Political Narratives Becoming Dangerously Homogenous

I was sitting as unobtrusively as possible in the back row of an assembly recently and observed an individual...around my age in his sixties...engaged in friendly conversation with another he had seen sitting in a row ahead of me.  It went a little nervously at first but then I noticed this man suddenly getting very loud as he laughingly proclaimed a very partisan, political statement meant to demean anyone with a different opinion...let me tell you, it was completely inappropriate for that solemn setting.  I'm afraid that this kind of behavior is only becoming more and more prevalent in our society, and depending on where you happen to live or be at any given moment in time, you could change the party labels of those involved and get the same kind of result.  It's all about people stuck in a particular narrative...and there are several narratives in a state of dominance right now...who are operating under the mass delusion that their adopted narrative contains all the truth and that those who disagree with it are themselves deluded, stupid, ignorant, or the enemy.  As an example just look at TV on competing channels and see Don Lemon and Tucker Carlson push their respective conflicting narratives.  This type of thing has been going on throughout our history, but its advent over the past few years...first of multiple specialized cable/satellite television channels, conservative talk radio, and finally, the Internet, political blogging and social media that have made narratives much less individualized and more homogenized within the different camps.  And I fear it's beginning to instill a new form of prejudice...

Usually when you use the word "prejudice" it means "pre-judgment" based on someone's ethnicity, gender, age, or faith.  Now since the mega-narratives of today tend to bundle together a number of different opinions on things, it's tempting to ascribe attributes to people based on little ways they behave.  So a dude walking in Publix without a mask MUST be a Trump-supporting fascist who denies he lost the last election and wants to keep minorities from voting, right?  Or somebody wearing a BLM tee-shirt MUST be "woke" and believe in taking away your guns and suppressing your right to speak your conservative thoughts on social media, right?  In other words, expressing a "piece" of a narrative is increasingly being interpreted as subscribing to that narrative in its entirety, and although our "brave new world" seems to be headed in that direction, I still think that as individuals we're more complex than that, each of us while often latching onto some to the narratives provided us still reserving the right to differ on some of their specifics.  But we are nevertheless going in the wrong direction.  As an exercise I suggest this: examine your own political beliefs and (temporarily) try to see things from the other guy's point of view...or at least try to find something genuinely complimentary to say about those with whom you fundamentally disagree.  You can always spring right back to your own positions, but I think if more folks did this they'd be more civil and respectful to their counterparts while preserving and strengthening their own crucial individual right to disagree on different details of the narratives foisted onto them by others... 

Great Old TV Episodes...from The Beverly Hillbillies

JED BECOMES A BANKER was one of my favorite episodes from the classic comedy series The Beverly Hillbillies.  It was first aired in early 1963 from the first season.  As a little kid I quickly latched onto the exploits of Jed, Granny, Jethro and Elly May as they adjust from their old life in the hills back to their new one in swanky Beverly Hills, California...and everyone else tries to adjust to them.  In this episode the Clampetts' banker, Milburn Drysdale, has an ongoing skeet-shooting rivalry with his fellow bankers...and he's determined to win the contest this time around.  Upon discovering Jed and Jethro shooting flies off their estate's wall with their rifles hundreds of feet away, Drysdale quickly makes Jed his bank's vice-president as only bank employees are permitted to play in the match.  The whole family goes with Jed out to the skeet shooting field and astounds their banker with their sharpshooting skill. Not only does Granny cut the clay pigeons to pieces with little effort (see above picture), but then Elly May pulls out her slingshot and shoots them down as well.  What I liked about this episode was the hilarious performance of Raymond Bailey as Drysdale, who generally played the straight man to the others' more comedic antics.  This one had one of the funniest finishes of the series.  There some other gems from this series as well, almost all of them during the early black & white years of the early 1960s.  Later on Jethro tended to take over the show with his clownish behavior.  At the time the series was running back then, as a kid I though Jethro was my favorite character, but now he kind of embarrasses me with his silliness and misplaced pride, a contrast to his transplanted backwoods family and their  dignified "noble savage" public image.  Nevertheless I recognized that Max Baer, Jr., who portrayed Jethro, is largely responsible for the series' enduring success, even to this day so many years later.  But as far as I'm concerned, Jed's the man now...

