My favorite writers workshop

On Tuesday night, my writers workshop was over at my house for a meeting.  Among other things, we did a story of mine, a kind of essay/narrative about the Fermi paradox.  More fun than it sounds, swear.

I've been a member of the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop for...let's just say a long time.  Most of my stories have gone through it.

I'm not particularly clubbable, so my ability to function as part of a delicate social organism like a writers workshop shows how beneficial I find it.  I've never been a big part of fandom or SF society in general, so this is my connection to other writers.

Some workshops are psychologically supportive, and help writers get confidence.  This one focuses on the work.  If you don't already have confidence ("confidence" here being only moderately correlated with "ability":  getting better makes some people more confident, but doesn't seem to do much for others) this would be the wrong place for you.  They'll rip your heart out and kindly point out that your aortic arch is a feeble cliche.

Anyway, aside from a couple of visits to Sycamore Hill (a one-week professional workshop), this is my experience of writing workshops.  Some people have gone through Clarion, and been to dozens of these things.  Still, when I do go to a science fiction convention, I'm often put on writing workshop panels.  Maybe it's because the organizers fear I have nothing else to say.  But when you do see me bloviating on one of these panels, you can relax in the comforting knowledge that I really don't have any idea of what I'm talking about.

Ken Burns to produce 18-part documentary on the history of yawning

Ken the Embalmer strikes again, this time at National Parks.  Burns has shown that he can make even something as exciting as the Civil War tedious, but has successively lowered his sites, tediumising a specific style of popular music (Jazz), and a sport that certainly doesn’t need any help being boring (Baseball). And these things went on for hours. He now turns his attention to a specific type of land-use administrative unit. The guy is...well, I can’t possibly say slowing down, but losing some kind of mojo, anyway.

Look, I like national parks. I’ve visited and stayed at plenty of them. But, aside from visiting them, hiking in them, and watching suns set over them, I have little interest in hearing about their history, learning more about the legal machinations involved in creating them, or hearing serious people tell me how inspired they are by them. And this, from a huge fan of the architect and designer Mary Coulter, and known dweller at the Zion Lodge.

Ken Burns has a gift for turning even interesting subjects into boring ones. I thought his Civil War a massive snoozefest. Elegiac violin music, pans over sepia photographs, and serious people telling me how important it all was. I’ve known it was important since being introduced to it by the Classic Comics War Between the States. I love reading about the Civil War. I have trilogies and atlases, I’ve puzzled over the ground at the Wilderness and looked up with horror at Marye’s Heights, I’ve stood beneath Martin Milmore’s Citizen Soldier (1868), at Forest Hills cemetery, with its surrounding graves of young boys, a large proportion dead on a single day, September 17, 1862 (Antietam). You want to learn about the Civil War? Start with McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, the best one-volume version, and move on from there.

Interestingly, not a single piece of movie footage exists from the Civil War. That makes watching it on TV, well, dumb. How many times can you stare into Stonewall Jackson’s eyes before you realize he moved around too much to leave many photographs behind? If there's no movie footage, and you can't interview anyone who was actually there, only a lecture-type presentation is possible.  Find the best medium to convey the information available.

Baseball did have people moving around on film, though slowly and doing pretty much the same thing in various decades, and jazz had people playing musical instruments (mostly from an era of incredibly poor sound quality). Aside from a few waterfalls, bears, and round-fendered sedans driving on newly blasted-out scenic routes, what are we going to watch in an extensive National Park documentary series?

You'll have to tell me, because I probably won't watch.

Remember: medicine is magic

Healthcare is not just another business, and what we buy when we buy it is not just another set of services.  Medicine is magic.

This is clearly true, even though free market types (I'm one) want to see it as amenable to normal laws of supply and demand. It’s not that those laws don’t apply to it. They clearly do. It’s just that there are other drives on healthcare consumption far beyond (or beneath) those laws that make it hard to analogize from other businesses.

