Author: Ryan (Page 4 of 16)

Book Review: Norwegian Wood

March 24, 2018 / Ryan / 0 Comments

I picked this book up because over on the book suggestion subreddits, Haruki Murakami’s books are constantly being recommended so I figured I’d give one a try. People are constantly praising Murakami for his beautiful prose and poignant writing, two things that I tend to enjoy so I had high hopes. Unfortunately, as you’ll see, I was pretty disappointed.

At times I felt like I must be reading a different book than everyone else: The prose was fine but really nothing special. I’ve read authors who deploy metaphors and similes that light up my mind and make me pause in admiration. Instead, most of Murakami’s writing seemed to fall into the category of “invisible” prose for me, where it flows nicely but nothing really jumps out. The overall melancholy tone was good, and there were occasional moments where the prose got a little more poetic, but even then I wasn’t particularly struck by it. I also found that a lot of the dialog didn’t quite scan for me: there were a lot of what seemed like non sequiturs, which I suspect is at least partly due to something lost in the translation from Japanese to English.

I was underwhelmed by the story and characters too. The main character is just about the most boring person I can imagine, with no real goals or motivation in life, and his primary love interest is a girl who is somehow even more boring than he is. The supporting characters are at least more interesting, but one of them (the second love interest) is an embodiment of the manic pixie dream girl trope (seriously, the description at that link could have been written specifically for her, right down to the hair dye). For some reason, despite being an incredibly boring and unremarkable guy, all the female characters in the book are in love with him and think that his every banal statement is amazing. Even the most interesting character in the book, an older woman who is at the same mental institution as the main love interest, and is a lesbian (and statutory rapist of an underaged girl – which is its own can of worms), ends up sleeping with the main character at the end of the book for no apparent reason. As for the plot, it was almost nonexistent, which is unfortunately pretty typical for a “literary” novel.

I guess I can see how a book about a young guy who mopes around aimlessly and yet for some reason has attractive women (of all ages and sexual orientations!) falling all over themselves to be with him might appeal to some readers, but I really don’t see why Murakami is such a literary darling known for gorgeous prose. Suffice it to say, I think this book just didn’t work for me. Maybe there is some aspect of it that went over my head that I’m not appreciating, but whatever the reason, it just didn’t connect.

The Purpose of a Gun

March 4, 2018 / Ryan / 0 Comments

What is the purpose of a gun?

It’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot since the Las Vegas massacre, and has come to the fore again with the massacre in Parkland and the national discussion about gun violence that has followed. It’s a simple question, but it’s one that I think doesn’t get enough attention, because the answers get to the heart of the gun debate in the United States.

The simple answer to this question is that a gun is a device for propelling projectiles at high enough velocities to kill animals at a distance. More specifically, many guns are for killing human beings. That’s what guns are designed to do. But when I ask about the purpose of a gun, I don’t mean “what do they literally do?” I mean, “why do people buy them? Why do people think they need guns?”

Many gun owners will say that they own guns for defense. They want to protect their property, themselves, and their families from harm. Others will say that they own guns for hunting: killing animals for sport and/or food, and all of the culture and traditions that go with that. Polls show that those are far and away the two main reasons people own guns. Of course, guns serve another purpose as well: they are used in war for killing people. Our species has put a lot of effort into finding better ways to kill each other, and modern firearms are one result.

So, guns are for self defense, hunting, and war. But guns are more than just simple tools. Guns have a deep cultural significance that other tools don’t. People get emotional about guns. Why is that?

It helps to look at those three purposes more closely. Self defense, hunting, and war are intimately linked with our culture’s ideas of masculinity. The “man of the house” is traditionally responsible for keeping his wife and kids safe. Hunting is a manly thing to do: it is a rite of passage for boys to go out hunting with their fathers, and bringing home meat to feed the family again plays into the idea of the man’s role as provider for the household. And soldiers are seen as the epitome of masculinity, taking the man’s role of defender of the family and expanding to to defender of the country. Historically, killing has been a man’s job.

The purpose of a gun in modern American culture is not just as a tool, but as a talisman of masculinity. A fetish, worshiped for its power to confer masculinity on its wielder.

Couple the gun’s near-mystical status with a culture that is deeply misogynistic, where men seek to distance themselves from anything that seems even remotely feminine. The easiest way to insult a man in our culture is to question his masculinity, to imply that he is in some way woman-like. Men are taught that they must constantly prove their masculinity to themselves and each other, so what better way than to acquire guns? Surely nobody can question my masculinity if I own an arsenal of military-grade weapons.

At the same time, expressing any emotion other than anger is seen as feminine and therefore forbidden to any self-respecting red-blooded man. Boys don’t cry. Boys are supposed to like gym class and play sports so they can prove their physical prowess against other boys. Boys are not supposed to like poetry or drama, because those activities involve openly sharing emotions other than anger.

