Once and Future Kings

Science fiction always has been literary snack food for me. The very first novel I ever read (other than kid-lit) was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. The second was H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. There was no turning back after that. Scifi includes quality lit, and more of it (beyond Brave New World and 1984) deserves to be recognized as such, but there is no doubt that the bulk of it is popcorn.
 
This past week between weightier meals I’ve snacked on short stories by veteran scifi author C.J. Cherryh, whose prose and characters I like well enough to tolerate the large portion of her work that is fantasy rather than scifi proper. In general I don’t care for fantasy. Why do I balk at elves and wizards while being fine with ETs and warp driven star ships? I could rattle off a list of whys and wherefores, but in truth they would be more rationalizations than reasons. Let’s just say it is a matter of taste. (Yes, the magical elements of Star Wars bother me too, despite the whole midichlorian explanation for them.) But the well-presented motives, flaws, and moral challenges of Cherryh’s characters (when she is on her game) are all-too-human enough for me to simply sigh and accept the setting. The social setting (quite aside from witches and enchanted woods and so forth) is generally medieval, as is the case in most fantasy by other authors.

This once again reminded me of how often scifi proper has the same social setting. Apparently democracy doesn’t have a future either on earth or in space. Instead, whether in A Princess of Mars written by E.R. Burroughs more than a century ago or in The Last Emperox (despite the gender neutral term) by contemporary author John Scalzi, we have monarchs, empires, noble houses, trade guilds, and feudal fiefdoms in which people vie for power through treachery and family connections with the tactics and ruthlessness of Richard III. There is little ideological in any of the plots: there are good nobles and bad nobles, but that is all a matter of personality and personal morals. For example in Frank Herbert’s classic Dune, the difference between heroic Duke Leto Atreides and evil Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is that Leto is a nice guy while Vlad is a sadistic creep. They are both hereditary despots (nominally serving the emperor) who never consider undermining their own aristocratic privileges.

The cheesiest adaptation of the ERB novel -
and not in a good way

 
I understand why so many scifi authors fall back on this trope. It simplifies world-building. We are all familiar enough with these arrangements to grasp the implications for a character at any place in the social order. In such a system the personal is political. This in turn simplifies storytelling, particularly when the characters are of the ruling class. Democracy is messy and writing about it is hard. It can be done. Take Gore Vidal’s eminently watchable and readable (non-scifi) play The Best Man first staged in 1960 and turned into a movie in 1964. Though much has changed since the early 60s in both the electorate and the specific policy debates, the process of choosing a candidate is much the same, and this play successfully makes it exciting. Nonetheless, trying to incorporate something like this into a tale of space battles and colonizing planets can be challenging. It may distract from the main plot.
 
I can’t claim total resistance to the temptation. One of my own scifi short stories about a planetary colony in another star system (The Lion's Share) features aristocratic arrangements, though I didn’t go full-on medieval. (Descendants of officers from the interstellar ship that brought the first colonists retained hereditary privileges.) Still, I admire scifi authors who try something completely different such as the anarcho-capitalism that turns up in Vernor Vinge’s novels or the anarcho-communism that turns up in Cory Doctorow’s or the globalist socialism of H.G. Wells in Men Like Gods. The point is not whether one likes or hates their visions as a reader – only that they didn’t surrender to the medieval trope.
 
By the way, I suspect the scifi popcorn authors may be right about democracy not having a long term future, though I do not anticipate a revival of medieval institutions. The outer trappings of democracy are likely to remain, but mostly as window dressing. The extent to which real power already resides elsewhere is widely debated though exactly where and with whom (the permanent bureaucracy? the 0.01%? the Bilderberg group?) is disputed largely along preexisting ideological lines. My favorite theory though is the one about interdimensional reptile aliens running the world – not because I remotely believe it but because at least it is fun. I couldn’t resist penning a short story (The Reptile Way) about that, too.
 
If I’m wrong, however, and feudalism does return, either homegrown or imposed from the stars, let’s hope our planet gets a nice guy Duke Atreides and not a Baron Harkonnen.
 

Monster Magnet – Space Lord (uncensored)

The Incremental Criminal

There aren’t many movies that I choose to watch based on an actor rather than the director or a plot description, but Aubrey Plaza movies are an exception. She has a knack for appearing in low budget indie movies with fresh and unusual scripts. (The same was once true of Juno Temple, but lately her cable TV career has kept her too busy.) Not all of them work. I hated An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn and had a mixed reaction to the oddball zombie film Life after Beth. But when they work (about half do) they work well. The quirky scifi Safety Not Guaranteed was marvelous as was Ingrid Goes West, an all too credible film about the intersection of social media and real life for a troubled young woman. So, I’m willing to give Aubrey’s movies a shot regardless of critical reviews one way or the other. I’m glad I did in the case of the 2022 Emily the Criminal.

