Understanding history (or failing to)

Something has been puzzling sociologists and criminologists over the past decade or so:  why are crime rates dropping so dramatically?  A couple of days ago Free Exchange, over at Economist.com, had yet another explanation: the advent of antidepressants and anti-ADHD meds.

This one seems weaker than most (as time goes by, the efficacy of both these drug types seems to be dropping:  it's possible that their action is completely misunderstood), but that's not what I'm interested in.  It's this:

This social change is going on, right now, in front of our eyes.  We have more statistical, analytical, and data-gathering power than anyone ever has, and we still can't understand what's causing it.  So why do we think we can explain anything about (say) how Goths, Alans, and Vandals overwhelmed the western Roman Empire?  Or how Western Europe managed to dominate the global economy in the 19th and 20th centuries?  Or anything at all?

Don't get me wrong.  I love history, and will continue to read it.  I just don't know that I can ever believe any historian's statement that "this happened because of that".

Or a politician's statement about the same.  If we'd passed dramatic gun-control legislation in the early 90s, many people would be saying that, clearly, the drop in crime rate was due to those restrictions.  And how could anyone argue?  It would be absolutely obvious.

Disclosure:  I favored gun-control legislation back then, and would certainly have reached that (completely incorrect) conclusion.  I no longer think guns are a particular social problem (partially because crime rate is clearly not correlated with them), and think that we should take the Bill of Rights seriously, even though I do not own a gun, and never plan to.

The urge to nerd

The comments on my reaction to Anathem highlight my anomalous location in the science-fiction universe.  Both responses (thanks Jim Cambias and oldhousegeek!), indicate that, while they understand my position, they are sucked into Stephenson's intellectual machinery anyway.  Why was I able to resist the seductions of nerd world?

In large part, science fiction is about thought and rationality.  Victory goes, not to the most passionate, committed, or lucky, but to the smartest and most process perceiving.  A science fiction character develops by Learning How.

I always wanted to learn how. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a nerd.  This was odd then—the cultural niche didn’t have the validity it does now.

Only one problem.  Aside from not really thinking like a nerd, I’m not actually smart enough to be one, either.  And I tried, believe me.  I tried through a Masters in Engineering from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth.  I tried through a number of professional engineering positions.  I tried until I just couldn’t try any more.

That’s just crazy, a colossal waste of time.  I try to be proud of it, but it made no sense, then or now.  I should have studied Byzantine history, like Harry Turtledove, or economics.  Or gardening.

I’ve wandered off the point here.  Neil Stephenson!  Smart enough to be a nerd, even too smart to be one.  Maybe I’m just jealous.  You’d think I could think vicariously through his writing, like learning to dance from those foot diagrams that now survive only in cartoons.

But I can’t.  I don’t think that way.  That’s a problem—I write science fiction.  What do you call a science fiction writer who can’t think like a nerd, or even truly appreciate someone else who writes like a nerd?

Remaindered.

But there might be a solution.  Over the next few months maybe we can find it.  After all, my book comes out in January.  We have to figure it out before then.

 

How to read Anathem

I’m a big fan of Neil Stephenson, and enjoyed much of his massive Baroque Cycle.  And I read it.  If you don't know, that's pretty high praise from me:  I am easily irritated and give up on a lot of books.

But I didn’t read all of it.  And that is the secret to reading Stephenson, and, particularly, his latest, Anathem: when things get tedious or confusing, just skip them. 

Anathem is set in a subculture on an alien world settled by something indistinguishable from human beings.  This subculture is a cross between monasteries and research universities, with some element of Classical philosophical schools thrown in.  But as an Avout, you live your entire life within these Concents (there is a lot of technical terminology, all cleverly defined).

The book starts unpromisingly:  a detailed description of winding a gigantic clock.  Then there is a fair amount of background exposition, until something like a plot starts developing about 150 pages in.  I almost threw in the towel, but the fact that it was Stephenson kept me going.  Eventually things started to happen.

But while the massive Baroque Cycle had reasons for its heft, there is absolutely no excuse for the length here.  The book is grotesquely too long.

