Culture – Page 43 – Into the Woods

Revisions done! Proofing again…

New proofs of Fugue in Ursa Major arrived today. This is the second proof set. Revisions after the first proof set were substantial, adding a couple of months to the production schedule.

However, I think the revisions have made it a much better book. Three chapters were completely rewritten. There are character and plot refinements throughout. To quicken the pace in the second half of the book, the revised version is almost 50 pages shorter. Still, at 300 pages and 94,000 words, it’s not exactly a short novel.

Ken Ilgunas gave me such good feedback on the first proofs that I asked the other first readers to stop reading and wait for the next revision. An author’s first readers are absolutely critical to the creative process. It requires experienced readers who can be good judges of the kind of story the author wants to tell. They mustn’t mince words when giving feedback. It can be like a kick in the stomach.

Fugue in Ursa Major is a pretty smart book, if I do say so myself, so smart first readers were a requirement. Though a lot of things happen in Fugue in Ursa Major, it’s not really intended to be action-packed science fiction. The book has strong contemplative, historical, and speculative elements that emerge during conversations between the two main characters, Jake and Phaedrus. Hopefully, Fugue in Ursa Major will be a brisk ride. But the heart of the book is in the lives of the characters. If Fugue in Ursa Major attracts enough readership, there will be a sequel. At the end of Book One, Jake and Phaedrus are just getting started with the world-changing task that has landed in their laps.

If all goes according to plan, the book should go on sale in March. There will be a trade paperback version, a Kindle version, and an Apple iBook (ePub) version.

Sappho

Le Coucher de Sappho by Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre

I have been besotted with the ancient Greeks of late, working my way through the magisterial The Greeks and Greek Love: A Bold New Exploration of the Ancient World, by James Davidson. The book is almost 800 pages long, in small type, so it’s a long haul. But I have had more fun with this book than any book I’ve read in months. Davidson is an Oxford-trained historian, but he writes with wit and humor. His approach is anything but dry. And rather than merely throwing out his analysis with a haughty academic attitude of take it or leave it, Davidson takes us into the texts. He lets us see for ourselves the basis of his interpretation of Greek history. We meet hundreds of characters from all over the Greek empire. He retells hundreds of stories from classical Greece. By the end of the book, you feel as though you’ve been on vacation in ancient Greece, and you’ve picked up a surprising amount of Greek vocabulary.

Thanks to Davidson, I also have discovered the poetry of Sappho. Right away I saw that she was the Greek Edna St. Vincent Millay. Here’s a fragment, translation by A.E. Housman:

The weeping Pleiads wester,
And the moon is under seas;
From bourn to bourn of midnight
Far sighs the rainy breeze:
It sighs from a lost country
To a land I have not known;
The weeping Pleiads wester,
And I lie down alone.

The rainy Pleiads wester,
Orion plunges prone;
The stroke of midnight ceases,
And I lie down alone.
The rainy Pleiads wester
And seek beyond the sea
The head that I shall dream of,
And ’twill not dream of me.

What is sad is that very little of Sappho’s poetry remains. She was born around 600 B.C., but most of her work survived until Roman times. Then Sappho’s work was at the mercy of the Christians. It seems there were book-burnings. The church was redefining love according to its own brutally prudish theology, so these ancient ideas had to go. But it was not only an active purging of the literary record by the church. It also was neglect of those documents that survived and found their way into monastery libraries during the Dark Ages. Davidson tells us how this neglect probably happened:

“Time and again, a manuscript of Sappho’s songs or of Strabo or of Archimedes, one of only two or three copies in the world, or one of only one, was allowed to rot in the book box, while the scribe spent his precious hours making yet another copy of the painfully awful Greek prose of the evangelists. Or worse, the priceless thousand-year-old text was systematically erased and overwritten to make a private copy of the more polished pieties of some bestselling Christian sermonizer.”

It’s a pity that the sermons weren’t burned instead.

