Chronicle of black_son_of_gray's failures

[7Wannabe5]

I think "Blood Meridian" is absolutely hard-going, and for reasons not reflective of its quality; the struggle to read it is like the struggle to decide what to do with the frozen beef tongue you picked up at the free food give-away. If I had to choose a recent novel that is of the highest quality, grade "brilliant", without being "hard-going" for other reasons, my pick would be "Outline" by Rachel Cusk, although...

He removed the Wilbur Smith from the seat pocket, where it still remained, and plunged it into the briefcase at his feet so that it was out of sight, as though wishing to disown it, or perhaps thinking that I might forget that I had seen it. As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition - I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another: in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

- "Outline" - Rachel Cusk

[Henry]

When I was in high school, my favorite band was Aerosmith. When I was in college in Boston, I worked at an ice cream shop and during my smoke a joint in the parking lot break they walked into the store and bought ice cream. When I realized I missed them, I cried worse than when my 13 year old girlfriend, who, by the way, is now a fat slobby Chewbacca ass licking intergalactic Star Wars bar whore, broke up with me. Soon afterwards they did the Walk This Way remake with RUN DMC and I predictably dug my feet in and took the pure classic rock poser stance that the original was better. Then my friend's girlfriend who was also a musical snob said the new was better and I said yeah, the new one is better. But here's the thing. Although both came out in the period I generally call my youth, both versions can still resonate because of the nostalgia factor. However, I'm not going back and re-reading The World According to Garp or pulling the Grease DVD out of the library bin. So I think music is the primary nostalgic vehicle in our lives And JD Salinger was not some type of genius recluse but a weird guy with some extremely suspect sexual proclivities, much like Steven Tyler. But back to the issue, if there is one, is that the corollary to the I should like something because I was told to like it is the I should like something because it's who I am with the flip side of the coin I should not like something because it's not who I am which for me came out when I tried to read Gravity's Rainbow a few times and couldn't make it out of the first 25 pages but couldn't put Marylinne Robinson's Housekeeping down.

[7Wannabe5]

Yeah, I think "The World According to Garp" at age 14 still remains my personal record for laughing until I cry while reading a novel. I read it during the same beach vacation I first experienced French kissing with a boy named Dick. I was not yet cool enough, still in nerd child mode, to be listening to Aerosmith when the first version was released, and the music snob I was hitting it with when the Run DMC version came out had a large Echo and the Bunnymen poster next to his bed. I thought it was cool that he would get up and cook us a steak in the middle of the night. When you are 21, hitting it with a guy who actually cooks food for you is pretty much the height of sophistication. And "Grease" is a coming of age icon for me, because my father took me by myself to see the musical theater production for my 13th birthday. For all my rough camper ways, I still have a bit of a thing for a man in a classic wool overcoat who is willing to accompany me to the theater. I also have a soft spot for reading together in bed at night. I gave my daughter and her husband a 1930s era book of gardening essays meant to be read together as a couple as a wedding gift. I think it was entitled "A Garden Bed Book." If I were ever to attempt marriage again, I would likely include both these items in the pre-nup.

[black_son_of_gray]

Update:

The garden is officially booming now. I don't talk much about the garden, but for those who might be interested...


We have ~10 raised beds, and this is the time of year when all the flowers are in peak bloom. Earlier in January, I was excited to plant some fruit trees (two apples, one plum, and one feijoa). Combined with our lemon (produces ~1 lemon a week) and our calamansi (very small, years from any real yield...), we have about as many fruit trees as we have space to grow them. I'm aiming for open center pruning and keeping everything at a ladderless height...we'll see how that goes. The apples and plum came bare root and had been more severely pruned in order to fit in the shipping box than I would have liked, but I dutifully planted the ugly sticks and they have all leafed out nicely by now. Already I have over a foot of new limb growth on the plum (citation rootstock, but still insanely vigorous), and ~5 inches on one of the apples. The other apple flowered and set a lot of fruit (!) which I had to prune out as there was no way the tree could support it, and it has been interesting to see how much energy it took out of the tree because it has only ~50% the growth and foliage of the other one.

