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The Teaching Front: Pondering Points
I teach history, not math. We should get this off the deck immediately. My math skills are, to be honest, atrocious. So when I sat down to figure out how to build my first batch of tests four years ago, it seemed to me that the best solution was to build a 100 point test. There would be four such tests in a semester, which matched my own experiences as a student. Issuing the grade the student earned would be a simple matter. Deduct points based upon errors, mistakes and wrong answers, subtract from 100 and there you have it, a grade to issue. If they lost 3 points, they got a 97 percent which would be an A. If they lost 65 points, that would be a 45 percent, which would be an F.
The thing is this. Just what, exactly should something be worth?
I’m not the first person to wrestle with this and there are all sorts of philosophies on what assessment should be used for, how many points to issue, should it be high stakes or low stakes and so on and so forth. An instructor’s assessment methodology, or lack thereof, is probably one indicator of their overall teaching philosophy.
I started with first principles.
First, I always hated homework in high school. To me, it was not much more than paperwork which had to be mindlessly completely. When I did it, which was not always the case, I ground through it reluctantly and turned it in. As soon as it was turned in, I forgot about everything except what the item was worth. If I really hated the class, and I hated half of them in any given year, I probably forgot the point value as well.
One pleasant aspect of college is that in many classes, you do not have homework. This often comes as a culture shock to freshman students, who are used to grinding out the assignments. You still have to do the assigned work, such as reading and study guides, but in most traditional college classes in the social sciences, homework isn’t issued.
It is worth pointing out that once someone pulled the gun away from my head per homework, which were now called study guides and reading assignments, I popped through them pretty quickly. I also retained the information for much longer than I might have otherwise. Not issuing homework also cut down on a number of other issues, such as allocating time to grade the assignments and the fact that most students probably cheat on the homework assignments. My summer working as a lifeguard around a bunch of high school students served only to reinforce that latter notion.
That leaves me with tests, quizzes and essays.
My first year exams were modeled on those issued by Larry Cox for American History at Maple Woods Community College. They were multiple choice exams only, 100 points, each question is worth one point each. It was the type of test I took and I remembered happily blasting through them without any real effort, though I messed up the scantron on the very first test which gave me a fright. Fortunately, we fixed the error and I got a solid A on my first exam.
The problem? Students were having trouble finishing the test. This is something I still struggle with, most people read v-e-r-y . . . s-l-o-w-l-y. The more important the item, the slower they go. They more nervous they are, they go even slower still. If they are prone to test anxiety, more on that in a bit, they tend to freeze up completely.
Another problem is the fact that other students who put in a minimal amount of time memorizing bits of data simply regurgitated the data onto the test, earned an A, just like I did, and moved on without really learning much. Given that survey classes are supposed to be preparing the students for advancement to higher levels and remembering my own troubles in that transition, this didn’t sit easily with me.
A final problem is that I was advised to issue some portion of the test with a writing component. Over the semesters I experimented with short answers, which are maddening to grade and issue points to. Just how much should a short answer be worth? Five points or ten? Twenty or two? It also seemed to me that the short answer wasn’t much better than the multiple choice in terms of assessing their understanding of the material. It was just another version of the multiple choice only I had to suffer through their bad handwriting.
There is cheating on tests as well, I might add.
So I pulled a page from the Western Civ classes I took years ago. On those exams the Instructor used a fifty-five point essay question. There were three per exam, he would pick one at random. Then you’d write. It was a harder test, to be certain, but it did force you to memorize the facts, think critically about the question at hand, organize a response and economize your words plus your time in order to complete the exam before the end of class.
I generated my first essay based exams with a point value of fifty points and issued them to my classes with fear in my heart. There was a lot of nay saying about the average student’s ability to write an essay, some of it well founded I might add. I’d still have the problem of bad handwriting and poor organization to deal with.
But why fifty points? Here is my reasoning.
First, if the point value is too low, like say 25 points, then the student will wargame the exam and figure they can skimp on the effort. At best you’ll get what is basically a short answer paragraph of maybe three to eight sentences which fails to answer the question on any level.
Second, if the point value is too high, then the student worries too much about the essay question, focusing on it to the exclusion of the rest of the exam.
Third, if they blow the essay, that is over half of the exam. Fifty points out of a hundred is a nice, round number to work with. They can’t blow it off, but they can’t blow off the other part of the test either. If they at least put some effort into it, they can get a passing score.
How do I grade the essays? On that matter, it becomes rather subjective and it is often a point of contention.
For one thing, I actually READ each essay. Students frequently assume that what I will do is skim their essay, looking for key terms. I do skim the essays the first time just to see how long it is, how it is organized, what I am dealing with over all. Then I read them.
I look for the following things when reading.
1. Is the essay well organized? Does it have a beginning, a middle and an ending which makes sense? Did the student accurately lay down the historical sequence of events in order to build their answer properly?
Often a badly organized essay is very much akin to a three year old with a box of crayons. It is all over the place and when I talk about essays I actually take a marker and scribble a line that goes in loops all over the board. This graphic representation sinks in for many of them.
2. Did you indent your paragraphs?
Some students do not know how to indent for some reason. When I get their essay, it is a solid block of text which is virtually unreadable. I warn them in advance to indent their essays, tell them how to do it if they have a doubt (place your index finger on the page and start writing from there) and I tell them that if they have a new idea, it probably needs a new paragraph. After all, Thomas Jefferson probably doesn’t want to share his paragraph with Alexander Hamilton.
Failure to indent costs a student one point per each offense to a maximum of five points. Five points is enough to hammer the point through to them without actually failing them if they executed everything else properly.
3. Factual errors.
Telling me that George Washington was at the Battles of Saratoga (for the record, he wasn’t) constitutes a factual error. I can’t brush it off as an opinion or an argument. When a student makes a factual mistake it shows me that they have not mastered the basic details required by the question. Thus I deduct points, anywhere from one to five, depending on the severity of the error.
These errors can and do add up very quickly. I also think this separates the adults from the kids in that someone who is good at memorizing bits of data often lacks the practice and experience of putting the puzzle together. It also serves as a pretty good indicator of what is going on in their headspace.
The complaint, often leveled by students against this element of the grading is that they have no real way of knowing EXACTLY what to put on the test. This type of student is one who still thinks, in spite of everything I have taught them, that history is merely about memorization.
“If only I can memorize the RIGHT details, I can ace Mr. Murphy’s test,” they must say to themselves.
The funny thing is, I do tell them EXACTLY what they need to know. It is called lecture and part of what I am looking for is their ability to summarize their understanding effectively.
4. Lack of details.
This is perhaps the most maddening aside from poor organization. Here is an example.
These guys were mad about taxes so they started a revolution. They fought against those other guys, I can’t remember who they are. It was a long fight with a lot of dead people in it but when it was over, our country was born. I’m sure glad they fought for us because I wouldn’t have my freedom without them.
A student will often say, “This is right, isn’t it?”
Yes.
And no.
