Says I To Myself, or Maybe the Universe

 

When commentators were falling over each other trying to illustrate what a long time Queen Elizabeth II had been queen (xx number of Prime Ministers and Presidents, etc.), they hit home with this statistic: they said that only 10% of the world's current population had been alive when Elizabeth was crowned Queen.

Well, that was June 1953, I was alive and a few weeks shy of my 7th birthday.  I have a vague recollection of the royal procession televised in black and white, but that's likely from seeing it later.  But I could have seen it.  I'd certainly seen Hopalong Cassidy and Captain Video.  (I'd also pondered the mystery of Bishop Sheen's guardian angel erasing his blackboard, just out of sight of the camera on his Tuesday night show.)  

When I heard this 10% statistic (assuming it is accurate), I was knocked back a bit. While I didn't realize my age group is that much of a minority (my generation was pretty large), it's not news that I'm not swimming in the Zeitgeist the way I once did.  Not that I even want to.

Since my retirement I've pursued the second look-- examination of some worlds of my past, but from perspectives made possible by the passage of time.  That's probably not surprising to anyone who has been reading this blog since 2016.  It's quite a lot of what I've been writing about.

Writing about a past of limited interest to that 90%, and doing so on an outmoded medium on the Internet, is not a recipe for a readership of clamoring millions.  Thanks also to Blogger ending support for the email notification system of new posts, my already small officially measured readership has diminished further.  I can't say I'm happy about mostly talking to myself, but I'm not about to change what I'm doing.

  Not everybody gets this chance--to look back, to reexamine, to discover aspects of the past I didn't know or understand, to explore the textures of the past in the present, to go deeper, to connect up those scattered memories into contexts.  Sometimes to experience the shiver of recognition, as when I recently flipped through an old history textbook I'd used in probably eighth grade, as seeing certain illustrations prompted an eerie echo of staring at them in 1958.  It's not all bliss--some memories revived do haunt the nights.  But I'm still not going to miss this opportunity.  I don't apologize to anyone for this, and I expect to keep doing it. 

 Maybe I'll find a better platform to write about it, but so far it hasn't bothered me enough to spend the time looking for one.  I spent way too much time in my life writing fruitless proposals or begging for assignments, trying to please editors and agents.  I know I'm overcompensating, but to me the Internet blog means I write and I publish it, no proposals to be approved, no publication situations or egos to deal with.  No market research.  No submitting manuscripts and waiting.  So nobody looking over my shoulder.  I just write it (hard enough, thank you) and publish it. In terms of access, my potential readership is the entire world, for as long as this thing is connected to the servers.  There's nothing stopping them but themselves.

Secret Progress Report

Back when I was writing book proposals, I even
created my own book cover. Now it's a blog series logo.

I've been working on several writing projects for at least twenty years.  Not all the time--lots of words have poured out, been published or sent out into cyberspace, including a lot of sentences I wrote to earn some money.  Nevertheless, these big projects have been difficult to complete.

One of them has been called Soul of the Future for a big chunk of that time.   The idea of this approach to writing about the future first came to me while walking down Murray Avenue to my apartment in Pittsburgh in the mid 1990s.  By then, a decade or more after my book The Malling of America was published, I'd realized that I could probably not depend on a decent book advance or even expenses for articles, to finance travel and so on for another book.  As I had no institutional support (university, foundation, etc.) and was unlikely to be offered any, and I still wanted to write a book, I would have to figure out how to do it without the expense of travel.

That certainly meant a different kind of book from The Malling of America.  Or pretty much any of the articles I'd published over the prior 20 years.  It took some thinking to come up with ideas I was interested in exploring, within those limitations.

So when I was idly wondering why so many movies about the future were apocalyptic, and that I could think of only one widely known utopian story from the recent past, a number of  questions and ideas came together, and I realized I had the makings of a book.

I did considerable research, and piled up drafts that didn't quite work.  I would stop at the point of exhaustion which accompanied discouragement, especially when the need to pay attention to paying work became acute.

  Meanwhile, we'd moved to Arcata and life went this way and that.  I kept computer files of my work on this project by year: some folders had lots of chapter drafts, some had little more than new outlines and notes.  I had a file cabinet full of notes from the old days of paper, and piles of notebooks. I did in fact publish essays and reviews related to this project, but I could not really get going on the project itself. There was so much to tell, and I couldn't find a way to tell it all.

