Pat Perrin's Blog, page 15

Jamais Vu

1987—Los Angeles, before PragMagic      We lived in a little house at the base of Mount Washington; at the top was perched the Self-Realization Fellowship. Its gardens are lovely, tranquil, and open to all. We loved to walk up there to retreat from that intense city, rest, and meditate. We were both working at Brain/Mind Bulletin [...]

Stories begin

1986—Pat     An ending. Three years of fun with literature and film and artworks and the writings of physicists, of making art and winning a couple of awards, of piecing thoughts together on paper, left me with a PhD in Art Theory and Criticism from the University of Georgia. My first degree in art, it marked [...]

Living Now

We have great news. Our forthcoming novel, Mayan Interface, has won the Silver Medal in the Adventure Fiction category of the 2021 Living Now Book Awards. Here’s a thought from the founders of the awards:  “Books are an important tool for gaining knowledge about life-improvement goals, and the Living Now Book Award results announcement is [...]

It’s All Story

Neofoxes may actually said to be specialists in one thing: Story. Telling, hearing, finding, living … Story. The first book we worked on together was PragMagic (Pocket Books, 1991). We distilled a decade of reporting that had appeared in Marilyn Ferguson’s Brain/Mind Bulletin, a newsletter that had become a clearinghouse for all kinds of research [...]

Concerning Height and Depth

Mutant foxes are shallow. Or so you’ve likely heard. It’s not a flattering generalization, and I wish people would stop spreading it around. But like most stereotypical notions, it has some basis in fact. As neofoxes hop about the cultural landscape, across all areas of speculation, creativity, and study, they cannot aspire to plumb the [...]

The More Things Change …

Pat and I really need to get down to business. As independent publishers we’ve got eleven books in print, and it’s time to start making money off them. A friend of ours, John J. Walters, was kind enough to send us a book to get started: Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed, by Patrick Schwerdtfeger. It’s [...]

Mutant Foxes

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

This aphorism by the ancient Greek poet Archilochus got quite a bit of currency during the last century. A lot of people asked whether, in the world of ideas, it was better to be a fox than a hedgehog.

As you know if you followed the polls, the 20th-century consensus wound up firmly in favor of the hedgehog. After all, the time had passed when one could be universally educated in all subjects and disciplines. There was too much stuff to learn about too many big things. Generalists didn’t stand a chance. The time of the specialist had arrived. And specialists are, by definition, hedgehogs—small, spiny, nocturnal, insectivorous, and extremely well-versed in one big thing.

Through the last phase of the 20th century and the first decade of this one, Pat and I defied this preference and steadfastly remained foxes—omnivorous, narrow-snouted, bushy-tailed, red-coated, and determined to learn as much stuff about as many big things as we could.

It’s been a risky and unpopular stance. Publishers, literary agents, and temp agencies have implored us to turn hedgehog. It’s been devilishly hard to make a living as writers, even though the keyboard long ago replaced the quill as a writing instrument. Worst of all, we’ve had to forego the hedgehog’s defensive maneuver of rolling up into a ball and pointing its spines outwards. Foxes are fatally furry and vulnerable to attack by parties of gung-ho specialists with their bugles, horses, and dogs.

But foxness wasn’t altogether a matter of choice for us. Call it ADHD if you like, but we are just not congenitally hedgehoggian. During our 20+ years writing together, we have published work about … let’s see …

… the Cardiff Giant, the American Revolution, radio and TV broadcasting, the Burr/Hamilton Duel, the Piltdown Skull, fractals, the Underground Railroad, the Declaration of Independence, the Shakers, g-forces, the American Civil War, Osama Bin Laden, addiction, mythology, nanotechnology, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, Deep Blue, the U.S. Constitution, lucid dreaming, Quakers, Spanish explorers, the U.S. Bill of Rights, the murder of Christopher Marlowe …

… just to mention a few topics.

We are not, of course, foxes of the old school (“paleofoxes”)—those fabulous panautodidacts ranging from Leonardo da Vinci to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Such metaphorical “true foxes” (figurative genus Vulpes of the allegorical Canidae family) were in-depth masters of all areas of knowledge. They became extinct in the middle of the last century, wiped out by sheer information overload.

But a few mutant foxes (“neofoxes”) have survived to enter the age of hyperinformation. We are masters of nothing and browsers of everything.

“But to what end?” you may ask.

Indeed, just what is a mutant fox good for?