Auxiliary Memory

Am I Losing My Memory?

This morning I got the idea of writing an essay about how there are generations of popular writers in all genres. I had been looking at lists of bestselling science fiction books on the web and I was surprised by how most of the authors were unknown to me. Obviously a newer generation has supplanted all the popular writers I once knew.

I figured at any given time there are a cadre of top writers whose names come to mind when people think of science fiction writers. Because I’m 61, I’m tied to the past, and think of SF writers long dead, and maybe forgotten, or never known to new readers.

Think of it this way, the stars of Hollywood in the 1930s would be much different from the stars of the 1950s or the 1990s. That people would think of the rock stars or baseball stars of the 1960s as a different generation or group than those of the 1980s.

I grew up reading science fiction in the 1960s, and Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke were the SF stars of that era. Who are the science fiction writing stars of the 2010s?

Now here’s where I lose my memory. I thought of writing an essay about how Heinlein rose to fame and then show how his fame diminished over time. I got some ideas about how to start the essay and decided to check on some facts I knew I had written about before. Then I found: “The Fall of Robert A. Heinlein and The Fading of the Final Frontier” by James Wallace Harris. That’s me.

I had completely forgotten I had written that essay. Not only that, but when I reread the essay it covered ideas I wanted to write in the essay I was imagining. What’s even scarier is I think the earlier essay had some better ideas that really impressed me. They didn’t even seem like my ideas. I had forgotten this essay so well that I could admire the writing like it was written by someone else. That feels weird.

Now is this common for writers to forget what they’ve written? Or am I suffering a side-effect of getting old?

I had already written the title for the new essay, “The Rise and Fall of Robert A. Heinlein and His Vision of Science Fiction.” Very similar to the earlier title. Now, it was going to be a different slant. I wanted to capture the flavor of science fiction that Heinlein and others created and show how that’s changed. 1950s and 1960s SF feels very different from 2000s and 2010s science fiction. That was going to be a lot of work, and I wasn’t sure how I could do it.

If I had unlimited time, I would describe how Heinlein saw space travel in the 1950s, and compare it to how science fiction writers in the 2010s see space travel. I may have had that idea before. I don’t remember. I think of ideas to write about all day long, and forget them just as fast. But that was true in my teens so I don’t think it’s an age issue.

Memory is such a weird thing. Back in the 1960s I swear my best friend Connell bought a book Birds of Britain by John D. Green, now a collector’s item. It was a photo book of British girls during the Mod era. Today Connell swears he doesn’t remember ever seeing such a book. Just now I watched an episode of The Twilight Zone about three astronauts coming back from space and how each of them slowly disappears from people’s memories. Reading my own essay that I had forgotten felt like being in The Twilight Zone.

For all I know I could have written this essay before.

The public is forgetting my favorite writers. I forget my own writing. Memories are fleeting. They’ve always have been.

JWH – 1/29/13

Reading Synergy

Sometimes I luck out and read two great books about different subjects that reinforce each other’s ideas and make each book more powerful. Earlier this month I read Half The Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Now I’m reading The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond, about comparing modern society to human societies of the past. Jared Diamond makes a case that human behavior is different under state governments than how we lived under pre-state societies. Diamond describes life and psychology in hunter and gather cultures, as well a chiefdoms and tribal societies. It might surprise you that there is much in the two books that overlap, but then any two books that chronicles so many cultures around the world are bound to overlap.

Half the Sky is introduced by saying 60-100 million women are missing from the current population. Kristof and WuDunn point out that gender selected abortion, infanticide, the favoring of male children to receive medical care over females, enslavement, torture and other horrible social practices explain the missing females from the world’s population.

Jared Diamond also describes how pre-state cultures are hard on females. His book explains why these cultures practice infanticide and gender selected abortions when they have access to technology. What Diamond essentially says is our modern way of life is new and that humans lived much differently for millions of years before the advent of state controlled governments.

Most traditional cultures, as Diamond calls them, fought constant wars over women, food, land and natural resources. Societies were male dominated and women were possessions. Polygamy was the common marriage arrangement which inherently treats women unfairly.

If you blend the two books together you see that the world is going through a transformation. We’re shifting from traditional cultures to state cultures which over time has abolished slavery and moved towards monogamy and fairer treatment of women.

