I wrote this the other day:
But I was exhausted by it. Not so much the conversation or reminiscing. That was good. More by having to exercise that much of my extrovert persona for such a long time in front of so many people. My strong tendency towards introversion has been fed by the years of being a care provider and working here alone.
It is part of the deep strangeness of my life that while I am so much an introvert I have often found myself in decidedly public roles. My early SCA career helped me understand how to do that, and do it reasonably well. But the tension within me remains.
Decidedly so. But a part of that is my understanding myself, and knowing that it is dangerous for me to be too isolated, too introverted. I know that I have to push myself out of my comfort zone in order to stay healthy. It’s like physical exercise: I don’t particularly like it – at least not at first – but I need to do it. And once I do, I’m usually glad that I did.
Like the other night. I was dreading attending the second session of a Neighborhood Leadership Program the city is conducting. I didn’t feel particularly well, and I could’ve used the time and energy to do other things that needed attention. But I went. And it was a good session, as I noted on the Neighborhood blog:
It is still too soon to say with any certainty, but I think that some good things will be coming out of this program, including some structural changes to how the city handles Neighborhood Associations, and how Neighborhood Associations are able to work together to achieve common goals. One of the first things all the attendees discovered was that just about every other Neighborhood Association had similar concerns and frustrations – and a realization that we would have a greater chance of success if we could work together rather than as isolated individual groups.
It is good to challenge myself – to take on jobs I won’t particularly enjoy, to do things I know I may well dislike, just for the experience. There’s a lot to be said for simple comfort, but it would be too easy for me to just become dead to the world or anything new if I relied on that too much. And I like to actually live.
Jim Downey
OK, so that was strange.
A week ago, my good lady wife mentioned an upcoming SCA event. The 25th Anniversary of the founding of the Kingdom of Calontir.
I’ve mentioned the SCA here before, and something about my involvement in it. The truth of the matter is that I was actually fairly important in the organization at one point, and am a significant part of the early history of the local kingdom. You can look me up, if you want, under the name “Thomann Shadan Secarius”.
Anyway, we kicked around the idea of going, just to see some old friends for a few hours. Didn’t make a final decision to do so until fairly late yesterday morning. Got into a storage closet, dug out some garb, found some stuff that I could still wear, and packed up and drove over to St. Louis. I was a little bit nervous about walking back into that slice of subculture. It had been at least 7 years since I had even stopped in at an event briefly, and over a decade since I had actually “attended”. Almost no one there (other than a few close friends with whom I was still in contact) had any idea what I have been doing with my life in the years since I was last active. And likewise I had little or no idea of what most of them have been up to. And it wasn’t likely that I’d be able to spend a lot of personal time catching up with people, in the context of a busy event with over 500 attendees.
But we went. Found the site, parked, grabbed our stuff and went inside. Got through the registration quickly (most people had been at the site for hours), went and found somewhere to change.
I was barely a step outside the men’s room after changing before I was seen and nabbed by some old friends. And basically spent the next four hours bouncing around the large site, from one group of people to another for hugs and quick conversations, thumbnail sketches of who was still married and who had broken up, who had died and who hadn’t been seen in forever (I was in the latter group for the most part), who was out of work, what kids had come along.
It was actually quite enjoyable.
But I was exhausted by it. Not so much the conversation or reminiscing. That was good. More by having to exercise that much of my extrovert personna for such a long time in front of so many people. My strong tendency towards introversion has been fed by the years of being a care provider and working here alone.
It is part of the deep strangeness of my life that while I am so much an introvert I have often found myself in decidedly public roles. My early SCA career helped me understand how to do that, and do it reasonably well. But the tension within me remains. Late last night, after getting home and long after my wife had gone to bed, I sat up, reading online but actually doing a lot of thinking about this. I remembered that there was a point late in the afternoon yesterday, as everyone gathered in the large sanctuary in preparation for a formal “court”, and I stood off to the side, just watching, both a participant and an observer in the event. It was always such for me in the SCA. Hell, it was always such for me in almost everything, including my own actions.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Book Conservation, General Musings, University of Missouri
A weird thing: in the middle of a very serious economic downturn, my personal economic situation continues to rise. We sent all our tax information to our accountant this past week, and I was somewhat suprised to note that I had earned roughly twice as much last year as I have earned in, well, many years. It’s still solidly under the household average for the nation, but nonetheless is a significant bump up.
And this year I could easily earn twice again as much, if I stay on top of my work demand. This hasn’t always been the case. In fact, for a long long time I was of the opinion that it was almost impossible to actually earn a living – let alone a decent one – as a book conservator in private practice. I still wanted to do it, and found ways to make that work, but for a very long time I earned very little.
