My time at Odyssey

Last week I did a guest author stint at the great Odyssey Writing Workshop, held at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH. Odyssey is kind of a bootcamp for people honing their skills in all areas of fantastic fiction. For six weeks, 16 writers write, read, think about, discuss, eat, and sleep fantastic fiction, under the stern yet kind direction of Jeanne Cavelos, who created the enterprise.

I envy them. I never did anything like this earlier in my career, which might really have helped.

Jeanne likes to have a writer or editor come in every week, to talk about the writer's life, and help critique varius students' work. Since writing is very much a part-time enterprise for me, which I anticipate for most of the students, I focused on how to manage that, and what to expect.

I'm not a writing teacher. It's just not a topic where I think I have an enormous amount to add. And it takes me forever to come up with something useful or interesting to say. This year my topic was literary SF, which is just crazy as a topic. Usually I do plot, which I can kind of fake. But it was kind of fun researching, thinking about how literary fiction differs from commercial fiction, what writers should pay attention to, and how to have fun with it.

After a couple of weeks drafting my lecture, writing critiques of a bunch of manuscripts, giving my lecture, having individual conferences with students, and in general talking about writing for a day and a half, I was exhausted. I came home and slept much of the weekend.

Jeanne does this all day every day for the entire session. It's really her baby, she knows everyone is depending on her, and she is enormously present for everyone at all times. I just can't fathom it.

This is about as much instructing as I can manage with my limited energy and even more limited neurons, but I do enjoy it, and end up meeting a lot of interesting people. I worked with some fine writers, and hope to see them in print soon.

My Readercon schedule

I will be at Readercon again this year, July 13-16.  If you want to catch me, go ahead, I'm not that fast.  Otherwise, these are the panels I will be on:

Thursday July 13

8:00 PM    5    How to Moderate a Panel. Alex Jablokow, Victoria Janssen (leader), Kathleen Jennings, Tom Purdom, Kenneth Schneyer. The moderator plays a crucial role in making panels run smoothly and enjoyably for participants and attendees. This panel will cover how to get questions rather than comments from audience members, how to deal with a panelist who goes off the rails, and how to make sure everyone gets equal time, among many other topics.

Friday July 14

3:00 PM    AT    Autographs. Alex Jablokow, Yoon Lee.

6:00 PM    C    The Catastrophe of Success. Alex Jablokow, Jim Kelly (leader), Matt Kressel, Paul Levinson, Eric Schaller. In a 1947 essay called "The Catastrophe of Success," Tennessee Williams wrote, "We are like a man who has bought up a great amount of equipment for a camping trip... but who now, when all the preparations and the provisions are piled expertly together, is suddenly too timid to set out on the journey.... Our great technology is a God-given chance for adventure and for progress which we are afraid to attempt." This is a very 1940s SFnal way of looking at technology and the world. We are in Williams's future, with 70 years of perspective to add to his still-relevant observation. What has changed in the human relationship to technology since 1947, and what has stayed the same? How can present-day SF explore this tension between what technology allows us to do and the fear that holds us back?

Saturday July 15

2:00 PM    5    The Life Cycle of Political SF. Dennis Danvers, Alex Jablokow, Barbara Krasnoff (moderator), Sabrina Vourvoulias, T. X. Watson. SF writers have often written deeply political books and stories; some stand the test of time, while others become dated very quickly. John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Joanna Russ's The Female Man, and Ursula K. Le Guin's "The New Atlantis," to name just a few, directly addressed major issues of their day and are still relevant now—but differently. What affects how political SF ages and is read decades after its publication? What are today’s explicitly political books, and how do we expect them to resonate decades in the future?

I hope to see you there.

The passions of Chalcedonians and Monophysites

Every commentator notes how partisan the American public has become. Positions seem continually more extreme, blue is bluer, red is redder, and no one is interested in what the other side has to say.

This may well be true. I live in a genteel blue area, and do know a lot of people with predictable doctrines (and many women I encounter specify adherence to these doctrines as a prerequisite for dating them), but no one seems particularly enraged at their opponents or uncomprehending of their positions.

So that leads to the natural question: what would the period after the Council of Chalcedon have been like if someone in Late Antiquity had invented Twitter?

Chalcedon, in 451, established the Orthodox definition of the nature of Christ, the same definition used by modern Orthodox, Catholics, and Protestants. But some found this an unwelcome compromise. Their position was known (I gather pejoratively) as Monophysitism. Their descendants are Coptic and Oriental Orthodox churches, including the Ethiopian, Armenian, and Syriac churches.

