After the history panel, I attended another panel on World Building. Although I feared it would retread the ground from Saturday, it was in fact much better and far more useful for me. The panel included two editors and two writers (Barbara Campbell, Wendy Delmater, Jude-Marie Green, and Kate Paulk). Despite speaking from their own experience, the panelists never made the talk all about them, and were quick to praise other authors about their successful work. Their advice was related to craft, not marketing: Find something worthwhile to say, and make your world help you say it. Though light on the specifics (necessarily so), their comments offered some path through the murk that surrounds any effort at serious world-building. They made me think more seriously, which is a recipe for a successful panel.

Perhaps appropriately, after a panel on how to build a world, I attended one on how to take it over. This wasn’t terribly useful but that’s OK because it wasn’t terribly serious. In fact, it largely was an opportunity for the moderators to riff off one another, which they did with speed and wit. Really, at this stage, what more can be said about world domination and cartoonish supervillainy? Although apparently the key is to have a plan…

The “dead dog filk” is “An event held after the formal end of programming at a convention” (definition courtesy of the Filk Glossary) It’s the last chance for the filkers to assuage the pangs of their addiction before the con breaks up. This was billed as “Dead Dog Filk / Gripe Session”, and it was actually far more the latter than the former (though I get the impression this is not the usual case). There weren’t too many specific gripes, except that some of the panels were scheduled too early.

This was explained as being due to the need to reserve the room; otherwise the ConCom (Convention Committee) would have slated something else in that space. Having non-filkers invade the filk room apparently messes with its feng shui. One of the interesting observations I had is the filkers still struggles with being a small, somewhat misunderstood community lurking within and looked askance at by the con at large — which is funny, as con goers are themselves a small, somewhat misunderstood community lurking within and looked askance at by society at large.

At the dead dog filk circle I finally ran into Merav Hoffman, who befriended me when I looked lost at last year’s Lunacon. Merav convinced me to attended Contata, which I ended up enjoying immensely, so I was glad to cross paths with her and catch up. One of my motivations in going to Lunacon every year is to attain a sense of community, and Merav has been very kind in helping me fit in.

After the dead dog filk, it was time to head home. Although NJ Transit once again let me down (two hours to go from NY Penn Station to Princeton Junction — and this was after they abruptly canceled the express I had been literally about to board), it was far from the ordeal from Monday and I got in before too late. Looking back, I’m really glad I went again. Lunacon has really turned into an event I look forward to, and it has yet to disappoint.

“Financial Meltdowns in SFF” attempted to deal with the depiction of real economics in science fiction. Not a lot of books include functioning, or even dys-functioning, economies. Many authors view them as externalities: The Galaxy is in the middle of a great depression but no one says why. The topic of the session was more interesting than the execution, perhaps because so many are basically not clued into macroeconomics (and I include myself in that).

I was looking forward to “Building a Fantasy World”. The panel included two published authors (including Lackey, whose resume is truly impressive) and two professional editors. Getting the view from “inside the biz” was pretty cool. Alas, it also meant that the discussion focused on the marketability angles: What type of fantasy worlds offer the potential for lucrative sales of multiple novels? I am much more interested in the craft of building worlds: How much detail to work out ahead of time, how to adapt real examples without ripping off history, and so on. Truth be told, I found the focus on selling lots of copies to be a little crass.

Ironically, they kept referring back to Tolkein — whose books did not sell well during his lifetime but which have become truly foundational in large part (I would argue) because he had a theme in mind when he wrote them. He sold well because he built a fantastic world, rather than building that sort of world to sell well. I think the key to successful world building is to build a world in which you can tell a story (or hopefully many stories) — and that just didn’t seem to be central to the panel.

The editor at Baen Books made a distinction that I like but not fully. He offered up a choice between a Star Trek model (many standalone stories in a common framework) versus a Babylon 5 model (a grand story arc). Good insight but I think he got it wrong, because B5 was not a vast and overwhelming epic. It was many episodes which, taken together, moved a larger story along. You could ease into the series, rather than committing to a five-year journey at the outset. I haven’t really encountered that in the fantasy market, though the panelists and the audience offered examples.

