In which I vent after a less than satisfying day...

I try to not use this space to moan too much about my personal stuff. I know no one wants to hear (read) it when I'm having a bad day. And most of what I have to complain about are decidedly first world problems, and much less serious than what other people are going through.

I understand that.

But, every once in awhile, I just have to vent. This is one of those times*

Start with the firecrackers that have been going off every night for the past three in my neighborhood, since they are the most immediate issue. Apparently, some of my neighbors either don't have a calendar or don't know how to read the one they have. The Fourth isn't until next week, people. I don't have anything against fireworks (except for their unfortunate tendency to start fires and blow peoples fingers and faces off sometimes), but I don't want to hear them every single night. A couple of nights ago, it sounded like they had a cannon out there.

Second of all, I haven't been able to concentrate at all today to get any writing done. It's been going really well since the end of last week. I've started the second draft of the novel I'm working on, and I've written nearly 11,000 words since last Friday night. Now? Nothing. I sat here and stared at the computer monitor for ages tonight, and...crickets.

Now, I know myself and my writing habits well enough to know that these things go in cycles, and that in a day or two I'll be on track again. At times like this, however, knowing that doesn't help.

So, after I gave up working on the novel, I figured I could get a newsletter I'm responsible for publishing up and going. I have a Saturday night deadline on that, and much of it is already written. But, I need to get everything into one document and formatted. Except, I couldn't get the reformatting to work, no matter what I did. I finally gave up on that, too. I try not to be a quitter, but it was either that or throw my laptop across the room, and that wouldn't have made anybody happy.

And then there's the job search. Nothing going on there, either. On the rare occasion I find a job posting that I have qualifications for, a talent for, and half a chance of getting, it turns out to be too far away for it to be practical for me to apply, considering that I cannot afford to relocate. As Roseanne Roseannadanna (the Sainted Gilda Radner) used to say on the old (good) Saturday Night Live, "It's always something."

I could just give up and go to bed. I've gotten the things I really needed to do, done today. Had a meeting at CVP, which went well, and where I volunteered to help with my committee's presentation during Seminar Week in a couple of weeks. I watered the plants (and discovered that I've got lots of cherry tomatoes on the vine and ripening). I washed dishes. I did the grocery shopping that I needed to do.

The hang-up with going to bed now, though, is that it isn't even 10 p.m. If I go to bed now, I'll wake up at three in the morning and not be able to go back to sleep. Since I don't have to get up early in the morning, that idea is a nonstarter. I might be able to find a book to start reading, but in the mood I'm in that's probably a long-shot.

Ah, well. I've probably vented enough for now, and it's served it's purpose; I feel slightly calmer now than I did when I started writing about half an hour ago or so.


So, if you've gotten this far, thanks for reading. I promise this isn't going to turn into an "oh-poor-me" blog. It's just been one of those days.


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*Five extra points to whoever can identify the movie this line comes from.

Book Review: "Virgin", by F. Paul Wilson

Virgin (Borderlands Press, 2007; 309 pages), by F. Paul Wilson, is an odd book.

This is not a criticism, just a statement of fact. I can’t remember the last time I read a book where it took so long to figure out where it was going. Again, not a bad thing, although I did nearly give up on it about a quarter of the way in, just because I wasn't sure what the writer was up to.

It starts out with the discovery, in 1991, of an ancient manuscript in the wilderness of Israel. Some years later, two manuscripts surface, written in an archaic form of Aramaic, seemingly authentic...until it turns out that the words were written with ink that was only a few years old.

One of the manuscripts, along with a translation of the text, ends up in the hands of a Roman Catholic priest in New York, given to him by a friend who thinks he will get a kick out of it. But there is a Shin Bet agent who is after the manuscripts, and he is willing to kill to get them back.

Who is the agent? Why does he want the forged manuscripts so badly? What or who is he protecting? And who is he, really?

There is much more to the story, including a US Senator with aspirations to the presidency with secrets of his own and a nun who is determined to find what the priest’s manuscript says is hidden. To say much more than that would be to take all the fun out of the reading of this novel.

It would be easy to say that Wilson set out, in Virgin, to out-Dan Brown Dan Brown. And there is an element of that to the novel. But Wilson takes a different, much more original tack to the genre than Dan Brown could ever have managed.

I do have to say that I didn't find the resolution to the novel to be completely satisfying, but that has to do with my own personal outlook and not with anything in the storytelling. And, the quibble I have with it is so small within the whole that it didn't bother me enough to ruin my enjoyment of the reading experience as a whole, considering that the larger message was something that had me nodding my head in agreement as I read the last few pages of the book.

I've not read anything by Wilson before, but on the strength of my experience in reading Virgin, I suspect that I will be seeking out more of his work.

Music Sunday: The Looking for Work Edition

This is going to be an unusual Music Sunday, I think, because I haven't had the time to focus on music very much this week.

You see, I'm looking for work. I have been for a few months now, and so far all I've got is crickets. Part of this has to do with the fact that I'm not what you'd call a traditional professional. I'm a writer, editor, and proofreader, and while there are other things I can do, I don't have the on-paper qualifications a lot of employers think they need from their employees. I'd like to think that the fact that I am very good at the things I do would at least partly make up for that, but with the economy as it is, job-hunting is kind of a crap-shoot. Right now I'm convinced that the odds of finding a real job are worse than the odds casinos offer to gamblers.

