Social helpfulness

A while ago one of my friends posted this on her Facebook status:

If you can’t read the caption, it claims that Facebook (or its representatives, management, board, employees or something) will “give $1.20 Dollars [sic] on each share!” to the girl in the picture, who is allegedly suffering from cancer.

Despite having been raised in Brooklyn and Connecticut, having worked for several global corporations and having been a social worker in a couple of prisons, my friend has a remarkably naïve grasp of what might or might not be a hoax.

Since she’s created a FB presence, she has reduced the number of emails urging recipients to forward to seven new recipients within 16 minutes of receipt and be prepared for a major wish to be fulfilled, or promising that Bill Gates is using this email to test the effectiveness of [Hotmail, Windows, the whole flipping Internet], so he’s going to give $5 to everyone who forwards it to their entire addressbook.

(I did have to quit sending her the Snopes debunking stories I pulled up because she got sniffy about me being such a party pooper. Well, fair enough—but why you’d expect me not to look that stuff up, I don’t know. Would a Jack Russell Terrier pass up an opportunity to bounce repeatedly off your cocktail party guests’ $3500 Nino Cerruti trouser legs?)

What I don’t get is the total dismemberment of any form of critical thinking from people who post these things. Leaving aside the issue of how a Higher Power keeps track of the number of people to whom you forward an email (or the question of what constitutes “time of receipt”—is it when it appeared in your queue? When you saw it in your queue but didn’t open it because you know what “This really works!!!!” in the title bar means? When you actually opened it? Or when you finished reading 15 screenloads of multi-font text attesting to the veracity of the offer?), why does no one seem to stop to inquire about the logistics of receiving $5 with nothing to go on but an email address?

I’ve learned my lesson with this particular friend—I keep my Snopes to myself and let her feel good that she’s just helped a cancer patient winkle $1.20 out of Internet zillionaires. (But what’s up with $1.20, anyhow? Why not $1.50? Why not $5.00—is Zuckerberg cheaper than Gates?) I myself always clap for Tinkerbelle, so who am I to police the Marche des naïfs?

BTW—if you were in any doubt, this FB thing is a total hoax.

Month of writing dangerously

November is National Novel Writing Month—“Thirty days and nights of literary abandon”.

What? You’ve never heard of it? Well, hello—300,000 people around the world have signed up via NaNoWriMo, committing to completing 50,000 words of some work of fiction by 30 November.

And you’re looking at one of them.

I’m really not much of a fiction person, at least as far as writing goes. (Actually, aside from detective novels, I don't read much of it, either. Um.) It seems so…so messy, you know? Plus—there’s that whole issue of having to have a storyline. So I’ve always stayed pretty clear of it—aside from a couple of short stories and a novella that I wrote while working at the third-largest engineering company in the world and didn’t have anything to do for a few weeks.

But I had this idea about ten years ago, and then it kind of faded away. So imagine my surprise when around five weeks ago it just jumped up and whacked me all over the inside of my skull and demanded to be let out.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s this: if the voices tell you to do something, you may as well get on with it, because you’ll get no peace until you do.

This is going to be quite the challenge because not only is it, you know, fiction, it happens to be partly a police procedural, a murder investigation. Yes—the voices would tell me to write something that is completely plot-driven. And me great on character development but absolutely pooh on plot.

Oh—and it’s set in some yet-to-be-determined large city in the north of England. Maybe Manchester; more probably Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Neither of which I’ve been to. (But see above about the voices.)

Clearly I have a lot of research to do in parallel with this month’s efforts.

Anyhow, starting…well, yesterday, actually, I’ve got a document titled “untitled”, occupying my desktop alongside “Timelines”, “Character studies”, “Forensics and investigative questions” and so forth. And I have to drop approximately 1700 words per day into it.

Another challenge is to just throw those words out—I’m a hyper-critical editor of my work, and I have to turn that function off, or I’ll never make the goal.

I’ll update you periodically on my progress.