Kristof and WuDunn make a case that if we change how we treat women, we’ll change how societies operate, and thus reduce terrorism and war, and increase economic activity and freedom for all individuals. Diamond indirectly says states protects individuals and frees them from constant warring and violence, which is mainly caused by males seeking personal revenge and retribution. He also points out the ownership of women causes much of the violence in traditional societies.

There is a synergy between that and the TV show I’m watching on DVD, Hatfields & McCoys. The two feuding families were more like two feuding tribes. I find further reading synergy between the above and the book Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne describing the history of the Comanche Indians, and The Old Testament. The Old Testament is a history of the twelve tribes of Israel conquering the Canaanites, and later about the twelve tribes of Israel trying to survive the onslaught to two state run societies, The Babylonians and The Romans. Empire of the Summer Moon is about the Comanches fighting the onslaught of the United States of America, another state run society.

For most of human history we live and fought each other as small groups. The standard operating procedure was kill your enemy, enslave the women, and adopt the children. The Old Testament illustrates this perfectly. Sometimes God told the Israelites to kill everything that walks and crawls when they invade a village, and sometimes God told them to kill only them men and keep the women and children. The tribes of Israel acted no different from the Comanches. Whether they were as cruel in their torture was not noted in The Bible, but I expect it was pretty much like what we saw between the Hutu and the Tutsi.

The upshot of all these books is individual freedom, peace, gender equality, the semblance of justice comes from state run governments. If we don’t want tribal societies like the Taliban or Al-Qaeda then we have to promote strong central governments.

Kristof and WuDunn don’t go into this directly. They just advocate uplifting women where we can, but what that really means if Jared Diamond is right, is we have to eliminate old traditional ways, which is a kind of cultural imperialism. Diamond is very fond of traditional societies and thinks we can learn from them, and that might be true, but he knows we can’t maintain all the old ways. This is best illustrated in his introduction when he compares 1961 New Guinea people to 2013 New Guinea people. The World Until Yesterday is an extremely important book.

In a pre-state society, safety is living very close to your tribe and your tribal alliances. It is extremely unsafe to venture far and meet strangers. Nearly all strangers are considered enemies. If you are alone and meet a group of strangers expect to flee or die. If you are with your friends and find strangers in a smaller number, expect to kill. This is the basis for our xenophobia. It worked the same for the Hatfields and the McCoys.

In a state society we learn to trust strangers. We can safely travel the world as long as we don’t venture into traditional societies. When you go to France you don’t expect the Frenchmen to kill you. That won’t be true in areas where people still live by traditional ways.

Kristof and WuDunn inadvertently make the case that lingering traditional societies are killing off women, or cruelly oppressing them, and that we need to spread strong governments into traditional societies. What they explicitly advocate is finding gentle ways of changing social customs in traditional societies to be more enlightened about women. If you read Empire of the Summer Moon you’ll see how 19th century people wanted to gently change the Comanche. It didn’t work as planned. I doubt changing the Taliban will be any more of a success.

Strangely enough, the real vector of change is television and the internet. Knowledge is homogenizing. Citizens of traditional cultures resent being forced to change. Practices like infanticide and female genital mutilation are natural, if not holy and good to them. It is insulting to these people to tell them their ways of doing things are evil and grotesque. But if they are given a choice they sometimes choose to change on their own. Television and the internet help them see their choices. Kristof and WuDunn say helping women will cause positives changes too. That’s a great hypothesis to test.

I highly recommend reading Half the Sky, The World Until Yesterday and Empire of the Summer Moon together for the strong synergy of ideas. All too often we think our way of doing things is the right way, and everyone else’s way is wrong. Many people advocate cultural relativism, but I don’t. I believe individuals are more important than cultures. There is no superior culture, but I advocate the maximum protection of the individual with the goal of giving everyone the most freedom possible. That avoids the which culture is better issue. Of course, individual freedoms tend to homogenize societies because it does away with violence, gender bias, slavery, polygamy, and all kinds of other culture beliefs that tend to color individual cultures.

JWH – 1/28/13

The Shelf Life of Nonfiction

I buy books faster than I can read them, and some books go stale before I get around to consuming them. Fiction is often timeless, but for nonfiction, most books have a shelf life. A ten to twenty year old science book is usually not worth reading. Books about politics and economics go bad even quicker. And books about current events and pop culture have practically no shelf life at all.

