Stupidity #1: Metro's new policy of randomly searching bags. I don't expect this will actually affect people much, except maybe on Inauguration Day (a day I plan to either work from home or actually go to the Mall to watch the speech, depending on the outcome next week) or September 11. The problem is that, like airport security, this is theatre designed to make people feel safer (or maybe protect against lawsuits) rather than measures that will actually improve safety. First, the randomness...especially in a crowded station it'd be easy to avoid getting chosen. Second, people can refuse to have their bags searched and then just walk (or bus, or taxi) to the next Metro station: no, an actual terrorist wouldn't hesitate to take a taxi! Third, if they find drugs or other illegal items, they will arrest you: isn't this a neat way around probable cause? (To me, this is actually the one harmful part of the policy; the rest is simply nuisance.) One wonders what led to the announcement of this plan now, more than seven years after the last terrorist attack. Metro's "suspicious package" policy (one bag left on a station platform can screw up tens of thousands of commutes home - as has happened repeatedly, though fortunately not much lately) does not give me confidence that their new policy will be applied in a sensible fashion, either.
Stupidity #2: Britney Spear's new song "Womanizer". It is so bad - so robotic, synthetic, and pointless - that it deserves a special anti-shout-out. My fiancee and I are very much out of the loop on pop music (actually, I have been out of the loop since about 1988). On occasion we look at the top 100 songs on iTunes in wonder, trying to see if we can even guess the genre of music from the name of the artist (lots of random capitalization, numbers, and acronyms seem to indicate rap...er, hip-hop; first and last names indicate either country or R&B; first names only indicate pop stars...and any songs with the words "club" or "shawty" in it tend to be give-aways). So why "Womanizer"? My fiancee and I were in a cab (we were going to see Paul & Storm, actually) and the cabbie had the radio on. The DJ proudly announced he was about to play this song, and implored listeners to "text me" if it was "hot" (I asked out loud what people were supposed to do if it was "not"). My fiancee and I looked hopelessly at each other. Was there some way we could escape? Jump out of the cab? Put on our iPods? Demand the cab driver switch the station? Alas, we did none of these things, and thus were subjected to "Womanizer" in its entirety. We alternated between staring at each other in shock and looking down, embarrassed. I shouldn't have tipped the cab driver after that. Who makes these songs popular? Does anyone listen to this kind of crap and say, "Oh yeah! This song describes my life perfectly! It's like Brit got right inside my head!"?
And, while we're on the subject, can I please call for a moratorium on bad emo remakes of 80s songs? Has it really been that long? Look, kids, if you want to listen to "Time After Time", check out the real Cyndi Lauper: she was cool in 1983 and, unlike Madonna, she's still cool. (Actually, I never thought Madonna was cool.) And Supertramp's "Give A Little Bit" was pretty darned good the first time around. Adding a whiny voice and some wimpy electric guitars is not an improvement. Thank you.
Stupidity #3: Readers of this blog know I am an accomplished internet stalker. Lately I have been following with morbid fascination the (mostly political) ramblings of a girl I went out with a few times many years ago on her new blog, where she has plenty of time to post because she has evidently been laid off from her job. I wish I could link directly to this because it is quite pathetic, but then again, I'm not exactly surprised at this (I actually used this woman as a template for a character in a short story I wrote at the end of grad school, and it was not a sympathetic character). In fact, after many times using "honesty" as an excuse for not being accountable for the things she said, in our last phone conversation she told me she was moving to NY, which was a total lie. Soon after I started dating my fiancee, as an experiment and just for kicks (because I saw she hadn't gone anywhere), I made up a fake profile on an internet dating site that she frequented. I made it as boring as humanly possible, only wrote a few lines about "myself", said I was working on an MBA, liked reading John Grisham...I mean total fucking snooze-FEST. And then I just let it sit there and lo and behold, within a few weeks, she contacted "me". Obviously I didn't respond, but I laughed and laughed. This was someone who would place internet personal ads about how she really wanted an "intellegent" guy and fancied herself a writer ("written works can take you places!"). This was someone who became obsessed with competing in triathlons - who in a previous blog would wax philosophical about it ("one day they will call me a triathlete") while peppering her posts with banal sayings (you know, "dance like nobody's watching" and its ilk) but - even after hiring a coach - couldn't even finish a half-marathon. This is someone who would go around saying, "Oh, I LOVE Tom Petty! Sheryl Crow is the BEST!"
OK, three choice bits (paraphrased, so I can't be tracked down, despite the use of quotes) from her blog: 1. On abortion (which she opposes): "to me, as soon as I found out I was pregnant, it would be a child, and I can't say that thinking doesn't apply to someone else." There's empathy in action, and what a developed sense of ethics! 2. She talks about how she is about to move and goes through stuff to "purge" things that no longer have any value, and in so doing finds stuff from a lady family friend when she was a child. "Let's take a a minute to remember her," she says, conjuring the hysterical image of her pausing for contemplation before dropping all this poor old lady's momentos into a big trash bag. 3. She recently announced, apparently after much soul-searching, that she is going to vote for John McCain. The entirety of her rationale for this sad mistake appears to rest in the following two reasons: a) we cannot have the same party in charge of all the branches of government, and b) Obama hasn't been scrutinized enough and he will "surprise" us as President. (At least she has the sense to dislike Palin.)
This stuff is comedy gold, and I haven't even touched on her posts about dating (yikes!). It's not that she can't even write a sentence - that would be less funny - it's just the utter nonsense of what she does write. Bad sentence structure, misspellings, and made-up words ("superficialness") mix with ignorance, ilIogic, and thoughtlessness - but hey, like our President, she is always sure what she thinks! I admit to deriving a certain amount of satisfaction from the fact that she is still placing internet personal ads while I am marrying a terrific woman (and one who really is intelligent, thoughtful, and a great writer). From what I can tell, this woman (not really an ex, just someone I went out with a few times) is not any closer to getting a clue today than she was as a college student in 2001.
Stupidity #4: Back to Metro for a moment. Yesterday on the way home, my fiancee and I witnessed an act of breathtaking self-centeredness, where a young woman entered our relatively crowded train at Rhode Island Avenue station and immediately planted her entire backside against the pole nearest the door, thus preventing the mother and small child who followed her onto the train from getting on without squirming past. Surely she saw them; she
must have been standing next to them while waiting for the train. Where did she think they went off to? Or was she too engrossed in her chick-lit novel to care?
It's interesting because so many of the problems of "city life" can be reduced to this self-centeredness. How people treat each other often appears inversely proportional to how crowded they are. So the desert nomads you read about in the Old Testament would invite any passing strangers into their tents for dinner, and stereotypical small town folks make eye contact and say hi to everyone; on the flip side, people (or animals) too crowded together will attack and kill each other for little or no reason (think feedlots or prisons). Well, urban areas are sort of in between. Now trust me, I dislike people and would a celebrate a Metro car all to myself. (In some ways, wouldn't we all?) But it ain't going to happen, and it suggests a minor extension of the Golden Rule, which if we all followed would make our lives a lot easier: Don't pretend you're in your own space when you're in public space, and treat others with the same consideration you would expect. No one can do this perfectly all the time, but come on, lots of people seem like they just don't even bother to try.
I'd also like to add: don't criticize people for doing or not doing something when they have no choice. My ride in this morning was very crowded and as I am exiting the train at Metro Center a woman in front of me is doing the passive-aggressive scolding of her fellow passengers as she walks past them - this not an uncommon phenomenon on Metro. She is scolding the folks standing by the doors. "Just stand there, don't move, don't worry about us," she is seething. And yes, it's true, their presence is slowing her (and me, and everyone else) down. But where are they supposed to go? The platform is jammed, the train is jammed, they are stuck. When I see people doing this, I sometimes want to pull them aside and ask, "OK, what *should* they do to avoid your ire?" But of course these people haven't thought that through.
A Little Bit of Hope: I have to run the homeless gauntlet between the nearest Metro station and my place of work. Yesterday morning I was waiting to cross the street and was accosted on the corner by a homeless man. Usually it's the guys with that homeless newspaper who wait at the corners waving papers around, and they can be fairly aggressive, so I said no before I even registered what he'd said. But it turns out he was offering me a page of his poetry for $1. As someone who would one day like to earn a little money from my own writing, I should have taken him up on the opportunity to become a minor patron of the arts. (And hey, no matter how bad his poem might have been, it would probably be better than a lot of the things written by the woman I talked about above.) It was a mistake on my part not to take him up on it, but next time I will.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Saturday, October 25, 2008
A Quiet Milestone
Last Tuesday marked the one year anniversary of this blog. During the past year, I have produced 74 blog posts (that’s about one every five days). I’ve produced anywhere from one to nine posts in a month, with an average of about six. Overall, I have written more than 114,000 words. That works out to about 9,500 words a month, and means my average post is more than 1,500 words long, which is pretty lengthy (that’s about three single-spaced pages). My word total includes 82,000+ in 2008; interestingly, I’ve only produced 75,000 words on my novel so far this year...but then again, writing a novel is more difficult, and I took about two months off.
When I was in the shower this morning and thinking a little bit about what I wanted to say in this post, it occurred to me (for the first time ever) that though it’s been a long-term dream of mine to write and successfully publish fiction, the times in my life when I’ve been productive (or at least prolific) writing fiction always correspond to times when I keep personal “check-in” files of some sort, be they a journal-type file on my computer or (this past year) a blog. Correlation is not necessarily causation, but there may be something to this.
Let’s start with high school: I wrote three novels and a host of short stories while in high school. I also kept a personal journal file on my computer (at least from eleventh grade on, when I got my first computer) into which I poured a lot of my rage and social angst. I wrote what amounted to hundreds and hundreds of pages, and rarely did more than a few days elapse when I didn’t write in that file. (The files would get so big, and so slow to open and close given the computer technology of the day, that when they got to be around a hundred pages long or so I would basically have to start a new file.) Despite all that, it took some time before I was willing to start projecting the truth onto the page, rather than the impression I hoped to give to everyone (including myself). Nonetheless, by putting myself on paper I was beginning to get to know myself, and to create a record of thoughts. I’ve read that writers need to produce a million words of crap before they come up with anything good; lucky for me, I got most of that million words out before I even graduated from high school.