The result of all of this is that I start to feel guilty if I'm not actually engaged in looking for work, or doing my volunteer hours at Central Valley Professionals, where I recently took a week-long seminar in job-search techniques, or doing something else to actively find work. Even though I know that I can only spend so many hours a day working on the search, I still feel guilty when I'm not either looking or thinking about looking. That translates into little time and little inclination to think about music.

Being a writer, however, means that I've also got writing projects going. I've written a little bit about those here in the past. One is a non-fiction project and the other is a novel. I don't feel quite so guilty when I'm working on those; I'm working, even if there is not an immediate pay-off for those projects. At least I'm doing something productive.

And this is where the music comes in. There aren't many songs about writing, really. But there is Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark", which is at least in part about a writing frustrated with just sitting and trying to write his book. Appropriate, I think for the week I've had, although I'm not that frustrated with my writing at the moment, as I've written well over 5,000 words this weekend so far.



Then there is this promotional video, from before music videos were a thing, for The Beatles "Paperback Writer", about the frustrations surrounding trying to get published. It is really the only other rock song I can think of that has to do with writing. Let me know if you know of others.



So, it's back to the salt mines for me, even on Sunday. One of these days, the books I'm writing will be finished - and published one way or another. At least these days there is the option of self-publishing. There's still a stigma to that, but things are getting better on that front, I think. And, maybe one day I'll actually find a job.

Not holding my breath, you understand, but the economy can't stay this crappy forever. Can it?

Was your weekend as busy as mine was?...

Yes. Today is Monday. Yesterday was Sunday, and was meant to be Music Sunday.

It was, as you might have noticed, not.

There is an explanation for that. I was otherwise engaged all weekend at an event for an organization that I belong to...in other words, it was Anniversary weekend for the Barony of Nordwache, Kingdom of Caid, Society for Creative Anachronism. That means that I was busy all weekend, from early Friday morning until late afternoon Sunday.

I was not nearly as busy there as some other people, but I did do several hours of volunteer work, sitting at Gate and running the Silent Auction. Additionally, it was hot at the event, which involved camping...and there was no air conditioning aside from the occasional breeze. I don't do heat, so I was exhausted by the time I got home. I did actually sit down and attempt to write and post the Music Sunday post yesterday evening, but I wasn't braining very well, as an imaginary* friend of mine has been known to put it.

Actually, I'm still not braining all that well today. I've also got dishes to do, and laundry to check to see if it's dry yet, and straightening, vacuuming, and mopping to clean up after having guests for two weeks. Three adults, two medium to large dogs and, occasionally, a five-year-old child in a two-bedroom apartment is a little crowded, and things tend to not stay neat and tidy. But roommate, her son and granddaughter, and the two dogs, are now gone on summer vacation, leaving room to actually do some cleaning up.

So, Music Sunday hasn't disappeared. It just went on hiatus for a week. I might even post a video or two along he way between now and then, if the spirit strikes me. No promises, but it could happen...so stay tuned.
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*An imaginary friend is someone I know online but not in real life.

Music Sunday - The Late Sixties/Early Seventies Edition

I like new music, old music, most kinds of music. It seems to me, however, that the period between 1967 and 1973 or so produced an amazing variety of good music - or at least a lot of music I liked when it came out and still like listening to today.

The thing that got me thinking about this this week was a surprise re-hearing of a song from 1969, "Ruby (Don't Take Your Love to Town)", by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. It was a song I liked when it was released, but I had nearly forgotten about it in the intervening years and it kind of surprised me to discover how glad I was to hear it again after so long. When it came on, I cranked the volume on the radio in the car and sang along - for some reason I tend to remember the lyrics of songs that I haven't heard in years - and despite the content of the song, just having heard it seemed to put me in a much better mood simply because I'd heard it.

Not that this is a song with fun, upbeat lyrics. Released during the height of US involvement in Vietnam, it tells the story of a man who was injured in the war, something that wsn't talked about a lot at the time, even with protests against the war heating up across the country and around the world. But it is a good song, and a good song is always a good thing.



Looking around for other songs from the time, I found a couple of others that are just as good, and just as good today as they were when they were recorded, also in 1969, even though they are much different than "Ruby". I found this 1989 performance by B. B. King of his 1969 hit "The Thrill Is Gone":



And then, for something completely different from either "Ruby" or "The Thrill Is Gone", there is "Come Together", the last song the Beatles ever recorded with all four of the band's members in the studio at the same time.



I think it is only appropriate to also include this song, from the following year, while the Beatles were in the process of breaking up. This is one of the first of Paul McCartney's songs as a solo artist, "Maybe I'm Amazed" which, for my money, is one of the most interesting love songs I've ever heard, and far from his later "silly love songs" period.



And, because I can, I'm going to include this song from a little earlier, The Animals' "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", from 1965. I've never been able to figure out if this is a song of rationalization or apology, but I've always liked it.



From a little later than the first songs this week, this is a live performance of "Heart of Gold", by Neil Young, from 1971 or 1972. I was lucky enough to see Young perform this song live in 1973. You'll have to bear with the first minute or two of the video, with Young searching for the right harmonica before he performs the song, but its worth the wait. And, really, it's kind of amusing watching him pull boxes out of various pockets before he finds the instrument he wants.



That's what? Six songs? I could post quite a few more, but this is probably enough for one Sunday. Enjoy.

Oh, and I'd love it if you'd drop a comment telling me about your favorte songs from the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Sigh...

Ray Bradbury died Tuesday night, at the age of 91, and I am very sad about it.

It isn't that he didn't live a long, full life. He did. But now there won't be any new stories from him, and that is sad for his millions of readers. I've been one of those readers for many years now - since the age of about eight, when my father brought me a copy of one of Bradbury's short story collections when I was stuck home in bed with almost-pneumonia.

