20211031.0430

As children gather in their joy
And youths as well
I remember a story that
The Good Doctor would tell
And recall that today is
Precisely equal to
Another holiday that
Seems to escape me
As the war about it looms again

20201031.0430

On this day
Precisely equal to
The subject of another one of your false wars
As the Good Doctor put it once
Will you
Still
Say that masks are folly
When you are all too apt to
Cover your own faces in
White draperies
And hide behind a thin line
That must not be very strong if
It needs so much support
Or to hide yourselves among
The feigned emblems and images of those
Whose deaths and dislocations
Have not been enough to satisfy your greed?
Will you still say
It's just a joke
It's just good fun
And will you laugh when
Your own martyrs are lampooned
Bruited about as bunting
More on one day
But not only on the one?

20190405.0430

One of the articles recommended for reading in my LinkedIN feed as I sat down to write this is Seth Borenstein's AP article "No AI in Humor: R2-D2 Walks into a Bar, Doesn't Get the Joke." The central idea is that humor is one of the most human of qualities, and that it depends on context--which artificial intelligence in its current state fails to comprehend. A number of technologists are quoted about the matter, noting the limitations on artificial intelligence despite its rapid advancement. Some warnings about the possible emergence of humor among artificial intelligences are also voiced. In all, the article does a decent job of presenting the present state of affairs and offering reassurance that at least some fields of human endeavor are likely immune to takeover by thinking machines--for now.
Of particular interest to me is a comment related from Columbia University's Allison Bishop: "computer learning looks for patterns, but comedy thrives on things hovering close to a pattern and veering off just a bit to be funny and edgy." To my mind, the comment echoes the words of another person from Columbia U; I am reminded of Asimov's comments about humor. There is no shortage of ideas about what makes something funny; that voiced by Asimov in his Treasury of Humor requires that a pattern be established and subverted. That is, there has to be some kind of pattern set up so that it can be deviated from--with the deviation offering the potential for humor. The simple deviation is not enough, of course; experience tells that it has to take certain forms and adopt particular content based on multiple prevailing contexts. How many jokes fall flat with one audience, only to have another rolling on the floor?
I have too much experience with such things to be comfortable recounting it. I want to be funny, to have people laughing because I want them to do so, not because they find me an object of scorn. But I think I try too hard at it; I certainly overextend in many of my attempts at humor, making connections that go farther than can be comfortable traversed or inserting a joke into a situation that does not admit of it. And it is because I do not take enough stock of context, focusing on the putative joke to the exclusion of its surroundings--not that the joke is necessarily good enough to merit that focus. So I wonder if the issue is not as much in the artificial intelligence as in other kinds altogether, kinds that are not necessarily accessible even to the "natural" intellect of a great many people.
Even if it is not, I suppose I have to face the fact that I am not good at being funny, even if I do often elicit laughter, and even if I can recognize being funny when I see it. I suppose it's like writing good stories in that; I can find them, and I can make sense of them, but I generally do not do well trying to make them happen. Clearly not, or I'd've sold more of them than I have yet done...

20109327.0430

I have noted, I believe, having a set of books kept in the living room that are fancier printings, bound in colored leather and with gilt- or silver-edged pages (for the most part), or slipcovered in hardback collectors' editions of works held elsewhere in the house in working copies, sometimes in multiple translations. They serve as celebrations of the printer's arts as well as of the writer's, editor's, and translator's, to be sure; they also serve as a reminder to those who visit that the household is one that prizes literacy. It is probably not necessary; few, if any, visit who do not know the occupants, and it defies understanding that those who know me or my wife would not realize that we value the written word, perhaps more highly than we ought to do. We met in an English graduate degree program, after all, and both pursued doctorates in the arts of the book (because that is the "liberal" in "liberal arts," "having to do with the book," though it is not for nothing that "book" and "free" share a term).
I have thought, though I do not know that I have noted, that the series of such things from which we draw most of our examples is itself a re-creation or re-inscription of a literary canon, though perhaps a different one than would have been taught prior to the culture wars in US academe. Yes, such things as Plato's Republic are included, but so is Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. Shakespeare is, of course, amid the series (though, with several other copies floating around the house, we've not opted to buy it), as is the Bible (ibid., including the Oxford UP Quatercentenary Authorized Version on the fancy-book shelf), but so are Lovecraft's works. So that much is to the good; the series editors look a bit further afield than the putatively standard works the Victorians would recognize, expanding the field of what might be considered "standard" readings.
At the same time, the works represented by the series skew heavily white and male. A large part of that has to do with the fact that many of the works presented in the series are those the Victorians might have recognized as standards; though the series does some work to move outside such a set, it does not leave that set aside as it does so. Too, there are and remain socioeconomic forces that work against the inclusion of works by women and persons of color; there is still less economic room for people who aren't middle- to upper-class white guys to spend their time writing than for women to do so, or people of color, or even working-class folk of whatever other demographic. Consequently, there is relatively less writing by those groups, and concomitantly, less chance for such writing to be recognized as being the kind of writing that lends itself to enshrinement as collectible. And that is problematic.
There is this, too: licensing the "fancy" editions has its own legal entanglements. While many of the "classic" texts are in public domain and may therefore be used with relative impunity, the emergent greater works--insofar as such things can still be discussed or described--remain under copyright, and not all authors or their agents are willing to have those works taken up in such series as serves for living room decoration for my family. I do what I can to get the authorized parallels to them, or I have done, but there are not always such to be found...