Lately I realized that if I was going to write an entire book, especially at my age, it would have to be, not a daily battle, but a daily joy, or at least obsession. It had to be something I was eager to do every day.

To do that, it would have to establish a narrative momentum that carried me along, before I could carry along any readers.

Recently I think I've got the momentum to go ahead with it.  And it came partly from a similar source that propelled me to write the final draft of The Malling of America.

The key that time was Moby Dick. My editor was demanding a first person narrator, and I could not figure out how to do it.  Finally reading Melville's actual prose, I realized that I could create a first person narrator who was based on me, but wasn't me.  He was a somewhat more naive and focused observer. (More like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby than Ismael or Leopold Bloom, but they were in the mix.)  Plus I lumped a lot of trips to see malls into one voyage. Melville probably did something similar, though I'm sure he made up more stuff than I did.

From that point the writing went quickly and well.  Of course, I had a long magazine piece, pieces of other magazine articles, lots of notes and tapes and several years of writing multiple drafts behind me.

This time the key was a biography of Charles Dickens by Michael Slater. I paused in reading Dickens' novels (my first post-retirement reading project)  to read this long biography that meticulously linked his activities with his writing.

  In addition to novels, Dickens was doing a lot of journalism.  I also knew that he'd published the novels in serial form, in magazines.  But the biography made it clear how thoroughly he did it that way.  He wrote literally to deadline.  His early novels hardly even had a plan--he was winging it.  But even later when he worked them out in advance, he was writing chunks of the novel, and seeing them published in a monthly or weekly magazine (usually the one he was editing) before he wrote the next chunk.

I don't edit a magazine but I do have full control over my blogs.  Recently I'd found that it was easier for me to write for my blogs than otherwise.  I improvised, things came together, the process and the prose flowed.  I revised, of course, though that's apparently not a bloggy thing to do.  But my blogs are pretty much unique anyway.

Another longstanding project--related to this one--was Soul of Star Trek, which is one of my blogs but which was always supposed to mainly become a book.  So in Star Trek's 50th anniversary year, I experimented in writing chapters for what might be a book, but as blog entries.  It seemed to work.  I'm sure I would change things when it comes time to actually make it a book, but the basics are there.

So I applied this idea of writing for periodical publication by blog to Soul of the Future.  I've written three posts, one of them quite long, so far.  The latest one, on 70s futurists, was the most satisfying.  I know it's basically about the best I can do, and except for minor revisions, it's finally done.  Because a lot of it derived from articles and drafts that go back to the 70s themselves, that was more like a 40 year journey.

Simply conceptualizing this as a series of posts gave me a voice, and I came up with a narrative strategy.  Just for the first several chapters, but hopefully one thing would keep leading to another.

So I have a narrative working, at least in the sense of one thing leads to another, or one answer leads to another question.  Tom Stoppard has said on several occasions that the basic task of the writer is to manage the flow of information received by the audience.  That's the secret difficulty a lot of writers have.  Jo Rowling once said she had a hard time with her first Harry Potter draft--she had so much of the story in her head, she was trying to tell it all in the first chapter of the first book.

I don't like to talk about works in progress, and I do believe they can be jinxed. But I'm not too worried about being thrown off by responses, or lack of them.  No one reads my blog.  I mean, literally no one reads this one, and very few people read my Dreaming Up Daily blog, where these posts are appearing.  As discouraging as that can be at times, I know in this case it's for the best.  It's why I resist drawing attention to myself through Facebook or twittering away or instanagramming.  I don't need a lot of noise.  I don't need to please anyone, or a lot of anyones.  At my age, this isn't going to be the start of a great career.

Still, I need to publish, to see what it looks like, to experience that feeling I remember: the words are out there, written for those phantom readers you can only imagine, and written with the likely criticisms of other writers and editors in mind: flagging sloppy research, bad diction, unjustified claims, misspelling.

No, at this point I just want to record this progress report for myself.  I'm doing it here because it looks better on the blog than on the word processing page.  (I love adding photos to the drafts, even if I couldn't afford to publish them in a resulting book.)

The reader(s) in my head, that's something else.  This blog's for you, too.

Nobody Blogs Anymore (But Me)

"Nobody blogs anymore," I was told, by someone who is in a position to know about trends in techworld.  I wasn't surprised, even when I said instinctively, "I do."

