Hierarchies of Literature

From “Anatomy of Criticism” by Northrop Frye:

 

“Every deliberately constructed hierarchy of values in literature known to me is based on a concealed social, moral, or intellectual analogy. This applies whether the analogy is conservative and Romantic, as it is in Arnold, or radical, giving the top place to comedy, satire, and the values of prose and reason, as it is in Bernard Shaw. The various pretexts for minimizing the communicative power of certain writers, that they are as obscure or obscene or nihilistic or reactionary or what not, generally turn out to be disguises for a feeling that the views of decorum held by the ascendant social or intellectual class ought to be either maintained or challenged. These social fixations keep changing, like a fan turning in front of a light, and the changing inspires the belief that posterity eventually discovers the whole truth about art. 

 

“A selective approach to tradition, then, invariably has some ultra-critical joker concealed in it.”

 

Just as most people choose their novels to meet their emotional needs, social groups rank novels by its needs as well.

 

When I was a kid, I devoured Asimov, Heinlein, and Star Trek fan fic (that Paramount endorsed to profit off of in book form) because those kinds of novels suited my emotional need to spend a few hours in a world in which intelligence was linked to heroism. As I grew older, I read more difficult texts like Tolkien, Donaldson, and Rand, but the basic idea was the same. I also read Jane Austen because she seemed to be the only woman author who liked intelligent, sensitive, guys such as myself.

 

I’ve also had a period of my life when I only read books by authors whose name I couldn’t pronounce. That was literally my criteria because I wanted to read authors from other cultures. I also spent a year reading popular books just to figure out why they were popular. I read lots of Chinese literature while living in China, as a way of engaging with the culture and having a ready topic of conversation with the people around me.

 

And I could be a snob about it; I maintained my own ego by making sure I was reading “better and more interesting” books than other people. As a writer, a friend of mine teased me about all the kick ass Asian heroines in my novels, and it’s occurred to me that I was writing about women who are strong enough to be the heroes of their own stories; these women kill their bad guys. Marrying such a woman myself would relieve me of the need to be the hero of her story and give me time for my hobbies instead, which I suspect many actual women would resent.

 

And professors like promoting books that are hard to understand; being hard to understand as a virtue in literature keeps professors employed. Proving that books are best understood in the context of other books also keeps professors employed.

 

Bestselling and unpublished authors alike have reasons to argue over the relationship of quality of literature and quantity of sales.

 

If you think the most important quality in a novel is characterization, might you also think individuality is a more important virtue?  If you think the best thing about a book is the plot, might you also think an active and purposeful life is more important? Doesn’t the very assumption of ‘heroes’ place too much stress on individualistic heroism and deemphasize collective action?

 

I don’t have the answers to those questions. Tolstoy thought he did, disregarding his masterpieces in favor of novels that used emotional intimacy with characters to impart moral lessons.

 

One of the ironies of Frye’s position is that sometimes the Powers That Be who rank books don’t know what they are talking about. Back in the 90s, in that brief decade of domestic policy’s triumphal ascendance over foreign policy in the news, there was a lot of argument over ‘the canon’ being taught. Conservatives wanted to keep the established classics as the focus of literary education, which basically meant living white guys wanted dead white guys’ books being taught in college classrooms, while liberals wanted books by women and minorities added.  What conservatives probably didn’t realize was that books that are established canon today were, even if written by white guys, radical in their day. The canon includes Marx, Sinclair, and Steinbeck; the majority of writers in the canon are at the very least liberal anyway. This leaves me to suspect that the true reason we have greater literary freedom today is that the sort of people who would ban books are too busy watching television to know what we’re up to. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” probably did more for gay rights than any novel.

 

And the hierarchy is more complex than before.  Publishers and readers have a chicken and egg relationship in determining which writers get published; editors have to really push to get a different sort of book published.  With the triumph of marketing research and methods over criticism and editing, the cultural determinants over writers are the publishers’ perceptions of what people will buy.  Book sales, television ratings, and elections are not pure evidence as to the desires and norms of society, since they are often manipulated, but word of mouth, grassroots movements, and social media still demonstrate public desires that eventually demonstrate what we want from our writers, no matter their medium.

