When Miguel de Cervantes first sat to write The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, commonly considered to be the first novel, we do not know what was in his mind. After we read the book, however, we gain insight to Cervantes psychology. When a writers creates a world, no matter how narrowly focused, that world must emerge from their own consciousness and unconscious. There is no where else from which those thoughts can arise.

That is not to say that Thomas Harris is a serial killer or that J.K. Rowling is a witch, but we can know something about the writer from the writing because the novelist writes, perhaps primarily, to learn their own minds.

Georges Simenon elaborates:

INTERVIEWER: Then if the readers interest you, it is because they want a novel to probe their troubles? Your role is to look into yourself and—

SIMENON: That’s it. But it’s not only a question of the artist’s looking into himself but also of his looking into others with the experience he has of himself. He writes with sympathy because he feels that the other man is like him.

INTERVIEWER: If there were no readers you would still write?

SIMENON: Certainly. When I began to write I didn’t have the idea my books would sell. More exactly, when I began to write I did commercial pieces—stories for magazines and things of that kind—to earn my living, but I didn’t call it writing. But for myself, every evening, I did some writing without any idea that it would ever be published.

We write, first, to understand ourselves and then, perhaps, to allow others to understand some part of ourselves.

Previously: George Orwell and Christopher Hitchins.

I once lost a job opportunity in my 20s because, I believe, I didn’t know what to say when I learned of someone’s potential tragedy. I simply didn’t know what to say. How do you respond when you learn (as I did this morning) of a death? What words are right when someone you know is facing a life threatening illness?

The Internet is full helpful things to say—commonly call listicles—but who can remember them all? I suck in these moments and fall back on the standard: I’m so sorry. I want to make the situation better, but I never seem to do so.

Oliver Burkeman, writing in What Not To Say, for The Guardian, offers one strategy:

Susan Silk, writing in the LA Times last year, drawing on her experiences of breast cancer. (When Silk declined one colleague’s visit, pleading exhaustion, she was told, “This isn’t just about you.”) Imagine a series of concentric circles. The person in crisis is at the centre. Her closest friends and family are one ring out; lesser acquaintances in the next ring, and so on. The central person “can kvetch and complain and whine and moan and curse the heavens”. For everyone else, the rule is: “Comfort in, dump out.” They can moan, but only to people farther from the centre. “If you want to scream or cry, if you want to tell someone how shocked you are, [or] how it reminds you of all the terrible things that have happened to you lately, that’s fine. It’s a perfectly normal response. Just do it to someone in a bigger ring.”

When I don’t know what to say I think the best response is to keep my mouth shut and listen.

You cannot laugh and be afraid at the same time. —Stephen Colbert.

So, I’m off to bed at 0204. I will be very, very surprised if I don’t wake up to news of Donald Trump’s victory.

For years I have tried to tell my friends here in Cuyahoga County that there is a great dissatisfaction in the rest of Ohio—and now, clearly in the rest of the United States—with the manner in which the Democratic Party has ignored working class Americans. That dissatisfaction has festered and tonight the wounds have burst.

What we are experiencing is not a Russian Revolution nor even a French Revolution but perhaps our truly first American Revolution, a class revolution led by the most unlikely of figures.

Richard Nixon rode to the White House on the shoulders of the Silent Majority. Donald Trump is poised to repeat that victory has been elected on the shoulders of a group that is neither silent nor a majority.

Update at 0615:

Not the majority of Americans, mind you, because 44 percent of registered Americans didn’t bother to vote. That means that Donald Trump will be the 45th president of these United States because 58,799,492 registered voters cast their ballots in his favor. A majority of a minority: 23.4 percent of the voting age population cast their ballots for a President Trump.

The numbers are going to shift, a little bit, in the coming weeks, but the result will not: less than one in four Americans wanted to make America great again. The rest of us have to deal with their decision.

Via Mano Singham…

Then Seth Myers throws a couple of mazeltov cocktails on the campaign. (My favorite bit though, comes at the 5:50 timemark.)

I’m a Lark, a person who is at his best before noon. I know that there are owls out there who can’t think straight before noon and so what I prefer is counter to their best interests, but I also think that we’re at our bests when our internal clocks actually synchronize with the natural rhythm sunrises and sun stets.