I honestly can't remember which collection it was (although I think it might have been R is for Rocket), or which stories were in it. That was a very long time ago. But I do remember reading his stories, loving them. I remember being entranced that he could take a series of short stories and weave them in and around each other so that when I think of books such as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, I think of them as novels and not as collections of short stories, which was what they really were.

He did write actual novels as well. Fahrenheit 451 comes to mind, of course, as does Something Wicked This Way Comes. Somehow, I just read Fahrenheit 451 for the first time a couple of years ago, in the context of a public marathon read-aloud sponsored by my local library system. I got to participate as a reader and had a wonderful time. It was a unique and lovely way to finally read a book that manages to project hope even out of a story set in a dystopian future.

Bradbury was, above all, a storyteller, and he could do that sitting in front of an audience and talking as well as or better than he could on paper. I had the good fortune to hear him speak one year at LosCon, in the main ballroom at the Burbank Airport Hilton. The room was full, or close to it, and he held his audience in the palm of his hand for close to two hours, telling stories of writing short stories and novels, of screenwriting and playwriting, and of the writers and others he knew along the way. Among other things he said that day, he confirmed the story that he had actually heard L. Ron Hubbard say, as has been attributed to him and has also been called an urban legend, that the easiest way to make a million dollars is to start a religion...before Hubbard ever invented Scientology.

That book of Bradbury short stories that my father brought me when I was a child was...I guess you could call it a gateway drug into my love of science fiction. And, really, fantasy as well, because in many of Bradbury's stories, the line between fantasy and science fiction was fine, and sometimes nonexistent. It was one of the first science fiction books my father handed me to read, one of the first of many, and it was probably a good place to start, a good writer to start with, because throughout his writing, and his life, Bradbury was able to maintain a childlike wonder about the world and the universe and he was able, as well, to project that wonder onto the page and into the consciousness of his readers.

If there is anything this world needs, especially today, it is a sense of childlike wonder. We still needed Ray Bradbury in the world. But, since he is gone now, as many of us as are able need to take up the torch and carry it along with us and spread it as far as we possibly can.

So, go read something Ray Bradbury wrote, in remembrance of one of the greats. And spread the word...he may be gone, but is work is still here and it is still wonderful.

Voting day...if you were lucky

So, I went to vote this morning, since it was Primary Day here in California.



I was at my polling place by a quarter after seven, walked in, announced my name like you're supposed to do...and was told that the roster wasn't there, that it had never been mailed to the precinct inspector (that's the person in charge of the polling place, a thankless job if there ever was one...ask me how I know). They told me that I could either vote a provisional ballot, go downtown to the elections department and vote there, or come back later.

Going downtown was out of the question. There are no parking places downtown that you don't have to pay for and, anyway, I was on my way to the job search seminar I'm taking part in this week and I would not have had time to go downtown, vote, and get back to my seminar on time. So, I said I would come back later, wished the poll workers well, and went home and had breakfast before I had to be at the seminar.

None of this made me happy. Well, finding that I had time for breakfast after all made me happy, but that's about it. There is no good reason I can think of for the roster not have been mailed to the inspector. Yeah, there are reasons - incompetence downtown, too few workers downtown in this era of budget cuts to get everything done that needed to be done before the election, the US mail losing the envelope with the roster and street indexes in it - but these are not good reasons. Incompetence is never a good reason. I know that budgets are tight, but an election is an important thing, and other things need to go by the wayside before getting necessary voting materials to the polling places on time gets dropped from the list of priorities. And, well, if he post office can lose a large, thick manila envelope containing official government documents, they really need to look at their efficiency.

There is just no excuse for something like this happening. I worked on precinct boards for years, often as the inspector, and while the rosters occasionally got to me just the day before the election, they were always there before Election Day. And even if the package did not arrive on the day before the election, the inspector should have been instructed to call downtown, and someone should have been waiting at the polling place when the workers arrived at 6 a.m. with a copy of the roster so that the all the materials would be in place when the polls opened at 7 a.m. Even if the registrar of voters had to deliver it herself.

Well, I went back to vote after I got out of my seminar at 4 p.m., and the roster was there. It had, according to one of the precinct workers, arrived shortly after I left the polling place in the morning. This is good. It isn't good enough. And this wasn't the poll workers' fault. They were nothing but polite and apologetic, both when I was there this morning and when I went back in to vote in the afternoon. In fact, when I was leaving after finally getting to vote, the Precinct Inspector thanked me for being so patient and understanding with them this morning. Apparently, not everyone was so understanding. I just told her that I'd been on the receiving end of too many irate voters during the years I worked at elections to inflict that on someone else.

And speaking of working on the election...I had applied to do so, but no one ever got back to me about it. I tried going downtown a couple of times to find out why I had not been contacted but, again, there was no parking to be had and I never got to talk to them about it. When I was talking to one of the workers at the polling place this morning, he said the same thing happened to him, and that he was only working because he aggressively pursued them about it. Then, this afternoon, he told me that I should probably go talk to them about it because, during the course of the day, eight or ten other people who had come in to vote reported that they had also applied but were never contacted. This seems very odd when the election department is always complaining that they never have enough precinct workers on election days. This must have been especially true if the elections department did as they claim and opened twice as many polling places throughout the county as they had in the last election.

I will be pursuing this issue with them. I needed the work.

So, that was my Election Day. If you live in a place that had a primary today, how did your Election Day go?

