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Why Didn’t I Hear The Beatles in 1963?

by James Wallace Harris, 5/25/23

I’ve been playing The Beatles all this week and I noticed something that has me thinking about it a lot. The first two Beatles albums Please Please Me and With the Beatles came out in 1963 in the United Kingdom but I didn’t hear them until after February 9, 1964, when The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Obviously, some Americans heard Fab Four songs before then because there were mobs at the airport and 73 million people watched Ed’s show that night.

When do you remember first hearing the Beatles? I got interested in those dates because I was going to write an essay about what I remembered about The Beatles from 1964, but it bothered me I was recalling my 1964 but the tunes were from 1962 and 1963. America and England were out of sync by over a year.

Why hadn’t I heard the Beatles on the radio in 1963? Starting in 1962, I listened to Top 40 music several hours a day on WQAM and WFUN AM radio stations in Miami, so I should have heard The Beatles’ songs if they were released. I just don’t remember hearing them at all in 1963.

Love Me Do/P.S. I Love You” was released in England on October 5, 1962, but not until April 24, 1964, in the U.S., when it reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Beatlemania could have started in late 1962, or early 1963 — why didn’t it?

“Please Please Me/From Me To You” was the Beatles’ 2nd single in England, released on January 11, 1963. It reached #1 on the New Music Express and Melody Maker charts. “Please Please Me/Ask Me Why” was the first Beatles single released in the United States on February 25, 1963, but failed to chart. Some radio stations around the country played this single but it got no screaming fans and was forgotten. “Please Please Me” reached #35 in Chicago on March 8 on their local charts, and again on March 15, but disappeared after that.

“Please Please Me/From Me To You” was re-released in the U.S. on January 3, 1964, and made it to #3 on Billboard. Again, it was obvious that Americans loved the Beatles, but why did we wait until 1964 to love them? This makes me want to write an alternate history science fiction story about Beatlemania hitting America during Christmas of 1962. And it can’t be all Capitol’s fault.

Three more singles by the Beatles were released in the U.K. in 1963: “From Me To You/Thank You Girl” on 4/11/63, “She Loves You/I’ll Get You” on 8/23/63, and “I Want To Hold Your Hand/This” on 11/29/63. Did Americans visiting England bring back these singles and albums? Weren’t there any word-of-mouth from the jet setters?

According to Wikipedia, 34 songs were recorded by the Beatles in 1962 and 1963. Capitol turned down the opportunity to put them out, and a little label, Vee-Jay snapped up the rights. Vee-Jay planned to release Introducing… The Beatles, a repackaged of the UK album Please Please Me in July of 1963, but Vee-Jay didn’t get it out until January 10, 1964. Then Beatlemania hit and Capitol took back the rights.

Theoretically, I could have heard some of the Beatles songs in 1963 on WQAM or WFUN in Miami, but I don’t think so. What if Beatlemania had arrived a year earlier? Would that have launched The Sixties sooner? The 1960s up until the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, never felt like the legendary times we call The Sixties. 1960 to 1963 felt like the 1950s.

The Sixties, at least to me, began when The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan. Seeing them that night felt like Dorothy opening the door in The Wizard of Oz when the film went from black and white to Technicolor. The magic of the Sixties ended for me with Charles Manson and Altamont. In 1970, The Beatles broke up, my father died, and I moved from Miami to Memphis. That’s when I felt The Seventies began.

I was going to write an essay comparing The Beatles’ first two albums against their competition. In America, our first two Beatles albums in 1964 were a mixture of songs from the UK 1963 albums and 1962-1963 singles plus some cuts from the third and fourth British Beatles albums recorded in 1964. It’s all rather confusing if I wanted to understand music as a product of its times.

Here’s an overview of what The Beatles were doing in 1963. As they were writing those songs, or doing covers of American songs, it was 1963. But they made a social and psychological impact on us in 1964. That delay fascinates me.

This week I played all the Beatles albums from Please Please Me (UK 1963) to The Beatles (White Album) (UK/US 1968). I can play all the albums through Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) over and over and did this week. All the songs appeal to me. Each album was a unique masterpiece. Things completely fell apart with The Beatles (White Album). (George Martin and others thought it should have been a single album. I agree completely. The White album feels like a single album with a bunch of outtakes and demos.)

Even though I loved all those Beatles albums through 1967, I’ve only put a few of their songs on my Top 1000 playlist on Spotify. I’ve been wondering why for a long time. I want to compare The Beatles’ songs to the hits that came out at the same time that I love better. But when I saw the dates when the first two albums came out were from 1963, I wondered if should I compare those songs to songs coming out in 1964 when I first heard those Beatles songs, or to songs that were coming out in 1963 when The Beatles recorded their songs?

As I listened to the Beatles’ albums this week it was obvious with each album John, Paul, George, and Ringo progressed in creative sophistication. But then so did pop hits each year. In America, those 1964 Beatles releases stomped the 1964 American releases. But shouldn’t they be compared to 1963 songs?

Finally, could I have heard some Beatles songs in 1963 and they just made no impact on me? Did it take Beatlesmania to get us to love The Beatles? And could the reason I put so few of their songs on my Top 1000 playlist is because Beatlesmania and The Sixties ended in 1969?

JWH

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Can AI Read Minds?

by James Wallace Harris, 5/24/23

We’ve known for a long time that we can’t trust what we read. And now with AI-generated art, we must suspect every photo and video we see. I’m even suspicious when the news comes from a scientific journal.

Recent reports claim that AI programs using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans can generate text, images, and even videos. In other words, it appears that AI can read our minds. See the paper: “Cinematic Mindscapes: High-quality Video Reconstruction from Brain Activity” by Zijiao Chen, Jiaxin Qing, and Juan Helen Zhou. Even though this is a scientific paper it is readable if you aren’t a scientist, however it is dense and leaves out a lot I would like to know. I hope they make an episode of NOVA on PBS about it because I would love to see how this experiment was done step-by-step.

The press is claiming this means AI technology can read our minds. I’m thinking this is a magic trick and I want to figure out how it works.

I find this tremendously hard to believe that AI will be able to read our minds. fMRI scans measure blood flow or blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) readings. They look like this:

I just don’t believe there’s enough information in such images to generate an image of what’s in a person’s mind’s eye. However, I thought about how it might be possible to get the results described in this experiment.

These scientists showed photos or videos to people while being scanned by an fMRI machine. They used AI to analyze the scans and then another AI program, Stable Diffusion, to generate pictures and videos that visually interpret what the first AI program said about the scans.

An analogy is sound recordings to vinyl records. Sound is captured with a microphone and is converted to grooves on a record. Then a record player plays the record and the groves are converted back into sound. If you look at this photo of the grooves in a record it’s hard to imagine it could reproduce The Beatles or Beethoven but they can.

Should we really believe that we can invent a machine that decodes the coding in our brains? For such a machine to work we have to assume our brains are like analog recording devices and not digital. That seems logical. Okay, I can buy that. What I can’t believe is there’s enough information in the fMRI scans to decode. They seem too crude. When we look at a smiling dog and create an image of it in our head, that mental image can have far more details than the patterns we see in the blood flow in our brains. I don’t think they are like the grooves in a record.

What scientists do is show people a picture of a cat, then take a snapshot of the brain’s blood flow pattern. Then they claim their AI program can look at that pattern and know that it’s a cat. Where’s the Rosetta Stone?

I can believe researchers could take ten objects and create 10 fMRI scans and tell a computer what the subject was looking at when scanned. And then test an AI program by taking new scans and having it match up the new scans against the old. But in the above paper, they are claiming they took a series of scans (every 2 seconds) that could generate a video of the movement of a cat’s head. In other words, the fMRI scans give enough information for the subject to have different blood flow patterns depending on the position of the cat’s head.

Even if they perfected this technique it will depend on building a dictionary of fMRI patterns and meanings for every individual. I seriously doubt there’s an engineering standard that works on all humans. Everyone’s brain is different. For an AI to read your brain your brain would have had to be scanned thoroughly and documented. If we showed the same cat photo to a million people, would the fMRI patterns even look close even in a subset of those people? My guess is it will look different for everyone.

The scientists who wrote “Cinematic Mindscapes” used a library of publically available datasets, that included fMRI scans that included 600,000 segments. No matter how much I reread their methodology, I couldn’t understand what they actually did. Since I’ve worked with Midjourney I know how hard it is to get an AI art program to generate a specific image, I’m not sure how they fed Stable Diffusion to get it to generate imagines. If you look at all the examples, it reminds me of how I kept trying to get Midjourney to generate what I visualized in my mind but it always coming up with something different, but maybe close.

