done, the guys who spend their days elbow-deep in toilet drains would be the ones raking in the gains.

Anyway, I also can't let myself neglect the point that both the Keynesians and the Chicagoland bullshitters suffer from alarming cornucopianism built right into their sets of axioms. I don't want to give him credit for this, but I suppose I agree with Davidson in that in the face of economic shrinkage forced by external pressures (you know, actual physics), the current economic will be that much more imperiled. Oh well, at least we invested for the future during the flush times.

Review: On Stranger Tides, by Tim Powers

[Yet again, apologies for such infrequent posting. Strange days.]

More astute cultural observers than myself will note that On Stranger Tides shares its title with a recently-released theme-park-ride-based crapfest of a seafarin' movie, which (to paraphrase an internet commenter who I'd happily credit if I could ever find again) pretty much rolled tape while Ian McShane and Geoffrey Rush talked like pirates for two and a half hours, and still managed to suck. I don't know how I failed to pick up on the connection with the novel, because I did see the movie (who could resist the marketing pitch: "it's not nearly as embarrassingly awful as the last one!"), and have since convinced myself that I remember experiencing a shimmer of hope or sadness when "inspired by the novel by Tim Powers" rolled across the opening credits. In hindsight, it probably explains what a reprint of a 1987-vintage, not-his-best publication was doing featured in the bookstore aisle.

Good thing the book and movie had nothing whatsoever in common. It didn't even rise to the level of "based on." Well, it borrowed almost nothing. I guess Disney managed to appropriate themselves a catchy title with those rights, and to co-opt any competitors who might have otherwise been tempted to generate a screenplay about pirates, on the Caribbean, from something that was actually worth reading. And the book does have both Blackbeard and the Fountain of Youth in it, but that's thankfully the extent of things.

That alone is a funny thing. If you were to pile variously unrelated local legends (Blackbeard, voodoo, and that elusive fountain) into a summertime concession draw, or into a television show, or into anything, you know, popular, then I'd consider it as axiomatically terrible as the latest uninspired vampire mashup to land in the "paranormal romance" section. [That's both unfair and sort of true. The whole fantasy genre has been simmering various familiar stews for generations now, and that doesn't mean it can't get pretty damn entertaining now and again. Like everything else, it's all a matter of how you manage to work it all in.] Tim Powers is generally good at mixing up the fantastic elements with contemporary life or historical events, and when you're doing these things, it really only comes down to how much finesse you can use to stitch up your secret histories, keeping consistency with recorded facts as well as with the story itself. Powers pulls it all together with an indiginous and slave-borne magic that manages to survive in a part of the world that's not yet gentrified it out of existence. (It's only a matter of time, of course.) He's done his research (and, as I thoroughly bored y'all with a few years ago, I can't not like Voodoo, it's just so unapolagetically freaky and ad hoc), and maybe even too much of it, unable to resist a thoroughly anachronistic quasi-scientific explanation here and there,* but it all weaves its way together quite attractively.

Much as it's appreciated, this story almost doesn't need that deeper consistency. Powers is mostly giving us an adventure yarn, complete with its share of duels, magic, cannonades, walking dead, romance, sardonic wit, betrayal, and nautical terms. As far as the story goes, it keeps the pages tearing right along, and he tops himself with dramatic entertainment and imaginative weirdness with each chapter. John Chandangac, a puppeteer off to Haiti to deal with some legal issues, finds himself conscripted (as Jack Shandy) into piracy, and, increasingly, into strange worlds of magic and obligatory derring-do. It comes complete with treacherous villains and a packaged love interest, with rescues and satisfying comeuppances clearly in store. Good stuff, and I'll happily recommend it for all that. Combining good writing and that thought-through depth, it's miles ahead of the sort of thing you'd expect from a pirate book that got the eye of Disney.

