Anthony Dobranski Online

Tag: change

  • Things change!

    A recent article in Politico discusses the current political debate about new spending on the United States’s infrastructure in historical terms. Two centuries ago we had a similar debate, where the Whig Party sought to invest in canals and roads to grow America’s internal market, against strong Democratic opposition.

    Nathaniel Hawthorne, the great novelist, was one of the opposing voices, seeing in improved logistics a great risk to agrarian supremacy. I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Marc J Seifer’s Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, in which I learned that Hawthorne’s son Julian was one of Tesla’s strongest public advocates, even supporting Tesla’s mistaken belief* that he had received transmissions from Mars on his Colorado Springs wireless testing.

    In one life, we see vast technological change, and its effects can be so sweeping that our grandchildren’s world is unimaginable to us. And yet, because it’s the only world we get, and because we inherit it, it seems permanent, and dependable.

    The elder Hawthorne fought against canals that now are parks, supplanted by railroads whose tracks are often now parks too. The younger Hawthorne, whose novels tended toward the fantasy and science-fiction of his day, in the vein of Stevenson and Bulwer-Lytton, so took the world his father fought against for granted, since it was granted him, that his restless imagination and privilege sought something even newer and grander.

    My choice of literary themes probably puts me in Julian’s camp, but you’ll notice that “privilege” I tossed in the previous sentence. While I benefit from the success of the Julians, the environmental degradation, social disruption, and grim life of repetitive labor in coal-driven factories that Nathaniel feared all happened too, and in many places still happen.

    I’m simply noting that what we see around us is as fluid as the state of our kitchen sinks — and most days, we’re not ready to admit that.

    *The source of Tesla’s Martian transmissions is now thought to have been early Morse-coded testing by his wireless rival Marconi.

  • The bad news is, I was right

    I’m finishing my second novel, but in the last few months I’ve spent some time with my first, The Demon in Business Class, as it enters a new medium. The amazing voice actor Laura Petersen has recorded the audiobook — early spring release! don’t worry, I’ll be posting about it.

    I’ve been pitching in doing proofs, catching small errors, but mostly just being regaled. Petersen is hugely talented, nailing Demon‘s scores of worldwide accents, and also finding subtle line readings in both narration and dialogue. It’s been a wonderfully self-congratulatory exercise. Gosh I’m a good writer. I should do it more.

    I’ve also heard how good I am at forecasting. I wasn’t looking too far ahead, and I had the small advantage of being a few years ahead of the times in my book.

    Even so, I got everything right.

    Back-cover copy is about drama, and my novel had that in spades, with fantastic powers, violence, conspiracies, and troubled romance. The Demon in Business Class also has: elites failing to see the difference between what’s good, and what’s good for them; religious people ever more tempted, and corrupted, by temporal power; the dissatisfaction with globalization; the angry assault on patriarchy; Russia’s aggressive refusal to play by American rules; China’s ever-greater confidence; a greater role for mysticism in public life.

    I don’t mean to brag, exactly. It’s hard to take comfort in being right about so many things that wouldn’t be my first choice if I had a say.

    Still, I did way better with my calls than most pundits and politicians. I am attentive to subtle currents and a clear-eyed thinker. It helps to remember that things always change, and that nature abhors a vacuum. These are cliches because of our complacency; step back, and they contain terrors.

    I have my own formula, once a line of dialogue from an early failed novel, now a personal mantra, my walking stick as I scramble ahead of changes.

    It says: When there’s no place else to go, you go there.

    There’s been a lot of going there the past few years. More to come. Trust me, I have a good track record.

    And, gosh, I’m a good writer. I should do it more.

  • On anger

    The Promised Land, and its malcontents.
    In the story of Moses, the aging Moses needs water for his people. Jehovah tells Moses to speak to a rock, but Moses strikes the rock twice. Jehovah lets the water flow, so the Jews can drink, but the cost is that Moses can’t enter the Promised Land.
    This story is a cliché now, but I think we use it wrongly. It’s not about authority punishing misbehavior, but about the failure to change.
    When the Jews are enslaved, anger and rebellion free them, at a horrible cost. One wonders if Jehovah, who created the Egyptians too, actually chose the angel of death. Maybe Jehovah just let Moses into the divine armory, to choose whatever weapon he thought best – and at the time, “by any means necessary” was enough justification for Jehovah to accept his choice.
    Forty years later, not so much. For the independent Jewish people, forced by their years in the wilderness to survive on their own, now ready to build a new land, rebellion risks their new social order. Moses’s anger and rebellion have no place here. They are no longer liberating, only destructive, for there is no longer an other to escape, to destroy. This is not to say that the Jews will never need rebellion, but as the story of David later shows, it will never again be an unalloyed good.
    I am an angry person. (more…)

  • Notes on bad posture (symbol much)

    I have a bad stance. I stand, walk and sleep with my feet pointed out. It’s always bothered me, but only mentally. I suspect it’s why I’ve never been much of a runner. It never hurt, however, nor derailed my skiing and skating. I thus never got serious about stretching the tight butt muscles that cause this splaying.
    Now in my advancing years, I walk night hallways to soothe my infant son. My knees click. They click less if I point my toes straight. I can force that to happen, but for it to be natural I have a lot of stretching ahead of me, both in discrete sessions and in changing my postures of habit (goodbye cross-legged sitting).
    The other day my dad came to visit. As I sat, he corrected me sharply, as only a parent-surgeon can. “Why sit sideways like that? You’ll hyperextend your knee.” He started naming ligaments. I just tuned out and shifted in my seat.
    Later, as I forced myself along another oddly straight night walk, I considered the moment. I do often sit so one leg lies sideways across the chair, with my other leg over it. Had I ever thought about it, I might have called it my reaction to a world too short for me, like my leaning back on the rear legs of chairs. Now I see another adaptation to my bad stance — muscles so out of balance that it is more natural to sit like the Tarot’s Hanged Man.
    This is a little story but for me an instructive one. Things that seem unrelated or rooted in different causes turn out to be the same buried problem, layered over and accomodated like a tree growing around a fencepost, creating all kinds of distortions. My last few years have involved re-seeing much of my life in this way, an unpleasant and humbling process but one for the long-term good. If nothing else, my knees should make it a bit longer. Perhaps I along with them.
    Also, perhaps, another instruction: that the world is full of good advice and it comes out when one needs it, but it takes a modest attitude to hear it all.