Just Finished Reading Tangerine by Catherine Mangan

I just finished reading Catherine Mangan's 2018 psychological thriller novel Tangerine.  Set in the 1950s, it's about the relationship between two young women...Alice Shipley from England and American Lucy Mason...who first meet as roommates at a Vermont women's college, bond closely as inseparable friends, and then abruptly part following a terrible accident there, revealed later in the story.  While the chapters alternate between first person narratives by Alice and Lucy, the time frames also fluctuate between the present time and their college days.  And the present time has Alice, recently married to an Englishman named John, newly arrived with him in Tangier, Morocco.  She is shy and fearful about leaving their apartment but her husband is ebullient about this very beautiful-but-strange locale.  Lucy, desperate to recover their close friendship, seeks out Alice's whereabouts and follows her across the ocean.  What ensues is a psychologically gripping war of will and manipulation between Lucy, Alice, and John...who has incurred Lucy's wrath after she spies him with another woman.  But even more than this, Tangerine is about someone who is a psychopath, who sees hers entire moral world only as it relates to her own self and pride and who is incapable of feeling true love...which is self-sacrificial in nature...and substitutes obsession for it.  And to her credit, Mangan realistically portrays how people are regularly taken in by psychopaths with their apparent emotional honesty concealing their lies, their unwillingness to ever admit defeat, their charm...and their skill at assassinating the character of anyone for whom they bear a grudge: remind any of you of a prominent American political figure during the last five or six years?  I checked out Goodreads after finishing Tangerine to see how other readers reacted to it and their reviews are all over the map, but I noticed that with a few of the negative ones the criticisms seemed misplaced: because Catherine Mangan used the first-person narrative form for her story, that narrative in itself is deliberately inefficient and the characters typically ethnocentric as white, visiting foreigners of the '50s in their view of the Moroccans...don't judge her writing skills or social outlook for that.  Additionally, just about everyone missed the point of what a psychopath is and how one must deal with them completely differently than how they interact with "normal" people who possess a social conscience.  See for yourself and read the book, it's not very long...

Quote of the Week...from Paulo Coelho

Every search begins with beginner's luck, and every search ends with the victors being severely tested.                                                                        ---Paulo Coelho in The Alchemist.

About three quarters of the way through Paulo Coelho's novel The Alchemist, the title character lays the above quote on protagonist Santiago, who is traveling with him across the north African desert to Egypt.  It stood out to me when I first read it and I had it bookmarked to return to later.  He then expands upon this quote with the following explanation:  

Before a dream is realized, the soul of the world tests everything that was learned along the way.  It does this not because it is evil, but so that we can, in addition to realizing our dreams, master the lessons we've learned as we moved toward that dream. That's the point at which most people give up.

It's true that the beginning of a dream or quest often seems to go smoothly, but sometimes I wonder whether the Alchemist had the cart before the horse with his above sayings.  Oftentimes we may not yet have a dream, but successful initial experiences in an area may inspire us to want to go further down that road toward desiring greater realization and success...and then the serious testing begins, especially when the expected social approval begins to wane over time.  After all, we tend in childhood to be rewarded with praise and greater esteem whenever it's discovered we have a special talent or ability with something, and as a child I always wanted to enjoy that kind of respect from others.  What distinguished the Alchemist to me was that while Santiago was wholeheartedly seeking to fulfill his dream of finding his treasure, he allowed himself to grow to appreciate everything around that did not necessarily provide positive personal feedback to his self-esteem...and that the process of the journey was more important in the end than the reward.  Yet without that sought-after reward, Santiago would have just continued with his day-to-day shepherding back in his homeland without ever growing from the inside...

The Alchemist is a pretty small book, but it packs a very big punch philosophically...I just presented a small slice of what it contains.  How about reading it for yourself and letting me know what you thought of it?

Constellation of the Month: Corvus (the Crow)

 

For May I picked Corvus (the Crow) as my constellation of the month, not because it has any bright stars or special deep-space objects of interest (it doesn't), but rather because it has over the years been a dependable sky marker for me during the spring evening hours.  I'm not sure how you get a "crow" out of the above configuration, but the irregular quadrilateral shape of its four brightest stars is unmistakable.  Corvus is located just south of the celestial equator and is between the Zodiac constellation Virgo to the north) and the very lengthy constellation Hydra (to the south).  If you take the top two stars in Corvus, line them up and point to the east (leftward), they point Virgo's bright first-magnitude star Spica.  Corvus is one of those constellations that don't exactly follow the loose protocol of following the Greek alphabet in order of their stars' brightness..."Alpha" isn't even a part of the quadrilateral.  Corvus and I go way back...it's one of the first constellations I remember identifying in the spring evening sky eons ago in 1964 when I was seven years old, so I have a rather soft spot in my heart for it...if one can do so with a sector of the night sky.  Next month I'll feature my second "constellation of the month" for June...in 2020 I picked Boötes for this honor: I have a couple of candidates this time around...

Weekly Short Stories: 1971 Science Fiction, Part 1

Today I move onward with my science fiction short story reviews from 1971, starting with the first four tales appearing in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1972 Annual World's Best SF, which spotlights the editor's selections from the preceding year.  Let's see...the first part of '71 had me finishing up my dismal ninth grade in high school with the fall showing some hope in my tenth, at least academically speaking.  Around late spring all of South Florida stank with the smoke drifting eastward from the burning Everglades as we were in the middle of a horrible weeks-long drought.  Nationally, Nixon was still plugging away as president, Apollo missions continued to land on the moon and return, and the Vietnam War was supposedly being "Vietnamized"...yet Americans, many drafted over there against their will, were still being sent into combat to draw enemy fire and die.  I read The Old Man in the Sea by Hemingway, The Pearl by Steinbeck, and Macbeth by Shakespeare, all in English class with Macbeth performed by all the students in a string of nauseating plays with the same repeating scenes.  But back to those sci-fi stories...

