In vino, veritas. Pliny the Elder nailed it: Wine tells the truth. It doesn’t make you do things so much as it lets you do things. You can learn a lot about yourself, and about your friends, by watching what happens when they’re well-buzzed.

National holidays can do the same thing to people–and not just because of the amount of alcohol people tend to consume given half an excuse. Like all things, love of one’s country can come in a lot of flavors. Soviet dissidents, for example, loved their country while hating its system–they loved its culture, its geography, its weather, the shared history in which their identity was rooted. Members of totalitarian systems, on the other hand, are trained to identify the system with the country, and to see non-conformity as so unpatriotic as to deserve death. Some people are patriotic about countries where they’ve never lived, so much so that they’ll move across the world to live in them, because they’ve fallen in love with the ideology, or the people, or the culture of that country. You can learn a lot about a person by watching the flavor of their patriotism.

Writing a political thriller series these last few years, I’ve carefully watched the political micro-climates around the world and studied how they relate to the version of love of country I carry around in my own psyche. Call it a love affair with the Jeffersonian vision of freedom: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

This year has been an amazing year around the world for the struggle against different forms of tyranny, and as an Americans it’s been more exciting than I can say to watch the most action-packed year of calculated struggles against tyranny since the late 80s and early 90s (it’s also more than a little embarrassing how little my home culture seems interested in carrying on their struggle on the home front, but that’s a topic for another time). It’s quite possible that the Arab Spring, the Iranian struggles, and the other protests and revolutions around the world will all come to bad ends in the same way that the revolutions of the twentieth century almost all ended in dictatorship, civil war, and genocide; still, I have a thin hope that some of the people who are laying down their lives–for reasons as simple as the next loaf of bread or as idealistic as bringing democracy and universal suffrage to cultures where such notions are without precedent–may have read history and learned from the missteps of the last hundred years.

Because of that, in celebration of the first revolution that actually worked (if imperfectly), I’ve dedicated Free Will (my new book about revolution) as follows:

This volume is dedicated to the men and women
Who sat in Tahrir
Who crossed the Wall in Berlin
Who fell at Tiananmen Square
Who bled in the streets of Tehran
Who lost their lives in Boston
And all those like them before and since.
To them we owe a debt we cannot repay
Save that we make their dream come true
For Everyone
Forever.

I’ll be seeing you soon, with the rest of the book. Have a safe weekend–and spend it however you want to. The ability to make that choice is a remarkable thing in the history of the world.

Last night on Dean Wesley Smith’s blog I made a snarky comment about the deleterious effect of a Literary Studies degree (or, in my case, 90% of a Lit degree) on creativity. The comment went something like this:

A Literary Studies course is the worst thing you can do for your creativity, other than bashing your skull in with a mallet while reciting the lyrics to “The Song That Never Ends”

Needless to say, this caused a minor row in the twitterverse among my fellow literati, and I received a few demands to justify myself (which is not easy to do on the best of days, let alone in 140 characters or less), so, in the name of entertainment, here goes, in no particular order:

1: The Premise of Literary Studies is Misguided

Leaving aside those in search of an easy “A,” people generally go into literary studies either because they want to pursue a career as a writer or because they love stories and want to teach literature to high school and/or college students. Literary Studies courses, however, don’t do much to prepare you for either.

To write effective fiction, there are a number of things you can study that will help: psychology, history, language, applied sociology and group dynamics, neurology, chaos theory, evolutionary biology, religion, semiotics, and philosophy leap to mind. And you can also learn a lot from studying literature, in the sense of reading books that you might not necessarily read for pleasure. Cultivating a habit of learning, and observing the mediums of communication around you, is extremely useful. Getting practice actually writing stories is also very important.

To teach literature effectively, it helps to be familiar with the historical context of the work in question, the background and literacy of the audience, and the subtle connections and influences of the work to other works in the canon being studied (it is, for example, difficult to explain a lot of the symbolic subtext of Lord of the Flies to someone who’s completely unfamiliar with the mythology surrounding Satan). One would also do well to learn the the techniques of Socratic Dialog, effective communication, critical thinking, and rhetoric.

But Literary Studies degree programs, while they touch on many of these elements, do not focus here. They focus on deconstruction, explication, and political analysis (and in ways that are dishonest, which I’ll get into in a bit). A Lit. Studies student is required to write a lot of papers, but is very seldom required to engage in creative work (such as writing stories). Even in the best of programs that don’t display some of the problems I’ll detail below, this leads to a very one-sided understanding of the creative process.

In explicating a poem, for example, one teases out the layers of meaning and symbols, underlining the ambiguities and tensions and bringing them into sharp focus. The explicator comes to see poetry as an exercise in precision engineering–such glorious economy of syllables hyper-condensing such subtlety surely must be the work of precise craftsmanship, akin to designing a car.

So when you go to write poetry and imbue it with meaning, you fall flat on your face. You can’t imagine that metaphors are something you pluck from the air, rather than something you labor over with great deliberation. It doesn’t occur to you that the process of composing metered poetry (we’ll leave freeverse to one side), while it has its exacting mechanical requirements, is not engineering. Jazz also has exacting mechanical requirements, but they’re requirements that have to emerge chaotically from the practiced subconscious, or the result sounds like shit. The multilayered themes that Lit students pick apart are just as often subconscious and accidental as they are deliberate, and some of the best comes in the heat of the moment, by accident, when the author/poet isn’t trying to be profound.

How can this be? Like jazz, poetry (and narrative) obey rules so complex that it’s impossible to “fake it” by reverse engineering. The only way to brilliance is the long way around, training oneself and honing one’s craft through laborious trial and error. The method is too complex to learn by rote.

