Benyakir B. Horowitz's Blog: Ben's Thoughts, page 2

Driving Past the Cows was Just Awful

Hello everyone,

I haven't written on here for a long time, it turns out. Most of my life is just reading, writing and doing all the other stuff in my life (like eating), so I don't have much time to ruminate on this (that pun was entirely intended). Claudia and I started on our road trip, and we've seen a lot of cows.

We left from Boulder and got into North Platte just a few hours ago. Road trips are supposed to be the big thing. There's On the Road (I love that feature) and stuff like that. it's a part of the American spirit and experience... kinda. The vast expanses of our empty space inspires. In fact, today I was thinking about how I'd write a book where a murderous truck driver was the protagonist, maybe inspired by the Green River murderer. I'll add it to my list of ideas.

The big highlight of our trip so far was not long after crossing over into Nebraska we came across a humongous cow pen (or maybe slaughterhouse). For about the next mile or so, our car stank like cow farts and general hay/muck. That's how it goes on I-76.

Also, Omaha is much bigger of a city than I thought it would be. I expected something like Cheyenne, AKA not much.

While driving, I was trying to explain to my wife the difference between pulp fiction and not. As someone once told me (and I never bothered to confirm it or research it because why should I?), pulp fiction was written on paper made from pulp because both the script and what it held up were equally ephemeral. It seems that by far what sells the most (or are the easiest to write) are pulp fiction books.

There is a funny comment in Foucault's Pendulum that I read recently, the difference between what they call SFA (self-financed authors) and normal ones. The SFAs use vanity presses and so on because they want to show the book off, that they are a writer. And a normal one writes for the pleasure of it. Well, obviously, there's another type, the ones that seek profits. I don't think in the 70s or 80s there was such a thing as an author that wasn't either published by a big house or through vanity presses.

I'd prefer to think of myself as someone who didn't write pulp fiction, but maybe unintentionally (or because of my inability), I am and shouldn't think myself above anyone else. As I see it (in a somewhat idealistic way, I guess), I would write forever and ever without selling a single book if that was in any way a maintainable lifestyle. I do need to put bread on the table, and my style of slow releases and not conforming to the conventions (such as designing the book covers in house) are hurting the bottom line. I wonder if there will ever be a day when not only I don't have to worry about this but a new writer who wishes to create.

And the funniest part? I will continue to produce because I like doing it, but I am forced to care about my popularity. What crap! I wouldn't have become a writer if I cared about people liking me.

Have fun for the next few months until I post again (or a few days, depending on how inspired I am),
Ben

The Flying Cardinal Punch

Hello all!

I finally had some free time, so I wanted to talk about what is my favorite example of deceptive advertising. It’s from the movie of Angels and Demons. For those of you who don’t know, the process of making a trailer for a film is usually done by a specific agency that does it for a ton of movies. The studios will send them the whole movie, and they choose bits and pieces out to make something that attracts moviegoers. They often will reveal the plot or include scenes that are deleted to make it more interesting. So all in all, you expect a sort of commercialism from them that diverges greatly from artistry.

That leads to what is the greatest example. I call it greatest not because it’s the most misleading (though it is greatly so), but because it’s the most entertaining example I’ve ever seen. My friend, Andy, and I still talk about it to this day.

So here’s a link to the trailer. I’ll link the juicy part specifically as at starting at 1:44. What I’m talking about is at 1:47 precisely. It looks like a cardinal is taking a candelabra, jumping and performing the infamous ‘flying cardinal punch.’

Now, we had both read the book because we had gone through middle school and high school when the Da Vinci Code was so popular, and we got onto Angels and Demons too. This did not happen in the book! There was no amazing Kung Fu from 90-year-old men (the actor is much younger, however everyone who works in the Vatican must be ancient), though there was the Hassassin (who gets removed from the movie anyway) who did some crazy stuff. So when we went to see the movie, we kept our eyes peeled for the scene. It must be spicy, at least that’s how we reasoned.

