The Superversive

Rumblings in the interior

19 August 2014 by Tom Simon 8 Comments

I have been quiet (here, though noisy in other people’s comboxes) for a few days, because I have had another bout of annoying health.

Last Wednesday night, my usual neck-ache (now definitely diagnosed as ‘severe torticollis’) spawned a headache of the ‘Why is a work gang of little crimson devils driving a railway spike into my right temple?’ variety. I eventually decided that I needed to go to the hospital, but while I was trying to find some way of getting there that did not involve paying $300 for an ambulance, the pain increased to the point where I decided to give in and call 911. While on the phone, I lost the power of speech, except for the ability to scream in pain every time I tried to talk. They sent police, who decided (after I regained the ability to speak) that I was not in pain and had faked the whole thing; and they arrested me under the Mental Health Act (which gives the police powers of detention but not of arrest) and hauled me to the hospital in the local version of the Black Maria.

Once there, I could talk to rational people who did not presume to tell me what was not happening in my head. The loss of speech worried the duty physician (almost as much as it did me), and the upshot was that they CT-scanned my head, told me to take ibuprofen for my neck (I had run out; fixed now), and made me an appointment at the Stroke Prevention Clinic. I had one stroke three years ago; it would not do for me to have another.

The clinic, in turn, ran a battery of diagnostics, and set me up for an echocardiogram (performed today) and a two-day bout with a Holter monitor (now in progress). The echocardiogram revealed that I do actually have a heart, contrary to popular legend. Other results still to come.

In other news, I have managed to spill liquid into my laptop when a bottle of Coke Zero fizzed up on me. The computer still works, but the keyboard is damaged; the 1, Q, and Backspace keys do not work at all. I have plugged in a cheap external keyboard for now, but I am going to have to get the thing repaired. This will knock a day or two out of my working time in the coming week.

I regret to say that I have not accomplished much in the way of work during all this. I hope my 3.6 Loyal Readers (and Allied Benefactors) will forgive me.

Filed Under: The Superversive

R.I.P., ‘Admiral Halsey’

7 August 2014 by Tom Simon 2 Comments

At about 4:00 this morning, on my way home from a late-night writing session at an all-night diner, my elderly and infirm Mazda Protege5 finally yielded up the ghost. [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Superversive Tagged With: it never rains but it pours, personal

Another letter

25 July 2014 by Tom Simon 2 Comments

More rubbish about my personal affairs, reproduced here so that in days to come, when I want to look back and figure out Why What Did That, I shall have a better idea of the chronology. —T. S.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: The Superversive

Leaving money on the table

27 May 2014 by Tom Simon 2 Comments

Bill Peschel, a commenter on The Passive Voice, suggests that Amazon is bound to stop offering independent authors 70 percent of the retail price on well-priced ebooks, and cut the wholesale price to 60 or 50 percent of retail, or even less. He asks:

‘Why would Amazon leave money on the table if they know that authors will accept less?’

I reply:

I’ll tell you exactly why Amazon would leave money on the table:

When the table it’s on belongs to the consumer.

Amazon isn’t in business to sell books. (Or electronics, music, movies, patio furniture, knickknacks, teddy bears, buggy whips, or anything else they have an SKU for.) Amazon is in business to lower prices. The company’s entire business model is about increasing efficiency, lowering overhead, and using that to cut prices so that consumers will shop there instead of the competition. This is a company that is perfectly content (and so are its stockholders) with a net profit margin of less than 1%. Leaving money on the table is what Amazon does.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: The Superversive Tagged With: amazon, ebooks, publishing

A letter

26 May 2014 by Tom Simon 22 Comments

A private epistle, occasioned by the ‘Altered Perceptions’ campaign on Indiegogo, and posted here for purposes of record-keeping. Read at risk of your own mortal boredom. –T.S.

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Filed Under: The Superversive

Anatomy of a troll

1 May 2014 by Tom Simon 6 Comments

I have recently blundered, in my usual unheeding way, straight into a heated online donnybrook on the blog of Mr. Brad R. Torgersen, taking the usual online form – that is, one or two trolls braying insults at a Greek chorus of sane people. I had something to say about the protagonist of the drama (I use the word in the Greek sense of ‘first actor’, not to be confused with ‘hero’). As it may be of some help to those who are perplexed by the behaviour of this particular kind of troll, I offer it here for the benefit of my Loyal Readers.

