I think Richard Kadrey didn't know exactly what he wanted with this book when he started it. The full title is Butcher Bird: A Novel of the Dominion, but it's his only book related to the Dominions as far as I know and Butcher Bird is a rarely used name for a secondary character in the story. Even the Dominions didn't really feature for more than a few pages in it.
Leaving the title aside, this was a pretty fun book. Not a masterpiece, but one of those fish out of water fantasy stories where the hidden realm reveals itself to the main character, then pulls them into weird adventures. This one features angels and demons as ordinary denizens of the "spheres" among other crazy intelligent species, magic, flying ships, trips to Hell, getting friendly with Lucifer, old gods, cities of old memories and lost things and so on and so on.
It was an easy read, so it didn't take me much to finish the book. It wasn't so much wanting to know how it ended (which was obvious - the heroes win) but what other weird visions Kardey can conjure before it does. The lead character is a bit uncommon, as well, as a motorcycle riding tattoo artist called Spyder who is still a nice romantic at heart. At least it's not an adolescent child in an English boarding school!
Bottom line: I am kind of curious about the many Sandman Slim novels by the same author, so this book was a success. If you want something easy and fun, this is it for you.
People know that I sometimes like to hold controversial opinions, sometimes just for the kicks. So first I will ask some questions, ask you to find your own answers, then read about what I think.
Why is sexual harassment different from any other type of harassment? Why is leaving from a job where your boss or colleague is an asshole any different because they are sexual harassers as opposed to regular assholes? Why is offering sexual services, including just dressing or behaving a certain way, a natural way of expressing oneself, but asking for them is illegal? Why do these things seem to happen only in the US?
Now, I am a technical person. While I am certainly not for sexual harassment at work, I need to understand why some types of behaviors are punished so differently from others that are very similar. Consider an employee who is humiliated and disrespected publicly at work, but not in a sexual manner. How could they ever support this outcry against sexual harassment, when their own plight is getting ignored? I mean, do we need laws to tell us when we crossed the line while being jerks? Why is there a legal segregation of jerkness? Why is someone abusing their power more or less guilty based on the type of abuse they chose to exercise?
And, as you might think, my opinion extends to a lot of these special exceptions to civilized behavior. They are called positive discrimination, affirmative action, employment equity and so on, but they boil down to one thing only: another type of discrimination. In the end, like any sort of forced empowerment, they will get abused. The rallying cry of Gretchen Carlson will fizzle out in a sea of false claims and malicious law suits. In fact, it only takes a few to invalidate all the others. It's like trying to make a drink less bitter by adding sugar, rather than removing the bitter ingredient. Or paying someone after you had sex with them against their will, if you see what I mean.
But what am I advocating? Certainly if we abolish the special rules, then all one can do when sexual harassed is to find another job. The asshole in power will hire more and more people until some are weak or desperate enough to accept their advances. If we extend the rules to cover any type of harassment, we expose employers to abuses and tie their hands in how to run their business. Neither option is acceptable, but neither is cherry picking which type of behavior is bad enough to be illegal based on its popularity. This entire issue is systemic: there is no way for the system to self regulate.
When all this #MeToo business started going on, I went and asked women about this. And girls here were supportive of the women who were coming forward, but not supportive of the ensuing publicity circus and these arbitrary lines being drawn in the sand. While the virality of discussion inspired so many people to come forward, which is a good thing, we have to consider why they failed to do so in the past and what will happen when fatigue will inevitably remove this from the public interest. Company policy and employee training, harsher laws? No formalization of common sense (which doesn't seem to be so common anymore) is a good idea.
To summarize this, if you behave like a douchebag and people around you don't call you out on it, then it is culturally OK to continue. It is not right, but putting it into a law won't stop it from happening. The recent publicity around this seems to be coming not from the gravity of the behavior, but from the number of people who suddenly came forward to expose it. If that would have been naturally possible, it would not have been news, it would have just been the normal process of weeding out assholes, so it is clear to me that the problem is not as much the specific type of harassment, but the system that makes difficult the public exposure of it and a subsequent moral censure.
I don't have a solution. I am sure if I could figure it out, so would a lot of other people, and this would be solved already. However, it doesn't hurt to look at these cases from a different perspective from time to time. Like from a different country, with a different culture. Or from high enough to understand which of the social values you foster lead to assholes in power getting more and more power and then abusing it. Let's not get hung up on local solutions for specific problems, turning everything into a legal and moral labyrinth where no one is comfortable, and solve the big problems first.
Sleeping Where I Fall is an autobiographical book from Peter Coyote. You might know him as a Hollywood actor, a man with a stern face, playing congressmen, detectives and conservative dads or other such people in authority. What you probably don't know is that before he was 40, when he decided he would try his hand at an acting career on the big screen, he was a "live off the land" hippie, a fervent believer in alternative cultures that eschew capital and personal property and value human connection and respect of the land and of the spirit, a man who chose his last name as most representing of himself. The guy on the cover is Peter Coyote, too. This book is an amazing recounting of those times, one of the works that I believe need to be read, whether you like them or not.