College was different. My entire fiction output during those four years consisted of one lengthy short story (really inspired by a high school situation), plus a few joke stories for my friends. (I also wrote occasionally for campus newspapers, though nothing fictional obviously.) The novels I’d spent so much effort on in high school no longer held my interest enough even for me to spend any time revising them. Looking back, I always think that it was because college was such an intellectual awakening for me, and I got so caught up in (and became so devoted to) the topics I was studying. I also became remiss with my journal file. I would neglect it during the semester and then on breaks (especially when back with my family) I would write and write and write, trying to capture everything that happened. I also devoted much time and effort to descriptions of people, their personalities, their interactions with me and others. When I look at those old files now, the ranting and raving of my high school days holds little interest, but these descriptions were generally pretty perceptive and help take me back down memory lane. There is an awful lot I forget in the day-to-day of life if I don’t write things down, and sometimes the narratives I construct for myself about the past don’t match up all too well with my actual feelings at the time.
In graduate school, I wrote very little that wasn’t work-related. Some silly little essays, an occasional op-ed for the campus newspapers, and I started dabbling with webpages to share some of my work with the world (even though parts of the world, especially some of the professors in my department, didn’t always appreciate what I had decided to share). But I wrote no serious fiction (come to think of it, I wrote one or two short stories my last year, but nothing prior), and I did not keep any sort of a journal file. On a number of occasions I attempted to restart such a file, but it never stuck. Maybe the most substantial personal things I wrote during seven years of graduate school were some travelogues of some of my experiences doing fieldwork.
The upheaval that accompanied my move to a postdoc, plus the quiet and serenity that went along with having my own place, rekindled my interest in writing. Mere weeks after moving I was working on some semi-fictional dialogues. Several months after moving I restarted a journal type file. My inaugural entry was a retrospective of my history of writing and – compared to my earlier journal entries – showed how far I had come in terms of self-awareness. During my time as a postdoc, I maintained the journal file pretty faithfully (writing at least once a week or so) until moving to D.C. I wrote about my career angst, stuff I read, genealogy, and fiction ideas. (Most but not all of it might have been fit for public consumption on a blog.) I wrote a handful of decent quality short stories (plus a couple of joke works, which have endured pretty well). I had in my head the precursor idea to the novel I am currently writing, and though I wrote a bit about the idea, I did not start actually writing it. Instead, with almost no preparation, I started working on another novel idea I had. It wasn’t a bad idea but I did not have the level of emotional disengagement needed to execute it properly. (The biggest problem was that perennial weakness: once again the protagonist was way too much like me. On the other hand, this made the writing quite therapeutic, and God knows I needed it.) In the last six months or so, I got swept away by my attempts to get away from my postdoc and stopped working on the novel. I still think it’s an interesting premise - but would need some tweaking to work.
Cut to here in D.C.: another major transition, but overall a good one. My first year I do my best to maintain the journal file, but I lose nearly a year’s worth of work thanks to a hard drive crash in early 2006, and never restart the file. I consider that it would be neat to keep a log of my experiences on my job (figuring it might be something people would want to read even though I’m not exactly standing atop history), but I don’t follow through. I’m also very busy, and working long hours. When, just over two years ago, I moved to my previous position, I found myself with a lot more time and freedom, and my thoughts turned to writing again. As that fall (2006) wore on, I started clearing extraneous stuff from my schedule and getting ready to seriously embark upon the research for my novel. And, slowly but surely, that is what I did for most of 2007.
Part of why I wanted to start this blog was because family stuff was coming to a head. But part of it may have been that subconsciously I realized I needed this other outlet if I wanted to have any chance of succeeding this time with the novel. That is always how it’s worked out in the past, at least.
I suppose the only other question is why a blog. Especially since this is one of the most idiosyncratic blogs I know. Who else writes intensely personal stuff but hides even generic items that might help people identify me? Who else writes a blog but does nothing to publicize it? How else wants an audience but doesn’t even bother to stick a webtrack on his blog so he can see who hits it? The blog format (as opposed to just a journal file on my computer) has both advantages and drawbacks. The biggest drawback is that there are some topics I can’t touch - either because they are self-identifying or because they’re too personal. The biggest advantage, though, is that I can have an audience without putting much work into it. Without at least the potential for an audience I might not try so hard.
Honestly, this blog doesn’t look a lot like those personal journal files. And, under the right circumstances, that journal file could still play a role: especially if I wind up somehow doing a job or going into a situation where capturing the personalities and events into a narrative might be something worth reading later. (I even considered briefly proposing that my fiancee and I produce a joint blog of the run-up to our wedding, but couldn’t really think of why that would be of interest to anyone – especially me – so didn’t suggest it.) But for now I don’t think so.
So happy birthday to this blog, and congratulations to me on finally starting to write again in a sustainable manner. Let’s hope there are many more such milestones to celebrate.
When I was in the shower this morning and thinking a little bit about what I wanted to say in this post, it occurred to me (for the first time ever) that though it’s been a long-term dream of mine to write and successfully publish fiction, the times in my life when I’ve been productive (or at least prolific) writing fiction always correspond to times when I keep personal “check-in” files of some sort, be they a journal-type file on my computer or (this past year) a blog. Correlation is not necessarily causation, but there may be something to this.
Let’s start with high school: I wrote three novels and a host of short stories while in high school. I also kept a personal journal file on my computer (at least from eleventh grade on, when I got my first computer) into which I poured a lot of my rage and social angst. I wrote what amounted to hundreds and hundreds of pages, and rarely did more than a few days elapse when I didn’t write in that file. (The files would get so big, and so slow to open and close given the computer technology of the day, that when they got to be around a hundred pages long or so I would basically have to start a new file.) Despite all that, it took some time before I was willing to start projecting the truth onto the page, rather than the impression I hoped to give to everyone (including myself). Nonetheless, by putting myself on paper I was beginning to get to know myself, and to create a record of thoughts. I’ve read that writers need to produce a million words of crap before they come up with anything good; lucky for me, I got most of that million words out before I even graduated from high school.
College was different. My entire fiction output during those four years consisted of one lengthy short story (really inspired by a high school situation), plus a few joke stories for my friends. (I also wrote occasionally for campus newspapers, though nothing fictional obviously.) The novels I’d spent so much effort on in high school no longer held my interest enough even for me to spend any time revising them. Looking back, I always think that it was because college was such an intellectual awakening for me, and I got so caught up in (and became so devoted to) the topics I was studying. I also became remiss with my journal file. I would neglect it during the semester and then on breaks (especially when back with my family) I would write and write and write, trying to capture everything that happened. I also devoted much time and effort to descriptions of people, their personalities, their interactions with me and others. When I look at those old files now, the ranting and raving of my high school days holds little interest, but these descriptions were generally pretty perceptive and help take me back down memory lane. There is an awful lot I forget in the day-to-day of life if I don’t write things down, and sometimes the narratives I construct for myself about the past don’t match up all too well with my actual feelings at the time.
In graduate school, I wrote very little that wasn’t work-related. Some silly little essays, an occasional op-ed for the campus newspapers, and I started dabbling with webpages to share some of my work with the world (even though parts of the world, especially some of the professors in my department, didn’t always appreciate what I had decided to share). But I wrote no serious fiction (come to think of it, I wrote one or two short stories my last year, but nothing prior), and I did not keep any sort of a journal file. On a number of occasions I attempted to restart such a file, but it never stuck. Maybe the most substantial personal things I wrote during seven years of graduate school were some travelogues of some of my experiences doing fieldwork.
The upheaval that accompanied my move to a postdoc, plus the quiet and serenity that went along with having my own place, rekindled my interest in writing. Mere weeks after moving I was working on some semi-fictional dialogues. Several months after moving I restarted a journal type file. My inaugural entry was a retrospective of my history of writing and – compared to my earlier journal entries – showed how far I had come in terms of self-awareness. During my time as a postdoc, I maintained the journal file pretty faithfully (writing at least once a week or so) until moving to D.C. I wrote about my career angst, stuff I read, genealogy, and fiction ideas. (Most but not all of it might have been fit for public consumption on a blog.) I wrote a handful of decent quality short stories (plus a couple of joke works, which have endured pretty well). I had in my head the precursor idea to the novel I am currently writing, and though I wrote a bit about the idea, I did not start actually writing it. Instead, with almost no preparation, I started working on another novel idea I had. It wasn’t a bad idea but I did not have the level of emotional disengagement needed to execute it properly. (The biggest problem was that perennial weakness: once again the protagonist was way too much like me. On the other hand, this made the writing quite therapeutic, and God knows I needed it.) In the last six months or so, I got swept away by my attempts to get away from my postdoc and stopped working on the novel. I still think it’s an interesting premise - but would need some tweaking to work.
Cut to here in D.C.: another major transition, but overall a good one. My first year I do my best to maintain the journal file, but I lose nearly a year’s worth of work thanks to a hard drive crash in early 2006, and never restart the file. I consider that it would be neat to keep a log of my experiences on my job (figuring it might be something people would want to read even though I’m not exactly standing atop history), but I don’t follow through. I’m also very busy, and working long hours. When, just over two years ago, I moved to my previous position, I found myself with a lot more time and freedom, and my thoughts turned to writing again. As that fall (2006) wore on, I started clearing extraneous stuff from my schedule and getting ready to seriously embark upon the research for my novel. And, slowly but surely, that is what I did for most of 2007.
Part of why I wanted to start this blog was because family stuff was coming to a head. But part of it may have been that subconsciously I realized I needed this other outlet if I wanted to have any chance of succeeding this time with the novel. That is always how it’s worked out in the past, at least.
