Month: November 2011
Protestor Insensitivity
Newt Gingrich tells the OWS protesters to “Go get a job right after you take a bath.”
To me that has all the sensitivity of telling the peasants “Let them eat cake.”
In a time when millions desperately struggle to find a job, it’s very insensitive to tell anyone in this country to “Go get a job” as if jobs were freely available. If more people had jobs we wouldn’t have protesters, or is that too hard for you Mr. Gingrich to understand? As someone wanting the job as our leader, I don’t think you are doing your job of understanding what America needs. Of course, conservatives have one answer for all our ills – lower taxes. In good times, it’s lower taxes, in bad times it’s lower taxes, during war time it’s lower taxes. Mr. Gingrich, I don’t think you hate the protesters because they don’t have jobs, you hate them because to solve their problems requires raising taxes.
Do all Republicans study the same group speak manual? I hear this get a job and take a bath line all over now from folks on the right. It’s the same automatic response I heard in the 1960s. Hey, pay attention, today’s protesters aren’t hippies, look close at this film, the protesters are well dressed and clean. They are normal students, and according to one professor they are extremely good students. The only reason they might need a bath is to wash off the pepper spray.
But back to the issue of telling people to get a job Mr. Gingrich – the protestors actually are working at their job of protesting the wrongs in our society. This has been a nasty job that few people would take for years because we’ve all been too busy getting ahead in life and not paying attention to how things are actually working – which is badly. Now we’ve discovered that millions of people in America are out of work, one in six are on food stamps, and the rich are getting so rich they are leaving very little money in the GDP to be divided by the 99%. Someone needs to be protesting. Hell, it should it should be your job Mr. Gingrich, but hey, you already work for the 1%. Republicans are quite industrious at protesting Barack Obama, but they total slackers at protesting the real problems in America.
When our leaders fail us and economic times are bad, there are lots of jobs in the protesting profession. Anyone wanting the job of President in 2012 better get used to protesters. Mr. Gingrich, you know history. The OWS protesters are cute bunny rabbits compared to the violent mobs of angry poor we’ll be seeing if you keep downsizing the government and cutting taxes.
Nor are these protesters doing their protesting job badly. They were following the correct rules of passive resistance set down by Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King. Everyone is focusing on the first part of this video where the officer sprays the kids with orange pepper spray – but everyone is ignoring the sublime second half of the film. The onlookers in the crowd start chanting, “Shame on you, shame on you” and they keep chanting “Shame on you,” until the police back away and leave. Even the police knew they had made a mistake. Look at their faces. Most of them knew the protesters were doing their protesting job properly, and they had made a mistake in doing their police work. But you didn’t see that Mr. Gingrich, all you see is your lower taxes playbook and worrying about the cost of parks and bathrooms.
Mr. Gingrich, I don’t think you are doing your job properly, so shame on you. In 2012 we need a leader who will listen to the people and see what 100% of the people need. This leader needs to stop reading from the group think teleprompter. Don’t tell Americans to get a job, because it’s your job to create jobs. Shame on you Newt Gingrich for being such a lazy fat-cat politician. If politicians had been doing there jobs millions wouldn’t be out of work today. You need to get another job – but not the one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I’m a law and order kind of guy. I don’t want to see Kent State or 1968 Chicago again. I hate seeing the police forced into being the bad guys during another social upheaval. Politicians who use inflaming rhetoric attacking protesters are the trouble makers to me. To all in that crowd that clapped for you Mr. Gingrich, shame on them too. They don’t have a clue as to what freedom means.
Those kids at UC Davis were clean and orderly. Sure, at some protest rallies they get idiots who do stupid things and use a protest event to go crazy – those numbskulls you can pepper spray all you want. But if young people, out of work people, and old people with dwindling pensions want to protest, they got a right to in this country as long as they do it nonviolently and orderly. Give them the facilities to hold protests as long as they are willing to show up for the job. I don’t want America to be compared to Egypt or Syria where they shoot protestors. We should all be supporting our kids new interest in politics.
JWH – 11/21/11
My Life as a Turkey (Nature–PBS)
My Life as a Turkey premiered on Nature this week. This is one TV show you won’t want to miss – it’s still being repeated on some PBS stations, and you can watch it online here. Here’s the preview.
Don’t be fooled by the subject – I know most people think of turkeys as dumb ugly birds – but this is a brilliant exploration of mind and nature. The film is based on the 1995 book Illumination in the Flatwoods by Joe Hutto. Hutto was given 16 wild turkey eggs which he incubated hoping that the hatchlings would imprint on his face – and they did. He quickly learned that being a mother to the hatchlings required a full time commitment and spend all his waking time with them for six months, and followed them for over a year.
If you’ve seen the wonderful film Fly Away Home, then you’ll know about imprinting. And even though this story is about how amazing wild turkeys are, and the power of imprinting, what really stands out is what Hutto learns about the conscious mind and living in nature.