It isn't Music Sunday...just an apology, an explanation, and one of my favorite songs...

Yes. I know. I missed Music Sunday this week.

All I can do is apologize and beg forgiveness. It was a crowded weekend, even though I was home the whole time. Saturday, after sleeping in a bit (hey, I have to indulge myself once in awhile), I spent time working on making award cords for my SCA Barony. Anniversary is coming up soon, and I need to have those finished by then. I also spent time...gasp...sewing. Nothing fancy, since I don't really sew. But, I'm making a quilt, so I spent a couple of hours sewing three-inch by three-inch squares together. I'm just pleased that I didn't break the machine, a real accomplishment considering the fact that sewing and I don't get along and that goes double (maybe triple) for sewing on a machine. I'm not proud of this fact, but truth is truth.

I also watched a movie, since I had the opportunity. It was The Lincoln Lawyer, based on a Michael Connelly novel and starring Matthew McConaughey, Marisa Tomei, Ryan Phillipe, and William H. Macy. I'm not a big McConaughey fan, to be honest, but this was a good movie that stayed, as far as I can remember (I read the novel a couple of years ago), pretty close to the source material. There's a great twist at the end (no, I'm not telling), and McConaughey was better in this than anything else I've seen him in.

Then, on Sunday, I made the mistake of sitting down and starting to read a novel, The Blackbird Papers (Doubleday, 2004; 326 pages), by Ian Smith. I figured it was safe to dip into it because it was an author I haven't read before, and it usually takes me time to warm up to new mystery writers. But, I got sucked in almost immediately and spent most of the day reading, in between washing clothes and dishes and worrying about the job-search seminar I started today. Not really something to worry about, I know, but I always worry about going into new and unfamiliar situations. So, when I sat down to attempt to write the Music Sunday post, nothing I would have been comfortable posting got written. This is not to say that nothing got written...just nothing I considered usable.

So, by way of apology, I'll leave this...(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay, by Otis Redding...here for you, because I love this song.

Book Review: "The Calling", by Catherine Whitney

Every once in awhile, when I'm at the library, a book catches my eye for some reason as I'm walking down an aisle looking for something else. I'll pick it up for no other reason than I take noticing it as a sign that I should read it. I've found some really good books that way, books that I wouldn't have read otherwise.

That's the case with The Calling: A Year in the Life of an Order of Nuns (Crown Publishers, Inc., 1999; 250 pages), by Catherine Whitney. I was walking down the aisle between aisles of books, on my way out of the library on Thursday, when the title of the book caught my eye. I backed up, pulled it off the shelf, read the flyleaf, and put in in the pile of books I was taking home.

It might seem that this book is an odd choice for me to be interested in reading. I'm not Catholic, and never have been. I'm not really a religious person. However, when I was studying anthropology at university, my concentration was in the anthropology of religion. Additionally, I've always been fascinated by the question of why certain people choose to devote their entire lives to religion in a formal sense...those who believe they have a calling, whether it be as a priest or a nun or other Christian clergy, or as a religious professional in any religion. So, a book like this is really right up my alley.

Turned out, it wasn't exactly what I was expecting. Yes, it explores the question of how some of the nuns in the teaching and nursing order that Ms. Whitney studied - it was the order that had educated her as a high school student - came to their callings, and how some of them felt that calling even after they left the order. But it also looks at the concept of the calling in a wider sense, in the sense that people often feel called to do the thing that they do, not only to make a living but to feel fulfilled in their lives. The gist of it, I think, is that one's calling is the thing one feels that they must do.

I was left with the impression that doing the research for and writing the book had left Ms. Whitney, who left her church and her faith behind after high school, and after a short flirtation with joining the order herself, with a sense of closure regarding her relationship with the nuns who had taught her. She notes that, when she spent some time with the sisters in the order, some of whom had been her teachers so many years before, they always referred to her as "one of our girls", and that this had left her with a feeling that she really had always been a part of the order, even though she had spent so many years feeling estranged from her high school experience and her religion.

The best part of the book, however, for my money, are the portraits Ms. Whitney draws of some of the women who were members of the order, and who remained, in many ways, members of the order even after leaving, as much members as the women who chose to stay when so many were choosing to change paths for many different reasons. Ms. Whitney does the valuable service of showing that these women, far from being the stereotype of women who became nuns because they were unmarriageable, or running away from the world, are in most cases, strong, intelligent, competent, vibrant women who chose the life they did as a positive step rather than as a "settling" for what was left for them.

Music Sunday: A Few Favorites...

No deep analysis today for Music Sunday. No theme. Just a few things I feel like sharing, songs and performances that I particularly like.

First, here's a live version of Summertime, by Janis Joplin, from 1969:



Also, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris with their cover of Love Hurts. I think this is the definitive version of this song.



And, finally, The Who, live, from 1975, Behind Blue Eyes (plus bonus Keith Moon):

Research and headaches and thinking too much, oh, my!

So, this is me, complaining.

I'm on the third day of a headache - migraine, sinus, or a combination of the two. Makes it really difficult to get anything accomplished.

Oh, I've gotten a few things done. Wrote some on the novel I've been working on, the one I started for NaNoWriMo last November, that hit a block when I started working on my non-fiction project. It will be interesting to go back and read what I've written the past couple of days and see if it makes any sense when I don't have a headache.

