The Grumpy Buddha

Is The Grumpy Buddha a Buddhist? (or: Who Cares?)

2011-11-27T22:41:00.006-05:00

Over the holiday, Slate magazine, famed bastion of contrarian thought, reposted an article by one John Horgan about why he "ditched Buddhism".

I will confess that my initial reaction was crawling with unskillful thoughts.

For instance, my first thought was What a profoundly stupid man this John Horgan is. He doesn't understand Buddhism at all.

Followed by I should give him a piece of my mind! Dumb jerkface jerkwad trashing my belief system!

But ... I like the Eightfold Path

But then, I had a much scarier thought: What if he's right?*

I won't keep you in suspense. He's not right. I mean, this was a throwaway Slate article, so demonstrating the problems with his argument isn't exactly proving Fermat's Last Theorem. Nevertheless, I think I learned something while thinking this through, so I thought I'd share.

Horgan's general argument is as follows:

Eventually, and regretfully, I concluded that Buddhism is not much more rational than the Catholicism I lapsed from in my youth; Buddhism's moral and metaphysical worldview cannot easily be reconciled with science—or, more generally, with modern humanistic values.

Amongst his claims are that Buddhism is functionally theistic, because it believes in reincarnation; meditation doesn't work; the concept of "no-self" is scientific nonsense; believing that oneself is unreal is bad; detachment is bad; and finally, that anyone who doesn't feel that Buddhism requires belief in these things isn't really a Buddhist.

My first idea was to consider his claims one by one, then jump on them and smash them into tiny contrarian bits.

The ninth step on the path: Right Jumping

However, I'm not sure that this is a useful course of action. I think that half his claims are strawmen, and the other half are easily refuted -- but I think it'd be more profitable to start with his final claim, and work backwards:

If you are a Buddhist, it means that you must believe these things:

1) You cannot be a Buddhist without meditating regularly, and finding that it reduces stress.

2) You cannot be a Buddhist without meditating regularly, and finding insights about the Nature of Self.

3) You cannot be a Buddhist without believing in reincarnation.

4) You cannot be a Buddhist without having the goal of total abnegation of self.

5) You cannot be a Buddhist without wanting to be detached from everything.

Well, sucks to be The Grumpy Buddha, I tell you what, because I'm not sure about the universality of #1 or #2, and I certainly don't believe in #3-#5, and yet I consider myself a Buddhist.

Horgan's argument for why you have to believe in #1-#5 to be a Buddhist is as follows:

Some Western Buddhists have argued that principles such as reincarnation, anatta, and enlightenment are not essential to Buddhism. In Buddhism Without Beliefs and The Faith To Doubt, the British teacher Stephen Batchelor eloquently describes his practice as a method for confronting—rather than transcending—the often painful mystery of life. But Batchelor seems to have arrived at what he calls an "agnostic" perspective in spite of his Buddhist training—not because of it. When I asked him why he didn't just call himself an agnostic, Batchelor shrugged and said he sometimes wondered himself.

Essentially: Horgan spoke to a secular Buddhist, and this person doesn’t feel like he absolutely must own the “Buddhist” label. Thus, secular Buddhists aren't really Buddhists.

This is an argument? I've consulted an expert on Latin phrases for logical fallacies, but she came up empty on "argument-by-being-a-schmuck". The closest she could come is

Caput suum in ano est

Simply because a person who first argues a given proposition turns out to be wishy-washy about it does not imply that the proposition is wrong.

Even if that person has written a book.

I have been an agnostic for virtually all of my adult life, but I have only recently come to identify with the Buddhist label. Why do I identify with Buddhism?

Go team non-attachment! But, you know, don't get all crazy about it.

Because I find that Buddhism has a structure that is useful in understanding why we suffer and how best to end (or at least alleviate) that suffering.

And that, in retrospect, is what struck me as so odd about Horgan’s piece.

He did not say

“I rejected Buddhism because I do not believe that suffering comes from attachment,”

“I do not believe that the Eightfold Path -- the practice of Right Action, Right Speech, Right Mindfulness, etc. -- has anything to do with the alleviation of suffering,"

“It is not helpful to me to recognize that I need not identify with every thought that comes into my brain"

“It do not find it useful to be mindful about the intentions I bring to everyday life.”

No, he said that Buddhists must believe in reincarnation, must try to completely dissolve the concept of self, and must want to detach themselves from all desires -- nay, all of humanity. Well, no wonder he rejected it!

I can’t be too hard on him, though. One of the links in the Slate comments about understanding Western-style Buddhism pointed to this site. The author says the following:

Buddhism is about getting to the root of existence, the truth of self, our delusions regarding what the self actually is, not how to prop up the ‘self’ and make it feel better.

Yeesh! No pressure! Perhaps this is what Buddhism is about for her, but to me this misses the point by a smidge -- and is kind of in line with what Horgan was bitching about.

My interpretation of the Four Noble Truths is that Buddhism is about reducing/alleviating suffering, specifically through the recognition that suffering comes through attachment. It’s not about discovering the Mysteries of the Universe. Now, it is absolutely true (as I understand it) that a major part of the path is discovering the nature of the self and one’s desires, but to me, that is the method, not the goal.

I'm not Pierce from Community, and, I would imagine, neither are a lot of other fans of Buddhism. We’re not all trying to become 15^th level Laser Lotus Buddhist Masters.

Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Patient acceptance of twofold egolessness as I achieve the cessation of craving and enter Tathagatha's Nirvana!

In my opinion, if:

You believe and appreciate that suffering comes from attachment,
You work to alleviate that suffering through the practices of Right Action, Right Speech, Right Mindfulness, etc., and
You understand that one's naive and reflexive concept of "self" is seriously problematic (note to Horgan: please read The Robot's Rebellion, or this post -- no scientific justification for anatta my pasty white Buddhist ass)

3) Then … you’re functionally a Buddhist – no woo, wizardry, or mystical whathaveyou required.

A Google Image search for "magic spells buddhism" found the above as the first link.
Make your own jokes, please.

So: you don’t have to completely jettison the concept of self, or look forward to the day when you do so.

Or believe in reincarnation.

Or think that when you meditate just right that it’ll be like floating in the clouds with magical all-wise spirit-beings.

I mean, you can, if you want. I'm not going to get all judgy on you.** And I know there are people out there who identify as Buddhist who would insist that if you don't believe those things, you aren't really a Buddhist. To which you can respond either:

"Uh-huh!"

Or, perhaps slightly more skillfully,

"Who cares? My practice is my practice, and how one labels it seems irrelevant."

Just remember, as a 100th level Laser Lotus once said:

Do not believe in anything (simply) because you have heard it.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
Do not believe in anything because it is spoken and rumoured by many.
Do not believe in anything (simply) because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
But after observation and analysis when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conductive to the good and benefit of one and all then accept it and live up to it.

------------------------------

*(Also in there: "Um, I think its kind of ironic that for a Buddhist, you're reacting so strongly to his article." Well, screw you, mindfulness! Let me have my fun.)
** Hah! Yeah, right. Of course I will -- but it'll be from the non-Buddhist side of me. And be a lot less snarky than it would have been 10 years ago.

The Grumpy Buddha is Comforted by the Quote of the Week

2011-10-23T17:08:00.001-04:00

When I started to write fiction I had the great disadvantage of having absolutely no talent for it. I couldn’t get characters in and out of rooms. They lost their hats and so did I. If more than two people were on scene I couldn’t keep one of them alive ... Give me two people snotting at each other across a desk and I am happy. A crowded canvas just bewilders me.

– Raymond Chandler

His Grumpiness Gets Critiqued: Part I (The Critiques and My Nonskillful Reaction)

2011-10-09T18:10:00.002-04:00

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WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING

This Post Is Laden With Heavy ME ME ME ME ME ME ME Content. Those Looking For General Grumpy Brilliance About Stuff and Things Should Go Elsewhere, Like Here or Here and especially Here.

WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING
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Over the last six months or so, his Grumpiness has been writing a little somethin'-somethin' involving a certain goblin detective named Axiom. While this was clearly a bad decision, it's something he's committed to, at least for as long as he's not uncommitted to it.

After months of regular writing, and helpful critiques on a number of chapters by a Tipper and a Jeff, I figured it was time to see if I could build a larger critiquing group, not to mention see whether my writing would fly with people who didn't know from the beginning what I was trying to do ... and so, I submitted my prologue and first chapter to Critters.

The critiques are in, and while on the whole they've been positive and helpful, there have been some annoying negative consequences to fight through. I thought I'd take some time to summarize the comments I got, and discuss what common themes there are (or aren't), and then figure out why I'm reacting the way I am.

A little backstory: When I wrote the Prologue/Chapter 1, I (and Tipper and Jeff) had a very good idea of exactly what the world was, and so did my original readers, because of all the (later) chapters that had been written before. The new critiquers, though ... well, you'll see.

Below I've cut-and-pasted some representative comments about various elements of the writing; below the comments I discuss my reactions.

On the Prologue:

Overall the intro was intriguing. I liked the card game as a way to introduce the character and drop him into an uncomfortable situation. --SM

I thought the opening line was a fantastic way to draw me in ... -- RB

You see, the opening hooked me ... I nodded after I finished the prologue. You've done a very good job and you deserve a pat on the back. --CM

BUT, OF COURSE

... the down on his luck gambler's been done to death and your game feels way too close to Texas Hold 'Em. Based on the prologue alone I have put this one back on the shelf. --DR

It’s not obvious why the prologue is there in the first place. It doesn’t do anything to spike the interest of the reader. --DS

I thought your prologue did not go well with the rest of your story. Sure he may want money and this is how you kick off your first chapter about him being late to work, but it really does not add to the story besides that. --YL

I'm not sure of the point of the prologue unless it is to set the stage for the fact that Axiom is broke and bored. --CB

On the Setting:

After reading the prologue and chapter 1, I don’t know what kind of world I’m in. I get that it’s not Earth, but is it a dark-future kind of setting, a sword and sorcery realm, or other? I have a sneaky suspicion that it’s a sword and sorcery kind of realm, but really don’t know for certain. There’s reference to a cop carrying a broadsword, but the reference to cops, gangs and the like seems somewhat contemporary. Perhaps you could lay a few more clues so I know what kind of world to be imagining. --BA

The setting was very confusing for me ... Assuming a typical fantasy setting, rush hour wouldn’t exist. Fantasy worlds are going to be agrarian based ... Carrying a cup of coffee as you walk to work, again more 21st century than medieval fantasy. No paper cups, so he’s likely using a clay mug which would require a kiln capable of hitting 600C. These things are more difficult to procure than people like to think. --DS

[O]verall I'm not seeing enough of the place ... the description is insufficiently present --RS

The scenes seemed out of focus and I could not tell where our main character is exactly. It is as if he is magically placed in a new situation and I felt that you rushed your first chapter. --YS

Unfortunately, you did not provide much orientation to the reader through the Prologue and first chapter, so I was left with many questions about what this or that meant, and what was the setting ... I had difficulty getting a handle on what world we're in. --AL

As a reader I have NO idea as to what the physical appearance of any of the characters are in broad strokes. Human, hybrid, alien, non-human. There are no
clues to indicate otherwise, but when Axiom refers to the thugs as "grubs" it could conceivably be a race of fly people. --CB

Even the person who liked it the best was a little iffy about the whole "setting" thing:

With setting, I couldn't tell whether the story was exploring concepts of urban fantasy. You mentioned cops, so I was expecting a gun, but then you mentioned sword. I got a little confused. I however resisted the temptation to read again, I wanted to put myself in the shoes of the reader -- I wanted to crit from a reader's point of view. But if setting was clarified and I didn't see it, no need to touch that part on setting. --CM

though,

you do a remarkable job of resisting the temptation of spontaneous exposition to explain setting and place. Definitely showing as opposed to telling. Harder to do but better in the end. --CB

On Axiom:

I like your main character – quick thinking yet jaded. --BA

The voice and humor stands out as a strength --RS

You give Axiom a very distinct internal voice for his first person observations. --CB

though as usual AL is a whiny little ... *ahem*, I mean:

I'm a little undecided on how he came across to me. --AL

On the Encounters with the Toughs/Structure (e.g., not getting to the murder scene immediately)

I think the final interaction with the ruffians did the most to generate empathy for me. He clearly didn’t feel entirely in control. But he took a risk to prevent something bad happening to someone he only had a general positive feeling for.... This was the most effective aspect of the story so far in generating and keeping my interest. --DS

I suspect the body of the story is going to involve the narrator's efforts to solve the crime of the multiple murders, but I didn't think that the fact that the main thrust of the novel wasn't overly identified was of concern. --RB

The chapter seemed to suggest that the murders up near the roof would eventually be Axiom's primary case. So, I came away from Chapter 1 wondering what role the chapter would play in the overall plot of the novel, and would we see Slab, Shifty, and friends again. --AL

Then we get to the meat of the chapter. But then we move on into another lengthy encounter, which at this point doesn't seem to have anything to do with the murder investigation. --SM

The interaction between Axiom and the thugs was okay as well. I had a slightly hard time believing that some thugs would shakedown a cop on the way to work, though, no matter how tough they are. --CB (Editor's note: I can rationalize this, build in some backstory to defend it, but generally speaking, oops.)

You do a great job of sharing more of Axiom's character when he opts to confront the goons risking his job for tardiness. Provided insight to the character without telling again. Deft touch there. --CB

The recurring thugs are a good character reveal. I guess the important question is are they weight bearing? Unless they become important you should probably find a more salient way to make that character reveal. --DR

Overall

Overall I don't think there's much I can contribute to improving the structure or narrative ... I think the key question to be answered when looking at the opening chapters of a novel is 'would you read any further?' And the answer in this case is a resounding yes. --RB

I enjoyed every word in your story. Characterization was perfect. Dialogue and exposition too were done well. POV was constant and the POV character saw only what he can see. The last is style. You've got it. Go you. --CM

I have no clue about such as what in the world just happened. --YS

This was a great piece of story-telling. --RB

Your writing style was smooth to read, but the questions that kept popping into my head kept disrupting the reading experience. --AL

My Reaction, Stage I: Ego BOOST!

Non-Attachment Shmon-Attachment -- Reading stuff like "I enjoyed every word in your story" and "The last is style. You've got it. Go you" was like injecting heroin into my eyeballs. I dismissed (mostly) the more negative comments as coming from folks who were looking for something more plot-drive than character-driven, and just not getting the point. Some of the more positive feedback was from someone who has actually published a few short stories, which of course makes him better than other people. Go me, indeed!

My Reaction, Stage II: Confusion/Frustration

Dude, he only wanted a little earth and water.

After digging a little deeper into the comments, there were some odd contradictions, like

And I have to say how much I loved the following line about the blood beetles in hard boots. --RF

"though the metaphor only worked if you gave the blood beetles hard boots" – the metaphor only works if the reader knows what a blood beetle is. --DS

Well, that's annoying.

And even some folks who gave it a general thumbs up thought the prologue was kind of pointless, with the exception of those that thought it was great.

And the encounter with the toughs was a great character reveal for Axiom, except for those that that it seems like a tangent because it's delaying us from getting to the murders.

And the fact is that in almost all detective fiction I've read, the detective is noted to be such on the first page (if not the first paragraph), and is On The Scene or Getting The Job within the first 1-3 pages. I'm not doing that. H'm.

My Reaction, Stage III: Inspiration!

Seriously, it was a very reasonable deal.

Sure, there were contradictions in the feedback, but I was getting three very consistent messages:

Axiom is an interesting character and the style works (my attempt to be a 5th rate Raymond Chandler is a success! Now to climb the rung to 4th rate ...)
The setting description is sorely lacking
Some folks liked it enough that they were willing to read further chapters

So I put aside writing New Stuff, wordsmithed Chapter 2 a bit, and sent it along to some folks. And then, to one person, Chapter 3. Thus leading to the next stage ...

My Reaction, Stage IV: Paralyzation

I just want a hug.

(Yeah, I know, 2006 emailed, they want their images back.)

And here's the problem with submitting material for a writing critique when you are only a quarter of the way (at best) through a first draft. You polish polish polish a couple of chapters, send them out, and while they're flawed, you find some folks that really like what you've done. You respect them, they respect you and give good feedback -- what could go wrong?

This: you decide that you need to hold onto these people, and so you send them Chapter 2. Except, you know, they loved Chapter 1, but that's partially because you edited it to death. And it's one of the most recent things you've written. Chapter 2, well, it's good, but it probably needs some work. I mean, you don't want to disappoint these people, right?

Did monkeys write this? Monkeys on heroin?

Imagine the look on their faces if they open up the next chapter and it has all the flaws of the early stuff, but none of the tasty stylistic goodness! That's the thing about writing something that is more character-based/voice-based/atmosphere-based than plot-based -- that shit takes time.

And so you enter a cycle of working and reworking and re-re-working your early stuff when you haven't even made it a quarter of the way through your novel -- even though you don't even know if, by the time you finish, it'll even make sense to start where you started. Ack!

Plus, after tweaking and trimming and polishing the early chapters, reviewing something new that you've just written ... well, it reads like you just started flinging poo at the computer screen, hoping something would stick.

And you call yourself a writer ...

Spending all that time tweaking old stuff so it's Good seems to have lowered my intolerance for generating new stuff, which will decidedly Kinda Suck. Meaning I've fallen off the track that's been working for me -- tweak only occasionally, while concentrating on writing new material. Bleah!

Still, being cognizant of all of this should be helpful. My current goal is not to worry about the old chapters, get some new stuff down on the page, and put off getting critiques of later chapters for a month or two. While trying to put in a little more description, of course. (Argh.)

As far as whether those very first chapters will make it to the final cut -- i.e., whether I'll decide I need to start At The Scene, and delete or move Chapters 0 and 1 ... well, I'm going to try not to think about that right now ...

Summing up, I think reviewer DS really nailed it:

"Fancy-pants" – not a term I associate with a standard fantasy setting.

E' and Buddhism (or: The chick with the weird hair won't stop staring at me!)

2011-10-08T02:06:00.003-04:00

Okay, let's start here:

Don't look away!

I'd like to tell you something cool I discovered about the parallels between Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) and Buddhism, but I can't. Little distracted right now ... she's locked into me with her squinty, steely gaze, and if I look away for even a moment, it will give her the opportunity she needs to suck me into the book with her hair.

What book? This one:


"New" is relative, of course.

I think she stole the hair from the smiley guy on the right and taped it to her forehead. But that's not important right now. What is important, and by "important" I mean "not really important, but interesting" is the parallel between RET - really, the precursor to cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) - and Buddhism.

"But Grumpy Buddha," you may say, "everyone knows about the connection between cognitive behavioral therapy and Buddhism! There are a million books connecting mindfulness and CBT. Tell me something I don't know!"

Well, first of all, no need to be such a jerk about it. Whatever happened to Right Speech? Second, this goes past mere mindfulness. (Okay, there's nothing "mere" about mindfulness, but open your mind for a second.) I found two (related) parallels that are only tangentially related to mindfulness. I'll start with the less cool one, and then build to the holy-crapoli one.

First: Albert Ellis, founder of RET, posited three "Insights" one can get from Rational Emotive Therapy:

Insight 1 - People seeing and accepting the reality that their emotional disturbances at point C only partially stem from the activating events or adversities at point A that precede C.

Insight 2 - No matter how, when, and why people acquire self-defeating or irrational beliefs (i.e. beliefs which are the main cause of their dysfunctional emotional-behavioral consequences), if they are disturbed in the present, they tend to keep holding these irrational beliefs and continue upsetting themselves with these thoughts.

-- That's right, bitches. Ellis just threw the Second Noble Truth at you, in psychologese.

Insight 3 - No matter how well they have achieved insight 1 and insight 2, insight alone will rarely enable people to undo their emotional disturbances. They may feel better when they know, or think they know, how they became disturbed - since insights can give the impression of being useful and curative. But, it is unlikely that they will actually get better and stay better unless they accept insights 1 and 2, and then also go on to strongly apply insight 3: There is usually no way to get better and stay better but by: continual work and practice in looking for, and finding, one’s core irrational beliefs; actively, energetically, and scientifically disputing them; replacing one’s absolutist musts with flexible preferences; changing one's unhealthy feelings to healthy, self-helping emotions; and firmly acting against one’s dysfunctional fears and compulsions.

