On Being A Writer

I like to fancy myself a "writer".

Yes, upon learning that my seatmate on a three-hour flight weighs in at just slightly less than a quarter of a ton and I will be unable to move my shoulders, arms or feet for the duration of the flight, and after asking "Just how many freaking calories do you have to stuff into that pie hole every hour in order to sustain that blubbery mass of human fat?", oh, I mean, "What kind of work do you do?", and after learning that this quivering blob of jelly is a sumo wrestler wannabe, and, finally, out of politeness asks, "What kind of work do you do?", I can respond, "Oh, I'm a writer". Oh, the joy...

Oh, I know I'm not a Hemingway or a Steinbeck or a Shakespeare. But when asked what kind of writing I do, I will respond, "Oh, everything". How-to books. Self-help books. Philosophy. Science. Romance. Biography. Bad checks. You name. I've written it. In my mind, at least.

My latest scientific endeavor is an examination of non-parallel universes. These universes actually intersect at various points and at various angles. The actual intersection can never by predicted. One day you're driving down the road and you suddenly realize you've been asleep at the wheel for some unknown amount of time and your vehicle is drifting off the road and you have to jerk the steering wheel to get back on track, and you think how lucky you were and, my god, you might have actually killed someone, and some idiot is probably going to say, "The hand of God kept you from disaster" but all the time you were in a universal-non-parallel-intersective event. Most unusual events can be attributed to this hpercapacative phenomenon.

Also bouncing around in my head is the outline for a romance novel concerning a young vampire who is just about to have lunch courtesy an amazingly beautiful girl when, you guessed it, a universal-non-parallel-intersective event occurs and instead of dining our young hero falls in love. This is going to be big, folks. I see movies, sequels, prequels, a TV series, spinoffs, related products, ad infinitum. My tentative title is "Sunset" or "Sunrise" or something along those lines.

Anyway, the idea of being a "writer" is appealing. Keeps my mind off the freaking cold. Just remember, It's Your Font, Do What You Want to Do. Writers seem to like to write in Times New Roman, at least in their word processing programs. Journals used to want stories submitted in Courier, but now Times New Roman is common in guidelines (alway… more → Between the Page and the Shelf).

Update: Unfortunately my work on non-parallel universes is not entirely original. In fact:

Other kind of universes include, but are not limited to, the below:

• almost parallel universes,
  
• not so parallel universes,
• rather unparallel universes,
• really non-parallel universes,
• universes that are not parallel at all,
• ass-backwards universes,
• bat-shit crazy universes,
• buck-wild universes,
• and the worst of all, perpendicular universes, which are what we're trying to discuss here.
  

There goes three minutes of work down the tubes. Dang.

I almost had this feeling I was channeling a certain Kenneth Schmierer.

Have a marvelous Monday,

Chuck

Chuck

Chuck in Florida



Chuck in Misery



That's right, folks, the temperature here went from 61 to 38 in 60 minutes Sunday. And 61 to 21 in five hours. Yipes! It is currently 6 degrees with a wind chill of -9. The high today is forecast to be 16. Same two digits as yesterday (61) but a world of difference. A world of hurt. Could be worse. In Ellendale (North Dakota, my hometown - Mom is still there) it is -12 with a wind chill of -31. Double yipes! The high today will be -10. That's right. The HIGH. Did I ever tell you about the time when I was in high school and the temperature never, NEVER, got above zero the entire month of February? In the mean time, the high for Sarasota the next few days will be...

77

Oh, lord, what the hell am I doing?

15:53	NW 22 G 28	Overcast and Breezy	21
14:53	NW 17 G 23	Overcast	25
13:53	NW 18	Overcast	28
12:53	NW 18 G 25	Overcast	32
11:53	NW 17 G 23	Overcast	38
10:53	SW 24 G 32	Overcast and Breezy	61

Terrorism

Pop quiz: Terrorism is another word for Islam. All Muslims want to kill all non-Muslims. To defeat terrorism all Muslims must be killed or converted. Black and white. End of discussion. True or false?

I am going to begin by saying that I am not a fan of Deepak Chopra. And I can already hear you saying, "What the heck does Deepak Chopra have to do with terrorism?" We'll get to that in a moment. First, why the heck aren't I a fan of Chopra? I've read two of his gazillion books (hey, he likes to write and the extra income helps pay for golf - what's not to like), one a self-help book, possibly Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine, but I can't swear to it, the other being Golf for Enlightenment: The Seven Lessons for the Game of Life which I CAN swear to having read for obvious reasons. I found both books to be uninspiring and I thought Chopra to be out-of-touch somehow. But that's probably just me. Let's get back to terrorism...