So, that project is going now, but the non-fiction work is still in the water, so to speak, because I've hit a block there. That mostly has to do with ongoing research (I tend to research as I'm writing, a section at a time, rather than doing all the research and all the writing, separately) issues. The local public library system here doesn't seem to have the sciences as a priority, and it is difficult to find up-to-date sources. In something like history, having access to up-to-the-minute work in the field is good but not necessarily imperative. Of course, you want to make sure that there haven't been any recent discoveries of primary documents or anything, but history, by its very nature, doesn't change that much in the retelling, unless you're working in relatively recent times. The bigger problem in history is watching out for sources that claim to be authoritative but are actually revisionist.

In the sciences though, and especially in paleoanthropology, which is what I'm researching currently, new discoveries are made frequently - at least, there have been several discoveries, or, at least, announcements of discoveries, that have the potential to rewrite what we know about human evolution in the past year or two - and if the writer is not aware of them, he or she can look like an idiot when the book comes out. There are periodicals, of course, the science journals where the official announcements and descriptions of new fossils are made, and my library system has a pretty good online source for some of those journals that I can use; otherwise, the online presences of most of the top journals make it prohibitively expensive to do research. You can either subscribe to the online journal for hundreds of dollars per year or you can purchase access to individual articles - sometimes at $20 to $30 or more per article. There is no way I can afford that.

But, books that are up-to-date in the field are rare in the local library system. And, for some reason, they are also rare in the library at the local state university. Added to that is the fact that if I use their resources, I have to use them there. Oh, they have a "community borrower" card for non-students, but that costs, last time I checked, $100 per year, and then you can only check out two or three books at a time. While I understand that students should have first access to the books there, two or three is a ridiculously low maximum. At the private university I attended for my upper division work on my BA, the community borrower card costs something like $25 per year, and the non-students is allowed to check out something like 25 books at a time, despite the fact that it is a much, much smaller library. Unfortunately, their collection of books on paleoanthropology is very small. Now, if I were researching something in history, or in theology or biblical studies, I'd have access to more than enough research materials there.

But a lack of research materials is not the only problem I'm running into presently regarding my non-fiction writing project.

There is, in addition, my blessing/curse of an oversize dose of curiosity and my belief in the principle, stated by John Muir among others, that everything in the universe is attached to everything else. It goes something like this with me, on this project:

I'm writing about archaeology and physical anthropology (hence the current focus on human evolution), and so I'm thinking about beginnings a lot. Part of what archaeology looks at is physical evidence for the beginnings of civilization, and before that, the beginnings of agriculture, and even before that the beginnings of art and other symbolic thought that mark the beginnings of behavioral modernity. But thinking about the beginnings of behavioral modernity in turn leads, at least for me, into thinking about the beginnings of humans. Which leads to thinking about the beginnings of mammals, which leads to thinking about the beginnings of animals, which leads to thinking about the beginnings of life, which leads to thinking about the beginnings of the earth...the solar system...galaxies...so that, pretty soon, I'm wanting to go find things to read about the beginnings of the universe. The questions that topic raises can be all kinds of frustrating, not least because I don't have the mathematics and physics to really understand most of the work on the subject.

What is more immediately frustrating to me is that I've been being very good about staying focused on the topics directly related to the book I'm writing. A long as I've got work to do on it, sources that I can use for research, I've been very good at staying on task, researching a section and then writing it, then starting the cycle over again for the next section. But now that I've got a temporary break due to inadequate sources, my mind is wanting me to go seriously off the reservation and start looking into some of the questions that I have about other kinds of beginnings than just the ones that archaeology and physical anthropology are so key in studying.

I'll be fine when I can get back on track with research sources. I know I will. It's this down time that is driving me crazy.

That, and this damn headache, which is better today - else I wouldn't have had the concentration to write this blog post - but still needs to go completely away.

Eclipse, Part Two...

Most people don't look up at the sky on a regular basis. A lot of people nearly never take time out of their busy days and nights to ever look up and see what's going on in the universe around them.

There's nothing like an eclipse to change that, although even in the midst of yesterday's annular eclipse, I saw people rushing around at the height of the Moon's journey between Earth and the Sun, apparently not paying attention to the wonder in the sky above them. Some of them seemed not to notice the odd cast to the light and the extraordinary blue tint that the sky had taken on.

I have to say that I honestly don't understand how they could just go on with their normal, everyday activities with what was going on above their heads. Even here, not in the path of the most extensive coverage of the Sun's disk by the moon, it was clear that there was something extraordinary going on. I've seen solar eclipses before, but I've never experienced one that so obviously diminished the amount of sunlight that usually makes it to Earth on a clear spring afternoon. You just couldn't not notice if you were anywhere where you could see outside, not here where I am.

And if you weren't in the path of the eclipse, let me just say, I'm sorry. It was spectacular.

Actually, aside from being in a windowless room, it would have been difficult for anyone here where I live to notice even if they were inside. I had been watching the eclipse off and on from the beginning, going outside every half hour or so to check the progress of the moon making its way across the sun with my home-made pinhole camera, but I was inside writing, when I glanced out the window above my desk because it had grown noticeably darker in the room as the height of the event approached.

Of course, I went outside to take a look. With the exception of one man across the street, none of the neighbors were even outside. The twelve-year-old in me wanted to go knocking on doors, to tell people to get outside and see the wonderful show the Sun and the Moon were putting on in the sky. I didn't do that. I've been made fun of before for looking up rather than down an my feet. But some part of me still thinks I should have.

It's not like what is above our heads is some faraway place that has nothing to do with us. The Sun warms our world so that life can exist here, and it makes it possible for plants to make their food to live, to become what feeds us, directly when we eat fruits and vegetables and indirectly when we eat meat that has in turn fed on plants. But those aren't the only connections we have to the stars.

