Steven P. Gregory's Blog, page 5

Book Launch Party for Cold Winter Rain

A book launch party for my first novel, Cold Winter Rain, is set for November 23 from 4-6 p.m. at the Barber Motorsports Museum.  See below to R.S.V.P.

CWR is the debut of Slate, a detective who shares my legal and aviation background, as well as my love of Alabama’s Gulf Coast.  Unlike me, he is driven by terrible losses, seeking resolution and order by solving dangerous puzzles in the cases he accepts.  Much of the action in the novel occurs in familiar Birmingham settings.  If you’ve read Robert Parker or John D. MacDonald, you will be on familiar ground as well.  Kirkus Reviews said of CWR:  ”Gregory’s prose is solid, and he vividly describes both the exterior Southern landscape and the insular, interior spaces Slate inhabits.”‘

Arrive at 4:00 for good food, good company, a short reading, a book signing, and even some door prizes.

The Barber Motorsports Museum, a visual feast, houses the world’s largest motorcycle collection and numerous vintage race cars.  I look forward to seeing you there.

TO R.S.V.P.:  If you’re on Facebook, please join the Launch Event and let me know if you are coming and if you’ll be bringing a date.  Or email me at Steven@StevenPGregory.com.

Tribalism and Ray Kurzweil

Futurist Ray Kurzweil presently enjoys a gig at Google as engineering director.  Kurzweil is sixty-five years old, and he takes 150 dietary supplements a day, according to an interview published in McLean’s magazine.  Kurzweil says he is trying to bridge his present biology to the day when biotechnology will reprogram human metabolism and extend our lives.

Kurzweil’s background is in computer software design; he analogizes the DNA of humans to the lines of computer code that provide the instructions for the hunks of plastic, glass, and metal we call computers.  Kurzweil notes — and this observation is surely accurate — that we remain programmed to survive in the harsh conditions our ancestors faced ten thousand years ago.  We are programmed to store fat, for example, whenever we consume extra calories.  Our insulin receptors are programmed instantly to respond to glucose in the bloodstream by signaling to the pancreas to produce insulin; over years of such exposure, some of us develop a disease called metabolic syndrome, in which the body no longer produces sufficient insulin.  This metabolic programming is the wrong set of instructions for a society where food sources are abundant.

Of course, individual choices can prevent these inherited responses from causing disease. If we exercise and eat sparingly, as our ancestors did, we can avoid these modern diseases.

But it seems to me another software artifact haunts human beings in the 21st century, just as it did in the previous dozen or more.  An old friend of mine, an avid fan of the football team fielded by the university he attended, tells me periodically how “we” are loaded with talent this year, that “our” coach surely surpasses any other, that “we” may contend for the national championship this year.  This fellow has enjoyed his sixtieth birthday, suffers from arthritis, weighs around 150 pounds, and has played no sport more confrontational than occasional two-dollar Nassau on his country club’s golf course.

Another friend, a graduate of a school with lesser talent coached by someone with a shorter c.v., chortles how “we” got a higher-ranked team into “our house” and “whipped their butts.”  This friend inhabits a football-size body but spent his college years playing  tuba in the school orchestra and now collects full-size classic cars.

These gentlemen aren’t — ahh — alone.  A quick Google search using the phrase “we at war” produced these hits:  from Time Magazine:  “The Aimless War:  Why Are We in Afghanistan”; from The Globe and Mail:  “Why Are We at War in Libya?”: from Fox News:  “Are We at War?  Obama Administration Officials Say No”; and an earlier post on Iraq from The Weekly Standard:  “Why We Went to War”.

Unless you are a member of a military unit engaged in an armed conflict, You and I are not at war.  You and I are tending to our businesses, commuting, emailing, drafting, traveling, having dinner with the family, playing with our dogs, talking to our neighbors.  If You and I are both in that slight majority of United States citizens who pay income taxes, You and I have been forced under threat of imprisonment to pay for three wars You and I do not support (see, e.g., this Salon article discussing the unpopularity of the war in Afghanistan).  My two football fan friends were not coerced into using the second person pronoun to refer to their favorite sports teams.  But collectivist thoughts are insidious.  They creep into our minds on their little cat feet, soon imposing their will on us without our resistance.

Collectivism surely must be programmed into our DNA, just as our metabolic processes were designed to store fat.  Collectivism derives from an inherited need to protect the group, the family, the tribe, from outsiders, the rival tribe, the next village, Vikings in their silly little boats and goatskins.  Fine.  But I haven’t seen any Vikings lately.  Al-Queda?  International criminals, yes.  But are they Vikings?  Invaders?  Ludicrous.  Remember the Red Army Faction?  The Weather Underground?  The Symbionese Liberation Army?  If you’re under fifty-five, probably not.  Otherwise, they exist only in memory.  I’ll share a secret with you:  Al-Queda will soon be only a memory as well.

Ayn Rand wrote:  “Collectivism is the ancient principle of savagery. . . . Collectivism is not the ‘New Order of Tomorrow.’  It is the order of a very dark yesterday.”

Deprogramming this collectivist tendency may be a choice we can make, just as we can choose to exercise and eat moderately.  In all our yesterdays, collectivism lighted fools the way to dusty death.  Today and tomorrow, ironically, in order to maintain our culture,

you and I must celebrate our individualism.  As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”

Wrong Way Blogging

Wrong Way Blogging

Read any article on blogging, and the self-appointed expert (and how the Web has grown those ranks geometrically!) will tell you that a blog should focus on one subject in order to find its audience, or, in that fin de siecle (I refer here to the end of the benighted 20th century, not to the milieu of the end of the 19th century, for which the phrase served as sobriquet for most of the 20th) phrase, so the blogger can find his “tribe.”  Most users of that phrase probably think the Washington Redskins football club should change its name out of respect for Native Americans, but cognitive dissonance serves as the primary mental state of most U.S. citizens (I refuse to write “Americans” when referring to U.S. citizens, but that is a discussion for another blog post) these days.  What, tribe can be used in other ways?  Yes, of course it can, but I’d be willing to bet those other connotations are not the ones you think of when seeing or hearing the word.

One-topic blogging may be the fast way to an audience, but I have discovered through a number of false starts that it is also the way to boredom with my own thoughts.  Why limit myself to one topic when I have almost innumerable interests?  My interests are eclectic.  I’m a bit of a dilettante, I admit it freely, but any writer who isn’t probably has precious little to say, because he or she has no subjects.  A writer must after all write about something, but if that something remains solely sports or politics or religion or 11th century art, the writer will soon either exhaust the subject or burrow so deeply into esoterica that only a few experts in the same field will care.

So at this reboot of my blog, my intention is to write longer blog posts (I pledge to avoid using “blog” as verb, as I generally strive not to verb nouns) about whatever topic occurs to me two or three times a week:  current events and partisan politics, writing, farming, cars, motorcycles, books, authors, movies, sports, legal issues, social media, travel, personal issues.  In the interstices I may post random bits from my media trawling or a tease from a novel or story or announcements about readings, new publications, book signings, and the like. I may even write in different voices or points of view, appropriate, I hope, to the subject.

Here we go again.  Enjoy the ride.

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