The grape vines have their first new leaves and I look forward to hacking them back every couple months and harvesting the leaves for cooking (they won't set actual grapes). I did that last year and froze the leaves...probably about $50 equivalent per year if purchasing brined vine leaves in a store. I made a big batch of dolmas once (delicious), but then we started blanching the leaves, slivering them, and simply adding them directly to rice-based dishes. That gives you the same flavor but without all the work of rolling and no need to simmer on the stovetop for so long. New discovery: Omani cuisine is awesome--give it a try. Otherwise, we've had a few heads of radicchio from the garden recently that cooked down into a very tasty pasta dish.

Still stair-climbing, and now hiking. We are right in the midst of wild-flower season in the Bay Area. Recent trip photos:

[black_son_of_gray]

Letters from a Nut

Origin story: In what will be unsurprising to probably everyone who has read more than one of my posts here, I confess that I have been a big fan of libraries since childhood. I also confess that I feel a great deal of gratitude in growing up when I did, before everything became computerized by default. I spent many years combing the local library's shelves in the pre-digital-Dewey era, and as a result I stumbled upon many niche topics I would not have otherwise. One of those topics was the comedy section. I get the sense that many people who like comedy (e.g. stand-up comedy sets, or comedy movies, maybe even comedy albums) are often unaware of comedy-related books. Don't get me wrong, I don't think these books are better in any way than other forms of comedy--they are just as hit-or-miss. But there is an idea embedded in one book I read that has resurfaced a few times in my head over the last couple years...

Letters from a Nut: The book (actually, a series) is called Letters from a Nut, by Ted L. Nancy. The Internet tells me that this is actually the work of comedian Barry Marder. The basic premise is that a Mr. Ted L. Nancy writes letters to people and companies and publishes the correspondence. They are absolutely ridiculous letters that the recipient appears to take seriously--Nancy is not quite trolling, if I remember correctly, because they were silly rather than malicious or mean-spirited. But in a sense, he is baiting them, because he is seeking a back-and-forth engagement. God only knows how many letters he actually wrote in order to get the responses he did. I would like at this point to emphasize how I don't want to duplicate the man's effort, nor the effect. But there is, to me, an interesting idea there.

The idea: Email, like mail generally (also: the internet), kinda sucks? By that I mean that, while it has so much amazing opportunity embedded within it, it has largely been co-opted by dreary consumer or practical matters. It is kind of amazing that I can type up a message and "send" it to a recipient anywhere on the globe (probably also in space, though I'm not sure exactly how that works for astronauts) essentially instantly and for free. And yet email is mostly spam, marketing, notifications, something from a list you didn't subscribe to, bills, etc. When was the last time you actually received just... a message from someone (not a coworker) writing directly to you (and not trying to sell something) and just, y'know, "corresponding"? Maybe this actually happens for you. If so, I'd actually really like to hear about it. Genuinely!

So I find myself wondering why I don't just email people more. I read a lot of books (fiction and non-fiction). I see stuff happening in the community. I hear about a project that sounds interesting. Why don't I reach out to those people and just throw something out there? If I really liked something, why not just type up a small message of appreciation. If I have an idea or suggestion, why not send it along? I think people are probably pretty receptive to this...but I don't really know. The only time I can think of when I actually did something like this, it worked. I was a subscriber to a local composting service, and for various reasons I decided to cancel. As usual, I was presented the "sorry to see you go, could you tell us why you are leaving?" message. So...I actually responded, wrote about a page concerning all the specific issues I had with the service and where I saw room for improvement etc., and the CEO of the company (again, this was a small, local company) actually wrote back to me. We had a few exchanges, and it was actually pleasant. (He offered me a 50% discount on the service too).

Yes, that is a kind of weird example. No, I don't necessarily think it is representative (or the kind of correspondence I'm really looking to engage in), but it gives me hope that such a approach might be worthwhile.

I can see little reason why I shouldn't do this. I have the time. I might make some interesting acquaintances (in a sense already filtered based on whom I reach out to). Others might genuinely appreciate the message. Maybe there are opportunities for serendipity. If nothing else, just writing the message, even if unread, is probably good for me. What is the downside?