-- AND then, as you can see, he throws ... er, something.

What were Insights 1 and 2, again?

Okay, it's not that tough. Basically, it's Ellis's version of the Eightfold Path, and one that's not too different than the one we're familiar with. It's not difficult to see Right View, Right Intention, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration, and, most of all, Right Effort in there.

Basically, you need more than just knowing that suffering is caused by attachment. You have to practice, regularly, to make skillful choices, to reflect on one's thoughts, and to reject firm attachments to beliefs.

BUT that's not all, folks. In the intro to the 1975 edition (aka the lady with the funky hair edition), Ellis and Harper note that they rewrote it using E-prime. E-prime eliminates all forms of to be, such as is, was, am, has been, being, etc.

The benefits of E-prime line up so closely with my (admittedly naive) understanding of the "no-self" Buddhist teachings that it made my head explode.

Don't worry, I feel better now.

To be honest, I still haven't quite grasped the whole bit in Buddhism about the abnegation of self. Frankly, it sounds kind of creepy.

On the other hand, when Ellis talks about it, I feel like I can leap right on board:

"When we use E-prime, we get rid of silly and essentially unanswerable questions, such as 'What is my destiny?' 'Who am I?'"

"When we employ E-prime, we eliminate the degree of completeness, finality, and time independence that we state or apply when we use the verb 'to be'."

When you stop using "to be" in all its forms, it's a lot tougher to make overgeneralizations. Not impossible, but tougher. The examples throughout the book emphasize this point: in RET, the problem so much isn't that we have a Self, it's that we get extremely caught up in it, attribute permanent traits to it, and assume that it's unified at all times and places -- and that most of the suffering we inflict on ourselves is due to overattachment to self-concept, and some rather silly beliefs about what we should/must do in order to protect it or live up to it.

Nice, eh?

Well, I thought it was cool.

So did I! And my hair isn't going to consume your soul, silly. Now, look away ...

Thoughts On Fitness From My Couch

2011-09-22T02:07:00.001-04:00

Okay, technically it's me giving my thoughts, not my couch, but lately we've been of the same mind on things.

If you're reading this there's a good chance that you clicked on The Grumpy Buddha link at The Fitness Nerd -- and if that's true, then there's an even better chance you're doing a respectable impression of a slack-jawed yokel right now.

Where iz the stuff bout push-ups and processed fud?

The Good Nerd has honored me with a link because I asked him a couple of fitnessy-type questions over the last couple of months -- at least, I guess that's the reason for the link. Thing is, unlike all the other folks in his blogroll, I never post about fitness. Instead, I blather on about Buddhism and lately, about Writing.

BUT. In honor of the Nerd, this will change, and I will tell you EVERYTHING I know about Fitness. From my couch. While eating a entire box of Entenmann's donuts.

Note: I wasn't always on my couch. About 2 years ago, I was in the middle of my first course of P90X. About 16 months ago, I was in the middle of my second course -- with a little Insanity and Crossfit thrown in, because it was just gettin' a little too easy.

BUT THEN ...

Okay, Tony, you were right, straight-arm shoulder flys don't need a lot of weight

Stupid Crossfit "girls"

What I thought was muscle pain in my right elbow turned out to be nasty, nasty tendonitis/tennis elbow/Lateral epicondylitis.

And it did not go away after taking a couple of months off.

And fifteen minutes into a pull-ups/push-ups/squats bit from Crossfit, my form went south (I guess) and OW OW OW OW OW. My left leg fell off from below the knee ... or, um, something tore a little bit.

A little over a year later, with ~5lbs of muscle lost and ~20lbs of fat gained back (putting me roughly where I was before starting to work out in January of 2009), I give you

THE GRUMPY BUDDHA'S THOUGHTS ON FITNESS

Once you start working out regularly, don't ever skip two days.
Track everything.
Don't model your intensity level in Kenpo X off of Wes. Yikes.
Just because you're hurt doesn't mean you can't do some core work, or modify other workouts. Seriously, get your fat ass off the couch already!
When you're eating healthy, you'll be amazed at how not-hungry you are for the number of calories you're taking in.
When you pig out, eat less the next day. Yeah, you might have read otherwise somewhere. Screw 'em.
Seriously, you don't need the processed crap. And it's fun to feel morally superior to all those suckers who can't resist the damned potato chips.
Grapes grapes grapes grapes grapes grapes.
After a certain age, those injuries aren't going to heal by themselves. REHAB goddammit, REHAB.
When you've been out of it for awhile, don't worry. The old habits come back surprisingly fast. I wouldn't be on this couch right now if I wasn't fighting a cold.
There's a lot out there about how you don't need to stretch before working out. Screw that, too. If you're used to stretching, stretch.
Chocolate milk is a damned yummy and perfectly acceptable recovery drink. Not only will it help build muscle, it'll make you a lot less sore afterwards.

Admittedly, not a lot of profundity there, but quit your bitchin', you got something.

Scene #6: Corporal Tunny and the Thing with the Different Point-of-View and Exposition and Stuff

2011-09-06T00:59:00.000-04:00

"Tunny."
"Uh?" He opened one eye and the sun stabbed him directly in the brains.

....

Tunny sighed. "You carry the hammock."

Now that we've been introduced to the three main characters:

Curnden Craw: Competent, Respected, Chilled
Prince Calder: Conniving, Vengeful, Smart-Ass
Bremer de Gorst: Whiny, Glory-Seeking, Bad-Ass

Abercrombie decides to fill in some gaps a bit by introducing two minor POV characters; the first is Corporal Tunny,

"a veteran of the Starikland Rebellion, the Gurkish War, the last Northern War, the Siege of Adua, this current unpleasantness and a quantity of peacetime soldiering that would have bored a keener mind to death."

The second character, Beck, has a nice little character arc; Tunny, on the other hand, seems here mostly to amuse and get us a sense of what life is like among the grunts on the Union side of the war.

Scene Question: Will Tunny be able to dodge doing work?
Answer to Scene Question: Hell no. What are you, stupid?

Abercrombie took care to make Tunny quite distinct from any of our main characters. He's a smart-ass, sure, but he's also a slacker and a bit of a coward (or, as he'd probably put it, realist) -- as he says,

"wars are hard enough work without people fighting in the middle of 'em."

Basically, the Tunny chapter gives us exposition about things like the chain of command (after we see Bremer deliver his message to the General, we hear Tunny's opinion on how shit will be rolling downhill, which will culminate thusly:)

"Within a minute or two, First Sargeant Forest will arrive to position his bared buttocks above my undeserving head."

Generally, with Tunny we're getting the dirt on the gritty details of war. We're not getting that from Craw so much -- he's got a small band of Named Men, after all, you're not going to see much bellyaching there. And not from Calder, who isn't on the front lines. As far as Bremer goes ... well, we did get a good chunk of exposition in the Bremer chapter, so: crap.

Still, as I recall, we'll be getting a bit less of it from Bremer in the future, as he develops his own little arc, and even then, in his chapter we learned more about what was going on at the upper echelons and not what life was like in the trenches.

Not much else to say except that Tunny has an enormously entertaining voice, and if you're going to throw exposition at the reader (and you kind of have to in a war novel), a character like Tunny is a good way to do it. He's chatty, he's got strong opinions, and he's quite knowledgeable. Unlike two of our three main characters, he doesn't have any incredibly strong desires (Craw, to me, is less driven), but Tunny has taken a firm stance against dying, and will be sharing with his newbie troops exactly the best way to non-fight fight a war.

Next Time: Our completely-different-in-almost-every-conceivable-way other minor character, Beck.

Kicking Meditation's Sorry Ass

2011-08-01T00:27:00.001-04:00

HELL YEAH.

Why the celebration? Because His Grumpiness successfully met his meditation goal for the last three months:

20 days of 15 minute sittings
20 days of 10 minute sittings
20 days of 5 minute sittings

Now I know what you're thinking. Why is His Grumpiness feeling like this:

when he should probably feel a little more like this:

After all, there are plenty of folks who meditate for an hour a day, or go off on week-or-month-or-year-long retreats. Well all I can say to that is SCREW THEM. Stupid jerks, running around bragging about how awesome they are, what with their lotus positions and their inner peace.

Er, anyway ... point is, six months ago, I was all "I should meditate but I don't, it's hard and I'm just too impatient and I just end up daydreaming and wah-wah-wah." But now I'm at a spot where not only does meditating feel good (though I still have to drag myself to do it -- it's just not as difficult to do so), but when I get going, it feels like 10-15 minutes is too short.

It's kind of like working out -- the first 10 minutes are hell, but then they get better. Same thing with meditating -- during the first 10 minutes my mind is bouncing around all over the goddamn place, but things start to settle and get more manageable. I've done a couple 20-minuters and they were actually kinda nice.

There's only one drawback, and that's that except for right now, it doesn't feel like that much of an accomplishment. Everything I've read (e.g., stuff like this) suggests that gradual, consistent change is the only kind of change that has a chance to become permanent.

Sadly, the problem with gradual change is that it's not something that is a big endorphin trigger. On the cusp of the accomplishment I am all "Go Me Go!" but I don't feel that things are much different than six months ago, even though they are.

Same with writing: His Grumpiness has written 3000+ words a week for the last two months, and it's clear in retrospect that I'm a better writer than I was even a year ago, but it's not something I feel in my gut.

C'est la vie. It's supposed to be about the journey, not the destination: the whole point is to let go of the checking-off-the-accomplishment-boxes.

Still ... I made my goal, so for tonight, WOOT!

The Heroes, Scene 5: The Nothing-ing (p. 48-55)

2011-06-25T23:45:00.001-04:00

"Beautiful, ain't it?" said Agrick, big grin across his freckled face.

"Is it?" muttered Craw. He'd been thinking about the ground, and how he might use it, and how an enemy might do the same.

. . .

"Doubt it. But I have a bad feeling." He frowned across Shivers' black outline, leaning against one of the Heroes, the valley drenched in sunlight beyond, and he put one hand on his stomach. "And I've learned to listen to my gut."

Wonderful snorted. "Hard to ignore something so bloody big, I guess."

Ah, good ole Nothing. I've been waiting for Nothing to happen for awhile now, and finally, it arrives! Now, you'd think that Nothing would be easy to do, but you'd be wrong.

Harder than it looks.

The gist of my yammering is that according to those Writing Book People, stories (at least, your non-hoity-toity conventional variety) generally consist of two elements: scene and sequel. You've got your scene -- what with the action and the conflict and the hey-hey and ho-ho, and AFTER that, you've got your sequel.

Santa: Scene

Santa: Sequel. Did you really have to kill all those teddy bears?

What we have in Scene #5 is the sequel to Scene #1. There's no pressing Scene Question, for once; instead, we have the reactions of the crew to what comes next now that they've taken the Heroes.

Generally, sequel is in this order:

Emotion
Thought
Decision
Action

but in this chapter there's a lot more emotion and thought than there are decision and action. After all, there's nothing to be decided, really:

But then in Craw's experience, and he'd plenty, wars were made from ninety-nine parts boredom, usually in the cold and damp, hungry and ill, often hauling a great weight of metal uphill, to one part arse-opening terror.

Craw knows what he needs to do: sit on his ass, wait, and make sure nobody sneaks up on 'em.

We're reminded of this in the very first paragraph -- Craw, our POV character, is pondering offense and defense. We learn in this chapter how each other 'main' minor character (Whirrun, Wonderful, and Agrick) is dealing with the situation:

Agrick: Cheerful, until Craw annoys him (to have some fun, and to sneak in some needed exposition for those poor souls who didn't read The First Law trilogy)

Whirrun: Living in the moment in the way only someone who thinks he's fulfilling some grand destiny can.

Wonderful: Thinking about her family, and choices made.

Craw: Thinking about a woman, Colwen, he had a thing for, and choices made.

The chapter ends with Shivers showing up (poor ole Shivers) and a bit of foreshadowing about how bad it's going to get, but nothing too dramatic. All in all, a nice little chapter: nothing dramatic, just something that gets in some exposition and character development.

That said, it would not be incorrect to surmise that when we next visit Craw and company, the shit will start hitting the fan.

Next Time: Meet Corporal Tunny!

The Heroes, Scene #4: Calder and Dow Get Hot and Heavy (p. 36-47)

2011-06-19T04:50:00.000-04:00

The stable doors shut with a bang like a headsman's axe, and it took all of Calder's famous arrogance not to jump clean in the air.

...

He strode between the grinning Carls and out into the evening, all the while thinking about how he was going to kill Black Dow, and take back what was stolen from his father.

When we left Calder, a one-eyed sociopath with authority issues was bringing him to Dow, probably for milk and cookies.

Calder + Dow = BFF

We're reminded of this in the very first line; the chapter doesn't start with some lame-ass description of the weather, but rather the war meeting -- "Three of Dow's five War Chiefs were in attendance ... the three that liked him least."

Scene Summary

Calder attends the War Meeting, led by Black Dow, attended by War Chiefs Glama Golden, Cairm Ironhead, and Brodd Tenways, as well as Dow's Second, Splitfoot.
They throw some exposition at us regarding recent battles
We meet Stranger-Come-Knocking, a funny, slightly schizophrenic nine-foot-tall-ish warrior and new ally
Shivers is sent to play messenger-boy, ala Bremer. He seems similarly thrilled about it.
Calder isn't given an assignment -- he suggests he'll go help his father-in-law recruit, and Dow says "Sure, whatever."
Dow reminds Calder that he's got Calder's wife, Seff under his thumb. A moment later, Calder is past that, back to plotting revenge.

As always, I'll start with the scene question -- the plan is, at novel's end, to chain these puppies together for each character. Should be interesting to see how many scenes each character has, and what each arc looks like.

Scene Question:

What the hell does Dow want/will Calder survive?

Answer to our Scene Question:

Just to remind Calder he's under his (Dow's) thumb/Yes

Dow demonstrates that he's fine (for now) with leaving Calder alone, as long as Calder doesn't fuck up, "dig my roots from under me". For most folks, that'd be a nice plus. However, the scene ends with Dow warning Calder that if he messes around, he'll hurt Calder's wife, Seff. Nonetheless, Calder walks out plotting about how he is going to kill Dow, and "take back what was stolen from his father."

Thus, this is more apt:

Answer to our Scene Question:

Just to remind Calder he's under his (Dow's) thumb, and Yes, but Calder is committed to action that will risk his life and his wife's life anyway.

Character Description

I noticed that Abercrombie does a bit of what I've seen in Elmore Leonard with regard to ending description with a bit of judgment. For instance, consider the war chiefs:

Glama Golden looked the hero from his scalp to his toes, big-knuckle brawny and heavy-jaw handsome, his long hair, his bristling mustache ... fistful of rings on his thick fingers, every part of him buffed to a pretty shine with bluster and self-love.

Cairm Ironhead was a very different prospect. His scar-crossed face was a fortress of frown you could've blunted an axe on ... chain mail glinting under a cloak of black bear-fur. The rumour was he'd strangled that bear. Probably for looking at him wrong.

Not bad.

Sense Check Scene #4

Sound ("Doors shut with a bang" -- first line)

Touch (None directly -- first 1.5 pages are mostly observation)

Smell ("smell of old hay and old horses, but far stronger was the reek of ready violence, think as the stink in a marsh" -- 1.5 pages in.)

Taste (Nope)

Rough beat/tag count, Scene #4 (p. 38-41)

Beats: 29

Nothing: 13

Said: 12

Said + adverb: 0
Grunted: 1
Sneered: 2
Growled: 2
Hissed: 1
Asked: 1
Chimed: 1
Muttered: 1

-- I figured Abercrombie couldn't keep up the "never use 'said' in a Calder scene" pattern, but c'est la vie. Interesting that well over half the dialogue has no tags of any kind -- either beats, or nothing. Also interesting that nobody is nodding, or shaking their head, and there's only one shrug in there -- I see that a lot of those actions in the fiction of a writer that shall remain nameless.

Finally ... the dialogue between Stanger-Come-Knocking, the 9-foot tall giant,and Dow is some of the best in the book -- no mean feat:

At Yeweald I fought the Dog Tribe and was pierced with seven arrows." He pointed out some pink blobs scattered across his ribs with his club of a forefinger. "But I fought on, and made a hill of their dead, and made their land my land, and their women and children my people."

Dow sighed, as if had a half-naked giant at most of his war meetings and was getting tired of it. "Maybe it's time to think about a shield."

"They are for cowards to hide behind. My wounds tell the story of my strength." The giant jerked his thumb at a star-shaped mass that covered one shoulder, and his back, and half his left arm with flesh lumped and mottled as oak-bark. "The dreaded witch Vanian sprayed me with a liquid fire, and I carried her to the lake and drowned her while I burned."

Dow picked a fingernail. "Reckon I'd have tried to put it out first."

.... and after he leaves:

"He seems a good sort," said Calder, brightly. "Nice of him not to show off the scars on his cock."

The Heroes, Scene #3, Bremer dan Gorst, the Whiny Hero (p. 21-36)

2011-06-06T00:29:00.000-04:00

The column was in chaos. The rain poured down. The army was mired in the filth and the men were in the most rotten spirits. And mine the most rotten in the whole putrefying swarm.
….

He stalked off into the drizzle after the wagon, and could almost hear the mocking laughter of the men and their officers prickling at his back.

Poor Bremer.

Bremer dan Gorst as a young man

In truth, the scene begins with a letter that Bremer is writing to his Majesty, recapping recent events and troop movements. Bremer is a seething cauldron of hatred on the inside, while being a polite grunt on the outside.

We see this immediately: the letter to his August Majesty puts a positive spin on things ("the weather is fair ... the men are in the highest spirits") while the follow-up shows what's really happening, and how bitter Bremer is about all of it.

And so once again we have exposition while character is exposed. His letter to his August Majesty, followed by what Bremer is really experiencing and thinking, demonstrates the central element of his personality, while the letter itself informs us of recent events and introduces to us to some new characters -- Lord Marshal Kroy, General Jalenhorm, Lord Governor Meed, and General Mitterick. Pretty sneaky, sis.

Poor Gorst ... we know what his Character Question is almost immediately -- Will Gorst ever get any respect?

Not getting any you-know-what

You know what would get him some respect? A good Scene Question, that's what! A mission! Yeah, that's it, a big-ole life-or-death mission, where the most dangerous warrior in the Union could kick some ass. That, and some sort of voicebox transplant, given his high-pitched, squeaky voice. (You're a cruel man, Abercrombie.)

Yeah. Sorry, Bremer. Anyway, Gorst is late for a meeting, so in scene 3 (let's say) the very lame question is "Will he get there, and will anyone really care?") After some heroics to push a wagon out of the mud:

"Thanks for the help, sir." The mud-caked soldier reached out with a clumsy paw and managed to smear the muck that now befouled Gorst's uniform even more widely. "Sorry, sir. Very sorry."
Keep your axles oiled you retarded scum. Keep your cart on the road you gawping halfwits. Do your damn jobs you lazy vermin. Is that too much to ask? "Good," muttered Gorst, brushing the man's hand away and making a futile attempt to straighten his jacket. "Thank you." He stalked off into the drizzle after the wagon, and could almost hear the mocking laughter of the men and their officers prickling at his back.

he gets to the meeting, we get a pile of exposition (seen through Bremer's incredibly bitter eyes), and the scene ends with Bremer being asked to carry an order to General Jalenhorm ... being told

"Remember, though, that you are the king's observer, not the king's champion ... no more heroics, if you please."

Thus, the answer to our Scene Question is "He gets there, but no, nobody really cares, and his next mission is to carry a piece of paper, so that should make for a pretty awesome scene question next time, I'm sure he's really pumped about it."

We get a lot of tastiness in those 15 pages, but it's mostly strategeric planning for the Union, while reacquainting ourselves with the wizard Bayaz and the Dogman. Bayaz is an exceptionally strong character -- especially for those of us who are familiar with him from the First Law -- and he makes the scene fly by. Poor Bremer, seemingly cursed to be a POV character who is only around so we can see what's going on on the Union side of things ...