Emily (Aubrey) embodies Millennial disillusion. She belongs to a generation told as kids that wonderful fulfilling futures lay ahead (though, oddly, also told the world would end in a dozen years) only to face-plant on reality after college. Emily carries $70,000 in student debt for a degree that landed her nothing more than a food service job that doesn’t pay enough to keep up with the interest on her loans. She shares an overcrowded apartment, has no time for her art, and is offered an unpaid internship that she is told is an “opportunity.” A felony assault on her record (she had a fight with her ex-boyfriend) further damages her chances of employment. In consequence, we understand (if not sympathize) when she accepts a $200 per hour offer from a fellow named Youcef to be a dummy shopper and buy high end electronics with stolen credit card numbers. By increments she gets ever deeper into the fraud schemes of Youcef until she becomes the one goading him to do more.
 
In his initial interview with her, Youcef says that no one will get hurt. Anyone who has been a victim of fraud knows this is untrue. Even if personal losses from credit card fraud are covered by the credit card provider, recovery is a hassle at best. Many – in fact most – types of losses are not covered at all. In these cases savings, credit, and lives of victims can be destroyed.
 
Many fraudsters are simply sociopaths. They have no empathy for others and think narcissistically only about their own gain. They believe it is their victims’ own fault for letting themselves be cheated. Others, however, are like Emily, who is not without empathy in a general way. They go down the slippery slope to crime in incremental slips and slides. They may start with something as simple as misstating income on a loan application without an intent to fail to repay the loan. Embezzlers at first typically intend to pay back improperly “borrowed” cash… but when they get away with it, keeping the money and taking more become tempting. Humans – including those who regard themselves as “good people” – are very good at rationalizing unethical behavior, e.g. “Hey, I didn’t create the system in which you best can get ahead by cheating. I’m just playing the game as I found it.” It is a game that all too frequently ends tragically for oneself and others.
 
So, it is a big Thumbs Up for Emily the Criminal. The film once again demonstrates that high budgets, fancy fx, and extreme stunt work are unnecessary for a good picture. All you need are good writing and a competent cast.
 

Trailer: Emily the Criminal

Forgetting to Remember

Earlier today I entered the pantry off the kitchen, paused a moment, and then had to admit I had no idea why I was there. I had wanted something, evidently, but whatever it was escaped me. At my age I would be worried about that but for the fact that I commonly did the exact same thing at age 12. Since my memory in academic matters was (as it still is) pretty good, my mom called me “the absent-minded professor.” She was being polite. My mind was simply occupied by something else at those moments, and that something else crowded out the original intended task. By the way, I was after a garbage bag as I remembered the next time I looked at the bin by my desk and noticed it needed a liner.
 
We all have had similar experiences. Suppose you wish to stop at a convenience store that is located a short distance beyond a left turn that you commonly take on your drive home. If your mind is preoccupied you are very likely to take that left turn before you realize your mistake. (A friend was once so preoccupied he drove to a local hospital and parked in the parking lot before realizing that there was no reason for him to be there – there hadn’t been for a year. “I’m losin’ it!” he said to me on his return. He wasn’t. It was just a glitch he never repeated.) There is more to forgetfulness than just distraction, whether by our own thoughts or the world outside. It long has been known that there are separate mechanisms for short and long-term memory. To kick something into long-term memory you either must think about it for a little while or have some emotional response to it. Otherwise it vanishes. As an example we again can use that route home you commonly drive. Odds are that ten minutes after you get home you won’t remember most of the drive – only the parts that concentrated your attention for some reason. By tomorrow you will have forgotten most of those parts too. This is one reason (among many) why eyewitness testimony is so notoriously unreliable; we usually don’t know until after the event that what we saw was important, so our attention probably wasn’t concentrated on the scene as it happened.
 
These two tiers of memory have been recognized for decades. But until recently the fading of long-term memories was regarded as serving no useful purpose. In recent years, however, mechanisms of active forgetting have been found to exist in the brain. Our minds “deliberately” (non-consciously but by normal function) weed out memories they tag as useless. This would not have evolved unless there was an advantage to selective forgetting. In his book Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering Scott A. Small explains what they are.

Dr. Small is the director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Columbia University. His studies of patients suffering from pathological forgetting – not just from Alzheimer’s but from other causes such as injury – led him to examine the difference between this and “routine” forgetting.
 
