Tag Archive for ebook

Essence

Snow White

Stories can bring the salient details of life to light. Real life contains a lot of noise and extraneous detail that can obscure a through line. Fictional stories remove that noise to rise the core themes and emotions to the surface for observation and examination. Fictional stories both pare down and embellish real life. They zoom in on the important stuff and focus the reader’s attention squarely there. When the story captures something true about the lives of its characters, it binds us to them. Usually, we find a story engrossing when we care about the characters and want to see what happens to them. While some portrait painters insist on live sittings with their subjects, it’s easier — although perhaps more facile — to start with a photograph. Photographs manage to capture some essence of personality, to flatten it into something easier to paint, simplifying the process of portraiture. Caricatures identify particular features of their subjects and render them in a ruthless way. In the realm of words, identifying salient features in characters and their world makes them more memorable and makes their actions more comprehensible. Perhaps caricatures resemble jokes in this way. Last month, I wrote about fairytales.…

Builders

Adventures into High Strangeness Header

Humans are builders. We are all given different talents and resources in life that we use to try to construct happiness for ourselves and for those we love. This continuous process of creation is not only quintessentially human but also the most common thing all animals do. All animals build, humans just take it to another level. We write and read books, make and play games, create and watch movies, paint and sculpt stories, weave musical ballads and landscapes. We are able to envision other lives and share those visions with others. I think that’s an amazing facility. We believe that we’re unique, as humans, for building by using our prodigious imagination. We don’t only build in physical and social realms, we craft fully imaginary worlds populated with people and other creatures. Perhaps whales, apes, or even other animals — the octopus? a colony of termites? — also dream up stories. It’s hard to know. I have always lived in my imagination. As a child, I made elaborate sets and toys to act out stories for myself and my friends. Our apartment gradually filled with paper and fabric cities, castles, and little animals made from scraps; I used to make…

We Own Nothing

Yap Stone Money

We are living through an interesting transition as we change our relationship with physical possessions. Physical ownership is giving way to a preference for virtual goods and services. For millennia, societies operated on a “favor bank” system, where performing favors for friends and members of the community built goodwill. This mutual support was crucial during hard times. Money and trade goods came later. Personal wealth evolved from physically holding valuables to entrusting them to banks. Today, banks themselves are a web of promissory notes, not physical reserves. Caption: Not all money was easily carried about. Rai stones for instance, remained stationary. Their ownership was determined through community consensus in the societies where they were valued. We store our financial assets in the cloud. Money, stocks, property titles, and insurance policies exist mostly in digital realms. Who actually holds physical stock certificates now? While we physically possess homes and cars (and even that might change), our ownership rights are digitally recorded. Our educational achievements and professional credentials are traded electronically. Our libraries of books, music, or games have transitioned from physical shelves to digital storage. Memories, once preserved in photo albums, calendars, and diaries, are now captured in digital formats and…

Emotion Field

American Mythology: superhero underdogs

I saw a question on Twitter: Can readers become emotionally invested in a story if the main character is interesting but not sympathetic? My answer was that I need characters that I can care about. A superhero that has all kinds of cool and interesting superpowers is ultimately boring unless there is an emotional narrative that I can care about. I think the most important answer an author can give to their readers in the first few pages (or paragraphs) of their book is why they should care enough to read more? And that answer is always why the reader should care. I find that caring about sympathetic characters is easier than for villains, no matter how interesting those villains are. I can go for a story about a young kid who grows up to be a villain because the world forces him to become one — he wasn’t born evil, he was made to be. Villany was forced on an innocent soul in order to survive. But this just means that I’m reading a tragedy. There are lots of different types of stories. It’s never about the genre. Science fiction is just fantasy wrapped up in fancy techtalk. Romance…

Of Marshmallows and Masks

Marshmallow Test

Most everyone in my family, most of our friends, and a lot of our neighbors have received at least one COVID vaccination shot! It is starting to feel like this year-long nightmare is winding down. And we are lucky to live in the right country and in the right state and in the right city where things are likely to get back to normal sooner rather than later. No one can deny that this had been a very difficult year. But part of the difficulty had been our own behavior. It is quite possible that if we heeded the science and recommendations from the doctors (not the politicians), we would have been here sooner with fewer lives lost and less devastation to our economy. So why didn’t we do all we could to arrest the progress of this devastating disease? Why did we take stupid risks? Why did some people refuse to wear masks and self-isolate? Well, consider the Marshmallow Test. In brief, a Marshmallow Test is an experiment that tries to measure the delayed gratification quotient. A child is given a marshmallow (or any other small but highly desired reward) and asked to wait alone in the room with…

Thoughts on Love

dog adopts kittens ABC 15 Arizona

What’s the main difference between humans and other animal mothers? It’s a strange question, I know. But give it some thought. We all watch videos of cute baby animals and their mothers online. We have all seen cross-species “adoptions” — ducks and that raise kittens; dogs that nurture bunnies; even lions that take in baby antelopes to rear. Humans obviously do that too — we love kittens and puppies and other baby animals and routinely raise them and talk about our pets as if they are our children. But there is a difference. And no, it’s not that other animals don’t tend to take on pets — the luxury of sharing food and shelter in the wild is just that — a luxury. There is something else. We have two grown sons, both in graduate schools. Clearly adults, right? But my emotions towards them are the same as when they were but babies. I don’t see adult men, I see the entire history of their lives before me. I hear the cries they made when they fell and got hurt or when they were sick and not feeling well. I remember their outrageous fibs and reasons why they can’t eat…