Understanding Anne Rice through Asimov

 I’ve done some reading. Not enough that the Rice and Asimov material has fermented together, but I’ve read two Asimov Foundation books, and I’ve read Rice’s The Witching Hour. 

I didn’t really enjoy the two Asimov books so much, so that I lost all my initial enthusiasm for this project and read other books and began playing video games again. I see a pattern and an overall direction to my biography unfolding here, the beginning of a downward spiral into discouraging and disappointing decisions which will lead to an intellectual flaccidity and vegetation. 

Years later after my death, readers, if there are any, of my biography, if I do eventually write it, will understand my failure to grapple with difficult mental challenges at this point in my life as the final turning point, the submergence of any faint glimmer of intellectual light that still exists in my writing. If so, I expect that the only people who might read this or anything else I write will be my own children. Hopefully they won’t be too disappointed. 

I didn’t particularly enjoy most of the Anne Rice book, because most of the book is a dopey soap opera - with a few mildly uncanny moments, but there is a book within the book, the “talamasca” file on “the Mayfair witches” that I enjoyed far more than the main story, that in a better world would have just been sold as the book without the boring frame of the soap opera overlay that is hundreds of pages long with very little happening while the “file” has sex and witch burnings and murders and incest and a spooky ghost all jammed into less than a hundred pages.  Reading it is like finding one of those web sites with the amateur feel that you know could never be published as a book because it’s too short and all the words are misspelled and there’s a clammy awkward feel to the tone like you’ve intruded on someone and they’re unhappy and you’re unhappy that they’re unhappy and you want to make a joke but you can’t.  So I liked that part a lot. Polished writing is drastically overrated. This philosophy should not come as a surprise for any reader of this blog. 

Speaking of polished writing, I attribute my reaction to reading the Asimov books to over familiarity with the stories and ideas. I’ve read them many times and I have to say that with Asimov the Ideas are elucidated very clearly but the characters don’t ultimately feel real to me, except for a few moments with Janov, an elderly researcher who accompanies Golan, the PC of both books. Golan is portrayed as a strong-willed man of action, mostly annoyingly hostile and proud of it, but the interactions between Golan and Janov are very sweet and touching.  It seems to me that Janov must be based on one of Asimov’s friends, for whom he had deep affection but also some subtle contempt. Janov is affable and easygoing, intellectually curious and enthusiastic, but physically timid and socially accommodating. He is portrayed as lacking in practicality, but empathetic. Golan is the singular hero of the two books. Able, forceful, impatient, masculine, and a real turd with other people. He wears thinner for me with each re-reading. More annoying, more dubious. He has a mystical talent for being Right, often referenced to in the book along with descriptions of Golan’s outspoken skepticism of his mystical ability to be right that I don’t know, of course Golan has to show how skeptical he is because the author knows how insufferable the character is anyway? There is an unmistakable “chosen one” aura about the character that I have grown to despise in all literature and film. It’s a sign of elitism in my opinion, a giveaway of the author’s estimation of their main character. “This guy is a loser and nobody will be interested in him so I need to make him the chosen one to justify telling a story about him.” It’s always completely unnecessary. Characters don’t need to save the universe to be significant. 

Asimov most definitely subscribes to the “great man” version of history, it is explicit in his fiction and nonfiction. Even in the Foundation series, which is based on one of my favorite ideas in science fiction, an epic story driven by an advanced mathematical study of history, “psychohistory”, which ascribes the major movements of history as based on impersonal and inevitable historical forces, Asimov unironically ascribes the whole psychohistory theory to one heroic genius who figures everything out. The first book of the Foundation trilogy is a serial about singular heroes who understand the theory and save the day. Asimov does introduce the antihero in the later books,  a person whose singular and unique abilities upend the mathematics of the series. I should admit that I loved the Foundation series the first few times I read them, and I truly admire and appreciate Asimov’s ideas and the spare, uncommon clarity of prose with which he explains them, but the characters in his books are not interesting to me.  Asimov’s fiction is all about the Idea, not the character. Ironically, there’s a line in one of Anne Rice’s books; “Beware the Idea,” that could summarize my complaints about Asimov’s books (the anti-idea theme is one of Rice’s central tenets, or ideas, in her vampire books). 

Okay to be fair, his heroes are thinkers who value facts and truth and reason. But it’s interesting that Asimov, a college professor and intellectual science writer, chooses to keep emphasizing that Trevize is also a man of action. And the sympathetic friend, Pelorat, is an intellectual, and he is depicted as a bit useless in a fight. Maybe a little self-hate from Asimov?  

