Writing to offend

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Brian Bixby

Writers have an almost unlimited opportunity to offend their readers: sex, violence, race, religion, politics, profanity, gender, class, and so on. Americans in particular live in a society that officially encourages freedom of speech, and at the same time says that people who are offended, in certain ways, have a right to demand an apology from you. And we condone certain types of censorship: explicitly sexual material is labeled “pornography” and sent off to its own little ghetto.

It can seem like a very attractive ghetto (photo: David Shankbone)

It can seem like a very attractive ghetto (photo: David Shankbone)

All this presents an author with problems. Including some of this material will alienate readers, and in the case of certain sexual or racial terms can easily get one’s work removed from the public eye and one’s own reputation destroyed. And yet this material, by its very controversial nature, can be a fruitful source of material for an author.

Although it’s less commonly recognized, this tendency to not want to discuss certain subjects in certain ways also causes problems for the readers. The problem is less apparent, and therefore more dangerous, when reading contemporary fiction. For example, we don’t want to deal with the contradictions of a culture that relentlessly exploits sexuality as “sexiness,” yet would prefer that actual sex not be presented, or be presented in forms artificial and stylistic, or banished to the “pornography” classification, where they will be read and seen frequently with a dollop of guilt.

When Capt. Picard (Patrick Stewart) can portray Shylock, what does that tell us about us?

When Capt. Picard (Patrick Stewart) can portray Shylock, what does that tell us about us?

The problem for readers becomes more obvious when dealing with the literature of the past. The tragic history of antisemitism, particularly in the 20th century, makes it almost impossible for contemporary readers to think about Shakespeare’s attitude toward the Jew Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. And our greater sexual openness (greater in imagination than reality, I am afraid) no doubt is responsible for the current mania in pop culture to extend the story of Pride and Prejudice. We know Lizzie Bennett and Mr. Darcy have a happy marriage, yet inquiring just how Mr. Darcy went about boinking Lizzie Bennett on their wedding night somehow seems tawdry. Instead, we have stories about zombies and murder mysteries to somehow assure us that Lizzie and Darcy really are happily married. And this, somehow, is dignified and delightful.

There are literary traditions that insist that all literature be uplifting, convey a positive message, uphold the moral values of society. If you hold to these theories, then your treatment of potentially offensive subjects, as a writer or reader, will be simple and straightforward. Somethings must not be discussed, and others should always be treated in line with those principles. The Hays Code, Hollywood’s self-censorship system from the 1930s until it collapsed in the 1960s, should be your model. And it must be acknowledged that the Hays Code did provide a generation of film-goers with movies that could be seen by the whole family.

But defenders of such a system should also acknowledge that the Hays Code was often at variance with actual social norms. Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca was a best-seller, which implies that readers accepted its plot as one worthy of public discussion, but it had to be altered to suit the Hays Code, because a person who committed a criminal act was depicted in positive terms in the novel. That was unacceptable under the Hays Code, so the criminal act had to be changed into an accident, thus robbing the story of its moral tensions. Then, too, Hollywood worked long and hard to circumvent the Hays Code by implying what could not be explicitly shown.

You mean you didn't realize that Bogie and Bergman had a past relationship in "Casablanca?"

You mean you didn’t realize that Bogie and Bergman had a past relationship in “Casablanca?”

I’m not a defender of the principle that literature must be uplifting. Indeed, I think an author should have and use license to portray any aspect of humanity to make the intended point in any given work. Yet at the same time, I have to deal with my readers, and with the structures of our society. There are some things I feel uncomfortable saying, and when I think of my readers, my problems grow greater. I will never forget the shock I had when a friend of mine told me that she had passed along a copy of one of my works to her parents. Said work describes a borderline-psychotic personality, bisexuality, promiscuity, dominance, psychological torture, alcoholism, and bad taste in decorating hotel rest rooms. I could easily imagine the trouble I was about to get into.

Well, fortunately I was wrong with my idiotic thinking. I ended up with two appreciate readers, instead of a legislative act banning me from the state. And that was a heartening result. It told me that if I had a solid purpose in writing as I did, if it was clear to my readers that I was writing to make a point, and not just to shock and offend, I could for the most part write as I felt necessary. I will lose some readers that way. But, hey, I’m writing sci-fi/fantasy. By writing in that ghetto, I’ve already accepted up front that there are a lot of people who won’t read what I write. I’m writing for the ones that will.

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Chapter 6 of Martha’s Children, and Chicago Bronzeville

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Brian Bixby

“Bleeding in Bronzeville,” chapter 6 of Martha’s Children, is now available. Ned finally gets  out of the basement to go visiting with Martha! But the friends of a vampire are, shall we say, a trifle unusual, not exactly the sort of crowd an ex-cop would want to hang out with. If you’re not already reading this weekly serial, you can start here.