20190314.0430

The desktop computer I have at home--that I have had since living in The City and that has moved with me thence to the wind-swept plains and to the Texas Hill Country--has an annoying habit of having its monitor cut out at odd intervals. It does not matter what I am doing; the screen loses its connection with whatever is going on and goes blank for a few moments or a few more before returning to its display as if nothing had happened. And I am vexed by it; I lose track of where I was in videos or in putting words into pixels on pages such as this one. I already have enough trouble with the latter (given research rapture and similar phenomena) that I do not do well with the additional, externally imposed interruptions.
Were I given to the kind of magical thinking that endows inanimate objects with agency and intellect, I might assert that I have somehow annoyed the computer into acting as it does. I might think I had offered it some petty slight that is not enough for it to quit on me altogether but is enough to induce it to falter just enough to attract my attention and annoy but not quite enough to prompt me to look for a replacement. (As with any device, I will have to replace it at some point, but that point is not yet, and I am not looking forward to having to do so. The expense and hassle are things I do not need at the moment, if I ever actually do.) I admit that I have acted in such ways with supervisors from time to time, needling them with things after they have annoyed me but still doing well enough in my job that they could not justify firing me for doing so--and if I have done it, it is not difficult for me to imagine that others have, or that a machine, given sentience, would. (And it occurs to me that an Asenion robot might be able to act in such a way...)
Were I so inclined to that thinking, though, I might also note that such thinking also tends to hold that the manner of use affects the sentience that emerges in objects that acquire it. So if my machine might make itself a petty annoyance in an occasional fit of pique, it might also do as I have done many times and advise those working with it that they need to take a break. And, as I was working on the machine and it killed its screen at me, I realized that I had been acting in ways I had not, my attention lagging and my breathing going strange; I was a podling staring into the Crystal's rays, and it moved the mirror aside, if only for a moment. (I seem full of strange references today.)
I would like to think that I am not thus inclined, that "I have my head on straight" and look at what is rather than that for which there is not proof. Or I tell myself such, at least. How true it is, I do not know, though I would guess it's less than it ought to be.

20190307.0430

In yesterday's post to this webspace, I comment that I have had several reasons to hoard printed pages. It must be the case that I have had them; I've dragged more than a ton of them across states and time-zones, and that kind of investment of time and effort has to have some justification. In earlier times, my doing so might have had to do with my work trying to be a scholar and teacher in the academic humanities, chiefly English languages and literatures. Even now, knowing that I ought to divest myself of some of the printed pages I have accumulated over the years in favor of electronic reading and library work, and knowing that I should get rid of some of the others because they represent connections to parts of me that I ought to relinquish--growths or vestigial organs that serve no purpose but threaten to grow septic--there are a fair few pieces that I mean to continue to keep. They continue to matter to me in ways that go beyond the words printed on their pages.
I've addressed some of the reasons why, to be sure. There are copies of works my wife and I have that are for display, and, yes, there is some snobbishness in having fancy ones that do not get opened often if at all. There are some that I keep for their sentimental value, because they were given to me by people for whom I cared and care. My copies of Asimov's Foundation novels are among them, for example, as is my grandfather's copy of an old edition of Shakespeare. There are some, too, that I still use, whether because I continue to play RPGs such as L5R or because I still flatter myself that I do a bit of research people might occasionally want to read or to hear me present at a conference now and again. (Did I mention I've got another one coming up in May?)
One thing that gives me some pause as I consider getting rid of some of the books I have but no longer use, or the academic journals I've gathered over the years, is that I make many notes in the margins of the books from which I study. The fancy and sentimental copies of my books are exempt from that, of course; the pretty ones should probably remain pretty, the ones that matter should get no blemish, and my pen-hand remains poor despite the practice through which I put it time and again. But my working books, the ones from which I've taught or to which I've gone time and again for materials from which to write what I write in the most formal venues where I write, are bestrewn with my notes, both interlinear and marginal. It is because owning copies of the books allows me to make the notes that I have continued to buy books as I have, and it is because there are little bits of me thrust into those pages through the guided work of my hands upon cylinders that trail something behind them that I am loath to part with so many of the pages I've acquired.
I worry that I will be diminished.

