The violent detective as a type

I do like reading detective novels and police procedurals.  A couple of recent ones are interesting because of what they have in common: main characters, professional policemen both, who brutally assault someone when they are not personally under threat. And they are not portrayed as anomic thugs, but as sympathetic protagonists.

Snow Angels is set in Finland, but is written by an American, James Thompson. So it's a bit of a Nordic thriller with training wheels. Kari Vaara, Thompson's Finnish cop, explains things to us, or to his American wife, like an expression about the passing of time that's based on the fact that you have to let a reindeer urinate every so often to avoid kidney problems, that are revealing and interesting. The book overall, however, is both unpleasant and incomprehensible.  It has a high level of sexual violence and degradation, and murderers pop up out of nowhere. One main suspect kills himself without, as far as I know, ever having been on stage at all. Vaara never, at any point, figures anything out. He sucks as a detective, and deserves to suffer the consequences of this, since he deliberately misleads others in order to stay on the case. Occasionally, he calls someone, who quickly provides the necessary answer--not that these answers get Vaara too far. Writing a real detective story is hard--believe me, I've tried it. Thompson doesn't have the knack yet.

But, the violent detective part. At one point Vaara beats and threatens to kill a suspect, his ex-wife's current husband, because the man insults Vaara's American wife. Real smooth police work there, Vaara. I suspect that this type of behavior is frowned on, even in Finland.  I'd say Snow Angels is mildly interesting (I did finish it), and decently written, but there are a huge number of better Nordic detective stories out there.

In the rural Wyoming Cold Dish, by Craig Johnson, the sheriff, Walt Longmire, beats someone up because of something bad he did, and breaks his nose. The victim is not a suspect or even anyone involved in the investigation, and this would, in the real world, endanger or even end Longmire's career.  I'm not quite done with Cold Dish, and so can't say what consequences this has in the book. And Cold Dish has significant virtues which I will discuss in another post.

In both cases, these are not even remotely fair fights. In one case the victim is a suspect in custody, in the other he's just walking down the street. Both detectives are portrayed as sympathetic (Longmire more so than Vaara). These acts make them look like volatile morons. What gives?

I'm starting to suspect this is just a cliche, a sign that the detective, despite some sensitvity, is not to be messed with. It's like alcoholism, a liking for jazz, a history of divorce, a troubled relationship with an adolescent child--a signifier of late-stage hardboiled fiction, which tries to be sensitive, then gets nervous about it. I may have to just live with it.

I prefer my detectives opaque and focused on the job. I'm not much interested in their inner conflicts. So unprofessional behavior based on their deep inner flaws just irritates me. If they actually suffered the consequences of their actions, I might get more interested.

Is "psychology" to blame for poor electric car sales?

This post on Wonkblog tries to puzzle out why people aren't buying electric cars. It seems that people are nervous about an expensive (around $40K for many models) vehicle that will only go 65 miles before needing a lengthy recharge.  Most Americans drive less than 40 miles a day, advocates say. What's the problem?

For about a century we've had vehicles that go hundreds of miles on a tank and can be refueled in a minute or two pretty much anywhere.  And they cost $40K only if we really really want to show off.  The article implies that we have an irrational attachment to the notion we can go out of our driveway and drive across the country if we want to.

Well, it is great that we can do that if we want to. Because if we can do that, we know we can do all sorts of other things without a second thought. We can make an unexpected trip to visit a client in another city, or go to the seashore to walk on the beach, or help a friend move, or spend a day or two not worrying about whether the battery is charged.  Even if we were upgrading from horses, that range restriction might give us pause.

The plain fact is that carbon compounds store a lot of energy in a compact and easily transportable form, a form that is easily converted into motion, heat, or whatever else you need. Nothing else comes close. So carbon compounds are going to make us go for a long time to come, unless someone puts electric strips down the middle of highway lanes, turning our vehicles into big slot cars. The expedient of having a backup internal combustion engine, as in the Chevy Volt, takes care of the range problem, but is what makes that car so expensive--it's a car that also has an electric motor in it. 