Christological wrangling seems to have fallen out of fashion (I gather it really requires Greek to be clear enough to fight about), and I won't go into the details they were squabbling about here. But they really did take it seriously, and the more heavily Monophysite areas of Egypt and Syria were always in conflict with Chacedonian Constantinople, Asia Minor, and Balkans. They would denounce each other, riot against each other, depose each other's bishops, and write endless screeds against each other.

Periodically, an Emperor would try to do something about it. Zeno came up with the Henoticon, which tried, unsuccessfully to paper over the differences by being unclear about what they were. Anastasius, a pious Monophysite, had no patience with extremists and exiled both overzealous Monophysites and Chalcedonians, finding them both tiresome. Justinian, who knew everything, tried to persuade everyone to an elaborate compromise position involving the Three Chapters (something else probably not worth the effort to understand), but even this late antique Woodrow Wilson was unable to achieve his goal. Justinian's Empress, Theodora, was a fervent Monophysite, and never compromised either.

Anastasius, by the way is one of my favorite Emperors. He took office at age 60, ruled for over a quarter of a century (491-518), and left the Empire (the Eastern Roman Empire by this point) prosperous and with a huge cash surplus, which unfortunately enabled his overactive successor Justinian to finance his endless wars. History tends to overvalue the flashy Justinians and undervalue the "how about we focus on reestablishing coinage with consistent value and stay away from overheated rhetoric" Anastasiuses.

When the Arabs invaded in the early 7th century, they conquered the Monophysite areas, which has been atributed to the inhabitants' hatred of Orthodoxy, but I think this is mostly a matter of geographical chance. It's just that they failed to conquer the Orthodox heartland.

The conflict between Chalcedonian and Monophysite wasn't all in good fun, but it wasn't a civilizational fissure either. Both inhabited a unified empire, honored the same Emperor. and got on with things. If they had spent their days tweeting about consubstantiality, they might have ended up hating each other enough to break up the Empire long before it finally fell to overwhelming force.

So, yeah. I'm with Anastasius. Sure, think those people are clueless idiots, and their doctrines are abhorrent. But we have a nation to run, jobs to do, food to cook, and beaches to lie on with our dates or our families.  Dammit, did that seagull just steal my sandwich? That's what I really need to worry about.

My new favorite ingredient: fermented bean curd

A few months ago I listened to Tyler Cowen's conversation with Fuchsia Dunlop on his podcast, Conversations with Tyler. The conversation takes place over dinner and includes one of my favorite economics/food bloggers, Megan McArdle as well as Ezra Klein and several other interesting people.

Well worth a listen. It makes me realize how often I'm just not paying attention to my food.

The podcast led me to purchase Dunlop's book Every Grain of Rice, subtitled Simple Chinese Home Cooking, also recommended. I don't usually read cookbooks, but this one has interesting information about Chinese food, its history--and its ingredients.

Here I discovered fermented bean curd. It comes in at least two varieties: red and white. Her main recipe is for spinach, but I went online and found one for cauliflower.

I popped down down to H-Mart in Central Square and grabbed some Laoganma brand (people seem to love The Godmother, and the somewhat mournful lady on the logo was allegedly a real person).

I bought a lot of other stuff too. It's a great market, though the one out in Burlington is way bigger, almost intimidatingly so.

I think I prefer the red to the white, but both are good. Salty and full of umami, the cubes are kind of cheese-like, and melt into the vegetables, giving them a distinct tang. I've never even been a huge fan of cauliflower, but the simple dish above is now in regular rotation, because it's so damn fast, easy to make, and delicious.

Anyway, its now a staple here. Give it a try.

Am I too lazy to get outraged?

Reply All is one of my favorite podcasts because it entertainingly explains all sorts of internet memetic activity in a way that even someone my age can appreciate. They've long had a segment called Yes Yes No where the boss comes to the two hosts (Alex Goldman and P J Vogt) with a mysterious tweet that he con't figure out, and that always turns out to be a deeply multi-referential deep dive into what the soul of the internet looks like that week.

Now, they've added "Why Is Everybody So Mad And Do I Have To Be Mad Also", about figuring out what everyone else is so outraged about online, and then whether that outrage makes sense. Using "also" instead of "too" is a stroke of genius, giving it slight fillip of dorky formality.

