Mark W. Tiedemann's Blog, page 91

Reaction

I should probably wait a few days or weeks before writing my reaction to last night's national insanity exhibition.  But I doubt I'll "level out" on what has happened.

First off, what part of Mr. Obama's  "fixing this will take a long time" did people not understand?  Did anyone seriously expect all this mess to be cleaned up in two years?  Or is it really just that people are only concerned about their own situation and everyone else can just—well, worry about their own situation?

Let me say this slowly, so there can be no misunderstanding:  we have been digging this hole for 30 years.  It will take a bit longer than two years to climb out of it.

Thirty years, that's right.  Since Reagan.  Dear Ronnie, so classically American in so many ways.  Carter began the deregulation frenzy with oil, hoping the oil companies would plow their new profits into development of American resources in the aftermath of the first major OPEC embargo.  Reagan was surrounded by the rest of the business community, who whispered into his ear, sweetly, oh so sweetly, "Take the restraints off, Ronnie, and we will build you that shining city on the hill all those Moral Majority types are going on about."  So he did.  And that started it.

(Unlike others, I am inclined to believe that Reagan was naive about this.  I think he was from that generation that actually trusted people of a certain stature, relied on native patriotism, and so was completely blindsided by the corporate vampires who talked him into deregulating damn near everything.  I think he expected them to reinvest in America, not start the whole ugly off-shore account boom and the outsourcing of American jobs.  Inclined, I say, but not willing to give him a pass.  Because along with that, Reagan oversaw the foreign take over of hundreds of American businesses, many of which were involved in basic research and development and manufactured things vital to our national interest.  Throughout the 80s, one company after another was bought by Japanese, British, German, French, and occasionally Korean interests and the result was a serious hemorrhage of expertise, know-how, and manufacturing capacity, not to mention the loss of good-paying, high-tech jobs as those businesses were all moved out of the United States and to their new host countries.  Why did he do this?  Because Reagan was a traditional conservative who believed government should have nothing to do with the private sector business, either pro or con, and he refused to established an "industrial policy" that would have protected these businesses.  At the time there was a tremendous wave of sentiment opposed to protectionism, which smacked of a "liberal" or at Democratic program, but in hind sight clearly was all about keeping international boundaries as open as possible for the multinationals that have presided over the disemboweling of our economy.)

Deregulation has been the culture in Washington ever since.  And while that has been the case, we have been through bubble after bubble after bubble.  Most people may be forgiven for not understanding what exactly is going on—after all, in the case of derivatives, even the people who write them admit they don't understand how some of them work—but basically we have permitted large financial institutions to use more and more of the money with which they are entrusted—yours, in other words—to make bets on the rising and falling of markets, which generate virtual dollars.

Now, virtual dollars don't actually damage anything unless you try to turn them into real dollars—by, for instance, taking your paper profits from such instruments and using them as if they are real and buy into other instruments.  Or just by removing what the stock market says is yours and putting it into a regular bank account (protected by FDIC).  Now you are removing real money from the economy upon which the bets are placed.  Taking it out of play that way means more virtual money must come into existence to fill the void and keep the markets up.

Someone has to actually pay real money into this at some point and that's where the bubbles run into problems, because in real terms there isn't actual capital—in the form of products or real estate—sufficient to cover the bets.  The bets are all made on credit and when the interest on the loan can't be met, real money has to be brought in to bolster the bubble—hence liquidations occur, foreclosures occur, inflation occurs, defaults happen.  Defaults are the worst because it is an admission by one or more players that they know the money isn't there.  Panic ensues, more and more players try to turn their virtual money into real money, but the only place they can get real money is out of the accounts made up of real things—other peoples' homes, bank accounts, businesses, jobs…

Sounds silly expressed this way, but this is what has been going on for 30 years, and the continual growth and sapping of the economy has left us ragged.  It can't be sustained now.