I'm an environmentally concerned blue-stater who bikes almost everywhere. I've never even liked driving. I still think electric cars are dumb. Like most of our so-called "alternative" energy devices (there's actually not much "alternative" about the coal-plant-generated electricity used to charge these cars) they, like wind or solar, are actually devices for generating tax credits and a sense of virtue, not practical solutions to real world problems.

Just to be clear, I'm reacting more against the clueless rah rah enthusiasm such gadgets encourage than against the idea that we should investigate alternatives to carbon-based transportation and power generation.

But few people who actually need to get anywhere are going to buy the current models. So don't blame the Stonecutters.

The indignities of the day job

OK, so it's pretty much my fault. I had a number of time-sensitive tasks with my client, and I put one of off that seemed less time sensitive...one that suddenly had to be designed and delivered. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving (the client is not in the US). For a conference.

I did it, with the help of an incredible designer (thanks, Ruth!)  Unfortunately, after she left, I found something that needed to be changed, so I had to download a trial version of Adobe Acrobat and cut and paste logos from one PDF to another.  I lack the visual skill to be a designer. I barely recognize myself in the mirror.

Dumb. It was dumb. Every time I looked at that particular project there was something more pressing to do. But, of course, eventually sunken bodies bloat and float to the surface. Fortunately, I work fast. And, fortunately, I partnered with someone else who does too. The client was grouchy, needless to say, but at least has what she needs.

Will I never ever do this again? I sure would like to think so!  I can take comfort in the fact that it happens a lot less than it used to--and I have been incredibly busy with deliverables.  But no excuses. Gratitude. Gratitude for the help I got, for the fact that the client reviewed and commented quickly, and for the fact that I am still (somewhat) alive.  Have a good Thanksgiving, everyone.

Do we deserve our doom?

How will future descendants view us?  I think most of us are honest, hard-working, decent folks. But, across the entire developed world, we have managed to get ourselves into a horrendous mess. A freaking dumb mess, because we already have as much stuff as anyone could possibly ever use.

And what are we doing to get ourselves out of it?

The childishly named Super Committee has come back out of their sekrit clubhouse with...nothing. Of course, they swore they would shoot their favorite dogs if they did not solve our problems. So now, having sworn this, they will, of course, return home, pour a last bowl of Iams, scratch  Maggie behind the ears and then put a hollowpoint through her skull. That will make them sorry they couldn't figure out the incredibly hard problem of how to reduce the world's largest military budget, out-of-control entitlements, or comical healthcare costs.

But look how useful that dang dog is, they will say. Nothing is be gained now by destroying such a fine animal now, is there? Only a fool would think of reducing value in this way.

Southern tier Europeans are rioting because the magic beans that were going to get them to the giant's hideout to steal talking harps and treasure have turned out to be...beans.  Those take a long time to grow, and then all you have are more beans. "But the guy said..." The Germans who kept funding the Mercedes their layabout brother-in-law was building out in the garage have finally opened the door only to find a couple of tires and lots of empty tall boys, and they are mad. How could anyone have hoodwinked them so cleverly?

Will my descendants see me as a ludicrous fool for even living in this time? Because I can see how things can easily tip into a real disaster.  And it's not going to be an accident, like getting hit by an asteroid or something. It's because that stack of wedding china we built to get to the bourbon we think Dad hid in that top cabinet is really starting to wiggle and we have no idea of how to get down. It's because we're morons.

My grandchildren will come to visit me wherever my irritated offspring have warehoused me and say "Grandpa, why were you all such morons?" And all I'll be able to say is "Just you wait, you wretched sprat. Just you wait. If you think you're smarter it's because you haven't managed to build your stack high enough. Isn't there a gravy boat in the sideboard you haven't tried to balance on the top yet? The problem with your generation is that you just lack enterprise."

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go off and work on my hollow laugh. I can see that it will really come in handy.

I'm a fan of RoboKopter

I've been wondering why news agencies aren't sending unmanned drones with cameras and microphones into areas too dangerous for ground reporters, just to give an idea of what's going on. Prices have been dropping, while capabilities continue to increase.