Yes, it is a description of something I cover in class. It is right, vaguely. It also lacks nearly every detail one would need in order to figure out exactly what the student was talking about. If the student were to give an informative speech on a lecture in my class using the above paragraph, they would probably fail the assignment. It lacks the standard who, what, where, when, how and why that one needs in order to flesh this out.
Lack of detail will cost a student one to five points per instance.
5. Insufficient length.
This usually goes hand in hand with the above. If I get a blank essay, I’ll issue zero points. If I get a paragraph like the one I mentioned in italics, I’ll be charitable and issue ten points for effort. If the student nails the multiple choice then they’ve got a 60 percent, which is just barely passing.
While disappointing in many respects, these are the easiest to grade. You put ten points on them and move on.
The essay questions themselves are challenging yet if you read them and answer every component of them, it is possible to build a framework from the question itself.
Here is a question from my Western Civ One class.
Describe the causes and motivations of the Peloponnesian War. Identify the major combatants of the war and provide details on the nature of this conflict. Furthermore, was the war inevitable? Did the major combatants want a war and could it have been avoided? Provide your opinion supported by sufficient historical evidence and reasoning.
Students often ask, “Why is this one single block of text?”
I tell them, “I want you to get into the habit of taking blocks of text like this and breaking them down into component parts. When you reach upper level courses, you’ll look back on this question and see it as pretty clear cut in what I’m looking for.”
During the same semester that I issued this question, I brought a 300 level essay question from Trinity’s classes in to read to my students. Even with a Master’s level education, it took me a lot of effort to pull apart exactly what that instructor was looking for. My question simply asks you to tell me what you know about the period in question, lay down the causes and motivations, and provide evidence for your opinion.
The evidence, in this case, was to be pulled from a survey of the historigraphic (a history of history) lecture which detailed what previous historians had said about the war. It was probably one of the most complex lectures I’d ever given a college level course and perhaps a bit too hard at the 100 level. On the other hand, my Western Civ students beat the living daylights out of the question in spite of the difficulty.
In an opinion based question like this one, opinion counts for ten points. If you give only an opinion not supported by knowledge of the facts, you’ll be lucky to get any points at all.
So, to rift off of something Terri Lowry once said, what are my objectives?
1. I want to impart to the student that the study of history is more than mere memorization. They must be able to think critically about the information in order to, at later stages of the game, have a defensible opinion based upon the evidence at hand.
2. I want the student to gain the ability to write a critical essay outside of the core composition courses in preparation for advancement to higher level college classes.
3. I want the student to develop the ability to summarize their argument effectively, balancing the need for time conservation in class against the need to provide as much detail as possible.
4. Finally, I want the student to actually REMEMBER something from my class for longer than sixteen weeks.
In this bit of pondering I’ve only covered the essay portion. I still issue a multiple choice component which is worth two points a piece for a subtotal of 50 points.
Why two points per question? Again, it gets down to time. I think, even though the essay is worth half of the exam, that it is the more important component of the exam. I have to balance that view against the fact that not all students are good essay writers and they have a limited amount of time to complete the exam. If I issued one point per question for a maximum of 50 questions, they would be back to lack of time, which would affect the quality of their essay.
I could simply make the exam a 75 point exam but then we’re back to the problem of a student worrying more about the essay than the multiple choice. I want to get them into the habit of taking both sections seriously.
I didn’t get to test anxiety on this run. Maybe I will later, but this particular essay is long enough already.
Oh, what would I give this entry if I were grading it?
To be honest, it does wander around a fair amount and it does lack detail in places. In other places, it is vague.
I’d give it an 80 percent. Barely a B.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
I’ve had a blog of one form or another since 2003. There was the first Pondering Tree at Journalspace, which blew up and sucked most of the material down a wormhole back in 2008. And of course there is this one.
In the Fall of 2007 I started teaching at roughly the same time I started publishing fiction. I never expected to teach given the screwball interpretation of the hiring policies at a sister campus. The change in jobs meant a change in what I could and could not post about. Obviously I could not talk in great detail about what happened in the classroom, my own scruples would prevent that if the law didn’t. Nor could I post on certain topics which might be seen as unprofessional.
The entries changed and so did the readership. In many respects it seems to have fallen off since 2007. Part of that is due to the ongoing stall in my writing career, which seems to be holding steady at two story publications. It would help if I would write fiction, send it to market and revise older projects. However, as I type this blog I have the earphones in because the television is going.
I simply can not write any fiction with any verbal audio input. I’ve tried over and over again with the results of staring at a blank screen in total frustration. That frustration bleeds into the relationship I have with the Woman I Love and causes endless havoc. As it stands, writing a blog entry or doing non-fiction with the earphones in, tuned to instrumental music, is borderline difficult.
In any case, the solution to that problem is a writing space where I am alone and it is quiet. I’ve blogged about that before so I won’t beat that horse again.
I find it unwise to blog about the relationship I’m in, or other relationships, which also causes grief from time to time. There is an ongoing feeling that the blog should be a couples blog, which it is not. It is a writer’s blog. Maybe it might be worth the time to create a stand alone couples blog but then it wouldn’t really be mine, it would be OURS.
There is also the feeling on my part that some things truly should be private. The world doesn’t need to know every detail about my relationship with Trinity. Even the Facebook feed doesn’t feature every aspect of our love affair for each other.
Further, writing anything that even feels remotely critical runs the risk of starting a problem. Such comments are often taken as a sign of unhappiness on my part and that the relationship is in trouble.
Which it isn’t. I can’t write fiction when ANY other human being is around. I had a bitch of a time doing it when I lived with my parents as a kid and again in my adult years. I can’t seem to get it done in a coffee house or any place else where humans are talking.
It is what it is.
As for blogging about my summer job, as with my teaching, there are things I can talk about and things I can not. I love the job but I have had my frustrations, the sort of frustrations that would bleed out there in years past. To be candid, I think my greatest frustration comes from enabling parents who put their children at risk with their own behavior. That said, I can’t really go into detail about that either.
Thus, I’m left with little to say most days. If I do have something to say, it is something that can usually be conveyed in less than 420 characters at Facebook.
At Facebook I’ve had some pretty lively discussions over one thing or another, the sort of thing which used to happen here at the Tree. I also use Facebook for many of the admin functions this blog used to serve, such as an online post it note, a record of things accomplished and yes, the things we ate for dinner. Sometimes I vent my spleen there, as I have done here.
Thus I find myself wondering about the future. Perhaps a day will come when the bare dirt around the Pondering Tree becomes overrun with the pixelated weeds and creeper vines of the internet. Should another server crash take place, perhaps it won’t even be that, nothing more than digital oblivion thrown to the four winds of words written and lost forever.
Who knows?
Year 2011 – Fall Semester Prep
We went to breakfast this morning at Corner Cafe in Liberty, the last hurrah for Summer 2011. Below is a shot of the place.
After a Wal-Mart run for some last minute items, I dropped Trinity off at the Pod in order to get some work done on the car. It took longer than I thought it would to clean the windows, wash the car and organize the trunk.
On the Guy Front per the car, the plan is to organize a maintenance kit for each vehicle. Once upon a time in the Army, I had such a kit for my privately owned piece of shit S-10 that my Father fucked me over with after I got back from the Gulf.