My conclusion is AI can’t read minds. But AI can tell the difference between different brain scans which were created with known prompts and get an AI program to generate something similar. But I never could figure out what the prompts were for the Stable Diffusion.

AI programs train on datasets. If the dataset is built from stimulus photos and fMRI scans, how is that any different than training them on photos and text labels. For example. Photo of a smiling dog with the text “smiling dog” and photo of a smiling dog with fMRI scan. If you gave Stable Diffusion the text “smiling dog” it would generate a picture of what it’s learned to be as a smiling dog from thousands of pictures of dogs. Giving the digital data from an fMRI trained the same way Stable Diffusion would produce images of a smiling dog but one it’s learned from training, not the one in the subject’s mind.

Previous fMRI research has shown they can link BOLD patterns with words.

This is not mind reading in the way we normally imagine mind reading. Isn’t it akin to sign language by having the subject’s blood flow patterns make the signs? Real mind reading would be seeing the same smiling dog as the subject saw, and not agreeing on a sign for a smiling dog.

What’s happening here is we’re learning that blood flow in the brain makes patterns and to a degree, we can label them with words or pictures or digital data, but it’s still language translation.

If I say smiling dog to you right now, you can picture a smiling dog, but it won’t be the smiling dog I’m picturing. AI art is based on generalizations about language definitions and translations.

Do we say it’s mind reading if I pictured a smiling dog in my head and then prompted Midjourney with the test: “smiling dog” and it produce a picture of what it thinks is a smiling dog? Sure, my mental image might be of a black pug and Midjourney might produce a black border collie. Close enough. Impressive even. But isn’t it what we do every day with language? We’ve all built a library of images that go with words and concepts, but they aren’t the same as every other person’s library. Language only gets us approximations.

Real mind reading would be if an AI saw exactly what was in my mind.

JWH

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Developing a Healthy News Diet

by James Wallace Harris, 5/21/23

Michael Pollan created a small book about eating healthy called Food Rules. As an analogy, I’d like to create a set of sensible rules about consuming the news. Pollan distilled his list of rules down to three simple sentences, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” but it really takes reading his book to understand that mantra.

What I would like to do is develop a similar simple mantra about my daily news consumption but I’ll have to work out the details first. Pollan emphasized eating whole foods rather than processed foods. Is there such a thing as whole unprocessed news? “Not too much” is an obvious target since we obviously consume too much news. Finding an analogy for “mostly plants” will be interesting.

What would be the equivalent of nutritious news? Experience has taught me that some news is unhealthy, and I often get news indigestion. I also admit I’m bloated and overweight from too much news consumption.

Like whole food and junk food, we prefer junk news over whole news. I spend several hours a day nibbling on news from many sources. Most of which is forgotten immediately. I wonder if my first rule should be:

#1 – Ignore easily forgettable news

We’re used to clicking on anything that catches our fancy while idling away moments on our smartphones. Essentially, this kind of news is gossip and titillation. Basically, we’re bored or restless. We should use that time in better ways, especially if it exercises our minds. Read real news instead. Or, do something active. Playing games, listening to music, or audiobooks, is more nutritious than never-ending bites of clickbait.

Everyone bitches about information overload but who does anything about it? I’ve learned from intermittent fasting that my body appreciates having a good rest each day from eating. I believe I need to apply the same idea to news consumption.

#2 – Limit your hours consuming the news

I find 16:8 fasting works well for eating. I’m thinking of a 22:2 fast for news is what I’m going to aim for at the moment. Two hours of news consumption a day might sound like a lot, but if you add up all the forms of news I consume including television, magazines, online newspapers, YouTube, and news feeds, RSS feeds, I can easily go beyond two hours.

We should also separate news from learning and entertainment. Learning something new could be considered a form of news. I’m not going to count educational pursuits in my news time. And if you enjoy reading nonfiction books or watching documentaries on TV, that shouldn’t count as news either. However, shows like 60 Minutes, CBS Sunday Morning, and The Today Show can be considered informative entertainment news. Some people just prefer news shows for fun rather than watching fictional shows. I’m not sure if they should count or not.

What we really want is to stay informed about the world so that we interact with reality wisely. Humans have an extremely difficult time processing information. We think we’re far smarter than we are. We constantly delude ourselves. And we think our opinions matter when 99.999% of the time they don’t. Most people think they are experts on countless topics after having consumed just a few hours of news. They think they know better than real experts who have put tens of thousands of hours into studying their specialty.

#3 – Stop assuming you know anything

I believe the real key to understanding the news is being able to tell the difference between opinion and significant data. The real goal of news consumption should be finding the best data, and that means getting into statistics.

Unfortunately, the news industry is overwhelmed with talking heads. Everyone wants to be an expert, and all too often most news consumers tend to latch onto self-appointed experts they like. News has become more like a virus than information processing.

I read and watch a lot of columnists and programs about computers, stereo equipment, and other gadgets. Most are based on personal impressions of equipment individuals have bought or been loaned from manufacturers. These tech gurus are a good analogy for what I’m talking about. Most of the news we take in daily is from individuals processing limited amounts of information and giving us their opinion. What we really want is Consumer Reports, Rtings, or the Wirecutter, where large amounts of data are gathered from a variety of sources, and statistically analyzed.

This is just a start on designing my news diet. I want to keep current on a long list of topics, but that’s like learning about all the vitamins and nutrients my body needs. News nutrition will be a vastly more complicated topic. What are the essential vitamins I need every day? Is it politics, national and international affairs, economics, crime, immigration, ecology, etc?

Do I need to know about everything? Is that what an informed citizen needs to do? Take immigration. Is anything I think about immigration affects the situation at the border? Does voting liberal or conservative even affect anything at the border? I can barely maintain order in my house, why should I believe I can organize all of reality on Earth? Maybe my last two rules should be:

#4 – Know my limitations

#5 – Pursue the news I can actually use

Like nutrition, news is a complicated subject that’s hard to understand and can easily confuse.

JWH

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The Emerging Mindset of Not Owning Movies

by James Wallace Harris, May 5, 2023

Ideas for this essay began when my Blu-ray player died. I got on Amazon to buy a new one, and then I asked myself: When was the last time I viewed a movie or TV show from a disc? When was the last time I bought one? I went and looked through our bookcase which has five shelves of DVDs and Blu-rays. Most have not been played in years, and some have never been played or even opened. I bought them because wanted to own them.

I realized that owning movies has a mindset. I’m trying to decide if I need to change that mindset.

This essay isn’t aimed at film fans who actually collect movies with a purpose. Nor is it about minimalism and getting rid of stuff. What I’m talking about is how buying movies changed us. We had one pop culture mindset before VHS tapes and DVDs, another afterward, and an even newer mindset is emerging with streaming. And those mindsets say something about our individual psychology.

Before the advent of the VCR, the main way to see a movie was when it was at the theater or rerun on television. If you wanted to see a specific film you might have to wait years. I used to go to science fiction conventions and one of their highlights was the film room where they’d run classic science fiction movies all weekend. There were also film clubs and festivals, but those were for serious film buffs. And a few people, usually rich ones, collected movies on film.

For the most part, people didn’t own movies and they had a mindset about how they watched movies. Starting in the 1980s, the VCR became popular. This created two industries – selling movies on tape, and tape rental stores. That’s when people really got into owning their favorite films and a new mindset emerged.

It changed society. Not everyone collected movies, but it was pretty common. Then came the DVD and it caused even more people to want to own movies. Most people just rented films and Blockbuster became part of popular culture too. Still, a fair percentage of people wanted to own movies.

Now we have streaming. Streaming has killed the movie rental store. A few still exist, but that way of life is now dead. And I think a lot of people have stopped buying movies on DVDs, Blu-ray, and 4k. Diehard fans still collect, but ordinary people have stopped.

Susan and I bought a lot of films on DVD and Blu-ray over the years. A few years ago we gave bags of them away to friends and the library. But we kept one bookcase of our favorites. Now I’m wondering if we even need to keep those.

Whenever I want to see a specific movie I can usually find it streaming on one of the subscriptions I already own, or on one of the free streaming services that use ads. Or I’ll rent it on Amazon. And if JustWatch can’t locate what I want, I’ll check YouTube, and pretty often, those forgotten films are usually there. It’s extremely rare that I can’t find a movie on the net.

For decades I believed if I really wanted to see a movie that wasn’t easily available I had to buy it. And it annoyed me when there was something I wanted to see and it wasn’t streaming or for sale. There’s a psychological component to that, maybe not a good one.

For the past few years, the only time I bought a movie or TV show on DVD/BD was because I couldn’t get it anywhere else. And most of those shows were oddities that I could have easily gone without seeing. Still, it’s weird of me to go to such lengths to acquire something I wanted on a whim.

