Being alone and together.

      Writers are some of my favorite people. Along with tradespeople and musicians. When I was first published, I knew nothing about the mystery subculture, but once introduced, I was very pleasantly surprised that it was rich, supportive, collegial and far-flung. After about twenty years in the mystery writing game, I can attest that hanging out in this community is just as rewarding as publishing the books and short stories that grant me entry.

      You wouldn’t think that people who spend so much time in a room by themselves, and living all day inside their heads, would be very good at social interaction. But it turns out that writers can be the most cordial of companions. They have liberal views regarding a drink or two, which doesn’t hurt. It’s also because writers are thinkers, people who know a lot about a lot of things, and it’s fun for them to exchange deep, wide-ranging and arcane information.

      Of course, there’s also our shared experience. All affinity groups exist because of this. Whether you drive Harleys or run extreme marathons (I do neither, nor ever wanted to). It’s easy to conceive of writers locked up all day in their writing rooms, emerging around cocktail hour to trade bits on how the day went and their expectations for tomorrow’s production.

      But I think more importantly, writers are people who trade in human emotion. They’re by definition empathic and all tangled up in the intrigue and confusion of human existence. It’s only natural that we’d want to hash things out with people engaged in the same endeavor. Woodworkers and musicians are the same way. When we get together, there’s a shorthand in the conversation, since everyone knows what everyone else is talking about. As the stories circle the table, we naturally fill in the unsaid parts.

      My wife often points out that I’m drawn to solitary pursuits. This is certainly true of writing and woodworking. Music is a bit different, since you need a group to really experience the enterprise. Though you also have put in alone time practicing and ruminating over your part in the performance, which only those inclined to spend hours by themselves can achieve. So it’s a bit of both.

      Tradespeople also belong to an ensemble. I might frame and trim out the house, but others have to sheetrock the walls, run the wiring, install HVAC and plumbing, lay the tile and counter tops – and we have to work as an efficient, orchestrated team to pull it all off.

      Advertising, another thing I did, is also a lot like this. You start out a project together, setting goals and blocking out objectives. Then the copywriter (me) and the art director would go off together and make stuff up. This is the equivalent of a writers room on a TV series. We’d both batt around ideas, write headlines, come up with visuals – contriving a bunch of creative options. Then we’d return to our individual work stations and do our solitary thing – writing copy, doing layouts, sampling visuals, etc.

      Then all the other elements of the agency – account managers, media buyers, production, finance, who had also been strategizing together, then laboring alone over their specialties, would join us to pitch the client our ideas.

      I love this ebb and flow between individual and collective effort. For me, it’s life best lived.

      Writing about writing is a little like dancing about architecture. There’s no way you can fully describe the experience. So maybe that’s why writers like to hang around with other writers. You don’t have to explain to them what you’re going through, because they already know.

      Writing is hard and impervious to easy explanation, but that’s okay. You just have to order another round of drinks and relax for a little bit before going back and doing it again.

Quis custodiet ipsos custode?

             I like democracy.  Churchill famously noted that it’s the worst form of government other than all the other forms that have been tried.  Yet there’s no better way to decide who should be in charge, since people are constantly trying to undertake that responsibility all on their own.  Everywhere you look, there’s some new effort by individuals and their affiliates to impose their ideas and prescriptions for behavior on everyone else. 

            Plato, who admittedly had some pretty interesting concepts, thought philosophers were the ideal rulers, since they knew a lot, which he believed meant they possessed greater honor and virtue.  Okay Plato, you might be right about the first part, but not so fast on the second.  While I had some excellent philosophy professors, nothing distinguished them as particularly virtuous.  I mostly recall bad haircuts and idiosyncratic choices in clothing.  Moreover, they hardly ever agreed on anything, and could easily come to blows over the relative merits of Apollonian vs. Dionysian principles.  Partisan battles pale in comparison.  

Some believe fervently that the government should stay out of the bedroom, which I think is a fine idea since it’s hard enough to get a good night's sleep without sharing the space with a bicameral legislature.  But there are lots of conflicting opinions about who should be doing what behind closed doors, and so far democracy has done a pretty good job sorting that out. 