I suppose the only other question is why a blog. Especially since this is one of the most idiosyncratic blogs I know. Who else writes intensely personal stuff but hides even generic items that might help people identify me? Who else writes a blog but does nothing to publicize it? How else wants an audience but doesn’t even bother to stick a webtrack on his blog so he can see who hits it? The blog format (as opposed to just a journal file on my computer) has both advantages and drawbacks. The biggest drawback is that there are some topics I can’t touch - either because they are self-identifying or because they’re too personal. The biggest advantage, though, is that I can have an audience without putting much work into it. Without at least the potential for an audience I might not try so hard.
Honestly, this blog doesn’t look a lot like those personal journal files. And, under the right circumstances, that journal file could still play a role: especially if I wind up somehow doing a job or going into a situation where capturing the personalities and events into a narrative might be something worth reading later. (I even considered briefly proposing that my fiancee and I produce a joint blog of the run-up to our wedding, but couldn’t really think of why that would be of interest to anyone – especially me – so didn’t suggest it.) But for now I don’t think so.
So happy birthday to this blog, and congratulations to me on finally starting to write again in a sustainable manner. Let’s hope there are many more such milestones to celebrate.
Friday, October 17, 2008
"Fluffy Puppy!?!"
In contrast to my past few quite lengthy posts, this is just a quick anecdote:
While walking from the Metro to work this morning, I stopped at a street corner to wait for the light. Traffic was crawling very slowly, bumper-to-bumper. Another pedestrian, a woman, stops next to me, and she is yelling into her cell phone: "We can't do it! They used a video camera to tape it and it's really difficult! We can't upload it to youtube!" I have no idea what she is talking about (though I am surprised how hyper she is about something so seemingly mundane...then again, this is D.C.) and do my best to ignore her while waiting for the walk signal.
All of a sudden she screams out at the top of her lungs in a little baby voice: "FLUF-FY PUP-PY!!!"
Not able to help myself, I turn to look. She is off her phone (thank goodness) and the video camera/youtube crisis of five seconds before has evidently been thoroughly forgotten. The object of her affection, I think (because there are no other dogs around) is in the back seat of one of the cars creeping by. Through the car window, I see a vague furry form, which looks way too big to be a puppy. (Then again, this would not be the first person I have met who refers to all dogs, regardless of age, size, or temperament, as "PUP-PEEEE!!": a trait that would be an immediate deal-breaker for me were I still in the dating pool, which thank the merciful heavens I am not.) Fortunately it is at this point that the light changes and I start wading through the gridlocked traffic across the street.
Whatever, lady.
While walking from the Metro to work this morning, I stopped at a street corner to wait for the light. Traffic was crawling very slowly, bumper-to-bumper. Another pedestrian, a woman, stops next to me, and she is yelling into her cell phone: "We can't do it! They used a video camera to tape it and it's really difficult! We can't upload it to youtube!" I have no idea what she is talking about (though I am surprised how hyper she is about something so seemingly mundane...then again, this is D.C.) and do my best to ignore her while waiting for the walk signal.
All of a sudden she screams out at the top of her lungs in a little baby voice: "FLUF-FY PUP-PY!!!"
Not able to help myself, I turn to look. She is off her phone (thank goodness) and the video camera/youtube crisis of five seconds before has evidently been thoroughly forgotten. The object of her affection, I think (because there are no other dogs around) is in the back seat of one of the cars creeping by. Through the car window, I see a vague furry form, which looks way too big to be a puppy. (Then again, this would not be the first person I have met who refers to all dogs, regardless of age, size, or temperament, as "PUP-PEEEE!!": a trait that would be an immediate deal-breaker for me were I still in the dating pool, which thank the merciful heavens I am not.) Fortunately it is at this point that the light changes and I start wading through the gridlocked traffic across the street.
Whatever, lady.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
On The Universe In A Single Atom By The Dalai Lama
Last time I was writing about how I thought humans represented a very idiosyncratic type of intelligence. I should add that I would expect any intelligent alien species to be idiosyncratic in its own way, as a result of whatever biological constraints and historical contingencies led to the evolution of that intelligence. One of the big quirks (and yes, this is how I view it) of the human species is its spirituality. I am not a religious person, and actually have a hard time even really understanding what “spirituality” means. There was a time when I might have grown up to be religious (or at least spiritual), but even by the time I was an adolescent I feel that time had passed. (And honestly, even at my first contact with the world of religion as a small child the idea of some imaginary being that everyone took so seriously struck me as a bit silly. Why believe in God but not in my imaginary friend?) With that sort of thinking, it makes sense that I grew up to be a scientist, and I have to admit – in fact, I do admit, without shame – that I am a materialist and reductionist. (I also admit that this is a belief – see below.)
Despite this, I am interested in the intersection between spirituality and science, but I am quite turned off by most of the tone of the dialogue in this country. Most of the time it is the shrill extremes that dominate (the militant atheists or, much worse in my view, the religious fundamentalists), and both extremes seem a bit too simple. The atheists are too simple because they shrug off the moral questions too easily. The fundamentalists, and here I am talking about Judeo-Christians in general but specifically the extreme representatives of certain Protestant denominations, have a worldview that to me is both ludicrous and wildly inconsistent (both internally and externally). What about the folks in the middle (Stephen Jay Gould’s “nonoverlapping magisteria” for example)? To me, they are trying too hard to be peacemakers and are either too wishy-washy or simply unconvincing, and they too are oversimplifying.
Enter the Dalai Lama. I have to start by confessing a weakness for Buddhism in general (I admit my understanding is pretty poor, though likely not much worse than many fundmentalists of their own religions) and for the Dalai Lama specifically. Compared with my understanding of Christianity (and Judaism), Buddhism seems subtle, sophisticated, tolerant, adaptable, and focused on the right things (compassion, reducing suffering) rather than on enforcing obedience and unquestioning submission to the existing social order. The spiritual aspect of Buddhism seems like it couldn’t be farther from an angry judging old bearded man in the sky (the stereotypical Christian God…and yes, I know some Christians have a much sophisticated view of God, but this caricature is God in mainstream American culture). And compared to his Judeo-Christian counterparts, the Dalai Lama strikes me as amazingly curious, intellectual, open-minded…dare I say enlightened (no pun intended)? Surely one could never envision the Pope writing a book for popular audiences like this one (a quote: “if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”). The Buddhist emphasis on unity and compassion is admirable, and meditation techniques and the inward focus are obviously powerful tools (and tools I’ve been interested in for years and should use more, even if I don’t necessarily buy into all the beliefs that led to their development).
In this book, which was published in 2005, the Dalai Lama looks at advances in science and how they corroborate (or not) traditional Buddhist views. He considers science and spirituality as two separate paths of inquiry for understanding the world. He makes the case that both science and Buddhism involve experimentation and analysis: ideas that do not work are abandoned.
Most of the book is the Dalai Lama talking about how certain advances in science match up with Buddhism. Obviously not a scientist himself, he gets much of his information by speaking with prominent western scientists, and sometimes the text struck me as more name-dropping than anything else (did he ever talk to a scientist who wasn’t a renowned giant in his field? ever drop in to see what the grad students and postdocs – or even junior faculty – were up to? Because that’s where a lot of the good work gets done). Since I know next to nothing about the larger context of Buddhism, his discussions of relevant Buddhist philosophy seemed somewhat disjointed, and while he cites a variety of texts (mostly hundreds or thousands of years old), without a bibliography or suggestions for further reading this is less than fully useful (I did not do a search to see how many of these books were available in English at Amazon.com, but my guess would be very few if any).
It is somewhat interesting, because he has such deep yet specific training, to read his take on some of the science, but there are occasions where he seems to me to miss the mark by trying to apply the subjective Buddhist focus to biological evolution, the origin of life and the universe, and physical concepts like relativity.
One of my long-standing pet peeves is anthropocentrism, especially in science. The origin of the universe is not about humans, the origin of life is not about humans, biological evolution is not about humans (well, no more or less so than it is about killer whales, fruit flies, dandelions, Phacops rana, and E. coli). It drives me bananas when people come up with theories the equivalent of “love makes the world go `round” because this is so self-centered. Sure, love is a very strong emotion, and yes it affects people’s behavior all the time, but do not take your internal perceptions and act like the world revolves around them. (Astrology is another maddening case in point: yes, the alignment and movements of gigantic and ancient celestial bodies as perceived from our vantagepoint on earth is all about our personalities and feelings and how our day or week is going to play out.)
Just to be clear, the Dalai Lama is not going this far, and he doesn’t dismiss the science, only finds it incomplete. But his specific complaints are hard to pin down; it’s almost as though the problem is that he finds the science too cold and dispassionate (which of course is the nature of science) for his aesthetic sensibilities as a warm spiritual person. He ends the book with discussion of genetic engineering and a plea for ethics in the broadest humanwide sense in science, something it’s hard to disagree with. The book would be unremarkable (well, it would still be somewhat remarkable given that the author is the spiritual leader and sort of head of state of Tibetan Buddhists, but the content would be pretty unremarkable) except for the sections on consciousness, where it gets very interesting.
Here the Dalai Lama sees a (pardon the expression) synergy between the Buddhist and scientific modes of inquiry, where a combination of the two (e.g., objective measurement of brain activity and corresponding subjective experiences of states of consciousness) could lead to a result greater than the sum of the parts. His ultimate goal is the alleviation of suffering, and if Buddhist techniques could improve attention and focus and lower rates of ADHD or senile dementia, for example, that would be admirable. Beyond this, he shares with scientists an interest in the plasticity of the brain, an understanding of which could have much wider ranging benefits.
I have seen, in top peer-reviewed journals, some of the work looking at differences in brain activity between experienced meditators and people off the street when performing the same task. Uniting Buddhist techiques with scientific methods in the study of consciousness doesn’t raise my hackles in the anthropocentric arena either because understanding consciousness (at least, human consciousness) is an anthropocentric area of inquiry, so the approach makes sense. I think scientists working in these areas would be shortsighted not to give the Dalai Lama’s approach a try.