Desert tan, folks. Not only had it been through three engine blocks by time I got it, but it was desert tan.
I really, truly, deeply wonder sometimes what that man was thinking. I should spend my independent study session with Terri Lowry writing up some material pondering that particular question.
In any case, the plan is to have a basic kit in both cars by October. Contrary to popular belief among my extended family, thanks again to my Father, I am capable of rudimentary maintenance work on the vehicles. By rudimentary I mean that I can change a battery, change the oil (not that there is a place to do that here at the Pod), check fluids, change tires . . . you get the idea.
I also need to get a full sized spare rim for the ZX-2. It makes me nervous, driving around on the pathetic sort of donut that they give you these days.
Lastly, I’ve all but decided to get a new keyboard, one of the old school clickety-clack Model M keyboards. At the beginning I can hook it up to my laptop and possible make some headway on various tasks which need doing. Later on, perhaps when I convert a space at my Mom’s into a true writer’s space, I can get a writing only computer to go with it.
Then we can see about getting this writing career of mine back on track!
So it goes.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
Twenty years ago this week I was coming to the realization that I had survived my first and last war. In retrospect, that war was a forgone conclusion. Military historians have ascertained that the reasons for the defeat of the Iraqi Armed Forces at the hands of the Coalition Forces of Operation Desert Storm can be traced to poor leadership, poor planning, lack of motivation among the opposing forces, and perhaps an overinflated assessment of the capabilities of Soviet technology.
It was a war that lasted, in terms of ground combat, four days.
It changed everything.
How did I come to stand on the razor’s edge of history? Granted, I didn’t have any effect on it through my personal actions. I was a mere cog, a little tiny bit of the war machine, one that could have been deleted without a second thought. In fact, if I were writing a novel on the Persian Gulf War, which would probably need at least one fire fight to satisfy the readers, I would pick someone other than myself as an example. I saw a lot of things, but in terms of actual battlefield changing actions, I did very little.
I bore witness, and that is about it. As wars go, I got off pretty easy in the initial assessment. So easy that many of my peers, including one particular prick in South Korea, frequently stated that it wasn’t a real war at all.
Tell that to the Iraqis we killed.
I am not a repentant veteran. I never have been. I offer no apologies for my service nor make any excuses. I do not experience any great discomfort at what happened. Perhaps I experience a very real regret that people I bore no personal grudge against were killed and I often wonder about the living that survived the dead.
I wasn’t particularly eager to go to war either. I was not the kind of soldier who sat around masturbating to the latest issue of Guns and Ammo while whispering sweet nothings to my weapon, named after some woman whose pants I failed to get into. I did not volunteer for Airborne training, in fact I actively turned down an opportunity to go. I did not have any particular affinity for elite infantry units such as the Rangers, who seem still to this day to be not much different than Marines. Technology interested me more than living in the mud and if the Air Force had offered as much for enlistment as the Army had, I probably would have been an airman.
Instead, I joined the Army. Money was part of the motivation, family lineage in the Army was another, and finally the lack of any real prospects was a third. Perhaps patriotism figured in at some point though I can be just as cynical as the next American about my home nation. Lastly, if nothing else, I knew I was a fighter. I had spent my teen years fighting. I would spend my Army years fighting and I’d fight some more after that.
It is perhaps a strange thing then that I was influenced by what is essentially an antiwar documentary which was aired in 1983 on PBS. Each night I would sit down in front of my small black and white television set in my bedroom, which was a big thing in my book, having a television, to watch Gwynne Dyer hold for on the futility of war.
The documentary, entitled War, was designed to educate the public on the futile nature of warfare as a means of resolving differences. Like many products of the Reagan Era, it was designed to scare the living shit out of anyone with an ounce of sanity about the probability of a nuclear war.
Here is the installment entitled The Deadly Game of Nations.
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The music with the intro, along with the images, embedded themselves into my teenage brain. Unlike my peers, I never saw anything you might call glory in warfare. I knew it was a bloody, horrifying, dirty business. I knew it came with horrendous costs, all I had to do was look at my Vietnam Era father to see that. From reading the history books along with science fiction novels, I knew that the next World War, the one we still haven't fought and hopefully never will, was going to be the last.
Dyer's job was to talk me out of enlisting. He wasn't a dick about it. He was a veteran of military service himself steeped in a solid background of military education. He was antiwar without disrespecting, demeaning or insulting the soldiers.
In my case, he failed.
To be fair, my father failed too. So did my mother, at least the first two times I signed an enlistment contract. Each time I managed to come up with sufficient justification for enlistment. Threats to crack my kneecaps not withstanding, I signed the dotted line. I should point out that I nearly did so again in 2004 in order to go to Iraq, not because I felt a need to prove myself, but because I felt a need to back up my support for Operation Iraqi Freedom by virtue of direct participation.
Perhaps some perspective is in order.
In March 1989, when I signed the Delayed Entry Program contract, these facts were known.
1. The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of Russia actively targeted civilian population centers with enough ordnance to destroy the planet many times over.
2. The danger of dying in such a war was no less or great at Fulda Gap in Germany than it would be if I stayed in Kansas City, Missouri. What difference does it make if a T-72 gets me, nerve gas or a ten megaton nuke chucked at Downtown KCMO? Dead is dead, no matter where the dying transpires.
3. The two Super Powers had managed to keep the genie in the bottle. I had a belief, perhaps a naive one, that no one would go so far as to chuck nukes around like so many hand grenades.
4. On a personal level, the economy sucked. My job prospects were awful. Four years of active service bearing witness to the failures of my civilian counterparts only serve to reinforce the notion that I had made the right choice.
5. I had to pay for college somehow.
So I signed up, knowing that I was signing a contract. I promised to go fight, and if need be, die. In exchange, the United States of America would feed, clothe and house me. They'd provide a rudimentary if not great medical care program and if I made it to the end of my first four years, they'd give me money for college.
If I could pick up an honorable discharge.
All I had to do was agree to go kill anyone the United States of America declared the Enemy of the Week.
It turned out to be the Iraqis.
If a war was to be fought, I expected it to be at Fulda Gap in Germany. Or maybe, in my wilder moments, perhaps Columbia fighting some Vietnam do over in an attempt to control the drug trade. I didn't expect Iraq and I don't think the Iraqis did either.
Dyer's series is useful for a lot of reasons. Aside from laying out the mindset of a soldier, he captures the attitudes of the early 1980s regarding the military.
1. Soldiers are obsolete.
2. They are preserving an obsolete way of doing things.
3. The equipment they use is expensive, fickle and will probably fail them at the worst possible moment.
4. The Soviets have more of everything, which will lead us to use nukes.
It turns out Dyer was wrong, perhaps sadly enough. He was wrong on every front. We still use wars to solve our problems. We haven't blown the planet up yet (and I probably just jinxed us by typing that). Our weapons are expensive and fickle yet they are also far more effective than anyone could have possibly imagined.
In one respect, I'm glad he was wrong. If he had been right, I wouldn't be typing this right now. I'd be in a grave somewhere, long moldered away to nothing, the victim of a futile effort to dislodge an invader from another country.