It's a good thing all that detail-level momentum keeps things rolling. Were I to pause very long, I might have wondered about what Jack Shandy's character was even supposed to be. Though he's got a score to settle, a father to avenge, and later gets a girl to fight for, he still seems more than a bit unmotivated and (realistically enough) ready to quit whenever the going gets very tough. He's not really a hapless sucker pushed around by events exactly (Powers sometimes writes characters are like this), but he also isn't quite convicted enough to make it as a plausible action hero. He starts off as completely bored by Beth Hurwood, the distressed damsel, and it's a little unclear to me how she manages to turn herself into a legitimate love interest by story's end. Shandy takes opportunities to slack off or betray people to save his ass, then, randomly, take some exception on noble principles. (Well, maybe that's all fitting a pirate.) He's such a blank slate that I was waiting for Powers to reveal that he'd been pushed along more than a little bit by some lurking Loas or bocors, given that mind control was well within that magical universe, but the closest thing we got placed Shandy as, merely, some kind of prophesied doom of Blackbeard, which isn't quite the same thing, and wasn't put out there very well either. Similarly, his training with puppets emerges for a couple plot events, but it's unclear how that made him more generally suited for piracy (how it produced the required physical constitution, for example), or contributed to his hardly-existent character. I'd argue that the plot shapes up unevenly too, and some characters are dealt with oddly (for example, Blackbeard had been built up as an intimidating and nearly supernatural bastard, and giving him a sympathetic point of view for three pages mid-story was a huge-ass mistake), or not enough, or dispatched before their time, only to let the long-telegraphed events finally emerge as a pretty significant anti-climax. It ends up a good book that with a few nips and trims could have been awesome. Ah well, it rips and roars enough that you'll hardly notice.



*Sorry to be so discursive, but this really interests me. The first one of these instances that I remember had the gang experience the magical fountain as a space palpably dead of possibility. The resident magician divulged an 18th-century version of quantum mechanics, explaining that the role of probabilities in subatomic nature had become fucked up in its vicinity. Now, you want to be careful about going too far when you import modern sensibilities into period literature (Powers probably went a little too far in manufacturing modern-minded characters too), and we've all seen those terrible movies where some classical villain's doomsday device looks suspciously like something out of 20th-century physics class. I don't think Powers handled this one much better you might get in a crappy skiffy flick.

Could he have done better? I mean, quantum mechanics has become essential to our understanding of nature, and the idea that the universe has aspects that can be described as probabilistic was a revolutionary advance in humanity's conception of things. Given that this is the understanding that Powers wants us readers to work with, could the character have better got there with the sort of book-learning, however abstruse, that was available in 1718? Or to look at it another way, could an open-minded seeker of secret knowledge found some other completely contemporary way to describe quantum reality if we can accept that he'd somehow been priveleged to the amazing secrets of the universe. I mean, in one sense, quantum is still just a description of the underlying reality, and while it's been made to be a reasonably accurate one, it's not not any less metaphorical than your standard selection of angels dancing on pinheads. With enough rigor, could a system of animating spirits be made as accurate as QM? Maybe I just want Ben Hurwood to use more convincing period language.

I should add that later in the book (too late in the book really), Powers tries this trick again trying to tie up the magic of iron into the story of the old and new worlds, and that second time it came out pitch perfect, and also funny. A character, now loopy with extreme age, observes that it's blood magic really, and celestial magic. Shandy is incredulous that anyone would think iron is in our blood. Exhaled from stars? That's crazy talk!

Animal Cruelty

I've frequently been fascinated by the clarity of moral calculus that people engage in with respect to animals. Euthenasia of pets, for instance, is common when we owners come to the conclusion that they have lived a good enough life. People may get carried away, but it's usually a precise calculus what vet bills are worth what extension of beloved Fido's life. Our relationship to other species is complicated by the fact that we eat some of the more sentient ones, but this isn't generally hard to rationalize, on any number of levels, whether it's pure speciesism (they're just not as sentient as us, dammit, and it makes the whole consideration easier), preservation (cows might well be extinct by now if we didn't raise and kill them), paternalism (giving them as good a life as can be hoped for), or a certain fatalist appeal to the natural order (humans are, to some degree, predators and scavengers; prey animals tend to get eaten by animals like us). People can find good hay sown in that moral landscape, but by and large, the decision to kill animals can be sober and considered, but it's still an easy one . More than that, it's one we are more than happy to embrace.