At the beginning of the last century, as a way of reducing energy usage, the federal government degreed that we would move our clocks forward an hour sometime in spring and back an hour in the fall.

That is so feckin’ last century.

Now that people have had a chance to actually study nearly a century of experience, we’re discovering that 20th century minds were full of shit.

Daylight Savings Time costs us far more than we save in this annual ritual.

James Dennin, writing in Three big numbers that show daylight saving isn’t just annoying—it’s bad for the economy for Money.Mic, explains:

Feeling groggier than usual? You might have gotten an extra hour of sleep over the weekend, thanks to gaining an hour on Sunday from the end of daylight saving time. But for many Americans, the adjustment actually throws off sleep cycles, and it may take as long as a week to get back to normal — and that hurts productivity.

That’s just one reason the biannual re-setting of American clocks is controversial.

Begun as a way to save energy during World War I and World War II, daylight saving time was eventually made the law of the land for most states in Uniform Time Act of 1966, backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

In fact, as the Daily Beast notes, retail stores are by far the biggest beneficiary of the practice when the clock moves forward in springtime, because people are more likely to shop on their way home when it’s light outside.

Or at least that was the idea at the time: Recent research has cast doubt on that assumption—among others.

Hallelujah!

Dennin proceeds to knock down, or at least seriously shake, the big three myths about DST:

Daylight saving time costs us $434 million in lost productivity;

Daylight saving might waste more than $400 million worth of energy; and

Daylight saving may reduce consumer spending by as much as 4 percent.

The world of 2018 will not be the world of 1918. The danger to any society is not that which is unknown, but rather what the society believes to be true when the facts show otherwise.

The time is now to face up to the facts and stop the annual silliness.

If you’re a blogger you need to be at The Millard Fillmore Presidential Library on Sunday beginning at 4 p.m. for the memorial service for Cleveland’s blogger zero, George Andrew Nemeth Jr.

You can read George’s official obituary here, and I’m sure that much more will be said over the consumption of adult beverages in Collinwood, but, for now, I’ll just say this: I’ve often referred to Roldo Bartimole as the Blogfather, but I like to remember George as Cleveland’s Blogdaddy, the person who created the collective that would go on to produce Meet The Bloggers, No Cleveland Walmart (now The Writing On The Wal), Bloggapalooza and much, much more.

I’m looking forward to the gathering.

Jill Miller Zimon, Writes Like She Talks and Cool Cleveland also remember George.

Joanna Walters, reporting in Katharine Hayhoe, climate evangelist, takes to the web to convert nonbelieversfor The Guardian, writes:

While most US climate scientists live amid constant controversy, [Katharine] Hayhoe believes she is enduring an acute level of abuse because she reaches parts of the population many of her peers cannot reach.

She’s an evangelical Christian. Her husband is an evangelical pastor, even, in a faith whose followers are largely skeptical of climate science.

But stating the obvious doesn’t stop the hate mail. It’s stepped up a notch since the academic launched a new web series in recent weeks, Global Weirding—a twist on the term global warming—to explain to doubters why climate change is causing ever more peculiar, dangerous weather and it’s our fault.

“Oh, I’ve been called the C-word, I’ve been called an ‘eff-wit’, some really disgusting stuff. Most of it is just hateful, hateful language, a lot of it anonymous—and when it’s not nameless, 99 percent of the time it’s from a white man. Facebook and Twitter’s systems for reporting abuse are garbage, by the way,” she said.

Hayhoe is the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, where she teaches and conducts research as an atmospheric scientist and an associate professor of political science.

So far Hayhoe—I can’t hear her name without recalling a friend who used the phrase Hay-Hoe as his personal way of saying Oh Well—has produced three videos: Welcome to Global Weirding; Just how long have we known about climate change anyways? (the most important so far.) and Texas and climate change. New videos appear every other week with the next due this Wednesday, 9 November.

I’ve added her to my Blogroll. You should too.

Since I don’t own a television set, the only place I ever see political advertising is when, like this morning, I go looking on line for them. I’ve already cast my vote for Jill Stein so the ads have no effect on me. Do they have any effect on you?