Yesterday I started reading Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age by Paul Graham, published in 2004. When this book came out, the back of the dust cover had seven high praising blurbs, but I think time has tarnished the luster of its big ideas. I’m not singling out Paul Graham for criticism, but using his book as an example of what time does to nonfiction, and to compare it to how fiction holds up better over time.

For example Graham writes about nerds and geeks and speculates on the nature of popularity and how it appears that being smart is a good thing before and after high school, but not during. Eight years later, this essay seems dated because the topic has been well covered since. However, when I think of great stories about nerds and geeks, I think of King Dork, a 2006 book by Frank Portman, Sixteen Candles, a John Hughes film from 1984, and Freaks and Geeks, a TV show from the 1999-2000 season. Graham’s nonfiction essay has few reporting details, other than some vague personal memories. Graham was abstractly talking about the reputation of being smart among high school students, and if you were clued into his message it might have felt insightful in 2004. It doesn’t in 2013.

Most of the essays are still somewhat appealing, but were probably much fresher as blog or magazine pieces at the time. You can read them here, and in particular, “Why Nerds are Unpopular.” I think the fictional accounts I mention above clearly show why nerds are unpopular, and these art forms have lasting power. Now, this isn’t meant to criticize Graham’s essays. I write the same kind of essays myself for this blog, and I often wonder if my ideas wouldn’t be better presented as fiction. Social commentary often works better shown not told.

I wonder if 1981’s The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder would hold up to rereading today? It won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize in 1982. Tracy used an abundance of actual details, and reported on the lives of engineers designing the Data General Eclipse MV/8000 minicomputer. No one cares about that minicomputer today. I found the book riveting at the time, but would I now? Readers today might care about the history of the subculture that built it, but it would be an esoteric read. I need to get a copy of The Soul of a New Machine and reread it to see how well it holds up 30+ years later. Few people will ever read The Soul of a New Machine today, but many will keep watching movies like The Social Network (2010) long into the future.

Sure, some nonfiction books do have lasting power. People still read On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin from 1859 and Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau from 1854. Would more people understand these books if they were made into movies?

When I pulled Hackers & Painters off the shelf to read last week, I also pulled Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul (2007) by Edward Humes, Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir (1999) by Jerry M. Linenger, and Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (1931) by Edmund Wilson. The Wilson book is the most famous, but only known to literary theory historians probably.

These books are all worth reading, but do they really hold up? Off the Planet offers the gritty details of being an astronaut and is far more realistic than any science fiction book. And think about that. Few people read about real space travel, and millions embrace highly unbelievable space opera in books, comics and movies. For the most part people just prefer fiction to fact.

Monkey Girl is a serious book. It’s an important book. It’s about the teaching of evolution in schools and the legal actions against it. A subject always in the news. Monkey Girl is brilliant reporting on reality, with thousands of details and ideas to chew on. I think that’s a clue to the success of nonfiction lasting. Nonfiction must report details, not speculation. A book like Eden’s Outcast, John Matteson’s 2007 biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father Bronson Alcott is timeless – until another biographer puts in more work that overshadows it.

I’m slowly moving from being a fiction bookworm to a nonfiction bookworm. We’ve always cherished and judged great novels as art, but I think we need to apply the same attention to nonfiction. Most nonfiction published is no more lasting than a newspaper, but some nonfiction books do have a long shelf life and we need to consider them as art too.

Yet, why does fiction have so much more lasting power than nonfiction? I’m reading South Wind by Paul Douglas, a fictionalize account of British expats living on the island of Capri published in 1971. Would a nonfiction travel book written at the time be more informative? Before that I read Confessions of a Crap Artist by Philip K. Dick, a fictionalize account of 1959 life in Marin County, California. I found it totally compelling.

What does fiction have that nonfiction doesn’t to make it enduring? How is it we often find fiction more educational about the past than nonfiction books?

Writing nonfiction that’s powerful and lasting, should contain an abundance of facts that our collective soul won’t want to forget. Either from research or reporting, nonfiction that’s as powerful as fiction must contain an overwhelming collection of vivid details about life in another time. Strangely enough, it’s the accumulation of significant creative details that make fiction powerful. Fiction can be lies that last for centuries. Few nonfiction books last very long. They are always superseded by books with better facts, but some nonfiction books do last. We need to identify and think about them.

Here is Modern Library’s 100 Best Nonfiction Books. There are many wonderful books on this list, but most of them just don’t convey the concept of classics to me. I’ve only read nine of them, and read parts of a few others. I often reread great fictional novels, but rarely reread a nonfiction book. Why?