But I’m also thinking about something else. Why do I feel I should see a specific film or television show when I want to? It’s because, in the 1980s and 1990s, we took on the mindset we could own movies and television shows. Previously, the mindset was movies and television shows were ephemeral. That fate would present us with what we needed to see. Owning is a mindset that says we can control reality.

Streaming presents a new mindset. What is the new mindset it creates? Is it one of a library in the cloud? A universal library? Well, actually, it’s a bunch of libraries in the cloud with different fees and requirements to use them. For music, I depend on Spotify, it is an almost universal library of songs and albums. Subscribing to a combination of three to six subscription services like Netflix, HBO Max, Apple TV, Hulu, etc. will get you a library of thousands of movies and television shows. Apple News+ gets me access to hundreds of magazines. Scribd and Kindle Unlimited get me access to countless books and audiobooks.

The trouble with this new mindset is you have to maintain lots of subscriptions. Subscribing to a bunch of services gives the illusion of owning a giant library. And I think that’s why I subscribe to so many services. It gives me the illusion I own all these movies, television shows, albums, books, audiobooks, etc. But do I even need to feel like I own a library?

I do have some friends who have tremendous discipline and only subscribe to one movie/TV streaming service at a time. Their mindset is different. My mindset is to pretend I own the Library of Congress. Their mindset is to enjoy everything at a branch library before switching to another branch library.

But I’ve been thinking about the mindset I had back in the 1960s when I watched movies and TV shows based mostly on serendipity. Back then, when I wanted to see a movie, we looked at the movie section in the paper and picked out something to see. Or we turned on the TV when we wanted to watch TV and flipped through the channels till we settled on something. I didn’t try to find something very specific or seek the very best of the best of all time. I had a small selection and picked whatever struck my mood at the moment. I didn’t read reviews, check ratings, or study books. I accepted what reality offered.

In 2023 I usually have a target in mind and go looking for it. I’d read about what others are watching and recommending, and decide that’s what I want to see. My friend Linda recommended The Diplomat, and I rejoined Netflix to watch it. It’s not like I didn’t already have thousands of shows and films to see on Prime, Hulu, BritBox, AppleTV, and Peacock.

Susan hates when we have company and we all decide to watch a movie together. The act of deciding what to watch drives her up the walls. And often our guests get frustrated too because there are so many choices and we’ve all developed highly individual tastes. Back in the old days, people were more willing to watch whatever was on with each other. Owning movies I think changed us all.

We all became aficionados of exactly what we loved. We all conditioned ourselves to seek out movies that pushed our own unique emotional buttons. We moved away from going with the flow. Owning movies changed us. It conditioned us to specialize and be picky. It made us want to watch exactly what we wanted to watch.

Oh, I’m sure millions of people subscribe to Netflix and when they want to watch something click it on and then scroll around until they find something to watch. They never got conditioned to seek something specific. I did. I didn’t collect to complete a collection. I bought movies because I wanted to be able to watch what I wanted when I wanted. Streaming does a better job of getting me what I want, when I want, without owning it.

However, I’m now asking myself is that good? What if the mindset we had back in the 1960s was actually better for us psychologically? Both owning and streaming fulfill our desire to control reality. What if going with the flow isn’t a better way? That would be more like Eastern philosophy.

I am not a hoarder, not as people see them on TV. But when it comes to books and movies, I guess I was. Owning a library of anything is a kind of specialized hoarding. There’s a psychology behind that. I’m wondering if late in life, at 71, I shouldn’t alter that psychology.

JWH

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Cats Make Strange Bedfellows

I have to sleep in a recliner because of my bad back. That means my cats only have one lap available from midnight until morning. My wife sleeps in the bed on her side which Lily and Ozzy find unacceptable. During the day, the cats choose between our two laps. If we’re sitting, we often have a cat in our lap.

Usually, I have one cat sleeping on me and sometimes it’s two. It’s not always fun, but if I try to lock them out of the bedroom they scratch at the door all night and bitterly complain in their language.

Cats are big on routines but I haven’t figured out how they divide up the time on my lap. Sometimes Lily hops on me as I’m going to sleep but Ozzy is there when I wake up to go to the bathroom. Sometimes it’s the reverse. Sometimes I fall asleep alone but wake up with a cat, or two.

It’s a unique emotion to regain consciousness to the sound of a retching cat knowing you have seconds to get an exploding feline to the floor. And nothing brings you back to consciousness quicker than an 18-pound cat doing a four-point landing just below the belt. Well, maybe when an 18-pound cat springs off of two legs while sitting just below your belt. Ozzy has some powerful hind legs.

I don’t know why my furry friends love sleeping on me at night. I’m an old man and need to pee several times a night. That means I have to wake them up and tell them they have to get off each time. You’d think that would annoy them enough to break the habit.

Getting up to drain my shrunken overactive bladder has evolved into quite a nocturnal ritual with me, Lily, and Ozzy. That ritual has been slowly refined over the last four years.

I wake up and tell the cat(s) they need to wake up and get off the lap. They step over to the table on the right side of my bed. I then pull off the blanket and put it on a chair that’s on the left side of my recliner. Then I pull the first pillow out from underneath my legs and pile it on the blanket. Then I pull out the second pillow and balance it on the first pillow. I’m careful to not let the stack fall to the floor because I hate looking for that stuff in the dark. Then I reach inside my pajama bottoms and pull out a small blue melamine plastic colander I use to protect the family jewels and set it on the table to my right. I then get up and walk five paces to the bathroom. I turn on a small light and log the time. Then I turn off the light. (You don’t want to know.) I do my business sitting down in the dark and then walk back to my recliner. I have to check to see if a cat hasn’t gone to sleep in the warm spot because if I sat on a cat it might kill it or the cat might claw the hell out of my ass in the dark and that would really wake me up. I try to never become fully awake.

Once I’m sure the seat is clear of cats I sit back down. I put my ball protector back in place, then put the first pillow under my legs, then the next, then I grab the blanket and feel all the edges until I find the short side. I throw the short side over my legs and catch the edge under my feet to hold in the warmth. Then I say out loud, “Pile on” and the cats will ignore me. Most times I immediately fall asleep and don’t feel them regaining their position. However, Ozzy always takes longer, and sometimes I feel Lily jump into his place first. So Ozzy walks around on me for a while trying to annoy Lily and tramples my crotch. This is why I’ve learned I need to ball protector.

As I said, I don’t understand their routine because it feels entirely random. However, I sometimes wonder if they haven’t set up a timetable. I should start logging that to see if I can’t detect an intelligence behind the way they take turns sleeping on me.

Usually, one cat sleeps on me at a time, and often for the whole night, no matter how many times I have to get up to pee. I wonder how they divide up the nights. Some nights it’s Ozzy other nights it’s Lilly. But every once in a while, Ozzy starts the night and Lily finishes it. Or vice versa. And then there are nights they are both determined to sleep on me.

They both want the space between my legs closest to my crotch. I think I’m going to go bowlegged sleeping with cats. If Ozzy gets the favorite spot first, Lily will sleep in the space between my legs below my knees. Ozzy won’t take that space though. First, he’ll try to sleep on top of Lily to make her mad. Sometimes this will piss her off and she’ll run away. Sometimes she digs in and just lets Ozzy bury her.

Evidently, Ozzy doesn’t find sleeping on Lily comfortable, so if he doesn’t run her off, he gets up and walks around my lap until he finds a comfortable position. This is where the plastic colander is essential. (It used to be a plastic storage bowl, but I discovered condensation in it and realized my genitals need both protection and air. Is this TMI?)

A lot can happen at night. A bird or squirrel (burglar?) outside the window will bring both cats instantly awake and sometimes their alert claws wake me. Sometimes they’ll spend thirty minutes grooming. When they are both piled on me and grooming, the different jostling patterns demand all my attention. Another annoying habit is gnawing their claws and trying to pull off a layer of claw. This creates a snapping motion and makes an irritating sound. And I’ve already mentioned the in-the-dark puking. Early in the morning, I often come awake with a cat in my face. I think smelling my face says, “Get up and feed me, you big bastard.”

I just go to bed (chair) just before midnight. Last night I got up to pee at 12:24, 12:44, 1:41, 4:44, and 6:43. And that’s a fantastic night for me. I haven’t slept for three hours in years. But there’s a chance I didn’t log a pee – that sometimes happens. I also took a pain pill, and that sometimes lets me sleep longer.