And, just in case—if any of my six readers has knowledge of investigative procedures, police corruption scandals, British social services, military CID (especially in the Royal Army) or the Newcastle library system, I’d really appreciate a little help.

& boo to you, too

It seems to me that the Bay Area seems to have taken Halloween particularly to heart. There are costume shops that I swear stay open all year long on the back of the business they do in October. And houses are decorated almost as elaborately as at Christmas in other parts of the country.

I’m not talking a hay bale, two scarecrows and a flock of pumpkins; or even one of those witches splatted against the front of a house. I’m talking ghosts and skeletons hanging from trees, that nasty white cobweb stuff and strings of orange lights.

But even so, I was driving home the other morning and came across a house that bespeaks complete devotion to the principle that you can’t have too much ghoulishness on this day.

It’s not one of the McMansions, or anything. In fact, it’s your basic little suburban 50s box made of ticky-tacky. Although, since it’s in the Silicon Valley, it’s your basic little $795,900 suburban 50s box made of tick-tacky.

Anyhow: here’s what I saw whizzing past it:

So, of course I stopped and went to investigate.

And it went on...

And on...

I'm betting that there will be sound effects tonight. And that there will be some traumatized trick-or-treaters.

Nobody knows anything

The other day I was channel-surfing & came across this 1992 fluff:

The Year of the Comet isn't exactly Tracy & Hepburn, & it’s not even Hanks & Ryan, but I recall finding it amusing about ten years ago. Penelope Ann Miller really does have a flair for screwball comedy & she’s never had the proper vehicles to strut her stuff, so I try to catch her when I can. Plus, I’ve had a thing for Art Malik ever since The Jewel in the Crown.

I don’t know what made me look it up last week, but imagine my astonishment to find that the pair at the helm of this truly inconsequential offering were: Peter Yates (director) & William Goldman (screenwriter).

If you don’t recognize Yates, he brought us Bullitt, The Dresser & Eleni, amongst others. Uber-action testosterone-fest, psychological exploration of the theatre world & the shattering tale of a woman in the Greek civil war. (Okay, he also directed For Pete’s Sake & Mother, Jugs & Speed, so perhaps I should just rest my case on his account.)

But Goldman—Goldman! The guy who wrote All the President’s Men, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man & The Princess Bride. The guy who wrote the book on screenwriting—literally. Adventures in the Screen Trade & Syd Field’s Screenplay were the two Bibles that would-be screenwriters absolutely had to read. Field told you how a screenplay works; Goldman told you how the business works.

His mantra was: nobody knows anything. & I’ve found that applicable to almost every company I’ve ever worked for.

& I was reminded of that when I discovered him attached to YotC. Nobody knows anything. Including me. 

Au revoir, Jacques

The world is a little poorer with the death this past week of cultural historian Jacques Barzun. He was 104.

If you’re not part of the academic community you may not know Barzun. That’s sad for you. He was a giant in the humanities, covering subject matter ranging from Berlioz to William James. When I say the man was an intellectual giant I am not being hyperbolic.

I have two of his books, Darwin, Marx, Wagner, from my undergraduate stint, and The Modern Researcher, from grad school. I can’t bear to get rid of either of them, despite them being really kind of ratty from the abuse they took in the scholarly way of things (and all the passing years), because Barzun’s writing was not only astute, it was lovely to behold.

Partly it may because I lean toward the cultural approach to history he embodied: I think everything is connected—economics, art, technology, politics, music, science, popular literature, and all the rest of it. You can’t (to my mind) enucleate any one element from all the others and say, “this is the history part”. So I have an innate affinity for Barzun.

But I met him informally (so to speak) before college, in the pages of Sherlockian criticism, because his inquisitive mind was a natural for the exploration of detective fiction. In fact, he wrote two classic books on the subject, A Catalogue of Crime, and The Delights of Detection. Again—a man after me own heart.

(You might like to read his “Ten Rules for Writing Sherlockian Pastiche.”)

Barzun lived a long and extremely productive life, and; he left an extraordinary legacy to us. If we’re willing to invest the time to explore and learn from it.