It took me half the book to figure out the solution, so I’m going to save you quite a few hours by telling you what to skip.  The best part of the book is near the end, and you want to get there while you still have all your teeth and can still stand up unaided.

So here’s what you do:

Whenever a bunch of intellectualoid characters are gathered in a room, or a vehicle, or some other defined space and start talking about something, skip it.  Just start flipping pages, until someone does something.  You can tell from whether there are a lot of quotation marks.  Sure, there are a couple of occasions where you might miss something plot-related, but not very often, and you can pick up what’s going on pretty quickly.  Grit your teeth and do it.  You’ll thank me, unless you're one of the people who think that's the best part, in which case you're not going to listen to me anyway.

Here’s what you will miss if you do that:

• A lot of intra-and-inter-concent politics, none of which prove to have anything to do with what happens.  It feels a bit like Stephenson thought that was what the book was about, found something more interesting for it to be about, but couldn't bear to give up on all his work.
• A lot of Platonic/Aristotelian cognitive style discussions which aren’t any clearer when described as Procians and Halikaarnians.
• Some discussions of religion by characters who never seem particularly religious.
• Many other somewhat relevant intellectual notions, like the quantum mechanical basis of thought, many worlds hypotheses, etc. etc.

The encyclopedia definitions incorporate most of what you need to know.

Here’s what you won’t miss:

• Characters.  There really aren’t any, and they certainly aren’t developed in these philosophical dialogues.  Reading more won’t let you know them any better.  Even in the first few hundred pages, which is set in the school, you don’t get a sense of any of them.  Don’t worry about it.
• Plot development.  Most stuff in the book just happens.  Knowing more doesn’t make the events make much more sense.
• Any notion of how this world actually works.  I certainly never figured it out.  It doesn’t really matter, because Stephenson dumps all that Avout/Concent stuff partway through, brings everyone together for a gigantic meeting, and after that it’s just a bunch of ubergeeks figuring things out, organized by some superbrilliant council whose authority everyone accepts, and all the smart kids get assigned to the Big Mission.  You’ve been here before, lots of times.

When you’ve jettisoned the overhead, you actually have a pretty good First Contact novel, involving some academic plotting, a trip across the ice cap, an erupting volcano, and a fun journey into space with a well-realized set of decoy operations.  Not worth 1000 pages, but certainly OK at 500, using my method.

The next best thing to an editor is a guide like this one.  Don’t let my sacrifice be in vain!

 

Rome's cultural survival

I suppose one reason Rome resonated for long after its fall was the survival of various of its cultural products.  Latin is pretty obvious.  Until the Renaissance, Western medicine was Galenic medicine (though it vanished and got reintroduced from Byzantium and the Arabs).  And astronomy was Ptolemaic astronomy.  Both were products of the late Principate.  It's a bit as if, having lost the political unity, Europeans held on to the intellectual unity, far beyond where it made sense.  Would these ideas have had the same staying power if they had not emerged in association with that dream of unity?  Ptolemaic astronomy itself seems almost like a crude metaphor for political rule from the center, having nothing to do with physical reality at all.

Rome Falls Again

As I mentioned, there has been a flurry of new books about the end of the Roman Empire.  It’s an interesting puzzle, with resonance for any empire:  how does something so solid and functional come apart?  Could anything have been done to prevent it?

But that is only one of the interesting questions raised by the Roman Empire.  The other, probably even more interesting, is how such an empire was created in the first place, and how, once created, it stayed together for so long.  This enterprise ruled the entire Mediterranean basin, and additional territories as far north as Britain, for many centuries. It built roads, administered justice, and kept down pirates and brigands.  It maintained cult temples, built arenas where prisoners and animals were slaughtered for entertainment, and fed urban populations from the produce of vast factory farms worked by slaves.  All at a level of technology no higher than anywhere else.

