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I’ve Got You Under My Skin

I don’t know when we decided to give ourselves to the Nano-overlords, but I suspect it was a gradual process. There was no light switch I flipped saying, “Sure, I want to be digitally monitored all the time.” As I child, I adhered to the idea of “Don’t put foreign objects in your body” which now seems to have become “Honk! if you got chipped!” The Right to Privacy now has morphed into “Alexa, can you buy me some hemorrhoid cream?”

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How We Got Ourselves Here

A NY Times article this week described a digital pill that will alert doctors whether their patients have swallowed the medication (based on its interaction with stomach fluid). The FDA has approved it, even though the drug companies’ clinical trials hadn’t yet shown that the monitoring improved compliance. In theory, the monitoring would only be done with the patient’s consent, but since this particular pill is aimed at patients with mental health issues, how would consent be obtained? Suppose a schizophrenic pleads not guilty by reason of insanity to a crime and their plea bargain requires them to take their meds — requires them to agree to swallow this pill that alerts security when they don’t take it? Society might be better off, but at the price of civil liberty. Continue reading “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”

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NaNoWriMo: Less Counting, More Dancing

The more people writing, the better! Really, writing should be encouraged. We can never have too many writers, artists, dancers, or musicians. But NaNoWriMo as a Thing To Do has always been kind of lost to me, and as people are posting their word counts on social media, I just can’t help but explain why.

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You Can’t Count your Way towards Better Art

NaNoWriMo is about writing 50,000 words by the end of the month of November, which means writing approximately 1667 words every day.  But 50,000 words doesn’t necessarily equal a novel. Some stories can be told effectively and be commercially successfully in a lot fewer words. Many stories take a lot more.

Honestly, 50,000 for a “novel” might be a little on the short side. Good for children’s books, or if you’re Vonnegut or Hemingway.  J.K. Rowling’s books started shorter (Sorcerer’s Stone was 77,000) and then, as they got interesting, became decent-sized. Four NaNoWriMo’s worth.

A great painting is not made better by having more paint strokes. A symphony isn’t better by having 50,000 notes as opposed to 35,522 or 272,395. But NaNoWriMo by nature is built around counting. It was started as a community project to help a handful of San Francisco writers practice their craft in miserable weather. It clearly struck a nerve, since so many people want to participate. But the participation effort is about writing a certain number. The helpers include several ways to count your words or build word count apps. That’s what apps do. Continue reading “NaNoWriMo: Less Counting, More Dancing”

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‘Tis a Mystery: Where Do Mysteries Come from?

Sherlock Holmes playing the violin while puffing on a pipe, gray smoke misting the air like thoughts of inductive reasoning… Hercules Poirot sipping on his tisane while musing with his little gray cells…Mr. Monk framing the room with his hands… Columbo, hand to his forehead, dripping cigar ash on his raincoat…such detectives have captured popular imagination for centuries and are among the most famous of our modern heroes. Mysteries have nearly eclipsed novels as popular reads. Agatha Christie is called the world’s best-selling author with two billion sales of her 66 detective novels.

How did we get here?

Most discussions of the history of the mystery define the universe as related to detective fiction — a premise I grant — and suggest that Poe’s “Murder in the Rue Morgue” was the beginning of the mystery. But let’s go back a little further. How does Poe’s 1841 short story about a detective, C. August Dupin, arise into existence? What were detectives before then? Didn’t anyone write short stories? Didn’t anyone write stories about people who investigated things? Continue reading “‘Tis a Mystery: Where Do Mysteries Come from?”