Personally, I found it amazing. It's not the writing style or how it played with emotions, but the information buried within that makes it a valuable experience reading it. In fact, if I was to critique anything about it, it is that is so packed with anecdotes and mind blowing ideas and descriptions of people, groups, ideologies and places, but does little to bring the reader to the emotions of the writer. It is too intellectual, trying so hard to be accurate and objective as to make the reader numb. Everything else, though, is top notch.
I don't think I would do the book service to summarize it in this review, but it goes so many different and interesting places: hippie communes, motorcycle gangs, famous artists, drugs, politics, road trips, changing the world, personal stories, psychology, acting, music, environment, native American culture, Wall Street, Easy Rider and so on. I do feel that the man who wrote this book is a great human being, but I have the nagging feeling that he misrepresents some of what he describes. Perhaps it is the somewhat neutral tone, the elevated language to render heart wrenching moments or just the fact that I find it so hard to believe a man could go through all that in just under two decades. I don't want to read Emmett Grogan's book Ringolevio on the same period, but you might want to, in order to cross reference and get a more accurate picture.
I recommend this book to just about everyone. It is one of those things that open your eyes a little to what was lost and what could be different and what you never thought about.
As additional resources, you might want to look at The Digger Archives online, where the site is terribly out of date, but the information there is (as is the Digger way) free. Frankly, I am disappointed to see that neither Sleeping Where I Fall or Ringolevio are offered free on that site.
Growing up I always had this fantasy of writing a journal. My sense of privacy - being sure someone would read and judge it - stopped me from pursuing that, as well as the simple fact that I didn't need a journal, I just saw it as a cool thing I should do. Little did I know that in my older years I would want some sort of record of my forgotten youth and find none. Yet the idea persisted.
I started an actual journal as soon as I had a computer and I understood the concept of encryption. It didn't really work, either. It was full of self serving bullshit and it described a person that I really wasn't. One could (and should) read between the lines in order to understand the smug and ignorant state of mind of the author. Later still, I started to write a book, something called The Good Programmer or something of that sort. Phaw! Even if I could have gotten past my chronic impostor syndrome, being a good programmer is nice, but not my goal in life. If it were, I would have made other life choices. And again, it was full of self serving bullshit.
You may detect a pattern here and it might inform your reading this blog post. Anyway, its point is to generalize my experience as a programmer, as fast and as clean as possible. Hope it helps.
Every time I write software - that I care about and have influence over its technical quality - I tend to generalize things: reuse components, refactor duplicate code and so on. In other words, find similar problems and solve them with the same tool. It is not Golden Hammering problems away, that's a different thing altogether, since it is I who is shaping the tool. So how about doing that for my life? I should care about it and have influence over its quality.
First time I started writing code I was actually writing it on paper. I didn't have a computer, but I had just read this beginner's book and I was hooked. The code wouldn't have worked in a million years, but it was the thought that counted: I played around with it. Later on I got a computer and I started using the programs, understanding how it works, not different from getting a smartphone and learning how to phone people. Yet, after a while I found issues that I wanted to solve or games that I wanted to play but didn't have, then I made them myself: I found a problem and solved it. But writing code is not just about the end result. As soon as I explored what other people were doing, I started trying to emulate and improve what they did. I played around with compression and artificial intelligence, for example. And I was a teen in a world of no Internet. I went to the British Council and borrowed actual books, then tried the concepts there a lot.
It was years before I would become a professional programmer, and that is mostly because the hiring process (in any country) is plain stupid. The best HR department in the world is just looking for people that have already done what is required, so that they do it at the current company as well. But that's not what a developer wants. Software is both science and art. The science is a bit of knowledge and a lot of discipline, but the rest, a very large chunk, is just intuition and exploration and imagination. People who want to do the same thing over and over again are not good developers; instead they are probably people that just want to make a buck with which to live their "real" life. For me, real life has been writing code - and I still think I am being paid for putting up with the people I work for and work with, rather that for doing what I love.
Professional work is completely different from the learning period. In it you usually don't have a say on what you work on and the problems that software is supposed to solve are at best something you are indifferent to and at worst something you wouldn't understand (as in will not, even if you could). Yet, the same basic principles apply. First, you are required to write good code. By this your employers mean something that works as they intended, but for you it is still something that you feel pride in having written, something that is readable enough so you understand it a few weeks later when you have to add stuff or repair something. You are expected to "keep up to date", by which they understand you would keep studying in your spare time so that you do work that they don't know they need done, but for you it is still playing around with things. Think about it! You are expected to keep playing around! As for the part where you see what other people do and you get to emulate or improve on that... you have a bunch of colleagues working on the same stuff that you can talk to and compare notes and code review with. Add to this the strong community of software developers that are everywhere on the Internet.
Bottom line: Just keep doing three things and you're good. First play around with stuff. Then find a problem to solve (or someone to provide it for you) and write code for it. Finally, check what other people do and gain inspiration to create or improve your or their work. Oh, did I say finally? This is a while loop, for as long as you are having fun. Hey, what do you know? This does scale. Doesn't it sound like a good plan, even if you are not a software dev?