Schopenhauer and “Fringe”

“…the representation of a great misfortunate is alone essential to tragedy (which may be caused by a) character of extraordinary wickedness…blind fate…by the mere position of the dramatis personae, through their relations, so that there is no need either for a tremendous error or an unheard of accident, nor yet for a character whose wickedness reaches the limits of human possibility; but characters of ordinary morality, under circumstances such as often occur, are so situated with regard to each other that their position compels them, knowingly and with their eyes open, to do each other the greatest injury, without any one of them being entirely in the wrong. This last kind of tragedy seems… to surpass the other two, for it shows us the greatest misfortunate, not as an exception, not as something occasioned by rare circumstances or monstrous characters, but as arising easily and of itself out of the actions and characters of men, indeed almost as essential to them, and thus brings it terribly near to us. In the other two kinds we may look on the prodigious fate only from afar, which we may very well escape without taking refuge in renunciation. But in the last kind of tragedy we see that those powers which destroy happiness and life are such that their path to us also is open at every moment; we see the greatest sufferings brought about by entanglements that our fate might also partake of, and through actions that perhaps we also are capable of performing, so could not complain of injustice; then shuddering we feel ourselves already in the midst of hell.”

I’m not a big fan of Schopenhauer, since it appears his best ideas were better said by the Buddhists, but when I was reading this I couldn’t stop thinking about “Fringe.”

On the surface, “Fringe” is about people suffering from either blind fate or the actions of wicked men and the heroes fighting back, but as “Fringe” evolves as a show, it moves towards the superior sort of tragedy. The wicked man turns out to be the wronged man, for his son was stolen by one of the main characters, and yet the kidnapper, from his point of view, was saving the boy’s life.

As the curtains of the plot are pulled back, we see again and again that the heroes and villains are not good vs. evil, but relatively normal people pitted against each other, seeing themselves as the heroes and the others as the villains. Some of the most interesting moments in the show occur when they realize how their own mistakes are causing the problems.  It is their abnormalities that make them interesting to us, but their abnormalities were created in part by each other’s decisions.

Writing From the Bottom Up

“Having made an utter failure of my life, I found myself one day, in the midst of my poverty and wretchedness, thinking about the female companions of my youth. As I went over them one by one, examining and comparing them in my mind’s eye, it suddenly came over me that those slips of girls – which is all they were then – were in every way, both morally and intellectually, superior to the ‘grave and mustached signior’ I am now supposed to have become…I had brought myself to this present wretched state, in which, having frittered away half a lifetime, I find myself without a single skill with which I could earn a decent living. I resolved that, however unsightly my own short comings might be, I must not, for the sake of keeping them hid, allow those wonderful girls to pass into oblivion without a memorial.

 

“Reminders of my poverty were all about me: that thatched roof, the wicker lattices, the string beds, the crockery stove.  But these did not need to be an impediment to the workings of the imagination. Indeed, the beauties of nature outside my door – the morning breeze, the evening dew, the flowers and trees of my garden – were a positive encouragement to write. I might lack learning and literary aptitude, but what was to prevent me from turning it all into a story and writing it in the vernacular?”

 

From the first chapter of “Dream of Red Mansions” by Cao Xueqin

 

And so the inspiration of the greatest novel China produced began when a writer hit bottom and looked beyond himself. The books of mine other people have liked the most had the least to do with me.  The novel I wrote that came the closest to publication was about a samurai who was duty bound to kill himself, but did not so he could help save a child. The conflict between honor and compassion defined his character… the editors loved it, the marketers vetoed it. I had simply wanted to illustrate the most difficult part of Japanese culture for Americans to understand.

 

I wonder what hitting bottom would mean for me.  I’m not sure it’s possible, since I always have the cushion of family to land on. To ‘hit bottom’ would require a Bruce Wayne-like determination.  In one of the movies, the crime lord scolded Wayne for being too soft to understand crime, so Wayne gave his coat and money to a beggar and went hunting for the bottom, not so much to join it as to understand it. It took a certain arrogance on his part to assume he would survive it, of course, but that’s what happens to obsessive people.