That said, our culture is changing fast. Women are breaking down barriers everywhere you look. Same sex couples can get married. Nerds are cool. The #MeToo movement is exposing rampant sexual harassment and men who have long gotten away with it are finally facing consequences. We had 8 years with an African American president. Cherished bastions of popular culture like Star Wars and superhero movies are having success after success by featuring women and people of color.

There’s a saying that goes: “When you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” Right now a lot of white men, raised in a hyper-masculine culture, are seeing these shifts and feel like they are under attack. Plenty of men are able to adapt to the changing culture and celebrate it, but there is a segment of the population who instead double down on toxic masculinity. They perceive a threat to their way of life, and in response they acquire arsenals and continue to repress emotions to prove their masculinity at any cost.

There is another facet to guns that also comes into play here. Not only are they powerful symbols of masculinity, but guns offer the illusion of control. It is terrifying to think of an armed intruder breaking into your house and threatening your family, so many people want a gun so that if such a situation arises, they will not feel helpless. They can take control of the situation rather than wait for the cops to arrive. Studies show that having a gun in your house actually puts your family at greater risk, but it feels like it does the exact opposite. Likewise, the idea of a mass shooting is terrifying, and makes people feel helpless. You hear gun advocates say that they want to carry weapons to prevent such attacks, that if we just had more “good guys with guns” then we’d be safer. What they are really saying is that they cannot deal with feeling helpless if such a situation were to arise. By carrying a gun, they feel like if they found themselves in an attack, they could do something about it. This is of course not backed up by reality, where having numerous armed civilians in a shooting is likely to just add to the chaos, cause additional unwanted injuries, and make it much harder for law enforcement to do their jobs effectively. But the idea of having a gun is comforting because it gives an illusion of control.

So what we end up with are heavily armed, emotionally stunted, white men who feel like their way of life is under attack, and turn to guns as a way to reassert control. It’s the perfect recipe for gun massacres.

It is obvious that this country needs better laws to make it harder for dangerous people to get their hands on weapons that make killing easy. But I think it is equally obvious that gun violence in this country is also a byproduct of a deeply toxic culture of masculinity, and that if we want to curb the violence we need to work hard to change that culture.

Book Review: Lincoln in the Bardo

January 12, 2018 / Ryan / 0 Comments

I first heard of George Saunders when I stumbled upon a series of short writing advice videos that he was in. He had a reputation as a master storyteller, and I made a note to try reading one of his books some time. When I saw his novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” popping up on recommendation lists, I decided to give it a try.

I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I knew basically nothing about the book other than the title and that the author had a good reputation. Lincoln in the Bardo turned out to be a very strange book that only partly worked for me.

The book is centered on Abraham Lincoln’s son, Willie, who died of Typhoid fever at age 11. As advertised in the title, the book is about Willie’s ghost as it lingers in the “bardo” – the in-between realm between the world of the living and death. Willie’s ghost encounters a cast of other colorful ghosts, who tell him their stories and try to convince him to leave the bardo and be at peace, while refusing to accept that they themselves should do the same.

Interspersed between fictional chapters are chapters that are composed entirely of little snippets and quotes from relevant historical accounts. I don’t know that all of the quotes were real, but at least one of the sources was “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which I know is a real book.

The book is definitely on the “literary” or even “experimental” side of things. There is sort of a plot, but it is pretty thin, and much of the book is side stories about the various ghosts and their various lives and reasons for lingering in the bardo. Some are funny, some are sad, some are just bizarre.

For me, the best parts of the book were when the two main ghosts, Bevins and Vollman, who serve as narrators, actually enter into Abraham Lincoln’s body as he is visiting his boy’s grave. They get a glimpse of his thoughts and feelings, and the result is a handful of very powerful and moving passages reflecting on grief, the impermanence of life, the helpless feeling of a parent who looses a child. These thoughts, in Lincoln’s mind, shade into thoughts of the war, or the thousands of other sons who have died or will die, and whether the price is worth it. These passages alone made the book worth reading, but they’re surrounded by a lot of weird stuff that didn’t connect as well with me.

I listened to this as an audiobook, which was interesting because it was done with a full cast. The two main readers were Nick Offerman and David Sedaris, and they did a very good job, especially Offerman. But many of the minor characters were also voiced by famous people: Lena Dunham, Julianne Moore, Susan Sarandon, etc. However, some of the very minor parts, especially among the dozens of snippets and quotes, were read by people who were clearly not trained actors (indeed, I noticed the cast listing seems to have Saunders’ entire family, for example). It’s amazing what a difference it makes when you go from a trained voice actor to a regular person who reads without any inflection.

Overall, I’d say this was worth reading for its occasional beautiful and poignant moments, but was a little on the strange side for me. I’d like to give some of Saunders’ short stories a try. They’re what he really is famous for, and I suspect I will like his short form writing better.

Book Review: Too Like the Lightning

October 29, 2017 / Ryan / 0 Comments

They say you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but what about its title? The title of Ada Palmer’s “Too Like the Lightning” gripped me the first time I saw it, and I knew I had to read the book regardless of what it was about. I only learned later that the title is part of a line from Romeo and Juliet:

I have no joy of this contract tonight.

