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Unfocused Reading

by James Wallace Harris, 3/12/23

I love reading best when I’m reading a book that I hate to stop reading and always want to get back to when I’m not reading it. Back in December, I was obsessed with reading Elizabeth Strout’s books. I read seven of her nine novels, practically one right after another. That was delightful. I was in reading heaven.

Right now my reading is terribly unfocused. I can’t stick with any book for long. Pictured on this page are all the books I’m currently reading — at least they are the ones that are currently up on my Kindle, Audible, Scribd, and Libby apps, and the books I see lying around. There’s probably more lying next to chairs, or under magazines.

Some of the books I’m reading are because I’m in an online book club for nonfiction books (Come Back in September, Song of the Cell). Or books related to what we read (Jena 1800, Sleepless Nights, The Romantic Revolution).

Others are because I’m in a Facebook group that reads anthologies (The Best of Nancy Kress, Beyond Armageddon, 21st Century Science Fiction). Others are because I’m interested in a particular subject, or they were recommended by a friend (The Good Lord Bird). (It’s great.)

I’m reading All Creatures Great and Small by James Harriot because Susan and I are watching the TV show of the same title. We finished the new series and are into the third season of the old series.

I’m reading Where The Wasteland Ends because I got interested in Romanticism in my online book club. I’m reading Miss Buncle Married because I loved Miss Buncle’s Book. I’m reading Neanderthals and The Great SF Stories 20 because I just love reading science fiction short stories.

I’m reading The Murder of the U.S.A. because I’m writing about the history of science fiction stories that deal with surviving a nuclear war, and it’s an early example of the subject. I’m reading Television’s Greatest Year: 1954 because I found it in a used bookstore and it looked interesting and is interesting. I’m reading Dangerous Visions and New Worlds because I like reading and writing about the history of science fiction. I’m reading How Hight We Go In The Dark because I try to keep up with current science fiction and it was considered one of the best SF novels last year.

I hope this illustrates how scattered my reading and thinking are at the moment. I’d much rather be focused on one subject and one book. When I was growing up and for many years of my working life, I mostly read one book at a time. I miss that simplicity, that focus.

When I joined Audible in 2002 I was on the 2 audiobooks a month plan, and I’d finish one audiobook and carefully study for days how I would use my second credit. Each book was special.

Then Audible started having sales, and now I have hundreds of audiobooks in my TBL to pile. And with all the Kindle books on sale, and all the wonderful buys I find at the Friends of the Library bookstore, I have a couple thousand books on my TBR pile. Life was simpler when I could only afford to buy one book at a time. I just can’t resist a book I think I want to read if it’s priced very low. And I subscribe to Scribd, Kindle Unlimited, and Apple News+ which provide access to hundreds of magazines and countless books and audiobooks. I have too much of a good thing. Less might be a whole lot more.

The book covers shown on this page are only the books I’m trying to read this week. It doesn’t include the books I’m buying or the books I recently gave up trying to read or finished.

I think between all the zillions of albums I can listen to on Spotify, all the zillions of movies and TV shows I can stream, and all the zillions of books, audiobooks, and magazines I could read my mind is running in seven directions at once trying to consume everything. It’s wearing me out.

I hanker for a simpler reading, listening, and watching life. One that is more focused. I think it’s time to cancel some subscriptions and give up buying bargains. I don’t know if I can ever get back to reading just one book at a time, but it should get it down too much less than 21 at a time.

[There is a certain synergy between this essay and the one I just wrote for my science fiction blog, “10 Reasons How I’m Reevaluating My Interest in Science Fiction.”)

JWH

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Visualizing My Discontent

by James Wallace Harris, 2/28/23

Yesterday I watched a YouTube video about writing morning pages. The idea is to get up and hand-write three pages of stream-of-conscious thoughts. So, I tried it this morning and I realized I have a number of things that make me discontent. And one of the things that make me dissatisfied with my life is not being able to see the big picture of what’s going on with myself. This brings me to this blog. I went to Xmind and created a quick mind map of my discontents hoping to see an overview of what was gnawing at me. You can see the results above.

The seed of discontent that inspired all of this comes from the way I feel each night before I go to bed — about how I spent my day. If I did something that felt productive, I feel satisfied with my day. If I didn’t I feel restless. I like when I have an ongoing project that inspires me to get up and get back to working on it. I haven’t had one of those in a while. My next level of satisfaction comes when I write a blog that I’ve put some good work into creating.

Of course, everything depends on health. Over the past few years, I’ve had to deal with a number of health issues. The walls of my life, my aquarium you might say, are the limitations of my health. When I was younger, that aquarium felt like the ocean itself, but as I grew older it shrank. As an adult, I began to realize my limitations, but the possibilities still felt huge, like I was living in the Atlanta aquarium. In my fifties, it felt more like a fancy 50-gallon deluxe home aquarium. In my sixties an ordinary 20-gallon job. Now when I feel bad it feels like I’m living in one of those bowls people keep goldfish in. When I’m feeling better, I’m back in a basic 10-gallon tank. My health goal is to do as much as I can within the boundaries set by my body. That means a lot of my daily anxiety deals with staying healthy. If I can maintain a certain level of health I feel like it minimizes my discontent. And the more I do, the less discontent I feel.

However, staying healthy juggles so many goddamn variables that it’s stressful to think about what to do to stay healthy. For instance, I watched a video, “7 Foods That Ruin Your Liver” this morning — two of which are among the top ingredients of the protein supplements I eat. Since I have a fatty liver, and sometimes have pains in my liver area, this is another worry. I also have a cyst on my liver. And I have gallstones. Eating carefully has become a very big deal for me.

Luckily, my health problems don’t cause me much discontent, or even anxiety. I’m used to dealing with them. My discontent comes from worrying over what to eat and how to exercise. I want to eat what I like and dislike making myself exercise. What would eliminate that anxiety would be finding a diet that I just stick with all the time, and finding a way to integrate just enough exercise to the minimum needed. Both really come down to discipline, but discipline is a major area of discontent for me.

I’ve been lucky lately, and have been feeling better. Last year wasn’t so good because of health problems and a hernia operation. Because I’m feeling better I feel like I should be doing more. Because I’m not doing more I’m feeling restless and discontent. That’s what came out in my morning pages.

Reducing that discontent and getting back on track will require finding a project to work on. I want something that will take me several days or weeks. Something that will make me feel like getting out of bed in the morning. The one I’ve picked to start on, but I don’t know if I’ll stick with, involves creating a new way to learn, memorize, and visualize a subject. My memory is deteriorating, but it’s never been very good for studying a subject deeply. I read nonfiction books and news articles all the time. But that information goes in and out of my brain almost instantly.

I recently read and reviewed a book about the German romantics. Supposedly, they found a lot of insights that have trickled down to us today. I want to create some kind of visual representation of their ideas and how they connected to other influential people over the last two hundred years. I figure this will kill several birds with one stone. It will touch on four branches of the mind map above: memory, reading, productivity, and anxiety. It might even touch on possessions because I will enjoy using more of my computer equipment, and it might touch on friends because it will give me something to talk about with them.

What I want to do is develop a way to visualize what I read to help me remember the information and convey what I’ve learned to other people.

All of this was inspired by scribbling out three handwritten pages this morning when I got up. Watch the video above, you might find it useful too.

By the way, the level of discontent I feel right now isn’t very high. I have a very contented personality. I find it very easy to just hang out and putter around in life. My greatest discontent has always been not being more ambitious. All I’m doing now is pushing myself to do just a little more.

JWH

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Famous Group Friendships

by James Wallace Harris, 2/23/23

The TV show Friends was a huge success for many reasons. However, there is one important reason few people mention that I want to reference for this book review. Group friendships don’t happen often in our lives and they usually don’t last long — yet they are often the ones we miss most when they are gone. Group friendships are usually created for us, by the classroom, churches, sports teams, the military, the office, arts and crafts groups, or hobby clubs. I fondly remember several such friendships and miss them. I even dream about them.

Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf and Jena 1800 by Peter Neumann are about a very special group of friends. Friends who made history. Friends who inspired how we think today. Because they were German and their relationships happened over two hundred years most people won’t know their names. However, those friends influenced people who became famous in the English-speaking world. We remember those friends as the founders of Romanticism. Interestingly, both Magnificent Rebels and Jena 1800 came out in 2022. Magnificent Rebels is longer, and the story is told more like a novel, and Jena 1800 is shorter but focuses more on the concepts, but both tell about the same people. I recommend reading Magnificent Rebels first to see if you like the people, and if you do, you’ll probably want to read Jena 1800.

As a kind of warning I must ask, do you really want to read a book about a bunch of Germans from the 18th century with hard-to-pronounce names? Names that are hard to remember because so many of them began with the letters Sch – Schlegel, Schelling, and Schiller. And there were too many damn Friedrichs. I admit this made the book hard to read but it was worth the effort.

Here’s the thing, I knew practically nothing about these people. I’ve heard of Goethe and Hagel, but haven’t read anything by them. The reason why I read Magnificent Rebels is that I read Andrea Wulf’s book The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humbolt’s New World and was completely blown away. And I don’t even remember hearing or reading about Alexander von Humbolt before. Wulf opened up a whole new historical territory for me to explore.

For most of my life, I’ve read and studied English literature and science from the perspective of English history. I’ve read very few European novels and haven’t studied their history and culture. I knew about the English Romantics (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats), but I didn’t know or had forgotten, they were inspired by the German Romantics. Being introduced to this new knowledge was the first reason I enjoyed Magnificent Rebels.

But the second reason, and by far the more important reason, is I love reading about counter-culture friendship groups that spark a revolution. If you enjoy reading about the Beats, the Lost Generation, the Bloomsbury Group, the Transcendentalists, the Futurians, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, or even the personal computer pioneers of the 1970s, then adding the German Romantics should be a pleasure.

Both books focus on the German romantics that lived in Jena which is in Germany. But their homeland wasn’t modern Germany. The books mainly cover 1796-1803, after the French Revolution and during the Napoleonic Wars when Europe was in upheaval. At one point in this story, Jena is occupied by Napoleon’s army who sacked the city taking any food, valuables, and wood.

I admire books about a group of people who do something so exciting that biographies are written about the group and the individuals. Magnificent Rebels makes me want to read more books about the German Romantics, but also books by and about all the individuals involved. Here’s a scorecard for the main personalities in the book, and the ones I’d want to study more. There were many other people mentioned in Magnificent Rebels.

The first block list the young people that had all the love affairs. The next block is Geothe and Schiller who were best friends and mentors to the German Romantics. They were older and represented the previous generation. The final group was the philosophers and scientists who were friends of the first group, but who were also successful in other fields.

Caroline Schlegel and Wilhelm Schlegel were married but had a best-friends kind of arrangement. Wilhelm accepted Caroline’s love affair with Fredrich Schelling. Friedrich Schlegel was lovers with Dorothea Veit, who was married. That affair was far less accepted.

To me, both Caroline and Dorothea are the most interesting people in Magnificent Rebels. In a way, because they were women, they had the most to rebel against.

The German Romantics remind me of the 1960s counter-culture. The German Romantics weren’t exactly the hippies of the 1790s, but there are comparisons. They were rebellious, flouting sexual conventions, and excited about everything new. For a while they did everything together, reading poetry, going to plays and concerts, discussing philosophy, attending literary salons, hiking in nature, and defying what was expected of them. They almost had a little commune. The men taught at the university in Jena and promoted new ideas that attracted students from all over Europe. But the women were thinkers and writers in their own right.

However, like with the student revolutionaries of the 1960s, things fell apart, often because of egos. It’s hard for two people to maintain a friendship, and group dynamics are infinitely harder to maintain. When the Jena set broke up, it felt like the Beatles breaking up. What we think of as The Sixties was really only from 1964-1969. The Sixties really began with The Beatles arriving in America in February 1964 and ending with Altamont in December 1969. These two books about Jena cover a similarly short period.

Magnificent Rebels and Jena 1800 both try to capture a certain era of exciting social transformation that happened in a small town with a few colorful people seeding changes that spread across the world. I also compare them with the Beat Movement of the 1950s.

JWH

Featured

How To Play Shanghai Rummy

by James Wallace Harris, 2/11/23

We recently decided to play Shanghai when my sister came to visit. It’s a card game I first learned back in the 1960s. However, we couldn’t remember the exact rules so I looked them up on the internet. There were several sites that gave slightly different rules, and they called the game Shanghai Rummy. As we played the game trying out different rules I decided to consolidate on one set of rules. I made a crib sheet to help remember the requirements of each hand (see below). My goal was to blend how we used to play with the rules published on the internet to maximize the fun and challenge of the game.

Each hand or round requires a different combination of cards to make a meld, and I noticed that the complexity of each combination was related to the number of cards required to complete the meld. The game gets harder with each new hand. I settled on the sequence of 10 hands (rounds) based on the rules at Wikipedia and Bar Games 101.

But our family had one last hand that I’m adding as a bonus round. It requires 17 cards to make the meld. With 11 cards dealt, and 6 cards acquired in three buys. This requires making a perfect hand, meaning you go out on all the other players before they can meld. It’s very hard but lots of fun. Because that hand required 17 cards to meld, I thought there should be a 16-card meld, so I created another bonus round. I just liked the symmetry of 12 hands of increasing complexity going from 6 cards in the meld to 17.

Here are the sites I consulted:

Players: 3-5 with 2 decks, 6-8 with 3 decks.

The Deal: 9-11 cards depending on the round. It can always be 11, but fewer card in the early rounds speeds up the whole game.

The Draw Deck: The undealt cards face down.

The Discard Pile: Start by flipping over the top card of the draw deck.

Melds: Composed of a combination of Sets/Books and Runs. A set/book is cards of the same value. Usually, it’s 3 cards. A run is a sequence of cards of the same suit. Usually, it’s 4 cards. Aces can be low or high. Jokers are wildcards. We called sets books when I was growing up, so our family uses the word book, but the internet has settled on set.

Buys: 0 to 3 depending on the round. A buy is a way to acquire cards out-of-turn. See below. Buying is very strategic to the game. Buying cards helps and hurts because they add two cards to your hand in a game where you are trying to get rid of cards. We always played by allowing 3 buys for every hand but limiting the buys in the early rounds makes the round more challenging and speeds up that hand. Be careful buying cards you don’t need, but sometimes strategy requires making a buy to get extra cards to have a discard.

Gameplay: Turns go clockwise. A player draws one card, either from the deck or the discard pile. They must discard one card. Before the next player takes a card, the other players have an opportunity to buy the discard. They must also take one card from the deck. This adds two cards to their hand, and they don’t discard a card while buying. After the buy, the gameplay returns to normal.

The goal is to gather the required meld and lay down. Then get rid of all the other cards in your hand. Generally, the first person to lay down will have extra cards and the gameplay will continue. As other players make their meld and lay down their cards, they can play their extra cards on any sets and runs currently on the table – but only before they discard. Players who have made their meld can lay down on melds only during their turn. Players who haven’t made their meld can’t play on the melds that have been laid down. Each meld can be from Ace to Ace only. Cards cannot be swapped in melds.

Players can not make more than the required number of sets and runs. However, you can make larger sets and runs. So instead of a 3-card set of 3 queens, you could have 5 queens. Or a run of 2-3-4-5-6-7 of the same suit.

Strategy: It’s easy to order your cards and know what you need for the rounds where you only make sets or runs. Rounds, where you make up both sets and runs, are very challenging. How you organize your hand and which cards you seek requires various strategies. How often you buy and when becomes strategic. Sometimes it’s fun to hold your cards until you can lay them all down going out on the other players.

Going Out: The player that can lay down all their cards and have an unplayable discard wins the hand. This rule varies. Some Shanghai rules say going out is when you have no discard. If this method is chosen, the bonus round won’t be perfect and others can still play. Decide ahead of time on which method of going out you prefer. We like requiring a discard.

All other players must add up the values of the cards in their hand and the total is added to their running score. The player with the lowest score wins the game.

Card Values: 2s through 9s = 5 points. 10s through Kings = 10 points. Aces = 15 points. Jokers = 20 points. Other scoring variations include numbered cards = 5, face cards = 10, aces = 20, and jokers = 50. That’s how we scored growing up, but it makes for some brutally large penalties.

Speeding Up the Game: Playing all the hands listed can take 2-3 hours. You can speed up a game by skipping certain hands, especially the first two and the bonus rounds. However, the most complex hands are the most fun.

I have many fond memories of playing Shanghai growing up. Whenever our family visited my Aunt Let in Mississippi in the 1960s, we’d play Shanghai. After we grew up, my sister and I would play Shanghai with our cousins, Sonny and Eleanor, who often played it nightly with their kids, and visitors.

Shanghai is a great card game because it’s not just the luck of waiting for a specific card. Various strategies can be used. You try to arrange your hand so that drawing several different cards will improve your odds of winning.

In all my years of playing Shangai, I have only run into one other person that said their family played this game. If you’ve played Shanghai leave a comment. And if you have any problems with the rules or understanding the rules leave a comment. I hope they are clear and precise.

JWH

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My Experiment With Plex Fails

by James Wallace Harris, 2/6/23

As I explained in my last post, I wanted to convert Susan’s favorite shows on DVDs to digital files so she could watch them with Plex. Because she sews and watches the same TV series, over and over again, I thought we could save money by canceling Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Max.

Well, things didn’t work out as I hoped. I started with Friends and The Gilmore Girls. I bought both as complete series DVD sets for Susan for Christmases long ago. In the first two seasons of The Gilmore Girls, I had two bad discs. And I had one in the second season of Friends. In recent years I’ve discovered other bad DVDs. I tried them on three different players – no luck. The DVD is essentially a 21st-century technology, but now that we’re in year 23 I’m discovering they are not a true archival format.

At first, I wasn’t going to let a few bad discs stop me. I got Plex all set up with a couple seasons of both shows and configured her Roku TV to use Plex. Susan isn’t very picky about picture quality, but I realized that Friends episodes playing on HBO Max are in 1080p, while the rip discs are 480p. See the photo at the top of the page to compare the 4:3 aspect ratio to 16:9. Not only that, but the image quality was far superior – essentially Bluray quality to DVD quality. That depressed me. I don’t know if Friends was digitally reframed for HDTV, or if it was originally shot in 16:9 but it looks great on flat-screen TVs. Seeing it on Plex reminded me of old CRTs, which is how we watched Friends when it came out.

The final straw for me was the closed caption was so much better on the HBO Max version. I told Susan I was giving up. We are going to try and just subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, or HBO Max one at a time.

But I also learned that ripping DVDs is a tedious business. It would have taken weeks to rip all our discs. Just messing with DVDs and DVD players is annoying. The whole reason streaming TV is great is not messing with machines and physical media. No wonder old DVDs are cheap at charity shops and library book sales.

The experiment wasn’t a complete failure. I ripped the last three seasons of Perry Mason that I’ve always meant to watch. Watching Perry on Plex is nicer than messing with DVDs every night. I also ripped Survivors (BBC 1975-1978) a favorite series I’ve been meaning to watch again. It’s not streaming anywhere. I even ripped some documentaries on DVDs I recorded off of broadcast years ago that I wanted to save and a couple of DVD compilations of videos we took on vacation and another of my mother made by some of her distant relatives.

Plex is turning out to be something for me, not Susan.

I guess I’ll start going through my DVDs to get rid of most of them. This experiment has taught me I prefer watching movies and TV shows streamed rather than played by a DVD/BD player. I will keep those shows and movies that seldom get streamed or are my absolute favorites, which I will rip to Plex.

I guess the decades of trying to own our favorite movies and TV shows are coming to an end. I’m also glad I didn’t run out and buy that Synology NAS right away. Computers are getting smaller, and we store stuff in the cloud. Thank GNU for Dropbox.

JWH

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When Will How We Watch TV Stop Evolving?

by James Wallace Harris, 2/2/23

In the 21st century, it now seems air, water, food, shelter, and video are the basic necessities of life. Who lives without screens in their life? Changing times and technologies keep making us adapt to new ways of consuming video.

  • Broadcast TV originally conditioned us to watch television on a set schedule. The price of this technology was watching commercials.
  • Cable TV gave us more channels but we still had to follow the schedule and watch commercials. We now had to pay a monthly bill too.
  • HBO and other premium channels made TV better than movies and freed us from commercials, but we had to pay even more on that monthly bill.
  • VCR let us time shift shows and zip through commercials, and forced us to deal with a growing collection of VHS tapes. It also allowed us to buy or rent movies and TV shows. VCRs created that wonderful subculture of video stores. This gave us more freedom regarding what to watch, but TV was now becoming a growing monthly expense.
  • DVD gave us better picture quality but we had to buy new equipment and replace all those videotapes.
  • DVD R/W+- allowed us to make our own DVDs. It saved us money over buying movies by recording them instead but we had to zip through the commercials again.
  • DVR made it much easier to record shows and zip through commercials. It was wonderful to give up messing with VHS tapes and R/W DVDs.
  • TiVo made going back to broadcast TV fun for a while but the $12.95 monthly fee to record free over-the-air TV was annoying.
  • Netflix discs by mail killed our addiction to Blockbuster and saved us money. I miss Blockbuster.
  • HDTV made TV watching great and more addicting than ever, but now we had to learn about new technology and spend a whole lot more on TVs.
  • Netflix streaming killed our addiction to renting discs by mail and saved us money. $7.99 a month was a tremendous bargain! Bye-bye Blockbuster.
  • Smartphones and tablets have become a new way of watching TV for some people. When the power was out during an ice storm Susan and I streamed TV over 5G on our iPhones.
  • Streaming services allowed us to cut the cord and give up cable TV. That saved us money – for a while.
  • Streaming TV services like YouTube TV allowed us to have cable TV without the cable box and for less money while including an unlimited digital DVR. However, they are now racking up their prices. $70 a month is like a Comcast payment from a few years ago.

When will how we watch TV stop changing? Is it evolving or just the churn of change? I thought with streaming services like Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, AppleTV+, etc. combined with YouTubeTV we had everything we could possibly want. That is until all these services started raising their prices. The fact that we can go months without using some of those streaming services is making me worry. I see that other people are thinking about it too.

TV used to be free. It used to be simple, three channels with a fixed schedule. Now it’s $150 a month, with thousands of shows that can be watched at any time on a variety of devices. TV now has too many choices. That’s mentally wearing. Even exhausting.

Looking back I see now that I subscribed to all those various streaming services to watch another popular TV show that everyone was talking about. Even today, when I talk with my friends they will tell me about the shows they love. Wanting to give them a try often means subscribing to something new. My friend Linda has solved this problem by only subscribing to one service at a time. But she lives with a lot fewer choices. But maybe that’s good.

$150 a month is not bad for how much pleasure we get. However, I cut the cord with cable TV because cable TV forced hundreds of channels on us I didn’t want. It irked me I had to pay $7+ a month for ESPN when I didn’t even watch it. Now, with all the streaming services I’m paying for thousands of movies and TV shows, I don’t want to watch. And I just can’t tune out all those unwanted offerings. Each time I click on Netflix or HBO Max I end up scrolling and clicking and scrolling and clicking to see all my choices. By the time I finally pick something I’m worn out. My sister Becky often yells “I HATE SCROLLING.”

I discovered something very revealing when I started ripping my DVD/BDs for Plex. I have several hundred movies and TV shows I’ve bought over the last several decades. Once I converted DVDs to digital files for a couple of TV series I started watching them. I was no longer interested in streaming services. On Plex right now I have two choices (Perry Mason and Survivors), both of which I want to watch. Imagine Netflix with just two TV shows. (And wasn’t AppleTV+ much better when it had fewer choices?)