Turns out it was just the dude tripping, though the context of that is slightly interesting. The antagonist (as-of-yet unrevealed to be the helper Langdon has) has pointed at the Cardinal in question and yelled ‘illuminatus.’ Apparently, to get someone shot in the Vatican, all you have to do is yell that.

Anyway, they had made the trailer by completing gutting the context. Color me disappointed. There are few films that do geriatric martial arts right, and it left a sour taste in my mouth.

Have a nice Tuesday,
Ben

About Intelligences in Sci-Fi

Dear Readers,

What you're about to read is a bit stream-of-thought and not well-formatted. I will do some editing, but don't expect good formatting or readability.

Now, I've always been a big fan of Sci-Fi, and I've been recently listening to podcasts. I also am a living, breathing human being, a surprise to some of you and most of all myself. Recently, I've seen a lot of trends I see as, if I have no better word, facile.

To explain better what I mean, I heard something similar to the idea that because the universe has no end goal, humans have none, when we develop A.I. it will have one. It will be an artificially constructed organism so therefore it will be better than us. And this gets repeated often, life will be measuredly ameliorated, it will be worse, it will be this or that. It will always be stable and fixed and able to be understood very easily.

There is no possible conception of such a mind as either wandering, incapable of conceiving of an ultimate goal (I guess I love the character Dr. Manhattan). Beyond that, there's the Hawking hypothesis (R.I.P.) or Terminator that the A.I. will want to kill us. Okay? Why are people so self-centered that they think that 1. other intelligence will want to kill us, 2. another mind will think like us and 3. we will be in competition for the same resources?

I think the logic goes like this: intelligence tends to conform to certain properties. All forms of life seeks to reproduce themselves and do what they need to further that goal. That's a bit simplistic, but it cuts to the chase, right? Hypothetical reader and straw man, I can hear you now, saying 'but that isn't true. First off, what about pets? And second off, what about people sacrificing their lives to save others? Third off, yada yada yada,' and you're correct if you understand me in the very literal sense which is not unreasonable given the types and amounts of popular discourse these days using those same words to mean a different thing than their original and my meaning. Anyway, we do that, us humans too, on a societal level sometimes, on a familial level (like the all-too-popular in movies man who pushes others out of the ways of cars but dies in the process) and on a personal level. It's the same phenomenon, different ways its manifested in a complicated monkey brain.

But I don't agree that intelligence and intelligences will always seek the same things nor conform so easily. It's not so far-reaching and incomprehensible to postulate that the human brain is complicated and doesn't work in what we would consider a 1:1 need to calculated response level like we would consider if we were macroeconomists. Demand doesn't perfectly match supply, nor do people pay according the market value of a good.

Let's face it, humans are irrational and so is human civilization. We pretend we're not, but everything we do is based on some cause creating an effect we either deem undesired or whatever. My point isn't that there's no reason behind things like superstitions but that they often get paved over.

I'm going to go on a tangent about God, and it'll eventually get back around to the point. Thank god I no longer am writing for school so I can just say that and not worry about it. Anyway, I am a spiritual person, but only in my way which isn't the way most people say it. I was raised Jewish and no longer adhere to it because of human intolerance, and my studies and thoughts have lead to two fatalistic conclusions: 1. everything happens for a reason, but it doesn't have to be a good one and 2. God has no connection to humans or our world.

Those words don't accurately describe what I want, but there's no better way to say it shortly, and so for lack of verbiage I say nothing. Let's start with the latter. In a simplification and stupidification of Buddha, caring about something makes you suffer. But I'm not a Boddhisatva or capable of pretending that I don't care about things. I have a wife, a family, books, my mind, all things that I care about greatly. But I know that there is no truer statement, that I feel sad or happy because of objects and events in my real world. As much as I don't value physical objects (except for my laptop, a substitute for an unending pen and notebook), I need emotional ones. And there are people that are the opposite, that treasure physical objects over anything else, and so on and so forth because the human race is complicated and so varied that no one will even come close to knowing it all. Our emotions are a natural reaction to how those objects fare in the world.