          Many, like Jefferson, believe the best government is one that governs the least.  Except for those things they think should be governed.  George W. Bush told us he was “The Decider”, a chilling thought.  Much better to throw it open to everyone for a vote.

Since this forum’s pre-occupation is writing and publishing, it’s important to note that readers are the constituency.  They vote with their eyeballs and wallets.  Naturally, there are plenty of editors and publishing outfits who believe there are books that people ought to be reading, and would love nothing more than to enforce their preferences.  Worse, there are politicians and advocates who are heavily invested in what ought not be published.  They believe they are doing this to guard us from harmful subject matter or points of view.  Well then, who is going to guard us from them?

It's only relatively recently that the complicated, frustrating and messy democratic process has delivered us a reading culture that encompasses Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto and Tropic of Cancer.  But it’s no time to be complacent, because that could all disappear if we let it.

If you’ll permit me to paraphrase a line misattributed to Voltaire, I may think your writing stinks, but no one should stop you from writing it.  You might believe this a noble thought, but it’s also the height of practicality.  Censorship, either political or commercial, is the slipperiest of all slippery slopes.  Freedom of expression protects all of us from the biases and preconceptions of some theoretical decider.  To me, this is such self-evident genius, it’s breathtaking that anyone would argue to the contrary.

I know for some it’s a professional responsibility, but I will never give a book a bad review, at least not publicly.  To paraphrase another bit of wisdom, if you can’t say something nice, put a sock in it.  Mind you, I think the world would be a better place if everyone loved my books.  It would certainly be a better place for me and my self-esteem.  But aside from questioning a reviewer’s taste and good sense, a one-star review is the price of doing business.  I just don’t want to do such a thing myself.

       As Churchill said, democracy isn’t perfect.  Mistakes happen.  Hitler, Hugo Chavez and Hamas were democratically elected.  But I agree with William Buckley that “I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”  Or for that matter, The Christian Coalition of America.  I also don’t want them to decide what we should write, read or publish.  Same goes for The Association of Nobel Laureates in Literature (if it existed), or the head of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Libertas perfundet omnia luce.

Stand up for your rights.

There’s no topic more likely to enflame people than the First Amendment.  That’s because it protects free speech, and thus the freedom to write what you wish. But there are limits that have been imposed by law over the years, and not everyone agrees on what those limits should be. 

            A classic example is the freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s just the beginning.

            I’m not going to get into all the exceptions, because it would take up the whole essay, but suffice it to say there’s a lot of speech, and written expression, that’s not protected.   Most people would agree that these limits are necessary and common sense, and thus we have prohibitions against slander and libel, hate speech and incitements to violence, though even those charges have to be proven in court, and not easily. 

            I worked in advertising and was once informed by a commercial speech attorney (the most prominent in the country, I’ll have you know) that the truth was an absolute defense against a libel charge.  Consequently, I was able to use the name of a branded product in a print ad because I simply stated something about the product the company itself had published (the list price of a new Porsche).  There was no defamation or disparagement.  Just the facts, ma’am.

            He also told me on another occasion that I could use a photo my wife took of a house, without permission, as part of a book cover design.  As long as I didn’t make a claim that the owners were doing something illegal I couldn’t prove, like running meth out the backdoor, I could do it, since it’s not against the law to use a photo of a house.

            My lawyer friend makes clear that political speech and commercial speech are different in the eyes of the law, and commercial speech is where most rules against slander and libel are enforced.

            Political speech has a much higher bar, which is why Trump and his sycophants can lie through their teeth every second of every day and be immune from prosecution, but copywriters and publishers have to be more careful.

            This is why I’ve always changed the names of restaurants and retail stores easily identified by people who live in the Hamptons, where most of my books are set.  And never use the real names of characters I’ve lifted directly from life.