Fragments of a Sappho poem discovered and published in the 20th Century

Don’t let them deter you: connect the dots

I am in the thick of revisions in Fugue in Ursa Major. A couple of days ago I was working through a section in which the story’s young hero is trying to figure out what the hell is going on in the world. He sees some strange things, but he doesn’t know what it means. He realizes that if he paid attention only to official sources of information, or to our crappy media, he’d never know what’s really going on. So he tries to study up on the science of intelligence analysis and connect some dots.

In this section of the book, I went on for several pages with my own ideas about acting as our own spies and how we might go about doing this. I included a pretty bitter indictment of the failures of our media and the swamp of propaganda and distraction in which we all must operate.

Months after I wrote this section of the book, I got a copy of the recent book Conspiracy Theory in America by Lance deHaven-Smith. My own thinking and my own critique of our contemporary information environment are so much like deHaven-Smith’s that you might think I cribbed those ideas from deHaven’s book. But I didn’t.

Here’s a quote from the jacket copy of deHaven’s book:

Conspiracy Theory in America investigates how the Founders’ hard-nosed realism about the likelihood of elite political misconduct — articulated in the Declaration of Independence — has been replaced by today’s blanket condemnation of conspiracy beliefs as ludicrous by definition. Lance deHaven-Smith reveals that the term “conspiracy theory” entered the American lexicon of political speech to deflect criticism of the Warren Commission and traces it back to a CIA propaganda campaign to discredit doubters of the commission’s report. He asks tough questions and connects the dots among five decades’ worth of suspicious events. … Sure to spark intense debate about the truthfulness and trustworthiness of our government, Conspiracy Theory in America offers a powerful reminder that a suspicious, even radically suspicious, attitude toward government is crucial to maintaining our democracy.

Now the reaction of a smart person to this proposition might go something like this: OK, but how do you distinguish between the crazies and their crazy conspiracy theories and the process of diligently trying to connect the dots?

I think the answer to that is pretty easy. Crazy people aren’t trying to understand what’s really going on in the world. Far from it. Rather, they have an ideological agenda, and they’re trying to make the real world conform to the craziness inside their own heads. Often this is religious craziness. Almost always it’s some kind of ideological craziness. And the crazy kind of people aren’t being diligent and scientific at all. They’re dishonest, stupid, and credulous.

But we aren’t like that are we?

Writing Fugue in Ursa Major required quite a lot of research. Though the story begins in the here and now, I have a lot to say about the past and how the world came to be the way it is today. In particular, I’m concerned with the history of classical Greece, the rise and fall of Rome, and the beginning of the Dark Ages. I’m no scholar, but this kind of research actually is a lot of fun to do. When, in the novel, my characters talk about how the world used to be, I want their thinking to be plausible and academically defensible. For that reason, I don’t mess around much with popular histories. I read the academic stuff. So, when you read Fugue in Ursa Major, you may wonder at times, “Was it really like that back then?” And my response would be, “To the best of our knowledge, yes it was.”

Conspiracy Theory in America, by Lance deHaven-Smith. The University of Texas Press, 2013. 260 pages.

Drug store lunch counter

I thought that all the old-fashioned drug store lunch counters had closed long ago. But I discovered today that there’s one in Walnut Cove at Hick’s Pharmacy. It’s called the Red Rooster. I asked one of the women who works there why there is no sign out front. She said there is — the red rooster logo. I guess all the locals knew that. And now that I know, I guess that makes me a local too. As far as I know, Hick’s Pharmacy is locally owned and not part of a chain. So that’s where I’ll do business hereafter.

Today’s lunch special was pinto beans, slaw, and corn bread for $4.50. I had it with onions.

Fugue in Ursa Major: delayed by revisions

In retrospect, I was way too optimistic in thinking that Fugue in Ursa Major would be ready to go on sale last month. The feedback I got from some of my first readers was very good and very intense. That left me with a good bit of thinking to do. Still, progress is being made, and I’ll have a new estimate on a new publication date as soon as possible.

Rocking chair rehab

I apologize for going so long without posting. I’ll blame it on the weather — first freezing cold, with some water problems, followed by heavy rain. January has been dreary so far.