And how did they ever run it?  As Peter Heather observes, in The Fall of the Roman Empire (#2 in my Fall of Rome reading series), in a useful chapter called "The Limits of Empire":

Looking at the map with modern eyes, we perceive the Roman Empire as impressive enough:  looked at in fourth-century terms, it is staggering.  Furthermore, measuring it in the real currency of how long it took human beings to cover the distances involved, you could say it was five times larger than it appears on the map.  To put it another way, running the Roman Empire with the communications then available was akin to running, in the modern day, an entity somewhere between five and ten times the size of the European Union.

And keep in mind that the European Union has 27 member states.

Somehow, a mid-Italian city state had successfully emulsified all the old long-standing political and cultural entities of the Mediterranean basin and beyond.  And that emulsion didn't crack for nearly five hundred years.

Warlords with powerful regional bases tore the Late Republic apart, but it stayed together.  One emperor after another succeeded Nero, but it stayed together.  The ludicrous Commodus couldn't destroy it, neither could the deranged Caracalla or the bizarre Elagabalus.  The fifty years of constant civil war following the death of Alexander Severus, with dozens of emperors and usurpers, should have finally taken it down, but didn't.  Diocletian and Constantine's military/bureaucratic Dominate made the whole thing much less fun, but it stayed together.  By that point, it wasn't even ruled from Rome, but from regional strongpoints like Trier and Antioch.  And when the Western regions were finally torn from this system (including the original capital, Rome), the East kept together, like a smoke ring blown through history, for hundreds of years more.

The Fall is only noticable because it stood for so long without falling.  And the Rise was certainly not inevitable.  What would Western history have looked like if there never had been a Roman Empire in the first place?

The Fall of Rome: a lately popular topic

In the past few years, there has been an interesting cluster of history books focused on the end of the Roman Empire:  its fall, its decline, its transition into other forms (part of the point is the disagreement on what to call what happened).  I don’t know if this sudden supply of popular scholarship is coincidence, a sign of some general mood, or simply the result of enough new information to force a reevaluation.

I’ve read one (Bryan Ward-Perkins’s The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization) and am in the process of reading another (Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire).  Then there is Goldsworthy and Wickham.  News on those when and if I get to them.

Ward-Perkins’s book is in three sections.  The first is a impressionistic account of how various tribes moved into the Roman Empire and how they related to the people they now ruled.  The last is a bit of a rant about recent historiographic trends that have repositioned the Fall of the Roman Empire as Late Antiquity, even as Ward-Perkins states that Late Antiquity is a pretty good term for that period (roughtly 400-800 CE).  He is quite entertaining on why northern European members of the EU might wish to come up with a kinder and gentler Fall of Rome.

The best section is the middle one, where he analyzes physical evidence for an understanding of the economic complexity of the Roman Empire.  He shows that, no matter what its flaws, there was one big advantage to living under the rule of the Caesars:  the extended peace and trading networks raised the economy to a high level for a pre-industrial society.  Everyone had tiled roofs, good pottery, and other implements of daily life—and Ward-Perkins is at pains to point out that the daily life of poor and middling people was actually relatively decent.  Having access to trading networks allowed farmers to rise above subsistence and specialize in the crops best suited to their local soils and climates.

All of this disappeared after collapse of unified Roman rule in the West.  Ward-Perkins is persuasive that, no matter how innovative the relations between Germanic rulers and native ruled, their lives had become materially much poorer.

Ward-Perkins goes directly at the point that comfort, safety, and material wealth are important measures of human happiness, and of civilizational complexity.  Those who didn’t have to live it can praise spiritual values or other aspects of nonmaterial culture.  As he points out, near the end of the book:

We have no wish to emulate the asceticism of a saint like Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, who spent solitary nights immersed in the North Sea praising God.  But, viewed from a suitable distance, he is deeply attractive, in touch with both God and nature:  after his vigils a pair of otters would come out of the sea to dry him with their fur and warm his feet with their breath.  This is a much more beguiling vision of the past than mine, with its distribution maps of peasant settlements, and its discussion of good- and bad-quality pottery.

I’d say this a book for the enthusiast, not someone coming to this period for the first time—though I’m not sure what else I would recommend as an introduction.  I might actually recommend Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity—although Brown is, in fact, the dark genius who pioneered the concept of Late Antiquity, and Ward-Perkins spends some time cautiously taking potshots at him.  I think once I get through Heather, at least, I’ll return to Brown to remind myself of what these revisionists are going on about.

