I am obsessing about a few things. Paperback book covers from the 70s; the era I’m interested in is when paperbacks sold for 95 cents to a buck and a quarter.
That was the cost of about 3-5 cups of the bad coffee we drank back then. This coffee was 35 cents a cup at diners; and it was bottomless. All the bad coffee you could drink for a quarter and a dime. Sometimes they set the whole thermal carafe on your table. Knock yourself out. It was an automatic drip blend, I think, huge cans, that’s right, tin cans with no pull tops, of Folgers, Maxwell house, some combination of robusto and arabica, which was the secret of the old-timey affordability. Arabica costs more.
I’m looking at series novels, series I read growing up. Maybe not surprising, having recently, err, in the last few years, completed my cover design / illustration project for Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber, and several other titles including Doorways in the Sand, Creatures of Light and Darkness, Dilvish the Damned, and the ongoing My Name is Legion project.
Maintaining the consistent brand on these was a challenge… it’s far from perfect, which, as it turns out, is sort of the norm in the series I’ve studied.
Anyway, I have been obsessing on creating a collection of the series books that really influenced me, each brand consistent, as my collection growing up, the fragments of which I still own, after many purges, were mongrel messes of covers, of eras, and of quality.
Some were used bookstore finds that fell apart as I read them, or as they sat on a shelf; some were new, for the time, with awful covers and bad typography, which became normal for SF books in the 70s and 80s, for reasons that I do not fully understand; computers hadn’t yet wrecked, or made tasteless, let’s say, a lot of design, so why they all became hideous before that era is mysterious.
So far I have identified Larry Niven’s known space, Heinlein’s signet years, Heinlein’s Ace Juveniles, the Pyramid E.E. Smith Collections (skylark and lensmen) and the Ballentine Lovecraft paperbacks as being iconic visually and important science fictionally. Hm. There’s also a set of foundation covers I am very attached to, and of course, that first legal LOTR where the covers form a triptych. Oh well.
I’m buying them all. I’ll do good scans and upload them to pinterest or whatever. Here too.
Larry Niven Known Space, this is a rough draft of a curated image I’m working on of this era of the Niven brand.
My feed withdrawal and existential horror at the post-trump / mid-COVID / Climate-change-world-on-fire has propelled me back into charming futures we foresaw in the past. Charming in retrospect. We worried about nuclear war, in a delightful binary way, (World toggles from to STATUS QUO to CINDER) and we dreamed of galactic empire, or more modest things, like Niven’s Known Space.
Known Space, for the generation that consumed it, felt startlingly real. At least for the readership of mostly white middle class boys like myself who lived there. I could ask Steven Barnes, Niven’s later collaborator and POC, how it felt to him… I should…
Niven’s future displayed no significant racism. But there was a cost to this for the white reader. We were asked to empathize with some viewpoint characters who were described as non-white, mixed race; I could dig up the description but Niven took the earth’s population at the time of the invention of teleportation, I think, and shoved them in a blender, to arrive at a POC mix of Caucasian, Asian, African, Middle-eastern, and so on.
I remember the shock at that. I’d gone to school in a minority majority system until forth grade and my best friend was Chinese American, and still, still, it was amazing, to be asked to be a POC in a SF story.
The character Louis Wu, was kinda-sorta asian, I mean, the name, and I was being asked to live inside his head. I was an SF reader, though, so after that first moment of confusion, I thought “why not?” And as Wu was living in a post racial world, written by a rich white guy, he was a comfortable fit. After I bit, I felt very good with being Louis Wu.
Yay?
After the stunning racism of stuff like the Lensmen stories, and Lovecraft, people like Niven felt appropriately utopian, for a white professional class that liked to think that the womens’ movement and the civil rights movement, had bent the arc of history permanently, and had us coasting to eventual equality on autopilot. Without us white people doing anything else.
Niven’s ‘ism’ was planet-tism, or species-isms. Folks who never went into space were parochial; different planets might have different mind-sets based on different environments; space travelers were cosmopolitan, and aliens could be a little bit but not too weird and largely defined by species-level stereotypes. The character of Nissus the ‘mad’ puppeteer, is an example of Niven seeing species-driven character traits as existing on a spectrum. His people were risk-averse (cowards) and Nissus was ‘mad’ in his ability to interact with other species. To be in their dangerous presence. Puppeteer’s furniture was all melted looking, lacking sharp edges or corners, in case they tripped and fell against a dangerous surface. And Puppeteers were tripods!