Apparently Mr. Chopra had the unmitigated gall (I love that phrase, but will agree it is overused) to suggest that certain actions of the United States of America have not only not decreased terrorism but may have increased terrorism. God forbid.

A certain Dorothy Rabinowitz then had the unmitigated gall (see - I told you) to characterize Mr. Chopra's comments as "blaming America" for the recent Mumbai terror assault. (See "Deepak Blames America") What did Deepak actually say? Something to this effect: "What happened in Mumbai", he told the interviewer, "was a product of the U.S. war on terrorism, that our policies, our foreign policies had alienated the Muslim population, that we had gone after the wrong people and inflamed moderates. And that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay."

Now I'm not so sure I agree with all of this statement, but Deepak certainly cannot be faulted for suggesting that the terrorism issue may be more complex than most people think.

Or, not.

At least not according to D. Rabinowitz.

Ms. Rabinowitz makes a valid point when she writes:

Nowhere in this citation of the root causes of Muslim terrorism was there any mention of Islamic fundamentalism -- the religious fanaticism that has sent fevered mobs rioting, burning and killing over alleged slights to the Quran or the prophet. Not to mention the countless others enlisted to blow themselves and others up in the name of God.

On the other hand, while never saying it, Ms. Rabinowitz certainly implies that IT AIN'T OUR FUCKING FAULT. WE ARE BLAMELESS. OUR GOD IS BETTER THAN YOUR GOD. NAH, NAH, NAH POO POO.

Mr. Chopra responds in A Fuller and More Personal Response to Dorothy Rabinowitz's Attack on Me in the Wall Street Journal:

When I first read Ms. Rabinowitz personal attacks on me as the lead article on the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal, I have to confess that my first reaction was that she was an ethnocentric racist and prejudiced bigot. After some reflection, I realized that she was probably more ignorant than bigoted.

A fine point, indeed. Not a "prejudiced bigot", but probably still "an ethnocentric racist"? Oh, and don't forget - "ignorant".

Later Chopra explains that he and others:

are attempting to create a critical mass of awareness to address the deeper causes of global instability including war and terrorism, climate change, social injustice, and radical poverty.

Why does this just resonate while Rabinowitz just fizzles? Care for more? How about this:

We live in a world were 50 percent of its population lives on less than two dollars a day and 20 percent lives on less than one dollar a day. We can't dismiss these as trivial facts if we want to understand the deeper causes of instability and violence in the world.

NIMBY! Well, okay, if The Great Bailout of 2008 does not work and The Great Recession (NOT Depression) lasts for ten years instead of ten weeks - maybe. But for now - well, if they had any sense those darn Muslims would have been born in America and been white and Christian and go to church three times a week although you'd never know it by their actions kind of folks.

Finally, again from Mr. Chopra:

Ms. Rabinowitz ought to realize that you can kill a terrorist, but that doesn't kill his ideology. And as long as that ideology has power and life, it will continue to regenerate new terrorists no matter how many terrorists you kill. The ideology of Islamic terrorism is barbaric, savage, brutal and primitive, yet still it is born in a context. That context is historical, cultural, religious, economic, and political. Refusing to understand that context, dooms us to an endless failed anti-terrorist policy.

An ideology can only be overcome through the creation of a new more appealing ideology. In order to accomplish that we need the participation and help of moderate Muslims throughout the world. There are between 1.6 to 1.8 billion Muslims in the world, and by far, most of them are the moderates we need to enlist in our efforts. We can't solve this global problem by branding almost 25% of the world's population as terrorists. I would hope Ms. Rabinowitz could recognize that this issue is far too serious of a problem for her to exploit it for her personal petty agenda. The Mumbai tragedy obviously gathered extensive international attention. Instead of channeling this global focus toward productive insight and solutions, Ms. Rabinowitz chose instead to direct the attention of this tragedy into a personal attack that can only further fan the flames of hatred and exacerbate the situation instead of helping it.

Well said, Mr. Chopra.

Deepak Chopra's son, Gotham, also takes up the defense in his article, My Response to Dorothy Rabinowitz and the WSJ. Gotham lays out just a few of the actions taken by the US which could explain a lot about why we're in the pickle we're in. His article may in fact be better than his father's. If you're short on time (who isn't) just read Gotham's piece.

I have more respect for Deepak and his family knowing a little bit more about what they have experienced. Would that the people running our "war on terror" could learn a little bit from them too. And Ms. Rabinowitz might get her head out of her the sand...