Bronzeville is the name often used to describe the black neighborhood that developed on Chicago’s South Side by the 1890s. Chicago’s whites didn’t want blacks in their midst, and they were willing to hire them for only the lowest-paying industrial jobs. So a black neighborhood developed amid the stockyards and steel mills of the South Side, handy to the jobs blacks could get.

Bronzeville's people knew they were being exploited (WPA)

Bronzeville’s people knew they were being exploited (WPA)

Problem was that Bronzeville kept growing in population. Blacks from the South, hating their lives as sharecroppers, came north hunting for work, especially in the 1910s and 1920s. Under normal circumstances, Bronzeville would have expanded. And it did, but not as fast as the population grew. Whites greeted attempts by blacks to move into new neighborhoods with harassment and violence. They inserted racial covenants into their property deeds, forbidding sales to blacks. So the population density in Bronzeville rose. There was so much demand for the limited housing available in Bronzeville that landlords found they could stop maintaining the buildings, raise rents, and still get tenants. After all, where else were the blacks to go? So, over time, Bronzeville became a community with too high a population density, made up of people who could only get low-paying work, and who had to pay high rents for lousy housing. That’s how Bronzeville turned into a slum.

It didn’t help that the city and Federal governments actually supported housing segregation! Chicago’s white neighborhood-dominated government wouldn’t allow housing projects to be built that would change the racial composition of a white neighborhood. And the Federal Government’s mortgage assistance programs wouldn’t support loans in mixed-race neighborhoods, on the grounds that they were “unstable.”

When the Supreme Court struck down racial covenants in property deeds in 1949, Bronzeville could finally expand . . . only to find whites harassed them when they tried to move into a new neighborhood. And then, wouldn’t you know, someone figured out how to make a profit on this, and “blockbusting” was the result. Savvy real estate operators noticed that, thanks to prior segregation, blacks still had proportionately less housing available to them, and were still paying higher rates than white people. The blockbusting operators would go into a white neighborhood and spread rumors that blacks were moving in, which would (they claimed) cause housing values to fall. Panicky whites sold out to the blockbusters at fire sale prices and fled to the suburbs. The blockbusters then turned around and rented the properties to black people at higher rents than white people had been paying. Ka-ching!

By the mid-1960s, blockbusting had helped blacks spread well beyond the old boundaries of Bronzeville. Ironically, one of the consequences is that the old core of Bronzeville itself went into economic and social decline as population densities dropped, communities shifted or broke up, and economic patterns changed. It didn’t help that Chicago’s industrial base was declining, making employment harder to find, especially for the less educated. The frustration of Chicago’s blacks would boil over into rioting after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968.

Ned’s Irish Catholic. The Irish lived in several neighborhoods adjacent to Bronzeville, and so developed a marked antipathy toward their black neighbors, especially when blacks ventured out of their old neighborhoods. So we shouldn’t be surprised at Ned’s less-than-enlightened view of black people. Give the guy a little credit. He knows he’s supposed to treat everyone as equals. He just spent too many years growing up among people who frequently and forcefully demonstrated they felt otherwise, and he has had too little exposure to black people to feel comfortable around them.

Scratch’s life isn’t any easier. His position is a lot less secure than Martha thinks, because the political and social turmoil in the black community is disrupting black vampire culture as well. But as Martha says, Scratch is smart. He took advantage of Bronzeville’s economic decline to open the pool hall in an established business district. So he can play the low-key community businessman among the humans, while providing his vampires with a place to gather and prey from neighborhood youths. For now, it’s working.

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Review: Seanan McGuire, Midnight Blue-Light Special

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Brian Bixby

It’s time for another review of a recent book from a prospective author’s perspective. Today’s subject is Midnight Blue-Light Special, which despite its title is not about shopping, but an “urban fantasy” (according to the publisher) written by Seanan McGuire, a writer hitherto unknown to me, despite having won a John W. Campbell Award for best new writer back in 2010.

Cover art: Aly Fell

Cover art: Aly Fell

Why did I pick up this book? Well, that’s lesson #1: have a good platform. Every book for prospective authors tells you to do this, and even suggests things you should do. But the point of the platform isn’t its construction. It’s bringing in your potential readers.

Let me explain how that worked for this book and me. I want to read new and interesting sci-fi/fantasy works. The local university was holding a sci-fi/fantasy convention, and the local independent bookstore was hosting a series of author signings for that con. I got the bookstore’s newsletter announcing this, which pointed to the list of authors participating. I ran a search on each author’s name, and went looking through their amazon.com pages, their websites, and their Wikipedia entries (if they had one) to find out who they are, what they’ve written, and how they position themselves as writers. Then I went to the bookstore and leafed through whatever from these authors was on the shelf.