20181127.0430

In conversations with my wife over the long weekend just past, I had occasion to remark about my involvement with various intellectual properties. In my younger years, I spent quite a bit of time, money, and energy consuming such narrative milieus as the Star Trek and Star Wars universes, of Middle-earth, of Asimov's sprawling future history that now looks so quaint even though the clarity of writing remains in force, of Donaldson's chronicles of unbelief and their turgid prose (and I am sure that one shows in what I write more than I might want it to--for several reasons), of Hobb's Elderlings corpus that led to my master's thesis, of Legend of the Five Rings and of roleplaying games more generally. And I am aware that most or all of them have surpassed my ability to access them fully; they are surrounded by critical and fandom apparatuses that exceed me (in most cases; fandom is largely beyond me, though I have a handle on criticism of one of the properties I've listed, at least).
I am not sure how I feel about the matter. I've noted in other places that I'm glad to be free of the dick-wagging that accompanies so much community engagement with the intellectual properties I've engaged with and those similar to them. I've also noted that I miss being able to devote myself to them as I once did--even though I know that engagement is far harder now than when I was young, given the proliferation of nostalgia and the products that cater to it, as well as increased access through various media technologies. There are not enough hours in the day to attend to them all even if that is all that gets attention, and I am not in a position to be able to give myself fully over as I used to be able to do. I cannot afford to be so selfish.
I am also not sure anymore that I want to be. Aside from the simple matter--but important to the kind of little shit that I was and that many people still very much are--of a sex life (which I do not discount), family life is fulfilling in ways that fandom never was for me. To be fair, I've been lucky in my direct experience of fandom; the communities in which I participated were relatively supportive, but part of that support came only because I had a place enforced upon me, and my challenges to it were in the forms accepted by those communities. Those in which I am still engaged are far more casual and more broadly supportive--but, again, I know I am lucky in finding them. Each of us within them has horror stories of others that were...not, and they do not except the "official" fandoms, those associated most closely with or outright endorsed by the owners of the intellectual properties involved.*
My family, though, my wife and daughter, particularly, are far better for me to have than a place among the various fandoms. I am an expatriate of those fandoms no less than of academe, and I return to them as I may, but I do not think I will seek to emigrate from that smaller, greater nation in which I now dwell.

*I am aware, at least peripherally, of the challenges of fan-work and, indeed, of fandom itself, to ownership of intellectual properties in a moral and ethical sense, though not so much in a legal one. The latter seems to be the common understanding, though, and given the general audience I presume to address in this webspace, it is the one with which I am working in this piece.

20170105.0611

My hand is itching to take up the pen
And scribe on linéd pages once again,
Scratching till the mind-blood flows and then
Clawing at the edges of the cuts
Made into inky blackness, breaking ruts
And looking to those watching as if I'm nuts
For tearing at the wounds that I have made.
I know I've my anxieties betrayed.
Amid such madness, few are those who've stayed
Beside me, going with me as I go
In and through and out again, who know
There will be something from this that will show.
Anymore, my why's Asimov's why:
I write like breathing; I do it, or I die.

20161122.0605

The Good Doctor writes
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
It is usually taken as an indictment of force,
A notion that ad baculum proceeds from those who cannot make their cases
Through sweet reason
But it assumes that all will listen to it.
It is an optimistic viewpoint.
But there is another reading.
If the incompetent wait until the last to enact violence,
Perhaps the competent begin it sooner.
Such a thought is perilous,
Of course,
But many thoughts are.
Some will therefore avoid thought.
Look where that leads.
Incompetence, indeed.

20160709.1834

There are times I am called away
By other things
Needful things
Although this is needful
Per the Doctor's example

Done with them
I return
And
Things
Are
Good
When I do

20160225.0637

This morning got off to a shaky start. As I was getting ready to take my shower, an earthquake made itself felt at Sherwood Cottage. I have not yet seen relevant data about it, but I do not need to to know that I was disturbed by the event. There is something eerie about hearing toilet water slosh around without having dropped something into it yet. (I do note, however, that a toilet is a wonderful place to be startled. If there is any place worth being when the crap is scared out...) But that part was not the most annoying; after all, with Oklahoma being the world leader in seismic activity, the ground shaking has become a common occurrence in the area of Sherwood Cottage. No, what was worse was that shortly after the shaking stopped, the circuit breaker governing the electrical circuit that feeds the bathroom (and bedrooms) flipped off. I got to put my pants back on (I was getting ready for my shower, remember) and go out to address the issue. It was easily enough done, but it disrupted the easy, accustomed flow of my morning, and I have to wonder what effects it will have on me for the rest of the day.