All these people screaming at healthcare meetings show that. Agree or disagree with their position, they are not just dupes of sinister manipulators. There's more to it than that.  They have visceral reactions to what is being proposed. It doesn’t even matter if they’ve understood the proposed changes—arguably, almost none of us understand any of the plan, we just decide by who is proposing it whether we think it's good or bad—but it’s clear that they are driven to respond, in a way they would not be on other subjects.

There have always been doctors, and they have always supplied a service to meet a demand. This is true, even though until about 1910 or so, physicians killed more people than they helped. Before the mid-19^th century, all they could really do was bleed you, blister you, make you throw up, or give you diarrhea. And, aside from bone-setting and a few crude surgical techniques that probably still killed you as often as they helped you, that was about all they could do for you. None of those "treatments" did a damn bit of good, but they often weakened you or dehydrated you, so you died sooner. And when physicians put you into a hospital, all that did was put you in close contact with people who had diseases even worse than yours.

But people kept paying for medical services, and the wealthy paid more and got physicians with elaborate degrees from Oxford or Paris who knew nothing whatsoever about the human body. So the wealthy died more often from overexcited physician interventions.  And, what’s more, every physician was positive that what he was doing was beneficial.  People wanted to be treated, so physicians existed, were trained, had certifications, etc., showing that economics is often the achievement of irrational goals through rational means.

So there is an emotional substructure to these debates that needs to be recognized. You can talk comparative effectiveness, you can talk procedures that have no positive outcome, you can talk overused imaging equipment...all of it essential to maneuver to improvements in healthcare provision, but it won’t go anywhere unless you realize that healthcare is still, at its root, magic, and doctors are magicians. It just so happens that their magic both works (a topic for another post) and costs an incredible amount of money.

Productivity and time

Almost every site, it seems, has a bunch of aspirational statements about becoming a writer on it.  And, what do you know, in this current world, almost everyone is a writer, to a much greater extent than before.  We all have our little printing presses and share a major distribution system.  Our pamphlets litter the streets, are shoved into cracks in the wall, and are stuck to the ceiling with old butter cream frosting.

And, sure, reading productivity tips is my favorite way to waste time too.

I wrote my new novel, Brain Thief, under standard conditions of fulltime job and young kids.  This meant efficiency (not my strong suit), finding time (early mornings:  planting colonies in an unpromising wilderness), and, ahem, actually pumping out the words (speed was never my thing either).  But, guess what:  if you pound your forehead against the wall for long enough, you might knock it over.

Other writers have mentioned that the words they wrote in full spate while demonically inspired don't actually read any different than the ones they wrote with the same effort as eating a 1958 Cadillac.  This is true of me too.  I think the book reads as lightly as if written on sweaty nights at the kitchen table when not working at the envelope factory, or in a beach house on Martha's Vineyard with a trust fund.  Doesn't really matter.

But, if I suddenly had more time, I think I would give up on the crisp efficiency of my mornings and weekends, and waste more time rather than produce much more.  Of course, that makes me sad, but leisure has its value too.  Time used in reading or bicycling beats time wasted in the office any day.

Not many tips here!  Maybe this:  writing is fun, but it's still a job.  Treat it like one.

Steps toward a career reboot

Some years ago, I was somebody.  Not much of somebody, to be sure.  No awards, no fame, but a steady succession of novels, and a number of short stories.

It didn't take me much to fall off the wagon.  Two kids, a fulltime job, irritation at the fact that, after all that work, I wasn't much of somebody.

But there isn't much else for me to do, so I've been back at it again.  My novel is coming out next year, and I've been sending stories out again.  It's not the most sensible course of action in the world, but it's what I've got.

So that's what this is all about.  I'm going for it.  Wish me luck.

The writer's garden

I don't know if writers garden, on average, more often than other people of equivalent age and social class.  Writers are too various for some kind of analysis.

The most prominent gardening writer I know is my friend James Patrick Kelly.  He used to live in Portsmouth, where he had a big suburban garden.  Now he lives on Lake Pawtuckaway, where he has a sprawling estate with shady areas, waterside plantings, and a croquet pitch.  There don't seem to be any pictures of his work on his site, which, oddly, is focused on his writing.