I hadn’t heard of McGuire, but she had several books to her credit, and had won some awards. When I looked through the book blurb for Midnight Blue-Light Special on amazon.com, the word that caught my eye was cryptozoologist: a scientist who studies creatures not yet recognized by most scientists, like the Loch Ness monster or the sasquatch. That’s an interest of mine. When I went to the bookstore, the book carried some endorsements that impressed me, and the back cover blurb promised humor. I’d been talking about the difficulty of writing humor lately, so, with everything else, I decided to pick up the book.

McGuire’s platform did four things that won her my patronage: she got in my face, her platform told me enough about her books that I found them interesting, she had endorsements that implied a level of quality, and the book was available, right there in the store. She made a sale and acquired a first-time reader. That’s what a platform should help you do.

Lesson #2: a series is as strong as the reader’s cumulative experience up to the last book they read. This works for and against an author. If someone liked the earlier books, they’ll keep reading, overlooking a weak book or two. That’s one reason publishers and authors love series. But it also means the first-time reader will probably judge the entire series based on whichever book they read first. And that won’t necessarily be the first book in the series.

To me, if you publish something as a book, with its own distinct title, it is a story that should be an enjoyable reading experience in itself. If I can’t read your book with understanding and enjoyment unless I’ve read some previous book of yours, then don’t give the new book a distinctive title. Call it volume two of the previous work. Or at least stick a preface in that explains everything I missed by not reading the first book.

On the other hand, there’s no point in writing later books in a series unless they do refer back to the earlier volumes. Indeed, I personally delight in catching references to earlier stories when I’m reading a series. Those help provide depth to the stories, and serve as a reward to loyal readers.

The difficulty is to balance the references to earlier stories so they illuminate the newest story in the series, without either bogging it down or mystifying the first-time reader. Which brings us to Midnight Blue-Light Special. It is the second volume in McGuire’s InCryptid Series, and I hadn’t read the first. As a first-time reader starting with that second volume, I’d say McGuire did well. There are numerous references to a previous adventure, which I gather was the subject of the earlier book, and several major elements, such as the boyfriend, are carried over into the second book. Yet McGuire offers quick explanations, most of the time, that don’t disrupt the story’s pace and bring the new reader up to speed. And the plot can stand alone for a satisfying read. I did become confused about the protagonist’s complicated family, but some of the characters in the story are equally confused about it, so I let it ride. It was a minor irritation.

Lesson #3: How you attracted your readers will determine what they get out of your story. I picked up the book for cryptozoology and humor. Humor enlivens much of the plot, which is about a cryptozoologist trying to save supernatural creatures from extermination. Sounds grim? Yeah, but McGuire loves sticking her monsters into prosaic situations, such as having to hold down a job, to show their absurd side. The tension of the plot and the comedy of the creatures play off each other for a good read.

However, the part of this book that really grabbed me were the four chapter (16-19) from the perspective of one of the supernatural cryptids, a human-looking one named Sarah. It is hard to write a decent alien, one that can engage our sympathies and yet still be really different from humans. Sarah is one of those rare creatures. She looks human, she thinks like a human, some of the time, but her biology is so different that her sensory and higher-level perceptual capabilities are significantly different. And at a deeper level her psychology is different, too. Sarah’s trying to manage living like a human in a world of humans, but she isn’t human and in some ways can never be human. Remind you of any good sci-fi/fantasy aliens you know? It should. I went along with McGuire’s human protagonist, Verity Price, for a fun ride, but it was Sarah who interested me the most as a person.

So there you have it. McGuire with her platform lured me in with a promise of humor and cryptozoology. And that, naturally, is what I ended liking the most about the book: the humor running through it, and the one cryptid who gets to speak with her own voice.

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Chapter 5 of Martha’s Children and Chicago sociology

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Brian Bixby

“Fighting Martha,” chapter five of Martha’s Children, is now available. Ned’s getting loose! Hooray! But the very next thing he has to do is fight Martha! Ned is going to find out just how tough the vampire Martha Fokker really is. And if you read the chapter, so will you. Or, if you haven’t been reading the story so far, start here.

I’ve mentioned earlier that Chicago witnessed the birth of urban sociology as an academic discipline in this country. Indeed, a lot of our concepts of how cities develop in the United States were based on sociologists studying Chicago.

A view of the Loop from the Chicago River

A view of the Loop from the Chicago River

The central business district? That concept was derived from Chicago’s Loop. The growth and expansion of the city in rings that spill out to suburbs? Chicago again. And like most cities in the East, Chicago annexed its nearer suburbs, but not its more distant ones. Ethnic neighborhoods? Urban sociologists not only mapped the neighborhoods of Chicago, but studied how ethnic groups succeeded each other as their economic fortunes changed. Slums and racial polarization? Sadly, Chicago is literally a textbook case of both for much of its history.