But God isn't afraid of dying or any sort of thing, therefore they will not have those specific fears and desires. And so what does God cherish? Humans' cherishing of life comes from biological instinct and adaptations in our brains. A simple precept is that God doesn't have the form of a human so therefore wouldn't have the same brain structure. Before we impute qualities to the unknowable (don't put the blame on me for the description, it says as much in the Old Testament), we should look at the variety in human cultures. Therefore, what God cares about is nothing that we care about.

To quote Manual Automata:

It seemed to me like it was one of those things like ‘evil’ that is so simple for us to define in English, but it’s hard to say in other languages. The French have Méchant, the Italians Cattivo, and so on, but they’re not the same. Sadism, indubitably a French word because it names a timeless concept after one of their own, might be the only connection.

I really only know about 2 cultures, that's adding my fractions of Italian, French culture combined with my fraction of middle-class college-educated American living. However, such common words and ideas should be consistent if we're going to extrapolate about other intelligences. To fully comprehend God, we must fully comprehend all the possibilities of humans, and they're far more varied than that.

And so, what does this have to do with God not being attached to anything? To quote my hypothesis from the 7th episode of Down South Boulder Road that I didn't expand on: any connections or feelings about humans are entirely based on human intelligences. Ipso facto, a greater intelligence will be undefinable and unknowable to our minds because we are so varied in our little world, a greater intelligence is capable of so much more than we can imagine.

As Shakespeare said:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Okay, first thing second, things all happen for a reason. I believe in a deterministic world, and it's fairly obvious that all of modern science is built on the hypothesis of knowability, that A will cause B. It's the fundamentals of testing conclusions and data, repeatability, that sort of thing. However, most people understand A as one event or phenomenon and the same with B. My contention is that such a possibility is present in a laboratory or certain environment, however it's a shit idea for normal human-to-human interactions (which must be limited in my life given my use of that phrase). There is no A and B because there are a million events that happen between A and B that you cannot isolate any one of them without some sort of great intelligence. Again, I treat the idea in Manual Automata, quote:

“I was telling you,” she continued, “advances in statistical analysis. You have action A and reaction B. Everyone does things because it makes sense to them. They see action A, reaction B according to their perceptions. They create a duplicate pair of events, C and D. That’s a level of complication that you don’t need to know. Let’s say there’s a thousand people that see or undergo an incident. That’s two thousand plus or minus events because we have to calculate, then there’s a million because each of them react the others’ reactions. It’s like when people first started getting computers to run up and down the stock market, buying and selling options and shares of companies. It was a matter of predicting how people thought and did things.

Now, to bring this back to Sci-Fi and other people's writings and not my own book I'm able to control and manipulate as I please. One example I like is AI predictive writing, some examples are Botnik Studios such as made-up Harry Potter stories and such. I'm too tired to find other examples, but here's some stuff: the weirdness with deep-learning, and I'm sure you get the picture.

I can hear the straw man from before, 'but didn't you say it was wrong to compare AI to God which is the obvious implication of the last few paragraphs?' Well, yes, you're completely right. Thank you for letting me get to my next point. They are both types of intelligences, and any good prediction will be equally impossible. Why should an A.I. have an end goal in mind for humanity? Why should humans more or less behave the same with the same priorities in the future when human desires are the very opposite of static? After all, people want to have less children or more children, seemingly the basis for a biology-focused priority system, completely differently depending on context.

Now, my problem with most Sci-Fi is that it is either an allegory, a simplification of technologies, a what-if that simplifies the question or a host of other things. This is why I used the word facile because ray-blasters or warfare in space is absolutely ridiculous unless you wish the world to be different than it is. It's fantasy and adventure in a different context. I really liked Kindred as partly Sci-Fi because the mechanics of the time travel were completely irrelevant. In the future, just as now, only an engineer would obsess over technology. But it's there and has implications, and they shouldn't only be relevant when it's convenient to the plot. So, in my parting words: like, is it really Sci-Fi when it isn't a well-thought-out analysis of details but in the background or even foreground that makes sense, dudes and dudettes? And therefore, part of A.I. and aliens in Sci-Fi should be more of a probe of the unknown than an expansion of the known?