So we should go over my actual reasons for re-reading books I’ve already read. I had a method, a theory, a reasoning for doing all this that has broken down in the implementation, that has resulted in this posting, this idle chatter in place of the prescise and powerful scientific and mathematically driven screed that I had originally envisioned.  I believe that you don’t really fully understand a book after reading it once. You may enjoy the story, you may react and experience the story as the entertainment as it was intended to be, but you don’t notice much on the first drive through. For me, the true understanding of the book, the  real picture, only comes to you after several re-readings. I’ve experienced this with movies as well as novels. The re-reading, or re-viewing, results in truly revelatory insights. Or at least they feel revelatory to me. But in order to accomplish this, it seems to require a degree of focus that I might no longer be able to muster at this stage of my life. If I was young and relatively undistracted, I believe I could come up with some great stuff, but I don’t really have the time to bear down and re-read books anymore. I’ve stopped this project to read other books or play video games or even work so many times that I can’t even remember when I started on this post with these books in mind. So I would like to apologize to any reader of this blog for the lack of genius insights. Its just a mess in here, really, and I would prefer not to disclose what “here” means and infers and entails to strangers on the internet. No

List of great blog posts that I haven’t finished

 I haven’t posted an actual written passage in a while because I’ve been working on a long historical post about Aethelred the Unready (or Redeless), and then I lost interest in that. The experience taught me that while I enjoy reading about history, I do not enjoy writing about history.  And I can apply this personal rule generally, with any serious subject. So I’ve decided to make a post, this post, about all the posts I began and then gave up on

1. Aethelred the Unready. Saxon King of Wessex circa 978. Generally blamed for the collapse of the house of Wessex, founded by Alfred the Great. Winston Churchill despised him but I saw myself in a distant mirror.. That’s all, haven’t finished it. 
2. The Pharmaceutical Industry, an insider’s perspective, based on my years of working in a pharmaceutical factory. Kind of an expose of waste and inefficiency based on fifteen plus years of irregular entries in my work journal that I sometimes kept up on and sometimes not. The regularity and level of detail in the journal entries usually depended on how frustrated or irritated I was on a particular day, usually with management, and over the years I’ve slowly lost my ability to respond emotionally to work. I call it lab rat in a cage syndrome. Recently I came up with a great idea for a horror movie script based on my work but I only think about it when I’m at work and don’t have much time to spare on the script. 
3. Growing up Mormon. Based on my years of growing up Mormon. I’ve already posted an incredibly well thought out proposal for a restructuring of the Mormon church. Or was it a restructuring of the Mormon church service? I don’t mind doing another one. 
4. An extensive re-write of the US constitution. Based on my disappointment with the US political system. Another topic that I’ve previously posted, where I discussed the serious problems with the presidential election, or as I call it, the single greatest threat to American democracy. 
5. My theory of literature, based on years and years, fifty years to be specific, of reading books and comic books. I’ve had some great thoughts about this and I’m eager to share them in blog format where people can’t talk back except in comments that I don’t read unless I know the person. 
6. My ideas for restructuring of corporations, based on years of working in a corporation. These ideas may sound a little communistic to people, hopefully. 
7. My ideas about community radio stations and how completely the internet has eclipsed them except with old people. Based on five years working at a community radio station. 
8. Now that I’ve listed these terrific blog ideas I’m feeling pretty motivated to finish one of them! Maybe

The end of The End of Eternity is not the end

I re-read books a lot. If I like them.  For this post I’d planned to read End of Eternity again but I lost my copy. I didn’t really like the book enough to re-read it per my usual standards but I wanted to keep re-reading it and come up with pun titles for the posts and amuse myself so I felt some disappointment when I couldn’t find it. I daydreamed about using one of the “kettles” in the book to go back in time and retrieve my copy while it sat on my nightstand and then take it back to my time to re-read it, but by the time travel rules in End of Eternity this act would change my reality and prevent my past self from ever finishing the book in the first place. So my past self would post a humorous blog entry with an “Eternity got Longer” pun and go back in one of the “kettles” and retrieve my copy while it still sat on my nightstand.  These hijinks would continue until I had completely unraveled all my reading progress on End of Eternity until I hadn’t read it at all and I would post something like “The Eternal Beginning of the End of Eternity” and I would give up until the future when I had the copy again but could not for the life of me think of another terrible pun. 