It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,

Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be

Ere one can say “It lightens.”

I’ll say up front that although this book is not perfect, I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, I can’t stop thinking about it. The basic premise is that several hundred years in the future, geopolitics on Earth looks radically different from what we have now. Technology is advanced enough that people can hop in a (flying) car and travel anywhere in the world in less than two hours, and this has led to a breakdown of traditional nations. Instead, society is organized into several different groups or “hives” and people can choose which one they ant to be a part of, if any:

Humanists: focused on human achievements (athletic, artistic, etc)
Cousins: focused on altruism and providing social services to all
The Masonic empire: A Rome-like monarchy built on the longstanding rumors of a secret society pulling the strings throughout history
The Gordians: Basically a think-tank become a nation, with a focus on understanding the human brain and behavior
The European Union: Self-explanatory
Mitsubishi corporation: A coalition of former Asian nations now run as a “shareholder democracy”. Owns most of the land on Earth.
Utopians: A group of scientists and others focused on the future. They work tirelessly to end all disease, extend human life, and colonize other planets.

Here is a more detailed description of each hive, written by Palmer herself.

This fascinating vision of the future is only the tip of the iceberg. The novel is crammed full of other really creative ideas about the future, and that’s what really made me love it. Some are relatively minor, like textiles that project an image of the background on their surface rendering the wearer nearly invisible. Others are fascinating and troubling, like “set sets”: humans who have been interfaced directly with computers since birth, co-opting the neural pathways normally reserved for things like sight and smell and taste, turning them into phenomenally powerful biological computers.

The plot of the novel revolves around a family who play a central role in the smooth functioning of this future world. Their two “set-sets” (along with a massive array of supercomputers) are responsible for the flight paths of the billions and billions of high-speed cars that zip around the world and make the distributed “Hives” possible. (The cars of course, are not driven by their passengers, and crashes are so rare that they make international news when they occur.) Only the small Utopian hive does not use their system of cars. Unbeknownst to most, the family also harbors a boy with extraordinary abilities that I won’t divulge here, and protecting him from discovery is a major driver of the plot.

But really I’ll be honest: this is not a novel about plot. It’s about this vivid and fascinating vision of the future in all of its glorious, messy, detail. The plot serves primarily as an excuse for the main characters to meet and interact with the outlandish characters who lead each of the Hives, and therefore to show the reader another facet of the complicated future world. (And of course, just as has often been the case with leaders of nations throughout history, the leaders of the hives all know each other and are connected by a web of marriages, adoptions, etc.)

In case the intricate worldbuilding didn’t clue you in, this novel is unabashedly smart, and to some it may veer into the territory of “pretentious”. You see, “Too Like The Lightning” is obsessed with Enlightenment philosophy. The writing style of the book is heavily influenced by this time period as well, with a narrator (who is also a main character) who speaks directly to the reader, sometimes even inventing interjections from the reader and responding to them. Palmer does some exposition jiu-jitsu by having the narrator ostensibly relating the events of the novel to a reader even farther in the future, but by explaining things to that future reader, we in the “past” are also able to understand things. Here, it’s probably easier if I just show an example, from where the narrator is explaining why he’s writing in the style of the 18th century:

“You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I describe, but you came to me for explanation of those days of transformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed the recent revolution, so it is only in the language of the Enlightenment, rich with opinion and sentiment, that those days can be described. You must forgive me my ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s and ‘he’s and ‘she’s, my lack of modern words and modern objectivity. It will be hard at first, but whether you are my contemporary still awed by the new order, or an historian gazing back at my Twenty-Fifth Century as remotely as I gaze back on the Eighteenth, you will find yourself more fluent in the language of the past than you imagined; we all are.”

I suspect some readers might balk at the almost self-indulgent way this book goes on about various philosophers and how their works are relevant for certain aspects of the future society depicted, but I found it refreshing. Usually if sci-fi is going to get self-indulgent about some subject, it’s science (often physics). Most people don’t bat an eye when the brilliant scientist in a hard sci-fi novel gives a big speech explaining special relativity or the chaotic orbits of planets in a multi-star system, or what have you. In fact, books like that are often applauded for their perceived realism. I’d argue that “Too Like The Lightning” is doing exactly the same thing, explaining some point of philosophy that is just as fundamental to understanding the world depicted in the novel as special relativity is fundamental to understanding Tau Zero, for example.

What really impressed me about this book (Palmer’s first published novel!) is the confidence and skill with which Palmer manages to pull off several very difficult things. The voice and narrative style, as you can see in the quote above, are very distinctive and unusual. The world she has created is intricate and complicated and feels organic, which means it is potentially confusing, yet somehow Palmer manages to write in such a way that you always have just enough information to want to keep going to learn more. From the very beginning , it is written in such a way that you trust all will be made clear in due time. Often I lose patience with stories that string the reader along, but “Too Like the Lightning” does it extremely well. In this, it has a lot in common with Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which also contains lots of philosophical discussions and likewise provides the reader just enough information to understand but doles it out slowly.