One Polish activist used such a device, RoboKopter, to film police at recent riots in Warsaw that I have to admit I had heard nothing about (HT: Kottke)

This page has two of the best. Here is a video of the device itself, flying around a stadium (no need to watch the whole thing).

Kottke has the fascinating observation that the different camera views in Madden NFL video games inspired the NFL to devise actual ways of delivering those kinds of views, since their audience was growing the expect them. He anticipates the same happening for news footage, as cinema quality and news quality merge.

The quality of the RoboKopter video is fantastic. For a long time, movies have used grainy, washed-out, blueish imagery to signify the "authenticity" of surveillance camera footage, and vomitcam jerkiness to do the same for handheld camperas.  What signifier will you use when all video images, no matter what their source, are of smooth brightly colored RoboKopter quality?

I'm still not seeing as many of these things as I would expect. Maybe the change will come quickly, and within a year or two they will be omnipresent. That's the way it happens.

Do you really want a bike that reads your mind?

OK, this is a little too much intrusion of science fiction into daily life:  a bike that allegedly shifts in response to your brainwaves (HT: The Infrastructurist).

Now I know why so few people bike: it's just too hard to decide when to jump up or down a cog. Although I'm not sure a mind-reading bike really solves that particular problem, since you still have to decide to shift, though it says it can also remember previous shifts by location, and then shift again at the same place, say downshifting before you hit a hill. No indication if it takes a wind reading before doing so.

This is kind of fun, if creepy, but it's really a solution in search of a problem. If the problem is the intellectual demands of shifting, it should measure muscular effort and cadence, and shift to maintain constant pace and effort. Your mind shouldn't really have much to do with it.

Or it could measure sweat (maintaining an effort that keeps you from getting to the office soaked in sweat) or passerby perception (if someone attractive is watching you, you'd like to be showing some real speed and form). There are lots of possibilities.

Or you can get a fixie, like I have, and just follow its cruel dictates.

Do you really want to know how much time you waste?

We don't know how many calories we eat, we don't know how many times we lie or delude ourselves during the day, and we certainly don't know how much time we waste.

I work on the screen all day. Early in the mornings, before paying client work, I use the Writer user on my Windows computer to do my fiction writing. It has no internet access. It is also oriented vertically, and my documents are green Lucida Console on black. This, incidentally, terrifies my offspring when they see it.

Not that I don't wander off and get distracted, but it's good old-fashioned distraction, requiring a magazine or seeing if the newspaper has been delivered yet. Character-building distraction.

The rest of the day, I am connected up to everything in the world, just like the rest of you. I started to wonder how much time I spent "recharging my batteries". I knew it was too much, but how much?

I put on RescueTime, which lets you track exactly that.  Some days weren't too bad.  Others, when I was stressed, were terrible. So, just like when the scale starts to go up and tracking is particularly imjportant, I stopped looking as much. I'm not a confessional blogger, so it will take me some time to decide to share any real numbers with you (and thus with my clients).

Now I put on Leechblock, a Firefox add-on.  This is more punitive (though RescueTime has nanny functions too--they just aren't free along with the basic time tracker).  You tell it what sites you waste time on (for me, Google Reader, Slate, Andrew Sullivan, and other commentators on events of the day), tell it how much time you want to limit yourself to, and it turns the spigot off when you reach the limit.

I don't generally hit my hourly limit.  But I do hit the daily limit. Do I really need to read that much well-informed commentary on the Euro crisis, the Republican debates, and human population genetics? Obviously, no.

The question is, will putting these limits on make me more productive on the things I want to produce? I'll follow up in a couple of weeks and let you know.

The menace of "red drift"

"Red drift" might have had a political connotation some decades ago, but now it refers to a problem with apple varieties.

This week's New Yorker has an article on apple breeding called "Crunch" (not free online, but I still read paper magazines), centered around the breeding of a new apple variety with the unfortunately overengineered name SweeTango.

I like articles about the day-by-day labors and decisions that go to create and then change everyday objects we take for granted, so I liked this one.

