I needed a break from reading the dense and detailed (but very well-written) slog that is James M. McPherson's Battle Cry for Freedom: The Civil War Era, and so I dove into the 2025 Arthur C. Clarke award winner Annie Bot by Sierra Greer-- Annie Bot is a sci-fi novel about the perfect android girlfriend, and while the book starts with a light, technologically provocative tone (warning . . . or perhaps selling point? there are robot/human sex scenes) but as I got further int othe story, I realized that though I was trying to read some sci-fi to escape the disturbing rationalizations, racism, and inhumanity of the Civil War, that Annie Bot and Battle Cry for Freedom are both ultimately about slavery and autonomy . . . but my NEXT book is going to be fun!
All the Pretty Good Horses
After we read James Wright's serene and transcendent poem "A Blessing," I like to have my Creative Writing students draw the scene-- at a minimum, they are required to sketch two graceful, docile "Indian ponies" that can "hardly contain their happiness" and if they're really cooking with gas, then they can also attempt to draw the narrator, who is so entranced by these kind and mysterious animals in the twilight that he says, epiphanically: "Suddenly I realize that if I stepped out of my body I would break into blossom" and, year after year, the results of asking kids to draw beautiful horses are extraordinary: .
and I do NOT allow the students to use their computers or phones to look at horses before they draw, and the point of this exercise (besides my amusement) is that for most of us, it is much easier to use our words to convey tone than it is for us to visually represent tone, especially if the tone is enchanting . . .
The Canadian Allman Brothers?
If you love the Allman Brothers but you've worn out the grooves on their oeuvre, then you could give "Dickie Betts" by the Dean Ween Group a listen-- no surprise that those guys did an Allman Brothers Tribute . . . or-- more surprisingly-- you could listen to "Making Memories" by Rush . . . I've been going through their discology lately and the tone and sound of this track kind of shocked me (in a good way).
The Hegelian Trumpalectic
tone, attitude, or methods, just remember, there will be an eventual synthesis of some of Trump's more obnoxious objectives and maybe, eventually, some sort of halting progress.
Dave is No Freddy Krueger
Chores on a Workday?
The Pathetic Fallacy, Pregnancy Edition
Today at work the ladies organized a "sprinkle" for a teacher who is very pregnant with her second child (and leaving at the end of the week) and it took me a couple hours to comprehend the term for the party . . . you have a baby "shower" for the first kid and then for the next kid, it's not as big a deal, so you tone the weather down a bit . . . and I guess for a third kid, you just get a "mist" or a "fog."
Daylight Sucking Time
A Noteworthy Parking Offense?
The Holdovers: Old Walleye Does It Again
Sarcastic Tone Implied
I'm not very good at sarcasm-- I don't have the voice for it-- so I've got to broadcast it . . . here it comes: you know what's fun after teaching English to high school students all week . . . helping your son on Saturday with all the AP English assignments he neglected to complete while he had COVID.
Tone? Term? What? Who?
Sci-Fi Twofer Tuesday
I read two excellent sci-fi books recently, and they couldn't be more different in tone:
1) The Humans by Matt Haig is one of those "from-an-alien-perspective" stories that begins with ironic detachment-- wow, these humans are silly and they really can't handle technology and they're dangerous to themselves and the galaxy so we've got to deal with them-- but then, with the help of a dog, the humans start to win over the narrator and things get fun and romantic and profound and complicated . . . a compelling plot and great reminders of why humans are absurd and wonderful;
2) Moxlyland by Lauren Beukes is a cyberpunk novel of the near future set in CapeTown, South Africa . . . and the apartheid is between class, not race; the government and the media is complicit in this and very oppressive and powerful, in a revised Brave New World sort of way . . . I'll just put a few quotes up that I highlighted on my Kindle and you'll get the idea-- but warning, you don't want to read this if you're a vaccine-hesitant-conspiracy-theorist (or maybe you do . . .)
Don’t be fooled by the cosy apartment blocks lining the highway, it’s all Potemkin for the tourists.