I think book publishers shoot themselves in the foot by not being explicit about where a book falls in a series or that it’s a series at all — and I think they’re salting the fields by focusing so heavily on long, multivolume epics. I know that I read less than I used to, just because I hate wandering in partway and because almost everything on the shelves is a continuation of something from before.

I volunteered an hour or so and was a “stage ninja” for the Masquerade costume competition. (At least I didn’t have to change…) My oh-so-crucial job was “human handrail”: I had to help guide people down the steps at the end of the stage. I did alright — no one fell — but it wasn’t particularly engaging. I had wanted to volunteer, though, and it felt nice giving a little time back. After the competition, they had a “Trailer Park” wherein someone showed 8 or 9 previews of upcoming movies.

Following that, I slipped upstairs (after chatting with Annie for a little while) and caught the second half of Thief of Baghdad, a fairly standard Thousand and One Arabian Nights adventure flick. In fact, it bears a lot of resemblance to Aladin, even though Disney apparently maintains the fiction that the two are independent. Thief is actually quite good (even if the FX are dated) and the thief himself is surprisingly charming. (I usually despise cute kids.) It was a bit of a shock to see that the evil counselor is played by none other than Major Strasser — and indeed, by the end, “Major Strasser has been shot”.

Following Thief, I slipped over to “Bad Movies with Bob Eggleton”. We only watched one bad movie, but believe me, it was enough. Starcrash is an extremely poor Star Wars rip-off starring Caroline Munro (of James Bond fame), Christopher Plummer (I kid you not!) and the screen debut of David Hasslehoff. It’s exactly as good as it sounds… that is, horrible. The FX are cheesy, the acting execrable, the writing worse, and the plot virtually incomprehensible. Although I’m sure Bob Eggleton didn’t intend this, it did serve to remind us how little the “outside world” understands sci fi fandom or what makes a movie resonate.

After that assault on my frontal cortex, I decided to call it a night, ending up back in my room, writing this blog entry. Which is now done.

I’m actually quite a bit early, as registration doesn’t even start until 5 PM tomorrow afternoon. In principle this means I could have probably skipped being here tonight and just come up tomorrow, and from a fiscal perspective I probably should have. But I hate travel and like having the time to recoup. Also I keep telling myself I will use this time to read and to write and generally attend to the personal activities I’ve been neglecting so far this year. We’ll see.

Friday is a somewhat light day, as is Sunday, but Saturday is chock full of things and in fact (as usual) I have far too many things to attend that all occur at the same time. I’ll probably end up just going to whatever is closest to where I am at the time-changes.

Why should I study something I don’t care about?  Why should teachers teach something they don’t care about?

Actually, to be 100% accurate, the student’s status said that this was in someone else‘s status.  But still…

“Why should I study something I don’t care about?” is a question that sounds more reasonable than it actually is.  Where you are at 17 — or at 5, or at 38 — is not who you will be your whole life.  Sometimes, indeed often, you don’t have the experience or wisdom to know what’s important.  (This is a generic “you”, not a some-particular-student “you”.)  And sometimes, to get to the good stuff, there really is other stuff you have to go through or learn.  That’s a part of life.  I’d even argue it’s not a bad part of life.  Things you learn should be meaningful, and that meaning should be clear.  But you aren’t done, yet, and what you care about is simply not the whole total of what’s worth knowing or doing.  It isn’t for anybody.

I guess fundamentally I disagree strongly with the proposition that “what I care about” is synonymous with “what is important”.  There’s an arrogance in that which is every bit as haughty and unjustified as the “We’re the teachers so we decide what is important” tack.  It’s so inward-focused it’s very nearly solispistic.