The most revealing, and disturbing, thing was the market-force-created ailment suffered by popular apple varieties, called "red drift" by the apple grower Dennis Courtier.  Natural variations in an apple variety will create some that are redder.  Retailers prefer them because they think customers like red apples better, and they hide bruises.  Breeders go for more of the red ones. So flavor goes down as red goes up, sapping flavor from Gala as it did from Red Delicious, and now, apparently, going after Honeycrisp.

The article is about trying to come with a kind of appellation contrôlée for apples (the author, John Seabrook, does not use this term, by the way), so that buyers can rely on a common flavor profile--a clear identity for the apple.  More and more, there will be such defined entities in mindspace, occupying defined parameters of crispness, sweetness, redness, shape, smell, place of origin, name of grower, connection to sense of simplicity or grace. "This red and no redder" will be the battle cry.

In the modern world, if you think something is simple, you must be missing something.

The pain of revision

My evenings are currently dedicated to rereading the draft of my novel, Timeslip, and thinking about what changes to make.  I sit in my armchair with a stack of lined Post-Its and a pen and go through chapter by chapter.

The text is already full of notes from when I was writing it the first time.  I have a keyboard macro that adds a dated note (italics, with three asterisks in front so I can search them out), whenever I need a fact, or am worried about something, or remember that this affects something earlier in the narrative, but don't want to stop to find or fix. I now use those notes to figure out what I should do now. Often the note really says something like "oh, you can figure this out later". Well, "later" turns out to be...now.

The hardest thing is pushing the conflict. The book is a piece of commercial YA fiction (ostensibly), which is useful discipline for me. Clever notions, character development, odd facts--can't hide behind those. It's always painful to see how evasive I was when writing the first draft, how I stepped away from one character's need pushing against another's, how I let Doug, the main character, coast along, or evade confrontation, or get a break because the opponent is taking a break too. Well, Doug is going to pay now. Revision is the job of going out in a van and hunting down the escaped prisoners (aka "the characters") and putting them back to work on the narrative chain gang.

Otherwise, we have a failure to.... Well you know the drill.

We're all overlevered: Margin Call

I saw Margin Call last weekend.  I like the idea of making a bad day at work into a movie, and enjoyed it quite a bit.

It won't teach anything substantive about how the financial meltdown occurred, but it will show you how individual decisions went to make it up.

Oh, I don't mean the decisions about how to design the financial model you use to calculate your risk exposure, though decisions are certainly there. I mean the personal decisions the individual characters make about how to live their own lives.

In the movie, no one is free to act. No one can say "I'm out of here", or blow the whistle, or even openly resist. Because everyone, with the possible exception of the young former-rocket-scientist whiz kid Peter, has borrowed too much money or made other bad decisions.  Eric Dale, the ex-engineer character played by Stanley Tucci, at first stands strong, but finally caves because he just bought a house that he can no longer afford. Kevin Spacey's Sam Rogers seems to have just come out of an expensive divorce. Paul Bettany's Will Emerson spends $76,000 annually on high-priced hookers.

Or at least, they tell themselves they are not free to act. To act freely they would have to give up things they have gotten used to.  Once you've tasted that life, you can't go back, even if that taste was paid for by money you did not, in fact, have. A Stoic would tell you not to get attached to anything that can be taken away from you. Stoicism is an impossible ideal, but I am a bit surprised that no one is currently promulgating a version updated to reflect our current situation.

In the end, two characters sit in a room, doing nothing, waiting for the only thing that's worth anything anymore: a golden parachute.  A person's worth is just the value of his severance package.

The movie's power comes from not condemning this or underlining it. It just shows it to us, and defies us to think that we would somehow behave differently under the same circumstances.

Returns to abstraction: science fiction and the real future

In the first chapter his fascinating, to-me-almost-incomprehensible account of infinity, Everything and More, David Foster Wallace talks about levels of abstraction. In order to learn math, you have to move up through levels of abstraction, from physical objects, to numbers, to unknowns, to functions and so forth. If you are unable to manipulate the abstractions, you are unable to go on with math. And, often, even if you do well at math (as I did), you don't really understand it.

