David Erik Nelson's Blog, page 41

This really *is* endearing, in my humble . . .

. . . and reminds me about how awkward it is (was? will have had been?) to hang out with 12-year-old me.

A Conversation With My 12 Year Old Self: 20th Anniversary Edition - YouTube

*thanks for the tip, Susie in Milwaukee!*

If only there was a handy catchphrase for this system, where you put *debtors* in *prison* for being broke

Just in case it slipped past you in civics class, we outlawed debtor's prisons in the US because they were deemed absurd and inefficient. After all, a person locked in a cell clearly can do little to earn back the money he or she owes you.

We seem to have entered a patently bizarre headspace, as a nation, where we see an individual going broke not as an honored American tradition, but as a terrible moral failing. e.g., *All* of our "Great Men" hit the skids with one or more schemes. Just off the top of my head: Twain only finished Huck Finn because he'd lost a fortune, I believe on a compositor or typewriter scheme, and needed liquor money. Henry Ford and T.A. Edison likewise bottomed out several times before hitting their stride.

We've made it more and more difficult for individual humans to seek protection from creditors once they hit rock bottom, yet seem eager to bail out gargantuan proto-human corporate entities when they show egregiously--even morally ruinous--judgement.

What up with that, America?

Probation Fees Multiply as Companies Profit - NYTimes.com

It is, rather, about the mushrooming of fines and fees levied by money-starved towns across the country and the for-profit businesses that administer the system. The result is that growing numbers of poor people, like Ms. Ray, are ending up jailed and in debt for minor infractions.

“With so many towns economically strapped, there is growing pressure on the courts to bring in money rather than mete out justice,” said Lisa W. Borden, a partner in Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, a large law firm in Birmingham, Ala., who has spent a great deal of time on the issue. “The companies they hire are aggressive. Those arrested are not told about the right to counsel or asked whether they are indigent or offered an alternative to fines and jail. There are real constitutional issues at stake.”

. . .

“The Supreme Court has made clear that it is unconstitutional to jail people just because they can’t pay a fine,” Mr. Dawson [a Birmingham, AL lawyer and Democratic Party activist] said in an interview.

*thanks for the tip, cara!*

"I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script"

I initially clicked through on this because I thought it was one of those snarky Onion-esque op-eds where a wickedly privileged person is a totally dickweed about some really basic aspect of polite human society.

But Olson--who garnered an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for A History of Violence--ends up making a really good point about the vast bulk of folks who "want to be writers," which is that they don't seem to want to spend the bulk of their time reading and writing. It's like someone who wants to be in the NBA but doesn't spend the bulk of his time sprinting, doing pushups, or playing basketball. At any rate, a worthy read (that, I now realize, I'm about three years late in reading. *sigh*)

I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script - New York News - Runnin' Scared

And this is why I will not read your fucking script.

It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you're in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't.

(By the way, here's a simple way to find out if you're a writer. If you disagree with that statement, you're not a writer. Because, you see, writers are also readers.)

. . .

Which brings us to an ugly truth about many aspiring screenwriters: They think that screenwriting doesn't actually require the ability to write, just the ability to come up with a cool story that would make a cool movie. Screenwriting is widely regarded as the easiest way to break into the movie business, because it doesn't require any kind of training, skill or equipment. Everybody can write, right? And because they believe that, they don't regard working screenwriters with any kind of real respect. They will hand you a piece of inept writing without a second thought, because you do not have to be a writer to be a screenwriter.

Those "Operation Fast & Furious" guns used to kill U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry? They were legally purchased in Arizona

The truth about the Fast and Furious scandal - Fortune Features

Quite simply, there‚s a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.

. . .

"Republican senators are whipping up the country into a psychotic frenzy with these reports that are patently false," says Linda Wallace, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service's criminal investigation unit who was assigned to the Fast and Furious team (and recently retired from the IRS). A self-described gun-rights supporter, Wallace has not been criticized by Issa's committee.

For me, the real nut here comes in passing, near the top of the piece, where the writer (Katherine Eban) mentions in passing that the valiant efforts of the NRA have crippled simple gun-tracking measures, thus making it *easy and legal* for international criminals banned from purchasing guns in Mexico to do so in Arizona.

I'm a hobby shooter and a gun owner, and I guess I'm even a pro-Second Amendment kinda American, if you wanna force the issue, but still, I want to know:

What the *fuck*, NRA? Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? Your paranoid, pandering, pocket-lining pseudo-racist bullshit is *actively* undermining a sovereign nation's attempt to claw back control of the streets from economically motivated thugs. You are *creating* a situation in which international law would conceivably support Mexican drone strikes against Arizona gun shops. How the Hell does that safeguard my rights and freedoms?