The other thing I remember from known space was that religion had zero impact on any of the actions of the characters; everyone was some sort of rationalist. This works best for people who came from Christian stock, who have lost interest in Christianity, of course; as a Jew, or any faith in opposition to Christianity, one worries if your people of faith have all been killed off and or assimilated.
…and of course, there was no visible oppression of GLBTQ, because, well, there didn’t seem to be any. Again, this works if you aren’t GLBTQ.
The world without obvious oppression, written by folks who never experienced oppression, wasn’t new of course, but Niven at least gave us a few reasons as to why the old school oppressions were obsolete.
I just remembered the teleportation thing as the excuse for the uniform racial makeup. Making the future so fundamentally different means that geographical isolation might not keep us as separate. Though of course, folks stuck in coal-mining towns often won’t drive to the nearest city to start new lives; they go down into the mines and get black lung and die in tunnel collapses.
So… not sure the teleportation booths are gonna completely get everybody off of the farm…
Anyway. Here is to Known Space; looking at the timeline of publications I realize that it’s written earlier than I thought, in the sixties. Ringworld is sort of the capstone to Known space, in a lot of ways, and its 1970 publication date means that, like the Beatles, Known Space was really an expression of the 60s. A mildly conservative expression of the 60s, avoiding a lot of the SF new wave. Really, if you think of it, Known space is a straight-line evolution of Heinlein’s Future History systematized in the 50s.
Which of course, I was devouring at the same time.
Hm. The timelines in the omnibus collections are similar, too….
At the time, so much of my privilege was invisible to me, in ways very common then, and still common now. But these texts dovetailed with that ignorance. Creating… indescribable feelings, at least, indescribable now.
I thought I was reading the future.
It wasn’t of course the future, but a future made for me, by someone a lot like me… but by someone without an ax to grind, or much less of one, when it came to gender and race. Even I could smell something rank coming off of a lot of old school space opera. Something a bit off in late Heinlein’s sexual wish-fulfillment fantasies.
Known Space, though, was a future I loved without reservations.
This was the place I wanted to go.
This is where I wanted to live.
Imagine that. The future as a place you would want to live in!
So, I’m trying to tie the meditation into a trigger, which is coffee; drinking it, finishing it. Failed today, got distracted, but I’ll keep at it.
I’m resetting the clock, going for a full 30 days in a row, because I want to be sure I can do 10 minutes before I go to 15.
So, without my Facebook feed, I look at my other feed-like things; email, my indy-pub sales, (somewhere between 0 and 3 books a day; closer on average to 1.) my NYT alerts. Check my blog hits.
I read the promotions tab in my gmail.
I waste time. But you know, these things hit empty. And then you gotta do something else.
Because none of these things is designed to keep you glued in. You can waste time this way… but you have to put some effort into it. It is not effortless to waste time reading the news, looking at your email.
I miss the feed, but not how it made me feel, often. My political screeds would get some positive feedback, as i articulated a shared rage, but more and more, I wonder what that is for.
I like writing. I like people reading my writing. The feed is instantaneous. You don’t get paid but you barely get paid for writing fiction most of the time anyway, even if you can sell a fair amount of it at professional rates, which I can, and do.
So the feed is seductive. But it’s insubstantial. It’s ephemeral, topical. It creates cortisol spikes, rage, anger. Or rather it takes a rage, an anger, and it feeds that flame, so that temporary feeling of rage becomes a solid glowing coal. The feed fans the flame. The feed adds fuel to the fire.
The feed leads you around and you know it does that, but you pretend you are doing what you want to do, that what you do for the feed is your choice, but if you get away from the feed for a time, you discover, no.
You’re not really like that. You’re not the person the feed makes you. Not really.
The feed encourages you to perform an identity which creates feedback. It’s operant conditioning. The feed has you creating a bazillion niche content channels, cultivate an audience, filling those attention markets with free product, an endless long tail, that becomes eyeball glue, which becomes profit. But not for you. Never for you. Unless you win some sort of viral lottery. If you’re amazing, or sexy, or cute, or outrageous, or lucky, or some combination of those things, which 99% of aren’t and never will be.