On that note, the Union itself gets shaken up, big time. Bayaz tells them that instead of warring for seasons, he wants things wrapped up. Immediately. As in ... this week, if at all possible. Bremer, of course, is a big fan of this, as he's looking to kill lots of things and then, preferably, die in combat, so we do get a hint that he might -- possibly -- gain some respect, have other folks see his worth.

Perhaps.

So, in sum, there's plenty of plot movement -- it's just that most of it doesn't involve poor Bremer, at least, not yet. Fitting.

Now, to run through the basics:

Sense Check Scene #3

Sound ("snarling driver whipped two horses into a pointless lather")

Touch ("mired in the filth","wriggling like maggots", "mud-spattered crush of soldiers", "slithered through the sodden underground ... eyes were whipped at by twigs")

Smell ("Putrefying swarm" and "stopped as solid as milk turned rank in a bottle", Paragraphs #1, #2)

Taste (Nope)

Beat/Tag Observations (p. 24-30)

Interesting. A quick glance suggests that there are a great deal more exaggerated dialogue tags with Bremer than there were with Craw or Calder. This works for Bremer, as he seems to have an exaggerated opinion of everything. Craw sees people say things, or occasionally mutter them. Bremer, not so much.

I see very few "saids" (again, amazed by that) and there are plenty of beats, but on p. 24-30 I see:

Crowed

Sneered

Squeaked

Conceded

Answered

Echoed

Replied

Ventured

Managed to whisper

Grumbled

Grunted

Burst out

Managed

Again, this is a bit of a revelation -- I don't remember seeing anything like this for Calder or Craw. It completely works for Bremer, though. Veddy interesting -- given the care with which Abercrombie has said he goes through his work, I'd be stunned if this were a coincidence. Something to keep an eye on ...

So, a POV recap:

Craw: Contractions, low-key dialog tags, close distance

Calder: Few contractions, low-key dialog tags, smart-ass commentary, close/middle distance

Bremer: Few contractions, italicized bitter whiny angst, dialog tags that read like a Don't Overuse These list from Nancy Kress.

Phrases/Descriptions/Dialogue that tempt me to hunt Joe down and eat his brain, thus allowing me to gain his knowledge. Crap -- isn't England where mad-cow disease comes from?

"It's Gorst," sneered one, as if he had been expecting a king and gotten a pot-boy.

"Naturally, as soldiers, you are all prone to be sentimental about warfare. But fighting is only any use when it's cheaper than the alternatives." He calmly picked a piece of fluff from his sleeve, frowned at it, and flicked it away. "This is the North, after all. I mean to say ... what's it worth?"

The king has abandoned me here, and no one will care a stray speck of piss if I am hacked apart and my brains splattered across the North. Least of all me.

NEXT TIME: SCENE #4: CALDER AND DOW, SITTIN' IN A TREE ...

The Heroes, Scene #2 (p. 15-21): Calder and the Sneaky Exposition

2011-04-22T11:40:00.000-04:00

He stood by the window, one hand up on the stone, fingertips drumming, drumming, drumming.

…

“Dow wants you.”

Scene #2 introduces us to the conniving smart-ass "Prince" Calder, son of the recently deceased Bethod, former King of the North. In the first scene, Craw was portrayed as an old straight-shooting warrior - so it makes sense to introduce his opposite, a young scheming coward.

Scene (though more of a Character) Question:
Will Calder have any effect on the fate of the North?

In the first paragraph, we learn two facts:
1) The fate of the North is being decided without Calder
2) Calder is pretty pissed off about it

Bickham would probably argue that a scene question isn't supposed to be an overarching character question that can't be answered in the scene, and I suppose it's not. On the other hand, when you're writing epic fantasy, I think you're probably allowed to have a page or three to introduce a character before throwing them into the fire, and that's what Abercrombie does here.

After some loving banter with his pregnant wife, Seff (nice way to make us care about said bastard -- give him a wife and a little warrior fetus!)

we get introduced to some characters Calder will have to deal with in the near future. Specifically, we learn, in banter between Calder and his wife, that:

1) Black Dow is a thug with all the North under his boot, with a few War Chiefs following orders, and
2) Brodd Tenways, War Chief #1, is a rotten old maggot,
3) Cairm Ironhead, War Chief #2, has a small penis,
4) Glama Golden, War Chief #3, has an even smaller penis ("like a baby's finger"),
5) Caul Reachey, Calder's father-in-law, is an honorable man.
Now, when these characters are introduced later, we'll recognize them. This is a nice little technique -- introduce part of his rogue's gallery by having two characters talk, entertainingly, about them. We get exposition, and character during that exposition, given the way Calder and Seff talk.

I think that's pretty huge -- when doing exposition, do it in such a way that character seeps through. Hell with "seeps" -- make it so that the exposition almost seems like a second thought! Elmore Leonard is pretty damned good at this as well.

The scene ends with Shivers (poor ole "I'm no dog" Shivers ... after what he went through in Best Served Cold, he's returned to the North) fetching Calder to take him to Dow. And his wife ... well, his wife isn't going anywhere -- she's being held hostage, to guarantee that Calder behaves. In addition, Calder

"reckoned there was about a one in four Shivers had been told to cut his throat on the way and toss his corpse into a bog."

And thus, we have the Answer to our Scene Question:

"Perhaps Calder should worry more about he and/or his wife being killed by Shivers or Dow."

That's a pretty classic "No, and furthermore!" Bickham-recommended scene finish.

Some other details:

Sense Check Scene #2
Sound (Fingertips drumming, first sentence -- also counts as touch)

Touch (Belly pressing into his back, fingers trapped against stone, lips tickling his ear -- all on the first page)

Smell (Nope. Perhaps, given the scene, it's for the best.)

Taste (Nope)

Rough beat/tag count, Scene #1 (p. 16-17)

Beats: 14

Nothing: 19

Said: 0(!!!)

Said + adverb: 0

Whispered: 2

Lied: 1

Also noteworthy -- Calder does snide little commentary as beats (e.g., "Except power", "For what that was worth")

More on Calder's POV in future entries, but at the moment it seems to me we're a little more distant from Calder than we are from Craw. Exactly how Abercrombie does this (and whether I'm correct) is something I'll be pondering in future installments ...

Phrases/Descriptions/Dialogue that have led me to ask every person I meet who sounds kind of like those guys that were on Monty Python whether they know Joe personally, I mean, it's not a big island, right?:

But Shivers looked at a pregnant woman like a butcher at a carcass, only a job to be done.

She squeezed his chin even harder, looking him right in the eye. "I love you."
He looked down at the floor, feeling the sudden pressure of tears at the back of his throat. "Why? Don't you realize what an evil shit I am?"
"You're better than you think."
When she said it he could almost believe it ...

Shivers raised one beckoning hand, a big ruby on his little finger gleaming the colour of blood in the gloom. Giving Calder no choice but to come closer, closer, far too close for comfort. Close enough to feel Shivers' warm breath. Close enough almost to kiss. Close enough so all Calder could see was his own distorted, unconvincing grin reflected in that dead metal ball of an eye.
"Dow wants you."

NEXT TIME: SCENE #3: BREMER DAN GORST, THE WHINY WARRIOR

The Heroes, Scene #1 (p. 5-15)

2011-04-15T23:26:00.000-04:00

“Too old for this shit,” muttered Craw, wincing at the pain in his dodgy knee with every other step.
...
Craw frowned around at the Heroes, forgotten giants, standing stubborn guard over nothing. "Those are the times," he muttered.

The doorbell rings -- the book has arrived! You begin to salivate, your mouth filling up with drool as you grab the box. You turn to run back to the kitchen, cry out "no, not fast enough!" and rip into the box with your teeth.

After gnawing through the thin brown tape, gums bleeding, you punch through the thick plastic. There it is. The cover is suckier than the English version, sure, but THERE IT IS.

You take a deep breath, savoring the moment, the saliva pooling again, below and around your tongue. It's Saturday, and you have no social life -- but it doesn't matter, even if you make Charlie Sheen look like that guy representing Sloth, in Seven, who cares, fuck 'em, you can snort coke off a supermodel's butt next weekend.

It's Here.

You grab a tasty beverage, throw your self onto your couch, crack it open (the book, not your couch), and begin.

“Too old for this shit,” muttered Craw ...

*Bwah???*

Oh, Orlando Jones, how far you've fallen ... okay, not too far, but still!

Really, Joe? You're going to start this book by making me do a 90-second double-take?

Seriously, this is all that goes through my head for the first 90 seconds:

That, and wondering whether he did this on purpose (and what purpose would that be?) or whether, as a Brit, he's unfamiliar with Sergeant Murtaugh. Wow.

Luckily, you can't be startled out of one’s mood when you haven’t had a chance to sink into it yet, but it was still a shocker. Tough to drop into readin'-fantasy mode when I have this running through my head:

I am happy to say, that moment aside, the novel was damned fine, and so, I begin Scene Summary The First: The Quest to Figure Out How He Does It. There's so much to cover, at both a macro- and micro-level, that it gives me brainal pain -- let's face it, I can't discuss eveything without each post being longer than the original scene.

You have to be realistic about these things.

At a minimum, though, I'll want to figure out what the scene question is and how that scene is answered.

Scene Structure/Scene Question:

The scene opens with Craw is striding up toward the Heroes, sore and afraid, committed to climbing to the top, pondering his life. And, in fact, we get our scene question — “Will Craw survive the meeting?” by the middle of the second paragraph, and it’s confirmed and emphasized several times over the next page.

We get some setting as well as further establishment of Craw’s character over the first couple pages — he’s feeling old, sore, a bit fearful, but he’s thoughtful, still thinks about a future where he’s not in the middle of a war. Also, he is resolved to do what he thinks is right:

"He’d thought it through, and this was the right thing to do. Or, the least wrong thing, anyway. Sometimes that’s the best you can hope for.”

This concept is central to Craw's character, and it will come up again.

I'm not going to describe everything that happens in the plot, ala Slactivist on Left Behind, as I have no bones to pick with Abercrombie's writing style (or his theology, I reckon ... Also, about half the pages of Left Behind are phone calls in which previous events are discussed, so it's pretty easy for Fred to describe them.)

The gist is that Craw’s team is introduced (Wonderful, a bald warrior chick w/bow; Whirrun of Bligh an armor-eschewing uber-swordsman; a few others), there's some banter in the Heroes (a group of standing stones, ala Stonehenge) with an opposing group of Northmen, and the conflict is resolved positively -- Hardbread, the leader of the opposing group (workin' for the Dogman) retreats peacefully.

I confess, the positive resolution was a bit surprising, given this is Abercrombie. Shouldn't at least half of them died? Maybe he’s going soft! On the other hand, it makes sense -- Craw is a crusty diplomatic veteran, it wouldn't have made a lot of sense for things to go horribly this early.

Doesn't this violate the Bickham rule about never ending a scene question with a "Yes!" Not completely: It ends with a “Yes, but” moment of a sort. Whirrun does a reading of some runes, to predict the future, and finds

“There’s going to be blood … [and] lately they’re right more often than not.”

So, a small (very small) victory, and allusions to mass quantities of hideous death in the immediate future. Okay, I'll take that.

So Abercrombie gets a thumbs up in the Scene/Sequel department. He gives us the scene question early, answers it with a Yes ... but, and starts as close to the action as you can get without confusing the hell out of his readers -- Craw isn't plotting the ambush of Hardbread with his team, not arguing whether to talk or to take them out -- no, as we begin, he's striding up to the hill, listening to his bones creak, wondering if he'll live another day. A page later, we're in a spot where one wrong word means mass combat. This Is Good.

Ah ... but what about all that other stuff that you're supposed to do when writing? Like refer to non-sight senses?

Sense Check Scene #1
Sound (Coughing, Paragraph #4)

Touch (Pain, Paragraph #1; Grass clutching at his boots, wind bullying, Paragraph #2)

Smell (Nope. Surprising! Old man nose, I guess.)

Taste (Nope)

A little surprising, the lack of allusion to smell, but it's not a big deal. For the record, in almost every single "first novel" I've read, the sense of smell is alluded to on the first page -- but I gotta say, it sometimes feels forced.

I should add that my hunch is that one of the reasons I like Abercrombie so much is that, usually, he doesn't go crazy with the description. My guess is I'm unlike about 95% of other fantasy readers in that preference, so I can't say he's doing it 'right' -- only that he's doing it right for me.

I was also curious as to how Abercrombie uses beats and speech tags. There's a good stretch of dialogue in the first few pages. By "beat" I mean a description of physical action (usually) or mental judgment (occasionally) in between lines of dialogue. Beats can help one avoid using the word "said" repeatedly, as well as make the scene easier to visualize.

Rough beat/tag count, Scene #1 (p. 8-11)

Beats: 17 ("I'm what?" Redcrow frowned at Whirrun, twitchy ...)

Nothing: 12 (One line follows the other, no dialogue tags or beats. Generally for quick dialogue, short sentences.)

Said: 7

Asked or Muttered: 1

Said + adverb: 0 (No saying "quietly" or "thoughtfully" or "boastfully" or "flatly.")

Growled, snarled: 2
Noted, demanded, inquired, repeated: Big Fat Zero. (I'm looking at you, Sanderson!)

I noticed that it's always “said Craw,” not “Craw said," when those tags are used. It's an interesting affectation, putting the "said" first, and I think it makes the work sound a bit more medieval. Which, um, seems appropriate.

Point-of-View (POV)

Craw is told in third-person, with close/middle distance (using Nancy Kress's awesome book as guidance). As with most of the chapters told from the point of view of a Northman, the writing style is raw, though perhaps not as raw as we might see later with some other folks — while Craw is a Northman, he’s an old and smart one. Still, the sentence fragments (”High time he retired. Long past high time. Sat on the porch…”), the contractions (always ’em for “them", ‘cause for “because”) help signal who we’re dealin’ with. That said, Craw isn’t a simple man — there are plenty of long sentences here, and it’ll be interesting to contrast him with Beck, a supporting character we’ll meet later on: also a Northman, but just a stupid kid.

Unlike many other authors, Abercrombie eschews the use of italics for thoughts for almost all of his characters. Later, we'll meet Bremer dan Gorst, and his tasty italicized thoughts -- however, only thoughts that are dark, dreary, and deeply cynical and/or bloodthirsty are italicized.

Phrases/Descriptions/Dialogue that have made me schedule a uterus transplant so that I can have Joe's children:

"...since you're still jawing and I'm still breathing, I reckon you're set on giving us a chance to talk this out."
"Then you've reckoned the shit out o' me," said Craw. "That's exactly the plan."

"Weren't expecting anyone. If there's two things we've got too much of in the North it's hills and rocks. Didn't reckon a hill with rocks on it would be a big draw."

Hardbread's nephew turned in the gap and gave Craw the fuck yourself finger. "We'll be back here, you sneaking bastards!" His uncle cuffed him across the top of his scratty head. "Ow! What?"
       "Some respect."
       "Ain't we fighting a war?"
       Hardbread cuffed him again and made him squeal. "No reason to be rude, you little shit."

Let's face it -- even if Abercrombie fucked up everything else, dialogue like this is what makes him so damned good, and he'd be eminently readable regardless. Still, "eminently readable" isn't nearly as good as "willing to endure bleeding gums and Lethal Weapons references and skip ecstasy-and-viagra-fueled orgies with supermodels readable," so I'm glad he's doing the other stuff well, too.

NEXT TIME: SCENE #2: CALDER AND THE SNEAKY EXPOSITION

The Scene Summary Project: Avoiding Writing, More Productively

2011-04-03T19:57:00.003-04:00

Recently, I've found myself unexpectedly godawful ignorant when it comes to some writing niceties, such as:
Story structure
Describing things
Suspenseful plotting
Everything else
It was unexpected because I've read a billion science-fiction and fantasy novels ... though it turns out, in retrospect, I hadn't "read" them so much as skimmed them.

I'd like to make up for lost time, though. AND SO . . . IT BEGINS.

Yes, that's right, I'll be fighting crime in spandex, with bright red gloves and boots. Also, I'll be rereading three books this year, with the goal of analyzing the living shit out of them. No skimming allowed!

THE BOOKS:
The Heroes, by Joe Abercrombie

Sandman Slim, by Richard Kadrey

Out of Sight or Killshot, by Elmore Leonard

All of these books have in common one thing: they absolutely kick ass, and I don't recall skimming a whit during them. They all have intriguing and/or fun characters and plots, and are interesting from beginning to end. (Or so I recall ...)

My primary goal is to break down each book scene-by-scene, to see how the authors Do Stuff. According to Mr. Bickham, in your well-written genre fiction you should see a well-defined scene question:

A statement of (definite, clear-cut, specific) goal
Introduction and development of conflict
Failure of the character to reach his goal; a tactical disaster (either “No!” or “No, and furthermore!” or “Yes, but!”)

For reasons of conflict, you never want to end a scene with a good ole fashioned "Yes," unless it's the climax, and even then there's no guarantee.

That's my main goal, and I'll be doing that for each scene. For some others -- especially at the beginning -- I'll be paying attention to much more:

The introduction of the overarching character arc (what I think Dramatica calls a "throughline")
Scene vs sequel breakdown, sequel being described as, after some conflict,

Emotion
Thought
Decision
Action (leads to next scene)

Where there is conflict, is it between two characters, or more? (I've heard that the former is generally 'better'.)
What do their speech tags look like -- how often do they use "said" versus beats versus nothing versus other crap? I like the style of each of these authors -- what, precisely, *is* that style?
How do they establish point-of-view? Are they consistent? How do they handle actors making judgments about what others' are doing, based on others' actions?
How often do they allude to senses other than sight?
How do they describe the stuff that I can't (if they do at all) -- some schmoe walks into a room -- do they jump right to dialogue, describe the room in a sentence, or ...?

I'm sure there's elements I'm missing, but this should be a good start. The goal, remember, is to avoid writing myself ... er, I mean, a crash-course in what I should have learned over the last X decades. I think that I'm gathering enough that I should discover a great deal about what makes each author's works hum ... but we shall see.

I'm as confused as you are.

Quote of the Weekend

2011-04-03T10:30:00.000-04:00

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.

-- Micah 6:8

Gushing Like A Bieber-Crazed School Girl Over the Slactivist, Fred Clark

2011-04-02T20:31:00.001-04:00

Let's start here: this is how I feel about the Slactivist.

as well as

and even a little

As you know, the Grumpy One likes thinking about writin'. He likes pondering spiritual matters, secular though he may be. And he likes profound thoughtations.

Well, if you like any of those things, or -- especially -- all of them, hold onto your freakin' hats, boys and girls, because I'm about to introduce you to Fred Clark -- not to mention link to him eleventy-billion times or so. Fred used to run the Slactivist site, though now he's moved to his own site at Patheos. Much of the content is simlar to that of any smart liberal blog, like Atrios or Digby, but his Fred's a little different.

Because Fred's also reviewing Left Behind, Tim Hayes and Jerry Jenkins's take on what the world would be like after the Rapture.

The writing in Left Behind is horrible, as is, as Fred cogently argues, the theology. No surprise there -- the surprise is that Fred's an evangelical Christian.

Like Fred Clark, except completely different

Those who know the Grumpy Buddha personally are aware that he has about as much love for evangelical Christianity as the English have for dentistry, but I have to say, Fred's opening up a new perspective for me. It's not completely new -- I was aware that Jesus spent a helluva lot more time complaining about the Pharisees than about condemning people for their sins -- but I'd never heard it come from an evangelical before.

Fred's put me in a tough position; I'd like to describe his amazing work in more detail, but I know that any words I choose will be inadequate to the task. (Great attitude for a would-be writer, right?) I don't mind being a link-monkey here, though, given what's on the other end.

Suffices to say, Fred bounces between writing critique and theological critique with aplomb. His is, officially, The Most Interesting Blog In The World.

So, without further adieu I give you *drum roll, please*

... oh, crap, I guess I need a little adieu, to introduce you the basics of Left Behind.

1) The Rapture happens.Two billion people (the "good" Christians and all children aged ~13 or less) disintegrate, their clothes neatly folded (courteous!) and their souls go to heaven.

2) Raymond Steele (no, he's not a porn star, he's the most superduper pilot in the world) is Left Behind, along with his daughter, Chloe.