For me, no, it never makes sense. I don't actually think I'm particularly busy during my day. I do have work to do, things to accomplish, something even something fun to do. But the amount of work is certainly not overwhelming. But no matter how uneventful the day, I don't have enough time in it to generate outrage over something I see online, forward it to others, post it on Facebook, and comment on it.

It's not that I don't get exasperated at some of the bits of flotsam that the internet floats into my mind. I have one kid in college and another heading there, so what happened at Middlebury College really did disturb me. So when I have beer or coffee with a friend, I will discuss some of the issues on my mind. Don't worry, I can view with alarm with the best of them, and speak fluent harrumphish. It's just that I prefer to express my outrage in person. And with an good IPA or dark roast.

I guess that's it. If I am not consuming a hot or cold beverage with someone else, opinions are just meaningless.

Behind on everything, but...catching up?

I am the mercy of my internal astrology. I have some decent organizational structures, essential for a basically disorganized person who has a lot of things to get done.

But sometimes they work a lot better than other times. For instance, recently, I've been catching up with stuff. I am doing nothing different, making no particular effort, but big chunks of stuff that were hanging around, punks with cigarettes dangling from their lower lips, ominously refusing to leave, have suddenly realized they had somewhere else they needed to be, and have cleared out.

I really wish I knew what conjunction or trine or whatever of my interior solar system led to a sudden burst of work.

But what then? Some people track things about their lives, like how much they sleep, how many hours they spend in REM, etc. To me, unless that information enables you to make a decision, it's just data, like counting the number of birds that land on a phone line outside your window.

I guess if the metaphor of internal planets is accurate, I could plan major life tasks for when they are in the right positions, and invest more effort in my external organizational systems when the planets tell me I'm going to be a useless load.

Because I sure don't see any correlation with anything else in my life. These moods of productivity come and go. I figure successful people feel productive a higher percentage of the time than I do. I envy them. I really do feel good when I'm writing well, producing for my clients, paying bills on time, and meeting my personal obligations, all without have to strain and torment myself. I wish I felt that way more.

But I guess I'll just have to be satisfied with feeling that way sometimes.

Works and days

Most of us writers need to make money, since few of us make enough from fiction to buy lunch, much less support ourselves (much less support ex-wives, college-attending children, expensive tastes in alcohol, etc.) So we have day jobs.

Mine is freelance marketing writing. I really like it, and regularly recommend this line of work to fellow writers with an inclination for it. It involves a lot of the same skills, in addition to the writing part: understanding motivation, creating suspense, leaving things to the imagination.

It's also got the feature that your clients can suddenly need what you're working on more than anything. One of my clients suddenly got a lot of pressure to generate a huge amount of marketing content, all at once, and with ridiculously short timelines. So she wrote me an email with lots of caps in it, got me a purchase order, had me invoice, and put me to work.

I have no idea why my client's higher ups only figured out they needed this stuff two weeks before it had to be in the hands of the sales team, but if you've ever worked at a large company, particularly one that has recently acquired large numbers of other companies, you know that everyone is barely keeping their heads above water, much less calmly looking ahead a few quarters to see what they'll be needing to get things over the line and make their numbers.

On the other hand, if I write fiction, someone will read it, but no one is really breaking my door down for it. So I won't lie: it's nice to be wanted.

And, as always, doing high quality work on deadline is the only thing anyone will pay for. Mediocre crap turned in late is somehow not a hot commodity.

But the fiction is still the first thing I do in the morning. I just have to give it a bit less time when deadlines loom. And the book is going pretty well. I should write about that at some point.

Back from London

I took my daughter Faith to London for school break, and it's taken me awhile to get back on schedule. We were absolute tourists, all the big sights you would expect. So don't expect any undiscovered gems or anything. Thought February was a great time to go, not too cold, not many other tourists. A few highlights:

Faith is a big politics fan, so we saw sittings of both Commons and Lords. The Commons chamber was destroyed during WWII, and is kind of bland, but Lords still has the elaborate 1834 Gothic Revival interior. Faith saw Boris Johnson in the Central Lobby--I saw the back of his head.