What changed?
Well, time. My reputation got more established. But more than that, just time. If I tell someone I’ve been doing this for 17 years, they figure I must be good at it. And having some grey in my beard helps a great deal as well. No, seriously.
That, and I made some changes in how I handle my fees when I closed the gallery and started working from home. Yeah, I increased them, but most people find that acceptable – with time and reputation, they expect your fees to go up. What I think is more important is that I established a minimum charge of two hours labor, meaning that people had to be fairly serious about wanting my services. It’s curious, but this actually helped a great deal.
See, when I first opened my shop, I would charge $25 an hour, with no minimum. And I would constantly get people coming in, wanting this little thing done or that little thing done, and wanting to only pay me for ten or fifteen minutes of work. It drove me nuts, but I thought I had to do it in order to keep the work coming in. Truth is, it took more time to deal with this stuff and track it than it was worth. Eventually I established a minimum half hour charge, but even that was pretty marginal. And people would constantly balk about the half hour charge, particularly when they just wanted some work done on a paperback or personal bible that could easily be replaced for a nominal cost. They saw me only as an alternative to buying a new book and getting on with life.
When I switched over to the gallery, with the bindery business as part of that, this sort of stuff dropped off some, but not altogether. Why? Because people were coming into an art gallery – a nice one at that – where they would feel a little foolish complaining about a $15 charge (my rates were then $30 an hour). This taught me a lesson, though I would still work long hours trying to keep the cash flow positive, dealing with every little project that came in. When I closed the gallery 8 years later, I knew one of the things I wanted to do was to set my fee schedule such that it forced people to respect my work right up front. I raised my rates (over the course of the time I was at the gallery they had gone up, but I basically doubled them again) and implemented the two hour minimum. I put that information on my voice mail and right on my website, and it is the first thing I’ll tell someone who calls me asking about binding work.
Now, during the period I was being a care provider, I didn’t have much time to do any conservation work. My time really was valuable to me, even though money was tight. So I wasn’t willing to try and fit in this or that small job, just to keep the money coming in. The temptation to go back on my fee schedule was minimized. It took a while, but soon I stopped getting the bulk of the calls wanting me to work on this or that easily-replaceable book. Instead, people now see my work as highly skilled labor, priced appropriately for the service, and suitable for care of rare and valuable books. I won’t get rich doing what I do, but I should be able to start paying off my debts from all those years of not earning much. Just not struggling is a very nice feeling for a change.
And there is the very big benefit that now I get to regularly work on really cool books and documents. As a friend noted this morning, following discussion of a set of volumes I had just done and told him about:
That is so cool. What an interesting job you have. Every project is different, fun stuff to look at. Very neat.
Indeed. It took a long time to get here, and I wouldn’t recommend the path to others. But I like where I’ve wound up.
Cheers,
Jim Downey
I just conducted a little experiment. It’s one you can probably try yourself.
See, some time back I decided that I needed to watch the 2001 movie remake Planet of the Apes. I’d been on a bit of a Tim Burton kick, and figured that I should see this, even though it had been widely panned and looked dreadful. But before watching it, I figured that I should watch the original once again, so that I’d have it fresh in my mind for the comparison to the remake. So both movies went onto my NetFlix queue.
I saw Planet of the Apes when it first came out. I remember seeing it, and being just completely blown away by the phenomenal story and really cool ending twist. Hey, I was 10. But while I no longer consider it phenomenal, it is a good movie, and I have seen it probably a dozen times since.
Anyway, the 1968 version arrived yesterday. Since Monday is a holiday, I decided that I’d watch it and get it back in the mail today – no reason for it hanging around. Last night I wasn’t feeling great, and this morning was a little more busy than I had planned. So about 11:00, I sat down to watch the movie, aware that I wanted to be done before the mailman arrived (usually between 1:00 and 2:00 on Saturdays). Feeling a little time pressure, I figured I could maybe zip through some of the opening bits and whatnot at a faster speed, get done more quickly.
I decided to watch the movie on my computer, where I could set the speed at 1.5x normal. It compresses sound in some way automatically, so that things don’t sound too weird. I’d done this previously with parts of other movies I already knew and wanted to get through. And here’s the thing: I was able to watch the entire movie at 1.5x speed, and it seemed just fine.
OK, I slowed down some of the “action sequences” to normal speed. But those were like a total of 10 or fifteen minutes. All the rest of it – all the dialogue, all the traveling, all the plot development – seemed perfectly normal at 1.5x speed.
Hmm.
I was done in plenty of time, so I went back and rewatched the ending at the normal 1.0x speed. It seemed to take forever to get through it.
Hmm.
