Can I Switch it Off?

Last night I started reading a new novel. Now, this is not a beta read for a friend, or an ARC (Advance Review Copy) but a published and successful novel by a writer I enjoy and follow on social media.

Of late, and by that mean the last two years, my pleasure reading has been rather limited. After signing with the Virginia Kidd Agency I pretty much devoted all the time I could spare to working on my writing to the detriment of past time reading.

A side note here: back in the early days of this blog you can find book reviews; I have decided to not do those anymore. I think there is a question of conflict in striving to be both a writer and reviewer. As I have friends who are professional writer it would be difficult to avoid the issue of bias and there is always the potential to poison working relationships with fellow writers, editors, and so on. If I discuss a book by title and author here it will be positive because it’s something I thoroughly enjoyed and want to share. I will not be posting critiques or criticisms of those titles that do not work for me.

Anyway, back to the subject. So here I was reading this book, enjoying the story, but damn it I could not stop the impulse to look at the prose and want to change it around. I could not stop the desire to ‘fix’ it.

People in my writing group have said that there is a distinct style or voice to my writing, but I have always had a hard time seeing it. I think I can see vague outlines of my voice now. It’s certainly there in sentence construction and how I think they are best assembled for dramatic effect. This is what I was doing with the novel. Looking at a sentence and saying to myself, ‘oh, that would be better with those clauses reversed.’ This inner editor voice is making it difficult for me to drop into the story and forget myself. It is also making me doubt my feedback to writers in my critique group.

How much of what I am saying is good critique and how much is just me trying to force my voice on things?

Dang, I don’t think anyone warned me of this when i set out to write.

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An American Birthday

Yesterday was the 4th of July. I spent it with my sweetie-wife in a relaxed and comfortable day off. We went to the theaters and for a second time watched Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, we enjoyed each other’s company, and we played games. The lack of cook-outs, picnics, and fireworks should be taken as a political statement. I believe that this is a great and flawed nation. A nation that has helped birth great ideal into the world and a nation that has failed to live up to its own great ideals.

There are those who look upon America’s history and stress only her sins. Make no mistake America have great sins upon her honor, most of them dealing with European racism towards the rest of the world. Our founding fathers possessed great insight and aspirations, but they also own people as chattel slaves. Looking only at the sins is a distortion; it is point-of-view propaganda that presents a false narrative.

There are those who ignore the sin and only promote the noble and uplifting elements of American history. With a wave of the hand they dismiss the suffering, the injustice, and the murder committed by this nations. Ignoring those terrible crimes, refusing to acknowledge them as terrible crimes, or placing them in some seal and irrelevant past with no connect to the present is also simplistic propaganda.

This nation has laid out high goals for itself and for humanity. This nation had never achieved those goal in total, it has always fallen short. Perfection cannot be achieved but people, we will also fail but we must always strive for that perfection. In the arts perfection can be the enemy. You may want the perfect prose but you cannot have it. There comes a time when you stop attempting to improve the piece and it must be what it is. This is not true of our nation. The United States of American will never be a completed project. We must always either be rising towards our ideal, or falling into decline.

With every vote to are choosing the path. Either up towards the heights or down into darkness. Where will you take us?

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Sunday Night Movie The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

The next movie up from my 5-disc DVD collection of film noir is The Asphalt Jungle. Directed by John Houston this is the story of small time hoods, one famous and brilliant criminal tactician, a crooked lawyer who is not as bright as he thinks he his, and the big jewel heist that they attempt to complete.

Starring Sterling Hayden as Dix a gambler and muscle man, Sam Jaffe, who often played geniuses, as ‘The Doc,’ a legendary criminal, and James Whitmore as the wheel man, The Asphalt Jungle is a film about the lower levels of criminality and the vices that crippled the men who dream beyond their abilities. This movie certain hits what I think are the central themes of classic film noir, an unmistakable cynicism about particularly concerning greed and characters who are consumed by their appetites or vices. With a story lacking in heroes, The Asphalt Jungle is about flawed people making bad decisions and the inevitable ruin of their lives. I think even without the Production Code requirements the only applicable end for this story was one of tragedy and failure. These are characters defined by their failures, even Doc, the mastermind, has only just been released from prison. The man hailed as a great crook, is still one captured, tried and imprison by the fumbling police forces.

Lacking snappy dialogue and a plot filled with unexpected reveals The Asphalt Jungle‘s power lays in their gritty portrayal of the street criminal life. There are no lovely costumes, no grand high-flying life, even the most successful characters are shown to be living a lie and that their material wealth of all illusion. The feel of the film is more like something you would expect from Warner Brothers, a studio that made its image one based on a ‘realistic’ portrayal of life rather than MGM which tended to focus more on glitz, glamor, and beautiful productions. The tone and look of the film comes from its director John Houston, an old- Warner Brothers man it should be noted. Produced post-war but before the material boom of the later 1950s, I like the film’s atmosphere of depression and limited resources.

A gritty, realistic, and entertaining film The Asphalt Jungle is a film noir worth seeing.

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An Innate Trait does not have to be Genetic

From the right side of my Facebook feed the other day I spotted an article pushing the position that people who are homosexual are not born that way and science proves it. I was skeptical of the proposition and went and read the article.

