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Today’s Random Thought

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When a writer for a major urban news and entertainment magazine can couch an entire political column in terms of an extended gaming metaphor, it’s time for the hardcore old-timers (and even harder-core johnny-come-latelies) to give up thinking that they’re still a misunderstood minority.

Face it, folks, gaming is mainstream.

And I say this as somebody who was playing D&D back when there were no pre-fab dungeon adventures available, never mind computers, and it was all done with dice, pencils, graph paper, and the insides of our heads.

Not Your Usual Job Opportunity

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Clark’s Trading Post in Lincoln, New Hampshire, is looking for a new Wolfman for the 2016 summer season.

Clark’s Trading Post is one of the first dedicated “roadside attractions” in New England, having originally been established in 1928 as “Ed Clark’s Eskimo Sled Dog Ranch.”  Tourists could view the sled dog teams and purchase souvenirs and maple candy.  In 1931, the first of the trained bears was added to the show, which differed from most trained-bear acts of the time because it used what would now be referred to as “positive reinforcement,” which Ed Clark adapted from the methods he used to train his dog teams.

(As it turned out, the bears really liked ice cream, and it remains their reward to this day – or at least that was what they were still using the last time I saw the show.)

A Random Election-Year Thought

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Because I live in New Hampshire, and we’ve been getting pollsters and campaign phone calls at the rate of two or three a day, and four-color glossy political flyers from all of the declared candidates in every load of mail.  We haven’t seen many candidates actually visiting up here in the North Country, though; I think Hilary got as far north as Berlin, and Bernie Sanders lives over in Vermont, so he doesn’t need to do much besides stand on the other shore of the Connecticut River and wave.  The Republicans, on the other hand . . . this year, either they think they’ve got us all sewn up, or they’ve forgotten that we’re here.

Meanwhile, I can’t help thinking things.  Like this:

Most of the time, a person who’s contemplating the acquisition of a house, or a refrigerator, or a new car tends to go about the process in a relatively thoughtful manner: they consider the amount of room in their budget, and their family situation, and their projected patterns of use before making the purchase; and only sometimes fall head over heels for the expensive model with the automatic icemaker out of a pure irrational lust for cold drinks in the middle of summer. You’d think we would approach the selection of our next president with something close to the same care, but we don’t. And I’ve decided that it’s because choosing a president is less like purchasing a home appliance than it is like choosing a spouse . . . we don’t want to be reasonable about it (although we should be), we want to fall in love.

And this is why people go off and do things like eloping with the chauffeur voting for a third party candidate with a single-issue platform and no chance of actually winning:  The main candidates make them feel like they’ve been promised they can pick their own future spouse – just so long as they pick one of the two unattractive prospects their parents have already approved.

The Slugabed Conundrum

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In the summertime, for those of us whose work doesn’t tie us to an alarm clock, getting out from under the covers at a timely hour is easy. The sky is already bright outside, most days, the room is warm, and the transition from sleepwear to regular clothing doesn’t involve any intermediate bare-skinned shivering.

Once the weather turns cold, though, things are different. You wake up, and the clock tells you that it’s a good and virtuous hour to get out of bed. But your ears and nose and any other exposed bits tell you that the room is distinctly chilly, and meanwhile the rest of you is snug under the flannel sheet and the down comforter in a nest which has by now reached the optimum level of retained body heat to keep you happy and warm for hours yet. Getting out of bed will involve, however briefly, an unpleasant bare-skinned interval between sleepwear-under-covers and daywear-in-the-bedroom.

So you look again at the clock, and decide that you can lie there for a few minutes longer. An hour later, you wake up, and look at the clock . . . .

And so it goes. In the deepest of midwinter, when the night-time temperatures drop to -20°F or even lower, I sometimes resort to putting at least the first layer or so of the next day’s clothing under the comforter at the foot of the bed, so that I can retrieve it in the morning and dress myself under the covers. But such measures are for January and February, not for November when it is merely, as they would say up here, a bit nippy in the mornings.

For Your Amusement and Edification

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A handful of links – some older, some brand-new – from around the web:

Slate has put up an interactive, annotated on-line version of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”, for those of you who might want to read it.  (My own attitude toward “Bartleby” is colored by the fact that I once had to teach it in a freshman English lit class, and the typical response to that story from the inevitable classroom wit is exactly what you think it would be.)

A cabinetmaker and scholar of historical furniture reports on a letter to the future found sealed away inside an 18th-century inlaid cabinet by the journeyman cabinetmaker who built the piece.

While I was trawling for other reasons through the  archives of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, I found this post wherein all the Nebula-winning novels from 1965 through 2004 are summarized in haiku.

And, finally, there’s Jim Macdonald having fun again over at his blog.