That’s another kind of shelf life. I keep my favorite novels, but I give away the nonfiction I admire.

JWH – 1/22/13

Retirement-Trading Money for Time

I’ll be 62 in November and I want to retire soon after that. I don’t know if that’s prudent, because waiting until I’m 66 would get me a lot more money, but it’s what I want. My friends Mike and Connell have always been industrious ants to my carefree grasshopper self. Both have been tight with their money, never spending much, always saving and investing. I didn’t start saving until late in life, but luckily I’ve been working for the state of Tennessee for over 35 years and have a pension coming. Enough to live on if I spend wisely, something I’ve never done.

Living like a grasshopper is possible before retirement, but after retirement its an ant’s life for sure. I’ve got to learn to pinch pennies and that’s going to be a new lifestyle for me. CouponBug here I come. I expect those old adages like a penny saved is a penny earned, or waste not, want not, will become way more meaningful after my retirement.

If I can’t change my spending habits this year, it’s probably a sign I shouldn’t retire. Soon a fixed income will become a reality. What they really should call it is a fractional income. The fraction I must embrace is 6/10th. Every month this year I need to prove my retirement worthiness by only spending 60% of what I normally spend. Luckily, since Susan started working in Birmingham, I’ve been learning to cut expenses. I think I’m close already, I just need to fine tune my penny pinching ways.

The trouble the 40% has to mainly come from causal fun expenditures, like eating out, cable TV, buying tons of books and music, going to movies and plays, buying gadgets and computers, etc. I could save hundreds a month if we sold the house and I got an apartment. Susan works out of town and has her own apartment, but I live in house she grew up in that we bought after her parents died. The cheapest way for me to live would be to sell the house and move to Birmingham, but I don’t want to do that because I have so many friends here.

When I look at my credit card statement it has lots of unnecessary charges. Charges for stuff I can’t be buying after I retire. If I was like Mike and Connell, I would have never developed such bad spending habits. They’ve been telling me this for decades, I’ve just haven’t listened. It’s amazing how much stuff we buy that we don’t need. Or how much stuff we pay too much for, or how much stuff we just plain waste. I buy $6 worth of grapes, but I let $3 worth go bad.

A word to the young, from a guy who didn’t listen. Every dollar you spend now is a dollar you won’t have in the future. Well, I never listened to that kind of talk either, but I guess every essay needs a message.

Essentially what I’m doing is trading money for time. I’ve always wanted more time, here’s my chance. Luckily I’ve never been one of those people who wanted to retire and travel the world and lead the good life. I won’t have the money for that. What I want is time to read and write, I want to listen to music and write fun computer programs. I want to systematically study the history of science and literature. Maybe I’ll learn to play the guitar, but I always say that, and never do.

I’ve got 500 hardback books waiting to read, and 200 audio books queued up to be listened to. I’ve got several novels, and hundreds of essays and short stories I want to write.

I want to spend a lot of time just snoozing and napping. I actually want to read all those cool websites and blogs I’ve been bookmarking, and watch all those movies and documentaries in my Netflix queue. Awhile back I bought the complete run of The Rolling Stone magazine on DVD. I’d like to read all the record reviews and listen to those albums on Rdio. Awhile back I bought a DVD of all the “Amateur Scientist” columns from Scientific American. I’d love to go through them and do some of the experiments. I want to program a time-line database. I want to learnt to program in Python and write programs that teach me math. I’d like to build my own super computer (by year 2000 standards) for modeling visual data.

I’m Henry Bemis and I finally have time enough at last. I just hope my glasses don’t break.

Now this paradise of time is going to cost me. Eating out for convenience won’t be practical. Spending money to go out to a play or movie just to spend two hours with a friend will be wasteful. Buying a new tablet or computer because it’s new and different will be an insane act. I have four computers, an iPad, two Kindles and an iPod touch. That’s a kind of CPU luxury will be silly in the future.

I now buy 10 books for every one I read. After I retire, I need to read 9 books for every one I buy. I need to become a library patron again.

I’ve been living without cable for a couple years now. For the price of Netflix and Hulu I have more great TV to watch than I can cram into a lifetime of 24×7 couch potato living.