But today was fairly nice, and Ken got started on a project that I’m happy to see come up in the queue: the rehabilitation of the rocking chairs. I bought the chairs as a gift for my mother some years ago, and she gave them back to me when I moved back to North Carolina. The chairs are classics, made by the P & P Chair Company, the original maker of the Kennedy Rocking Chair. You can still buy these chairs, and they’re very pricey. Mine have been sitting on the side porch for five years, and the weathering had taken its toll.

I did not like the original finish on these chairs. It was that plastic-skin finish that everything seems to have these days. The finish does not soak into the wood, and over time it peels off in tiny flakes, leaving the wood unprotected.

Ken’s first step was to sand the chairs. That left the chairs with a silvery-gray patina that is quite beautiful. The next step will be to apply a new finish. We’ve chosen a deck stain, because it’s the kind of finish that goes on thin and soaks into the wood. And of course it’s a finish designed for protecting wood that is exposed to the weather. I’m hoping that it will protect the chairs better than the original finish.

And whose knows. After the finish is dry, the chairs may come indoors and sit by the fireplace for the rest of the winter. Life is hard for porch chairs.

In the photos below, the new finish has not yet been applied.

Christmas in Danbury

Carolers

Carolers at the Arts Council reception

Moravian star in front of the old Stokes County courthouse

The old Stokes County courthouse

Charlie’s surrey

Charlie

Inside the Stokes museum

Mantel in the museum

Inside the Stokes museum

Sousveillance?

Source: Stephanie Mann, age 6, via Wikipedia

Periodically I check out the web site of David Brin, a science fiction writer and futurist, to see what’s on his mind. Brin is the author of the brilliant and classic Startide Rising (1983), which won both the Nebula and Hugo awards the year it was published. But, smart as Brin is, I find that I usually disagree with him. This is because I put him in the unpleasant category of techno-utopians — people who think that technology will solve all our problems, including our energy problems and even our political problems. I think that is bunk, and dangerous bunk.

Brin had linked to a piece he wrote in “The European” in which he argues that the solution to growing surveillance and invasion of privacy is “sousveillance.” The word “sousveillance” is a made-up word and is the opposite of surveillance. It means spying up at elites the same way they spy down on us. The prefix “sur” of course comes from a French word meaning over, or above; and “sous” is another French word meaning under, or beneath.

This notion that sousveillance is an effective antidote to surveillance seems to me to be so obviously silly that I’m inclined to think that the techno-utopians are even more deluded than I had thought. Just give everyone a Google glass and we’ll fix the world’s surveillance problem!

First of all, there is a straw man fallacy: “… [F]or the illusory fantasy of absolute privacy has to come to an end.” Who said anything about absolute privacy? There has never been such a thing as absolute privacy in American society or American law. The law and the Constitution are almost silent on the issue of privacy. But there have been lots of lawsuits having to do with privacy, and as far as the courts are concerned the issue is pretty settled.

But the second and biggest point of silliness is the notion that we small people have the same power to spy on elites that they have to spy on us. Yes, sometimes it happens. The photo of the cop pepper-spraying a group of already restrained protesters held our national attention for weeks. That was a fine example of sousveillance — someone had a camera ready at the right time. Another brilliant lick of sousveillance was when a waiter (or someone) at a Romney fund-raising event for rich people secretly made a tape of Romney trashing 47 percent of the American people as “takers.” It helped expose Romney as a servant of the rich, and it helped him lose the election.

Edward Snowden’s spying on the spies, then releasing the evidence to the media and to Wikileaks, is the all-time best example of sousveillance. Because of the actions of one very clever nerd, the elites caught red-handed are still squawking and trying to lie their way out it. We got some very useful information on how elites’ surveillance systems operate, though that information will soon enough be obsolete.

But as brilliant as these coups of sousveillance were, such things are always going to be rare and accidental. That is because elites have systems for secrecy that we little people will never have. They are rich, they are ruthless, and they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars (most of it our own tax money) to build walls of secrecy around themselves while monitoring everything we do. The idea that the little cameras in our phones, or built into our glasses, can fix this is seriously dumb. Nevertheless, we need to always keep our cameras handy, and we must be creative in coming up with new ways to spy on elites.

Dumb cop: Nailed by the camera!

Dumb politician: Nailed by the camera!

The rewards of rural life

A concerned citizen speaks to the Stokes County commissioners.