            The likelihood of a lawsuit is beyond distant,but why take the chance.  No publisher wants that kind of exposure and I don’t blame them. When I worked as an editor, I made this point to a writer who insisted on naming an actual company, unfavorably, in his novel.  We said sorry, we won’t publish you.

            As a fiction writer, the possibility of getting into legal trouble is about as remote as it can get.  Your publisher will know if you’ve drifted into dangerous territory and will advise you accordingly.

            If you’re self-published, I’d run your book by someone like my lawyer friend.  The odds are very low you’ll have to make changes, but they’re not zero.

            In this political environment, legal dangers have increased, for sure. Especially for non-fiction writers.  Ironically, fiction writers can portray a public figure committing all sorts of venal and carnal sins, and be fine as long as his or her identity is disguised behind a change of name and light variation in circumstances. But if you’re representing this as truth in nonfiction, and you can’t prove it, be careful.

        

            Hysteria has begun to set in within the arts community, and I don’t blame anyone.  There are real threats to our freedom of expression. But as for now, the First Amendment is holding, and we have a responsibility to exercise it with abandon. The worst thing would be to self-censure for no good reason because of reckless threats from the benighted and dictatorial.

            I’m not a lawyer. I might be wrong about some of the things I’ve written here. I’m just sharing my experience.  Yours might be different.  So please, consult an actual attorney if you have any concerns at all about your work.

”Parents in Tech Want Their Kids to Go Into the Arts Instead.” — Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2025.

             The sub-head was:   “Hands-on jobs that demand creativity are seen as less vulnerable to artificial intelligence.” 

Before all us underpaid artists and writers start letting the Schadenfreude sneak in, our chosen path is still a chancy way to make a living, and always will be.  That is, if you put all your financial eggs in one basket.  I’ve always believed that picking between science and the arts, or business and the arts, is a false choice. 

There’s no law that says you can’t do it all.  I have friends from college who went all in on careers in music, or photography, or theatre, or dance.  Some of them made it, and though now elder statespeople in their fields, many of their names, and certainly their achievements, are recognizable.  You haven’t heard about the ones who failed, now dead, embittered, or wistfully resigned. 

 I’m sorry for them, but I have little sympathy for those who regarded their art as a higher calling, superior to anything one might do to just make a little money.  This is nonsense.  I believe that all honest work is equally honorable.  My son is a working artist who also helps run a sawmill.  He paints and pays his bills.  The art might be more enriching, but he loves wood and delights in the associations he’s developed inside the woodworking community.  He also knows how to run giant mill saws, shop tools, laser cutters. CAD/CAM and C&C machines, computers in the service of art and commerce. 

You want to give your grandkids good advice?  Just say “Man-machine interface.”

I’ve been entangled in the building trades my whole life, mostly as a designer and cabinetmaker, and you won’t find a more intelligent and engaging bunch of people in any profession.  None of them ever thought I shouldn’t be writing books.  One of them is in a band with a standing gig at a local bar.  Another is a carpenter and phi beta kappa graduate in English literature.  Do not challenge him on how to cope inside crown moldings or the rankings of the best books of 2024.

I have another carpenter friend who’s also sort of a career criminal who loves my books and shares them with his fellow inmates.  He wrote me once to say he’d convinced the prison librarian to stock my whole list. 

This might be the definition of a captive audience. 

       The standard advice by the self-important is to follow your passion.  Well, I’ve aways had a passion for regular meals, a decent place to live and a serviceable car.  You can achieve all this and still have plenty of time left to write novels, paint landscapes, play funky bass or imitate Sir Laurence Olivier at your community theater.  Or all the above.  (You could also watch a lot of sports and work on your handicap, but these are different ambitions not addressed in this essay.)

Since this is a project in alienating as many people as possible, I also have little sympathy for those who talk about writing a book, or learning guitar, or playing Lady Macbeth, but never get around to actually doing any of it, blaming their demanding job/kids/wife/husband/Pilates class.  The same rules of time apply.  There’s plenty of it in a day, or weekend, to pack a lot in if you really want to do it.  I suspect that many of these people have learned that it’s really hard to be good at anything in the arts.  That it takes tremendous discipline, hard work and sacrifice.  So it’s a lot easier to talk about than actually do.