In a very real sense, we come from the stars. Every bit of us, every molecule, every element that our bodies are built from, started out inside a star. When Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sang that line in "Woodstock", "We are stardust...", they weren't making it up. We really are part of the stars. Not the ones we can see in the sky at night now, if we are lucky enough to be in a dark enough location to see the night sky without the competing lights here on Earth. Instead, we are the product of stars that have already lived and died and exploded, sending the elements created in them as they went supernova and spread those elements out into the universe where they could create planets and plants and people and, well, pretty much everything else in the cosmos.

This is my challenge to you. Wherever you are, take ten minutes to step outside tonight and look up. If you are in a city, try to find a place where the lights in the sky aren't overpowered by the lights on your block, so that you will be able to see as many stars as possible. But, even if you can't find a place with low light levels, just go outside and look up. There are stars up there, and galaxies. And planets, not just here in our solar system, but out there orbiting other stars. At last count, nearly 800 planets have been detected outside our solar system. Even if few of those planets so far discovered are not likely to have life on them, who knows how many might be out there that could have, might have, do have some kind of life. It could be "life as we know it" or it could be life of entirely different kinds. It could be microscopic life, or it could be intelligent life. But none of that matters. What is important is that they're there, part of the grand whole that we call the visible universe.

And if that isn't something to stir the imagination, and the soul, I don't know what is.

Music Sunday - Eclipse Edition

Happy Music Sunday!

Because there is an eclipse of the sun today, I thought I'd just leave you some sunshiny music, so I can go outside and monitor the eclipse when it starts here, at about 2:30 p.m. local time. We won't get the full effect; this part of California is a bit outside the path for that. But, we should get a pretty cool view, anyway.

Here's George Harrison and a few friends, with Here Comes The Sun. An obvious choice.



And John Denver, all by himself, singing Sunshine On My Shoulders.



And then there's Cream's Sunshine Of Your Love



In case you're wondering what all the hoopla about the eclipse is about, here is a little primer from NASA.



And, finally, because this is an annular eclipse, known as a "ring of fire" eclipse, I'll leave this last song for today with you.



That was Johnny Cash, singing "Ring of Fire" on the Grand Ole Opry in 1968.

Music Sunday - Censorship Editon

I suppose that music censorship really started to be a "thing", in that it came to the attention of many people here in the United States, during the 1985 Senate hearing regarding what was labeled "porn rock" after nearly 20 record companies agreed to put labels warning of "Explicit Content" on some records. The agreement by record companies to do this came after a group called the Parents Music Resource Center put pressure on them to do so. And this is probably the thing that comes to mind most often when record or music censorship is brought up...music that has sexual content or so-called obscene words, or that has what censors consider to be references to drug use, all of which some parents might object to their children listening to.

The hearings were interesting, including testimony from Frank Zappa, who called the stickers, and the PMRC campaign "nonsense", and an appearance by John Denver, whom the PMRC expected to support their cause. Instead Denver spoke out against censorship and what he called misinterpretation of songs, including his own "Rocky Mountain High."

This sort of censorship has been going on much longer than since 1985, however. In the 1960s, the popular Sunday night variety show staple, The Ed Sullivan Show, attempted to censor performances by, among others, The Rolling Stones and The Doors for respectively, sexual and drug references, with varying success. Mick Jagger altered the words of "Let's Spend the Night Together" to "let's spend some time together", as requested, but he obviously rolled his eyes at the camera as he did so.



In the case of The Doors' performance of "Light My Fire", Jim Morrison was asked to change the lyric, "girl, we couldn't get much higher" to "girl, we couldn't get much better". During the performance, Morrison sang the lyric as originally written. After the show, the band was told that they wouldn't ever be invited onto the show again, and they weren't, but it didn't seem to bother Morrison or the band very much. They'd already done the show and apparently were not interested in repeating the experience. Both of these incidents took place in 1967.

More interesting to me are the songs that have been censored, or that there have been attempts to censor, on radio or television, based on lyrical content that doesn't consist of "dirty" words. One of my favorites in this category is "Lola", by The Kinks, which was released in 1970. The BBC would not broadcast the song, not because the subject matter of the song included a transvestite, but because the lyric named a product, Coca Cola. Ray Davies had to go back into the studio and replace "Coca Cola" with "cherry cola" before the BBC would play the song on the air. I hear both versions on the radio here in the US, and was puzzled that there were two versions until I read this story a few years ago when I was writing a paper for a college class on music censorship.

Politics have also resulted in music censorship. "Eve of Destruction", most notably recorded by Barry McGuire in 1965, was banned on some US radio stations for its lyrics critical of, among other things, the draft, the war in Vietnam, and the existence and use of nuclear weapons. Earlier, in 1963 and again on The Ed Sullivan Show, a scheduled appearance by Bob Dylan never took place because the song he wanted to sing, "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues", was deemed too politically sensitive to sing. Dylan walked off the show rather than agree to the censorship.



This clip of "Eve of Destruction", from the time tht the song was the #1 hit in the US, is a little strange. I'm not sure what the producers of the show thought the dancers would add to it. At least, it was allowed on the airwaves, which was more than some radio stations would allow at the time.

I could go on and on in detailing incidents in which interest groups or networks or governments themselves have attempted to restrict or completely stop the playing of some music over the airwaves. The BBC appears to have an especially lengthy record of this sort of activity. It once even banned an instrumental piece of music, the theme to the Frank Sinatra film, "The Man With the Golden Arm", in 1956, because it was connected to a film that had drug use as a theme. Doesn't make any sense to me, but then again, most censorship doesn't make much sense to me.