The Dalai Lama argues that one can embrace science without necessarily embracing materialism and reductionism. His argument is much more sophisticated and nuanced (and persuasive) that what I have read elsewhere. Indeed, I will concede that just as religion requires belief, so do materialism and reductionism. [I have to admit: I wrote the sentence above but am unsettled by it now reading it over. I am not sure it is true, and may need to continue the discussion of this point in another post.] It is much more honest, if you want to avoid faith, to be an agnostic (a statement of not knowing) than to be an atheist (a statement of not believing in something that science and rational inquiry can never prove nor disprove). Yes, I acknowledge this is true, but the caveat is that the whole concept of God is totally anthropocentric. I can sit at my kitchen table and in five minutes produce a dozen other postulates that are untestable by science: there is a ghost that follows me everywhere I go, the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc etc. To be brutally fair and honest, I cannot both claim to abandon faith and disbelieve in the ghost or the FSM anymore than I can some religious deity; I must be agnostic about all such unprovable statements. So why does the God thing get taken so much more seriously? (And of course religions do produce some testable hypotheses. The Dalai Lama concedes some ideas of Buddhist cosmology are not consistent with modern scientific observations. Most, but not all Christians will concede that Genesis is not literally true because its predictions for what the earth should look like do not match up with reality.)
It infuriates me when believers call non-believers self-centered (because they are not willing to believe in, and surrender to, a “higher power”); to me, it is the believers who have constructed their entire universe with themselves in the middle. Nonbelievers see humankind as quite small indeed (if still pretty remarkable in our own way) and yet, to quote Darwin, “there is grandeur in this view of life”. You just have to have a little imagination and a big sense of perspective.
In sum, the Dalai Lama is sophisticated on spirituality (though this book isn’t the best place to learn it), somewhat naïve on science (though at least he is curious), and very interesting in the place where science and Buddhist spirituality best intersect (the study of consciousness). I think this book would be worthwhile for people interested in the topic, especially those used to usual tenor of the conflict in this country and looking for a different, refreshing, neither unnecessarily uncompromising nor mushily “can’t we all just get along” point of view.
Despite this, I am interested in the intersection between spirituality and science, but I am quite turned off by most of the tone of the dialogue in this country. Most of the time it is the shrill extremes that dominate (the militant atheists or, much worse in my view, the religious fundamentalists), and both extremes seem a bit too simple. The atheists are too simple because they shrug off the moral questions too easily. The fundamentalists, and here I am talking about Judeo-Christians in general but specifically the extreme representatives of certain Protestant denominations, have a worldview that to me is both ludicrous and wildly inconsistent (both internally and externally). What about the folks in the middle (Stephen Jay Gould’s “nonoverlapping magisteria” for example)? To me, they are trying too hard to be peacemakers and are either too wishy-washy or simply unconvincing, and they too are oversimplifying.
Enter the Dalai Lama. I have to start by confessing a weakness for Buddhism in general (I admit my understanding is pretty poor, though likely not much worse than many fundmentalists of their own religions) and for the Dalai Lama specifically. Compared with my understanding of Christianity (and Judaism), Buddhism seems subtle, sophisticated, tolerant, adaptable, and focused on the right things (compassion, reducing suffering) rather than on enforcing obedience and unquestioning submission to the existing social order. The spiritual aspect of Buddhism seems like it couldn’t be farther from an angry judging old bearded man in the sky (the stereotypical Christian God…and yes, I know some Christians have a much sophisticated view of God, but this caricature is God in mainstream American culture). And compared to his Judeo-Christian counterparts, the Dalai Lama strikes me as amazingly curious, intellectual, open-minded…dare I say enlightened (no pun intended)? Surely one could never envision the Pope writing a book for popular audiences like this one (a quote: “if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”). The Buddhist emphasis on unity and compassion is admirable, and meditation techniques and the inward focus are obviously powerful tools (and tools I’ve been interested in for years and should use more, even if I don’t necessarily buy into all the beliefs that led to their development).
In this book, which was published in 2005, the Dalai Lama looks at advances in science and how they corroborate (or not) traditional Buddhist views. He considers science and spirituality as two separate paths of inquiry for understanding the world. He makes the case that both science and Buddhism involve experimentation and analysis: ideas that do not work are abandoned.
Most of the book is the Dalai Lama talking about how certain advances in science match up with Buddhism. Obviously not a scientist himself, he gets much of his information by speaking with prominent western scientists, and sometimes the text struck me as more name-dropping than anything else (did he ever talk to a scientist who wasn’t a renowned giant in his field? ever drop in to see what the grad students and postdocs – or even junior faculty – were up to? Because that’s where a lot of the good work gets done). Since I know next to nothing about the larger context of Buddhism, his discussions of relevant Buddhist philosophy seemed somewhat disjointed, and while he cites a variety of texts (mostly hundreds or thousands of years old), without a bibliography or suggestions for further reading this is less than fully useful (I did not do a search to see how many of these books were available in English at Amazon.com, but my guess would be very few if any).
It is somewhat interesting, because he has such deep yet specific training, to read his take on some of the science, but there are occasions where he seems to me to miss the mark by trying to apply the subjective Buddhist focus to biological evolution, the origin of life and the universe, and physical concepts like relativity.
One of my long-standing pet peeves is anthropocentrism, especially in science. The origin of the universe is not about humans, the origin of life is not about humans, biological evolution is not about humans (well, no more or less so than it is about killer whales, fruit flies, dandelions, Phacops rana, and E. coli). It drives me bananas when people come up with theories the equivalent of “love makes the world go `round” because this is so self-centered. Sure, love is a very strong emotion, and yes it affects people’s behavior all the time, but do not take your internal perceptions and act like the world revolves around them. (Astrology is another maddening case in point: yes, the alignment and movements of gigantic and ancient celestial bodies as perceived from our vantagepoint on earth is all about our personalities and feelings and how our day or week is going to play out.)
Just to be clear, the Dalai Lama is not going this far, and he doesn’t dismiss the science, only finds it incomplete. But his specific complaints are hard to pin down; it’s almost as though the problem is that he finds the science too cold and dispassionate (which of course is the nature of science) for his aesthetic sensibilities as a warm spiritual person. He ends the book with discussion of genetic engineering and a plea for ethics in the broadest humanwide sense in science, something it’s hard to disagree with. The book would be unremarkable (well, it would still be somewhat remarkable given that the author is the spiritual leader and sort of head of state of Tibetan Buddhists, but the content would be pretty unremarkable) except for the sections on consciousness, where it gets very interesting.
Here the Dalai Lama sees a (pardon the expression) synergy between the Buddhist and scientific modes of inquiry, where a combination of the two (e.g., objective measurement of brain activity and corresponding subjective experiences of states of consciousness) could lead to a result greater than the sum of the parts. His ultimate goal is the alleviation of suffering, and if Buddhist techniques could improve attention and focus and lower rates of ADHD or senile dementia, for example, that would be admirable. Beyond this, he shares with scientists an interest in the plasticity of the brain, an understanding of which could have much wider ranging benefits.
I have seen, in top peer-reviewed journals, some of the work looking at differences in brain activity between experienced meditators and people off the street when performing the same task. Uniting Buddhist techiques with scientific methods in the study of consciousness doesn’t raise my hackles in the anthropocentric arena either because understanding consciousness (at least, human consciousness) is an anthropocentric area of inquiry, so the approach makes sense. I think scientists working in these areas would be shortsighted not to give the Dalai Lama’s approach a try.
The Dalai Lama argues that one can embrace science without necessarily embracing materialism and reductionism. His argument is much more sophisticated and nuanced (and persuasive) that what I have read elsewhere. Indeed, I will concede that just as religion requires belief, so do materialism and reductionism. [I have to admit: I wrote the sentence above but am unsettled by it now reading it over. I am not sure it is true, and may need to continue the discussion of this point in another post.] It is much more honest, if you want to avoid faith, to be an agnostic (a statement of not knowing) than to be an atheist (a statement of not believing in something that science and rational inquiry can never prove nor disprove). Yes, I acknowledge this is true, but the caveat is that the whole concept of God is totally anthropocentric. I can sit at my kitchen table and in five minutes produce a dozen other postulates that are untestable by science: there is a ghost that follows me everywhere I go, the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc etc. To be brutally fair and honest, I cannot both claim to abandon faith and disbelieve in the ghost or the FSM anymore than I can some religious deity; I must be agnostic about all such unprovable statements. So why does the God thing get taken so much more seriously? (And of course religions do produce some testable hypotheses. The Dalai Lama concedes some ideas of Buddhist cosmology are not consistent with modern scientific observations. Most, but not all Christians will concede that Genesis is not literally true because its predictions for what the earth should look like do not match up with reality.)
It infuriates me when believers call non-believers self-centered (because they are not willing to believe in, and surrender to, a “higher power”); to me, it is the believers who have constructed their entire universe with themselves in the middle. Nonbelievers see humankind as quite small indeed (if still pretty remarkable in our own way) and yet, to quote Darwin, “there is grandeur in this view of life”. You just have to have a little imagination and a big sense of perspective.
In sum, the Dalai Lama is sophisticated on spirituality (though this book isn’t the best place to learn it), somewhat naïve on science (though at least he is curious), and very interesting in the place where science and Buddhist spirituality best intersect (the study of consciousness). I think this book would be worthwhile for people interested in the topic, especially those used to usual tenor of the conflict in this country and looking for a different, refreshing, neither unnecessarily uncompromising nor mushily “can’t we all just get along” point of view.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Close Encounters
I’ve been spending (or is that wasting?) time over the past few weeks watching videos at hulu.com, which includes a fair number of complete movies that you can watch for free as long as you are willing to put up with “limited commercial interruptions”. These appear to be directly proportional in frequency and duration to how popular people guess the movie is, and my biggest problem with them is that you wind up having to watch (endure is more like it) the same 15 or 30 second spot half a dozen or more times in the space of an hour or two. Why any advertiser thinks making me watch the same ad nine times (rather than maybe two or three) over the course of a movie is going to make me more likely to buy their product (rather than just piss me off with boring repetitiveness) I don’t know.