I make such a comment because work continues today. I am still working on the freelance project noted yesterday, having put together between a fifth and a quarter of the project. Additionally, I have at least one tutorial meeting; students are clamoring for my attention in advance of a project being due in its final version tomorrow. I have a conference call this afternoon, as well, which will pay me a fair bit for my time and attention, so I will be sitting for it. And I have a short stack of papers to assess, collected from a class taught at the local community college. There is no shortage of things for me to do today, as is true of most every day, so I need to be in good form so that I may address the lot. This morning did not help me get off to a good start; I will do what I can to plow through, because I must, but I have my suspicions about how things will go.

In the past, I have been told both that such thoughts make me oddly superstitious and that they tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. (Admittedly, I was not told these things by the same people.) It seems to me, though, that the two are mutually exclusive, with superstition taking as irrational the belief that such forecasting or omen-reading as I might be thought to do is accurate and self-fulfilling prophecy necessarily noting that what is predicted happens because it is predicted. Neither offers a solution; ignoring the events of the day leads to discontinuity and a failure to learn, while self-fulfilling prophecy seems only to work in one direction: the unpleasant. (The Good Doctor addresses the issue directly in Prelude to Foundation. And I am reminded that I need to re-read the novel yet again--as well as the rest of the series it heads. Someday, when I have time and a bit more stable footing...)

20151212.0814

The Fall 2015 instructional term is done! Exams have been given and graded, grades and paperwork have been turned in, and I have even managed to compile my end-of-term report already. I am done, at least for now and at least with the work of teaching. Now, I get to turn my attention to other things, many of which I listed in yesterday's post to this webspace. I find myself excited at the opportunities presented, which is unusual and desirable.

One thing I know I will have to deal with, however, that I am not looking forward to treating is student complaints. I am aware of one that has already come in, one criticizing my ability to do simple math. I *do* err from time to time, and when I do, I *do* work to correct those errors; because I know I occasionally make mistakes, I looked back over the grades in question. My math was correct, which was the complaint made. Had there been a comment about my entering a grade incorrectly, perhaps matters might have been otherwise--but there was not, and so they were not. But I know that the one is only the first in what is likely to be a series. How many will come to me and how many will go to my superiors and demand an accounting is unclear; I can at least hope to avoid being called into meetings again. It does occasionally happen...

Aside from that, though, things look like they will be more or less good. Weather around Sherwood Cottage looks like it will be conducive to reading today; the sky is currently overcast, and rain is expected. The sound of water falling from a gray sky usually helps me take words from the page through my eyes and into my mind, which will make the freelancing easier. That is good, in turn, since I have been told that another order will be waiting for my attention soon--and since I will be available to do more such work, I am happy to have it coming in. (I remain a counterpoint to those who argue professorial indolence; I work as much during breaks as I do during the term, if not more. I am far from the only one who does so.)

Something else occurs to me as something to which I might look forward. I try each year to return to the touchstones of my reading life and of genres in which I do much work, re-reading Asimov's Foundation corpus (the Robot, Empire, and Foundation novels) and Tolkien's Middle-earth works (The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings). I know that many would think it strange that I look to those works as cornerstones of my reading life, particularly since my academic attentions run to fundamental works of English literature. And it is certainly not the case that I devalue the trinity of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, or the greater canon that includes Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory, Spenser, Donne, and others. The Good Doctor and the Prince of Fantasists, though, ground my personal canon, if such a thing can be said to be. I read them early, and I read them often--and I think it shows. Getting back to my basics seems a thing worth doing from time to time, and I hope to have some time to do it.

20150701.0715

My most resplendent and wonderful wife has her birthday today. I know the number, and I have no trouble reporting it: 29 + taxes and fees. What I am doing with her is our business, thank you kindly, but you may rest assured that I will be taking care of her. (I was going to write "as she deserves," but I am not able to do that; she deserves more than I am able to give.) That she will get to see her parents today and that we are hosting her nephews help with that, though.

