The universal appeal of Jack Vance

As I mentioned below, I grew up as a big fan of Jack Vance.  I found him so eccentric that I'm always surprised to find how many other fans of his there are.  Even Eliezer Yudkowsky, on one of my favorite blogs, Less Wrong, praises him, in a blog entry on whether awfulness is a requirement for intense fandom.   His point:  Vance was not awful, in fact was a real craftsman, and still has intense fans.

Well, I don't know how intense.  And there always comes that terrible question about one's youthful loves:  can an adult read them?  Vance's prose, widely praised, is ornate, bookish, and arch, very much a specialized taste.  One of my favorite passages, still resonant after all these years, is from The Palace of Love, the third of the Demon Princes novels.  Edelrod, a poisoner from a planet of poisoners, explains a poison that looks like a lump of gray wax:

Observe this deadly material.  I can handle it without fear:  I am immunized!  But if you were to rub it on an article belonging to your enemy--his comb, his ear-scraper--he is as good as gone.  Another application is to spread a film over your identification papers.  Then, should an overofficious administrator hector you, he is contaminated, and pays for his insolence.

The exclamation mark is also a characteristic of the dialogue of Bruce Sterling, now that I think about it.  Not an obvious successor, but there is a connection when you look.

Vance's plots are collections of coincidences and misunderstandings, his favored women seductive and remote,  his cultures each built around some key obsession, his aristocrats pompous and bumbling, his aliens genuinely weird, and his novels journeys through beautiful and elegant puzzles.  I see Gene Wolfe as the closest thing to an adult Vance.

And, of course, he has been an influence on me.

Who makes healthcare expensive?

In the June 1, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, Atul Gawande has one of his usual fine articles about physicians and healthcare, this one about the influence of physicians on healthcare costs.  McAllen, Texas has extremely high costs.  El Paso (in the same state, though some hundreds of miles away) has relatively low costs.  Physicians in McAllen order more tests and order more procedures.

And the higher costs translate, not into better outcomes, but into similar or slightly worse outcomes.  After all, every procedure and every hospital stay increase risk.  I think it's worth some effort to stay out the hospital.  It's Dr. Stork vs. Dr. Log.

The Dartmouth Atlas has been studying this issue for years.  Different areas have wildly different utilizations for various procedures.  With utilization comes higher cost.

Gawande points out that neither single payer or consumer-based models are likely to save us.  I agree that making someone pay a higher percentage of the cost of their emergency cardiac bypass isn't going to affect things at all, though do think a louder consumer cost signal has appeal.

But the real issue here is culture.  Each area has its own physician culture.  Physicians seem arrogant to the rest of us, but between themselves they are intensely conformist.  The seek approval constantly.  After all, think of those premeds at school.  These are people who always want an A, and the way to get the A is the give the right answer.  Like many complex professions, there is an extended time of apprenticeship, where they learn not only the business, but the culture and expectations.  One doctor trains another.

There's also a lot of habit involved.  Referral patterns tend not to vary.  A solution used once will be used again.  Drug company reps have always taken advantage of this.  A drug prescribed once will tend to be prescribed by default for that condition.  The day is just too busy, and the problems too various and complex, for a reevaluation of all the basic facts every time.

Note:  this is not all doctors, and not all of the time.  But we all tend to underestimate the power of our situation in our decision-making.  Culture and habit are incredibly powerful.  Changing a place like McAllen is not just a matter of changing some regulations.  It means changing a culture.  That can be quite a job.

The perils of childhood play

As I’ve mentioned before, I like the 100-year-old photo blog, Shorpy, both for the pictures and the comments. But the comments on this one startled me.

The title is "Children's playground, St. Louis", and it is from 1936, taken by Arthur Rothstein for the Farm Security Administration.

One commenter sees this as "a wonderful place to go play."

I see a horrendous, dangerous dump, not a happy scene of “use what’s available” childhood play. And I think the photographer’s caption is sardonic.  This is what people then were trying to get rid of.

You always get some “good old days” commenters on Shorpy, but this time they seem to have gone off the rails, describing the healthy joy of playing with old springs and bones in a cesspit.

Now, sure, open and unrestricted play in a mildly dangerous and ominous place is one of those real pleasures of childhood that is definitely rarer now than it used to be, and I suppose that’s a loss. Jerry’s Pit, near my house, was a flooded brick pit that for years served as the local swimming hole, and the skinny kids in the pictures of it sure do look happy.