Ned’s Irish, Irish Catholic in fact. So were most of his neighbors and classmates in school. Back in the old days, employers believed each ethnic group was better for certain kinds of jobs, and people liked to live with others of their own kind, so a lot of working class neighborhoods grew up that were dominated by a single ethnic group: Irish, Poles, Italians, Germans, Lithuanians, and a host of others. After being devastated by the Depression, Ned’s neighborhood revived with the factories in World War II. By the late 1960s, it was a prosperous working class neighborhood, with a scattering of white collar workers. The more successful Irish are already moving out to the suburbs, fearful of urban crime and the possibility of blacks moving into the neighborhood, which they believe will ruin real estate prices. In fact, most of the crime in Ned’s neighborhood is committed by local youths. And, ironically, the neighborhood will gradually go over to Hispanics starting in the 1980s. But that’s in the future. The people of the neighborhood watch their TVs and read their morning newspapers. They know crime is up, they’ve followed the coverage of riots elsewhere in the city, and they’ve heard how blockbusting has changed the racial composition of other neighborhoods. They have it good, and they fear change. And they hope Mayor Daley, who is one of them, will help keep them safe.

Francis O'Neill was Chicago's chief of police, 1901-05. He also collected Irish folk music.

Francis O’Neill was Chicago’s chief of police, 1901-05. He also collected Irish folk music.

For his Irish Catholic neighbors, Ned was a model son (until he was turned into a vampire). He’d become a cop. There were a lot of Irish cops, they dominated the police force in 1969 as they had for decades. By following in their footsteps, Ned was reassuring the people of his neighborhood that the city, and the police, would keep them safe.

The urban sociologists could have told them that nothing is permanent, that their safety was at the mercy of forces not even a legion of cops could defy. “White flight” would turn Chicago into a minority-majority city in a few decades. The industrial economy of Chicago was about to go into a tailspin. Like many other neighborhoods, Ned’s would have to adapt or die. As it turns out, it would end up doing a bit of both.

The black neighborhoods in Chicago follow a different trajectory. But that’s a topic for next week.

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The end of the Knights Templar, 1314

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Brian Bixby
The burning of the Templars

The burning of the Templars

Today marks the 699th anniversary of one of the major steps in the destruction of the Knights Templar: the burning of the last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, as a relapsed heretic. It was one of the last acts in the downfall of the Templars, but also one of the first steps in constructing a legend about them.

Temple Church in London, originally a Templar building

Temple Church in London, originally a Templar building

The Knights Templar were a monastic order formed around 1119 to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land in the aftermath of the first Crusades. Their mission quickly expanded to actively fighting the Saracens. The Templars became a popular order and received many charitable gifts. To manage their wealth, and finance their wars in the Holy Land, they gradually developing a banking network across Catholic Europe. Unfortunately, their great wealth could not redeem their military failures, and along with the other Crusaders and monastic knights the Templars were driven from the Holy Land by 1291. The greedy King of France, Philip IV, in debt to the Templars, coerced Pope Clement V into helping him destroy the Templars on the grounds of heresy. The order was dissolved in 1312. De Molay, who had confessed under torture, recanted his confession, and was officially executed for doing so. And that, more or less, was the end of the Templars in fact.

As a rule, the use of instruments indicates torture during the interrogation of the Templars

De Molay being interrogated. Note the presence of instruments to imply torture.

But it was the start of the legend of the Templars. De Molay was said to have proclaimed his innocence at the pyre, and said that God would call the Pope and the King of France to account for their sins. And both died within the year! The confessions of the Templars were interpreted to show they had secured some great relic of supernatural power, and that they had been engaged in witchcraft or diabolism. And people wondered where the great wealth of the Templar order had gone to.

The process by which these legends developed was long and complicated. By the 18th century, de Molay and the Templars had been incorporated into Masonic mythology, such that there is a Masonic order of Knights Templar, and a boy’s order named after de Molay. The Holy Grail had been connected to the Templars by the early 19th century. It would take the 20th century to add space aliens.

But why the Templars? How have they become the focus of so much mysticism and occultism? Certainly the suddenness by which the Order was suppressed, and the more fantastic elements of the confessions extorted under torture from the Templars gave them a shady reputation in the 14th century. They proved handy when 18th century seekers for  spiritual knowledge went looking for noble precedents. And that’s much akin to their role today, as dubious keepers of ancient spiritual wisdom in a hopelessly mundane and unsatisfying world.

As mythical models, the Templars might serve to help people visualize and act on their spiritual goals. But as historical figures, the Templars were ultimately failures, militarily, politically, and spiritually. People looking for spiritual enlightenment deserve better.

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Chapter 4 of Martha’s Children, and looking for models in detective fiction

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Brian Bixby

“Of kings and rippers,” chapter four of Martha’s Children, is now available. Think Martha’s the worst thing that could have happened to Ned? Ned thinks so. And then he finds out he’s wrong. If you’re not reading the story, you can start here, and a new chapter goes up every Friday morning.

