Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 167

The time at the tone is: NOW

“If I write in the present yet digress, is that real time? Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers of the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time. Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.”

– Patti Smith in “M Train”

Writers are seldom in real time. We’re writing about yesterday or years ago and we’re writing about tomorrow and aeons into the future, creating time machines with words. If I’m sitting in a room in the purported here and now and you walk in and sit down in a vacant chair, you may soon observe that I’m not really there; I’ve gone deep into the past where time and space are so real that I can taste her breath in my mouth while noticing that the color of her lipstick matches the color of the dawn’s “sailor take warning sky.”

Patti Smith follows–figuratively speaking in her own time–the gurus who postulate an “eternal now.” Interesting, perhaps true, but that concept doesn’t help us get to work on time or remember when to feed the cats. Time used to be all mixed up before the railroads created time zones at high noon on November 8, 1883. Before that, time was a roll-your-own approximation of the sun, moon, stars and custom. But, you cannot run a railroad–other than the Polar Express–through roll your own or the eternal now.

[image error]As the New York Times said looking back at the date and time in 1983, “Some citizens grumbled about ‘railroad tyranny’ and tampering with ‘God’s time.’ The Mayor of Bangor, Me., deplored the change as an ‘attempt to change the immutable laws of God Almighty.’ The Indiana Sentinel lamented, ‘The sun is no longer boss of the job.'”

I’m reminded of the verse in Isaac Watts’s old hymn “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past”:

A thousand ages in Thy sight

Are like an evening gone,

Short as the watch that ends the night

Before the rising sun.

That verse made quite an impression on me the first time I sang it in church. I felt small, awash in an almost-timeless universe, awash in the power of my own thoughts and words to take me away from the “now”–as defined by the railroads–into fluid moments so far away most people have forgotten them or not yet imagined them.

When a writer writes, the time is always now or, if not now, whatever we say it is. From time to time, I ask people, “Is it yesterday yet?” Nobody seems to know. They haven’t yet noticed that the right creative thought and/or the well written book will take them into yesterday with or without clocks and time zones.

I guess people notice the eternal now when they read and become lost in the story. Writers are always lost in the story, and I think that’s a blessing even though it plays hell with temporal appointments ruled by clocks.

[image error]

1960 movie poster

When I read H. G. Wells’ novel The Time Machine, I thought what a wonderful invention that would be, this long before “Star Trek” invented the “temporal prime directive” stating that the people in our time couldn’t tamper with the people in another time.  Science fiction writers love playing with the notion that if a person simply strolls through the past, his/her presence there might change the world. What would happen to you if you accidentally killed your great great grandfather?

If there really is an eternal now, then the answer to that question is probably “nothing.” For years, writers have wondered if a time machine might make it possible to “go back” and save President Lincoln. Some say that, had he lived, reconstruction wouldn’t have become the hellish mess that it was. A character in Stephen King’s 11/22/63 figures out how to return to Dallas on the date in question and save President Kennedy. The world resulting from that was a horrible mess, darker than the dark ages. As it turns out, playing God is dangerous because we don’t know what God knows in the “evening gone” since Lincoln and Kennedy were shot.”

Yet, when we write, we are playing God. Sometimes I wonder if our play is confined to the pages of our novels. Perhaps our stories have impacts we can’t imagine and will never know. Best we can do is hope that our muses keep us on the straight and narrow so that we always write the right thing when the time is right.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of magical realism and contemporary fantasy novels, a fact that shouldn’t surprise you after reading this post.

Where did I get the name for my previous blog?

In 2004, I self-published the first edition of my contemporary fantasy novel The Sun Singer. The second edition, from a small publisher, came out in 2010. When that edition went out of print, I self-published the current edition in 2015.

[image error]The story is about a young man named Robert Adams who travels to a look-alike version of Glacier National Park, Montana, where he finds a raging battle in progress between the evil king and a rebel group. While Robert has had some psychic skills for many years, he buried then as deep in his mind as possible because he stopped trusting them. Now, to survive the battles and find his way home to our world, he must rely on them once again.