I had both cats all night last night, so for those five times, this routine was repeated:

  • wake up cats and get them off me
  • stow the blanket
  • stow pillow one
  • stow pillow two
  • stow the ball protector
  • lower the footrest
  • walk to bathroom
  • log the time
  • pee
  • return to chair
  • check for cats
  • recline
  • position pillow one
  • position pillow two
  • position the ball protector
  • find the edge of the blanket
  • recover my body so everything is warm and comfortable
  • tell the cats to “pile on”
  • fall asleep

It’s amazing how fast I can fall asleep. Sometimes I can fall asleep before the cats resettle themselves. And I dream. Boy, do I dream! Getting up so frequently in the night is a great way to interrupt dreams. I think about the dreams while I pee. I’m always impressed with the creativity of my unconscious mind. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the dreams or my thoughts the next day.

JWH

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“Created by Humans” vs. “Created by AI”

by James Wallace Harris, 4/22/23

The first video I watched on YouTube this morning was “How to create a children’s storybook using ChatGPT and Midjourney AI for Amazon KDP Start to Finish.” eLibrary1 explains how she creates children’s books using AI tools.

It’s actually quite fascinating. She gets ChatGPT to suggest a series of ideas and then asks ChatGPT to write up 500-word versions of the ideas she likes. Then she tests those stories against an AI checker to show how they can be easily detected as AI-created. Then she runs the stories through another program that rewrites her stories. After that, she checks again and shows how the AI detector shows they are now human-written. Then she runs them through a plagiarizer detector to make sure they won’t be rejected for that reason. After she’s sure she’s got something good to work with she submits the stories scene by scene to Midjourney to have it create the artwork.

As I watched this video I thought about how so many people are concerned with seeing “Made in America” tags on the products they buy. I wondered if people in the future will look for “Made by Humans” or “Created by Humans” tags?

My initial reaction was I wouldn’t want to read a book that eLibrary1 created. I would feel cheated. I expect art and fiction to be produced by artists that suffered for their art. But then I thought, what if the story and pictures were better than what people produce? I’m already seeing artwork produced by AI that blows me away.

Just scroll down for a while in Midjourney’s Community Showcase.

Or look at Latest Works at Art AI Gallery.

The range of what’s possible is tremendous. But then, it’s all been inspired by art created by humans. Is AI art actually creative work? Well, humans don’t create artwork out of nothing either. They have a lifetime of being inspired by other artists.

Let’s ignore this philosophical question for a moment. Let’s go back to the old idea of people “liking what they see” as a test of quality. I love visiting art galleries. I love looking at graphic art in magazines. I love looking at art books. I often buy books for their covers. And I have collected thousands of science fiction magazines, both in physical format and digital scans (but mostly digital). The reason I love them so much is because of their covers.

I’ve got to admit that AI-generated art presses the same exact buttons as art produced by humans. I have not read fiction written by AI writers, but what if I love their stories as much as I like AI art? To be honest, I believe I have a stronger psychological desire for fiction to be human-generated. What happens to that feeling if I read an AI-written novel that I like more than all my favorite human-written novels?

What I’m feeling right now is the desire to tune out the AI world. To retreat into the past, and savor the art and fiction created before the 21st century. That I want to become a modern Luddite that rejects AI machinery. But what will I be missing out on?

What if machines can take our imaginations further? Isn’t that why I’ve been a lifelong science fiction reader? Isn’t that why I took psychedelic drugs in the 1960s? Isn’t that why we admire the greatest of human thinkers?

Maybe I want to run away because I’m old and tired. One of the main enjoyments of getting old and putting up with the pains of aging is seeing how events unfold. So, why turn away now?

JWH

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Jim and Susan’s TV Watching Update

by James Wallace Harris, 4/21/23

Back in December, I wrote about how Susan and I needed a new TV show to binge on. We were wrapping up Downton Abby having rewatched it from the first to the last episode and the two movies. I asked for recommendations and figured I might update that post and let y’all know what we ended up watching.

Here are the series we’ve binged on so far, watching two episodes a night starting at 9 pm.

Time Period Series
1912-1926Downton Abby
1903-1930Upstairs, Downstairs (1971)
1936-1939Upstairs, Downstairs (2010)
1937-1953All Creatures Great and Small (1978)
1938-1939All Creatures Great and Small (2020)

We tried Northern Exposure but it didn’t hook us. I guess we weren’t ready to leave England because we ended up watching Upstairs, Downstairs – both the 1971 and 2010 versions. It wasn’t nearly as good as Downton Abby but we got so we liked it well enough. The contrast in TV production in the 1970s and 2010s was striking. Upstairs, Downstairs (1971) never had elaborate sets, and the costumes weren’t as elegant either. The storytelling in the older show was simple too. Most of the early 1970s episodes only featured one plot line, whereas Downton Abby and Upstairs, Downstairs (2010) switched between several. That’s something that become standard in 21st-century television.

All three shows had an ensemble cast, but Downton Abby’s was much larger. Plus, Downton Abby had lots of exterior shots, which made the period setting far more realistic and enjoyable. The newer Upstairs, Downstairs was quite well done, it just didn’t last long enough for us to get attached to the show.

After Upstairs, Downstairs (2010) we started watching both the new and old versions of All Creatures Great and Small. We watched one episode of each starting at 9pm. This was fascinating for about ten days seeing how they each presented the same material from the book. Episodes of the 1970s All Creatures Great and Small tended to be choppy and episodic, often jumping days between scenes.

The newer show made each episode a solid coherent story. But this meant they’d stretch out some anecdotes from the book and skimp quickly over others. Overall, the storytelling, production, and cinematography were superior in the new version. Of course, widescreen high-definition made a huge difference too. On the other hand, I think we liked the characters better in the older show, although we like both sets of actors a lot. However, I was slightly more taken with the newer Helen. Susan, I think liked the looks of the newer actors, but found the characters in the older show more developed.

After ten days of this dual viewing, we switched to just watching the newest version to finish it off and focused on the old version. All Creatures Great and Small ran for three seasons in the late 1970s and then stopped around 1980. It had 90-minute one-shot Christmas specials in 1983 and 1985. Then in 1988 it started back up and ran another four seasons. The first three seasons covered 1937-1939. The fourth season picked up again in 1949 and the story ended in 1953. The first three seasons of the new show covered 1937-1939. I don’t know if there will be more or not.

We watched Upstairs, Downstairs – and the older version of All Creatures Great and Small on Britbox.

Again, a contrast between TV production in the 1970s and 2020s. Of course, in this show, the exterior shots were important in both productions. I’ve got to say, the old series seems to have spent far more time on the gritty details of being a large animal vet. We see all kinds of animals being born, often with Herriot’s or Farnon’s arm up to their shoulder in a cow’s vagina. And these scenes look very realistic. So realistic I have to wonder if they weren’t assisting in real animal births. They did fake it in the new series, but it’s hard to find out information about the making of the original series. That’s because Google only wants to show me articles about the new series.

I did find this one article that suggests the older version did work with real animals, and the actors did have their arms inside cows. What dedication to method acting. (If you know of any links that describe the details of how they produced these scenes in the older show, leave a comment.)

Now that we’ve finished the 91 episodes of the old version of All Creatures Great and Small, we’ve started rewatching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel so we can be well prepared to view the final season, season 5 which is appearing weekly now. We want to time things so we finish season 4 when all the episodes of season 5 have been released.

Last night, it occurred to me this is our first show set in America. I think we’ve both seen the Mrs. Maisel series twice, but not by watching it together. Susan was working out of town for its first three seasons and I watched it with different friends.

Susan and I have come to really enjoy our 9pm to 11pm TV time. Looking at the shows and the time periods they cover suggests that Susan and I share a love of period stories that feature a large cast centered around a family or family-like structure. We’ve never been into mysteries, thrillers, or cop shows.

It’s a shame that’s not our only TV viewing. It would be great if we were busy and active with other hobbies and only spent two hours a day on television.

However, we’re both TV addicts, and we watch a lot of television that the other doesn’t like by ourselves. Susan in the living room, me in the den. That means we subscribe to a bunch of TV services, all of which are raising their prices. We probably spent less money before we cut the cord on cable. When we had one TV using one cable box, we watched a lot more TV together. I think it was the invention of the DVR that started us watching shows separately.

I prefer watching TV with somebody else. That’s how I grew up. TV was a family social activity. Of course, we only had one TV, and if you wanted to watch it, you generally had to watch it with others. I’d also go to school and talk about the TV I watched with my family with my friends at school, making it even more social. In the 1950s and 1960s there just weren’t that many shows to talk about, so most everyone was familiar with what was shown on TV. Nowadays, TV watching has become almost a solitary activity as masturbation. Plus, there are hundreds of choices customized for every taste that divide us. I think that’s kind of weird.