I don't write as much, or as well, as Jim, so I will have fill things out a bit.  But my yard, like my oevre, is a bit smaller--actually, 40 feet square, crammed between several concrete block garages.  I've done my best.

Here rudbeckia, phlox, and liatris near my garage.  You can see that I don't favor a crisply organized look.  Sun is hitting the rudbeckia, which makes them glow.

This is along the garage in the other direction, a few weeks earlier.  Daylilies, Russian sage, butterfly bush, cranesbill.  All easy to grow and with satisfying results.

Most weekends I must write, or drown.  But when I can, I work in the garden.  I have the front and side to do yet--they make the house look abandoned, or lived in by a more traditional type of alcoholic writer.

A short guide to healthcare finance

There is a lot of activity and discussion around reforming healthcare finance right now.  It's clear that the members of Congress and the Executive Branch are the wrong people to come up with a good long-term solution.

But solution to what?  What's the story here?

A few things to think about:

People consume healthcare services.  In any given year, some people consume a lot, some people consume less, some consume little or none.

There are many arguments over whether people use too many services, the wrong kind, etc.  I presume there are process improvements possible here and there, maybe even significant ones, but the distribution of use is pretty much dependent on whether people are sick or injured, and actually need them.

Reform question: are services distributed differently than health distribution would lead us to expect?

The amount of services consumed in aggregate will increase over time.

More and better services are constantly available, and as our aggregate wealth increases, we will want to get more of them.  This will happen even if the average person doesn't get less healthy.

Reform question:  are more services provided and consumed that these conditions would lead us to expect?

These healthcare services cost something.  Salaries, supplies, and facilities are paid for.

We may, again, argue about whether this or that costs too much (it's rare that someone says something like "OTC anti-allergy medications are absurdly cheap given their effectiveness"), but as the amount of services consumed goes up, so will costs.  People who provide healthcare tend to be high-value employees who provide one-on-one services and thus are paid a lot;  the devices, drugs and procedures used are precise, highly regulated, have to pay off a lot of research, need to be sterile, etc. etc., so healthcare is more expensive than other industries where the risk of killing or damaging you isn't so high.

Reform question:  are unit costs significantly higher than these conditions would lead us to expect?

Some people can afford many healthcare services, some a few, some almost none

So poor people whose conditions require a large amount of healthcare services either go without, or we take money from those who can afford more and buy healthcare services for them with it.  If healthcare services are cheap relative to average incomes, fewer people need assistance.  If they are expensive relative to average incomes, more people need assistance.  If too many people need assistance then there is no one to contribute money for others.  Note that the distribution of "can't afford" and the distribution of "use a lot of services" don't correlate particularly.

Reform question: how many people genuinely can't afford the healthcare services their health conditions require?  How many more could afford them only with some financial pain?  How much financial pain is "too much"?

So now what?

You can push down on aggregate healthcare service consumption or on costs per unit consumed, once you know that one or the other is "too high".  You can distribute money to enable necessary consumption among those who cannot otherwise afford it.  Pushing down on aggregate costs would decrease the amount of money that needs to be distributed, but not eliminate the need for distribution.

And that's about it.  Everything else is detail.  But no one wants to be clear about any of this, so I really don't know what any of us should do.

Trusting a photograph

Photographs are staged, selected, manipulated, and modified, and are in no way a useful guide to reality. We know that. But when we see a photograph, particularly an old one, we feel we’re seeing something. James K. Polk was not a handsome man, but it is fascinating to see this image of a him (I gather there was a photo of William Henry Harrison, so it's not actually the first of a sitting President, which I had long thought). That’s what he looked like, we say to ourselves. Amazing

And it is. That is, kind of, what he looked like.  Is this steely eyed man John Brown, or this somewhat more ingratiating version?  At least we're pretty sure about the hair.  

But back then, you were conscious of being photographed. The speed of the emulsion meant you had to sit still for a long time for your image to be clear—or be dead, the reason dead soldiers and dead babies make up a large proportion of early figure photographs.

So think about the first-ever photograph ever taken, Louis Daguerre’s image of the Boulevard du Temple.