When company comes over and we then decide to watch a movie together picking a show depresses us. It makes people happier if I pick out a movie and invite people over saying we’re going to watch X. Susan and several of my TV-watching friends get annoyed if they have to decide on a show. Maybe my current problem with watching TV by myself is having too many choices.

The nightly TV program Susan and I watch together is Upstairs, Downstairs which we get from Britbox. We know what we’ll be watching at 9:30 every night – two episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs. I like that routine. Susan watches other shows by herself while she sews. If I want to watch something on my own I’m currently satisfied with either Perry Mason or Survivors. When I finish those series I’ll rip a couple more.

We did sign up for the current sale for Peacock+ ($29.99 for one year). If all the subscription services charged like that I wouldn’t mind keeping several subscriptions going. However, even though Peacoak+ has lots I think I want to watch, I just don’t feel like watching anything yet. Maybe when I finish with Perry I’ll give one of their shows a try. Maybe the key for me is to only have a couple of shows I follow (besides the one I watch with Susan).

I’ve been very happy the last few days puttering around with ripping DVDs and setting up Plex. I’m not sure Susan will like a very limited TV environment, but I do. I’m not going to try and rip all my DVDs and Bluray discs. I’m just going to rip something when I’m ready to watch it.

I would be perfectly fine just subscribing to BritBox for several months. That’s how we get Upstairs, Downstairs. I’ve already canceled HBO Max and Netflix. I want to cancel Hulu but can’t until I rip some DVDs for Susan. I’d love to cancel YouTube TV, but Susan can’t let go. I only use it for Jeopardy, NBC Nightly News, and Turner Classic Movies. But those two shows are available on YouTube for free, and we’ve got hundreds of old movies on DVD.

It feels like I’m trying to de-evolve my TV watching to back like it was when I was growing up. Just a few channels. Susan is still addicted to the cable TV level of variety. I’m trying to get her to notice that she uses YouTube TV to watch old TV shows all the time. Except for things like tennis matches and cooking shows she seldom watches anything new.

I have friends that watch a lot of television and go through many new shows each year. I used to be that way. I don’t know if it’s getting old or not, but I’m tired of the new show rat race.

JWH

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Renting vs. Buying TV Shows

by James Wallace Harris, 1/29/23

Problems:

  • Streaming services keep raising their prices
  • Content is spread over more competing streaming services
  • 99% of the content is not something I want to watch
  • Favorite TV series keep switching services
  • Some of my favorite TV shows aren’t streaming
  • It’s hard for two or more people to limit subscriptions

For some reason, I can’t get into watching TV anymore. I flip through Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV+ regularly trying to find something I can watch. But I quit most shows after five minutes. I’m ready to give up on streaming TV. I mainly watch YouTube Premium which is $11.99 I think. I definitely get my money’s worth there since I watch a lot of YouTube channels and I hate commercials.

Susan on the other hand, cross-stitches all day long watching all her old favorite TV shows over and over again in the background. But we’re paying about $60 a month for streaming services for Susan to watch those same old TV shows over and over. That seems wasteful.

Of the five TV shows and movies Susan currently has on repeat mode (Friends, Andy Griffiths, MASH, Harry Potter movies, and Gilmore Girls) we already own all of them except MASH on DVD or Bluray. There are a few other shows Susan will put on sometimes, like Gray’s Anatomy and How I Met Your Mother. She does change things up sometimes but not that often and with not that many shows.

Anyway, I was wondering if it would be cheaper to buy the complete series of TV shows she likes and rip them to Plex than to subscribe to all those streaming services? Plex is a program for creating your own customized streaming service. You convert your DVDs to files that are stored on a computer. You run a Plex server program on that computer to fetch the files, and a Plex app on your smart TV, Fire Stick, Roku, or other streaming device to play them. Plex acts like any other streaming service but it shows you what’s on your computer. It can also play music files, show photographs, or videos you made yourself, or stream content from the web if pay for the premium Plex service.

Right now, Amazon has all 11 seasons of MASH for $54. If we canceled all the streaming services we’d pay for it in one month. How I Met Your Mother is $43. The Big Bang Theory is $73, which is another favorite of Susan’s watches from time to time. I doubt Susan would add more than another six or eight series in the coming years. Since she doesn’t try new series, she’s not gaining any old favorites.

The downside of Plex is the time it takes to rip all the DVDs and the price of the server and hard drive. I have old equipment that works for now that costs me nothing. However, it might be nice to buy a new little mini-PC and a very fast SSD to make it fast to rip and copy files. Playing files from my old 5th-generation NUC is very fast. I’m thinking even with new equipment we’d be saving money in less than a year. Or I could buy a fast DVD/BD drive for my main computer which is a 12th generation NUC and rip the DVDs there.

We stopped watching our DVDs and Blurays because it’s annoying to use them, especially after the convenience of streaming. However, if I took the time to rip them, they would be as convenient to watch as streaming. I stopped watching Perry Mason in the 7th season. I could finish that series if I could get back into the mood of watching that show. I have all the discs. In fact, I have complete series of several old TV shows. Plus we have hundreds of favorite movies we could put on Plex too.

Maybe we don’t need streaming services anymore. It’s gotten rather annoying how streaming services keep raising their prices and offering even more shows we don’t want to watch.

Idea #1

What would be great is a streaming service that offers just all the old TV shows for $9.99 a month. It’s all those new movies and original content that are rising the prices. Spotify gives me access to nearly all music for $9.99 a month, so why couldn’t some streaming service for old TV? The trouble is there are too many streaming companies wanting us to subscribe.

Idea #2

If Amazon sold digital complete series for the same price as DVD sets I’d buy them because streaming from Amazon Prime is easier than maintaining a Plex server. The complete Friends on DVD is $53. But it’s $200 to buy all ten seasons digitally. Amazon should promote building digital libraries which they house. I bought the complete Andy Griffith Show for Susan on Amazon and she plays it every day.

Idea #3

The owners of TV shows should sell the complete series on USB drives. A $15 drive must be far cheaper than producing all those DVDs. That way people could buy the USB drive and easily copy the shows to their media servers like Plex. That would be far more convenient than ripping DVDs. Or they could sell a complete series as a download.

The reason why people are cutting the cord with cable is they’re tired of spending a lot of money for a lot of shows they don’t watch. Streaming services are getting like cable used to be – expensive and full of unwanted content. I’d much rather buy movies and TV shows and put them on my own server.

Conclusion

We could always subscribe to one streaming service at a time to have some new content to supplement the old content we’re buying. We spend very little going out. And we don’t go on vacations. Hell, we used to go to the movies once or twice a week before the pandemic. So four or five streaming services are much less than that. They are a bargain. And they are convenient. But I’m getting so tired of seeing hundreds of shows I don’t want to watch and thinking I’m paying for something we don’t use.

Let’s see how I feel after ripping a couple hundred discs. It might not be practical. But it’s kind of fun creating my own streaming service.

JWH

Featured

Miss Buncle’s Book by D. E. Stevenson

by James Wallace Harris

Why do we love some books more than others? Why are some books so enchanting? Why is it so hard to always find the perfect book to read? Especially when we’re old and jaded and have read thousands of books.

I just finished Miss Buncle’s Book by D. E. Stevenson and I want to explain why I loved it so much. I mostly read science fiction, but lately, I’ve gotten tired of the genre. Well, not completely. I recently found a science fiction novel that completely enchanted me too, but it was an old science fiction book that came out in 1939, the setting was England in the thirties, and wasn’t sold as science fiction. See my review of The Hopkins Manuscript by R. C. Sherriff.

I just finished Miss Buncle’s Book by D. E. Stevenson and it pushed all the buttons that make me love books. Am I so burned out on science fiction that any decent story from any other genre would charm me to pieces? I don’t know.

Can I examine these two books and draw any conclusive conclusions that would help me always find a great book to read? And what is great? I might think Miss Buncle’s Book and The Hopkin’s Manuscript are great novels and other people might think they’re both snooze-fests.

Both books are set in England during the 1930s and I have to admit that I’ve been watching a lot of TV shows and reading other books about England before 1960. Maybe I’ve just found a new fictional setting that I like better than those offered by science fiction right now. But why England? And why older books? (I should admit that I still like older science fiction books. Maybe my reading problem is the 21st century.)

Is this a case of reading the right book at the right time? Would they have been so entertaining if I had read either of these books when I was in my teens, twenties, forties, or fifties? Is part of the equation for finding the right book include the age, gender, and philosophical outlook of the reader? I worry about recommending books because even when I love a book, I’m never sure someone reading my review will.

One reason why I’m sick of science fiction is I’ve read too much of it. But I’ve also got tired of the future, especially the far future. But the present isn’t very appealing either. I think I’m looking for comfort books. For cozy novels. And Miss Buncle’s Book fits the bill perfectly.

Normally, I wouldn’t pick a book aimed at women readers, but in the last year, I’ve read quite a number of books by women authors aimed at women readers. I had just finished reading a science fiction book by D. E. Stevenson, The Empty World and while researching her I found this video from The Comfort Book Club:

The enthusiasm of the YouTube host and her mother, as well as the testimonials from the show’s viewers, convinced me to give Miss Buncle’s Book a try. I’m so glad I did.

This 1934 novel is set in the small village of Silverstream. That might be in Yorkshire because we’re told Barbara Buncle has a Yorkshire accent. Barbara has a problem. The depression is on and her investments are no longer paying dividends. She needs money and decides to write a novel. Unfortunately, she has no imagination and writes a story about all the people in her village, just changing the names. She submits the book with the pen name of John Smith and it gets accepted. The publisher loves it, thinking that it’s either a very gentle satire or the work of a very simple mind. However, the publisher renames her novel, Disturber of the Peace.

Slowly the citizens of Silverstream discover the book. Even though it’s set in Copperfield and the characters’ names are different, they recognize themselves. Barbara Buncle has a knack for realistically painting portraits in words. Some of the village folk find it a pleasant read but others are outraged, especially Mrs. Featherstone Hogg, who is livid that the novel reveals she was once a chorus girl. She wants to find out how John Smith is and have him horsewhipped.

Miss Buncle is so mousy that no one suspects her. Several of the Silverstream citizens make it their business to ruin John Smith. But we’re also shown many villagers who are good people. The plot gets quite involved and it eventually becomes a book within a book within a book story when Miss Buncle writes a sequel.

Having this book within a book plot is rather clever. The humor is relatively dry since the story is told realistically even though the action gets rather far-fetched. Its humor is not like P. G. Wodehouse, but I imagine Wodehouse fans will love D. E. Stevenson too. If you like the TV series All Creatures Great and Small and the James Herriot books they were based on, you’ll probably like Miss Buncle’s Book. Miss Buncle’s Book is the first in a series of four. The blog Books and Chocolate thought Miss Buncle’s Book had the same appeal as Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson.

But why did I prefer Miss Buncle’s Book now over my standard fare of science fiction? The writing in science fiction has gotten rather baroque in both prose and ideas. Miss Buncle’s Book is very straightforward and simple, yet very detailed. The characters are far more appealing and realistic compared to what I see in 21st science fiction.

However, I think the most important factor is the novelty of the setting. Science fiction and fantasy settings have gotten old and tiresome. Right now I’d much rather visit a small English village than Mars, or the future, or an interstellar spaceship. However, I wouldn’t mind if a Martian or a human from the future was visiting a 1930s English village.

If you’re a Scribd subscriber, they have the first three Miss Buncle books on audio. They are also available for the Kindle at Amazon and audio at Audible.com. There are nice paperback editions of the first three books from Persephone Books.

JWH

Featured

Reconstructing 1973

by James Wallace Harris, 1/5/22

[The photo above was probably taken in 1972-1973. It should do to show what I looked like in 1973. Jim Connell is on the left. I’m on the right. Connell was 6’4″ so I look tall and skinny. I’m much lower to the ground and wider today.]

How many memories can our brains hold? Is there a limit, like a hard drive? I know from experience there are limitations on accessing memories, so I assume there are storage limits. However, countless random forgotten experiences burble to the surface of my mind daily. And at night I have an apparently limitless supply of visual settings and characters to film my dreams.

I’ve always been obsessed with wanting perfect recall. Aren’t the things we obsessed over what we want and can’t have? 2023 is the 50th anniversary of 1973. I shall use that year for testing my memory in this essay.

This is not another nostalgic look back in time. In fact, I feel the golden glow of nostalgia is finally starting to wear off. 1973 is one of the least remembered years in my mind. At this moment I can’t recall anything specific I did in 1973. I know I was doing stuff, and some of my vaguer memories might have taken place that year, but for now, I just don’t remember what I was doing. I’m not even sure where I was living at the time.

Think of this essay as a cold case. I’m going to go through old drawers and paperwork looking for clues and use the internet to find out what was happening in the world at large to see if that triggers any memories of 1973.

Unfortunately, around 1975-77 I went into a Buddhist phase and gave away or threw away a lot of my possessions. I intentionally tossed most of my personal mementos because I didn’t want to be attached to them or be hung up on the past. I regret that now because I destroyed all my letters, photos, slides, 8mm films, and copies of my APAzines. When my mother died in 2007 I inherited all her photos and mementos. She kept a lot of my report cards. And over the years people have given me photos and old letters. Plus I have my college transcripts — if I can find them. Physical clues are theoretically slim, but I shall look for them.

I shall use full names in case some of my lost friends are Googling their own names. Who knows, maybe it might cause a reconnection.

Sadly, many of my close friends from the 1970s have died. My old roommate Greg Bridges has moved away and I’ve lost contact with him. 1973 was well before I met my wife in 1977. I’m still in contact with my old high school buddy Connell, and my sister Becky is still alive. Becky married in 1971 and moved to Dallas, so she won’t remember much of my 1973. Most of my relatives have also died, at least the ones I saw the most in 1973.

I did not remember a visit to Dallas in 1973 with Carol Suter and Jim Connell until after writing the first draft of this essay. The act of writing has caused memories to float to the surface. Sometimes it took hours, sometimes days to recall. I shall note these delayed experiences in italics.

I’ve written an essay like this before, in 2019, for the 50th anniversary of when I graduated high school. This time I want to go deeper into reconstructing the past. One of the best books I’ve read about being a historian is Jesus Before the Gospels by Bart D. Ehrman.

Ehrman covers all the sources of evidence a historian uses to reconstruct the past and discusses the effectiveness of each. Ehrman shows how memory is unreliable. He also shows how unreliable eyewitnesses are too. Even if I had lots of memories of 1973 I couldn’t trust them. Not everything I write here will be truly reliable. One of the most damning pieces of evidence Ehrman reviewed in his book was about a professor who had his students write down where they were and what they saw and felt the day after 9/11. Then a decade later he tracked down many of those students and asked them to write down what they remembered about 9/11. Several wrote something entirely different. But here’s the kicker. Some of those students who were shown their original essay written the day afterward claimed they didn’t believe what they had written. They believed their memory!

The first piece of evidence I found is a transcript from Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis).

I was a terrible college student. I dropped out many times. I hardly ever did homework, and it’s amazing I got grades as good as these. During 1971-1972 I attended State Technical Institute Memphis. There I majored in a two-year computer science degree. I loved computers, but the focus was on COBOL and getting a job in a bank. I decided I didn’t want that and transferred to Memphis State in 1973. This only came back to me as I studied the transcript.

Many of these courses are general requirements but the ones that weren’t, remind me of when I was searching for a major. I remember now I was considering history, sociology, English, and anthropology. Although, at some point, maybe even when I quit State Tech, I was considering getting a library degree. I needed a B.S. degree before moving to Knoxville to get an M.L.S. degree (Master of Library Science). I just can’t remember.

I remember liking Byzantine history but not the course. It required too much real work. I don’t know why I made an F in “U.S. Southern History Since 1865” since I made an A in “U. S. History Since 1865.” I have absolutely no memory of taking that course. I took “Southern Literature” in the Spring of 1974 and got an A. I also took two Library Science courses that spring, which backs up my memory theory that I was thinking about becoming a librarian.

One course I distinctly remember is “ENGL 3501 English Grammar” because it was about grammar theory and was really hard. And I have trouble with ordinary grammar. What improved my grade was writing a paper on computer translation of languages. I was really into that subject and I impressed the professor.

I lived at 140 Eastview Drive in Memphis during that year because that’s where I remember writing the paper on computer translation. I was sharing a duplex apartment with Greg Bridges who was my science fiction buddy. We went to conventions and produced a fanzine on Gestetner mimeograph which the two of us co-owned with Dennis McHaney. Another buddy John Williamson lived next door in the duplex across the driveway. We got our friend Claude Saxon to move onto this street too, just a couple doors down. We pictured ourselves creating a hippie-like commune by getting all our friends to move to Eastview. It was a rundown neighborhood in 1973, and it’s worse now in 2022. Here’s what it looks like today from Google Maps.

One of the reasons why my grades were falling off was having so much fun at the time. I was into fandom and a member of two APAs – Spectator Amateur Press (SAPS) and Southern Fandom Press Alliance (SFPA). I was also going to lots of rock concerts and smoking a lot of weed with many friends. Two that I remembered a day later were Tom and Sara. I ended up dating Sara’s sister Alice in 1975.

It was while Greg and I lived in this Eastview duplex that he worked on the Programs committee at Memphis State and he got Fred Pohl, John Brunner, and James Gunn to come and do a two-day seminar. The three writers took Greg and me to lunch and we got to listen to them talk about the old days for a couple hours before Pohl and Gunn had to go to the airport. Then we spent the afternoon taking John Brunner around Memphis. He wanted to see the Lorraine Hotel because he was the president of the Martin Luther King society in London. This was before it was renovated. Then Brunner took Greg and me out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant on Union Avenue before we took him to the airport.

I was able to document this from a fanzine article Greg Bridges wrote for Memphen 279 in 2002. The internet has become my real auxiliary memory. Pohl, Brunner, and Gunn were in Memphis on November 22 and 23 1972. That’s before 1973, and earlier than I thought. I assumed 1973 or 1974. But, can I trust Greg’s memory. I hope he had some kind of physical evidence.

I’ve always told people I never lived anyplace longer than 18 months during the 1970s. His date puts me in Eastview in 1972 and I’m pretty sure I moved out in the summer of 1975. I remember 1975 because that’s the year Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen came out. If Greg’s dates are correct I lived on Eastview for almost three years, maybe longer. That completely contradicts what I believed for years.

To me, the 10th, 11th, and 12th grades seemed like the longest years in my memory. I went to three different high schools in two states while living in four different houses. There’s got to be more to 1973. I was twenty-one for eleven months of 1973, that should have been a special time. I suppose going to college filled up the time in a way that made it seem quick and not memorable.

I found a timeline I made years ago. It gives me a few clues. Jim Connell came to visit me and he, Carol Suter, and I drove in Carol’s yellow Gremlin to Dallis to see my sister Becky and her husband Skip Suter, Carol’s brother. That was when I first met Becky’s future second husband Larry Gamer. I was very impressed with him since he was a computer programmer.

Another thing I remember is making a trip to Cape Kennedy with Carol. Her mother asked Carol and me to drive her nephew and niece back home to Titusville. They had been staying with Carol’s mother. Their father, Carol’s uncle, worked at NASA and he took Carol and me to his job site at a communication facility on base. While we were there they taped conversations with Skylab 3, which operated from July 7, 1973, to September 25, 1973. This was when we were out of school and could have made the trip. After we dropped off the kids, Carol and I drove to Gainesville to see my old friend Jim Connell. I remember sleeping on the floor in a communal house. But I’m not sure of this memory. It might have been another trip with Carol. But Gainesville would have been close to Titusville. I do remember we went by Six Flaggs in Atlanta. That’s when I saw Helen Reddy in concert.

I made that timeline decades ago to help me remember all the places I lived. It confirmed the trip to Gainesville. It said the Helen Reddy concert was on 8/31/73. It also said Carol and I went to see Edgar Winter and Dr. John the next day, 9/1/73.

So far I’ve been able to prove I took 12 college courses and visited Dallas, Atlanta, Gainesville, and Cape Kennedy in 1973. That’s something but not much.

I have found one letter from 7/29/73 that I wrote Connell which he returned in 1980. I wrote Connell hundreds of pages of letters, which he kept in a box, but his mother threw out sometime in the 1970s. I’d give anything to have that box now. Here’s the letter:

There’s something woo-woo in that letter. In the third-to-the-last paragraph on page one, I asked Connell to imagine a future where he has a daughter born deaf. Connell’s stepdaughter went deaf several years ago after having to take some major antibiotics.

This letter is also weird because it sounds like me now. But then I was trying to imagine the future and now I’m trying to reconstruct the past.

I had Connell read the letter to see what he remembered. He didn’t remember the letter but he thought we thought many more thoughts per second back then than we do now because the letter impressed him with my stream of ideas.

I don’t remember taking any photographs from 1973. I don’t think I owned a camera. That really limits my recall.

A day later I remembered that not only did I own a camera, but so did Greg Bridges and John Williamson. That we had built a darkroom, in the living-room closet at the house on Eastview and considered ourselves amateur photographers. I still don’t think we took pictures of ourselves. We were all into nature photography and macro photography. I did take several rolls of film using Carol as my model. Plus we made super8mm movies. Williamson was into various creative hobbies and even made silkscreen images. He made a silkscreen cover for my SAPS apazine After the Goldrush. I through all that out in my later Buddhist phase.

I’m now out of physical evidence to prove my existence in 1973. Wikipedia’s timeline of major events of 1973 triggers little for me. Neither the 1972-73 nor 1973-74 TV schedule triggers any memories. I’m not sure we watched TV at the Eastview house or even owned a TV.

In my letter above I review a movie. I can’t remember where I watched it. I sometimes rode my bike over to my mother’s house to watch TV there. Today I had a vague memory of a black and white TV in an old wooden cabinet sitting in a tiny living room that had one ugly couch. This memory was in black and white. All my memories of that Eastview living room are in black and white. I think it must have been dark and dingy.

In this post about 50 albums from 1973, I remember many of them, but most of them I bought later. The only ones I think I bought in 1973 were Brothers and Sisters by the Allman Brothers Band, ‘Pronounced ‘Leh-‘nerd ‘Skin-‘nerd’ by Lynyrd Skynyrd, Over-Nite Sensation by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John, and Piano Man by Billy Joel.

I was able to verify going to a few concerts by recalling them and verifying the dates on the internet. Carol Suter and I went to see Elton John on October 11, 1973, at the Mid-South Coliseum for the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road tour. We also saw him one other time, but I can’t remember if it was in 1972 or 1974. Carol hurt my feelings because she said she would go with me to see Billy Joel during the Piano Man when he was at Lafeyette’s for several days but then went with someone else. I now wished I had seen Billy Joel before he was famous.

I also saw Frank Zappa twice during the 1970s. He was in Memphis in March of 1973, but I can’t verify I was at that concert, but I think it was around the time of Over-Night Sensation. I and my friends went to a lot of concerts during these years. It seemed like every week some big act would perform, often two or three at a time. And the tickets were less than ten dollars back then.

If I would go to the library and look at the microfilm of the Commerical Appeal for 1973 I could verify all those concerts probably. I might even dredge up some other 1973 events I remembered or attended.

Here are the most remembered science fiction books from 1973. I don’t remember reading any of them during that year. Greg and I were both science fiction collectors. I’m pretty sure I subscribed to F&SF that year because I had collected over 200 back issues. But I probably also subscribed to Galaxy, Analog, Amazing, and Fantastic. I also remember building several large bookcases for my collection. They were the same size as a sheet of 1/4″ plywood. I used 1 x 8-inch planks for the shelves and plywood for the backing. They were huge. Greg used giant metal shelves in his room. We even had bookcases in the hall and living room.

Greg and I also published fanzines, traded fanzines, and subscribed to fanzines. Our favorite was Richard Geis’s Science Fiction Review. A few years ago I bought most of them again on eBay and scanned them for the Internet Archive. Probably if I reread the 1973 issues it would trigger many memories.