To be fair, I am somewhat assigning motivations on the assumption that the point of asking “Why should I study something I don’t care about?” is to offer as an answer “You shouldn’t”.  If the question is a legitimate call for information, it’s perfectly valid.  Students should demand to know why they are studying what they are asked to study, how it moves them along toward their goals or what it achieves.  Teachers should continually ask (themselves and others) why they cover what they do.  So as long as the questioner is intellectually honest enough to be open to the possibility that there could be things worth studying even if the questioner doesn’t particularly care about them — as long as that’s true, it’s a good question.

2. My fondest memory of college is an evening before Winter finals, spent sipping hot chocolate and coloring with crayons on the floor.

3. I once took a journey by rail in a figure-8 around the nation.

4. While growing up in NYC in the 1980s, whenever I awoke to the sound of thunder, I spent a minute wondering if it was a Soviet nuclear strike.

5. I have a curious attraction to songs that repeat their openings in the closer.

6. People tend to be misled by me because I mean exactly what I say.

7. I wrote my first love poem at the age of 20. It was pretty bad. So were the next twenty-three.

8. I think Sneakers was five years ahead of its time and so became the most underrated movie of 1992.

9. I am absolutely convinced that we are living in the final century of human history. What comes after, I don’t know.

10. Much of my professional success has come from a lopsided mix of ability and (mostly) confidence — even when the latter isn’t justified.

11. If they had had those computer-linked digital microscopes when I was growing up, I very well might have been a biologist.

12. Every year at college I fell hard for exactly one (different) person. I didn’t get over the last one for over fifteen years.

13. I am liked by more people than I like. At the core this makes me worried that I present a false face.

14. My favorite breed of dog is “mutt”.

15. Despite what everyone seems to think, I have no skill at chess.

16. I think that, had he not written “pop”, Billy Joel would be recognized as a great American songwriter on the order of Copeland — and I don’t care what anyone else thinks.

17. There are times I worry that my muse of writing has abandoned me in retaliation for neglect.

18. I have known few joys as satisfying as figuring out a really good way to get a point across to my students.

19. I don’t know what or who God is, but anyone’s definition that leaves out music is simply wrong.

20. I have been in love many, many times. I have been loved exactly once, and it’s still going on, and I still don’t exactly know how to react.

21. But I can’t imagine my life any other way anymore.

22. I can’t get through the “Le Marsailles” scene in Casablanca without tearing up.

23. I think that life is simpler than people make it out to be.

24. I’m not so keen on arbitrary rules and, apparently, cannot count to 25.

25. I think about the vast and timeless sweep of the Universe, so brimmed with meaning beyond our sight or understanding, and I am floored by the fact that I can think about it.

26. Every minute of every day I am imbued with a desperate knowledge that we are running out of time. We have to become stronger, smarter, better – and we have to do it now.

27. At the end of it all, for absolutely no good reason, I remain an optimist.

The title comes from a Patty Griffin song.

He’d gone several blocks without even realizing it. His head wasn’t into the comforting contrast between the familiar warmth of his beat-up old jacket and the crisp fall air. His head wasn’t into anything at that moment, he was on auto-pilot, his legs swinging out a brisk but unhurried stride, taking him… nowhere, really. He slowly became aware of the streets mottled in fallen red and orange, the occasional car swinging by him on the left. He paused and wondered Where am I going? And then, almost reflexively sardonic, What the hell am I doing here? But that made the question larger than a Saturday morning walk, and he wasn’t ready for that, not yet, so he just began walking again.

He turned onto Broad Street and started into “downtown”, the hard kernel of shops and homes that had been swallowed by the sprawling suburban amoeba but not yet digested. There had been a time, he knew, now long past, that the spaces between this town and the next had been a divide as intimidating as that between Earth and Moon, when it had seemed logical to think of people living Over There as odd, rival, even alien. Then the interstate had punched through that barrier like a hydraulic ram through a two-century-old farm wall, and through the gap had come oozing… each other, really, the disturbing sameness that had settled over the countryside everywhere, turning fields of grain into fields of asphalt.