THE FOURTH PROFESSION by Larry Niven

Frazer, a California bartender in the not-so-distant future has as a surprise customer one of the alien hooded Monks, as they call them, a trader group that landed on the moon a couple of years earlier and were thought to only be on Earth around New York.  To pay for his many drinks, the Monk offers him a number a pills, each of which imparts a special knowledge or ability. The alien's visit prompts a visit by an official government intelligence agent, raising Frazer's fears that since he consumed the pills and now possesses special skills and awareness he might become a prisoner of the state.  And the Monk has a more dire proposal: in exchange for more knowledge pills humanity is to design and build a "laser launcher" that will allow his ship to leave the moon and accelerate back to the stars...otherwise, they'll sadly have to explode our sun in order to provide the necessary energy.  It's a quandary for Frazer...I liked how he figured it all out at the end...

GLEEPSITE by Joanna Russ

In a nightmare dystopian future for Earth with an extremely poisonous, overheated atmosphere and male humans for some reason nearly driven to extinction, a bat-like woman visits an high-rise office where two sisters employed on the night cleaning shift are working.  She offers to sell them "daydreams", vividly amplified by a device around her neck...in the process drastically altering the appearance of the office.  She is drawn to the locked panels leading to the lethal outside...and it is here that I completely lost the author's train of narrative, difficult enough for the bulk of this very short story due to her deliberately cryptic writing style.  In researching other readers' reactions to this story, they either didn't get it at all or thought it was a masterpiece...maybe if I wake up at three in the morning with a flash of sudden insight I'll join the latter group, but for now I'm just dumbfounded...

THE BEAR WITH THE KNOT ON HIS TAIL by Stephen Tall

This tale centers around what seems to be an interstellar distress call.  Humanity has developed an extremely fast way to circumvent the speed of light and can now pretty much travel anywhere.  The "bear" in the story is the constellation Ursa Major, and the "knot" is the star system Micor...on the stars is about to nova and the intelligent beings on one of its worlds are transmitting the intermittent, highly musical signals.  A psychic pinpoints the source and the rescue crew sets out.  This is more one of those old-style, feel-good stories about people being basically good, with no apparent limits to human ingenuity and desire to explore and help: kind of like Star Trek, actually...

THE SHARKS OF PENTREATH by Michael G. Coney

Sometimes when a story's protagonist is something of a jerk, reading it can be an irritating experience.  Often though, there is an important point to be made: such is the case here as in a severely overcrowded Earth of the future, humanity has to rotate between Fulltime...like our ordinary existence...and Shelflife...stored away with the mind in a dream state.  The richer people can, while in Shelflife, have their minds projected into robots that can travel just about anywhere.  A little coastal resort has its shops and inns, and the owner of one of them spends his Fulltime with his wife there obsessing with squeezing out money from tourists as he'd like to have enough saved to travel the world himself.  An experience with a couple visiting the place while in the robots, with their bodies in Shelflife, changes his perspective, though, and explains the point of him being the story's "hero": sometimes a life lesson needs to be taught...

Next week I continue with more reviews of science fiction short stories from 1971...

Game of the Week: Baseball

 

Technically, I have never played a single game of baseball, America's supposed "pastime".  When I was a little boy in the early 1960s my father and I both collected baseball cards off the backs of Post cereal boxes...I was very proud of those although I knew little-to-nothing about the game itself.  Like just about every sport I did in school recess/P.E. classes, no teacher ever taught me the rules, and we always played variants of baseball: in my early elementary school years we played kickball, where the "pitcher" rolls the red inflated ball to the "kicker" at home plate...you got an "out" simply by hitting or tagging the baserunner with the ball.  I was pretty good at that game because I was both a good kicker and runner.  Later on we would play softball, but not like how the women in college play it: the pitchers were required to throw the ball slower and with a greater arc to give each batter a shot at hitting it.  By high school it was clear whenever we played softball which of my classmates had played league baseball away from school: their skill levels were way beyond mine.  I never cared for baseball and its variants because almost all the time...unless you're the pitcher or catcher...you're just standing around on the field waiting for the ball to come your way or waiting your turn at bat behind the plate: very, very boring (see above picture from the South Park episode The Losing Edge).  As a spectator, though, I often enjoy sitting down to a televised Major League baseball game, especially if the score's close: doesn't matter that much whether one of "my" Florida teams is playing.  I like the often intricate strategies within an inning, especially after a runner reaches base and the pitcher is exhibiting problems of some sort...then it gets interesting.  Still, even without this pandemic going on I wouldn't want to be stuck for some three hours in a ball park watching a game live.  And I absolutely have no interest whatsoever in either college baseball or softball even though I live here in Gainesville where the University of Florida teams in both sports routinely excel each year.  No, for me baseball is now an exclusively televised Major League spectator sport...I began following the standings earnestly starting in the 1969 season, although "my" first World Series was in 1965, between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Minnesota Twins...