            I might have had a bigger literary career if all I’d done was write books.  I’ll never know, and I really don‘t care.  Instead, I got to do an awful lot of interesting things, meet a wildly diverse array of people, master several different commercial and manual skills (like playing the funky bass), and pay all my bills.

Mostly on time. 

 

 

All life is improvisation.

I hardly ever listen to rap or polyphonic jazz.  Okay, basically never.  But I’m glad other people do, and want them to continue.  You might wonder how I square this in my brain, and I can tell you.  Easily.

Charles Darwin

            Darwin figured this out in the 19^th century.  In order for nature to evolve, species had to pump out a lot of experiments, deviations from the norm, which biologists somewhat frighteningly call mutations.  The vast majority of these oddities whither and die immediately.  But some squeak through, and others, a tiny percentage, turn out to be better than the original product.  Again, with a bit of luck, this success multiplies, until the whole species jumps on the bandwagon and its continued survival is thus temporarily assured.   

            I didn’t see any of the movies up for the Oscars this year.  I didn’t like the sound of them, because I’m an old-fashioned movie-goer who likes what he likes and rarely shells out part of his fixed income on something designed to make him uncomfortable, confused or even challenged.  This is a failing on my part, I admit, but I’m still glad these movies got made and were honored.  Art, like nature, depends on experimentation to survive and thrive. 

            Most contemporary art leaves me scratching my head.  Maybe because the artists aren‘t blood relatives.  My son is a professional artist and he never tries to do anything that’s been done before.  Because he’s my son, I look closely at his work, and always find something to appreciate.  This keeps me open to other efforts, and when something crosses my path that gets to me, I’m grateful for the experience.

            My favorite form of art is Impressionism.  This stuff is now considered as homey and mainstream as a cardigan sweater, but when it first emerged, most people, and nearly all the commentators of the time, thought the artists were completely out of their minds.  That turned out not to be true, Van Gogh notwithstanding.  Art lovers  simply had yet to adjust their eyes, minds and social constructs to absorb the work.

        You could say the same thing about jazz and James Joyce.  Cultural revolutions rarely blast on to the scene (I’d say the Beatles were the exception.)  They come on little cat feet, slowing infiltrating our attention and devotion.  The early innovators are usually disregarded into oblivion, sadly, but the victorious mutations they create are relentless and unstoppable. 

            The alternative is stagnation.  Ironically, this is usually a side effect of success.  If everything is working for you, there’s little incentive to change.  The French Academy was saturated with rewards, admiration and nice granite galleries featuring their work.  The Impressionist rabble was likewise poor, denigrated and overlooked, but they owned the energy of innovation, and eventually, the established art culture just rotted away. 

            It’s not a stretch to attach the same logic to biology.  Everyone loves Koala bears, but they only eat certain types of Eucalyptus leaves, and are thus endangered as their food supply fluctuates.  Racoons, on the other hand, eat almost anything.  We have no shortage of racoons, and there’d be a lot more Koalas if they developed a taste for Vegemite sandwiches. 

“Hey, let’s give it a try!  What can it hurt?”  This doesn’t always pan out, but it’s why humans rule the world today.  There’s never been a more versatile and adaptive species.  Like racoons, we eat almost anything.  We’re not that strong, relative to polar bears or saber tooth tigers, but we amplify what we have with devices and machines.  As such, we’re now not only the apex of the apex, but a threat to the planet’s survival.  Too much of a good thing? 

                I don’t know what would qualify as experimental writing these days, though I’m sure others do.  I hope so.  I’m probably the least likely reader to discover the trends of the future, since I feel the same way about novels and short stories as I do about movies.  My diminishing timeline leaves little room for branching out, dabbling in the Avant Garde.  As with breakthroughs in quantum mechanics and new records in the 100-meter dash, this is something better suited to the young. 