But “downtown” persisted, an isolated patch of high ground in a rising tide of ubiquity and mediocrity. He didn’t fool himself — the people living and working in the town’s center bore the same sameness as the inhabitants of the newest subdivisions. He should know; he was, he ruefully admitted, one of them. Yet, there was something to be said for the saving features of place. The people might be the same but the town was different. Its streets were too narrow for traffic and there was never enough parking. The buildings were small and varied and hunched over just a little bit, a tiny weary tilt you might not see unless you looked for it. Shops were eclectic and closed at strange times and not grouped thematically, and not a warehouse outlet among them. You passed fellow shoppers on foot, loping past them, not rolling silently on the lookout.

And right down Broad Street ran that which had first spawned the town and which still nourished it, a silver thread tying this “downtown” to the real one. Traveled one way, these tracks carried the people into the City, where they earned their living. Traveled the other, it carried them down to the Sound, where they spent it. Not as many took it that way anymore, not for twenty years or more, not since the opening of the parkway. Yet in the summer still the trains could be found packed with retirees and teenagers and anyone who wanted the water but couldn’t or wouldn’t drive there themselves.

He felt drawn to the rail. Neatly bisecting the town with a geometer’s precision, it had been the axis mundi, the hinge about which life had revolved. Now it had almost faded from communal consciousness, used but not noticed, except to be cursed on those occasions when you got caught at a grade crossing while the train chugged by. The rail didn’t seem to notice or mind its diminished status; it just plodded on, year after year, in a world that had moved past it.

He walked alongside the rail, following it like Theseus’ thread, wondering if it would lead him to salvation or the monster. He felt vaguely confident that he had some time before he need worry about a train overtaking him in either direction. The decaying ridership had forced an ever-lengthening schedule, one he had once known by heart, when he first arrived here and, still in a student’s habits, used the train for his frequent excursions to the vibrant City. He realized he hadn’t been to the metropolis, by train or car, in something like half a year; and then only to resolve some issue with his taxes. When had he stopped seeking the bright lights and high culture? Had he outgrown his youthful fascination, or had he just grown old?

Surprisingly soon, he was in “downtown”, in the tiny square that sat at the center of town. Here he came upon the platform that the transit people insisted on calling the “station”, a long slab of concrete that the tracks flowed around like a fallen branch in a steel stream. Never quite deciding which way he should detour around the station, he ended up choosing neither and instead climbed the cracked steps to the platform. This vantage put within his sight the whole of the square — the municipal building with a lone police cruiser parked out front; the two pubs that sat on opposite corners like sparring partners; the pharmacy. And of course, the bookstore.

The dilapidated ramshackle bookstore, stooped and overborne like its owner. The old man was in there now, he knew, shuffling about to meet the dwindling needs of the traffic in the store, a stream thinned and stretched by drought despite the relative crowds that flowed through the square on this mild October day. People didn’t read anymore, and when they did read, they didn’t want someone handling the books like a jeweler does a Faberge. They wanted a bibliographic supermarket that spit out books like boxes of cereal.

He remembered how uplifted he had felt, when he first arrived here, when he had gotten off that train and the first thing he had seen was a sign in the bookstore window, Help Wanted. This was an omen, he had thought. Here was his chance to live among the words that he adored. Here he would be surrounded by all the authors who inspired him, buoyed by them, transformed by them. He would breathe deep the musk of leather binding and stacked page and so absorb the essence of his heroes. They would be the silent chorus cheering him on to his own literary greatness. This little bookstore would be the stepping stone to his transcendence.

Now six years had somehow gotten away from him, and what was there to show of his transcendence? A rent he could barely afford and a car payment he really couldn’t, eked out by persistence in a dead-end job at a dead-end business. One lousy Saturday off every month, which he wasted by walking down to the store anyway. Scribblings and scratchings of ever-decreasing frequency and quality. One or two sales to journals sufficiently obscure and low-grade to stand as proof that no more were coming.