The big bucks in our economy come to those who have moved vast numbers of levels up the ladder of abstraction. The person who sells apples makes little, never mind the person who picks them. The person who creates financial instruments that hedge commodity price fluctuations makes a great deal more.

Science fiction is about the future. In the future, anyone who matters will deal with matters so many levels above concrete physical reality that there will be no clear relationship between the two. But that's not that interesting to read about, save in a tight story that is really, in some sense, about that process of abstraction, and what it means, both for the world and for the human soul. But how often can you do that?

Which is why you still see characters repairing physical things, like space drives or time machines, rather than trying desperately to fix a system of busted collateralized debt obligations. Or, even worse, arguing about how to define the problem to be fixed.

This is an interesting problem for fiction, because the people doing the abstracting are still shaved primates, with status hierarchies, anxieties, and flawed bodies that will inevitably stop working. It's that boundary between profit-and-knowledge-creating abstraction and human need that is a fertile ground for our fiction.

OWS's problem: rich people look like the rest of us

Time was, if you want to caricature a rich person, it was easy:

 

You put him in a top hat and tailcoat, and away you went.  And rich men really did look like this. The image was universal in the early 20th century:

The Soviets particularly loved it.  Monopoly's Rich Uncle Pennybags lacks only the bloated belly.

BTW, don't worry what the banners say.  Part of the Capitalist's banner says "death to workers", which misses the point of exploitation so thoroughly as to be comical.

And let's not forget

Only the top hat is left, but the lust for lucre remains.

So I wasn't surprised to see people dressed as classic plutocrats at various Occupy Wall Street protests. But it's sad.  No one dresses that way anymore. And sometimes you'll see striped pants added to the ensemble, which is just wrong. Striped pants symbolize duplicitous or ineffectual Western diplomats, not plutocrats, for heaven's sake. Get your obsolete stereotypes straight.

But rich people nowadays wear exactly the same banal clothing everyone else does.  Their houses are just grotesquely swollen versions of our houses. They have a lot of cars, but everyone has a pretty nice car. Everyone's teeth are white.

This is one reason OWS has an uphill battle. If you can't mentally picture your enemy, its hard to become angry at them.  If only they would carry bags of money with big dollar signs on them, it would be so much easier.

Things you can't make up: political aesthetics

Middlebrow strivers like me love listening to the BBC show In Our Time. If you're perpetual question is "what, if anything, is up with...?", with topics from angels to the Glencoe Massacre, this is your show.  Its panelists are limited to Brit academics, which is fine, though I wonder if such a show would ever go in the US. I am sure that we have a gigantic amount of underutilized academics who, if handled by a smart interviewer, could give a good account of themselves.  Any volunteers to compete with the terrier-like Melvyn Bragg?

But that's not what set me off.  Today I listened to a show about...the Frankfurt School (you'll have to scroll way down to find it).  No one cares about the Frankfurt School any more (Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, etc.), but they used to be big, particularly in parts of the university other than engineering, where I spent my time. Some interesting notions, but you get no mind cred for faking knowledge about them any more, so you genuinely have to be interested in no-longer-fashionable thinking about the cultural conditions of late capitalism to listen to that particular program.

But that's not what set me off either.  It's the academic specialty of one of the guests, Esther Leslie (and, yes, I was pleased that she looks the way she does).  She is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London.  I would not have dared make that up, and am delighted to learn it exists. Not that I have any idea of what it is.

Recent reading: American Pastoral

Even though I read a lot, I lack a broad connection to American literary fiction.  So I can admit it: until I read American Pastoral, I had never read a book by Philip Roth.  Don't worry. I have many worse derelictions to fess up to, some other time.

My conclusion? Roth is pretty good, but he lacks the skills to make it as a genre writer.  He shouldn't quit his day job as literary lion. I'll have to check out his genre-ish The Plot Against America, to see if this is true. I did like him enough to try another book.