3) Buck Williams (no, he's also not a porn star, he's the Greatest Investigative Report of All Time) is also Left Behind.

4) They soon convert to Christianity and ... well, and don't do much, because after all, the coming apocalypse is God's Idea, and so they really can't oppose the Antichrist, because he's Part of the Plan. (At least, they can't oppose him by the middle of book #2.) So they mostly mope around and try to get close to the Antichrist because it might be helpful for narrative purposes.

The convenient thing for Fred is, Tim and Jerry really suck at everything.

They suck at worldbuilding:

The Event -- the spontaneous disintegration of every child on Earth -- is regarded as little more than a curiosity. It is the subject of idle speculation at the water cooler, but no one seems affected by it in any meaningful way. This is, again, an insurmountable, fatal failure for this book. It turns every scene in the novel into something monstrous and horrifying.

In LB, the disappearance of 2 billion people is scarcely noticed, but the possibility of a new secretary-general at the United Nations has everyone on the edge of their seats like they're watching the ninth inning of a perfect game.

They suck at creating characters:

While the Rayford-POV section was all about what a great guy Rayford is, the Buck-POV section is all about what great guys both of them are:
Buck tried to concentrate on the captain's answers but felt himself trying to impress Chloe, too. Everyone in the business knew he was one of the best in the world at interviewing. That and his ability to quickly sift through the stuff and make a readable, engaging article of it had made him who he was. Buck had breezed through the preliminaries, and he liked this guy. Steele seemed honest and sincere, smart and articulate. He realized he had seen a lot of Rayford in Chloe.
Consider those two paragraphs alongside this one:
Whether you're interested in poetry or prose, fiction or nonfiction, you'll hone your skills and polish your craft, working alongside one of the Guild's Master Craftsman.
That's from the site touting Jenkins' "Christian Writers Guild Writing Course." For only $1,365 you, too, can learn to flesh out your characters by piling on the superlatives and adjectives. How will your readers know that your hero is "honest and sincere, smart and articulate" unless you tell them?

On that note, Hero #1, Buck, is a complete idiot:

Buck Williams has his work cut out for him. He's in charge of investigating and reporting the biggest story in the history of the human race.

What caused the instantaneous disappearance of 1/3 of the world's population? Could this strange event have been the result of foul play? Are the missing still alive? Is it possible they could return just as suddenly and mysteriously? What does it mean to suddenly find ourselves in a world without children?

None of these questions occur to Buck or to his editor, Steve Plank, as they sit down to discuss his duties in the days ahead. They aren't yet able to answer even the most basic questions about the disappearances -- who, what, when, where, why, how? -- but none of this seems to bother them.

Buck thinks he should be investigating international financiers. Steve, on the other hand, thinks Buck should focus on the Jews. Yes, you don't have to be a member of the John Birch Society to work here ... but it helps!

And Hero #2 Ray Steele is an ass:

Rayford Steele and Hattie Durham make the long walk back to the terminal, carefully threading their way past the smoldering wrecks of various crashed planes. "All around were ambulances and other emergency vehicles trying to get to ugly wreckage scenes," LaHaye & Jenkins tell us.

One pictures Rayford wheeling his little pilot's bag behind him, muttering G-rated curses under his breath as it pops up onto one wheel and drags on its side after bumping over the still-twitching body of one of the thousands of injured. "Two square miles of tarmac," Steele thinks, "and this jerk has to drag his fatally wounded self right here so I have to wheel around him? Like I don't have enough trouble already?"

Okay, that last scene doesn't actually appear in the book. LaHaye and Jenkins, like their hero, are wholly focused on moving along. The "ugly wreckage scenes" are not explored in any further detail -- they exist only as obstacles between Rayford and his family.

Here we see the "profamily" ethic of Timothy LaHaye's brand of religious conservatism at work. Rayford is, first and foremost, a husband and a father. The dead and the dying who surround him at the airport are strangers, untermenschen. They are not his family and therefore, according to LaHaye's profamily view, Steele is right to ignore them on his way back to Irene and the kids. (Even though, by now, Steele has a pretty good idea that Irene and the kids are long gone.)

Rayford Steele's single-minded tunnel-vision -- his ability to avoid even seeing the suffering of those outside of his immediate family -- is typical of the worst extremes of this profamily ethic as applied by the outer wing of America's religious right.

... It is only by erecting such boundaries that Rayford Steele is able to sidestep the suffering of strangers, picking his way across the airport to the terminal and refusing to let his gaze dwell on the "ugly wreckage" that surrounds him.

There's something deeply perverse and inhuman about a story in which we are asked to consider such a man "heroic."

...

Rayford Steele is a massively deluded creature. We've just seen this painfully illustrated, yet again, in his long prophecy sales pitch to Hattie Durham. Throughout that conversation Rayford comes across as a controlling, self-centered, inarticulate jerk wholly devoid of empathy. Yet in every other paragraph of that section we're also told that he perceives himself as a paragon of "passion and persuasion," and that this is how he thinks others perceive him as well.

And their lack of social skills is comical:

There's a bit of a lesson in the first meeting of our two heroes, Buck Williams and Rayford Steele. It's a fine portrait of the insecure alpha male in his native habitat. Rayford seems so eager to strike a dominant posture that I was afraid he was about to start peeing on trees or mounting somebody.

The theology is atrocious (Ray is accepting a job to become the Antichrist's pilot):

At some point in your life, the Antichrist is going to offer you a job.

Don't take it.

And especially don't delude yourself into imagining that taking it might actually be God's will because, conveniently, God's agenda for you and the Antichrist's agenda seem to perfectly overlap. The job offer itself is a trap set for you by others. The rationalizing delusion is a trap set for you by yourself. Just say no.

Rayford's delusion here might be the stuff of a better novel. He's supremely confident in the infallibility of his spirit-feelings, even when those feelings are leading him to become a henchman of the Beast. That smug confidence is the stuff of classic tragedy -- hubris, then a precipitous fall. I'm picturing a story in which Rayford is portrayed as someone like Alec Guinness' Col. Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai, enthusiastically devoting himself to the work of the enemy with lots of grand, self-congratulatory speeches right up until that final horrified "What have I done?"

But of course this isn't a David Lean film or a Pierre Boulle novel. It's a slap-dash piece of pulp-heresy by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, and for LaHaye & Jenkins, hubris doesn't precede a fall. They regard it, instead, as a sign of godliness.

And did I mention the writing?

Buck heads inside and meets up with his friends and colleagues for the first time since one third of the world's people disappeared and hundreds of thousands more were killed in various catastrophes involving planes, trains and automobiles. Since that event, Buck had been on his own, but:
He was with people who cared about him. This was his family. He was really, really glad to see them, and it appeared the feeling was mutual.
That second "really" is what sets Jerry Jenkins apart as a novelist. Passages like this make one grateful that he is sharing this gift with others. You, too, can sign up for his "Christian Writers Guild" and you can learn to be a really, really good writer.

In the end, what hits me the hardest is something that Fred has pointed out more than once when discussing the admonishments and advice of LaHaye and Jenkins, and the greater conservative Christian community.

The prophet Micah says, “What does the Lord require of you? To do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God.” That right there is some pretty direct leading.

If you tell me that you’ve received a “direct” message from God to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly, I’m inclined to believe you. If you tell me that God has given you some kind of “direct leading” away from justice, love, mercy and humility, then I say “Bah, humbug.”

Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly ... if that isn't at least 75% of Eightfold Path, I don't know what is. And it's in the Bible, too. Go figure.

Quote of the Week

2011-03-27T22:49:00.003-04:00

What happens to a man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course. Except war. If a man lives in the sphere of the possible and waits for something to happen, what he is waiting for is war -- or the end of the world.

-- Walker Percy, in The Last Gentleman

Quote Of The Day

2011-03-18T02:00:00.000-04:00

Found while surfing the fantastic Slactivist Left Behind archives:

To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire --
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.
-- Edgar Lee Masters, from "Spoon River Anthology"

The Misenchanted Post: Lessons Learned

2011-03-07T00:13:00.002-05:00

As I was saying, I had fond memories of Lawrence Watt-Evans's The Misenchanted Sword and so I picked it up, thought maybe I'd write up a little scene summary and/or analysis on it ala Bickham. It suffices to say that I soon found I'd rather have dinner with Zombie Betty White than complete the exercise.

Here, Zombie Betty White does me a favor and eats the hand I turn pages with.

What I remembered:

The story's protagonist, Valder, is on the run from the Northern Army
He runs into a wizard that gives him a sword that makes him invincible in combat, BUT it has only 100 or so charges
The sword also makes him immortal. The catch is,
After it runs out of charges, the sword will turn on him, and he'll die
If he doesn't use up the charges, he'll still get old and blind and cripply, so the immortality thing isn't as awesome as it seems.

Cool, right?

Er ... well ... kinda. The first third of the book is okay -- while the first chapter is almost all exposition, he does eventually get the sword (yay!), and tests it against a series of foes where he learns how it works, where it doesn't, etc. Generally entertaining.

The middle is where things take a turn for the holyshithowinthehelldidImakeitthroughthis. At the end of Chapter 8 (p. 100), Valder has worked his way back to his army. It takes the next five chapters, fifty pages, for the camp wizards to test the sword and figure out its capabilities; sometimes Valder's helping out, otherwise he's just wandering around the camp. There is no action, and there is precious little conflict; it's just detective work. It's like if there was a forty-minute scene in Buffy where most of the time is spent with Buffy looking at random items in the stacks, checking back with Giles every couple minutes or so to help out.

(By the way, it took fifteen minutes to find that lame pic -- I was completely unsuccessful in finding a screen capture of the whole Scoobie Gang sitting in the library plotting and planning. I wonder why that is? Oh, right, because while those scenes are necessary -- and actually, I like them more than most -- NOTHING HAPPENS. They are, borrowing from Bickham, Sequel, not Scene.)

The worst part, though -- wait. I need to use a larger font. This is pretty bad.

The worst part ...
At the end of the fifty-page waiting game, Valder is informed that whether he likes it or not, he's going to become an assassin for the Ethsahric army.

"Let me rephrase that," Kelder said. "Within the next ten days you'll give Wirikidor [Valder's sword] the opportunity to kill the enemy's chief sorcerer on the western front." He smiled. "You're going to be very useful, Valder."

Valder was not at all sure of that, but he did not argue. If assassination proved unbearable he could botch it, and they would reassign him. He found it impossible to believe that he was going to kill any sorcerers.

Nine nights later, as he stood over the body of a dead sorcerer, he still found it hard to believe.

Yes, that's right. Fifty pages where there's naught but plotting, planning, and preparation, so that we could get a one sentence summary of what happens in the next bit of action.

I could be missing something, of course. Maybe this is an advanced writing technique. Let's see ...

They lay still for a while. It was too dark to seek for cover, if indeed there was any to find; but Sam felt that they ought at least to get further away from the highways and out of the range of torchlight.

"Come on, Mr. Frodo!' he whispered. 'One more crawl, and then you can lie still.' With a last despairing effort Frodo raised himself on his hands, and struggled on for maybe twenty yards. Then he pitched down into a shallow pit that opened unexpectedly before them, and there he lay like a dead thing.

Three weeks later, as Bilbo relaxed in Rivendell, drinking a cup of tea with Sam, he found it hard to believe that he had Gollum to thank for helping him destroy the One Ring.

Yeah, that works. Let's try another:

"He runs it, Rorschach! Runs Pyramid Deliveries, Dimensional Developments, the whole show!"

"But Veidt was target."

"I know it's crazy, and I don't want to believe it, but perhaps we should find Adrian fast. 'Karnak' ... Rameses built a gigantic hall there -- a monument. Karnak must be Veidt's Antarctic retreat. Better grab those papers from the desk ... it's a long journey ..."

Later that afternoon, as Dan lay in Laurie's arms shortly after Veidt had killed half the population of New York with a teleported psychic alien-looking octopus, he wondered where Rorschach had run off to. Turns out that Doc Manhattan was vaporizing him.

See you in Shutter Island!

Wow, writing is easy.

Now, I know what you're thinking. It's one thing to skip past his first assassination attempt, but it's not like we're going to skip all of them, and it's certainly not like he's going to have the world end off-screen.

Well, we skip all the assassination attempts, I'm afraid. And with regard to the world ending ... on p. 180, just as Valder is about to get a little tense with the running-out-of-charges thing, he hits a break: the gods themselves have ended the war:

"The gods have achieved in a single day what we could not in all these centuries of war! The Black City, capital of the [Northern] Empire, has been blotted from the face of the World, and the other northern cities lie in ruins or worse."

There is a downside, though.

"The eastern half of Ethshar - yes, fully half - was destroyed by the demonic invasion, and is now uninhabitable."

So in the space of a page or two, we find out from a supporting character that there was a huge off-stage war between the Ethshar gods and the Northern Empire demons, and the gods won, but roughly half the world was destroyed or decimated. I'm not sure there's a better example of telling, not showing out there.

Wrapping up: over the next 100 pages, and I admit I skimmed those FAST, Valder seems to wander around a bit, buy an inn, and eventually finds a hot wizard to cast a spell on him to make him young, and they get married and live happily ever after.

So. What is the lesson here? Is it simply that I was an idiot, but now that I have read many many writing books, and am more mindful about what I read, I am wise and thoughtful and can recognize trash?


It's really not.

The painful bits of Telling, not Showing aside, there's a reason that I like Watt-Evans's stuff:

His characters sound like real people. They act and react like normal people -- often very matter-of-fact and low-key, and I like that. When Valder was told he had to become an assassin, he didn't go all pants-wetting nervous, or think about how he'd bring glory to his name, or save his country, or whatever -- he thought about it like a job, and if he decided he didn't like it, he'd tank it. It may not be "proper" from the point of view of building dramatic characters, characters that are supposed to have super-mega-strong wants and needs, but I don't care!

I wasn't kidding when I said I like the Giles library scenes in Buffy. I heard that the writers thought they were death, and wanted the little bits of exposition to end as quickly as possible, but I don't mind some dithering and detecting when you're dealing with awesome magics. Why would you rush something like that?

There's a decent amount in there about different levels of magic spells, talking about how magic works, etc., and while these days I appreciate more of a character-driven story than one built around a Cool Magic System, I wasn't always this way; no doubt it appealed to the D&D geek in me.

To my knowledge, his books eschew the horrendously cliched Chosen One meta-mega-uber-myth. Valder isn't secretly the son of a demigod. He's not the subject of some ancient prophesy. He's Just A Guy.

As I previously noted, there's a ton to get right when you're writing, and just getting a quarter of it right is a huge accomplishment. Watt-Evans may have really blown some stuff in his first book, but he had enough juicy bits to keep me interested. And when it's so, so easy to focus on the juicy bits, and skip the nonsense -- well, why not?

It does make me wonder, though ... do other fantasy fans read like I used to read? Do they just skip the parts that bore them, and dig right into the meat? If so, all this pondering about being consistent in POV and such may be a bit pointless.

Here's where we get to the lesson that is both inspiring and depressing.

Inspiring: You can get published even when you're not hitting on all cylinders! Depending on your audience, you can get a long way with just a really interesting premise, even if your implementation isn't outstanding. Sometimes, getting it only 1/4 right is just fine.

Depressing: If you're not an outstanding author (or even if you are), perhaps you need an fantastic premise, or an exciting, awesome plot in order to pull in your readers -- which means that I should be focusing more on my complete lack of ability to create a story more than my complete lack of ability to tell a story. If in the genre, premise and plot are 90% of the puzzle, and writing skill is only 10%, then focusing on that 10% might be silly, if all one is looking to do is find readers.

Still, much more inspiring than depressing -- I want to write something that someone like the present-day me would like, not one The Young Grumpy Buddha would have liked.

A hundred years ago or so, I was at a con in the Midwest, and Lawrence Watt-Evans* was on one of the panels. Someone asked him the inevitable question of how long it takes to become a competent writer. He said that you needed to write every day, and accept that everything you write for the first eighteen months is going to be crap.

Wise words, even if he does occasionally kill millions of people off screen.

------------------
*A year or three ago I read the Dragon Weather trilogy, by Watt-Evans; I don't recall loving the last one, but I definitely liked the first a lot. Given that this was after I entered my picky-trying-not-to-skim phase, my hunch is that millions of people and/or dragons do not die off screen in it, and that he's hitting on most cylinders. I'll have to pick it up again. I think The Misenchanted Sword was his first book -- it was published back in '85. I have a hunch he picked up a few things since then.

Quote of the It's Been A Long Time Since A Quote Of The Week

2011-03-02T02:26:00.000-05:00

In thoughtless moments, craving is the escape route from suffering.

--Winton Higgins

(The more I think about this, the more profound I find it ... not that I've found its helpfulness is proportional to its profundity. Not yet, at least. But it's probably trimmed 20% off of my mindless computer and console game-playing in the last week.)

Skipping To The Good Parts: How To Read 100 Books A Year Without Really Trying

2011-02-28T14:12:00.005-05:00

Or really reading.

When I was a kid, I loved going to the library -- my folks took me there constantly, budding little geek that I was, and I devoured the kids' section. I remember in particular a book on the Bermuda Triangle that I must have read a dozen times (Google + Amazon = wow).

Explain the disappearance of Flight 19! I dare you!

Every year the library had a contest (for kids) to see who could read the most books -- of course, I crushed it. In retrospect, it's obvious that my habit of reading books too quickly to learn anything from them is the fault of a small public library in the Midwest. Bastards.

But I'm jumping ahead.

Eventually, after exhausting (several times) every kiddie book on Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, Psychic Powers, and the Bermuda Triangle, I stumbled over to the young adult'ish fiction section at age 8 or 9 or 10, and found the Book of Three. I was immediately hooked. The Hobbit followed shortly thereafter, along with the purchase (okay, mom bought them for me!) of mass quantities of Dungeons & Dragons paraphenalia.

Good times, good times. But ... WERE THEY?

Er, well, yeah. But I have regrets. Like most geeks, during my teens I devoured mind-dribble fantasy novels like I had devoured all those kiddie-books on paranormal goofiness. I must have read 50 or 100 books a year during that time, but as far as books that I remember ... well, it's very few. I recall enjoying the Book of Swords trilogy, the first few books of The Guardians of the Flame series, Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality, Terry Brooks's Elfstones of Shannara, and Lawrence Watt-Evans's The Misenchanted Sword.

In retrospect that while I enjoyed much (some?) of what I was reading, it's probably not right to call it "reading" -- "skimming" is much more accurate, and it's kind of a shame.

This has become obvious to me as I've tried to read books in the same genre in the last few years -- I find that, almost without exception, I don't have the patience for them, and part of it, I think, is that I'm much more mindful now about when I skip over the Boring Parts. I try to reset and read everything, and soon realize that I have better things I could be doing with my time.

This really hit home when I recently attempted to reread The Misenchanted Sword. I had some great memories of this book; I read a bunch of Watt-Evans when I was a teen, and I remember it was this book that hooked me.

But now, I'm crossing wires -- there are really two points to all this:

1) When you skim books, you learn very little about what makes good writing good, and bad writing bad, because you just ignore everything that doesn't interest you. Given the number of books I've read, I should know a great deal more about description, plotting, and story structure than I do. Alas...

2) Analyzing books you enjoyed when you were younger can be a dangerous, but useful exercise ... sure, you may end up wondering what in the hell was wrong with you, but I think it's starting to give me some insights into what makes genre fiction good. They are both inspiring and depressing.

#1 has been sufficiently covered: if you're a young'n reading this, and you want to be a writer someday, PAY ATTENTION. Reading isn't a race. I used to bask in how geekily cool it was to check ten or twenty books out of the library at once:

Now, I wish I'd read fewer books, more deeply. Of course, if you're not planning on ever becoming a writer, it's fine to just skim away, read The Good Parts and toss the rest, but if you are ...

#2 ... well, that's the topic for the next post.

A Plea To Books on Writing: Please, Shut Up about the Writing, Already

2011-02-26T19:33:00.005-05:00

If there's one thing the Grumpy Buddha can't stand, it's ... well, the spectre of mortality that hangs over him like a lumpy, moldy shroud. (Nothing special there, I guess.)

But if there's two things, it's that, plus books on Writing that make his Grumpiness feel like a bad person.