Explication and analysis have their place (I still very much enjoy them), but they don’t do the three things they’re supposed to do:
They don’t help you learn to be a better writer.
They don’t help you understand how the poet/author created her masterpiece.
And they don’t necessarily tell you what the poem or story means, because while looking at the pieces it’s very easy to miss the gestalt, and many truly masterful wordsmiths produce works that can only be enjoyed or understood on the gestalt level.

To use philosophical terms, a work of literature is “contingent” rather than a “thing in itself.” It is always a piece communication, and that nature has a non-trivial bearing on its meaning, content, etc. Studying “Literature” (in quotes here because “literary studies” encompasses film, lyrical music, narrative nonfiction, and poetry as well as fiction) in the way it’s been studied in the last seventy years is, essentially, to spend a great deal of time studying nothing at all.

2: The Methods of Literary Studies are Dishonest

Every field in the academy–the sciences, critical history, the plastic and visual arts, the dramatic arts–has a toolkit. In a science department you learn to do science (methodology, experimentation, reporting, peer review) and use its tools (from Bunsen burners to calculus), so that you may produce new and important work in that field (new scientific theories and data). In a history department, you learn to do history (research, evaluation, criticism, interact with the empirical and social sciences that might have a bearing on your studies) so that, in the end, you are prepared to make discoveries and communicate them. In a graphic arts program you learn to do art (sketching, painting, sculpting, photography, the ethical and legal environments you may have to navigate as an artist, etc.) so that you can grow into a competent, producing artist.

You see the trend. In every degree program, you learn to do the discipline. You don’t just learn to think about it, you are equipped to be an active participant in the creation of further knowledge and culture in that field.

If you’re pursuing a lit degree, though, you will come out of your degree program equipped to talk about written works as if you understood them (unless you’re an exceptional student and learned less popular methods of analysis, you probably don’t). That’s it. Four to six years and a hundred thousand bucks, just to learn the jargon. Here are some things that you won’t learn in any literary studies program I’ve ever seen:

Character voice, nested plot structure, cliffhangering, tension, writing effective sex scenes, misdirection, making violence interesting, structuring conflict, copyright law, libel law, contracts, the unique tax problems of writers, effective (and multisensory) imagery, subtext, dialog, and (unless you’re studying poetry) rhythmic techniques, applied psychology.

Note that those are things that all fiction writers employ to some extent, whether they do it consciously or subconsciously (and the business items are things that all writers ignore at their own peril).

Instead, what you’ll learn to do is “analyze” literature. What they call “analysis” is not something that would pass for analysis in any other field. The standard literary method derives heavily from Foucault and Derrida, and deals in things like deconstruction, post-structural approach to narrative, and social power dynamics projected through the medium of the text. These guys were the last of the Marxist/Bourgeois literary/social philosophers (each had different roots, but that great philosophical divide in many ways reaches an end point with them), and giants in artistic philosophy circles. They were both quite concerned with how narrative creates culture, frames thought, coerces conformity, and serves as the velvet glove of the power elite. Their concerns were with the meta-narrative–their word for “worldview”–of western culture.

For those of you in the know, yes, I realizing I’m simplifying this to a criminal degree. For the rest of you–I’m sorry that this stuff is so esoteric. It really is relevant, as you’ll see next.

Getting into the ins and outs of Postmodernism (the school of thought that they inadvertently codified) is a long and much more complicated discussion, but here’s where it gets dishonest with respect to literary theroy:

The devotees of Postmodernism began using literature as a way to do philosophy under the radar, so to speak. By carrying out their philosophical and political dialectic in the realm of literature, they were able to promulgate an ideology (some aspects of which I heartily agree with, others not so much) without being subject to the normally ruthless forces of substantive academic debate.

Over the course of the twentieth century, critical thinking in literary analysis gradually went out the window, replaced by ideologically driven thinking encapsulated in a jingoistic (and obfuscatory) vocabulary. And, in all of it, the one thing that wasn’t being studied was literature. Instead of the object of study or of craft, literature became the cypher through which myriad agendas were worked (because, after the Marxists learned how to use this kind of doubletalk, everyone else appropriated the shell game for their own ends).

3: The Culture of Literary Studies is Anti-intellectual

If you spend any time around academic institutions, you’ll sense a bit of tension between the sciences and the humanities. Back in the time of Percy Bysshe Shelley, these two broad fields of endeavor more or less declared war on each other. The hyper-rationalistic scientists looked with scorn upon all things emotional (believing, as they did, that superstition, indolence, and poverty were all the results of ignorance and fear). The Romantics fought back, arguing for the purity of nature and passion, and arguing that science could tell us nothing useful about the human condition. That split deepened and grew bitter over the centuries, and is a deep source of much of the culture war that plagues Western civilization right now.

In The Lord of the Rings, when Saruman declares himself “‘Saruman The White’ no longer, but ‘Saruman of Many Colors,’ for the white light may be broken and bent to more effective use,” Gandalf replies “He who would break a thing to understand it has left the path of wisdom.” This, in a single exchange, is the fight between the Romantics against the Rationalists. Because of that fight, the Romantic half of academia [i.e. The Humanities] (literary and religious studies and some philosophy–though this camp used to also include philosophy and history) has seen itself as the sanctified purveyor of wisdom about the human condition.

I consider it a good thing that the last fifty years have seen astonishing advances in our understanding of creativity and how it works. Rationality is no longer seen as antithetical to emotion and creativity, but as an expression of both. If you want to study any kind of art, you can’t do it anymore without an understanding of the latest in neurology. Applied psychology, sociology, optics, and ecology wouldn’t hurt either. Although the scientific picture of humanity is far from complete, the understanding of the mechanisms of human communication and thought are now far superior to the fuzzy mysticism that once passed for precision in the humanities. This doesn’t mean that there is no room for the ineffable, only that we better understand how and why some things feel ineffable.