But if you are an enthusiast, Ward-Perkins’s book is well worth reading, and refreshingly short and brisk.

Harakiri: individual honor vs. institutional corruption

The valor and honor of warriors is a given in fiction.  Otherwise what you have is a bunch of violent thugs acting for immediate interest:  sometimes entertaining, but not genuinely moving.

Honor requires that others are aware of your honor.  Fiction would have it that this is automatic, that honorable acts are clearly visible to all, dishonorable acts likewise.  Most works involving honor posit that honor transmits itself without barrier, like gravity.  But, of course, this isn’t true at all.  PR is always important, and often absolutely necessary.  Without a Homer, an Achilles is nothing.

Harakiri is a savage story of private honor and institutional corruption, with a clear-eyed view of the requirements of running an enterprise that has honor as an important balance-sheet line.  It was made in 1960, coincidentally the same year as the action of yesterday’s movie, In the Mood for Love, and takes place in 1630, the era when the Tokugawa Shogunate was tightening its grip on Japanese life, and beginning the process of turning the islands into the samurai theme park they remained until Commodore Perry kicked over their carefully balanced house of cards.

The movie, directed by Masaki Koboyashi and written by Shinobu Hashimoto, the writer of the better-known Rashomon, among others, is an impressive work, and must have hit its postwar audience, anxious to remind themselves of their past glories, like a katana blow.  This is no slice-‘em-up samurai movie (though it does have some great fight scenes, one an atmospheric duel, the other a many-against-one fight that is as realistic-seeming as any such unequal contest I’ve ever seen).  This is an almost mathematical analysis of honor and responsibility, and highly recommended.

Hairy, basso profundo, and sardonic, Tsugumo arrives at the gate of the Iyi palace and announces that he wants to use their courtyard to commit ritual suicide.  He is an unemployed samurai, who came of age in a high-demand civil war environment, and is now excess to requirements with a central power that needs enforcers more than it needs warriors.  He turns out to be the second masterless samurai to show up at Iyi Palace—and the samurai managing the palace in his master’s absence, a politic man who clearly knows all about honor and its limitations, tells Tsugumo the story of the earlier suicide, which we see in brutal flashback.  Then Tsugumo tells his own story, seen in flashbacks alternating between rising stress in the courtyard as various events are seen to be intimately connected.

Sharp, well-structured, without a wasted move, this movie was previously unknown to me.  Highly recommended, particularly for anyone wanting to write more adult fantasy, as this manages to mix exciting local color and dramatic action, the daily life of people just trying to get by, and sharp ethical conflict, all in one tight package.

In the Mood for Love: a homeopathic dose of narrative

The family's away for a week, so I'm reading and watching movies.  It's an Asian weekend, for some reason, and first off was Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood For Love (2001).

What's it about?  Primarily, Maggie Cheung's hips.  Also cigarettes and stairways, but mostly the hips, displayed in a kind of dress called a cheongsam, sometimes going down and up stairways, and sometimes while Tony Leung smokes to a romantic melody heard many times during the film.

And that's OK.  I'm totally sold on the dress, and willing to move to Hong Kong, circa 1960, even if I have to listen to Nat King Cole sing in phonetically learned Spanish (the oddly charming popular music heard over several scenes), if only I can watch Maggie go out to get noodles.  Why she doesn't cause a riot every time she does it is beyond me.

There's not a lot of plot, by a narrative addict's standards anyway.  Maggie and Tony (not their character names) each rent a room in adjoining apartments.  Each also has a spouse (never seen), who take up with each other, leaving Maggie and Tony to look longingly at each other.  Tony wants to write narrative--martial arts serials.  He may or may not be trying to lay out some narrative in this relationship (he has them act out possible scenes from their spouses' adulterous relationship), but if so, he fails, what might be a Signal From Fred to the director/writer.  Maggie also has something going on that never makes it to my consciousness, at least:  as one character says, "She dresses that way to get noodles?" What is she trying to do?  She aids and abets her boss's affair, like a good PA should, so does she do the same for her husband?