 

An Early-June Miscellany

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A trio of literary (more or less) links:

“Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.”  If that line has an all-too-familiar ring to it, you shouldn’t be surprised.  Here’s an article from Slate on the barking-dog trope in modern fiction that will reassure you that you aren’t just hearing things that aren’t there.  If it inspires you to double-check your own stories for gratuitously vocal canines, so much the better.

Which brings us to another literary animal, in this case the dead mule, as encountered in Southern literature.  The dead mule is one of the genre-defining images, like unicorns and spaceships; much as the presence of a spaceship renders a story science fiction, the presence of a dead mule declares it to be Southern.  I don’t know what happens when you have a spaceship and a dead mule in the same story – something by Howard Waldrop, maybe.

And finally, from the editor of Clarkesworld, a list of the most common titles for short stories submitted to the magazine.

On Criticism, Reviewing, and Voting

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Or, how much is “enough”?

Personal statement of belief, one each, coming up here.

I believe that if you’re going to criticize a work — by which I mean, do a serious and in-depth analysis of its merits and its flaws, or a serious and in-depth examination of some aspect of it, then you have a moral responsibility to read the whole thing.  And that responsibility includes continuing past the point where you are certain that you don’t like it and are never going to like it and would prefer that nobody else ever like it either.

Serious criticism is serious business, and sometimes that means sucking it up until the bitter end.

I believe that if you’re going to review a work — by which I mean, provide other readers with a read/don’t read recommendation — then you really ought to read the whole thing.  And if you simply can’t bring yourself to go that far, you have a moral responsibility to let your readers know how far you made it before you had to stop.  (“The [insert bad stuff here] hit me in the face on the very first page, and as Dorothy Parker recommended, I threw the book aside with great force” is a legitimate review.  So is something on the lines of, “I stuck with it until the last third of the book, and then the cumulative [insert bad stuff here] overwhelmed me and not even interesting characters and a kick-ass plot were enough to keep me going.”

If you’re going to vote on something, I think that you should at least look at everything on the ballot.  This isn’t as onerous a task as it appears, because frankly, for most stuff it doesn’t take reading the whole thing to determine whether you think it’s make-the-cut-worthy or not.  Most short fiction shows its true colors inside the first few paragraphs; most novels, inside the first fifty pages if not sooner; and I believe that in this case you don’t have a responsibility to continue past the point where the work trips your personal “life is too short to keep on reading this stuff” trigger.

Also:  If you’re basing your public  “will read/will not read” comments off of somebody else’s reviews, reactions, or analysis, say so, and link if possible.  Clear citation is a positive good.

Shaking the Tambourine

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It’s that season again . . . time for one of my semi-regular posts where I clear my throat nervously, point at the “About” link in the header, and let people know that I offer editorial and critique services for a reasonable fee.

(It’s been a long hard winter, with all the household expenses that a long hard winter always brings.  Because I’m a hardworking Dr. Doyle, I’m doing my bit to keep the electricity and the internet flowing.  Wherefore I also point, discreetly, at the tip jar link at the bottom of the right-hand margin.)

It Doesn’t Have to be Difficult to be Good

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We – that’s both the artists-and-critics “we” and the people-in-general “we” – have a habit of conflating difficulty and quality.  If something is hard to do, or hard to understand, we tell ourselves that it must also be in some way better than a similar thing that is simple or clear.  This is a tendency that needs to be watched out for and kept on a tight leash, because for every complex and difficult thing that it encourages us to appreciate, there’s something plain and straightforward that it tempts us to pass by.

Herewith, by way of edible illustration, is a simple recipe that produces a better-than-store-bought enchilada sauce.  (This comes in especially handy if you happen to live, as we do, in a locale where the grocery store doesn’t carry any strength higher than Medium.)

Red Enchilada Sauce:

2 T oil (canola or vegetable)
2 T flour
2 T chili powder
1 T cayenne
1 T powdered chipotle pepper
1/2 tsp. garlic powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. cumin
1/4 tsp. oregano
2 cups chicken or vegetable stock

  • Mix up the seasonings – chili powder through oregano – in a small bowl.  (If the mix as given looks too hot for your taste, go with 4 T of mild chili powder instead of the chili powder/cayenne/chipotle mix.  If you want an even higher octane, go with a 2 T chili powder/2 T cayenne mix, or experiment with other powdered hot peppers until you’ve got a blend you like.)
  • In a saucepan, heat up the oil and add the flour.   Mix it up and cook it for a minute, stirring so it doesn’t burn.
  • Add the chili powder and other seasonings.  Stir it up some more – it’ll be a thick paste.
  • Add the chicken stock, and use a whisk to stir it up so that the mixture doesn’t clump up or stick to the bottom of the pan.
  • Reduce the heat and simmer for 10-15 minutes.

Either use immediately or decant into a glass jar or similar container and use later.

This makes enough for one batch of enchiladas.