It fell far short of the bold position but it did rely on a curious fact about human sexuality; that within identical twins the sexual orientation of the pair is not always matched. It follows that if two people bearing identical genetic make-up do not share a trait then their genes do not determine that trait. Or at least is not determined solely by their genes.

The mistake is to think that because something is not solely determined by the genes then it must not be innate to the individual. The growing field of epigenetics has shown us that there are a lot of factors and traits that are set before birth but not because of the presence or absence of a gene but because of gene expression.

The position that people are choosing their sexuality was also the point of a recent conservative op-ed piece I read the other day. The main evidence supplied by the author was that more people are identifying are gay. bisexual, or transgendered than in the past and that this must represent people choosing these label simply because today’s ‘permissive’ society allows them to do so. The author goes on to argue that it our society were not so ‘permissive’ some of these people would reject such things and go on to be happy, heterosexual married people further society. That last element he presented no evidence only an assertion that matched up with his world view.

I found his argument unpersuasive. At the very least you have a diagnosis problem. People often lie on surveys and they often lie on sexual surveys getting good number on such a subject is very difficult now and was more so in years past.

As I have stated in other posts in my opinion it is better to think of human sexual desire as a spectrum, and that most individuals do not exist at the far ends Society can repress expression but that does not change the underlying predispositions. Despite human genetic make-up being basically the same throughout history and around the world the expression of sexual desire has varied greatly. The Spartans carried the same genes as we do today but had a very different set of sexual practices.

So while there is no ‘gay gene’ that doesn’t mean people who primarily are attracted to member of the same sex selected that and it also means that these people who so stridently insist on this false binary choice are very likely not so far out on the spectrum themselves.

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The Ultimate Insult

What is the worse political insult you can throw at a person? It’s not fascist. It’s not Nazi. It’s not Communist. I think the worst insult you can hurl a person is either liberal or conservative, and more specifically Democrat or Republican.

Now those sound pretty tame compared to the others mentioned. Surely, it must be far more insulting to be named a Nazi than a Republican. Well that depends on who is doing the naming. Those on the left expect to be called Communist and such from the right and liberals have long named Conservatives Nazi. In a partisan political combat those are practically medals. However if you are a conservative and a fellow traveler on the right calls you a liberal, that burns, that’s a wound. The same is perfectly true from the left. During the last presidential election the insult thrown with the most emotional weight at Hilary from fellow Democrats was that she was really a Republican.

This is the apogee of tribalism. It ceases to be about ideas, solutions, or even principles but everything devolves down being a good member of the team. I certainly know this effect well.

I believe in a second amendment right to bear arms; I believe in capital punishment; I believe a flat tax rate; I believe that capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system, and more than once I have had conservative friends call me a left-wing liberal.

I believe in marriage equality; I believe in a woman’s right to control her body; I believe in social safety nets and universal care; I believe that corporations are not people, and more than one liberal friends have called me a right-wing conservative.

To me being called a liberal or a conservative is hardly noticeable, but to a partisan it is the supreme insult. It is to be called traitor, a turncoat, a quisling for the enemy. People who are partisan will contort and twist to avoid this. If it means taking up the same side or cause as the opposition they will stand silent on events that may otherwise inflame them.

This is opposed to reason and discourse. Free yourself from your tribe; think and speak for yourself.

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DVD Review The Set-Up (1949)

When I got my boxed set of film noir DVDs one of the pleasant surprises was discovering that one of the films had been directed by Robert Wise. Wise came up through the old school Hollywood. he was the editor on Wells’ Citizen Kane, became a director with the fantastic Val Lewton horror movie The Body Snatcher, and had a career that spanned just about every genre of movie. The Set-Up was the last picture he made while under contract for RKO and it is a bleak, tragic, and fantastic bit of gritty filmmaking.

The movie’s premise is simple; Stoker is a down and out boxer, thirty-five year olds his career, such as it is, is drawing to an end. His wife Julie wants him to give up boxing, the injuries and chance of serious harm or death have become too much for her but Stoker knows he’s just ‘one punch’ away from turning everything around. Unable to take it anymore she bails on attending his evening’s fight, a lousy bottom bill in a terrible dive. Stoker’s manager, Tiny, meanwhile is taking bribes from to local crime boss to make sure stoker goes down in the fight. Tiny doesn’t tell Stoker of the fix because there’s no need; Stoker always loses. Why share the bribe money?

What makes this movie work is the focus on characters. Not just the leading characters like Stoker, Julie, and Tiny, but the bit supporting characters bring this film to life and do so with a strong sense of theme. When the bout is going on Wise doesn’t focus all of his screen-time on the boxers, but with judicious cuts he plants us among the spectators and their bloodlust. In addition to a taunt story of a man whose dream is slipping away The Set-Up is also a sharp commentary on blood-sports without being a ‘message movie.’

The DVD has just one bonus feature but it’s a great one. The film’s commentary track is split between director Robert Wise and Martin Scorsese.

I have never been a particular fan of sporting movies but The Set-Up moved me, wringing out powerful emotions with it’s gut punch of an ending.