The culture of critical theory (almost any degree program with “Studies” affixed to the end of it), though, don’t see it this way. Instead, like the priesthood of a dying religion, they have spent the last forty years fighting a rear-guard action against the sciences, and in the process they’ve grown moribund. If you want superb literary analysis, with very few exceptions, you have to go back to the era of World War 2 and before. Literary studies have, in the meantime, produced almost nothing new, and very little of note.

Ironic and tragic, but in a field of study where the horizon is as limitless as human imagination, the bulk of the intelligentsia are ghettoized. Only a very few brave souls, such as Steampunk Scholar Mike Perschon have dared to break out of the narrow brackets of modernist literary criticism and delve into the un-respectable “genres.”

Alas, the prevailing culture regards the unreadable, the unenjoyable, the old, and the highly political as the only works worthy of study and comment. (This isn’t a new phenomenon. The “Classics” of today were the pop entertainments of yesteryear. But it is a much more intense, and intensely unpleasant, phenomenon today).

Literary Studies and Creative Paralysis

When taking an intellectual approach to any field of endeavor, one risks short-term creative paralysis in the face of information overload–centipede problems, they’re called. I don’t have a problem with that–it’s natural, and it does pass if you relax and let the learning sink in.

But the broken culture, the dishonesty, the political doubletalk, and the intellectual vacuity of Literary Studies programs can and do produce long-term creative paralysis. The Lit student who learns “analysis” under these conditions is prone to adopting those same lazy, self-destructive mental habits as his own, forever second-guessing himself, wondering if this or that turn of phrase betrays unconscious racism, or sexism, or if it will be construed that way, opening him up to slander from his audience. If he’s one who wants to write romance novels, or mysteries, he’s left to wonder if his life’s work will be worth the bother, since he’s been trained to de-value entertainment and enjoyment, and to think of genre literature (or anything that doesn’t carry a heavy political message) as “pulp,” “hack,” “fluff,” or “trash.”

In the meantime, hacks like Bradbury and Ellison and Andre Norton just mastered their craft through practice without the benefit of literary studies (none of them went to college, one of them never even attended high school). Most authors through history, and most authors today, did not learn their craft by studying for a Lit degree.

So, like I said, if you’re wanting to be a writer, do yourself a favor:

Study literature by reading. Pay attention to how your favorite writers (or writers you don’t particularly like) use words to shape your perceptions, evoke emotions, and alter your consciousness. But for Pete’s sake, don’t go into debt to get a Lit degree. You won’t learn anything you need, and you’ll very likely use years of your creative life unlearning the self-destructive mental habits it teaches you. If you ARE interested in deep symbolic analysis, learn history, get familiar with your culture’s literary heritage, and take some semiotics courses. But don’t waste your money on lit courses.

If you find this post useful or thought provoking, please consider donating to the tip jar at the top right of this site, or buying a copy of any of the books you’ll find listed in the right sidebar. Writing is how I make my living–I enjoy it and would like to keep it up!

Vanity
For your starter today, I’ve recently finished Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape. We recently had a three episode set discussing the premise and arguments Harris addresses in the book. I’ve also posted a review at Goodreads. It’s an interesting and provocative book–if you have an interest in ethical philosophy, I highly recommend it.

Whimsy
This is an oldie, but goodie, video of a squid filming its own escape from a skin-diver.

Civil Liberties
Are you offended and frightened by the recent shooting? Wish you could silence people who are talking about “targeting” and “taking down” the opposition? Think that such speech is the moral equivalent of a terrorist threat? I humbly suggest that you might want to rethink your position in light of this excellent piece from Slate.

In a similar vein, the attempt to silence political speech on the Internet has been whole-heartedly embraced by the Obama administration. EFF brief here.

Politics
In the “I reserve skepticism but it’s starting to look like I was wrong” department, there’s encouraging news about the early effects of the new health care bill.

Business and Writing
In the “cool research for Steampunkers” department, the Guardian talks about the FEMALE criminal underworld in Victorian London.

Ever wondered what the real scoop is on the most important part of you’re book’s marketing (i.e. the cover)? Turns out that Laura Resnick did a very extensive series of articles a few years back that goes in depth on how the whole business of covers works. Well worth the read.

The charming Kate Elliot posts a great article at SFWA offering advice to teen writers from someone who’s been there. If you’re a teen writer, check it out.

Bob Mayer expresses admirably why I’ve not yet done a book trailer, and why it would take a special project for me even to consider it. A quick read, worth the click.

For your treadmill-listening pleasure, Gail Carriger gives a delightful and characteristically witty interview with SF Signal, discussing the impact of social media on the book industry and the author’s business model.

Nathan Lowell’s publisher Robin Sullivan does a guest blog for J.A. Konrath in which she busts some myths about indie publishing and talks about the sales growth curve of her authors. Interesting, useful stuff.

If you thought 2010 was tumultuous for the publishing industry, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Borders is in the process of a crash-and-burn, and depending on how it goes down, it could do anything from expanding the print-book market to seriously shrinking it over the near-to-medium term (though I doubt it will actually sink any of the publishing houses along the way, it may mean a lot less cash going around to buy new titles). If you have print books on the market or on the way to market, it behooves you to read Joshua Blimes’s excellent and thorough Borders post-mortem report.

Science and Technology
As an enthusiastic tender of a bacteria culture (lacto bascillus San Francisco), this kind of stuff fascinates me. An in-depth article, with sub-links, on the unique ecosystems that exist within cheeses.

Perhaps I’m showing my age–and I can’t believe I just said that–but I’m still blown away by the return of lay people to the sciences. Last week, a ten-year-old girl discovered a brand-new supernova, and setting a world-record in the process.