One might complain that we oughtn't to have done all that betting in the first place, but that doesn't get you far.  We did it.  Why?  Because we could.  From the top all the way down to the bottom.  Gambling.

Not just the big banks, although the damage done by their gambling is the most visible and sweeping, but really they couldn't have done it had it not been the national pasttime on the individual level.  Young graduate gets his (expensive) degree with loans he has to repay.  Out the door and into the wilderness, he snags a job that pays a salary his father or grandfather would have found unimaginable at the same time in their lives.  But they likely didn't have the same debts to service from day one, they or their parents, had to shell out money from savings to get them through college or they themselves worked to put themselves through semester by semester, paying as they went.  That is, if they went to college at all, which has itself become a symptom of the new era because the preceding generations fueled the notion that their children would not have to work with their hands and would have degrees.  (We have a dearth of tool and dye makers, machinists, practical engineers, carpenters, etc because of this sincere and short-sighted dream, which has in turn made us less competitive in a world where actually making things is still necessary.)  But does the newly-minted grad work to pay off his existing debt?

No.  He gets married, buys a house, two cars, maybe a boat, has a couple of kids and starts their college funds.  All on credit.  Now on top of the students loans, he adds all this, so he goes to his new boss and says "I need a raise" and because thousands of these people are doing this, companies start going into overdrive to (a) cover the expenses and (b) find ways to cut costs to remain profitable.  And while all this is going on, health care costs rise, competition becomes more cut throat, forces companies to load on more debt to make them unattractive to larger companies seeking to buy them and gut them.  But the extra debt means they then have to cut more expenses and the new grad gets fired in a wave of cut-backs.

And on and on.  The simple truth is, you cannot have everything right away, but we have convinced ourselves we can and, more than that, it is our right.

The overburdened system, staggering under the load, collapses when the financial market goes into one of its periodic fluctuations and the people with real money at the top pull out to wait for "an adjustment" and cause the ruination of marginal enterprises…

I could go on.  All this is the result of the government being stripped of its power to say No to the betting.  The predators at the top are the worst because they know exactly how this works and always walk away intact, leaving a trail of debris behind them, looking for the next bubble.

Yet people seem not to understand that the problem isn't that companies can't make enough money but that they can't finance the virtual economy and survive.  They can't gamble.  They can't do what they're supposed to do in the financial equivalent of Dodge City.  Where there is no law there is chaos.  And chaos is what we have.

So the Democrats failed to fix a three-decade-old problem in two years and the voters threw them out of power in a fit of pique.

Of course, this was after roughly 41% voter turnout nationwide.  Had the turnout been the same as 2008, which topped 60%, we might not be looking at an insane outcome.  Once more, we do not so much have majority rule as minority veto.  Given how close some of the races were, this means Republicans have won we a bit more than 20% of the eligible vote.

Twenty percent.

It is tempting to do a Pilate and walk away.  What is it with Americans and their aversion to participate in their own destiny?  A question perhaps never to be answered.

But maybe this is a good thing.  I'll look at it that way.  This crop of Republicans has two years to prove they can do this better than the Democrats.  (And believe me, I don't think much of the Democrats, but at least they were trying to spend the money where it mattered—here in the country.)  Maybe after they fail, they'll be tossed out on their ear again.

Not, however, for the right reasons.  It will be once more an exhibition of the only true national party—the Where's Mine? Party.  Because that's all this was.  People pissed that Happy Days aren't here after waiting two whole years!  Wahhhh!

If the Republicans manage to roll back the new regulations and head us back into the economic environment conducive the great betting game that produces virtual money, we will be…I can't honestly think of a clearer image, so forgive me…fucked royally.  The gap between rich and poor has been the direct result of power brokers throwing dice with the personal goals and lives and dreams of millions of people who do not have the power or the savvy to tell them no.

I guess you can tell how I feel about this election.  The monkeys are back in charge of the zoo and it's bananas for everyone.  Don't like bananas?  Tough.