The experience of hosting those nephews is proving to be interesting, certainly. Aside from Ms. 8, I have not got a lot of experience with children outside of a classroom (I have taught elementary school kids, and I was certified to deal with grades 8 through 12), although the one nephew is at an age I remember well (instead of in flashes of embarrassment and pain, as the younger's age) and seems to be interested in such things as grilling and being useful about the house; there is some connection to be found. The younger, though, eludes me. Sherwood Cottage is simply not set up for an elementary-school boy (which makes sense, since the birthday woman and I have not got one), and I did not do terribly well at that point in my life...

I did note in my morning reading Jeff Sellingo's LinkedIn piece, "Wanted in College Graduates: Tolerance for Ambiguity." In it, after relating an anecdote for an early job interview, the author makes the assertion of the title, noting that those who are mentally flexible are most likely to find career success in the face of increasing automation. He references the research of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck in support of his claim, invoking her findings about purportedly "fixed" psychological qualities such as intelligence to bolster his claims about flexibility before returning to his opening narrative and remarking that striving for flexibility in any field will prove helpful. It is a charming piece, one that does well enough for the venue in which it appears, although there are points where it could be improved.

In effect, Sellingo argues for a position not unlike that staked out in Asimov's "Sucker Bait," a story I have referenced before in this webspace. Like the Good Doctor, if less elegantly, Sellingo praises the "connective tissue" among ideas, the ability to take knowledge from one field of human endeavor and apply it to another. It is a praiseworthy thing, to be sure, one lauded in my own education (I am "a literary generalist" in many of my cover letters, which makes sense since my graduate program was explicitly generalist), as well as in broader academic work (the push towards interdisciplinarity) and contexts broader yet (the jack-of-all-trades figure)--although I own that there are problematic depictions of the diversely-skilled (Tolkien's Melkor had part of the knowledge of all his kindred and turned evil, and Milton's Satan is of much the same type, as I have argued). Unfortunately, though, even if such flexibility is noted on job advertisements as desirable, it does not seem to be reflected in the hiring systems I have encountered, and it is not reflected in the attitudes of students who view schooling as a means to acquire a narrow set of technical skills they think will equip them for careers--and no others.

20150422.0648

I woke this morning with a strange sensation: hunger.

I do not normally eat soon after waking; experience tells me that my stomach tends not to handle sudden filling well. Usually, I shower and get a cup of coffee or two in me before I go to eat, partly because of my experience, and partly because it takes that long for me to become aware of needing to eat again. (I enjoy eating, far more than I do sleeping, but I am just about as thrilled to need to eat as I am to need to sleep: not at all.) Today, though, I rose from bed with a hollow gut, and I am not certain why. Dinner last night was decent enough (kind of a half-assed ramen/soba dish involving soft-boiled eggs and tasting pretty damned good, actually), and I was not terribly more active after eating the evening meal than I normally am. It does not make sense to me.

What does make sense to me is why the author I am currently reading for freelance work is a best-seller. I will have more to say after I get the freelance job done (which will likely happen tomorrow throughout the day), but I note that the book I am reading reads quire well, indeed. If it is typical of the author in question, I completely understand why the author's books sell widely. It is a welcome contrast to some of the pieces I have had to read, including badly-written vampire pornography that managed to be prurient while eliding much detail. Why people go in for some of the schlock they do...

I suppose, though, that I am no better. The kind of writing that Tolkien and his successors do is often decried as juvenile, fantasy being seen (correctly) as escapist and thus (incorrectly) as reflecting an inability to handle the "real world." Asimov and his like are regarded similarly--with the added bonus of being "incorrect" in their predictions, and of being badly acted, since more science fiction than fantasy is put on screens silver and small. I take in such works gladly and with abandon, which surely does not position me well among the traditionally erudite. (I would note, though, that I am a medievalist by training, if perhaps not so good at it as I ought to be--my Latin is quite rusty--and so I am steeped in the traditions often prized by the ultimately conservative establishment that is Western formal education. I cling to it in the hopes of landing a job.) Then again, at least people who read such works as annoy me are actually reading, and voluntarily. I have to count that as a good thing, both because it means people are reading and because it means people are in the market to buy the kinds of things I produce in my freelance work, meaning there is more money for me to earn.

My reading of popular fiction at least earns me a few dollars along the way...but that does not make it better than others'...

20150412.0843

Work continues, as should be no surprise. I spent the whole day yesterday grading, managing to clear out one set of papers across the breadth of the day (seriously, from a few minutes after yesterday's post to after ten that evening; I definitely quaffed from the wrong flagon). There is still grading left for me to do, although it will not take so long, as the assignments are far shorter than those I treated yesterday. And there is a 1,500-word freelance piece staring at me--with a much longer one to drop on Tuesday. Conference work still needs my attention, as well, both in dealing with a couple of panels and in drafting a paper. And I probably ought to put up another piece on the Tales after Tolkien Society blog; I've yet to do one this month, and we are almost two weeks into it. (Contributions are welcome; let me know.) So, yes, as ever, there is much to do.