The Singularity (in the loose sense) continues apace with the development of contact lenses that display information directly in the field of vision. This is the very epitome of “augmented reality” technology. Wonder how long it’ll be until we can buy them at Walgreens.

Another nifty extra-solar planet discovery–this one very like Mercury.

It’s early days yet, but there’s more rumblings from legitimate autism research that might just have nailed down one of the reasons for increasing incidence and prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorders in the last couple decades. Encouraging news, as this one is completely preventable. Also weird as hell, which tickles my interest-o-meter.

In archeology news, physicists seem to have cracked the secret of the Mayan ability to make dyes that last forever.

At the end of December, the BBC did a wonderful 1-hour documentary on the most world-shaking scientific and technological advantages which, thanks to the marvels of YouTube, you can now see for yourself.

Along similar lines, here’s an article on 8 Science Fiction gadgets and plot devices that became a reality in 2010.

Laser weapons deployed for use on the high-seas! That’s right, non-lethal stun lasers are now being tested for use against pirates. No joke!

And, for the sake of great science-fictiony fun, here’s a great essay by Ronald Bailey speculating on the GOOD things that the lack of ET signals could portend.

Orwell
In other news, moral crusaders continue to Bowdlerize and lie about history “for the sake of the children.” If I can point to the single most harmful strand of human nature, aside perhaps from the propensity to commit genocide, this is the one I’d pick.

On the other hand, there are people of genuine moral fiber still circulating in the world. If you want something that will make you cry or stand up and cheer, check out this statement by the father of one the 9-year-old girl slain in the assassination attempt this week. Someone who takes his responsibility as a member of the body politic seriously enough that he’s unwilling to call for the curtailment of the civil liberties of others as salve for his grief? Uncommon! And displays most excellent character.

Weird Apps
Digital Life has info on an app for all you iPhone folks that will tell you when you can leave the theater to hit the bathroom without missing any plot points in currently-released movies. Behold, RunPee!

And that’s it for this time. Catch you around next time the world gets weird!

Vanity

On the ever-so-self-indulgent subject of, well, me, there are a few items potentially of interest.

First, I released a second Clarke Lantham novel. When Clarke Lantham goes home for Christmas, the results can’t be good.

Meanwhile, the first Clarke Lantham book has been getting some attention. KindleAuthor just interviewed me about it, View from Valhalla loved it, and Seth Harwood, Gail Carriger, and Philippa Ballantine all liked it well enough to provide blurbs. If you haven’t read it yet, you can check out the first couple chapters here. For that matter, you can check out the first part of book to, A Ghostly Christmas Present, here. Enjoy!

Art and Writing
If you’re an artist, or a writer, and you live somewhere that the influence of Hollywood reaches (i.e. everywhere), it’s very easy to forget that being “in shape,” “fit,” or “athletic,” doesn’t mean the same thing as “lean,” “6-pack abs,” or “what I saw on the cover of Vogue this month.” Forgetting this basic fact of life robs stories and paintings and graphic novels of realism, even if slightly. So, for your benefit and mine, here’s a photo essay featuring over 100 Olympic atheletes in phenomenal shape, each featuring a very unique body type.

Odd how the two most “offensive” words in the English language at the moment were words that were only mildly naughty 30 years ago. While one of these will continue to be a problem for a while, the other is redeemable. Check out Hal Duncan’s brilliant linguistic history of “cunt,” and his take-down of the implicit sexism sold with the demonization of what is, after all, a very cute word for a very delightful organ. He also goes into depth in the way usage varies on either side of the Atlantic. Unusually thought-provoking, and not played for shock value. Very useful for writers who write cross-culturally.

Publishing
We all know publishing is changing — snooze, hit the alarm, pull the other one, etc. We read about it in the New York Times a hundred times, which one would expect, as publishing is a big presence in New York. But when you read about it in the LA Times you know the movement’s gone big. Of course, this is the LA Times, which isn’t exactly a bastion of non-sensationalistic accuracy. Even so, it’s a fun read full of links to authors doing innovative things. Fun stuff!

TeleRead posted an interesting overview of the history of book piracy, it’s sociodynamics, and economics, with a follow-up column speculating on what it means for the industry. Some interesting stuff here by Chris Meadows.

For those of you who, like me, have a huge library full of books by dead people that will never be released in e-book format (or, at least, not for anothe decade or two) there is an inexpensive non-destructive way to digitize your books. This method is legal and ethically benign so long as you do not share or sell the resulting digital books. As an open source advocate and DIY culture member, I am very much in favor of projects like this. As an author who makes his living off his intellectual property, I work hard to make sure my work is always available in forms that do not strip the reader of his or her fair use rights. The other side of that contract is that the reader doesn’t steal or pirate the creative work of the entertainers whose work they consume. So, with that caveat, enjoy the workshop experience I’ll keep writing ‘em if you keep reading ‘em.

Speaking of piracy, Paul Cornell writes a provocative ethics article about illegal downloading filled with many good and some rather flacid points. Worth a read, nicely thought-provoking.

Got a book available on Kindle? You can now post the sample on your website with the Kindle for the Web app. This post from indieKindle gives instructions for embedding the app on your site or in a blog post.

And, speaking of e-books…solar powered e-reader, anyone?

Beauty
A really fun time-lapse of what looks like the blizzard from hell — over 3 feet in less than 24hrs. Most impressive – the best 30 seconds you’ll spend today.

Terry Gilliam, whose work has always been kinda steampunky anyway, is producing a steampunk puppet movie that looks really damn cool if this short film version of it is any indication.

Not to be out-done on the time-lapse front, NASA brings you a time-lapse of a sunset from another world. Click here to watch a Martian sunset.