Seriously, guys -- and by "guys" I'm pointing at you, Jack Bickham, Sol Stein, Nancy Kress, and a bunch of other muckety-mucks -- stop getting in my face about how important it is to write when you want to be a writer.

If I wanted to write, why would I read your goddamn books? Your books do not exist to help me write, they exist to teach me the craft without having to go through all the fuss and bother of writing. That's the point. And, you know, give me the illusion of doing something constructive writing-wise without having to put words down on virtual paper. This is not rocket science, people.

But they're all the same. I get it already, adverbs modifying speech tags are incredibly horribly stupendously bad, except when they're not, and show, don't tell, unless you're Elmore Leonard, and be consistent in your point-of-view, leaning towards first person or third-person limited, unless you're Charles Stross and under the illusion that shit like multiple 2nd person POV won't annoy the living fuck out of me, seriously, whoever got farther than the fifth page of Halting State deserves a goddamn medal, and where was I again?

Oh, right. Whining. So anyway, they give all this advice that is heavily rehashed -- except for the stuff that isn't, like Kress's distinction between 3rd person limited close, middle, and distant, huge piles of Bickham's scene and sequel stuff, Stein's chapter on building suspense -- and then they have the nerve to throw in exercises!

If I wanted to write mini-bios or "a brief scene involving taking [a] puppy outside in the middle of the night" don't you think I'd have done so already, Ms. Kress? My magnum opus, How My Puppy Started The Apocalypse, would be resting comfortably at the top of the New York Times bestseller list right now. Here's a hint: it's not. I checked.

Bickham is another story altogether. He doesn't just want me to write, he wants me to do crazy-ass analysis of what I'm reading! This is an exact quote from Writing and Selling Your Novel (p. 55):

Take a contemporary novel. Pick one chapter. Go through it and underline in RED every word that absolutely specifies the viewpoint with a phrase such as "she thought," "he heard," or whatever. Then, with BLUE, underline all those portions which you assume are in the same viewpoint, even if there is no specific viewpoint pointer ... If you spot a place where the viewpoint character speculates about another's internal processes, or draws conclusions from evidence about same, bracket those in GREEN. Put an ORANGE X in the margin every time viewpoint is reinforced with another direct statement such as "She saw." Circle "warm" adjectives with PURPLE. If you see a verb that suggests motion, circle it in YELLOW. If an adverb modifies that verb, outline it in FUCHSIA. If a sentence alludes to one of the five senses, circle it in AQUAMARINE, but if it seems like the author is trying too hard to squeeze in the allusion, draw a squiggle over it in LAVENDER. If a sentence, when spoken aloud, would be a good setup for someone saying "That's what she said!" underline it in BLACK. . Finally, if the sentence has the kind of footnote that you found amusing in the author's previous works, but at this point it's just annoying, scratch it out in OCTARINE.

He concludes (p. 56) by saying

I wish I could face you as you read these words, and give you a shake for emphasis. If you rolled your eyes at me, I would follow by smacking you around a little, and if you still refused to take my advice, I would resort to mild application of electric shock. Please don't make me go there.

His entire book is like this -- exercise upon exercise of analyzing book chapters and/or what you've written. Clearly, there is something seriously wrong with this man.

HOWEVER ... it just occurred to me, there may be a method to his madness.

I now realize that Bickham & company have given me an out -- if reading books on writing fails to please, but actual writing must still be avoided, I can still take The Middle Way*: analyzing what I'm reading! I'll get all the tasty benefits of feeling like I'm making progress in learning to become a writer, while continuing to avoid the messy act of writing. Well played, sir!

I shall begin immediately. Or, you know, tomorrow.

------------------
*Interestingly, The Middle Way is a term Buddha used to describe the Eightfold Path -- the way between belief in an eternal self and belief that the self is completely annihilated upon death. So, you know, I also have that going for me.

Asshole Buddhism

2011-02-22T23:37:00.001-05:00

There's a lot to be said for all this Buddhist stuff, what with the Mindfulness and the Right Action and the Right Livelihood, not to mention the advice that it's cool to be kind and non-violent toward all living things.

That said, there's an odd strain of Asshole Buddhism out there. It's a combination of some weird stuff from old Zen-ny stories, with a sprinkle of modern-day cultlike hazing.

Exhibit A -- one of 101 stories from the "101zenstories" page.

Now, admittedly, I have fallen behind on my dharma practice, but I fail to see the lesson here other than Ekido is a massive prick. The similarities between this story and the "I think you should kill Isaac ... what do you think?" story in the Good Book are plain:

God: You're sure you're fine with this ... you would say ... if you thought I was asking you to do something "wrong"?

Abraham: Like I'd know! Like I have any chance of forming an independent basis of right and wrong outside the instructions of some supervisory being. No, Lord, I am your bitch!

In modern secular Buddhism, there's adamant rejection of dogma, made easier by the fact that in much of Buddhism in general, there's emphasis on the idea that faith in a higher power is unnecessary, not to mention that mere "belief" is useless. Thich Nhat Hanh, who is apparently something like a 27th-level Buddhist, notes

"Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. Buddhist systems of thought are guiding means; they are not absolute truth."

and the big DL says

"Three qualities enable people to understand the teachings: objectivity, which means an open mind; intelligence, which is the critical faculty to discern the real meaning by checking the teachings of Buddha; and interest and commitment, which means enthusiasm."

So ... what is the point, then, of stories which elevate the Teacher to mythic superwise beyond-good-and-evil heights, as many zen stories do? Is it just some sort of hardwired genetic need (or, at least, inclination) many have for a Daddy figure, someone we believe knows everything, who can tell us exactly what is right and what is wrong, so that we feel Safe? Probably -- it's striking, though, how it manifests so similarly across cultures and belief systems that are so otherwise diametrically opposed.

There's not a lot of Asshole Buddhism out there, but every time I see it, it makes me go "bwah?!" (Admittedly, some of it is more douchey than assholey, but why split hairs?) The submit yourself totally to us and if you leave it's because you're "weak-minded" culty Goenka stuff is especially creepy.

That said, it took a lot of time to find even this lame set of examples (hey, when you fall in love with a blog post tile, you don't let something stupid like attachment to Reality get in your way), so I'm probably safe -- it's unlikely Buddhism will turn me into more of an asshole than I already am.

NaNoWriMo Wrap-up: 30 Days of Sucktitude

2010-12-05T03:07:00.003-05:00

Wow.

I had a few goals during NaNoWriMo:

Get used to sucking
Develop a regular writing habit
Figure out the plot of the novel I've been thinkin' about

I was, I think, sesquisuccessful -- I kinda got used to sucking (say, 80%), kinda figured out more about the plot (say, 60%), and almost completely blew the whole "writing habit" thing (10%).

I figured that to write 50,000 words in one month, I'd have to create a special writing schedule, figure out what time of day I was most productive . . . nope. It was pretty much regurgitate one or two thousand words at the last possible moment, right before crashing for the night, and rarely did I feel like I was mentally at my best. The idea of writing a half hour or so before work -- I think I tried it *once*, was happy with it, and never tried it again.

So that kind of sucks.

Lessons learned:

1) Writing is Hard.

I mean, I knew it was hard before, but goddamn . . . there's so much stuff to juggle, I had no idea how difficult it was to keep it all in the air at once. And then I realized that not only are there twelve balls to keep in the air instead of three, but that I wasn't really competent at even juggling *one*. Hell with high-level stuff like character development, just describing two people talking in a realistic way is tough.

When I started NaNoWriMo, I was worried about lining up story arcs with character arcs, about the differences between third person limited "close" and "distant," about worldbuilding.

Now, I'm worried about how to describe one person talking to another without the action looking like that from a Geico xtranormal video. Or describing a pair of pants. Or a haircut. Or a hat -- no, that's not true. I'm not even close to being brave enough to try to describe a hat.

Indeed, I yearn for the day when I will be courageous enough to attempt to describe a hat. Until then ...

2) I should have more respect for hack writers.

They way I now see it, writing a novel is like carving a puzzle by hand one piece at a time. The puzzle can be "easy" -- two dimensional characters, cliched plot, similar character voices, uninspired dialogue -- but just because it looks simple and may not be mentally challenging, it still takes a lot of skill to do the rest of it well.

So, for instance, this puzzle is pretty easy:

But if I had to hand-carve each of those pieces, and guarantee that by the end that each piece would be flush with its neighbors, well . . . I'd be pretty much screwed.

So I'm a little less judgmental now ... for the time being ;). It's not only tough to get it all right, or most of it right, it's tough to get even a quarter of it right -- so my hat is off to those that can do even that much well.

Bastards.

Part-time Buddhist, Full-time Jerk

2010-10-31T21:46:00.001-04:00

I kid, I kid! The opinions of some of my occasional Readers aside, I think I'm mellowing in my old age, and have made some movement towards that whole Right Action thing.

I haven't been posting, but I have been Practicing; on and off, admittedly -- meditating for fifteen minutes here and there, remembering to be Mindful now and again, reminding myself of how impermanent things are (see bottom), and it's all been helpful, especially the latter. Still, I can do a helluva lot better.

And I do feel guilty for not updating this site more often. There is, after all, so much still to cover! The rest of the Eightfold Path, the three Buddhist Boogeymen (Greed, Aversion, and Convusion), everything I've read about brainal mechanisms and happiness and . . .

Yeah, it was a little overwhelming. I think I suffered from what some researchers call Ego Depletion -- now, this may be all in my head -- but isn't everything?

Gist is, between work and fun relationship events and, um, this little piece of evil, I've been occupied. Not always productively, but occupied. Advice-giver-types say that if you want to make a shitload of changes in your life, you shouldn't try to make them all at once; e.g., if you want to quit smoking and lose weight, you'll have a lot better chance of success if you go after one, and then the other, instead of tackling both simultaneously.

So, no biggie. I may not have practiced as much as I'd like, and I may not have posted as much as I "should", but his Grumpiness has not been a stick in the mud for the last two months . . . Changes are Afoot! And this is good.

And speaking of Changes . . . there's a big one that starts in about two hours from now. His Grumpiness has decided to do NaNoWriMo: that's National Novel Writing Month, and that means 50,000 words within the next 30 days.

Hachi Machi! Given my past failure to write even half that in a month's time, given that the success rate for participants is below 20%, given I don't have a regular writing practice, given that I have a massive Aversion to sucking . . .

Well, now. I would not put much money on me to finish this.

On the other hand . . . stranger things have occurred. I wouldn't bet against me, either.**

**(Not that I want to get all . . . attached to success or failure, of course! Wouldn't be very Buddhist of me. If I finish at 30,000 words, I'm not going to beat myself up. Still, pulling this off would be one helluva coup.)

Right Speech and Right Mindfulness: The Strawberry Pizza Dilemma

2010-09-05T23:00:00.003-04:00

Ah, strawberries -- so sweet and tasty.
Ah, pizza -- so greasy and saucy and delicious. (And, of course, SQUARE. I'm talking thin-crust Chicago-style pizza here, not that shitty New York nonsense.)

Ah, strawberry pizza -- so . . . um, bwah-wubba-huh? Strawberry pizza?!

Exactly.

This isn't a sushi/ice cream issue, where you have two wonderful items that obviously would taste horrible together . . . no, this is something different. We're talking two foods that work spectacularly when apart, that -- who knows? -- may also work together. (I mean, people put pineapple on pizza all the time, right?)

What is the purpose of this strained metaphor? Remember this little post on Right Speech? Remember this non-existent post on Right Mindfulness?

Do you have any idea how hard it is to combine those two goddamn things? I think it may be a better idea to just buy this

and try to coax a couple of bits of deuterium into combining to form ⁴He, so I can give up on the far more difficult task of combining Thinking About What I'm Doing and Speaking.

This is a problem that his Grumpiness has had since childhood -- Mother Grumpy used to nag Young Grumpy Buddha all the time to "think before you speak," but he could never quite get the hang of it. Whenever the opportunity or need to speak came, the YGB was on pure auto-pilot, and only noticed after the fact that he had, in all likelihood, blown it once again.

Over the years, his Grumpiness has matured, and all objective and right-minded individuals agree that he is a witty, intelligent, engaging individual, albeit with a penchant for oversharing. So while his Grumpiness is not regularly screaming at people

or offending them

or babbling incoherently

he does have work to do. And this is tough given the overwhelming urge to speak reflexively, without any thought.

Case in point: His Grumpiness resolved that today, his first act of communication would be done mindfully, and correctly (i.e., with the principals of Right Speech).

Needless to say, this was not accomplished.

The first communication was a short email. It was done with the principles of Right Speech, but it was not done mindfully. No harm done . . . but still, a goal unmet.

Then he called a friend for directions. For the most part, he nailed Right Speech, but he did poke a little fun at her when she asked a silly question. Of course, at the time she was watching two toddlers AND was doing him a favor . . . shame on you, Grumpy Buddha! And he did this because he was not being Mindful about said Speech.

Then he went shopping. He did not screw up Right Speech, but had no cause to -- and once again, an interaction took place without his brain even noticing it.

2.5 for 3 on Right Speech, but 0 for 3 on Mindful, Right Speech . . .

Tsk tsk.

Tomorrow is, though, as they say, another day.

We'll see what that strawberry pizza tastes like eventually . . . I am assuming that the metaphorical one will taste a lot better than the real thing would, because, you know . . . ew.

Hulk SMASH! Also, Hulk Writes, Runs, Builds, and Creates . . .

2010-09-02T14:01:00.002-04:00

. . . while Spock is still trying to figure out which pen to use.

(Note: I could not find ONE "crossover" Spock/Hulk image, and I'm too lazy to create one. So instead, you get this.)

(How can there not be one Spock/Hulk image mashup out there? I couldn't even find any Spock/Hulk fanfiction. I am beginning to lose faith in the IntraWebs.)

In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer discusses the behavior of a patient ("Elliot”) who had a brain tumor removed. Elliot was exceptionally intelligent before the operation, and remained so afterward. However, he almost completely lost the ability to make decisions. When it came to deciding between a red pen and a blue pen, or deciding where to eat, it was almost impossible for him to make decisions. He was fired, tried to start businesses, which failed, was taken in by a con man . . . tough life, all around.

Later, doctors examined him, and found that the operation rendered him essentially emotionless, unaffected by the world around him. EKG readings confirmed that when Elliott shown scary or disturbing images -- specifically, the following:

. . . he remained impassive.

Emotions are what drive us to make decisions – and to make decisions without any emotion at all is extremely difficult. This suggests that humans are the most emotional beings on the planet, not the least, our intellect notwithstanding. As Lehrer says, "A brain that can’t feel, can’t make up its mind."

I don't mean to imply that I fear this Buddhist quest will lead to a cud-chewing Prozac-ian mellowness in which one never does anything. After all, two of the hindrances (Doubt and Torpor) are concerned directly with inaction, and another (Anger/Aversion) is much more often destructive than constructive.

It does mean that depending on where one's mind is at the beginning of this quest, one probably should focus on different hindrances. If your problem is Doubt and Torpor, the last thing you need is to make sure that that Restlessness hindrances has been sufficiently beaten down.

The Grumpy Buddha is one of those folks -- meaning that, as logical as he is, he is recognizing the benefits of being a little less like this:

and a little more like this:

Err, um, where did that come from? I meant to say, more like this:

H'm. The Grumpy Buddha likes the feathers, but the color scheme won't work with his eyes. How about . . .

. . . that's a wee bit too angry, and His Grumpiness has the occasional flash of a problem in that area.

No, what we're aiming for is:

Yeah. That's it.

Quote of the Day From A 15th Level Buddhist Wizard

2010-09-01T11:49:00.000-04:00

Do not expect full realization; simply practice every day of your life.

– Milarepa

(Note: The big Mil once "summoned a giant hailstorm . . . killing 35 people", so I'd start fucking practicing without expectation, if I were you . . .)

Seeking Justice vs Letting Go: Profound Thoughts. Profound, Useless Thoughts.

2010-08-31T10:13:00.003-04:00

I wake up each day torn between the desire to enjoy the world or change the world. This makes it difficult to plan the day.
--E.B. White

Let's get this out of the way: You aren't E. B. White, and neither am I, so let's cut the shit. You don't get to whine about how Buddhism promotes some sort of cud-chewing bovine complacency, through encouraging people to deal with suffering internally instead of addressing its external source.

I mean, what were you doing to Change The World anyway? Sorry, dude, but surfing the blogosphere and nodding in agreement when Glenn Greenwald whines about something Howard Kurtz said doesn't count.

"Oh, but wait!" you're saying. "Also, I drive a Prius!" Well, gee, sorry, I wasn't aware. Everyone else, stop reading. Let's let Sir/Madam "I drive a Prius and occasionally give a handful of bucks to The Human Fund" go pleasure themselves while thinking about proud they are that they TiVo Whale Wars and use address labels from the Sierra Club.

Done? Then let's continue.

My general non-activist nature aside, the tension between the Buddhist approach of letting go, versus getting pissed off and trying to change things, bothers me. And the Buddhist defense of it seems like a bit of a cop-out as well.

The defense is something like "Buddhism advocates compassion for one's fellow beings, and can inspire people to help others, but from a basis of non-anger, non-aversion, non-blabbity-blahblahblah." In other words, you can better help people if you first remove the Anger Blinders from your eyes.

To which I say,

Seriously, that's not the way human brains work, and it's certainly not how one inspires other human brains to action. Let's face it, most people aren't all enlightened and zen.

They're suspicious,

angry,

sad,

and constipated.

As Barbara points out in one of her essays about getting breast cancer,

What sustained me through the "treatments" is a purifying rage, a resolve, framed in the sleepless nights of chemotherapy, to see the last polluter, along with, say, the last smug health insurance operative, strangled with the last pink ribbon. Cancer or no cancer, I will not live that long of course. But I know this much right now for sure: I will not go into that last good night with a teddy bear tucked under my arm.

I think that for every Dalai Lama, there are a hundred Barbaras; my gut tells me that the Barbaras are affecting more lives, if you control for the fact that they don't have the benefit of being chosen by a bunch of monks as the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama. (He did pick the right toys, though. I guess that's big. I'm imagining a set of Buddhist action figures.)

So, I think in the search for justice, a little righteous anger is good, even if it leads to suffering. There is more to life than happiness, after all.

But really, this is academic. For every instance that an enlightened and peaceful acceptance of suffering leads to an uncorrected injustice, there are literally a thousand, perhaps ten thousand instances in which the suffering alleviated far outweighs the satisfaction of getting even. So: good job, Mike. My hat is off to you. Not sure I could have done it.

Enough mental masturbation on the subject for now. It's time to get back to more pressing concerns.

Release date: September 21st. I'd better work through this fucking "attachment" stuff in a hurry.

Seeking Justice vs Letting Go, in Three Acts. Act III: Karma's A Bitch

2010-08-30T21:20:00.005-04:00

In a recent Planet Money podcast, Adam Davidson and David Kestenbaum discussed how in India these days, there are a handful of billionaires, and 400,000,000 people who live without electricity. David interviewed a 75-year old cobbler, Umrao Singh, who makes about $2/day -- a good wage, relative to what some make in India -- which means, typically, little to no schooling for your children, a ramshackle handmade shack, no running water, no electricity, no health care, and basically

". . . very little hope that you or anyone in your family will ever get out of poverty any time soon . . . . [you] spend your entire life trying to be one step ahead of hunger and disease . . . and [dream of] owning a piece of plastic sheeting to help keep out the rain."

They asked Umrao about what he thought about this. His response?

"This is my life. This is karma. There is nothing I can do about it, it is all written. There are people five minutes from where I am sitting that make 200,000 rupees a month. But what is written, is written, you cannot change it . . . Nothing is missing . . . this is what is written for me. I am content."

Of course, after Umrao said this, a friend pointed out that Umrao had said that in his next life, he wanted to be born into those fancy apartments across the street.

In a related incident, I was listening to a Zencast by Robina Courtin, who said something along the lines of**

It is foolish to be upset if someone punches you in the nose, because karma explains why you were punched; you basically punched yourself in the nose, you can't blame the person that punched you.

So, you know, karma is basically an angel . . .

** She uses almost those exact words ("punching yourself in the nose") in a Zencast that I cannot find, but the linked talk expresses similar sentiments.