JWH

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Are You An Old Man Listening to Music By Yourself?

by James Wallace Harris, 4/10/23

None of my fellow Baby Boomers want to sit and listen to music with me anymore. What happened to y’all? When did you guys stop listening to music? I’ve read articles about how most people stopped listening to new music sometimes in their thirties — but when did you stop listening to the old music you love too? And by listening, I mean sitting down and listening with the same devoted attention you give a movie at the theater?

Sure, y’all will put Pandora on in the background sometimes. Or randomly listen to a playlist of the 37 tunes you bought on iTunes for your iPhone. And you might still get a kick out of seeing geezers from the past perform live. But when was the last time you bought a new album and just sat and listened to it? And when was the last time you sat and listened to an album with a friend?

Rock music defined the 1960s and 1970s pop culture. Most of y’all gave up on music after that. I was still crazy about music in the 1980s and 1990s. But I have to admit, it’s been harder to feed by habit in the 21st century. I mostly rely on old music now. (There are exceptions like Adele and Kings of Leon.)

My feelings are hurt that my wife and none of my friends no longer want to share music with me. The only people I know who still listen to music like me are guys I read about online or watch on YouTube.

The other day I was watching a YouTuber film at a trade show for audiophile equipment and I noticed something very interesting. The halls of this convention center were filled only with men, mostly middle-aged or older men. I watched carefully trying to spot a female in the crowd as the YouTuber visited one booth or dealer room after another. Didn’t see one female. But lots of grey beards and bald spots.

My wife and her friends still love going to concerts. Just the weekend before last, they went to see Journey and Toto at the FedEx Forum. She and her friends will spend big bucks to see ancient rock dinosaurs roam the Earth again. They’ll even travel hundreds of miles to see their favorite blasts from the past. But she doesn’t listen to the old albums from these same groups. Before she went to see Chicago I asked her if she’d like to listen to some Chicago albums with me. She just said, no.

I don’t like live concerts anymore. I saw Chicago when they were touring with their first album. I bought that first album the week it came out because it was a mysterious double LP with a Priced Right sticker that just intrigued me. It blew my leather sandals off.

Back then I haunted record stories, going to several each week. By the time I started college, I had 300 LPs in my collection.

When I blog about music I get a damn few hits. When I try to talk about music I’m excited about, I can tell I’m boring my friends. I know there are people who still love listening to music because of all the audiophile YouTubers. I’m especially amazed at younger guys who love and know so much about music from the 1960s and 1970s. Wait, I just remembered, there is one female record collector who produces videos for YouTube (Melinda Murphy). What a lucky guy her husband must be — assuming he enjoys sitting around listening to records with her.

I’m learning that as we get older we retreat into ourselves. Is that because we all have uniquely favorite things we like to do which seldom overlap with our friends? I consider myself damn lucky to have two friends who read science fiction.

My wife and friends love spending time with things I don’t enjoy anymore. I wonder if Susan’s feelings are hurt that I don’t watch sitcoms with her anymore. When we first got married we watched several each night together. I’ve lost my taste for them. So while she’s watching M.A.S.H., The Andy Griffiths Show, or Friends by herself in the living room, I’m listening to Buffalo Springfield or The Byrds by myself in the den.

So, are you an old guy who sits by himself listening to music?

(I’ve spent a fair bit of time dredging through old memories and I realize that I only knew a handful of people who would sit around a listen to music with me. I guess I’m wanting something that never happened much anymore. Mostly I listened to music with friends before I got married, and it usually involved getting high. Early in our married life, Susan would go record shopping with me, and even listen to what I bought afterward. I remember when I married Susan, she had a box of about 40 LPs, many of which I liked, and that impressed me. She even bought a few albums over the years and listened to them sometimes, sometimes by herself. We went to a lot of concerts together. But she slowly stopped buying CDs – except for The Foo Fighters. Now she listens to Spotify, but only rarely.)

JWH

[picture above was generated by Midjourney. The AI has a weird idea about stereo systems.]

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Come Back in September by Darryl Pinckney

by James Wallace Harris, 3/31/23

I nominated Come Back in September by Darryl Pinckney for my nonfiction book club because it was on some best-books-of-the-year lists at the end of 2022, and because it was about creative writing and literary people from the 1970s and 1980s. The book club members voted it in and Come Back in September was our March 2023 read.

However, I don’t think I can say, “Rush out and buy it.” It won’t be a bestseller, but I’d highly recommend it for a specific audience. If you have any of these qualities, you should read more of what I’ve got to say about the book below:

  • Your twenties and thirties took place in the 1970s and 1980s
  • You enjoy reading memoirs and autobiographies
  • You majored in English
  • You’ve taken or taught creative writing courses
  • You enjoy reading and writing poetry
  • You’re fascinated by the New York literary scene of the 1970 and 1980s
  • You love The New York Review of Books
  • You know about Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein
  • You’re interested in Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, and Susan Sontag
  • You get a kick out of books with lots of name-dropping and gossip
  • You’re interested in punk rock from the 1970s and 1980s
  • You’re interested in black literature and writers
  • You’re interested in feminist writers of the 1970s and 1980s
  • You want to know about AIDs in New York in the 1980s
  • You can handle terse prose that is detailed and highly episodic

Come Back in September is mostly about Darryl Pinckney and Elizabeth Hardwick, two people who were completely unknown to me. Both have achieved a certain level of success in the literary world, especially in New York City, but are far from famous.

Even though Pinckney dedicated Come Back in September to the memory of Barbara Epstein, I feel the book is mainly about Elizabeth Hardwick – she is pictured on the cover. Epstein and her husband Robert B. Silvers, along with Hardwick were the founders of The New York Review of Books. Epstein and Silvers coedited the magazine from 1963 to 2006 when Epstein died, and Silvers was the sole editor until 2017 when he died.

Elizabeth Hardwick was Pinckney’s writing teacher and mentor. She also hired him as an assistant and helper. They became personal friends. Evidently, through that connection, Pinckney got a job working in the mailroom at The New York Review of Books and getting to know Epstein and Silvers. Much of this memoir is about his life at the magazine in the 1970s and 1980s. If you are a fan of The New York Review of Books, then I recommend Come Back in September. Pinckney went from mailroom clerk to typist to substitute assistant to reviewer, writer, and I believe even doing some editing.

Pinckney was born in 1953, making him two years younger than I am, but still very relatable in age. He accomplished goals I only fantasized about achieving. Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) was born the same year as my mother and died the same year as my mother too. So, I pictured Pinckney throughout his memoir as interacting with a woman my mother’s age. I tried picturing my mother, a white woman born in rural Mississippi, befriending a gay black man. She wouldn’t have been prejudiced against him, and I’m positive she would have loved the attention that Pinckney gave Hardwick. She would have considered him a much better son than me.

Most of the memories in the book are divided between Pinckney’s life with friends and family, and his life with the literary crowd, and most of those seem to deal with Hardwick. So, why does he dedicate the book to Barbara Epstein? Maybe she helped his career more because of her position.

While reading Come Back in September I kept thinking about all the things I was doing the same years while Pinckney was writing about them.

Pinckney first met Elizabeth Hardwick in 1973 and he opens his memoir with:

I made Elizabeth Hardwick laugh when I applied late to get into her creative writing class at Barnard College in the autumn of 1973. Not only could I, a black guy from Columbia across the street, rattle off a couple of middle-period Sylvia Plath poems when she asked me what I was reading—Blacklakeblackboattwoblackcutpaperpeople—I told her that my roommate said we would kidnap her daughter, Harriet, if she didn’t let me into the class. His sister was her daughter’s best friend. I’d met her at a party of his Dalton School friends. I was in.
 
   Where do the black trees go that drink here? 
   Their shadows must cover Canada. 

I walked her to the subway at 116th Street and Broadway. Plath had come around once for her husband’s class when they lived in Boston. Professor Hardwick remembered her as almost docile, nothing like the poems that would make her famous.

Professor Hardwick was fresh and put together. Her soft appearance made the tough things she said even funnier. In her walk, she rocked gently, from side to side. She was on the job, in a short black leather coat and green print scarf, carrying a stiff leather satchel with short handles just wide enough for a certain number of student manuscripts. I hadn’t yet seen her bound up from a chair and break free, flinging over her silk shoulder a silver evening bag on its chain, saying to an astonished table of graduate students and free spirits who’d just agreed among themselves that poetry was everywhere,

   —I’m sure you’re very nice, but I can’t bear that kind of talk. 

And then dancing away from their party because she’d rather be at home looking forward to Saturday night delivery of the Sunday New York Times. 

At our first official teacher-student conference in dingy Barnard Hall, I made Professor Hardwick laugh again, because I recited the last paragraph of Lillian Hellman’s memoir An Unfinished Woman:

    Although I do have a passing sadness for the self-made foolishness that
    was, is, and will be … 

—That fraud, Professor Hardwick said. She tried to do everything but have me killed. 