The bookstore vanished from his sight, blocked by a dinged-up silver wall. The City-bound train had lumbered into the station and was disgorging a handful of passengers. By a miracle of the bureaucratic ballet, at the same moment, the outbound train also slid into place. The station was full of people boarding and debarking, a swirl of humanity that isolated him. Then the platform was empty, but the trains were still there. To either side of him were open doors inviting him to board, to ride, to move.

He could do it, he realized. He could step to the left and get on the outbound train. He could take it all the way to the end of the line and then walk to the water and watch night steal over the Sound. There had been times when he found inspiration in the sky’s fire reflected in the water and in the leaves. He could get away from here.

Or he could move to his right and ride the rails to the City. He could count down the station stops until the train deposited him in the beating heart of the City, eight million stories and more unfolding everywhere he looked. He could bathe himself in the undimming light and lose himself in the throbbing pulse of the crowd, find again what he had discovered and misplaced.

The trains puffed patiently, whispering invitations to a different tomorrow.

Like synchronized musicians, two sets of chimes sounded simultaneously, high then low. On each train, the doors slid closed; then each train slid smoothly out of the station. At first with the inevitability of the tide, then with rising exuberance, the cars raced off in opposite directions, leaping toward their ultimate destinations.

He stood on the platform, turning his head first rightward then leftward, watching them slip away. Then he turned completely around and pondered the path he’d walked to get here. He took a breath, held it, let it go. He started back down the steps.

Anyway, by now, he figured, she would be packed and gone.

Wow.

It’s going to take a while to absorb this. Words like “historic occasion” don’t cut it. This was an epochal moment at a critical time, and I am proud and amazed to realize that my nation once again rose to the moment. We put paid to some of the ugliness of our history and we recapture some of the promise of our future. People voted for change, for hope, for tomorrow. Against a rough and oft sleazy campaign, Senator Obama — no, President-elect Obama — ran an honorable campaign that took the high road, kept to issues, avoided the politics of personal destruction, and treated the American citizenry as adults, not animals to be cadged or corralled. Barack Obama staked his career on the premise that in a dark and dangerous time, this nation would listen to our better angels — and quite against expectation, the nation responded.

The Reagan revolution has run its course. The Nixon Southern Strategy lies bankrupt on the dustbin of history. The wiles and vile counsel of Karl Rove and Lee Attwater has been refuted, rejected, and repudiated — we have decided that we will not be a nation ruled by fear, led by slander, demeaned and diminished by demagogy. We don’t have to agree on everything to agree that we are all Americans, we are all heirs of the great revolution, and we are all in this together.

This campaign has lasted twenty months. It has aroused passion and resistance, hope and fear. It has elevated what is right about this nation and it has exposed all that remains wrong. It has been draining and it has been exhilarating. It has overlaid a touch of the transcendental into our everyday life. And at long last, it is finally over.

Barack Obama has been elected President of the United States of America. History has been made. The future has been reclaimed. It is finally over…

… Now, it’s time to get to work.

I teach physics to high school seniors, a large number of whom are eligible to vote. Dishearteningly, many of them have decided that they won’t be exercising their franchise because, as they tell me, “It’s not like my vote counts anyway”. With polls in New Jersey showing Barack Obama with double-digit leads, it seems at first glance that they have a point. But I argue fiercely that, despite that superficial impression, they should in fact get to the polls. My argument boils down to this: Elections aren’t about winning a contest. They’re about governing a nation.

Let’s assume for the moment that the polls are accurate. Let’s assume further that you’re an Obama supporter. (If you’re supporting McCain, there’s more for you below.) Surely there’s no motivation to get out the polls, right? After all, Senator Obama is going to win those 15 electoral votes either way. If the election were just about winning, then those votes are all that matter. But since it’s also about governing, there are other considerations — one of which, for example, is the popular vote. A president who wins the electoral college but just squeaks by on the popular vote (or loses it) can be crippled right out of the gate. Consider George W. Bush, whose first nine months in office were roundly criticized for drift and inertia.