To Music (and Robert Herrick)

Melt, melt my pains
With thy soft strains;
That, having ease me given,
With full delight
I leave this light,
And take my flight
For Heaven.

Not bad for poetry that's over three hundred years old, eh? Harper's No Comment post highlights Herrick's To Music, to becalm his Fever (ca. 1660) and notes that:

Of the seventeenth century English poets, Herrick’s work has the closest inherent relationship to music. It is melodious, and most of his poems (excepting perhaps the more religiously themed ones) have the character of song about them. Among his contemporaries, in fact, Herrick is called “the songwriter,” and settings of some of his poems survive (unfortunately for him, the poetry is much better than the music.) Still reading this particularly beautiful effort (note especially: “Fall on me like the silent dew, / Or like those maiden showers/ Which, by the peep of day, do strew/ A baptism o’er the flowers.” The construction and language are wonderful), I think immediately of John Dowland’s songs, especially the Second and Third Books. There is an inescapably downbeat angle to them, but they are beautiful, lyrical and thematically very close to Herrick.

Listen to John Dowland’s Lachrymae Pavane as performed by Winston Arblaster in the Bishop’s Chapel, Wells, England—there are no lyrics for this “dance of tears,” so imagine Herrick’s appeal to the curative power of music.

Michael Hirsh of Newsweek writes:

Goodbye, Anti-intellectualism, Brains are back!

After eight years of proud incuriosity and anti-intellectualism, we now have a leader who values nuance and careful thought.

What Obama's election means, above all, is that brains are back. Sense and pragmatism and the idea of considering-all-the-options are back. Studying one's enemies and thinking through strategic problems are back. Cultural understanding is back. Yahooism and jingoism and junk science about global warming and shabby legal reasoning about torture are out. The national culture of flag-pin shallowness that guided our foreign policy is gone with the wind. And for this reason as much as any, perhaps I can renew my pride in being an American.

...after nearly eight years of a president who could barely form a coherent sentence, much less a strategic thought. We can finally go back to respecting logic and reason and studiousness under a president who doesn't seem to care much about what is "left," "right" or ideologically pure. Or what he thinks God is saying to him. A guy who keeps religion in its proper place—in the pew.

One tragedy of the Bush administration is the amount of American brainpower and talent that went unused, the options that went unconsidered, because they were seen to lack ideological purity.

---

Scott Horton write in the The Daily Beast:

Palin's Mole at The Times

The one and only -- William Kristol!

In October 13, Kristol’s criticism reached the boiling point. “Fire the campaign,” he thundered. “What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. Shut down the rapid responses, end the frantic e-mails, bench the spinning surrogates, stop putting up new TV and Internet ads every minute. In fact, pull all the ads—they’re doing no good anyway. Use that money for televised town halls and half-hour addresses in prime time.” Among the McCain tactics that had failed, he acknowledged, were the very ones he had advocated just two weeks earlier.

As I reported previously, Kristol was instrumental in convincing the McCain campaign to select Sarah Palin, and he stood tenaciously by his candidate. He used his position as a media figure—at the Weekly Standard, on Fox News, and in his valued column at the New York Times—to advance his vision of the campaign’s interests.

This raises an obvious question for The New York Times: should Bill Kristol’s contract as an opinion columnist be renewed when it runs up at year’s end? There is no problem with the conservative viewpoint advanced in his pieces—he was after all hired as a replacement for a conservative voice, William Safire. Still, the Times must be concerned about Kristol’s intervention in the campaign he was writing about. Simply put, the pundit meddled in the campaign he was commenting on.

Personal comment: Yes, this is the same Bill Kristol who so expertly predicted on December 17, 2006 on Fox News Sunday, "If [Hillary Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she's going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her ... Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single democratic primary. I'll predict that right now."

Shouldn't be much of a loss for the NYT and maybe the RNC will bar him for life.

---

Scott Horton again, this time in Harper's:

Something’s Odd in Alaska

It ain't over till it's over. Regarding some odd election results in Alaska --

The more likely answer is that someone has lost track of a very substantial part of the Alaska vote. Moreover, the disappeared votes appear to be disproportionately drawn from the Democratic column. Alaska, as John McCain taught us, has a long record of corrupt politics. Seems that this doesn’t stop with gratis home makeovers and bridges to nowhere.

Obama: America's Putin

Oh. My. God.

Did Charles Krauthammer really say Obama ran "a brilliant general election campaign"? He did.