I suspect there are far fewer people blogging, at least in the old sense of writing often for an autonomous site, with the goal of inducing as many readers as possible to follow each consecutive post.

And that's because of course there are far fewer readers who follow specific blogs.  While some bloggers have gone on by affiliating with media sites, most I suspect have transitioned to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.  Social media is The Thing, and it drive out everything else.

I sometimes try to make myself care.  I suppose it is possible to enhance reader access by using social media to alert readers to posts, or maybe I could get over my extreme distaste for the aesthetics of the Facebook page and post there.  Assuming I could get used to the ever-changing nature of the site, and it's chaotic and privacy-threatening features.

It seems like a lot of trouble that takes a lot of time, especially time away from writing the blog entries/essays.  Avoiding all that trouble was pretty much why I started in the first place.  I had spent far too much time and energy on trying to make publication possible.  Blogs were (and are) instant publication.

Somehow I've taken to writing in this format.  I've been working for years on book projects, and have recently found I can complete chapters for a projected Soul of Star Trek book by preparing them as posts for my blog, Soul of Star Trek.

So I'm basically not going to mess with that.  Maybe later I'll do something different in addition.  If there is a later.

But for now, I'm content to work within existing parameters.  As a writer you learn not to mess with what's working.

I have a small cadre of known regular readers for my Dreaming Up Daily blog, and at least until the election I'm content to sound off for them.  There are many more hits registered for Soul of Star Trek but I don't know about actual readers.  I suspect my recent posts aren't being read, but that's okay.  I'm doing them to do them, finally, and let them go.  (Although the goal is still a book, even if  I wind up publishing it through google or whatever, and once again cast something to the wind.)

But there aren't many hits registered for this blog, which I think I started first or maybe second of still-going blogs, all those blogging centuries ago.  But I've known for several years that this blog gets few hits, so my occasional posts here are in the nature of a kind of diary, plus a kind of file cabinet of ideas, for easy access.  As much as I counsel against becoming dependent on "the cloud" and cyberspace in general for storing things, I've done it through my blogs.  A lot of my writing exists on them, and nowhere else.  They could truly be gone with the wind.

So...here it is, here am I, September 2016.  I'm needing to fill the hummingbird feeders more frequently now, though I'm seeing only one hummer, a delicate slim small green one.  In past years there's been at least two, usually three, and sometimes four.  There are hummers around all year now (and may always have been) but they come to the feeders in late summer through mid February.  Other times I see them in the front yard more than in the back.  Plenty of flowers they like in both places.

Today is fog covered but it has again seemed to be sunnier more often this summer than say ten years ago, though that's been the trend for several summers now.  Knowing what it portends adds a strange dimension to the general perception that it is pretty damn nice--warm to hot sun, blue skies and warm to cool temps.  After some spikes early in the season, we got no real hot and humid days this summer.  The variation day to day seemed larger, but within a comfortable range.

Now it's getting cooler, especially at night.  This year we had a good crop of tomatoes--cherry tomato size though different varieties--and blueberries on several bushes back and front, and some but not many strawberries.

I can see Toby's pear trees next door are bearing a lot of fruit, so far unpicked. I don't think the people who live there now are relatives, but it seems the family still owns the place. Toby's trees have outlived him, and so his memory stays alive, at least here. We got some pears from our little tree, but the little apple tree, while it yields full sized apples, doesn't produce many edible ones.  Never has.

Pema the cat is hanging out next to me now as I write this.  We've spent a lot of time and attention on her health for several months now, but that's another post in itself.  At the moment she's good, sort of.

Okay, I'm going to throw in a few random photos I've taken this summer into this post.  With the rise of Instagram and the phone cameras, people are altering their photos with filters etc. until reality is unrecognizable.  I don't know what I think about that, except for two things: (1) once again I'm not taking the time, trouble and expense of doing such, and (2) I tend not to look at photos that appear to be excessively manipulated.  Because, what am I looking at? I've noticed this especially with photos taken during eclipses, Super Moons and meteor showers, etc.  They're often unbelievable. So what's the point?

The Internet of Remembering

My unfiltered photo, Trinidad Head June 30, 2016, now past, but now your present, and here to stay.