The Sun Singer is a hero’s journey novel, that is to say, a story about a person who undertakes a journey and comes back from it forever changed. Oddly enough, I began dreaming about this story when I was in junior high school. On a visit to see my grandparents in Illinois, we visited Allerton Park, now owned by the University of Illinois, which serves as a convention center and nature preserve with a collection of outdoor statuary including The Sun Singer. It was almost as thought my seeing that statue created the connection to a story I was destined to write.

In some ways, I am the Sun Singer. Each of us is, when you consider the fact that our life’s journey seems to be intended to transform us into the very best we can be. With that in mind, it seemed fitting to name original blog “The Sun Singer’s Travels.” It was about the hero’s journey, my own journey through my published books, and–through its writing posts–the journeys each of us take when we write a novel or short story. A few months ago, I merged that blog into this one to reduce the amount of time it took to keep two blogs active and up to date.

The sequel to The Sun Singer, Sarabande, is a heroine’s journey novel in which a young woman comes from the look-alike world into our world to search for Robert Adams. She doesn’t have an easy time of it. Even though I’m no longer using the original blog name, I’m still focused on the same kinds of ideas and subject matter.

I’m very definitely a child of the new age, a long time student of magic, and a strong believer that each of us is much more powerful and complex than we appear. The challenge is finding out how and why that is so and then creating a world that mirrors our highest goals.

–Malcolm

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Too much interior monologue will kill a good story

“Interior monologue, in dramatic and nondramatic fiction, narrative technique that exhibits the thoughts passing through the minds of the protagonists. These ideas may be either loosely related impressions approaching free association or more rationally structured sequences of thought and emotion.” – Encyclopaedia Britannica

True stream-of-consciousness fiction can yield a lot of exciting passages about a character’s inner life (which s/he may or may not confuse with reality) as well as plot-advancing impressions that mesh well with the story line.

[image error]When I think of “too much interior monologue,” I’m not bashing well-written stream of consciousness techniques in spite of the fact that readers who don’t like literary fiction will hand out one- and two-star reviews for such novels on Amazon. When an author’s protagonist thinks about the situation s/he is in, that’s interior monologue.

Naturally, it’s normal and relevant to think about the situations we’re in. On the other hand, when this thinking does on for hundreds of words in multiple places in a novel, then it is likely to ruin the story. Writers are told that most of what they put in a novel should advance the plot. Overused interior monologue doesn’t advance the plot: instead it puts the plot on hold.

I just finished reading a novel with an interesting plot. A protagonist with a history of panic attacks which s/he manages with prescription medication (as much as possible) undergoes a traumatic experience before being put into an unrelated but more dangerous situation where her life and the lives of others is at risk.

I’m not going to identify the novel or even count the number of words in it and compute what percentage of it is plot-stalling interior monologue. My impression, though, is that 40% of the novel is interior monologue along the lines of. . .I need to keep my self from screaming. . .I need to relax. . .maybe I didn’t see what I think I saw. . .can I trust person XYZ. . .maybe if I told my story and/or got certain people to trust me, they would believe me and/or help me.

Stop Talking to Yourself and Do Something!

A little bit of this is fine. But when it goes on and on and on, there’s really nothing happening. Yes, maybe this would happen in real life, but writers are also told that writing fiction that copies real life–as a 24/7 video camera might view it–is bad because a lot of that real life stuff is trivial. In the novel I just finished, the character’s fight to keep her panic under control and her considerations about what may or may not be happening can be conveyed to the reader much faster.

When I see excessive amounts of interior monologue, my first thought is that the writer doesn’t really have enough depth in the plot to make a novel. That is, there are two few events and dialogue passages to sustain a book-length story. So, the interior monologue pads the length of the book out to the minimum number of words the author or publisher feels are necessary to call the book a novel rather than a short story, novelette, or novella.

I liked the plot of the novel I just finished. I liked the satisfactory ending and the fact that the protagonist’s experience ended up making her a stronger person ready to take stock of a lot of decisions about her life that had been stalled. I think it’s a shame, though, that the story was dragged down by the interior monologue instead of being pushed forward with a greater number of plot elements.

