Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 37

Teeth

I went to the dentist yesterday. I'm having two crowns put in at hideous expense, and my dental insurance pays for almost none of the work. I thought I was going to spend my retirement traveling. Though -- in point of fact -- I am not much of a traveler. However, I still keep thinking that the money I am spending on my teeth would pay for a nice trip to Iceland.

I'm headachy and tired this morning. A simple dental appointment should not slow me down so much. Maybe it's PTSD, due to the money I am paying out.

Or it may be that I really dislike dental work. I am old enough to remember how primitive dentistry used to be, back in the 1950s when the dentists used stone tools. Those early experiences have stayed with me. Modern dental chairs are designed to be comfortable and form-fitting. I always notice that I am lying in them as straight as a board, my body rigid. And I notice when I describe torture in my writing, the torture device always looks more or less like a dental chair, surrounded by dental appliances. (To be fair, it looks more like 1950s dental equipment than the current chairs and machines.)

Who Is Going to Buy the Cars, Henry?

Another facebook discussion, this one about the apparent plan of US business and the federal government to create a permanent recession, leaving most Americans poor or living precarious lives, always on the edge of poverty. I wrote:

The part I don't understand is how one maintains a consumer economy if most people have too little money. However, Keynes said you can stabilize an economy at any level, including endless depression. The question then becomes, can you stabilize a society with endless poverty?

One of my facebook colleagues wrote that the plan was apparently to sell to the Chinese, if Americans could not afford to buy.

I replied:

I did some quick checking on the Internet. The US consumer economy is approximately 11 trillion dollars a year. The Chinese consumer economy is approximately 3 trillion a year. Because there are so many more Chinese, the spending money per person is a lot lower, and a lot of that spending money is going to go (I assume) to food and housing. This may help US agribusiness, but not other US companies. The European Union is currently collapsing, and most of the rest of the world is poor. The US is 25% of the world Gross Domestic Product. Lose that and you lose a lot of buying power.

I don't think most business people and politicians are able to think about economics. This is also true of most economists, who are utterly clueless about how economies work.

So, am I able to think about economics? Well, I am better prepared than economists, because my training is in accounting and science fiction. Accounting is about real money in the real world; and science fiction (at its best) is about extrapolating the present into the future and seeing the possible results of present action. Good science fiction, like good accounting, is rooted in reality.

The economist James Galbraith was recently in Greece. He said one of the things he noticed were all the elderly people going through garbage, looking for something to eat. He also noticed all the empty storefronts. This is the end result of austerity economics.

Greece has some special problems, because it belongs to the European Union and does not have its own currency. But this could happen in any country, if the government decides that spending must be reduced and the social safety net is not needed. Societies are complex and fragile. It isn't that difficult to break one apart.

Urban Spawl 2

I grew up in a city and have always lived in cities. This may be one reason why I never got a a driver's license. My mother didn't drive, which is another reason, though not driving is really eccentric in my generation. I have never liked cars or suburbs. Cars are way expensive and a crazy way to move people around in an urban area. America makes transportation, which should be a public good, a private expense -- though the highways are a public expense and an ugly blight on the landscape. Imagine if we had the old trolleys I remember from my childhood, instead of vast concrete structures that cut the city into pieces.

Suburbs are ridiculous. In the Twin Cities Metro Area, developers have paved over farms, marshes and woods to create ghastly housing. The farms provided food. The marshes soaked up runoff water. The woods absorbed carbon dioxide. The suburbs -- mostly bare green lawns, roads and ugly houses, isolated in the middle of their lawns -- produce nothing useful, except work for developers and highway builders and money for the Koch Brothers' oil company.

According to AAA, the average cost of owning and operating a car is now $760 a month. The cost of a monthly all-you-can-ride card for Twin Cities Metro Transit is $85. This is for the expensive card, which allows you to ride express buses. But if the buses don't run where you live or work, you need the car, however expensive it may be.

If we are going to survive in the modern world of global warming and peak everything, we need dense housing and mass transit.

Urban Sprawl

Paul Krugman has an article on urban sprawl and how hard it is on working people who rely on mass transit.

Here are my comments from facebook:

I don't drive, which means I have organized my entire working life around mass transit, though Patrick does drive and has a car. We use the car for shopping and trips out of town, and Patrick used it for his job, before he retired. We always lived within the Twin Cities, near bus lines that ran fairly frequently. Not everyone can do this, especially now, when most of the apartment building and conversion in the core cities seems to be upscale. People are pushed out into the inner ring suburbs, because that's where they can afford to rent. They may move to find better schools, though my friends with kids have them in St. Paul schools and are mostly happy with the schools. I don't know how much education drives movement any more.

A friend was talking about how bad bus service in the Twin Cities is. I don't find this, but my standards may be low. But there is no question bus service in the suburbs is awful. I live close to multiple lines, some of which run every 20 minutes through the weekend. The places I am likely to want to go -- the centers of the two cities and the commercial areas leading out of the centers, such as Grand Avenue in St. Paul -- all have good service. There are buses running to the suburbs which run ONLY at rush hours on week days. If you miss your bus, there may not be another one.