Now, this could just be due to the fact that I know the movie pretty well, and my mind was able to fill in the emotional development usually tied to visual/spoken narrative without a problem. But I think it has more to do with how we’ve been conditioned to experience movies currently. We expect them to move more quickly, for the information to be conveyed in a more rapid pace.
It could just be due to the style of current film-making, with quicker cuts and More Jam-Packed Special Effects!
Or it could be that our lives really are faster now than they used to be.
1.5 times faster.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, General Musings, Genetic Testing, Health, Predictions, Reproduction, Science, Science Fiction, Synesthesia
I’ve written previously about synesthesia, and most recently said this:
The implication is that there is a great deal more flexibility – or ‘plasticity’ – in the structure of the brain than had been previously understood.
Well, yeah. Just consider how someone who has been blind since birth will have heightened awareness of other senses. Some have argued that this is simply a matter of such a person learning to make the greatest use of the senses they have. But others have suspected that they actually learn to use those structures in the brain normally associated with visual processing to boost the ability to process other sensory data. And that’s what the above research shows.
OK, two things. One, this is why I have speculated in Communion of Dreams that synesthesia is more than just the confusion of sensory input – it is using our existing senses to construct not a simple linear view of the world, but a matrix in three dimensions (with the five senses on each axis of such a ‘cube’ structure). In other words, synesthesia is more akin to a meta-cognitive function. That is why (as I mentioned a few days ago) the use of accelerator drugs in the novel allows users to take a step-up in cognition and creativity, though at the cost of burning up the brain’s available store of neurotransmitters.
And now there is more evidence that synesthesia is a more complex matter than researchers had previously understood:
Seeing color in sounds has genetic link
Now, Asher and colleagues in the United Kingdom have done what they say is the first genetic analysis of synesthesia. Their findings are published this week in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
Researchers collected DNA from 196 people from 43 families in which there were multiple members with synesthesia. They looked exclusively at auditory-visual synesthesia, the kind where sound triggers color, which is easier to diagnose than other possible forms.
They expected to find a single gene responsible for synesthesia, but they found that the condition was linked to regions on chromosomes 2, 5, 6, and 12 — four distinct areas instead of one.
“It means that the genetics of synesthesia are much more complex than we thought,” Asher said.
No surprise there. The article goes on to discuss what may be happening physiologically – researchers are still trying to construct a model of how synesthesia actually happens in the brain, and still tend to see it as something which “goes wrong” developmentally. The supposition, according to the CNN article, is that there is a failure of a necessary “pruning” of cross-wiring in the young brain.
But what if it is instead a meta-cognitive function, something which is emerging as part of ongoing evolution of the human brain? In other words, an enhancement of our current ability to think and remember, by allowing our brains a bit more complexity in the neural connections?
Hmm.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Cosmic Variance, General Musings, Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling, movies, Science, String theory
(This is one of my newspaper columns from Columbia Daily Tribune, updated with links. Thought it might be of interest while I am away for a few days. – JD)
Harry Potter and the Superstring Revolution
One of my favorite String Theory blogs (yeah, I have rather eclectic interests) recently got into a discussion of the new Harry Potter movie. Even hard-core physicists like to discuss movies in addition to the latest research into 11-dimension supergravity and the advantages of D-branes over M-theory. Which is good, because when these people start throwing around the advanced math wizardry needed to really understand these concepts I’m just a Muggle. But if they talk movies or art, I can chime in with the best of them.
Anyway, the discussion of Goblet of Fire turned into a debate of whether or not the Potter books themselves should really be considered literature. And, frankly, it was rather funny to watch a bunch of really smart people try and wrestle with something so completely outside of their field of training. Sure, most of them had taken some lit classes while undergrads, but they were working with tools not really suited to the problem. It’d be like me, with a little bit of math from college 25 years ago, trying to engage one of them on the validity of the Superstring Revolution. I might have a general understanding of the issues involved, but I’m completely unequipped to contribute anything meaningful to the debate in the language of science.
What was really interesting about this, though, was that none of them saw it that way. They were all certain that their opinions of literature, as an intellectual exercise, were completely valid. They had fallen into the trap of thinking that their likes or dislikes in literature was all that was necessary to have an informed debate.
This is a common problem with all the arts. Non-artists usually think that their personal preferences are all that matters. If someone doesn’t like a Pollock drip painting, then it isn’t “art.” If they think that opera is boring, then that’s sufficient to consider it outmoded and useless. And conceptual art . . . well, it’s beyond the conceptual boundary horizon for most folks and so doesn’t even exist. Might as well be magic.
Furthermore, if you challenge these opinions people will get really indignant and defensive. They don’t want to hear that an understanding of the issues involved is necessary to appreciate some art. The old line “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like” will pop up in one form or another very quickly.