Compared to what the corporates have done? >>10: What do you mean? >>skyward*: corrupting govts with their own agendas, politicians on their payroll, exacerbating the economic gaps. building social controls and access passes and electroshock pacifiers into the very technology we need to function day to day, so you’ve no choice but to accept the defuser in your phone or being barred from certain parts of the city because you don’t have clearance. you tell me how that compares to you hacking an adboard.
“Repeat. Do not be alarmed. The M7N1 Marburg variation is only fatal if you do NOT report to an immunity center for treatment within 48 hours. Repeat. It is NOT fatal if you present yourself promptly for vaccination treatment. Vaccination is 100% effective within three hours with minimal lasting side-effects.
Left is Right?
We were doing ethical relativism and ethical universalism in Philosophy class today and I had a thought that merits further development-- by someone other than me, a simple shed-builder:
W.T. Stace claims that ethical absolutism is the province of the right, of conservatism and religious folk, but that may not be the truth any longer . . . the right seems more concerned with general libertarianism-- if you want to wear a mask, do so, but don't make me wear one; if you want to be green, great, but don't regulate pollution, etc.-- while the new "woke" movement on the left seems to believe it has the right ideas on race, climate, gender, etcetera . . . of course, there are exceptions and anomalies-- abortion comes to mind-- but perhaps this reversal in tone and attitude has also caused and confused all the polarization and animosity (and the important thing to remember is that nobody knows the best way to do anything, one society's outcast is another society's hero, and there's usually-- but not always-- a range of solutions to ethical problems, and complete faith in ethical relativism is an absolute and thus a paradox).
Man Tantrum
Tuesday afternoon, my wife started preparing two elaborate recipes (Crispy Sour Cream and Onion Chicken and some Ethiopian lentil dish) and then she left to go do some gardening at her elementary school-- she runs the gardening club there and she's always planting stuff on the school grounds-- and then the kids came home from tennis practice (Ian defeated Alex 6-1, 6-3 and so the younger brother is officially first singles) and they were hungry and I was getting hungry as well (and inebriated-- I've been avoiding grains and bread and sugar, for the most part-- so the two beers I had while making salad really went to my head) but my wife lost track of time while she was planting things and I don't think she had her phone on her (or she was ignoring my frantic texts) and so I made an attempt at these recipes but I was quickly overwhelmed by all the ingredients and steps and methods and such so I pretty much gave up and sulked and drank wine on an empty stomach and by the time she arived home I was a frustrated disaster and while I tried not to blame her, she definitely caught my tone and got pissed at the fact that if she's MIA for forty minutes the entire house falla apart and I told her that if it was some simple recipe-- like grill some meat and steam some broccoli, then I'm fine-- but this was advanced culinary arts and she said we should have eaten something else-- and I agreed and apologized and said it was my fault and it definitely made me think of the passage I've included below from Joseph Campbell's Myths to Love By that we are annotating in College Writing-- when Alex and I were alone on our snowboarding trip, away from "completely efficient females," we just ate beans and meat and things were easy . . . and the only thing of value I can offer is the fact that I am slowly but surely constructing a new shed . . . but even that is slow going and harder than it looks.
So much, then, for the mythic world of the primitive hunters. Dwelling mainly on great grazing lands, where the spectacle of nature is of a broadly spreading earth covered over by an azure dome touching down on distant horizons and the dominant image of life is of animal societies moving about in that spacious room, those nomadic tribes, living by killing, have been generally of a warlike character. Supported and protected by the hunting skills and battle courage of their males, they are dominated necessarily by a masculine psychology, male-oriented mythology, and appreciation of individual valor.