Hallowe'en Is Over…Time To Clean Up

Soulard Past

Was a time I wandered around with a camera around my neck and acted like the "cool photojournalist" type.  Another aspect of "career" I never acted on in any serious way.

Except the work.  I loved the work.  The images were all.  (I'd read about Alfred Eisenstadt walking away from his position at LIFE Magazine when a new batch of editors started cropping his photographs with scissors.  He told them it was in his contract that they run his work as he gave it to them, but they said "Pop, it's just not done that way anymore, you gotta get with the times" and he said "No, I don't" and quit.  Part of me thought I'd gotten the jump on that kind of scene by not even taking the job in the first place, but at the end of the day I was just a stupid kid who didn't do the work to find out how to do the work.)  I was very serious about the work itself.  I'd stay up late in my darkroom, music playing, working in oversized trays.

I didn't pay nearly as much attention to the color side as maybe I should.  I did a lot of it, but I never took the same time to learn how to print color as I did black & white.  Now I'm going through these old transparencies and thinking, hmm, not terrible.

Example, from Soulard's Market.

Antoine Soulard was a refugee from the French Revolution who settled in St. Louis and became the first "official" surveyor for the village and surrounding lands.  The section of the city now occupied by this open farmer's market was once owned by him.  Later his widow "gifted" it to the city when they tried to make her fix the streets in her area.  She didn't want to pay for that, so she turned it over the the town, who then had to do the repairs out of general revenue.  (Republican thinking even before the city was even part of the country!)

Soulard's Market is on Broadway and part of the heritage of old St. Louis, even though it is still some distance beyond the borders of the original 1763 village.

I've worked this image over a bit to make it more, oh, photojournalistic.

Why I Am (Partly) Not A Conservative

I try to ignore Glenn Beck.  I think he's pathetic.  All he can do is whine about things he quite often doesn't understand.  For instance, his latest peeve has to do with being bumped out of line by science fiction.  Yeah, that's right.  Glenn Beck's book Broke has been number 1 on Amazon for a while and it apparently got beat out finally by a science fiction anthology.

His complaint that this is from "the left" is telling.  First off he's trying to make it sound like some profound philosophical issue, that a science fiction collection outsold his book on Amazon.  (He also noted that the Keith Richards autobiography bumped him as well and please note the twist he gives that.)

Why the Left?  Is science fiction a left-wing thing?  I know a lot of SF writers who style themselves right-wing, libertarian, conservative, etc.  Some of them are very good, too, and I have read some of their work with pleasure.  Unless they were writing from an overtly political stance, I found no reason to call them on their "rightishness" because they outsold another writer's work that might have been a bit leftish.  This is just a silly complaint and displays an obsession with partisan politics or just immaturity.  This is, of course, Glenn Beck we're talking about, who seems to find more reasons to evoke Nazi similes than any other pundit I know of and has occasionally shed tears over the abuse he sees our great country enduring from the left.

But this is ridiculous.  Because isn't this…I mean, Glenn, isn't this just the free market making itself heard?  Your book can't stay number one because that would belie the whole principle of competition you claim to believe in.  Everybody who works hard and honestly should have their shot at being number one for a little while and this anthology is a poster-child for hard work and perseverance because, well, it's self-published!  It doesn't even have a major (or minor) publishing house behind it!  It got there all on its own, man!  This is the flower of the free market!  David whupping Goliath's ass!  This should make you proud!

No, he berates it because it has to do with death or the culture of death, which he equates with left-wing politics somehow.  And for good measure drags Keith Richards into the whole death equation.

If the Right wants to know why people on the Left or even in the Center have no patience for them, this is ample explanation.  The expression  "Get a life" comes to mind.