 

The narrator, which commentators have assumed is Cao, argued against the assumption that poverty prevented inspiration. In contrast to the West, where poverty is assumed to be fuel for inspiration, in China most writers were independently wealthy scholars who belonged to little clubs where they shared their work with each other. Word of mouth was the only advertising.

 

Sometimes in Chongqing I would be sitting in my 15^th floor apartment thinking, is this really my life? Coming home every evening to a lonely apartment I haven’t even bothered to fully furnish because I know I’m leaving the country anyway?  Then I would stand on the balcony and look down at the people who make their living selling food on the street, either as groceries or cooked, and I would wonder how they managed to eek out a living.  I was a regular at one stand where the woman basted chicken and grilled it right in front of us. She was an expressive woman; I didn’t need to know Chinese to know when she and her husband were arguing. Most days they were happy, some days they would be working side by side without looking at each other. The Chinese are much more willing to reveal their family difficulties to the neighborhood.

 

But I don’t generally need to hit bottom to kick myself in gear again. I can use the shame of making a mistake to guilt myself into writing. I can give myself deadlines. Right now I have a post it note on my computer, “What have you written today?”

 

But it’s not just about how much one writes, but what one writes. If I hit bottom, what would I write about? Would I be too ashamed of how I got there to be honest about what it was like? Would I fall so hard I’d crack the mirror and find a distorted reflection?

One Part Romance, One Part Adventure, Seasoned with Satire

Fifty Ways to Love Your Lover: The Novel http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KROBHRE

 

Candice is a brilliant and beautiful young woman from a wealthy and abusive family. She meets a young man who is strong and intellectual, but doesn’t understand woman. She undertakes his education, helping use his IQ to raise his EQ, but when she turns him into the perfect boyfriend, can she give up her plans to marry a rich man?

 

Kissing the Anti-Christ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KNSUX6K

 

Christina Graves, intrepid liberal reporter, is searching for a story, while Senator Derek Hardy is searching for power. After he announces his campaign for the presidency, she starts to hunt after his secrets.  While she squirms her way through an increasingly conservative management and he through the twisty maze of his father’s power structure, they are drawn towards each others’ determination, intelligence, and, yes, good looks.

Will ambition triumph over love?

 

Ancient Lesbian Sex Secrets http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KMA0D1Y

 

When WRIP free radio starts running out of money, the Dark Lord, satanic talk show host, aka Kenneth, decides to tell his audience that their prayers will be answered or their money back.  When Jessica Hoh needs more money to pay for college, she joins an escort service.  When Feather’s poetry brings in the pennies, she writes paranormal romance novels to pay the bills. When Sam’s video game profits slump, he needs a way to advertise them.

 

When they meet each other, they naturally decide to a make a movie, one that will settle all their woes: The Ancient Lesbian Sex Secrets.

My Non-fiction

Dressed for Yesterday http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KRPX2W6

 

This is my humorous take on my life, that of traveler and teacher, reader and writer.

 

Sun-Tzu, Bruce Lee, and the Tao of Martial Arts http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KNNFU1S

 

The first regular exercise I ever found was in Tae Kwon Do when I was about thirteen, but after getting my black belt I moved on to study many others like aikido, Tai Chi, judo, and boxing. Since I generally prefer an intellectual understanding of what I’m doing, I read the Taoteching and books by martial artists and ancient Chinese generals who used Taoism as the basis for their strategies. This book is the result.

Frye and the Organization of Literature

“As literature is not itself an organized structure of knowledge, the critic has to turn to the conceptual framework of the historian for events, and to that of the philosopher for ideas…it is clear that the absence of systematic criticism has created a power vacuum, and all the neighboring disciplines have moved in.”  - Northrop Frye

 

I can think of all sorts of examples of philosophical schools colonizing literary studies: feminism, Marxism, post-modernism, just off the top of my head. To push these theories off to the side (perhaps not all the way out, since philosophy and history are the context of literature), people would have to study literature from the inside outwards.

