My New Binge Worthy Show: The Detectorists

By James Wallace Harris, Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Normally I watch new TV shows with my friends as a reason to get together socially. For a while now, I don’t have the patience to watch a lot of TV by myself. But last night my friend Mike told me about a series he’s watched three times already: Detectorists. I watched by myself the first six 30-minute episodes before going to bed at 12:32am. I was hooked. So far this charming British TV show has racked up 13 total episodes. It’s quite binge worthy, but it won’t be a long one. The show is about two English guys, Andy and Lance, who love to search for buried treasure with their metal detectors. Mostly they find old nails, low value coins, beer can flip tabs, and Matchbox cars. They hope to find gold from an ancient Saxon burial.  Andy and Lance belong to Danebury Metal Detecting Club (DMDC), along with six other eccentric endearing oddballs. Their rival club is even stranger.

Detectorists

The show is about metal detecting, but not excessively so – just enough to get me to price metal detectors on Amazon, but maybe not enough to turn me into a detectorist. I love shows about quirky sub-cultures, and this show is a doozy. It’s also beautiful, funny, endearing, and quite observant about ordinary people and their lives. The show also makes me want to move to rural England.

You can catch Detectorists on Netflix. Here’s a trailer. I thought I just let y’all know, at least my TV addict friends who are looking for another show to shoot up – especially one without gun porn. Warning, they do swear though. Not much, not as much as the women in my life. Another reason to love this show – the characters are ordinary looking, even homely, and definitely not CGI/surgically engineered beauty clones. This might be odd for me to say, but shows that promote gun lust and absurdly beautiful characters have jump the shark for me.

JWH

What I’ve Learned After Three Years of Retirement

By James Wallace Harris, Monday, October 24, 2016

October 22nd was the 3rd anniversary of my last day at work. The time has zipped by, but I feel I’ve already gone through several psychological phases. For the first year I used to occasionally revisit my old work place, but I don’t do that anymore. Even though I was at the university for over 35 years, I no longer feel part of that world anymore. I’ve entered a new territory, and I’m slowly learning to colonize it.

Joining Medicare feels like the gateway to the land of the aging. I don’t feel old, but I know I’m new old. I’m in the toddler phase for growing up to be old old. I now ask about senior discounts, and I notice just how much advertising is targeted to the elderly. Am I eventually going to need all that stuff? (Home catheterization, lift chairs, slim fit adult diapers, hearing aids, step-in bathtubs, electric stair chairs, medical alerts, motorized chairs, etc. – and all those zillions of drugs.)

Old-Pug

I now watch out for scams. I keep seeing stories on the news about con artists scamming the elderly. I don’t know if its my new wariness, but I sometimes do feel extra sales pressure at stores or from hired workmen. I screen all my house-phone calls. Even though I’m on the national do-not-call list, I still get lots of calls. I assume since most people have switched to cellphones, there’s far fewer landlines to cold-call. And they seem more desperate. Most of calls I get are about selling stuff to people my age. Is that direct marketing targeting, or are older Americans the only ones with land lines?

And I hate charity calls. I feel bad about saying no to worthy causes, but I resent they feel they have a right to call my house and interrupt my life. Because I’m one of the last people on Earth to have a landline, it means I get a lot of calls. I just don’t answer my phone anymore, letting my machine reply for me. Supporting charities that call my phone only encourages them to call more. It’s time that all telemarketing becomes illegal, even for charities. (I’ve had three calls while writing this essay this morning.)

I spend a lot of time alone. My wife still works out of town, so I only see her on weekends. I visit with friends, but I like being alone. I’m getting addicted to it. I love puttering around with my projects. I hate when strangers come to my door. I can feel myself evolving into a crotchety old man. I used to be polite to con artists, salesmen, and church people knocking on my door. Now I just get rid of them as fast as I can. I’m not mean, or rude, but cut their spiel off quickly. Who knows how nice I will be in ten years.

I love quiet – unless I want to play my music loud. And I love to play my music loud for an hour or two a day, especially when I nap. It’s emotionally uplifting to hear my favorite oldies when I’m coming in and out of consciousness of a nap.

And my taste in TV has taken a very weird turn lately. I don’t have the patience to watch movies anymore. I can watch them if I have friends over, but not alone. And I still love new TV shows if I’m watching with friends, but again, not alone. My attention span for TV has shorten. At night, when watching TV by myself, I’ve become addicted to seeing an old Perry Mason before going to bed. That’s about 45 minutes. Growing up Perry Mason was my mother’s favorite TV show, and The Fugitive was my father’s favorite show. I couldn’t stand either. I’ve always hated mysteries – either books, TV shows, or movies. But for some strange reason, since I signed up for Medicare I love Perry Mason. I can always spot who is going to get kill, but I never can guess the murderer. Are we supposed to figure that out? I always feel they’re pulling a fast one at the end, plot-wise. But I’m not sure I care. I love the show because it’s in black-and-white, has old 1950s and early 1960s cars, and all the actors and actresses aren’t beautiful and buff. They even have a fair amount of bald guys, wrinkled, and fat people. Folks I can identify with.