Hutto got to integrate himself into the natural world like few people do. He got to think like a turkey and realized these wild creatures were a whole lot more aware of things than we believed.
We think of humans as the only animal with self-aware consciousness – but new studies are suggesting that consciousness is a spectrum of awareness and even multiple kinds of awareness. Some people suggest that animals have phenomenal consciousness – awareness of the world around them, and this is what Hutto descends into when he’s with his wild turkeys. Through long intense observations he learns what the turkeys see in their world, and even learns their language.
This film shows Hutto becoming a Zen like guru of awareness. Hutto talks about how most people live in the future, always thinking about what will happen. The turkeys live in an absolute now. Like Ram Das teaches – Be Here Now.
But I don’t think I need to say any more. Watch this show. You can do it now from here. I kid you not, you will be amazed. No words I can say will prepare you.
JWH – 11/20/11
Why Write a Novel?
Have you ever dreamed of writing a novel? I have since high school. Evidently tens of thousands, if not millions of people, also have that fantasy. But just what does it mean? Why write a novel? For the third time in my life I’m trying to write a novel and it’s been a very revealing experience. Novel writing is hard. Oh, it’s easy enough to crank out the words and keep writing until you have a novel length manuscript, practically anyone can do that if they persist.
Is 100,000 words of fiction a novel? By the least common denominator definition maybe, but a novel is a story with certain elements like characters, plot, conflict, epiphany, etc. Let’s say we have a gadget that measures the power of each of these aspects in a novel and you can run your draft through it and get a readout, with ratings of 0-100 for each element. 100 represents what the best novels ever written would measure. Unless you have a lot of talent, or have a lot of practice writing short stories, more than likely your first attempt at writing a novel will barely register 1 or 2 on any scale, and maybe if you have a knack for a certain element, hit a 10 or 20.
I’m working on NaNoWriMo and even though I’m able to crank out chapter after chapter I’m not sure if any of them have value to readers, or would register very high on our novel analyzer. In my head I fantasize about writing a novel of the future where humans and robots fight over politics, philosophy, science, religion and the environment – but making that real is hard. Yesterday I saw a movie, Martha Marcy May Marlene, that was so intense and bleak that it made me emotional sick. Why did they tell that story I asked myself leaving the theater. That make me ask myself about the story I’m working on: What am I telling my readers. Would it entertain, inspire or depress?
I’m not sure most bookworms ask themselves why they are reading a particular novel – they just hear about a book and get it. I’m sure every reader hopes the next book they buy will be a page turning wonder, but generally they’re not. Often we have to push ourselves to keep reading, hoping we’ll “get into” the novel. To get hooked. That’s what readers want – they want to get hooked – the more addictive the better. Bookworms love finding books that compel them to read all night long, or even all weekend long.
Then, is the primary reason to write a novel to hook readers? The movie I watched yesterday hooked me but ultimately it was extremely dissatisfying. The story was about a mentally ill young woman who had gotten caught up in a Charles Manson like cult. The review I read said the film was about a young woman readjusting to life after leaving a cult – so I assumed it was a religious cult, and expected a film about a person coming to grips with reality. That sounded fascinating to me and I went to the movie with great expectations. If I had known the cult was of The Family kind I wouldn’t have gone. In other words I wanted a story that had a positive outcome. This story was very realistic, leaving viewers with an implied ending that would be horrific and nasty, but very real-world.
I bring this incident up to make another point about why write a novel. Are you writing escapism or are you saying something about reality? Martha Marcy May Marlene was saying something about life I didn’t want to experience, but I have to admit that it was deeply perceptive about reality.
If you think about all your favorite books and movies you’ll probably realize you admire the ones most that have lovable characters that you identify closely. It’s very hard to tell a story about truly unlikable characters. It takes great talent to create a Hannibal Lector or Dexter Morgan, where the readers learns to like evil people, but people would rather read about a likable serial killers than read a book where all the characters are realistic and depressing.
When most people dream of writing a novel they do so because they imagine fortune and fame. Few writers get rich, and even fewer gain any kind of fame. Writing is a lonely business demanding huge amounts of time creating black marks on white screens. It’s a painful process giving birth to story that people will want to read, and I’m talking about anyone wanting to read. Few would-be writers produce stories that get read. Sure they might coerce a few family and friends to read their story, but that’s about all. Even the successful ones who actual sell a story to a publisher, most of those books never recover their advance and fewer than a thousand people buy them, and its doubtful that even those books get completely read. It’s just a huge task to compose a story that requires ten, twenty or even thirty hours to be read. It’s a monumental task to create one that many people will actually read, and its even a winning a Powerball kind of event to write a story that millions love to read.
Why write novel? Many people believe if they write something they will love to read themselves, others will want to read it too. That’s the first goal of writing – to please yourself. I believe this, but I’ve got to ask: How many people can write something and have the objectivity to know if it’s something they would want to read? And furthermore, and I think this is even a greater philosophical question: How many people know what they like to read? I even wrote about this in “My Kind of Story.”