As I’ve stated earlier, I decided to take some time off writing fiction on this blog in February to consider what sort of fiction works well in serial form on a blog, and what sorts do not. My prime candidate for fiction that does not work well on a blog was detective fiction, particularly of the “whodunit” variety. I figured that the intricacies of plotting, the requirement of inserting genuine clues, and the need to salt the story with red herrings to confuse the reader made this sort of fiction ill-suited for writing on a blog.

But what I “know” and what’s true aren’t always the same thing. So I decided to do some reading in the genre, to better understand its strengths and weaknesses.

At their worst, detective stories are futile exercises in which the reader tries to outguess how an implausible set of clues led to an equally implausible solution to a murder mystery. My recent exposure to this type of detective story was watching the movie version of S. S. Van Dine’s The Kennel Murder Case (1933), starring William Powell as detective Philo Vance, hero of a dozen novels from that era. It’s considered to be one of the great movies of its type. To me, it looks like a period piece, and not a very distinguished one at that. I have to wonder if the critics who liked this movie had read Van Dine’s novels and imported his characterization of Vance into the movie, because Vance in the movie has almost no character. And the murder mystery itself? An implausible juxtaposition of multiple suspects, an improbable coincidence, and an even more outrageously improbable demise.

Myrna Loy's wit in "The Thin Man" is as appealing as her looks

Myrna Loy’s wit in “The Thin Man” is as appealing as her looks (though this shot is not from that movie)

So why was I watching a dog like The Kennel Murder Case? Because six months after he starred in it, William Powell starred as Nick Charles in The Thin Man (1934). The trailer for “The Thin Man” shows Powell playing both Vance and Charles. It’s cute. Here’s a link to it. The Thin Man was based fairly closely on a Dashiell Hammett novel, and it is rightly considered a classic. It’s not just the plot, no, clever though it may be. It’s the smart way Powell as Nick plays off Myrna Loy, who portrays his wife Nora as no one’s fool.

It took reading a piece by Hammett’s successor as writer of hard-boiled detective fiction, Raymond Chandler, to explain to me why The Thin Man is a success while The Kennel Murder Case deserves to rot in oblivion. Chandler, who incidentally loathed Philo Vance, wrote, “The technical basis [of a good pulp detective story] was that the scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one which made good scenes.” (From page viii of Trouble is My Business (Vintage, 1992).) Or as I interpret it, the plot’s useful only insofar as it engages the reader’s emotions as well as intellect. I could care less about the people in The Kennel Murder Case, and the most exciting scene is told in a flashback with no dramatic power. Nick and Nora, on the other hand, are a swell couple, and they use their brains and their hearts in dealing with people who have real problems that spill outside of the strict needs of the plot.

It’s nice to know I subconsciously realized this while writing The Dragon Lady of Stockbridge. What’s the plot, after all, but two female magicians going after the magician that’s crossing them both? It’s how Rebecca and Abigail, and their supporting cast, become involved and what they do and why they do it that makes the story. Martha’s Children has an even simpler plot, one I could summarize in one sentence. I won’t, of course, not here, not while I’m still writing and posting the story. Because it’s not just the plot I hope you’re reading for. It’s Ned and Martha and the characters yet to be introduced, and the constellation of connections I will develop among them (to refer to a previous post on writing).

This is why the talk about there being really only four or five plots in fiction is a lot of nonsense. No one writes just for plot, and no one reads just for plot. Writing an intricate detective story may require more plotting, and therefore be more difficult in serial form. (Though the difficulty of managing a different reality for a science fiction or fantasy story is just as challenging.) It will require the writer to be more plodder than panzer. But in the end, it’s only one part of writing a good story.

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Chicago 1968: politics as riot

Posted on March 10, 2013 by Brian Bixby

In Martha’s Children, Martha and her fellow vampires end up in a war with the Chicago cops when they come to that city for the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Their experience resembles that of many of the people who came to Chicago that summer. For Chicago was a city at war, hosting a political party torn apart by a war.

LBJ signs the Civil Rights Act of 1965 while Martin Luther King, Jr. looks on

LBJ signs the Civil Rights Act of 1965 while Martin Luther King, Jr. looks on

It wasn’t supposed to be that way. At the beginning of 1968, Chicago and the Democrats were sitting pretty. Mayor Richard Daley and his Democratic political machine ran the city, and were looking forward to hosting a political convention, at which Daley expected to play a role befitting a man of his political stature. And the Democrats, firmly in control of Congress, expected to rubber stamp the renomination of President Lyndon Baines Johnson for another term, and cruise to victory in November. Good times all around.

Even the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon was attacked during the Tet Offensive

Even the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon was attacked during the Tet Offensive

But LBJ was engaged in a two-front political war. In those days, the conservative Democrats dominated the Old South, while moderate and liberal Democrats won the support of labor unions and cities in the North. Though a Texan himself, LBJ had pushed through major civil rights legislation, alienating the segregation-minded Southerners. And his escalation of the Vietnam War had aligned some liberals against him.