So far the movies I’ve chosen to watch have been pretty good. I watched “Halls of Montezuma”, an old World War II movie about the Marines storming an island in the Pacific. Without any of the bizarre cinematography or gratuitous blood and gore of many more recent movies, it managed to tell the story quite effectively. There was a hint of propaganda to it on one level, but with the huge costs paid by American troops it’s hard to say the take-home message was anything but “war is hell”.
I watched two old time seafaring movies: an older movie “Moby Dick” and the much newer “Master and Commander”, both of which were great. I also watched “Behind Enemy Lines”, which was occasionally nonsensical but at least was exciting (but talk about weird cinematography).
I’ve watched a few others – some good, some less so, only one terrible (“Dragonheart” – my God, what horrible writing, nonsensical plotting, unlikeable characters, and bad special effects). Yesterday I watched “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” – it was the first time I had ever seen that movie in its entirety. It was pretty good, all things considered. I especially liked the unaged World War II pilots coming off the alien ship, looking as though they weren’t especially keen to come back to humankind. Of course they are unaged because they’re supposed to have spent most of their time away traveling near the speed of light – hasn’t even seemed that long to them, probably. Well, at least we won the war! Maybe they’ve been to the aliens’ world and then came back. The aliens themselves, which we only get a few vague glimpses of, are straight out of Communion, though there does seem to be some variability in their heights and limb proportions that may indicate differences in age, “race”, whatever.
I’d had it in my head, never having seen the movie before, that there actually was no glimpse of the aliens, and so I was actually a bit disappointed that there was, thinking people’s imaginations and the mystery associated with not knowing would beat some special effects (though maybe this isn’t the way to make a huge cinematic commercial success). Whoever those aliens in Close Encounters are, they are able to breathe earth’s atmosphere and tolerate its pressure and temperature without any problems (even plenty of creatures on earth can’t do that: what if the only intelligent species on earth lived at the bottom of the oceans?). And evidently humans can walk onto their ship with no problems. Quarantine, viruses, diseases? No one seems to worry about them. The aliens are wonderful, enlightened, obviously very powerful but everything in the movie screams that their intentions are benevolent. (It also seems like if they wanted to take over they could do it pretty easily so their acting kind means they probably are.)
The aliens stand upright, have two legs and two arms, torsos, heads, faces, eyes, noses, mouths, hands, fingers that even appear to have nails on them (though I didn’t quite catch if they had opposable thumbs). Some have big eyes, look like human babies in their proportions (to hold their big brains?). Why, they even smile recognizably, though the musculature around their mouths seems less developed (what does that indicate about their sociality?) and the smile seems to indicate the same thing as a human smile. They do not wear any clothing or have any individually recognizable features – at least not at first glance. No sexual dimorphism or sexual features at all that I could tell. If you think I’m reading too much into this, or maybe just being facetious, I’d just like to point out that aliens who look like this have clearly experienced remarkable evolutionary parallelism with humans…all the more remarkable given that we have no idea how they reproduce or inherit morphological traits (do they have DNA, for instance?). We also have no idea about the geological or other biological characteristics of their planet…think about earth: without plate tectonics creating a rift in the right place at the right time, and trees and open savannahs and lions and a host of other particularities, the likelihood of humans evolving just as they did decreases greatly (even if you’re got your base apes hanging around as a starting point, meaning everything so far as proceeded as it did in our history). My point is that, if there were intelligent life on other planets, every minute detail of their appearance would provide us a wealth of information about their history and context.
Just to expand a bit on this: humans are intelligent, sentient beings, but only in a very particular and idiosyncratic way that is intimately tied in with the circumstances of our evolution. The competition aspect of evolution is key to predicting what kinds of outcomes there would be on other worlds that bear any resemblance whatsoever to ours (even just in terms of mechanisms, never mind specifics). Think about this: orangutans are as intelligent as other great apes, but they are also solitary. Solitary creatures, even if they evolved an human level of self-awareness and intelligence, would never build civilizations or develop more than rudimentary technology, because these things require sociality. And a solitary intelligent species co-existing with a social intelligent species would get wiped out or enslaved…at least on this planet, under our current rules…unless it stayed in an extremely marginal niche (and even then).
To take it even farther, our ideas of progress are technologically determined. Even as I type this into a computer and use my iPod and Blackberry, there are people making clay pots and hunting with stone tools and living in thatch huts in other parts of the world. (And I don’t understand how a Blackberry works, even though I can use one. And forget about specific technologies; what about just the theoretical underpinnings? Think about this: most people don’t understand Darwinism and it’s 150 years old. Part of this is a philosophical block. But very few people understand relativity either and it’s 100 years old – they don’t even really teach it in the physics classes most people take.)
I’m not talking about socioeconomic inequality – I’m saying that even given a single uniform type of intelligence like humans have (no matter how idiosyncratic it is), as long as it’s social, many different types of cultural foundations can spring up that value different things. (And even within a culture there can be great disparity in levels of understanding.) Since people are the same everywhere, differences in culture probably spring primarily from geographic differences (in the terrain, the climate, the plants and animals) and historical legacy: traditions and values passed down. But again, the most numerous, warlike, and technologically advanced will tend to dominate (and those traits are correlated). Of course, once aware of it, we can control and even seek to consciously modify our cultures…and some cultures put more emphasis on the individual and others on the collective, some demand faith and others discourage it. But there still is an underlying human nature that sets limits on the boundaries of things.
Some people tend to look at those “little white men” as the humans of the future. Sad news but while humans do continue to mix their genes (and thus “evolve”), that most certainly doesn’t imply some directional selection. If those little white men had human-looking forebears, then at some point in their history the most intelligent reproduced while the less intelligent did not...and I don’t just mean on their equivalent of the African savannahs at the dawn of their history – I mean even in a context like we’ve got today. Sexual selection can drive the evolution of some ludicrous (a value-laden term I realize) traits, and in human societies it’s true the warlord usually has more offspring than the peasant (though if the peasants ever revolt they may destroy that whole line), but a lot of that perceived fitness is focused on cultural accoutrements rather than on something as fundamental as brain function and morphology (yes, maybe there’s a correlation under some circumstances, but look around: do you see one now?). Look at human societies today: sure, there is a minimal level of intelligence and physical capacity necessary for fitness, but beyond that are there pressures driving us to be more intelligent? (That I can use my Blackberry without understanding it certainly suggests not.) Our getting larger and stronger through the years (over the past tens of thousands) says much more about external conditions than our genetics – that capacity to be bigger and stronger was always there but was frequently limited by our environment. So if our little white men evolved from human forebears in any cultural context, it almost implies some genocidal “master race” scenario in the history of the aliens, and that’s something that humans obviously find almost universally abhorrent. (Imagine if our WW II pilots had come out of the alien ship at Devil’s Tower only to be welcomed “home” with a seig heil.)
So why are they visiting us and not us them? Maybe they had more time, but then again, see above. The idiosyncracy of their hard-wiring might mean that in their initial leap into intelligence they were better equipped to understand complex mathematics (and maybe less equipped to make art or value kinship much, or maybe they lack spirituality). (A side note is that under evolutionary rules like ours it is difficult but not impossible to imagine two intelligent species on the same planet. Humans and another intelligent ape? No way. But humans and dolphins, or maybe something at the bottom of the ocean, or in Antarctica? Why not?) At a minimum, building a ship to fly to another world requires some understanding of energy, some exploitation of the natural resources on their planet. One also wonders what is motivating the trip: curiosity, bloodlust, something else we can’t understand, some combination? The mere appearance of such a ship tells the physicists about the feasibility of producing technologies that right now seem limited to the realm of imagination.
What is interesting to me is that human civilization seems to have emergent properties that most of us as individuals do not understand. As Dan Gilbert writes, we behave in certain culturally proscribed ways even when the motivations for that behavior (I’ll make more money and that will make me happier) make no sense and have no empirical basis (well, worse than that, there is empirical evidence to suggest that it is not true). Why do we do it? It seems as though there is something external driving us. And yet, what if we didn’t? What if we could break with the legacy of the past and decide right now that we wanted to focus all of our efforts on something else (besides self-interest, beating the other, finding happiness, whatever)? What drove ancient people to build so many of the monuments we just see? It might have been simple self-aggrandizement by their leaders, but maybe it was something else. Of course if all humans were going to do this, we’d have to start modest, like feeding everyone and giving them proper sanitation and maybe getting our population and consumption patterns under control. An open question is that if we wanted to do this would we be able to (even if we could answer all the millions of ethical and logistical questions embodied in such a decision, including who actually would get to decide) or would human nature – our idiosyncratic historical legacy – doom any such effort to failure? Any time governments ignore human nature (look at communism) they are disasters from the perspective of quality of life.
As for the question of whether there is intelligent life out there, I don’t see why not. But even if it could reach us (an open and separate question) would it be “intelligence” we could understand? Who knows? Looking at humankind, I subscribe to the pessimistic view that the best evidence for intelligent life in the universe is that no one’s tried to contact us yet.
So far the movies I’ve chosen to watch have been pretty good. I watched “Halls of Montezuma”, an old World War II movie about the Marines storming an island in the Pacific. Without any of the bizarre cinematography or gratuitous blood and gore of many more recent movies, it managed to tell the story quite effectively. There was a hint of propaganda to it on one level, but with the huge costs paid by American troops it’s hard to say the take-home message was anything but “war is hell”.
I watched two old time seafaring movies: an older movie “Moby Dick” and the much newer “Master and Commander”, both of which were great. I also watched “Behind Enemy Lines”, which was occasionally nonsensical but at least was exciting (but talk about weird cinematography).