In tropical jungles, on the other hand, an altogether different order of nature prevails, and, accordingly, of psychology and mythology as well. For the dominant spectacle there is of teeming vegetable life with all else more hidden than seen. Above is a leafy upper world inhabited by winged screeching birds; below, a heavy cover of leaves, beneath which serpents, scorpions, and many other mortal dangers lurk. There is no distant clean horizon, but an evercontinuing tangle of trunks and leafage in all directions wherein solitary adventure is perilous. The village compound is relatively stable, earthbound, nourished on plant food gathered or cultivated mainly by the women; and the male psyche is consequently in bad case. For even the primary psychological task for the young male of achieving separation from dependency on the mother is hardly possible in a world where all the essential work is being attended to, on every hand, by completely efficient females. It is therefore among tropical tribes that the wonderful institution originated of the men's secret society, where no women are allowed, and where curious symbolic games flattering the masculine zeal for achievement can be enjoyed in security, safe away from Mother's governing eye. In those zones, furthermore, the common sight of rotting vegetation giving rise to new green shoots seems to have inspired a mythology of death as the giver of life; whence the hideous idea followed that the way to increase life is to increase death. The result has been, for millenniums, a general rage of sacrifice through the whole tropical belt of our planet, quite in contrast to the comparatively childish ceremonies of animal-worship and -appeasement of the hunters of the great plains: brutal human as well as animal sacrifices, highly symbolic in detail; sacrifices also of fruits of the field, of the firstborn, of widows on their husbands' graves, and finally of entire courts together with their kings. The mythic theme of the Willing Victim has become associated here with the image of a primordial being that in the beginning offered itself to be slain, dismembered, and buried; and from whose buried parts then arose the food plants by which the lives of the people are sustained.
Joseph Campbell
This Land is Your Land, This Land is Nomadland
Jessica Bruder's book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century is an eye-opener to another America, an America of a wandering people, who-- usually due to some setback-- are houseless (but not homeless) and move through our nation "like blood cells through the veins of our country" in tricked out camper-vans, small RVs, handmade trailers, and converted house-cars . . . these people-- who are mainly white . . . perhaps because it's hard to "boondock" as a person of color-- meet at desert rallies like the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous and move from one grueling temporary job to the next-- the sugar beet harvest, shelving and scanning items at the Amazon warehouse, cleaning the toilets at campgrounds, short order cook at Wall Drug . . . the work is hard and you are reliant on your tribe of van dwellers, your own resilience, Advil, and the ability of ride to endure wind and weather; the financial crash of 2008 sent many of these people on the road, but so did lack of pensions and unions and healthcare, lack of decent lower-middle class jobs and lack of a safety net to care for these folks-- and these are spirited people, many of whom are over sixty, and couldn't bear to live without freedom; Linda May has dreams greater than living in a van, she purchases some desert land in Arizona to build an Earthship homestead-- a self-sufficient, off-the-grid house; she's a grandmother of 64 and wants some place to call her own, but she struggles with how to go about it . . . these are her words:
Someone asked why do you want a homestead? To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff to impress people I don't like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse for an online supplier. The stuff is all crap made somewhere else in the world where they don't have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen to sixteen hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won't last a month. It is all goin to a landfill. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country where we don't have to see them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. The American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world . . . there is nothing in that warehouse of substance. It enslaved the buyers who use their credit to purchase that shit. Keeps them in jobs they hate to pay their debts.
despite the tone of this section, there is also a pioneering spirit in the book-- there is a shared tone with the favorite pieces of literature of the Rubber Tramp crew; I was proud to say I've read ever book they mentioned as a favorite: Travels with Charley, Blue Highways, Desert Solitaire, Into the Wild, Walden, and Wild; if you don't want to read about all this, definitely watch the movie-- it's a masterful amalgam of the real stories in the book (and the real people) and some quality acting by Frances McDormand . . . and if you don't want to deal with any of this but still want to get the idea, listen to a recent episode of The Indicator wherein they explain that the Simpsons-- once representative of the lower middle class in America-- now live a lifestyle unattainable by that demographic.