Just Finished Reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Portuguese writer Paulo Coelho is said to have written The Alchemist in the span of two weeks in 1987...yet it's clear that he had already worked out the philosophy of living that he espouses in this short novel.  Santiago is a young man living in Spain with a dream of adventure and treasure...his visit to a nearby fortune teller confirms this and a subsequent encounter with a man calling himself King Melchizedek of Salem (the same who met up with Abraham in Genesis) sets him forward on his quest.  A shepherd by trade, he sells his sheep and ships over into northern Africa and an excruciating crossing of the Sahara Desert to his destination: the Egyptian Pyramids.  Along the way he meets up with the Alchemist of the book's title...as well as romance, a much deeper appreciation of the world around him as it exists in the present, and a whole slew of maxims, one of which is that when you set out to accomplish the dream of your life, the universe will conspire to help you.  Perceiving and heeding omens is another absolute necessity...I think I'll present yet another idea of the Alchemist on this blog's next "quote of the week" article on Friday.  The concept Coelho presents here of someone leaving his home to travel a dangerous path on an adventurous quest for a big prize is very vivid and literal...maybe that's been how you picture fulfilling deeply held dreams of your own, but my dreams aren't quite as easy to present like that.  Still, as the author pointed out through other characters, it is only too easy for one to get so caught up with their routines of everyday existence that they eventually abandon and even forget the dreams that they had earlier held to be important in their lives.  And to this extent the book resonated with me.  The prose is written in beautiful, simple language, the characters are easy to empathize with, and as I said before, the story is brief. I think most anyone would get something positive from reading it as I did, and I thought the ending was perfect...

Great Old TV Episodes...from Columbo

 

When I was a kid in the early 1970s, NBC had a great programming concept: the NBC Mystery Movie, in which over the course of weeks they would show episodes from a multitude of ongoing series including MacMillan & Wife, McCloud, Faraday & Company, Tenafly, Banacek, The Snoop Sisters, Ellery Queen...and perhaps the most beloved, Columbo. Initially I didn't care for this series as I foolishly automatically opposed murder mysteries where the perpetrator is known from the start...but it's the psychological duel between the killer and Peter Falk's enduring character of Lt. Columbo, always in his ratty old raincoat and seriously underestimated by all, that gives it such a great, enduring appeal.  The murder is always conceived to be airtight, but right off the bat Columbo starts poking holes in the scheme and spends most of the episode politely hounding his suspect, tearing bit by bit at their sense of security until it's all completely uncovered at the end.  Such was the case in the Season 2 episode The Most Dangerous Match, first shown in early 1973 and starring Laurence Harvey as Emmett Clayton, an obnoxious, overly proud and arrogant chess master threatened by an old champion from Eastern Europe, played by Jack Kruschen who has come out of retirement for a special, highly-publicized match that just so happens to be taking place in Columbo's home territory.  After being humiliated by his elderly opponent in a private warm-up match (see above picture), Clayton plots his demise in order to escape the public humiliation he sees for himself if the match goes on...but he hasn't foreseen an even more formidable opponent: Lt. Columbo...

I've been writing for the past few weeks about various games, but have so far avoided discussing chess...not to fear, I plan to do so before long.  For some reason, chess causes a lot of folks to get very uptight as if their whole sense of worth is tied up in their performance...Harvey's character in this episode is an extreme example.  But it doesn't have to be chess: it could be any kind of endeavor that can serve as a snare drawing one's fanatical devotion and sometimes creating a bubble of superiority and infallibility that, when popped by another, can be personally devastating. Diversify your interests, I say, even if that means you come up playing "second fiddle" to others from time to time. I remember an excellent old Twilight Zone episode, A Game of Pool, starring Jack Klugman and Jonathan Winters, with a very similar theme but a different game...

My April 2021 Running and Walking Report

In April I ran a total of 107 miles, with 4.8 miles being my longest single run...and I ran on every day of the month.  For walking, I covered 125 miles in the same time, the vast majority of it coming at work...my job involves an awful lot of walking.  I finally got to participate in a public running race after joining the Florida Track Club and entering their April 3rd 5K event at Hogtown Creek Headwaters Park in northern Gainesville...as it turns out, the closest race ever to my home.  I ran it slow and easy, just happy to be back in the mix...although with the ongoing pandemic races are still few and far between.  I'm thinking of running in the Florida Track Club's Friday evening track meet at Cone Park in eastern Gainesville next month on the 7th...they have a number of runs to chose from including 400 meters and 5K: these are the two I'm leaning toward at the moment.  The last time I ran in a track race was in April, 1973. Although I initially thought they were going to emulate the kind of track and field meets from my old high school time, there are no field events like pole vaults, long jumps or shot put.  And even with the purely track events, there are no sprint races like 100 or 200 meters, the shortest event being 400 meters.  When I was a kid, to me running was synonymous with all-out sprinting, going as fast as I could until I pooped out...my forte was the 50-year dash while the 600-yard run they used in high school for physical fitness tests was to me a very long distance.  By the ninth grade they were having us do mile runs, though, and by the time I trained with the track team in early 1973 I was finally beginning to learn the concept of pacing myself: that was crucial because our regimen included intense interval training as well as ten-mile cross-country runs... 