Standing there, getting his shoes shined, is the first person to be photographed, and it’s a candid shot. That long-legged guy there was one person who didn’t pose, because he didn’t know there was anything to pose for.

But now we’re suspicious. Everything is staged, selected, etc. Did Daguerre put his buddy Jacques up to it?

Daguerre: Hey, Jacques, I’ll show you something fun. See that shoeshine guy out there? He’s not getting much business. Why don’t you go out there and get your shoes shined?

Jacques: What’s wrong with my shoes?

D: Nothing. But if you go out there—

J: They’re old, sure. But if I’d known you would make a comment, I’d have worn my other pair.

D: There’s nothing wrong with your shoes, Jacques. Great shoes. From around here?  There's a great place on the Place Vendome....

J: I picked them up on a business trip to Mulhouse.

D: Well, see? But, anyway, if you’d just go out there to that shoeshine guy, I’ll show you something amazing....

J: Again with the shine. The shoes are clean, Louis. I'm careful about stuff like that.  Why should I go out and get my shoes cleaned?

D: Here. I’ll pay for it. And enough for a tip, too.

J: Do you think I can’t afford to have my shoes shined? I’ll have you know, things have been going pretty well. Pretty well, indeed. I don’t have the free time for fancy chemical experiments, but I got enough to get by.

D: I didn’t mean—

J: You didn’t used to be like this, Louis.  Is it those chemicals you’ve been smelling?

D: For God’s sake, go out there! You’ll see why. You’ll think it’s great. I swear.

J: Fine. I’ll do it. Just don’t expect me to come back.

Poor Jacques. He never knew that generations yet unborn would be looking at him. But if he hadn’t been there, would it have been as interesting a picture? We’ll never really know how it happened.....

Everything you know is wrong

A few months ago I wrote about the slippery nature of truth in personal narrative. Typical level: low to medium.

Fiction was invented for a reason. Reality isn’t “boring”, really, but it is poorly structured, noisy, with obscured causation, and a complete lack of justice. And the final resolution to any problem, no matter how minor or serious? Everybody dies.

Not to give anything away, but pretty much everything we know of as history partakes of the same problem. As far as written evidence goes, it’s all written after the fact, sometimes long after the fact, either by axe-grinding participants in the events or by those who have benefited by the victory of one side or another and are basing their account on the self-serving oral testimony of people who barely remember what happened.

No surprise, photographs are increasingly seen to be made up as well. Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber points me at an account of a famous Robert Capa photo of a dying soldier during the Spanish Civil War: most likely faked, as were various other famous iconic images.

All of the images examined in the article are really images crafted to fit into a prevailing narrative, whether about the fears of a looming European war, the Male Gaze, postwar love among the ruins, or the dignity of the struggle for civil rights. We love things that tell us that what we already believe is absolutely true.

Images too, are contingent and full of distracting non-narrative elements. Really, without narrative support, few of them are readable. Random instants in time are lacking context, past, and motivation, problems made worse by the fact that they are two-dimensional, taken from a certain angle, and have issues with focus and resolution. We see a lot less than we think we see in them. No wonder photographers, through selection, manipulation, and outright staging, try to come up with ones clear enough for us to understand them. Boosting the signal-to-noise ration means focusing on some signals more than others.

The wonder is that we take any of them as at all representative of that annoyingly contingent reality we know is all around us.

Healthcare and the writer

One negative feature of our current system of healthcare finance is the fact that health insurance is tied to employment.  This makes changing jobs more difficult and self-employment more expensive, since employer-provided healthcare benefits are excluded from tax while self-employed people can only deduct it from their taxes, a deduction that might be worth very little.

I have other reasons for not trying self-employment, but this is a significant barrier.  The reason it's hidden away there in that employer contribution is so that we don't know how much it actually costs, and, as I pointed out yesterday, even the obvious part costs a lot.  The self-employed see more of the real cost.

That's not to say that the cost is obviously too high.  "More than I wish I had to pay" is not necessarily too high.  But I wish we could all clearly see the cost, and that the cost didn't depend on whether you had a large or small employer, or whether you decided to provide your services on a contract basis rather than as part of firm.  None of those things have anything to do with the actual provision of healthcare services.