In many ways, Dyer convinced me that it didn't matter where I was. Stay at home and catch a nuke or go for a soldier and take your chances. This series did the convincing.
So it goes.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
It is a tired line I hear pretty regularly.
Quote, “The United States of America is doomed. She is in terminal decline. She’ll go the way of the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire.”
This line gets trotted out every time the country goes through a fiscal downturn. If we are at war against an enemy we can’t pick up a quick victory against then the line gets shouted from the rooftops. You see this reflected in science fiction where predictions of the 21st Century feature a worn down, tired United States of America experiencing a malaise akin to the one Russia suffered at the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Meh, pessimist that I am, I don’t quite buy it. Why?
If you study the course of American History, and I’ve done so over the last three and a half years of teaching it, what you see is a pretty clear cycle. The country frequently goes through periods of boom and bust, sometimes prompted by poor fiscal behavior, stock market manipulation and overextension. One could build a series of lectures going over every panic, every depression, recession, what have you and how they happened. One could just as easily come up with the reasons for why we managed to get out of those downturns.
It should also be pointed out that since the Founding, the United States of America has had people waiting in the wings for the country to implode. They were around in Europe during the 1790s yet it should be pointed out that we did not resort to beheading people. They were around in the 1860s when we fought the American Civil War. Move ahead and you’ll find the same type of person during the Cold War and in the post Cold War Era. It is almost as if there is an academic-intellectual complex devoted solely to taking bets on when my country is going to go into the toilet.
Is it going to happen this time? Well, things are pretty bad. The unemployment rate is at ten percent. The economy is not in the best of shape. Our financial institutions seem to think that it is business as usual and our politicians can’t seem to make the hard decisions on what needs to be done.
Do I have solutions? I’m getting old enough to realize that I probably can’t solve them, but I’ve got a general list of things I think need to happen. Here they are.
1. Reform Public Education: I don’t know what they are teaching in public schools but I continue to get students who can not read, can not write and lack the ability to engage in critical thinking. They seem to think that education is merely a matter of memorization, regurge and then forget it.
I think, as an aside, I am particularly horrified that the worst cases are people who have listed education/teaching as their major. I’m further horrified by the notion that teaching isn’t about the mastery of a subject matter, it is all about technique.
I am beginning to believe that education is too important to be left to local school boards. Not only do I think unions need to go, I also think local control needs to go. I’m not willing to let the Federal Government take it over, but it might be best to place State Governments in charge. Maybe then there would be some level of uniformity.
Finally, we need a whole new attitude toward education in general. The Blue Collar attitude of a utilitarian education is a long standing, nearly intractable American tradition. The question is always, “How will this put food on my plate?”
The question ought to be, “How will this improve the world for future generations?”
2. Transition to nuclear, solar and wind energy: If we’re going to have more electric cars, we’re going to need to generate more power to charge them. Unless we want to build coal fired plants, that means we’re going to need a new power grid. Solar and wind can provide some of that power but I think they need a foundation which provides consistent power regardless of the weather. Nuclear power is the best bet for that.
Hey, the French do it. Aren’t we always saying we should follow the French more often?
3. Back to the Future, a return to railroads: Every morning during the semester I get up and drive twenty to thirty minutes to Longview from North Kansas City. I spend a great deal of time in my car, wasted time, time that could be better used if I were on a train. Many cities in this country need to be retrofitted with light rail technology. Interstate travel should be facilitated by maglev trains which could move freight and passengers as rapidly as aircraft. An additional benefit is that the maglev or regular trains could not be used to knock over skyscrapers in a 9-11 type attack.
The maglevs and light rail could be powered the new power infrastructure I suggested.
4. Kill the internal combustion engine: I like the freedom my car provides and yet it has always been a love hate relationship. The car is a significant drain on my time and resources. Without it, I can not find work. With it, it takes money out of my pocket in much the same way a protection racket might. Worse, the gas money goes out of the country to some bastards who think blowing up my fellow Americans is a great way to pass the time.
Much as the South was once addicted to human slavery to drive their economy, we are addicted to the internal combustion engine. It has to go. The sooner, the better.
Oh, I’m not saying we should give up cars. Without all the improvements I’ve suggested above, many are still going to need some sort of personal vehicle to get around. If they were cheap enough and if I could find a charging station then I could be talked into purchasing an electric car.
5. Foreign entanglements: Washington warned us about them and for a while, we managed to keep to our own affairs. The 20th Century, for better or worse, changed all of that. We live in a global economy and the thought that we could dial the clock back to 1890 is probably unrealistic.
That said, we could and probably should cut back. If we could cut off our oil consumption then we could probably cut back on our footprint in the Middle East. It probably wouldn’t hurt, while we are at it, to withdraw from NATO. Europe seems to be capable of defending themselves these days. I don’t think they need American troops to protect them and I always thought the expansion of NATO (which drew us into the Balkans) was a bad idea.
Increasingly I believe that our attention should be focused toward the Asia-Pacific Region. With China continuing to rise as an economic power along with South Korea and Japan, our economic interests lay in that region of the world.
I don’t think, however, that we are destined for war with China. At some point when my thoughts are more clear, I’ll ponder on that a bit.
6. Americans need to lose the gut: Someone thought I was joking when I wrote that a national medical care system should have a physical fitness requirement. It does bear echoes of 1984 but my point is pretty simple.
We eat too much, exercise too little, get diseases as a result and drive up the cost of care. I’m just as guilty of it as everyone else. If there was an incentive to engage in physical fitness then perhaps Americans would work to stay healthy.
Let’s say you get advanced on a ration based system to Tier One Status for doing all the right things. You get priority care because you are working out, eating right, dropped the smoking, the drinking and the drugs. If you are Tier One, because you cost the least to take care of, you also get a massive tax break.
On the other hand, if you eat too much, do all the wrong things, you are moved back on the ration based system. Your options are limited and when you get an obesity related disease, you are told that if you do not lose the weight in a properly proscribed, healthy manner, then you are going to be limited in the level of care you receive.
Harsh? Yeah, but I don’t think we can afford our Big Macs anymore. If I had it my way, I’d tax the daylights out of fast food, soft drinks and other junk food. I’d use those taxes to subsidize healthy eating options, fruits, veggies and if it makes you happy, I’d subsidize the organic variety over the other stuff.
These are some things I think the country needs.
What do you think?
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
Sometimes when I read my student’s essay responses to the exam, I wonder what they are thinking. Or worse, what they are being taught outside of my classroom.
One frequent essay question which appears in my American History 121 classes is the issue of dropping the atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II. It is one of the most controversial issues in American History today and is often grist for the revisionist’s mill in politics, history and even science fiction.
I give a pretty extensive lecture on the Rise of Japan stemming back to the 1840s and 1850s with the efforts of Commodore Biddle and later Commodore Perry to open Japan to trade with the United States. The lecture is perhaps more broad and than deep but in my defense, it is a survey course and I feel that it does provide some aspect of multiculturalism for the students. It is also a classic clash of two different cultures. I also give an extensive lecture on the causes of the war between the Empire of Japan and the United States, the nature of that war and the views of the Japanese Government up to the use of the atomic bomb.
