Self-improvement and self-help

I have long thought that the only personal program worth pursuing is figuring out who you are, and being the best version of that that you possibly can.  Figuring out who you are takes up the first part of your life, turning yourself into the best possible you takes up the rest, sometimes only after some bits and pieces of you have already started to come off.

That's self-improvement.

But you're not alone in this world, and you don't make sense without taking everyone else into account.  I, for example, have a wife and children. And our oldest is having serious problems in school, all self-inflicted. He doesn't have the slightest idea who he is yet, and desperately enraged at the necessity of finding out. So I spend a lot of time trying to understand, coach, and encourage, while not giving up on mutual understanding of my authority.

I sometimes feel like I have to defuse an unexploded munition daily. Every day the little numbers stop before they hit zero is a good day. Some weeks don't have that many good days.

Being who I am, I'm reading a lot of books. Some are good, many are indifferent or useless.  But the good ones speak with a real clarity. After all, we do have a lot of experience in dealing with adolescents. It would seem that there would be a lot of useful rules of thumb, and kind of flowchart reasoning: "when you do this, does A happen? Does B happen? The most effective approach differs between these two."

Many books are inspirational, intended to let you know you are not alone, that you are still a worthy human being, etc. Those don't do anything for me. I am looking for that distilled information on how to keep your child from failing Algebra, off drugs, and not screaming at his mother. And I'm finding it. That's self-help, and, at its best, it is an astonishingly useful genre. People know this stuff.

Most people who mock self-help books (myself among them) are smug in our assumption that we undertand ourselves and can figure out what to do if the situation is difficult. I can tell you here that I don't have the slightest idea of what to do, except continue to love, and am incredibly grateful that intelligent and dedicated people have chosen to pour their wisdom into text for me to benefit from.

Historically inexplicable: crime falls again

I've mentioned this before, but I might as well do it again: we don't know anything about historical causation.

The crime rate has fallen again. And despite sophisticated statistical models, camera-equipped cell phones everywhere, less mendacious police stats, and a general application of a huge amount of skilled brain power, nobody knows why.  This is happening right now, right here, all around us as we go through our day.

How are we supposed to explain why the Roman Republic fell? What the economic effects of the Black Death were? Why one group of people prospered while another languished? How the Industrial Revolution started? The amount of information available about those things is miniscule compared to the crimes stats of one medium-sized town in Pennsylvania.

It's not that I'm saying it's not worth trying to answer these questions. It certainly is. It's just that I can't believe anyone would say "this is the explanation".

But, of course, the incentives of academia are not the incentives of the rest of the world, and these incentives don't encourage ambiguity or degrees of confidence, and certainly not conclusions that violate predefined norms of ethnicity, sex, or religion.  And most historical work is now done in the Academy. What do we miss because the pursuit of tenure is not the same as the pursuit of truth?

I'd like to think we'll figure some things out. But some will be forever unknown.  And others will have only a relatively small degree of confidence. We'll just have to live with that.

The madness of the engineer

I was once an engineer.  My advanced academic degrees are all in engineering. I loved engineering, but something in my mind just is not suited for it.

I suppose that's also why I haven't come up with a spuriously precise date for the end of the world, like Harold Camping just did. Engineer.

Or why I don't believe in Young Earth Creation Science, like a number of members of that movement. Engineers.

Or why I don't seek a solution to political and economic development issues by hijacking planes and crashing them into large buildings. Many of the 9/11 terrorists were...engineers. One could argue that, if you want to have effective profiling of potential terrorists, an engineering degree should weigh as heavily than ethnicity or religion.

There is a mentality to engineering, a belief in closed systems, predictable outcomes of complex processes, and rationality. All of these are tools. They can be harnessed to reasonable ends, like designing bridges, electronics, and power plants. Or they can be used for insane purposes, constructing plausible structures on foundations of madness, confusion, and falsehood.  Theologians are just engineers without capital budgets.

To an engineer, everything should fit in the box, without leftovers. Tab A fits in Slot B. If you have the money, and a material with the right physical characteristics, you can build a tower to Heaven, and a translation device to handle the resulting multiple languages. Rationality cannot cure madness, but it can certainly make it more powerful.