Though I certainly enjoyed my 17 years in San Francisco, rural life is far from boring. One of the good things about backroads places such as Stokes County is that the American system of government operates at a small scale. People know each other. It’s easy to get involved. A few people can make a big difference.

In my political activities against fracking, I’ve gotten to know a good many people. Often the same people who show up to work for one urgent cause will show up to work for another urgent cause. In Stokes County, the newest urgent cause is preserving an enormously valuable 19th-century resort and keeping it in the hands of the public. The resort, Vade Mecum, belongs to the state of North Carolina at present and has been operated at a loss by N.C. State University. A few weeks ago, N.C. State informed Stokes County that they’re closing Vade Mecum, which had been used mostly as a seasonal camp for young people. Very quickly, the county’s leadership — both elected and unelected — have gone to work to come up with a plan that would get Vade Mecum and its pristine 900 acres into county hands and keep it open. Tourism is increasingly important to this county, and Vade Mecum adjoins Hanging Rock State Park, which is the most visited state park in North Carolina. So Vade Mecum and its land could become an important part of Stokes County’s tourism master plan.

The room was packed at a meeting Monday of the county commissioners. A retired farmer, in a 30-minute presentation to the commissioners that was simply the most entertaining and most effective presentation I have ever seen, outlined to the commissioners a plan for preserving Vade Mecum that was developed by a group of concerned citizens. The commissioners seemed to like the plan and have promised to act soon on preserving Vade Mecum.

Though dramas like this certainly happen at the state and national level, here at the county level everyone is up close to the action. There is a real sense of working together. I like it. And at this stage of my life, I’d rather live here than even in a place like Paris.

The main lodge at Vade Mecum

Digging ever deeper for human roots

Source: PNAS

There were many stories in the news this week about sequencing the DNA of a boy buried in Siberia 24,000 years ago and how the boy’s DNA links early Europeans to Native Americans. None of these stories mentioned that linguists have been looking for — and may have found — the same connection. This research by linguists is new and remains controversial.

All this is fascinating, and though I’ve read a good many articles on the linguistics involved here, much of it is too technical for me to understand. Here is a less technical article on how linguists have been able to trace languages back as far as 15,000 years.

The important thing to a generalist, though, is that DNA, language, and culture always migrate together. Culture, however, is fragile and can be stamped out almost overnight, while DNA and language (except when genocide is involved) are much tougher and change slowly at statistically predictable rates.

We grieve for lost languages, though languages are tougher than cultures. We also grieve for lost cultures, as I have been grieving for lost Celtic culture. This new genetic and linguistic evidence shows that the Native American cultures and Celtic culture have common roots if you go back far enough.

It seems to be an axiom of human history that, when cultures collide, the shittiest culture tends to win, and more gentle, naive, or nature-oriented cultures tend to lose. Take a look, for example, at a cultural element that Celtic culture and many Native American cultures had in common — the belief in reincarnation. Julius Caesar, who wrote extensively about his war against the Celtic Gauls, was very interested in the military advantages of a belief in reincarnation:

“They [the Druids] wish above all to convince their pupils that souls do not perish but pass after death from one body into another, and this they see as an inducement to valor, for the dread of death is thereby negated.”

This belief in reincarnation is found all over the world, particularly in gentler cultures. In reincarnation, it is assumed that people themselves work through their foibles and destinies, over time. It is chiefly the Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which frankly I regard as inferior religions — that abhor the idea of reincarnation and prefer to let their often angry and vindictive sky god sort people out after death and reward them or punish them appropriately.

It is very hard for me to understand that many people celebrate, rather than grieve for, lost cultures. Here is a chilling quote from Theodore Roosevelt, from Hunting Expeditions of a Ranchman:

Above all, the extermination of the buffalo was the only way of solving the Indian question. As long as this large animal of the chase existed, the Indians simply could not be kept on reservations, and always had an ample supply of meat on hand to support them in the event of a war; and its disappearance was the only method of forcing them to at least partially abandon their savage mode of life. From the standpoint of humanity at large, the extermination of the buffalo has been a blessing.

A blessing for whom, and for which god?