Anyone try this?

[mathiverse]

When was the last time you actually received just... a message from someone (not a coworker) writing directly to you (and not trying to sell something) and just, y'know, "corresponding"? Maybe this actually happens for you. If so, I'd actually really like to hear about it. Genuinely!

I correspond with one friend by email. My typical MO is to have long text message conversations with long distance friends, however this friend is luddite enough that they aren't instant message users on any platform, therefore we email each other. We also have periodic voice or video calls at a lower frequency.

For the most part, I haven't quite turned these emails from surface level catching up to more interesting, longer form conversations about interesting topics yet, but I'm trying to. The thing I loved about this friend is that we could have hours long conversations on interesting topics when we were in person. I've started changing the things I bring up and talk about at length in our emails in an effort to get back to that except via email.

[Lemur]

@bsog

This post speaks to the state of things because, hypothetically, if I were the recipient, I'd probably be thinking "okay...what is this person ultimately trying to sell me on" and I'd completely miss any attempts at a genuine interaction like this.

But that is just me though. I think a lot of people would be pretty responsive. I can at least attest to a personal experience. Last year, I sent out emails to 3 people I used to serve with in the military. People I haven't spoken to in over a decade and also, like me, don't have social media. 2 did not respond but my good friend from New Mexico responded in a very long email about his whole life the past ten years and it was pretty awesome to catch up after a few more exchanges.

These exchanges felt very personal and real and I'm glad I did it.

[theanimal]

When was the last time you actually received just... a message from someone (not a coworker) writing directly to you (and not trying to sell something) and just, y'know, "corresponding"? Maybe this actually happens for you. If so, I'd actually really like to hear about it. Genuinely!

I have a very similar experience to @mathiverse. I correspond with multiple friends via very long texts (essentially emails) and one friend occassionally via email. Some of these conversations revolve around catching up, whereas others discuss values, philosophy, hopes for the future and so on.

I think you should look into what Derek Sivers is doing. He asks people who read his books, use his services, listen to podcasts he's on etc to email him. He's built up a large correspondence doing so and ends up visiting many of these people on his travels.

[black_son_of_gray]

I think you should look into what Derek Sivers is doing.

Thanks for the recommendation!

[black_son_of_gray]

Books read in the last month or so:
Starship Troopers by Heinlein
Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein
The Cockroach by McEwan
Foundation by Asimov
The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way by Bryson
Ender's Game by Card
A Clockwork Orange by Burgess
The Courage to Be Disliked by Kishimi and Koga
A Confederacy of Dunces by Toole (finally finished after hiatus midway through)
Bird by Bird by Lamott

Something I have started doing recently is: listening to the audiobook (at ~1.5 speed) version of a book while following along with a physical copy. Because I am doubling up the sensory inputs (auditory and visual), I feel like I can push the pace and still retain ~100% comprehension. I could probably push it more, but the voices get too chipmunky for me at around 200%. For some books, this hybrid approach has been particularly worthwhile: Ender's Game (Card himself recommends his work being read aloud), Starship Troopers (for the quick rattling off of military jargon), The Mother Tongue (allows a professional reader to pronounce words correctly while you can also simultaneously see the spelling--very useful!), and A Clockwork Orange (the pervasive nadsat slang is quite distracting to parse out, but Tom Hollander was narrating in the audiobook, and he is very, very good.)

For those following along (no doubt with bated breath), am I still chugging away at the novel I am writing. I'm currently revising the fourth draft while beta readers have a go at it. There may be a few tweaks to the storyline here and there moving forward, but mostly I am focused now on the granular, sentence level editing. For this, I have employed the assistance of LLMs to, I think, great effect. I have played around with ChatGPT and Claude models, and explored how these tools might be used to greatest effect for a writer. My conclusion is this: great for editing, bad for storytelling.