But this scene is something quite different. For one thing, the kid is alone in this spot. Think there’s a reason for that? He’s making the best of it. But I don’t think that best is all that good.

The hero of David Copperfield's life

The problem with a bildungsroman is that the protagonist eventually grows up.

There are several interesting entries on About Last Night about David Copperfield, about the brilliant beginning, of Copperfield's sad and poetic early childhood, and the inevitably more mundane life he leads afterward, for all its Uriah Heeps and Mr. Micawbers.  I recently reread it, and though I would not have put the boundary down as sharply as Carrie Frye (CAAF) and Graham Greene do, but there is a lot of activity in the book, including a weird doubling of fallen women, elaborate scheming, and shipwrecks.

Such depictions of childhood have a unity that the adult world lacks, and the potentialities of that time can never fully be realized.  I am put in mind of a book from my own genre, SF, called Emphyrio by Jack Vance.  After a somewhat melodramatic preface, it depicts the odd and somewhat ominous childhood of a boy named Ghyl Tarvok (Vance's made-up names always have a specific rhythm to them) in a city called Ambroy.  He is raised by his mysterious father, Amiante, a brilliant craftsman in a world where mechanical reproduction is banned.

The first part of the book has a tender and melancholy mood that is rare and hard to maintain.  There are mysteries to the half-ruined city, and Ghyl, amid all the activities of his youth, tries to puzzle them out.  Then, in the latter part of the book, he goes offworld, has adventures, finds some things out...none of it has the sombre energy of the first part.

But such complaints just show how demanding we are when a writer raises our expectations.  Dangerous, to be too good at the beginning of a book.  Make your protagonist's childhood mundane and somewhat tedious, and we will find his young adulthood much more interesting....

Dream on: a sin of fiction

Over on her blog, Nancy Kress asks whether you should start a story with a dream.  And I see plenty of stories, particularly those meant for younger readers, that do so.  It's an easy way to introduce quick drama (it's not usually a dream about waiting in line at the DMV) and maybe some background information, and then start the story with a "waking up" that is both metaphorical and real.

Two problems.  One is just a matter of building reader trust.  When I read a story starting with a dream, my first thought is that the writer couldn't figure out a better way to start the story.  I started the first draft of my next book After the Victory with my main character having a dream and waking up.  It does start in the middle of the night, with an emergency alert.  But my suspicion of the trope, rather than any inherent lack of sense to it, made me remove it.  Too sensitive to being called a lazy genre writer?  Maybe.

The second problem is that real dreams make no sense whatsoever.  It's like building a narrative based on the names of cars that pass you on the highway.  Any coherence is imposed retrospectively, but a conscious mind that doesn't have any privileged access to the sorting and discarding processes of REM sleep.  A sensible dream that conveys useful information to the dreamer, or even predicts the future, is another piece of...let's say casual workmanship on the part of the writer.  Of course, dreams have served divinatory purposes all through history, so I'm kind of swimming against the current of human expectations in general here.  It is not unreasonable that a character in the story would think that a dream conveyed useful information.  But that's the different between what the characters think, and what the reader is supposed to think.

Dreams can't bear the weight that has been put on them by fiction.  Any writer should be wary when a dream presents itself as a solution to a narrative problem.  And any reader should be wary when they come across one in fiction.  Make sure the writer is giving you good weight.  Your time is valuable.

Double threat edits

My morning/weekend job (writing fiction) and my day job (running marketing for my employer) have both thrown up gnarly deadline requirements simultaneously.  I have the intensively copy-edited manuscript of Brain Thief to return in a week or so for the one, and a significant rebranding, web site rewrite, and collateral redesign for the other.

I seem to be doing okay on both, but wish me luck.

Definite article

If you think we writers just throw a bunch of words down on a screen and then send them off and get them printed that's...sometimes not true.  Sometimes there is editing.  Sometimes there is agony.  And sometimes there is obsessive devotion to detail.

My next book is called Brain Thief.  It almost wasn't.  It was almost called The Brain Thief (it was originally titled Remembering Muriel, but that was a lot of drafts ago, so forget about that).