A memory that came to me on the second day of writing this essay was about my Raleigh 3-speed bicycle. I didn’t have a car that year. When I needed a car I’d ride my bike over to my mom’s house and borrow her car. I rode that bike all over Memphis. Once, and I don’t remember when I visited Connell in Miami and he told me to bring my bike on the airline. I did. And we rode it all over Coconut Grove, where I used to live. I loved that bike. I have no idea what happened to it. That saddens me.

Well, this research is running too long for a blog post, but I think you get the idea. We can remember a lot. Especially if we have triggers. I often have vivid memories of the past pop into my head unbidden. It makes me wonder if everything is recorded and if the bottleneck is the mechanism of recall.

I’m sure if I kept at this experiment I could write a whole book about memory and what I could eventually remember from 1973. I doubt many would want to read it. I’m not even sure anyone will want to read all that I’ve written here. Most people don’t seem very interested in remembering the past. I even know people who say they intentionally try to forget the past and throw away anything that makes them recall it. That horrifies me. I hate that I went through that Buddhist phase.

How much can you remember from 1973?

JWH

Featured

Why I Need To Side With Amazon/Audible

by James Wallace Harris, 1/1/23

Daniel Greene just posted The Audible Situation on his YouTube Channel. Greene is not attacking Amazon/Audible, but he is reporting on a controversy that began when author Brandon Sanderson posted “State of the Sanderson 2022” about why Sanderson wanted to publish his audiobooks first with Speechify rather than Audible. Amazon/Audible is moving towards becoming a monopoly for indie publishers and Sanderson wants to counter that and give other publishers a chance. Greene sides with that idea, and I sympathize completely. However, I need to explain why I and probably many other readers will stick with Amazon/Audible.

I’ve been buying audiobooks for maybe thirty years and buying them from Audible for twenty. I’ve been buying ebooks since the Rocket eBook came out, which was a little over twenty years ago. I have over a thousand Kindle books in my Amazon library and seventy-four pages of audiobooks (20 per page) in my Audible library. That’s a huge library of digital books I want to protect, and Amazon/Audible does a fantastic job of helping me. If my house burned down I’d lose all my physical books along with my iPad, iPhone, and Kindle. But I could buy a new iPhone, log in and have instant access to all my Amazon/Audible books.

Over the decades I have bought ebooks and audiobooks from companies not owned by Amazon/Audible. Nearly all of them have been lost as I moved from computer to computer, or forgotten the places and accounts I bought them from. I’ve bought books from Kickstarter, Apple, Barnes & Nobel, Recorded Books, Downpour, Humble Bundle, Phoenix Picks, O’Reilly Books, and many other publishers. I also bought audiobooks on cassettes and CDs, For example, we bought all the Harry Potter books on CD as they came out, but recently when my wife wanted to hear them again, she rebought them on Audible because it was convenient and because they will always be in her library.

Some of the ebooks I bought I sent to a Kindle device, but they don’t stay there as I’ve moved to new devices. And they don’t always look right in my Amazon library.

Years ago I realized that the only secure way of “owning” a digital book was to buy them from Amazon/Audible. I know they could change their policies or go out of business, but since Amazon is so big I’m betting they will be there until I die.

Amazon/Audible has become my trusted library to store digital books. They keep them fairly well organized and easy to find. They bought Goodreads and that helps me remember and review my books. That ecosystem makes for a very good digital library system. Even when Audible stops selling an audiobook I still have my copies. Of course, with thousands of books, some may have been deleted and I haven’t noticed.

There are times when I remember owning a book and going to Amazon/Audible and not finding it. When I search my mind I realize it’s missing because I bought it elsewhere. Sometimes I can still find them on my computer or remember the publisher and my account, but as time goes by, that’s becoming rarer.

If we thought of books like buying a movie ticket and watching a film, then buying books from any publisher wouldn’t matter. It would be a one-time experience. But if you buy books to build a library that doesn’t work.

I often see wonderful deals on Humble Bundle. I would buy them if they instantly became part of my Amazon library. And that’s true for deals from other publishers. But I’ve stopped getting those deals because I can’t easily keep up with their books for the long haul.

I do agree that it’s wrong that Amazon/Audible has gotten such a stranglehold on the industry. And I don’t see why Amazon/Audible must demand exclusive deals from authors. Amazon/Audible should stop that practice just to show goodwill to the book world.

I can think of some farfetched solutions to this problem. If there were an international registry of digital ownership that was separate from the publishers and sellers that would track what digital works a person owns, then that would break the monopoly. Booksellers would offer readers the best deal, and readers could pick from whichever seller they liked. But their purchase would be added to the registry. And they could then always download a copy of that book even if the bookseller or publisher went out of business. Such a system would even allow readers to leave their library to someone when they died.

Of course, Amazon/Audible has already created such a registry, and that’s why they are so successful.

JWH

Featured

Downgrading to DVD – When Streaming TV Fails Us

by James Wallace Harris, 12/31/22

I’ve lived long enough to experience a number of technological revolutions in television. I was born in 1951, and some of my earliest memories are of watching TV in 1955. TV screens were much smaller then, and the image was in black and white. Well, the whites weren’t white, and the blacks weren’t black, and the image quality was halfway between a black-and-white half-tone photo in the newspaper and a Tri-X black-and-white photograph. What we saw on the screen was small, and fuzzy, giving the impression we had bad eyesight.

Although we couldn’t afford it, my father got us a color TV in 1965. Wow. That was the first big tech breakthrough in television that I remember. And not all shows were broadcast in color. I remember how the TV Guide noted which shows were in [COLOR]. As it became more common, they shortened it to [C].

Growing up with black-and-white TV is the main reason why I love old black-and-white movies. And for two reasons. First, I learned to love watching stories visually told in black and white, and second, early TV ran old movies from the 1930s and 1940s that were mostly black and white.

The next big tech innovation was cable TV. No more messing with the antenna anymore. Cable TV took us far beyond ABC, CBS, and NBC. But the biggest tech change was in the later part of the 1970s when we got a VCR. That opened up time shifting and freed us from the TV schedule. But more importantly, it allowed us to buy or rent movies and TV shows. We had more freedom than ever for choosing what we wanted to watch and when.

We didn’t know how bad the image quality of VHS was until we could buy DVDs. A couple decades later we got large flatscreen TVs that could do 720p and 1080i and realized we needed Blu-ray discs. Then came streaming TV services that freed us from the disc. I’ve gone months or even years without using a DVD. Susan has a big collection of Christmas movies she watches each December, but this year I noticed she streamed most of those movies.

We could almost give away our DVD/BD library. But not quite. Every once in a while I’ll want to watch something that no streaming service offers, and no site rents. Sometimes these forgotten shows are available on YouTube, but usually not. That’s when I have to return to the disc.

I wanted to show Susan Northern Exposure to see if she wanted it to be our next series to watch together every night. It’s nowhere to stream or rent online. Luckily, I have seasons 1-4 on DVD. But they are on flippy discs which I hate, and seasons 3 and 4 didn’t use the original music. The music was an enchanting feature of the series, but the producers didn’t foresee they’d have to pay expensive royalties if they resold their show on disc. [See explanation.]

If Northern Exposure was on a streaming service I didn’t already subscribe to, I would subscribe to that service just to watch it. Or I’d buy a digital copy on Amazon. After that, I’d want to buy it on Blu-ray. Unfortunately, the only complete series for sale on Region 1 discs still doesn’t have the original music. There are Blu-ray and DVD sets from Great Britain but they are expensive and Region 2 discs.

Fans of the show on Amazon are spending $170 for the Blu-ray sets and another $170 for a Region-free Blu-ray player. I’m not going to spend $340. So, I got out my old DVDs but discovered that my Sony Blu-ray player was dead. I haven’t used it in a very long while. Streaming really has changed us. Luckily, I have a cheap $29 Region-free DVD player I had to buy it to watch Love in a Cold Climate because I could only find that old series used on Region 2 discs. Downgrading to DVD is how we watched the pilot of Northern Exposure last night.

The image quality was a step down – 480i. And the DVD player was poorly designed with a terrible remote. And that release on flippy discs forced us to watch previews for several TV shows from back in the 1990s each time we start the player.

Quite a downgrade in TV watching. Still, the 4:3 image on my 65″ screen was far better than what we saw in the summer of 1990 on a 25″ screen. I could say it was a retro-nostalgic experience, but I’m too addicted to the current state of television technology to be satisfied. I’m awful tempted to spend the $103 and get the British Region 2 DVD set. That’s a lot more money than the American Region 1 $39 DVD set of the complete series, but it has the original music that I’ve ached to hear again. I really want the Blu-ray version, but it’s just too damn expensive.

For now, we’ll try the old DVDs to see if we get hooked again on a show we both loved thirty years ago.

JWH

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Susan and I Need a New TV Show – Give Us Your Recommendations

by James Wallace Harris, 12/30/22

About six weeks ago Susan and I developed a new nightly routine. At ten o’clock she would feed the cats, and then we’d sit down to watch an episode of Downton Abbey with a piece of cake. This has turned out to be an extremely delightful routine and we want to keep it up. However, we’re about to run out of Downton Abbey and need a new show.

When we first got married we always watched TV together, but in recent years, our tastes have diverged greatly and we have a hard time finding shows we like watching together. I’m no longer interested in half-hour comedies which Susan loves. And Susan hates shows like Breaking Bad and Stranger Things. However, we both liked The Sopranos. And that might be a possibility, although Susan might not like it anymore.

It’s strange how our tastes have changed over the last four and a half decades. She used to sit and watch Star Trek with me, and I’d watch The Gilmore Girls with her, but those days of watching something we didn’t like just to be sociable are over. We need something we’ll both love.

So, if there is a series you liked as much as Downton Abbey please let us know. We both liked Downton Abbey in the past, so it was an easy pick. If you’re a couple, recommendations you both like might be more valid.

We are currently considering The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which we’ve both watched and liked, and Call of the Midwife which Susan has seen some. We want an hour show that has continuity. Downton Abbey was really a soap opera, and that might be a key to why we looked forward to ten o’clock every night (and well, the cake.)

It helps if the show is streaming somewhere, but I’m not against buying a DVD set.

I just remembered a show we both loved – Northern Exposure. So that’s three possibilities. But if we’re to keep this routine up we’ll need a whole lot of shows.

JWH

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2022: Year in Reading

by James Wallace Harris, 12/30/22

It’s always amusing to look back over the books I read during the year to see how many I’ve forgotten. For some reason, I remembered them all this year. Oh, I couldn’t have made a list from memory, but when I look at Goodreads database every book came back to me. That’s unusual. It could be I’m getting better at picking memorable books to read. I tried to review many of them, so that might be a factor too. I read eight anthologies for a Facebook group devoted to reading a science fiction short story daily. And six books were read for a nonfiction book club. Also, I got interested in four authors this year: Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, Elizabeth Strout, and Anthony Powell. Finally, this was my year for reading history, especially about the ancient world.

2022 was the year of reading Elizabeth Strout. I read seven of her nine novels. I binged on them, reading those novels in about seven weeks. But when I look at my list, I see I read Bewilderment by Richard Powers at the beginning of the year. If I think on it for a while, my memories suggest I might have liked it better than Lucy by the Sea, my favorite Strout book, and the novel I currently think of as the best I read in 2022. Memory is tricky and comparing books is so hard.

On the other hand, An Immense World by Ed Yong feels like my favorite nonfiction book right now, but when I dig through old thoughts, I have to wonder if I didn’t like Where the Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon better? It wasn’t The Soul of a New Machine or Hackers, but it did press my love of computer history button long and hard.

Whether I’m reading a novel or a nonfiction book, the best ones often feel like the most amazing book I’ve ever read — while I’m reading them. So, instead of picking the best books of the year, I’m going to bold any book below that I highly recommend. I really enjoyed all the history books I read, but I doubt many people would, so I’m hesitant to recommend them.

Here are the books I read in 2022. Links are to my reviews.

  1. The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery
  2. Bewilderment by Richard Powers
  3. The Great SF Stories 25 (1963) edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg
  4. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony
  5. We Can Build You by Philip K. Dick
  6. Dr. Bloodmoney or How We Got Along After the Bomb by Philip K. Dick
  7. The Other Side of Philip K. Dick by Maer Wilson
  8. Philip K. Dick: Remembering Firebrght by Tessa B. Dick
  9. Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Breman
  10. The Big Book of Science Fiction edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
  11. Star Science Fiction Stories No. 1 edited by Frederik Pohl
  12. Hugo & Nebula Award Winning Stories from Asimov’s Science Fiction edited by Sheila Williams
  13. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber
  14. Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living by David Fideler
  15. Over My Shoulder: Reflections on a Science Fiction Era by Lloyd Arther Eshbach
  16. The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick
  17. Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World by Philip Matyszak
  18. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon
  19. No Man on Earth by Walter F. Moudy
  20. The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Six edited by Neil Clarke
  21. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
  22. The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome by Susan Wise Bauer
  23. The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction edited by Robert Silverberg
  24. In the Funhouse: 17 SF Stories about SF edited by Mike Resnick
  25. Galaxies by Barry Malzberg
  26. Time’s Last Gift by Philip Jose Farmer
  27. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
  28. The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade by Susan Wise Bauer
  29. Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee
  30. John Brunner by Jed Smith
  31. Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein
  32. Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson
  33. Methuselah’s Children by Robert A. Heinlein
  34. Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein
  35. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
  36. For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs by Robert A. Heinlein
  37. Revolt in 2100 by Robert A. Heinlein
  38. The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham
  39. A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell
  40. A Buyer’s Market by Anthony Powell
  41. The Acceptance World by Anthony Powell
  42. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
  43. Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout
  44. My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
  45. Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
  46. The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople by Susan Wise Bauer
  47. At Lady Molly’s by Anthony Powell
  48. The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
  49. Index: A History of the by Dennis Duncan
  50. Abide With Me by Elizabeth Strout
  51. Oh, William! by Elizabeth Strout
  52. The Good New Stuff: Adventure SF in the Grand Tradition edited by Gardner Dozois
  53. The World Turned Upside Down edited by David Drake, Eric Flint, and Jim Baen
  54. Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout
  55. An Immense World by Ed Yong

For many years I’ve ended my yearly summary of reading with my reading ambitions for the following year. I’m not going to do that this year. My reading tastes seem to be in flux. I like trying to read one book a week, or 52 books a year, but I’m not sure is that’s a useful goal anymore. What I love is finding great books to read. I think I’ll worry less about genre or subject, or how many, and focus on making every read count. It felt really wonderful to discover Elizabeth Strout this year. And to be honest, I am finding reading science fiction, by favorite genre, becoming less rewarding. I might just be burned out on the genre for a while.

I’m also excited about the Anthony Powell books from his A Dance to the Music of Time series of twelve novels. I’m on the fifth book and so far they show more promise than they deliver. I’m hoping if I read all twelve, and think about their total impact, my impression might change.

I’ve been studying the Best-Books-of-2022 lists and there are many I want to read. So, I’ll just call them my reading goal for the year.

JWH

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Historical Bible Study Counteracts Irrational Faith Better Than Books by Atheists

by James Wallace Harris, 12/22/22

Most Christians acquire their faith in childhood. A growing proportion of Christians drop most of their early beliefs as they get older and better educated. But a significant proportion of Christians cling to childhood beliefs their entire life. Faith in the irrational can be extremely strong, no matter what evidence to the contrary is given.

Why do some people hold onto their cherished childhood beliefs with such tenacity? We know that a baby taken from a Christian culture and raised in a Muslim culture will become Islamic rather than Christian. Beliefs children are exposed to in their early years, imprint on them stronger than beliefs acquired later in life. It is very hard to deprogram early beliefs, even silly and irrational beliefs. Why is that?

One theory is cognitive dissonance. That theory studies the psychological stress caused by people experiencing conflicting information, usually caused by having old beliefs exposed to new and contradictory information.

For some people, accepting new information can undermine their psychological stability so it becomes imperative to go to any extreme to preserve the beliefs that define their sense of reality. Decades ago, a number of books became popular promoting atheism, with some becoming bestsellers. They may have had an impact because the percentage of people attending church has been declining faster in the last decade. On the other hand, many Christians left the mainstream churches and joined evangelical churches which advocated even more extreme Christian beliefs. In contrast, other believers just doubled down on their faith.

Many from that demographics became anti-science in several ways and politically skeptical. They deny climate change, vaccines, the medical profession, scientists, and even democracy. I’ve wondered if it was to maintain their Christian faith. Their cognitive dissonance is so great they are being forced into extreme views about how reality works. To some family and friends, these people are embracing disturbing irrational beliefs. This is further polarizing our society. If we are to solve our civilization’s problems we’ll need to heal this cognitive schism. To fix our relationships with each other and the Earth we must agree on what is real.

This divide will be the defining crisis for Christianity in the 21st century. If Christianity wants to regain its validity, its message must be universal. Christianity should have some core values that all denominations embrace, and even non-Christians will admire. Christianity needs to coexist with science, philosophy, history, and all other areas of knowledge. It can’t keep breaking up into smaller and smaller denominations and sects that claim they each own the truth, especially when those truths are so crazy sounding to the average person.

I’ve been discovering a different approach to Christianity in the last decade, which has been an emerging academic discipline for a couple of centuries. That is the historical study of Christianity and its texts. People who embrace both the sacred and the secular are pursuing these studies because it’s the most fascinating cold case in history. Who was Jesus, what did he really believe, and how did Christianity develop. The major focus is on the first century CE. What happened then and how do we know it.

And one of the primary methods for analyzing this period is the study of the New Testament. Most Christians, even the ones who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible seldom study the New Testament with such scrutiny. This kind of Bible study used to only exist in seminary schools – now it’s becoming a popular self-study. However, not all scholars pursuing this history are doing it with the same level of discipline. Many true believers have become Biblical archeologists to prove the validity of their faith even when it conflicts with secular truths. But what’s interesting is Bible study has become a powerful force for eroding faith in the irrational. There are several former evangelicals who are now university scholars that don’t believe what they once believed. And we’re discovering that the Bible does match up with history in many ways, but often not in the ways the faithful want.

Whoever the historical figure we call Jesus was and what he said is hidden by two thousand years of revisions and creations. Jesus, and that wasn’t his real name, is portrayed differently by the Apostle Paul, and the writers of the four gospels. The human being we call Jesus probably didn’t consider himself divine or claim to perform miracles. Everything we think we know about Jesus was invented by ordinary people decades after he died. They gave him an origin story and superpowers to compete with other figures of their times. Did you know that Augustus, the Roman Emperor, was also called a son of God? The followers of Jesus had to top that. And they kept topping every other competing belief system at the time. Their best recruiting promotion was to promise ordinary people everlasting life. No other religion promised that at the time.

Are there any clues to what the historical Jesus said and did? Maybe. One intriguing approach is the Jesus Seminar.

Many of the people who are doing historical analysis of Jesus and Christianity have examined a tremendous amount of information. Getting where they are coming from requires reading countless books. And it requires learning the disciplined approaches of professional historians. Yesterday, I discovered a video on YouTube that covers some of this territory in a very concise matter. It’s a good introduction to what I’m talking about, although some of the faithful might not like their light, even flippant approach.

After that, I recommend reading the books of Bart Ehrman or watching his YouTube channel. I find his books to be a more efficient method to take in information than watching hours of his YouTube interviews. In 2016 I wrote a review of some of his books for Book Riot. Back in 2014, I reviewed five of his books for this blog.

Trying to decipher who Jesus was is an enticing historical mystery to solve, and I think from the YouTube videos I’ve been seeing, it’s becoming very popular. I’m guessing that it will reshape Christianity. I’d like to think the teachings of the historical Jesus had certain unique philosophical insights but it’s almost impossible to know them until we can distinguish what he might have said from the fiction created about him during the first and second centuries.

JWH  

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Reading Elizabeth Strout

by James Wallace Harris, 12/15/22

My fiction of choice has always been science fiction, but I’ve recently had my fill of that genre and started reading contemporary and literary fiction. I got hooked on the books of Elizabeth Strout and Anthony Powell. I’ve finished Oh, William! today, my sixth Strout book in six weeks, and started my seventh, Lucy by the Sea. She only has nine novels, so I will run out soon. Hopefully, I’ll be satiated and can try somebody new, but I’m hooked on her now. (Concurrently, I’m on the fifth book of the twelve in Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time series, but that’s another story for another time.)

I began my addiction to Elizabeth Stout with Olive Kitteridge, a “novel” composed of 13 short stories. I saw the HBO miniseries based on the book years ago, but when I tried to watch the show again after finishing the book I realize it wasn’t the same experience. My image of Olive is not Frances McDormand’s version even though I liked her version very much.

I also read the sequel Olive, Again which adds another 13 stories to the Olive Kitteridge saga. We meet Olive in her sixties in the first book, and we last see her in her eighties in the second book. I’ve seldom read books about old people, but now that I’ve become old myself they have become very appealing.

Of the Strout books, I think I’m the most partial to the Olive stories, but I also love the Lucy Barton books too. There are four in that series, My Name is Lucy Barton, Anything is Possible, Oh, William! and Lucy by the Sea.

I feel both series are kind of experimental. Olive’s story is told in short stories, where some stories only have cameo appearances by Olive. Lucy narrates her story in the first, third, and fourth books, but in the second novel, we hear about Lucy from other people. I found that perspective fascinating after the first book. I listen to the books on audio, and in the books where Lucy narrates, they each feel like one long monologue. The only standalone Strout story I’ve read is Abide With Me, which has a best-seller-type third-person structure.

What’s striking about both series is the sparse, clean prose that feels like a hyperrealistic painting. I believe that’s why I like these books so much after all the science fiction I’ve been gorging on. They are hard, concrete, and mundane which contrasts sharply with the otherworldy fantasy of science fiction.

I got hooked on Strout because of my friend Linda. After I read Olive Kitteridge I started mentioning Strout to my friends and I learned that Anne (Old Anne) had already gotten hooked too. She was reading Strout in publication order and insisted that I should start over and do the same. I didn’t agree. When I mentioned to Annie (New Ann) that we were reading Strout, she wanted to read her too.

Along the way, Linda told me that she heard a Kelly Corrigan interview with Nick Hornby where she asked him what was the last book he was most impressed with, and Hornby had said Oh, William! (For now, I agree too.)

You can search online for the recommended reading order for reading Elizabeth Strout and find opposing opinions. I don’t know if it matters, even within the Olive and Lucy series. For example, if you only read Oh, William! it would work fine as a standalone novel. But I was happy that I read them in series order. Starting Stout with her first book is fine, but I feel her later books are the best.

One reason why I don’t think reading order is important is they all have the same theme. Stout likes to explore how we really don’t know each other, especially our parents, siblings, children, and spouses. And we also don’t know ourselves either. Her books inspire me to pay more attention to the folks in my life and myself. Don’t worry, they aren’t heavy. Strout succeeds with lightness.

I’ve been listening to the Elizabeth Strout books, but I liked them so much that I’ve been buying hardback copies to study. I even ordered a copy of Best American Short Stories 2013 where Strout was the guest editor. I want to see what kind of fiction she admired.

Are any of y’all fans of Elizabeth Strout?

JWH

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In Control, Losing Control, Out of Control

James Wallace Harris, 12/10/22

[Don’t worry, everything is fine. The essay below might sound like whining, but I write to think things through. I’m aiming to sound comic but I’m afraid it might sound like bellyaching. But putting thoughts into words is very therapeutic for me.]

I’ve never thought of myself as an anxious person. Alfred E. Neuman was my self-help hero growing up. I had anxieties but I never thought much about being anxious — that is until I got old. Now that I’m retired and obviously aging I realize that things beyond my control might be creating new feelings to experience, and one of those new feelings might be anxiety over anxiety. Right now, that sensation is minor but I can see where it could become major.