My guess is few writers ever ask: Why write a novel? Just as few readers ask: Why read a book? I’m pretty sure Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Stephen King and J. K. Rowling all knew or know what makes a good novel and why people will want to read it. (I’m a bit doubtful about Rowling since she’s only had a one-hit-wonder.) Most other writers I believe write something they throw at the wall and hope it sticks. If understanding how a novel works equals the ability to produce a novel that readers will love, then we should be able to write computer programs that churn out bestsellers.
Now the question I have to ask myself is: Why do I want to write a novel? I’m not driven by fame or fortune. So why torture myself to write one? Coming home every evening after work to write on the novel for NaNoWriMo takes quit smoking kind of willpower. It’s worse than dieting, at least when I’m not eating I can go do something fun. Writing is all consuming. It eats up time like crazy. And like the robots in my story, I have to ask where the base programming comes from that provides my motivation.
This now brings me to the nitty-gritty of the question: Why write a novel? For me it’s because I have two characters I want to bring to life. What I discovered writing for NaNoWriMo is I have no plot for my two characters to exist in. Now I could write a literary story that has no plot, like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, or I need to find my inner Steven Spielberg and invent a story for them.
And I think that answers my question, you write a novel to tell a story or create a character, or hopefully both. I can’t even tell jokes because I never remember the plots much less the punch line, so creating a story for a novel is very hard for me. Rowling spent years imagining her story and characters. She saw it in her mind so well she could draw scenes from the story. Now that’s a vivid imagination.
Well, I need to get back to my NaNoWriMo work – this essay is almost as long as my word quota for the day. But I took the time off from the novel to think about why I want to write this novel and that is helping me with the plot. October should’ve been NaNoPloMo – National Novel Plotting Month. Writing a novel is a soul searching endeavor. Can you imagine a story that takes ten hours to tell and one that people will want to read? Try doing it sometimes. It will teach you a lot about reading and watching movies and television shows.
Writers obsess over their opening paragraphs because they know its the success or failure moment as to whether you can get people committed to reading your work of art. Why write a novel? Because it’s a challenge to dazzle readers with a beautiful feat of imagination.
[Aside to myself: Now that should make you try harder! Go write!!! Sorry to everyone else for having to read my pep talk to myself.]
JWH – 11/13/11.
NaNoWriMo
I’m doing NaNoWriMo – November is National Novel Writing Month, where participants join an online communal boot camp and urge each other on to write 50,000 words of fiction in one month. Yesterday I passed the 10,000 word mark. This also means I’m writing less for my blog, so I’m taking a bit of time off tonight to explain my absence.
I’ve tried writing novels before and usually crash and burn around the 100 page mark, or about 20,000 words.
Novel writing appeals to the amateur in people – because most people feel they can write their first novel and be a success. That’s sort of like sitting down at the piano for the first time at Carnegie Hall. I’ve written 473 posts for this blog, so I consider that my piano practice for writing, but it’s not enough, especially since it’s nonfiction. I’ve written about 30 short stories for various MFA writing classes and Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in 2002, but that’s not enough practice either. I’ve read that most writers have to complete several novels before they get one published.
The NaNoWriMo people don’t expect word marathoners to complete a finished and polished novel, they just expect participants to go the distance. And even at the 10,000 word mark I’ve learned a lot. I’ve been thinking about the story I’m working on now for years, thinking I was writing it in my head when I was too lazy to write at the keyboard, and what I’ve discovered is that all the thinking I’ve done so far is no where near enough story for a novel. I discovered that by day 3.
At day 6 I discovered the ending I had planned wasn’t really an ending and I had to blast right on past it. This morning while in the shower thinking about what to write for day 7 I realized that I needed to blend in another story I was thinking about, so two novel ideas become fuel for one. I just doubled the characters I have to bring to life and now have two settings to paint, and I’m not sure how far that will get me either. Novel writing is MUCH harder than it looks. Just read one page of any great book and count the number ideas the writer had to imagine on that page. A novel isn’t about one idea, but thousands.
I’m already thinking of converting ideas I had plan to use for blog posts into subthemes for the novel. This story is becoming a black hole for all my words and ideas. And I know NaNoWriMo is just the start, because come Dec 1 I’ll have my 50,000 words, but a modern novel is really closer to 100,000. And those are 100,000 polished words that have gone through many drafts. And that means I need to think in terms of NaNoWriYears.
I love puttering around after work pursuing all kinds of fun activities that capture my whim. What I’m realizing now is how much writers have to give up to create their work. I see that it’s got to be all consuming. Damn, I wished I smoked cigarettes and took speed. I need to drive myself on, and now I can see why writers are often so addicted to stimulants. All I have is loud music. Tonight I’m listening to my “All Along the Watchtower” playlist that’s contains 117 different versions of the Dylan classic. I’m playing it loud!
Well, back to the word mines…
JWH – 11/7/11
Auxiliary Memory 