The title The Brain Thief was a suggestion of my editor at Tor, David Hartwell.  I liked it.  Then, at a reading, my friend and workshop member Brett Cox suggested, delicately, that the rhythm would be better without the definite article.  The three thudding monosyllables seemed wrong to him.  In addition to being a fiction writer and critic, Brett is also a poet and songwriter (and this does not exhaust his descriptors).  I realized he was right.

But, for some reason, the title change never got noted in the right place, until I noticed that blurbs were coming back with the old title.  I asked David.  And then there was much discussion at Tor.  I have no idea how many people had to spend time on this.

In the end the title change was approved.  Brain Thief it is.  I love my family, but there is no way anyone here would understand why I fret about things like this.  Fortunately, my editor does.

Whenever you read anyone's prose, feel glad that you can't actually see the little droplets of blood all over it.

Monument to a forgotten figure

One of my...hobbies, interests, whatever, is public sculpture. I was just down in Washington DC with my family, and got to see a lot of it. I favor the period roughly 1870-1920, which seemed to have developed a style and training regimen which allowed for a large number of skilled practitioners to be working across the country at the same time. As I travel, I find work even in small towns that is of astoundingly high quality.

Take a look at this:

This is part of a memorial to Ulysses S. Grant, one of the most respected figures of the late 19^th century, now bulking nowhere near so large as his greatest opponent in the field, Robert E. Lee. It stands on the high end of the Mall in Washington DC, just below the Capitol, looking out to the memorial to his boss, Abraham Lincoln.

It took twenty years for the sculptor Henry Merwin Shrady to study and create the two dynamic groups of mounted soldiers and the gigantic statue of Grant on his horse Cincinnati (supposedly the third-largest equestrian statue in the world), along with some lions, reliefs, and other features.  If you've never heard of Shrady (I hadn't) it might be because he died two weeks before the monument was dedicated.  He deserves to be better known.

To my eyes, the work is startlingly Hellenistic, rather than Classical.  The cavalry group on Grant's right and the artillery group on his left struggle dramatically through mud.  Every body part of horse and man is torqued, exhibiting force and movement.  Garments flap, faces are contorted.  You feel the terror and stink of the Overland Campaign.

Here is the cavalry group:

Here is an artilleryman's face:

For his part, Grant sits with grim calm, his hat foursquare on his head.  He was a man who needed impending disaster to be able to relax.

The monument, though dramatic, has trouble holding its space.  It looks a bit of an afterthought, and I gather that changes have occurred around it.  The sculpture can't manage the space alone--no sculpture can.  It could use a flight of stairs or a colonnade.  It wouldn't even need to be architecturally distinguished to do the job.  The new National WWII monument, elsewhere on the Mall, is pretty much a decorative fountain (big in monuments nowadays), but its big blocky columns with their metal wreaths define the dedicated space effectively.

Wikipedia entry on the memorial.

Some other photos, not by me.

Metafictional Ferrellism: Stranger Than Fiction

A few days ago, I watched the movie Stranger Than Fiction with my son. It’s a metafictional story, where a person recognizes he is the character in a work of fiction, and struggles to escape. It was pretty OK. The character, an IRS employee, is played by Will Ferrell, the writer by Emma Thompson, ragged-haired, chain smoking, un-made-up. The literary theorist Ferrel goes to for help is played by Dustin Hoffman, somewhat reprising a similar role in I (Heart) Huckabees, a movie I enjoyed a great deal more than this one.

There was a lot to like, though I was disappointed by how superficial Hoffman’s analysis and critique are: there are all sorts of questions of genre, audience expectations, and issues of characterization (“it’s weird, but I’ve really started noticing what brand of pen people use”) that he could use to figure out the author’s identity, but he focuses on the phrase “Little did he know...”, a wooden piece of foreshadowing that makes the writer seem pretty industrial grade.

But let’s talk about Thompson’s writer. She hasn’t published a book in ten years, and, from Hoffman’s professorial admiration of her, you figure she’s a literary writer, not big on sales. Nevertheless, her publisher sends an enforcer, played by Queen Latifah, to get her to finish her book. This smooth woman gets paid a fulltime salary to bring highbrow midlist authors to parturition, a character who could only have been invented by a writer who knew nothing about the writing business. Or maybe it is a blocked writer’s greatest fantasy: “my unwritten book is so important that everyone’s greatest interest is that I finish it”. Latifah doesn’t get enough to do, either as a character, or in the plot. She’s mostly someone for the writer to explain things to.