Quote of the Week...from Asha Rangappa

Facebook is primarily a mechanism for bonding, not bridging.  Studies show that in the vast majority of cases, people live in self-made echo chambers on Facebook that reinforce their existing views of the world.                                                                    ---Asha Rangappa

Asha Rangappa is an American lawyer and former FBI agent who has served as commentator on several networks and shows, most prominently CNN.  I chose her above quote because on different levels it totally resonates with what I've grown to think about Facebook over the past eight years that I have been active on it.  Originally when I signed up for my account on that social media site I had set up my profile and then pretty much stayed clear of it...until I perceived that the masses worldwide that were driving the blogging revolution in the first decade of this century had almost totally abandoned their own blogs and turned to Facebook for the sake of convenience...and for that "bonding" with folks they already knew.  So I had a choice to make: continue blogging on my own or post links to my articles on Facebook.  I chose the latter and from 2013 through 2020 I did just that while increasing over time my number of Facebook "friends".  But this site has an insidious algorithm that limits who can access my links on their newsfeed...even "friends"...and my readership wasn't really improving over time.  But since I was checking Facebook to see reactions to articles I posted, I was also observing the behavior of other users...and it's very true like Rangappa said, that people react to others' postings more as a bonding statement than to cross bridges and get to know others more and exchange ideas.  The fact that access is typically confined to a predetermined, insular community doesn't help, either.  Facebook makes it all a popularity contest with their "scores" of how many people liked a posting or commented on it.  I am glad I went through this long-term experiment with Facebook because it solidified in my mind the intransigent and socially fragile states of thinking within people at large.  As long as you're saying something they already agree with, they're okay with you, but even if that's so they have to evaluate what they perceive as your popularity level before they are willing to publicly chime in. I also have been dismayed at reading the marginally insane posts of folks that I know in real life to be rational, functioning adults: are they just assuming different personas in social media, or is the "echo chamber", bubbling-off tendency in Facebook turning their minds over to the dark side?  No, I had enough and stopped linking this blog to that site starting in 2021...interestingly, although I no longer get the sparse instant "likes" from some articles, the anonymous bean counter on my Google account shows no decline in readership, and I'm writing just as freely and happily as ever...

Just Finished Reading The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

I first saw the movie The Tin Drum back in 1981 when HBO had it in their lineup...I was able to see both the English audio version as well as the original German version with English subtitles...the latter seemed more powerful.  It's based on the Günter Grass novel with the same title, first published in 1959 in German with the title Die Blechtrommel and which I finally just got around to reading (the English translation).  Both the author and his protagonist, Oskar Matzerath, grew up in the formerly German city of Danzig (now Polish Gdańsk) in the late 1920s during the Weimar Republic and in the 1930s and 40s while Hitler was in power and experienced World War II from the side of the Germans.  The book conforms in large part to the movie, with a few minor variations, up to the last part (the years after the war) which the movie omitted. In the book version, while in a mental hospital in the 1950s, Oskar narrates his life story, all the way from birth: an important detail since he claims he was born imbued with an adult's thinking and viewpoint of the world.  Like Grass, Oskar distinguishes his national identity using his mother's lineage as Kashubian...neither Pole nor German: like the movie he goes back to relate how his grandmother met his anarchist, arsonist grandfather.  By the time Oskar turns three, he is fed up with the duplicity and hypocrisy of the adult world.  For his birthday his mother gives him a tin drum, to which he quickly bonds.  And then he makes the Peter Pan-like decision to stop growing: he maintains his three-year old height at 3'1" until the war ends in his early adulthood.  Oskar's narration occasionally returns to his mental institution and his keepers and visitors, but he is primarily focused on relating significant events in his earlier life.  His mother has been involved in a long-term romantic triangle between Pole Jan Bronski (whom Oskar considers to be his true father) and her husband, German Alfred Matzerath.  Not to give away all that happens, but in film and book both it turns into a story of attrition, with little Oskar always seeming to be a sort of catalyst in the unfolding tragedies while coming out of them himself unscathed.  He is obsessed with his tin drum, which he beats with fervor and force, constantly wearing out the one he has and needing to replace it.  He also discovers a special talent: he can break glass with his high-pitched, loud shrieks, rendering him virtually immune from discipline.  The film version seemed to make a connection between the rise of Nazism and Oskar's decision to drop out of the growth process, but the book isn't at all clear on this. Grass makes the point, I think, that you can have an adult's perspective without the necessary accompanying knowledge and character: that is certainly the case with Oskar.  And to that extent I identified with this singular fictional character, recalling my own younger years...not that I possessed any magical ability to suspend my own physical growth.  When I first saw the movie I was greatly impressed...it won an Academy Award for best foreign movie and the soundtrack music was hauntingly beautiful.  But a few years later a controversy arose about whether the actor portraying Oskar, David Bennett, a minor at the time, had been improperly used for a sex scene.  After some censorship of the movie, an investigation ensued, the director exonerated...but still there is a shadow hanging over it: regrettable, for while very intense and disturbing in places, I consider The Tin Drum to be one of the greatest films ever made.  Since I already knew pretty much what was going to happen having watched the movie, the book was a bit anticlimactic...although I enjoyed Oskar's intellectual wit and defiance at the world that came out better on paper.  Good book, good movie: take your pick...