Hearing aids: one of those things people wish someone else would pay for

Living in a state with incredibly high medical costs (Massachusetts), having worked in several healthcare businesses (including a Medicaid health plan), I'm always reading and thinking about our "healthcare bubble", and trying to understand what the problems actually are, and what a long-term solution would look like (hint:  nothing Congress will come up with).

This article about hearing aids caught my eye.  It's mostly about how to choose them, etc., but it starts by pointing out that they are expensive ($2000 - $5000), and people are surprised that insurance doesn't pay for them.

If I needed a hearing aid, I'd prefer that someone else pay for it too.  Heck, if I had a roof leak or my refrigerator stopped working, I'd prefer that someone else pay for those.  For these examples I tried to pick "things that have gone wrong that really need to be fixed", and in two areas that for most of us affect our daily life much more the healthcare does:  food and housing.

It's not like there's some moral hazard involved in having insurance pay for hearing aids.  It's unlikely that anyone would be more likely to expose themselves to situations involving hearing loss because they know that somewhere down the line they'll be able to get a cheap hearing aid--though moral hazard and risk homeostasis can be slippery things, and are certainly not well understood yet.

It's just that I think that there are medical expenses, with real quality of life consequences, that we should pay for ourselves, unless we are genuinely financially unable to do it.

We don't want to hear that.  I don't want to hear it.  I'm forced to pay a lot for health insurance (many months it is my fourth largest expense, after food, mortgage, and taxes).  Once I've done that, I want it to pay for medical products and services that I need.  If my doctor will lobby for me to get it covered, I'll be fine with that.

Then I'll be irritated that my health insurance consumes an even greater part of my income.

A rare triple divergence

Language Log is one of my favorite blogs, even though (or maybe because) they regularly demolish some cherished bit of usagism on my part.  And they don't like Strunk & White either, and all writers  take an oath to cite S&W when talking about clear writing, even if they have never done more than read other writers' references to S&W.  It's kind of like a secret handshake.  And now that you know it, you can do it too.

Just don't read LL, or you'll feel like an idiot when you do.

Anyway, that wasn't the point of this.  Really.  The point was a post on Conversational Incongruence, which, as LL often does, springboards off the online comic xkcd, because eventually xkcd distills any zeitgeist idea into witty conversational exchanges between stick figures, and LL is on hand to provide linguistic exegesis.

In the comments, various people recalled conversation divergences they had experienced, and I did too:  a rare triple divergence. Once I was having pizza and beer with two friends: a veterinarian and a politically active minister.  We got to talking about "AI".  Each others' responses made less and less sense, until we realized that the  vet was talking about artificial insemination, the minister about Amnesty International, and I about artificial intelligence.

What was the conversation "really" about?  Do any of us, who often spend a week hiking together, actually listen to what the others have to say?  Is there a series of veterinarian/minister/science fiction writer bar jokes none of us have ever heard?  Do you have any idea of what I'm talking about?

The Great Carbon Transition

I used the phrase "Great Carbon Transition" in my last post, and then wondered where I had gotten it.  I did a phrase search and found...that it had come from the inside of my own head.  Google found no other uses.

I think this is a great term for what the next fifty years or so are going to involve.  And it's the kind of absurd Capitalized Phrase For A Historical Period that always appears in SF novels set in the far future to describe historical events that occured between that time and the present, which real people so seldom use.

But we are, after all, the future's past, so Great Carbon Transition it is.  Remember, you heard it here first.

Where's a heavy-lift cargo airship when you need one?

This story in the New York Times detailed how hard it is to move gigantic wind turbine parts to their final locations.  Either truck or train, the limits of how big they can be and still go under bridges and make road turns are being reached.

Where are the graceful lighter-than-air cargo vessels we were so long ago promised?

Like many science fiction writers, I cherish a sentimental attachment to those great whales of the sky, though in my more sober moments (I do have them) I realize that it was a historical accident that allowed them to flourish at all, and that they don't really make any sense.

