Monthly Archives: April 2012

View 721 Monday, April 16, 2012

I spent the weekend alternating between doing my taxes and being involved with the Writers of the Future awards stuff. Saturday I went over to Author Services to lecture to the contest winners, and let them trap me into being driven over to the Wilshire Ebell theater to do rehearsal of the awards ceremonies. I usually simply refuse to do that. I know how to hit my marks, and it’s not as if I haven’t done this sort of thing before, or that I get stage fright. Usually Fred Pohl and I take a stand on rehearsals, but Fred wasn’t here this year, Roberta hadn’t come down with me to hear me give a lecture, Joni was her usual persuasive self, and next thing I knew I was in a car with Reznick and Tom McAffrey and some others driving through Hancock Park to what was at one time the Hancock Park Women’s club back in the days when Hancock Park was at least as rich as Beverly Hills and the women of Hancock Park could afford elegance and luxury. The building was constructed in 1929.

I’d been to the Ebell some years ago when Roberta was involved with the founding of the LA Opera company. She was on the Opera League Board for several years, and before LA Opera got the Dorothy Chandler pavilion opera house there were operas in other places, and either they put on one of the operas at the Ebell or there was a fund raiser there. And we went there for some other stuff.

It had fallen into – well, let’s say that it had seen better days. And there was a crew of workmen apparently brought in by Writers of the Future to spiff the place up. Astonishing. Anyway, we had the long and rather dull rehearsal which was a distraction from the taxes and used up Saturday well into the evening. Then Sunday there I was at 1530 in evening clothes because they wanted to get all the photographs before dinner. I was astonished at how great the old theater looked. They had really spruced it up. And the ceremony went well, a bit long but that’s to be expected, so I didn’t get home Sunday night until well after bed time.

And today has been eaten with chasing down papers and receipts and deciding what’s deductible and all the rest of it. I’m on top of it now, and all I have to do is get it entered into TurboTax for the finish. TurboTax is descended from Macintax, which I discovered when it first came out, and I recall in BYTE days advising people to get a Mac just so they could use Macintax because it was so much better than anything you could get on a PC. Eventually it got bought and transformed into a PC program, and I do it now on Emily, the Intel Extreme system along with my old DOS based accounting program that I wrote myself in C-BASIC about thirty years ago. It does things right, and I have had no problems with it, so I’ll finish tomorrow and print these things up.

The Writers of the Future had a somewhat different kind of presentation program, which included interpretive dancing based on the stories and illustrations of the winners. That sounds like Modern Dance which is something I would usually pay money to avoid, but this came off very well indeed. I have to say I was impressed.

I also ran into Arwen Dayton, Sky’s wife, an old friend I hadn’t seen in a couple of years since they moved to a new house away from the beach. Her science fantasy works are selling very well indeed – better than mine, I think. I read her first novel and thought she had considerable potential, and she has kept at it, doing particularly well in eBook sales, which isn’t astonishing. She also looks like she’s still in her teens.

I always have a good time at the Writers of the Future presentations. It’s a chance to get together with some friends I don’t get to see so often now that I don’t go to many science fiction conventions, since WORF pays expenses for all the judges to come to Hollywood (or wherever the event is, I’ve been to one at NASA Houston and another in the United Nations Hall of Nations of all places, but lately they’ve tended to be in Hollywood). This one was a bit more hectic than usual because they expanded the attendance at the awards ceremony by a factor of three or so, and while there were a few glitches it all went well. I have suggested that they add one more feature, given how much they make of the contest winners. In the old Roman Republic (and later in the Empire for that matter) when a Roman general celebrated a triumph, a slave or freedman stood behind him in his chariot, and as the crowds cheer and hailed him, he would endlessly repeat “Remember, thou art but a man.” After the contest is over and the awards are given comes the hard part…

I always take Victor Hanson seriously. His essay on the Zimmerman/Martin affair is worth your time.

Alas, I did not proof read the eBook copy of Red Heroin that is now up on Amazon, and a reader has been kind enough to tell me that it contains a major formatting error, rather consistently putting in a 1 instead of I – and in a first person viewpoint novel that has got to be a terrible distraction. I have asked my agent to get me a final submission copy in Kindle format, which I will proofread myself, and we’ll get the book put up again. Amazon has a policy of giving a free download of a corrected edition to anyone who bought the previous edition; I’ll let you all know when that’s done.

And if you find egregious errors in any of my eBooks, please be kind enough to send me email telling me. Books are intended to take the reader out of his environment and off to the world of the book – at least most of mine are – and I sure don’t want you to have to work to read one of my novels. Mr. Heinlein used to emphasize that it’s the author’s job to weed out breaks in empathy in your stories so that the reader can lose himself in that world. I certainly try to do that.

It’s late and I have to get up and finish the taxes in the morning. I keep trying to catch up…

View 720 Friday, April 13, 2012

Friday the 13^th falls on Friday this month.