I’ve watched a few others – some good, some less so, only one terrible (“Dragonheart” – my God, what horrible writing, nonsensical plotting, unlikeable characters, and bad special effects). Yesterday I watched “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” – it was the first time I had ever seen that movie in its entirety. It was pretty good, all things considered. I especially liked the unaged World War II pilots coming off the alien ship, looking as though they weren’t especially keen to come back to humankind. Of course they are unaged because they’re supposed to have spent most of their time away traveling near the speed of light – hasn’t even seemed that long to them, probably. Well, at least we won the war! Maybe they’ve been to the aliens’ world and then came back. The aliens themselves, which we only get a few vague glimpses of, are straight out of Communion, though there does seem to be some variability in their heights and limb proportions that may indicate differences in age, “race”, whatever.
I’d had it in my head, never having seen the movie before, that there actually was no glimpse of the aliens, and so I was actually a bit disappointed that there was, thinking people’s imaginations and the mystery associated with not knowing would beat some special effects (though maybe this isn’t the way to make a huge cinematic commercial success). Whoever those aliens in Close Encounters are, they are able to breathe earth’s atmosphere and tolerate its pressure and temperature without any problems (even plenty of creatures on earth can’t do that: what if the only intelligent species on earth lived at the bottom of the oceans?). And evidently humans can walk onto their ship with no problems. Quarantine, viruses, diseases? No one seems to worry about them. The aliens are wonderful, enlightened, obviously very powerful but everything in the movie screams that their intentions are benevolent. (It also seems like if they wanted to take over they could do it pretty easily so their acting kind means they probably are.)
The aliens stand upright, have two legs and two arms, torsos, heads, faces, eyes, noses, mouths, hands, fingers that even appear to have nails on them (though I didn’t quite catch if they had opposable thumbs). Some have big eyes, look like human babies in their proportions (to hold their big brains?). Why, they even smile recognizably, though the musculature around their mouths seems less developed (what does that indicate about their sociality?) and the smile seems to indicate the same thing as a human smile. They do not wear any clothing or have any individually recognizable features – at least not at first glance. No sexual dimorphism or sexual features at all that I could tell. If you think I’m reading too much into this, or maybe just being facetious, I’d just like to point out that aliens who look like this have clearly experienced remarkable evolutionary parallelism with humans…all the more remarkable given that we have no idea how they reproduce or inherit morphological traits (do they have DNA, for instance?). We also have no idea about the geological or other biological characteristics of their planet…think about earth: without plate tectonics creating a rift in the right place at the right time, and trees and open savannahs and lions and a host of other particularities, the likelihood of humans evolving just as they did decreases greatly (even if you’re got your base apes hanging around as a starting point, meaning everything so far as proceeded as it did in our history). My point is that, if there were intelligent life on other planets, every minute detail of their appearance would provide us a wealth of information about their history and context.
Just to expand a bit on this: humans are intelligent, sentient beings, but only in a very particular and idiosyncratic way that is intimately tied in with the circumstances of our evolution. The competition aspect of evolution is key to predicting what kinds of outcomes there would be on other worlds that bear any resemblance whatsoever to ours (even just in terms of mechanisms, never mind specifics). Think about this: orangutans are as intelligent as other great apes, but they are also solitary. Solitary creatures, even if they evolved an human level of self-awareness and intelligence, would never build civilizations or develop more than rudimentary technology, because these things require sociality. And a solitary intelligent species co-existing with a social intelligent species would get wiped out or enslaved…at least on this planet, under our current rules…unless it stayed in an extremely marginal niche (and even then).
To take it even farther, our ideas of progress are technologically determined. Even as I type this into a computer and use my iPod and Blackberry, there are people making clay pots and hunting with stone tools and living in thatch huts in other parts of the world. (And I don’t understand how a Blackberry works, even though I can use one. And forget about specific technologies; what about just the theoretical underpinnings? Think about this: most people don’t understand Darwinism and it’s 150 years old. Part of this is a philosophical block. But very few people understand relativity either and it’s 100 years old – they don’t even really teach it in the physics classes most people take.)
I’m not talking about socioeconomic inequality – I’m saying that even given a single uniform type of intelligence like humans have (no matter how idiosyncratic it is), as long as it’s social, many different types of cultural foundations can spring up that value different things. (And even within a culture there can be great disparity in levels of understanding.) Since people are the same everywhere, differences in culture probably spring primarily from geographic differences (in the terrain, the climate, the plants and animals) and historical legacy: traditions and values passed down. But again, the most numerous, warlike, and technologically advanced will tend to dominate (and those traits are correlated). Of course, once aware of it, we can control and even seek to consciously modify our cultures…and some cultures put more emphasis on the individual and others on the collective, some demand faith and others discourage it. But there still is an underlying human nature that sets limits on the boundaries of things.
Some people tend to look at those “little white men” as the humans of the future. Sad news but while humans do continue to mix their genes (and thus “evolve”), that most certainly doesn’t imply some directional selection. If those little white men had human-looking forebears, then at some point in their history the most intelligent reproduced while the less intelligent did not...and I don’t just mean on their equivalent of the African savannahs at the dawn of their history – I mean even in a context like we’ve got today. Sexual selection can drive the evolution of some ludicrous (a value-laden term I realize) traits, and in human societies it’s true the warlord usually has more offspring than the peasant (though if the peasants ever revolt they may destroy that whole line), but a lot of that perceived fitness is focused on cultural accoutrements rather than on something as fundamental as brain function and morphology (yes, maybe there’s a correlation under some circumstances, but look around: do you see one now?). Look at human societies today: sure, there is a minimal level of intelligence and physical capacity necessary for fitness, but beyond that are there pressures driving us to be more intelligent? (That I can use my Blackberry without understanding it certainly suggests not.) Our getting larger and stronger through the years (over the past tens of thousands) says much more about external conditions than our genetics – that capacity to be bigger and stronger was always there but was frequently limited by our environment. So if our little white men evolved from human forebears in any cultural context, it almost implies some genocidal “master race” scenario in the history of the aliens, and that’s something that humans obviously find almost universally abhorrent. (Imagine if our WW II pilots had come out of the alien ship at Devil’s Tower only to be welcomed “home” with a seig heil.)
So why are they visiting us and not us them? Maybe they had more time, but then again, see above. The idiosyncracy of their hard-wiring might mean that in their initial leap into intelligence they were better equipped to understand complex mathematics (and maybe less equipped to make art or value kinship much, or maybe they lack spirituality). (A side note is that under evolutionary rules like ours it is difficult but not impossible to imagine two intelligent species on the same planet. Humans and another intelligent ape? No way. But humans and dolphins, or maybe something at the bottom of the ocean, or in Antarctica? Why not?) At a minimum, building a ship to fly to another world requires some understanding of energy, some exploitation of the natural resources on their planet. One also wonders what is motivating the trip: curiosity, bloodlust, something else we can’t understand, some combination? The mere appearance of such a ship tells the physicists about the feasibility of producing technologies that right now seem limited to the realm of imagination.
What is interesting to me is that human civilization seems to have emergent properties that most of us as individuals do not understand. As Dan Gilbert writes, we behave in certain culturally proscribed ways even when the motivations for that behavior (I’ll make more money and that will make me happier) make no sense and have no empirical basis (well, worse than that, there is empirical evidence to suggest that it is not true). Why do we do it? It seems as though there is something external driving us. And yet, what if we didn’t? What if we could break with the legacy of the past and decide right now that we wanted to focus all of our efforts on something else (besides self-interest, beating the other, finding happiness, whatever)? What drove ancient people to build so many of the monuments we just see? It might have been simple self-aggrandizement by their leaders, but maybe it was something else. Of course if all humans were going to do this, we’d have to start modest, like feeding everyone and giving them proper sanitation and maybe getting our population and consumption patterns under control. An open question is that if we wanted to do this would we be able to (even if we could answer all the millions of ethical and logistical questions embodied in such a decision, including who actually would get to decide) or would human nature – our idiosyncratic historical legacy – doom any such effort to failure? Any time governments ignore human nature (look at communism) they are disasters from the perspective of quality of life.
As for the question of whether there is intelligent life out there, I don’t see why not. But even if it could reach us (an open and separate question) would it be “intelligence” we could understand? Who knows? Looking at humankind, I subscribe to the pessimistic view that the best evidence for intelligent life in the universe is that no one’s tried to contact us yet.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Catch Up, The Nobel Prize, Politics
It’s the first day of a beautiful three day weekend. I have now been at my new job for four weeks (two pay periods), and while I can’t say I’m quite comfortable yet, I am slowly settling in. So far it seems to be a good fit. Last night my fiancee and I organized a happy hour with a bunch of friends and colleagues, and that was a lot of fun. Several of us went and had dinner afterwards.
So the Nobel Prizes have been awarded, including the literature prize, which is the one I’m most interested in (and what does that say? I work on both science and policy and I care most about the literature prize). They gave it to a French writer I have never heard of, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. I know there was some hype beforehand; would this be the year that an American like Philip Roth or John Updike won the prize? And one of the members of the Swedish academy actually went on the record saying American literature was too insular. No American has won since Toni Morrison in 1993. I’ve read a bunch of Roth, very little of Updike – I can’t say I was sitting here rooting particularly hard for either of them to win. One plus to the choosing of all these foreign writers is that it exposes (most) American readers to new names. Though sometimes few of the winner writers’ works have been translated into English, and the Nobel doesn’t always change that. A few years back, Orhan Pamuk won, which prompted me to pick up Snow. It was good, but quite slow moving. I finished it, but have not picked up anything else by the author since. Many of the Nobel Prize winners I never get around to.
