CSotD: Weekend Wrap-up
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Sheldon has been kind of sporadic lately as Dave Kellett focuses more on Drive, which I gather has become his bread-and-butter. But he's just finished a book project there and now has Sheldon creating his own fantasy story.
I particularly liked this because it hit just as I was becoming burned out on the middle-school books I assign my young writers to review, and — bless his heart — just as one of them wrote:
While the book was good it wasn’t very unique. It was your average, everyday fantasy book where the hero has to save the day.
Which made me feel that I wasn't just losing my own edge. Mind you, he's 13, at the top end of our age group, but, still, it sounds like he has also picked up on the fact that the publishers are grinding out same-old-same-old.
And apparently selling it. Or at least marketing it.
By the way, I don't object to "very unique," because one of my missions is to teach the kids to write like people and not just produce what teachers want to see.
The notion that "unique" is an absolute is one of those rules that make no goddam sense outside the classroom, or, for that matter, in it.
My own take is that, at some possibly-sub-atomic level, everything is unique and therefore the word, as an absolute, is useless, while, at other levels, everything is all pretty much the same and so there are, indeed and of course, levels of uniqueness.
To put it in more utilitarian terms, one snowflake may be theoretically unique, but when there are two feet of them in my driveway, they are very similar, one to another.
And when there are 12 feet of average, everyday fantasy books on the bookstore shelf, ditto.
The very idea of "average, everyday fantasy books" is nearly as appalling as the fact of their existence.
Nor do I think this is purely a middle-school phenomenon.
Today's Retail had more adult-oriented impact in part because I signed up for a JCPenney credit card a few months ago in order to save $20 on my first order, was a day late and took a $25 late fee.
And canceled the card, but it was a good trick and they're to be congratulated.
But a few decades earlier, as a newly divorced freelance writer with two kids, I got caught in that 28 percent trap and it wasn't so easy to laugh off.
In fact, a decade-and-a-half later, with the nest empty, regular work and a decent salary, I was still struggling to make minimum payments on the pile that had accumulated in the meantime, which kept me living paycheck to paycheck and making no progress towards any sort of retirement.
When the paper I edited went under, I had a very positive interview at a similar but better run weekly, and would have been hired except that, to make ends meet, I had to ask for more money than the job was worth.
I ended up in bankruptcy, but didn't feel bad because, at the interest rates I was paying, they'd all long since had their principle back with a profit.
Today, I'm living fairly comfortably on half what I was making back when the bloodsuckers were upon me.
There was a time, O Best Beloved, when consumer interest was tax-deductible, presumably on the theory that, when we borrow money and buy things, it helps keep the economy chugging along. But they fixed that, and only home mortgage interest is deductible today.
As for usury laws, those are for libtards. Don't expect any help on that.
Another thing that has since changed is that in the '80s, credit card offers came to the male in the couple, so it wasn't hard for a somewhat hapless freelance writer to get a VISA card, based on "our" income, about a month before we split.
Which I mention mostly as a segue.
Because — as Joel Pett says — didn't those women bring it yesterday?
I had granddaughters marching in Boston, in St. Paul, MN, and in Concord NH and I'm as proud of them and their parents for that as for anything else any of them have ever done.
I particularly like Pett's take because it was a case of little drops of water wearing away at the stone.
Ahead of the march, Social Justice Warriors were offering tips online about how to counteract tear gas and how much provocation you could legally dish out to the police, but what I heard from everyone who was there was that it wasn't about confronting anything but the national conscience.
It was about standing up, a message as much to the rest of the country as to the Powers That Be.
Felt like old times.
I wasn't at the 1967 March on the Pentagon where this famous photo was taken, but I was at an April, 1968, peace march in Chicago that, thanks to some provocation from (the real) Mayor Daley's office and a small but hostile segment of both students and police, turned violent.
The saddest part was the horror on the part of the good cops, whom we'd been chatting with on the march from Grant Park to the Civic Center and some of whom were, indeed, wearing lilacs tucked into the face shields of their motorcycle helmets.
I've often wondered how those guys who tried to protect us that day made it through what followed in August.
What I do know is that, as Phil Ochs notes, it set the mood. Out-of-towners might have been shocked by the Convention, but those within 100 miles of Chicago had already separated into those who wanted trouble and those who did not.
Which, in turn, divided the Movement.
I truly hope that doesn't happen again.
Stay strong. Be cool.
Keep on keepin' on.
Here's your moment of historic zen
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