And for breathtaking, how bout a collection of photos of man-made footprints on other worlds?

Science & Technology

Recycling. We all do it for the environment, but some kinds of recycling–like recycling plastic–are a waste of energy, resources, money, and doesn’t yeild an environemntal or economic gain. This isn’t true for everything–aluminum, scrap metal, electronics, and (thanks to a recent breakthrough in dealing with treatment of toxic de-inking chemicals) paper–all yeild tremendous benefits when properly recycled. But plastics…man, plastics are a problem. They’re all chemically different, they have to be very carefully sorted, cooked, and then are downcycled (made into things further down the supply chain) rather than recycled to the same quality. It’s a dirty secret, and it’s been a bit of a problem and embarassment for a couple decades now. That might not be true for much longer. Seems that, rather than resorting to dogmatism and moral guilting on one side, or lazy-bones naysaying on the other, one scientist has figured out a process for recycling all plastics that’s inexpensive, energy efficient, and a net environmental gain. Bravo!

In the realm of philosophy of science, Alvin Plantinga, an otherwise respected epistemologist from Harvard, is in the process of dipping his face in egg when it comes to philosphy of science. His companionable discussion with Daniel Dennet gives you the bulk of his case in his own words, and P.Z. Meyers (whom I consider entertaining but not exactly one for nuance) takes him apart very effectively here.

Research on different kinds of invisiblity continues apace. This article talks time distortion effects of certain kinds of meta-materials, and gives a roadmap for a proof-of-concept. I’ve been having a blast watching this field go from the stuff of dreams and science fiction to the stuff of serious, hard-core well-funded research in the last ten years. I can’t wait to see–or not see–some metamaterial-based invisibility prototypes in action.

In other news, 3D image editing for anaglyph is coming soon to a computer near you.

The field of linguistics has long been one of those in-between sciences–not quite a real hard science, but something more quantitative than a social science. Google Books looks to be changing that. Ronald Bailey talks about the new trend in tracking linguistic and cultural evolution using quantitative analysis of Google’s book database.

You know the insomnia you get after a traumatic experience? Turns out that trying like hell to get to sleep might not be such a good idea after all.

If you’ve heard about geopolitical unrest because of China’s attempts to lock down the rare-earth metal market, don’t worry. Turns out they’re not the only country with lots of the “rare” stuff.

Education

If you’re a strong autodidact like me, you’re always on the prowl for new educational stuff. OpenCulture just updated their list of free online courses from major universities this month, and the selection is getting really impressive. Even scarier, as one who grew up in academia, I’m starting to recognize a lot of names on that list.

Meanwhile, one of the most excellent shows on the history of technology, James Burke’s Connections, has made its way onto YouTube. Bears multiple re-watchings. Check it out.

If you’re like most people, you’ve heard about the Theory of Relativity (E=MC^2) and have a vague idea that it means all matter is energy or something like that, but you’ve never really been able to get your head around the math to understand what it really means. Well, fear not — the always-readable Bertrand Russel wrote the definitive popularization of general relativity, and Derek Jacobi read it. Now, it’s available for free to the public as an audiobook. Go grab it now, give it a listen, and prepare to have your mind turned inside-out. Fun stuff

Also in the “good clean fun” department, someone with actual sexual experience on the order of decades is now producing a sex education series on youtube. Funny, clever, and no-bullshit, he calls it the “Guide to Getting It On,” and he hits a lot of points that younger, hipper educators often miss.

Politics

This is the only political article this time, and I’m including it because of how much of a shocker it is. Francis Fukyama’s analysis of where liberal econimcs went wrong by embracing the liberalization of financial markets instead of trade-goods markets. It’s very interesting watching the Keynsians, the Monetarists, and the Hayekians all starting to converge on this point in the wake of the recent banking crisis. More interesting to me is that Adam Smith got there two hundred years ago–and that politicians and policy makers still aren’t listening.

— — — —
I got tons more in my salad bowl, but that’s already a more substantive meal than I had planned to serve up. Hope you enjoy — and have a great New Year!

Welcome to the second of several Down From Ten Feedback shows. This one is episode ten, part two of the Dealing In series of feedback shows, where I and several friends answer your emails and talk about whatever comes up. This time, I’m joined by Metamor City and Down From Ten cast member Chris Lester, New York Times Bestseller Gail Carriger, and producer/actor/cartoonist Kitty Nic’Iaian. What do we talk about? An incomplete list, in no particular order:

Food
Pacing
Screenplays
Chekov
Soulless
Racism and bigotry in the Victorian world
Douglas Adams
Thomas Mann
Cultural change throughout history
The Death of the Author
Focault
Deride
Shakespeare
The Royal Shakespeare Company
POV characters
George R.R. Martin
Neal Stephenson
Shakespeare
Employing Symbolism in writing
Tee Morris

“Picard, I could blast this ship out of existence if I felt like it. I could grow hair on your head. Turn your crew into embryos, force Worf to recite doggerel. I could turn your ship inside out, your reality outside in. I am not being condescending, Picard… not that I’m incapable of it, you understand, but this simply isn’t one of the times. Now, what I most definitely am, Picard, is arrogant. Why? Because I have a reason to be. I have a right to be. So… mortal… what’s your excuse?”

Harlan Ellison is arguably the least popular author in science fiction, because his personal reputation (some of which, he’s the first to admit, he worked hard to earn) paints him as something in between Q and the unholy hybrid of Ross Perot and a pissed off garden gnome. He’s also one of the greatest living authors in the world; the quality of his stories, and their diversity, is such that he’s never been out of work since he started selling consistently in the 1950s and 60s.