In the New Yorker this week, Casey Johnston wrote about various social media platforms that wipe away photos and text after a brief period, like 24 hours. Now you see it, now you won't. This is much prized, Johnston writes, especially by younger posters whose identity is formed in the moment, and may be obsolete and even embarrassing before long. This "satisfies a craving for immediacy and ephemerality, one that has lately grown to encompass all of social media." Johnston calls this the Internet of Forgetting.

 Well, I am not young and that is not my Internet. Time and its contents helplessly obsess me. I crave scope, so I can maybe make some sense of it. The past has a different reality now that I have more of it myself. Rediscovering elements of the past and reflecting on them, connecting and reconciling, all add something necessary to my present. Besides, these discoveries as well as re-discoveries in both their original context and in mine now, also constitute much of my entertainment. 

So fortunately for me, there is also an Internet of Remembering. There are search functions to vast data, various Wikis and especially YouTube. On YouTube I can access (as I have recently) radio broadcasts from the 1940s, particular baseball or basketball games from--well, I haven't even explored how far back. Interviews from the 50s, movies from the 30s (ever heard of the Torchy Blane series? Neither had I. It's pretty good. Besides which, it may have been an inspiration for Lois Lane.)

Reading about past events in historical context, I can find documents and publications of the time online. I can even see the faces and hear the voices, from at least FDR on. There are surprising snippets of performances by legendary actors, though unfortunately not so many whole plays. Can't find in any library an obscure treatise on ethics and psychology by one of the greatest classic science fiction authors (and least known outside the s/f community), Olaf Stapledon? Search online, and ye shall find the entire text. And so on.

A recent instance of personal memory...I remember one Saturday morning when I was 8. I was watching "Space Patrol"--an episode in which Buzz Corey and crew used their "time drive" to travel to 1956. They mentioned that they were traveling from the 30th century, when "Space Patrol" takes place.

 My mother caught some of this. She asked me if I knew what century we were living in. I don't think I did, exactly. She said it was the 20th century, and the Space Patrol people were coming from the 30th. She mentioned that she used to listen to Buck Rogers on the radio, and he had traveled to the 25th century. I probably remember this because I learned something about time.

 I recall Saturday mornings when there was one outer space show after another--"Tom Corbett, Space Cadet," "Rocky Jones, Space Ranger," "Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers" and "Space Patrol." I researched these shows on the Internet in 2010 and discovered enough to figure out that they were probably all on during only one year: 1954.

 I was writing fiction based on my childhood, and for reasons having to do with other events in the chapter, I selected a certain October Saturday to revisit these shows, and how my friends and I used them in play. Then I found a "Space Patrol" episode guide that described the show scheduled on the Saturday I had selected. From the description it seemed very likely it was the very one I remember, when my mother and I had that conversation. (I blogged about all this right here at the time.)

 Well, it's 2016 and many "Space Patrol" episodes are now on YouTube, though not always under their original titles. Also YouTube can be difficult to search systematically. But the other night, I happened upon and saw this episode--the one I last saw with my mother in our living room in 1954.

 But the Internet of remembering has more functions than revisiting personal memories. Here's another YouTube show I watched recently. I've been reading Arthur Miller lately--this latest Miller jag started when I read a roundtable discussion of contemporary playwrights, and one of them quoted Miller. I then found on the Internet the interview with Miller that contained that quote, and more along that line. That started me reading some of his nonfiction and lesser known plays, and re-reading his autobiography. So on a whim I went back and searched YouTube for television interviews.

I immediately found an interview he did with Charlie Rose in 1992. When the conversation veered to that now historical moment--the 1992 election campaign and the rise of Ross Perot, a purported billionaire businessman outsider--I got chills, especially when Miller said: "When a leadership arises in a country that believes it can lead by using the darkness in men, it's probably unstoppable at a certain point." He'd grown up watching Hitler's rise in Germany. 

Does anybody--even those who lived through it, as I did-- remember what it felt like with Ross Perot in 1992? I didn't. From 2016, Perot now looks like an early and milder version of Trump, thanks to this interview. There's precedent, a continuum of sorts perhaps. And people were worried then. (Miller thought America was too diverse to fall completely for a dictator of darkness, which of course may be our salvation now.)

 And to add to all this co-incidence (which means things happening at the same time, like the past in the present), Miller once described the function of playwriting as "remembering."

About many things, it doesn't pay to forget. The Internet of Remembering is important to our survival, as well as the lives of "the olds" as Johnston says that tech folks call anybody over 30. So in my case I guess it's "the ancients."