Six years earlier there had been a Mike Nichols revival of Hellman’s play The Little Foxes at Lincoln Center, and she, Hardwick, had reviewed it for The New York Review of Books, calling it awkward, didactic, and full of cliché. She didn’t believe in the South as an idea, she said.

 —Her use of black people, she said. You would die. 

Agrarianism was a bore. Had I read Allen Tate? A poet I’d never heard of. 

—You don’t need him. Faulkner?

  The Bear. 

—You do need him. But don’t ever do that again.

—Excuse me?

—Read Lillian. People were cutting me on the street. She got people to write letters. She told them, I’m not used to being attacked by someone who has been a guest in my house. I made up my mind that I didn’t care if I never went to another dinner party at Lillian’s. Dashiell Hammett was always trying to get away from her, for Patricia Neal.

I was discovering so much: Rimbaud, Frank O’Hara, Baldwin’s essays, Gertrude Stein’s autobiography. Every day, from hour to hour, there was something new, a name to put on my list of names to reckon with. One afternoon I walked by an open door and a guy with long blond hair was at his upright, preparing to play. The music had poignance and a couple of other people also paused. My mother loved the piano, but I had never heard of Erik Satie. Friends and professors had a lot to tell me.

Pinckney, Darryl. Come Back in September (pp. 3-5). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

I quote so much of the opening pages to give you an idea of reading Pinckney’s prose. I had to pay close attention, and often reread lines to pick up on what he was saying. Pinckney’s prose reminds me of poetry, which involves short lines, that are tense, terse, vivid, detailed, and hard to read. On a superficial level, Pinckney’s prose reminds me of Hardwick’s novel Sleepless Nights, which I’ve just started. Both books are told in a long series of snippets of memories.

Our nonfiction book club rates books, 1 to 10, at the end of the month. I gave it a 10 even though I had problems with it. I think those problems were mine and not Pinckney’s. I admire Come Back in September quite a bit, but it’s just not something I always cared about, but I never stopped valuing its quality. My hunch is that Come Back in September is far more brilliant than I’m capable of perceiving.

This memoir is an amazing bit of memory excavation. I write about dredged-up memories all the time, so I know how hard it is, and I admire it when I see it done so much better than what I do.

I had problems with Pinckney’s writing style at first, but once I tuned into his way of expressing memories, I could see what he was doing. I don’t know if it was intentional, or if that’s how he thinks. His prose is very granular. He depends on the accumulation of memory flashes rather than one long consistent narrative.

I am reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s technique. Vonnegut claimed to write his novels in 500-word chunks. Pinckney does something similar, but often his chunks are very short – just long enough to capture a significant moment of the past. Come Back in September covers the years 1973 to 1989 and is based on journals and letters, but I also expect deeply buried memories.

By our reading group’s rating scale, a 10 should be for books that we consider highly recommendable. I can’t say that’s true for this book. It’s highly recommendable if you are the right reader for this book, but I guess most readers won’t be. Still, I rated it a 10 for a group. I wasn’t the only one.

Now for the philosophical reading question. Should we always read books that are exactly like what we’ve trained ourselves to read? Even though my undergraduate degree is in English, and I’m a dropout from an MFA creative writing degree, Pinckney’s prose and subject matter were far outside of my normal stomping grounds. For the first half of the book, I had to push myself to read it. Eventually, I adapted and the second half became a page-turner.

I’m not sure if I will ever reread Come Back in September, but I think if I do, I will find a great deal more to get out of it. I’ve tried to find out more about Pinckney and Hardwick online. There’s a lot for Pinckney, he’s become somewhat successful over the years, but I believe Hardwick has become more obscure. I can’t find any videos of her at all, but within Come Back in September she expressed a distaste for that kind of attention.

A couple of years after the events in Come Back in September Pinckney published his first novel, High Cotton. It’s dedicated to his parents and sisters. Elizabeth Hardwick mentored and encouraged his writing during this time, so I was surprised she wasn’t mentioned in the dedication.

Another problem I had with the book, is all the big-name authors that Pinckney got to hang with back in the 1970s and 1980s are not ones I care about. How many people still read Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, etc.? Still, I imagine for people who do, this book will delicious inside gossip.

Pinckney leaves me mostly interested in Elizabeth Hardwick. I’ve started Sleepless Nights, but so far I don’t like it. It’s too poetic. She shunned plots. I can read books without plots, but I need engaging characters and marvelous settings to make up for them. So far I haven’t found them.

Hardwick’s novel and Pinckney’s memoir are both about collecting memories and depending on the totality of those collected flashes of memories telling a story. That worked for Pinckney but it took a while, that may also be true for Hardwick.

Jim

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Just Saying No To Vinyl – Going Back To CDs

by James Wallace Harris, 3/28/23

The big news in the music world is vinyl is outselling compact discs in sales. That’s because it’s for total sales and not total units. That’s not hard to believe when LPs go for $20-50 for regular releases, and much more for special editions. Yet, CDs seem cheaper than they’ve ever been. I’m going back to buying CDs. Fooey on the $50 LP.

I just bought Fleetwood Mac- 1969 to 1974 on 8 CDs for $36.99. And Eagles, The Studio Albums 1972 – 1979 on 6 CDs for $27.88, and What’s That Sound? Complete Albums from Buffalo Springfield on 5 CDs for $26.39. The sound quality is impressive but the packaging is very cheap. Just cardboard sleeves for the CDs in a cheap cardboard box, no booklets or documentation.

I actually like these CDs in slim cardboard sleeves. I’m going to try and find a set of file drawers that will just fit them. Or maybe some miniature crates like how we use to store LPs. CDs in plastic cases take up a lot of room.

The Fleetwood Mac set seems to be all recent re-masters but I can’t be sure. Then Play On, one of the Fleetwood Mac albums has the same 18-cuts with bonus tracks as the remastered CD that Amazon sells as a single CD for $14.27. The Fleetwood Mac set has a sticker that says “Six studio albums re-mastered on CD for the first time. Plus a previously unreleased live performance from 1974, 20 bonus tracks, and 8 previously unreleased tracks.” That’s interesting because the box contains 7 studio albums and a live album CD. I ain’t complaining.

The Buffalo Springfield set has a sticker saying it was “Re-Mastered from the original analog tapes under the auspices of Neil Young.” Buffalo Springfield never sounded so good to me. Their original LPs and CDs always seemed thin sounding. The new set has Buffalo Springfield’s three original albums, with the first and second in both mono and stereo.

The Eagles set has six studio albums on CD, with no extra information, no extra cuts, and no claim to be re-mastered. But the CDs sound good.

For years I’ve been trying to get back into vinyl. I sometimes buy old LPs at the library bookstore for 50 cents each, and I bought a handful of new LPs when they were on sale. But I won’t buy them new anymore – they’re just too damn expensive, and still going up in price. And every time I hear a skip on an LP I want to give up vinyl completely – give away my records and turntable. No vinyl revival for me.

I like to play one or two whole albums each day. Sometimes in the afternoon when I’m tired, and sometimes after dinner when I’m tired and not ready for television. I’ve gotten so I enjoy hearing a whole album – and played loud. Susan is nice enough to indulge me for a couple of hours.

And I feel bad about always streaming music because I’ve read artists don’t get paid much through that system. I’m willing to buy new albums, especially if they are priced around $5-10. And I love these new bargain sets. Amazon has a bunch of them and I’m going to buy more. They are usually marketed under “Original Album Series” or “The Studio Albums” keywords.

I think the only Fleetwood Mac album I bought when it came out before they went big with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham was Bare Trees. Over the years I’ve picked up a few albums with Peter Green and Bob Welch. I bought the 1975-1987 albums as they came out. It’s great to jump back and hear all the earlier albums. There is even a cheap box set of the earliest Fleetwood Mac albums that I’m going to buy.

These cheap box sets are a great way to really get into a group, and time travel to the past. There are quite a few artists and groups I didn’t listen to when they came out that I’m willing to try now because they now have an enduring reputation. I especially want to try a lot of jazz groups. I’ve already ordered a set of Weather Report albums on CD.

I have hundreds of CDs I’ve bought over the last forty years, but some weren’t mastered that well originally. I’m willing to buy CDs if they are priced low and especially if they’ve been re-mastered. I’d love to buy a cheap box set of Joe Walsh solo albums and James Gang albums. The old CDs I have sound thin and poorly mixed. I don’t see anything remastered for them currently.

So, it’s back to CDs for me. Just saying no to the vinyl revival. I know LPs are cool, and wonderful to look at and hold, but CDs sound better and are more convenient to use.