And below the fold…? Well Continue Reading »

If all you know about Rugby was encompassed in Tom Brown’ School Days, then you might start with The Beginners Guide To Watching Rugby Union.

For the 16 days running from Wednesday, 9 November to Friday, 25 November, I have a plan.

With a single exception—events in and around the Dakota Access Pipe Line (I’ve set up a Google alert for this purpose)—I’m not going to read any news. Full stop. I’m also not going to write any news here or at The Writing On The Wal except for items directly related to DAPL.

I am going to follow what happens in North Dakota because I think events there have the potential to be historical. How many people show up in Standing Rock, North Dakota, could re-shape the political landscape for decades.

Instead I’m going to read, write (off-line), walk, listen to music and think about what I want to do with the next four years of my life.

For readers concerned about essays from Roldo, don’t worry. I’ll continue to post Roldo’s views just as fast as he can write them.

I, unlike a lot of Americans, am perfectly content to sit quietly in a room alone.

More people could greatly benefit from exercising their own facility with that ability.

Ralph Nader, writing in The Silver Linings of Silver-Tongued Donald, discovers the seemingly impossible from Election 2016:

Are there any silver linings to the tumultuous, degrading, sordid presidential campaign of Donald Trump—a failed gambling czar, corporate welfare king, and supreme hypocrite to his own accusations about others?

Yes. Here are seven:

1. New York Times star columnist James B. Stewart, may be right when he writes that bipartisan outrage over Donald Trump’s not paying income tax for several decades may lead to stronger support for “a comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s loophole-riddled revenue gathering system.” The brazen Trumpeteer may be just the jolt that Congress needs. Maybe.

2. By raising the trade agreements issue (NAFTA, TPP, etc.), Trump startled many complacent Republicans into an awareness long dimmed by the empirically-starved, obsolete, 19th century “win-win” “free-trade” dogmas. Unknowingly, of course, Trump missed the deeper insidiousness beneath these corporate-managed trade agreements that are driving American industries to Asia and Mexico. I’m referring to the loss of our freedom to improve consumer, worker, and environmental protections in our country in favor of the self-imposed imperatives of corporate commercial international trade (see citizen.org/trade). In any event, when President Obama tries to push through the Trans-Pacific Partnership giveaway in next month’s lame duck session of Congress, Trump’s blasts may add to the prospect of defeating the TPP.

3. On November 4th, the New York Times ran the headline: Veterans, Feeling Abandoned, Stand by Donald Trump. This is a spreading disdain for both major Parties by veterans about more than how they have been Continue Reading »

In my mind, 2016 is over. America has decided and I can’t imagine anyone changing their vote in the next three days. Voting is still critical. How you intend to vote is how you intend to vote, the vital bit is that you vote.

For me, 2018 and 2020 are what are now important and we need to start planning what we will do between now and then. One heir to Occupy Wall Street is the Revolt Against Plutocracy and co-founder Victor Tiffany has some thoughts:

Our original idea was a bad idea, and I take full responsibility for it. However, the Revolt Against Plutocracy committee put our heads together and decided the revolutionary strategy had to include party building. Voting Green is an act of revolution; writing in a person not running is a lost opportunity. The Green Party needs 5 percent of the national vote to acquire minor party status. RAP is an American movement for a political revolution, not for an election protest effort. We should have made the pledge Bernie or Green in 2016 from the beginning. We had no instruction book to use; what we did was, like Bernie’s political revolution from within an establishment party, unprecedented. I apologize for the mistake.

I argued in Philly Hillary Clinton is more dangerous than Trump. Bernie or bust was never Bernie or bluff. Voting for her because you fear him is like jumping off the top of a skyscraper that’s on fire. One of our slogans was “follow Bernie’s light, or you’ll be running from Trump’s fire.” If fear is your motive for voting, then vote Green, the only safe, sane choice this year. We made ourselves clear in Philly during our press conference and on a billboard: NOMINATE SANDERS OR LOSE IN Continue Reading »

Yesterday one of my students, a young man with a musical bent, asked me if I knew this song. I wasn’t paying a great deal of attention to music in 1980—I didn’t even know the origin of the phrase I have become comfortably numb on a fellow university student’s t-shirt that year—having just left active duty in the Navy, entered Ohio University, and become a sergeant in the Ohio Army National Guard.