(Incidentally, Eban's Fortune piece linked above and excerpted is itself highly contentious right now--but the Wikipedia article on the so-called "ATF gun walking scandal" is pretty even-handed and informative.)

*thanks for the tip, Miriam!*

Steampunks, we've got some 'splaining to do

In a nut-shell: An author named Lavie Tidhar (with whom, incidentally, Poor Mojo's Giant Squid and this fair weblog's core editorial staff share billing in the upcoming Steampunk III anthology) tweeted this the other day:

I see Steampunk as “Fascism for nice people”.

Hoo-boy did *that* piss folks off! There was the wailing and the groan and the gnashing of teeth and the boycott-threatening and the etc.

For context: Lavie is the author of at least three steampunk novels and more than few noted short stories, as well as non-fiction on steampunk as a genre. This specific tweet was kicked off by his brain while he was drafting "A Lexicon of Steam Literature of the Third Reich

" (scroll down to see it; the top of the page is Lavie's response to the teeth-gnashing wails, etc.) Now, Lavie didn't precisely go so far as apologizing here, but that strikes me as perfectly appropriate, because he doesn't really have anything to apologize for.

Listen: Steampunk sits on precarious moral foundations, and if you believe that part of the point of fiction is to write *moral* fiction--to speak to how humans *do* behave vs. how they *should* behave--then this is maybe sorta important. Science fiction/fantasy (and especially urban fantasy) notoriously have a Race Problem, which is that they kinda fail to acknowledge our real-world Race Problem. In terms of any *specific* story this is fine; no one wants every damn space opera to be a Very Special Episode of Diff'rent Strokes. But when you add it up, the general absence of an accurate treatment of race across the genre becomes as glaring as the sea of pasty white faces hunched over their keyboards.

*Pause.* Yes, I know, there are tons of counter examples viz. race in SF/F, even from the squarest, least offensive, most middle-of-the-road SF we've made. But, seriously, if someone says "You know, we're kinda all writing stories that somehow ignore the Western World's central conflict for the last several hundred years" and your reply is "What about Uhura! Star Trek had the first interracial kiss on television!" then you're sorta saying that the biggest accomplishment white male writers could imagine for an African-American woman in the distant future would be to get to voluntarily kiss a powerful white guy, which is . . . um . . . I mean, that's sort of insanely offensive. Or, more to the point, that's sort of *exactly what I'm talking about.*

All of this is magnified x100 in Steampunk, because we're *grounding* our stories in an America and Europe that was miserable to folks descended from Africans, crumbling for folks descended from Conquistadors, basically all but collapsed for the Native People of the Americas, contemptuous Asians and the Muslims responsible for the maintenance and advancement of human knowledge throughout the European Dark Ages, and on the verge of launching an unprecedented campaign to rid the world of every living Jew.

Which, in a way, brings us back to Lavie's little dieselpunk faux encyclopedia entry, linked above, which I urge you to read because it is *wicked* and *fun*!

In the end, no one is asking any of us to dwell on *any* of this. As readers, that's your prerogative. You work hard, and you just want to relax and read something fun. I get that. Lavie gets that. Everyone gets that. That's totally cool; go buy a different book.

But how in the world can you expect a human with a shred of conscience to dwell in that world for weeks, months, years--as a writer must--kitted out with a 21st century notion of justice and equality, and *not* address it at all, ever? And not even *acknowledge* it during his or her writing breaks? Why is the response to lash out and threaten that writer's livelihood, and that of other authors who happen to write for the same house? What is the terrible thing that Lavie is saying that shouldn't be permissible to say? That it might be a little gross to unquestioningly lionize a period where progress for the self-appointed "ideal" few was fueled by the blood of the "degenerate"?

I bring all of this up because I write fantasy and SF and steampunk in part *because* I can't help but talk about race and religion, and these are great places to talk about it. Most pale 21st Century Americans get super squicked out and quiet if you try and talk about the racial disparity in modern prison populations, but they can really dig in and talk a blue-streak if we talk about made-up persecution of androids. It might seem nuts, but doing the latter makes room in the conversation to talk about the former openly. I've spoken at steampunk conventions and always been shocked and gratified by how open fans are to talking about just these very uncomfortable topics. Meanwhile, I've often been *shocked* by the things humans will write in a letter or email, or will post online *right next to their actual name and photograph.* This isn't about anonymous trolls or drive-by haters. There's something else that happens when we code our feelings into words, and when it's gloomy and I'm down, I start to worry that the whack shit people tweet to the world is what's in their heart, not the thoughtful things they say to my face.

What I'm saying right now will sound trite--especially after the twitter freakout by white folks who read the Hunger Games then flipped when they realized Prim is black--but I firmly believe that for every sub-literate tweeter there are a dozen white people whose hearts are turned when they mourn that made-up little black girl. That few degrees of twist will be the seed for a racial conscience that will guide them when they are hiring, when they are firing, when they are voting, when they are purchasing.