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New DVDs to my Library

The collection is not new, but they are new additions of my collection. Yesterday I received in the mail my latest eBay purchase, Film Noir Classics Vol 1. This is not one of those 50 collections of publica domain movies taken from questionable source material. The collection is five individual packaged DVDs, all from Warner Brothers the studio that specialized in street and crime cinema, in one boxed set. It was cool finding it a very affordable price. Of the five films I had seen only one, Gun Crazy, but I certainly wanted to add it to my library.

What made for a pleasant surprise was that one of the noirs, The Set-Up, was directed by Robert Wise, one of my favorite directors. Another benefit of these movies is that many of them were B-features. That means they were designed to play as the second feature in a double bill. Directors and writers were a little more experimental with the B movies and they were also shorter. There is something to be said for being about to watch an entire story in an hour and a quarter instead of 3 hours plus.

I am looking forward to a week of cool movies and bonus features.

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Sunday Night Movie Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)

Last night I was in the mood for something from yesteryear. Now some time ago Universal put out boxed set for their classic monsters until the branding of ‘Legacy Collections.’ I have many of the set including the one for Frankenstein. The Legacy Collections include the original film for each series, some decent bonus material about the classic horror film, and several of the sequels or associated films.

Ghost of Frankenstein is the fourth film is the series and it continues the story from the previous entry, Son of Frankenstein. Ghost is used metaphorically as the Frankenstein of this film is the second son of the original mad scientist but titling a movie Second Son of Frankenstein seems underwhelming.

The population of the village of Frankenstein, convinced that the area is under a curse dues the action of Henry and his son Wolf Frankenstein dynamite the standing castle where in the previous story the monster had fallen into bubbling sulfur pits. The explosions free the monster and aided my Ygor, who has somehow survived the hail of bullets from the last movie, escapes fleeing the town. Ygor takes the monster to Ludwig Frankenstein, Henry’s second son, in hopes that the creation might be healed and returned to full ability, allowing Ygor to manipulate it to continue his own evil schemes.

The creature kills of the Ludwig’s associates and this after much turmoil with the local populace, prompts Ludwig to plan to transfer the brain of his dead associated to the monster’s body as a way of undoing the crime and transforming the monster into a non-dangerous creation. Ygor, working on the ego of Ludwig’s disgraced mentor gets his brain placed into the monster without Ludwig’s knowledge. These villagers arrive, torches are barred, great manor houses are burned, and Ygor in the monster’s body goes blind because the great mentor hadn’t considered blood type mismatch.

Over all this is pretty standard fare for a Universal monster sequel. It pays fair attention to continuity but hand-waves is way past anything that would actually kill the story, such as Ygor’s ability to survive the gunshot wounds without medical care. Dr. Frankenstein once again pays the price for meddling in things that ‘man was not to know.’ (Hmm we should really have a Lord of the Rings moment in some film like this where the female mad scientist proclaims she is no man.) In terms of the Universal classic monster cycle, which was the first cinematic universe, this is purely a middle-grade entry. The movie did not descend in unintentional farce as with Son of Dracula casting Lon Chaney jr as the Count,, but neither did the film come close to matching the atmospheric heights of Frankenstein.

As this film was from 1942 I did ponder a sequel in which Nazi’s took the castle and ended up dealing with mad scientists and the classic monster. Ah movies that were never even considered.

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Say “Thank you, Mr. Reagan.”

Oh no, this is not about any of the current healthcare debates of tax cut proposals. I have a feeling that most of you reading this own a smart phone and that you can take advantage of that device’s GPS for turn-by-turn navigation. This is a feature that has not only enabled a great deal of modern commerce but has saved lives. For this you say ‘Thank you, Mr. Reagan.’

The Global Positioning System, GPS, was developed for the U.S. Military to allow the United States to have pinpoint accuracy on all it’s assets around the world. It is what is referred to in mil-speak as a ‘force multiplier.’ A factor that allows a force to fight as though their number were actually larger than are present. Opening that up to everyone’s use is a major policy and that policy change was ordered by President Reagan after a tragedy.

September 1 1983 KAL flight 007 wandered off course and into the airspace claimed by the USSR. Mistaking the passenger jet for a spy plane the Soviets shot it down killing all 269 aboard. I order to avoid such tragedies in the future the Reagan administration opened the GPS up to world-wide civilian use.

Say ‘Thank you, Mr. Clinton.’

The system opened to civilian use by Reagan was slightly altered to degrade performance. Non-military users could not locate their position with an accuracy greater than a few hundred meters. This prevented navigation errors such as with KAL 005 but preserved a significant degree of superiority for the U.S. Military. In 1996 the Clinton administration, recognizing the huge private sector potential, removed the additional signal that degraded the service for civilians. Now everyone with a GPS receiver could pinpoint there location to within a new meters. You know, that thing your phone does all the time.

What’s the point of all this?

Conservatives and Liberal can both have terrific ideas, either can advance the common good and either can see beyond petty self-interests. Only a partisan fool blithely disregards something solely because it came from across the aisle. Every idea, suggestion, and should be judges on its own merits.

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