It's almost pathological, how we jump at the opportunity for dignified bloodlust. I remember being about 11 years old, walking up the street to hang around with my friend Ron. There was important news! He came out and informed me of an impressive specimen he'd found just down the road a little, on the edge of the pasture. Push aside the tall grass , and yeah, sure enough there it was creeping along the rigging, a big, motherfucking garden spider, yellow stripes and hairy black legs. Ron looked carefully at me, and nodded portentiously. "We should kill it." (Why? Because it was guilty of being a big nasty spider. Grimly, we must face our fears.) I remember some misgivings of conscience, but I went right along in the quest for a big rock, and was entirely complicit in the deed.

I think I may have told this story before, but much more recently, a couple years ago, the neighbors called the cops about a skunk that was wandering around in the neighborhood. This is not entirely surprising, as our back yards are woodland-like, and wild animals emerge from time to time. The skunk had crossed the street when Johnny Law rolled in, and was by then slowly ambling along into the forest-esque square on the other side of the road. The policeman stepped out of his car and unholstered his pistol, taking careful aim from about ten or fifteen yards away. CRACK! Dead skunk. Now, I was in my living room watching this with my kids. I get that a skunk wandering so close to people might cause some concern (even if they were all indoors), but it's like the dumb beasts have ever figured out roads. I see the risk of the thing being rabid and attacking people not significantly outweighed by the risk of this chucklewit waving a gun around in a residential neighborhood and shooting my car or his foot. But there was a skunk. With a serious face, it had to be killed.

When it comes to mammals, we can also form clear conceptions of cruelty vs. necessary killing. People get upset about animal cruelty, as they have in this Ohio story (and I am pretty depressed about putting down a dozen friggin' Bengal tigers too), even if civilized murder is the necessary response to it (and in this case, the safety concern was much more immediate). I am not sure that the charge of cognitive dissonance is entirely fair when it comes to comparing the way we treat our food animals, automated feed lots and other modern horrors, to individual acts of cruelty, like this amateur zookeeper. I mean, among the people who care about this stuff even when it's not in the news, opposition to both forms is common. Likewise, people who do kill animals (hunters and farmers, say, or your enthusiastic foodies) I've noticed also tend to have their moral equations worked out consistently. I do think there's a pretty solid dissonance in the general public though, bemoaning the murder of tigers as they dig into their Big Macs, at least if my Facebook feed is any indication. If it's industrial cruelty, and hard to avoid in our lives as-lived, then it's invisible (and hell, I like a burger too). Specific acts of cruelty, though? Those are unconscionable. The parallel with war vs. murder is left as an exercise to the reader. Hell, it may be even worse on that level: people cry when random dogs get shot in movies.

Review: Anarchy Evolution, by Greg Graffin and Steve Olson

[Full title: Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God]

Most of you have never met me in person, but rest assured, I am not, by any measure, one of the cool kids. I've been historically bemused by any social movement, and if there's any indication that the scene is years past its prime, then look for my enthusiastic presence. There you'll find me on the trailing edge of fandom, a day's detour from the concert, with only nine bucks in my pocket. "What's on your iPod, Keifus?" Same shit as last year, and it's no more interesting now. Although I have always had issues with rolling along the same general direction as everyone else, and I am not a big booster of authority, I'd rather heckle or dream than angrily defy it, and I'm certainly nothing like punk (even if, in theory, there may be punks like me).