This got me thinking about the nature of anxiety. If you’re a two-year-old and you can’t get the toy you want, throwing a tantrum is a way to communicate your anxiety. If you’re a teenager and feel like you don’t fit in socially anxiety might reveal itself in countless ways, such as a fear of where to sit in the cafeteria at lunchtime. As an adult and you feel overwhelmed at work, anxiety might manifest as a good old-fashion coronary.

I’m not sure what I’m feeling. It might be the existential angst of aging, the looming dread of civilization’s collapse, or the plain mundane fear of dying. Or maybe I just don’t have enough to do. However, I’m starting to think what I’m feeling is wimpy anxiousness over dealing with house repairs and visits to doctors. Components in my body and home keep wearing out.

I’ve always been pretty laid back, a go-with-the-flow kind of guy. I think that was because we moved around a whole lot when I was a kid, and so I just got used to things always changing and being up in the air. I never lived in any house longer than eighteen months until I was in my forties. I just solved problems as they showed up.

I also have the kind of personality where I avoid conflict and stress. I got a job in 1977 that I stuck with until 2013. And I got married in 1978 and have been married ever since. I don’t like rocking the boat. I think all of that has led to a low-anxiety life, which I was lucky to find and grateful to have.

But now I’m 71, and I realize I’ve been living in the same house for fifteen years. That has made me very comfortable and I worry more and more about losing it. And the body I’ve depended on for 71 years is becoming less dependable, and that’s freaky too.

Something is changing. Besides my body and house needing more frequent repairs, Susan is getting some health problems too. Susan and I both hope we can die in this house. I realize that I’m trying to control three big things. My health, Susan’s health, and the house.

Now, this anxiety is nothing compared to a family that’s lost their home in Hurricane Ian, or being the president and worrying over the national economy. But it is a feeling that I’m having to deal with, and I’m trying to figure out how to deal with it, and what exactly causes it.

In 2022 I had one operation, two ER visits, four ultrasounds, three CT scans, one MRI, and countless other medical tests. My doctor is talking about three additional operations I might need. Also in 2022 I had to replace the outside AC unit, replace the hot water heater after it flooded my computer room, had to have dead limbs removed in February after a falling limb speared a hole in the roof last December, and now I’m having to spend another three thousand having the trees cleared of diseased branches again after a giant limb fell across the back on the house.

I’m still a fairly la-de-da kind of guy, but I realize this slight background radiation of unease is not going away. I realize it’s because I’m trying to control things that are hard to control. I worry about Susan, but neither I nor her doctor can nag her into exercising — so I have no control over her. And there’s only so much control I have over my body even though I am willing to diet and exercise to help myself.

Although I can have the house repaired I realize I’m slowly losing control over our home (as I hear another small branch hit the roof). I can no longer do most of the repairs myself. I gave away my big ladder because I don’t think I should be getting on the roof anymore. Before I would have just gotten on the roof, sawed the big limb into pieces, and tossed them down to the ground. Now I have to wait for the tree people to clear it off. However, that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The tree guy spotted numerous diseased branches that need to be cut out, and some of them are giant and could cause significant damage to the house. I now have falling tree limb anxiety, to add to my flooding floors anxiety.

In a fantasy of gaining control, I considered having all the trees near the house cut down, and having an addition put on the back of the house so I could move the water heater and HVAC out of the attic so there would be no water lines above us. And since we have a few days of power outages every year, I’ve also considered getting a standby natural gas generator. However, all those considerations might be overkill.

In 2023 I’ll probably have more maintenance done on my body, and I’ll replace an ancient dishwasher, and a refrigerator that leaks, and have some other plumbing problems fixed. And there will be other unforeseen things to fix too. I’m amused that my body and my house both seem to be breaking down equally as often.

I sometimes contemplate moving to a retirement complex. A friend is investigating assistant-living apartments for their parent and the assistant-living facility they described sounded super-attractive. I would no longer have to worry about controlling a house, just my body. But I think we’re too young yet for such a facility.

Still, I realize that between now and oblivion I’ll be fighting to control my health. That’s nothing I even considered when I was young. For now, I’d say I was in control, but I can foresee losing control, and even being out of control.

All kidding aside, I’ve always felt anything I was anxious about I could fix myself. One aspect of this new feeling of anxiety is a sense that I can no longer fix my problems myself. I must hire people. I’m becoming more and more dependent on doctors and repairmen.

My sister Becky once observed that we start off life in one room with people taking care of us and end up in another single room with people taking care of us. (I think she said it more graphicly, with references to butt wiping.) Maybe I didn’t feel particularly anxious most of my life because I felt I could fix my problems, and these new anxieties I’m feeling because I’m getting more and more people to take care of my problems and I’m spending more and more time in fewer rooms.

JWH

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I Wish I Had Been A Librarian

by James Wallace Harris, 12/8/22

I almost became a librarian. This was a long time ago. What kept me from that career was having to move to another city to get an MLS degree. Susan and I had been married for a few years, and we didn’t want to move. I worked in the Periodicals Department at Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis). I was a Periodicals clerk, which was an hourly position. I was working on my English degree and taking some undergraduate courses in library science in a program designed to produce librarians for K-12 schools. I didn’t want to work in a school, but at a university, and most universities require a Master’s of Library Science. In fact, my university required an MLS to get the job, but a second master’s in a useful subject to aid in working in a library to keep the job. This was also true of the public library at the time. And even with two master’s degrees, the pay would never be much, but I’d work in the environment I loved best.

Instead, I took a job at the College of Education setting up their network and creating a student database system to track student teaching experience. I worked there for the rest of my life, but I’ve always wished I had gotten that MLS degree and spent my 9-to-5 life in a library. When I was young I worked at the Memphis Public Library for a few months, and later at the university library for six years. I love periodicals. And I love how magazines have become available on the internet as digital scans. I have quite a collection of them. I believe my compulsive acquisition of books and magazines is caused by a gene for librarianship.

Reading Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure From Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan has brought back my desire to work in a library. I’m not sure I can recommend this book to everyone, but if you love books and libraries it might be for you. Its subject is somewhat esoteric. Did you know that the idea of alphabetizing had to be invented? That made me wonder who came up with the idea that letters of the alphabet should have an order? Duncan didn’t cover that.

Books haven’t always been like the books we read today. When books were scrolls they didn’t have covers or even titles. A book might be written over several scrolls of paper, so if you had a bunch of scrolls, finding the one you wanted, and the part you wanted to read, could be very difficult. So early librarians started tying the scrolls together and putting them in bins. Then they learned to glue little tags of paper to the end of scrolls to identify what was in the scroll. That’s the beginning of the index. As I said, this book won’t be for everyone, but if you have the library gene it might.

What most people think of as an index, that section of the book at the back with a list of keywords and page numbers wasn’t invented right away either. When books began to be printed people got the idea of helping people find specific places in them, and the index as we know it was born. At first, the index was published separately. Then when they started being published with the book they were put in the front. It took centuries before they standardized on placing the index in the back of the book.

David Duncan’s book is mostly an amusing look at all this. He was especially delighted by discovering what I call index wars. For example, Richard Bently satirized a 1695 book by Charles Boyle by publishing an index that ridiculed Boyle’s book by how he indexed the keywords. This led to all kinds of indexing shenanigans including dirty politics. Duncan found quite of bit of indexing history in the line, “Let no damned Tory index my History!” by Whig historian Laurence Echard whose three-volume History of England was indexed by Tory sympathizer John Oldmixon.

Another bit of off-the-road history Duncan discovered was that very scholarly accused the lesser scholarly that their poor thoughts were due to reading just the index rather than the whole book when composing their writing. That’s because indexers use to put more information into their indexes.

Duncan shows many photographs of the fine art of indexing satire but it’s hard to read them because they were being written at a time before standardized spelling. Luckily he translates historical English into modern English. And the historical humor has become very dry. You’ve got to enjoy a good three-hundred-year-old in-joke to really appreciate this book, but Duncan is good at explaining them. Sometimes the humor was as crude as the silliest of Saturday Night Live skits.

Duncan eventually works his history through the centuries up until the age of Google and online indexes. This is where I wished I had worked, using computers to organize information, periodicals, and libraries. In a way, our website Classics of Science Fiction is a kind of index. We index the popularity of science fiction short stories and novels. I’m all the time thinking of things I’d like to put into databases that deal with books and magazines. Reading Duncan’s book showed me there have been bookworms with the same kind of bibliographic urges for thousands of years.

But Index, A History of the also inspired two very specific librarian-type desires. The first was triggered by Duncan’s coverage of The Spectator, a very influential publication.

Many of the journals of the eighteenth century fall into this intermediary zone, and none more so than the Spectator. Founded in 1711 – and no direct relation of modern magazine of the same name – the Spectator was a cheap, daily, single-sheet paper that featured brief essays on literature, philosophy or whatever took its writers’ fancies. Its editors were Richard Steele and Joseph Addison (whom we met in the last chapter having his Italian travelogue mauled by ironic indexers), and, although it ran only for a couple of years, it was immensely popular. The Spectator started off in a print run of 555 copies; by its tenth issue, this had ballooned to 3,000. This, however, was only a fraction of the true readership. The editors claimed that there were twenty readers to every copy, and deemed that even this was a ‘modest Computation’. The Spectator was a paper designed for the emerging public sphere, a conversation piece to be read at ‘Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-tables, and in Coffee-Houses’.2 A paper to be read and passed on. 

What’s more, the Spectator was only the best known in a long list of similar sheets. The Tatler, the Free-Thinker, the Examiner, the Guardian, the Plain Dealer, the Flying Post – papers like these were able to capitalize on a perfect storm of rising literacy rates, the emergence of coffee-house culture, the relaxation of formerly strict printing laws, and a growing middle-class with enough leisure time to read. The eighteenth century was gearing up to be what scholars now call the age of print saturation.3 That term saturation has some interesting suggestions. Certainly, it implies excess – too much to read – but also something else: too much to keep hold of, a new disposability of printed matter. Our poor, abused quire of paper was born at the wrong time. Flicking through original copies of the Spectator preserved in the British Library, one certainly sees the signs of coffee-house use. You won’t find stains like this in a Gutenberg Bible. And yet the essays are among the finest in English: wryly elegant, impeccably learned. If you had bought the paper for self-improvement you might well want to come back to it. 

And so it was that the news-sheets found themselves being republished, almost immediately, in book form. These editions, appearing within months of their broadsheet originals, anticipated how the kind of reader who would want the full run of the Spectator would want to use it: not simply as a single sheet – a single thought – for a few minutes’ entertainment with one’s coffee, but as an archive of ideas that one might return to. Benjamin Franklin, for example, describes coming across a collected edition of the Spectator as a boy and reading it ‘over and over’, jotting down notes from it and trying to imitate its style in his own writing.4 The movement from coffee-table to bookshelf implies a different mode of reading, one of reference, reuse, of finding the thought, the phrase, the image, and bringing it into the light again. If the Spectator was to be a book it would need an index. 

The indexes to the early volumes of the Spectator, along with those of its older sister the Tatler, are a joy in themselves, full of the same ranging, generous wit as the essays they serve. Rifling through them, a century later, Leigh Hunt would compare them to ‘jolly fellows bringing burgundy out of a cellar’, giving us ‘a taste of the quintessence of [the papers’] humour’.5 Who, indeed, would not want to sample more after reading a tantalizing entry like ‘Gigglers in Church, reproved, 158’ or ‘Grinning: A Grinning Prize, 137’ or ‘Wine, not proper to be drunk by everyone that can swallow, 140’. The Tatler, meanwhile, offers us ‘Evergreen, Anthony, his collection of fig-leaves for the ladies, 100’, or ‘Love of enemies, not constitutional, 20’, or ‘Machines, modern free thinkers are such, 130’. Elsewhere, two entries run on together, oblivious to the strictures of alphabetical order: 

     Dull Fellows, who, 43 
     Naturally turn their Heads to Politics or Poetry, ibid. 

There is something at once both useless and compelling about these indexes. Is ‘Dull Fellows’, listed under the ds, really a helpful headword? Of course not. But it catches our attention, makes us want to find out more. This is as much about performance as about quick reference. Each entry is a little advertisement for the essay it points to, a sample of the wit we will find there. The Tatler and Spectator indexes belong to the same moment as the satirical indexes we saw in the last chapter, but unlike William King’s work there is nothing cruel or pointed about them. Instead, they are zany, absurd, light. ‘Let anyone read [them],’ declares Leigh Hunt, ‘and then call an index a dry thing if he can.’ The index has made itself at home in the journals of the early eighteenth century, adapting to suit their manners, their tone. Moreover, it signals the elevation of these essays produced at a gallop for the daily coffee-house sheet to something more durable, to a format that connotes value, perhaps even status. At the midpoint of the second decade of the eighteenth century, the index is primed to offer the same sheen to other genres, to epic poetry, to drama, to the emerging form of the novel. And yet, we know how this story ends. In the twenty-first century novels do not have indexes. Nor do plays. Poetry books are indexed by first line, not by subject. Why, then, was the index to fiction a short-lived phenomenon? Why did it not take? To shed some light on this question, let us turn briefly to two literary figures from the late nineteenth century, both still indexing novels long after the embers had died down on that particular experiment. What can these latecomers tell us about the problems of indexing when it comes to works of the imagination?

Duncan, Dennis. Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age (pp. 173-177). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. 

Reading about The Spectator makes me wish I was sitting in a library compiling information from old magazines. Of course, this is partially what Duncan has done by writing his book. By the way, The Spectator can be read online at Project Gutenberg.

Another example of how Index, A History of inspires my bookish ways is when Duncan wrote about Sherlock Holmes, and how Holmes built a massive index to help him be a detective. Did Doyle/Holmes know about the zettlekasten method? Just reading this bit of Sherlock Holmes history makes me want to do an annotation of a Sherlock Holmes story to find all the hidden clues — not to solve the crime, but to see how Arthur Conan Doyle created his characters and stories. I don’t remember ever getting excited about Holmes keeping an index when I read some of the Sherlock Holmes short stories. I need to go reread them.

Some people define themselves by exotic travel, others by the gourmet meals they consume, but I find purpose in connecting words in books to words in other books. Just note the interesting details quoted from the story and what Duncan made of them.

‘Kindly look her up in my index, Doctor,’ murmured Holmes, without opening his eyes. For many years he had adopted a system of docketing all paragraphs concerning men and things, so that it was difficult to name a subject or a person on which he could not at once furnish information. In this case I found her biography sandwiched between that of a Hebrew Rabbi and a staff commander who had written a monograph upon the deep sea fishes. 

The year is 1891, the story ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, and the person Holmes is searching for, sandwiched between the rabbi and the amateur marine biologist, is Irene Adler, opera singer, adventuress and lover of the man now standing in Holmes’ drawing room, one Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein and hereditary King of Bohemia. The tale will find Holmes outsmarted and chastened by Adler. ‘Beaten by a woman’s wit,’ as Watson puts it. It begins, however, with Holmes coolly in control, seated in his armchair and not deigning to open his eyes, not even for a grand duke. 

It is probably no surprise that Sherlock Holmes should be an indexer. His schtick, after all, his superpower, is his encyclopedic learning, the world’s arcana: a human Google, or a walking Notes and Queries. But that would be preposterous. Besides, from the very first adventure, A Study in Scarlet, we have been informed that, in Watson’s appraisal, Holmes’ general knowledge is severely limited: ‘Knowledge of literature – nil; Philosophy – nil; Astronomy – nil; Politics – feeble . . .’ So occasionally Conan Doyle offers us a glimpse behind the curtain, a look at the system which allows Holmes his universal recall. Every now and again we see him pruning and tending his index, ‘arranging and indexing some of his recent materials’, or ‘sat moodily at one side of the fire, cross-indexing his records of crime’. It is, naturally, an alphabetical system, with a ‘great index volume’ for each letter of the alphabet. When he wants to check something on, say, vampires, he is, characteristically, too lazy to get up himself: ‘Make a long arm, Watson, and see what V has to say.’ As a line of dialogue, incidentally, isn’t this a minor masterpiece of characterization? The asymmetry of the pair’s relationship is smoothed over with chummy slang: make a long arm. Watson, the gopher, will take the book down from the shelf, but he will not be the one to see what V has to say; Holmes, of course, will do the reading, balancing the book on his knee and gazing ‘slowly and lovingly over the record of old cases, mixed with the accumulated information of a lifetime’: 

‘Voyage of the Gloria Scott’, he read. ‘That was a bad business. I have some recollection that you made a record of it, Watson, though I was unable to congratulate you upon the result. Victor Lynch, the forger. Venomous lizard or gila. Remarkable case, that! Vittoria, the circus belle. Vanderbilt and the Yeggman. Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder.’ 

‘Good old index,’ he purrs. ‘You can’t beat it.’ The index – his index, with its smattering of everything – is the source of his mastery. 

Holmes’ alphabetical volumes represent the index unbound, not confined to a single work but looking outwards, docketing anything that might be noteworthy. It is by no means a new idea; Robert Grosseteste was practising something similar six-and-a-half centuries previously. In the Victorian period, however, it is taken up with a new intensity. Co-ordinated, resource heavy: the universal index is becoming industrialized. Looking closely at Holmes’ index, there is something charmingly, inescapably homespun about it. Victor Lynch, venomous lizard, Vittoria the circus belle: this is a rattlebag of headers: patchy, piecemeal. Like Grosseteste’s Tabula, Holmes’ index brings together the collected readings and experiences of a single, albeit extraordinary, figure – the index as personal history. But Holmes, in his way, represents the last of a kind. Not long after ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ first appeared in the Strand Magazine, Holmes would come to be indexed himself, a recurring entry in the annual Index to Periodicals, which trawled the year’s papers, magazines and journals, keeping a record of every article. The efforts of even a Holmes or a Grosseteste appear paltry alongside a venture of this scale, available to anyone with access to a subscribing library. But how to bring such a thing into existence? That will be a three-pipe problem.

Duncan, Dennis. Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age (pp. 203-205). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. 

JWH

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The Best Books of 2022 I Want to Read Soon

by James Wallace Harris, 12/5/22

I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos about organizing personal information using note-taking apps, computer programs like Notion or Obsidian, writing in fancy notebooks using pens, etc. Tonight I even started writing a Python program to track the books I want to read. Then I said, “fuck it, this is too much trouble.” I decided to come up with the easiest method I could think of to get the job done. Whenever I read a book review in the many best-books-of-2022 articles I find on the web this month, I’m just going to take a screenshot and put it here.

Last year I picked 23 books from 2021 that I wanted to read in 2022. So far, I’ve read 8. This year, I’ve tried to be less ambitious. So far I’ve only picked 8. Of those, I have access to them from these sources:

Scribd:

  • The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
  • Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
  • Goliath by Tochi Onyebuchi
  • What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill
  • The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan

This makes me want to keep my Scribd subscription which I was thinking of giving up.

The Candy House is also available on Libby from my library but with a long waiting list.

The other three I will have to buy from Audible:

  • Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley
  • A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys
  • Weapons of Mass Delusion by Robert Draper

I’ll probably add more to my 2023 TBR list as more best-of-the-year lists are published, but for now, let’s see how I do with these eight.

JWH

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An Overwhelming Amount of History

by James Wallace Harris, 11/21/22

I’m not going to try and review Susan Wise Bauer’s three-volume history of the world. It’s just too much. I’m just going to give you my impression of what they are like and let you decide if you want to read them. I got all three audiobooks on sale at Audible and at least one of the Kindle editions on sale, maybe two. So if you want to try one, wait for a sale. Although, I sort of wish I had gotten the hardback editions too. I find I actually read more if I listen to audiobook editions or read Kindle editions, but the hardbacks would let me just dip back into them from time to time.

Here are their titles. Their subtitles are more accurate than the main titles. Links are to the Kindle edition.

  1. The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome
  2. The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade
  3. The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople

First off, I knew very little of the history that Bauer presents. However, and this is a huge warning, it’s nearly all about wars, conquests, rulers, and reigns. If you like history with a story or interpretation, these books aren’t for you. It’s just the facts mam. And it’s relentless. It took me most of 2022 to get through seventy hours of audiobook listening because I could only handle it in spurts. All three volumes equal the length of some audiobook versions of the King James version of the Bible.

On the other hand, I was very impressed with Bauer’s writing. It’s concise and fascinating. She often refers to period sources, which I liked a lot. And she would reference later art and literature that looks back on history. I was impressed by how much poets and artists from the 18th and 19th centuries knew about history. We just aren’t the classical scholars people used to be.

Here is a sample from The History of the Renaissance World to give you an idea of Bauer’s prose and focus.

If you’ve ever been curious about all those Kings of England and France, then these books are for you. Another reason why I like Bauer’s history books is she covers more than the Western world. She jumps to the East and the New World too. Here are two timelines for a sample of how she jumps around. If you note the years, you’ll see that she almost goes year by year. These cover just a few chapters in the Renaissance book.

And each mention on the timelines mostly leads to a short game-of-thrones-like conflict. Human history is amazingly like HBO’s Game of Thrones. However, the TV show is much less violent and evil compared to history. And that’s the main takeaway I got from reading these three volumes of history. Most of humanity throughout history has suffered from the ambitions of a few. The people of history that have led us have nearly always led us into suffering. There are no “Great” leaders in history even if they have been bestowed that title.

I know there is a movement among conservatives to fight what’s called Critical Race Theory being taught in schools. Conservatives don’t want their children to feel bad about themselves. Well, they shouldn’t read any history then. Anyone who idolizes any leader from the past, or glorifies any era is deluding themselves. Anyone who gets easily depressed should not read these books or any history books that cover history honestly.

That’s another lesson from reading these books. We glamorize history. If you compare the movies made about the Crusades or the Middle Ages to what really happen, you realize we’re lying to ourselves. Knights and crusaders were not nice people and were definitely not chivalrous. Heroes are not what we think. Joseph Campbell was full of bullshit when he described the mythology by the hero. So was Tolkien. If you feel romantic about any story dealing with aristocracy then you are fooling yourself.

We have whitewashed history so thoroughly that many people long for the past. The whole heroic fantasy industry is just childish make-believe. Even dark violent fantasies like Game of Thrones are clean and nice in comparison to history. If Hollywood made films based on Bauer’s history books and filmed things as they happened I doubt few people could psychologically handle them.

I can’t say I recommend Bauer’s History of the World series. I’m glad I read them. I might even read them again. Many have recommended we study history so we won’t repeat it. After reading these books I’m now confident we can’t break out of the loop.

When I was a kid I wanted to know the truth. Obviously, we can’t handle the truth. I keep trying. Studying history is like pistol-whipping myself to handle a little more truth. I face reality in tiny bits and then run back to escapist hiding, but I always poke my head out once in a while for a little bit more of reality.

Now that I’ve read these books I’m going to go hide for a while.

JWH

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“Why Are All Your Friends Women?”

by James Wallace Harris, 11/17/22

While my sister was visiting last week we socialized with five of my friends. At one point, Becky asked, “Why are all your friends women?” I answered defensively, “I have male friends too,” but actually not that many. Well, two, if you don’t count several guys I interact with on the internet.

I’m writing this essay because this morning I was reading Flipboard and saw another article about how modern men don’t have friends. That made me think about Becky’s question and wondered if I had more female friends than male friends because guys don’t make many friends with other guys. I thought of bull elephants and male orangutans that spend most of their time alone in the jungle. Is it just natural for males to lead lonely lives?