One thing I have to keep remembering about getting older, is young people often feel squeamish about our appearance. Of course, most of my women friends have a great deal of self-loathing for their looks. They often complain about themselves and others looking bad because of age. They find getting old depressing. It doesn’t bother me. At least not yet. I was never good looking to begin with. And I have started noticing the affects of age on my friends. But I prefer looking at old folks to young people. I have nothing against the young, but I just feel alienated from the world of youth. I’d love to move to a small 55+ community. Somewhere where it felt like thinning gray hair, sagging flesh, and baldness, was the norm.

Being retired means living with less stress. I want complete control over my environment and habits, and I want to avoid all surprises, which usually involve me breaking in some way, or the things I own breaking. Everything wears out. Being old is mainly about worry about wearing out. I’m having to spend hundreds on my HVAC this morning. A couple weeks ago I had to replace the roof. Too bad they don’t have Medicare for houses. I wonder which of us will go first, me or the house? I’m trying to time it so the house collapses around my body when my heart stops beating.

And like I said, I’m just a toddler at this getting old thing. What will it be like to be in my 70s, 80s, or 90s? I get the feeling I’ve got many more psychological phases to pass through.

JWH

Agoraphobic Writing

By James Wallace Harris, Monday, October 17, 2016

Recent essays written for other sites:

In many ways I prefer writing for this blog, Auxiliary Memory, than writing for other sites. I’m somewhat agoraphobic, so I spend most of my time at home. And the older I get, the stronger that tendency becomes. Now those feelings are carrying over to my writing. I’m inclined to become a writing hermit, and just write for this blog. I like having all my thoughts in one cozy familiar place.

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However, it’s mentally healthier for me to get out of my house and my blog. Sticking to my comfort zone can be debilitating.

Writing for Book Riot is interesting because I’m way out of my element. Most of their readers and writers are young, diverse, and I’m guessing, female. It’s a challenge to create something they will want to read – and I’m not sure I am. But I like the challenge. Trying to resonate with readers from other generations is educational, enlightening, and good for my literary agoraphobia.

Writing for the Classics of Science Fiction or Worlds Without End doesn’t take me far from home. I’m out of the house, but I’m only standing in my front yard next to the street. I created the Classics site with my friend Mike. And WWEnd is about science fiction and lists, matching my own quirkiness. Their readers I assume are SF/F/H bookworms and book collectors. Some are like me, old white guys remembering the science fiction we read growing up, but others are young, reading books and authors that are unknown to me.

I’ve always said blogging is piano practice for writing. But blogging tends to be cozy and comfortable. The more I remove myself from the story, struggling to write something objective and journalistic, the more I have to mentally push myself. I can actually sense a barrier. Age and ability has it’s limitations, and I often feel like I’m a fish in an aquarium scoping out the edges of an invisible force-field that holds me in.

Even though I want to push myself into new writing territory, I have to admit that I’m most comfortable writing about science fiction. It’s what I know. Whenever I write about something else, I have to do significant research – and that’s time consuming, requiring much mental effort, and psychic straining. It’s like weightlifting. I have to build up my muscles to handle the new load.

Whenever I read a magnificent work of nonfiction, I’m always impressed by the bibliography. That tells me how much work they did. Even when I write about other subjects I’ve been interested in all my life, I feel like I’m leaving the comforts of home. I assume everyone has a touch of agoraphobia about doing new things, but that might not be true. Are there people that are always willing to dive into unfamiliar waters?

Before my mother died, I got annoyed at her when she refused to leave her home, and it was obvious she couldn’t take care of herself. We tried to get her to live with us, but she refused. Nor would she consider assisted living. Now that I’m getting older I understand. I worry that I’m getting so attached to this house that I’ll never move again. I also think about just writing for my blog.

I figure I have another ten years to try new things, until I’m about 75. Because by then the urge to stay home will be too overwhelming – if it isn’t already.

JWH

 

Rejecting Some Science Fictional Ideas

By James Wallace Harris, Friday, October 14, 2016

The job of science fiction writers is to imagine things we haven’t imagine before. To speculate about the future, distant worlds, alternate histories, extrapolated trends, artificial life, machine intelligences, the future evolution of our species and so on. The territory of science fiction is quite large. As readers we are entertained by these feats of creativity, and all too often we are enchanted by the ideas that science fiction writers have given us. We want travel to distant worlds to be possible. We want to meet intelligent beings from other worlds, or build sentient machines. But I also think we should think carefully about science fictional speculation and reject ideas that aren’t rational.

ChildhoodsEnd(1stEd)ChildhoodsEnd(1stEd) (1)

I’m currently rereading 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke proposes several ideas in this book, some of which I don’t like, and some of which I hope are wrong. In Clarke’s two most famous works: 2001: A Space Odyssey and Childhood’s End, he theorizes that advanced aliens have or will uplifted our species. I don’t know why this idea is so appealing to him. What’s really a strange is 2001: A Space Odyssey was published in 1968, coincidentally, the same year as Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Däniken, which proposed a rather similar idea.

I find the theory that we needed aliens to uplift us, or accelerate our evolution, or explain some of our accomplishments, to be insulting. And these ideas have a strange kinship with religion. Powerful aliens are very much like how our ancestors imagined their gods. And as much as I dislike von Däniken, he spotted the religious angle. I wonder if Clarke knew what he was doing?