 

But I wonder how much one can understand music by studying acoustics, how much one can understand painting by studying the chemistry of paint, so how much can we understand literature by understanding words?  Is the proper study of literature really just linguistics? Or would linguistics be to literary studies what neuro-science is to psychology?

 

If you subscribe to the idea of narrative psychology, the idea that your identity is a narrative we have formed out of our memories, that we turn our memories into stories with a theme (the meaning of life) and a main character (you), the perhaps literature is what happens when your brain becomes so good at creating narratives that it goes hog wild, and yet compartmentalizes them to keep you from going crazy (conspiracy theorists might actually be using a similar skill set as novelists). Nor would it surprise me if mythologies have more in common with literature than with history.

 

So if we wanted to make literary studies more scientific, then studying narrative psychology would be a good start.

My Funny Fantasy

Might and Right http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KTJ10D8

 

For Emperor Vor, conquering an empire is the easy part, ruling it is hard. His brother wants his throne, his wife disagrees about which son should secede him, a wizard conspiracy wishes to stop him, and a mixed bag of heroes is coming to kill him. His allies are his tea sipping, spy master sister, a chaos wizard, and a death priest.

 

The delicate political balance of his empire is upset when his daughter returns from her adventures in the mysterious West and Winderon, an elf born under the most dangerous of moons, finds the deadliest magic of all to use again him.

 

Love the Sin http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KNTIA00

 

Everyone searches for love, except for Cindy Wainrock, but everyone has to struggle through the difficulties to find it. Maria struggles against poverty, Deputy Tony Sanchez has to solve a murder, and Xia has to slay the vampires who kidnapped her would be boyfriend for his virgin blood. Yet Cindy may face the greatest danger of all, a murderer given a magical defense perfect against any but the purest of heart, which she definitely is not.

 

Ninja B Goes to College http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KN0J2EM

 

Ari’s grandfather is the head of the ninja clan, and sends her to college in America to study computers, but the university is hunting grounds for vampires. Unfortunately her bounty collecting is interrupted by biggest problems, for the vampires are only one part of the Anti-Christ’s cult, and her ally Cindy Wainrock’s father is a rich jock who likes wearing body armor while driving an armored car to hunt down liberal activists. 

 

What will happen when the satanic plot to rule the world conflicts with the alien conspiracy that already does? Can she ally with the Chinese kung fu master Xia who had come here to study engineering?  And what will happen when Xia and her junior mad scientist boyfriend finally create his dream: a quantum mechanical AI?

My High Fantasy

From Before the Flood http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IAZ0NM2

 

Soon after the fall from Paradise, people were not alone on Earth. They had giants for neighbors and thunder lizards to avoid. Angels came down from Heaven and ruled many areas as demi-gods, but when Satan’s minions rescued him from demonic torture, he plotted his revenge against God and humanity. While angels battle for the future of the world Yesu (daughter of a god) and Lilith (Adam’s first wife) fight for the future of humanity.

 

Whispers on the Wind http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KNNUH70

 

Louis Averone, the bard, thinks he is the only one who can hear the Song whispered on the wind, but when it sings of Sorrow, suicides spread. The more attuned to magic wizards are, the more they are crippled by depression.  As wizards move to steal the magic and warriors to kill the source, whatever it is, Louis Averone, Csaris the wild wizard, and Captain Valorie de’Lane hope to heal the Singer.

 

The Dragons are Coming http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KNN4WC6

 

For their forbidden love, Bernard was castrated and Helen sent to a nunnery, but while sacking an ancient, distant temple, Bernard discovers the original prophecy of dragons returning to destroy the lands. Realizing the translation his people have used is dangerously inaccurate, he rushes back to save Helen. Only she wishes him to tell the Church Mothers, and introduces him to the son he never knew he had.

Criticism's Relationship to Literature

Quotations from Northrop Frye’s “Anatomy of Criticism”

 

“Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism. It is therefore impossible to ‘learn literature’: one learns about it in a certain way, but what one learns, transitively, is the criticism of literature…criticism, rather, is to art what history is to action and philosophy to wisdom: a verbal imitation of a human productive power which in itself does not speak.”