I'm not going to claim I was a bad engineer because of my inherent negative capability. I was a mediocre engineer because I'm just not that smart.  Too bad, I really did love it.

But now, from outside, I can see how a useful mental process can run rampant outside of its natural habitat, like kudzu or Asian carp. It's worth keeping an eye on.

A continual project of self-improvement

When I think about all the efforts I make at making my mind a little better equipped, a bit more efficient, perhaps even a trifle more pleased about the world it finds itself in, I think of a tiny essay by Logan Pearsall Smith, called "Edification" (this is it in full):

'I really must improve my mind," I tell myself, and once more begin to patch and repair that crazy structure. So I toil and toil on at the vain task of edification, though the wind tears off the tiles, the floors give way, the ceilings fall, strange birds build untidy nests in the rafters, and owls hoot and laugh in the tumbling chimneys.

One more Hanna point to take off with

There is a scene in Hanna, which I wrote about yesterday, that is the point where the movie, frightened of its daring, returns to its technical chase-scene roots.  The epicene, workout-suit-clad, Eurotrash henchman who has been pursuing Hanna finally catches up to her and the family who has, unknowingly, been protecting her and, knowingly, nurturing her.

To avoid spoilers I won't say exactly what happens next (surely that that much happens is no surprise at all). But a person from the normal world, our world, the one we actually live in, gets a glimpse into Hanna's world, the "normal" world of the movie, with its operatic intensity. The scene ends almost before it begins, and so seems gratuitous, but I saw the potential of a collision of worldviews, where neither has an obvious advantage: austere dedication versus modern tolerant hedonism, as shown through two engaging characters who have a strong bond with each other.

Ah, well, they didn't do it, so I'm free to.

Our standard killing machine: Hanna

Over the weekend, I caught the movie Hanna with some offspring.  It was the kind of movie I like, in that it had some interesting stuff in it, but really was a complete mess and made absolutely no sense, so I can take the thoughts it stimulated and use them somewhere.

There isn't much to give away about the movie.  Hanna is a teenager being raised somewhere above the Arctic Circle by her father, and taught to kill reindeer and fight with her bare hands. The rest of her knowledge of the world comes from a McGuffey's Reader-like one-volume encyclopedia.  Supposedly this is going to make her able to defend herself in the vicious world outside.

For no good reason, it does. Father and daughter go off separately, and kill many people.  They kill as many people as the supposedly bad character, acted by Cate Blanchett purely with her cheekbones, does, and with as little concern for their humanity.  Hanna treats the helpful people she encounters out in the world purely instrumentally, and abandons them to the violent fate they get for helping her out.  Both father and daughter are soulless, emotionless automatons, with no visible goals.

Still, we follow them, particularly her, because the movie is beautiful and fun to watch, and the action scenes genuinely suspenseful.

At one point Hanna encounters a quirky family of ex-hippie parents, sardonic and sophisticated teenage daughter, and warmly sensitive son. The actors are brilliant, their personalities are vivid, and the movie promises to take off and break through the "targets in a shooting gallery" dynamic with which such movies treat regular people (that is, us)--until it totally feeps out and doesn't.

It was as if the screenwriters discovered humanity by accident, were on the verge of creating meaningful art, and freaked out. It's genuinely odd, but in that oddness is my stimulus.  What is it like to be the human who encounters the martial-arts-trained obsessive who treats me as a disposable piece of stage scenery?

Somewhere in there is an interesting story.

"The Day the Wires Came Down" available for download

Asimov's has made my story "The Day the Wires Came Down" available as a free download (pdf).

A must for alternate-transportation mavens.  Check it out.

New England: home of lame Civil War generals. And proud of it.

The South loves its romantic generals. As well it should. Though they fought in an evil cause, they were interesting men, and excellent fighters. Fortunately, they lost, and can be regarded almost as fictional characters.

The North won, and one of the reasons it won was that it cared less about military prowess and more about political coalition building. It's frustrating to read about Nathaniel "Commissary" Banks, for example, getting chased around the Shenandoah by the brilliant and deranged Stonewall Jackson and abandoning his stores, thus the nickname. Other campaigns, like the Red River campaign, were notorious for military ineptitude.