Deep thoughts, people.

Until the next time,
Ben

Edit:
I was writing this post at about midnight after a lot of driving, and I was pretty tired. I'm not going to edit any of it for posterity, but an example came to me last night. So police forces are using algorithms to predict where crimes will happen, and they're middling and getting better. It's not so hard to guess that these will get more sophisticated, and crime will be dramatically reduced. The only crimes that people will be able to continue to get away with are ones that are increasingly sophisticated or committed by those who have power. The second, corruption, is another thing to deal with. But petty crimes in a distant-future Sci-fi will have to be defined and committed completely differently.

My Inspirations

Hello all,

I've been taking a nice, long day off since I finished the latest rounds of edits, and, to be honest, I kinda got bored with all this free time. I'm used to spending all my time reading/writing/putting out fires/trying to do social media stuff. So I thought I'd tell you my inspirations for Manual Automata, my current Work-In-Progress and future works.

I have a strict policy of working on one thing at a time. In the past (not with writing), I've tried to multi-task, and I only satisfy myself with my work if I do one project at a time. However, I have about a dozen ideas all floating around for books. I plan to get them all down in book form, but it'll probably take me years.

I began writing in late 2016/early 2017 by writing down my life story. It wasn't very inspired, but it was what I knew. I had a few threads to follow, but I had no idea where to start or even how to consider plot elements or how to write an introduction or all those important details. So I just wrote and wrote endlessly, and I learned a lot. I mean, I had learned a lot already by writing my two theses, but they were academic non-fiction. I discovered how I'd write transitions and introductions and all those things: by not doing it.

I've always been a big fan of abandoning formalities. I think it really started when I got into linguistics, and their whole prescriptivist versus descriptivist bend influenced me. When I transcribed audio the first few times, I got a taste of how people actually speak. And it's nothing like writing. Add on top of that a preference for Realism and against Romanticism. I should write how things occur. The sounds, the emotions, the small imperfections, repetitions, ten millisecond pauses, hundred milliseconds-long awkward pauses, all that sort of stuff. What you don't pay attention to shouldn't be ignored. Life, communication is hardly ideal like people pretend to. Nothing corresponds 1:1 with something else.

I think living abroad complemented my realizations. Once I started to really learn Italian, I started to really conceptualize that a foreign language is a product of foreign thinking. If concepts like evil aren't able to be expressed in a few words, what did they really mean?

Anyway, back to my inspirations. My first book, Manual Automata, was the combination of two elements I had for two different stories. A man turning himself into a robot was the first one and is the driver of the action of the story. The second was great economic division. I covered where I got the latter idea on a Podcast so you can learn about it there! The former was because I kept having the feeling while looking for work that the world and most employers would prefer me and many of those who work minimum wage jobs to be robots that didn't complain and didn't have those stupid human needs.

My next book (the one I'm editing now), which will be coming out in the next few months hopefully, was inspired by an event in my life and my own revelations. It was a short period of my life, but one that has affected everything that came after it.

My third book has two inspirations, Tommynockers and a story I read online about a man's wife suddenly disappearing for a long period and coming back all of a sudden.

The point of me talking about this is that inspiration can come from anything at all. When I'm in a creative mood (usually in the process of writing a first draft), I frequently wake up to write something down. I'll dream, or an idea or configuration of words will come to me. Maybe a memory will surface from my youth or something of the like, and I write it down. Then in the morning I can figure out how it should fit in. I love dreams most of all because I believe confusion reflects human experience better than clean-cut words and well-structured sentences. And I think a lot of people (readers and writers alike) think formalism and formality are more important than an author using the forms of words as an expression other than their meaning. Also, I may just be writing badly.

