Blogorrhea Junior

Author Shout Out

To Robert Kuson, author of Shadow Divers, the book I added to my Head Candy list not too long ago. He must have googled himself last night (hmm, when used as a verb, is Google capitalized?) and run across my rec. He kindly dropped me a note to thank me, though I can't think I've affected his sales all that much, if at all. Can't say I've ever had an author do that. Just for that, I'll buy Dad a new copy instead of a like-new used one.

Under a Different Guise

Ideas, they're so darn dangerous.

And those people who purvey them—journalists, novelists, even (eek!) poets! Bad enough we've got too many home-grown ones in this country already, that intellectual elite that the Democrats and Liberals suck up to. Why should we let them in from anywhere else? Our own journalists, after all, have to be "embedded" (read controlled) with the troops, and all their news vetted before we're let them report on the war. Except for those few wild-eyed independent ones. We'd be crazy to allow foreign journalists into the country to say whatever they wanted about us. They do already, on their home soil, and it's too bad their governments let them mouth off like that.

And the novelists and poets! Who knows where that would end. Their ideas are really insidious because they can just shrug and say, "It's just a story," or "it's just a poem, and you're just reading into it."

This might be true, if Americans could actually be made to think. But thinking smacks of intellectualism and, oh, it's just all too confusing!

So lets just keep them out of the country. We'll make new extra special visa hoops for them to jump through, so we know exactly who they are and can deny them entrance or deport them if they get too uppity. We probably ought to lock up the ones who are here, too, except for that pesky First Amendment. Well, we can bury the writers under lack of publicity, anyway. Where's that new Danielle Steele novel?

Sometimes, I think this country's motto was coined by Dorothy Parker. One day at lunch at the Algonquin with the rest of her intellectual Round Table New Yorker cronies, in a word game, she was told to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence. Parker's reply: "You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her think."

Don't leave your mind open; you might get something in it.

Anti-intellectualism at its best

"There's an arrogance in the scientific community that they know better than the average American."

I hardly have to say anything about this wonderfully preposterous quotation, except to give the attribution:
Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, which is opposing funding for a number of sex research and education programs.

I mean, what, after all, is the difference between the average person and scientists? Twelve years or so of highly technical university education, much of it advanced math and physics (how many average Joes went beyond Algebra II)? Mind-numbing hours in a laboratory running equipment that average people cannot even put a name to? (Centrifuge? Mass spectrometer? Washing machine? Oh look! There's a bunsen burner! I remember that from high school!) Learning to tease the details from the whole, and then weave them back into the whole to make the picture clearer?

If there's no difference, why aren't more people doing gene splicing in their basement? (And why should you be grateful that they're not?) It's sad enough that this is attitude now prevails in sex education and research, but this isn't the only area that "average Americans" heap scorn upon. We're happy as a nation to take our technology, medical advances, and pills and run with them, but have little if no understanding of how it comes about, and how absurd some of the experiments and studies seem from an untutored point of view. These are not issues that Congress or any lay person should be making decisions about. When they do, you wind up with money more ill-spent than if it were left to peer review. No physicist in his right mind would give anyone a nickle to study cold fusion, but the Department of Defense has. Granted, DOD is always chasing after wacky (and not so wacky) new technology, but experts in the field have already decided it is a failure. Why is DOD more qualified to make that statement than physicists?

Cold fusion aside, what this kind of attitude is really about is old-fashioned anti-intellectualism, the fear, in America, that somewhere, someone is smarter than you are, and therefore, more equal. In a country where everyone is taught they can be anything and that we're all equal, any evidence of factors to the contrary is met with fear and loathing—unless it has to do with money. There, we've all got an equal shot.

Just don't tell that to the poor, with their disgracefully bad educations.

Take Another Little Piece of My Heart

Have I said how much it sucks when friendships blow up? It sucks even more when they take a dream with them. You know that old adage about never going into business with a friend? Believe it.

A couple of years after I got to be friends with a person who shall remain anonymous (I'll call her Chris), I mentioned that I'd always wanted to have a little press of my own. Reading about Virginia and Leonard Woof's Horgarth Press put the idea into my head, but it stayed in the "Dream On" file because I knew it was one of those things I couldn't do on my own. When I mentioned it to Chris though, suddenly the idea took flight.

First we started writing together, and couldn't believe how well we meshed. I read over our stories now and can't remember who did what part. Then we started doing zines together, and that was a hoot too. We spun ideas off each other and came up with something other than the run-of-the mill product. She was as nuts about paper as I am and it was a huge amount of fun shopping for it with her. It was a lot like work with with my other art partner, Marcia, over at Another GridKid Production.

Then Marcia and I did Stories from the Ruins together, and that got me thinking how much I'd enjoy doing hand-made books. Chris got right on board with that, and before I knew it, we were making business plans and looking for authors. Once we found one, though, it got harder and harder to pin Chris down to a schedule. Not to bitch and moan, but I wound up doing a lot of the preliminary work, including setting up the website and the blog, and looking for potential buyers (some of that leg work I did for the Ruins book, too, to be fair).

Then it all fell apart, for some reason I'm still not able to explain, except possibly a nervous breakdown on Chris's part. At first I thought I could still make this work, then I realized on the train last night, that I was doing the same thing to Lizard that Chris had done to me., i.e., procrastinating and being uncommunicative. That hardly seemed fair.

In a strange case of synchronicity, when I got home last night, there was an email from Lizard, gently pointing out that this is what I was doing, and asking was I having second thoughts. Before I could second-guess myself, I fired off an e-mail that said, basically, yes, I was having second thoughts, and they were pretty much telling me this wasn't a viable project by myself.

So I've closed down Long Meg Press. I'd like to add "at least for the time being" to that statement, but barring some huge windfall (a Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation would be nice. Hint. Hint.), the press is pretty well dead in the water. Or, actually, stillborn, since it never really got off the ground. We flapped real hard, or at least I did, but didn't manage to achieve escape velocity. Back in the Dream On file.

I'm not sure how I feel about all this. A little sad, a little relieved, a little bewildered, a little wiser. I learned a lot, ended up with some pretty impressive and still useful equipment, and had my life turned 180 degrees for a while, so it wasn't a wasted experience, by any means. It's not what I would have spent my time or money on if I'd known Chris was going to lose interest at a crucial moment, so I feel as though I've taken a detour out of the course I was charting with my own writing. Time to get back to it.

Brain Sludge

After spending the day yesterday shopping with Roz & Eva, then most of the evening on the phone, I'm utterly brain dead. I've been reading the reissue of Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, which I'd somehow missed the first time around, and dozing most of the day. So much for painting. I'm too groggy to muster a reply to Egretplume's journal addendum to our discussion last night, but I'll get around to it shortly. It's percolating through the sludge in my brain, even as slouch around the apartment doing nothing. I was, however, sucked in by the movie meme, which shows my sad lack of immersion in pop culture in this particular medium. I noticed there were rather a number of Ewan McGregor movies on the list though. Strangely enough, I have not yet seen them all.