My current application of Claude is to paste in short passages and specifically ask for suggestions where a sentence can be made: 1) more concise or 2) clearer without sacrificing specific details. A made up example: before "He could see that the ball was red." after "He saw a red ball." or "The ball was red."* You'd be surprised how often this kind of wordiness can by trimmed down. I'll probably revise the manuscript down 10k words (~30-40 pgs)! This particular application is something I might otherwise pay a human editor good money for, and I think it does it comparably well...perhaps even better.

You'll note that I don't want LLMs to do any of the creative work. Everything that is story is coming out of my head. (Also, I am choosy about even the concision/clarity suggestions, because I care about the rhythm and flow of a sentence, and LLMs are generally tone-deaf. They don't know a beautiful line from a perfunctory one.) That is the joy of writing, and in any case, I have asked many times to see what kind of plots or story arcs these models can come up with, and they are all entirely derivative and tropey--I mean, what else could they be??? (Pro tip: in your prompt, specifically ask for a "boring", "idiotic","asinine", or "ridiculous" story/plot, and it is often better.) But LLMs are very helpful when it comes to language usage. There are all sorts of idioms or (verb + preposition) combinations that are a nightmare to hunt down the most common/preferred usage, but which LLMs will very nicely explain: e.g. "Using (preposition) is the most standard usage, and implies ... while (preposition), though less common, is also acceptable, and implies ..." This is a level of scrutiny most people probably won't entertain, but I personally think it is part of the gap between "perfectly fine writing" and "polished/professional prose".

*In case you are wondering, this specific example contains what John Gardner called "filtering", which is where a writer needlessly "filters" description through a character's senses. e.g. "He heard a bell ringing." vs. "A bell rang." (where it is implied that he could obviously hear it, otherwise it wouldn't be mentioned). The goal, according to Gardner, is create a fictive dream-state, whereby the reader slips into the uninterrupted stream of their own imagination. Having vivid sensory details filtered through a character ever so slightly abstracts them, making the fictive dream a little more difficult to achieve, and that is why it is usually undesirable.

[candide]

This be either unanswerable or too personal, or both, but were there any through-lines that made you pick the books you did over this short time frame?

I ask because those are a lot of books I have read, and in case liked. I'll quote grab and edit for the overlap:

Books read in the last month or so:
Starship Troopers by Heinlein
Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein
Ender's Game by Card
A Clockwork Orange by Burgess
Bird by Bird by Lamott

A lot of sociology that uses the vehicle of science fiction to hold it together. And then "Bird by Bird" was on a bunch of book shelves of English teachers I hung out with over the years of being one. One summer, I plopped a copy off my wife's book shelf and read it.

Even the Bryson book is a near miss for us as book twins. I remember seeing it at the library on the trip I picked up instead "Prodigal Tongue" by Lynne Murphy, which goes into the history of the differences between American and British English.

[black_son_of_gray]

This be either unanswerable or too personal, or both, but were there any through-lines that made you pick the books you did over this short time frame?

I'll do my best explain! (Also, I forgot Foundation by Asimov in my list above, so I have edited the post to include it).

Through line #1: "I get that reference!" Somewhere further up in this journal I mentioned that I choose some books on the basis of their continued popularity/cultural significance. If it is part of a canon, e.g. "The Golden Age of Science Fiction", or a book that I have heard referenced many times, but still don't know anything about it, I'm inclined to pick it up.

Books I chose because of this: A Clockwork Orange (I had seen the film), Foundation, Starship Troopers, A Confederacy of Dunces

Through line #2: Understanding an author's evolution. If I enjoy a work by an author, I often investigate their career/bibliography. In particular, I'm looking for additional works by them of equal/greater reception, or I want to see how they handle a different topic/story/genre.

Books I chose because of this: Stranger in a Strange Land, The Cockroach, The Mother Tongue.

Bonus points to The Cockroach, because I had recently read a book by McEwan, and enjoyed it, then saw that the premise was a satirical take on The Metamorphosis by Kafka (which I had already read because #1 above), and so that was an immediate "Yep!" (It never hurts when a book is short, too)

Through line #3: Browsing serendipity. I have always loved combing library stacks. I also am surrounded by a rather huge number of Little Free Libraries and like to take walks. So, many of my books selections are, in addition to the above through lines, simply the result of random availability. I really like this because it's closer to a random sampling strategy (after filtering through the other through lines, of course).