So I've had a Bad Religion CD or two gathering dust for I'm not sure how many years, finding, as I mentioned a couple years back (that one time I did dare bare my playlist), that the music saddled an odd (and not exactly unappreciated) line between brilliance and trying way too fucking hard. Not long after that though, I picked up their Empire Strikes First album, and this time it did grow on me, to the point where I must have worn out the grooves on that CD. Not bad, considering it was already five or six years past its sell-by date, and these guys are even older than me. You're not supposed to pick up on punk in your mid-30s, right? Even the stuff made by emotionally and financially stable geezers. Empire perhaps picked up more coherent social messages than religious ones, which scratched a big itch I was developing, and it rides BR's usual themes of heady skepticism, empiricism, anger in the face of life's futility, and some mystery at the contrast between its depth and its smallness, which are tingles I've always had. More importantly for my enjoyment, I found it musically far more compelling than what had formerly occupied my playlist. They were writing more engaging (if not exactly unfamiliar) harmonies and arrangements, composing with some welcome dynamic range, and they dug up a kid drummer (named Wackerman!) who can really pound the things and very satisfyingly fill up the deeper parts of the acoustic space. (Disclosure: I have no clue the path they took between 1994 and 2004 to make that transition, and this is by no means a scholarly musicology. I'm nobody's goddamn fanboy.) This isn't the hardcore stuff that those couple of skateboarding kids in my high school were into; it's melodic and catchy. It sounds a little like Social Distortion with more composition, fun vocal harmonies, and a couple more chords. Throw in the lyrics and you have, in Empire anyway, something like the world's angriest and wordiest folk music (to hear Greg Graffin list his influences, I see now that that's no coincidence), and I am forced to conclude it's probably not cool, but I really like it anyway.

So what the hell, I went and bought the guy's book. Even here on the lower tiers of giftedness and drive, I'm sympathetically interested in those times that artistry and scholarship can find interesting ways to intersect. The book, however, is a mixed bag.

It's divided among memoir, life observation, and a scientific discussion, I think recreating, in a way, the bullshit sessions that passed the time and drove the lyrical content of the band all these years. The personal sections are arguably the most interesting. Graffin sets himself up, even as a high school misfit discovering punk while it was still real, man, as the world's most well-adjusted bad boy. (This describes his personal appearance pretty well, too. He reminds me a little of Matt Taibbi.) I can picture Mrs. Graffin clucking, not very far behind the scenes, that they're basically nice boys, and if some of them are a little wild, I know Greg's got his head in the right place, and at only 16 years old, he's already so successful. Graffin is wise enough to realize that he's lucky to have ended up with solid emotional grounding and alternate skill sets, and to be gifted without the addictive proclivities that were ruining some of his peers in those days. When the music track got too jaded, he managed to duck into an academic setting, and then back again, and today, he's somehow stabilized himself switching between teaching duties at Cornell, a popular music career, and a devoted family and community life. As a memoir, I thought that the conflict and interplay of these different drives was interesting, and could have used even more of it. It's a life not without its own small tragedies, but the dude's clearly got something figured out.

If the scientific content were presented in the style of a collegial bullshit session, I think I'd have been more down with it. Some of his takes are at least interesting (hell, I've been there often enough myself on some of them), and more than most people, I love stretching a metaphor, and letting empirical thought mingle with life wisdom, but you have to be a little careful about how seriously you take that sort of thing. There are some interesting speculations on how cultural evolution—human or animal behavior—may be a companion to genetic evolution, and patient readers of this-here blog may have noticed that I really love poking around this subject myself, but I think it's too much to say that animal behavior overrides genetics. I will agree with him (and I've been riding the theme a little lately in other conversations) that loving or even knowing people does require a well-placed element of faith, even for a naturalist.

The book's just not so deep. There's more to be said about the environment's role in evolution than he did in this little survey, and I'd have accepted as an answer that environment determines (a variety of possible) social behaviors, which feeds back to genetic selection, which feeds back again to the environment. I can't disagree that there's something a little more complicated going on in selection than mere adaptation, and I think it's cute to observe that "unnecessary" genetic selection (attractions to plumage, musicianship, or other things that don't produce a Darwinian concept of fitness*) can be a significant response to abundance instead of scarcity. As far as evolution being anarchic, well and good, and a popular vote against the whole "becoming man" thing is well placed, if not very novel, but it'd have been more interesting to read deeper thoughts about how the social context of evolutionary theory has affected the understanding itself (especially since one social context is being rather liberally extrapolated here). Why did eveolution get so radicalized in the public consciousness while other equally remarkable scientific revolutions sort of flew by? Well, it's touched on, but not much. Graffin comes off at his most scientifically interesting and competent in the role of a field biologist, and he's better in this book at interplaying evolutionary anecdotes with those from his life than he is in weaving together the shakier generalities, even if the effort sounds like it should be fun.