 

Looked at it from this perspective, is philosophy then the attempt to study how to be wise, history the attempt to understand political actions, and criticism the study of how to write better? No, because that would reduce science to the attempt to make better technology, which is, by the way, the position in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” that the primary goal of science is to find better ways to do things, not just satisfy human curiosity. But I digress.

 

 All metaphors are imprecise, of course. I can definitely see the primary benefit of studying history being the improvement of politics, even if as a child I read history because it engaged my imagination.  I mostly read political and military history because I enjoyed the military conflicts between great generals and the debates between great politicians. It wasn’t until I took AP history that I realized the importance and interesting aspects of economic and cultural history that I now realize are the context of generals and politicians alike. I remember an article I read that the democratic spirit of American soldiers gave them a tactical advantage in WWII because American squad leaders were more likely to make decisions on their own while their German counterparts were more likely to wait for orders.

 

The idea that philosophy is a “verbal imitation of” wisdom which is a “human productive power which in itself does not speak” requires precise definition of those terms. You have to define wisdom by your actions and philosophy by the understanding of those actions. For example, we could debate the wisdom of a President’s decisions, and our argument would reveal our philosophy.  We made decisions all the time, often without thinking about it because we ‘just know’ what to do; philosophers try to figure out why we know what we ‘just know.’ In this light, criticism helps us to understand why we like or dislike various books.

 

But physics is just one way of studying one part of nature. There’s also biology, chemistry, etc. Is criticism more like physics or is it more like science, a collection of disciplines?  Given the number of different philosophies of literature, I’d say “criticism” is more of a general term like science than a specific term like physics. But Frye’s point is that criticism is not just another kind of literature, which was apparently a common idea when Frye wrote his books. He’s after objectivity in criticism, without which there is little justification for critics. If you can’t be objective about literature, critics are just better read and more verbose snobs.

My Science Fiction

Escapees from Hell http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IAZ0NM2

Two thousand years ago, aliens conquered Earth and turned humanity into a military-industrial complex to fight their interstellar wars. Anyone who resists is sent to Hell, an underground prison, but someone escapes…

From Whence Gods Came http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L3D7GEQ

Soul’ren is a young teacher, an alien among humans, living within a broken Dyson Sphere, with her adopted father, a war hero with a shattered memory. An invasion from another universe had been thrown back, but not before great damage to galactic civilization.  That enemy is trying to break back through the geometry of the universe, and Soul’ren must find a space ship while her father searches his broken memories for the way to hold them back.  Accompanied by the stern Kractor, the dashing Andelis Ali, and genetically enhanced gorilla warrior Dark Tiger, Soul’ren will face the dangers of mountains, ice fields, and jungles just to challenge the last bastion of technology, ruled by a mad alien and his robot minions.

 

The Sea of God http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KMI8N72

While telepathically exploring the universe, Daowyn meets June, an American teenager grieving over her late father. She mistakes him for an angel and latches onto his mind, causing a mental swap that leaves her with what she thinks are miraculous powers and the alien crippled back on his home world. While she explores the potential of spirituality to create a life based upon love and freedom, he searches for a way to Earth to restore them both to normalcy. Told from the point of view of a law of physics in stream of consciousness style.

 

The Astral Series

Book One: God’s Lioness http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IBGF4A

Parallel universes collided into one, causing different parts of Earth to exist as different eras. There Shiki, a woman trained in an advanced Japanese military, is sent to the world of Aphrodite to steal the magic of immortality, but then is chased by a poet warrior Federico determined to bring her back. But even as they fall for each other, they are caught up in the plots of seers playing chess with the future, and the only way to win is a suicide attack against Hades.

 

Book Two: Call to Order http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IBK7874

After a mission on Hades, the heroes discover that the Ice Giants of old wars are on their way to Earth to stop the Time Waves from spreading temporal chaos off world, even if it means destroying the entire planet. They need to recruit allies, but the dark alliances and ancient resentments among interplanetary governments hinder them. Caldra, a priestess of science, resists ancient enemies, the restrictions of her religion, and even the limitations of science to protect humanity, especially the life of the man she loves.