Suffering: It's for your own good!

2010-08-30T19:59:00.003-04:00

While I'm not sure yet about the whole Buddhist take on suffering, they're certainly not bugfuck crazy like the Catholics.

On Suffering (from catholic-pages.com):

Let us remember clearly that:
Sufferings come from God for our benefit.
When we are in the state of grace, we derive immense merit from every suffering borne patiently, even the little sufferings of our daily lives.
God will give us abundant strength to bear our sufferings if we only ask Him.
If we bear our sufferings patiently, they lose their sting and bitterness.
Above all, every suffering is a share in the Passion of Our Lord.
By our sufferings, we can free ourselves in great part, or entirely, from the pains of Purgatory.
By bearing our sufferings patiently, we win the glorious crown of martyrdom.

Next time you get a paper cut, or your house burns down, or have your 2-year old die in a traffic accident, remember: It's For Your Own Good.

Seeking Justice vs Letting Go, In Three Acts. Act #2: Ain't Cancer Grand?

2010-08-23T00:34:00.006-04:00

In 2000, at age 59, Barbara Ehrenreich (of Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch fame), found herself diagnosed with breast cancer. She recounts her story in Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America, but you can read the full story in Harper's or in the Guardian.

Her journey leads her to entertaining and depressing insights about the ultra-feminine nature of the Breast Cancer industry -- and it is an industry:

"Awareness" beats secrecy and stigma of course, but I can't help noticing that the existential space in which a friend has earnestly advised me to "confront [my] mortality" bears a striking resemblance to the mall.

More germane to our subject is how her new culture (or, as she describes it, the "pink-ribbon breast cancer cult") infantilizes women:

Possibly the idea is that regression to a state of childlike dependency puts one in the best frame of mind with which to endure the prolonged and toxic treatments. Or it may be that, in some versions of the prevailing gender ideology, femininity is by its nature incompatible with full adulthood -- a state of arrested development. Certainly men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not receive gifts of Matchbox cars.

And, directly related to the paradox at hand, the tension between living happily with one's disease, and questioning its cause and its treatment:

In the mainstream of breast-cancer culture, one finds very little anger, no mention of possible environmental causes, few complaints about the fact that, in all but the more advanced, metastasized cases, it is the "treatments," not the disease, that cause illness and pain . . .

The Breast Friends website, for example, features a series of inspirational quotes: "Don't Cry Over Anything that Can't Cry Over You," "I Can't Stop the Birds of Sorrow from Circling my Head, But I Can Stop Them from Building a Nest in My Hair," 'When Life Hands Out Lemons, Squeeze Out a Smile," "Don't wait for your ship to come in . . . Swim out to meet it," and much more of that ilk.

My love of quotations notwithstanding, I'm probably going a little overboard here, so I'll skip right to her well-supported, well-argued conclusion:

In the harshest judgment, the breast-cancer cult serves as an accomplice in global poisoning -- normalizing cancer, prettying it up, even presenting it, perversely, as a positive and enviable experience.

It is possibly true that if Barbara had embraced the pink ribbons and the teddy bears, the vapid sayings and the story that others were trying to impose upon her, she might have been happier.

But it is also true that for every woman that questions whether the pain of chemotherapy is worth it, given the dismal increase in 5-year survival rates, questions how bad science led to recommendations that increased breast cancer risk, questions the Cancer-Industrial Complex (companies that both make and promote carcinogens, and create treatments for cancers) -- well, for every woman that fights the system, fights back against the "pink-ribbon cult," the chance drops a bit that another woman will be forced to suffer what she is suffering through.

I will give Barbara the last word.

Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a "gift", was a very personal, agonising encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before – one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune and blame only ourselves for our fate.

Seeking Justice vs Letting Go, In Three Acts. Act #1: A Funny Guy Goes Through Hell

2010-08-22T23:27:00.006-04:00

In a recent This American Life podcast ("Return To The Scene Of The Crime") Mike Birbiglia recounts how he was T-boned by a drunk driver driving a Mercedes.

The guy tried to hit and run but ran into a tree, was arrested . . . and then, the next day, when the accident report came back, Birbiglia was somehow found to be at fault, and that he owed twelve grand to the guy with the Mercedes.

The cop fucked up the report, stating that Birbiglia drove his car . . . into his own car.

He called the station, and the cop ("Officer Timson") ducked him right and left. He finally gets a hold of the officer, explains the situation, and the asshole says "You made a bad turn, pay the bill, do the right thing." Birbiglia explains again that this is an easy thing to fix, he was almost killed by this guy, etc., and once again Timson says "Do the right thing, and pay for the guy's car."

Birbiglia gets a lawyer, but the lawyer doesn't take the case, because Mike couldn't show any loss of income. Birbiglia then goes apeshit, dreaming of tracking down the drunk driver, suing the LAPD, and so on. For months, he obsesses about this in every waking moment, and stays up until 3AM concocting schemes.

The story does not have a happy ending.

The end hurt to listen to the first time, and it caused me pain again just now, as I listened to it once more.

Over dinner, as he's scribbling down his latest plan on a napkin, his wife-to-be, Jenny, tells him to let it go. She tells him "You're right, but it's only hurting you."

And he drops it. He pays the driver. And he moves on.

Back in the saddle!

2010-08-18T02:08:00.002-04:00

First, I'd like to give a shout out to the small but important set of people who have angrily demanded an explanation for the lack of a recent update.

Your whining makes me feel all warm and toasty inside -- seriously :).

The Grumpy Buddha apologizes; he has been traveling, entertaining family members, trying his hand a bit at writing fiction, and even doing the Socializing Thing. All good reasons for a brief hiatus.

BUT . . .

There have been some bad reasons, as well. It's a little intimidating just how much I want to cover:

The other six bits of the Eightfold Path
The other four Hindrances
Yearning for Justice vs "Letting Go" in Buddhism
More thoughts about our stupid brains, with specifics on how shitty the wiring can be
And much, much more!

Sadly, though, one of the Grumpy Buddha's issues is procrastination, and nothing feeds procrastination like feeling overwhelmed. It triggers one of those Hindrances that I introduced a little while back: Doubt. And so, Doubt will be one of the topics that I will soon explore.

But . . . not today!

Given the hour, I will leave those thoughts for later. I will, though, conclude on a positive note. While reviewing this blog, specifically, this post, it struck me just how right I was about the role of impermanence in our lives, and specifically, our thoughts.

The Grumpy Buddha has had an eventful last two months, to be sure -- still, it strikes me just how different what I am thinking (and overthinking) about now, was different from what it was last week, which was different from the week before, and so on. Similarly, my mood has changed -- I may not be bouncing off walls, but I'm certainly not in the Funk that I was in late last month.

And so, to be ironic, I will end my thoughts on impermanence in the exact same way I ended that post, because the lesson, I think, is one of the most important ones there is.

------------
The concept of impermanence is perhaps the central theme of Buddhist thought -- central enough that it deserves the kind of font size, font type, and color changes that people use when they first discover word processors.

Whatever we are currently thinking about is not nearly as important, permanent, or profound as we think it is -- no matter how strongly our gut (or brain) tells us otherwise.

It's a hugely important concept, it helped me, and I advise you to consider it the next time you find yourself trapped in your own mind.
------------

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

--George Bernard Shaw

Buddhism: Lists, anyone?

2010-07-31T23:20:00.004-04:00

I love me a good list, and even better, a list of lists.
But why stop there when you can make a list of lists of lists?

Short List of Lists -- The Important Stuff

Longer List of Lists -- 1 item through 37

Mega-List of Lists -- including some crazy crazy shit

No one gets more meta- than The Grumpy Buddha.

Fun stuff from the Mega-List:

8 guests at the chod feast
(I won't even bother listing them, the name of this list rocks hard enough on its own)

8 liberations
4. attainment of the field of the limitlessness of space
5. attainment of the field of the limitlessness of consciousness
6. attainment of the field of nothing whatsoever (I think this one might be easier than #5 or #6)

9 Unfortunate Times:
1. being born in a hell-state (I cannot argue with this.)
3. as a hungry ghost (A ghost, though, is fine. Just not one that skipped breakfast.)
4. as a jealous god
5. as a god (No offense, but someone needed an editor. Shouldn't this be the 8 Unfortunate Times?)
6. among barbarians (So, you know, Alabama, or the South End of Boston)

10 powers:
"5. transform earth into gold etc" (Admit it, now this Buddhist thing is starting to look tempting. The "etc." is really what makes this work.)

10 benefits of bodhicitta
3. you outshine the shravakas and pratyekabuddhas (whabbitahuh?)
7. you accomplish whatever you wish (What is this, The Secret?)

10 Objects for Attaining Absorption:
"6. Yellow" (I think this has something to do with fighting The Green Lantern.)

16 thoughts preventing realization
1. Dislike or disrespect for our spiritual guide. (Well . . . I'm fucked.)

Quote of the Weekend

2010-07-31T22:41:00.002-04:00

Working on sequel to "eat pray love" called "shit cry die." Sort of a glass half empty take.

--Mike Birbiglia

Quote o' the Week -- Courtesy of the Mark Twain Project

2010-07-29T15:36:00.000-04:00

As to the past, there is but one good thing about it, and that is, that it is the past—we don’t have to see it again. There is nothing in it worth pickling for present or future use. Each day that is added to the past is but an old boot added to a pile of rubbish. I have no tears for my pile, no respect, no reverence, no pleasure in taking a rag-picker’s hook and exploring it. If you can find valuables in your pile, lucky boy you—that is all.

--Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain

(What the heck is a 'rag-picker's hook?)

How Your Brain is Like a Profoundly Retarded Overprotective Mom

2010-07-18T15:24:00.011-04:00

I love talking about brains, and not just because The Grumpy Buddha is also a zombie. Which, by the way, is but a tangent from explaining how I ended up here:

but let's leave that for the moment and talk about the topic at hand, which is the horrible way that these two facts overlap:

Your brain is dumb.

-and-

Your brain is trying to help you.

The second fact is pretty obvious, but the first one requires some explanation. Well . . . it does, if you're not someone that The Grumpy Buddha knows personally.

If you're one of TGB's buddies, then you have, sadly, heard him give a "Listen to the interesting things I've learned about the brain, and Happiness, and . . . !!!" spiel about eleventy-billion times, and are right now looking for a gun to put in your mouth.

Which just goes to show my point -- you brain is dumb -- because if you were smarter, you'd just close the page and go goof around on Facebook. SO, I will leave the many, many things . . .

. . . wait, you probably need a few seconds to get over that pic, right? I know I do. I mean, ewwwww, talk about gut brainal processes just going YOWZA that's WRONG. At least I didn't post this one.

Let's pause . . .

. . .

and we're back. I'll leave details about how dumb the brain is for another post (*link to be inserted*), and summarize here:

We evolved to have two general sets of brainal processes - higher-order ones that are generally conscious, and lower-order ones that are generally unconscious.

The lower-order set evolved in a way that is absolutely not "intelligently designed" and can lead us to make some really horrible decisions.

Trying to control the second set with the first set is like trying to ride an elephant and control which direction he moves with a thin riding crop and some harsh words; incredibly difficult except under ideal circumstances.

In sum: we all have some very crappy brainal processes -- and they both hard to observe, and hard to control.

(Those who practice meditation experience this directly. One of the many benefits of meditation is that it helps us become mindful of this phenomena. Furthermore, it allows us to both practice controlling these processes, and accepting that they are so very difficult to control.)

Those interested in more details about the brainal processes can wait for my summary of The Robot's Rebellion and Nettle's books Happiness and Personality, which will appear here sometime in the next twenty years, or go pick up the goddamned books themselves. But some general classes of brainal stupidity:

Tries to protect us from dangers that aren't really dangers.
Gives us factually inaccurate cues about pain, energy levels, and other states-of-being.
Tries to get us to engage in activities that it claims will make us happy, but won't.
Causes us to resist getting engaged in activities that will actually make us happy.
Is horrible at planning for the long term.
Tries to draw conclusions using information that is trivial and irrelevant.
Is generally a whiny bitch.

See my problem? It's dizzying how fucked up our brains are. And yet, I want to keep this post to something less than seventeen thousand words. So I will limit the discussion to but one aspect of fuckupitude, and that is one that is relevant to the topic of my last post -- Torpor, i.e., a lack of mental energy.

And here's the catch. Torpor is not, specifically, a lack of mental energy -- at least, the hindrance of torpor is not. It is the perception of a lack of mental energy. Similarly, sloth is not a lack of physical energy; it is the perception of a lack of physical energy.

I shall illustrate.

Say that you have had a long, draining week at work, and were out late Friday night with your friends. You get home about 5AM, and wake up on Saturday at 10AM when there's a loud knock at your door.

You turn over, pulling the pillow over your head, cursing those damned Jehovah's Witnesses.

But there's another loud knock -- they won't go away! You're almost too tired to be angry -- you plan for the day was to sleep twelve hours, get up, and then veg on the couch -- but you drag yourself to the door to chase them away, and instead of finding JoJos, you find, depending on your sexual orientation,

A) Olivia Munn, gamer, comedian, and all-around hottie at your door in her Princess Leia outfit, asking for a quickie before she jets you off to Paris for the rest of the weekend,

or

B) Ryan Reynolds, wondering if you'd like to shred some lettuce on his abs.

Needless to say, they also point out that they find bed hair incredibly sexy.

Current scientific theories propose -- and I agree with them -- that in such circumstances, your energy level, which was hitherto weak and faded, would leap to astronomical proportions.

There are, of course, more mundane examples. (The Google Image searches, though, would have been much less fun.) You might be lying around completely bored and doing nothing, and a friend calls (or drags you out) and an hour late you're having the time of your life. Kids are infamous for being all pouty and "I'm bored/tired" and then going through the roof if they get a new toy, or get to go out for ice cream, or get to go to the shooting range.

The gist is, back in the day before well-stocked shelves with twenty-seven different types of ice cream, getting food was hard work, and it was generally profitable to save every ounce of energy we could. Physical effort burns calories, but so does mental effort, and there was sometimes an evolutionary advantage to sitting on your lazy ass.

So, our brains evolved to save us energy -- which is why they often tell us we are out of gas, when in fact our tanks are in fact half-full. How often have folks committed to working out on a treadmill 20 minutes a day, or even just taking the stairs, and find that their brains come up with excuses for not following through -- and in retrospect, realized that their brains were full of crap?

It's not that your brain hates you. It's that your brain likes you, and is trying to help you. Unfortunately, it's severely retarded -- by several million years or more, which is when the roots of these brainal mechanisms were developed, in our distant ancestors.

And because it's your brain telling you this, it's tough to get it to stop, especially because the thing telling it to stop is another, generally weaker part of the brain.

But it's possible, and in the future I'll talk about some tricks and habit-building processes that make it feasible.

I want to leave you with an excellent Radiolab podcast that a Viewer posted in a prior comments section, about the limits of the human body. It talks about how the brain creates signals to save it energy, and how dedicated athletes train themselves to override them to perform feats that are pretty mind-blowing. (I'll discuss them in detail in the "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About How The Brain Is Dumb But Were Afraid To Ask -- Or You've Already Heard It Fifty Times Over Dinner With The Grumpy Buddha, God He's Dull, I Can So Identify With That Baby With The Gun" post.)

The Radiolab Link

The Five Hindrances, or: Welcome to Funkytown

2010-07-18T01:13:00.007-04:00

What are the Five Hindrances? I'm more than happy to pretend you asked. They are:

Sensual desire
Aversion, anger, and ill-will
Sloth, torpor and boredom
Restlessness and worry
Doubt

I know what you're thinking. "But Grumpy Buddha, you've only discussed two of the eight aspects of the Eightfold Path! What about Right Livelihood? I've just gotten my law degree and have offers from De Beers, Dyncorp, Halliburton, and Anti-Slavery International and I'm not sure which to accept! And do you not see the irony of posting on Right Concentration and then bouncing off to a completely different topic?"

Well, first of all, go with one of the first three companies, and burn those fuckers from the inside. Can you say . . .

Second of all, you have a point.

Problem is, they call The Grumpy Buddha "Grumpy" for a reason. TGB went away last weekend to visit some friends in another state, and had a great time, but ever since his return . . . can you say "funk"?

No, not that kind of funk. Rather, it's been the heart and soul of the "Torpor" hindrance, with a heapin' helping of Aversion on the side. Basically, I didn't want to do nothin' -- not work out, not meditate, not write (though I did punch out the one post on Wednesday), not anything. At one point I thought to myself "You know what usually cheers you up, reading some Elmore Leonard," and I didn't even bring myself to do that -- which is plainly bizarre, on the face of it.

It's a helluva thing, torpor, and I realized that it was the next thing I wanted to write about. Well, in theory.

Problem was . . . there's a lot to say. A lot of thoughts to organize. Probably some reading to do. Some reflection. And I hadn't even introduced the concept of the Five Hindrances yet here, or put much of a dent in the Eightfold Path.

And so, rather than doing something constructive, I, in a spiritual sense, picked my figurative nose. And I dug deep, delved for the boogers of my soul, and inspected them gravely, before flicking them onto a wall of self-reflective shame. From which they bounced back and stuck to my forehead of regrets.

I probably pushed that metaphor too far.

The gist is, there's a lot to be said, and I'm happy that I've now put the groundwork in place for saying it. We'll get back to the Eightfold Path, trust me.

I will also say that a key Buddhist teaching has helped me pull my way out, and made the funk itself a more tolerable thing. One thing I told myself several times during Funkytown was that this too, shall pass. At the time, it seemed like I'd be in that mood forever -- what was I thinking, planning to write 25,000 words a month? Approaching total strangers and asking them for their photos? Updating my blog every couple of days? Who was that alien being?!

Well, I'm not sure . . . but I know he was around, and not too long ago (less than a week, actually), and I know he'll be back. The concept of impermanence is perhaps the central theme of Buddhist thought -- central enough that it deserves the kind of font size, font type, and color changes that people use when they first discover word processors.

Whatever we are currently thinking about is not nearly as important, permanent, or profound as we think it is -- no matter how strongly our gut (or brain) tells us otherwise.

It's a hugely important concept, it helped me, and I advise you to consider it the next time you find yourself trapped in your own mind.

Right Concentration: The Easy One

2010-07-14T02:54:00.003-04:00

Easy to describe, that is -- but rarely easy in practice. Unless, you know, you're playing Civ: Revolution . . .

Sid Meier may be the Antichrist. (1325 for a Space Race victory, though . . . not bad, right?) Er, where was I?

Right Concentration is in the brainal section of the Eightfold Path, and it's pretty much exactly what you think it is. It is strongly dependent on an aspect that we have not discussed -- Right Effort -- as it is about consciously directed FOCUS, on one thing, excluding all others. One HEALTHY thing. Focusing on that odd mole on your leg, or your collection of porn or, yes, Civilization, Civ II, Alpha Centauri, Civ: Call To Power, or Civ IV (Civ III kinda sucked) doesn't count. Civ: Revolution may, though. I'm just saying.

In Buddhism, one of the primary methods to develop Right Concentration is through the practice of meditation. It is outrageously, ridiculously difficult to sit down and focus on one's breath, and only one's breath, for more than a few seconds, much less a few minutes. Our brains may not be designed for multi-tasking, but they are certainly designed to wander, and this is never clearer than when you sit down on that damned cushion and tell yourself that you'll just focus on your breath.

Try it right now. Sit down and for ONE MINUTE, focus on nothing but your breath. In, out, in, out . . . I'll even say you can bounce around a bit with your concentration, focus on your chest rising and falling, or the sensation on the tip of your nose, or the sound it makes.

. . .

My guess is you didn't make it ten seconds until you thought that maybe you were uncomfortable, or about what to have for dinner, or whether you were going to make it the full minute or not, and how to keep track of it, d'oh, you should have set an alarm. It's tough stuff, conscientiously focusing on one goddamned thing to the exclusion of all others!

And that's where we will leave things now, for it is late, and His Grumpiness finds that his ability to concentrate is fading. Still, though, not much left to be said here, except that I think that the ability to concentrate is like a muscle. You need to exercise it, apply it frequently, and keep it in good condition, or else the little bugger will shrink to the size of a walnut.