Work is not the only thing that continues, either. Ms. 8 continues to grow and develop. Although she has not acquired any new words since last time I noted her vocabulary, or none that I have heard her voice or am able to recognize, she is walking a bit more than before, and a bit more steadily. She also interacts with her environment more, making changes to it that are not simply throwing things around; she is beginning to build things and rearrange them for her comfort and convenience. She is also mimicking her mother's actions and mine more nearly, acting as if reading books; she turns pages and moves her mouth as if to sound out the words printed thereupon. I have to wonder if the Mrs. and I are starting Ms. 8 on the same dark path we have walked, that which leads through academia to...somewhere, I guess. I'm not there yet, I think and hope.

If this is the end of the road, it is not exactly paved with yellow bricks. Then again, it also does not lead through a land where semi-sentient straw-bundles stand with sticks up where the sun doesn't shine, and Talus's descendants or Olivaw's forebears do not rust where they have attacked thinking trees. The large, floating, disembodied head that is itself a lie seems to factor into the surroundings, though, and in plenitude; I am still looking for the curtains, but whether to uncover what lies behind or join those who operate the machinery they seek to hide. It seems a better racket than what I am doing now, and not less temporary than my current position seems to be.

20150103.0941

I would seem to have missed the commemoration of Asimov's birthday (although I might not have missed the day, as it was not completely recorded...), and I find myself somewhat conflicted. On one hand, the work that the Good Doctor did is the important thing about him--the words he wrote are what remain and what have inspired many. I am not part of his family, after all. But on the other hand, I have long been a reader of his, and I am a nerd, and it is part of that that I ought to attend to the minutiae--which I have not done. There is a sense of diminishment, somehow, a sense that I have not done as I ought to have done, that I am somehow less because of it.

That such a feeling would befall me makes some sense. I have mentioned, here and elsewhere, that I am very much a nerd. Enthusiasm, as I note in earlier comments, is typical of nerdiness, and enthusiasm often manifests as attention to small details, a passion for getting things exactly right. As such, failing to get things exactly right becomes an indication of lessened enthusiasm, thus of lessened nerdiness--and when a label has been applied consistently and pervasively, it becomes a component of identity. Threats to identity do not sit well. (I am aware that there is substantial peril in reducing identity to labels. That I still do is a part of the social conditioning imposed upon me, tacitly and explicitly, throughout my life, and there is little I know how to do and can do to overturn it. There are...other things bound up in it.)

At the same time, the utility of the "nerd" label (assuming, of course that labels retain any usefulness in general) is diminished. A Cracked.com article about which I comment in another venue usefully dismantles the definition--and while I am aware that there is some trouble in using a post to a comedy website to support an argument, I find the basic point put across to be largely valid. Nerdiness is not what it used to be (if it ever was, admittedly). For me to be at odds with what a nerd is "supposed" to be is not necessarily a failing, both because the supposition is bad and because not being a nerd remains desirable.

I am left without a clear direction in the matter. Some part of me suggests that I ought to let it pass by as something of no importance; again, I am not part of the Good Doctor's family, so the dates of his birth and death should not be what matter to me. I certainly have enough other things to which to pay attention. I know myself well enough to know that the matter will stay on my mind, receding perhaps into the distance, but still marring the landscape of it in some way I cannot yet foresee, altering the scenery and the view for the worse.

20141202.0921

I know that I am posting later than I normally do; the morning has been busy. I have already completed a bit of freelance work today, which please me no end, and I have been working with the online L5R PbP RPG I have noted before. It has formally begun, so what leisure time I have is being devoted to it at this point--and it helps me by giving me practice writing, negotiating competing demands from international audiences, and storytelling (so I need not feel quite so guilty about doing things other than work). And I have been attending to other things, as well.

That said, I do feel some obligation to make a post to this webspace. I have, as I recall, waxed poetic about the demands of writing for a public audience--even one as small as mine tends to be (I do look at the reader statistics thoughtfully provided by the platform). More, I find myself much in mind of something I have seen attributed to the Good Doctor: "I write for the same reason I breathe--because if I didn't, I would die." My feeling for writing is not quite so strong (obviously, or I would be a *lot* more productive), but it is of the same sort; I write because I have a need to do so, and I write here because I feel a need to do so. Thank you, then, dear readers, for helping me meet one of my needs.