The enemy’s Tet Offensive in January, 1968 discredited the Administration’s claim that the United States was winning in Vietnam. On March 12, Eugene McCarthy, running as a peace candidate, won 42% of the vote in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire. Robert “Bobby” Kennedy, brother to the President assassinated in 1963, entered the race also as a peace candidate a few days later. Realizing he could not succeed as President and hold his party together, LBJ announced his withdrawal from the race on March 31.

The Democratic party split three ways, with Kennedy and McCarthy squabbling over who would lead the left, George Wallace advancing as the segregationist candidate of the right, and LBJ’s Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, historically a party liberal, fighting to hold the party machinery and center together.

The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the powerful black spokesman for peaceful integration, on April 4, dashed black hopes and led to riots in most major cities, including Chicago. Mayor Daley called in the National Guard to help his police crush the riots, even telling them to “shoot to kill” suspected arsonists and looters. (There was a lot of argument after the fact whether Daley had given such an order. But it reflects his general attitude.) And then just as he had won the California primary and was about to unify the peace wing of the party, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated on June 5. The left wing of the party fell into chaos, feeling it had been cheated of a chance to win the nomination.

Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman at an anti-war demonstration

Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman at an anti-war demonstration

Finally, to top off the witch’s brew, the Yippies, a radical political movement whose name was a play on the term “hippie,” decided to hold their political convention, at which they nominated a pig for President, in Chicago at the same time as the Democratic convention. Several other radical movements decided to show up in force as well, many to protest LBJ’s Vietnam war policy. Daley, who regarded any protest as a blot on his city’s honor, ordered his police to use massive force to crush any demonstrations that threatened the Democratic convention, or public order generally, and called in the National Guard to help. He had crushed the riots after Martin Luther King’s death. He would crush these, too.

The result was a running street battle that lasted throughout the Democratic convention, and even sometimes spilled over into the convention hall. Perhaps 10,000 protesters confronted the police, day after day, night after night, trying to hold demonstrations while living on the streets and in the parks. And the police pushed back, with riot gear, clubs, and tear gas. The conflict reached a climax on August 28, the day of the “police riot,” when so much tear gas was deployed, it even made its way into the hotel where Hubert Humphrey was showering. And it was all on television, shocking the American people.

There’s no way to show the mess and violence of those days in a single picture. There are many videos on the web, though I wasn’t able to find one that told the story well and in brief. Here’s one of them, more of an Establishment take than many, showing two episodes of demonstrations in the street bracketing an episode in the convention of the police removing a delegate: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/74510-1

Although the majority of Americans supported the police against the demonstrators, the violence left a lasting legacy. The following year would see the radicals return to Chicago for the “Days of Rage,” and later that year the Chicago police would shoot down the city’s Black Panther leader. Chicago would continue to be plagued with political and racial violence for years to come.

Nor did Hubert Humphrey do any better. Although he had won the nomination, the peace faction of the party never accepted him. The Southern conservatives went a step further and bolted the party to form a third party under George Wallace. Republican nominee Richard Nixon, running as a centrist claiming he had a secret plan to end the war, was the beneficiary of the split among Democrats, winning the election with only 43% of the popular vote.

Daley Nixon

Two years later, in 1970, Mayor Daley, still in charge, greets President Nixon on his arrival in Chicago

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Chapter 3 of Martha’s Children, and the evolution of monsters

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Brian Bixby

“Vampire Evolution,” the third chapter of Martha’s Children, my current serial, is now up. While bound in his coffin, Ned makes a friend. But in the topsy-turvey world of being a vampire, he soon regrets it.

Yes, I’m posting the chapter Thursday night instead of Friday morning. We have house guests, and I’m not sure when I’ll get to my laptop Friday morning. Hence the early posting. Nevertheless, I expect chapter four will be posted Friday next week. If you’ve not been following the story, you can start here.

Werewolf evolution in action? The ancient legend

Werewolf evolution in action? The ancient legend shows a wolf-headed man acting like a man

It sounds like a joke, but why wouldn’t evolution apply to vampires? Or to any other supernatural creatures in our world? So long as they live, compete with other beings, and reproduce, evolution should operate.

Martha’s own concept of vampire evolution, as you can see, makes the relationship between vampires and humans resemble that between disease micro-organisms and humans. Deadly diseases that quickly kill have to spread rapidly, or else they’ll die out. A disease that can’t spread rapidly has to survive in its hosts for some time, and typically establishes an equilibrium with its host, with some cost to the host.