Why the sly genre slam? Because, like many literary writers, Roth likes using suspense-like pacing, without ever seeming to recognize how suspense really works. He also saddles the book with an oppressively lengthy intro section from the POV of his alter ego, Nate Zuckerman. And make no mistake, this useless frame (to which he does not return in the end) is over 20 percent of the book, and involves that impossible-to-make-interesting-in-literature event, a high school reunion. The frame also involves Zuckerman not knowing the single most important thing everyone knows about his character, the Swede--that his daughter blew up a local post office, which is scarcely credible. He relies on this ignorance to stretch things out unconscionably.

Speed reading suggestion: start the book on page 89 and you won't miss a thing.

The real story, which Zuckerman tells from the point of view of the Swede (actually the Jewish Seymor Levov), is about the Swede's relationship with his daughter Merry, who becomes a 60s radical and blows up an innocent man to protest...things. She is realistically tiresome and inarticulate, though at somewhat too great a length.

Roth clearly did a lot of research on the glovemaking industry, Swede's family business, which was undergoing a mournful decline in the Newark of the 60s and 70s, the main time of the novel. We learn a lot about glovemaking and Newark businesses, all quite realistic. It is as well-researched and as dull as a novel by Richard Powers (wow, I really am in a confessional mood here: many people love him, but I regard Richard Powers as the Ken Burns of literature, which you can take as you wish). If there was some metaphoric intent to the glovemaking, I missed it, but then, I hate metaphoric intent and tend to be obtuse about it.

So the glovemaking promised to enter the plot but really didn't (he probably mentions Shakespeare's dad, the glovemaker, somewhere along the line, but I can't swear he does). The main suspense-fake comes from Merry's friend/handler Rita, who is a manipulative and fascinating terror who shows up to torment the Swede in interesting ways. She promises that there is something to figure out...but there really isn't. She just gets the Swede to make dumbass decisions. After a certain point she's been interesting enough to remind the reader of how dull the other characters are and Roth forgets all about her.

To some extent there is no point--as Homer Simpson, our greatest literary critic (apart from the creators of TV Tropes) says, as Marge tries to figure out the moral of an episode (Blood Feud): "It's just a bunch of stuff that happened."

The story kind of wanders around after Rita disappears and ends in mournful and self-flagellating suburban infidelity, like a parody of all those 60s and 70s novels of oral sex in the suburbs whose appeal has never become clear to me. Of course, it's a look back at that period, so maybe that makes sense.

There's a tight and painful story of misplaced enthusiasm and parental cluelessness in here, but this version is too long. I say that about a lot of stuff I read, and it's certainly true here.  Roth's editors are too indulgent. He's a pretty good writer. With some discipline, he could make something of himself....

Still, I read it. That's getting to be high praise, since I often give up on novels long before the end. I'll certainly try another one, though I have some other current non-genre literature to get through first.

Finding your own limiting factor

FuturePundit has an interesting entry on working memory.  It seems possible that, in addition to raw intelligence, or processing power, various other factors go into your mental performance, including working memory and long-term memory. To have complex thoughts you need to hold the various parts of the thought in your memory while having it. And to develop sophisticated skills you need to remember them for an extended period of time.

For anyone, no matter how smart or successful, one or another of these is probably the limiting factor in mental performance. If you knew what your own limiting factor was, you could focus your attention on it. This would be the most effective way to get better performance out of your brain. And, even if there are hard limits to improvement, you could make decisions about the types of tasks you would be best at and try to get work that lets you do those tasks most.

And, as time goes by and you get older, it would be useful to know where you are declining most. You probably worked out ways of doing things when you were younger that suited the mental skills you had then. You are not likely to let these habits go, even though now, with a different set of inherent abilities, they are suboptimal.

Note, I say "useful" to know. Not cheering or delightful. Cognitive decline seems inevitable. But you can probably work out ways that that decline hits actual performance as little as possible. As in war, victories are nice, but successful fighting retreats are what take the real skill. As much as possible, our goal is to live to fight another day.

How to get through life if you are not awesome

I think everyone agrees that Steve Jobs was awesome. I'm not a big fan of Apple products, but I would not argue with that assessment.