The big ideas are undermined by a scientific and philosophical outlook that comes off lightweight enough in the places I know pretty well to make me suspect the whole rest of it. I come off thinking that Graffin is a more enthusiastic biologist than a brilliant one. There's a piece, and I don't know if it's him or science writer Olson, that generalizes chemistry as mating puzzle shapes and the big bang as a giant cosmic fart of hydrogen atoms, which I found all sort of embarrassingly simplified. Nor do I think that a proper scientific philosophy demands that the universe be knowable, as suggested early on, and I tend to be more careful than to describe scientific (and if I accept the central metaphor, biological, social, or musical) creativity as embodied by big Eureka! moments, as I've blathered endlessly over the years. In the early stages of the book, he describes his religious views like the world's most patient internet atheist, and the science views are similarly pedantic but survey-ish. If he's taking it all down for the benefit of his intended audience (probably the college freshmen he also lectures to), then okay, I guess that's one thing, but for the guy who can put together some astute wordplay in his lyrics, using the biggest thesaurus in rock-n-roll, then I expected a lot more from the prose.

One thing I will take home is the use of "naturalist" as a worldview. Might be bad religion, but it refreshingly doesn't have to define itself against anything. It's good to base our understanding on what we can observe and deduce, and be open to the fact that the authorities, and we too, may damn well be wrong.

*Erratum: the idea of sexual selection did originate with Darwin. Oops.

Review: Blood, Bones, and Butter, by Gabrielle Hamilton

Full title: Blood Bones and Butter: The Inadvertant Education of a Reluctant Chef. Look, you know that the self-selected memoirs of anyone who has been lucky enough to find they've received an inadvertant education, and land a somewhat prestigious creative job are going to be just a little bit precious. I mean, who is even able to discover the things that really satisfy them, never mind make a successful (dual) career of them? It might be something you usually get from memoirs), but quite a lot of my investment here is puzzling out just how much I like and trust Gabrielle Hamilton. (I am struggling that I might having be a sexist reaction, but to be fair, I brought in similar suspicions about Anthony Bourdain's famous book, to which this one most easily compares, and while I find his self-deprecating sarcasm a slightly more palatable contrast to the underlying ego than her unremitting authenticity, the key difference between the two reads is that Hamilton is a much more personal and composed--that is, better--writer.) It's a hell of a story: a suddenly neglected kid in a 1970s suburbia that I can relate to, a teenage cokehead with a chip on her shoulder that I can't quite connect with, a talented serial dropout (at least she doesn't bullshit us that she's not also a writer), an itinerant American, a lucked-into career boost, a difficult marriage of convenience. It reads like so much self-mythologizing, but on the other hand, Hamilton's writing is very approachable, entertaining, and impeccable in the basic-but-elegant mode she's aiming for, and she doesn't offer any simple arcs for the development of her character. She is not unaware (nor is she apologetic) about the role she herself has played in the challenges she writes about, and she is thoughtful enough to keep turning around and questioning her instincts and understandings about her own story. It's the sort of honest exploration which really warms up this reader, and this sort of analysis was much appreciated. If I found myself occasionally annoyed to hear about some of the breaks, then the difficulties with people brought home a believable balance of both tragedy and a sort of privilege.