Finally, I found it refreshing to read far-future sci-fi set here on Earth rather than a space opera set in an unknown star system on the other side of the galaxy. Most authors writing this far into the future use the time gap and fictional worlds they’re writing about as an excuse to start with a relatively blank slate. Palmer instead takes the far more challenging route of setting her story here on Earth. That means that her worldbuilding has to deal with the complicated, messy baggage of thousands of years of real history, but as a historian Palmer is up to the challenge and the result is a sci-fi vision of the future that feels far more “real” than the hardest “hard” sci-fi.

I was disappointed at the end of the book to learn that it is really only the beginning of a longer story, but that’s unfortunately par for the course in speculative fiction. That said, I still thought the twists and revelations at the end were very good. As I listened to the end of the audiobook (which has a great narrator) on a plane, I may have said “whoaaah” out loud. I am eagerly looking forward to reading the next book in the series.

Book Review: Blood Meridian – or – The Evening Redness in the West

September 9, 2017 / Ryan / 0 Comments

I have mixed feelings about this book, which I am pretty sure is exactly the idea. Like other Cormac McCarthy books, the prose in Blood Meridian is great, as long as you can tolerate lots of arcane and antiquated uses for words and don’t require frivolous punctuation like quotation marks and apostrophes. The book is full of evocative descriptions of the desert southwest, from the details of tiny Mexican villages to the size and desolation of the desert. However, that same gorgeous prose is used to describe some of the nastiest violence and depravity that I’ve ever read, so it is absolutely not a joy to read.

The book follows The Kid, who wanders west in the 1840s and gets caught up in a gang of men roving the Mexican border killing and scalping Indians. They quickly realize that it’s awfully hard to tell whether a scalp comes from an Apache or a Mexican, and end up just killing indiscriminately. They go from being hailed as heroes to hunted as monsters.

As far as plot and characters go, this book is pretty weak. The plot is pretty repetitive, and in some places barely makes sense, and most characters are little more than names. In fact, most don’t even have names. Even the Kid, technically the main character, is basically only there to provide a point of view on the events. The only real character is The Judge, fascinating and monstrous both in physical bearing and in deed, who by the end of the book is revealed to be more a symbol than an actual character. The whole book, even though it is based on real historical events, is written in such a way that it feels freighted with symbolism and half-perceived meaning.

When you get down to it, this is less a novel than a treatise on the human love of violence in the guise of a novel so that it is more “palatable” (which, to be sure, is a generous term to use for this book). It is a sort of dialog between the author and the reader that goes like this:

Author: Do you like westerns? Cowboys and Indians? You like the idea of a past when men were men and the frontier was there to be settled by those who could handle its hardships?

Reader: Yes, that sounds great!

Author: Ok, here you go.

Reader: Oh. No, no, that’s horrible! So much death and cruelty. And really, dead babies too? Was that necessary? Why are you showing me this?

Author: You say it’s horrible, but you’re still reading.

Reader: Well, there is some great writing here. But there’s something wrong with you.

Author: The reader dost protest too much, methinks. I think you like it. I think you know you’re supposed to say you hate this but it also excites you. If there’s something wrong here, is it with me, or with you? Or both of us?

This is not a fun book. Both the plot and the characters are lacking. But despite that, having had a few days to reflect on it, I think this is a very good book because it forces the reader to have that internal conversation. This book would probably reveal hidden symbolism and meaning with a second read through, but I don’t have the stomach for it. Heck, I don’t blame people who can’t make it through a first reading. It is not for everyone. You don’t read this for fun, but if you do read it, it sticks with you and makes you think.

Book Review: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

August 15, 2017 / Ryan / 1 Comment

For the majority of popular authors out there, especially in genres like sci-fi and fantasy, it’s all about the plot. Prose exists to tell you what’s going on and otherwise its job is to get out of the way and try to be as “invisible” as possible. That’s why it was so refreshing to read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. The prose in this book is the opposite of that bland “invisible” utilitarian prose that is so common. It’s so good that it is hard to even find the words to convey it. The difference between other authors’ writing and the writing on display in Kavalier and Clay is like the difference between those sleepy ponies that give kids a nice safe ride at the state fair and a thoroughbred racehorse on a straightaway. You get so used to safe, easy, invisible prose that when a book comes along that really shows you what the English language can do, its power is breathtaking and exhilarating. Seeing it used to its full potential relieves a tension you didn’t even know was there.

There’s so much to gush about when it comes to Chabon’s writing, but one of the most noticeable things for me was the skill with which characters are introduced. Even for minor characters who are present for a scene or two, he somehow manages to deploy the perfect metaphor, the perfect few details of their appearance and demeanor, so that in a paragraph you not only know what the person looks like, but you know their backstory, their motivation, their family life, their aspirations and disappointments in life. You feel like you know the person, like you’re pretty sure you’ve met the person in real life.