You bring yourself to the feed, but you’ll find that much of what you bring sinks like a lead balloon, and you shrug, and you don’t mind, because that’s how intermittent reward schedules work. Nobody stops being addicted to slot machines because they don’t always pay off.
What matters is they spin, and and ping and pong and ring and clatter, and all of that bonds to those moments when you do win, and so every time, it starts up again, you remember, you could win. You could win. Like the time that open letter to those assholes at the radio station lead to a thousand shares and tens of thousands of hits and phone calls and sponsors pulling support and that actually did something.
That one time.
Life without the feed is this endless succession of things you find yourself gradually losing interest in; because that is how consciousness is supposed to work. That is how we find balance in our lives. By doing various things. But getting enough of some things.
I may be an extreme case, an edge case, someone for whom social media is particularly fucked up. I don’t know. But I find myself standing here staring into the sky wondering what the hell am I doing. Really. Who am I talking to.
So, I did about five days of my daily focus challenge before missing a day.
I missed a day. I resolved to not let missing the day derail me. To not beat myself up. Meditation is about acceptance, to some degree, at least for me.
Then I missed two days. I was amazed, as it seemed to me I had, at most, missed one. But no, two. I decided to not get too mad at myself, and resolved to do better.
Then I missed two days again, only, looking at my app, and here is where bookkeeping is essential, the two days was really four days.
Four days.
So, this isn’t working. Why? Well, I am not shaming myself into doing it. I’m not paying myself, nobody is paying me, to do it. Nobody but me cares if I do it. There are no immediate consequences for not doing it. There are things that call to me more urgently. The habit doesn’t take, or if it does, it can die away almost instantly.
I repeat the ‘making a habit stick,’ google search, which has like five ideas, which, it seems, I have to google over and over again as if I’m cooking dried beans in a pressure cooker. That’s one fucking number per bean. I eat two kinds of beans. I keep forgetting.
I need a schedule, or at the very least, a trigger for the new habit to stick. How do I know that?
One day missed, two days missed, then four, all while thinking I’m building a habit, when I am most definitely not.
I am shit at schedules. I slip on one thing and the whole day goes fucking out the window. So triggers.
Coffee. I always have coffee. It’s hard to say when I finish the coffee, sometimes I sip at it for a long damn time, but now, when I finish it, boom. Ten minutes.
Down the street from me sits a dark shingled, two story home oddly canted in its sizable lot, surrounded by this purple fence densely inscribed with inscrutable ramblings. I have heard that his house was built on another lot, which some big institution wanted, and they moved it here at great expense, and he had them orient it along a north south axis for mystical reasons.
The guy must be wealthy; the house and property would go for a few million now. Cambridge hasn’t figured out, yet, how to squash this guy’s identity with zoning regulations. The stuff on the fence reminds me schizophrenia, but it isn’t a nasty sort. It’s all curiously upbeat. Or at worst, opaque.
One part of the wall has a huge moose silhouette on it, labeled, the cosmic moose. I love it.
This public identity works for this guy, who dresses like a hippie, in rainbow threaded embroidered layers. We used to sit in cafes together. He had a shoulder bag full of action figurines he would set up around him on his table, before he started writing in his spiral notebook.
This identity works for this guy. My hat’s off to him.
My identity doesn’t work. My social media identity. Maybe my entire identity down to the core, but let’s start picking away at the upper layer first, shall we?
So, everyone knows the aphorism about insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
This is the top line of what I am now trying to do with my relationship, broadly, to the internet. I mean, to stop doing that, to be clear. This isn’t about Facebook and Twitter and blogging; this is about everything flowing through the broadband pipe. News. Streaming movies and TV. Oversharing. Finding freelance work. How I exist as a political being. Everything. All of it, more or less at once.
I’m trying to not do the same things, over and over again, and expect a different result.
My single identity, the train wreck, we can call it, rams together overshares, accountability posts, my professional ambition, my teaching impulses, my attempts to find freelance work, my posting of creative work, and my vitriolic politics, shot through with cries of fury and despair at, uh, lots of infuriating and despair-inducing things.