One reason I don’t see more guys I know is that I don’t like leaving home, and neither do my male friends. My longest-running friendship is with a guy named Connell. We met in March of 1967 when we were in the 10th grade at Coral Gables High School in Miami Florida. We struck up a conversation over science fiction and astronomy. I moved away from Miami in 1970 but have remained friends with Connell ever since. But we’ve both stopped traveling and haven’t seen each other in more than twenty years. However, we do talk on the phone a couple times a week.

I met my other close male friend, Mike, in 1980 at work. He lives in Memphis. Susan and I are friends with Mike and his wife Betsy ever since then. We used to socialize more with them, and even travel together, but both Mike and I have become homebodies, especially after Covid, but also because we’re getting old and our health is in decline. Only my wife Susan still likes to go out or travel. I’m quite impressed with her for that.

I had many more male friends, but they have died, moved away, or I just lost contact with them.

Somehow I’ve been lucky to make several female friends which I’ve known for over twenty years. I see and talk to them all fairly regularly. Counting Susan my wife, and Becky my sister, I think the number of my women friends is eleven. Becky got to meet five of them, not counting Susan. I guess that’s why she asked her question.

Several of my women friends I met through Susan. Susan was and is much more social than I am. She has run around with several social groups over the course of our marriage. For a decade Susan took a job out of town and only came home for the weekends, and sometimes not even that. This forced me into socializing again. I started going to the movies with some of her friends or having them over to watch TV, and they became my friends. Two of my women friends were ones I made at work before I retired. And two were ones I made on my own. Our shared friendships were mainly based on movies, TV shows, books, and liberal politics.

If Susan had never worked out of town, I don’t know if I would have made all those women friends. I guess loneliness is the mother of socializing. I do wonder now that I’m in my seventies and want to socialize even less if my women friends will still want to stay friends. When Covid hit we all stopped going to the movies and eating out, and that put a big dent in what socializing I had left in me. By then Susan was back home and we hunkered down keeping each other company for those social distancing years.

If I had never gotten married I would probably be an old guy like those in all the articles. I think some of my women friends were friends with me because they considered me safe because I was married and unthreatening. I think women also like me because I’m willing to listen, and I have a high tolerance for lady chatter. I know that comment will irk some, but I’ve known a lot of guys who told me they broke up with women because they talked too much.

I would like more male friends. Actually, I would like more friends of any kind who share my interests, but that tends to be old guys. Before I retired I thought I had several male friends at work that I would stay in touch with after retiring. But it didn’t work out that way. Some of those guys were just too busy with their families, or they lived too far away in the suburbs. And a couple of them I just stopped seeing when politics got too polarized. Guys love their hobbies, and unless you’re friends share your hobbies, we seldom make the effort to meet up. Many men are just not that social.

When I was young I joined clubs, like the astronomy club, science fiction club, or computer club, and I made casual friends. But I’m just not a hobby club kind of guy and dropped out of all of them. I might have stayed in them if the internet hadn’t happened. The internet is probably the biggest reason why so many guys don’t have friends today.

And when men are social, the driving force behind it is to get laid. Once I got married I began losing interest in going out, especially to parties. And I have to admit that I made friends with so many women because I was also attracted to them. Nothing happened in that regard, but I believe I enjoy the company of women because I’m programmed to chase after women and to consider them pleasant company. I’ve wondered if I would keep up female friendships if that programming had been turned off.

Unless we have a shared interest I’m not sure guys have a reason to get together. I’m not sure we crave each other’s company. We like to compete with each other, and we like to work together on a project, build something, be on a team, work towards a goal, or fix something together. Women seem to have the ability to just be friends without a purpose. To just hang out. All those lonely guys in the articles seem to be both unlucky in love and without a purpose.

I do have shared interests with all my female friends, but it’s at a smaller percentage than I have with Mike and Connell. Actually, many of my interests and all my hobbies bore my women friends. I wish my female friends had more male-like qualities. Probably all of them would call me sexist if I said why. But then I’m often called sexist by my women friends because I like to make generalizations about males and females.

I do wonder about all the men in these articles who can’t make any friends. Maybe they never leave their apartment. You have to leave the house to make friends. That’s probably why I haven’t made any new friends in the last decade. And I have to wonder why men don’t make more female friends. Guys who are married probably are like me and gave up socializing after getting married. But unmarried guys should be out there socializing – especially if they are under fifty and still want to find a wife. However, I’ve known a lot of guys who told me they don’t like being friends with women, and once they gave up on getting married or getting laid, just gave up on women.

The internet has allowed me to make a lot of online male friends. But that’s because I get to meet people who are interested in my exact interests without leaving home. For example, I like science fiction magazines that were published from 1939-1975. I and two online friends, one from Great Britain and the other from South Africa, created a Facebook group devoted to science fiction short stories and it now has 642 members. Many of them love the same old science fiction magazines that I do. I used to have two friends that loved those magazines that lived in town. One died, and the other moved away. Sometimes it’s hard to find friends with the same exact interest.

JWH

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Is It Worth the Effort to Create a Database to Store Memories I’ll Forget?

by James Wallace Harris, 11/16/22

This weekend, while my sister was here visiting from Florida, we watched The Automat. It’s a lovely nostalgic documentary about the Horn & Hardart Automat restaurants that were in Philadelphia and New York City from 1902 to 1991. What made the story so charming is it combined history with sociology, pop culture, and interviews with famous people who related fond memories of visiting the Automats. The Automat portrayed a unique subculture.

I told my sister this documentary reminded me of another I liked very much but I couldn’t remember its name or even its subject. That was rather frustrating. After she went to the airport yesterday, I began struggling to remember that documentary. I got on Google and tried search terms such as “nostalgic documentaries” and “quirky documentaries.” I went through many lists, discovering documentaries I had seen, liked, and forgotten, but didn’t find the one I wanted. I had a vague sense it involved a household fixture. During the hours of trying to dredge up what the documentary was about, I recalled it dealt with music, but not normal music, maybe it was about jingles in ads. Then the word “Broadway” popped into my mind.

I put the word Broadway in IMDB and came up with Bathtubs Over Broadway. It was on Netflix and I went and watched some of it again. It’s about a writer, Steve Young, who wrote for The Late Show with David Letterman. Part of his job was finding oddball records for Letterman to make fun of on the show. Young discovered that during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s corporations would spend huge sums of money putting on musicals at their conventions, and they made commemorative soundtrack albums to give to their salesmen. Sometimes these corporations spent more on producing these shows than some famous musicals on Broadway. Again, this documentary combined history, sociology, pop culture, and interviews to document a unique subculture.

Now, this essay isn’t about those shows, but about remembering those shows, or remembering anything. I often struggle to recall a name of a person, book, movie, album, TV show, event, etc. I’ve done this all my life, but it seems to be getting worse now that I’m older. And, as they say, necessity is the mother of invention, I’ve been wondering if there is a technique or system I could develop to help me remember.

My first thought was to keep lists. My second thought was to make flashcards. My third thought was it had to work with my phone. The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) has a feature that allows registered users to keep lists, so I started one for documentaries I’ve watched. Weeks ago, I also started a list in Notes on my iPhone for movies and TV shows I’ve seen, but I might move it to IMDB.

One reason I feel the pressure to remember books, TV shows, movies, and documentaries is that whenever I talk with my friends, one of the main topics is what we’ve been reading or watching. And during my weekly get-togethers or phone calls, I often forget what I’ve seen or read during the past week.

However, is all this list-making worth the effort? I’ve tried it before and failed. It takes a bit of time, a little effort, and discipline. I have faithfully maintained a books-read list since 1983 and that has paid off in many ways. I’ve often wished I had started that list with Treasure Island, a book my mother read to me in 3rd grade in 1959. So a log of all the TV shows and movies I’ve watched would have been just as handy.

But how practical is it to keep lists of everything we want to remember? What about a list of everyone I’ve ever known? Or a list of everywhere I’ve ever lived, including vacation spots? They wouldn’t be impractical long lists.

Most of my memory struggles could be solved with five to ten good lists.

Have I just come up with a new idea for a social media service or an extra feature for Facebook? When do kids get their first smartphone or tablet? How young can you start entering data into your memory database?

It’s amazing that we have memories at all. I have no idea how molecules in the brain record what we experience. It’s amazing but unreliable. What if we had a reliable external memory? How would that change us and society?

What if we had photos and video clips of everyone we’ve ever met? Or at least got to know? You know those videos of people whose fathers took one picture a day or year for decades to make a speeded-up version of their growth? What if we all did that with our family and friends over our lifetime?

What would this take to make this happen? We have some of the technology right now. It would just take discipline and maybe ten or fifteen minutes a day. I started with my reading log in 1983. Several years ago I began using Goodreads. Now I’m using IMDB. None of these methods is perfect. What’s needed is software designed specifically to be external memory, with features that helped with recording and retrieval.

All of this makes me wonder just how much we want to remember? It might not be that much. Theoretically, we could record everything we see and hear to video, but I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t want that much. It would be nice to just have a few minutes of video of our peak experiences. Isn’t what we really want a finite number of concrete facts? A handful of lists, a diary, and a collection of photos and videos might do the trick.

So, how much of our life could be remembered in one terabyte?

JWH

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Dang, I Broke My TV Watcher

by James Wallace Harris, 11/5/22

I seem to be losing my ability to watch television. In the past year or two, when I try to watch TV by myself, I have the hardest time getting into a TV show or movie. If I’m watching television with Susan or a friend I have no trouble settling into the show, but if I’m alone, I often abandon a show after five or ten minutes. Because I’m a lifelong TV addict used to filling my evenings with the boob tube, this is disturbing.

I’ve got sixty-seven years of solid practice watching TV, so why am I losing this skill now? Some of my earliest memories are of watching TV when I was four. I started watching television with the 1955-1956 season, but sometime in 2021, I began noticing I had a problem, maybe even earlier, but it’s painfully obvious in 2022.

The TV watcher part of my brain has broken. And it’s not for trying. Every evening I try getting into several movies and TV shows. Every once in a while, I find one that my mind will latch onto, but it’s getting rarer. So I’m developing some theories about why my brain is broken.

The Gilligan Island Effect

I loved Gilligan’s Island back in 1964 when it first aired. But as I got older I could no longer watch it. My friend Connell and I use Gilligan Island as our example of being young and stupid. Whenever I catch it on TV now I cringe and wonder how could I ever been so easily amused. That feeling is also true for The Monkees. It embarrasses me to recall those were once among my favorite shows. Now I understand why my dad used to pitch a fit when they were on, telling me and my sister we were morons.

As we age we become more sophisticated in our pop culture consumption. I assumed that development stopped when I got into my twenties because I pretty much watched the same kind of shows for the next several decades. However, with The Sopranos, TV jumped a level in sophistication, and for most of the 21st century, I’ve been consuming ever more sophisticated TV content.

What if my TV-watching mind has gotten jaded with all TV? So everything now feels stupid like Gilligan’s Island did when I got a couple years past twelve?

The TV Buddy Effect

As I said, I can watch all kinds of TV shows and movies if I’m watching them with other people. And looking back over my life I realized I watched a lot of TV with other people. With my family growing up. With friends when I was single. With Susan for most of my married life. With my friend Janis when Susan was working out of town Mondays through Fridays.

When Susan retired and Janis moved to Mexico, things changed. Susan now wants to watch her favorite TV shows from the 20th century and I don’t. So she sits in the living room with her TV and cross-stitches while watching endless reruns of her favorite shows. She likes old shows because she doesn’t have to look at them while she sews. I sit in the den and try to find something to watch on my own. Over the last few years, I’ve had less and less luck until I’m starting to wonder if I can’t watch TV alone at all anymore.

Susan and I do watch some TV together. Around 5:30 we watch Jeopardy and the NBC Nightly News that we record. It’s a family habit and the cats sleep in our laps. On Wednesdays we watch Survivor.

This year I was able to binge-watch Game of Thrones. I had watched it as it came out, and when two of my friends living in other cities each expressed a desire to rewatch the entire series I joined them. I discussed each episode with Linda and Connell in separate phone calls.

The YouTube Effect

Let me clarify something. I can watch about an hour of YouTube a day, and I can channel surf trying to find something to watch for another hour. (By the way, that drives Susan crazy. Another reason she likes watching TV by herself.)

My dwindling ability to watch TV has coincided with my growing love of watching YouTube TV. I have to wonder if watching endless short videos and constantly clicking from one subject to another has broken the TV watcher in my brain, so I can’t stick with longer shows.

The Relevance Effect

Last week I binge-watched A Dance to the Music of Time, a four-part miniseries based on the twelve-novel series by Anthony Powell. I had seen it before, but because I was now reading the books I wanted to watch it again. That seems to suggest if I have a good reason to watch television that I have no problem sticking to a show. My mind isn’t completely defective. I’m now on the fourth book in the series, and I’ve bought a biography of Powell and a character concordance to supplement my reading. The series has over 300 characters.

Knowing the Magician’s Tricks Effect

Another theory I’ve developed deals with my studies in fiction. As I read and think about how fiction works, I’ve paid more attention to how movies and television shows are constructed too. I’ve noticed that I often quit a movie or TV show when I spot the puppeteer. I can hardly stand to watch a mystery or thriller nowadays because they seem so obviously manipulated.

Male Aging Effect

I remember now how my uncles as they got older stopped watching TV except for sports, and even then, still not often. My male friends stopped going to the movies years ago, and I’ve finally stopped myself. I’m now doing what Susan and I used to laugh about her father – going to sleep in his den chair after dinner. Since we bought Susan’s parent’s house when they died, I’m going to sleep in the very same den, around the very same time – 7:30.

Conclusion

Because I sometimes find shows that hook me, I figure my TV watcher isn’t completely broken. I do worry that it will conk out completely. Right now I spend my evenings listening to books or music, and I worry that those abilities might break if I overuse them. I’m thinking my TV watcher needs new kinds of TV content to watch, but I have no idea what that would be.

With so many premium channels cranking out so many kinds of quality shows for the last two decades, I worry that they’ve done everything to death. One reason my mind responded so well to YouTube is the content is very different from regular streaming TV content. But I feel like I’m about to reach the end of YouTube too. I’m starting to think TV shows and movies are like clickbait, that once you’re used to all the variety of bait, you become jaded and stop clicking.

JWH

p.s. I’m using DALL-E 2 to generate the art for my blog.

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Can Fiction Educate As Well As Nonfiction?

by James Wallace Harris, 11/2/22

I turn 71 this month, and getting older is getting harder. Being old is nothing like I imagined. That’s a problem for me because I like to be prepared, and being prepared requires anticipating the possibilities.

Last year I read The Art of Dying Well: A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life by Katy Butler. It’s a useful handbook giving tips about healthcare for the elderly, plus Butler relates plenty of stories about people she met who were going through a variety of issues as they approached death. I learned a lot from her book. People tend to decide between two paths toward the end of life. Some want to take advantage of everything medicine has to offer, and others prefer to take a gentler path, choosing less aggressive medical procedures, or even refusing treatment. One of the best lessons of the book is doctors will go to extremes to keep you alive unless you learn to say no. And for me, the important part of The Art of Dying Well is learning when to say no, and how to decide what you want before you lose control of your situation.

When I read Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout this week, I was surprised by how it inadvertently taught many of the same lessons. Although it’s called a novel, it’s a collection of thirteen interrelated short stories, and often those fictional stories were like the case studies in Butler’s book. Olive is in her late sixties at the beginning of the book, and seventy-four at the end. I was particularly horrified by the final accounts of Olive’s husband, Henry.

Olive Kitteridge is a book that offers a series of intense emotional impacts. And most of them made me think about how I will deal with a particular issue if it should happen to me. Henry’s fate is the hardest to contemplate. One day he and Olive are going to the grocery store and when he steps out of the car, he falls to the ground. He’s had a sudden stroke that leaves him blind, unable to walk or talk, and probably has left him deaf. He’s put in a nursing home where he needs to be cared for like a small child. To me, that’s scarier than anything Stephen King ever imagined. And how do you prepare for something like that?

It would help to have all the proper legal paperwork ready. And it would help if others knew your wants. That’s covered in the Butler book, but it’s covered in more detail in Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life by Louise Aronson. Aronson is a doctor who eventually got into geriatric medicine. Her book is heavier than The Art of Dying Well, with more clinical details. It has a tremendous wealth of information, but I found Aronson’s structure for her book somewhat disappointing. Elderhood has a clearly laid out structure but Aronson doesn’t always stick to it.

Both nonfiction books are excellent handbooks for anticipating getting older, especially for the medical and legal details. But the novel, Olive Kitteridge, was also excellent for the same purpose, but in a different way. I guess it’s a handbook for philosophically preparing for our last years. Some of its most important lessons were about communication, or more precisely, the lack of communication.

Much of the novel is about waiting until it’s too late to express our true selves. One of the strongest reasons why people want an afterlife is so they can meet up with dead loved ones. Is that because we really want to tell them something? Or that we really want to ask them something? I know that’s true for me.

I loved reading Olive Kitteridge enough that I’m going to read more Elizabeth Strout books and have already started on Olive, Again – a sequel with additional short stories about Olive Kitteridge and the people she knew. I’m also keeping The Art of Dying Well and Elderhood to reread again and again as I get older.

JWH

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To Doze, and To Dream

by James Wallace Harris, 10/28/22

“To sleep—perchance to dream” is what Shakespeare had Hamlet say, which suggests dreaming was an iffy affair back then. That used to be for me too, but lately, I’ve been dreaming my ass off. I’m afraid I’m not as eloquent as the bard but it conveys how close I am to that cauldron of the unconscious.

It is also true, I sleep more, but I sleep in patches. My overactive bladder never lets me stray too deeply into the dream world, so I believe my need for REM sleep has adapted. I now reach the dream world much faster than when I could sleep the night away.

All this dreaming lets me consciously observe my unconscious mind closer than I have ever done before. Dreams percolate up even during a bit of drowsy dropping off. They are so close it’s like watching ripples on a pond.

What disturbs me is at night, when I get my best sleep, and my bladder kindly lets me leave this world for as long as one or two hours, then when the need to pee does bring me awake, I’m able to recall dreams with plots. Normally, surface dreams are just the bubbling up of chaotic ideas and images. Often bizarre and unconnected, these dreams are what I expect dreams to be. But in deeper sleep, there seems to be another mind at work, an author of dreams. And that often provokes a Weird Tales kind of vibe. Who is the composer of my unconscious? Or is a bit of my conscious mind deep diving into my unconsciousness? Maybe the two states are starting to blend?

Lately, some of my dreams make me think this author dwelling in my deep mind wants to be a science fiction writer. When I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once the other day, I felt that screenwriter was kin to my dreamworld writer. The unconsciousness connects to the multiverse.

I’ve always assumed when I die I’ll reach a state of absolute nothingness. Now, I worry I might be thrown into the chaos of endless dreams. My scientific thinking conscious mind doubts that, but as the conscious world becomes more chaotic itself, it’s easier to wonder about such possibilities.

I used to think humans were mainly rational beings. Recent years have taught me differently. I still believe we dwell in an objective reality that we subjectively observe. But I now doubt how well our conscious minds can map that external reality. I assume the unconscious mind is like an iceberg, with nine-tenths of it existing below the surface of awareness. I had hoped as we evolve as a species, and evolved as individuals, more of that tip would rise above the deep.

My frequent encounter with dream snippets suggests I’m seeing into my own subroutines. That makes it easier to understand why so many people around me talk about the world so weirdly.

This makes me recall a very strange book I once read: The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. Jaynes offered a rather logically thought-out woo-woo theory that humans didn’t always think with a singular integrated mind. I now wonder if our sharply polarized political world isn’t due to the population being divided by different states of mind. Jaynes assumed we left the bicameral mind stage thousands of years ago. Maybe we didn’t. Maybe I should reread his book. Maybe it will read less woo-woo today?

The logic of the dream world seems much different than the logic of the wide awake world. But I’m not sure everyone knows the demarcation between the two.

JWH

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Audiophile Music: What I Can Hear and What I Can’t

by James Wallace Harris, 10/18/22

For the past couple of years, I’ve been following several YouTubers that review audiophile equipment. Audiophiles are a subculture of music fans who are fanatical about playback equipment: amplifiers, speakers, DACs, CD players and transports, turntables, headphones, streamers, etc. Most music lovers just get a system from Bose, Sony, Apple, Sonos, Yamaha, Devon, etc., and are happy enough.

Audiophiles are obsessed with every aspect of sound reproduction and are on a never-ending quest to find better equipment. Low-level would-be audiophiles like me spend four figures on a setup, while the hardcore aficionados spend five figures, and the rich dudes and they are always dudes, spend six figures on their equipment. The $64,000 question: Can they hear what they claim?

I love listening to music. One of my big regrets at this time in life is I don’t have any friends who want to come over and listen to music with me anymore. For most people, music is something they put on in the background. When I listen to music, I give it all my attention like watching a movie or reading a book.

When I was young, I and my friends would sit around and listen to albums. Back then I had friends who were like me and spend much of their income on buying records. But those were the years before I got married. And even in my early married life, Susan would go record shopping with me, and we’d listen to albums together. We also went to a lot of concerts. But at some point, Susan, and most of my friends lost interest in buying new records. Susan still loves going to concerts but if I ask her if she wants to listen to some albums from the bands she’s going to go hear with her friends she always says no. She only likes live music. And I gave up on live music years ago.

I consider albums are works of art that should be studied and admired. Audiophiles like to think they can buy equipment that will allow them to hear the music at a deeper level and I bought into that belief.

Listening involves two main factors. One is the limiting factor of our ears. What frequencies can they handle? As we get older, this degrades. The other factor is how much can we discern in what we hear. And that can be a lot. Have you ever considered how many details an artist who paints realistic scenes can see? Looking over my monitor out a picture window, I see mostly trees, but if I examine them closely, there is an infinity of details to be discerned. The same is true of listening to music.

Audiophiles make astounding claims, some of which are questionable. Back in the 1970s, I had a friend, Williamson who love the music of Duane Allman. He claimed when he listened to At Filmore East, a live album, he could hear when Duane adjusted the knobs on his guitar or amplifiers or changed a setting with a foot peddle. Is that even possible? Was Williamson just bragging, or lying? Or is such close study and listening possible?

Audiophiles often talk about listening to the decay of individual notes created by different instruments. They have a whole lexicon used for describing sound qualities. Many audiophiles claim they can tell the difference between records mastered with all analog sources and those that have digital recordings somewhere in the reproduction path. (Those people were recently embarrassed when they learned a company that claimed to sell expensive editions from all analog sources had been lying to them.)

After spending over a year researching reviews I bought a new stereo system that cost twice as much as my previous system. I knew I wouldn’t hear twice as much, but I hoped for a noticeable increase in sound quality. All the reviewers claimed the components I bought were superior to the ones I had. My new system sounds great, but so does my old one. They each sound different. But I don’t know if I can say one is better than the other.

Maybe these systems have gone beyond the level of my hearing ability and my ability to make finer discernments. I’m already losing interest in watching my audiophile reviewers, and they were my favorite thing to watch on TV for the past year. Many of those reviewers claim buying an $800 DAC would let me jump to the next level, but I wonder. And by the way, there’s a level of DACs beyond that in the $3,000-5,000 range they rave about, and more after that which run $10,000 and up. And those audiophiles swear they can hear so much more!

Can they? Could I?

I’ve already shifted my YouTube watching away from equipment reviews to album reviews. The LP came out in the late 1940s as record manufacturers shifted away from producing 78s. I’ve heard only a tiny fraction of albums that were produced since then. There are thousands of great albums to be discovered, so that’s what I’m working on now.

I’m beginning to realize how I’m different from most people. I spend most of my time focused on works of art: books, music, movies, TV shows, paintings, computers, etc. Most people like doing real things, eating, going out, socializing, exercising, being in nature, and interacting in the real world. I like the artificial world of art and abstraction. I guess that’s because I’m an introvert.