Patrick Richardson opined, at the end of a longish bout with the troll:

Honestly, I’ve come to the conclusion that [redacted] is a serious, clinical masochist. It’s the only reason I can come up with for his continuing to show up at the fora of [redacted] authors, claiming to be better than multi-NYT bestsellers when he so clearly is not, and then bending over grabbing his ankles and asking to be spanked.

This was my response, slightly edited for your possible edification:

I used to deal with trolls for a living (saddest job I ever had), and I can tell you that it probably isn’t masochism. More likely, he is so socially inept and so incapable of reading emotional clues from text, he actually thinks that his words are inflicting righteous damage upon us, the heinous foe, and that he is returning to his lair covered in glory after causing us all to writhe in soul-deep agony at the sudden exposure of our horrible, horrible guilt. And he is so plug ignorant of the art of dialectic that he actually believes he is winning his arguments with us.

Moreover, as a person who despises religion, theology, philosophy, and history, who knows nothing about art, literature, science, technology, or any of the useful trades, he is gloriously unequipped to appreciate any mode of thought but his own – and his own mode contains no actual thought, just an angry clashing of slogans without ground or consequent, like Nietzsche on cheap drugs. Therefore (hello again, Dunning and Kruger) he imagines that his own mental slush is superior to all our thoughts; that we disagree with him is, to him, proof of our imbecility. We all have gone through a phase of being something like him – usually in childhood, before we learnt sense; we all have outgrown it, seen through it, put away those childish things – but he imagines that there are none but childish things, and that we can only differ from him by falling short of his measure, not by exceeding it. I may be mistaken on one or two points, but that is my reading of the man, based upon more experience of his kind than anyone should have to endure.

In short, [redacted] is like a blind man carrying a burnt-out and wickless lantern, wandering from town to town, unshakably certain that he is bringing the benighted people around him their first experience of light.

Hope that helps.

Filed Under: The Superversive Tagged With: dialectic, the internet, trolls

Call for information

15 February 2014 by Tom Simon 8 Comments

I’m posting this in the hope that one or more of my Loyal Readers will be able to help me with a small difficulty. I’m looking for a word. More precisely, I’m looking to see if there is a word.

I want to find out whether there is a specific technical term for the kind of name whose literal meaning is the complete opposite of the thing it actually refers to. I don’t mean an oxymoron or a contradiction in terms, I mean things like these:

The Australian habit of calling redheads ‘Blue’.
The Holy Roman Empire, which as Voltaire observed, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.
Orwell’s ‘Ministry of Truth’, which produced nothing but lies.
‘Democratic People’s Republic’ almost anywhere you find it, but especially as applied to the comic-opera régime of North Korea, an unconstitutional hereditary monarchy in which the people count for nothing.

I have a sort of vague intimation that there is a term for these kinds of names, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it is. It may be Latin or Greek in origin, a whatsitation or thingumanym. (I may adopt thingumanym anyway, as a kind of meta-name for ‘some particular class of words that hasn’t got a name, but you know the ones I mean in this context’.)

So, what’s the proper word for these thingumanyms? Anyone? Bueller?

Filed Under: The Superversive Tagged With: language, requests

Yes! We have gone bananas

13 February 2014 by Tom Simon 4 Comments

Just checking in, since I know my 3.6 Loyal Readers are wondering where I’ve been, or else worrying about really important things like how to set Granddad’s 1974-vintage digital watch which they found in the attic still inexplicably working after all these years but even more inexplicably keeping the correct time for Meiganga, Cameroon; in which case, hearing from me will help them get their minds off their own perplexities.

In a nutshell, I have been unwell. My ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’ posts saw me through the worst of my flu, but that was succeeded by a general compound of malaise, ennui, Weltschmerz, Angst, and other ghastly feelings imported at great expense from Europe. Any fool can be sick, but it takes a rich fool to have Krankheit.

Since I have reached a sort of impasse with my old family physician, I sallied forth when I was able, and went to see a new doctor. He gave me the standard diagnostic questionnaire for depression, and gravely informed me that if I am not suffering from depression, ‘no one on this earth is’. (I scored nine out of nine.) He put me on Effexor, and Effexor put me promptly to sleep. I lost more than a week; the time is simply a blank in my calendar. I could have told people I was in training to be Rip Van Winkle.