Anyway, it’s their world that’s being quietly created, and theirs to relish.

“Writers are people who write.”

This quote is universally attributed to Ernest Hemingway, and there is no evidence that he actually said it.  But no one cares, because it’s exactly the kind of thing he would say, and we do know that’s what he believed. 

On this matter, he was correct.  If you spend an hour a day messing around on the guitar, you’re a guitar player.  If you go to the driving range every weekend, you’re a golfer.  If you write all the time, because you‘re compelled to do so, you’re a writer.  Before I was published, I didn’t feel this way, which I regret.  It wasn’t fair to my unpublished self, because I sure as hell worked like a son-of-a-bitch to remedy the situation. 

            I have a young friend, unpublished, who’s been working on a book for many years, putting in the hours of writing and rewriting, casting about for help and advice, cramming in writing time around a demanding job and busy toddler, feeling buoyed and desperate in equal measure, and generally going through the paces of apprenticeship.  To me, he’s a writer, because he’s always working at it, no matter what. 

            The thing is, writing is rarely easy.  There are moments when we all feel as if some supernatural power has taken hold of us, directing our hands to tap away effortlessly, composing as easily as breathing or strolling down the street.  We’ll also agree that this hardly ever happens.  Instead, it’s not unlike digging a ditch.  You have to put the shovel in, push down with your foot, and haul the stuff out of the ground.  This is hard work, and you know how hard it is with every word and shovelful. 

      Pausing with your hands over the keyboard while staring into the void is something our life partners have often witnessed.  They think we’ve slipped into a trance, but we know we’re only trying to come up with the next word, phrase, analogy, simile, descriptive sentence, or clever tie-up to the end of a chapter.  You feel like your mind is now trapped in concrete, and not another thought will ever occur to you.  But it always comes anyway, you just have to wait for it. 

            Some people don’t feel well unless they run a few miles a day.  Some of them are friends of mine, and in their 70s have sleek, toned bodies and the glow of clear heads and arteries.  I’m not one of them.  I think a car is a much better way to travel from point A to point B, and will never run unless being pursued by a wild animal, which is a distinct possibility where I live in New England.  But I understand their addiction.  I’m the same way about writing.  If I don’t write something, anything, at least once during the day, I feel like I’ve not slept or eaten.  I get jumpier than an addict, which I guess I am, sort of.  I know it’s a mental problem, but I’ve heard of worse. 

            Though as noted above, running for a few hours or crunching through a narrative is difficult, even if you can’t help yourself.  It usually starts smoothly, but there’s always that point when you start to fatigue and mild regret sets in.  Your breath shallows or your hands begin to get sore.  Your brain starts to wonder why you launched this effort in the first place, when you could be on the couch watching NFL Highlights or Antiques Roadshow. 

            But then, endurance kicks in, and you keep going, because why not. You’re already out on the road or at the keyboard and it seems better to just push through.  You start to think of new things to write, new connections and old ideas that can be pulled out of the dusty attic of your tired brain.  You tell yourself: this isn’t that hard. You just have to keep going, and if it sucks, you can always erase it all and start over again tomorrow.  There will aways be other ideas, other notions, other turns of phrase, something else you can put down on the page, because this is what writers do.

            They write. 

Vive la différence

      I don’t have to tell you there’s a lot of tribal hostility going on in America these days. Aside from being damaging to society, these impulses are truly stupid.

      First off, people are hardly ever made up entirely of their racial, political, gender and socioeconomic affiliations. They are mostly just people. Pardon the cliché, but we’re all a lot more alike than we are different. And that is a fact.

      We all need to eat, sleep and pass waste. We all fall in love, grieve our losses, get carpel tunnel, worry about money, like dogs and cats (most of us), fuss over our appearance (most of us), drive cars, hang out with friends, watch TV, coo at babies, suffer our kids’ adolescence, revere grandparents/writers/actors/sports heroes, do foolish things when we’re young and have aching joints when we’re old.