There is a noble statue to Banks in the town square in Waltham, where I used to work. He was Speaker of the House of Representatives, Governor of Massachusetts, and apparently much respected.

In front of the Massachusetts State House stands an equestrian statue of the unfortunate Joseph Hooker, who lost the Battle of Chancellorsville. In Providence, Rhode Island, statues of local hero Ambrose Burnside abound.

There are just ones I have noticed myself. It may seem odd, but the war was won, and everyone felt that things had worked out, so there was no need to get mad about this lost battle, or that suicidal charge. After all, war is hard, and very few can be expected to truly excel at it.

This was stimulated by yesterday's thoughts about Benjamin Butler, who, as far as I know, has no statue. But, after all, statues require physical attractiveness as well, which Ben lacked. Ambroze Burnside, everyone conceded, looked great on a horse. I'm not sure how good a horseman the lawyer from Lowell ever could have been....

In praise of Ben Butler

First, let's get the most important thing out of the way:  Benjamin Franklin Butler was short, ugly, and wall-eyed. Stephen Douglas and Alexander Stephens were short, Lincoln was ugly, and while I'm not aware of any Civil War era politicians with strabismus, there surely must have been a few.

But poor Ben had it all, and was pudgy to boot. The tall and handsome are not mocked, and so even the most foolish of them seem to have decent historical reputations. Short ugly people are screwed in that department.

Plus, Ben was not a good general. A political general, he managed logistics well enough, but feared combat, like many other generals did. He failed Grant during Grant's big push toward Richmond in the spring of 1864, but then, so did Sigel and Banks. Success is war is second only to handsomeness as a means of historical approval.

Butler was called to mind by an interesting article in last Sunday's NYT Magazine, about the first slaves to escape across the lines to Union troops early in the Civil War, and Butler's brilliant improvisation of calling them "contrabands of war", thus creating a formula that allowed for freeing escaped slaves without dealing with legal issues of property and reparation.

Ben Butler was involved in many other interesting events in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1853, just before his inauguration, Franklin Pierce witnessed the death of his 11-year-old son in a railway accident. Pierce's wife, Jane, hired Butler to defend the railroad. She regarded the accident as a judgment from God.  Note: this is largely from memory, and it's hard to find a reference to this incident online.

He then, exceeding his authority, commanded troops that held Baltimore in the early days of the war, helping keep Maryland in the Union.

After his "contraband" improvisation, he commanded the occupation of New Orleans. His actions there, ranging from bold to deliberately provocative (notably, General Order 28), led to his execration throughout the South, and is probably what most people know him for.

After the war he managed the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, wrote several important Civil Rights acts, promoted payment in greenbacks, and entertained and irritated people in a number of public offices, including governor of Massachusetts. He also ran for President.

Years ago, American Heritage ran a striking photograph of a bizarre elevated railway , with Butler sitting pretty in the middle of a gaggle of local notables.  I can't find the photograph itself, but the description of it is here. That Butler is associated with an eccentric form of transportation is a sign--I had forgotten all about that picture when I started writing this post.

Here is a picture of the railway, from this obituary of the inventor.

Benjamin Butler is more interesting than most historical characters who make appearances in historical novels.  I think it's time to rehabilitate him. And give him a ride on a steam-powered monorail.

A new lit crit term no one really needs: Bombastoroman

For years, my writing workshop, the Cambridge Science Fiction Writers Workshop (usually abbreviated CSFW) has tolerated my somewhat overexcited manner of critique. This style wouldn’t fly everywhere. Sometimes I get a little too excited. Still, the workshop has functioned for decades. I like to think my injection of energy has something to do with that.

James Cambias submitted a story to the last workshop that was a kind of bonsai or haiku version of one of those gigantic multidecker hard SF novels, full of adventure, weird species, gigantic artifacts, and deranged speculation.  Only his was a few thousand words long, fun and tight.

A Bildungsroman, staple of college lit courses, is a novel of education, of growing up, of learning who you are.  What is the hard SF novel series about uncovering the truth about the universe, and understanding what we are as a species?  The Bombastoroman!

OK, so maybe I'm revealing my true literary colors here. I feel that, increasingly, SF is too long. And this is true no matter what length we're discussing.  The stories are too long, the novellas are too long, and the novels are too long.  The Bombastoroman rules all.