ALL of the books in the list except for Bird by Bird and The Courage to Be Disliked were happened upon rather than sought out. In general, I don't want anything to do with algorithms or promotionals or "trending now!" type recommendations. I'm not interested in books I think I'll like. Experience tells me that I'm more likely to encounter a worthwhile book by ignoring my preconceptions rather than following them. (I do not ignore my actual experiences, though. I've read enough e.g. Dickens to know I'm not interested in his other books. So I'll never read David Copperfield, and I guess I'll just have to live with that, Through Line #1 be damned... Thankfully, there are many millions of other books to choose from.)

Through line #4: Writing craft. This is somewhat self-explanatory for The Mother Tongue and Bird by Bird, but I'll also read a book that is universally considered 'well-written' simply to see what that looks like. Craft books tend to circle around the same ideas stated by earlier writers, so eventually that becomes Through Line #1.

[black_son_of_gray]

Books read in the last couple weeks:

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon (aborted after ~30 pages, style not for me)
Matrix by Lauren Groff (aborted after ~30 pages, distracted by other books, might return--I otherwise like her writing)
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (paging @7Wannabe5)
No Time to Spare by Ursula K. Le Guin
Words Are My Matter by Ursula K. Le Guin
Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders
Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami
A novel just published by the instructor of a writing workshop I attended.
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (currently halfway)

I fed some samples of my fiction writing into the LLM model Claude and asked which authors write in a similar style, and Ursula K. Le Guin kept popping up. I had heard the name before, but hadn't read any of her stuff, so that is why she shows up in the list so much. [Other names: N.K. Jemisin (I have read some of the Broken Earth series, and agree), and China Mieville (had never heard of, now I'm curious)]

I enjoyed The Left Hand of Darkness quite a bit, and I'm sure I'll eventually want to read e.g. The Dispossessed, etc. Le Guin has a ton of work out there--Not quite as much as the formidable Joyce Carol Oates, but still...one could spend a very long time working through it.

It's funny to read banned books from the Victorian Era--I usually can't tell why they were so scandalous. (Often it's something like an unmarried man and woman dining together. ) Tropic of Cancer (not Victorian) was banned for a long time for being obscene, and you'll know why within a few sentences. It's now ~90 years old, but the vulgarity still reads very modern. Much of the language could easily be mistaken as coming from select comment sections of the current Internet.

[7Wannabe5]

You are taking me back. It's been over 4 decades since I first read Ursula Le Guin and Joyce Carol Oates. "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Corrections and Began My Life Over Again" is freakishly and not entirely coincidentally reminiscent of my own early sullen-Nihilist delinquent phase*. It's interesting how Le Guin's background in anthropology contributed to her thought experiments with gender and other social norms. Kind of like some Sci-Fi writers are more likely to ask "What's a likely outcome of this observed trend?" while others are more likely to ask "What is arbitrary, could possibly change/differ even if it hasn't?" Le Guin's "Those Who Walked Away from Omelas?" sort of forms a triumvirate with Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron."

*I wonder whether Heinlein would agree/amend that every human should also spend at least one long afternoon in jail cell or juvenile detention facility and/or have at least one bisexual experience?

[black_son_of_gray]

Kind of like some Sci-Fi writers are more likely to ask "What's a likely outcome of this observed trend?" while others are more likely to ask "What is arbitrary, could possibly change/differ even if it hasn't?"

Indeed, Le Guin addresses this exact topic in her "Author's Note" before The Left Hand of Darkness (50th Anniversary Edition, at least). The full text of that Author's Note can be found here, from the publisher. It's a good example of her non-fiction prose, which is insightful and unapologetic and well-reasoned, without being brash. I wish I'd discovered her earlier. Those on the forum who only read non-fiction or who roll their eyes in private about "genre" fiction might get the most out of it.

[Western Red Cedar]

I'd definitely recommend The Dispossessed. I read it in college and it was the book that mad me start taking Science Fiction as a literary genre seriously. Interesting political commentary and narrative structure. She also has some great short stories.