This can work, if one is a genius. If you’re Kanye West, you can do whatever the fuck you want, and you will continue to make a living. Sure, some people will think you’re an asshole. But you can just chug along and keep making hits, being a nut, shrugging off the articles you see about how maybe the media should not broadcast your bipolar issues. You don’t even have to admit you’re bipolar!
I’m not Kanye West.
As I try to pull this blog together, I am realizing that I need a set of outlets for each kind of content, with appropriate audiences for each. I need to curate separate identities, or, simply move some identities out of the web all together.
I have, for sometime, wondered, am I just not trying hard to enough, to do the stuff I want to do, or, does my social media identity sabotage my efforts?
The internet is forever; to some degree I will never escape the identity I have built with 10,000 posts. But I can at least tidy this shit up. Curate what I am putting out there now. I’m not important, and so relatively few people are gonna hold stuff against me if I just make sure that shit is gone when they look for me, professionally, do that sanity check, we all do, when we have to create any kind of new relationship.
So this site if a transitional object. What does the endgame look like?
The writer-author-teacher identity.
The graphic designer illustrator identity.
The personal identity’s internet footprint / residue.
The political identity.
I could do the personal is political thing, merge the two, that’s understandable. But personal, political and business and creative all rammed together in one steaming mess?
That doesn’t work. For me. I’m not Kanye.
And I need to stop pretending I ever will be, or that this will ever work.
The amount of work to do in all this is daunting; the desire to burn everything to the ground is great. But I have made many wonderful friends and had many meaningful interactions in the social media space, all of which of course, helped Mark Zuckerberg get paid to elect Donal Trump president.
That has to stop. I have to stop doing that.
So I’m trying. To save the best, to abandon the rest, and that, I am now admitting, is going to take time and effort.
I have some basic spam control plug-ins set, but hadn’t noticed that I had over 4500 subscribers with randomly generated looking names.
I deleted about 1500 of them before realizing that I have no way of telling the few real subscribers to maybe come back and re-subscribe if I, uh, delete them first. So. Yeah.
So those of you tucked into the remaining 3000 or so, you will be cut off shortly. I have a new deterrent for the new malicious signups, and will keep on top of the human spammers who get in.
I’m going to set up a very clear blog to email feature plug-in thingy. I have to research them a bit. I have mailchimp but ever since realizing that mailchimp content all ends up in people’s promotions folder at gmail, I have wondered if maybe another solution makes more sense. You would need to dig me out of the ads folder and do something to keep me from always landing in there… this is why nobody does blogs anymore…
WordPress link spam and comment spam is weird and depressing. The degree to which any and all functionality on any sort of website can be hijacked, abused, and used to make criminals a few pennies or so, isn’t something we thought about, back when we dreamed about this global computer network.
Ah. Our dreams. Well, Cyberpunk captures the feel of the present pretty well, actually. Dystopic in many ways.
Signet Mass Market Paperbacks of Heinlein’s stuff, mostly from the 50s and 60s, including the justly hated Farnham’s Freehold written when I was one. See the black guy on the cover? Yeah. Not a good thing. Discrimiflip genre. Ouch.
ADHD brain (you’ll notice I use ADD and ADHD more or less randomly) decided recently that collecting old books I liked as a kid in sets, by one publisher, was a good use of my time. So that’s the image above, the Signet edition Heinlein (non-juvenile) novels of a certain era.
I found a feature in photoshop that did a lot of the work, and then, spent another hour or so tweaking the images, trying to get them to similar yellowing, trying to tease detail out of the random scans and iphone shots I pulled from antiquarian book sites. I discovered issues with the brand template being slightly deviated from, over the editions.. and I tweaked them mostly away, so they looked better lined up. (I had similar minor issues doing my Amber covers. I sympathize with the 70s designers, using their old, shitty analog tools, trying to get it perfect. They had a good excuse; me, not so much.)
My father read a lot of this stuff in Astounding magazine before it became Analog, issues his mother and then mine diligently discarded over the decades; he would re-buy paperbacks now and then, from different publication eras, and I filled in the missing titles from used bookstores—but always random editions, some very worn, that I destroyed while reading.
When I read a paperback I didn’t treat it kindly. I read the hell out of it, leaving pizza stains and, in older books, sometimes shattering the spines.