You heard it here first.

A new story: The Boarder

I've posted a new story, The Boarder, which originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

It is neither. This is, in fact, a straight piece of conventional fiction, in the form of a memoir. But it is about science fiction, the experience of reading it, and the relation between it and the history of the actual space program, told through the manifestation of a Russian metallurgist as a boarder in a boy's house.

I suppose the story should have had a more interesting title. Vassily is one of my favorite characters. He is not a real person, but is based on my understanding of what such men were like.

In fact, I always wanted to be such a man, an eccentric and brilliant engineer with a sense of the way the world works. I may be eccentric, but the engineer part never worked out for me. Vassily is, in part, my attempt to regain some of the feeling of physical certainty that such people have.

It's actually a story quite close to my heart. Even if none of it ever happened.

"The Day the Wires Came Down"

My story "The Day the Wires Came Down" is the cover story of the April/May Asimov's.

It is about a brother and sister who learn a few things while on a normal-seeming errand on a kind of aerial gondola system that runs above the rooftops of the city in which they live. 

If possible, I ask my readers to refrain from seeing "The Day the Wires Came Down" as a steampunk piece, despite the presence of a technological level that is clearly late 19th century. There is steam, there is coal. There are even balloons. But the entire approach is resolutely non-punk. The story has none of the silicone-enhanced Victorianism that, to mind, characterizes that lately popular subgenre.

Here is the complete painting of which the magazine cover is a piece.

It's a beautiful illustration, and I hope leads people to the magazine, and the story. The artist is not American, and is identified as Ornicar (you can see the artist's name as the destination of the telpher car in the illustration).  When I learn more about the artist, I will let you know.

But don't be seduced by Ornicar's svelte steampunkness.  Arabella is not a Victorian lady--she is much more reluctant in her role, and more resistant to characterization, than this easily besooted parasol-carrying lady is.  Her brother Andrew has vanished. And my airy Jablokovian city has gotten a bit subterranean. All in pursuit of magazine-cover signifiers, I presume.

The story is a bit of a mystery, an elegy for a vanishing form of transportation, and a first exploration of my city.  I plan to write other such pieces. Give it a read, and let me know what you think.

How to be less mediocre

One of my favorite blog names is Less Wrong, because of its clear sense of the achievable.  It is also something I read regularly. It descends (as I remember) from another favorite blog with similar ambitions, Overcoming Bias.

We are wrong, and we are biased. Our mental tools are feeble and designed for different purposes than we are trying to use them for. Trying to think is like one of those puzzles where you have a burnt candlestick, a box of spaghetti, and a gossip magazine from 1953, and need to do something like resect a bowel or cool down a nuclear reactor.

My whole life is attempting to achieve things with inadequate tools. I'm not mentally organized, I'm easily distracted, I dislike sustained boring effort, and I often get discouraged. I have no particular talents, though I once thought I did, or hoped they would emerge as I matured.

That I get through even a day, ever cash a paycheck, and ever finish a book, or even a blog post, that I stay married and keep my children alive, is the result of deliberate conscious technique. Of ways of wrapping that magazine around that spaghetti to make a lever and then using the wax to absorb alpha particles...hey, look what that Dorothy Kilgallen has got up to.... 

Books and web sites are full of people who tell you that they were alcoholics, or sex addicts, or had a psychotic breakdown, and now have Pulitzer Prizes and run their own multimillion dollar motivational businesses.

I love some of those people.  For example, I love "Penelope Trunk". She has great workplace advice. But a hot Aspergerish serial entrepreneur who is a former professional volleyball player already has a charisma/status advantage most of us don't.  What about us regular shlubs?

All I can offer is information on my experiences in trying to be...less mediocre. About trying to feel less ashamed of myself when I look back over my day, my week, my life. About what has worked for me...until it stopped working for me.

Every day can't be a clean reboot, because then you have to look at that stupid hourglass for far too long.  But, everyone once in a while, you can do it.

The bikepocalypse continues

Boston drivers suck.  Boston pedestrians suck. And, yes, Boston bicyclists suck. Can't we all just admit we suck, and get on with it?

No, of course not.