There are other needs, of course. The Maslovian hierarchy applies, I think, at least in part; my writing is a higher-order need than others I yet feel. For I am not at all certain of my security or of the esteem in which I and others hold me. (I have spoken to anxieties about the former on more than one occasion--not all of the training, formal and informal, I received as a graduate student has been to my benefit.) And I offer the statement not as a plea for cheap statements of validation; any that would come in the wake of this piece would register as shallow and reflexive, iterations of pity and condescension (whether intended so or not). It is simply a thing that is.

Perhaps I write as a backwards approach to the Maslovian, using what I perceive as my "thing to do" as a means to secure the ostensibly more fundamental levels of need. And perhaps that is why I remain ill at ease; I am approaching things in reverse. (It may be that Maslow is a bit off. I am not informed enough about psychological issues to be able to speak to that end; I would welcome input from those who are.) Whatever the reason or effect, however, I write because I must, here and elsewhere; I have no doubt that I will continue to do so, and I nurture the hope that it will work to my benefit and that of those for whom I care.

20141114.0658

It makes sense that I seem to do my better writing--I find that I have more to say and an easier time of saying it--when I am writing about the things I read and have read. Multiple degrees in English ought to be good for something after all, even if they do not make me immune to the occasional typographical error. (Those who read this blog know that it makes use of its own earlier entries from time to time. Poring over the blogroll for them reveals points of authorial inattention to details of usage. They doubtlessly indicate laziness or too much haste, and those who will engage in the fallacy fallacy--among whom are many pedants I know directly or by report--will perhaps be better served to read otherwise.) And it seems to be the case that I have more readers when I do make such comments than when I do not, if the readership statistics this platform offers me constitute anything like a reliable indicator.

There are times, though, when what I read chokes my throat with anger and knots my hands into claws that an old and angry part of me wants to wrap around throats and squeeze. I feel my chest tighten and a grimace creep across my face, and I know that my pupils open further the blackness within my eyes. And it is not at fictional exploits that this happens; I get annoyed, of course, and voice that annoyance with keyboard and tongue, and I am extravagant in my annoyance. But I do not react to that the way I do to reports of the all-too-real stupidity of the world, stupidity that, once permitted (and almost certainly permitted because we have to think of the children--and I am a father who rails against it), often spreads until it threatens to choke out what little intelligence finds purchase in the thin and rocky soil offered to it anymore. (Yes, I know I near falling down the slippery slope into something like an appeal to tradition. Note the qualifiers. There is some small hope, even yet.)

I do not do well to address the issues that provoke such reactions while amidst such reactions. I am not doing so now. I am, instead, attempting to distract myself from them for a bit so that my unconscious or subconscious mind can work to find some redress to the problems presented. (I follow the Good Doctor's "The Eureka Phenomenon" for this idea.) Perhaps, in time, I will return to them with a clearer mind and find a way to speak against them that does not make of me the kind of ravening idiot that I believe many of those who perpetuate such stupidities to be. But it is more likely that other concerns will shove them aside, new indignities piled upon them, and they will be pressed down into the substrata from which, in time, distilled bitterness may be pumped or hardened, cutting bits of it mined out and polished to a brilliant sheen.

20141113.0630

It seems that more people read what I write when I write prose than when I write verse. That they still read when I write verse tells me I am not so far gone as a Vogon, but it still suggests that more lines on the page ought to be sentences than free verse or iambic pentameter. (Not that I do much of the latter.) For today, at least, I will take the hint.

I have on occasion noted histories of things on my shelves and in my home. I do entertain the idea that I might put together some collection of creative nonfiction that discusses a number of them, but that will have to wait until a large number of other projects are completed (including a freelance project I really need to write today). In the meantime, though, I can relate a bit about one of them (and it *may* make it into the hypothetical later collection, although I will doubtlessly amend it and improve it; the kind of writing I do in this webspace is not exactly as polished as I would have it be to be in print):

I often note that I "cut my teeth on Asimov," and it is more or less true; an early memory has me looking at the expanded collection of Foundation novels my mother had just after Foundation's Edge came out, thirty years after the Foundation Trilogy. Even now, I have copies of a number of the Good Doctor's books on my shelves, including paperbacks of the Foundation series--including Forward the Foundation. It is a first paperback run of the work, and it is battered and abused through repeated reading, the sweeping art-insert behind the front cover long since gone. (I know that I will at some point need to replace it. I do not look forward to doing so.)