We are deluged with information from our five senses constantly. Were we to remember all of it there would be too much data for our brains to process. We would freeze up and would have trouble generalizing as we are overwhelmed by details. “As our brains intrinsically know, not everything we store is worth remembering, and there is a real advantage,” Small writes, “to forgetting details of the world we temporarily encode.” Many autistic people have excessively detailed memories and consequently get upset by minor changes in the environment – a book out of place in a bookcase for example – that most of us never would notice. They notice because they remember exactly the way the bookcase looked yesterday. PTSD is another condition of remembering too much – in this case obsessively.
 
Much of the memory pruning occurs during sleep when important memories are reinforced and trivial ones are discarded. Our nonconscious minds are pretty good at determining which is which. This is why it is useful to sleep after cramming for a test. Small goes to some length to detail the neural processes by which memories are either strengthened or destroyed. In recent years technology has advanced enough to view these processes directly.
 
In an interview with Psychiatry News Small explained, “The ability to forget helps us prioritize, think better, make decisions, and be more creative. Normal forgetting, in balance with memory, gives us the mental flexibility to grasp abstract concepts from a morass of stored information, allowing us to see the forest through the trees.”
 
So the purpose of forgetting is remembering – remembering what is important. As with every other trait, humans fall along a spectrum in their capacity to remember and forget. There are super-rememberers: actress Marilu Henner, for instance, who might remember what color dress she wore on some randomly named date in 1982. Thanks to her job in front of a camera, many of these memories can be verified. Then there are super-forgetters who don’t remember what they wore yesterday. But both forget. Both forget most of their lives. The super-rememberers (the condition is called hyperthymesia) typically don’t even perform better on standard memory tests (e.g. reciting lists of numbers or words) than average people. Their minds don’t tag these lists as important and therefore memorable. Their memories instead tend to be autobiographical: to whom they talked and what they had for breakfast on, say, September 7, 1992. One still can see how this would be an advantage, though I suppose “forgive and forget” is off the table.
 
So, all of our memories are edited: a balance of the forgotten and the reinforced. I have the forgetting part of the equation down pat. How much that assists my remembrance of the rest is debatable. But maybe it would be a good idea to write myself a note before going into the pantry.
 
 

Stevie Vann Lange – Remember

 

Identifying Garbage

The purpose of most clickbait on social media sites is to expose the clicker to additional ads. We all know this, but we sometimes take the bait anyway. Nowadays AIs creepily choose bait specifically tailored for each user based on his or her online activities. Mention on Facebook that you are looking for a new car and auto ads will appear. Recently I’ve mentioned dumpsters online. It is perhaps no surprise that a link appeared to an article in A Lot Finance titled 50 Things Retirees Should Throw Out. The AIs also obviously know my age. I clicked. I’m a fan of uncluttering, so I was willing to wade through additional ads to see if there was any genuinely useful advice. These were the 50.