Many people I know have dropped their land lines and switched to a smart phone. I’ve kept my land line and use a dumb cell phone that costs me about $8 a month. My 12 year old truck just passed 71,000 miles, so I figure I can drive it another 20 years. Susan began working out of town five years ago and I started cost cutting then, but now I’ve got to get deadly serious about not spending money if I want to live without working.

And in a way that’s such a weird concept, to live without working. I’ve been working for four decades. Will retirement be like my growing up years? Or will I be growing down?

There’s more to preparing for retirement than just living cheap. Work has always been a major social outlet, so I’ll need to psyche myself up for spending a lot more time alone. Less money and fewer friends maybe, but hopefully do more with those fewer people, a lot more. Most of my socializing costs money. I need to invite people over. I need to learn to cook for people and plan inexpensive activities at home. Oh yeah, that means I need to learn how to cook and host parties.

My friend Peggy who recently retired says her problem is time management. She says she never gets anything done because she always feels she has all the time in the world. I hope that doesn’t happen to me. Of course, I might be fooling myself.

That’s the thing about planning for retirement, you really don’t know what it will be like until after you retire. Wouldn’t it be funny that I’ll finally get to give up the old 9-to-5 and then discover I was one of those guys who was happiest working until they died? I don’t think I will be. All the people I know that have retired have said retiring has been the best thing in their life and they are busier now than ever before.

JWH – 1/21/13

Windows 8 Nightmare

My old friend Connell called me up tonight to update me on his saga of getting a new laptop with Windows 8. From the last installment I had thought everything was great. Connell is not a computer guy. He’s been using Windows XP for years and never went to Vista or Windows 7. Both Connell and my wife Susan bought a new laptop with Windows 8 the same week. Susan wanted Windows 7, but none of the stores had a machine that came with it, and she didn’t want to custom order one from Dell or HP. Both Susan and Connell bought their machines and set them up without my help. I thought that was a good sign. I did help Susan by giving her a Windows Easy Transfer cable and telling her how to use it.

Connell was quite angry when he called tonight. Susan’s initial calls claimed Windows 8 wasn’t too bad, but since then she’s been running into some problems, mainly frustrated that some of her games aren’t Windows 8 compatible. It’s frozen up a couple of times and she had to hold the power button down until it shut off. But she loves her new machine anyway, especially that it doesn’t run hot like her old laptop.

Connell’s biggest frustration has been with the Charms bar. He can’t get it to open when he wants it, and it opens when he doesn’t, driving him crazy. Neither know how to go deep and configure their machine, or find options when they need them.

I’ve set Windows 8 up three times now on test machines at work. I can use it, but it’s a pain in the ass, and it’s butt ugly. I really, really, really dislike Windows 8. Windows 7 is my all time favorite operating system, and I have OS X on an iMac at work. I’m worried what will happen if I want to buy a new machine and my only choice for a PC is Windows 8. I guess I’ll have to choose between Linux and OS X, and since I’m too cheap to buy a Mac, it will be Linux. By the way, I put Ubuntu on my iMac as a dual boot and I really think Ubuntu looks great on an iMac. But I won’t spend $1200 for that either.

Connell is planning on taking his laptop back and getting a Chromebook. I’m curious how that will work out. Susan is adapting to Windows 8, but she mainly plays Farmville and GameHouse games. She’s going to give me her old laptop and I’m going to buy a SSD drive for it and put Ubuntu on it. I wonder if she’ll want it back?

I’m also thinking about buying Android on a stick for my television and experimenting with it.

What’s happening is Windows 8 is forcing people to consider alternative OSes. At work I’ve decided not to roll out Windows 8. We can still get Windows 7 from Dell. Many of our professors are now wanting Macs. The iPhone and iPad have convinced many of our Windows users to try iMacs and MacBooks. We were 95% PC, but that’s changing. I still push Windows 7, but the tide might be turning. Windows 8 will only inspire more switching. I’ve already gotten several calls from people buying Windows 8 for their home machines. Some have asked how can they put Windows 7 on their new machines. Luckily I don’t have to support home machines, but I tell them they need to get used to Windows 8, because going back to Windows 7 is costly and time consuming. Microsoft should make a Revert to 7 disc and give it away. Connell was told he could pay $60 to have Windows 7 put on his machine from the store where he bought his new laptop, but he thought that was insulting and a ripoff. You shouldn’t have to pay $60 to fix a new machine.

Microsoft, I think you need to pull a Coke Classic and bring back Windows 7.

JWH – 11/14/13