But what story is Ferrell in, if he’s not in a metafictional one? Thompson’s book seems immensely dull without the character’s revolt, down to the irritatingly self-righteous baker, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, whom Ferrell audits, and whose life-affirming joy warms Ferrell from his useless, enclosed life...well, you’ve been there a hundred times before. “Why am I suddenly meeting only wooden, stereotyped characters? And why do I feel compelled to explain everything to you, even though I barely know you?”

Charlie Kauffman is the master of this kind of thing. For real metafiction fun, Synecdoche, New York is the movie to see, probably more than once.

How long will we keep going to plays?

I am a longtime playgoer. I have had a subscription at the Huntington Theater in Boston for more years than I care to think about, and for many years had one at the American Repertory Theater, in Cambridge.

I love plays. I also love trains, and my experiences on Amtrak are, regrettably similar to my recent experiences in playgoing.

Last night I saw The Miracle at Naples, by David Grimm. It is set in Naples in 1580, in is what suppose could be called a “comic romp”: a commedia dell’arte troupe comes to Naples, and the various members get into various scrapes, mostly sexual. There are some vague attempts to connect what happens to the miracle of the liquefaction of the blood of St. Gennaro, a local tourist draw, but the blood is eventually forgotten. It has the vaguely limp feel of the comic relief sections of a Jacobean drama, without the drama. There is nothing even vaguely 16^th century about the characters, their issues, or their reactions. There is no plot, no real characters, and few good jokes. But the stage set, a courtyard dominated by a huge statue of St. Gennaro as bishop, was incredible, using perspective to make it look like the courtyard extended way back behind the stage.  But, as Dorothy Parker supposedly once said, the actors kept getting in front of it.

The play, to use a precise critical term, sucked. Most of the new plays the Huntington puts on suck. Some are just inept, while others are active offenses to the soul. The previous one we saw, Two Men of Florence, was a painfully earnest and labored play about Galileo (what do these people have about the 16^th century?) by Richard Goodwin, speech writer to JFK and husband to Doris Kearns. This too had a great set, with a big turntable, stars that appeared in the sky, and dramatic experimental apparatus. But man was it dull. Not bad. Not even inept. Someone in a play workshop would probably feel justifiably proud of having written it. But it had no business wasting the time of a bunch of good actors (including Edward Hermann) or an audience, as part of a season of works to which we are supposed to pay attention.

Even the fairly good new plays by new authors the Huntington has put on (Sonia Flew by Melinda Lopez, Boleros for the Disenchanted by Jose Rivera, Well by Lisa Kron) suffer from poor structure, lack of ambition, and a kind of easy spiritual uplift. And the bad ones (most notably Persephone by Noah Haidle) are almost mesmerizingly bad. You have to rely on established writers, like Theresa Rebeck, Tom Stoppard, and David Lindsay-Abaire to get anything maybe worth watching.

Why should younger writers go for the theater?  There's more fun to be had, and more money to be made, in TV and movies, not to mention video games, YouTube videos, and corporate training videos.  I presume they write them as prestige resume builders.

So why do I go? I like to go to the theater, I like getting together for dinner with my friends, and I am always hopeful. But that hope is not immortal. And it’s not like the Huntington’s choices are bringing them in: playgoers are a graying demographic, and the performance I attended was more than half empty.

I keep wondering if I’ll ever have the nerve to boo and catcall. Routine standing ovations show that the form is moribund. Hearing a boo might reassure people that it still lives.

Who’s with me?

Sins of the writer: popular characters

If, as I discussed yesterday, writers can try to destroy your pleasure in reading by teaching you good writing technique, and thus get you to realize how rare it is, how can I not join in?

Here's a simple one.  You have a character who is a performer, an artist, or...a writer.  Since this is your protagonist, or a character you really like, or even, maybe, a thinly disguised version of you, this character is good at what they do (yep, singular "they".  The guys on Language Log say it's okay, and it's just too convenient).  Of course?  There are only two kinds of artists in fiction, failed and brilliant.  Sometimes both.  "Pretty good", "just okay", "occasionally interesting" are seldom used to describe the work of a character we want to be admirable.

Okay, so how do you show that this person's work is more than just pretty good?  That's right, you have them create something, and you have everyone else think it's great, and it becomes incredibly popular overnight.  Simple.

There might be reasons I take this personally, but this isn't the time.