It’s not just the descriptions of people, it’s all the descriptions. Chabon manages to find the perfect words every time so that it’s not just a description, it’s a visceral feeling. It’s familiar even if there’s no reason it should be. And somehow this is done without feeling like the prose is bloated. The only complaint I have is that he does have a tendency to use an unusual word when a more common one would do fine. It’s a fine line to walk: sometimes the less common word has shades of meaning that are missing from the everyday one. But sometimes it just sounds pretentious. And I’ll admit, there were a couple of times, for some reason both involving violent events, that the word choices and figurative language was so unusual I didn’t actually understand what happened except by context clues. But for the most part, I think the writing falls on the correct side of the fine line.

So what’s the book about? It is nominally about two Jewish cousins, one from New York, one a WWII refugee from Czechoslovakia, who team up to create a superhero comic. I was never much of a fan of comics, but I am enough of a SFF fan that I have absorbed some comics knowledge through osmosis. One of the coolest things about Kavalier and Clay was seeing Chabon use the strength of his prose to convey the power of the story being told by the comics in such a way that an adult reader gets the same feelings as a kid reading the comic.

But comics are just the surface veneer. The main theme of the story is “Escape” and whether it’s a good thing or not, ranging from the escapism of comic books, to escaping the War, to escaping the city to settle for living the American dream in the suburbs, to escaping from that sterile and boring suburban life to be who you really are, etc. I’m not doing it justice of course: it is very well done, perfectly walking the line between ham-fisted and too subtle.

I also found it interesting to see many familiar threads appear in Kavalier and Clay that I recognized from Chabon’s collection of personal essays “Manhood for Amateurs.” Comic books and magic tricks, of course. But also a lot of melancholy and wistful reflections on growing up and nostalgia for childhood, fraternal (or in this case, cousinly) bonds, and the relationship between father and son.

It’s not a perfect book. I found the first half to be much more engaging than the second, as if once he was done introducing new characters, the writing lost some of its initial spark. That said, it was still excellent. The prose in Kavalier and Clay makes you feel things in a way that very few other authors are capable of, and it certainly cements Chabon’s place among my favorite authors.

I’m volunteering for the Democratic party, and you should be too.

August 14, 2017 / Ryan / 4 Comments

I don’t know the original source for this image. If you do, please let me know.

The Republican party has gone off the rails.

In just the last week, the Republican president threatened nuclear war with North Korea, military action against Venezuela for no apparent reason, thanked Russia for expelling American diplomats, and failed to immediately denounce Nazis and white supremacists even after they murdered a woman and assaulted many others. Before that, Republicans came within a hair’s breadth of passing a law, drafted in secret at the last minute, that would dismantle the Affordable Care Act (which is based on conservative ideas) and strip health insurance from millions of people. Our attorney general is a man who was deemed, in 1986, in Alabama, to be too racist to serve on the district court. Our Secretary of Education is a billionaire who has openly said that it is her goal to use education reform to “advance the kingdom of God” in direct opposition to the separation of church and state. The Republican party is systematically making it harder for minorities and the poor to vote, and has gerrymandered legislative districts in many states so that even if the GOP gets fewer votes, it gets more representatives. They reject the fact that humans are causing climate change, even as its effects become more obvious every year. They stole a seat on the supreme court.

It’s easy to point the finger at the Republican voters who got us here, and they absolutely deserve that blame. Many of them will claim that they just want smaller government and lower taxes and that they don’t support Nazis or racism or taking healthcare from poor children. But it was obvious what they were getting when they voted for Trump and Ryan and McConnell and other Republicans. If you are willing to ignore racism and misogyny and contempt for reality itself in order to get lower taxes for the rich, then guess what? The blood is on your hands when Nazis, encouraged by the people you elected, openly murder people on the streets.

That said, Republican voters are not the only ones to blame for the rise of Trump and the Republican party’s insanity. You and I are responsible for it too. We are complicit because we took for granted that facts and human decency should win out over lies and hatred. We sat by and watched while Republicans organized and voted and methodically took over every level of government. We saw Obama elected and thought that the country had turned a corner and that our work was done, when in reality the work was just beginning. We bickered among ourselves instead of working together to defeat one of the greatest threats that our democracy has ever faced. So now we have white nationalists in the streets and in the White House, a know-nothing president condoning their behavior and casually threatening nuclear war, and people having to call to beg their senators not to let them or their loved ones die for lack of health care.

This last election was a wake-up call for many of us, and I know that many of you have been participating in the resistance: marching and making calls, writing your representatives, going to town halls, donating to worthy causes, and all the rest. I know you’re tired, and I know you’re stretched thin, but there’s something else that I encourage you to do: Get involved with your local Democratic party as a Precinct Committee person (PC).