Except for lifting and transporting large, cumbersome, heavy objects to remote or, it seems, heavily populated areas.  This seems like a perfect use.

I doubt anyone is going to finance the development of the things just for this purpose.  The various efforts of recent years all finally ran out of money and closed up shop.

Since I think wind turbines are a bit of a historical accident themselves, gadgets from the early phases of the Great Carbon Transition, the fad for them might not last long enough for them to provide a good motivation.

Of course, then the airship can be used to take away the gigantic parts once the turbines have become white elephants and need to be dismantled.

Sleep training

Yesterday, in his New York Times column, David Pogue reviewed the Zeo, a sleep analysis tool (you may need to register to read it).  You strap on a headband and it can show you your waking, REM, light sleep, and deep sleep periods.  If you have trouble sleeping this thing will tell you that, yep, you have trouble sleeping.

But we're all after efficiency.  A great feature of the thing is that you can set your alarm to wake you when you are in light sleep, so you don't wake up groggy.  It won't wake you later than a predetermined time.  And, over time, I suppose you could start seeing whether your sleep cycles are 90 minutes or something else, so you can plan to go to sleep so a light sleep period coincides with when you should wake up.  And you can see how that works for naps.

I've always wanted a nap alarm that I could set, not for 20 minutes, but to go off after I had been asleep 20 minutes, which is quite different.

The thing costs $400, so I'm not getting one any time soon.  But there will be competitors and cheaper, more effective versions coming along.  Then I can finally get into sleep training.

The cover of Brain Thief

I’ve always been irritated by writers who post the covers of their upcoming books with remarks about how much they like their covers.

So I should probably feel more embarrassed about posting the cover design for my upcoming book and telling you how much I like it than I am.

But I will disguise it as a bit of an essay on cover semiotics, and also as a marketing pitch: I’m showing you this so when you spot Brain Thief out of the corner of your eye at a bookstore, you will forget whatever else you were there to buy and grab it immediately. I understand why you might even want to shove people out of the way, but please refrain. Jablokov fans are goal-oriented, but laid back about it. Looked at this way, showing you the cover now is just a public service!

A cover is an ad for the book. Its goal is to get you to come over and pick it up. Once you’ve picked it up, its job is done, though it might well have post-purchase signifier work to do (“I am the kind of person who reads books like this!”), signifier work that, as has been much discussed, the Kindle will not perform for you.

But, key to this, the cover should accurately signal what kind of book it is, so that the right person picks it up. Time and attention are scarce resources. It is the responsibility of everyone presenting the book, from author to bookstore, to use these resources wisely.

You’re looking over the New Book area. Some books strike you as books you'd like, others not.  All sorts of things go into that decision:  title font, subject matter, the style of the illustration, whether it has people in it, etc.  You reach out...and pick one up.  You glance at it and use your second order analysis--blurbs, reading the first page, reading page 117, whatever.  But if that analysis reveals that this is completely the wrong book for you, then the cover has sent you the wrong signal and wasted its efforts.  If it sent you the wrong signal, it's sending the wrong signal to people who would like it, and they don't pick it up, an even greater loss.

Making these choices isn't easy.  This cover, for example, is making some claims, about style, about mood, about quality.  The book is suspenseful, full of cool stuff, and somewhat creepy.  It's also funny, but that's hard to convey when the book isn't actually a comic novel.  The somewhat pulpy suggestion I made for the cover would have conveyed the humor, but missed the other important information.  So, yes, I do like the cover!

Hard SF and Hyperrealism

I had a good time at Readercon, and saw several old friends.  I did not come up through SF fandom, and the field is not the center of my social life, but I have such a good time whenever I do go to a convention that I should it more.

As I mentioned last week, my one panel was on the narrative voice of hard SF.  Of course, the discussion wandered all over, though I tried to keep it back on the ostensible topic, not to be a control freak (I wasn't even the moderator) but because I was interested in the topic:  does hard SF derive its authority from its content, or from its form?  For those of you not conversant with the various subgenres in science fiction, hard SF is that variety whose writers pride themselves on playing by the known rules of the various sciences, though physics has always been the most obvious one.  That this does not banish faster-than-light travel is just one of the problems with any vigorous definition of this branch of SF.