Outside it is raining cats and dogs. I haven’t used that expression since – well probably since childhood, but I do recall it, and at one time it wasn’t all that unusual. I was recently reminded of it in a conversation with a friend who has an autistic child. While I think many cases of ‘autism’ are something else, this one was as real as it gets: the boy became fiercely hostile, inarticulate, frustrated, often violent, and was generally diagnosed as hopeless and retarded to boot. His father would not give up, and over years managed to cope; now the boy goes to school, and may well end up going to college. The times I have met him since his – I won’t say recovery because I don’t know what he recovered from – since he has been able to go to social events – he has been bright and well informed about subjects he is interested in. At ten he knew as much about Medieval history as most adults including some stories I didn’t know. He’s also polite and mostly respectful.

But his father tells of one day when the boy was still very much disabled. It was raining and the boy became extremely hostile, and managed to convey his disgust at being lied to. It took hours to find out what all that meant. His father had remarked that it was raining cats and dogs. And the boy looked outside and there were no cats and dogs. And thus he had been lied to. It took another hour to get across that this was an idiom, what the Spanish call a modismo. I am encouraging my friend to write up a detailed case history; we have at least this case of a diagnosis of hopelessness followed by a recovery that certainly would not have happened without the determined actions and extreme patience of the father.

Medicine used to advance through case histories. Detailed descriptions of everything – relevant or not – followed by detailed descriptions of treatments and their effects – could sometimes be compared to produce insights. One of the insights might be just what is relevant, which is not always obvious, which is why the case histories had to be detailed and include everything whether the describer thought it relevant or not. The textbook I had for abnormal psychology was the Henderson and Gillespie Textbook of Psychiatry which emphasized case histories and minimized theories. It was rare in the early 1050’s; in that time most psychology books were written from the viewpoint of, and often in defense of, a theory, and there were many theories, most of them based on — well, on examination, on nothing much at all. There was Freud, whose theories of Id, Ego, and Super-Ego were pure smoke and air with no evidence for their existence in physiology – and which were based on ‘case histories’ many of which turn out to have been made up. There were others, many others. Jung, Karen Horney, Wilhelm Reich, Carl Rogers – I could go on and on. Most of them were supported only be case histories, and even assuming that the case histories were real, they were all recorded by observers looking through the lenses of theories.

Meanwhile non-Freudian psychiatrists had stayed with the case history methods of medicine or wandered off into the realms of shock therapy (insulin, electro shock, and some others too disgusting to mention) but about this time pharmacology developed new treatments. Lots of them. And there was enormous financial pressure, and legal pressure as well, to empty out the madhouses – oops, asylums – oops, psychiatric hospitals. When I studied abnormal psychology it was pretty well agreed that schizophrenia was incurable. It had for a long time been ‘dementia praecox’, as opposed to ‘senile dementia’, and neither was well understood, but one thing was clear: neither psychiatry nor psychology nor psychoanalysis nor anything else we knew how to do could cure it or even do much to assuage the symptoms, and all that remained was to lock them up for life. Some became fairly useful members of the psychiatric hospital community, some didn’t; but none of them got ‘treatment’ because once it was known that you were schizophrenic attempts at treatment were a waste of time. Yes, I oversimplify, but not by much.

And during this era came Dianetics, a synthesis of Jung (particularly the collective unconscious) and Korzybski’s General Semantics, both intellectually respectable (although oddly enough Jung more than Korzybski) by a science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard and espoused by A. E. Van Vogt. Dianetics was supposedly validated by Hubbard’s experiences with ‘cases’ but it turned out to be very difficult to find any of those clients, and the suspicion is that Hubbard, like Freud, made up or exaggerated some of them. Whether he did or not, his Dianetics treatment methods were fairly effective in comparison to the results of more traditional psychotherapies such as psychoanalysis, and training as a Dianetics auditor was enormously cheaper than training in traditional psychotherapy (much less psychiatry which required an MD before you could even start learning). Dianetics caught on just like Wells Saddler, and was enormously popular on college campuses until the AMA denounced Hubbard and Dianetics for practicing medicine without a license. But that’s another story.

My point here was that everyone, traditional psychotherapists of various schools, psychiatrists with their new bag of pharmaceutical tricks, Dianetics auditors – all recorded case histories if at all through the lenses of their theories. And then came the DSM, which may not have been intended as the standard for every mental practice but in effect became sol which practically forces practitioners to record their case histories according to already known patterns – when, as with autism, the problem may well be that we don’t know the patterns. Henderson and Gillespie, my abnormal psychology textbook (Henderson and Gillespie, Textbook of Psychiatry,7^th edition), has two index entries to ‘autistic thinking’, one for autism and for Aspergers none at all—nor is there any mention of ADD or ADHD. Now they spend a full quarter or semester on those matters. Last week’s New Scientist has a new item on how the autism rate in England has about doubled since the year 2000. And I am told that a sizable percentage of adolescents in wealthy school districts are being given drugs for various forms of ADD.

Now clearly something is happening; but what is not clear. The tendency is to classify as if we understood, but in fact we don’t. The only time I ever did anything in clinical psychology was when I worked with a local pediatrician on a couple of cases of bright young males who were not doing well in school. All I did was talk with them, and it was pretty clear that their problem was that they were bored stiff, and they didn’t know any educated adults who would have rational conversations with them. I could relate to that having grown up smart in a country environment during the war.