I also imagined an alternative reality where I used one of the time travel cell phones in the Marvel series Loki to go back and grab the copy on my nightstand and by the time travel rules in Loki and the Marvel universe in general - as explained in detail by Smart Hulk in Endgame - my reality wouldn’t change and I would still have read the End of Eternity once before and I would have plenty of punny post titles to use. But, also by Marvel universe time travel rules, when I took the book from Past Andrew’s nightstand, I would create an alternative reality, and in the alternative reality, alternative Andrew would lose the book before finishing it and would never post any idiotic posts about End of Eternity at all and might complain to the TIme Variance Authority from Loki who would arrest me for taking Alternative Andrew’s book but now I’ve really pushed it because I really doubt that the TVA from Loki would care about a missing copy of an old Sci Fi book and they would more likely tell Alternative Andrew to get over it unless - get ready for it - I myself am and always have been Alternative Andrew all along, and a careless Andrew from the future has taken my book and all the infinity stones holding our universe together and left our precious timeline to suck it - all to post one more dumb pun variant on the End of Eternity. 

Short Post script:

I found the copy of End of Eternity and I watched some of the Eternals movie again but I haven’t started to re-read End of Eternity. There’s always another book to read, I have a stack of books on my nightstand and I don’t see how I’ll ever get to it. I need a time machine. Ba-dat ssssss.  

Hi I’m John, I work in Quality Assurance

 I recently posted something about unpleasant careers, which reminds me that for the past decade or so, even reaching back into the time before IPhones, I’ve worked in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, in Quality Assurance. Why Quality Assurance? Why Pharmaceuticals? Entirely by accident, of course. I was working temporary jobs, which I rather enjoyed actually, and had an assignment to go work at a pharmaceutical plant, and eventually got a permanent job there. It could easily have gone the other way, if I hadn’t gotten that particular job I would probably have moved to other assignments and maybe stumbled into some other career, and I’m betting that if I hadn’t gotten a push from a Manager there who happened to view me with second hand approval (I was a friend of their star employee), the position would have gone to someone else more deserving. But here I am, working in a heavily-regulated, science based industry where management prefers humanities degrees with a minimum of two years Creative Writing experience. Haha! Gotcha! They’re actually pretty easy-going about the creative writing experience.
And yes, I do some writing for this job, mostly emails of one sentence or less - and they are spell-binding, I assure you! I mock myself, but I would love to teach a college course in emails, procedures, and investigations; the only reading and writing I’ve done in pharmaceuticals, and they probably comprise over 90% of the professional reading and writing performed by English majors in the pharmaceutical industry and possibly anywhere. Humanities Professors would probably prefer to completely ignore the existence of this kind of English, but I can’t think of a better way to gain appreciation for “literature” as we call it, the English designed to tell a story, than to study it alongside the everyday English, the English that organization people use to avoid telling any story at all. I would call it “camouflage writing”. It’s actually a lesser form of fiction, meant to bore and repel rather than enchant and distract. You may write it to hide your lack of knowledge on a subject, or to avoid telling people all you know about the subject to safeguard your job, or like the greater part of working people you may have never really learned to write except in the organization where everyone writes in camouflage and you don’t actually know how to write in any other way.
And of course, in a regulated industry, the regulating authority will read your procedures and your investigations. Maybe they will read them in front of your managers. Maybe their eyes will glaze, and they will stifle a yawn, and the managers will sign you a thumbs up, and offer them a blanket and a pillow.
People ask me; “What is Quality Assurance? What do you do exactly?” And I answer...
Gotcha again! Nobody has ever asked, literally ever, in all the years I’ve told people that I work in Quality Assurance. Not only have they not asked what it is, they usually stop asking me anything, as if my answer was so awful, so surprising in a very bad way, that they don’t dare ask anything more, as I might construe the slightest hint of interest on their part as a signal to vomit forth every nasty dribble of information on quality assurance that I’ve been holding in all these years and they so do not want to hear about it that they are conversationally frozen with fear.
I completely understand, of course. The name “quality assurance” was devised by the same people who devised standard operating procedures and please believe me when I say that they are not interested in being interesting. See notes on camouflage writing above.