PCs are volunteers for the party who work at the most local level, usually within their own neighborhood. They help to get people registered to vote, to find out what issues matter most to their neighbors, and help get out the vote when election season comes around. PCs also play an important role in getting their county’s voice heard at the state level. For every three Elected PCs from a county, the country gets one additional representative at the state level.

The time commitment is not very large: occasional meetings and events that you attend as you are able. It is incredibly gratifying to get involved with a group of like-minded people from your county who are getting out there and doing something to turn the tide in 2018 and beyond. It’s also a great way to learn about local and state candidates so that you can make an informed decision for the primary election and help make sure the party puts forward candidates whose views reflect your own. As a PC, I’ve already gotten to meet multiple candidates for state and national office, as well as our representative in the U.S. House.

Becoming an active part of the party also lets you influence the party directly, outside of the primary election. If there is an issue that you think the Democrats aren’t emphasizing enough, or that you disagree with, then the best way to fix that is to get involved. Meet the people in your local party who can communicate that sentiment to those higher up in the party, or tell your representatives and candidates directly when you meet with them as a PC. I’ve been a PC for a few months now, and at least for my county, I have noticed that most PCs are older retired people. There is a lack of people from my generation and younger, meaning that the younger perspective is missing from the grassroots foundation of the party.

And lest you think that the Democrats are just taking the place of Republicans as the “Party of No” without any policy to back up our resistance, I encourage you to take a look at the Democratic party platform. I think you’ll like what you see there. We are fighting against racism and white nationalism. We are fighting to ensure that every person has access to affordable health care. We are fighting to ensure that every citizen can vote, and that every vote counts. We believe that everyone deserves a good education, not just those who can afford to pay for private schools and expensive colleges. We believe in science, and that something must be done to slow climate change.

It really boils down to this: the only way to stop the Republican party’s madness is for Democrats to start winning elections at all levels. Republicans have taken over our government because they are organized and they vote. If you want to resist them, then the best thing you can do is help the Democrats do the same. Get involved. Help make the Democratic party what you want it to be. Only then will we be able set our country back on the right track.

My Experience as a Stay-at-home Dad

August 11, 2017 / Ryan / 0 Comments

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been taking time off of work and spending it at home with our 7.5 month old baby. I’ll continue to be mostly off for another couple of weeks (more on that “mostly” caveat later), but I have enough under my belt at this point that I thought it would be worth writing down some thoughts.

Most people, if they’re going to take time off, take it right after the baby is born, and I did take some time off then as well. But we decided early on that it made more sense for me to postpone some of my paternity leave until now. Erin was lucky enough to be able to be off work from when Shane was born in December until the end of July, so the idea is for me to take this time off now to ease the transition as she returns to work.

The fact that I’m able to take this much time off at all is pretty great. The family medical leave act (FMLA) requires employers to allow employees to take up to 12 weeks of leave in the 12 month period following the birth of a child, but it doesn’t require that leave to be paid which is absurd. The only other nations in the world that don’t provide any paid family leave at all are Suriname and Papua New Guinea. Thankfully, I have accumulated enough sick leave and vacation time that I am able to take this time off without missing a paycheck, and my job is flexible enough that I can do this without causing major problems.

What I am doing is pretty unusual though. In the workaholic culture of the United States, and particularly the culture of science, it is not common for dads to take this much time off. Everyone I have told about this plan to take time off has been supportive, sometimes with with hints of jealousy, but I still feel the need to explain myself to everyone (including writing this blog post).

I hate that I feel guilty for taking this time, and that in explaining it, I feel the instinctive need to promise that I’m actually going to use this time to get some work done. Because heaven forbid that I would be so decadent as to take a month off for the sole purpose of spending time with my baby.

So, with that, let’s turn to the question of how my decadent month of child care is going.

First, the obvious: it’s great. Instead of just seeing my baby first thing in the morning, and then in the evening when both of us are tired and fussy, I get to spend all day with him. That’s interspersed with nap times when I can read a book, or get a little work done, or make dinner, or whatever else I want/need to do. We can go on little adventures, like taking the running stroller to Buffalo Park and going for a jog, or walking to the grocery store to get some ingredients for dinner. As a homebody who is content to just hang out in my house most of the time, this works well for me.

One thing I have noticed is how quickly I lose all track of time. Not that I don’t know what day it is, but at the end of the day it’s very hard to say what I actually did when. When did he last eat? How long were his naps? Did he go to sleep nicely last time or was it 45 minutes of screaming and crying? It all blurs together, making these questions surprisingly hard for me to answer. I actually went so far as to install a phone app to track feeding and nap times just so that I could verify that, yes, it has been 4 hours since the last bottle so that’s why he’s fussy. Taking care of a baby this age is repetitive: He is generally awake for about two hours, followed by a nap ranging from 45 minutes to a couple hours. In between naps, there are bottles, diaper changes, eating solid food, maybe a bath, and play time. When you add in at least 15 minutes (and sometimes much, much more) time spent getting him to calm down in preparation for nap time, you end up with a nearly endless cycle that blurs together.