Until next time,
Ben

The Writing Process of Manual Automata

Hi everybody,

If you're like me, then you're probably wondering, what's the writing process like? I knew I had no idea before I got into this all so I'll tell you, dear reader, what it's been like for me.

This is the basic outline:

1. Write
2. Edit
3. Publish

1. Writing

All of those are a bit more complicated than what they may seem. For the first one, it's a lot more than you just sitting down in front of a computer or a notebook or scratchpad with a pen and paper or, god forbid, a typewriter.

There are two main techniques for writing that can be further subdivided. You may want to consult someone about creative writing, as they'll know more. But here's how I see it: planned and unplanned. As in, write an outline, prepare your points of inflection of the plot. Most media (movies, books, comic books, etc.) will follow a 3-act structure, the one we all know. Some people will decide how long each section will be, how it's all going to figure out, whatever.

Obviously, from the way I write, you can tell I don't do that. I set myself the goal of 2,000 words a day. It can seem like a lot or a little, and I don't know if it's any better from an author's perspective. In 12th grade English, we could circumvent a lot of coursework by doing the NaNoWriMo, so, being the lazy student I am, I jumped on board. What I learned is it's about that pace that'll get you to 50,000 words in a month. Well, less, but 2,000 is a nice, round number and easier to figure out than 1,666. I'll tell you a story. At the beginning of 2017, I decided I was going to try this writing thing out, and I wanted to finish a book, all of it by the time I went back to Italy in July for two months to visit my wife's family. I started at 2,000 words a day, but I worried that I wasn't going to get done, so I started doing 4,000 to 6,000, even once 10,000. Let me tell you, that's a lot of words. 2,000 you can manage in about 2 or 3 hours if you're decently concentrated, 1.5 if you're on top of your game and know exactly what you're going to write. I worked non-stop editing and reviewing the book (with the help of my wonderful editor who volunteered to help me) for a few months, but I soon realized that what I'd produced was infeasible. I abandoned that, a book whose bits and chunks I use every day. I have a plan for how I'm going to get it all into shape, and expect the first part of it as my next book. The rest to come later.

For me, I have a beginning point and plot details in my mind. While I was writing my first book, Trump was just elected and soon to be inaugurated when I first started. For me, he influenced a lot of my thinking, and, as I said on the first of my podcasts, an author cannot write independent of their context. Well, maybe really well-researched historical fiction or whatever, but a person cannot create things without education and gender norms and culture, all of those unique to their lifetime and points of influence. For me, the biggest thing was the growing income equality. The Republicans were talking all about cutting the National Endowment for the Arts, and that really pissed me off because like hell I was going to become the next Stephen King and sell millions of books. All I want in life is to write, and I don't want to market myself, but, I'm gonna get to this later, you gotta. All I want is a solid paycheck to output work, but it ain't that easy.

I realized that what the world wants out of me is that I'm a robot. It's like the industrial-revolution-inspired schooling system. You're taught from an early age to sit around and perform the tasks you're told. I'm not complaining too much about that because, as it turns out, I'm remarkably good at that. When a class is all that, sitting for hours translating Latin poetry, figuring out integrals, filling in bubbles on a standardized test. But that doesn't make me a good human, I realized. I got accolades for it in high school and somewhat in college, but I got burned out so hard by my second year that I decided to go into Italian. But a lot of jobs want that sort of dependent thinking, do-this-so-that thought, and so it would be better if I didn't have any aspirations. If I were a robot, problem solved. It was the basis of the book, and everything else in Manual Automata is pontification based on it.

2. Editing

Okay, I told you about some of the writing process. It's just how I've always been. The first draft of anything I produce will be nigh-incomprehensible and badly worded. I power through it so I don't get disheartened and throw it all away. I think everyone goes through this, but there were no less than 10 times per book that I think 'this is all crap, I should throw this away and burn every copy of everything I've ever written. Who'd want to read this garbage? I should just sign up for Computer Science classes and try to work in an office because I suck.' And, until I make it big or famous, that will probably be true.