In keeping with the politics theme, we went to the Garrick and saw This House, by James Graham, a wonderful play about an unpromising subject, the hung Parliament of the mid-1970s, with the two party deputy whips as the main characters. Watching the procedural infighting, sly tactics, and confict between principle and practice might seem to show how arbitrary procedure is, but really shows how the structure provided by procedure keeps passion within bounds and focused on meaningful ends. Harrison, the Labor deputy chief whip, says, at a climactic moment, that all he ever wanted to do was work in the engine room.  I also liked that MPs were always referred to by their constituency, particularly "Finchley" (Margaret Thatcher).

I kept away from huge museums, which can be tiring, but we both enjoyed the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum, which is kind of a museum of the museum's origin, just the right size, and full of interesting oddities.

The Palladian Queen's House at Greenwich is startlingly elegant, with impressive maritime art, including a portrait of the older Pepys, long after his Diary, which placed him right in his day job--and an impressive day job it was, too.

Lots of Hawksmoor churches, one in Greenwich, several along the Docklands Light Railway on the way back, and Christ Church in Spitalfields, where I took Faith afterward to rummage through the vast number of vintage clothing stores there. Faith got tired of Hawksmoor. I did not. My interest him no doubt stems from the Peter Ackroyd novel Hawksmoor which I remember being impressed by when I first read it, but I'd like to think I have my own aesthetic response to his stagy facades.

John Soane collected more things in his house than I would be comfortable with, but I'd still like to liver there. And you can always go right across Lincoln's Inn Fields to the Hunterian Museum to see the skeleton of Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant, whose biggest fear was that John Hunter would get hold of his body after he died and put his skeleton on display in his museum. There is something so wonderful and awful about the tangle of love of knowledge, obsessive completism, and showmanship revealed by the incident that I hope well-meaning spoilsports never give the long-gone Byrne the funeral at sea (in a lead coffin) that he was desperate to have. Science is never an emotionally neutral endeavor.

I'd forgotten what a theme park of the war against Napoleon St. Paul's Cathedral got turned into: aside from Wellington and Nelson, it's piled with the overblown monuments of forgotten generals and admirals. And Nelson's black marble sarcophagus (lowered through the cathedral floor to the crypt during the funeral ceremony in what must have been an extremely stressful event for the engineer) was originally made for Cardinal Wolsey, then taken by Henry VIII for his own tomb, but never used (perhaps not large enough....) and then knocking around royal palaces for 250 years, never quite matching the decor, until George III finally figured out a use for it.

And we went on the Millennium Eye. I'm from Chicago, so it takes more than a leftover from the Columbian Exposition to impress me, but it's got a good view. Still, I'd advise spending the money on beer instead.

Well, that's enough. Give me beer and a lot of old crap to look at, and I'm happy.

The kind of sentence I like

From Song of the Vikings, by Nancy Marie Brown:

They brought home bright-colored cloaks and tunics and hose in the brilliant scarlets and leaf-greens of the alum-fixed dyes that were all the rage in twelfth-century Europe; an ell of scarlet wook sold for six times the equivalent length of undyed gray.

Alum is what is called a mordant (a lovely word that, according the Griffin Dyeworks, comes from the French "to bite"): something that gets dye to actually stick to the fabric. I love the detail because it relates to culture, fashion, and technology, and, of course, status, which depends on all of those.

The "home" here is Iceland. The subtitle of the books is "Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths". It is a biography of Snorri Sturluson, the 13th century literary and political genius who seems to have given form to a lot of what we now accept as the standard Norse myths, even as his political machinations contributed to chaos in Iceland, his murder, and the eventual loss of Iceland's independence and its rule by the King of Norway.

His era, called the "Sturlung Era" after his family, is when family and regional sagas were written down in the form we now know--13th century views of events and personalities in the 10th and 11th. Snorri seems to have written Egil's Saga, one of the longest and best known. A story does not tell itself. It says something about both the teller and the listener. The people of the contentious and threatened Sturlung Era looked back to the Saga Era and tried to understand how they had ended up where they were.

This is all research for the book I'm working on. It is not set in Iceland, but is definitely inspired by it. Brown does mention, among things, that Iceland's climate does not allow honeybees to survive. I definitely have bees in my book (growing out of my story "The Forgotten Taste of Honey"), so there you go: not Iceland.

Laying rails for the locomotive

Some writers are able to think of stuff while they write.

I sure can think of stuff, but it is almost always clever, glittery distractions from whatever it is I am trying to accomplish. Pointless flashbacks, cool devices, elaborately describe artworks...name it, I've done it.