I have also learned that I’m not very good at playing with babies this age. I’m probably not supposed to say this, but babies are pretty boring. I’ve always thought of myself as being good with kids, but babies are different. My go-to way of entertaining a baby is to read board books, but unlike younger babies who don’t really do much (and therefore make a fine book reading audience), 7 month old babies are interested in everything. This also means they aren’t generally interested in a single thing for very long. We’ll sit down to read some books, and after a couple pages, he’s fussing, wanting to gnaw the book or reaching for the dog, or looking at the colorful toy on the table. Also, this may come as a surprise to you, but books written for infants and toddlers are not particularly interesting for adults.

When books fail, there are always other toys. Dangling toys are always a hit, and things that crinkle or that feel nice to chew are also good. There’s peekaboo, or bouncing on my knee, and when in doubt I can usually make him crack up with tickles or a kiss-attack. My problem is that is seems like we can go through all of these options and then I check the time and only a few minutes have passed.

I’ve found that the best entertainment for everyone involved is actually food. We’re working on learning to eat finger foods, and putting Shane in his chair and placing a slice of peach or a stick of roasted sweet potato or a piece of banana on his tray to play with will keep him happy and entertained for quite a while. Meanwhile I get to play goalie, keeping him from sending his food off the edge of the tray, or retrieving fragments of food that have managed to bypass the bib and end up in his lap.

The hardest part about this has been self-inflicted and I knew it was going to happen, but that didn’t stop it. I built up this time off as this mythical gap in my calendar during which I hoped to get all manner of things done, ranging from work that I haven’t had time to get to, to writing, to exercise, to home improvement projects. Of course, it turns out most of the day is taken up with caring for my baby (shocker, I know), leaving just nap time for all of this stuff to happen. By not fully disconnecting from work, I have lost quite a bit of that “free” time during naps to answering emails, or helping my summer student finish up her presentation and paper, or doing some work (but not enough to feel satisfied). I am ashamed to find myself impatient for the baby to go down for another nap so I can get more stuff done, but then when nap times come, I never get done what I want to, and so I end up frustrated.

If I was truly off of work, with no responsibilities that kept drawing me back in, I think this month would be more enjoyable. Instead, I have been trying to exist as some sort of Schrodinger’s dad, in a bizarre superposition of working and not working, which turns out to just make both the time off and the small amount of work accomplished feel less satisfying. I think next week I am going to try to do a better job of actually being “off” so that I can enjoy this time. The week after, Shane starts half-day daycare, and I can ease back into working.

I want to make it clear that I recognize how fortunate I am in having this time off to spend with my son. I always feel guilty and self-indulgent when I write blog posts like this, because I know that many people only wish they had lives easy enough to have the “problems” I write about on this blog. I don’t mean to be overly negative, but I think it is worthwhile to talk about parenting honestly, and I use writing here on the blog as a way to process thoughts that otherwise would just rattle around in my head. So, thanks for indulging me and reading this far.

Now, the baby is waking up from his morning nap, so I am off to have a fun day with my son!

Book Review: The Sheep Look Up

July 30, 2017 / Ryan / 1 Comment

It’s strange to call a book that was published in the 70s “timely” but The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner is just that. It is a dystopian sci-fi novel about a world where there are no government regulations on pollution, so corporations are freely poisoning the air and water, making the planet unlivable. The president of the United States is an idiot who, when he can be bothered to get involved in current events at all, mostly delivers short, simplistic, often xenophobic quips that indicate that he has no idea what he’s talking about. Race and Class relations are tense and the incompetent government and ongoing environmental disasters only exacerbate them.

In the novel, the skies are perpetually overcast because of all the smog. People have to wear filter masks whenever they go outdoors, and rain comes down filthy and acidic. The Mediterranean sea and the Great Lakes are dead. Rampant pesticide use has led to an evolutionary arms race and there are now nearly-indestructible pests that destroy most crops, not to mention the resistant fleas and lice that infest the slums. Likewise with antibiotics: resistant diseases are widespread, and combined with the many diseases caused by all the pollution, most people are constantly sick with multiple ailments. All of this causes political and geopolitical unrest that grows out of control over the course of the book.

Like his other famous novel, Stand On Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up is written in an experimental style, telling a larger story through lots of small, disjointed sections. A page or two about one character, then a news report, then a few advertising jingles, then a poem, then back to a few pages about some other characters, then an emergency government bulletin, and so on. It’s an effective way to give an overall feel for events in the country and wider world, but it makes it very difficult to keep track of main characters. By the end of the book I recognized some of the names as people I’d heard about before, but had completely lost track of who was who. It doesn’t help that they are all written in basically the same 1970s slangy voice.

I remember enjoying Stand on Zanzibar, but I read it much faster (while on Christmas break in grad school) rather than the slow pace that was forced on me for The Sheep Look Up by a new baby, work, and occasionally having to return the ebook to the library because someone else put a hold on it. I almost didn’t finish, but decided that the book was so timely that I might as well power through.