On the other hand, if Senator Obama wins the election and wins the popular vote handily, it would give his agenda quite the boost. For example, if he wins by an excess of 20 million votes, it would be a landslide comparable to FDR’s election in 1932. Even a more likely outcome of six or seven million votes strengthens his hands and makes rapid adoption of his program much more likely. The length of the presidential “honeymoon” is strongly influenced by the extent by which the president wins the popular vote. In that race, every vote in New Jersey counts just as much as one cast anywhere else — even if that vote doesn’t affect the electoral total.

Obviously, if you are a McCain supporter in New Jersey, similar but reverse arguments apply: You would want to reduce the margin of an Obama victory, or (of course) increase the margin of a McCain victory. And even if Obama takes New Jersey, McCain could win the presidency — and in that case, you would want his margin of popular votes to be as large as possible. In essence, if your side wins, you want to maximize its advantage in the popular vote so as to advance the agenda with which you agree. And if your side loses, you certainly want to diminish the margin of victory for the other guys, so as to retard their agenda as much as possible. Both possible scenarios dictate that you get out and vote.

And of course, there are issues here bigger than simple partisan calculus. Democracy depends on an engaged electorate. There is no excuse for sitting out any election, particularly one so fraught with historic import. When turnout is low, politicians know that the road to victory lies in pandering to small but focused interest groups. The key becomes energizing your voter base and ignoring the rest of the population. But when turnout is high, the game changes. Pandering to everyone is the same as not pandering. Discourse and compromise become more viable, indeed, more necessary. When you can’t tailor your message to a narrow group and still win, you feel the pressure to formulate real solutions that appeal to a wider array of voters. Raise voter turnout and you improve the entire political process.

Think your vote doesn’t count? Heck, on the contrary — it just might save democracy.

Maybe we can now stop hearing so many pious paeans to the great genius of Our Illustrious Founders, the guys who gave us this inflexible, unresponsive, creaking tub of a political system in the first place.

No, they’re still geniuses. They met in Philadelphia, surveyed all that was known of human history at that point, and sat down to solve the problem of human governance. And here’s the kicker: They actually did it. They crafted a system that included self-correction, that respected the minority viewpoint while empowering the majority, and that could cope with a vast expansion in people and area. They actually solved the problem — and they did it so well, they changed the world as a result.

The irony, of course, is that by changing the world, they rendered obsolete and invalid the conclusions they’d drawn from history. History is different, and so the old rules don’t work.

On the other hand, their system has survived (admittedly creaking) for 220+ years, risen above existential crises both foreign and domestic, expanded the definition of “citizen” (indeed, of “human”) far beyond its original sense, saved civilization (or helped save it) at least twice, while providing a standard of living so amazing that the typical person far exceeds the wildest dreams of avarice of the most powerful of old. Not so bad.

The failure isn’t in the system. The failure is in us. We live in reduced times, where we accept corruption and ignorance, where we sit back and watch cable news like it was no more significant than sport (when we can bothered to watch it at all), where we avoid the person of differing opinion and where we trust only those who already agree with us. The Founders have not failed us; it is we who have failed them, and ourselves. We have allowed ourselves to be lulled into a stupor of reality TV and Fritos; we celebrate the ignorant and mock the educated. We would rather have a President to share a beer than to solve problems, and we would rather believe the cynical testimony of implicated cronies than do the legwork to understand what’s really going on.

The system hasn’t been tried and found wanting. It’s been found hard and left untried. American citizenship is advanced democracy and it’s hard work … too hard for too many.

The failure lies in us.

I am a “Values Voter”.

I value

* compassion over condemnation

* debate over demagoguery

* reason over rage

* freedom over fear

* truth over lies

These are American values.

I believe

* that real patriots ask questions

* that government should not decide who I am, or who you are

* that a sound safety net serves the interest of us all

* that people should be judged on the content of their character, not the content of their wallets or the color of their skin

* that justice everywhere is threatened by injustice anywhere

* that labor has dignity and diversity has worth

* that each person deserves a fair deal and a true opportunity

These are core American beliefs.

I am a “values voter”…
… and this is my country, too.