No, being left (possibly, arguably) alone for a summer as a thirteen-year-old, a big feature of the first third of her story, is no break, and it's hard not be taken aback by that one. On the other hand, let's not pretend that she's missing the chance to brag what a badass she was, and as she tells it, she (more than once) managed to push the resulting self-destruction just to the point of Reversible Damage, only to then get things together, not without the help of some timely benefactors. All that life experience, and considering the mean streets she roamed, few of the scars. When it comes to a cooking philosophy, she's turning the authenticity up to eleven as well. She takes on a book-jacket-worthy viewpoint of well-crafted simplicity, of real food, culled from an experience of growing up with it, from living poorly among it, of constantly falling back into the restaurant business, in environments ranging from deep integrity to the bullshit fads of the high-end catering world of the 1980s. Detouring a year of your life to work food service among the primitive farms in France, or living in a hut on tiny island in the Aegean will no doubt tune you in to real eating, genuine local character, close to the source, but from my lowly vantage, it's as unattainable as all the foo-foo technical cuisine that I also can't afford. You haven't had an egg until some wine-buzzed Frenchman with hay on his sweater yanks it warm from the nest and brings it to your door that morning, etc. Well, it is a wonderful inspiration, even if she often realizes the downsides too (not for dilettantes), but it's noted that it is one which sets me just as firmly among the have-nots.

And needless to say, it is probably with a conscious effort that she approaches writing with the same outlook, with a genuineness that she feels is missing from the joyless context-heavy anaysis that her finally-successful graduate education swam in. The fact that she's effective in writing with this earthy but artful style also makes me want to eat her food.

I've never realized how affirming it is to read a memoir from someone of your own generation (Hamilton is only a few years older than me). Long-time readers of this blog will understand the resonance I might feel of living through a transitional neighborhood, one caught in the moment between farmland and sprawl, with a soft spot for the few surviving geezers that kept the simpler life going for a bit longer than everyone else. I didn't want to live like that either, but on the other hand, I was pretty damn happy that my parents patronized the old folks as much as hers did. It's still interesting to me that American food chic has evolved, in a way, to a version of the source purity I remember, which, now that the lifestyle has all but disappeared, is considered a luxury, and I sort of wished Hamilton had somehow managed to fully Americanize her foodie inspirations (although maybe pulling from polyglot European country influences is Americanizing it). Of course my parents' friends didn't include legions of artists, and they didn't have theme parties, or Kerouac-style bashes with stream-cooled jug wine and mountains spit-roasted lamb either--even at nine years old, Hamilton is more authentic than you or I will ever be--but damn, I sure wish they did. I can see why the author would be driven to re-create that with her own family in her own life, and how she would be driven to write by the resistance she finds in everyone else. I mean, I don't think I needed the teen drug years, but that sort of missing adult experience is killing me too.

Editorial

As many of you know, I'm looking for a new job. While the Doomsday Clock ticks inexorably down on the current one, I've begun to desperately expand my range of options, and I ask, not for the first time, what if there were a way to somehow merge my expensively utilized labor and my time-wasting hobbies into one single well-regarded career? How awesome would that be? Well...

I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that, so far as careers go, writing is a lot like cooking. It's one of those things that lots of people think they can do well, whether or not they actually can, and it tends to garner some kind of amped-up mystique as a countercultural endeavor, you know, along the lines of, "yeah, I'm going to get the hell out of this place and live my dream of" (a) "opening a restaurant," or (b) "finally writing that novel." It's something that looks easy when you are not actually doing it. In reality, of course, things go differently, and the notoriously low success rate of new restuarants is re-learned in the usual hard way (or if making the food's your goal, then welcome to the factory version of prep, and also to an established career ladder that's got to look pretty vertiginous from down there by the dishwasher), or agents or editors give you an unwelcome bit of honesty about your great American epic, and even if you do manage to get in, then welcome to a world of unappealing effort-to-reward ratios and inadequate credit. As a career, professional writing is probably even more swamped with dreamers and hacks, given that there's no tradition in chefdom, so far as I know, of getting in the door by sending in unsolicitated of samples food. Although on the other hand, chefs appear to sometimes get laid, which has to be something of a draw.

[Oh hell, I've been here before, haven't I? The chef analogy is the product of my upcoming book review, and I'm only going to take it a little bit further here. Last time, it was a comparison to musicians. I think if we're going by nookie potential, then the order goes something like, rock star > live musician > chef > session artist > concert musician > line cook > novelist > journalist > ghost writer > scientist > blogger > bottle polisher > vagrant > me. Not that I'm bitter.]