With the possible exception of Emily Dickinson, we all hope to be recognized someday.  But be wary of the writer who takes the easy way out.  If a character's work has quality, it's up to the writer to convey that quality to you.  I tried to do that in Carve the Sky, by telling the story through the perception of a connoisseur.  It proves to be easier to convey the skill of a critic than that of an artist.  Go figure.

Beware the writer who teaches writing

I observe that other writers love to teach readers about writing.  I "observe" this, because I don't share the urge to run writing workshops, give seminars on writing, write books about how to write, or even give blog tips on pronoun usage.  Truth in ranting:  I do belong to a peer writing workshop, where I give criticism in order to receive it, so, at some level, I am complicit in the system.

In other entries, I've talked about the sins of writing:  the ways writers consistently and persistently convey reality incorrectly, either through the inherent problems of fiction, or their own mental inadequacy, or (ahem) the unreasonable demands of their readers.

To the extent that teaching writing does the same thing, and is effective at doing it--explain to the would-be writer how to convey reality, or inner states, or fantastic situations, or suspense better in functional and elegant prose-- to that extent does it risk ruining the reading experience.  Why?  Because most writers aren't much good at most of that stuff.

I've become an enormously sensitive reader over the years.  I don't mean perceptive, or anything else virtuous.  I mean princess-and-the-pea sensitive.  Bad sentences leave me queasy, even if the plot is suspenseful.  Characters introduced to exemplify some flaw, and be bested by the virtuous protagonist, infuriate me.  And this last is used way too frequently in my field, speculative fiction.  I won't go on.

But most readers of writing manuals, most attendees at writing workshops, most readers of blogs with writing tips, will not become writers.  They will stay readers.  But they will be more demanding readers.  This may seem good.  Moving the demand curve upward for better-quality writing will increase supply of same.

But I fear that all it does is make you unhappy with what used to be simple pleasures.  I read many popular books in my field and see what makes people like them, without being able to share in that pleasure, because I don't see why the writer couldn't have done the rest of the job up to the same quality.  But the cheerfully clueless readers are made happy by the books, because they don't care about those other issues.

So, beware, you writing students.  Your teachers are actually teaching you to read.  And once you learn how to do it, you can never go back.  Do you really want to make most science fiction and fantasy seem like unreadable dreck?  Whatever will you do with your time?  And how will you talk with your friends?  It will all seem like a lover after the end of the affair, all irritating snorts, bad habits, missed birthdays, and unbearable self-righteousness.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Sins of literature: the general popular with his troops

Having taken a tour of Civil War named streets in my neighborhood, I'm thinking, naturally, of George B. McClellan.  The Seven Days battles happened on his retreat down the Peninsula, and marked the advent of Robert E. Lee.  Second Manassas (see?  I'm not unreasonable about the name itself, just seeing it in my neighborhood) happened when McClellan was temporarily replaced by Pope, successful in the West, who then got creamed by Lee.

McClellan was a superb manager and a terrible leader.  We most value those who rise to the top in a crisis, even though most time is spent in non-crisis.  McClellan was at his worst in a crisis, and at his best with the routine.

McClellan's men loved him.  And why not?  He kept them fed, supplied, and, as far as he could, safe from combat.  He would only put them in harm's way when he had overwhelming superiority of numbers.  Vain, self-important, and paranoid, McClellan would make a poor hero of a work of fiction.

But writers often use "popular with his troops" as an index of admirability.  And, I suppose, it is.  Lee was popular with his troops too, and Lee is a classic fictional hero.  But humans can love, en masse, people they would not admire or even like individually.  Can fiction handle a popular, pompous narcissist?  History certainly can.

More Civil War street names

Not far from my house is the site of Camp Cameron, where annual musters were held before the Civil War.  It was then an actual camp, for new recruits, until neighbors complained about how rowdy the young troops were, and they were moved elsewhere.  The land, straddling Cambridge and Somerville, was developed in the 1880s.

The short little streets there have names from the Seven Days Battles of the Peninsular Campaign:  Malvern, Glendale, Seven Pines, and Fair Oaks*.  Never mind that Seven Pines and Fair Oaks are two names for the same battle.  I like to think that these were names the soldiers gave to roads between lines of tents, which hung around until houses were built there, but another street is named Yorktown, which is a developer-type name, used for high schools, shopping centers, etc.