Another book review...of a much better book

This is much, much better.

After taking more than a week to drag myself through the last book I read which, if you saw the review I posted here I didn't like that much, it took me just two days to read Dead Time (Dutton, 2008; 400 pages), by Stephen White.

I hadn't read anything by Mr. White in awhile, and after this installment in the story of Dr. Alan Gregory and his family and friends, I suspect I'm going to be catching up on the volumes that I've missed in the past few years, while my reading attention was elsewhere. Simply, I had forgotten how good a writer Mr. White is, how he can spin an engrossing story, and how he is able to write realistic, multi-dimensional characters that are completely believable. He even makes the info-dump that most novels have to have, to catch the characters (as well as the reader) up on events, entertaining and readable.

For those of you not familiar with this series, Dr. Alan Gregory is a psychologist living in Boulder,, Colorado and who has an unfortunate (well, fortunate for the reader) habit of getting caught up in murder and mayhem. In this case Meredith, his ex-wife, calls on him to find the woman who is carrying her child as a surrogate when the woman disappears under mysterious circumstances. Those circumstances end up having to do with the disappearance of another young woman at the Grand Canyon some years before, in event that involved both the surrogate and Meredith's fiancee, Eric.

The story, this time, opens out from Boulder and stretches to New York City and Los Angeles, where Dr. Gregory manages to get himself in over his head on more than one front. I really hesitate to say anything more about the story, because I don't want to spoil it for those who haven't yet read it. I will say that there are family complications along the way for the doctor, in the form of a new adopted son and as his current wife, Lauren, sets out for Holland to find the child she had given up for adoption before she knew the doctor.

That is one of the things I appreciate about Mr. White's books. He is able to juggle the main plot and side plots in a way that makes them seem like one whole, rather than a story with an "Oh, by the way" or two cobbled on in order to make the world creates for the reader more like real life, where there are usually five different, and mostly unrelated, things going on at the same time. This ability makes his books more than just a straight line from one event in the story to the next, again like real life. As there are few straight lines in nature, there are very few in real life.

And that was one of the problems with Natural Selection, the previous novel I read and reviewed. It was one straight line, jumping from one event to the next, with very little respite, and very little believability. And, by the way, info-dumps that were excruciating to read. I didn't realize how little believability, in fact, until I had the reading, so close in time, of Dead Time to compare it to.

I like the books I read to make me feel like I have fallen into the world the author has invented for the book, whether it is the "real" world or a close facsimile thereof, or a completely invented world. And I like to feel like I have been on a journey, rather than on a sprint to the finish line.

Dead Time is a good book, and a an excellent reading experience. I wish I could find more novels with so much texture to them.

I read it, but I didn't necessarily love it...

I grumbled all the way through, but I finally finished reading Natural Selection (Hyperion, 2006), by Dave Freedman, after posting recently about how I wasn't sure I really wanted to finish it.

I think reading it probably wasn't a waste of time, since I believe I learned some things about how not to write a novel as I read along. I did nearly throw it across the room in the last 50 or 100 pages, when there were some things said or implied about evolution were unclear and didn't seem to jibe with what I've learned about how evolution works. Or, maybe the author just left things out that would have made that part of the story make more sense. There was also the fact that Mr. Freedman included one of those "I never mentioned it but..." scenes as he was wrapping up the story. I hate it when a writer does that, especially when it contradicts things that were established earlier in the story.

That said, what was going on within the story managed, in the end, to keep me turning the pages, and I ended up reading much later into the night last night than I should have done to finish the book. It was a near thing the whole time, but my need to know what happened outweighed the things I found frustrating and irritating about the book and about Mr. Freedman's writing.

I never did really warm up to any of the characters. I didn't like how Mr. Freedman handled the chapters and parts of chapters that were written from the creature's point of view. I don't know that I can say I liked the book as a whole.

On the positive side, that makes fourteen books I've read so far this year, and takes my total pages read (aside from reading for research for my current writing project when I haven't read a whole book through) this year so far to 5788 pages. With not even half the year over, I'm more than halfway to my pages read goal (10,000 pages) even though I'm still six books shy of the half-way mark to my goal of 40 books read this year, up from the 31 books I read last year. I know I should probably be reading at least a book a week, but with writing and, now, job-hunting, my reading time is more limited than I would like at the moment.

You have to ask the right questions...

Hat tip to Neil de Grasse Tyson for tweeting this video.

The context of the video is the vote today in North Carolina to decide the fate of Amendment One, the implications of which go far beyond just which personal relationships will be recognized by the government there and which will not. This message is applicable far beyond that, however; it is relevant socially, historically and, most especially for us in the United States, constitutionally.

So, I'll shut up and let the message speak for itself.

Music Sunday - Early Beatles edition

Today is Music Sunday. I was going to write a nice post about guilty pleasures...those songs people like in their heart of hearts, but won't admit to liking because the songs or the artists are not "cool enough". I've got them, you've got them...everybody's got them.

I'll admit to some of mine. Not all of them, but some of them. But that will have to wait for another day. Plans change, and things come up, and it's cleaning day around here. And since I was up until 4 am, there will probably be a nap in there somewhere, and fairly soon.

Never fear, however, there will still be Music Sunday.

One of the things I did while I couldn't sleep last night, was that I watched Help, the Beatles second film. It's a fun movie. Silly, but good silly, and with lots of good music. It isn't the classic that A Hard Day's NIght is, but then again, few movies are. I love A Hard Day's Night, while I merely like Help a whole lot.