In order to actually write a scene, something unified in space and time that has a structure and focus and conflict and a decent ending that kicks you into the next scene, I have to already know all of those things before I actually write it. I've learned this through long experience.

And all that is hard for me, and takes a long time. Sometimes I start writing, with a good amount of planned material, and tear through it, and run out of plan. It really is like driving a locomotive off the end of the tracks. No progress, and a lot of frustration.

So I always have to make sure I've excavated, distributed the ballast, built bridges across particularly perilous obstacles, dropped the ties, and nailed the rails on before I get going.

I'm working on a novel just now (a hefty expansion of my recent novella, "The Forgotten Taste of Honey") and ran out of rails. I got to a location, looked at my notes, and realized they were entirely too vague, lacked conflict, and in general were lazy generalities. Who wrote this crap?

So I just spent almost two weeks (I'm not fast) really getting into it. Now I think I have what I need to get through it. Can I actually work ahead in enough detail to keep my locomotive from burying its nose in the mud again?

I'll let you know.

A hissy fit is not a strategy

I never used to write about politics. I didn't feel that I had anything particularly useful to say about it--no more useful than most people, anyway. But things seem...odd. Almost science fictional! So maybe my profession does give me some specific skills in viewing our current situation.

Which, no matter how things work out, people in the future will study earnestly. If nothing else, my statements here will get fed into some gigantic opinion parser. "What were the people of what was then known as the United States think on the first day of February, 2017?"

Well, here are two articles and one blog post full of useful observations and good advice for those who find themselves in this era, don't quite know how they got here, and wonder what best to do to get through it.

Everyday Authoritarianism is Boring and Tolerable

We live life day to day. All of us. We go to the store, we read stories to our children, we have dinner with friends, we rest our heads on someone else's shoulder, we get irritated with our clueless boss. That's what we do. Normal tyranny becomes...normal. As Tom Pepinsky says

The mental image that most American harbor of what actual authoritarianism looks like is fantastical and cartoonish. This vision of authoritarian rule has jackbooted thugs, all-powerful elites acting with impunity, poverty and desperate hardship for everyone else, strict controls on political expression and mobilization, and a dictator who spends his time ordering the murder or disappearance of his opponents using an effective and wholly compliant security apparatus.

Oppressors in movies and books wear snappy uniforms with ominous symbols on the collar. They are easy to spot.

Don't get used to things. I think that's probably the most important lesson. Remember what life in this country is supposed to be like, and hold to it.

In Venezuela, we couldn’t stop Chávez. Don’t make the same mistakes we did.

Venezuela? Seriously? The lessons, sadly, are pointed.

Andrés Miguel Rondón describes here the many mistakes the sensible middle class made when trying to combat Hugo Chávez. Our befuddled and self-regarding left is already making the same ones with Trump.

Don't give up on democracy, because a lack of democracy will never be your friend, even if the voters seem crazy. Don't become hysterical and tell people all sorts of terrifying things that are not really the things anyone really worries about:

But a hissy fit is not a strategy.

The people on the other side — and crucially, independents — will rebel against you if you look like you’re losing your mind. You will have proved yourself to be the very thing you’re claiming to be fighting against: an enemy of democracy.

And, finally

make every question a strategic question

Know why you're doing what you're doing, and what you hope to accomplish by doing it, both near-term and long-term. Are you just expressing your rage, despair, and befuddlement? Stay home, breathe deeply, unplug, and don't go back online until you know what the hell you are trying to get done. Have solid goals you can communicate to others? Move toward those goals, step by explicit step.

Leftists are actually arguing for political violence. Aside from the fact that is just wrong, it's also futile: do leftists think they have some kind of advantage when it comes to the use of violence? Do they own guns? Have they served in the military? Do they have a ballistic nylon bugout bag in the back of their 4x4? Do they even deadlift?

Fredrik de Boer has lost patience with these people, and he's an ardent leftist who has put in the time and paid serious dues. I never had any patience with them to begin with, because I'm a hardshell centrist. Don't Tread On Me, Vibram sole or not.

We will always be the country that elected Donald Trump as President

I every much dislike someone identifying a moment as the one where "America lost its innocence". The United State is a real country, with real people in it, real people with real needs, fears, prejudices, and false beliefs. Its citizens have done many terrible things, to each other and to others. They have also done great things. That is why there is less excuse for us.