It’s been pointed out that many Nobel Prize winners were fairly obscure when they won the Prize, and time hasn’t done anything to bolster their popularity. Other extremely well-regarded writers never won. James Joyce, for example...I won’t cry any tears there. He is widely regarded as a genius, but what good is literature if no one can understand it? I have the same problem with William Faulkner, and often wonder why people talk about Faulkner in the same breath as Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Some of the prizes are clearly political. Even Solzhenitsyn, who I wrote about last month, won the prize in part because of the political context for his writing. I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing, though it’d be nice if the prize committee were more straightforward about it. Did you know that Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature? He did, in 1953 (the year before Hemingway). Of the 105 people who have won the Prize, I have read works by less than 20 of them...and that still probably puts me out ahead of most people.
A search of Amazon.com shows me that were I hot to read something by this year’s winner, I would have only a few selections, and none in English or available new from mainstream publishers. This is a two-edged sword. On one hand I wonder what it says about even the reading public in the U.S. Maybe we truly are outside the “global dialogue” of literature, as the Swedish academy member put it. On the other hand, I detect some proud snobbishness coming from my friends in Scandinavia; awarding the prize to people no one’s heard of (and whose books I can’t get) will do less to bolster any global dialogue and more to make people like me just ignore the prize as a politically correct sideshow. Even Solzhenitsyn wanted it more for its political clout than for what it might or might not have said about his quality as an artist.
On a not entirely unrelated note, and to follow up on my discussion from last time, I have added a few new works of fiction to my Amazon wishlist. And what was interesting – and this is not a new observation, but I noticed it again over the past week – was that some books get such a terrific marketing blitz, while others pass through almost totally unseen. The same handful of books will get reviewed by the New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic, New Yorker, etc...and then they show up as banner ads on the sides of other webpages. And I wonder who decides how much glitz to give each of these books as they come out, and especially why the media bite on the same ones. As a reader, it’d definitely be in my best interest to read reviews of different books everywhere, instead of three reviews of the same book. So the books I’m now interested in: are they the literary equivalent of Top 40 music? (Probably not, that’d be chick lit, Danielle Steele, John Grisham.) But they are definitely being strongly marketed, and I wonder what I’m missing or how I’m supposed to find out. Not being able to get my hands on at least a novel or two from Nobel Prize finalists (and winners) in English does not speak well of the current state of affairs.
And now moving from the literary into the distinctly unliterary, I am pleased to see that finally Obama and Biden are pulling comfortably ahead. I’ve been fascinated with Sarah Palin, and remember fondly the days just a few months ago when I was ignorant of her. So much ink has been spilled there’s really very little for me to say, so I’ll just make a few observations. First, she is essentially the female equivalent of George W. Bush. Of course, there are many differences between them – in her favor, she wasn’t born into political and financial wealth. She fell in because of circumstance (whereas with GWB, it’s amazing that he fell in even despite circumstance). What I mean to say is that she is his equivalent in her inarticulateness (though evidence suggests some of this may be contrived), her inability to say the word “nuclear” (which surely must be deliberate: if she can learn to say Ahmadinejad, she can learn to say nuclear), and her appeals to emotion and disdain for pesky “facts”. She talks to people like they are children, and people think this is a good thing. She disdains so-called “elites” while in fact she is more elite than the people she disdains (much less the people she is trying connect with). That people dislike our President and are energized by her makes no sense to me, because they are the same.
The second observation I have has been made repeatedly over the last few weeks: that she acts and sounds like an indifferent student who has crammed for a test. Her contentless (but tortuously verbose) answers to Katie Couric's questions reminded me of the types of essays students in my classes would write when they had no idea of the answer. "The author chose this style to write his book in because any other style would not have suited the author's needs in writing this book, and would not have conveyed the same sense that the chosen style did." And more such nonsense. We had an intern at my old place of work who wrote that way, and it drove me batty. Our leaders have to be curious, not omniscient. I was actually somewhat depressed watching the last Presidential debate at both candidates' answers to the question: What don't you know and how will you find out? Tom Brokaw called it "zen-like", but that's the kind of question that every doctoral prelim committee, job interview, and teacher in the world should be concerned with. Imagine what Palin's answer to such a question would be!
There is obviously a tension in U.S. politics, and it’s a tension that makes sense. On one hand, we want leaders who can understand our problems. On the other, we need leaders who are smart and capable. Despite our mythologizing, not anyone can (or should) be the President. But because we are so distrustful of “elites” (whatever we may mean by that – aren’t elites just the fulfillment of the American dream?), politicians must walk a line rather than just be themselves. This is what makes so much of it so awkward. But the people get what they ask for, which is one of the many wonderful and terrible things about a democracy.
So the Nobel Prizes have been awarded, including the literature prize, which is the one I’m most interested in (and what does that say? I work on both science and policy and I care most about the literature prize). They gave it to a French writer I have never heard of, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. I know there was some hype beforehand; would this be the year that an American like Philip Roth or John Updike won the prize? And one of the members of the Swedish academy actually went on the record saying American literature was too insular. No American has won since Toni Morrison in 1993. I’ve read a bunch of Roth, very little of Updike – I can’t say I was sitting here rooting particularly hard for either of them to win. One plus to the choosing of all these foreign writers is that it exposes (most) American readers to new names. Though sometimes few of the winner writers’ works have been translated into English, and the Nobel doesn’t always change that. A few years back, Orhan Pamuk won, which prompted me to pick up Snow. It was good, but quite slow moving. I finished it, but have not picked up anything else by the author since. Many of the Nobel Prize winners I never get around to.
It’s been pointed out that many Nobel Prize winners were fairly obscure when they won the Prize, and time hasn’t done anything to bolster their popularity. Other extremely well-regarded writers never won. James Joyce, for example...I won’t cry any tears there. He is widely regarded as a genius, but what good is literature if no one can understand it? I have the same problem with William Faulkner, and often wonder why people talk about Faulkner in the same breath as Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Some of the prizes are clearly political. Even Solzhenitsyn, who I wrote about last month, won the prize in part because of the political context for his writing. I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing, though it’d be nice if the prize committee were more straightforward about it. Did you know that Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature? He did, in 1953 (the year before Hemingway). Of the 105 people who have won the Prize, I have read works by less than 20 of them...and that still probably puts me out ahead of most people.
A search of Amazon.com shows me that were I hot to read something by this year’s winner, I would have only a few selections, and none in English or available new from mainstream publishers. This is a two-edged sword. On one hand I wonder what it says about even the reading public in the U.S. Maybe we truly are outside the “global dialogue” of literature, as the Swedish academy member put it. On the other hand, I detect some proud snobbishness coming from my friends in Scandinavia; awarding the prize to people no one’s heard of (and whose books I can’t get) will do less to bolster any global dialogue and more to make people like me just ignore the prize as a politically correct sideshow. Even Solzhenitsyn wanted it more for its political clout than for what it might or might not have said about his quality as an artist.
On a not entirely unrelated note, and to follow up on my discussion from last time, I have added a few new works of fiction to my Amazon wishlist. And what was interesting – and this is not a new observation, but I noticed it again over the past week – was that some books get such a terrific marketing blitz, while others pass through almost totally unseen. The same handful of books will get reviewed by the New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic, New Yorker, etc...and then they show up as banner ads on the sides of other webpages. And I wonder who decides how much glitz to give each of these books as they come out, and especially why the media bite on the same ones. As a reader, it’d definitely be in my best interest to read reviews of different books everywhere, instead of three reviews of the same book. So the books I’m now interested in: are they the literary equivalent of Top 40 music? (Probably not, that’d be chick lit, Danielle Steele, John Grisham.) But they are definitely being strongly marketed, and I wonder what I’m missing or how I’m supposed to find out. Not being able to get my hands on at least a novel or two from Nobel Prize finalists (and winners) in English does not speak well of the current state of affairs.
And now moving from the literary into the distinctly unliterary, I am pleased to see that finally Obama and Biden are pulling comfortably ahead. I’ve been fascinated with Sarah Palin, and remember fondly the days just a few months ago when I was ignorant of her. So much ink has been spilled there’s really very little for me to say, so I’ll just make a few observations. First, she is essentially the female equivalent of George W. Bush. Of course, there are many differences between them – in her favor, she wasn’t born into political and financial wealth. She fell in because of circumstance (whereas with GWB, it’s amazing that he fell in even despite circumstance). What I mean to say is that she is his equivalent in her inarticulateness (though evidence suggests some of this may be contrived), her inability to say the word “nuclear” (which surely must be deliberate: if she can learn to say Ahmadinejad, she can learn to say nuclear), and her appeals to emotion and disdain for pesky “facts”. She talks to people like they are children, and people think this is a good thing. She disdains so-called “elites” while in fact she is more elite than the people she disdains (much less the people she is trying connect with). That people dislike our President and are energized by her makes no sense to me, because they are the same.
The second observation I have has been made repeatedly over the last few weeks: that she acts and sounds like an indifferent student who has crammed for a test. Her contentless (but tortuously verbose) answers to Katie Couric's questions reminded me of the types of essays students in my classes would write when they had no idea of the answer. "The author chose this style to write his book in because any other style would not have suited the author's needs in writing this book, and would not have conveyed the same sense that the chosen style did." And more such nonsense. We had an intern at my old place of work who wrote that way, and it drove me batty. Our leaders have to be curious, not omniscient. I was actually somewhat depressed watching the last Presidential debate at both candidates' answers to the question: What don't you know and how will you find out? Tom Brokaw called it "zen-like", but that's the kind of question that every doctoral prelim committee, job interview, and teacher in the world should be concerned with. Imagine what Palin's answer to such a question would be!