Over the years I saw most of these titles on the shelves, in this edition, but never bought them; first of all, I never collected books so much as read them. I was ambivalent on the tie dye illustration style, preferring oil paintings that looked like scenes from the book, if they were done well and didn’t look stupid, or something generic and science fictional.
Nowadays I find this illustration style wonderful, dated, perfect.
Every time you pick up a real book and read it you look at the cover, and the cover intertwines with your memory of the book, at the same time pinning that reading to at time and place, often, the three things merging; the text, the cover, the time of your life.
Of course Kindle ebooks advance you past the damn cover when you ‘open’ them; you mostly see the cover as a shitty thumbnail and maybe a slightly larger thumbnail and then, if you buy it, you probably never page back and look at the cover ever again, which is, of course, horrible, if you are a designer, or illustrator, or I suspect, any kind of human being at all.
Anyway. A lot of these RAH titles were republished subsumed in a single huge, unwieldy, is the word, tome called The Past Through Tomorrow which had a very Meh typographic cover displaying a few boring impossibly arranged planets on a blue field. I read this paperback off and on for years, checking off the short stories and longer ones; at the end of the book there’s a whole damn novel, Methuselah’s Children, which I didn’t have to suffer with, as I had this Signet edition of it. I grew to love the cover.
The Past Through Tomorrow deteriorated quickly, I mean, the paperback, and I have seen cracked and falling apart versions for decades.
So now, I want to have a set of these, but not spend more than five bucks a book. This is only a little hard to do, as I look at lots of lots of vintage paperbacks. And I see… the end of my childhood, my perpetual adolescence, hours spent staring at covers loitering in Economy Books in the late, great, Shopping Town Mall, at first as a strip mall, and then an enclosed, faux village with the food court, and a public library, and the steak house that would be my first real (bad) job.
I’m back looking at images of books I thought about reading, thought about buying, reading the cover copy, knowing that so many I wouldn’t, when they were written by people like me, randos. Folks who wrote a book or three. Who never won awards.
ADD brain, post parental death brain, nostalgia ridden brain, looking for my own future in past brain.
The Tomorrow Through The Past brain.
Burning the time I once spent being mad because many people were wrong on the internet. And still are, I’m pretty sure.
The light outside my window. The old cat that helps me make the bed. Stacked clean laundry my wife keeps there.
The photo is of my bedroom, where I sit, on three square ikea shelves taped together on my Purple brand matress, with a magic foam neck pillow between my ass and the laminate particleboard.
The shelves provide support, get rid of the sinking into quicksand feeling. And the magic neck pillow doesn’t work for magically fixing your fucked up neck. No matter how many you buy.
The light shifts on the blinds. When I start hallucinating I open my eyes, glasses off; the blinds are less interesting and catch my attention less than the eyelid movies that start playing after ten minutes or fifteen. I’ve read of traditions where the eyes are kept half open, half lidded, focused on a spot on the ground several feet ahead of the sitter, to avoid being interrupted by the scenes emerging from neural noise and overactive patter recognition circuitry.
I have a fan in the room, and I play a nature sound playlist from spotify, and the two create a stable sonic environment, again, just interesting enough to keep me from listening for distant cars, distant voices, picking out HVAC sounds, my wife typing at work downstairs.
I have to shave a lot of yaks, before I sit, make bed, pick up room, brush teeth, sometimes a neti pot, wash face, light incense, to blot out sensations that will annoy me that, undistracted, I will tune into. Is there something stuck in my beard? Can I smell my own fucking breath? Did the cat pee somewhere in the condo it wasn’t supposed to, again, like it used to?
You get the idea.
Of course, a real pro could just plop the fuck down and let them all go, one by one, accept them, let them recede, but, as I gleefully admit, I suck at this, several thousand hours into the practice.
And that’s fine. It’s the thing I let myself suck at without self recrimination. God that’s wonderful.
So. Why is it so hard to make myself do this?
It’s harder for people with ADD to make and maintain habits, I have been told, and this makes sense to me, as my life is amorphous haze of activity, hyper focus, procrastination, meaningless planning, good intentions, unachieved ambitions, self-flagellation and a kind of plodding progress toward long term goals.