 

Book Three: Trial of Chaos http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IBJ99Q8

Alliance have been built, and ultimate enemies, the villains behind the thrones, have been revealed, so Csaris, the scientist who accidentally caused the Time Waves by going back in time to rescues his daughter’s life, will finally face the man who tricked him into it by killing her.  Just as worrisome, he will need the help of both his daughters’ mothers.

Chinese Literature, "The Daily Show," and "The Colbert Report"

“Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true;

Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real.”

 

From “Dreams of Red Mansions” by Cao Xueqin

 

“This couplet, which presides over an archway leading to the Land of Illusion … has long been regarded as  one succinct summation of that narrative’s ordering principle and thematic focus…it is the delight and constant effort of those readers to decipher the hidden signification of puns, enigmas, riddles, names, anagrams, metonyms, and oracular verses that stud the text. Whether all such devices add up finally to one grand and consistent scheme of narration that can justify the nomenclature of continuous allegory is a question still subject to debate.”

 

-Anthony C. Yu’s commentary upon the couplet.

 

Which leads me to thinking that this is why the trinity of informed comedy, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver, are the most respected television journalists working today, but in reverse. In our present political system, fiction is too often being treated as true, and truth is being presented as fiction, in this case, comedy.

 

Truths that are too difficult for politicians and the people to swallow are often most persuasively presented as fiction, from James F. Cooper’s defense of Indians (now seen as racist, but in his day he was their most radical defender), to Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” to Kirk and Uhura’s interracial kiss (the first on TV) to lesbianism on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

 

Now the journalists who are rubbing American’s noses hardest against the unforgiving solidity of reality are Steward, Colbert, and Oliver.  Their patient research puts the present in the context of the past, by pitting clips of Governor Bush and President Bush in debate with each other, by reviewing past promises of politicians, and by my favorite of all, “The Word,” in which falsity is placed in the context of irony.

 

And by making us laugh about it, by presenting themselves as entertainers instead of journalists, they dodge the bullets of accusations, like not being ‘fair and balanced’ or not being ‘objective’ which means they can tell the Truth instead of reporting mere facts. They can make an argument instead refereeing the exchange of sound bites between lobbyists, lawyers, and liars.

 

In “Dreams of Red Mansions,” there is a dualism between “zhen shi-yin” (also the name of a narrative character in the book) and “jia yu-cun” which mean “true events concealed” and “false language enduring” respectively.  In Chinese literature, this division is a philosophical paradox, the hero’s family name is even “Jia,” but in the America media it is a battle ground between liberal and conservative commentators with our comic trinity and their supporting cast ever ready to call “BS.”  “True events concealed” happens with every cover up and classification, while “false language enduring” refers to the enduring powers of fiction, be they the Big Lies or the too Big Truths that make up our culture.

 

“Whether all such devices add up finally to one grand and consistent scheme of narration that can justify the nomenclature of continuous allegory” depends a great deal upon your view of history.  Whether you believe in God, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, or Isaac Asimov, you implicitly accept history as a “scheme of narration” that can be understood through symbolic thought.  And if the world was truly chaotic, comedy would not work either, because in order for their comedy to make us laugh, it needs to contrast the order of the world with the order of our worldview. Colbert’s entire intro to his show is a homage to the importance of symbols to our political thought, and the rest of his show is a send up of our thoughts about them.

 

There are limitations to my comparison of an 18^th Century Chinese novel and 21^st Century America media.  “Dreams” was a single work of poetic philosophy about human desires meant for a small readership of the educated elite, while the American media is a chaotic mess of commentators sacrificing restraint and sometimes reason to grab millions of viewers.  And yet Cao realized that only fiction can tell the biggest truths, just as Stewart, Colbert, and Oliver have realized the only way to prod America with the shock of enlightenment is to make’em laugh.

Poetry Collections

I Tell Myself a Little Lie http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KM0EIXS

 

These are poems of my doubts.

 

Fifty Ways to Love Your Lover: The Poems http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KM0TO6O

 

These are fifty poems of the pains and pleasures of love.