Becoming more bestial (Germany, 1512)

Werewolves began acting more like beasts by the time of this engraving from German in 1512

Werewolves are similar to vampires in several ways: superior qualities as a predator, reproduce through attacking humans, as vulnerable as humans a fair percentage of the time. Also like vampires, there are specific means to attack and kill them in their enhanced state. One presumes that evolution operated to make them hard to detect while in their normal human state. Given their nature, I would expect they would be more common in rural areas than urban ones, where wolves would be too easy to spot, and hence werewolves would probably never achieve a population density as high as vampires. Still, there are quite a few stories about urban vampires. Perhaps they thrive in suburban neighborhoods or in the warehouse districts of a city.

Ghouls, feasting on the dead, are no doubt having trouble adjusting to the rising number of cremations. Perhaps a smaller subspecies will develop. At least the ghouls can take solace in the fact that they are no longer competing with “resurrectionists,” medical school doctors and students who used to steal corpses from graveyards for dissection demonstrations. (Yeah, there’s a real basis for Frankenstein’s robbing graves for body parts.)

By the 18th century, werewolves had become more bestial still

By the 18th century, werewolves looked more like beasts, too

A read through almost any grimoire will demonstrate that the invocations offered summon demons whose skills and powers can help people. Whether it’s defeating your enemies, making someone fall in love with you, discovering buried treasure, or, curiously, reconciling you with your enemies (a common demonic power in The Lesser Key of Solomon), the demons in demand are those that can solve problems humans have trouble addressing on your own. Pity the demons whose powers are such things as unstylish dressing or hexing phonograph turntables. No one wants them these days. They have probably wasted away, or gone back for remedial demonic power development courses. Maybe Quixiliban, the rarely-invoked dread lord whose powers included inducing lard intolerance in people you curse, will one day stage a comeback with the power of destroying your enemy’s cell phone contact list.

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Criticizing others’ writing

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Brian Bixby

Back in December, I posted a query to readers, asking when and how it is appropriate to criticize the writings of others on their blogs. I should note I was thinking of literary blogs when I wrote this, though some of my readers considered the broader field of any type of blog that involves significant writing. I received several answers in response, and some more on my cross-posting to Facebook. I’ve thought over the answers I received, and read some other people’s blogs on the same and related subjects.

Because she published anonymously, is Jane Austen the Anti-Blogger?

Because she published anonymously, is Jane Austen the Anti-Blogger?

The most important point most readers made was that blogs may be read by the public, but they are not public spaces. We have traditionally published works, which are definitely public. We have diaries that are private so long as they are not published by their authors, and immune from criticism. And then we have blogs, which are privately owned but are designed to be read by the public. In effect, the consensus was that the blog remains the author’s, and that it is not acceptable to criticize the blog’s content anymore than it would be to criticize the author. Praise, on the other hand, is always acceptable. We have “like” buttons, but not “dislike” buttons.

The comparison suggests when criticism would be appropriate: when the critic and author know each other well enough, and the author invites criticism. Moreover, just as one is not expected to insult someone to their face, criticism that is not constructive is ill-mannered. And that pretty much was the consensus of my readers. Moreover, most readers agreed that criticism should be leavened with praise for the positive aspects of the writing (with the proviso that if you can’t say anything positive, don’t say anything at all).

With those as the standard norms, we can set limits on the value of blogging and criticism. If you are looking for people to read your ideas and writing, to enjoy them, and to respond positively to them, blogging is a good idea. If you are looking to hone your writing skills and need searching criticism, blogging is only somewhat useful. A blog gives you a place to practice, with an audience. You should also be searching for fellow writers for mutual criticism, or an editor for high-caliber criticism.

Typical American political discussion

Typical American political discussion

There are at least two likely exceptions to these norms. Political blogs by their nature end up attracting opposing views. And blogs with high visibility and thousands of viewers have generally ceased to be individual amateur productions, and become more professional and commercial. So they should expect and be able to handle adverse criticism. Whether they do or not is another story, one I have not investigated in any depth so far.

Acknowledgements: My thanks to Elizabeth Blackbourne, danapeleg1, Catana, pam2626, crimsonprose, Richard Gassan, Helen Morey, Carole Scimemi, and Mark Martin for their feedback to the original post. (Hyperlinks to those with WordPress blogs supplied.) Any interpretation, misrepresentation, or simple distortion of their posts is my own responsibility.

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Chapter 2 of Martha’s Children, and the Sixties

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Brian Bixby

“Home schooling, vampire style,” chapter 2 of Martha’s Children, is now available for you to read. Ned thinks being a vampire is his only problem. By the time Martha teaches him a thing or two, he’s going to find out differently. Chapter 3 will go up next Friday.

Martha’s Children is set toward the tail end of that tumultuous period that has gone down in popular history as “the Sixties” or 1960s. The Sixties have conceptually dominated and divided our politics and society ever since. And that’s because the Sixties saw the clash of two myths.