So every day I listen to a couple albums from over the last seventy years. I sit by myself and listen with all the discernment I can muster. I listen to people in the past express their creativity. I’m never sure if I hear everything they intended.

JWH

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What If Mrs. Saunders Had Read Us To Kill a Mockingbird Instead of A Wrinkle in Time?

by James Wallace Harris, 10/10/22

In 1962, when I was in the 6th grade, my teacher Mrs. Saunders would read to the class after lunch. The book I remember from that year is A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. I found it so exciting that I went to the school library and checked out a copy so I could read it faster than 30 minutes a day. At the time, I didn’t know the novel was science fiction, or that the story belong in a category of fiction. But looking back, I see Mrs. Saunders had put me on the road to becoming a science fiction fan.

Yesterday, I wondered if Mrs. Saunders’s influence on my life would have been different if she had read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee instead? Would I have become a different kind of bookworm? Instead of being fascinated with space and time travel, would I have become interested in social justice and equality? I did come to care about those issues later on in the 1960s as the decade progressed, but could I have been made aware of them sooner by reading the right book?

Even though I mostly read science fiction, I do read some serious literature. I was an English major in college. I know when they come out, The Best American Short Stories 2022 will have far deeper, more mature, better-written stories than The Year’s Best Science Fiction Vol. 3: The Saga Anthology of Science Fiction 2022. Yet, the odds are I’ll probably buy and read the science fiction anthology.

In eighth grade, my English teacher required us to read three books each six-week grading period and raised our earned grade by one letter if we read five. She had an approved reading list. That’s how I discovered Heinlein. She gave me the chance to read science fiction and non-fiction, and I took it. What if I had read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank instead? Would I have matured sooner? Would I have been more conscious of the real world?

What if in 1965 I read The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński instead of Stranger in a Strange Land? Would I have become a different person? Or, did I read what I read because I was an immature kid that could only handle the immaturity of science fiction? I tend to think it’s the latter because I know serious literature is far superior to science fiction now and I still seldom choose to read it.

I believe I read science fiction then and now to escape from the real world. I read nonfiction as a kid and as an adult to learn about the world. However, I do wonder how I would have been different if I had gotten addicted to serious literature as a kid.

If I had a time machine and could go back to talk to my younger self I would tell him to read To Kill a Mockingbird. I’d say, “Kid, stop daydreaming about going to the Moon and Mars. Other people will do it, but not you. And if you could, you wouldn’t like it. Our personality isn’t suited for space travel. Spend more time with people and less time with books, and when you read a book, make sure it helps to know more about people.”

I’m pretty sure my younger self wouldn’t listen. People don’t take advice. Not even from our future selves.

For all I know, Mrs. Saunders may have read To Kill a Mockingbird to us and I just ignored it. She read us several books that year, and A Wrinkle in Time is the only one I remember.

JWH

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Fiction v. History

by James Wallace Harris, 9/25/22

Ken Burns’s new documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, punched me in the soul. No documentary has ever moved me as much, and I’ve seen a lot of them. And it’s not because it’s about the Holocaust. I’ve even read about most of the painful facts it presents before. No, the gestalt of this film, which is well over six hours, is to set off an epiphany about our relationship with history.

At the highest level, the documentary asks: What did Americans know about the treatment of the Jews under the Nazis from 1932 to 1945 and when and how did they learn it? But to answer that question Ken Burns and company have to describe what Americans were like during those years. The U.S. and the Holocaust give a different history of America for those years from any I’ve ever encountered from people, in school, reading, at the movies, or on television.

Maybe the best way I can describe it is to say: Everything that has horrified me about living through the years 2016 to 2022 existed in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. The documentary cements a theory that I’ve been developing in recent decades – that people don’t change and even the percentages of the population that hold specific opinions don’t really change either.

The documentary set off this existential conundrum: Why didn’t I already know what the documentary revealed? Or did I just filter it out? Republicans are in an uproar over Critical Race Theory and other curricula that they’re afraid will upset their children. I imagine they will be just as upset at The U.S. and the Holocaust. I knew about the wide popularity of the KKK and eugenics in the 1920s. I knew Americans were mostly isolationists and anti-immigration in the late 1930s. But the documentary gives us a different take on history than what I was taught.

I have to wonder since FDR was president from 1932-1935, have we always gotten the Democratic party’s view of that history? I wonder if Ken Burns has rounded out the historical period by adding the Republican party’s take on those years? I do know the documentary feels very synergistic with today’s politics.

I love old movies from the 1930s and 1940s, and none of the hundreds of movies I’ve seen from that era convey what I learned from The U.S. and the Holocaust. My grandparents, parents, aunts, and uncles, all lived through those years, and none of them ever described the mood of the country revealed in the documentary. I’m a bookworm that has read countless works of both fiction and nonfiction about America in those decades, giving me some of the details from in the documentary, but not in the same gestalt. Two books that come to mind are One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson and In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson.

After I watched the Ken Burns documentary I read The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. It’s a kind of science fiction novel, an alternative history where Charles Lindbergh wins the 1938 presidential election and for many of the reasons described in the documentary. Roth was born in 1933, and he makes himself the point-of-view character in his novel. Young Phil is only 8 when it begins and 10 when it ends, but his viewpoint is mature. It’s about the anti-Semitism of those years.

I thought The Plot Against America was a well-told story about Jewish life in Newark, New Jersey 1938-1942. I thought Roth’s alternate history speculation was well done, deriving from the kind of knowledge I got watching The U.S. and the Holocaust. But the story is mainly a personal one, and its gestalt is different from the documentary.

Last night Susan and I watched Radio Days for the umpteenth time. It’s Woody Allen’s nostalgic look back at those same years. It completely ignores all the political history of The U.S. and the Holocaust. Radio Days is like both movies from that period and later films that worked to recall that era. They all filter out the nastiness of racism and xenophobia that existed in America back then. Although some of it came through in the film The Way We Were, and the book version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

And just before I watched the three episodes of The U.S. and the Holocaust I read Revolt in 2100 which contains a 1940 short novel by Robert A. Heinlein called “If This Goes On….” Heinlein imagined America would go through decades of The Crazy Years, before undergoing a second American revolution that created an American theocracy. I was disappointed that Heinlein didn’t do more world-building for his novel, but after seeing the Ken Burns documentary I understand his inspiration for writing it. It’s obvious that many Americans back then wanted a Protestant theocracy. Consisting of only white people from England, Germany, and some Scandanavian countries.

I think it’s important to distinguish fascism as a political philosophy from the Nazis, who were also fascists. What many Americans wanted then and now is basic fascism, and the Philip Roth novel shows how America could have turned fascist.

The other day I saw a quote on Facebook that went something like this: If you get warm and fuzzy feelings reading history then you’re not studying history. I’m on the third volume of world history by Susan Wise Bauer, and it’s brutal. Most people want to romanticize history, which is what we get from novels and movies. The Republicans don’t want CRT taught because they want their kids to feel all warm and fuzzy studying American History. The new Ken Burns documentary will not leave you feeling warm and fuzzy.

My current theory is humans can’t handle reality. That we develop all kinds of psychological delusions to filter reality out. We prefer our fantasies. And popular history along with pop culture gives us nice takes on the past that allows us to cope. It’s also why most people’s theory of how reality works is no more complex than a comic book. It’s why we’ve always clung to religion. It’s why I have a life-long love of science fiction.

We just can’t handle complexity. There are plenty of real history books that document the reality of the times they cover, but they aren’t widely read. Maybe the Republicans are right, and history is too brutal for children. But maybe we keep repeating history because we’re all too wimpy to handle history.

I’m getting so I can’t stomach the historical lies of Hollywood, but I don’t know if I can handle all that much real history either. I used to think that maybe four percent of the population was mentally ill. In recent years, I’ve upped that to forty percent. But lately, I’m thinking there’s an entry for all of us in the DSM-5.

JWH

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What I’m Learning From Thinning Out My Books

by James Wallace Harris, 9/22/22

I want a new stereo system for my bedroom. A higher fidelity one than what I described in “To Go, or Not to Go — To the Bookstore?” That was written back in July, well before I had my hernia surgery on August 29th. I used researching stereo equipment to avoid thinking about surgery before my operation and to ignore my physical discomforts afterward. I have a long history of using unpleasant experiences as justifications for buying myself new toys.

Two things have stopped me from ordering my new stereo equipment. First, my release instructions warned me not to pick up anything over five pounds while I recovered. Second, I have no room to set up new equipment. Making room will involve getting rid of stuff and rearranging furniture, all weighing over five pounds. So while lying around with pillows on my lap to protect my swollen private parts from cats, I’ve been mentally analyzing the best way to free up the most wall space while requiring the least weight lifting.

After much grinding of my mental gears, I’ve concluded the easiest solution is to get rid of two bookcases worth of books. My bedroom has four bookcases of books. For twenty years before I quit working I stashed away books for my retirement years. Well, I squirreled away too many. Way too many. And in the decade since I’ve had all my time free, I’ve learned that most of the approximately 500 books I’ve read over the last ten years were bought after I retired.

I’ve been trying to thin out my collection for decades. But whenever I try to pull volumes to give to the Friends of the Library I start reading and think, “Oh man, I’ll read this someday. This one is too good to give up.” I just can’t follow Marie Kondo’s advice because every book I hold sparks joy.

It’s either give up books or forget about that new stereo. Ouch! I’ve spent four hours this morning going through half a bookcase. With much agonizing, I’ve found 23 books to discard. That’s about one shelf of books. I need to clear off eleven more shelves.

This is so painful. But what doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger – right? What I’m learning is each book is a little world of knowledge that I wanted to incorporate into my soul. And to decide not to read a book means deciding that’s an area of knowledge I’ll remain ignorant of.

By the way, did I tell you that all these books are nonfiction? I’m not ready to thin out my science fiction collection. That’s revealing too.

Some of the books I’m discarding I’ve decided would be better on audio anyway. I’m opening each book up and reading from it randomly. I realize that some books, particularly certain kinds of history books, I’d rather listen to than reading. I can get rid of those (unless I’d want to keep them for reference). Examples are Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson and Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 by Taylor Branch.

However, I’ve discovered another type of book I can part with, but the reason why disturbs and depresses me. I’m finding some books I thought I could read when I was younger are probably too difficult for my older mind or would require a level of concentration that I no longer possess. A good example is Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life by Joyce Carol Oates. Her intellectual analyses are ones I’m no longer capable of handling, and maybe never was.

The final type represents an acceptance of resignation. I’m just not going to live long enough to get around to some books. These are the books I feel would be the last in line. I’d love to read Complete Collected Essays by V. S. Pritchett or Harlan Ellison’s Watching because I admire their commentary on pop culture’s past. But I have to decide what’s really worth learning in my fading years of life.

Another funny kind of realization is I’m torn between preserving my precious reading time for what’s relevant to the existential needs of my remaining years and books that offer the purest delightful fun. Two examples of what I’m keeping are Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes and Zappa: A Biography by Barry Miles.

I know without a doubt I could give away all the books in all four bookcases and not really miss them. My eyes now prefer reading ebooks and I have over a thousand of them waiting to be read. I also have over a thousand audiobooks hidden away in the cloud. And I have six bookcases of physical books in my computer room. Yet, I just hate to part with physical books. I’ve thought about putting bookcases in other rooms of the house, but that would be unfair to Susan. She’s already bitching about how many books she’ll have to get rid of if I die before her.

With every book I hold to decide its fate, I mentally go through a gauntlet of emotions and thoughts. I should make a daily meditation of routinely going through my library. With each book, just reading a few paragraphs here and there inspires several ideas for blog essays.

JWH

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Did Henry Mancini Invent Spy Music When He Composed/Conducted The Music From Peter Gunn in 1958?

by James Wallace Harris, 9/20/22

The Music From Peter Gunn was composed and conducted by Henry Mancini and recorded on August 26, 31, and September 4, 29, 1958 for the TV show Peter Gunn that premiered on September 22, 1958. The original soundtrack was released in 1959 and won the very first Grammy award for Album of the Year that year, beating out Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Van Cliburn.

The soundtrack was very popular, eventually earning a Gold Record. And the song, “Peter Gunn” has become iconic, inspiring many covers and interpretations. The album was so successful that RCA came out with More Music From Peter Gunn later that same year.

You can listen to a rearranged compilation of those two albums here while you read on.

But this brings up my second question for this essay: How many songs were recorded in those original sessions for the Peter Gunn TV show? The tunes on the YouTube video sound slightly different from the original album, and the lineup of songs are different too.

I have found these two albums that call themselves complete, but they are different. The first has the original two albums, plus two more albums on two CDs. The full description is here. The second is just the original two soundtracks on one CD.

The first album is described at Discogs as:

This release contains the complete original Henry Mancini albums "The Music From Peter Gunn" and "More Music From Peter Gunn", scores for the Blake Edwards' "Peter Gunn" TV series. Also included two further complete LPs presenting alternative versions of this music by Pete Candoli and Ted Nash, plus a single tune omitted from the companion volume "Shelly Manne & His Men Play Peter Gunn"

The second two albums are a mystery to me, even though I once owned the Nash LP. I now wish I hadn’t given it away. If anyone knows why the Ted Nash and Pete Candoli albums are considered part of the complete Peter Gunn, let me know below. Were they connected with the show? Were these songs alternated arrangements for the show?

I’ve heard a lot of reissues and even the ones that are supposed to be the Mancini originals often sound slightly to somewhat different from the original LPs, with a different lineup of tunes, and song titles. One thing that’s really confusing on Spotify, is the album they list as The Music of Peter Gunn & More From Peter Gunn is actually the soundtrack to the 1967 film Gunn … The One! – which has newer versions of some of the songs they used on the TV show, along with newer songs for the movie.

The original album feels like a special subgenre of cool 1950s jazz, the kind of jazz that people who hate jazz thinks of jazz and loves to hear. Mancini in his autobiography said, “The Peter Gunn title theme actually derives more from rock and roll than from jazz.” But the rest of the album does sound like jazz. I do wonder if all the guys who recorded at Blue Note considered it jazz? And did they resent its success?

The first LP I bought with money I earned (from cutting lawns) when I was fourteen was the soundtrack from Our Man Flint, with its music composed by Jerry Goldsmith. I quickly acquired soundtracks for Goldfinger and Thunderball, composed by John Barry, and the soundtrack for The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which was arranged and conducted by Hugo Montenegro, but I believe at least the title tune was composed by Jerry Goldsmith.

I loved the music on these soundtracks and thought of them as Spy Music. I’m not the only one that uses that label. You can find playlists on Spotify under the title Spy Music, and even the All Music Guide has it as a category. The songs on these albums sound a bit like jazz, but I don’t know if the music would really be considered jazz. But I do like this music a lot.

When I started trying to find out how many songs were recorded for the original Peter Gunn show it occurred to me that Mancini’s music might be the origin of what I call Spy Music. It’s gotten me back into listening to Spy Music. When I get time I’m going to make my own playlist for Spotify. Some of the Spy Music playlists I’ve listened to use cover tunes. That bugs me. I want the originals, well, at least the songs from the original albums.

This bit of research is also making me want to research soundtrack music. For movies and TV shows, each scene only uses pieces of a song. Do composers write whole songs and then the editors clip out what they want. Or are composers given clips of scenes and asked to compose music just for them? Are soundtracks fleshed-out clips? And why are so many soundtracks missing from Spotify?

That’s why I wondered just how many songs were composed for the Peter Gunn TV show? Did Mancini just create a batch of tunes for Blake Edwards? Were Nash and Condoli on set arrangers? This blog quotes the whole chapter on Peter Gunn from Mancini’s autobiography, but it doesn’t answer all my questions. I’d love it if some YouTuber researched all of this and produced a 30-minute documentary that answered my questions.

Update: 9/22/22:

I got The Music From Peter Gunn – Complete edition, a 2-CD set in from Discogs today. Its booklet answers some of my unanswered questions.

The Pete Candoli and Ted Nash albums were recorded in 1959. It says the recording location for all the albums was Hollywood. I wonder if it was in the same studio? The first two albums were from RCA but the other two were from Dot and Crown, but they all could have been recorded in the same location. Many of the musicians were the same. Was the 1959 recording done to give the musicians their own album and chance to earn additional money, or were they extra recordings for the TV show?

JWH

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How Could We Maximize Democracy?

by James Wallace Harris, 9/15/22

What if we had the perfect voting machine – how would it change politics?

What would make the perfect voting machine?

  • It would only allow one vote by each registered voter
  • It would block any illegal votes
  • It would block tampering
  • It would be trusted by all
  • It would make vote tallying easy
  • It would allow for easy recounts
  • It would be easy to use
  • It would be easy to access

Let’s imagine a perfect machine. Let’s imagine its impact like we were plotting a science fiction story about the future.

What if the government issued every registered voter a tablet that had limited internet access and could only be used for one function: voting. The tablet would be configured:

  • Fingerprint recognition
  • Faceprint recognition
  • Voiceprint recognition
  • Eyeprint recognition
  • Had a unique physical ID number in a chip
  • It will only work with the .gov domain

To register to vote and get one of these machines you’d have to prove your identity to the government. It would link your machine ID and identity to the voter registration system. It would register your encrypted biometric data. You will be given a voter registration card with your name and machine ID.

When you vote it would only accept one vote from your machine’s ID and only if your machine has validated your biometrics in four ways. This is far more secure than any online banking system or financial investment system. No one but yourself should be able to use this tablet. If it was stolen it would be useless.

Whenever a vote is taken the results should be tabulated nearly instantly and the results put online. Anyone could validate their vote by looking up their machine ID in the voting results. It’s not likely anyone will know this number unless you tell them. If you think your vote was changed you can register a protest.

This method would allow any individual to conduct a vote recount. The data file from a national election would be large, but probably smaller than a downloaded song. Voters could be given software that would allow them to drill into the data and analyze the results. Everyone should get the same totals. If needed, a vote could be retaken to validate the process. And countless checks can be added to the system to automatically look for fraud.

Right now we have a representative democracy. We vote for people we want to vote for us. With this system, we could vote directly. Our elective representative would prepare possible laws but everyone would vote on them. Of course, not everyone would vote on each issue, but the numbers would be huge. Far greater than any valid statistical sample. This would eliminate more forms of current corruption.

To make this system even more effective, we should set the winning majority higher than 50%. This could solve our current political polarization. We should aim to make more people happy with our government and laws. We should aim for a two-thirds majority or 66%.

That would push out the extremes of the political spectrum and create a purple party in the middle. Our representatives would have to work up laws based on compromises that would appeal to a wider majority.

Right now we’re getting minority rule and citizens are becoming unhappy. There’s talk of civil war. Extremists on the left and right want things that the majority of Americans don’t. Our political system is corrupted by political parties and their shenanigans. If we maximized democracy it would eliminate the need for political parties. Everyone would vote for their own unique platform. But to achieve a two-thirds majority would require voting with the aim of making the most people happy rather than just ourselves.

I doubt this will ever happen, but it’s a kind of science fictional speculation of how we could change things if we tried. Human nature pushes us to keep doing the same thing until everything breaks and we’re forced to start over. Some people are advocating starting over now, but that will only make even a smaller percentage of people happy.

If we had such a maximized voting system it would be important to elect politicians that tried to make the majority happy rather than just special interest groups.

JWH

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What If I Didn’t Come Back From The Dead?

by James Wallace Harris, 9/3/22

Last Monday I had hernia surgery and was under general anesthesia for over two hours. Being anesthetized is maybe the closest thing to being dead. Our conscious self is turned off so completely that it feels like we’re gone for good.

Interestingly, my book club book this month is Being You by Anil Seth and he introduces the study of consciousness with the discussion of general anesthesia. This was the fifth time I was put under so beforehand I was contemplating being gone. And I kept asking myself: “What if I don’t come back?” I thought it was philosophical fun to imagine nonexistence.

Mostly I thought about people I would miss but if I didn’t exist I wouldn’t feel anything. I think of death being like how things felt before I was born. I feel the only existence we know is this one. But my atheist beliefs could be wrong. I wondered how it would feel if I came to, but in another existence. I’ve always hoped if that happened I would be given all the answers to my questions about this existence.

My hunch is this existence is our only one. That reality is filled with many infinities but infinite existence isn’t one of them. Mostly I thought if I wasn’t coming back I should do a lot of paperwork before I might die to help Susan out. But I didn’t do that for two reasons. First, I assumed I was coming back. Second, because I’m lazy.

Still, it felt very weird and fascinating trying to imagine not existing.

Before my surgery, I had a long talk with my surgeon and he agreed to do everything I wanted. I was worried about two things. I was afraid lying on the surgical table for hours would inflame my spinal stenosis. I worried that I couldn’t hold my pee for that length of time because of my overactive bladder. I told him of these fears weeks before the surgery. He said he would try to arrange my back on the table like I needed and would give me a catheter but I would have to wear it for a few days at home. So I practiced lying flat each day before the surgery. Then on the day of the surgery, I told him to not worry about positioning me for my back but do whatever was best for his work. I also asked for the catheter to be removed before I came to and if I couldn’t pee on my own in recovery they could put it back in.

He seemed glad I practiced lying flat and agreed to my method with the catheter. This made me very happy and cleared all my worries. My surgeon then said he wanted to pray for me. I said sure. I’m not the kind of atheist that’s against religion or religious rituals. I am actually grateful for any prayers I receive.

I was impressed by the length of his prayer. He carefully went over all my problems and concerns and then covered all his goals in great detail while asking God for help. It was reassuring on several levels. First, it let me know how closely he listened to me, and second, it carefully laid out his working plans. But it fits in with my contemplations on nonexistence. And his prayer set the right mood for the occasion.

I felt that we each used a different language for understanding our shared existence. I use the word Reality for what he calls God. He believes in a personal relationship with God whereas I think I’m interacting with infinity and randomness. What he calls God’s will I call the unfolding of evolving randomness. Prayer assumes we can ask for blessings. I assume I will get what will be but I’m on one long lucky anti-entropic run of fabulous luck. The big difference is my surgeon believes there’s an existence after this one and I think death is oblivion. I’ve always been exceedingly grateful for this existence.

Well, I did come back. I’m writing this on my iPhone with one finger. The surgery went very well but it was more involved than my surgeon expected. I had no back pain after the surgery. And for 24 hours my back felt limber and young. Even after the drugs wore off it hasn’t been bad at all. And I peed right away when they rolled me back to my room after recovery. And in the days since I haven’t had much pain. I did without drugs except for a couple Tylenol and later, a couple of ibuprofen. However, I am suffering from a swollen scrotum which is typical of this operation and why I’m not sitting at the computer.

I’m quite glad to be back but I’ve learned that God’s will or reality wasn’t finished with me regarding this surgery. We never get what we picture, and my surgeon’s prayer didn’t cover post surgical complications. I thought going under inspired a lot of philosophical musings, but it turns out dealing with an expanding scrotum, generates even more existential thoughts.

One side effect of this experience is to feel sorry for women and their boobs. I imagine my affliction feels somewhat like getting a breast implant. My package is so much bigger it’s freaking me out. Having a sensitive globular appendage is not convenient. It gets in the way, making sitting and walking weird. So I imagine having two would be more than twice as inconvenient. And the size of my burden is still smaller that what most women have to deal with. I now regret every time I ever wished a woman had bigger breasts.

Yes, I came back, but to something I never imagined. But then, the future has always been what I never imagined.

If there is a God and he/she/they willed these big balls on me then I hope it’s God’s sense of humor and not punishment. So I will close with a prayer: “Dear God, please make my scrotum normal again. And if you intended a philosophical lesson help me learn it quickly. Amen.”

JWH

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Reading With My Eyes and Ears At The Same Time

by James Wallace Harris, 8/26/22

I’ve recently learned why it’s best to read with my eyes and ears concurrently.