Dan Brown’s “Teaching Moments” Come to Mind

Dan Brown and others who write novels about ancient secrets with a modern twist to them are often criticized for stopping the action through the insertion of a lot of exposition in which one character tells another character what the ancient secrets are all about. This is a slick way of telling the reader what those secrets are about. If you were going to write a spoof of such books, you’d have one character pull a knife on another character and then–so to speak–freeze the action while the character tells somebody else why all this matters (for, say, a thousand words) and then go back to the knife fight.

That really tears apart the pacing of the action. It’s also very frustrating to the reader. Excessive interior monologue has the same negative impacts.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of “Conjure Woman’s Cat,” “Eulalie and Washerwoman,” and other magical realism and fantasy novels.

Is Honesty Really the Best Policy?

To be completely honest, I’m not comfortable with being completely honest.

For one thing, if we had total honesty, there would be no privacy, and that would be like eating, reading, and having sex in glass houses.

[image error]People and agencies of government advocating unconstitutional snooping and searches are famous for saying, “If you have nothing to hide, you can’t complain about such programs.”

The thing is, I do have something to hide: the stuff that’s nobody’s business. That’s my right to privacy.

While I may have to accept the possibility that the Creator knows all and sees all as the Eye of Providence on our dollar bill suggests, I don’t accept the notion that anyone who is not the Creator needs an all-seeing eye. I don’t want Sauron’s eye from “The Lord of the Rings” watching–must less recording–what I’m having for breakfast and what book I’m reading before lunch.

[image error]Some people say that if they (or the Feds or the Cops) have the all-seeing eye of Sauron (and promise to use it in a purportedly proper manner), we will all be safer. I’ve never seen any evidence that proves the truth of that fable, and even if it were true, it would make us all manacled to those using the eye.

When it comes to spies with eyes, I’m keeping my curtains closed, and if you ask me what I’m doing inside those curtains, I will lie about it. Sure, I know the day will come when somebody will invent an all-knowing brain that will hear every thought we have. When that happens, we’ll probably have people lobbying for a PreCrime division of the department of justice similar to what we saw in the Tom Cuise movie “Minority Report.”

[image error]Except the all knowing brain will be worse, for not only will it be able to predict and stop crimes before they happen, it will stop whatever we’re planning to do before we can do it. The brain sees that I’m planning to drink a bottle of booze, so it alerts the authorities. Or the brain sees that I’m planning to read a book the brain doesn’t want me to read, so the people that own the brain come to my house on a warrantless search and take away the book.

You can see the potential of that, right?

Perhaps, on the day when the eye of Sauron and the all knowing brain are created by Congress or implemented by one alphabet soup department or another without Congress’ knowledge, writers will be given magic rings that make them immune. After all, it’s our job to make stuff up. I’m cynical about that. If we were given immunity, there would probably be an override button so that–say, for national security or some other catchphrase–those with the proper clearances will know that on Friday, I will put sugar on my sugar cookie before sitting down to write a post called “Is Honesty the Best Policy?”

I don’t think so.

Gosh, such a notion might destroy government as we know it because what if people swore they were telling the truth when they weren’t telling the truth? Some say we’re not telling the truth even when we think we’re telling the truth. We’ve all heard that eye-witness testimony is often wrong even though the witnesses providing it don’t think they’re lying. Perhaps all testimony is perjury, one way or another.

Some quantum physicists believe that everything that can happen does happen. If so, then lies really can’t exist can they?

Until we accept that reality, what we need when our privacy is at stake is well-crafted perjury that can’t be detected. I’m comfortable with that.

–Malcolm

As you might suspect even without the help of an all-seeing eye, Malcolm R. Campbell writes novels that are often labeled as fantasy and/or magic.

 

 

Review: ‘The Dovekeepers’ by Alice Hoffman

The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Masada The last bastion of the Jewish freedom fighters against the Roman army symbolizes the end of the Kingdom of Judah at the end of the Second Temple period and its violent destruction. On the mountaintop there are remains of magnificent palaces from the reign of King Herod and silent committees for the Roman siege and the bitter end. The mountain that became a symbol.” – Masada National Park Website

Our knowledge of the siege of Masada by the Roman legion comes to us primarily from the chronicle written by Josephus, a Jewish rebel leader who was captured by Rome in an earlier battle, became a Roman Citizen, and was commissioned to write about the Jewish-Roman war. Josephus’ account, which some consider problematic and likely to have a Roman bias, has been enhanced by conservation, restoration, geographical, and archaeological work that’s ongoing at the site in modern-day Israel.