It seems to me that there are more and more crazy people around me. They are relatives, friends, colleagues, random people on the street and I have no idea where they came from. I don't remember as much insanity from when I was a boy, but then again I was even more oblivious then than I am now, and that's saying something. Yet, since then the population of the planet grew from 4.5 billion to 7 billion and, more importantly to me, the population of my home city of Bucharest grew from about 1.5 million to a city where just as many people come from outside the capital to find opportunities. But the percentage of mentally afflicted seems to have more than doubled. But what is crazy?
I mean, I just saw an old lady, looking like she was chronically homeless, shouting obscenities to no one in particular. Who else was she to talk to except herself? She can't even trust another human being enough to talk to them, even if the thought came to her mind. And if she has an audience of one, just as sane as she is, who is to say she's talking crazy? Or when you see some company executive make stupid after stupid decision, then boldly coming on stage and presenting it as the best idea since fire was invented. Do they know they are sociopaths? Does anybody else know? Do they even care? There is a quote in the Mindhunter TV series: "How does a sociopath become the president of the United States?", asks the young FBI agent. "How does one become president if they are not?", responds the psychology professor. And I am reading this book, that I am going to review in a few days, about the counterculture in America, during the 60's. If those people would appear in front of me right now, foraging through mall trash and explaining cosmic truths while loaded with speed and LSD, I would probably catalog them as insane.
Maybe insanity is not a state, but a perception. It's just a socially unacceptable behavior. It does hurt the person using it, but that's mostly because they can't fit (or maybe they fit too well). Have I become more sensitive because of the carefully constructed shell that protects me from hardship? Anything going through it hurts like hell because I am not used for stuff to come through. I have thin skin covered by layers of callousness. Maybe society is more exclusive now? It is easier to become crazy, as you only have to fall a little bit before you get into an unstoppable spiraling decline. Certainly you can't experiment now with personal freedom; it's almost gone, taken away bit by bit, not (only) by repressive governments, but by our willingness to waste time and resources until there are none left. Open relationships? Life on the road? Chemically expanding your mind? Forget about it! You get homeopathy and holotropic breathwork and feel enlightened.
There is another hypothesis worth exploring. Maybe people are not crazy at all. Perhaps I am the mad one. At every stage I expect the full weight of social scorn to come over me and crush me like the bug I am. How dare I? I wouldn't even know what I was guilty of - which, paradoxically, would prove I am even more guilty. They would come at me with carefully crafted smiles and expressions taken from shows or movies they have all seen and burn me alive, giggling all the way, like they are making the greatest joke in the world while providing me with the help they know I desperately need. All these people that apparently speak only to themselves, yet somehow communicate with others by methods unseen, they would suddenly all turn towards me, pointing their fingers and letting out inarticulate cries. Then, of course, I would know that I am insane, because I would never be able to do any of that.
I just don't know. Where does this vomitous mountain of madness come from? Maybe more importantly, where is it going?
Star Trek Continues, a fan production which started in 2013, ended with the eleventh episodes. As so many others, they are ending a perilous enterprise (pardon the pun) through CBS legal issues and moving to other, non Star Trek related, productions. And it's too bad, because you can see that this series had quality rivaling official Star Trek franchises. I have embedded the playlist with all the episodes. Enjoy!
Here is what Vic himself had to say about the ending of the production:
Drown is a tiny collection of 10 stories about Dominican people, written from the viewpoint of an adult talking about their childhood. Up until the end of the book I was convinced I was reading the story of the same family, written in some weird ass way, and I am sure the stories were changed a little to reflect a similar point of reference; however in truth the 10 stories have little in common other than the fact that they are about Dominicans and that I liked each and every one of them.
It is so interesting to see a good writer pour out his heart on paper. I felt like a greedy vampire, drinking on the lifeblood of the writer. Junot Diaz is, of course, Dominican and the stories are partially autobiographical. I find fascinating how sure of themselves and focused are underprivileged people, as compared to my own experience of ever doubting myself and never feel like I am good enough. In a perverse way, the stories show how liberating it is to know and to be constantly reminded that you are not good enough. You handle rejection well, you always try, because any success, not matter how small, is a victory. No character in this book is ever happy, but they are rarely unhappy. Discontent? maybe. Rebellious and angry against the shit cards they have been dealt? sure. Not giving a shit about anyone but themselves? unfortunately so. But at every step we are reminded of the struggle of the characters to get anywhere in life.
Bottom line: to me it was a refreshing subject, with great writing style. I don't think I will actively pursue any other work from the author, but as a first contact, it was nice, short and to the point.
I am a .NET programmer living and working in Bucharest, Romania.
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Unless otherwise specified, all code or any type of work you find on this blog is under MIT license. While I welcome attribution, I don't require it. Just use anything in any way you see fit. Consider it completely and utterly shared for the lulz.
I think Richard Kadrey didn't know exactly what he wanted with this book when he started it. The full title is Butcher Bird: A Novel of the Dominion, but it's his only book related to the Dominions as far as I know and Butcher Bird is a rarely used name for a secondary character in the story. Even the Dominions didn't really feature for more than a few pages in it.