I brought up a Nabokov quote, from Pnin: "Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnaped by gypsies in babyhood."  This manages to slam both Dali and Rockwell at the same time (when the novel was written, both were working and popular).  Both practiced an absolute fidelity to the specific details of representation, at an incredible level of technical skill.  Both (as I read Nabokov) used that skill to provide a completely false image, Dali obviously, Rockwell less obviously but perhaps more dangerously.

So I said that hard SF was socialist realism kidnapped by fairies in babyhood.  Getting the scientific details write provides a presumptive authority to convey an image of a social reality that is usually false.

Why go on a panel if you can't cause trouble?

My one Readercon appearance

Our local literary SF con is this weekend, at the exciting Burlington Marriott.

Readercon specializes in panels like "Hegelianism in Golden Age Space Opera" and "Adverbs: Threat or Menace?"  It requires not just a willingness to bloviate and a couple of writing credits from the 80s, but some serious understanding of the field and its literary tropes, understanding I don't really have.

Maybe that's why I'm on only one panel, at 11 AM on Saturday, June 11:  "Is Hard SF Just a Narrative Voice?", inspired by an essay by Paul Park.

But I think the fact that you can rate how badly you want to be on a panel, but can rate an unlimited number of panels as "A+, must be on panel or will die miserably" is the problem.  If participants had been given, say, a limit of three A+ chits, I might have gotten another choice or two.  I did my best to rate my level of interest honestly.  Of course, you might say (my readers tending to inappropriate levels of both perception and expressiveness) that if I didn't really want to be on a panel I shouldn't whine about not getting on it.  And you would be right--my readers tend also tend to be annoyingly challenging to the author.

Still, if they don't minimize panel choice inflation, I'll reconsider my tactics next year.  But if you're in the Boston area this weekend, come and attend the convention.  It's great fun, and an excellent place to spot those writers who say "I don't just write stories about elves and spaceships, I'm also an intellectual heavyweight".  I'm lucky it's around here.  It's hard to bike to from my house, because of a busy stretch of Route 3, but certainly doable.

Tragic waltzes and satirical marches

One notable cultural success of the Soviet period was co-opting talented and even brilliant composers.  Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, and many others wrote marches, oratorios, movie music, and popular tunes that celebrated and supported the regime.  Stravinsky, perhaps the most brilliant of them all, escaped to the West, but Prokofiev and Shostakovich were two of the greatest composers of the twentieth century.

This is not in accord with our "artist as revolutionary" ethos: current dogma is that all artists are in opposition to the state, and to what is accepted and respected.  So we look for subversion in their works, as we do in the works of all artists. So the musical production of that time seems to be covertly subverting its ostensible purpose.

Prokofiev died the same day as Stalin, and so did not have the opportunity for ex-post-facto justification, but Shostakovich lived until 1975, and so was able to attempt to rehabilitate his reputation in a less-brutal time.  Was he trying to point out subversive elements that weren't originally there?  Music's meaning is notoriously contextual.  Most of what we think we perceive in it is just our own expectations.

Still, the waltzes of the Soviet period have a distinctly end-of-the-party mournful quality.  And some of the marches seem almost absurd in their satire, so much so that you can't believe Party functionaries commissioned them and paraded to them.

One tragic waltz was used by Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut.  Here is a good version.  Another is Khachaturian's, from the Masquerade Suite from incidental music to a Lermontov play, here.  The mood reminds me, maybe weirdly, of the Christmas song that manages to catch some of the tragic sense of evanescence that is an essential part of the holiday, Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.

Then there are the satirical marches, best of which is from the master of genre satire, Prokofiev:  the innocuously named "March for Military Band in Bb".  The first half of it is here.  All of it is in the soundtrack of this horse video, starting at 4'33".  Shostakovich wrote a "March of the Soviet Police" which can be played straight, I think.  I can't find a version online.  But I can't really imagine any collection of serious Soviet types marching toward the future to the Prokofiev.  How did they really perceive these pieces?