I recall listening to Rush Limbaugh once trying to trash U2 on the air and managing to demonstrate his utter cluelessness and inability to deal in metaphor.  Is hyper-literalism symptomatic of right-wing thinking?  It must be, because literalism is where they get all caught up and their incompetence shows.  I listened once in complete dismay to Pat Robertson condemning the film Trainspotting for its "glorification of drugs" and I sat there dumbfounded wondering how on earth anyone could see that film as a glorification of drugs.  I remained baffled until I realized, based on a couple of other articles from fundamentalists and right-wing pundits, that in their view the mere mention of drugs, regardless of context, is glorification.  Somehow they could not see a film that takes a serious, unvarnished look at drug abuse as perhaps critical of the lifestyle.  I suppose because there was no father-figure character preaching in the film.

But it showed me another problem.  The possibility that an audience might empathize with the characters—not approve, because clearly in the case of Trainspotting approval is virtually impossible, but understand.  These are human beings, with a problem, certainly, but human beings all the same and maybe they deserve some sympathy, some help, some understanding.

Because understanding is not what they're about.  They don't want to understand —they only want to condemn that with which they disapprove.

Upon Obama's election and his early attempts to reach across the aisle and his calls to work together, Rush Limbaugh made a broadcast in which he declared that he did not want to understand, to cooperate, to reach across the aisle, to work together.  He flatly refused the idea that common ground could be found.  While I'm sure there are some far Left ideologues who feel the same way, I hear very little of that from most of the Left.

Let me be clear, I'm talking about the mouthpieces here, and by extension those who fawn over them.  I'm talking about the Hannitys, the Becks, the Limbaughs, the Robertsons, the Savages.

They have no depth.  No perspective.  They in fact seem to have no sense of proportion and certainly no grasp of anything but the plainest equations of Us versus Them.  Their comparisons are absurd and frightening, their intransigence at times borderline obscene, and the culture they would see dominant is inarticulate, graceless, and vapid.  Like their last president, W., they "don't do nuance" and it shows.

I can deal with conservatism.  I can even sympathize with some of it and agree with certain aims.  We spend too much, often regulations seem arbitrary and ill-conceived, and the tax structure is a Rube Goldberg agglomeration of bad compromises, loopholes, and penalties badly in need of revision.

I cannot deal with humorless, puddle-deep, anti-intellectual, squeamish petulance masking as political philosophy.  The Tea Party candidate for congress in Texas who declared that armed insurrection in the case that the midterm elections don't go their way is not "off the table" does not impress me as mature patriotism—which I'm sure it was designed to look like, the moronic conflation of the willingness to do violence with a twisted idea of "adult"—but as the posturing of a ten-year-old in a schoolyard showdown ala the Duke facing down the bad guy.

It is possible that these folks have been there all along, but when we had a Soviet Union and a global communist conspiracy to fix their attention we didn't notice them so much.  Since the Soviet Union collapsed and the only thing responsible government should have done was go around cleaning up the messes left over by all the proxy wars we'd fought with them since the end of World War II, these folks have had really nothing to vent their conspiracy-obsessed, uptight, puritanical faux-patriotism on.  It took a while for them to build an empire of disinformation and fear-fostering on the multitude of petty gripes and cultural shifts they rigorously and doggedly label Liberal or Left, even when those labels have nothing to do with the subject being so condemned.  9/11 was a gift to them, finally something to fix their attention on and get people stirred up to a rousing level of hyper-adrenalized nationalism—the politics of aversion carried to almost virtuoso heights.

At the end of the day, in all honesty, I have to admit that I cannot join with these people not so much because I disagree with their politics—I do, but not completely, and I find much that could feed a useful dialogue in some of their saner examples—but because I dislike them as human beings.  I don't know if their deep conservatism has made them such feckless mooks or if their culture blind puritanism has made them conservatives, but however it worked, the result is, to me, repulsive.  They seem compelled to slot people all the time, in this category or that; even when something goes the way they think it should, if it does so for the "wrong people" they're unhappy; and they have no sense of irony.

Really, Glenn.  You got bumped out the number one spot on Amazon and it's because of the Left?  Get a life.