So, what I'm going to do is leave the title song of Help here for you to enjoy, along with a little Beatle silliness. I'm not sure where this performance is from, but it just goes to show the sort of thing that pop artists had to put up with in the Sixties. Even the Beatles.



And then, I found this gem, part of an appearance by The Beatles on the BBC on December 7, 1963, not long before they came to the United States for the first time. Here you can see how advanced Beatlemania had become even before it spread here to the States.



By next week, I hope, the insomnia will be gone, and we can get down to discussing those guilty pleasures that music provides.

Choices, choices, choices...

This is my problem...and a decidedly first-world problem it is, of no consequence whatsoever in the universal scheme of things. But it is a problem for me, and it's bothering me for some reason.

I'm reading a novel, Natural Selection (Hyperion, 2006), by Dave Freedman. It's, oh, I don't know, call it science fiction, call it techno-thriller. There is a crew of scientists in search of an elusive new species of ray that is carnivorous and very, very smart. Think of them like velociraptors under the sea. Except that some of them are learning to fly, have evolved the capacity to breathe air...and they are very very hungry. At this point in the narrative (I'm 186 pages in), they've already eaten one person, a pod of dolphins (is that the correct term? A pod? Or is that just whales?) and a whole lot of seagulls.

The scientists have yet to see a live one of these creatures, but they've dissected the one dead specimen they've found, and it is all mouth, teeth and stomach...as part of their necropsy (autopsy on a non-human specimen), they pulled 56 dead but undigested gulls out of its stomach.

It's an interesting concept for a book. That's not my problem.

My problem is, I don't like any of the characters, I'm running out of patience with the chapters told from the rays' point of view. And the author, probably because this is his first novel, has a tendency to info-dump more than he really needs to.

In ordinary circumstances, I would have given this book 50 pages, 75 at the outside, and then put it down in frustration. But, I find myself wanting to see where the story goes, how the author solves the problems he's setting up for the characters, and how he solves the problem he set up for himself as a writer in seeing the story through to the end.

This, even though at least once a chapter I get an almost-overwhelming urge to throw the book against a wall.

Part of me wants to keep reading, for the reasons stated above, as well as just that I'm nearly halfway through the thing and it seems stupid to put it down now. On the other hand, well, the frustration just keeps building. And it isn't like I don't have anything else to read. My to-read pile is huge. Plus, I should be spending more time on my writing and less time reading a novel I'm pretty sure I don't even like that much.

My questions to you, dear readers, are two. First of all, should I keep reading or give it up and go on to something else? And two, do you ever run into problems like this when reading a book, where you want to put it down and not pick it back up but can't quite convince yourself to just cut your losses before it sucks any more time away from you?

Drop a comment if you have any advice, experiences or just think I'm making a mountain out of a molehill.

In which, again, I just don't understand some people...

I don't know what's in the air around here, but my allergies are kicking my butt the past two or three days. Feeling, most of the time, like someone has bashed me in the middle of the face with a baseball bat, which is how my allergies tend to manifest, has put me in a surly mood. In addition, I've had a headache that I'm not that sure is completely related to the allergies, although they are probably a contribution factor.

Consequently, in the crappy mood I've been in, I've been trying to avoid anything that will make me angry. Oh, like the news. Me cranky and angry at the same time is not a good combination.

However, surfing around the Internet, it's well nigh impossible to avoid the news entirely. And so, I've heard about the preacher in North Carolina who told the fathers in his congregation that if their sons start to act "effeminate" (his word), the fathers should punch the kids.

Excuse me? Completely aside from the question of what the Old Testament has to say about social issues in general or homosexuality (which is, of course, what the preacher was referring to) in particular, and whether the verses those who believe God does not like homosexuality really mean what they think they mean, which is a different post altogether, HOW IS ADVOCATING PUNCHING SOMEONE BECAUSE YOU DON'T LIKE HOW THEY ACT IN ANY WAY CHRISTLIKE?

Sorry for screaming, but really? Was this guy, who will remain nameless because I don't want to give him a name-check, even in this blog that not that many people read, saying that fathers should beat the gay, or what they perceive as the gay, out of their sons? Is this really something that Christ would have advocated, based on his reported attitudes in the New Testament? Having read the gospels, and huge portions of the rest of the New Testament, I would say that, no, this is not something Christ would have been okay with.

Now, since the video tape of this preacher saying these things has been all over the Internet and all over the other media, he has backpedaled furiously...so furiously that he's dug himself a deeper hole. His explanation/apology? He didn't mean it. It was a joke.

I suspect that all this as to do with the fact that North Carolina is about to vote on whether to define marriage as between one man and one woman. It's an issue that tends to get the religious right all riled up and saying things that they really shouldn't be saying, things that tend to get them in hot water one way or another. But, again, that's beside the point. He shouldn't have said what he did, no matter what the provocation.

So, who is going to volunteer to sit this guy down and explain to him that suggesting that fathers beat their sons because they think their sons might be behaving "effeminately" is not very funny. That it is, in fact, child abuse.

I'm on the other side of the country, so I'm not a good candidate for the job. And even if I was in shouting distance, he's probably not the sort of person who would be amenable to listening to a mere woman. Basically there's not a snowball's chance in hell that I would be able to convince him. I know there's no way he'd be able to convince me of his position, either that punching kids - for any reason - is a good idea, or that it is something to joke about.

But, hey...if you're in his neighborhood, and if you want to give convincing him that he is wrongheaded on this issue a try, please, let me know how it goes.