There is obviously a tension in U.S. politics, and it’s a tension that makes sense. On one hand, we want leaders who can understand our problems. On the other, we need leaders who are smart and capable. Despite our mythologizing, not anyone can (or should) be the President. But because we are so distrustful of “elites” (whatever we may mean by that – aren’t elites just the fulfillment of the American dream?), politicians must walk a line rather than just be themselves. This is what makes so much of it so awkward. But the people get what they ask for, which is one of the many wonderful and terrible things about a democracy.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Alarming Dearth Of Fiction, A Soldier’s Story, Monthly Goals, And Other Topics
As I reach the end of my long slog through Omar Bradley’s A Soldier’s Story (and resist the temptation to draw a parallel to the long slog of the Allies through Europe) I find myself facing a serious dearth of fiction to read. In Bradley’s defense, his book was well-written and interesting; my former boss gave it to me and told me it was one of his favorites, and that by itself was enough to make the slog worthwhile. Bradley was indeed a great manager of people, be it the front-line troops or the egos of the high command. I can see why his voice appealed to my former boss, who was a great manager. I had trouble understanding some of the details of the myriad maps Bradley showed of various troop movements and strategies, but I came away with a much finer appreciation of all the things involved in such a massive undertaking, as well as with a better understanding of some of the events in the European part of the war. One thing I liked about the book (at the same time it was a bit frustrating for someone like me with only layman’s knowledge about World War II) was that Bradley knew precisely what he’d set out to do with the book and didn’t attempt to do any more than that.
With respect to fiction, in searching my shelves for what to read next I am finding an abundance of interesting nonfiction just waiting to be read (and many of them thick tomes like Bradley’s that will take me a while), and little in the way of fiction besides some long and difficult reads like Thomas Mann and Dostoevsky. So far, the books I’ve read this year have been evenly split between fiction and nonfiction; I don’t know, however, that I would unreservedly recommend a single one of the novels, whereas I’ve read several excellent works of nonfiction.
Seeking to remedy this situation, I turned to my Amazon wishlist. I routinely use this wishlist as a holding place for books that catch my interest. Some books stay on the list merely for hours; others for for five or more years. Some never get bought. But it’s a place where books that sound interesting stay until I make a final decision about them one way or another.
Of the approximately 90 items currently on my list, less than 20% are fiction. Another 10% or so are writing about writing of various sorts, but even then 70% of my list is nonfiction. Sure, I could head down to the nearest used book store and fill a big bag with fiction, but most of the new stuff is not appealing to me. So I think the only solution is just to keep reading the nonfiction. When I need a break, I’ll know it. Meanwhile, why not go where my interest leads with respect to reading for pleasure? My day job is beginning to involve lots more reading (including several books that I will not list on this blog for fear of self-identifying), and so it’s logical that I’d want to break it up with fiction. But if no fiction is currently calling my name (and plenty of nonfiction is), then so be it.
I also wanted to use this post to assess progress on my September goals and lay out goals for this month. Last month I said I was going to avoid artificial sweeteners and cut down a bit on caffeine. While at home I did a nearly perfect job of this. At my new job, as it turns out, coffee and sodas are free (as is clean water). This would have been a dream come true before I decided to cut back; now it is a serious test. So far I’ve been less than perfect (I’m being kind), but still better. I’ve been drinking a lot more carbonated water and less soda (either the regular or the diet kind) and less iced tea. I’ve also been drinking more water. But some days are better than others. I have to keep working on it.
I set myself the goal of writing 10,000 words on the novel and exceeded it slightly, ending the month with just over 70,000 words. With respect to scenes, I am working on the seventh of 24 right now, and my expectation is that the eighth will be unnecessary. So plugging along. I hope to hit 80,000 words by the end of this month, and perhaps be halfway through my 24 scenes.
I set a goal of 12 weight and 12 cardio sessions for September. Now, I had a problem with my back and skipped a week of weights. I’m back at it (no pun intended) and have done weights twice so far with no problem – I’m just being extra careful on my form. I think the issue was exacerbated by sitting for long periods at a high desk at work. I bought a lumbar support pillow last weekend and so far it has made quite a difference. Though it sounds silly, I think a footrest would also be a good idea to ensure that I have proper posture (and proper weight distribution) while sitting at my desk at work. Anyway, with respect to the gym, for the month I managed 10 weight workouts and 14 cardio workouts (and I wonder if I may have actually forgotten to write one or two of the latter down – I feel like I did a lot of cardio this month). So a few less for weights (thanks to the back issue) and a few more for cardio. Let’s go for 12 and 12 again this month…hopefully, I can exceed it.
Well, the family issues I mentioned last time appear to have been subsumed into larger excitement about the wedding. (To be precise about what I’m saying, I don’t mean the larger issues. But the smaller issue of my grandmother’s gift and the nonsense that accompanied it.) I, as you might have expected, decided not make a huge issue out of it and when I spoke with my parents last weekend the conversation was positive and wedding-focused. So far, I will give them credit: they have been pretty low-maintenance about the wedding. I even broached not inviting an “aunt” of mine who I cannot stand (and aunt is in quotes because she divorced my mom’s brother when I was a small child and then disappeared – I did not see her again until I was a postdoc…though why I can’t stand her has little to do with this) and did not get any immediate pushback. Not sure if the issue is totally settled yet, but I think my decision to invite every single other relative besides this woman of my own volition surprised and relieved my parents. I don’t know who else they thought was on my shit list so that they wouldn’t be invited…but anyway, who I invite and who actually shows up are two different things.
I have a new idea for a short story. I don’t want to spell it out in too much detail here now. I want to sit down and give it a try and see if it works. I’m still not 100% sure about point of view or even about all the details, so it may require a little more thinking. But right now I think it could work.
It’s fall, finally, and even though I’m still sitting here in shorts the days of sweating my balls off walking up to the Metro should be over for a while. The days have been beautiful, the leaves are beginning to turn…this is the part about living in D.C. that I enjoy.
With respect to fiction, in searching my shelves for what to read next I am finding an abundance of interesting nonfiction just waiting to be read (and many of them thick tomes like Bradley’s that will take me a while), and little in the way of fiction besides some long and difficult reads like Thomas Mann and Dostoevsky. So far, the books I’ve read this year have been evenly split between fiction and nonfiction; I don’t know, however, that I would unreservedly recommend a single one of the novels, whereas I’ve read several excellent works of nonfiction.
Seeking to remedy this situation, I turned to my Amazon wishlist. I routinely use this wishlist as a holding place for books that catch my interest. Some books stay on the list merely for hours; others for for five or more years. Some never get bought. But it’s a place where books that sound interesting stay until I make a final decision about them one way or another.
Of the approximately 90 items currently on my list, less than 20% are fiction. Another 10% or so are writing about writing of various sorts, but even then 70% of my list is nonfiction. Sure, I could head down to the nearest used book store and fill a big bag with fiction, but most of the new stuff is not appealing to me. So I think the only solution is just to keep reading the nonfiction. When I need a break, I’ll know it. Meanwhile, why not go where my interest leads with respect to reading for pleasure? My day job is beginning to involve lots more reading (including several books that I will not list on this blog for fear of self-identifying), and so it’s logical that I’d want to break it up with fiction. But if no fiction is currently calling my name (and plenty of nonfiction is), then so be it.
I also wanted to use this post to assess progress on my September goals and lay out goals for this month. Last month I said I was going to avoid artificial sweeteners and cut down a bit on caffeine. While at home I did a nearly perfect job of this. At my new job, as it turns out, coffee and sodas are free (as is clean water). This would have been a dream come true before I decided to cut back; now it is a serious test. So far I’ve been less than perfect (I’m being kind), but still better. I’ve been drinking a lot more carbonated water and less soda (either the regular or the diet kind) and less iced tea. I’ve also been drinking more water. But some days are better than others. I have to keep working on it.
I set myself the goal of writing 10,000 words on the novel and exceeded it slightly, ending the month with just over 70,000 words. With respect to scenes, I am working on the seventh of 24 right now, and my expectation is that the eighth will be unnecessary. So plugging along. I hope to hit 80,000 words by the end of this month, and perhaps be halfway through my 24 scenes.
I set a goal of 12 weight and 12 cardio sessions for September. Now, I had a problem with my back and skipped a week of weights. I’m back at it (no pun intended) and have done weights twice so far with no problem – I’m just being extra careful on my form. I think the issue was exacerbated by sitting for long periods at a high desk at work. I bought a lumbar support pillow last weekend and so far it has made quite a difference. Though it sounds silly, I think a footrest would also be a good idea to ensure that I have proper posture (and proper weight distribution) while sitting at my desk at work. Anyway, with respect to the gym, for the month I managed 10 weight workouts and 14 cardio workouts (and I wonder if I may have actually forgotten to write one or two of the latter down – I feel like I did a lot of cardio this month). So a few less for weights (thanks to the back issue) and a few more for cardio. Let’s go for 12 and 12 again this month…hopefully, I can exceed it.
Well, the family issues I mentioned last time appear to have been subsumed into larger excitement about the wedding. (To be precise about what I’m saying, I don’t mean the larger issues. But the smaller issue of my grandmother’s gift and the nonsense that accompanied it.) I, as you might have expected, decided not make a huge issue out of it and when I spoke with my parents last weekend the conversation was positive and wedding-focused. So far, I will give them credit: they have been pretty low-maintenance about the wedding. I even broached not inviting an “aunt” of mine who I cannot stand (and aunt is in quotes because she divorced my mom’s brother when I was a small child and then disappeared – I did not see her again until I was a postdoc…though why I can’t stand her has little to do with this) and did not get any immediate pushback. Not sure if the issue is totally settled yet, but I think my decision to invite every single other relative besides this woman of my own volition surprised and relieved my parents. I don’t know who else they thought was on my shit list so that they wouldn’t be invited…but anyway, who I invite and who actually shows up are two different things.
I have a new idea for a short story. I don’t want to spell it out in too much detail here now. I want to sit down and give it a try and see if it works. I’m still not 100% sure about point of view or even about all the details, so it may require a little more thinking. But right now I think it could work.
It’s fall, finally, and even though I’m still sitting here in shorts the days of sweating my balls off walking up to the Metro should be over for a while. The days have been beautiful, the leaves are beginning to turn…this is the part about living in D.C. that I enjoy.
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