To understand the Sixties, you have to go back to the end of the Second World War in 1945. Eight million men came home, determined to live the life of the American Dream that hardly anyone had seen since the start of the Great Depression in 1929. With the G.I. Bill giving them financial support for getting an education, buying a home, and starting a business, they got married, settled down in the suburbs, had their 3.5 children, a dog, and a car. And they built a generation of economic prosperity, in which everyone got richer, and the nation’s income was distributed more evenly than any time since the Industrial Revolution.

The new American paradise: Levittown

The new American paradise: Levittown

True, there was an enemy on the horizon: the Soviet Union, a brutal, atheistic communist dictatorship. In reaction, Americans pulled together, forging a common political consensus on most issues, becoming militantly capitalistic and Christian. And who better to lead our country than the boys who fought the war? Every President for forty years (1953-1993) had served in the military in World War II.

Although Reagan's military service was making films in Hollywood

Although Reagan’s military service was making films in Hollywood

But not everyone was happy with the 1950s version of the American Dream. The Negroes, as they were then called in polite society, had served in the war, too, but had come home to segregation, prejudice, and poverty. They couldn’t even vote in many states, thanks to the way poll taxes and literacy tests were manipulated. So they fought back. And partly because it’s hard to claim to champion freedom and equality when an entire race has to sit in the back of the bus, they slowly gained support from the Federal Government and slowly gained ground. But not without violence and struggle. The Supreme Court could declare segregation illegal (in Brown v. Board of Education, 1954), but it took troops to desegregate schools, and civil rights workers would die trying to get the black man the vote, especially in the South.

In 1963, protesters still dressed up to show they were proper folk

In 1963, protesters still dressed up to show they were proper folk

Women were the second group that found that the American Dream, 1950s style, wasn’t all that great. They were supposed to be sex symbols, housewives, and mothers, and that was it. It seemed like enough in the eyes of many men, and even many women. But quite a few women disagreed. They wanted more independence, more respect for their minds and work, and they found their discontents emerge in everything from pop fiction (Peyton Place) to serious analyses of their role and image in society (Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963).

Finally, having grown up in unrivaled prosperity, some of the Baby Boomers (so call because there was a statistically immense number of births between 1946 and 1964 compared to the years before or after) looked around and asked why, if America was so great, there was still such poverty, prejudice, pollution, and often a general dissatisfaction with the narrowly defined normal life. So some of them, a minority it should be noted, seized on alternatives, from marginal figures in the arts to radical political programs, as a way to critique and improve American life.

Woodstock: symbolic apogee of the counterculture

Woodstock: symbolic apogee of the counterculture

The result was the Sixties. A minority of people decided to protest against “the System” and to try novel living arrangements and deviant lifestyles. The majority looked on, puzzled and bewildered that anyone could be unhappy with living in the best country in the world, and yet stung by some of the valid criticisms the “counterculture” offered. And a small minority, which included many people in positions of power, saw the dissidents as troublesome malcontents upsetting a perfectly nice world, and were willing to use force to put them down.

And so for a decade, more or less, the country was torn by protests and violence as some people either tried to change the System, or find an alternative to it. Bucking the Man could get you arrested and even killed. Or you could drop out, take drugs, live on a commune, and find yourself dead broke, brain damaged, and with kids you couldn’t take care of. No choice was without its risks and costs. And most people stuck to what was considered a normal way of life, which imposed its own costs.

Yet, slowly, what was normal changed. Racial prejudice became unacceptable. Women could have jobs and a career without being stigmatized. Sexuality outside of marriage ceased to be frequent and shameful and became frequent and at least tolerated. People began to think about the environment as something to be cared for everywhere and not just in national parks.

I’m simplifying a lot here. I’ve managed to leave out the Vietnam War, or any explanation of why similar protests rocked Western Europe. And there’s a thousand other major developments I haven’t even mentioned.

The point is that as the Sixties wound down, the era spawned two myths. The first myth was that the American Dream had reached a pinnacle of social development in the 1950s, that the Sixties had been a disaster, and what we as a nation had to do was return to the values of the 1950s. The other myth was that the Sixties had been the first surge of an idealistic movement supported by most Americans to change our society and make it better. The first myth ignores the flaws in 1950s America, and kids itself that we can go back in time. The second myth tends to idealize the rebels, ignoring everything from a skyrocketing venereal disease rate to the sometimes senseless violence, and glosses over the fact that permanent change came only as they convinced the non-revolutionary mainstream to change.

Ever since, those on the political right have looked fondly back at the 1950s and condemned the changes spawned by the 1960s, while those on the left have done the reverse. The “culture wars” since the 1980s have been over the various legacies of the 1960s. I had thought the departure of the WWII generation from the political stage would have ended them, as the last pre-1960s generation died out. And yet in 2008, one of the political controversies was over Barack Obama’s ties to Bill Ayers, one-time leader of the Weather Underground, a violent revolutionary movement that had petered out in the mid-1970s. Thirty years later, and it was still a flashpoint, at least for some. I suspect that for many younger voters, it was ancient history, no more important than a list of Roman consuls.

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