Students are asked to analyze the options facing US leaders in 1945, consider the alternatives and then provide an opinion. In order to get most of their essay points, the student must demonstrate that they have a grasp of the events, particularly the causes, motivations and perceptions on both sides of the fence.
As a rule, when I give this lecture, I do not give my personal opinion on the matter. There are a number of reasons for this. First, I do not want my students regurgitating my own words back to me. Second, I am not trying to create intellectual clones/drones, I want them to learn to think for themselves. Third, I do want them to struggle with the material and give a solid, well argued opinion.
On the better essays, I get the usual arguments pro and con which have been exhaustively debated elsewhere. The pro-bombing argument is that it shortened the war, saved lives and was the only thing that would break the Japanese. The anti-bombing argument is that it was immoral, a war crime, and used primarily to dissuade the Soviets from invading the Japanese mainland as well as to show them who is boss in the post War world.
Sometimes I see arguments which make me wonder what is going on in their heads. For instance, one option was to continue General Curtis LeMay’s firebombing campaign. I take great pains to point out, for a lot of reasons, that the firebombing killed far more Japanese civilians than both nuclear weapons combined.
To my horror, I have seen students argue that firebombing is better than the atomic bomb. Which leads me to wonder about their thinking. It is okay to firebomb but not okay to nuke? How is one any better than the other? They will argue that using the atomic bomb is unethical under any circumstances. Once they’ve made the statement, they do not elaborate on why the atomic bomb is unethical and how that compares to firebombing.
I will say that the anti-bombing side has never argued for a ground invasion, nor have they argued for a naval blockade to starve the Japanese into submission. No, what I have seen, on very rare instances, is something that bothers me.
Students on the anti-bombing side will argue that the cause of the problem stems back to Biddle and Perry’s efforts to open Japan. That, on the face, is a pretty sophisticated argument and one worth conceding. It does ignore the reality that a European power was likely going to open Japan up to trade anyway but since I do not lecture on that and the textbook doesn’t even cover that topic I give them a pass on that score.
What follows is what troubles me. Basically it can be summed up as follows.
If only Perry and Biddle, as well as the United States, had been respectful of the culture of Japan, perhaps the hundred years of diplomatic strife which lead to World War II could have been avoided.
Read that line for a minute and tell me if something bothers you about it. It seems pretty solid, doesn’t it? It shows that the student in question (multiple students have used this argument, I might add so I am not singling any one particular student out). Even with my qualification, I have to admit that I’ve been reluctant to blog about this. My concern is that students will troll the internet looking for material to use in their essays or papers at other campuses. I have additional concerns but I will keep those to myself as they do not quite pertain to the matter at hand.
The problem with the statement in italics is that it is a fallacy. It makes the assumption, a false one, that Perry, or any other American dealing with Japan up to 1856, didn’t respect Japanese culture. In fact I’d argue that Perry had a great deal of respect for it in that he studied what he could of their culture in order to figure out how to accomplish his mission, which was to open Japan up to US Trade.
What he learned, from Biddle’s failure and his studies, is that the Japanese respected belligerency and strength.
Perhaps what the student meant by respect is that the United States respect Japan’s desire for isolation and not resort to belligerency in order to open the Empire up. Thing is that Commodore Biddle tried the diplomatic, tactful approach during his mission in the 1840s and was pretty much blown off. Worse, he left the Japanese with the impression that America was incredibly weak and not deserving of respect.
The problem I’m describing, and I relate this in lecture, is a clash of differing cultural values on what constitutes respect between the Japanese and the Americans of the time.
What is probably most likely is that the students in question feel that if Perry and Biddle had a respect for Japanese culture in a 21st Century American sense, then perhaps the war could have been avoided.
And herein lies the core problem, the fallacy of presentism. Presentism is when a student of history takes their present day values system and makes a historical interpretation through that filter or bias.
If only Commodore Perry had been through a sensitivity session. If only he had our 21st Century values.
Well, you can and probably should make a moral judgement on those grounds, but does it get at the historical truth of the matter? Do we gain a clear perspective of what Perry was thinking in the 1850s?
Or perhaps I should put it this way.
To expect Commodore Perry to behave as a 21st Century US Naval Officer would is no different than expecting Socrates to hold forth on the Petrine Theory of Papal Supremacy. It’d be pretty difficult for Socrates, Plato or Aristotle to do any such thing as the Catholic Church didn’t exist yet. Or perhaps just as unlikely would be to expect Marcus Tullius Cicero to write extensive essays on the Enlightenment or Marxism.
Out of what time warp is Perry supposed to get these values? He isn’t a product of 21st Century America, he is a product of early 19th Century America. He simply wouldn’t see the problem of contact with Japan in the same manner as we do.
He wouldn’t have foresight of coming historical events either. I suspect if the Americans did have a crystal ball showing them what was down the pike that they probably would have behaved far more aggressively than they did.
How does this apply to American Science Fiction?
Well, a classic example is The Lucky Strike by Kim Stanley Robinson. Ostensibly an alternate history concerning the use of the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945, Robinson uses a protagonist who is somehow inculcated in the values of late 20th Century Liberal America. The protag, Captain January, is disgusted by the bomb and believes that he best alternative is to drop the bomb into the ocean near the coastline. When he does so, the Japanese see the effect of the bomb and surrender.
The moral of the story? If only we had tried something else then things could have ended better than they did.
Aside from presentism, the story is also flawed due to a poor understanding of what was going on in the halls of Japan’s government in 1945. Their reaction to the bombing of Hiroshima was simply to state, and I paraphrase, “We lose more in firebombings than we did with this one atomic bomb. We may as well continue to fight.”
Dropping the bomb into Tokyo Bay would not have impressed them anymore than the actual bombing of Hiroshima did.
I have also seen this in the Fantasy and Steampunk movements. There has been an effort over the last few years to modify the traditional medieval style Fantasy away from the original European roots into something that is more reflective of our 21st Century progressive values. The same can be said for the Steampunk movement with calls issued to move away from depictions of racism, colonialism, imperialism, and sexism.
As a fiction writer, I’m supportive of the idea that you ought to be able to write whatever it is you want to write. As a reader and a historian however, I have to admit that I find these politically correct fictionalizations of the past to be something of a disservice. Part of why the Fantasy genre doesn’t interest me in the first place is that it seems to focus to the exclusion of all else on the nobility. Everything is too clean, too neat, with most problems whisked away with a sword or magic. I suspect before long it will be this way with Steampunk as well, a distorted, sanitized view of what Victorian culture was like.
The past as it should be, not how it was.
Such things I am pondering today.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
Ponderings on Writing
I may have related this story here at the Pondering Tree or perhaps it was as the first version over at Journalspace. If I did it at Journalspace it is most likely lost forever, in which case I should probably tell the story again.
You probably should not openly state that the quality of a certain publication would be greatly improved if its’ editor stepped out in front of a speeding bus. Especially if this editor rejected your story.