Weekly Short Stories: 1970 Science Fiction, Part 4

Today I finish up with my reviews of some of the standout sci-fi short stories from 1970, as they appeared in the anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1971, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and reflecting their choices from the previous year.  As I mentioned before, 1970 was a problematic year for me but there were good elements as well: that summer was great, not because of travel or a big event but rather for being a quiet, peaceful time of reflection and relaxation.  Not that I'm automatically opposed to those other things, but I'm more partial to taking it easy on my vacations.  This was also the first year in the NFL that Don Shula coached the Miami Dolphins, turning around a last place franchise from the year before into a playoff team in December.  Now here are my reactions to those final four tales...

THE SHAKER REVIVAL by Gerald Jonas

Set "way off in the future" in 1995, a journalist sends letters to various pertinent parties regarding the New Shakers, an exploding religious movement focusing on young people that he fears his own son may have joined.  They practice the "Four Noes": no hate, no war, no money, no sex...and live together in insulated communes while practicing a kind of music called "jag rock".  The races in this dystopian tale are segregated and blacks are severely discriminated against, literally confined to walled ghettoes resembling those which the Jews suffered through under Hitler's tyranny.  The New Shaker movement appears to have arisen in response to an official societal emphasis the previous two decades on hedonism.  Reading this made me think that Buddha would have had an issue with all the sides in this story: how about some moderation in everything instead of, like in a centrifuge, separating and pulling apart the extremes? Just saying... 

DEAR AUNT ANNIE by Gordon Eklund

Like the previous entry, this is another earthbound tale about the near future, this time about how a wildly popular advice columnist in advanced old age has her identity and sentient memories placed in an enduring robot exactly duplicating her appearance, duping even her erratic, violence-prone and erratic son to believing she's still alive.  Soon all society is under her sway and people are forced to attend special sessions that, with the aid of injections, have them work out and eliminate their violent tendencies.  But now it seems some are immune to the therapy and Aunt Annie has a decision to make.  A lot of science fiction tales paint a picture of a more totalitarian society in store for us...with all this political correctness/woke/cancel-culture going on around us it may not be "fiction" for much longer...

CONFESSIONS by Ron Goulart

Confessions is a funny little fictional stew of science fiction, murder mystery, and humor that works well as a professional  freelance ghost writer (Silvera) chasers down a delinquent client (Scribbeley) for his fee.  Complicating his task is that the client skirts about the world in a flying house...kind of hard to catch!  But Silvera finally gets his man by sneaking in to one of  Scribbely's parties with his friend Kohinoor...but the latter is discovered murdered and a police detective teams up with Silvera to find the perpetrator.  There's also a little Robert Louis Stevenson in this story: read it to find out what I mean...

GONE ARE THE LUPO by H.B. Hickey

A hard to decipher tale, this is written from the viewpoint of a Moomie, the indigenous intelligent life on another world that a few humans of the game-hunting variety had settled and brutally exploited...they've already made one lifeform, the Lupo, extinct, and now they use Moomies as menial labor, servants, and objects of entertainment by making them dance.  The settlers have human visitors from other worlds and they ridicule the Moomie who is dancing for them.  But in such a story as this, you know there is going to be a payback at the end...

Next week I begin my look at science fiction short stories from 1971...

Game of the Week: Solitaire

 

Solitaire is a family of card games that, as its name suggests, are to be played by one person alone.  I tend to forego all the varieties and stick with the standard version, as pictured above using a deck of cards I got from the Hampton Inn (see the picture on their back).  After shuffling the cards, they are dealt in rows, first card turned up, with each succeeding row beginning one card shorter from the above one...until the last row is a single upturned card. The object is to fill each suit with cards, going in order from Ace to King, before the game's rules prohibit any advancement in play.  I've played it so many times, going back to childhood, and still play it on my phone app...which of course is much more convenient without cards to shuffle or a needed surface to play on.  Since I don't "win" most games, I keep score by playing games until I lose five, counting the number of cards "on top" for each one...since it's Solitaire, everyone can play it the way they like.  Like most card games, there is a mixture of luck and strategy in it...my strategy is so automatic now that I spend almost no time between moves.  I tend to play it more on my work breaks or when I'm tired...very little intellectual or physical effort required here...

Our Brief Stay at Daytona Beach

 

Melissa and I have been enjoying our stay at Daytona Beach, which began yesterday afternoon and will end tomorrow. Not that many people are around here, happy to say...we're staying at one of our favorite hotels about a mile north of the Boardwalk.  The weather's been very cooperative, too. It's always fun to have a little change of scenery as well as getting some time off from work...