My plan is to explore a lot of music, especially albums that came out from 1960 to 1980. I’d like to buy all my favorite albums on CD and keep them in order by when they were originally released. I only want to buy albums I’ll listen to whole – from the first to the last track. I’m not interested in buying the greatest hits albums or compilations. I have Spotify for those songs.

Year Album Artist
12/05/1966 Buffalo Springfield Buffalo Springfield
10/30/1967 Buffalo Springfield Again Buffalo Springfield
06/30/1968 Last Time Around Buffalo Springfield
09/19/1969 Then Play On Fleetwood Mac
09/18/1970 Kiln House Fleetwood Mac
09/03/1971 Future Games Fleetwood Mac
03/00/1972 Bare Trees Fleetwood Mac
06/01/1972 Eagles Eagles
03/01/1973 Penguin Fleetwood Mac
04/17/1973 Desperado Eagles
10/15/1973 Mystery to Me Fleetwood Mac
03/22/1974 On the Border Eagles
09/13/1974 Heroes Are Hard To Find Fleetwood Mac
06/10/1974 One of These Nights Eagles
12/08/1976 Hotel California Eagles
09/24/1979 The Long Run Eagles

JWH

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Why Do I Want Old Issues of Rolling Stone Magazine From the 1960s and 1970s?

by James Wallace Harris, 3/26/23

The other day I got the hankering to read old issues of Rolling Stone from the 1960s and 1970s and started trying to track them down. This morning I decided I needed to psychologically evaluate why I was doing this because I realized as I was still lying in bed that I don’t have enough time in life to read everything I want to read. So why waste reading time on these old magazines? That got me thinking about a Reading Bucket List and focusing on reading the most important books rather than just trying to read everything.

I might have ten more years, or it could be twenty or thirty, but the time to get things read is dwindling. For practical purposes, I’m going to assume I have ten years which will put me in the average lifespan range. Since I average reading one book a week, that’s 520 books. My best guestimate suggests I already own six times that many in my TBR pile. Or, put another way, I’ve already bought enough books to keep me reading for another sixty years. I need to stop chasing after more things to read like hundreds of old issues of magazines.

So why want to read a bunch of old magazines? Since I started contemplating the idea of a Reading Bucket List, I realized it’s not the number of books. This was my first useful revelation today. It’s the number of topics I want to study, including fictional explorations on those topics too.

Lately, I’ve been reading about the creation of the atomic bomb, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, atomic bomb tests in the atmosphere, how the general public felt about nuclear war in the 1950s, and 1960s, and how all of that influenced science fiction novels and short stories. If I explored that subject completely I could use up my 520 books easily. Because I want to explore a number of topics before I die, I also need to limit how deep to get into them.

I see now that my Reading Bucket List won’t be a list of books, but a list of topics to study. So I need to change my bucket list name from Reading Bucket List to Topics to Study Bucket List. My fascination with topics usually doesn’t last long, just a few weeks or a couple of months. However, most of the topics I’m interested in are reoccurring. I’ve chased them my whole life and keep coming back to explore them some more.

(It might be valuable to make a list of these topics, but that’s for the future. Another project: see if I can create a timeline of how often these interests resurface.)

Let’s get back to the magazines. I believe writing the above paragraphs have already helped me see something important. I want to reread old issues of Rolling Stone with a specific goal. (One reason I write these blog posts is to think things through and see into myself.)

I want Rolling Stone magazines to find albums and groups I missed when I read Rolling Stone the first time they were coming out. This is part of a larger project of studying I’ve been piddling away at for decades. I started haunting record stores in 1965, but I never could afford to buy many albums each week. As I got older and had more money I’ve always tried to catch up by buying older records when I bought new ones, filling in the past. Now with Spotify, I can listen to almost any album from the past. But I need to know about the group or album to search for it and play it. I thought I’d read old record reviews and look for albums that are forgotten today but got good reviews back then.

My ultimate goal is to get a solid understanding of popular music from 1960 to 1980. Eventually, I want to add 1948-1959 and 1981-1999. And if I have time I’d like to learn about classical music. But I’ll define this topic as: What Were the Best Albums When I Grew Up? I figured Rolling Stone magazine from 11/9/67 to 12/31/80 could help me.

There are plenty of books on the best albums of all time, including from Rolling Stone, and I have many of them. But they tend to focus on the same famous albums and artists. I love when I find a song that’s been forgotten that really excites me. For example, recently I found “Harlem Shuffle” by Bob & Earl from back in 1963. I was listening to AM music at least eight hours a day back in 1963, but I don’t think I remember this song, at least not distinctly remember it. The title is familiar, and some of the lyrics, but then this song has been covered a number of times, including by The Rolling Stones.

Yesterday, I played “Harlem Shuffle” several times very loud on my big stereo with a 12″ subwoofer and it sounded fantastic. Boy did it press some great buttons in my soul. And that’s also part of my Topics to Study Bucket List. I grew up with certain buttons I liked pushed. I want to understand them. Studying music from 1960-1980 is working toward that. Studying science fiction that came out from 1939-1980 is another. But like I said before, making a list of all of them is for another day.

And wanting old issues of Rolling Stone is not a new desire. Back in 1973-74, I bought three huge boxes of old issues of Rolling Stone at a flea market. God, I wish I had them now, but I wouldn’t have wanted to drag them around for fifty years either. And earlier this century I bought Rolling Stone Cover to Cover, which featured every issue from 1967 to May 2007 on DVD. I still have it, but the discs have copy protection and the reader software stopped working after Windows 7. I’m thinking about setting up a machine, or virtual machine, and installing Windows XP on it to see if I can get it going again. But that will be a lot of work.

With some help from some folks on the internet, I’ve gotten the first 24 issues of RS on .pdf. I’m hoping to find more. If you have them and wish to share them, let me know. Or if you know of any other source. I’m also interested in learning about other magazines that reviewed music from 1960-1980. And I’ve already gotten some recommendations of less than famous bands to try. If you have a favorite forgotten album or group leave a comment. And now that I think about it, if you’re working on a similar project, tell me about your methods.

Ultimately, I want a list of all the albums I love most from 1960-1980. I might even buy them if I don’t own them already. I enjoy listening to one or two albums a day. Recent great discoveries were the first albums by Loretta Lynn and Etta James. I was surprised by how well they were produced, and how well everything sounds on my latest stereo system.

This week I discovered Amazon is selling CD sets that feature 3-8 original albums from certain groups for about the price of a single LP. Yesterday, I got in a set of Buffalo Springfield that was remastered under the supervision of Neil Young. 5 CDs for their three albums. (2 CDs are copies in mono.) I also ordered the first 6 studio albums of the Eagles, 7 albums from Fleetwood Mac’s middle period, and five albums of Weather Report. But these are famous albums. The real goal is to find forgotten albums I love as much as the classics of rock music.

JWH

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Are You in Future Shock Yet?

by James Wallace Harris, 3/24/23

Back in 1970, a nonfiction bestseller, Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, was widely talked about but it’s little remembered today. With atomic bombs in the 1940s, ICBMs, and computers in the 1950s, manned space flight and landing on the Moon in the 1960s, LSD, hippies, the Age of Aquarius, civil rights, gay rights, feminism, as well as a yearly unfolding of new technologies, it was easy to understand why Toffler suggested the pace of change could lead society into a collective state of shock.

But if we could time travel back to 1970 we could quote Al Jolson to Alvin, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” Couldn’t we? Toffler never came close to imagining the years we’ve been living since 1970. And his book was forgotten, but I think his ideas are still valid.

Future shock finally hit me yesterday when I watched the video “‘Sparks of AGI’ – Bombshell GPT-4 Paper: Fully Read w/ 15 Revelations.”

I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT for weeks, and I knew GPT 4 was coming, but I was surprised as hell when it hit so soon. Over the past few weeks, people have been writing and reporting about using ChatGPT and the general consensus was it was impressive but because it made so many mistakes we shouldn’t get too worried. GPT 4 makes far fewer mistakes. Far fewer. But it’s fixing them fast.

Watch the video! Read the report. I’ve been waiting years for general artificial intelligence, and this isn’t it. But it’s so damn close that it doesn’t matter. Starting back in the 1950s when computer scientists first started talking about AI, they kept trying to set the bar that would prove a computer could be called intelligent. An early example was playing chess. But when a computer was built to perform one of these measures and passed, computer scientists would say that test really wasn’t a true measure of intelligence and we should try X instead. Well, we’re running out of things to equate with human-level intelligence.

Most people have expected a human-level intelligent computer would be sentient. I think GPT 4 shows that’s not true. I’m not sure anymore if any feat of human intelligence needs to be tied to sentience. All the fantastic skills we admire about our species are turning out to be skills a computer can perform.