My headline comes from Jonathan Kirschner's excellent article America, America, in the LA Review of Books, where he also says "there is no happy ending to this story". (I found Kirschner's piece via Daniel Drezner's Why President Obama is the Jon Snow of American foreign policy)

I do think Trump is the human O-ring, and that we are running a real risk of permanent damage to our political system. Kirschner runs down many of the real issues that led to the rise of Trump, and the refusal of responsible people to deal with these issues. We really do have things we need to do. Serious, hard, unrewarding things that no one will really thank us for, because, despite the fact that we have become rich and free through hard, incremental work, no one seems to find hard, incremental work credible as a solution to anything.

One thing I think everyone with anxiety about what Trump will do to our future needs to do is consider the practical consequences of their actions. They should have a plan, something they are aiming at, and then ask themselves, when tempted to do something emotionally satisfying that will get some clicks and likes from people who agree with them, "is this helping us get to where we should be?"

Does claiming Trump is not a legitimate President get you a step toward where you want to be? Or does it, in fact, make the future where a coalition successfully addresses the issues less likely, because a President they campaign for is then also considered illegitimate?

I tend to support Obama in fighting cleanly and fairly. Others think any weapon in this conflict is welcome. But, again, the question: will fighting dirty help you win? And if you do "win" with such methods, can you govern, help the weak, increase freedom, increase wealth, and do a minimum of harm? Can you pass a working system down to future generations?

But, of course, we know that the important issues revolve around arguments about how many people attended various past public events.

After such an election, what forgiveness?

Recent reading: Lady Susan

In her teens, Jane Austen wrote an epistolary novella. It was published decades after her death as Lady Susan. It's flawed, but entertaining. Lady Susan is a manipulative yet observantly witty, and is a dominating character--no one else in the narrative is of much interest.

It involves money and marriage, no surprise, and is no one's idea of a romance. Lady Susan tries to marry her daughter off to a wealthy but otherwise inappropriate suitor, but her plans are thrown off by her own urge to misbehave with yet another man. A good manipulator is never manipulated by her own emotions, so Lady Susan falls short of the ideal.

Whit Stillman recently turned the book into the movie Love and Friendship (named after quite a different unfinished Austen work, even though there is little enough of either in the book, or the movie). It's a chilly and austere enterprise, probably not worth seeing if you haven't read the book.

It is interesting to read, because it's always interesting to see a writer working with favorite themes but with incomplete control of technique. Since the novel is written in letters, the letters must be written to someone. So Lady Susan confides all her machinations to her friend Alicia Johnson. Alicia has no role in the narrative, save as uncritical cheerleader to Lady Susan, and is give a perfunctory background life with an unsatisfactory husband. She's a bit like a pillar in the middle of the living room put in to support to roof by an architect who hadn't figured out a way to work it into the design.

In the movie, Lady Susan (Kate Beckinsale) keeps popping into London from the country house she is staying in to visit Alicia (Chloe Sevigny, played as American, presumably to expand the film's market) whenever she needs to talk to her, as if there's a commuter train between the two. If Alicia had been an actual part of the narrative, that would have been easier for Stillman to manage.

One thing I really like about Lady Susan is that she is a bad mom. And this is just a fact about her, not much more terrible than her other personality traits. In most fiction, being a bad mom is the worst thing a woman can be. Bad dad...well, hey, that's a hard job, no wonder us guys screw it up now and then. Lady Susan describes her daughter as a bit of a dullard. Mean, but entirely accurate, in both book and movie. She is phenomenally dull. Her only use really is to get married off so that mom can continue to live an overleveraged life.

The story feels truncated, as if Austen went on to other, more promising projects (Sense and Sensibility, originally Elinor and Marianne was apparently also epistolary in its original draft) and never got back to it. Kind of a pity. If Alicia Johnson, earnest confidante, had turned into an actor in her own right, with goals that gradually diverge from Lady Susan's, it might have been quite something. Call it Will and Idea, and scoop Schopenhauer into the bargain....

I read this for my favorite book group, where I always find myself reading something unexpected.

Did you ever notice...?

At the risk of chanToo European for you?nelling the late Andy Rooney: did you ever notice that the small, double basket carts at the grocery store are always gone?

People don't actually fight over the things, at least not here in Cambridge, where people are really well behaved, but sometimes it seems like they should. While there are dozens of the big, traditional shopping carts, large enough to hold an entire side of beef, case of PBR, and a gross of Lean Cuisines, all of which require diving into the depths of the cart to retrieve, the nimble, post-divorce carts are in scarce supply.

