Author: skzb

I play the drum.

Another Entry in the This Really Happens Department

There’s this billboard in Minneapolis; at least two of them, in fact. They are advertising an insurance company–a place were you pay money so you can be a little less worried if you get sick, or have a car accident, or a burglary, or you die or something.  The billboard shows a sandwich of some kind, with cheese oozing out.  And it says, “Oozing with Discounts.”

So, yeah, there you have it. You are driving along, and you go, “Ah! Yeah, I want to be protected by the company that oozes!”

But here’s what I can’t get out of my head.

Somewhere, probably in New York, some guy in a cubicle went, “Ah HA! Ooozing! That’s what I’ll go with!  The client will like that!”

Then he went to his manager, who said, “Oh, good one, Whitcomb! Yes, the client will really like associating his company with the idea of oozing!”

Then they went to the client representative, who said, “Oh, smashing work, fellows! Yes, I can see it now, all over America.  We will be the oozing insurance company!”

Then it went to the art department, where they created an oozing visual to go with the oozing words.

And then the company approved it all.  They said, “Ah HA! This will get us our market share! We will be locked in with everyone who wants car insurance that makes one think of oozing fluids!  Go us!”

And that’s how it happened.  It boggles the mind.

 

All Right, Yeah, I’m a Conservative

I really am.  Those who know me well already know that, but for the rest of you, let me explain.

There is what one believes, and then there are one’s natural inclinations.  And all of my inclinations are suspicious of change. Not against change; suspicious of it.  I scowl when new words are coined, and demand that they justify themselves.  In music, I grimace and tap my foot impatiently at drum machines and atonality.

In Texas Hold ’em, I still call the fourth community card “fourth street” and the fifth one “fifth street” instead of “the turn” and the “the river” respectively. Why? Because I do, that’s why.

In politics, yeah, I’m a Red, but I’m an old-school Red: an orthodox Trotskyist, a traditional Marxist. I believe that the proletariat is the revolutionary class, that the falling rate of profit causes market crashes, that history is best understood as the struggle to wrest human wants from nature, that the materialist dialectic is the best general explanation we have for matter in motion, and that explanations for social phenomena that don’t start with the class struggle are liable to be vacuous. I disliked the New Left when it was New; and I still dislike it now that it’s no longer Left.  Post-modernism and identity politics I find easy to hate, because both my inclination and my reasoned beliefs line up (as opposed to language and music, where, really, I wish I were more comfortable with change).

And in fiction, I am quite fine with both reading and telling stories. I feel like all fiction ought be stories. I do not believe that; I believe that there is room  for all sorts of experimenting and wild, weird stuff. But what I want are stories. I want to write them and then see them published in books.  You know, the kind people hold, and turn the pages, and read? And I want them sold in book stores where people browse; and I want them in libraries where people can pull them off the shelves and consider checking them out; and I want them in used book stores where people who can’t afford new books can try new authors without going broke.

I approve of the new stuff, of e-books, of certain alternate publishing strategies. I think, long-term, they will probably have a positive effect on the quality of stories; but I’m not comfortable with them.

Because, at heart, however much I wish I weren’t, I’m a conservative.

 

So, What IS Science, Anyway?

I know science–both the discoveries and method of–are important to me.  I know that I believe we ought to deduce natural laws from the facts, as opposed to imposing them on the facts.  I know that when we are dealing with social issues, it is vital to get away from subjective impressions and strive for objective truth.

Some believe science is limited to the falsifiable (more or less created by Karl Popper).  Others (Brickmont, Sokel, Kuhn, Feyeraband, Lakatos, Hawkins, &c) dispute this in various ways for various reasons.  One can, in fact, argue that, by the standard of falsifiable, most of what Einstein was famous for was not science, as it was not able to be falsified at the time. This can be disputed, and if you’re in the falsifiable-only camp, then you had better dispute it–if Einstein wasn’t a scientist, there are no scientists.

My point is, there is more than one definition of what science is, or what scientific method means.  I want to know what you think.

 

Apropos to OSC, a Quick Story

This brief excerpt is from The Mayor of MacDougal Street, the memoirs of Dave Van Ronk (one of my heroes) page 75:

Years later, I was talking with him [Oscar Brand] and expressed my disgust that that he, or maybe someone else, had put on a show with Burl Ives, who had outraged us all by naming a string of names in front of HUAC. Oscar just quietly said, “Dave, we on the left do not blacklist.” Put me right in my place.

 

Update on Hawk

Had a good day yesterday, and I’m pretty sure the rough draft is past the halfway mark now. If my pattern remains true, things should pick up from here on.  On the other hand, this book is still being very weird–demanding I plan out certain levels of detail that I normally leave to revision–so we’ll see.

And speaking of revisions, oh my god this one is going to require them.  Like I said before, I’ll be using a scythe. That’s another odd thing: in the past, the degree of revision I needed has been inversely proportional to how much planning I did for the first draft; this time it seems they’re both going to be unusually long processes.

That said, with luck, I’m on my way.