History is important to developers.  An attractive conversion of factory buildings to condos on the other side of Cameron Avenue is on a street proudly named Tannery Brook.  In the actual age of tanneries (and there were a lot around here--I live in what was the low-rent, swampy, smelly, Irish and French-Canadian area of town) that would not have been a selling point.

Bloody battles and smelly industrial operations become charming if seen from far enough away.

*I get this wrong all the time:  Seven Pines/Fair Oaks was part of the overall campaign, but not part of the Seven Days Battles.  My apologies to the real buffs.

Unreasonable rage at a street name

Near my children's school, here in Cambridge, Mass., is a short street with a name that, for a long time, irritated me.  The street is called Manassas Avenue.

Two things bugged me.  In 1861 and 1862 two battles took place at a creek in northern Virginia called Bull Run.  The first was the first battle of the Civil War.  So, the first thing:  we northerners call those battles the first and second battles of Bull Run, since we favored geographic features while southerners favored the nearest town when naming battles.  But Manassas, I have to say, seems to be winning out, and I see the battles referred to more often that way than I remember from my youth.  I can kind of deal with that, though I always suspect the loyalties of the National Park Service.

But, the stranger thing:  we lost.  The North got its butt handed to it in both those battles.  Can historical knowledge have fallen so low that a street in the heart of the heart of the North, Cambridge, got that awful name?  Any Gettysburg Streets in Charleston or New Orleans?  Somehow, I doubt it.

Well, come to find out, Manassas Ave. is named after a person, Manasses P. Dougherty.  The name was changed in 1907, from Sparks St. Court.

I'm still suspicious.  Why the spelling change?  A southern sympathiser in the Registry of Deeds?  Rewriting history is those people's favorite hobby.  You can't take anything for granted.

Butcher knives and other improper signifiers

The Boston Globe had a story recently about people being honored for saving a woman from being murdered by her husband with butcher knife.  They did a dangerous and brave thing, but that's not what struck me.

It was "butcher knife".  This what might be called a "headline signifier":  that is, something, probably not accurate, that catches the reader's eye and conveys the meaning, rather than the actually reality, of events.

Most people do not have anything called a "butcher knife" in their home, mostly because no one butchers meat at home.  But saying someone was attacked with a "utility knife" or a "chef's knife" would seem to be minimizing the risk, while at the same time being inappropriately finicky about terminology.

We accept this, though, I admit, I always think "well, what kind of knife was it?"  When someone attacks someone else with an item found in the kitchen, do they grab the boning knife or the santoku?  A writer's mind wants to know.

Related (albeit distantly) to this is the event, found in even sober history books, of someone being "torn limb from limb" by a mob.  Or, even more dramatically, "torn to pieces".

Maybe this literally happened.  But seeing these phrases in place of  the more mundane "killed by an angry mob" makes me wonder what actually did occur.   The medieval and early modern practice of "quartering" usually involved cutting the body into parts with (wait for it) a butcher knife, or, in French style, attaching horses to to the limbs in a coordinated effort.  The human body is pretty well constructed.  Beating someone to death and tearing a few pieces off (what I presume is what usually happened when someone was attacked by a mob) is relatively easy, the other things relatively hard, particularly with a tightly packed group of people who probably can't move freely to begin with.

This is actually sounding kind of gruesome.  But "torn limb from limb" is a seemingly meaningful description that raises a number of questions when you think about it.  I'm not currently planning to describe the death of a character at the hands of a mob, but if I do, I'd like to get it right.  Where should I turn?

Biblical marketing

I'm a big fan of the Shorpy. Every day it posts interesting historical photographs, often in high definition. Commenters remark on various almost invisible aspects of the photographs--and if they miss something obvious, they are mocked by the ominipotent Dave. Being mostly male, it seems, they get quite excited over photographs of attractive women, and discussions about tooth-straightening, style, and cosmetic surgery ensue.

A comment on this image of a Washington D.C. drugstore in 1921 caught my eye. It points out a number of bottles of a popular grape juice called, believe it or not, Naboth. The commenter links to a postcard from the Naboth bottling plant.

Am I alone in finding this name for a juice company crazy?  If you remember the story, Naboth owned a vineyard near King Ahab's palace.  Ahab wanted it for himself, Naboth wouldn't give it up, so Queen Jezebel arranged for Naboth to be stoned to death on false evidence.  Ahab got his vineyard, but Elijah told him he would be slain in the spot where Naboth was executed, and the dogs would lick his blood and eat Jezebel's body (1 Kg 21:1-20).