      We are genetically nearly identical. Apparent differences are chance deviations almost unidentifiable in the human genome. Intelligence, physical strength, endurance, the ability to play ping pong, beauty/homeliness and crooked teeth are randomly distributed across all people throughout the world.

      Culture is what attaches itself to these vague dissimilarities, exaggerating differences and inciting conflict where none is necessary.

      My grandfathers were both hearty working-class blokes who overcame a lot of adversity to achieve a measure of success in the world.

My grandmothers were upper middle-class creatures of privilege, who married below their social status. I went to a high school with kids from all over everywhere, less than half of whom went on to college. None of us stuck to our neighborhoods, and if you played sports, ethnicity mattered not a wit. I think this helps explain why I could always swim in any socioeconomic stream that presented itself.

      I’ve always gotten along with everyone who wanted to get along with me, irrespective of their origins or distinctive characteristics. To me, difference is endlessly involving. I had plenty of friends who were a lot like me, but I never thought I should restrict myself to their association.

      In my professional life, I worked within a few international organizations, where this belief in our common humanity was cemented. You only have to close the bar with drunken Japanese, Vietnamese, Swedes, Germans, Egyptians, Nova Scotians, and a few crazy Kiwis (I could go on) to feel kinship with the entire world.

      I’ve always written my books accordingly. Thank God my publisher Marty Shepard never thought it necessary to suggest I add greater diversity. First off, he didn’t need to, and secondly, such a thing would never have occurred to him. And this was a guy with impeccable left-wing credentials. All he cared about was what worked for the story. We never once talked about a character’s race, religion, sexual orientation or economic standing as a thing apart from his or her role in the book.

      Other writers write books where a character’s identity is at the center of the narrative (Marty published a number of these), especially when they belong to groups that have been disadvantaged, disenfranchised or otherwise discriminated against. That’s a good thing, especially when it helps spread empathy and compassion. But nonetheless, the only basis for criticizing any book is the artistic quality of the work. In that, everyone should be fair game, because these are the standards that need to endure and make our art form deserving of attention and regard.

      Scientists will tell you that fear and hostility toward The Other is wired into our brains. I don’t doubt it.

      But biology isn’t destiny, and as the only animals who posses morality, we have it within us to overcome atavistic impulses. This fear and hostility are almost entirely the result of ignorance about The Other. This is easily fixable if you have an open mind.

      Contrary to the old saying, familiarity breeds understanding. Understanding breeds a greater awareness of the world as it actually is, not the distortions of the bigoted, manipulative and censorious.

Weather or not.

Elmore Leonard was indeed a great writer.  That doesn’t mean his 10 Rules For Good Writing should be followed.  Some of them make sense, but, “Never open a book with weather?”

     What if your book is set in the Amazon, might your characters take note of a little humidity?  What if your lead guy is a leatherneck working on an oil rig in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska? Can he say, "Gee, it's nippy." How about Monsoon season in Bangkok?  "Before I left the house I had to choose between an umbrella and diving gear."

      I wrote a book set in the Hamptons that starts in the middle of a raging snowstorm, a phenomenon not often observed out there, at least not in fiction.  Not a single reviewer mentioned my flagrant violation of Leonard’s rules.  So there.

            I find the cliché of “setting as character” a little annoying since it’s not.  Setting is the setting.  But there is some truth that a special setting, like Raymond Chandler’s LA, Parker’s Boston or Grafton’s Santa Terresa, California, does have a personality that infects the story, like a member of a series ensemble, familiar and prominent in the narrative.

            You English majors will recognize the term “pathetic fallacy”, a conceit used by Homer, Shakespeare and 18^th century Romantics where the mood and behaviors of the characters both reflect and influence natural forces.  In modern literature, this can be pretty silly, unless it’s deftly metaphorical.  Lee Child’s Jack Reacher is often found trudging through a howling blizzard somewhere in the Upper Great Plains (even in Chapter 1), establishing the promise of savage and frozen-hearted villainy about to ensue. 

             (My wife played on a softball team in graduate school composed mostly of PhD candidates who called themselves The Pathetic Fallacies.  Still my favorite use of the term.)