This is another example of a twist in I continue ponder about adolescents in America. Why is a student born at the end of the last millennium interested in a fairly obscure techno song written nearly twenty years before he was born?

As I write this I’m listening to Pink Floyd, a major influence during my own adolescence—I watched Wizard of OZ while listening to Dark Side Of The Moon way too many times—and thinking about how very, very different Comfortably Numb is from Temporary Secretary.

So, yesterday I wrote in FBI AGENTS RESIGNED OVER COMEY’S DECISION… about how FBI agents had handed in letters of resignation in protest over FBI Director James Comey’s decision earlier this year to give Hillary Clinton a pass on criminal charges resulting from her infamous email server. I was prompted by Neal Gabler, writing for Moyers & Company pondering why one of the world’s worst newspapers, England’s right-wing Daily Mail tabloid, which is about 10 notches below our own New York Post, which is 10 notches below any real newspaper, that broke the deeper story.

This morning, prompted by competition with the Daily Mail or Gabler’s piece, perhaps, The Guardian leads with the headline: ‘The FBI is Trumpland’: anti-Clinton atmosphere spurred leaks, sources say

Despite the best attempts by television and movie producers over the years—think Jimmy Stewart in The FBI Story, Efrem Zimbalist Jr. in The FBI or Kirsten Vangsness in Criminal Minds—to paint the agency as those friendly guys and gals keeping us safe from the current existential threat, our Federal Bureau of Investigation is anything but.

Spencer Ackerman ledes:

Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.

Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.

“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.

This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House.

I don’t want either Trump or Clinton in the White House, but one of them will walk away victorious (barring a repeat of 2000 and a tied Supreme Court) on Wednesday.

Comey will be waiting in his office to see how he and his new boss will deal with his next seven years.

As a writer I’ve long been aware of The Master’s understanding and use of The MacGuffin in film. I confess that I missed this connection in the dumpster fire that is our national election this year.

Neal Gabler, writing in Alfred Hitchcock Explains James Comey, the Media and 2016’s ‘MacGuffin’ for Moyers & Company, makes the case:

In effect, then, the Clinton emails have always been what the great film director Alfred Hitchcock called a “MacGuffin,” which Hitchcock described as the “device, the gimmick, if you will, that sets the plot in motion.” And he continued: “It doesn’t matter what it is. And the logicians are wrong in trying to figure out the truth of a MacGuffin, since it’s beside the point. The only thing that really matters is that in the picture, the plans, documents, or secrets must seem to be of vital importance to the characters. To me, the narrator, they’re of no importance whatever.”

It takes Alfred Hitchcock to reveal the secret of the emails as well as the basic operating principle of our political media. To the media, the emails are the primary plot device. In reality, they mean nothing. And I should add this: Should Donald Trump win this election, and he very well might now, historians 50 years from now will be scratching their heads over how something so inconsequential as a private email server could possibly have swayed the election. Emails! Really! How do we explain a MacGuffin overtaking our politics?

Gabler’s connecting of the dots, however, is not the nut of his story. This is:

The thing is that while the media have been obsessing over the MacGuffin, they have missed entirely the real story—the story that historians will examine and ponder. Oddly enough, it was arguably one of the world’s worst newspapers, England’s right-wing Daily Mail tabloid, which is about ten notches below our own New York Post, which is ten notches below any real newspaper, that broke the deeper story.

The Daily Mail reported that FBI agents were incensed over Comey’s decision not to prosecute Clinton (so, says the paper, was Comey’s wife) and many submitted resignations in protest. [Emphasis mine, JH] Even when real newspapers finally caught up with this angle, they soft-peddled the significance of the nation’s primary investigative agency being an in-house right-wing force that was determined to veer the election toward Trump. The later dump of Bill Clinton documents only underscores the determination of the FBI to turn the election.

That is real and really disturbing news—colossally big news, giant headline news. With his sudden announcement, Comey may or may not have been trying to pacify the GOP, which would have been bad enough. It does appear he was trying to raise morale among the gestapo at his own agency by aiding Trump. And let’s be clear: He knew he was aiding Trump.

So, who else is reporting this story?

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