Drowsiness, as Dr. Hussain warned me, is a known side-effect of Effexor, but it doesn’t usually hit people as hard as all that. However, I have been knocked out cold for 36 hours by a mild sedative, so I should perhaps have expected this. The good doctor then put me on a reduced dose, not intended to be therapeutic, but merely to allow my metabolism to acclimatize itself to the drug. After a few days, my foggy and logy feeling went away, and so (blessed relief!) did the nightmares that had been hag-riding me for months, robbing me of all rest and turning my hair grey. Apparently my drowsiness is now confined to the time I actually spend sleeping, which is, in my humble but infallible opinion, a good place to put it.

I had a series of misadventures last week; the heat in my flat stopped working, just as we had a cold snap with temperatures down to –25 °C, which (for those of you who still use Fahrenheit) translates to ‘much too bloody damn cold’. My car died in rush-hour traffic, after dark, in the fast lane, going uphill, and had to be expensively towed and more expensively resuscitated. (The alternator belt had snapped, taking out other parts along with it, and so the car stopped running the moment the battery ran down.) This is the same car, Admiral Halsey by name, that got stuck on the ice in my back alley in January and had to be winched out by a tow truck, and needed a new battery because the old one would not hold a charge. None of this work is worth doing, since the car is technically scrap metal, but at the moment I can’t afford either to do without it or to replace it. I have a kind of frail, perishing hope that it will last me the rest of the winter, which in this sunny clime runs until May or thereabouts.

Through all this, The Worx (a program of Prospect Human Services) was faithfully badgering me to come in and get my resume furbished up so that I can look for part-time work. I would, I maintain, have been unable to do any work that I did find, so nothing was lost except time; but today, at long last, I struggled over to their offices (the Admiral won’t idle anymore; he wants to stall at every stoplight) and worked on that for a spell. On my return journey, my attention was diverted by something that I hope may divert you as well.

Prospect H.S. have their offices in an industrial park, not far from a specialist greengrocer’s which has (I believe) found the true and permanent cure for the dreaded Grocer’s Apostrophe. Every grocer thinks that the plural of BANANA is BANANA’S; this is an ineradicable part of the human condition, at least until either the English language or the apostrophe dies out. Some plucky lad or lass at this establishment, however, got rid of the whole problem by getting rid of the plural entirely. But the cure may have been worse than the disease:

BANANA
49¢/POUND

‘What!’ I thought. ‘They have only one banana, and they sell it by the pound? That must be some banana!’ And I was irresistibly reminded of an old song, the lyrics of which I jot down here from memory, for those of you who may not be blessed (as I am) with more than perfect recall:

Yes! We have one banana,
We have one banana today!
It’s tasty and mellow
And curvy and yellow
And too big and heavy to weigh.
By itself,
It made a whole shipload;
Each end
Has its own zip code;
But yes! We have one banana,
We have one banana today!

This peerless feat of memory shows, I believe, that my mental faculties are just about as good as they ever were and better than I deserve; for which the thanks or the blame should go to Dr. S. Hussain and the inventors of venlafaxine, a.k.a. Effexor.

You’re welcome.

Filed Under: The Superversive Tagged With: effexor, grammar, yes we have no bananas

The twelfth day of Christmas: Adeste

5 January 2014 by Tom Simon 5 Comments

One likes to close on a high note, and since I began this twelve days’ journey in the Baroque period, I shall end there. ‘Adeste fideles’ is one of the most familiar Christmas carols all round the world; I dare say it has been translated into every living language except possibly Pirahã.

I thought of posting one of the performances at the Vatican, either from Christmas Eve, 2011, or from Epiphany a year ago. But while every material resource has been lavished on these – the best choirs, the best orchestras, the best arrangements and conductors – I am sad to say that the results do not justify the means employed. These versions plod. They limp from note to note; the choirs are not tight, the rhythm diffuse and imprecise, with the inevitable result that the words become mushy and indistinct. I had the impression that the singers would have fallen asleep but for the sheer volume of the orchestra. Both those performances were a chore to listen to, and I suspect they were a chore to perform: an old favourite of the masses that must be trotted out for its yearly exhibition, no matter how tired of it the musicians have become.

But even at this late date, it is still possible for a choir to treat the song, not as a staid set piece from an over-familiar repertoire, but as an invitation to make a joyous noise. As an example, I offer this performance by the choir of Hendon St. Mary’s in London, directed by Richard Morrison, with soloist Jo McGahon.

Merry Christmas to all, and a joyous Epiphany tomorrow; and may God’s grace go with you in 2014.