            I’ve written two other books that featured giant storms, which might betray more of a meteorological than literary obsession.  In both, hurricanes capped off the action, a deployment of weather as a plot device Leonard is silent on.  In Black Swan, I was credited with a clever use of the “locked-room mystery” motif (trope?), though my actual intent was to crib somewhat blatantly from the plot of Key Largo.  The concept of being trapped in a claustrophobic space as an uncontrollable fury smashes into the building is pretty compelling.  Especially when you’re trapped there with a bunch of murderous, drunken bad guys.  Weather in this case really deserves to be front and center, open to any metaphorical, theological, existential interpretation you wish to infer. 

            My other book featuring a wild tempest took place on the Jersey Shore, where I actually rode out a hurricane.  I was a lifeguard, and since the town was paying us to protect lives, we had to stay on while the protected fled to the mainland.  After clearing out a few knuckleheads trying to surf in the wrathful Atlantic Ocean, we retreated to our bungalow for the night, when the worst of the storm hit.   So, I too was confined to tight quarters that were being bashed and jostled by the wind with a bunch of people who were not murderous, but decidedly drunk.

            This was an experience that I had to use at some point.  In Homer, to say nothing of the Old Testament, these sorts of events are an act of divine cleansing of the hubris and corruption inherent in ever-fallible humanity.  I didn’t want to go that far, though as we all know, few things impose a greater sense of humility on real people and fictional characters alike than a rip-roaring natural disaster.    

          After that storm in New Jersey, with only the Beach Patrol and other first responders wandering around looking at the damage, the world was strangely quiet, even serene.   For some reason, it evoked the feelings I had reading the last paragraph of Joyce’s The Dead, which I believe is the finest bit of literary language ever composed in English.  So I adapted that for the ending of my lifeguard book, Elysiana. 

            I waited for charges of appropriation but never heard a word. 

I won’t try convincing Sarah Connor.

If you follow the news even superficially, you’ll be aware that the world has a very uneasy relationship with rapidly advancing technology.  This tension has been with us since the first Luddite took a cleaver to a water-powered loom, and it will likely never go away.

           The difference now is the speed at which things are changing.  At best, it can give one a sort of psychic vertigo, at worst, it can throw you into abject terror.  For many, it feels as if the machines are on the march and we’re all about to be trampled under their cybertronic bootheels.

I take a somewhat sunnier view.  I’m glad it doesn’t take a week to travel from Connecticut to Philadelphia while being jostled around in a poorly sprung carriage over rocky, rutted roads. Rather, I can board an airplane, that on the ground looks impossibly huge and ungainly, and complete the trip in the time it takes for my courtesy coffee to cool down. 

I understand writers who compose longhand with specially curated pens.  Or use an Underwood inherited from their great uncle.  Long ago, I knew a writer who could only start a new project sitting in her car, and only after cleaning the ashtray.  I have my own superstitions, such as always writing in the same font and point size, using indents and paragraph breaks with no space, and sticking to the same word count per page.  But otherwise, I’m all in on the Microsoft Word app living here on my Lenovo PC.  The first computer I wrote on was a Wang Word Processor, and the fact that I could quickly type out the words, while immediately backtracking, deleting, correcting, inserting and all those other wonderful manipulations felt like a form of magic.  Not unlike flying at 35,000 feet in a metal tube that weighs as much as a small commercial building. 

To me, it’s not the technology, it’s what you do with it.  Nearly anything can be used for good or evil.  I can use a hammer to drive a nail or to put an aperture in my neighbor’s prefrontal cortex.  The same airplanes that deliver me to Ireland brought down the World Trade Center.  They transport Doctors Without Borders and arms merchants.  The machines have no moral agency, they just do as they’re told. 

The current obsession is with AI, understandably.  It’s a very powerful tool, and it takes little imagination to foresee how it will change things in our lives, for better or worse.  I’m guessing the better will win out, in areas such as medical research, energy development and space exploration.  The downside is also there before us, especially if you’ve seen the Terminator.  There are commentators who think Schwarzenegger is already at the door, sawed-off shotgun and titanium skeleton poised to strike.