Anyway, focus, we were talking about focus, right. I’ve been told the squirrel joke is really shitty by some people with ADD, but this is me, and let me say, ok, wait. I see. squirrel and what were we talking about again?
Focus.
So, rather than throw up my hands and say, ‘Ok, we start again at ONE, because, you know. I SUCK,’ or saying, “Okay, if I miss a day I have to just make it up with two sessions the next day…” I’m saying, “I took a break but will just do it today.”
So, I did, yay me, and I looked at my zen timer app, the biggest and bestest iphone timer app in the world, where I meditate with at least 10,000 other people all over the world at any given time, and jesus, why is that even a thing, knowing that, and I discovered, to my considerable chagrin, a word I seldom use, that I’d missed TWO whole days, in a row, and how did that happen?
So, new sub-goal, try to keep the missed days down to ONE for fuck’s sake.
Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube enjoy manipulating their slaves. Also, for some reason, they have the matte painting from The Devil in the Dark behind their dome on Triskelion.
So, to cross the two challenge streams here, I took a 50 day break from FB, and a 30 day break from Twitter, and glancing back through my feed to see how folks are doing, again and again I find people arguing with idiots. (GOP/ Trumpist Wing Nuts)
I feel like I need to join in, and add my two cents.
My heart speeds up. The words start forming in my head. My fingertips itch for a keyboard. I search for a link, to a recent NYT piece, to counter the dumb ass meme about Biden’s COVID deaths being just like Trump’s. The deaths are red-shifted, see? Because the fucking morons aren’t getting fucking vaccinated; because of fucking Trump and fucking right-wing hate radio, and social media, and also because people are sometimes stupid for other reasons, too.
Then I think why?
Why would I do that?
Who’s mind is going to be changed? Why? Oh, and what’s the primary cesspool spreading the poison?
Facebook. Social media. Youtube.
It’s the fucking Gamesters of Triskelion. (It’s a Star Trek episode, TOS, The Original Series, look it up I guess?)
We fight for their amusement. Oh, and our fights are monetized. Am I a hot chick in a green wig in a metal bikini? Or maybe I’m a megalomaniac in a toupee.
The brains laugh and make bets. Kirk tricks them into trying to care for the pathetic drones they have been parasitizing. Says that’s an interesting game. The Enterprise flies off.
I hope to hell the candy colored brains stuck with the program. And didn’t just go back to the pitch black oven like robot warehouses and the monetized dopamine trigger rage machines.
Meditation wise? Yeah, five days hasn’t transformed me into Buddha yet. My therapist said it could take, you know, years.
So maybe I should take the Adderal.
We’ll see. But seriously, FB and Twitter is miserable. Get off of it for six weeks, and come back and look at it, and monitor your body, as you do, your heart rate. It is so, so obviously unhealthy.
ADD limits executive function; what we used to call ‘will power’, when we linked the concept to free will. Of course it never made any sense, to berate someone for lacking will power, because if will power was simply a matter of choice, a free willed quality, who the fuck wouldn’t decide to have a lot of it?
People without ADD are better at creating routines which allow executive function to be redirected in various ways; getting out of bed and doing your work and paying your bills can be on a kind of autopilot; your executive function is now free to clear our drawers or plan vacations or take night courses.
Successful people often articulate their success as a series of schedules, or period of focus, time invested in certain things. “I goof around a tremendous amount,” said the famous entrepreneur, never.
You can build habits with ADD; but you will have to expend more of your executive function keeping them going than a normal person would. So adding even something as trivial as a ten minute meditation a day to a schedule can backfire–or rather, that ten minutes can knock something else out of the schedule, not because of the time involved, but because of the limited supply of what I’m gonna just call will power, because I’m tired of saying executive function over and over again.
So, I have been maintaining my weight with intermittent fasting, (is everyone still talking about IF? I’m off social media… so I don’t know!) and filling my apple fitness rings and doing my freelance and chipping in on a weekly adult ed writing course, and I added in the ten minutes, and now I’m eating at midnight again, fasts dropping from 15-16, to 13-14, and the number creeps upward on the scale.
So this is day 5. At some point I should start getting some kind of ball rolling. But this is sad. Because its not the time. It’s the mental energy.
It’s also of course, the yak-shaving, the procrastination, which I’ll talk about tomorrow.