Alice Hoffman’s imagined and heavily researched retelling of those final days at Masada through the eyes of four strong and complex women characters, Aziza, Yael, Revka, and Shirah, breathes new life into our understanding of what has been called the Giant Revolt as well as the freedom fighters’ culture, daily lives and spiritual beliefs. These four women are Masada’s dovekeepers, looking after massive dovecotes where the birds are fed and cared for, the eggs gathered for food, and the excrement taken to enrich the mountain’s gardens and fields.

The storyline follows these women–who to varying degrees follow the outlawed practices of witchcraft–as they travel to the mountain, become part of the daily life and commerce of the community there, and as the Roman Legion approaches and begins its siege, how they coped with the developing reality of a Roman victory.

These four women, as well as many other players in the story, are deeply developed by Hoffman to the extent that we know their inner-most thoughts and dreams and the secrets of their souls. Hoffman’s penchant for magic plays a strong role here. Since the outcome of the novel cannot go against history, the magic will not defeat the Romans. But it will play a role in the characters’ lives.

Magical realism ties the book together in many respects because magic cannot be separated from the four women’s view of the world or their daily practices. Also, like modern-day traditional witchcraft and conjure, magic cannot be easily separated from the place where it lives. The result for the reader is an immersion into Masada. What we know after reading the novel may not be wholly factual (thought Hoffman defers to Josephus’ account), but it is definitely true.

The truth of the matter is that we come away from this wondrous book, having read a compelling story and with a greater understanding of what it might have been like to be trapped within that mountain fortress nearly 2000 years ago. Some critics say The Dovekeepers is Hoffman’s masterpiece. That’s an understatement. You must read it when you’re ready to read it, for it’s not an easy story. It will probably change you. Some day–but not today–I will forgive Alice Hoffman for plunging me into the horrors and triumphs of that faraway world.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of two Florida folk magic novels, “Conjure Woman’s Cat” and “Eulalie and Washerwoman.” Learn more on his website.

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Feds Nab Bad Writers Committing Crimes With Plot Generators

Washington, D.C., January 2, 2018, Star-Gazer News Service–Homeland Security Agents announced here today that a massive sting operation has resulted in the arrest of thousands of writers with low Amazon rankings committing crimes with the help of plot generator software rather than writing great American novels.

[image error]Chief of station Liberty Valance said that the writers were caught when the modus operandi of a “larger than usual” number of crimes matched the formal structure of short stories and novels.

“Over and over again, we were seeing exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution,” said Valance. “We also saw a correlation between writers who purchased plot generator software who were getting rich even though their Amazon rankings–with numerous one-star reviews–were in the toilet.”

Publishing insiders have worried for years that plot generator software was more likely to be used for planning perfect crimes rather than perfect fiction.

“If a writer’s any good, s/he doesn’t need a software package to create the plots for his or her novels,” said Bennett Surf, director of the American Association of MFA (manufactured authors) Colleges and Universities.

Analysts discovered that writers were launching their plot generator apps and typing in phrases like “knock over liquor store,” “make money via insider training,” “run over granny with a reindeer,” and “overthrow government” rather than using the software for the purpose for which it was intended.

“That purpose,” said Surf, “was bilking prospective writers out of hundreds of dollars by selling them a product that promised that a lack of imagination and writing skill need not keep their fiction off the New York Times bestseller list of the Pulitzer and Booker prize winners circles.”

Valance said that most of those caught designed first person crimes rather than third person or omniscient narrator crimes, making it easy for profilers to “pin the tales on the wannabees.”

A white paper issued by attorneys for the top ten plot generation applications said that the programs were dispensed for purposes of fun and relaxation, and that all of those “spending hard-earned cash” for the products signed terms of service agreements in which they promised not to use computer-assisted plotting for anything other than novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories.