The Sheep Look Up is an unusual and challenging read, and definitely feels dated, but at the same time is frighteningly relevant to current events, and for that reason I’d still recommend checking it out.

Patriotism, Genre Fiction, and Criticizing What You Love

July 3, 2017 / Ryan / 0 Comments

In both genre fiction and politics, our culture is struggling with the idea that you can criticize something that you love.

When someone points out that many video games are disturbingly sexist, or that Lord of the Rings is kind of racist, or that the Avatar movie perpetuates the “white savior” trope, are they no longer a fan of genre fiction?

When someone points out that the United States is the only country out of the 25 wealthiest nations that lacks universal health care, or that black people are disproportionately incarcerated and killed by police, or that our wars in the Middle East are responsible for the rise of ISIS, are they no longer a patriot?

In both cases, I say that thoughtful criticism is a deeper, more meaningful expression of love than blind enthusiastic support.

Let’s take Game of Thrones as an example. I love Game of Thrones. The books are among my favorite books of all time. They’re vast and deep, with well-developed characters with unique narrative voices; exciting, twisty, satisfyingly complex plots; epic, vivid worldbuilding; and they signal a profound shift in the fantasy genre, subverting the tropes of the genre established by Lord of the Rings and beginning the modern era of more “grimdark” fantasy. Likewise, the show is excellent: visually stunning, well-acted, and it brings the books that I love to life in a way that allows many more people to experience them. Not only that, but the show has been a revolution in terms of getting excellent genre fiction onto television, demonstrating to TV channels that compelling, adult-oriented stories can be told through genre fiction, and that audiences will eat it up.

But I will readily admit that both the books and the show have major problems too. The show is famous for its gratuitous nudity, and there have been several notorious examples of changes to the original book where main female characters are raped or threatened with rape. There is also a problematic “white savior” vibe to much of Danaerys’ story line. I would argue that the books are somewhat better, but there’s still a whole lot of rape and threats of rape, which is often defended with the old “historical accuracy” argument, because apparently dragons are plausible but a medieval society that isn’t quite so horrifically misogynistic is not.

There are those who see comments like those in the last paragraph and reflexively condemn them. How dare some “social justice warrior” criticize the genre they love? Why can’t people just enjoy things without picking them apart and over-analyzing everything? Why do these SJWs have to ruin everything by insisting on political correctness? They’re clearly not real fans. They clearly hate the genre.

For those who have been paying attention, this conflict came to a head in the video game community with the “gamergate” fiasco a few years ago. Women who dared to point out that video games are full of a disgusting amount of misogyny were harassed by an army of angry, mostly white, mostly male gamers who felt that their favorite hobby and its fundamental culture were being unfairly bashed. The conflict rapidly escalated to doxing (the release of private personal information), lost jobs, lost homes, and death threats.

Later, in the speculative fiction community, a similar conflict arose when the “Sad Puppies“, a group of angry, mostly white, mostly male, readers stuffed the ballot for the Hugo Award. They were supposedly fighting back against their perception that science fiction and fantasy were being ruined by SJWs trying to force everything to be politically correct and shoehorning women, people of color, and LGBT people into fiction, rather than trying to tell good old fashioned apolitical stories. (It apparently did not occur to them that it is possible to tell great speculative fiction about people who are not white straight men, or that all fiction carries with it political baggage.)

And then, of course, there is the 2016 election, where a group of angry, mostly white, mostly male, voters were apparently so appalled that we had a black president, and that a woman dared to run as his successor on a platform of inclusiveness and tolerance, that they instead voted for an unqualified narcissistic idiot. Trump’s campaign and its “Make America Great Again” slogan catered directly to the perception that criticizing our country is unpatriotic, and that somehow making things better for people who aren’t straight white men undermines what makes our country great.

But here’s the thing that the gamer-gators, sad puppies, and Trump voters don’t understand: unlike them, we don’t criticize from a place of hatred, but of love.

Sci-fi and Fantasy are supposed to push the limits of imagination, so why is it so hard to imagine that young women and people of color could be the heroes in great adventures? Video games allow the player to escape the real world and experience being powerful and “the chosen one”, so shouldn’t players be allowed to leave behind racism and misogyny when they enter the game world? And the United States is supposed to be a country where all people have unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, so shouldn’t we strive to uphold that ideal? Shouldn’t we point out where our great country does not live up to its promise for all of its citizens and then work together to form a “more perfect union”?

When you’re raising a child, you don’t praise them when they are behaving badly. You set high expectations and then help them to live up to those expectations. Why is it so hard to apply the same logic to the other things we love?

Whether it’s genre fiction, video games, or the United States of America itself, what we want is for the things that we love to live up to their true potential. To me, this is a much deeper, more meaningful way to show your devotion to something than blindly singing its praises and ignoring its flaws.