Dumpster by my barn last year

1.    Your Home. Um, I don’t think so. The time may come when selling my home and downsizing is necessary for financial reasons. We do what we have to do. But as long as I can pay the bills on it I’ll keep it. It was built by my dad. It is home.
2.    Your Children’s Old Stuff. I don’t have kids, so there is nothing to throw out. My parents’ old stuff is a bigger issue.
3.    Business Clothes. As a real estate broker my attire was semi-formal at the best of times. There are still uses for a tie and blazer or sport jacket, so I’ll keep them for now. My clothes closets don’t overflow anyway.
4.    Collectibles. If this means coins, stamps, butterflies, 19^th century clocks, or other such hobby-like collections, I don’t collect sets of anything. I have random individual artifacts, each with some family history attached, but they are not collections.
5.    Exercise Equipment. I never have bought exercise equipment.
6.    Fine China. I don’t have any. My good plates look a little nicer than my everyday microwavable plates but are by no means special or valuable. I don’t cringe when one breaks.
7.    Storage Unit. I have no storage unit to empty. I do have a barn and have done pretty well at cleaning out my excess stuff from it since 2020. However, the space was then filled by the stuff of friends and family who due to special circumstances have needed a “temporary” place to put it all. I am not free to throw that out.
8.    Old Spices. I do need to keep a better eye on expiration dates, though this is not a major space issue.
9.    Cars. The article suggests I no longer need two of them. True, I don’t need two, but I like having them because they serve different purposes. I have a very basic Chevy pickup for hauling lumber, gravel, brush, and whatnot. I have a Trailblazer (a smallish SUV) for…well…a car. The latter also has All Wheel Drive (the truck does not), which makes it a good winter vehicle. Besides, I suspect if one of my garage bays went empty it would be filled in a week by more of my friends’ stuff. Temporarily.
10. Old Linens. I don’t have a closet full of these. Do people keep more than two per bed – one spare for when the other is in the wash?
11. Kitchen Equipment. I presume this means portable equipment such as blenders and fryers rather than the built-ins. I don’t have these. (I’m a single male for whom cooking is not a hobby.) I do have a coffee maker but I’m not getting rid of that.
12. Dirty Old Shoes. I don’t let these pile up anyway. I do have some nice shoes that I seldom wear because I don’t dress up much anymore, but for the occasions when I do I’d better keep those.
13. Sentimental Items. OK I have some of these but I keep them because they are…um…sentimental.
14. Expired Makeup. Not an issue.
15. Home Décor. Wouldn’t ridding the existing décor just mean getting new? I don’t see the decluttering advantage.
16. Antiques You Don’t Care About. I wouldn’t still have them if I didn’t care about them. However, if I ever downsize as urged in point #1 I can cut them loose then. I don’t collect antiques for their own sake. Each has a family history of some kind, so they probably should be meted out to cousins (the closest blood relations I have remaining) if and when I need to get rid of them.
17. Old Computers. Because of the special disposal rules for electronics, these do tend to accumulate in basements and closets until “later.” As it happens, though, I’ve caught up on ridding myself of these.
18. Bulk Items. That is pretty vague. The article clarifies, “However, most people find in retirement, there’s no need for all those groceries!” Given the exclamation point, the prospect seems pretty exciting to the author. Once again: single male for whom cooking is not a hobby. Except for Thanksgiving and the occasional cookout, I never bought groceries in bulk anyway.
19. Extra Furniture. I wouldn’t call any of my current furniture extra. I’ve already gotten rid of the excess – from my old office for example.
20. Phone Books. Not a problem. I’m aware of the internet and have been for quite a little while. I have a prodigy email for goodness sake. (Prodigy predated AOL.)
21. Old Files. I do dispose of most files more than seven years old.
22. Anything That Is Too High Maintenance. Again, pretty vague. This begs a dating joke but I won’t make it.
23. Jewelry. Not really my thing.
24. Missing Pairs. Well, yeah. Why would I keep an unmatched shoe?
25. Holiday Décor. I never tried to outdo the neighbors with holiday decorations so I merely have two modest boxes with lights and bulbs for the tree. I’ll use them again so I’ll keep them.
26. Books. Them’s fightin’ words.
27. Expired Medications. Not an issue.
28. Luggage. “You probably don't need a 10-piece luggage set.” Maybe not. I actually hadn’t considered that.
29. Knick Knacks. Like the artifacts and antiques mentioned above (in fact they are the same items), I keep only the ones with sentimental family history.
30. Old Phones. Do people keep old phones?
31. Sports Equipment. Don’t really have that.
32. Musical Instrument. “But let's be honest--that guitar hasn't been out of its case in years.” The only instrument in the house is a piano. I don’t play it (my mom did) but for weight reasons alone it is staying where it is.
33. Outdoor Equipment. I live on 5 acres. Admittedly 4 are woods, but nonetheless I’m keeping my lawn equipment.
34. DVDs and CDs. “If you're no longer using them, why not get rid of them?” I’m using them.
35. Power Tools. Don’t touch my tools!
36. Magazines. I don’t save back issues of anything.
37. Board Games. The board games in my house don’t belong to me. See #7.
38. Film Projector. There is one of those stored in the crawlspace. Perhaps I should project the 8mm reels in the box next to it before disposing of it though. They are probably just home movies of myself and sis as kids on a Florida beach, but you never know.
39. Musty Towels. I replace these as needed anyway.
40. That Old Camera Recorder. I don’t own one of those old VHS models.
41. Old VHS Tapes. I don’t store these.
42. Everything in That Junk Drawer. Everything in that junk drawer is there for a reason: paper clips, spare keys, carpet tacks, notepads, magic markers, etc.
43. Servingware. OK, I rarely use the big serving platters, but I do use them on Thanksgiving and other occasions.
44. Anything That’s Not Yours. See #7.
45. Miscellaneous Cords and Chargers. I’m pretty good at disposing of the ones that don’t fit my current equipment.
46. Office Supplies. I still find use for files, envelopes, reams of paper, et al. left over from business days. They’ll whittle down simply from regular attrition.
47. Fake Plants. I do have some of these. (They were mom’s.) They are the only plants I can keep green, but I suppose they could vanish from the house without causing any angst.
48. Lunch Boxes. I don’t own a lunch box.
49. Keepsakes You Don’t Care About Anymore. Well, they wouldn’t be keepsakes then, would they?
50. Bulky Old TV Sets. Already long gone.

So from all that came the mildly useful suggestions to dispose of fake plants, old luggage, and maybe a movie projector. Well, that is something I suppose, but not enough volume to justify ordering another dumpster. If a link shows up with the bait 50 More Things Retirees Should Throw Out, I think I’ll leave it unclicked.

 

The Cramps – Garbageman