“We even banned the use of plot generators for poetry because sonnets and limericks are usually horrible and potentially criminal,” said Plots-R-Us CEO Bill Smith.”

“There never have been any writing shortcuts (other than sleeping with somebody in the publishing business) and now–thanks to the Homeland Security Department’s agents and analysts–crime no longer pays as well as it did,” Valance said.

The White House praised Valance for no longer being a decorative drapery. “Today, it’s curtains for wordy criminals,” President Trump tweeted.

–Story by Jock Stewart, Special Investigative Reporter

 

 

 

New Year, New Look, New URL

[image error]For the new year, I’ve changed the WordPress Theme for this blog’s look and feel as well as the URL:  https://malcolmsroundtable.com/

I used the previous theme for quite a few years and was especially fond of it. Who knows, maybe I’ll return to it some day. But for now, a clean slate for 2018.

The picture is all about magic, though I can’t promise my novels or blog posts will float in the air in a cloud of blue smoke. Being more consistent than usual, I’m using the same picture here as I do on my Conjure Woman’s Cat website.

[image error]The magic on this blog comes from my novels, at present the Florida Folk Magic series published by Thomas-Jacob Publishing in Florida. Already released are Conjure Woman’s Cat and Eulalie and Washerwoman. I’ve promised my publisher the third book in the series by Spring.

You’ll also find magic in posts here that relate to life itself, the idea being that we’re all on a hero’s journey or a heroine’s journey in an attempt to become the best that we can be. Life transforms us. There’s a synchronicity to it that tends to put in our path the very things we need whether they’re experiences, people, epiphanies about the cosmos, the environment and our stewardship of it, or even books, music and songs.

[image error]As an author, I can’t help but talk about books, writing techniques, and publishing. Sometimes you’ll find a review of a book I enjoyed, or a tip about making stories and novels better, or an occasional feature called “Book Bits” that lists links to reviews, author interviews, and publishing news.

While I’ll often mention other books and authors from Thomas-Jacob Publishing, I don’t review my colleague’s books here or on Amazon or GoodReads because doing so just doesn’t look right. They don’t review my books either. But all of us talk a lot about the books we like for the same reason a NASCAR driver talks about a new engine: we can’t help it.

One thing you won’t find here very often is politics because, as I see on the news and on Facebook, that’s hard to discuss without getting into a shouting match. I don’t think those shouting matches make things better. Nonetheless, my old-school reporter character Jock Stewart (from my novel Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire) will occasionally contribute a satirical news story post about real or imagined events that probably have political overtones. (Authors really don’t have as much control over their characters as readers believe, so I’m innocent here when Jock writes what he writes.)

I really don’t think the New Year gives us a clean slate any more than any other day, but this seemed like a good moment for some shameless self-promotion about this blog and its new look. As always, I appreciate all of you who stop by and read my posts and hope that your journey through 2018 is everything you desire.

–Malcolm

 

 

Mama Don’t Allow No New Year’s Resolutions ‘Round Here

“Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.” – Oscar Wilde

If you are driving along a wilderness highway and approach a bridge with a sign that says, “80% of the cars trying to cross this bridge will fall off,” would you drive across the bridge?

Most people will probably say “no.” Ironically, nearly all of those people who say “no” make New Year’s resolutions even though (according to this study) 80% of these resolutions will fail.

[image error]Experts (whoever the hell they are) say that we make resolutions because we feel guilty for being naughty during the holidays when we ate too much, drank too much, slept around too much, and stole too many of our kids’ presents out from under the tree.

Mama’s view of resolutions was this: “If you’re so all-fired gung-ho about reforming, you would have done it already.” Since Mama didn’t care much about what the neighbors thought, she didn’t care much about the peer pressure that induces people to announce on January 1 that they’re turning over a new leaf.

She tended to think resolutions were an all talk, no action way of life. While it’s easy in the middle of a hangover from hell to blurt out, “With God as my witness, I’me never going to drink again,” it’s sheer vanity to stand up in front of a bunch of your best friends and say, “In 2018, I will be kind to my fine feathered friends because they might be somebody’s mother.” Everybody applauds, and thinks, “wow, what a saint.”