Rejections are strange things. On the surface they are easy enough to understand. “We don’t want your story.” But they can be so much more, to the point where reading them and comparing stories is akin to reading the tea leaves. In Terri Lowry’s Creative Writing course we actually spend time talking about rejection letters and their stages of evolution. I should probably talk about that first.
When you send your first stories off you will most likely receive either no response back or a form letter. The form letter will be pretty clear. Depending on the publisher, the form letter may contain guidelines, frequent errors and the like. This is what I received in 2001 when I sent my first stories off to John Joseph Adams, the Editorial Assistant at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Over time, and with some luck, you will evolve as a writer. Editors will begin to leave little comments or notes on your rejections. Gardner Dozois at Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine was known for doing this. What gave me hope is that I received these handwritten slips in very short order, by 2003.
This is a sign that the editor is paying attention and sees some potential. It is also meant to encourage you. It does not mean resubmit that story. I’ll get to resubmissions here in a bit.
If you are persistent, you will eventually receive a full letter in response to your submission. This letter will most likely be typed or these days e-mailed to you. It will contain a critique of your story, what the editor liked, what worked, what the editor did not like and why the editor isn’t going to buy this story. Again, this is a sign of progress. You are getting closer. The editor is taking valuable time to advise you and mentor you. Gardner Dozois sent me such a letter in response to my story Tranquility Lost, which can be found and read for free at Bewildering Stories.
At this point of the game, two things can happen. The Editor in question considers you to be pro-material. You are on the brink of breaking through, right on the edge. It can go either way with your next submission.
The best case scenario is a straight acceptance. I received my first one in 2007 from Andy Cox and his Fiction Committee at Interzone Magazine. This acceptance will talk about why they like the story and what they are prepared to do in order to acquire the story for their publication.
The next best case scenario can be (but isn’t always, I’ll get to that) the rewrite request.
The rewrite request looks like the personal rejection letter. It contains positives and negatives. It also contains advice and suggestions on how to fix the story. Finally, last but not least, this letter will contain an invitation to resubmit your story after you have made the revisions.
Depending on the editor and the quality of advice, you have two choices at this point.
1. Follow the advice and hope for the best.
2. Disregard and send the story to the next market on the list.
I say it depends on the editor because editors, just like writers, have reputations. Some editors have reputations for being supportive, straight up, honest and fair. Other editors have a reputation for being fickle, unclear, or in some cases they have other agendas driving their mission which have nothing whatsoever to do with your career or your story.
In most cases, I would advise this. If you agree AND TRUST the editor in question, as I trusted (and still trust) Gardner Dozois, then rewrite the story and resubmit it.
On the other hand, if you disagree and DO NOT TRUST the editor in question, then you really need to ask yourself if this trip is necessary. Again, there are no guarantees.
Case in point. Most regular readers know this but Gardner Dozois retired (sometimes I’m inclined to think he was forced out by a controversy that brewed up over a particular story but I have absolutely no proof of this) as Editor of Asimov’s. This affected me personally because I rewrote a story for his consideration and it missed his retirement date by one week or so. In fact, fellow writer Lou Antonelli was the last writer purchased by Gardner, he made it by that one week margin.
The new editor, who I won’t name here for a lot of reasons, took over. They took their sweet time getting back to me while I waited on pins and needles for a response, any response, on my story.
The new editor sent another rewrite request. Unlike Gardner’s, it was muddled, unclear and in my mind, contrary to what I was trying to achieve with the story. In fact, at the time, it read very much like a veiled rejection letter. However, I was prodded, both by people in the community and people here in my personal life, to rewrite my story and resubmit it.
I tried to get clarification on the required changes. I received nothing. I had nothing to go on with this new editor, no track record or anything else. All I had was word of mouth from various people who had met her personally. I wasn’t reassured by what I heard but when a goal seems to be SO CLOSE, you decide to push forward.
I rewrote (actually, I butchered) my story.
And I sent it off.
And then it was rejected. If it says anything at all about this new editor, the rejection was partially written by her predecessor and it was a half hearted one at that.
As I said, rejections are funny things. I’ve received maybe fifty to sixty rejections over my career to date. Given that many writers receive hundreds of rejections before they achieve their first professional sales, I have done pretty well. None of those other rejections make me angry. They are part of the business, part of the deal. You just roll with them. You weren’t the flavor of the month.
And most of the rejections since my first sales have been personal ones which indicate, “So close, Murphy but not quite.”
Now here is what you should not do as a writer.
For nearly two years I kept my anger bottled up, something I am not very good at. My friends and family will tell you that the longer I try to suppress my anger, the stronger, the more virulent, the more powerful it will become. However, I kept it pretty well in check for awhile.
Until my first sale in 2007. The reviews came in and contrary to what I expected, they were all positive.
The common belief, one that I held until those reviews started coming in, is that my success at Interzone with Tearing Down Tuesday should have negated the anger, the growing ball of something that transcends anger to a point where the emotion I experience doesn’t even have a proper name.
Instead, success served to reinforce and fuel that anger. My feeling today is that Maternal Soldier is every bit as good as Tearing Down Tuesday and The Limb Knitter. Yet I can’t sell it to save my life.
With the second sale in 2008, more positive reviews plus lots of reader comments at Apex and again, my anger grew.
At the same time that Interzone purchased Tuesday, Asimov’s rejected a story set in the same universe, featuring similar themes. For the record, they aren’t the same story but they do feature a post singularity world.
The current editor at Asimov’s rejected it. Readers aren’t familiar enough with the singularity to know what I was talking about.
Which was really the final straw, I thought. The same magazine that published Charles Stross and his singularity stories wasn’t going to publish this? Especially when Interzone was willing go do down that road?
I remember reading that reject in my dock office at 1000 Walnut on a very cold, snowy day with a mug of tea in hand thinking, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
The message of that reject was pretty clear to me. Gardner’s replacement wasn’t going to buy anything I wrote, no matter what it was.
Eventually, sooner or later, my anger will vent. If you are an aspiring writer or even a small writers, you’ve got to learn how to manage this. Anger scares the living daylights out of folks who do not live in the Blue Collar World.
My anger vented in a series of postings at the magazine’s forum. I basically stated, in many different forms, that I thought the magazine would be greatly improved if the current editor was hit by a speeding bus.
I didn’t threaten this person directly. That is against the law. However, it is not against the law to openly wish for bad things to happen to people. It is just bad manners and perhaps more importantly, bad for your writing career.
Why?
Well, the editorial community is pretty small and they do talk to each other. More to the point they read the forum comments left by readers and writers. What happened is probably common knowledge.
Now, to date, I have no evidence at hand that indicates that my behavior has resulted in the rejection of my stories. No evidence at all. It is possible that it is a factor, in fact it is probable in some cases that it is a factor. Editors don’t want to be associated with nutters and the like.
However, I’m realistic enough to believe that the rejections I have received pertain more to the same things which caused many of my stories to get rejected. The story doesn’t match the editor’s tastes, or the anthology, they have some quirk or flaw that isn’t worth fixing, that sort of thing. It is, again, part of the game.