Beware, you suburbanites. A Cambridge grocery store will terrify you. The aisles are just wide enough for naked mole rats to squirm over each other. You'll get claustrophobia, and the package sizes will make you feel that you've woken up in Lilliput.

Maybe thisAnything to keep them from scooping food from the shelves sport-model carts have no place in the rest of the country (though there must be plenty of divorced and single people everywhere), but here they are a wonderful invention. I see parents maneuvering those giant carts with the driving simulator on the back (two steering wheels--fortunately, self-driving cars will probably be mandatory before these deluded toddlers get old enough to apply for a license), but then, these people drive Escalades and probably have sectional sofas the size of aircraft carriers at home. For the rest of us, the sport model cart is just what we want.

Particularly for me, since I put my bike panniers in the bottom basket and fill the top.

So why do these grocery stores run out of them so much? There are any number of possible reasons:

• They are expensive, despite their small size
• They are easily stolen, damaged, or otherwise require frequent replacement
• The manufacturers are having trouble filling orders
• They require their own line, which reduces the available inventory of the tradtional carts prohibitively

You can come up with your own reasons. If I was an actual journalist, I'd do some research and learn what the supply and use contstraints really are, but really I just want to complain. If anyone does figure out an explanation, let me know.

Addendum, 2/1/17: I asked a clerk at the store, and he said that those smaller carts are stolen way more frequently than the big ones. They only have half of their initial purchase of 36 small carts left, and really have to think if it's worth the cost. At least everyone seems to like them!

Where I'll be at Arisia

I'll be attending our local con, Arisia, next weekend (January 13-15). I probably won't be there Friday night, but will be all day Saturday and Sunday.  If  you're there, say hello. My panels are:

10 am Saturday Fashionpunk
A discussion of various aspects of fashion and SF, with Chris Brathwaite, T. X. Watson, and Nightwing Whitehead.

10 am Sunday How to Self-Edit That Steaming Hot Pile of Crap
Thrilling editing stories and methods, with Trisha Wooldridge, Matthew Kressel, Jackqui B., and Ken Scheneyer.

1 pm Sunday The 100 Year Old Barbed Wire: The Great War & SF
A combination of works by people who went through that war, and works about and influence by it, with Sioban Krzywicki, Greer Gilman, Debra Doyle, and Sonya Taaffe.

'Twas ever thus

Sometimes the world seems totally different, when it is actually completely the same.

I was reading Sean Davis Cashman's America in the Gilded Age (research for a possible book), when I came across an account of a conflict the urban reformer and founder of Chicago's Hull House, Jane Addams, had with a corrupt local boss, Johnny "DePow" Powers.  She wanted to clean the streets of trash, and so launched two campaigns, in 1896 and 1898, to unseat him. She failed both times. As Cashman puts it:

She discovered she could not compete with his reputation for generosity. He boasted that 2,600 ward residents owed their city jobs to him. He distributed railroad passes, Christmas dinners, and free coal. Ordinary people could appreciate such minuscule largess without realizing that they usually paid for it in the extortionate street railway fares Powers secured for his allies, the railway companies. Ironically, they prefered his top hat and opulent life-style to the cloth caps and austere behavior of Addams's candidates.

That "irony", if such it is, will always be with us. The popular politician who lives large and crushes more virtuous opponents is a staple of democratic politics, from Alcibiades's day to this.

Our political Morton Thiokol O-ring

On January 28, 1986 the space shuttle Challenger took off from Kennedy Space Center, in unusually cold temperatures. Morton Thiokol had built the boosters out of four segments each. Field joints containing rubber O-rings seals connected the segments. That morning, the cold rubber of the joints, operating in temperatures far lower than ever tested, became stiff.

A jet of exhaust came through one of the cold-stiff seals and played on an external tank containing oxygen and hydrogen, until the tank exploded. At 73 seconds after liftoff, Challenger came apart. I'd like to say "killing all aboard", but it seems that the crew survived, as the crew compartment continued to climb before free falling into the ocean, finally killing everyone aboard.

This was the result of "normal deviance": things seemed fine on every other day, so poor practices continued, shrinking safety margins. Because safety margins are a pain in the ass.