That copy is one of two I received when I was ten or eleven. Both my parents and one of my grandmothers had bought a copy for me, the former as part of a complete set of the Foundation novels (which says much of who and what I have been and still am, as well as the support for it I was provided), the latter as a single item. I recall being happy to receive both as well as confused as to whose gift to keep; I no longer recall whose I did, which copy still manages to be on my shelf more than twenty years later.

It does not matter, really. The important thing is that I have had as many years of enjoyment from the piece--which I contend betrays the Good Doctor's awareness of his impending death from complications of AIDS (he had several surgeries and thus several transfusions in the 1980s, after HIV emerged in force but before physicians knew to screen blood for it)--as I have. I have said that I will need to replace the copy at some point; the day will come when the binding fails and the pages flutter away, or the pages will tear and no tape will save them. But a volume held for decades is not one so easily set aside, and I am something of a bibliophile in any event...I do not relish the thought.

20141109.0822

Freelance work continues, which is good because I need the money.

I have commented before (here and here, for instance) about the ways in which the freelance work I have been doing has expanded my reading repertoire. (It is an odd thing for someone who studies and teaches literature for a living would speak of such a thing or feel the need to do it, admittedly.) Although I cut my teeth on Asimov and read his Foundation corpus and Tolkien's Middle-earth corpus on a more or less annual cycle, and such works are increasingly part of the main stream of US popular culture (more the latter than the former, as it happens), and although such writers as Chaucer and Shakespeare and such works as Beowulf and Le Morte d'Arthur remain known if not exactly enjoyed by most, the stuff that I read and study* is not normally regarded as being really part of popular literature. What I read for my freelance work, however, is.

Most recently, I read for the freelance write-ups Gillian Flynn's 2009 Dark Places, and I found it strangely compelling. The protagonist is hardly a sympathetic character, although she is positioned such that she really should be; typically, the victim of substantial physical and emotional trauma evokes a level of pity almost inevitably associated with sympathetic portrayal, but such is not the case in the text. Instead, the character wallows in the effects of the trauma, not so much because she cannot surpass it as because she is unwilling to surpass it. She is offered ample opportunity, both in the narrative as it unfolds and in the presumed back-story, to seek help and find a way to navigate trauma so as to enter more fully into the world and help herself to be more than the victim of circumstance. She repeatedly refuses, accepting her status as acted upon throughout the text and only loosely moving into being the actor.

Part of me recoils from the character, likely as a result of the deeply ingrained habituation of my upbringing and my participation in the main stream of US popular culture noted above. (Being defined as several ways Other** by that main stream requires engagement with it.) Another part recognizes the characterization as an echo, probably unintentional, of Donaldson's characterization of Thomas Covenant in the first three novels of his series. Still another part of me, likely that which has grown up as a result of my training in the academic humanities, reminds me that I do not have enough grounding in trauma theory to be able to untangle the understandings of horrific events embedded in and transmitted by Flynn's Dark Places. Having neither the situated ethos of having suffered trauma myself nor the invented ethos of long study of trauma as trauma and the effects it has on those who have endured it, I perhaps ought not to say so much about the presentation of it in text as I otherwise might.

Although I recognize that the last part of me is more likely correct than the first, I recognize also that the former will have much more currency in the prevailing culture of the United States. I can easily envision many of the people among whom I grew up, and indeed among whom I now live and among whom I lived in The City, seeing such a person as Flynn's protagonist and thinking "Pull it together; something bad happened to you, yes, but you have to get over it and move on." I can easily envision them looking at her failure to do so and seeing only weakness that deserves condemnation. Perhaps there is something in the novel that seeks to force upon the reader the question of how to handle such people as Flynn's protagonist, people who are shaped by their circumstances in ways that they cannot or will not set aside and yet unfit them for "normal" life. Or perhaps there is something in the novel that uses the protagonist to frustrate what "normal" means. But most readers will not seek for such a thing; they will see instead that the work thwarts the easy and comfortable expectations they have as a result of reading repetitions in the genre, and they will turn aside from it utterly.

I did not, though, not only because of the paycheck, and I am glad of it.

*I am well aware that the study of literature is fraught, that many will suggest it is not worth studying at all, and that others will chafe at the inclusion of Asimov and Tolkien alongside Chaucer and Shakespeare. Tolkien generates quite a bit of scholarship, including what I curate here; Asimov prompts somewhat less, although he ought to get more, since he was himself an academic. And I maintain that the rejection out of hand of "popular" work by scholarly bodies is a large part of what prompts the rejection of scholarly bodies by the readership of "popular" works.

**I am aware also that my Otherness is less in scope and scale than the Otherness imposed on, well, others. I make no claim to being particularly or especially excluded / abjected. I have a small taste of it, though, and I can make inferences about its extrapolation, perhaps.