Which is not to say that Obama did not run a brilliant general election campaign. He did. In its tactically perfect minimalism, it was as well conceived and well executed as the electrifying, highflying, magic carpet ride of his primary victory. By the time of his Denver convention, Obama understood that he had to dispense with the magic and make himself kitchen-table real, accessible and, above all, reassuring. He did that. And when the economic tsunami hit, he understood that all he had to do was get out of the way. He did that too.

And not only that, but Obama is Clinton and Putin rolled into one.

With him we get a president with the political intelligence of a Bill Clinton harnessed to the steely self-discipline of a Vladimir Putin. (I say this admiringly.) With these qualities, Obama will now bestride the political stage as largely as did Reagan.

Excuses

I suppose it is a natural part of growing older, not that I have any personal experience with that mind you, that you begin to compare the world as you knew it when you were growing up with the world today. In most instances the former pretty much sucks compared to the latter. We heard our parents saying the same thing, probably much the same way they heard it from their parents. Oh, "the good old days"...

So what has changed between 1950 and 2007? Really. Technology for starters. Our family didn't have a television until I was in grade school. My first records (you remember, the things before CD's?) were 78 RPM and the size of dinner plates. My mom had to buy us a state-of-the-art phonograph player (you remember, the thing before iPods?) just so we could get Long-Playing, 33 1/3 RPM records the size of large dinner plates. Our telephones were big black things with a rotary "dial". My grandkids are so sick of hearing me talk about this stuff.

Speaking of telephones, remember the first "portable" phones? They were the size of World War II walkie-talkies. Maybe they were WW II walkie-talkies. Walkie-talkies? Think about it. Roll it around on your tongue. Who the hell came up with that name - the same people that brought us Teletubbies? Side note: what we think of as a walkie-talkie is more properly a handie-talkie and was patented by Motorola, the now-parent company of the small software outfit my son works for.

Okay, everyone knows 2007 technology kicks 1950 technology's butt. And that's okay with me as I sit in my easy chair with my wireless notebook in my lap writing (and spell-checking as I go) thoughts that my friends all over these United States of America will be able to read in just a matter of moments. Shortly I plan to take my current portable phone out of my pocket, flip up the cover which contains a one megapixel camera with 4x zoom, gaze lovingly at my son and grandchildren displayed in a small, tv-like screen, click on my calendar to see where I need to be today, pull up my personal phone directory and call one of my golfing buddies in Florida (hope he's not out on the course) and ask him how he likes his GPS-based range finder that can be mapped to any of over 10,000 golf courses in the world and is accurate to within a yard. Yes, I'll take 2007 technology.

But other things in the current world aren't going so well. Climate change, drought in the Southeast, fire ants, hurricanes - some things I don't have much control over. A senseless war in Iraq, a semi-sensible war in Afghanistan that no one seems to care about, plunging house prices, spiraling national debt, a government that is probably just more incompetent than corrupt - some things I might be able to do something about but it's going to be a hard row to hoe. Oh, please, don't get me started on ho, ho, ho's.

Then there's what's happening to our society. Kids that just don't give a f***. Adults that do give a f***, oftentimes when they shouldn't be (just ask soon-to-be-former Kansas Attorney General Paul Morrison). And now eighty plus baseball players stand accused of using steroids. My, my, my, what is the world coming to?

Thomas Sowell writes Say It Ain't So, Joe in NRO and there's a lot of talk about the “black sox scandal,” the deliberate throwing of the 1919 World Series. But within that discussion this jumped out at me:

That was long before we became so sophisticated that we learned to come up with excuses for those who violate rules and additional excuses for those who refuse to impose penalties.

Can this be why kids just don't give a f*** and adults too frequently do? There are no penalties, no consequences. I know I wouldn't get away with behaving the way that many kids do in school today - I would have gotten the crap beaten out of me by my dad and my ears burned off by my mom. Today's parents threaten a lawsuit if the school admin threatens their poor, pampered offspring because the only time the parents see their children is when there is a disciplinary problem and because that is the only time the parents see their children and they want their "together time" to be pleasant and happy, they automatically defend them. It's nuts.

Sowell ends by saying:

There is still some lingering hope of sanity in the baseball writers’ refusal to vote Mark McGwire into the Baseball Hall of Fame, despite his tremendous career achievements. Keeping known rule-breakers out of Cooperstown would be a lot more effective deterrent than putting asterisks alongside their records, to be disregarded by those who are “non-judgmental.”

Unfortunately Senator George Mitchell’s report on steroid use in the major leagues and its recommendations are of the let-bygones-be-bygones approach that has spread the disregard of rules throughout the whole society, from student cheaters to career criminals.

Amen.