Anyway, what's different about those posts and this one is that several years later, I'm looking at the idea a lot more seriously. The AAAS (publishers of Science magazine) has a series of blog posts on science writing and editorial careers, as do a few other sites, most of them garnered from gentler economic times, which is alarming enough it its own right. It might take different sorts of people to throw themselves into science writing than onto the fiction slushpile, but the tone of the advice sure sounds damn familiar, including the old nostrum of "if you can stop doing this, then you probably should." These posts paint a picture of a similar writing field, this one teeming with (other) hopeful refugees from the business and academic worlds, either unemployed or unfulfilled, and just as disrespected by the working writers. Much as I instinctively loathe the condescension of career advice columns, and much as I recognize the tendency of other narratively-inclined people to write things as their own personal Odyssey, reading those blog posts has been helpful, as it has given me some of the required language to put in my cover letter. [Adaptability to jargon may well be the most important science writing skill there is, and you know, you'd think that with ten years of doing this very thing, I would gone through this exercise a little more carefully before I started dashing off formal inquiries into the high-level positions.] Even among the current job listings I've trolled, a "science career off the bench" is reduced to something of a buzzword. Working scientists and engineers often need to be reassured that an alternate career is still an intellectually valid one (we have lots tied up in this conception of ourselves as the few truly indispensible members of society), but fuck it, I'm over that part. Writing about the good stuff still beats performing research on the uninspired stuff, and even though the confluence of science and English skills is less rare than popular prejudices suggest, doing both does at least access my fuller skill set.

I am merely competent at manipulating the physical elements. Usually, my bigger strength has been in manipulating the story about those things. Putting together a plausible narrative around what information I can gather at the last minute, or, better, to make a convincing argument in a field I just learned, is where I have occasionally shined. I say on my cover letter that I write maybe ten research proposals in a year, and on the order of twenty technical reports, which account for all of my real deadlines. Sometimes I mention blog posts and papers and patents too, and for some reason I fail to disclose the endless presentation slides. I think it's because I'm ashamed of all the time I spend with PowerPoint. So far as time management, seriousness, and meeting deadlines goes, that's the area where it's natural, and I don't worry a hell of a lot about that part of a potential job. If I do offer an advantage over all the other people who do this, it's that, unlike them, I'm a top-notch generalist and a congenital rationalizer. For your benefit, I'll leave off the play-by-play of how important it ends up being to understand and evaluate research in almost any field (I like to tell the editorial people that, and needed a little nudge that I should), but when you get down to it, verisimilitude is what I do.

I'm slowly gathering that one should be choosy about which sort of writing/editorial position to chase. A substantial pay cut looms for just about all of them, and if it provides other benefits, such as not being miserable, I may be okay with that. Here in Massachusetts, as usual, I'm set back by competition from the young college recruits facing a terrible job market, and the the biomedical industry that has taken over the local publishing sphere as well. The more legitimate writing jobs include, in approximately increasing order of appeal, writing manuals and regulations, ghostwriting your way through the terrible papers and reports of your more stereotypical technician, summarizing content for the for higher-ups or writing literature reviews the "real" scientists, and various flavors of journalism. A few of the advertisements seem to be data-entry sweatshops, and one place called an internal summarizer position a "research scientist" which really did manage to offend me. I'm really angling for a full-time university position where I can write or edit content (and maybe take the opportunity for some classes to improve my technical skill set too). There are a few of these out there, and they're my best hope just now.

Journalism, a lot like cooking, has taken a weird trip in this country from a trade into a profession, with arguable results. They like to peddle college degrees for what used to be job skills. The official outlets speak to credentialism, because after all, most of these folks have been credentialled themselves, and it counters other advice I've had about the skills needed in the field. Still, there are several science writing programs in the country (two of the best ones are in Massachusetts), which appear to provide an excellent sorting function. (The MIT one is run by one of the better Balloon Juice contributors, still blogrolled here.) I mean, I don't doubt that I'd learn better skills going into the program, and I'm mulling over the idea as a means to network, practice, and actually get a job, but again, I've already been doing this sort of thing professionally, if you accept my job description, for a decade or more now. Can I get in with my present resume? I guess I'll keep passing it around.