Post Title Fail

I could have titled this post "David Mitchell," but that would miss the point of paying attention to what (I suspect) David Mitchell is himself pointing to: how fiction works and how unavoidably narratological and historical we are.

To my fellow fictionistas: see Paul Bloom's Intro Psych at Yale, anything by James Wood (and especially his latest New Yorker piece on Mitchell) -- "not to mention" Mitchells's body of work itself, aka his corpus.

Intermittently, one might tune in to Entitled Opinions.

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If this post feels like a sticky note with nothing to stick it to, try OnFiction for the positive version. Or check out Quack Watch for several emphatic instantiations of the negative version. (For one example, search "gallstones" therein to get a clue about how fiction's argument with facticity can go seriously wrong.)

At The Oil Drum, a conversation is currently ongoing that encourages extra gas tax, because cars are the primary use of oil in our economy.

That's a waving-the-stick strategy. But how about the carrot thing? Gimme a tax break and something better than a $40,000 investment in a solar roof, and you could turn me around in a quick minute. How about a little row of propellers on my roof line? I don't need to be hooked up to a grid to get wind from a thousand miles away. And surely that would cost less that $40K.

Also, HUD, which regulates the construction of mobile homes, could do a whole lot more. Huge reductions in energy use are available in the revision of building codes. Whole cities are re-vamping just by requiring (or at least rewarding) passive solar and optimized insulation.

The Top Shelf

A character in one of my favorite novels makes a point of being noticed in a troublesome way, just to feel like he's there. Me, I'm kind of the opposite most days in real life. Being in the way is just something I don't feel entitled to do.

I have found another trick, which I like to pull in the grocery store. If there are a couple teenage boys in sight, I decide I need something on the top shelf that one of them could reach for me. I like feeling like a small key in their lives. They will likely bury the details, but may simply have a lingering memory of what it felt like just to be helpful.

I also put away others' grocery carts in the parking lot.

Not that I've ever been able to move so well as this athlete, but now, at last, I can't even quite imagine being able to do so. At one time I could at least vicariously engage, but no longer. I'm old and getting older, and so it goes.

The best I can do now is understand that there is a precision and a potentially smooth and beautiful impact in the best kind of writing. We can dance with our words. And we can learn something about writing's best practices from every art.

Added: Note that this routine is essentially a coordination between some self and some other, a call and response and all that. Our stories need much of the same kind of dare. (Watch again while "keeping your eye on the ball.")

It should be so simple.

What Chris Matthews (at MSNBC) might get, but does not say in his documentary on the far right's shenanigans, is that it's not freedom and liberty some go on and on about — if they only knew; it's that the default mode of living in the world today does not accept that we crave the opportunity to be of use.

And yeah, I'm admittedly leap-frogging. Were I not so lazy, I'd lay it out for you.

The short version is that Doing Bidness is, in a primordial way, the original "fair trade agreement." Competition versus cooperation just misses the point of what an advanced social species has going for it.

Use me? Yes. Abuse me? No.

'Nuff said.