Transparencies of Days Past

Gradually, given enough time, I'll both learn proficiency with the new digital medium and transfer my best images from nearly forty years of photography.  I've been doing this "in between" all the other things on my plate and it hasn't had top priority, but once in a while I find some old negatives or, in this case, transparencies that make me wonder, for only a moment, why I'm doing anything else.  I finish working something like this over…

…and I get a thrill such as I used to whenever I first made a new image that I thought was worth a damn.

What's fun now is  that I barely remember taking some of these photographs, but I remember them.  This was an abandoned house behind the property of the people I once worked for.  Furthermore, I shot this with my view camera, a 4X5 Linhof.  I very much wanted to do fine photography and I was raised on the idea that the f64 Group—which had members like Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Wynn Bullock, and others—were the gold standard.  Most of them shot with large format view cameras.  When I finally acquired one and started working with the format, I fell in love.

Negative size relates directly to print quality, that much is obvious, and I could make some very large prints from 4X5 negatives.  But the color work!  This was shot on a long obsolete Ektachrome, E3.  Through most of the 60s on until, oh, the mid 80s or thereabouts, amateur transparency film was E4.  That designates the emulsion type and the processing type.  E3 had been the studio standard for decades and even up through the mid to late 70s large format transparency film was E3.  I could process this myself at home, but it was a magnificent pain.  It required re-exposure part way through the process.  But it possessed a color saturation and vividness e4, as far as I'm concerned, never had.

This particular one, though, had problems.  When I pulled it out of the sleeve it was clear that I had probably been the one to process it.  The image was washed out, heavy in the cyan range.  It may not have been properly stabilized, I don't know.  But there was enough to it to make it worth scanning.

Once in Photoshop, I was able to revive the original color, much to my surprise, and the image is as sharp as one might wish.  I took it further by erasing a couple of superfluous details, ramping up the contrast a bit, then de-saturating it somewhat for a kind of "aged" look.  Little else was done.  The original exposure had captured everything I needed in good register.

The view camera kit weighed about thirty pounds and I lugged it all over for several years, trying to make "important" images.  A lot of it turned out to be magnificent garbage, but some…well, some came out not too badly.

You'll find this one and a couple others now on the Zenfolio site.  Enjoy.

The Celebration of the Book, 2010

I'm taking some time to put on my President's hat and talk about our upcoming event.

We're a week away from the Celebration.  October 23rd at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri.

If you've been reading this blog any length of time, then you know about my involvement.  For the last 8 1/2 years I've been working for it, trying to make it better, five of those years as president.  We've done some pretty cool things in that time.

The Missouri Center for the Book has, like most such organizations, been undergoing some ups and downs the last few years.  We have been reorganizing in order to be a more vital part of the literary and reading community in Missouri.  Among the things that we have done over the last few years is the establishment of the Poet Laureate office for the state.  We are instrumental in running the program and selecting the candidates for the post every two years.  The program has been very popular.  We also continue to run the state Letters About Literature Awards for students.  Every year we send representatives to the National Book Festival.

And we put on our annual Celebration.

There are more things we're planning for the future, but the Celebration is our signature event.  Public participation and support are essential.  While we are technically a state agency, we reserve no direct financial aid from the state, and must rely on people who appreciate what we do for support.  This year's Celebration is important for a number of reasons, but mainly public participation will determine what kind and whether we will have one next year.

So I'm asking people to come.  Money is fine, we can always use money, but we'd like to see a crowd this year.  We'd like to see you.  There's nothing like a roomful of warm bodies appreciation what's on stage to keep something like this going, to keep it alive, to keep it relevant.

Soon we'll be launching our new website, which will have blogs and discussion boards, and we can draw the whole state into a wonderful conversation about books and authors.  But even a healthy internet presence and participation by a big online community isn't the same as people walking through the door, sitting down, and listening to our authors and presenters.

So plan a weekend, show up.  And next year, we'll do it again.