I complain a lot about my English degree

I  complain a lot about my English degree and how people with English degrees don’t get paid like engineers unless they get a law degree too, but to be honest I have met or heard of dozens of successful people who incidentally happened to have an English degree. I believe that if you’re a tiger and a go getter you can do well no matter what degree you earned, but if you’re not a tiger or a similarly type-A animal, you should study engineering. I’ve actually toyed with the idea of abbreviating my degree as “Eng.” on my resume, just to get by HR keyword searches.
I’ve developed my own theories to explain why English degrees might be undervalued by businesses. Most people would tell you that business managers want to be lean and want results, and hiring someone to just write things when technically any college graduate should be able to write, and when there might not be a business need for cleverly worded essays every day, seems like a waste of money to most of them. Why not just hire an engineer who can write?
And many people in the sciences definitely believe that English degrees are easy degrees, and that therefore the people with English degrees haven’t worked hard or learned to problem solve like the science majors have, so that a bunch of soft-headed poets with no grasp on reality have glutted the job market.
To clarify, no engineer or manager has used those harsh and judgmental words in my presence, I have interpolated their formless, nonverbal twitches and mutterings and as an English BA can form those thoughts in a more verbally direct manner.
Forgive me, I mentioned that I have my own theory: Humanities studies have suffered an evolutionary reversal similar to what peacocks might suffer if wild dogs developed a lasso. Previous to this hypothetical lasso, young people of the upper classes invented English and other Humanities degrees to learn art and poetry, in order to impress potential romantic partners or spouses. Nobody saw any actual utility in an English Degree, it functioned like a magnificent peacock’s tail to impress other young people by its utter uselessness, back when a person’s uselessness signified
At this point you may believe that I am about to say, in agreement with prevailing belief, that the job market was the lasso, but I believe it was the Civil Rights movements of the 60s. The purveyors of English and Humanities degrees, like High Priests, had used the so-called Dead White Males of British Literature as their Idols, and used the DWM’s Works as their Magic Totems, in order to add the facade of sanctity and seriousness to the peacock’s tail. The egalitarian values of the Civil Rights movement eroded and discredited the DWM’s authority, and so destroyed the romantic magic of the English degrees. Young people sought out alternative forms of magic; rock music and beat poetry, sourced by the new Idol of Social Activism. Some High Priests stayed true to the old idols, but the rest switched to align their teachings with the new egalitarianism. They escaped the worship of the DWMs, but in the mad rush to Social Activism, they unhinged the bread and butter roots of the degrees, the utilitarian mechanics of writing and textual analysis, unfortunately associating them with the old hierarchy. They trained a generation of English BAs with uplifted values and sloppy, unfocused writing skills. The orthodox High Priests denounced these methods, but even more unfortunately, associated them with the new Social Activism. The engineering faculty, who respected the old

 Humanities DWMs as the gods of a neighboring tribe, viewed the new, lose, free wheeling Humanities curricula with contempt.
So the state of the humanities at the time of my own studies. I took classes with both sects, and as you might expect I did not take a side. I chose a Creative Writing emphasis, as you might expect, but I enjoyed the disciplined critical analysis classes, as you might not expect.
The University of Utah offered a creative writing MA, which I did not pursue, because I believed, and still believe, that you need to find something to write about. The people who believe that you need to find something to write about will usually, after arriving at this decision or realization, boldly go off to Antarctica or New Guinea, offering up their mortal frame to the tribulations of unpleasant weather or unpleasant people in order to compile a database of sufferings to spin into lucrative, matter of fact accounts that readers like me will devour appreciatively in the comforts of the suburbs. I didn’t do that either, so I followed a third alternative, listless pursuit of unpleasant careers. So that’s what I have to write about.

If you’re looking under the hood, you’re not driving the car

We’ve moved to a completely graphic format in the blog recently. I’d intermittently threatened to do this many times in the past, due to the incredibly tight time constraints on my writing time nowadays, but I don’t know if anyone took those threats seriously because I don’t know if anyone actually read them besides myself and I know I didn’t take them seriously until I actually began to do it. And I still don’t really take them seriously. 

So the move to a graphic comic book format seems to have cut the blog readership by about 50%; a metric which, if viewed from the standpoint of a businessman assessing the blog as a business venture would definitely indicate that the sole proprietor of the blog, myself, had made a serious mistake. On the upside, if we look at our cash conversion rate per customer, which is zero, and multiply by that by the lost readership, we find that we actually haven’t experienced any decline in blog income. Heartening news! 

But I’ve decided to compromise on the blog format somewhat, in order to lure my mother or other random family members back to the customer base. So from this post on we will be providing written content as a supplement to the comics. 

This week’s Comic:

Written supplement to this week’s comic:

Not my best comic, and I say that with deepest respect and appreciation for the artistic struggles that accompanied this comic from conception to its moment of publication on the World Wide Web. I actually produced three versions of this comic in an effort to find some kind of punchline, and if I haven’t deleted those versions I will insert them at some inappropriate or ill-timed juncture of this post, so the reader can view and appreciate the difficulty of joke making. Actually I think the previous sentence, that I just wrote down mere moments before, illustrates my difficulties better than the actual mis-fires could. No one with a running joke engine in their head could write “the difficulty of joke making”. If you’re looking under the hood, you’re not driving the car.   

I will use that sentence as the title of this post, and perhaps as the epitaph of this blog. We have reached the solipsistic wind down of the blog, after the failed surge to comic greatness has washed back into the dirty sea of the internets