I should probably make one additional point.
Folks would probably forget what I did eventually, especially if I didn’t remind anyone about it like I am doing right now. But the thing they won’t forget is this.
I am unrepentant. I do still hope for the eventual replacement of the current editor at Asimov’s. By speeding bus, by retirement, by medical emergency or through getting forced out, it matters not to me. I harbor no good will toward this person who I feel is cowardly, dishonest, unclear and incredibly fickle.
My lack of repentance probably doesn’t help my case.
There are things I could be doing with my career. I’ve been advised more than once to give up on short stories and move off into novels. I’ve got some options I am looking at and I will probably see about that. I’ve been advised to give up on science fiction and try my hand at mainstream literature. I’ve been advised to give up on writing fiction and concentrate on my career as a college history instructor. Given that within a year I will have finally realized a full return on my investment as a historian, I can see that point.
For now, however, I will endeavor to keep writing fiction. I’ll write what I want to write.
And we’ll see how it goes.
So it goes.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
Aboard the Battlestar Steven Francis Murphy BSG-71
Location: CIC
Mission: Damage Control and Assessment
I’m running on three hours of sleep after learning that my father is back in the hospital last night. He is having heart trouble, trouble breathing, etc, etc. So that was part of my evening last night on the eleven month anniversary of Trinity and I. Mom’s down with illness as well and I’m having a bitch of a time finding the time and energy to get enough lecture material scraped together for Western Civ.
The problem isn’t knowledge or material. That I have plenty of. No, I just need the time to write the lectures into something useable so I don’t stand there in class and babble on like an idiot. I call those lectures Falling Down the Stairs Lectures. I used to give a lot of them during my first two years of teaching and it is a horrible experience that ranks right up there with a dream where one is naked in public yet no one notices.
In other words, I hate not being fully prepared.
Worse, I hate not getting at least four hours of sleep. It is a wonder I didn’t stand there in class and drool all over myself. As it is, my military bearing and two years of experience allowed me to slug my way through both lectures this morning. I wouldn’t say it was a cheerful experience but my 0800 students seem to know that crossing me is unwise.
Apparently tales that I threw someone out at 0830 for tardiness have gotten ’round the campus (though they are somewhat inaccurate, the general gist is true). My 0930 class is a bit more spirited but that isn’t a bad thing. Some of them will get a wake up call here in a couple of weeks.
Of course the other problem is that running on three hours of sleep makes doing physical fitness training problematic. It is a great way to injury yourself and for those that aren’t following John Birmingham’s blog, be advised that he snapped his ulna in martial arts last week (probably not due to fatigue). I’ve already got some problem spots, notably along the upper right arm near the tricep, some elbow and some shoulder trouble. I don’t need to blow something out when I have a 145 pound stack of weights over my chest because I wasn’t focused.
On the other hand, I was able to get the iPods operational using a campus computer to download iTunes. The iPods are both synced and prepped. I didn’t load any music onto Trinity’s iPod as I only had one of my CDs with me. I’ll try to reload iTunes on my laptop and see if that will work. If that doesn’t work, I’ll load a few songs onto Trinity’s iPod on campus while she is at an extra credit lecture.
As for Dad, well, he’s terminal, kids. We’re all terminal but he is closer to it than most of us are. Estimates range from tomorrow to a year from now. That said, Aunt Margaret said over at my facebook that we Murphys tend to be a stubborn lot (all those bad genetics I guess). He may well outlast all of us, beat the lung cancer and come in under the five percent statistic on remission/cures.
Makes you wonder how long he’d live if he hadn’t gotten Agent Orange related crap.
YouTubeage Action: James Bond OSTs to listen to while writing
When I write some action scenes, I tend to draw upon movie sound tracks, notably those by John Barry but he is not the only one. Here are a couple of my favorites.
This is called “Space March” and it is from the You Only Live Twice soundtrack. It matches the opening scene where an American space capsule is captured by a mystery spacecraft. The scene, if you haven’t seen it, is akin to watching a snake unlock its’ jaw to consume its’ prey, slow but inevitable. The Americans, of course, blame the Russians for the incident, which gets the movie going.
In a similar vein is “007 and Counting” which is matched to the video you see now. A rocket is hijacked by our bad guys in Diamonds Are Forever. It happens to be carrying a diamond augmented laser satellite and you can see where this is going.
So it goes, kids. Repair operations continue. I’ve got to pick Trinity up later from her therapy where she is trying to get her ship back to 100% or at least as close to it as she can.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
The Writing Front: Tracking the Stories
Apparently over the summer I had three stories out.
I think.
I sent Maternal Soldier out in June apparently. For some reason I got this cross wired with Healing Hands of the Killer. Since I thought HHK was still at the June target market, I sent Maternal Soldier back out (engaging in unintentional simo submission which is bad juju in the field).
Maternal Soldier came back from the second market, Andromeda Spaceways, last week. That is the reject I blogged about. But at the June market I did learn, though I have not received the official reject, that Maternal Soldier was a great story, but didn’t fit the market guidelines.
So, two rejects for Maternal Soldier this week. Great story, everyone tells me. I just can’t sell it.
In the meantime I figured out that Healing Hands of the Killer never went anywhere, near as I can tell. I think.
Conversely, the other story which went to the same market as Maternal Soldier was Entangled. I didn’t even think I sent that story out but apparently, according to the editor who brought me up to speed on MS, I did.
Confused? You sure the fuck aren’t the only one. I’m confused and more than a little pissed the fuck off.
Why? Well, once upon a time, back in the Dark Ages of the Uniguard Era, all stories were methodically tracked, logged, annotated, followed, followed up upon, and the like. I knew where they were, I knew which one I sent out, I knew everything except whether or not they’d sell. Now, in the wonderful Golden Age of Adjunctland, I can’t seem to keep track of any of my stories.
Fuck! I can’t even get a new story written, let alone keep track of the old ones. About the only project which was relatively regimented was Research Project Number – 04, and even by previous standards of RPN-02 and 03, the regimentation was sloppy by comparison.
What happened? Teaching happened for one thing but that isn’t the only source of trouble. I’ve got multiple fronts of chaos and aggravation ongoing (which I make it a point not to EVER BLOG ABOUT). I’ve got demands on my time which far outstrip my ability to meet them and there are consequences for not at least attempting to meet those demands.
And it has gotten so bad that I don’t know where my stories are at. I had to have an Editor clarify my own submissions for me! An Editor I have a great deal of respect for, I might add.
This, my friends, is going to change. Oh yes. This will not continue as is.
The good news? Well, I have two bits.
First, Entangled is still under consideration. I wouldn’t hold your breath, kids. Then again I said that about The Limb Knitter and it sold so maybe I should follow Gardner Dozois advice about writers being the worst judge of their own work.
Second, I did receive a message from another editor who is interested in taking a gander at Maternal Soldier. No promises of course.
So, it isn’t all bad.