Great Old TV Episodes...from the Bell Science Series

 

THE STRANGE CASE OF THE COSMIC RAYS is one of the eight hour-long episodes in the Bell Science series of television specials spaced out over the late 1950s and 1960s...later they were all transferred to film and projected on the walls of elementary schools across the nation, including mine, Nova Elementary.  I saw all of them in the fourth through sixth grades (1965-68) and thought so much of them that I would even skip my own class to sneak in on a showing down the hall in another.  Frank Capra directed the first four episodes, including this one from 1957, featuring (pictured) narrator Dr. Frank Baxter (a fixture for all of them) and actor/screenwriter Richard Carlson as they try to win the detective mystery award for the latter part of the twentieth century (with puppets of Dickens, Poe and Dostoevsky serving as judges).  Their story is that of the mysterious cosmic rays that blanket the Earth and how electrons are ripped away from atoms in the process.  By creating an animated analogy using Fagin, Dickens' thief from his Oliver Twist novel, they explain that it's the atoms broken up by the invading rays...i.e. Fagin's "henchmen" that register on all the devices and these subatomic particles are many in number, including protons, neutrons, electrons, positron, mu mesons, and pi mesons...the latter of which Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa in 1935 predicted as an instrumental factor in the yet-unexplained nuclear force.  But what was Fagin, the original cosmic ray?  Naked atoms of all types, stripped of their electrons after being emitted by stars and accelerated to near-light speeds by nebulae across the cosmos...oops, I gave it away.  But of course, it's science and not fiction...

Unlike the other seven Bell Science shows, The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays was difficult at the time for me to follow...I'm guessing that other kids had the same problem: physics is hard enough without throwing nineteenth-century English literature into the mix: it probably didn't help that the first time I saw it was halfway through the film, after I slipped into the back of the room unnoticed.  I was mystified by it all and impressed by how Baxter and Carlson presented the scientists making the important discoveries in such a favorable light...I imagine a lot of young students back then were inspired to go into science and engineering from watching this and other Bell Science movies.  They have all these movies on YouTube...I recently saw this particular episode and noted the discontinuity between the heavy science being taught and the use of puppetry and funny cartoons to explain it.  I was in my first year of life when this show first aired on TV and viewed it some ten years later in school...the science since has dated and even Yakuwa's theory about the nuclear force has been challenged.  But of course now we have quarks, hadrons, and string theory to use as models and frameworks.  Maybe some of today's dry scientific papers with all that mathematics could use some puppets and cartoons, too...and bring back good ol' Dr. Baxter or a reasonable facsimile thereof to help us poor goofs to understand it all better...

Just Finished Reading Summer Bird Blue by Akemi Dawn Bowman

Summer Bird Blue is a 2018 young adult novel by Akemi Dawn Bowman.  Rumi Seto loves her little sister Lea, as they grow up in Washington, D.C. with their mother after their selfish father left them following Lea's birth.  The two teenage girls are avid musicians, Rumi on the piano and Lea with the guitar...and are heavily into writing their own songs, both music and lyrics...they have a technique by which they call out three words randomly and use that as a basis for a new song: the latest one is "summer", "bird", "blue". But one day while they're all together in the car there is an accident and Lea dies from it.  Left without her very best friend, Rumi sinks further into despair and anger when she discovers that she is being shipped out to live with her aunt in Hawaii...how could her mother abandon her like this? Most of the book is about how Rumi deals with her grief and anger...she gets to know her neighbors on either side of her temporary new home: teenager/surfer boy Kai and the elderly, gruff Mr. Watanabe.  In all her interactions with others Rumi is blunt and critical, both of them and herself...and she cannot experience anything without being reminded of her dead sister.  During the course of this grief period she has memory flashbacks of the two of them, including their conflicts and Rumi's jealousy of Lea's popularity and her mother's perceived favoritism toward her sister.  Rumi has promised her departed sister that she will finish writing that final song Summer Bird Blue, but in her current state she finds herself blocked.  Along with the main story line is Rumi's examination of her own attitudes toward sexuality as well as the ethnically diverse composition of the characters...the latter is interesting and welcome but the relationships and personalities here are universals that could easily transfer to other settings.  If you can put up with the adolescent self-absorption and explosive rage that Rumi displays throughout the book, I think you, like myself, will find it a difficult, but enlightening look at what the loss of a very close person in one's life can bring out.  I was touched by the grace shown by those around Rumi as she went through her pain...

Quote of the Week...from C.S. Lewis

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.                  ---C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) was a renowned British author of novels and books with Christian themes...perhaps his most famous work was the seven-volume children's series The Chronicles of Narnia, which I've read a number of times and was sadly a bit overblown in its movie adaptation.  Although he died at age 64 on November 22nd, the same day as John F. Kennedy's assassination, I think this quote of Lewis has a lot of merit...in spite of the fact that I am also 64.  I think the converse is true as well: you are never too young to set another goal or to dream a new dream...this principle applies throughout one's life span.  Do you have goals that involve working for their attainment over a span of years into the future?  At my age one might argue that doing this isn't realistic...but I recently saw on the news a woman who was a groundbreaking pilot during World War II and just turned 100, and she's still happily enjoying her life.  I don't know enough about what's going to happen in my life tomorrow, much less ten or twenty years from now.  But wisdom dictates that I continue involving myself in interesting and challenging endeavors that project well into that future, regardless whether I am there to completely fulfill them.  Either one grows or withers away, and you grow by embracing struggle for self-betterment...C.S Lewis was obviously a wise man...