56

It has been my practice to, as best as I can, as much as I'm allowed, ignore birthdays.  My birthdays.  I love the attention, don't get me wrong, but I have always been a bit nervous about attention, especially undeserved attention.  I mean, what the hell, it's just another day of the week, a point in the arbitrary cycle of time humans impose on nature, and I'm just passing through.  What's so special about that?

Birthdays are markers, to be used by people to order their universes.  It matters little to me that I am now 56 years old (fifty-six!  shit, how did that happen?  I was just…) but it matters to me how long I've had the life I have, the friends I have, have done the things I've done, and know the world as I do, and in that respect birthdays are just as important as any other marker.  It's an anniversary and if people want an excuse to say to each other "Hey, I'm glad you're in the world and that I know you" then by all means, birthdays are a good one.  The anniversary of one's advent into the world.

But fifty-six?  Seriously?  Damn.

Middle-aged.

At this point, I have to say, I've had a hell of a good time.  It didn't always seem so while I lived it, but in retrospect there is very little to complain about.  Most people have a list—you know, A LIST—detailing all the things they want to do.  Probably a goodly part of anyone's list never happens.  That trip to the Antarctic, hiking the Swiss Alps, seeing Europe, lounging on a beach in the Mediterranean…or more mundane things like, building your own house, learning to fence, owning a really frivolous car (just because), or playing in a band…lists contain a lot of wishes, some dreams, a lot of stuff that once we reach a certain age we realize we didn't really want to do after all.

I have a list.  There are things still on it that I want to do that I haven't and may never do.

But the number of things that I have done…

It's been a pretty good life to this point.  It would have been nice if this or that had gone differently and produced a better result, but the fact is I have done much of what I wanted to do.  I've photographed mountains, played in that band, met a lot of very cool people (and some not so cool).  I grew up blue collar not-quite-poor (and my parents worked their way out of that into a comfortable gentility) and managed to sabotage my own educational opportunities—which only means that where others went to college, I went to the local library—and yet I can count as friends a few of the best writers on the planet, a couple of top drawer philosophy professors, fine artists, and, most importantly, the best kind of friends anyone could hope for who are, regardless of any other merit, simply wonderful, decent people.

I've published books.  That's something that figured large on my list.  I've done it.  (I'd like to keep doing it, which is a problem right now to be solved, but hey…)

One thing on my list that I actually believed would never happen because I was such a screwed up kid, was falling in love with a woman who would be my best friend and staying with her for life.

I did that and there was a time I thought I didn't want that.

Kids are messed up.  They draw their images of potential selves from the world around them because, often, it's easier than sorting through the mass of conflicting impulses that passes for a psyche at that age.  So they end up "trying things on" and pretending to be various things at various times.  If they're lucky, they don't get stuck with something that doesn't work for them and grow out of it to find out who they really are.

(When I was a kid, that phrase was a prominent source of bitter discussion in my home.  "I don't even know who I am" was not a statement that got a lot of sympathy from my parents.  Firstly, they thought it was ridiculous—how could you not know who you are?  You live with you!  Secondly, they were Depression babies, and for many of them the necessity to grow up fast and deal with a world intent on crushing them materially allowed little time for esoteric self-contemplation.  Who you were was whatever you did to survive.  The luxury of taking the time to go on a discovery tour of your own self seemed absurd to them.  And yet, the fact is they often benefited from not having the time to toy with options—the crucible of life, as it were, burned away the unnecessary and left them only with what worked.  It resulted in a kind of admirable self-confidence if not the most sympathetic of personalities.)

I had a list as a teenager of all the things I thought it would be cool to be.  I've joked from time to time that, basically, I wanted to be James Bond.  (My teen years were the first periods of my life when I felt a little personal power.  I'd been a small, weakly child with what later would be termed Nerdy interests and it got me bullied, a lot.  Power was important to me and once I tasted it I wanted more.  James Bond was the dude, man.  Nobody screwed with him, he knew all the right lines, slept with all the finest women, and went wherever the hell he wanted to go.  Despite working for MI6, he was no one's tool, and that appealed powerfully to me.)