Both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Childhood’s End even appear to want transcendence through alien intervention. Isn’t Clarke just wishing to be reborn into a higher form and live in heaven? Isn’t he rejecting our current existence and state of being? Which is what most religions do too, by their claims the physical world is imperfect, full of sin and suffering. I prefer science fiction that is full of hubris, and humans pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

The second speculation Clarke pursues in 2001: A Space Odyssey is the fear of artificial intelligence. This is more logical, and maybe even practical. But it’s rather oddly religious too. Isn’t Clarke rejecting our ability to create and conceive our own evolutionary replacements? Isn’t Clarke’s warnings against HAL much like the Bible’s warnings against the Tower of Babel? Isn’t it saying God and aliens can create intelligent beings, but we can’t? Are they both saying, don’t aim too high because we don’t have the abilities.

What if we substituted crosses for monoliths in this story, and God for aliens. Wouldn’t it still work? Aren’t both of Clarke’s most famous stories about salvation by high powers? Aren’t their parallels between the beginning of 2001 and the Garden of Eden story? These two novels are very popular. Yet, isn’t that easily explainable? Even today most people seek salvation via high powers. Look at the current election. Isn’t Donald Trump actual claiming he can save us, that he knows more, that he can work magic, and people believe him. But isn’t that also a rejection of our own abilities and accomplishments?

Sometimes when we read a science fiction story we need to reject its ideas. Even though both of Clarke’s masterpieces are compelling stories, I wouldn’t want them to be true. I’d rather believe we’re here alone in the universe, and we evolved through random events. Then again, I’m an atheist.

JWH

Classics of Science Fiction Version 4

By James Wallace Harris, Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Classics of Science Fiction version 4 is finally finished. I could not have done it without my friend Mike. I had been dreading doing all the work required to update the eleven year-old version 3. In fact, months ago I had given up on the idea, and just moved the v. 3 lists off my hosting site to this blog. I just didn’t want to relearn PHP and MySQL. Mike has been studying new programming languages like Go and Swift, and I asked him if he thought there was an easier way of doing the project. I told him I didn’t want to mess with a hosting site, a SQL database, or creating a data entry system. We finally decided on using .csv files for data entry, and typed everything in Notepad++. Mike programmed the project in Go.  He then developed a complete template based system that generated all the .html files, which we copied to WordPress. It took us weeks to enter in the 65 lists used to create the new Classics of Science Fiction list. After all this studying of science fiction books we’re both looking forward to getting back to reading science fiction.

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Titles and authors are linked to content on Wikipedia and Goodreads. Percentage ranks are linked to the actual lists each book were on. Unfortunately, this makes the main page rather large and slow to load.

I’m not sure how many science fiction readers care about such lists, but if you study the new site, it’s very revealing. I love studying how books become popular, and then how they are forgotten. The new main table which ranks the books by the percentage of lists each title is on, replaces the old method of just counting total lists. Not all books could have been on all lists, so to be fair, we calculated the percentage of lists they were on of all the lists they could have been on.

I know all this math might put some people off, so we show both percentages and counts on the tables were titles are ranked.

My favorite table is Versions 1-4 compared. Titles in red are those books that didn’t make it to version 4. Titles in blue are those new to version 4. This quickly lets you see what books are being forgotten, and which books are spreading in our memories.

Each time we make a new version of the Classics of Science Fiction list we love to see which newer books stand out in the crowd. This time we were anxious to see how many books by women writers had become popular in the last decade. We also made a separate list showing which books by women writers are the most remembered in all the lists we gathered. This time, we found eight lists devoted completely to women writers, but most of those lists didn’t try to rank titles. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le  Guin was on 43 of the 65 total lists. But we figured it could have only been on 48 of those lists at most. This meant that The Left Hand of Darkness was on 90% of the lists it could have been on. 43 of 48.

Using percentages allowed newer books to rank higher than they did in version 3. We figure this is fair because we’re removing the penalty for being newer. Older books have an advantage under the system of just counting total lists. For example, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie was on just 11 lists, but because the maximum number of lists it could have been on was just 22 lists, it’s overall ranking was at the 50% rate.

Ultimately, meta-lists like these don’t mean much. It’s just a statistical way to track how books are remembered. But I find that fascinating. I’m sure fans will be outraged if their favorite science fiction novel doesn’t show up on the list. We didn’t choose these titles. Study the 65 lists we used. I’m sure you’ll probably find your favorite novel on some of them. For the main list, it took being on at least 10 lists. To create the list of books by women writers, we wanted it to be around 100 titles. That required using a cutoff of being on at least 4 lists.

We’ve learned that longer lists get boring for readers. I think ideal book list runs to around 100 titles, but for the main list we allowed it to run to 140. Version 3 ran to 193 titles and it was way too long. Probably for many bookworms, Top 25 or Top 50 lists are more appealing. Just scan down the ranked lists and stop when you feel titles are less than classic. The point of this project is to show which books other readers are remembering, and not to make any claims that these are the best books.

JWH