Who could pass up a marketing hook like that for wholesome grape juice?  Along with the Gibeah Motor Court, Jehu's Driving School, and Joshua's Walls and Masonry, not to mention the annual Jephtha Father Daughter Dance, a way of linking our daily life to uplifting Biblical events.

It's amazing how often people grab the first top-of-mind connection for their marketing, no matter how little sense it actually makes.  Naboth:grapes.  Sure, perfect!

My favorite non-Biblical clueless marketing link is a holiday hotel I read about called "Nessun Dorma".  Opera is just as good as the Bible for vague connections no one is entirely sure of.  This is one of the most famous arias around, from Turandot, particularly through Pavarotti's rendition.  Very romantic.

It means "None shall sleep".

6 reasons you should donate blood, not money

I don't like getting stuck with needles, but I still give blood.  I did yesterday, in a church basement near work.

I love giving blood because, aside from not costing me any money, it is incredibly efficient.  Money donations are often completely wasted, or used for some purpose other than you intend, or are used in some ineffective way.  Blood is different.

1. Blood isn't fungible.  That is, it can really only be used for putting into someone else's body and not for any other purpose.  So you know where it's going.  I suppose someone could sell it, and thus turn it into fungible money, but I don't hear of that, not in this country.
2. Blood can't be used for fun.  Relatedly, no is tempted to go on a tear with blood.  Most people, actually, don't want the stuff around.
3. Blood can't be used to pay administrative costs.  Most charities spend huge quantities, perhaps most of the money they get, to pay salaries, marketing costs, office rents, etc. etc.
4. Blood is something people really need.  You don't have to worry that your aid is being poured into some useless dam or training course or anything else with an unknown or negative outcome.
5. Blood is something people really need.  And there isn't enough of it.  The people who need it, really need it, in an immediate and clear way.
6. You can always make more.  If you're healthy, you keep cranking out those red blood cells and plasma anyway.  In the end, it really doesn't cost you anything.

When you give money, you often have no idea of what you're giving, and who you're giving it to.  With blood, you're hitting the target.

The Red Cross has improved its processes in the past few years, but I still think they could revamp their marketing and outreach, and get their donation rates up substantially.  But that's for another time.

The vanished sport of fox tossing

When we read historical novels, or fantasy novels with a historical setting, do we want to know what it was really like?  Do we want to see our characters behave in ways actually consistent with their time?

I'm reading Tim Blanning's excellent The Pursuit of Glory, an history of Europe 1648-1815.  Not a strictly chronological history, but a largely material and cultural one, starting with an informative discussion of roads, and how incredibly hard it was to get from one place to another, no matter who you were.

But it's the entertainments of the past that sometimes make clearest its distance from us.  In a chapter on the incredible prominence of various types of hunting in the lives of the rulers and aristocrats, Blanning tells about a popular sport in German lands:  fox tossing

...in which a fox was tossed in a net or blanket held by hunt servants or gentlemen and ladies of the court until it expired.  This usually took place in the courtyard of the prince's palace with the assembled courtiers looking on from the palace windows.  The Saxons seem to have been particularly fond of this form of entertainment:  in the course of 1747 Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, had 414 foxes, 281 hares, 39 badgers and 9 wild cats tossed to death.  It could also be found at the imperial court at Vienna, where in 1672 the Swedish envoy found it odd that the Emperor Leopold I should join with the court dwarves and small boys in delivering the coup de grace to the tossed foxes by clubbing them to death

I have to admit, I'm not clear on what the cause of death was.  Did the animals suffocate?  Get smashed on the ground?  Or was post-toss bludgeoning always required?  I suspect that this is not high on a list of sexy research topics for history graduate students, but surely someone can be persuaded to dig into it.

In this period these lands also favored a form of hunting where animals were herded by beaters into an enclosure on a lake or river, so that hunters in boats could kill huge quantities of them without needing to do anything other than pull a trigger.

All good fun.  A historical fiction where the character pursued the actual pleasures of his or her age could be both disturbing and informative.  Imagine a cheery nobleman, a good master, who cheers his crew up with an entertaining fox toss before dinner.  Not only is it fun, it gets rid of foxes.  Clubbing them, however, makes you absurd.  Leave that to the boys.