But I also wanted to be an artist.

So by the age of 21 I was a conflicted mess, pretty much worthless for anything long-term.  I was living a kind of life that seemed to be what I wanted.  I won't bother to go into details, but superficially it was almost everything I thought I wanted.

And I was lonely.

But I'd finally begun to write.  Interestingly enough, a pattern emerged from my early stories.  I had a number of sympathetic characters who were craving stability and opted for the security of life-long commitments.  Of course being adventure fiction I stacked the odds against their achieving it—and then having them triumph.  I still had no idea what I actually wanted, but clues were appearing.

There was a period of almost nine months when I totally overturned everything I thought till then I'd wanted.  I fell in love—deeply, so powerfully—and within weeks realized that I'd been doing everything wrong.

One of my annoying personal habits has always been to ignore the instruction book when learning a new thing and tackling the most complicated aspect of it first.  Headlong dives into top-level stuff, which leads to a lot of flailing, near-drowning.  Never walk when you can run and never play scales when Rachmaninov's Preludes are in front of you yearning to be played.  (The fourth print I ever made in my home photolab was a multiple collage ala  Jerry N. Uelsemann.)  So I tackled this the same way.  Overnight I walked away from the life I'd been living, made a commitment, and then tried to make it work.

It blew up, leaving a crater the size of my heart (at the risk of being a bit melodramatic) and I drifted back into a ghost-image of what I'd been before.

Then I met Donna.

Come spring, we'll celebrate 31 years together.  (Thirty-one?  31.  How'd that happen?)

She has backed me in everything I've ever tried to do.  I cannot ask for a better partner, and while many times things haven't been exactly pleasant, they have always been meaningful and suffused with the dream-stuff of reality at its best.

Turn around three times and now I'm 56.  I'm frustrated by many things right now.  But that is a direct result of being engaged in complicated, difficult, worthwhile stuff.

I'm in my last year with the Missouri Center for the Book.  Come March, per our by-laws, I leave the board (for a year, technically).  They elected me president in 2005.  Taking office, I found I had responsibility for an organization that was crippled, reeling, and about to lose its place in the world.  Now we manage the state Poet Laureate program, we've been conducting our annual Celebrations again, and we have direction.  We're about to become a membership organization and expand our outreach to various institutions and organizations around the state.  We're doing Cool Things.  When I leave, I trust the organization will be humming along nicely, all by itself.

I'm still looking for a new publisher.  My agent and I have just selected a pseudonym to market me under, since apparently my name is a negative in the marketplace due to some, er, problems with my previous career choices.  But I'm writing short fiction again.

Best of all, though, I have great friends.  My dad once told me that in life I'd have many acquaintances, but I'd be lucky to have one real friend.  Well, by that metric, I'm wealthy, because I have several real friends.  Starting with Donna, I can off-hand name Jim, Tom, Greg, Kelley, Nicola, Tim, Bernadette, Lucy, Terry, Lloyd, Carol, Carolyn, John, Nathan, Peter…

That's the short list.  Really good friends.

And on this day, I wish them all well, wish them the best, and thank them for being part of what has to date been a damn good life.  Thank you all.

(But, really…56?)

A Plague On Both Houses…With A Pastoral Addendum

Listening to election news lately is like keeping track of a Roller Derby game.  They keep going around the same circle, bumping into each other, occasionally shouting unsubstiated things—at each other and the audience—and by and large just getting in each others' ways.  If you like that kind of sport, it can be entertaining.  Otherwise…

So I've been working on new fiction and playing with photoshop and basically tuning it all out.  As much as I hate to say it, I already know that I'm not going to vote for any Republicans, and most of the Independents are seemingly farther right.  As much as I agree that spending is out of control, voting for the Republicans right now also brings a whole bunch of other nonsense into play that I just can't tolerate.  (I know, I should be tolerant, but after a while, stupidity is unsupportable, in the name of anything.)