 

Science is Pretty Quarky http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KLZQ3A0

 

These are all poems riffing off scientific ideas, mostly evolution.

 

The Sound of Each Soul http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KLZEGCM

 

These are poems of desperate resistance against conformity, but then, most poems are.

 

Prose Collections

“Anything Goes” is a collection of short stories that cruise along the boundaries of sin and saintliness, inspired by my youthful trips to “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” my interest in pagan and Christian mythologies, and my struggle to find my morality.

 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L3J9X3M

 

 

“Devils, Daughters, and Dieting” is a collection of three novels. “Devil May Care” is about two people on opposite ends of the economic spectrum who have near death experiences and wake up to use opposite methods of trying to make the world a better place. “Fathers and Daughters” is about a police detective investigating the death of a man who had abused his ex-wife and daughters, leading to the scandals of the rich; meanwhile, his own daughter runs afoul corruption within the department. In “Weighty Wager,” two people bet on who can lose 100 pounds first; she uses mostly dieting and he uses mostly exercise. Warning, this is the funny one.

 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KRV75ZK

 

“Letters to Women” are my confessions about how I’ve felt about many of the women in my life, excluding my mother (sorry Freud), who have influenced me for better or for worse.  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KY9PHKA

 

“Novel Novellas” These novellas are shorter versions of novels that I wrote, in case you just want a sampling. One of them is a Western fantasy, another a college romance, and two of them are fantasies based upon Asian influences, but those novels aren’t due out until 2015 because I want to finish the series. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KTJ2WVC

 

“Science Fantasies” are short stories that start with scientific ideas but my imagination rather runs away with me. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IC91L2C

 

“Zen and the Art of Drunken Story Writing” was mostly written in bars or after I got home from a bar. So many people have told me that writers have to be drinkers that I thought I’d give it a try. My favorite among them are the three “Adventures of Little Miss Jane,” set back in the old days of the British Empire.  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KY9PFS4

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

China is an economic powerhouse on the path towards supplanting the United States…or is it?

About five years ago, the University of Beijing released two interesting bits of data. The first is that government corruption is a drag upon economic development to the tune of 15% a year. The second is that the costs of environmental damage will be so great that about 2040 the Chinese economy will start to shrink. These costs include medical costs, the costs of importing food, and clean up. This assumes no radical improvement in green technology; many countries are working on clean energy and the winner will probably be the next economic superpower (or will remain so if it’s the US).

China’s housing situation is precarious. The bigger the city, the more expensive the homes are, and Chinese are crowding in fast. Two million of Nanjing’s work force are there illegally, because their residency documents have them in the countryside. It can take a lifetime to pay off a housing mortgage. Beijing wants to ease the tension by lowering prices, but the local governments need to keep them up because the leases on those properties are a primary source of government budgets. The local officials have a personal stake in those city budgets because the biggest item is “entertaining” visiting officials. That means the city governments are paying for officials to visit each other, including top restaurants and hotels, and paying a lot.  The State Owned Enterprises also have a stake in higher realty prices because they have been making up for their losses by investing in real estate (SOE for coal, oil, etc. sell their products at a loss to keep the Chinese economy chugging along).

I recently read on Asia Times Online that since the beginning of the world-wide recession, Chinese debt is increasing twice as fast as their economy. It was the price Beijing was willing to pay to keep Chinese working, but is unsustainable.

And investment capital isn’t as in love with China as it used to be. American companies keep their high end manufacturing in America to protect their intellectual property rights. Workers’ wages are cheaper in Southeast Asia, so much so that even some Chinese companies are moving factories there. Japanese and Koreans will think twice about investing in an increasingly assertive China, so even China’s foreign policy, which is using historical claims to grab at oil and gas reserves under the seas, is hindering their economic prospects.

So China is strutting itself for now, but Beijing has rocky waters to navigate. If Washington D.C. can be patient and smart with its diplomacy and invest in its future, in the long run, America had outlast its latest rival. I know that’s a big if in our present political atmosphere, but it’s what I have to say.