Lecture prep continues otherwise. Since those entries bore the piss out of everyone, I won’t hammer out what I did today.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
Pondering
Anger. Rage. These are emotions I know very well, perhaps as well as some men and women know their lovers. There are nuances to anger, gradations, flavors and even scents of a sort. They can range from a cold, icy sensation to a clear, numb field of calmness.
These days we are told that anger is a bad emotion, to be denied, dealt with, psychoanalysed away, prayed away or supressed. If we acknowledge our anger, and that doesn’t always happen, the venting of that anger almost invariably causes as much destruction as the original offense. Most of the time, short of physical violence, it solves nothing.
Over the years I have had to learn to deal with my own anger. I have had to learn that the use of physical force is not a suitable outlet for that anger. In other words, I can’t beat someone down because they make me angry or caused offense. I’m pretty good at keeping my anger from reaching a point of physical manifestation.
I’m not so good at the verbal manifestations, or their internet manifestations. I’m known for flamewars in the science fiction community wherein a hallmark of those wars was more the acid of my words as opposed to reason. I felt it necessary to put my objections to many things forward, mainly due to the sense that no one else would. I felt it necessary to publically declare what I felt was unfairness in the genre.
Have I changed? Well, that is what I am pondering.
Did the source of the things which make me angry suddenly go away?
No, they didn’t. I’m still angry about the Maternal Soldier incident at Asimov’s and I do not ever forsee my mind reconciling that situation. I’m still angry about things which transpire in other parts of my life unrelated to science fiction.
Here recently I’ve come to realize that I expended a massive amount of intellectual and emotional ordnance to make one very small and relatively petty point.
I’m angry about X, Y, and Z. I was so angry about these things that the keyboard at my mother’s house used to bounce in the cradle as I pounded out my anger. Hours were burned away as I hammered at the keys. Perhaps the ironic thing is that I was still able to produce material for my assigned history courses. I was still able to teach and I was still able to produce work for my client on Research Project Number Three when the worst of this was going on.
I wanted to make a point, that I wouldn’t be run over, that I wouldn’t be ignored, that I wasn’t going to back down. I was going to fight it out, engage at will, fire on targets of opportunity. The War would never end.
Well, it did. Sorta. I got busy with other things. My teaching obligations consumed more of my time. I had course work to turn in as a student and I have a ten month old relationship with a woman I care very much about.
In coming back to those old battlefields on the internet over the last couple of months, I realized that so much of the energy expended was simply pointless.
I also realized that I was a junkie of sorts. I liked the rush of that bouncing, pounding keyboard. The gratification was immediate. Someone would rise to the bait within seconds if you were in the right place, and there is nothing a writer wants more than to have people pay attention to them.
I’m very good at getting people to rise to the bait.
Thing is, that energy should be going into my fiction. Yes, the anger too should go into my fiction. What if the keyboard bounced while I was typing fiction? Yet it doesn’t. My fiction method is mainly yours truly calmly, quietly, puttering along with a Pilot V-5 Extra Fine Black Ink Pen.
I’m getting older and I find that I do not really have the time or the energy for this sort of thing.
Am I turning a new leaf? Oh, I sorely doubt it. As I said, my views haven’t changed nor have I forgiven anyone. I certainly won’t apologize for my previous actions.
However, I do think I’d like to build something as opposed to tearing something down. There is more tearing down than building going on in science fiction these days.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
Pondering Tearing Down Tuesday
I’ve got more pictures to post but I’ll do that sometime tomorrow. I thought I’d take a break from Fall Semester prep to do a little bit of pondering about the story.
Tearing Down Tuesday filled what I felt was a gap in the current science fiction inventory of recent short stories, namely a story set in the American Midwest that did not rely upon East and West Coast stereotypes of Midwesterners. From 2000 to the moment I sold TDT, I found my level of aggravation with the lack of such stories growing. When such a story did manifest itself, it usually took the cheap shots at the population which lives in the Midwest.
Who are those people? Well, in the case of DeKalb County, Missouri, they tend to be of European descent. In other words, they are white. If you look at the demographics, I believe the county population tends to run eighty percent plus on the white side. They are hardworking people who do their best to run their farms, keep their bills paid and support their families. They believe in taking care of their own problems for the most part without a lot of government help.
These days they grow corn, a lot of corn. In fact I remarked to Trinity that we didn’t see a single wheat field on our way to Maysville, Missouri and back. The main crops were corn for use in ethanol and soy. This is a contrast to the fields of golden wheat I remember from my childhood. They also maintain a certain amount of livestock, but not the massive herds that many might think.
In some instances, they’ve managed to adapt to changing conditions. One local example in nearby Clinton County, Missouri is the Shatto Milk Company, located on Highway 33 not far from Highway 36 in Northern Missouri. They produce local organic milk sans additives in an environment that looks to be healthy and easy on the animals. They also run a gift shop on the property which is where we met the owners. The story is that in the late 80s they realized that the major purchasers of milk were not paying anything close to prices that would sustain their business. They had to try something else.
So they took a leap and went local and organic. Others in the region went down the same path, raising heirloom livestock, growing organic produce and changing the way they do business.
However, for every success story, you can find a dozen deserted farms in Northern Missouri. The land has been sold or rented to the survivors.
The people in this region love to hunt deer, quail, turkey and ducks when the seasons permit. They fish with permits and subscribe to the Missouri Conservationist. More than a few of them, including one of my cousins, works for the Missouri Department of Conservation. They care about where they live and want to see it preserved. They are capable of adapting to changing conditions if pressed.
This goes against the usual depiction of the Midwestern Rural Resident. Inflexible, stubborn, unchanging, conservative and very religious.
I suppose the big dig against this environment is that it does not possess the same diversity which can be found in urban environments. Perhaps. However, given demographic trends in the country as a whole, I will make a prediction.
The Midwestern Rural Areas will, probably by the end of the century, be split between European and Latino populations. It is a bit of a failing on my part that I did not account for this in Tearing Down Tuesday. There simply should be more Latino characters in the region.
Another dig against the Midwest is that it is backward. No Starbucks. No bandwidth to speak of.
These are people who still take pleasure in their environment, enjoying a sky full of stars while the coyotes compete with the bullfrogs and the cycadas for one’s attention. They enjoy fishing on the lake under the moonlight, poker games and fish fries.
They have their flaws. The stereotypes would not exist without those flaws. They are the people I know, the land I know, the grist of my sunshine summers under brilliant blue skies. They are the people Robert Heinlein wrote about in his stories.
And yet, I suspect, there is not a lot of room for stories from this land in American Science Fiction today. I find it quite telling that Tearing Down Tuesday sold to a British Publication, Interzone, and not an American one. Now to be fair, TDT was never sent to an American market, but my gut tells me that outside of Apex Online Magazine, I’d have been hardpressed to sell that story anywhere else.
The other concern I have is, well, frankly, these people are the Enemy Personified to many in American Science Fiction. They are rednecks, white trash, probably inbred and most likely engaging in perverse acts with their livestock. There may not be any room for stories from Northern Missouri.
A writer is instructed from the start, write what you know. It is good advice.
However, the message I get from the American Science Fiction Community is also very clear to me.
Rednecks need not apply.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
Those that done said stuff