He edited the two greatest anthologies in the history of the genre, he penned the Star Trek episode that showed the possibilities inherent in Gene Roddenberry’s lovably hokey show, his influence on and friendship with J. Michael Straczynski were instrumental in bringing Babylon 5 to market (thus giving Ellison an instrumental hand in two of the most historically important Science Fiction dramas, as measured by their effect on culture–in Star Trek’s case–and on the nature of televised drama in the case of Babylon 5). He’s the author of two of the most reprinted stories in history. He nursed the New Wave movement of the 60s and 70s to something artistically and culturally important, with ramifications far beyond Science Fiction.

A lot of my friends (as in, almost all of them) can’t stand him. Some will go into fits of huffing and profanity when he come sup in conversation (as will a much greater number of my casual acquaintances). He’s an irascible bastard, with very little patience for those who (in his opinion) don’t get it. He’s scrappy, picks fights whenever he can, and is a master of scandalizing the easily scandalized. And arrogance? Yeah, he’s got a lot of that.

And you know what? I don’t care. Normally I’d smile and nod, but it’s time to go on record saying I don’t give a good goddamn if Harlan Ellison is an asshole. Although I enjoy being kind to people whenever possible and dislike cruelty, I always have and always will admire Harlan’s work ethic, his devotion to excellence, his impatience with half-assedness, his integrity, and the amazing quality of his work over a more-than-fifty year writing career.

So, like Peter David’s Q said, yeah, he’s arrogant. And if you have a problem with that, I gotta ask: What’s your excuse, mortal? I certainly don’t have one. I haven’t earned that right. If I live long enough and write well enough, I might have a ghost of a chance of earning it, but that day is decades off (at best).

I think it’s an important thing to say, and to say now. Because, you see, Harlan is dying. Today, he is appearing at MadCon in Madison, Wisconson, and it will be his last public appearance. Ever.

You can read Harlan’s announcement here.

There are only a very few people left who have been around our field since the beginning, or nearly so. Harlan Ellison, Frederick Pohl, Robert Silverberg, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, Anne McCaffrey, Harry Harrison, Brian Aldiss, James Gunn, Michael Moorcock. I might have missed one or two, but the fact remains: I can now count our living history in names that don’t even take up all my fingers and toes.

These are the people we owe our field to. Their stories, and the tales of those who came before them starting in the 1920s, have helped shape our civilization, because they inspired the scientists that entered the space program, that powered the computer revolution, who pioneered the internet, and who are now powering the biotech revolution. They are the visionaries whose dreams our stuff is made of.

If you are fortunate enough to be in the room with any of these people, treasure the chance. Listen to their stories. Remember the history. They’re going fast, and I suspect that most of us in the under fifty category won’t realize how precious they are until it’s far too late.

It’s been two years since I started putting my fiction out into the aether through podcasts, selling stories, and otherwise subjecting the universe to my…shall we say “colorful” mental meanderings. My readers and listeners have been good enough to send me feedback throughout the endeavor, which is excellent market research as well as great motivation to keep on.

If there is a single topic – beyond “you cliffhangering bastard” – that I get hit with most, it’s about how I deal with sex in my stories. There are the occasional “that’s really hot” comment, but more often there are the complaints, such as “I can’t stop listening, but do you really have to have so much sex/homosexuality/eroticism/etc.?” I find it fairly ironic, in these post-Heinlein days populated by paranormal romance, vampire erotica masquerading as everyday fiction, and abstinence porn, that treating sex merely as a normal part of life could raise so many hackles, but there you are.

More interesting than that, though, is how little I hear complaints about the violence, which is every bit as unflinching (or, in the words of one reviewer, clinical), as the sexual content. There are moments in Predestination or The Man In The Rain which turn my stomach
reading them, and yet they pass with relatively few comments compared to, for example, the sex scene between Joss and Cassy toward the end of Predestination or pretty much anything in Down From Ten.

As an American, I’ve been hearing about the double-standard between sex and violence most of my life – over the last two years I’ve been able to see it in action through my audience and through the eyes of non-American colleagues such as Philippa Ballantine, who once quipped to me: “On American TV sure, we’ll show murder and mayhem, but God forbid you show a boob!”

We all know this, right? Or at least we’ve heard it before. Most Americans ignore it in one fashion or another. Toward the conservative end of the cultural spectrum it can even look like a good thing: Robert M. Price once told me in an interview that he found Hostel powerful because it shows that the trivialization of sex through pornography and prostitution leads directly to slavery and torture (he’s not alone in this assertion – there’s a broad coalition of feminist and fundamentalist philosophers who share the same general conclusion, though their core values otherwise differ).

Normally I keep my trap shut about things like this, unless someone asks me about it directly, because it’s the kind of topic on which people tend to be partisan. That changed this week, though, when I watched through a TV series called Harper’s Island – a nice little mystery thriller made for CBS last year. The premise is simple – it’s Ten Little Indians done in the style of a slasher film, and it’s remarkably effective. It’s effective, well-executed (no pun intended), and deeply twisted.

I had a lot of fun watching it until it occurred to me, sometime in the middle of the series, that this was done for broadcast TV – not cable, not satellite or premium channels, but broadcast. This series which features the kind of gore that, even today, would earn it a hard R rating in the theater, was broadcast on American TV.

You know, American TV, where three frames of breast exposure is enough to cause a national crisis? Where Bono saying “fuck” on an awards show costs the network hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines? Where the word “piss” is bleeped out of Mythbusters episodes that air on cable? America, the land of the free that banned Carlin from the radio? The America that is so culturally brittle that it can’t stand the freedom of speech enshrined in its own constitution for fear of what might happen to the children?

There was a time not too long ago when you could expect the similar levels of sex, violence, and “bad” language on TV. Quality adult programming required a wink and a nod sometimes, but a good writer could do it – and recently there’s been a flowering of really good adult entertainment as broadcast has had to compete with cable and the Internet. It was censorship, and appalling, but there at least seemed to be a consistency about it – a sense that some level of intensity (about anything) was for adults, and thus not okay for broadcast where anyone of tender years might be watching.