But we're nothing compared to NYC, as this, yet another story about NY bike lane conflicts, shows. Nothing gets people angrier than bicycles. This, by the way, includes my wife, who had a run in with a bicyclist a few months ago, and came home denouncing us all.

And bike lanes just make people go berserk. Bicycling advocates (as distinct from people who just ride their bikes to get from one place to another) try to find ways to demonstrate that bike lanes are inadequate, unsafe, cluelessly designed. And bike haters try to demonstrate that...well, that they hate people who ride bikes.

I'm not going to read the New York Magazine article Infrastructurist links to--it starts with an obsessed psychology professor who videotapes a new bike lane to demonstrate it is underused. Why do I suspect she lives in a rent-controlled apartment?  One reason for New York's obsessiveness is that its bizarre rent regulations not only encourage obsessive behavior, but make it mandatory for survival.

Cambridge was forced to eliminate its belovedly insane rent control regulations quite some time ago, and is a much saner place because of it. We even have a bike lane here and there, nothing too crazy.

Of course, we all still suck. On that, I think everyone can agree.

A way of understanding the Old Testament that any parent of a teenager will understand

Finally having a teenager in the house has illuminated all sorts of previously mysterious subjects for me.  I've previously mentioned how it led me to understand Evil Child narratives.

Now it has led me to a revelation about the Old Testament. I was at the wake of the parent of a friend yesterday. In talking about what she had to do, my friend mentioned how distressing she had found most of the Old Testament quotations on offer for the funeral ceremony. That God seemed permanently pissed off.

I thought about the Israelites and their relationship with their God, and realized that the entire dynamic works perfectly if you regard the Israelites as a teenager, and God as their parent.

God constantly warns the Israelites not to do certain things. Not only do they do them, but they seem to do them just to get God's goat--I mean, if God so clearly exists, why would you go through all that effort to create a Golden Calf, which is just a statue?

But it sure did piss God off.

The Israelites have short attentions spans, never take care of things when they should, are constantly enraged, sulky, or depressed--and then complain when they are not taken care of. They lie, they hide things, but hate being regarded as anything less than honorable. They hang out with bad companions and bring back terrible habits ("I mean, I'm the only people not allowed to worship idols!  Do you have any idea of how much everyone makes fun of me?")

God is short-tempered, saves them from the consequences of their actions, and feeds them. Sometimes He doesn't feel like explaining every detail of His plans, and just wants them to do what they're supposed to do, and then has to deal with a lot of complaints.

Sometimes He loses His temper and slays thousands of them.

They make up afterward, but are never quite comfortable with each other. There is no other option, however:  He is their God, and they are His people. So if the trip across the Sinai seems like the worst family vacation you've ever been on ("Are we there yet?"), it makes perfect sense.

The New Testament is something else. Maybe I'll understand it when my kids get older....

SF's DFW problem

I'm a fan of the work of David Foster Wallace. Not a big fan, mind you. Like any mild DFW fan, I prefer the journalism to the fiction, and the short fiction to the long. True DFW aficionados love Infinite Jest, which has so far defeated me--if you want the truth, I don't find the wheelchair-bound French Canadian terrorists funny, and if they aren't funny, they aren't anything. Broom of the System, on the other hand, I found delightful, but I think true fans find it a lesser work.

I occasionally bring up DFW in discussions with fellow science fiction writers. The usual response is disdain and contempt. Sometimes it is bewildered ignorance: "who?" Occasionally, the situation gets belligerent.

Our field is somewhat parochial, but I have to admit, this startles me.

First of all, to progress, you have to steal from other genres and writing styles. DFW is almost impossible to steal from, but something of that paranoiac self-awareness, where you are fully conscious of your own intestinal peristalsis, would be useful in our field. Infinite self-awareness leads to total inaction, a defining state of post-modernity.

I was with two science fiction writer friends recently, and I talked about DIY sous vide cooking--sealing food in vacuum bags and cooking it in a hot water bath to a precise internal temperature, which gives you perfect medium-rare steak every time (130 degrees F), and then searing it to get a nice brown surface. Their reaction?

As it turns out, they both eat their beef well done, and found the idea terrifying and gross.