And on one level, that’s OK. I wouldn’t think of telling someone that they couldn’t form an opinion about what they like or dislike in art any more than I would consider telling them what they liked to eat for breakfast. But if you’ve never even heard of eggs, how can you have an opinion on the proper preparation of a nice quiche? It’d be like having strong feelings about word choice in the translation of Rilke’s Der Schwan when you don’t speak German. Sure, you can have an opinion, but it’s not something I’m going to take particularly seriously.
This isn’t to say that only an ‘expert’ can have a valid opinion about art. Hardly. By its very nature art is designed to elicit a response even in the uninformed. It’s perfectly OK to say “I like that painting.” Or, “I don’t care for opera.” But when someone starts to try and talk about the validity of a particular work of art (or music, literature, et cetera), they need to know what they’re talking about. Otherwise, people will treat you like the guy sitting in the sports bar who keeps yelling “pass the ball” at the TV during the baseball game. Or, perhaps more appropriately, like the guy at the Quidditch match who keeps calling for a relief pitcher.
Jim Downey
No, not more poetry. But you know how it is – your brain gets working that way, and soon you can’t escape making such references.
Rather, this is post #600 for this blog. That works out pretty well to 100 posts every four months, since I launched this blog right at two years ago. Of late I have had some thoughts about the natural lifespan of a blog – whether I should be considering a good point to close it down. But there’s no hurry – I’ve not yet accomplished getting Communion of Dreams published, and I still find plenty of things more-or-less related to it to write about, though the primary focus of the blog does seem to have shifted yet again. Oh well. For now, I will be sticking with this venue, and I promise plenty of warning if I give serious consideration to shifting over to something else.
Anyway, happy 600.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Climate Change, Emergency, Failure, General Musings, Guns, Health, Humor, movies, Nuclear weapons, Predictions, Preparedness, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, Weather
Gah – it’s 55 degrees here. Inside, I mean. No, we don’t have the thermostat turned that low. The heating system, an old hot-water radiator setup, just can’t keep up when the temps get down to below zero Fahrenheit. Not in an old house with minimal insulation (and no simple way of adding any). So we wander around, playing Quintet, waiting for something resembling normal weather to return, trying to get done what we can.
It’s sobering. And instructive. In Communion of Dreams I stipulate a long period of harsh winters for much of the northern hemisphere, following the ‘small’ nuclear war in Asia. Having lived through some 15 Iowa winters, it was easy to imagine what that would be like. But I was younger, and memory is fleeting. Combine those cold conditions for a prolonged period with an economic collapse, and those years in my novel would be brutal – moreso than any of us probably understand.
And let’s hope it stays that way. When I read things like this, I wonder whether I have been entirely too optimistic about our future. Then again, not like these geniuses have been right about anything else for the last couple of years.
Wait – they’ve been entirely too optimistic, too, haven’t they? That’s what got us into this financial mess.
Gods, now I really am depressed.
And cold.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Gene Roddenberry, General Musings, movies, Science Fiction, Star Trek, The Prisoner
I caught the news last night, but somehow had managed to miss this comment to my post of a week ago – Patrick McGoohan has passed away.
Ah, damn.
And so has Ricardo Montalban.
Ah, damn.
We tend to think of actors as their most important (to us) roles. People who won’t recognize the name of McGoohan probably know him as #6 from The Prisoner. Likewise, Montalban is forever known better as Khan Noonien Singh to generations of SF fans. And while this is unfair – both men were accomplished actors who played many roles, and who lived interesting lives – it is understandable, because they came into our lives for only a limited time and in this particular context. And they live on in those characters in our minds.
So, yes, farewell to each. But I will always cherish their memorable performances.
Jim Downey
A good friend of mine lives out in the wilds of Iowa. Beautiful country, but a bit isolated. Certainly not off the grid, but far enough from any major population centers that there’s about a 15 x 23 foot patch in one corner of his farm where you can almost get cell phone reception. On a good day. If you’re lucky.
This morning he was telling me that they just switched their internet companies, bundling together their phone and cable as well. Typical set-up, which will do nothing for their cell phone reception.
Or could it?
I got to thinking while I was writing him, and it occured to me that there is probably no reason that you couldn’t set up a simple local cell node connected to your computer. All it would need to do is cover a small area around your home, with connectivity over your internet connection to your general cell provider. All the technology exists to do this, from a WiFi hookup to VOIP. And it could provide much more reliable cell coverage for millions of people in remote areas, without the need for expanding the cell network into areas with sparse populations.
Hmm.
Does anything like this exist already? Or have I just come up with a simple cell solution for a lot of rural people?
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 