That's why he really doesn't have that much useful advice to give to the rest of us. Even an interesting commencement speech is pretty boring, and life is too short to listen to commencement speeches when not actually waiting to get a diploma, so I have not listened to his, today seemingly inescapable speech, but I pretty know what's in it.

How to be awesome.  That's really like advice on how to be tall, or how to be beautiful. Tall, beautiful people tend to be given more chances to have good lives than short, ugly people, so it stands to reason that you'd try to be one.

But as a short, ugly, unawesome American, what I want is help getting just a little better. How to lose a pound or two, or crank out another pullup, or finish that story, or get through my workday a bit more cheerfully, or do something for my wife that makes her happy. If I think about being awesome, I will not be able to do any of those things. And they're pretty much the only goals I will be able to actually achieve.

Things we know that are wrong: morituri te salutamus

Many things intellectualoids  like me "know" are really detached pieces of information that just imply knowledge.  We read essays and reviews and pick up references to works that require a substantial investment of time and intellect to understand. How many of us who make reference to the life of man in a state of nature being "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" have ever read Leviathan, or anything else by Hobbes?

I know I haven't, and am not likely to. It's just a little intellectual accessory I display to show what kind of person I like to think I am.

Unfortunately, aside from being ludicrously simplified, our intellectual accessories are often wrong.

For example, anyone trying to pretend to a knowledge of gladiators in the ancient world (again, like me) knows that gladiators always said  "Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutamus" (Hail, Caesar, we who are about to die salute you)  before going out on the sand.

Except they didn't.  This phrase is only attested to have been used once, at a naumachia, or naval combat, at Fucine Lake to celebrate the completion of a drainage tunnel.  The sailors on the ships supposedly said that phrase, to which the Emperor Claudius jokingly replied "or not", which led the sailors to refuse to fight.  How they heard him and made this decision is not clear--it's a big lake and there were nearly 20,000 of them. They were finally persuaded to bloody combat and all was well.

However, the phrase had an afterlife in later eras, in paintings, poems, books, movies, etc., and now represents a casual, hip understanding of gladiatorial combat in the ancient world. It even appears in Heinlein's Glory Road, the person addressed changed to the feminine, since Rufo is addressing Star, the Empress.  I remember feeling all cool for recognizing it when I read it as a young man, since Heinlein doesn't explain it. He knew his audience. All of us want to show we know something, but really don't want to put too much work into it. Providing little tidbits like that to the developing intellect is an important and underappreciated function of science fiction novels.

We'll all continue to the use the phrase.  But now you can one-up anyone by referencing Fucine Lake, Claudius, and the sparse historical record when the phrase surfaces. That's sure to gain you the respect of your fellows.

A novel draft finished

This weekend I wrote "The End" on a draft of my YA novel, Timeslip.  At four months start to finish, it went much faster than these things usually do for me.  The book is more action/adventure, with an actual opponent, and some pretty clear things to achieve.

Now, it's not done, by any means. It has to sit in a (virtual) drawer for a four to six weeks in order for me to forget a bit about how much work it was to write, so that I can tear it apart, raising the stakes in each scene, etc.

I'm thinking about printing it out and working entirely from the printed version, typing it all back in. This seems like a perverse waste of time, but experience tells me that running the narrative through my brain and out through my fingers again actually helps. Keeping stuff that seems perfect as it is usually results in trouble down the line anyway, and things do not go faster in the end.

I won't even try to guess when a workshop-ready version would be ready, but I'm glad to have gotten through this draft.

In Our Time opens its archives

One of my favorite podcasts is In Our Time, a BBC radio show hosted by Melvyn Bragg. Every week he gets some Brit academics into the studio to talk about something like Boethius or the Sturm and Drang movement. Bragg is good at asking productive questions and keeping his guests from getting stuck on some obsessive academic point. I listen to it almost every week.

For quite some time, BBC Radio 4 has posted the most recent radio programme. They got busy over the summer, and have now posted all of their old shows for download, dating back to 1999. They classify their shows by history, philosophy, culture, religion, and science.

If you're a civ nerd, it's great fun. Check it out.