This may change in about five minutes, but as of now, AI is simply a super-aggregator, not really an intelligent being.  It’s wicked fast, comprehensive and clever at impersonations, but still doesn’t have the power to CREATE anything.  So far, only human brains are capable of making those quantum leaps, short-circuiting the deliberative process, jumping the walls of the maze and grabbing the cheese. 

If AI ever does come up with an original thought, entirely original and paradigm shattering, we better watch out.  But I wouldn’t hold your breath on that happening anytime soon.  

I’ve been thinking about all this because for the last few weeks I’ve been dealing with computer upgrades and the vagaries of assembling a new home entertainment system. The process is maddening and humbling at the same time.   But I’m sticking with it, because at the other end I’ll have something unattainable only a few years ago.

 

Technology is not my friend, but it’s not my enemy.  It’s just a thing, without a mind, without a will.  Ready to serve, but impartial to the master.  Humans still get to decide what to do with it all.  How they decide will still be a matter of morality and good sense, and likely dumb luck. 

That’s what we need to be afraid of.

“We love to work at nothing all day.” – Bachman Turner Overdrive

I noticed at the end of the old year lots of commentary on the radio and in print about the virtues of doing nothing.  I think the premise of all these pieces was that our modern lives are consumed by distractions and attention-seeking media, such that we never turn off our brains, or rather, never disconnect from the clamor to the degree needed to settled down our inner minds.  So not literally doing nothing, just not doing things that mess up your ability to ponder, evaluate, reconsider, plan and create in a quiet mental state.

I wholeheartedly subscribe to this premise.  I have always cultivated my skills at doing nothing for this exact purpose.  Also, to avoid doing things I should be doing, while feeling self-satisfied that I’m actually using the time for deep thinking.  There’s no better way to loaf around without feeling guilty, since what you are actually doing is properly attending to healthy cognition. 

The authors’ prescriptions for treating this ailment always include taking long walks, presumably without your iPhone.  My wife and I walk our dog every day, so check that box.  None mentioned a technique I’ve developed over decades I call “Rotting on the front porch.”  This involves sitting out there half the year with a drink, these days fruit juice, and maybe a plate of cheese and crackers, occasionally with some sliced Italian sausage thrown in.  The key to this meditative practice is to leave all your devices in the house, and only bring along the dog, who can teach us all about the rewards of serious rotting behavior. 

When my niece was a little girl, she and I developed “The Lying Down Game.”  I would often come to her house after a long day at work to spend some time, and my only ambition was to lie flat on my back and stare up at the ceiling.  She was intrigued by this, and would join me on the floor.  We’d consume a fair amount of time doing this, interrupted only by occasional comments – nothing more taxing than discussing her time at school, or exchanging inane, impossibly unfunny jokes, which were nonetheless funny to the two of us.

All of this would be quite familiar to the Buddha, who taught that a quiet mind was the path to enlightenment.  He believed that forcing oneself to think was a fool’s errand.  Rather, one merely needed the mind to work unobstructed, to have the thoughts flow in naturally and unimpeded.  I think he was on to something, and maybe after a few thousand years of testing out the theory we could acknowledge the value. 

I’ve been doing a lot of woodworking lately, the thing I do along with writing.  I see the two pursuits as being essentially the same.  There’s a strenuousness to woodworking that differs from merely tapping on a keyboard, but in both activities, I take a lot of breaks.  I just sit and look around at my surroundings, which I find pleasingly chaotic, but also orderly in their own way.  Like my mind.  Even if it might appear to be a jumble to the unpracticed eye, to me, everything is where it ought to be, or will be as soon as I get off my ass and make an adjustment.  Or rewrite a paragraph.

This practice has likely improved with age, as my physical strength declines inversely proportionate to my talent for brooding and hashing things out by simply looking around. 

I could write more, but I think a productive break is in order.