We thought we’d trump computers with our mental skills, but it might be our physical skills that are harder to give machines. Like I said, watch the video. Computers can now write books, compose music, do mathematics, paint pictures, create movies, analyze medical mysteries, understand legal issues, ponder ethics, etc. Right now AI computers configured as robots have difficulty playing basketball, knitting, changing a diaper, and things like that. But that could change just as fast as things have been changing with cognitive creativity.

I believe most people imagined a world of intelligent machines being robots that look like us — like those we see in the movies. Well, the future never unfolds like we imagine. GPT and its kind are invisible to us, but we can easily interact with them. I don’t think science or science fiction imagined how easily that interaction would be, or how quickly it would be rolled out. Because it’s here now.

I don’t think we ever imagined how distributed AI would become. Almost anything you can think of doing, you can aid your efforts right now by getting advice and help from a GPT-type AI. Sure, there are still problems, but watch the video. There are far fewer problems than last week, and who knows how many fewer there will be next week.

Future shock is all about adapting to change. If you can’t handle the change, you’re suffering from future shock. And that’s the thing about the 1970 Toffler book. Most of us kept adapting to change no matter how fast it came. But AI is going to bring about a big change. Much bigger than the internet or computers or even the industrial revolution.

You can easily tell the difference between the people who will handle this change and those who can’t. Those that do are already using AI. They embraced it immediately. We’ve been embracing pieces of AI for years. A spelling and grammar checker is a form of AI. But this new stuff is a quantum leap over everything that’s come before. Put it to use or get left behind.

Do you know about cargo cults? Whenever an advanced society met a primitive society it doesn’t go well for primitive societies. The old cultural divide was between the educated and the uneducated. Expect new divisions. And remember Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” For many people, AI will be magic.

Right now AI can help scholars write books. Soon AI will be able to write better scholarly books than scholars. Will that mean academics giving up writing papers and books? I don’t think so. AIs, as of now, have no desires. Humans will guide them. In the near future, humans will ride jockey on AI horses.

A couple weeks ago Clarkesworld Magazine, a science fiction magazine, shut down submissions because they were being flooded with Chat-GPT-developed stories. The problem was the level of submissions was overwhelming them, but the initial shock I think for most people would be the stories would be crap. That the submitted science fiction wouldn’t be creative in a human sense. That those AI-written stories would be a cheat. But what if humans using GPT start producing science fiction stories that are better than stories only written by humans?

Are you starting to get why I’m asking you if you feel future shock yet? Be sure and watch the video.

Finally, isn’t AI just another example of human intelligence? Maybe when AIs create artificial AIs, we can call them intelligent.

JWH

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What I Learned Cataloging My Books, Ebooks, and Audiobooks on Goodreads

by James Wallace Harris, 3/21/23

I learned several things this week while entering over fifteen hundred books into my Goodreads database. The books I added were mainly acquired since I retired in 2013. One insight that impressed me the most was I was specializing in a limited number of topics. On one hand, I was disappointed by my narrow range of interests, but on the other hand, I was annoyed at myself for being scattered in my intellectual pursuits. You can’t get good at something if you try to get good at too many things.

If I judged my reading as a leisure activity it wouldn’t matter what I read. However, if I judged my reading as an education, then I was majoring in too many subjects. But here’s the kicker to this revelation. Before I started cataloging my books I assumed I was reading for fun and randomly exploring any subject that caught my fancy. It was only as I entered all the titles into the database did I realize that I have been specializing in several areas. And my immediate impulse was to read deeper into those topics and to go out and buy more books on those subjects.

Why was I chasing so many subjects when I’ve always wanted to be a master of one? Why would I want to do that? Yet, focusing on one would mean ignoring many things I want to know more about. That thought has started me to do a lot of naval gazing this week.

My original goal was to put all my books into my Goodreads database so I’ll know what I own to keep from buying duplicates when I’m at the used bookstore. So far I’ve found a shopping bag of duplicates which I gave to my buddy Mike. I entered all my books into Goodreads many years ago but didn’t update the database when I bought books or gave them away, so my Goodreads database was badly out of date. I had been putting this task off for years because I couldn’t figure out which books to add or delete from the system to catch up again.

My solution was to create a “shelf” called “2023 inventory” and reenter all my books linking them to that shelf. Then delete all the books in the system that wasn’t in the 2023 inventory.

After entering 1,506 books, which were all the physical books in the house, I had 3,159 total books in the database. That implied I could have given away 1,653 books, but then I realized that some of those might be Kindle or Audible books I own. Now I must go down the list of 3,159 books, and if they aren’t in the 2023 inventory, see if they are in my Kindle or Audible libraries. If they aren’t, I can delete them.

Doing all this librarian work has been rewarding in several ways. The work is revealing how my reading has shifted away from physical books to ebooks and audiobooks. This process has also revealed other insights about myself. For certain titles, and subjects I tend to buy both the audiobook and the ebook edition because that’s how I like to study them. And for some titles, I have the ebook, audiobook, and physical book. If I really like the book and subject, or if it’s fiction, and I really enjoy the story, I like getting into the book through all three formats.

I can spot my favorite authors because with some writers I’ve collected their books in all three formats. That also reflects a consolidation of interests, focus, and specialization.

When I used to go to parties I noticed that people tend to talk about things they loved most. The most interesting people were the ones who could expound deeply on a subject. Like most people, I just chatted about what little I knew about a zillion subjects.

I eventually observed that some people like to specialize and that some people even feel they are experts on their favorite subjects. It’s even fun to see two fans of the same subject argue over who knows more. I see from my data entry the subjects I’ve unintentionally tried to master. What’s funny is I seldom meet people interested in the subjects I’m interested in. Which is why I seldom talked much at parties. (This blog is my way of nattering about what I like.)

Thinking about people who know a lot about a little has led me to ask why I’d want to specialize in certain topics anyway? It’s not like I’m at a university trying to pass courses and get a major. I never go to parties anymore. I think it’s like my urge to catalog my books, which is a kind of anal pursuit, I also want to organize what I know.

There is a certain satisfaction in getting the biggest picture on the tiniest of topics. There is also satisfaction in collecting everything of a certain type. For example, I like westerns, so I collected my favorite western movies on DVDs. Then I started buying books about movie westerns. But after that, I started buying books about the history of the American West. I’ve done the same thing for classic rock and jazz music. While cataloging my books I realize I was gathering novels written in England between the wars, and books about their authors. That interest is also reflected in the TV shows I’m watching. Susan and I have recently watched all of Downton Abbey, Upstairs, Downstairs, and we’re currently going through the seven seasons of the first television version of All Creatures Great and Small.

The upshot of all these cataloging revelations is I want to focus more on my best subjects. And abandon some lesser interests to put more time into my majors. After I finish this project I could write my tombstone epitaph – “Here lies Jim Harris, this is what he liked to read:” I mean, isn’t what we focus on one of the best descriptions of our personality?

I only have nine bookcases. And they are all full. I don’t want to buy more bookcases. Nine’s my limit. I feel that’s also an analogy for my brain. It can only hold so much, so if I want to get better at one subject I have to forget about another.

If I want to buy more books I have to get rid of existing books to make room for the new ones on the shelves. This tends to distill my collection even further into specialized subjects. It also means I cull crappy books for better books.

But there is something else to consider. I’m getting older. I’m running out of time. My mental abilities are declining, which limits how much information I can process. And my physical abilities are declining, which also influences my book collecting. I can imagine a future where I can only handle six bookcases, or even three, and maybe down to just one.

I put every book I own onto a Rubbermaid rolling cart one shelf at a time to take them to my computer to enter their data. That physically wore me out. I’m thinking of getting rid of the heavy coffee table books in my collection just because in the near future I won’t be able to handle their weight. And there’s another reason I need to start shrinking my collection. If I should die I don’t want to burden my wife with having to get rid of a couple of tons of books. And if I ever need to move to a retirement apartment or assisted living I wouldn’t want to deal with all of them either.

This week of cataloging my books has reminded me of which subjects I’ve studied over the last forty years, which subjects are my favorite topics, and that I want to thin out my collection.

Currently, Goodreads says I have a total of 3,150 books but I haven’t finished entering all my Kindle and Audible books. Amazon says I have 1,608 Kindle books and 1,544 Audible titles, however, many are already in Goodreads. I’ve just got to figure out which ones aren’t. Luckily, Kindle and Audible books don’t weigh much, or take up much space.

I’ve always wanted to make a list of everything I own because I assume it would tell me a lot about myself. This Goodreads list is a good start toward that.

JWH

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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