If you’re lucky, none of those people will be around when you take your 12-gauge shotgun out to the duck blind and shoot a lot of Mallards out of the sky for dinner.

Like Mama, I think resolutions are just showing off. Many are probably made because people are staring at you expecting you to reform or because you’re drunk and don’t know any better or because Mr. Jones caught you sleeping with Mrs. Jones whereupon you thought it best to say, “Oops, wrong bedroom, but rest assured I’ll never do this again.”

Some resolutions may have a dash of merit, as in Jame’s Agate’s “New Year’s Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.” I like Marlene Dietrich’s “I resolve always to be myself, and not to let them influence me!”

Basically, most of us are who we are and, in spite of a few complaints, we’re comfortable with that. No wonder we fail on January 1st when we tell a bunch of drunks at a party, “I’m going to stop being who I am.”

I grew up thinking that most of what I did wasn’t any of Mama’s business. If I made a New Year’s resolution, I didn’t tell anybody about it, least of all her. If it failed, well, no problem, it only had a 20% chance of succeeding anyway. If it succeeded, people thought I was simply walking the straight and narrow more often than before.

It wouldn’t be a vanity thing, you understand.

Otherwise, I tend to be fairly comfortable with my faults as well as my strengths. Being superstitious, I worry that if I got rid of a fault, I’d crash and burn somehow because it was sustaining me more than I knew.

So, I have no resolutions for 2018 because I don’t want to get rid of anything that seems wrong but that’s actually working. Maybe some of the so-called positive things about me are ruining my life. Needless to say, it’s best not to tamper with the way things are.

If pressured by drunks at a party, I always have a few resolutions handy. I resolve to stop running with scissors. I resolve to wear clean underwear when I leave the house. I’m going to stop brushing my teeth with Sani-Flush. I resolve not to sleep with Mrs. Jones if Mr. Jones is in town.

That’s throw away stuff, but it’s handy at New Year’s Eve parties.

—Malcolm

 

 

 

 

 

Excellent Source for Self-Publishing Help

“I was recently tasked with putting together a publishing workshop for my local library. As I researched and gathered information, I realized everything they needed to know was available right here, on IndiesUnlimited.com.”

via Everything You Need to Self-Publish – Indies Unlimited

As author Melinda Clayton says, there’s a wealth of information stashed under the Knowledge Base and Resource Pages menu selections on the Indies Unlimited main screen. Sometimes I think we become so accustomed to the menu selections on blog-oriented sites, we forget they’re there and miss out on the links and other information they lead to. We read the posts of the day and move on.

Self-publishing can seem like a daunting process when an aspiring writer first decides to take the plunge. In addition to Indies Unlimited, you can find helpful resources on sites such as Poets & Writers, Association of Writers and Writing Programs, Jane Friedman, and Writers Digest.

The information is “out there.” Half the battle is knowing where to look.

–Malcolm

Oh Lord, Take Away That Homogenized and Blended Milk

“My darling girl, when are you going to realize that being normal is not necessarily a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage.” – Alice Hoffman in “Practical Magic”

When I was little, I despised the arrival of homogenized milk because I believed it was synonymous with milk that had lost its character, in part because milk from different breeds of cattle was mixed into a blander product (such as the Guernsey/Jersey/Holstein Triple Blend championed by Foremost). And, practically speaking, there was no cream on top for coffee or cereal.

[image error]Some folks use the word “homogenized” to speak of a world in which all cultures, races, traditions, and religions are accepted. I have always hoped to see such a world. But there is a danger in putting the wrong spin to it, that is, shaking it up like homogenized milk so that all of its wondrous components lose their identity.

Every culture, religion, race, and tradition has unique gifts to add to a nation’s culture, to the world’s culture, to our discussions of issues and values and goals. When we gloss over these gifts for the sake of convenience–or perhaps for the sake of an easy conformity–we are burying the gold each of us has to offer.