And now I am rambling. My point, if I have one, is that we need to get particulars before we generalize. I know this: my friend’s son was diagnosed as hopeless, and everything I have been told by professionals would agree with that; but he didn’t give up, and now the boy is likely to have a normal life and may in fact do a lot better than that. And if there’s one case that’s an exception to the rules imposed by the DSM there are certainly others. I’m encouraging my friend to write up this case history in as much detail as possible. We need a lot more of that. Including cases that didn’t turn out well.

And it has stopped raining cats and dogs. I even see a ray of sunshine.

I actually came up intending to write about The DOJ lawsuit against Apple. In theory this is supposed to be good for all of us, but I can’t help thinking that it’s really another step in giving Amazon a monopoly in the eBook market. I love Amazon. Most of my income comes through Amazon now, some direct to me, some to my agents, some from sales by my publishers – Amazon is enormously important to all writers. The major competition for Amazon has to be Apple. At the moment Amazon wants to lower the prices of eBooks – at least of best sellers – and was doing so by buying books from publishers, paying the publisher demanded price, and selling the eBooks at below that cost. Of course they couldn’t keep that up, but Amazon has traditionally gone for market share rather than profit – exactly the opposite of Apple, which has always put immediate profit above market share, and has always been striving to keep prices of Apple products high. A number of authors and agents talk about this in an article in today’s Los Angeles Times by Carolyn Kellogg. I’ll have more to say on this another time.

I’ve been putting it off, but I have to get back and finish my taxes. This evening I have a dinner with other writers and the winners of the Writers of the Future Contest, the weekend is filled with stuff, and Monday night is the tax deadline. I hate the notion of having to spend so much time proving to the government that I deserve to keep some of what I have earned.

And I missed this when it was published last fall. It’s by the late James Q. Wilson, and you’ll enjoy it.

Burying the Hatchet

The long, arduous and incomplete process of civilizing humankind and suppressing its most violent impulses.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904332804576537813826824914.html 

I’m still thinking about this one.

View 720 Thursday, April 12, 2012

I have spent two days doing the taxes. The rules have changed to make it harder, or at least TurboTax says they have. I now have to list every charitable donation one a t a time rather than just attaching a copy of the ledger page on which my donations are listed and referencing that, which I have been doing for thirty years or more. That’s annoying. Other things are annoying as well.

While the Black Panthers and others are cheering that Zimmerman has been charged with murder, I have yet to find an attorney who believes the charge will lead to a conviction. Of course given racial aspects it may be that it can’t lead to an acquittal ,either, at which point the political pressure will be on to get Zimmerman charged with a federal crime. Once a special prosecutor was appointed it was well nigh inevitable that Zimmerman would be charged, even though the local DA declined. Given the political pressures including attention from the White House it was likely that the charge would be murder. The question becomes one of motive. Talk shows have made much of Zimmerman’s eleven 911 calls, but in fact 11 calls in five years isn’t all that excessive for a neighborhood watch activist. Two 911 calls/year about suspicious persons in this neighborhood wouldn’t be considered all that excessive; we have had several warnings about teams who ring the doorbell, and if there is no answer try the door and assume they have 40 seconds to grab anything they can find. There are perfectly legitimate magazine sales teams, and there are others who may not be. I have no idea of the conditions in Mr. Zimmerman’s gated community, but given that he was apparently the unofficial ‘captain’ of the neighborhood watch there I’m not sure that 2 calls a year would not be justified.

It’s now time for Romney to make his case on why he should be President. We’ll see how he does. Meanwhile the White House has got into the kerfuffle over whether Ann Romney ever worked in her life, as if raising children doesn’t count. When I was young, “women’s liberation” meant that mothers wouldn’t have to work outside the home. Things seem to have changed a lot since then. Of course it is now said that Hillary Rosen wasn’t speaking for the White House although she has been a more frequent visitor than many Cabinet ministers and is or was until today considered a good source of information about the President’s views. Hillart Rosen is a political strategist for the Democratic Party. Rosen’s remarks seem to have riled some women. She’s now a legitimate target for nearly anyone. It will all pass.

For thousands of years men were expected to provide for the household and women were expected to manage it. And in Memphis when I was growing up, most of the city commissions that actually ran the city were dominated by married women. There might be a figurehead man chairman, but everyone understood that the power rested with the commissioners, just about every one of them married, educated, and upper middle class. They had the time and interest to participate in self government. And of course most church committees and charitable functions were run by married women who had the time to participate in these associations. That’s not modern, of course. And surely we’re so much more civilized now and the children are so much more civilized since all that changed.

The Greeks thought that leisure was important because without it there was not time to study philosophy and participate in politics. Hillary Rosen says that Ann Romney shouldn’t comment on politics because she has leisure. Perhaps she hasn’t thought that through, but it in effect what she said.

I have to return to my taxes. I am not likely to be rational about much of anything until this is over.

The good news is that I have enough to pay the taxes. The less pleasant news is that I might have to run the summer pledge drive a  bit earlier than I had planned; we’ll see.