Anyway, this writing process of getting down one bad copy before I weasel out of it is how I've done every writing assignment in my life. So the editing process will take 3-4 times longer to complete than the act of creation. I wrote Manual Automata between July and August of 2017, and it was available to buy December 28th. And a lot of that was editing. I think the final draft was given in November of 2017 right before Thanksgiving.

The process went like this, a few days after completing the first draft (I took a break so I wouldn't have a mind still polluted by the writing process), I went through and took out the things that made me flinch the most or were internally inconsistent. The last thing, consistency, is incredibly important and hard to get. During the writing process, I'll often get an idea of what to put in a chapter that I've already written, so I'll go in an put it in. However, I don't remember if I've already discussed that point or not.

The first edit took the book down from 110k words to something like 95k. And believe me, all those removals were important.

Then I gave it to my editor, she read through it, bounced it back to me with changes. I changed it, bounced it back to her. We repeated this process like six times or something. In total, I've read my own book about a dozen or more times. Every author that you've ever read has probably done the same thing. At least. The longer the work, the more times you have to edit. It grows exponentially.

3. Publishing

So, I'm only halfway involved with the publishing part. Remind yourself, I'm an independent author, so I don't have to go through the whole querying process. I tried it for my first book that I never got through, and it sure sucks. I only got some rejection letters about six months after I submitted them! Some of them haven't reached me yet.

I spent a lot of time meditating on this whole part because, well, if I were to admit it, I hate the idea of kowtowing to someone who doesn't understand my passions or whatever. I want my books to be more or less an expression of myself. And I don't think I'll ever be a really cool artist or artiste or whatever, but I like to imagine myself similar to the people who produce the kitschy mid-west folk art. Not in theme or ideas, but they're really saying something about themselves, almost not truncated. I admire them a lot.

So the publisher I work with, we use Lulu. Then begins the not-so-wonderful part. There are a lot of things that you also have to do that have nothing to do with writing. You have to submit your book for book reviews if you want to get people to look at them. Well, nicely enough, there are a few that help you. Some of them require that the book isn't published yet (whoops, we found this out afterwards) or within 90 days of publishing, which is nice. There are some where you have to pay a decent chunk of change. It's not fun.

Well, if you want to do something more organic, there is social media. So I've had to write about 5 book descriptions and 5 bios for Goodreads, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, and the list goes on. You have to network with people. Ugh, I despair at the thought of having to be social. I signed up to be a writer so I could stay home in my underwear with a scowl on my face and ordering my wife to bring me a bowl of cheerios.

Well, I'm running out of ideas of what to write, so tell me if you have any questions, even you, at this later date who reads this years after I publish this blog post. Maybe in the year 2685, when the world's run by an intergalactic council of the big 5 publishers, you'll have a question of why anyone would defy them and not work under their umbrella. You can ask my computer-generated replica of a consciousness it.

Until next time,
Ben

Manual Automata's Cover

In my first post, I want to write about what inspired the cover of Manual Automata, drawn by my wonderful editor and publicist, Gloria T. August according to my designs. Here, how about an image so we can see it directly?



The first thing that comes to your mind is, what the heck was Ben thinking? Well, to answer that question, I'm going to start off with a few things.

There are two main parts to the image, the brain and the trailer. They both are plot elements to the book. The brain, half-completed, is about Jules' transformation of self into a robot and his conflict about sacrificing his humanity to achieve his goals. The trailer is featured in a scene and a qualifier of modern life.

Next part is the green tint to the image. It's not exactly aesthetically pleasing, but it's far from generic. In a movie you'll often see a shortcut the director puts in. For example, a cross pendant around a character's neck can represent godliness, faith, their beliefs or even hypocrisy. The intent was to show a physical phenomenon, the degradation of the environment and general pollution as well as the corresponding human feeling of disaffection and desperation in the face of a degrading world so far beyond caring about them that they might as well give up hope.

I hope that wasn't too depressing, and I hope that it helps you understand the work and the frame of mind that it was written with.

Good reading,
Ben