When I joined Audible.com in 2002 it changed my reading life in several ways. First, it made me discover several things about my reading abilities. I always thought I was a great reader. I thought that because I was a bookworm. Listening showed me that was a delusion. I was really skimming books because I was reading too fast. Listening revealed that my inner reading voice was crappy at best. Listening made it all too obvious that there were nuances to fiction and nonfiction that I was completely missing.

When you listen to a professional narrator read a book you often get to experience the book at its best. Usually, the words are pronounced correctly, and the dialog comes across naturally, at a speed at which you’d hear it in real life. This enhances the dramatic effects of fiction, but it also has a cognitive impact on nonfiction.

I suppose good readers do all this in their heads, but I didn’t. I read to find out what happens. I did not savor the words or the writing. As a reader growing up I conditioned myself to read books with fast action prose. Either for fiction or nonfiction. I mainly stuck to science fiction and popular science books.

When I started listening I quickly learned I could handle other kinds of prose – especially longer, and denser books. For example, I listened to Moby Dick, not an easy novel. Listening opened up the 19th century to me. I never had the patience for old classics, but once I started listening I got into Dickens, Austen, Trollope, Elliot, and even Henry James. I also got into all kinds of nonfiction, including dry academic works, because hearing made them more interesting and accessible.

Over time listening helped me to read better with my eyes. Listening taught me to read slowly, and that made a big difference. I would switch back and forth depending on what format was the cheapest to buy.

However, there are still books I couldn’t get into – like Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherry. Her dense prose makes my eyes glaze over when I try to read that novel, and my ears tune out when listening. Because it’s one of a handful of novels I haven’t read on the Classics of Science Fiction list, I’ve been pushing myself to finish it. And I’ve learned a trick that will help me.

I can only listen to books if I’m doing something else, like walking, doing the dishes, eating, exercising, etc. I had to give up walking, and because of my back problems, I’ve been exercising less. That’s cut into my listening time. If I try to listen while just sitting I fall asleep.

However, I’ve found a trick to beat that. I listen to an audiobook while reading the book with my eyes. Not only do I stay awake, but I retain what I read better. That’s always been one of the drawbacks of listening to books. I don’t retain them as well when I read with my ears. I don’t get into them as well when I read with my eyes.

When I read with my eyes and ears at the same time I get into the most and retain the most. And it turns out, it lets me read some books like Downbelow Station that I previously couldn’t read with just my eyes or just my ears.

Isn’t that weird?

The trick is to follow along with the words as I hear them – and don’t let myself get distracted.

I listened to Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the Ancient World and The History of the Medieval World but started listening and reading The History of the Renaissance World. I’m getting so much more out of this dual-reading method, especially retention, that I’m thinking about rereading the first two volumes with the new method.

There is a major drawback to dual reading – cost. I do subscribe to Scribd.com and they sometimes have both the ebook and the audiobook. They had the recent biography on Buckminister Fuller that I listened to on audiobook so I just had to buy the Kindle edition. With Downbelow Station I had the paperback I’ve been meaning to read for years, and I’ve had the audiobook I’ve been meaning to listen to for years. And sometimes Amazon will give you a deal on the audiobook if you buy the Kindle edition first. Sometimes I get the Kindle on sale for $1.99 from Bookbub announcements and then buy the audiobook. Or I buy a used copy of the book or get it from the library.

I’m not going to read every book with my eyes and ears. But for books that I want to study, or total grok, or can’t get into, I will try the dual reading method.

JWH

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What Books Do You Speak?

by James Wallace Harris, 8/8/22

Most of our ideas are borrowed since few people have original thoughts. The other day I was wondering why conservatives and liberals think so differently. I decided one reason is that they read different books. Of course, not everyone reads books. Ideas are also passed around from person to person, or by newspapers, magazines, journals, advertisements, political rallies, television shows, the internet, etc. We dwell in a sea of ideas.

Ideas do originate with original thinkers, and often they are first published in books. Journalism and other forms of mass media then propagate those ideas, which in turn are spread by word of mouth. So, for now, let’s think of the basic unit for storing and spreading ideas are books.

My theory is conservatives and liberals think differently because the foundation of their beliefs comes from different books. I’m not suggesting that all conservatives and liberals read the same set of books, but the ideas for their thoughts and speech originated in a subset of books.

I was thinking along these lines because I wondered if conservatives and liberals each had a core set of twenty books, what would happen if the conservatives read the liberal’s books, and the liberals read the conservative’s books? Would our polarized political opinions begin to homogenize?

Then I wondered about fundamentalist religious people who put their faith in one book. What would happen if all the fundamentalists around the world all read each other’s holy book?

Thinking about that brought up an obvious stumbling block. Most people’s beliefs are based on what they first learned as children. If you are raised Christian and conservative you’re most likely to stay Christian and conservative. That suggests ideas acquired in youth are stickier than ideas acquired later in life. For my test, we’d have to raise children with The Bible, The Quran, The Tanakh, The Talmud, The Vedas, The Upanishads, The Tipitaka, The Tao Te Ching, The Yasna, etc.

We know minds are open and plastic at birth. If you took a child from a Christian family and gave it to a Muslim family to raise, it will grow up Muslim. But for some reason, after a certain age, minds close and lose their plasticity.

On the other hand, fads arise and spread ideas/memes all the time. Adults will embrace new ideas. Fox News, the Internet, to Tik-Tok can spread new ideas like a California forest fire. This suggests that people can acquire new ideas that they put on top of the foundational ideas that were programmed in their youth.

And ideas don’t have to come from nonfiction books. If all you read are romance novels and watch romance TV shows and movies, your ideas about relationships will be different than if you only consumed mysteries.

I’m in a book club that was reading Developmental Politics by Steve McIntosh, a book about our polarized politics. McIntosh hoped his insights would help solve that problem but most of the readers in the book club doubted it. One of our members did believe in McIntosh’s ideas and thought they could work. I felt McIntosh’s ideas were insightful but figured for them to be persuasive, would require everyone to read many other books first. McIntosh’s book was complex enough to require reading dozens of other books to fully understand it.

That’s when I realized we speak in books. When we express ourselves, we pass on fragments of books, but we don’t pass on enough information to let other people fully understand the foundation of the original ideas. Generally, we pass on tiny fragments of the original idea that are barely impressions. And we seldom communicate ideas but express ourselves emotionally.

If you want to understand a person, you have to consume the same books they did, or at least the same secondary sources. If a friend is passionate about a belief you’ll never understand your friend until you understand the foundations of their beliefs.

Few people understand the sources of their beliefs. Few people can point to a set of books and say here’s where my ideas originated. The origin of a classical education came from the study of foundational books, but that idea broke down in modern times when we were overwhelmed with significant books.

Yet, even when there was only one book for most people, The Bible, Christianity spent centuries arguing over its meaning. If you study all the people who claim to be Christian today you’d find very little commonality. The Bible is too big and too diverse. If we took The U. S. Constitution instead, which is tiny in comparison, we still get endless disagreement.

Ideas are slippery and inexact. Even if we read the same books and speak about the same ideas we don’t interpret them in the same way. Humans aren’t computers. We filter ideas through our emotions. Books might sow ideas but they don’t plant them evenly, and they grow inconsistently.

It appears that humans latch onto vague concepts and use them for ammunition to get what they emotionally want. Even if we read the same books we’ll still be a long way from finding agreements.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. What we need is a better approach to understanding each other’s wants. It might start with reading the same books, but it would only be a start. We’d also need to start studying each other’s emotions, and emotions are even harder to communicate than ideas. That’s what McIntosh was getting into with Developmental Politics, building on developmental psychology.

JWH

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To Go, or Not to Go — To the Bookstore?

by James Wallace Harris, 7/21/22

Each morning before I get out of bed I plan to do something with my day. It’s never very ambitious because of health problems, lack of discipline, and laziness. And things seldom go according to plan. Today I decided to donate ten books to the library bookstore. That impulse came from getting a new toy. I feel like Jerry Pournelle in his old columns for Byte magazine called “Chaos Manor.” In those columns, Jerry would get a new computer which would cause a cascading series of problems. I got a new little tube amp, a cheap one, to set up a better stereo system in my bedroom. That single act has caused a domino-falling cascade of problems to fix.

The only place I have to put a stereo in my bedroom is on top of two bookcases. That’s okay if I don’t care about sound quality, but this new little tube amp sounds great — if the speakers are at ear level — but sounds like crap next to the ceiling. For me to solve this problem, will require moving two Ikea Billy bookcases and replacing them with a piece of furniture 72 inches wide and roughly 24-30 inches high.

“Ah-ha!” you might be thinking. “He’s finally getting to the part about going to the bookstore.”

Well, not quite. This is going to be a long story about getting old and how my aging mind and body affect my decision-making at seventy.

The quick and easy solution to my problem was to go into the dining room which we’ve converted into a gym and take the TV credenza and put it in the bedroom in front of the bookcases. That left the TV on the floor for now, but I had to give up exercising when my back went out a few weeks ago, so I can worry about it later. Since I’ve become semi-invalid the easiest solutions are the ones that work with the least effort.

If Susan and I had had the foresight to have children we could have gotten them to move the bookcases into the dining room, left the TV on the credenza, and then sent those kids to Ikea to get a cabinet for the stereo. Unfortunately, back in the early 1980s, we didn’t anticipate this need.

My back has gotten somewhat better. I can do a little lifting. I don’t want to do too much because I might screw it up again. I figured I could unload a shelf or two each day in stacks on the floor. There are two cases with six shelves each. You do the math. I could put slides under the cases and push them into the dining room, and then reverse the process of loading them back up. Ikea also offers delivery and assembly for a fee. Thus, without offspring, and if I’m patient, I can get the job done in a week or two depending if Ikea can deliver that quickly.

But is this the best long-term solution? Susan has long complained that she doesn’t want to deal with all my books after I depart this world — whenever that might be. I keep telling her she can just call Salvation Army or a book buyer, but maybe all those books are my responsibility?

This morning I decided I would start going through my books and weed out enough to empty two bookcases. I figured I could carry ten or twelve books to the library bookstore each week and eventually, I’ll donate two bookcases worth of books. So after doing my spinal stenosis physical therapy exercises I pulled the first book off the shelf I thought might be the first of ten I would part with today. It was The Long-Winded Lady by Maeve Brennan.

I opened it up to a random page and started reading. Whoops. There went my plan. Maeve wrote lovely little essays about living in New York City for The New Yorker. The first one I read was about seeing a young woman collapse on the street outside her restaurant window. The next was about an evening walk to see a farmhouse that had been moved from downtown to Greenwich Village. I bought this book after seeing a documentary, I think on HBO, about another writer who met Brennan before she died. That writer had discovered Maeve on the street after she had become homeless. I’d like to see that documentary again, but I can’t remember its title.

I’m afraid every book I pulled off the shelf had a story behind it, one that made me want to keep it. I have more books than I could read in another dozen lifetimes. It might take me years to find and decide which books I could give away that would free up two bookcases full of books.

That left me so despondent that I went to the library bookstore and bought five more books.

JWH

p.s.

The other night Janis and I were jabbering on the phone about all the hoarders we know. We felt horror at what has befallen our friends. Now I need to worry if that affliction needs to be added to my recognized list of afflictions.

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Getting Too Close to Helpless

by James Wallace Harris, July 14, 2022

For this essay, I’m defining helpless as being in a situation where we can’t help ourselves or get help from someone else. As I get older I worry that someday my wife Susan or I will find ourselves in a completely helpless situation. This weekend it almost happened. Our hot water heater in the attic broke and water was pooling on the sheetrock of the ceiling above my computer room. A seam then spread open and water was draining onto the floor. Susan and I had to find a solution fast and several times I wasn’t sure we would.

First, we were lucky I discovered it so soon. I have an overactive bladder so I’m frequently going back to the bathroom which is annoying. But in this one instance, it put me Johnny-on-the-spot as I went down the hall to the bathroom. The pool of water was only in the middle of the floor.

I yelled to Susan and ran into the kitchen and pulled the filled garbage bag out of the tall kitchen trash can and ran back and put that under the water flow. I saw that it would fill pretty fast so I ran back to the kitchen and got the recycle bin and dumped the contents out on the floor and took it back to the room. By then Susan was there with a pile of towels.

I then went out into the hall, pulled down the attic stairs, and rushed up into the attic. The hot water tank is right next to the stairs and I could see the overflow pan was full and not draining. Damn. I went back down the stairs and ran outside and unscrewed the hose from the outside faucet and dragged it back into the house and up the stairs and connected it to the flush drain. It didn’t have a faucet handle but a slot so I yelled for Susan to get me a large screwdriver. I tried to turn off the hot water heater but it would only let me shut it down to pilot light. For some reason, I couldn’t make the button turn to the off position. I looked at the pipes and saw a red handle so I turned it all the way to what I hoped was an off position. When I had the screwdriver I opened the flush faucet and water started spraying everywhere from a leak in the hose connection. I turned it off.

Two weeks ago my back was hurting so much, that I could barely walk, so I was thankful I was able to be going up and down the stairs. I was moving at a frantic pace but I was calm. I wondered what would have happened if I couldn’t go up the stairs. I don’t trust Susan on the attic stairs. It was then I realized I could be helpless. If I couldn’t fix this problem I had to get someone else. Help means either doing it yourself or finding someone who could. I was suddenly scared I couldn’t, and we’d be helpless. I know this is a minor emergency, but it was enlightening.

Then I went back down the stairs and called our regular plumber. I told them immediately I had an emergency of running water but they made me give me my information first before they told me they couldn’t have someone out until Monday. It was Saturday afternoon, but I thought it was Friday. So I called another plumber thinking I might catch someone still there. The same thing happened. Wanted my information before telling me the soonest would be Monday.

I got some duck tape and went back upstairs and wrapped the hose. I turned on the drain again. It didn’t shoot water. I went outside and saw that water was coming out of the hose. I then went back to the computer room and dragged the first bucket to the front door and emptied it on the front porch. I took the empty bucket and swapped it for the full and emptied it.

I felt I had a bit of breathing room. Then Susan said she still heard running water.

I went to the computer and looked up emergency plumbers. I found one that claimed 24/7 service and called them. Same thing. Can’t come until Monday. I then ran to the hall closet and got my T-wrench and went outside to the street to turn off the water to the house. However, I couldn’t get the valve to budge. I figured I had to call MLG&W to come shut off the water. I didn’t want to do that because I didn’t know how long they would take to get here, and I didn’t want to go days without water.

I went back upstairs and realized that I had shut off the gas, not the water. I started looking around. This time I looked at the top of the water tank, which almost goes to the ceiling of the attic. There I saw water spraying from around the intake pipe, but I also saw another turn-off handle. I gave it a quarter turn and the water stopped running.

That gave me a sense of release. The flow of water from the computer room ceiling slowed, and in about fifteen minutes it stopped. I called the plumber and made an appointment for Monday.

However, I kept wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t been able to shut off the water. What would we have done? What would Susan have done if I wasn’t home? She probably would have called a neighbor, her brother, or MLG&W. I pictured us taking turns swapping filled buckets all weekend, even taking sleeping shifts at night.

It’s incidents like this when I want more control. I should have been prepared. I should have known where the water shut-off to the tank was located. I thought I was prepared by buying the tool to shut off the water at the street. When the plumber came Monday I ordered a new tank and ordered an automatic shut-off device that works with a water sensor in the overflow pan. I also ordered a new overflow pan and all new drainage pipes. But is that enough? I prefer not to deal with another computer room flood. This was the second. Years ago the HVAC installers made the mistake of putting in the condensation pan at a tilt – a tilt away from the drainage outlet.

We don’t have complete control of our lives. On the news that night there were stories about flooding in the east that ruined entire homes. Our flooding was nothing, so I was thankful. However, knowing we can’t control everything doesn’t stop me from worrying about becoming helpless. One sight that always scares me when I see it on the news is when first responders have to rescue old helpless people.

I know I’m worrying about the inevitable, but that doesn’t stop me from worrying. It doesn’t stop me from thinking of ways to be prepared. If I designed houses I wouldn’t put the HVAC and hot water heater in the attic. Every house should have a little machine room on the ground floor, with a floor drain and sensors for flooding. This house has had a hot water heater in the attic since 1952 and things have been mostly good 99.9999% of the time.

Getting old has made me worry about my body breaking down or my house breaking down. I realize there are things I can do to help myself. I also realize there are things I depend on Susan to help me do. And I know there will be other things I will have to depend on friends or hired help. This flooding incident has made me think about the times I might not find any kind of help. Generally, that’s never a problem because we have each other. But it’s a thought.

JWH

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It’s Hard To Tell What’s A Bargain Is Anymore

by James Wallace Harris, 7/2/22

One value of writing an essay is thinking through an idea. I’ve rewritten this essay several times as I rethink my assumptions and feelings. When is a bargain a great deal or just something cheap I really don’t need? When does something feel expensive when it’s not? When is something cheap but overpriced or a wonderful value? How does inflation warp our sense of value as we age?

In 1962 when I was in the 6th grade I could ride my bike down to the base theater on Homestead Air Force Base and see a movie for 15 cents. That was a kid’s price back then. I could get a candy bar for 5 cents, and a coke in a cup for another nickel. It was a small cup, but also the only size cup. Total expenditure was a quarter. The last time I bought a movie ticket, before the pandemic, it was $12. Candy was around $5 and a drink was around $5, but the comparison isn’t perfect. In 1962 I probably got a 200-calorie sugar high, and today it would probably be a 2,000-calorie sugar overdose.

Magazines in 1962 were 15-25 cents. Today it’s $7.99 – $11.99. Back then I’d read in a magazine all week. Today, I’m lucky if one will divert me for 30-minutes because I have so many others to read. Back then I was happy with Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Mad Magazine. Today I try to keep up with a couple dozen mags. But is having a quantity a bargain?

A paperback was 35-60 cents. I’m not sure they have mass-market paperbacks anymore. It’s $11.99 for a Kindle book. A science fiction magazine like F&SF was 40 cents in 1962, but $9.99 an issue in 2022. What’s hilarious is I often pay $10-15 for old issues of F&SF today. Last year I paid $35 for Fall 1949 issue (v.1 n.1) of F&SF. It originally cost 35 cents. I believe that tells me its real worth. How many things do I enjoy today that I would I pay 100x their original costs sixty years from now?

In 1962 all TV was free. There were three channels. I can still get ABC, CBS, and NBC for free if I wanted to use an antenna, but I watch them through a $65 package from YouTube TV today and get several dozen channels thrown in. It ruffles my feathers to pay that $65 but my wife Susan considers it a cheap essential and her favorite form of entertainment.

Susan worked out of town from 2008-2018. She loves TV way more than I do, so I encouraged her to have cable TV at her Mon-Fri apartment. I got to cut the cord at our house, which delighted me. I bought a TiVo to record off-the-air shows like Jeopardy and the nightly news but I mostly watched Netflix for fun shows. About $25 a month total. I was thrilled except that I missed Turner Classic Movies (TCM). Cord-cutting felt like a real bargain!

When Susan stopped working out of town I convinced her to try streaming TV. We tried AT&T TV before settling on YouTube TV. YouTube started out at $45 a month and is now $65. Not a bad deal, but with all of our other subscription TV services, we’re now spending $128 a month. That seems like a lot, as painful as having a cable bill. But times have changed. There are so many options for watching TV.

Cord-cutting was never about saving money. I just hated paying the cable bill because out of the hundreds of channels we got, Susan liked about a dozen and I watched two. That just bugged the crap out of me. However, I now subscribe to Apple News+ for $9.99 a month and it gets me over 300 digital magazines to read. I probably look at less than a dozen of them, yet I don’t agonize over the fact I’m paying for almost 300 I’m not reading. I’m not being consistent, am I?

Before Apple News+ it wasn’t uncommon for me to buy a handful of magazines at the bookstore and spend $75. So, I’m thinking: What should a handful of TV channels cost?

I also spend $9.99 a month with Scribd.com for ebooks and audiobooks. I read or listen to one or two a month and consider it a bargain without worrying about the ones I’m not reading. Again, $9.99 versus $40-50 for two books. I only use YouTube TV for TCM, so $65 for one channel seems extreme. Although, if pressed, TCM is worth $65.

Netflix used to be about $9.99 a month, and I considered it a great bargain too. However, now that there are so many subscription services, it’s hard to tell what a bargain is anymore. When we only had Netflix and watched it all the time it was a bargain. Netflix seems much less of a bargain when we have Netflix, AppleTV+, HBO Max, Hulu, Amazon Prime, PBS Passport, Peacock, Paramount Plus, Wondrium, etc.

We should go through a new kind of cord-cutting, sub-cutting. With so many premium streaming TV services, we often ignore one or two for months while we binge-watch shows on the others.

I don’t mind paying for something we use. We spend very little money on going out, vacations, clothes, etc. I drive a 22-year-old truck. We’re retired, and spend most of our time home, so we can afford a few TV subscriptions. However, I don’t want to waste money either. And I like a bargain — and I’m a cheap ass. But is Netflix a bargain when I ignore its large buffet of movies and TV shows for several months of the year?

We recently canceled Netflix because neither one of us watched it for months. We even discovered we were paying for two subscriptions because Susan had never canceled her out-of-town sub. We mainly canceled Netflix to protest the newest price hike. Psychologically, a TV subscription should be $4.99 – $9.99. Anything more, and I worry about getting my value.

HBO Max is $14.99. That seems like a Mercedes price when I’m used to driving a Toyota. HBO Max has a cheaper subscription but it’s with commercials. I’m adamantly against paying to watch anything with commercials. If I had to watch commercials I’d go back to over-the-air TV and cancel all my subscriptions.

When we had cable I always wanted to have a la carte channel buying. I thought the perfect payment method would be to subscribe to just the channels we wanted. And I’d be willing to pay extra to not have commercials.

For some reason, Netflix seemed like a wonderful bargain at $9.99 a month, but a terrible deal at $17.99 a month. Oddly, HBO Max at $14.99 a month seems like a better deal than Netflix or Hulu. But now that I’ve canceled Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Max hardly seems worth $30+ a month either.

My friend Linda is very disciplined. She subscribes to only one TV service a month. Currently, it’s HBO Max, but she plans to cancel it and go to AppleTV+ again when some of her favorite shows return with new seasons. So she spends from $5 to $15 a month on TV. Now that’s a bargain.

When YouTube TV was $45 a month it was a real bargain. Now that it’s $65 it doesn’t seem like one. And if they raise their price again, it will seem like a rip-off.

But am I being penny wise and pound foolish? Going to a movie is $12. Buying a DVD runs $8-25 and I used to buy a lot of them. Renting a movie on Amazon Prime runs $2-20 and I still do that. Watching just one or two movies I used to go out to see, or once bought on disc turns any premium TV subscription into a bargain.

The other day I bought 8 seasons of The Andy Griffiths Show for $15 each on Amazon Prime for Susan’s birthday. She watches that series over and over while she sews. But I thought it was painful to see her watch Andy on commercial TV that cuts several extra minutes out of each episode that originally ran 28 minutes. Most premium streaming TV channels offer dozens, if not hundreds of complete TV series. Andy isn’t on any of them at the moment.

I really can’t complain about their monthly prices. They are a bargain. But only if we watch something during the month. I’d say one movie or one season of a TV show is breaking even, and anything more makes them a bargain.

Susan doesn’t mind commercials. She sews while watching television, and just ignores those never-ending painful minutes of ads. I sometimes wonder if she could handle over-the-air broadcast TV. I bet she’d be just as happy watching MeTV all day long as she is watching all the old TV shows on TBS every day. But she loves many other channels. She considers YouTube TV a cable TV service. When a tennis tournament is on she has to have ESPN. So YouTube TV is a bargain to her, but a waste of money to me.