Increasing bank capital requirements can lower the risk of catastrophic 2008-type failures and bailouts, as Neel Kashkari, president of the Minneapolis Fed has proposed, but at the cost of higher interest rates and lower growth (the most recent episode of the Planet Money podcast has that story). Repairing infrastructure before it actually falls down costs money taxpayers always bitch about. Computer security slows things down, and makes interactions more difficult. Security precautions are always annoying, and no one can tell which ones are effective. Earthquake-proofing buildings in tectonically active areas is expensive, time-consuming, and can affect how buildings look.

If nothing bad happens for awhile (and that "awhile" doesn't have to be very long) people start cutting corners. They get irritated at inspectors, security drills, perfectly good money spent for no visibly good reason. They get to think that you should only worry about problems that happen visibly and regularly. Even trained engineers and technicians, like those that day at KSC can fall prey to it. It's not obvious. And, until something goes really wrong, the problem is invisible, because failure is sudden and dramatic, rather than slow and visible.

Our economic and political system seems robust, flexible, and responsive. And I'm sure it is. Still, both democracy and capitalism are essentially unnatural. Both insist on valuing strangers as much as personal contacts, tell you that costs in the short term lead to benefits in the long term, and are complex and opaque. Maintenance and upgrades have to be continuous, and that work can be quite tiresome and unrewarding.

We have elected a Morton Thiokol O-ring as President.  Assume nothing, and keep your eye on the thermometer.

A few podcasts I like

One of the most influential cultural figures in my (part of) my world is Mike Duncan. Duncan pioneered a deeply researched, perceptive, snarky style for presenting longform history podcasts in the History of Rome, and then in Revolutions.

The first history podcaster with a high profile was probably Lars Brownsworth with his Twelve Byzantine Rulers, many years ago, but I think it took Duncan to really show how a regular person, working hard, could do it.

Robin Pierson, with his imposing The History of Byzantium is the most obvious successor, since he took up where Duncan left off, with the intention of going all the way to 1453.

But lately I've really liked The History of the Twentieth Century by Mark Painter, who, from his biography, also writes science fiction. No wonder it's good. He picks interesting music of the period (he had a particularly funny run of playing "A Hot Time On The Old Town", which seems to have been the sound track to America's introduction to overseas military intervention. He really seems able to pull out the interesting and significant points from any incident, character, or situation. I'm a big fan.

Many podcasts are self-indulgent, unedited, and focused on whatever happened in the last five minutes. I like a couple of those (like the Slate Political Gabfest and Slate Money). But, by and large, it takes a lot of work and editing to get a podcast worth listening to.

I'd love to do a podcast myself, but have trouble getting done what I need to already. I have a concept, topics, and everything. Someday, maybe....

The saving remnant

Before the election I worried that Clinton's victory would enable the Left to continue to ignore the consequences of its intellectual bankruptcy, failure to engage with the real problems facing our civilization, and insular self-satisfaction.

Well, Clinton didn't win, but that didn't make any difference to my prediction. The Left really does seem intent on ignoring these things, focusing, instead, on our new President's (many and real) personal failings, a total nonstarter as either a political move or a coherent philosophical position.

I continue to find the fate of Washington's Initiative 732, where social justice activists helped defeat a sensible-seeming carbon tax proposal because it didn't provide enough direct payoffs to their constituencies, instructive. Sometimes, the real question we ask about a big problem should be "how can we solve it?" and not "how can we use it to bludgeon our cultural enemies?" Self-righteousness always seems to triumph over incremental problem solving.

I'm worried that, seemingly envying Putin's Russia its vibrant cultural life, booming economy, and inclusive politics, the Trump administration will settle us with a crony capitalist system that looks superficially like the wealth-and-freedom-creating system we are used to, but is actually something quite different.

Instead I see essays on cultural appropriation, an issue that shows how far past its sell-by date American progressivism has gotten. But I certainly can't do any better on that topic than Fredrik deBoer's no one has the slightest idea what is and isn’t cultural appropriation, and deBoer is far leftier than I.

Fortunately, I am reading a lot of really sensible people, from the usual Marginal Revolution to a couple of recent discoveries that seem to be in my weird little political segment, Bleeding Heart Libertarians and The Niskanen Center.

Real thought is out there. We need to cling together, while keeping in mind how easily the sensible middle gets ground between the upper and nether millstones of two ferociously competitive teams. Being sensible has not usually been a particularly successful political movement.