Poor working people are in a bind. If they live in the Cities, they may need a car to get to jobs in the suburbs. If they live in the suburbs, they may need a car to get around at all. But cars are expensive, and affordable cars are likely to be unreliable.

I can survive without a car (a) because Patrick has a car and (b) because we can afford to live in the city next to good bus lines and (c) because I have always been able to find jobs in the Cities and on bus lines. Not everyone can.

Reviews

I got another review of Big Mama Stories at Strange Horizons. All the reviews thus far (two in Locus, one at Tor.com, plus Strange Horizons) say the stories are a tad bit too didactic, though the reviews are mostly positive.

I mentioned this to my brother. He said, "The stories are what they are. If people don't like this kind of story, they won't like these." Which I thought was a nifty way to describe the book.

There is also a nice and intelligent reader's review at Amazon.

Do reviews matter? They matter to me. I pay attention to recommendations from reviewers I respect, and I pay attention to blurbs by writers I respect.

The next question is, what is wrong with didactic? There is a long tradition of stories with morals. AEsop's Fables, for example. Fairy tales and folk tales can be anarchic, as in trickster stories. They can also have straightforward morals. Be kind of old people and animals, especially if the animals can talk.

Pacific Rim Again

I am clearly not able to let go of this movie. So here is more from facebook:

The two bits of advice on how to watch Pacific Rim I have encountered are (a) pay attention to the visuals and (b) pay attention to the emotions. Don't pay attention to the idiotic script. Patrick just asked, "Then why have the idiotic script?" I think he's right. The movie would have been much better with no words at all.

It needs to be restored as a silent movie, like Abel Gance's 1927 tour de force Napoleon. A music sound track would be fine. There was one on the restored version of Gance's movie which I saw I think in the 1980s. But I wouldn't go with silent movie subtitles. The movie needs to be entirely without words, except for the credits.

One of my facebook colleagues suggested that the movie should just be a series of fights between monsters and robots.

I answered:

That's pretty much what it was. But there was silly stuff involving people and words that got in.

The people could be left in, moving around to dramatic movie music. But no words!

Patrick said, "It would be like Koyaanisqatsi."

A 1982 movie that consisted of images and music by Philip Glass. Well, yes. It would sort of be like that. Only with robots fighting monsters.

Pacific Rim

I have now seen Pacific Rim. I think it may be the most boring movie I have sat through. At one point I took off my glasses so I wouldn't be able to see the screen. I considered going to sleep.

The script writers should be shot for crimes against plot, dialogue, art and science fiction. Back in the day, you could give Jackie Chan an escalator and something else simple -- a bag of groceries, an umbrella -- and he could create a fight scene a hundred times as good as anything in this movie.

The idea of huge robots boxing with monsters struck me as silly. And the fights were incoherent and dull and endless. Think of that amazing fight scene late in the original Matrix, with Neo almost dancing around bullets. That's what you get when a Chinese martial arts expert designs your fights. The fight scenes in Pacific Rim appeared to have designed by small children or possibly dogs.

Patrick adds, "What do you have against dogs?"

I liked John Carter. I liked Thor and Captain America. I didn't like The Avengers, but it was one of those movies where I was interested enough to try and rewrite the script in my head. Too much fighting and not enough character development, but Joss W. was stuck with too many superheroes. There wasn't much he could do about that. And the obvious solution -- to make the movie about Loki and his conflict with Thor, because Loki's envy and villainy is what drives the plot -- would have left the other heroes in the background.

I knew everything ahead of time in Pacific Rim, including most -- if not all -- of the dialogue. Not only was it predictable, it was stupid. I have large parts of Jane Austen memorized. But hearing the lines again gives pleasure. Surprise is not essential. But decent writing is.

I went with Lyda Morehouse and Sean Murphy, both of whom liked the movie. Lyda said it was a movie about robots and monsters fighting, and it worked well as that. She also said it was an homage to Godzilla movies and the kind of anime that is all fighting. I have to defer to her knowledge.

Bird Listening

A couple of days ago, I came out of my building and heard a liquid bird song coming from a tree in front. I'm terrible at bird calls, so I had to look for the bird, which proved to be a robin.

The winter bird calls around here are the gurgles of pigeons, the cawing of crows and the chip-chip-chip of English sparrows. It's a pleasure when the robins and house finches arrive in the spring.

I should learn more calls, but I mostly would not hear them. Still, there are times, especially in the spring, when I hear calls I don't recognize. They are migratory birds, warblers, too small for me to spot.

Story! Picture!

Ouch. My page views were down to 48 yesterday. So here is a picture. Pictures make a blog more attractive.
This goes on sale July 23, and it contains one of my stories, a hwarhath Sherlock Holmes story. Dozois puts together a good anthology, so you might be interested in getting the book.

I don't usually self-promote. Not much, anyway. But Dozois is recruiting authors to spread the word. Since he buys my stories, I want his anthologies to do well.

More on Auks

I decided I need to know the Icelandic word for auk. It's alka, with an accent over the 'a' which means it is pronounced 'au.' Auk came into the English language from Icelandic or Norwegian. The Icelandic word for great auk is geirfugl, which means 'spear bird.'