Bargains are relative. And it’s harder to budget when two people are involved. Susan said if YouTube TV raised its prices again, we’d cancel something else.

Even though I don’t watch them much, I consider AppleTV+ and PBS Passports to be real bargains because they are only $5 a month. If all the services charged just $5 a month I’d be willing to subscribe to all and not worry if I used them each month. But at $10-15, I figure we have to decide which is worthwhile, and which is a bargain.

Maybe we should cancel any streaming TV service that’s more than $10 a month. But I pay $13 a month for YouTube Premium so I don’t have to watch commercials. All the content is free, I’m just paying to get rid of stuff I don’t want to see. Now, is that a bargain?

Life was simpler when everyone watched the same three broadcast channels. We had a lot more shared culture. But those days are over. Now we have endless choices in endless varieties. Is that a bargain? Again it’s relative. But in 1966 I could go to school and nearly everyone I knew had watched some of the same shows I had watched the night before. That was priceless.

JWH

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When Will Women Have a Constitutional Right to an Abortion?

by James Wallace Harris, 6/25/22

Predicting the future is impossible, but we can speculate. The Supreme Court just changed its mind about how it interprets the Constitution regarding a woman’s right to an abortion, so can we expect it will change its mind again? Congress could pass a law giving women a right to an abortion but the Supreme Court could knock it down. The most lasting solution would be ratifying an amendment to the Constitution. That probably won’t happen anytime soon. But when might it be possible?

Anti-abortionists fought to reverse Roe v. Wade for half a century, will it take that long for the political pendulum to swing back? Polls show that a majority of Americans want abortion to be a legal right for women, so how did anti-abortion voters win? The common answer is they joined forces with the conservatives. The conservatives have also worked for decades to get what they want, and are succeeding because they have formed a tight coalition among several special interest groups.

I would assume feminists would have to join several other special interest groups and work with the Democrats to get what they want. Is that possible? What alignment of special interests would beat the alignment of specialist interests the Republicans have formed?

We must admire the conservatives for their dedication, focus, and work to get what they want. Are liberals willing to make an equal effort? Will liberals make a more significant effort to join school boards, get elected in city and state governments, work to influence law school curriculums, and do everything else the conservatives have done since the 1970s?

I have read many books about how conservatives have achieved their political goals over the last fifty years. Many of their tactics have not been honest or ethical. Will liberals go to such extremes? We are currently watching the conservatives subvert democracy to game the system. They have been sowing doubt on all the tools liberals would use to get what they want, especially science, education, medicine, journalism, and common sense.

Liberals have always relied on intellectual proof to fight for what they want, and conservatives have completely undermined intellectualism. Liberals can’t rely on logic to get what they want. They will need to build a coalition of passionate wants. Conservatives have won what they wanted with well-managed minority interests. Can liberals find enough minority interest groups to create a larger coalition than the conservative groups? They have the feminists, LGBTQ+, some minorities, environmentalists, and anti-gun, but who else? They used to have labor, but that’s not so anymore.

It would be great if the liberals could claim the scientists, but scientists are often people first and scientists second. The Republicans have done well with certain religious groups, are there other believers that would passionately support the liberals?

Are there interests that liberals could take back from the conservatives? The core driving force of conservatives has been anti-taxes. Greed is the most powerful political interest of all. If the Democrats could find ways to solve social problems by spending less money it would be a huge factor. If Democrats could find ways to improve the financial health of families and individuals without increasing taxes it would also help. Voters want security, stability, and law and order. Republicans have always been able to capitalize on that more than Democrats. If liberals want to swing the pendulum back their way, they need to change that.

I doubt I’ll live long enough to see the political pendulum swing back to the liberal side. The conservatives are still gaining momentum. I’ve seen a lot of change in my life, and if I live another ten or twenty years I expect to see a lot more. I never imagined that Roe v. Wade would be overturned. But then, the future has always been everything I never imagined.

JWH

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How Game of Thrones Reflects History Like Two Opposing Mirrors

by James Wallace Harris, 6/15/22

My friends Linda, Connell, and I are rewatching HBO’s Game of Thrones, and this time around I can’t help but compare it to current politics and the books on ancient history I’m reading. When I saw the series years ago I only thought of it as an epic fantasy. This time I feel George R. R. Martin distilled millennia of human history into one fictional story.

I’ve lost count of the times a real game of thrones has played out in my study of history. By now I’ve read dozens and dozens of accounts of power plays for a throne. One example from ancient Egypt deals with an assassination attempt on Rameses III from The History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Baurer:

THE FAULT LINE running through Egypt, temporarily plastered over by victory reliefs and building projects, was still liable to crack open at any point. Rameses III held the throne by right of his father’s coup, and he was not immune to power plays.

Towards the end of his reign, one of his lesser wives hatched a plot to assassinate the king by mob violence. Scribes who recorded the affair during the reign of Rameses’s successor say that she began a campaign to “stir up the people and incite enmity, in order to make rebellion against their lord.”10 Apparently she hoped that the mob would not only remove Rameses III, but also his appointed successor—his son by another wife—so that her own son would become king.

A harem plot to kill the pharaoh was hardly unknown, but this one was remarkable for the number of people involved. The court recorder lists, among others, the two royal standard-bearers, the butler, and the chief scribe. The overseer of the herds was accused of making wax figures of the king, apparently for use in an Egyptian form of voodoo;11 the chief steward was convicted of spreading dissension. The conspiracy apparently stretched all the way down into Nubia: “Benemwese, formerly captain of archers in Nubia…was brought in because of the letter which his sister, who was in the harem, had written to him, saying, ‘Incite the people to hostility!’”12

The records of the conspiratorial accusations end, in monotonous regularity, with either “He took his own life” or “The punishments of death were executed upon him.” The exceptions were three conspirators who merely had their noses and ears cut off, and a single acquittal: a standard-bearer named Hori, who undoubtedly lived the rest of his years in disbelief that he alone had survived the purge.13

By the time the trials dragged to a close, the intended victim was offstage. Rameses III himself had died of old age.

That trial reminds me of the current Jan 6th hearings. I wonder how people will study January 6th in future history books?

Donald Trump’s campaigns to stay in political power remind me of Game of Thrones too. Trump wants the 2024 presidency like the Game of Throne characters wants the Iron Throne. I imagine Trump pictures himself as Tywin Lannister, rich and powerful, but he’s actually more like Robert Baratheon, a leader in name only who shirks his kingly duties to wench and hunt. All of Trump’s would-be advisors remind me of the treacherous advisors in King’s Landing. People like Steve Bannon obviously want to be a puppetmaster to the powerful in the same way Littlefinger and Varys pulled the strings on those who would rule Westeros.

This year I’m on my fourth book about ancient history and there is one obvious lesson that stands out above all others: Beware of rulers. There are always people, usually men, who believe they should rule, and they think nothing of getting thousands or even millions of innocent people killed to fulfill their ambitions.

The alpha humans always want more. The betas connive to be alphas. And the rest of humanity, the omegas, are the pawns in the game of thrones. To the ruthless, the 99.99% of humanity are the Star Trek red shirts in their personal fantasies. We see that with Putin in Ukraine right now. I’ve started another book, Bloodlands by Timothy Synder, that focuses on Hitler and Stalin’s roles in killing 14 million people from 1933 to 1945. Why do we let our rulers have so much power?

Until humanity can rule itself without ambitious psychopaths we’re going to repeat the same loop forever. In the history books, there have only been a couple of minor incidents where the ordinary citizens protested their role as cannon fodder. Most of history is about one ruler after another waging war. When will this infinitely repeated story horrify us enough to break free of the cycle? Since Game of Thrones was such a huge hit, maybe we love things just the way they are?

Eight seasons of Game of Thrones is about endless warring and the remembrances of wars. The story ends and we think there will be peace, but history tells us that won’t be true. Why don’t we get other stories in history and literature? Why not the stories of those people who built the beautiful cities we see in Westeros and Essos? Why is it always conflict and destruction?

Why do we mainly remember the monsters of history and literature? None of the major characters in Game of Thrones are good people. Is this why Trump and Putin are so well-loved in their respective countries? Are the rest of us just fans, taking sides while watching the game play out? Is that our only role, to pick a team to follow? Go Starks! Go Lannisters! Go Trump! Go Putin!

Below is one of my favorite and telling passages in The History of the Ancient World. In chapter 52, history intersects with the Old Testament and 19th-century literature. It’s not that I endorse what’s being reported, but I think it reveals something deeply psychological in the human race, especially when you compare these events of almost three thousand years ago to today. This passage reminds me of the destruction of cities in Ukraine and King’s Landing in season eight.

JWH

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Are You Prepared for a Trip to the ER?

by James Wallace Harris, 6/10/22

Now I don’t mean are you wearing clean underwear or are you psyched up to wait in line for hours to see a doctor? I mean something different. Are you prepared for your body to fail? When I was younger I was rushed to the ER because my sister hit me in the hit with a croquet mallet and I was bleeding like someone in a horror film or the time when we were goofing around in PE and I broke my arm, but those are not the kind of bodily failures I’m talking about. Are you ready to start falling apart unexpectantly?

Last week I had to go to the ER. I had food stuck in my esophagus. It was below the windpipe so I could breathe, but if I tried to swallow water to help clear it, the water wouldn’t go down and I’d have to puke/cough it back up. I waited two hours for the food to pass. This has happened to me before and it’s always cleared, but after two hours I worried it might be really stuck. So I went to the ER. I should have gone to a GI doctor years ago instead of waiting for an ER emergency visit. My mother had her esophagus stretched. I think having food stuck in mine for seven hours did stretch it.

Luckily, after waiting five hours, I got to see a doctor, and just as she was getting ready to send me to a GI specialist, the food fell through. What a relief. I had been imagining the kind of things they’d stick down my throat. I still had to stand another hour to be released.

Unluckily for me, I was having a bad back spell, and standing for six hours aggravated the crap out of my back. When my back gives me trouble, I can’t sit. I can lie down or stand. (I’m typing this while standing.) So, instead of going to see a GI doctor about my throat, I’m seeing a back doctor and getting an MRI tomorrow. After that, I might schedule a visit with a GI doctor, but I have three other pressing issues, any of which could send me to the ER again.

I did not expect to get so old at 70 so fast. While I was waiting in the ER for five hours I watched the other people around me. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about waiting five hours. That’s part of the deal, and other people who came in before me were still waiting when I left. The ER was run very smoothly, and they have a triage system.

If it was obvious you needed help you got it immediately. The next stage involved a form that asked five questions to determine if they needed to act almost as fast. (If you could fill out a form, you’re not quite dying I suppose.) One of the questions was: Are you having trouble breathing. I wasn’t, since the food was past my windpipe. So I didn’t check it, if I had, I might not have had to wait five hours, but I didn’t want to cut in line. I sometimes started to have trouble, but I could cough up all the saliva that built up and I was okay again. The third stage, after a bit of waiting, is where a nurse takes your vitals and gets the details.

None of the form questions were about severe pain, and quite a few people in the waiting room seemed to be in a lot of pain. That old advice about seeing the ER doctor right away if you arrive in an ambulance isn’t true. We came in a car, but I saw people arriving in an ambulance that was told to wait in the waiting room, and the EMTs took them off the stretcher and put them in a waiting room chair. There were three waiting room areas, and I guess about forty people, but that included loved ones or caretakers.

One guy was in agony, I think from a kidney stone (he leaked blood by the urinal and on the floor while I was in there puking up spit). He kept demanding to see a doctor but was told he had to wait. He left claiming he was going to go find an ER that would help him. I wondered how to be best prepared for having kidney stones. Is it having a good urologist?

The lesson I learned in the ER, and it was a very educational experience, was to get prepared because I would be in there again, and maybe in worse shape. I had to call an ambulance for my mother a couple of times, so did my sister, and my mother even called them on her own several times. Getting old means getting to know the ER system. Getting old means learning to deal with all kinds of medical specialists. Getting old means learning to endure all kinds of diagnostic procedures.

I’m the kind of person that likes to picture what I’m going to do before I do it.

What I’m trying to figure out now, is how to be better prepared for trips to the ER. My mother said to always wear clean underwear, but there’s got to be more things to do to make the experience better.

JWH

Update: I’m not sure this essay succeeded in conveying the positive experience I got from my visit to the ER. It was painful for my back, and I would have preferred not to have had food stuck in my throat, but overall I found those six hours very enlightening. Contrary to that old adage, what doesn’t kill us won’t always make us stronger, but in this case, I think it made me wiser. I fear my writing effort here has failed because I haven’t conveyed that wisdom.

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Be Prepared!

by James W. Harris, 5/18/22

Back in November, I had to jump-start my truck the old fashion way with cables off my wife’s car. It was tricky getting her car into position so my cables could reach. After that, I started parking my truck facing out in case it happened again. But I had also heard about these portable chargers and I got on Amazon and ordered a DBPOWER 1000A Portable Car Jump Starter (pictured above).

When it came in I couldn’t believe how small it was. It comes in a nice case, but the actual charger is about the size of a paperback book. I charged it up on 11/6/21 and stuck it under my truck seat. Today, I went out and discovered I had done the same dumb thing again – which is to not shut my passenger door tight after getting groceries out. I know, I’m a dumbass.

I immediately remembered the DP1000 and wondered if it was still charged up. It was. So it holds a charge for at least six months. It was damn simple to use. You plug in a small set of cables, connect red to positive, black to negative, turn it on the DP1000, and start the truck. It started instantly. I was so impressed. I’m going to get one for my wife’s car now.

I’m not advocating the model of device I got is the best. It says it was good for up to a 7.0L gas engine or 5.5L diesel. There’s a huge variety of them to choose from, even some that are combined with an air compressor. I already had one of those.

I was mightily impressed with this little device. I’ve helped jump other people’s cars with my cables and it hasn’t always been convenient to align the vehicles. This is the solution.

JWH

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Why Do We Keep Repeating History When We Know We’re Repeating History?

by James Wallace Harris, 5/16/22

I’m listening to and reading Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World by Philip Maryazak. It’s a quick overview of 40 civilizations of early history beginning with the Akkadians and ending with the Hephthalites. To be honest, I had only heard of less than half of these civilizations, mostly because of references in the Bible or from Greek and Roman history.

I’ve never studied ancient history much but I’ve recently gotten hooked on it, especially after reading The Horse The Wheel and Language by David W. Anthony, The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, and The Writing of the Gods by Edward Dolnick. The first two were a slog to get through but I still admired them. The Writing of the Gods was sheer fun and would probably appeal to many readers. Forgotten People of the Ancient World is a breezy summary, which I’m thoroughly enjoying, but it doesn’t go too deep. Perfect for me right now, but I’ll want to know more later. Actually, the entries on Wikipedia cover more for each civilization than Matyszak’s chapters, but his book integrates a digestible narrative with inspiring photos and maps making it easier to read.

When you read/listen to one summary of a civilization after another, it’s pretty damn obvious that humankind is on repeat mode. Humanity is Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, but we never learn how to break the cycle. You’d think with all this history we’d figure it out the secret.

Some cycles are obvious, like the rise of powerful leaders. Why do we call Alexander III of Macedon the Great? Sure, he conquered a lot of territories but he also killed, destroyed, and plundered. We hate Putin today for what he’s doing in Ukraine, but how was Alexander III of Macedon any different? We really should call Alexander, Napoleon, Hitler, Putin, and every other empire builder the monsters of history.

That’s the number one cycle we keep doing over and over, which is to allow egomaniacs to become rulers. We’ve tried to avoid that by creating democracy, but as you can see from recent times that doesn’t always succeed at controlling men who want more. And even then democracies sometimes go around and destroy other countries too, just like would-be emperors. Humans have this thing about destroying their enemies and expanding their territory. Like Rodney King, I must ask, “Can’t we all just get along?”

A less obvious cycle we repeat is the reverberation between big government and small government. All the successful civilizations grew, needing central control to keep things organized. The central government of the Akkadians had to build vast irrigation systems which required taxes and governmental infrastructure. There are always people who resent that. They rebel and undermine the central government and civilization erodes and eventually collapses. Why can’t we find a balance between secure political structures and personal freedoms?

We fail to be good stewards of the Earth and overtax Mother Nature with our endless growth and consumption. Nor do we save for the future to withstand random destructive acts of nature. Humanity is no Boy Scout, it’s never prepared.

Another hit on the Top Repeat list is ignoring reality. We feed our hatreds and greed with crazy ideas and justifications. We’re always our own worst enemy.

I feel like we’re living in end-of-civilization times. Reading about history is somewhat soothing but for a strange reason. It promotes stoical thinking.

Here’s a neat video on YouTube about how chaos theory predictions patterns of disorder in ordered systems. We live with entropy, and civilization is anti-entropic. It helps to understand both chaos and complexity theory. It won’t help the world to know this, but at least it explains some things.

JWH

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Why Did I Dream About the Dead Woman?

by James Wallace Harris, 5/15/22

A vivid emotional dream woke me. The dream was short, but it gave off an intensity. I was in a room, but I don’t think it was me. I was watching two men struggle with a dead woman trying to lay her body out straight. She wasn’t fat, but she was somewhat big, maybe tall, and around 160-170 pounds. There was a short man at her head and a taller man at her feet. I never saw their faces. The woman had died in a fetal position, tangled up in a quilt. The two men were lifting her up to stretch her out on her back. My impression was they were going to take her away, so maybe they were funeral people. I apologized to them for not helping, but I didn’t tell them I was afraid to get too close to the dead woman. I felt that strongly. I don’t know if we were related, but she was in her forties, much younger than me, but then who I was in the dream was younger too.

The woman was bald, and when they got on her back and arms folded on her chest, they stood up. The woman’s head then quickly sprouted short dark hair and she turned her head towards me and gave a beautiful smile. Shocked, I pointed exclaiming, “Look, she’s alive!” But when they looked down again, she was dead like before.

That was the end of my dream.

I’ve been reading books and watching documentaries about ancient Egypt and I wondered how ancient people would have interpreted this dream. Ancient Egyptians were obsessed with the underworld. All through history people have tried to make dreams meaningful. I wonder if this dream was supposed to be a message to me? I didn’t know the woman. And I’ve never believed in dream interpretation, yet I wondered why I dreamed this dream. Was it only my unconscious mind sorting information?

At 70, I’ve known a lot of people who are no longer with us. And since my body is obviously in decline, I don’t think I’ll be around for many more years. A dream about death seems important. When I woke up I wasn’t frightened. It wasn’t a nightmare. But I was puzzled.

Since I’m an atheist I don’t think we exist after death. But what if I’m wrong? Lately, there are been a lot of speculation about this universe being a simulation. What if I died and came to in another existence, and then realized I had been in some kind of virtual reality, wouldn’t that be weird? But then, what happens when I die in that reality?

I am amazed at my dreams for another reason. How does my brain generate images? Or construct stories? Often my dreams feel like productions equal to short movies. If I have a speech center of the brain, where is the movie studio center? What’s weird is I have that condition, aphantasia, that keeps me from visualizing imagery in my waking life. Yet, I have no trouble generating imagery in my sleep. I used to generate imagery when I was high, but that’s been half a century ago.

By the way, do we really see movies in our dreams? Sometimes I think dreams are a series of images, each one triggering an emotion, giving the illusion of movement.

I can easily understand how primitive people could believe what they did about dreams – they seem so real. The more I read about consciousness the more I believe my perceptions are very limited. And the more I read, the less I feel like I know anything.

I’m always amazed at people who are so confident in their beliefs. I’m sorry, but I assume you’re delusional. I know I am. The more I read, the more ways I’ve come across in which we fool ourselves. I guess you think I read too much.

Most of my dreams are about desperately searching for a bathroom and I wake up needing to pee. You may laugh at that, but isn’t it rather straightforward. Isn’t my unconscious mind just saying, “Wake up and go pee!” If it can be so direct about something so basic, what is my unconscious mind telling me when it shows me a smiling dead woman?

JWH

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Just Who Slept With the Pods?

by James Wallace Harris, 5/14/22

In the 1956 film, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dr. Miles Bennel (Kevin McCarthy) realizes his friends and neighbors are changing. One by one they all start thinking alike and that worries him. If you haven’t seen this famous film about the pod people you should. It’s based on a 1954 Collier’s serial by Jack Finney called The Body Snatchers, which was then published as a book in 1955.

The story is about an invasion of pods from outer space that transform people if they sleep in the same room with one. Back in the 1950s, the story was seen as an allegory about communism. Finney has said he didn’t target communism specifically when he wrote the book, but most readers and moviegoers did back then.

In 1951, Robert Heinlein had published a similarly themed novel called The Puppet Masters. In that story, flying saucers land with creatures that attach to our backs, and take over our bodies and minds. Heinlein was an arch anti-communist, and his story was intended to imply the evils of a commie takeover.

In 1953 Robert Sheckley’s story, “Keep Your Shape” reflected a liberal’s paranoia. It appeared in the November issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Sheckley rewrote the story for his collection Untouched by Human Hands and gave the story a much more elegant ending and a different title, “Shape.” It’s a humorous story told from the aliens’ point of view, about how they invaded the Earth twenty-something times and always failed. The aliens come from a rigid society of shape-shifting creatures whose God dictates that everyone has to maintain a certain shape. On Earth, the aliens are corrupted by our freedom when they see that we take so many different shapes. Sheckley’s story was anti-establishment and anti-conforming.

My point in mentioning all these stories is I feel like the conservatives have been sleeping with pods or have an alien riding on their backs. I feel this because they all seem to speak the same way. It’s kind of creepy to see political ads for Republicans because they all claim to toe the party line better than any other Republican. They all claim to hold the same beliefs. And their followers all repeat the same soundbites. I’m sure conservatives feel the same way about us liberals.

A couple days ago The New York Times ran a book review called “Where Have All the Liberals Gone?” The conservatives have made the term liberal such a dirty word that liberals are now calling themselves progressives. Conservatives have aligned themselves so tightly with Donald Trump that it reminds me of the fanatics who follow Putin and everything he says.

It makes me feel like the Kevin McCarthy character wondering when I will fall asleep and wake up a pod person. I no longer think of communism when I watch Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I think of everyone following one leader, one strong man’s view. If you look at history, the dangerous horrors of the past didn’t come from ideologies, but from single men pushing their view of reality onto everyone else.

I no longer understand what conservative or liberal philosophies means, even if they ever had a consistent description of their goals. I’m now thinking it’s always been individual men pushing their own philosophy onto other people. (I use the word men because I can’t think of any women dictators in history. I hope women won’t mind me being sexist in this instance.) That’s why Trump is so popular – people resonate and relate to him. He is their political philosophy, no matter how you label it.

I want a true democracy. But I don’t think it will ever work when winning is defined as a 50% majority. I think it needs to be at least 60%, and better yet, a winning majority should be defined at 75%. I want to live in a society where we work to compromise and create laws that attempt to make 100% of the population happy. It will always fail to reach 100% agreement, but if we could work out compromises where 60-75% of the population come to some kind of agreement, then I think we could escape our never-ending political polarization.

Right now we vote for our self-interests. And we vote for candidates that come closest to those self-interests. I have to accept that Trump is a beacon shining on what a lot of people want. But as long as half the country wants something different we’re going to have a miserable society.

When 50% is the finish line for any political agenda, we’re going to be ruled by pod people. I think real democracy begins when 75% of the population hammers out good compromises. I don’t think one politician with one point of view could ever find that many followers. Maybe we should move away from politicians and have referendums on everything. If we can’t find ways to get three-fourths of us to agree, then we should do anything.

It doesn’t matter which side of the political spectrum you live on, if we have minority rule, or even 50% majority rule, half the country will always feel they are living with pod people.

JWH

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