Now, the situation seems to be changing, and in a bad way. Harper’s Island features some of the most grisly violence I’ve seen this side of a slasher film – done well enough to make the makeup artist part of my brain goggle in wonder, to be sure – frosted by a sense of calculating sadism and paranoia worthy of the villains (or heroes) of Thomas Harris. It’s not an exploration of violence, it’s merely a thrill-ride, and a remarkably effective and occasionally nauseating one.

Does it feature the kind of language people might use when being stalked by a serial killer? Does it show anything sexual beyond the briefest acknowledgments that its characters have some kind of sexuality? Of course not! Children might be watching.

Growing up as I did on the cultural right wing, I long considered the American double-standard to be harmless and quaint. I understood the fears that lay behind it, even though I thought they were ridiculous. I chuckled at the amount of effort certain groups put into the mind games behind sexual purity, and the money they waste on meaningless political and cultural campaigns. I thought it was understandable, and maybe silly, but not really harmful.

It took seeing Harper’s Island to realize how much my views have changed. The cultural conservative picture of sex, and the double-standard it dictates isn’t just quaint, silly, or something that can be condescendingly shrugged off as the product of too much insularity. It’s an insidious, destructive lie that is now so baldfaced that we can watch dismemberment on prime-time broadcast while anthropology documentaries censor tribal nudity (I kid you not).

A basic part of adulthood is the ability to deal with the world as it really is. Every social creature – including every human – has sex organs, sexual appetites, and sexual inclinations. The bonding impulse is as foundational to life as the need for food. Everyone touches, everyone eats, everyone dies, and virtually everyone has orgasms. To pretend otherwise is unbecoming the dignity of an adult.

It’s also genocidal. That’s because there is, after all, a link between sex and death and violence. The lack of willingness to deal realistically with sex is something that endangers the lives millions of people every day. In the age of AIDS, the price of childish delusion and the illusory comfort it brings can be measured by a metric once used exclusively for strategic warfare: Megadeaths.

I have a very high violence tolerance. I believe that violence in art and entertainment can be life-affirming and useful as it caters to our visceral natures. It helps us cope with the prospect of death. Violence can even be a social good (though such circumstances are far fewer than they once were). It can help us feel keenly alive in ways that we in civil society can’t access in any other way without harming those around us. But in no way is it more life-affirming than our primary bonding impulses, or touch and pleasure, or the difficulties of love and friendship.

The dictionary defines terrorism as “the systematic use of terror as a means of coercion”. In political terms, terrorism is is characterized by non-strategic but politically-motivated violence conducted against civilians. When used by an outside or revolutionary force, it is an attempt to destabilize or undermine a regime, culture, or system by eroding the trust that makes the system works. It can also be used by a sitting government against its political enemies, in which case it’s generally called “tyranny” or “totalitarianism” depending on the degree to which it is practiced.

That’s it. That’s what terrorism is. Intimidation, harassment, or political wrangling isn’t terrorism. Expulsion for running afoul of academic standards isn’t “terrorization.” Civilians who die while caught in the crossfire of a war are not “victims of terror/terrorism.”

And, most importantly, soldiers and representatives of a military or political authority are not victims of terrorism. They’ve run afoul of another phenomenon that we have a perfectly good term for: they are casualties of guerrilla warfare.

Guerrilla war is war conducted by military irregulars against strategic and military targets. Oklahoma City Bombing? Conducted by a revolutionary against a government building housing paramilitary administration in revenge for earlier actions by that paramilitary organization — that’s guerrilla warfare. Ditto for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, and the RPG attack on my friend’s tent during the Iraq war (don’t worry, he was outside watching a movie at the time).

Then there are a whole slew of things domestically that are neither terrorism or guerrilla war, but get called “terrorism” by pundits and public officials and radicals. A peaceful protest at a WTO event isn’t terrorism, it’s dissent. When that protest turns violent (as they frequently do) it’s not terrorism, it is either a riot (if it’s spontaneous escalation) or it’s a revolutionary attack that rides the line of guerrilla warfare but usually doesn’t qualify, as it’s not well organized enough. Columbine wasn’t terrorism, it was a killing spree (there was no political motive). Fort Hood still seems up in the air – it might have been a guerrilla attack with substantial collateral damage, or it might have been a killing spree (but it wasn’t terrorism by any classical definition).

These categorizations can sound pretty meaningless – or worse, callous – because they are all ways of saying “people got killed/hurt for no very good reason.” But they are important because they all point to fundamental moral issues about violence. When we don’t make such distinctions, we lose the ability to make ethical distinctions between necessary violence and gratuitous violence. This distinction makes the difference between murder, manslaughter, and self defense. It also makes the difference between police work and police brutality, between crime and treason, between warfare and war crimes, and between disagreement and terrorism.

And, of course, in the grey areas where the categories overlap, there is lots of room for exploring moral ambiguities through fiction.

To conclude, I quote the immortal words of George Carlin:
“Please pay attention to the language we’ve all agreed on.”

[In honor of her new book Soulless, which impressed me with its groundedness in the Victorian world, I asked author Gail Carriger to blog about the art of finding good research sources for Steampunk writing. This is her contribution - thank you very much, Ms. Carriger! -JDS]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: nothing beats primary sources. I hate to be a traitor to the Author Guild’s justifiable objection to the Google Book settlement, but Google books does already have a number of good primary sources from the 1800s available.