Fast Times at Action Park
Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America's Most Dangerous Amusement Park is a tribute to a bygone era-- a time when the United States was less litigious; a time when hazing, heckling, and ethnic slurs were still regarded as good fun; a time when New Yorkers were a good deal grittier than they are now; a time of freedom and individuality; and a time when a good-hearted but slightly demented man named Gene Mulvihill could single-handedly build a shrine to action, danger, adventure, drunkenness, good times and fun on a mountain in New Jersey; the story is told by his son and despite the broken bones, open wounds, electrocutions, drownings, paralysis, comas, and death-- or perhaps because of them-- Andy Mulvihill appreciated working at Action Park and taking part in the family business; the bonding that occurred between the lifeguards at the Wave Pool-- in between pulling out twenty to thirty idiots a day-- is legendary . . . Dazed and Confused, Fast Times at Ridgemont High type stuff . . . and the chapter by chapter description of the evolution of the park-- from the Alpine Slide to the Cannonball Loop to Motor World to the Wave Pool to an authentic German Beer Hall to Surf Hill-- is the weird history of the obverse Disney World, a place closer in tone to Jurassic Park than the Magic Kingdon . . . this is a book that will make you proud to be from Jersey-- I odn't remember ever going to Action Park itself-- but I did go on an Alpine Slide in the Poconos (which was also installed by Gene Mulvihill) and rode to fast and flew off the chute . . . which can happen, when YOU are in control of the ride . . . the book also reads like a theme park version of Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment . . . there was something about this mix of New Yorkers and New Jerseyans-- many of whom couldn't swim well-- that made them want to ram speedboats into each other, jump off cliffs onto other people's heads, t-bone folks with Lola racers, get drunk, throw garbage everywhere, shit on the floor, race down dangerous slides (water and land-based) and basically ignore danger and forget to assess risk; a must read if ytiou are thinking about travelling back in time to the 80's and opening a shrine to personal autonomy.
It's Comment Appreciation Day!
zman quoted me . . ."it's all in the revision and editing . . . very few people do anything good not he first try"
Well said.
zman said...Parts of this "sentence" remind me of the time I checked into the Fairfield Inn in Raleigh NC, a low-slung place near the airport. I went to my room on the third floor, set my stuff down, started to unpack, and realized that there was a swarm of ants on and around the desk. I brought all my stuff downstairs and told the guy at the desk. He said "Yeah we have ants on the third floor." I asked him why he put me on the third floor given the formic situation and he replied "Well there's no view on the second floor." I told him I would trade the view and the ants for no view and no ants, so he moved me to the second floor. There were no ants in my new room but when I flushed the toilet the bowl didn't fill up and the sink didn't have any water. I called downstairs and the guy at the desk said "Yeah there's no water on the second floor right now." I asked if he had any rooms with water and without ants and he moved me to the first floor. You would think he would've run through all this beforehand.
then I chimed in . . . and Zman graciously gave me permission to do something very weird:
Dave said...holy shit. i was rushing my post because I had to go to acupuncture . . . i think I may make your comments into tomorrow's post-- they deserve to get front-page treatment that's an exceptional anecdote--i might-- with your permission-- set it to music.
zman said...You have my permission to make a song out of my experience at the Fairfield Inn. Not only is it near the airport, it's between a Cracker Barrel and a Hooters.
i will turn the dial down on my customary snark to say that this is a very cool thing that happened in daveworld and i appreciated hearing about it.
/unsnark
Dave said...that helps with the setting . . . and thanks for turning down the snark, rob!
his snark goes to 11
Horror Recommendations for Both the Patient and the Restive
If you're looking for a gothic novel in the vein of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" and Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw," then give Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger a shot . . . she wrote it in 2009, but you'd never know it-- it's set in the 1940s and impeccably researched and pitch-perfect in tone-- the disintegration of Hundreds Hall and the family that lives in it mirrors the slow and crumbling decay of the noble class in England . . . the proletariat is assuming more political and economic power, at the cost of old and ancient ways, but the dead aren't going to cede power to the working-class quietly; the book is a slow-burn and often frustrating-- especially the budding yet doomed romance-- but I loved it . . . if you don't have the patience for historically accurate neo-Gothicism, then you can check out the Overlord-- it's streaming on Amazon right now-- the film begins as a harrowing WWII action-flick, but soon devolves into a Tarantino-esque Nazi-zombie genre mash-up . . . it's totally entertaining, gross, and fun . . . my son Ian and I both loved it.