We used to laugh about all the individualists in high school, college, and first jobs who went out of their way to look the same as everyone else. While we saw them as lemmings, that view was an insult to lemmings. Star Trek would later capture mindless conformity with its Borg civilization. As Wikipedia describes it, “The Borg are a vast collection of ‘drones,’ or cybernetic organisms, linked in a hive mind called ‘the Collective’ or ‘the Hive.'” When an individual was assimilated into the Borg, s/he lost his or her individuality. One had to admit, the Borg was a very efficient (and as the good guys on the Starship Enterprise discovered) very deadly.

Long before Star Trek’s Borg cautionary tale about homogenization turning sour, authors and other thinkers who had not yet been assimilated into the addictive sameness we often find (and willingly create) in modern society warned us about the evils of (figuratively speaking) of same-same homogenized milk. My favorite has always been Emerson’s comment in Self-Reliance:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

[image error]I was a terror when any of my teachers in high school and college advocated doing things a certain way because that was “what as done” or because they (those misguided teachers) saw education as hammering out children on a Henry Ford assembly line. They hated my Emerson comment, telling me that (like recruits in a boot camp), you need to be broken down and made all the same so that you will emerge from school with a firm foundation. I was told to leave the classroom more than once for responding that “by the time I have that firm foundation I’ll be a mindless automaton.”

I saw that foundation not as a Brave New World wonder, but as soul-stifling indoctrination. Some say our schools have gotten worse in that respect since I was a student. I applaud those who say that we should celebrate our differences even though I think most little minds are ruled by the hobgoblin that wants to sandpaper away those differences because automatons are easier to predict and control, living and working as they do–as Pete Seeger sang in his famous 1963 song “Little Boxes”–“And they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.”

Walmart is a manifestation of over-homogenization because it kills off local businesses run by local people, each of whom as a different looking storefront, a different philosophy, and an individualistic approach to his or her products and customers. Social medial debates are often a manifestation of over-homogenization because they play out with all the people on the left sounding just the same and all the people on the right sounding just the same as though each group acts via ticky tacky pronouncements from its own Borg mother ship. Since I grew up at a time when people still remembered where our Christmas traditions came from, I mourn the fact that across the county so many of them have been lost or, worse yet, shaken up into a plastic bottle of homogenized celebration in which we’re told that the components have new meanings–as in the fiction that the Twelve Days of Christmas end on December 25th instead of beginning on December 25th.

I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions because they tend to sound like practices we should have all began a long time ago rather than waiting until January 1 to proclaim “I’m no longer going to kill people I don’t like” or “I’m no longer going to drink a quart of whiskey a day” or “I’m going to stop hating people who aren’t just like me.” Good Lord, are we so homogenized that we need a specific day each year to see the light or turn the other cheek or find our true path? Even though most of these resolutions sound good, they will fail because–as Tanya Tucker sang in 1992, “Well it’s a little too late to do the right thing now.”

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Pasteurized, non-homogenized milk was delivered to our Tallahassee, Florida doorstep by the local dairy that was about a mile from our house. (No, this is not our house.) – Florida Memory Photo.

The fact that it’s too late is the fault of that “good foundation” we were all given in school and the little-minds-ticky-tacky approach the movers and shakers who tell us what to do have done with that foundation after graduation. As you’ve probably noticed, we’re told that being all the same is being normal.

My feeling is that if we need a real New Year’s resolution to try on for size, it’s “I will no longer be normal.” Yes, I know, if you’ve a Star Trek fan, you know that it’s nearly impossible to escape from the Borg collective, and if you live in a typical suburb, you know there are homeowners associations that insist that all the homes maintain the same ticky tacky look the builder bestowed upon them, and if you live in many communities, you know that if you question the quality of produce that comes from the local supermarket, the city council has passed laws to keep you from growing vegetables in your front yard because then all the yards will stop looking all the same.

Some scientists tell us that no matter what we do about humankind’s contribution to the natural cycles of global warming and cooling, that it’s too late to do the right thing now. Likewise, it may be too late to escape the ticky tacky society that results from homogenization run amok.

But let’s give it a shot. Let’s say spilt milk is something to celebrate rather than something to cry over.

—Malcolm