What we seem to be seeing a lot of right now is some kind of principle that should have a name, basically a principle that half-measures are worse than leaving something alone.  The health care "overhaul" is unpopular.  Some of it deservedly so, but polls are showing that people are cherrypicking it—there is a lot that they like, but the total package sucks.  So they think.  Of course, premiums were heading no where but up, so most of us are about to end up without health insurance anyway, so you would think the cry would be for more controls, not less.  (Is anyone still so naive as to think that deregulation is a good idea?  Don't most people understand that the current economic fiasco is the direct result of NO REGULATIONS on key parts of the financial sector?  How is it they can come up with a thesis that says less will work any better?)  But it is fair to say that the compromises that resulted in the current law hamstrung it so badly that it may well be worse than nothing.  If Obama had forcefully backed single payer…

Of course, that scares people of a certain mindset even more.  Single payer!  That's Socialism!  Well, somewhat.  And so what?  If the end result is to provide good health care for as many of our people as possible…

But there's no point going over this again.  People may not say it, but they act as if they would rather die bleeding in the street than have the government in any way involved in their (nonexistant) medical care.  If we got the way the Republicans want to, that's pretty much what will happen.

Mind you, if people in general were willing to say "Let them die" if they can't pay for their own health care, then there would be some spine to the Republican position.  But we're not.  We take of people when we find them in serious straits.  And pass the cost on to those who can.  Increased premiums.  Why isn't this seen as a form of Socialism, only privately funded?  Why do we think Big Business has more moral authority in this than our elected officials?

Be that as it may, I don't much care right now.  I'm listening to all the campaigns and feeling more and more like Mercutio.  They either haven't the brains, haven't the guts, or haven't the ethics to represent me.  But I will vote.  Oh, yes.  I believe that if you don't vote you don't get to bitch.  And I intend to bitch.

Meantime, I'm playing with fiction and photographs.  After such a bit of spleen, here's something more pleasant to contemplate.  Enjoy.

On The Way Home…

Stopped in the middle of one bridge to do this shot of another, early morning Monday on the way home.

On The Road Part Two

A quick follow-up to my abbreviated MadCon report just past.  Harlan Ellison arrived at the hotel Thursday evening, around eight o'clock.  Only a few of us were in the lobby.  Allen Steele, Peter David, Donna, and myself.  Peter David's wife Kathleen and their daughter (who Harlan "terrorized" to our surprise and her later delight).  From that point on it became a really good experience.  All the rumors that had been floating around about Harlan's imminent demise proved exaggerated.  Though he didn't look his best—clearly he has been ailing—and he arrived wearing a sweatshirt and pajama bottoms (Pierre Cardin, as he repeatedly joked, since he wore them all weekend), as the weekend progressed he came more and more alive.

I have a couple of photographs of Harlan.  I will not post them.  Harlan has developed a deep antagonism toward the on-line postings that pass for "news" on the internet.  He loathes the practice of recording and uploading on the spot.  Someday, maybe.  The pictures are for Donna and me.

But I do have a shot—a bit blurry, not great—of one of my panels.

From left to right, that is  Gene Wolfe, John Krewson (of the Onion), Allen Steele, and Yours Truly.  I believe this was the panel on how we all got into writing science fiction in the first place.  Or just writing.

Saturday morning Donna and I drove down to the capitol, downtown Madison, for their semi-legendary farmers market.  It was brisk, but a bright, lovely morning, and we walked around among all the vendors.  I have a couple of shots from that, but not yet ready to post.  They will likely end up in my Zenfolio portfolio.

On the way home, however, we stopped a couple times to take shots of the sunrise.  We left the hotel at 4:15 AM and drove south into a wonderful morning.  At one of the first rest stops, I shot this.

Not the greatest work of art ever produced, but there are elements of it I quite like.  I may work on it further.

Anyway, it was a fine trip, in the best company.  Maybe I'll say more.  Later.

Or maybe not.