Quote of the It's Been Awhile

2010-07-13T02:20:00.001-04:00

The Moral: Money, position, health, handsomeness, and talent aren’t everything.

-- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

On Writing: The One Month Check-In -- How Did I Do?

2010-07-04T19:57:00.006-04:00

On June 5th, I made a pledge that I was going to write 25,000 words by . . . well, today. The eventual goal is to write fiction that others might actually tolerate, perhaps even enjoy, but the immediate goal is simpler. To whit: develop a regular writing habit, irregardless of content, style, and grammatical correctness (hence the use of "irregardless").

I figure that once the habit is set, it will be easier to switch between styles, e.g., it'll be easier to spend a half-hour a day writing fiction after I've built up a habit of spending a half-hour a day blogging. I'm not sure whether that's the case, given how many times I've sat down to spend fifteen minutes working on scenes, story, plotlines, setting, or what-have-you, and ended up spending an hour blogging, but it's probably too soon to judge.

Plus, I think I'm getting something out of this blogging, regardless, so . . . there you go.

So how did I do? Kinda meh.

8640 words that are fiction-related (including time spent on setting, plotting, etc.)
8900 words bloggin'
17540 words TOTAL

I'll give myself a C+. Which, given that one of my goals is to get comfortable with sucking, isn't so bad. Let's face it -- if I go back 45 days, my output was a big fat ZERO.

and now . . . I've got a dozen or more blog posts, a notebook with 20 pages of scene ideas, images, lines, and character notes, and a few thousand words of writing. Bad writing, to be sure, but writing, nonetheless.

The habit, I think, is well on its way to being formed.

I'm going to shoot for 25,000 words again next month, and I have a hunch that I'll hit it. I hope that half of it will be fiction-related stuff, but if it's not . . . it's not.

Right Speech: Why You Probably Should Just Shut The Fuck Up

2010-07-04T04:33:00.006-04:00

The Grumpy Buddha thought long and hard (at least twenty or thirty seconds) about which bit of the Eightfold Path to describe first, and he settled on Right Speech. Why? Three reasons:

It's the easiest aspect to describe
It's the toughest aspect for His Grumpiness to follow

And most importantly,

It's not actually the toughest aspect for His Grumpiness to follow. He just doesn't want to, because he's a gossipy, whiny bitch.

Fact is, while none of the aspects are easy, many of them get violated through reflex or lack of care. I may want to be able to concentrate, but simply not be able to find the energy; I may want to be mindful, but get stuck in auto-pilot; I may want to understand why some element of Buddhist thought should work, but get lost in goofy paradoxes or other complexities.

With Right Speech, much of the time I know I'm being a douche, and I go through with it anyway. It's a conscious violation, and thus, deserving of scorn.

The general guidelines for Right Speech are as follows:

Don't lie (or mislead or misrepresent)
Don't complain about others ("divisive speech" and gossip)
Don't insult others ("harsh speech")
Don't babble (pointless speech and "idle chatter")

As the bigview site puts it, "Positively phrased, this means to tell the truth, to speak friendly, warm, and gently and to talk only when necessary."**

Now, the problems with Right Speech are pretty obvious. Specifically with regard to items #2 and #3, well . . . Fact is, most people suck, and need to hear advice on how they can stop sucking so badly.

And those of us who know that certain people suck, need to discuss these people (and how much they suck) because we need to plan on how to live our lives around their suckiness.

No more making fun of people behind their backs? Can you imagine a world in which you would be discouraged to create or share images such as this?

Neither can I, my friend. Neither can I.

The problem with #4 is different: we are social creatures, and "small talk" serves a social purpose. It puts others at ease and . . . I dunno, some shit like that. Frankly, His Grumpiness is only marginally social, hates small talk, thinks Twitter is fucking retarded (unless you're funny, and sorry, you're not) and ditto with all of that Facebook crap. Talk about your idle chatter. So he's going to give #4 a pass. And because he's not a moral reprobate, ditto with #1.

But hoo-ey, boy, #2 and #3 -- His Grumpiness can't complain about stupid people? Or tell them that they're stupid?!

Seriously? What about evil people?

Well . . . luckily, there's a bit of a loophole (one which I will be stretching big enough to fly a Boeing 747 through, thank you very much.) One is allowed to say things that are true, that others need to know, even if they are disagreeable, but one must only say them at the proper time and place, and then, "skillfully."

So you can pretty much say whatever you want, as long as it's true, and then excuse it with a slight head shake, a shrug, and a gentle "It needed to be said."

Still, this can only be stretched so far. It is difficult to rationalize yelling at someone, or making fun of someone, or nagging someone, or calling someone's integrity into question, and then defending it as saying there was really no better time, place, or method to deliver an identical message.

Unfortunately.

In fact, the Grumpy One recently had an experience in his own life where he told a colleague that she was a shitty scientist. It was more elegant than that, of course -- it was one of those acerbic, biting, concise and precise one-liners that get right to the heart of things in one efficient (and against a less tolerant person, fatal-to-the-relationship) jab. Anyway, as brilliant as it was, it was also . . . unskillful, not to mention unwise, and he made sure to apologize. It's but one case of many where I knew better, but couldn't -- no, CHOSE not to resist the urge. (I will point out, in my favor, that later, as I was going all Mindful on my douchebaggery, I made sure than when apologizing, I didn't give any half-baked or even full-baked excuses -- no "I was having a bad day" crap.)

So that's what I'll be working on now. Perhaps someday in the future I will be able to resist the urge to make fun of creationists, Scientologists, bad comedians, and assholes in general, but that time has not yet arrived.

What I can do, though, is try to make it so that in my personal life, I'm more careful in what I say, how I say it, when I say it.

I fully expect to go the way of Malcolm at the end of this episode. But we'll see.

**Apparently, proper grammar *coughshouldbewarmlynotwarmcough* is not required in Right Speech.

A Pedantic Side Note about CBT and Buddhism/Mindfulness

2010-07-03T03:12:00.001-04:00

There's a reason why practitioners of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) have recently been investigating the integration of CBT with meditation and mindfulness training -- CBT combines:

Reasoning through one's rational and irrational thoughts
Forcing behaviors that help one reinforce that reasoning.

Thoughts alone don't cut it, nor do deeds alone -- you need both.

The Eightfold Path has a very similar structure:

Be mindful of what you're doing, thinking, and feeling
Understand the source of your thoughts and actions, while accepting that some will be rational, some irrational
Live in a way that decreases the likelihood of surrendering to irrational (they say "unskillful") thoughts and actions

There do seem to be differences: CBT is more change-centered, where irrational thoughts are challenged, whereas mindfulness practice seems to be more about acceptance of irrational thoughts. However, as we'll discuss in the future, the Buddhist idea is that while all thoughts -- rational and irrational -- should be accepted, they should also be understood to be transient, impermanent, and not something to invest in and/or deeply identify with. This puts the two approaches on pretty much the same page.

Given the lack of humorous content in this post, I was going to leave you with a lolcat, but I do not believe that would be what one would call Skillful Action. Thus, much like the audience of someone who has gone to see Joe Rogan, you will just have to suffer and wait for it to mercifully end.

And you may now go.

More on the Eightfold Path. Or: Damn, Can't I Just, Like, Say A Few Chants or Throw Some Money Into A Collection Plate And Be Done With It?

2010-07-03T01:58:00.041-04:00

The EightFold Path can be chopped up into three areas:

1) Signs that you bought the DVD and buy into the Master Plan

Right Understanding/Right View (Learn why all this should work)
Right Attitude/Right Intention/Right Aspiration (You're going to at least TRY, right?)

2) Brainal stuff

Right Mindfulness (Be aware of what you're doing)
Right Concentration (FOCUS, McFly!)

3) Shit you actually have to get your lazy ass to do (or avoid doing):

Right Action (Don't be evil)
Right Speech (Don't be a douche)
Right Livelihood (Don't work for BP, Perdue, Lockheed Martin, or be Glenn Beck)

It doesn't say that all you need is to have a good heart, or a dedicated mind, or eat right and do ten push-ups a day to make everything hunky-dory. No, you've got be thoughtful, act correctly, and understand why you're doing what you're doing. They support each other, and if you ignore some of them, sooner or later you'll fall behind on all of them.

And here you thought all them there Buddhists did was sit around and hum to themselves while thinking about partially dismembered people trying to applaud. But don't run away just yet.

Though there are alternative approaches. Hookers and blow, anyone?

No? Okay, then . . . we'll be covering the eight elements in a pretty random order. I'd like to say that we'll go from easiest to hardest (or vice-versa), but they're all a bitch.

It's not too late to write a check.

The Fourth Noble Truth: The One With All The Gory Details

2010-07-02T01:13:00.007-04:00

When we last left our heroes, they were contemplating the first three Noble Truths:

Shit Happens, causing Life to Suck
These are linked because we crave Shit not to Happen (or to happen differently)
We can learn to stop this craving . . . somehow.

As Grumpy as I am, I confess, this all actually makes a world of sense. Well, #1 and #2 do . . . #3, well, I'm a scientist and would like to see some empirical evidence. But for now, let's go with the flow. We can always convert to Scientology later if it doesen't work out.

With the Fourth Noble Truth, we get to that "somehow", and enter "buy my DVD" territory. The Fourth Noble Truth is that we merely have to follow the Eightfold Path in order to achieve enlightenment. To whit:

Right Understanding
Right Attitude
Right Speech
Right Action
Right Livelihood
Right Effort
Right Mindfulness
Right Concentration

In the future, I will experiment with focusing In Actual Real Life on a given one on a given day of the week . . . god, is that going to be a train wreck. But it should be entertaining, and his Grumpiness needs work on all of them.

It is important to note that, as Ms. Boorstein points out, that this isn't a path in the sense that you need to work on one before the other. You can pretty much start anywhere, and they're all interconnected -- you don't notice whether you're speaking rightly without being mindful, for instance. So it's more along the lines of being an Eightfold Circle or Eightfold Dot.

The Cliff Notes: Keep all this shit in mind as often as you can, and you'll get a handle on craving, leading to greatly decreased suffering (even if we don't all end up in Nirvana.) It sounds like a lot of work, and I think it is, but you have to admit, the payoff sounds pretty sweet. Also, the Eightfold Path is also known as "The Middle Way"

because there are no cocaine binges allowed, but also no self-mutilation. So that's good, right? Plus, there's a small chance that Bryan Cranston may get involved, which would be awesome.

Of course, we really don't know how much work we're in for until we define what "Right blah blah" is for each of the blah blahs.

Something tells me we'll get to them though, and funny .jpgs will be involved.

The Third Noble Truth: You Can Stop Wanting Different Shit To Happen

2010-06-30T01:09:00.008-04:00

To review:

The First Noble Truth is that Shit Happens (A), which tends to make Life Suck (B)

A->B

The Second Noble Truth is that this link is not direct. Life Sucks (B) because we want (C) Different Shit To Happen.

A->C->B

The Third Noble Truth is that we can stop wanting Different Shit To Happen

A->C->B

thus breaking the link between A and B. Theoretically, if one can do this in all situations, one will achieve Nirvana, or, as the bigview site puts it:

Nirvana means freedom from all worries, troubles, complexes, fabrications and ideas. Nirvana is not comprehensible for those who have not attained it.

To which I say: Bullshit. I'm not going to live my life by a philosophy whose roots are built up around some goofy incomprehensible paradox. I mean, what the hell? Is this the series finale of Star Trek? Are you Q?

No? Then don't give me this "it's incomprehensible unless you've attained it which you know come to think of it you probably never will" nonsense. That's not how the Grumpy Buddha rolls.

I mean, I'm sure that there's going to be some nasty paradoxes down the line when we get to the concepts of self and non-self, but at least have the manners to put that crap in the fine print, and not 32-point font in the Foundation of the philosophy.

But we'll let that go for now, and settle for an end to most craving. Most stuff that causes us to be grumpy in everyday life does seem, upon reflection, pretty goddamned stupid.

Is it really that important that some jerk cut you off in traffic? That a friend was a half-hour late to dinner? That you didn't get invited to that party? That your douche-y coworker got the promotion that you deserved?

The answers: No, they really should have called, they're all stupid jerks anyway so who cares what they do, and surreptitiously copy some lesbian donkey porn onto his computer and then tell his boss.

Anyway, so there you have it. The Third Noble Truth. There's not a lot of meat there -- they save that for the next one -- which, yes, makes this one a little worthless, as there's no reason to believe it's possible until you dig into the details.

In fairness, it's a big enough concept -- "I can stop craving stuff, or craving that different stuff happens?!" that it deserves a bullet point of its own.

Epiphany: Thinking = Good

2010-06-28T01:51:00.005-04:00

The follow-up epiphany to "Thinking = Good" is that I've got a hell of a lot more thinking to do if I'm going to do this whole Writing Thing.

As I strolled through the Fells this weekend, I listened to a bunch o' Writing Excuses podcasts, including one on how to turn an idea into a story. The prompt they used was that insects had suddenly gained a resistance to all pesticides, and had started chomping through all of our crops, and how one might construct a story around that idea. They proceeded to talk about the process they'd use to turn that into an outline for a story:

Figure out points of conflict
Define the boundaries of the problem
Start sketching out possibilities (a "book guide") for The Big Three:

Plot
Setting
Characters

(Perhaps) figure out the ending, so you can aim towards it

It was a fun little exercise, but I wasn't sure that I was learning a whole lot. (By the way, their decision: The Bugs Have Learned Magic. Little bastards.) It was all pretty obvious, frankly -- anyone who has read the number of writing books I have (it's much more fun than actually writing) knows that you need to start with conflict, etc.

Still, I also knew that I had avoided spending time on any setting work, and had been feeling it in my writing exercises, which are supposed to be loosely or directly based on specific stories ideas I have in mind. I'd start writing a minor scene, and halfway through be asking myself, "Why do either of these people care about what's going on? What reason do they have to not just call it a day and go get a beer?"

Long story short -- I spent a little time today reviewing the premises/scenes/characters that I've had in mind for awhile, and came upon the scary realization that I have a hell of a lot fewer grand story premises than I thought, more (potentially) fun, interesting scenes than I thought, and fewer characters struggling to get through shit than I thought.

In other words, I haven't done a tiny, tiny fraction of the background work I need to in order to actually start writing a story, no matter how poor. BUT . . . I have a lot of fun ideas, and it shouldn't be too painful to throw at least some of them together into a coherent narrative.

My fear when I started was that it'd be a waste of time to start world-building and grand plot-building too early, that I first needed to generate the writing-about-anything habit, and worry about story later on. I now think that that was a minor mistake. It is, however, easily remedied.

The only problem is, world-building and grand plot-building rarely ends up generating a significant word count, and I do like the idea of my primary goal being to generate a shitload of words on electronic paper. I actually emailed "Mur Lafferty" about this problem at I Should Be Writing, but have not yet received a response. I mentioned before that I was suspicious as to whether she actually existed . . . if the lack of a prompt email response to his Hallowed Grumpiness isn't 100% indubitable confirmation of that, I'm just not sure what would be.

I think I might go with a 3x multiplier for setting-scribbling, or -- oh, better yet -- track the amount of time I work on these, and give myself credit for 35 words/minute (as, according to my Write Or Die program, this is my average WPM rate.)

Eeexcellent. Problem solved. By the way, today could have been a better day for writing, but I still managed to put in about 2500 words. Not too shabby, compared to prior days, and about lives up to the expectations I had last night.

It's a long shot . . . but I have this image of myself, 5-10 years from now, published and relatively successful, spending 2-3 hours a day writing, looking back at posts like this and from last night, boasting about writing 2500 words in a day, or whimpering about my inability to sit still for fifteen minutes of writing exercises. Would be a helluva thing.

The Second Noble Truth: You Suffer Because You Want Different Shit To Happen

2010-06-28T00:34:00.004-04:00

You may recall that the First Noble Truth: Shit Happens, and thus, Life Sucks.

The Second Noble Truth delves into this a little deeper. Personally, I have a grudge against the Buddha for this -- I would have preferred a Truth Structure that was more like:

Truth 1: A
Truth 2: B

as opposed to

Truth 1: A, thus B
Truth 2: Here's more about why A, thus B

but he's pretty dead now, or in Nirvana, or some shit, so there's not much I can do about it. Still . . . it'd be nice if the Dalai Lama could get on this and issue a correction. Seriously, it pisses me off.

And so, I suffer. To whit:

Shit happened: The very Foundation of the philosophy I am using to guide my life is really poorly structured. Talk about some lousy bullet points.
And then, Suffering happened: I desire for things to be different -- for this Foundation to be a little clearer, streamlined, efficient -- and so I feel unease, confusion, and bowel discomfort.

If I wasn't clinging to the idea that someone forming a philosophy that eventually more than billion people would follow should have some general idea of the best way to structure an argument -- no suffering! Wanting things to be different than they are -- or wanting things to stay exactly as they are, right now -- that leads to suffering, and that's the Second Noble Truth.

Sadly, it's pretty damned difficult to escape any form of clinging, attachment, or wanting. And we want a lot -- some of it crazy, some of it not so much. For example . . .

Extremely Unreasonable Wants:

To have Jessica Alba or (and?) Ryan Reynolds massaging your thighs as you read this
To travel back in time and throwing $1000 into Microsoft in 1986
A solid gold apple

Now, while most of us have given up on these dreams, many more of us struggle with

Fairly Unreasonable Wants:

To be liked by everybody
To never be disappointed by your loved ones (and vice-versa)
To never be unhappy with your job

and find it extremely difficult to jettison

Fairly Reasonable Wants:

To not die
To love someone and be loved by someone (preferably the same person)
To produce something that is valued by others

Finally, almost everyone would agree that anyone who can completely jettison most (or any) of the following desires should be classified as mentally ill.

Extraordinarily Reasonable wants:

To not have your children die before you do
To find people who can tolerate your presence
To live most of your life without severe physical pain
To not live your life in fear
A solid gold banana

Well . . . sucks to be you, sir/ma'am, because clinging to what must change, and wanting something to change that will not (at least, not as much as you want) . . . that's what causes suffering.

Still, there's some hope here -- or so the Buddha tells us! Now that we know what causes suffering, then by addressing the cause, perhaps we can eliminate it -- or, a little more practically, at least reduce it greatly.

I smell a Third Noble Truth coming . . .

On Sucking: Meditation and Writing

2010-06-27T04:22:00.001-04:00

Something I've noticed recently is how much in common these two pursuits share, and I'm struggling with the way that one of them is slowly becoming tolerable, while the other continues to give me fits.

It seems like it should be the easiest thing in the world to commit to meditating 15 minutes a day, and writing at least 15 minutes a day. I have the vague sense that people have struggled with more dire challenges -- my problem is the very definition of whiny-ass titty baby luxury problem -- but, well, there it is. I'm lucky (?) enough to be able to set goals that are not imposed from the outside -- but because of their nature, and my nature, they seem to be exceedingly difficult to get myself to pursue.

Yet I'm comforted by the fact that I put off meditating for months and months and months, and now regularly sit for 15 minutes at a stretch without hardly any mental annoyance whatsoever. If I can create one such habit, I can create another.

(And yes, I still suck at meditation -- my mind wanders, it twists and turns and daydreams, but I just bring it back to my breath and all is forgiven. I've started to meditate regularly, 6x/week for 15 minutes a day, and while I'm not sure that it's helping me achieve enlightenment and/or inner peace, I feel better afterwards, at least for a little while, and I don't feel bad if my mind wandered quite a bit during the exercise.)

On the other hand, writing anything exercise-based for even 15 minutes, if I'm not feeling inspired, feels like swallowing hot coals, in that it fills me with a feeling of mild unpleasantness. The problem is avoidance, more than anything; I spent much of the latter half of the day avoiding writing, because my gut told me that I wouldn't live up to expectations and would thus feel like shit . . . of course, another part of my brain consistently told me that because I was avoiding writing, I should also feel like shit.

What the hell is this? I mean, seriously, what am I doing to myself here? I understand that under many conditions, striving is supposed to lead to happiness, but christ, in the current instance it seems to be leading to nothing but self-inflicted pain. Though -- interestingly -- it's not the activity that is leading to pain, it's the avoidance of the activity.

