Realism / Thomas Pollock Anshutz/ The Ironworkers' Noontime

In the flurry (at least for me) of comments discussing the nature of the publishing industry and JMG’s efforts to make an opaque system understandable, I received a reply that got me thinking about a couple of my secret vices.  

I tend to latch onto an author that writes extended series within the same “universe” and fleshes out the nature of that universe.  I also tend to re-read the books that I enjoy many times over.

I think that these two are connected, I think that, in another medium, there are folks that enjoy reruns of old TV series.  These examples are variations on a theme.  

So, let’s talk about an example of an author/series that I have repeatedly enjoyed.  L.E. Modesitt and the Recluce Novels.  

Now, I am not dogging Mr. Modesitt by any means in the following description, but he has taken the Bildungsroman to the bank, and as I own 21 of the 22 novels within this series I think that I can safely say this isn’t a criticism.

But I am thinking that the act of rereading books like I have (and other books too, e.g. Neal Stephenson, Eric Flint, and William Gibson come to mind.) It boils down to looking for comfort.  I suppose that this quest for understanding and comfort is a very human experience.  

Mr. Modesitt writes the same book any number of ways.  But each one of the books somehow, even though it tells the same story, manages to tell the story a little differently.  Maybe JMG had it right when he wrote his best (in my opinion) fiction novel “Star’s Reach”.

One wet day on the road that runs alongside the Hiyo River toward Sisnaddi, Plummer told me that every story in the world is just a scrap of the only story there really is, one big and nameless tale that winds from the beginning of things all the way to the end and sweeps up everything worth telling in between. Everybody has some part in that story, he said, even if it’s just a matter of watching smoke from a battle over the next hill or listening to news that’s whispered in the night. Some people wander further into the story and then wander right back out of it again, after they’ve carried a message or a load of firewood that settles the fate of a country or a dream. Sometimes, though, somebody no different from any of these others stumbles and falls into the deep places of the only story there is, and gets picked up and spun around like a leaf in a flood until finally the waters either drown him for good or toss him up gasping and alive on the bank.

At the end of the day, writing is telling stories.  It is telling stories about people and events.  Fiction or non-fiction.  Even science writing is about this.  

Stories that you re-read are usually because you like the people whose story is being told.  Sometimes you re-read the story because you hate a person in the story.  But at the end of the day, re-reading is just visiting old friends.

The  Bildungsroman is the easiest way to make friends with the imaginary persons on the page you are reading.  I have a sneaking hunch that almost all novels worth reading have at least a dollop of this technique scattered through their pages.  

Books allow stories to be told that describe the way things should have happened.  Ones that you re-read and become old friends with are stories about how things “should happen”.  And they have folks that you just might like if you got to know them.

Taishō period (1912–1926) / Hasui Kawase/ Mount Fuji from Narusawa in Autumn

I suppose that I am Eeyore.  

I’m good with that.

For the past two years, things have been getting progressively more dicey and the reactions of the people around me have gotten weirder.  More and more I try to keep my mouth shut and become more hermit-like, but that really kinda crimps around half of my nature. I enjoy talking about the world and the decisions being made on my behalf for someone else’s benefit.  

But it seems lately that things are getting nasty.  

More and more folks don’t want to look at both sides of any issue.  They have decided their belief system and chosen their ideological lenses and have little intention of looking beyond their beliefs.  Unfortunately, the way that I see things and the angles of approach that I take are becoming increasingly unpopular.  

Mostly this is important because I am inherently a “whatabout” kinda guy.  But this doesn’t fit into most systems of belief worth a damn.  That makes for awkward conversations.  Not because I am right or wrong (I think that I purvey equal quantities of both flavors) but because the actual process of asking “whatabout” forces folks to go through the annoying process of dredging up their current belief sets and the accompanying rationales to discuss/refute/validate the same.  

This is annoying because it requires the interlocutor to go through almost the same mental effort that they went through to come up with their current beliefs.  This is where part of the annoyance comes in.  The other part of the annoyance comes from the idea that I am trying to convert them to my way of thinking, it seems to bother them that isn’t the case, I am thinking that this is from the current cultural norm of poisonous, hate-filled tirades when someone says something contrary to one's own beliefs.  Nope this is simply trying to get someone's opinion about a subject.  Not to proselytize my current belief, but to get information about how they came about their beliefs.

You see, I think that everyone has come to their beliefs honestly.  They get a data set somehow, somewhere and then run it through their mental evaluation and come up with a set of beliefs concerning that particular subject.  What interests me is their data sources and their processing algorithms.  

Because for utmost things that I am curious about, the outcome isn’t that important because (1) there is usually nothing that we can do about it, and (2) there usually isn’t a “right” answer.

Might as well be talking about the weather.

Surrealism / Alejandro Obregon/ Agua cálida

Well, my quest for figuring out how to use LibreOffice to write is not at all going well.  I am coming to the conclusion that doing so is more trouble than what it is worth.  I think that it may in fact be possible, but the effort would require too much work.  

I am completely content with DreamWidth and have no intention of leaving.  The price is good, but it looks to me that the underlying code is limited and the effort that I would have to put into the process of aligning LibreOffice with DreamWidth’s fork of LiveJournal just ain’t worth the bother.

I read an interesting article the other day.  “The Crankification Engine” which really kinda hit the nail on the head.  But it also kinda gave me a warm fuzzy about this little vanity of mine on an off-the-beaten-track of the internet.  Might be because since I am not all that great a writer, I have so few people coming by I don’t have to worry about the cranks dogging me.  

But mostly this is just a place that is here for me to jot down thoughts.  I suppose that it is more a diary/journal than a blog.  Not all that many folk stop by in the first place and the folks who do stop by are polite.  I took a couple of minutes today to assure myself that I was still way-far-out of the mainstream by querying google analytics; here is a screenshot of the last thirty days.

I do keep track of who is stopping by, as I cherish my semi-anonymity, after all, the reason that I deserted Blogger was that there were too many people trolling for the act of writing there to be pleasurable anymore.

What I am wondering about is are there two Blogolands out there on the fringes of the internet?  For argument's sake, I will propose the following:

• South Blogoland is the high profile, “LOOK AT ME” section of the Blogoland peninsula.  This land is occupied by folks who actively attempt to garner new readers and have places for folks reading to contribute to their slim wallets.   These folks tend to watch their audience closely and write around subjects/attitudes that draw in readers.  Current controversies are the order of the day and opinions are shaped around input.  South Blogoland is highly polarized with a nasty symbiosis between differing beliefs being cross posted in mutual attacks to strut the nobility of the writer’s belief system as compared to the barbarians on the other side of South Blogoland.

• North Blogoland is a different beast.  Lots of anarchy here.  Anime fanfolks, kinky porn addicts, off the beaten track cooking, political fringe babbling, religious fanatisicm all compete in an arena of not really giving fuck one.   Readership is low, and there tends to be a real purpose here.  My favorite places here in North Blogoland are a place going through the Hávamál stanza by stanza, a nice lady who gushes about prayer gardens, a cranky old chef, and a writing machine who posts stuff about the occult.

Maybe the key to what is being written and where in this peninsula it is published is just defined around the classic American motivation of “what’s in it for me?”  I think that the folks down in South Blogoland are still into the concept of “monetization”.  Folks down south write because they are hoping that someone will give them money.  After all, that was the whole purpose of blogging where it started over at wordpress and blogger, stick links in your piece and whore for whoever was on the other end of the link, stick up a “tip jar’ and go “digital busking”.  

Now, I can’t say that I didn’t start out down south.  But over the years the north was where I ended up.  I can’t say that this is a bad thing