Kar-Wai is a bit elliptical for me.  The spouses are only caught in glances, and he likes showing only one side of a conversation.  I'd prefer just a couple of grab bars to let me save myself from narrative confusion:  if I hadn't read some reviews, I might have been at sea for much longer.  Did the spouses meet when they moved next to each other by chance, or did they know each other before?  And does Maggie really travel to all the way to Singapore to smoke one of Tony's cigarettes?  And what in the world does Charles DeGaulle have to do with anything?

Worth seeing big screen, I think.  I saw it on DVD, and the scenes are so textured I felt I was missing out.  Plus, the hips would be much clearer.

This excerpt will tell you all you need to know about whether you'll like seeing it.  This isn't an interlude between more narratively active parts of the movie, though there is real dialogue elsewhere, this is the movie:  hips, stairs, noodles, music.  No cigarette smoke here, you'll have to rent it for that.

Next up, the somewhat less elliptical and dreamily romantic Harakiri.

Book response: Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

I picked up Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil, by Rafael Yglesias, on a recommendation I read from Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution, and enjoyed it a good deal.

I don’t usually like books about therapy and therapeutic cures, but this one held me, and, I think, educated me a bit about therapy, its uses, and its limitations. Written in a straightforward, almost deadpan style, I read it with a pleasure I don’t get as often from novels as I used to. It’s long because it has a lot to say, not because the author can’t bear to edit his own work. The various sections of the book have strong narrative lines, and build suspense in a way that isn’t as typical of literary fiction as it should be.  I recommend it also.

And it certainly should have gotten more attention from people who like fun books with ideas, as Mr. Cowen says.  That said, I think Yglesias flubs a lot of the issues the book has put in play when he reaches his third section.

And the book is sectional. The first is a psychological biography of Dr. Neruda, explaining his personal issues and behaviors. The second is about Dr. Neruda’s professional career, centered on the analysis of one particular patient, but also dealing with the issues of the 80s mass child abuse trials and the introduction of psychoactive drugs like Prozac (the book was written in the mid-90s and much of its action takes place a few years before). This section ends with a crisis that propels Dr. Neruda into becoming something like a corporate trainer. He works for a computer design company and solves the psychological problems of its employees.

This section manages to drop all the interesting issues raised in the middle third, and additionally has things like a long technical description of a doubles tennis game, showing Neruda’s control of all things psychological.

I’m not sure why Yglesias made this choice. Neruda drops his life to counsel the various people at this company (two in particular), and drops all the issues he had worked so carefully and subtly to raise for investigation.  What we get in return is nowhere near as significant.  And it's interesting, because writers usually flub the middle third, between setup and denouement.

It might be because Yglesias picked an odd emotional progression:  in the first third, Neruda is deeply involved (it's his own childhood), in the second almost as deeply involved (it's his adult life, and a patient that he cares a lot about), while in the third he's as involved as any committed corporate trainer would be (OK, maybe a bit more than that).  Tension drops.

Now, if someone had rained on the last part of Dr. Neruda’s parade like this before I read the book, I might not have started it—which would have been a mistake. There aren’t enough good books out there to miss this one.  And even the third section suffers mostly by being in contrast to the first two.  Find it, read it, and tell me what you think.

District 9: The epiphany of the everyday Eichmann

I don’t usually like science fiction movies—an odd prejudice, not shared by most other readers in the genre.

I do have a teenage son though, so we went together to see District 9 this week.

As usual, I liked it better for what it might have been than what it was. It had a good vomitcam/found-media look to it, and the scenes were well structured, timed, and acted. The special effects weren’t ludicrous. The landscape and setting were solid.

But, looked at as a whole, the movie was incredibly creepy--and not in the way I think the director and writer intended.

I’m sure you know the story by now. Backstory: refugee aliens get dumped in Johannesburg and everyone hates these lowlife scum but doesn’t know what to do with them.