Not all SF writers are afraid of literary experimentation, and not all eat their meat cooked to shoe-leather consistency because they fear microbes and other gross living things. But: DFW and medium rare steak. There is some kind of deep connection there.

Is science fiction the well-done steak of literature? No wonder some readers find my productions too...bloody.

Actually, this explains a lot.

Confessions of a late adopter

I'm a science fiction writer, but have an aversion to acquiring new gadgets. I get some of them eventually, but not all of them, and tend to have older, less capable models. To give you an example, a few months ago I left my mp3 player in the locker room at my health club...and somebody turned it in to the front desk.

It might have been the wind-up key on the side that disturbed him.

But I did recently get a last-generation Kindle, mostly for travel. I always haul tons of books around, and the Kindle lets me do that with less weight. Even this latest screen is a bit gray, I think, but I do read it.

So, what have I read? Since getting it for Christmas, I have used my Kindle to read:

Willa Cather's My Antonia

Two Charles Willeford novels: The Woman Chaser and Wild Wives

Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native

Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation

Elif Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

The Cather and the Hardy were free, the Willefords were from a cheap five novel set, Cowen is a popular short. The Batuman is the only real new purchase here.

So, not a life changer or anything. But it makes for a nice portable library. I do foresee carrying more of my reading on this thing, but I am fairly on in my habits, and will be haunting used book stores until they cease to exist.

I actually have something to say about each of these books, but I'll have to save that.

Brief Boskone post mortem

Yeah, I know--Boskone was last weekend, and it's already Thursday, and life has moved on. What can I say? It's been a busy week.

Boskone comes just a month after Arisia, in the same hotel in a windswept, crisply redeveloped area of Boston.  But Boskone is about books, is much smaller, and skews substantially older than Arisia.

I see some old friends reliably every year:  Ann Tonsor Zeddies, Rosemary Kirstein, Gregory Feeley, Paul Di Filippo, Michael Swanwick and Marianne Porter, David Hartwell, Kathryn Cramer, Jeanne Cavelos, Allen Steele, Gavin Grant, Karl Schroeder, Toni Kelner, Kelly Link, Alex Irvine, as well as my regular local colleagues.  I also met a few new people I enjoyed:  Jo Walton, David Anthony Durham, Charlaine Harris, and Margaret Ronald (OK, I actually met her at Arisia, but that was just a month ago).

I was moderator on a panel on Urban Fantasy.  I knew nothing about Urban Fantasy, and so was able to ask a lot of dumb questions without exposing myself. It's probably not the subgenre for me, but I learned something interesting.  One question I asked was: what outside-of-our-genre literary works would someone who likes urban fantasy probably also like?  The one answer everyone agreed to was Dorothy Sayers. I happen to love Dorothy Sayers, so maybe I'm wrong and should give urban fantasy a try.

What do people think of that assessment? Any other works that would qualify as urban fantasy cognates?

Incomprehensible mysteries: The Crimson Rivers

I like watching genre films from other countries. Genre, by definition (my definition, anyway) is "preprocessed", accepting certain conventions that reduce mental overhead, so that attention can be devoted to other things. Culture is another "preprocessing", with accepted conventions. To watch a genre film (and nothing is as genre as a genre movie) from another culture is to trip over obstacles that the intended viewers don't even notice.

The utterly incomprehensible French suspense film, The Crimson Rivers (Les rivières pourpres) (2000) is a good test. It's based on a novel, which means the writer had to throw out a lot. Movies often point up the flaws of their source material (David Lynch's Dune is a good example). I can't tell whether that's true of CR, but it makes no sense whatsoever.  Two rule-breaking jerkwad cops are allegedly mismatched (one played by a younger Vincent Cassel, the ballet director of Black Swan), while actually being pretty much alike. It all takes place at a satirical take-off of a grande école, set in the great scenery of the Alps, where tenured professors seem involved in some impossibly long breeding experiment, a metaphor for self-centered French high culture.

Not worth seeing, unless you really want to see Dominique Sanda as a blind crazed nun in a dungeon.  I'd lost track of her since the half incredible/half ridiculous 1900, but apparently she's been working steadily since. Who knew?

Final point.  Why, when a someone is about to deliberately smash you into oblivion with a giant truck, does he always blow his horn first?