Enjoying Sitting Outside My Favorite Gainesville Starbucks

 

There are two Starbucks coffee shops near my home.  The more distant...and the oldest...is at Magnolia Parke off NW 39th Avenue near Buchholz High School, while the other is on NW 43rd Street near the WCJB Channel 20 studios, across the street just down the road from Talbot Elementary.  I used to prefer the latter because of its proximity, and before the COVID pandemic closed its indoor seating I enjoyed a large room to sit in.  This facility used to be at the north end of the adjacent Publix shopping center with a rather cramped indoor seating area, but they built a larger store to install a drive-through...which to me as an exclusively on-site customer has pretty much destroyed my use of it.  For one, the cars in the drive-through tend to back up...even into the street like they do at the Starbucks on NW 13th Street just north of 16th Avenue...to the point where I can't even use that way to enter or leave the parking lot. But even when I phone in my mobile order and go inside, they are so backed up with the drive-through orders that they often don't have mine (or other customers') ready...or if they do nobody wants to acknowledge my existence and hand it to me: I'm not criticizing the hard-working employees there...their system could stand a little tweaking, that's all.  Today I'm sitting outside at Magnolia Parke Starbucks...from the above picture you can see how nicely they've provided spaced, outdoor seating.  And when I order a drink by phone, it's ready for me: no drive-through! But although sitting here is pleasant, I long for the day when once again I'll be able to sit indoors and enjoy a brew with my handy-dandy word processor in front of me...  

Weekly Short Stories: 1970 Science Fiction, Part 3

Below are my reviews of the next four 1970 sci-fi short stories as they appeared in the book World's Best Science Fiction 1971, presenting the editors' choices from the previous year. I remember that I read a lot in '70...some books I enjoyed then were The City Boy by Herman Wouk (an English class assignment), Nightmares and Geezenstacks by Fredric Brown (a science fiction short story anthology), Lost Horizon and Random Harvest by James Hilton and Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings by Charles Hapgood...all published years earlier.  I also thought this was a great year musically, dominated by the Beatles' swan song album release Let It Be and Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison's solo efforts (Instant Karma, Maybe I'm Amazed, and My Sweet Lord among them).  But there were a lot of other musical acts that produced some great, memorable songs that year...maybe my personal life wasn't all that hot in 1970, but reading and music rocked!  And now here's my take on those four stories...

NOBODY LIVES ON BURTON STREET by Gregory Benford

Implicit within this brief tale is the notion, which I believe to be erroneous, that if people were allowed to just "let off steam" and physically act out their frustrations in controlled violence then society would remain peaceful and folks would be happier.  On Burton Street in the future, an angry mob approaches the peacekeeper force...but it's all contrived: the rioters have been preselected by psychological analysis and the police are really android robots with fake blood: it's all a charade.  To me, the more a person reacts with violence to their problems the more they will use it in the future...but not according to the pop psychology used in this story...

WHATEVER BECAME OF THE MCGOWANS? by Michael G. Coney

On a beautiful, newly settled planet with only plant life (other than the human settlers), Richard and his pregnant wife Sandra begin to experience time lapses and curious phenomena concerning their own bodies.  And they wonder whatever happened to their neighbors the McGowan family, who seemed to have abandoned their large estate, which is always visible to them with its small clump of trees in front.  I could see where this story was going early on, but I had not anticipated the ending...which had an interesting "scientific" explanation for it all...

THE LAST TIME AROUND by Arthur Sellings

This is a tale about the contrasting differences in aging between spacemen traveling close to the speed of light and those remaining on Earth.  Such an astronaut has made a career of going on missions to the stars...although from his own vantage point he is living a normally-aging life, those on Earth and the surrounding Solar System settlements see him as more than 200 years old.  This has always complicated romantic relationships for him, until one woman comes up with "the solution", something I take strong issue with in the same way that I've always thought the Star Trek device of "beaming" people around was very faulty in conception...but you'll have to read the story to know where I'm going on this...

GREYSPUN'S GIFT by Neal Barrett, Jr.

A quirky, funny young woman with her tolerant husband and little son finds a very tall, obviously alien man sitting on a bench outside their New York apartment.  He is clearly awkward and out of place on Earth, since he is, after all, a visiting alien.  Helping him further to make him stand out less to others...and that's difficult since he has eight arms and legs and no discernible facial features...she takes Greyspun, as he calls himself, into their home where he asks them "What do humans do?"  You see, his species' role in the universe, i.e. what they "do", is just what he is doing: discerning and understanding in an empathetic way the other intelligent life forms around him.  His hosts don't know how to answer him, but the woman takes him on a tour of the city.  Sadly, Greyspun finds the answer to his question, leading to a sudden, somber ending for what had been a lighthearted tale, with tragic consequences...

Next week I finish my look back at 1970's science fiction short stories...