Which, of course, leaves two paths -- give up on the pursuit, which would probably do little but replace the pain of avoidance with the pain/shame of avoiding avoidance, or embrace the path and experience the pain of failure.

When I put it that way . . . it seems rather obvious what must be done. Naturally, I figure this out at 4AM, when I'm drifting off and ready to crash for the night.

One of my current favorite quotes is "What a wonderful world it would be if we all did as well today as we think we will do tomorrow." I am rarely optimistic . . . but I think tomorrow will be a good day.

But we'll see, eh?

A Very Buddhist Quote Of The Weekend

2010-06-20T01:53:00.001-04:00

How many people eat, drink, and get married; buy, sell, and build; make contracts and attend to their fortune; have friends and enemies, pleasures and pains, are born, grow up, live and die -- but asleep!

--Joseph Joubert

On Writing: Distractions. Also: Does "Mur Lafferty" Actually Exist?

2010-06-19T22:16:00.005-04:00

Let's start this off by describing my surroundings**:

A rerun of High Stakes Poker is playing on TV
In my book bag, to my left, is a copy of Bickham's amazing Scene and Structure
On the top of the couch, to my immediate right (for I am reclining comfortably on said couch) are two other seemingly (so far) awesome books on writing fiction
A few feet my left is my Ipod, resting even more comfortably in its Ipod player. On this Ipod are about a billion podcasts, including several by this "Mur Lafferty" character from I Should Be Writing.

So: what do these things have in common? What are you, stupid? You know exactly what they have in common -- I've paid a hell of a lot more attention to each of them today than I have to putting electronic pen to digital paper.

(Sorry. I shouldn't have yelled at you like that. But it's been a hard day . . . and by "hard" I mean "completely wasted by my lazy ass.")

A trap that I fall into is to substitute reading or listening about writing for, you know, actually writing. I'm sure that my issue here is not particularly unique, but that doesn't make it any less painful. (Of course, it's really unfair to call it a "trap" as that implies that it's at least vaguely hidden, but c'est la vie.)

Hence my growing love/hate relationship with the possibly fictional character of "Mur Lafferty," who runs the I Should Be Writing podcast ("a podcast for wannabe fiction writers." Hello!) The title is awesome, and the podcast has been interesting so far, but the site . . . the site scares me.

Eight links to free fiction.
Eight links to Friends Of ISBW.
Six links to other fiction podcasts.
Five links to "other writing resources."

And you just know that each of those sites will have links to other links to other links to other links, until I've basically visited every site on the web in which some random schmoe talks about how to string words together. Sorry, but that's not what I need right now, and this Mur character should know better, because hey, if anyone knows that I Should Be Writing And Not Surfing Around, it'd be her, right?

Thus, some hypotheses:

"Mur Lafferty" is just one of the many personalities of some more conventionally named individual, and her site was built by one of her other, more evil personalities.
"Mur Lafferty" is just the next generation of attempt to pass the Turing Test, and has incorporated in itself inherently frustrating contradictions because the programmer thought it'd make "her" seem more human, as opposed to just more annoying.
"Mur Lafferty" is an evil ice goblin (note: most goblins are noble, upstanding individuals, so this is a shame in more ways than one) that ended up in Our World through, oh, being whacked on the head, or stepping into a wardrobe, or was caught in a tornado, whatever. Hey, it's happened to about a million fictional characters going from this world to some more fantastic one, it's gotta happen at least one time in reverse, right?
I think that counts as a story idea. Yay, notebook!
"Mur Lafferty" is actually a real person, and I'm wasting time complaining about her instead of doing "real" writing because it's more fun.

Yeah, it's probably one of those.

So it's a problem, these distractions. I need a writing book whose first fifty pages is just the word "WRITE YOU IDIOT, WRITE" repeated a few thousand times. After that, it gets to the advice.

Until then, though . . . "Scene and Structure" is really quite good, and it's time to reread it . . . again.

**Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a boob-free distractions-worthy .jpg? You're welcome (or I apologize).

You don't think I'm peaceful? Step up to my face and say that, bitch.

2010-06-19T12:41:00.003-04:00

Addendum To The First Noble Truth: Life Sucks because our brains suck

2010-06-18T09:55:00.003-04:00

A little bit more on the Noble Truth that Shit Happens, and thus, Life Sucks. One thing I love about the main precepts of Buddhism (as I understand them) is how well so many of them line up with what I know about evolutionary psychology.

We evolved in a way such that negative emotions have a much stronger kick than positive ones; most positive emotions have a relatively low-key kick to them, basically reinforcing whatever behavior we're currently engaging in that is helping us. Essentially, they are supposed to kick in when the optimal message is "What you're doing right now is good. Keep doing it." The message is rarely an intensely urgent one.

Negative emotions, on the other hand -- and there are a ton of them -- anxiety, sadness, anger, fear, restlessness, laziness, jealousy, etc. -- are often stronger, because especially in the case of the nastiests ones -- anxiety/fear -- they needed to have a much stronger sense of immediacy.

If you're eating berries, and they're good for you, it makes sense to feel a generally positive emotion so that you keep eatin' the berries. But you don't have to keep eating them right now; you can have them later if you want.

On the other hand, if you're being chased by a tiger, or being attacked by a fellow tribe-member, you need that immediate 100% grab-your-attention flight or fight response, NOW, or else you may not survive long enough to do the deed with that hot hairy ape across from you.

Thus, it's not surprising that as we lead our day-to-day lives, we should experience more discomfort than comfort, and that feelings of comfort will often be fleeting. Remember, the chance that any given vehicle (in this case, you or me) is in the absolutely perfect position, engaged in the absolutely ideal behavior, in a given situation is pretty damn low.

Another interesting correspondence between Buddhist thought and evolutionary science is how the concept of "self" gets dissected and challenged, but I will leave that discussion for another time. The use of the "vehicles" terminology in the last post is an example of this -- it's how many evolutionary scientists refer to the collection of genes that evolved to "work together" to increase the likelihood of surviving. Of course, those "vehicles" are you, me, and all these other life forms traipsing around the globe. (Well, not me. I don't traipse. But you probably do.)

The First Noble Truth: Shit Happens

2010-06-18T08:46:00.009-04:00

Caveat emptor: the writer cannot currently claim to be a Buddhist, has no official or unofficial Buddhist training, and can't even sit in half-lotus position for more than five minutes without getting a cramp. This take on Buddhist thought is filtered through my personal filthy misanthropic lens. If you know more than I do . . . well, kudos to you, sir/ma'am, and I'd be happy to hear where I've been led astray.

Now, then.

There's a lot going on in Buddhism, but as I see it there are two key areas -- you've got your Four Noble Truths, and you've got the Eightfold Path. This is appealing to me, because it's clear that the Buddha was a fan of 2-to-the-nth-power -- the math nerd in me highly approves.

The first Noble Truth -- it is called a "Noble" truth because that's how you get people to listen to you, the Buddha was no slouch when it came to PR -- is that SHIT HAPPENS. And life tends to suck because of it. This is much more comforting than it might otherwise seem on the face of it.

Basically, if you think that life is full of pain and suffering and discomfort, it's not because you're Doing It Wrong.

Now, don't misunderstand me -- you probably are doing it wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong, and are causing yourself a heaping extra helping of pain, suffering, misery, and general bowel discomfort. Nonetheless, even though you're an idiot, you should take comfort in the fact that even if you were Doing It Right, you would probably experiencing some level of pain a good deal of the time.

And that, my friends, is some weight off the old shoulders. It's kind of pathetic, but knowing that everyone else is having a shitty time of it too, and it's not completely our fault . . . kinda comforting.

A key to the whole "Life Sucking" idea is that we are not stagnant -- life is about change. (At least, until we all get tasty immortality-inducing nanobot injections, or download ourselves into cyborgs, etc. Sadly, probably not in my lifetime.) Or, in Buddhist terms, "impermanence." Because life is about change, it means that no matter how awesome things might seem right now . . . they ain't going to stay that way.

People you love are going to die. You're going to get old (or not), and die. And unless you're "lucky" enough to just get hit by a bus, or die at the height of orgasm while embedded between four to eight nubile young models, it's probably going to be a nasty process.

And even before then, you'll have other more minor-but-still-annoying discomforts. Financial problems, relationship problems, worries about your kids, your parents, your friends. Day-to-day discomforts, where you either eat that tasty donut but then feel crappy afterwards because you broke your diet, or deny yourself that tasty donut and feel discomfort because your brain is telling you, c'mon dude, it's just one lousy donut, what harm could it do? (Or, if donuts aren't your thing . . . cigarettes, shopping, checking Facebook, etc.)

Discomfort, pain, all of that is a fact of life. It's wired into our genes, because our genes were more likely to be carried on by vehicles that felt a LOT of discomfort, and because of it, tried to change their situation for the better -- eat more, achieve more, collect more. So don't feel bad, is basically the message here -- our lives are wired to suck. Rah!

In case you thought it would be impossible to end on a more down note, I leave you with a quote from Primo Levi, an Italian chemist who spent ten months in a camp near Auschwitz, near the end of WWII. It says a lot about why the typical path to achieving freedom from suffering generally doesn't work, and in the long term, will never work.

For human nature is such that grief and pain -- even simultaneously suffered -- do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to a definite law of perspective. It is providential and is our means of surviving in the camp. And this is the reason why so often in free life one hears it said that man is never content. In fact it is not a question of a human incapacity for a state of absolute happiness, but of an ever-insufficient knowledge of the complex nature of the state of unhappiness; so that the single name of the major cause is given to all its causes, which are composite and set out in an order of urgency. And if the most immediate cause of stress comes to an end, you are grievously amazed to see that another one lies behind; and in reality a whole set of others.

So that as soon as the cold, which throughout the winter had seemed our only enemy, had ceased, we became aware of our hunger; and repeating the same error, we now say: "If it was not for the hunger!"

I could really use a donut.

On My Almost Complete Lack Of Progress Meditating, Or: Hank Gets Ham

2010-06-17T02:38:00.001-04:00

One of the resolutions I made to help become more Zen (which technically isn't the right term but we'll go with it for now) was to start to meditate regularly. Other resolutions include:

Read literature on Buddhism and pretend to start to practicing it
Summarize what I'm learning about Buddhism at this site, and give excuses about why I haven't started to apply those lessons to my own life quite yet
Start to write more (a seriously bad idea)
Stop wasting time watching bad TV shows and playing computer games that I've played a thousand times before
Socialize more, and get out of the house

So, including meditation, six general resolutions, for which I shall have to come up with snappy acronyms.

I am happy to report that I have come through with flying colors on the "get the hell out of the house" resolution, but with the others . . . partial success at best.

The hour is late, however, and I hardly have the time to go on and on about my failures in general -- no, I will instead talk about one failure in particular, and that is with this whole meditation business.

My meditation failure can be broken up into two pieces -- neither a grand cause for concern, but still, a little on the irritating side.

Failure #1: I made a stickk.com commitment to meditate for at least six 15-minute periods last week, and I fell . . . er, four short. It was a fun weekend. This resulted in the Evil Hank receiving $100, probably to be used for the purchase of several cans of this.

I came through the three weeks previous, though, and recommitted to do so again for the next four weeks. I even upped the bet -- no way in hell I'm shipping that damned cat $150. He'd never let me live it down. I have to say, I like stickk.com, and should probably use them more often.

Failure #2 is of a much more general sort -- I really don't know that it's doing anything. The meditating, I mean. I've been doing (or attempting) what I understand is called Vipassana meditation, Vipassana being Hindi for "tedious."

V. meditation is pretty straightforward: you focus on your breath, and . . . well, that's it. Now, if there are any Buddhists in the audience, they probably just leapt to their feet screaming "YOU FOOL! THERE'S SO MUCH MORE TO IT THAN THAT! CURSE YOU, YOUR FAMILY, YOUR FRIENDS, AND ALL THAT YOU LOVE!" and are even as you read this are storming my house.

To which I say: BRING IT ON, BUDDHIST BITCHES.

Seriously, though . . . yes, there's a lot more to it -- and a lot less, in some ways, as you technically don't even focus on your whole breath, but just the effect or nature of it on one part of your body (say, the tip of your nostrils).

So my mind wanders -- CONSTANTLY -- and I find myself daydreaming -- CONSTANTLY -- but I try to not beat myself up too much about it, and just bring my focus back to my breath, which is precisely what you're supposed to do. I think that my level is probably exactly what it's supposed to be for someone just starting out, and that it's supposed to take years to get to the point where I've achieved something-or-other (apparently, "the truths of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness of phenomena" among other things.)

I will say that recently, the 15-minutes seems like it's ending just as I'm finally settling in to focus, and feel like my brain is starting to chill. This may not be progress: I think I'm daydreaming more, meaning that time flies by more easily . . . but regardless, it may mean it's time to up the duration. Well, maybe next month. No rush, right?

I must add for the elucidation of my readers that if Vipassana meditation doesn't sound like their cup o' tea, there are many other options. There's tantric meditation and yogic meditation and Zen Buddhist meditation -- the latter seems to be a bit more . . . involved. In that school, they throw you an unsolvable riddle (the "what is the sound of one hand clapping" crap that Bart so easily disposed of)

WHILE putting you in a nasty, nasty environment -- 100 degree weather or with water dripping on your head or with Betty White felating you, whatever. The idea is that because the student cannot escape the situation, he or she must flee into the "pure experience of the moment," which, you know, is that the moment really sucks, I would guess. (I doubt that's it, though.)

So for now, I'll stick with Vipassana, I think. I understand there's a meditation center in Cambridge -- that'd be a bit of a schlep, but as part of Resolution #6 -- GOOTH (get out of the house) -- it might be a good idea to pay a visit, just to see what the hell is going on there. Why not?

The inspirational hits, they keep on comin'

2010-06-12T09:51:00.001-04:00

Right now something like this seems appropriate.

We would rather be ruined than changed.

We would rather die in dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

--W.H. Auden

On the other hand . . .

Getting out of bed in the morning is an act of false confidence.

--Jules Feiffer

A Slightly More Inspirational Quote Of The Day

2010-06-08T12:06:00.000-04:00

Did you ever hear of a man who had striven all his life faithfully and singly toward an object and in no measure obtained it? If a man constantly aspires, is he not elevated?

Did ever man try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them, that it was a vain endeavor?
--Henry David Thoreau

Quote Of The Day

2010-06-08T11:28:00.000-04:00

No problem is so big or complicated that it can't be run away from.
--Linus (from Peanuts)

A Brief Note On Those Crazy Happy Buddhists

2010-06-08T02:05:00.002-04:00

From the comments:

The awesome perfect Zen state, in which one is enthusiastic about everything
~ not entirely accurate. Zen, as I understand it, has nothing to do with enthusiasm, just acceptance, and accepting that acceptance. And then accepting that you have accepted that acceptance. And so on...

My understanding of Buddhism is that once one achieves enlightenment and the elimination of suffering, one is just so mindful and content and peaceful that a natural enthusiasm for life, and almost all aspects of life, just starts budding out all over.

For instance, take this classic Buddhist story:

A man walking across a field encounters a tiger. He fled, the tiger chasing after him. Coming to a cliff, he caught hold of a wild vine and swung himself over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above.Terrified, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger had come, waiting to eat him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little began to gnaw away at the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine in one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

The gist (as I understand it) is that once one has learned to accept all that life deals out, and learns to be mindful of the moment, and savor each second as it passes . . . well, like I said, the end isn't a peaceful-cow-contentment so much as an enthusiastic connection to all life.

I remain skeptical, but I think that's the theory.

On Writing, Part II, or: My Doubts Do The Electric Boogaloo

2010-06-08T01:57:00.006-04:00

So . . . yeah, writing. Becoming a Writer. Whatever.

This is a bad decision for a variety of reasons:

Writing is not a social activity. (Yes, you can join a workshop, or hang out on message boards, but the work itself is solitary in nature.)
Writing is not a physical activity. I spend enough time already on my ass in front of a computer -- spending an extra 30 minutes, or hour, or two hours a day in a similar position seems pretty stupid.
Writing goals are generally inherently shitty, and hard to progress towards. This one will take a little longer to explain, but it's one of the most important problems.

The "good choices" of the last post have some easy-to-attain-or-judge goals.

If you're a hiker, you can count the number of trails you've been on, or build up to a hike of a given distance -- and when you've done it, you know it.

If you're working out, you'll see progress quickly, and it's very measurable (whether in miles run, pounds lifted, pull-ups made, or whatever.)

If you're taking photos, they're easy to share with practically any and all of your friends, and they'll be happy to tell you what they like and what they don't.

And if you're a drug dealer, you can easily quantify the mad cheese you're banking due to your peeps taking care of that beef with those wankstas on the corner. I'm just sayin', yo.

Plus, all of these activities (especially the cheese-banking) are to a large extent enjoyable while you're doing them. (Working out -- maybe not as much, though it's pretty sweet when those endorphins kick in. And you almost always feel awesome post-workout.)

Writing has NONE of these advantages. It's really quite a stupid activity to engage in "for fun" when you think about it.

When you start out writing, you suck, and it takes forever (well, years, or hundreds of thousands of words, whatever comes first) to get better. And because you'll suck, it will be difficult to get honest opinions about your work, not to mention get folks to read it. It takes a moment to look at a photo -- but a few pages of a short story is another . . . er, story. (Feel the writin' prowess!)

And it's HARD to know what you're doing wrong -- you'll know you'll suck, but not how to improve. And then it'll come the time when you think you're not doing so bad . . . but no, you actually still suck. Sorry, but you do.

To quote Jonathan Coulton:

"The process is excruciating . . . I think anyone that has done it, will agree . . . it's brutal, it's work, it's pushing a heavy rock up a hill."

He does say that "Occasionally something good happens" but I think that that "occasionally" is pretty freakin' infrequent for those of us who are just starting out.

So I have, for reasons as yet unspoken, decided to try to Become Enthusiastic about an activity that is inherently solitary, non-physical, and causes one to be fraught with self-doubt and uncertainty.

Yikes.

But this is where that bit in my last post comes in, and it gives me a shred of hope:

Thus, according to Buddhist thought, one could be quite enthusiastic about some pursuit, but still be miserable, or be temporarily happy and then fall back into a Deep Dark Pit O' Doom, especially if one ties one's self-image too closely to one's success in that pursuit.

If one is comfortable with sucking (i.e., does not tie one's self-concept as a Writer to the fact that one is writing extremely poorly), and if one creates goals that are easily measurable (say . . . word count, or time put in hammering away at the keyboard), then the third disadvantage flies away, and all one is left with is the first two.

And, you know . . . those aren't so bad, especially when one can engage in other activities to meet one's quota of social and physical exercise.

So . . . what the hell, right?

I've heard it said that you need to write a million words or so before you have a clue about what you're doing. I've also heard it said -- by Lawrence Watt-Evans, many moons ago (~15 years?) at a con, that when you start, what you write for the first year-and-a-half or so is going to be crap.

I'm not getting any younger, so it's time to make a commitment. I'm not going to go with that million words thing right off the bat, though.

Let's start small -- say, 1000 words a day, on average, six days a week. Hell, 25,000 words a month -- that's pretty wimpy, but it's a start, and it's about 24,950 more words a month than I've been doing lately. I'm going to count anything non-work that is at least vaguely constructive -- blog posts, writing exercises, and real story work or background writing. I'm going to be keeping track of the total at the bottom right . . . let's see where this takes me.

Now, a critic might say that bloggin' don't count as real writing. They have a point, their delightfully grammatically incorrect idiom aside. But I like bloggin', and figure that it's more important to put time in hacking away at the keyboard than it is to worry about precisely what the content is. What's key is to create the habit . . . next month, I'll put a limit on how much of that word count can come from the blog.

(By the way -- it's one thing to say that this will work if one becomes comfortable with sucking, and another to actually DO that -- but we'll leave the Buddhist commentary on all of this for another time. It's important, though -- it will probably mean the difference between this being a long-term commitment, and something that lasts for a week or a month.)

Quote Of The Day

2010-06-07T00:50:00.000-04:00

The first kind of failure is the slow fail -- not failing fast enough or explicitly enough. You can waste a lot of time this way.
--Geoffrey Moore