Story: Eichmann-like resettlement bureaucrat (played with entirely inappropriate charm by Shartlo Copley) who loves his wife and petit-bourgeouis life has something terrible happen to him and, in trying to escape what has happened to him, inadvertently helps someone else. The movie sets him in a hero position, but he is an awful human being.  First he lies and manipulates uneducated aliens to move them to an unpleasant camp out in the desert, eliminating their unhatched eggs in the process. Then, when the bad thing happens to him and his organization turns against him, he murders dozens of his former friends and colleagues without a whimper or sign of grief, and then betrays a friend and tries to kidnap his friend’s child in order to cravenly save himself. Only when that attempt fails does he return and kill many more of his former colleagues so that there can be some kind of hopeful ending (the basic “put the battery into the flashlight” or “attach the gardening hose” denouement that makes up a good chunk of both SF and fantasy).

I’m not even going to go into the it’s-a-dessert-topping-it’s-a-floorwax black ichor that can changes a human into an alien and power a spaceship, all at the same time, or the alien weaponry that litters the landscape that the aliens never use, even against each other.

How do we end up rooting for this guy at all? We marketers know to offer you an unpalatable product, or one clearly too expensive, before we offer you the product we want you to buy, which then seems quite reasonable by contrast. This is known as the “irrelevant alternative”. Character sets in fiction can serve the same purpose. Just as Eichmann might seem better compared to Himmler or Heydrich, so this guy seems better compared to his shaven-headed irrelevant alternatives (one a sinister supervisor, the other an overarmed thug).  And one of them practices a terrible betrayal of his own.

The more I think about it, the more startling the whole thing is.  Do we pay attention to anything anymore?

Military informational graphics I could use

Yesterday, I discussed an interesting informational graphic I cam across in the course of my work.

I read a lot of history.  Unlike some people, I don't focus on military history, but certainly read a fair amount of it. The first rule of any military history book is that there are never enough maps.  Sometimes there are ridiculously few, but even when there are a fair number, they are insufficient.

Partially that's because, no matter what, what you finally have are unit designations moving around on a surface somehow coded for terrain.  I am not an expert in tactic, weaponry, or logistics.  Just looking at those rectangles doesn't tell me much.

I don't even know the range of their weapons (if we're in the modern era).  How far do their arms fire?  What units are in range, which ones are not?

I don't know the effects of terrain.  Can this unit actually see that one, or not?  How long would it take for this unit to move toward the enemy?

I don't know what the various commanders perceived.  What did they think the battlefield looked like?  How adequate were the maps they had?  What did they see?

This may all seem vaguely sissy to real military readers, but, as I said, that's not me.  And this would be impractical for all maps.  That can be expensive, and I doubt the publisher provides a lot of money for that.

Still, it would be fun to see a campaign seen, not only from the empyrean post-game wrap up POV, but also from ground level, so you can follow the decisions as they get made from the information available.

The day job: great informational graphic on a subject you're not interested in

In my day job, I'm marketing director for a financial services firm specializing in multifamily housing.  Yesterday, my boss passed around a great graphic on property values this decade, showing that we've dropped back to the values of early 2004, and that the $2.2 trillion of properties acquired or refinanced since that point have lost value.  Four graphs, locked together in time, with crisp annotations, give you the story (though I could have used the years at the top, as well as at the bottom, to orient me).  Bravo to Real Capital Analytics for creating it.  And using it to market their expertise and services, which I can only admire.

The subject might be of interest to you or not, but I'm asking you to admire the way the information is presented.

I think good informational graphics are getting more common, with, for example, a lot of comment about the work of Megan Jaegerman, here as presented by Edward Tufte, for a long time the best-known proponent of improved informational graphics.  He has made a great living going around the country presenting his observations and recommendations.

The books are good, though not great.  He tends to be unsystematic, so you don't really learn any techniques to create your own.  People who have taken his class tend to find it unsatisfying, because there is no content that is not already in the books.  But, as pretty much a text person, I've learned a lot about what's possible, and what not to do, from him.

I'm putting a piece together to promote a new product (a green capital needs assessment for existing multifamily buildings) and am trying to work out graphics that show its benefits.  I'll let you know how I do.

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.