And that's the business we're in, me and Mojo and Fritz and Lavie. And so I want to draw your attention here and point you to Lavie's fake encyclopedia entry, salvaged from an alternate Now in which both he and I would be unconcieved ash, if even that. It really is a neat little romp (I say that without irony or sarcasm) and includes little runs like this:

. . .

DICK, PHILIP K. (KINDRED)

American author of pulp fiction. His novel The Man in the High Castle (1962) posits a world in which Germany lost the War (see also FALSE REALITY, HITLER LOST). All known copies of the novel have been destroyed. The author perished in a rehabilitation camp shortly after.

GOLEM

A JEW creation, born out of OCCULT PRACTICES and DEGENERATE SCIENCE. A mechanical man.

BLACK RACE, THE

Devolved race, mostly extinct – some are kept (alongside JEWS, GYPSIES, SLAVS, CHINAMEN etc. etc.) in specialized zoos. Perhaps the best way to see them is at the Berlin Zoologischer Garten, where many rare examples of near-extinct lower races can be seen in their native habitat, including such rare specimens as PYGMIES, AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES and the IRISH.

. . .

FACT: "Nothing is sexier than a topless girl making a fishface."

I hate to feed the BuzzFeed Monster, but several of these gags LOLed me, sitting here in the tattoos-and-facial-piercings-atheists coffee shop situated in downtown Dutch Reform Christian Village (I'm working on "vacation"!)

41 Regrettably Tacky Photos Of Famous People

Photographer: "Nothing is sexier than a topless girl making a fishface."

OMFG! Hoverboard Lightsaber Portal Gone Fight!!!

I'm getting mad-crazy sea-sick just thinking about it!

Hoverboard Lightsaber Portal Gun Fight - CollegeHumor Video

CollegeHumor’s Favorite Funny Videos

On Schooling, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Career Readiness, &c.

I continue to write a monthly column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. This month's column kicks off a Summertime Fun in the Sun Series on Education! It goes like this:

The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for the Money: Getting Schooled

Sadly, this is increasingly how we want to talk about schooling: What are the grades? The test scores? The graduation rates and matriculation rates? How many go to four-year universities? How many finish those programs? Who’s got a job and how much is he or she earning?

Of course you can fudge scores and graduate a class of functional illiterates – and public schools are accused of such skullduggery all the time by right-wing pundits. But even when we move away from dumb numbers and into fuzzier, but more reasonable questions of “career readiness” and “marketable skills,” that move doesn’t really change the metric. We’re still saying that the point of schooling – the point of our children’s lives, as they spend at least a third of each day on schooling – is to make more money.

Pardon me for playing to type, but that seems like a pretty goddamn shabby lesson for our kids, and a pretty shitty life goal.

“Hey, kid, what do you wanna be when you grow up?”

“Rich!”

If I heard my boy say that, it would turn my guts. . . .

Is Yglesias arguing that Kickstarter might undermine tax revenue, or that government is crappy at assessing non-fungible benefits?

The title to this article is *almost* at odds with the actual thrust of his observations. Short, and worth mulling over:

If crowdfunding is too successful, the economy may suffer in surprising ways. By Matthew Yglesias - 10 Rules for Starting a Small Business - Slate Hive

Unfortunately, economic growth—gross domestic product—is made of money, not dreams. A sudden shift in the share of labor and capital that are devoted to dream-following would show up in national account statistics as a large fall in productivity. The psychic rewards would go unmeasured. We thus might mistake an outpouring of creative energy for a collapse in wages and incomes, leading to some potentially serious policy errors. . . .

Recommended Reading: Clockers by Richard Price #FridayReads

A long book, and in some regards the template for THE WIRE (Price wrote for Season Five, and it shows; you'll see some dialogue that he lifted directly from CLOCKERS for his episodes); well worth the read for all of us, essentially mandatory for fans of that HBO series, though.

On the surface CLOCKERS is a gritty mystery procedural set in Jersey. A dozen pages in, and you realize it's the dark mirror of GATSBY, in that GATSBY is a slim book about a man who was really only limited by what he imagined he could be, and CLOCKERS is a long book about a species of men who are fundamentally trapped by the limits of what they can imagine themselves to be. (I.e., for better or worse, CLOCKERS argues that we're all and every one of us folks who "arise from the platonic conception of ourselves".)

That said, more deeply CLOCKERS is a really stunning exploration of what is knowable, of how we know things, and in how terribly our Beliefs will obstruct our simple capacity to observe and understand concrete Facts. The mystery at the heart of CLOCKERS is that there are no Mysteries.