* One of my personal favorites, with recipes and other interesting tidbits about domestic management in 1876, is Things a Lady Would Like to Know

* Floote’s Medical Common Sense is another wonderful resource for a historical perspective on the Victorian attitude towards medical science, not to mention a window into scientific, social, and psychological theory. This is an American classic (if non-fiction can be called such).

There are other useful primary sources as well, that you might be able to order through Amazon or a rare books dealer. My two favorites are:

* Baedeker, Karl. 1896. Baedeker’s's London and its Environs. (or any Baedeker’s dated to the Victorian era) for maps, railroad time tables, popular museums and visitors areas, not to mention names of shops, clubs, restaurants, news papers and more.

* Edwards, Amelia B. 1877. A Thousand Miles Up the Nile. For language and the Victorian adventurer abroad feel.

As for secondary sources, what you need may depend upon what you’re writing. I write comedy of manners, so my needs reflect this more pedestrian interest level, someone with a more military bent probably has a different list. Never the less, I find myself constantly reaching for the following:

* Pool, Daniel. 1993. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. For the basics.

* Cunnington, C. Willett. 1990. English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century. For anything to do with women’s clothing

* Flanders, Judith. 2003. The Victorian House. For domestic life questions. The information is not well structured, but it is there.

* Farwell, Byron. 1972 Queen Victoria’s Little Wars. For the quickest insight into the Empire Building mentality and military history of the age.

Aside from Wikipeda, which can be an okay place to start, there are some good, if not particularly well organized, research tools dedicated to the Victorians online as well.

* By far the biggest and the best is the Victorian Web which is a great spiderweb of all sorts of useful information

* The Victorian Dictionary offers up primary newspaper articles on different topics

And here are a few interesting individual offerings online.

* Victorian Slag Dictionary

* Victorian Etiquette

* The Illustrated London News (starting in 1842)

* Victorian servants

* The Ladies Journal

* Godey’s Lady’s Book

* Naval Ships of Victorian times

* Nick Names of Cavalry regiments

* Some ways to tie a cravat

* La Mode Illustree LiveJournal group

Other tips:

* If you have a DVR or Tivo trigger in keywords pertaining to your topic of interest. You never know what the history channel might be dealing with next. It will at least give you a jumping off point.

* Watch BBC costume dramas, and or, rent the DVD and check out the extras, they often have interviews with historical experts.

* Having a really hard time answering a research question? Cold call a local university history department. Experts love to talk about their expertise, perhaps there is someone in the history department you can ask. They may at least give you a book or article to read.

Lastly, of course you can keep an eye on my website, I often put up bits and bobs I’ve discovered around the net.

Often, fantasy and historical fiction falls prey to this far too easily, because we don’t often question where certain expressions in our language come from. For example, you wouldn’t want to describe a complete package as “Lock, Stock, and Barrel” if the story you’re writing takes place before the seventeenth century when the musket became widespread in Europe. The reason? “Lock, stock, and barrel” are the three major components of a musket, and all three together means that you have everything you need to assemble one.

This kind of thing can shatter the illusion that you work hard to create, as it did for me in Peter Jackson’s “The Two Towers” during the sloppiest moment in the film. At the battle of Helm’s Deep, Aragorn commands a brigade of elf archers to “fire” on the enemy. I can’t emphasize this enough: nobody in the history of the world has ever fired an arrow. The notion of “fire” being synonymous with “activate” was nonsensical before the invention of the first ever fire-powered weapon, the cannon in the 13th century in China (not introduced into Europe until much later). Even so, archers were not commanded to “fire” until many generations after bows, arrows, ballistas, catapults, and crossbows ceased to be used in military combat. When commanding archers, the term is “loose” or, less frequently, “release,” “arrow,” or “trip” – NOT “fire.”

To further the historical literacy among fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction writers, I recommend bookmarking the phrase finder and using it frequently when writing and proofreading. A good etymological dictionary and slang dictionary wouldn’t hurt either.

Lisa Paul, in the comments, delivered a round bitch-slap to me for missing the obvious possibility that the following faux-pas could be an attempt to emulate the Brooklynite coloquialism “S/he was robbed” and convey their accent. She could be right. However…I like my take on it better . Can anyone confirm whether the author of the MSNBC story is from Brookly?

—original story follows—

Nastia Liukin had a bad day yesterday at the Olympics. Not only did she lose the gold due to a scoring decision, she’s the occasion for MSNBC, one of the more prestigious news sites on the internet, deciding to dump English in favor of LOLCAT-speak.

You heard it here first, guys. According to this page, Nastia Luikin “wuz” robbed. And she wuzn’t just robbed once, she “wuz robbed” twice. Once in paragraph two’s lead sentence, which says “It seems that she wuz robbed,” [sic] and once in paragraph three, which restates the imperative as a teasing question: “Wuz Luikin robbed?”

LOLspeak hits MSNBC

It’s one thing when a blogger does it – people who are on the net all day sometimes reflexively revert to IM shorthand or lolcat-ese. Dumb, but excusable. It’s quite another when a professional news organization (one of the biggest in the world), includes this kind of juvenile idiocy in their news reporting. I guess that an eighth grade reading level isn’t low enough anymore for some press corporations – they’re changing their writing standards to “Eighth grade Instant-Messaging level.”

Now, by the time you read this, somebody over in the editorial department of MSNBC might have gotten a fucking dictionary out or, you know, USED A SPELLCHECKER on their page and caught the review. If not, let’s not tell them, ok? Let’s just spread this meme *everywhere.* Let’s embarrass the hell out of them. Let’s get everyone so hopping mad about it that maybe, just maybe, people will look to see if a journalist, an editor, or a copy editor can spell before they’re hired. Maybe we’ll even get lucky and schools will start requiring (and encouraging) that students demonstrate basic traffic-sign level literacy before promoting them up the academic ladder to be with their friends.