Month: August 2010

Dumbfuckery du Jour

Dana Hunter

My heart’s not in it tonight, my darlings.  I had an utterly shitty day.  All I really want to do is crawl into the loving arms of geology and dream for a while.

But three items commend themselves to my attention, and the Smack-o-Matic is giving me the puppy dog eyes, so let’s do some brief bashing.

In the “having a heart attack from not surprised” category, the rabid right’s not happy Judge Walker handed their asses to them, so what can they do?  Why, say he’s gay!

Fox News, for example, ran a piece from University of Notre Dame law professor Gerard Bradley, who expressed concern about the lack of attention paid “to one very troubling aspect of the case.” (via A.L.)

This is the question of the judge’s bias due to his possible interest in which side wins the case. […]

Battalions of commentators have wondered about his bizarre handling of the case, and many have attributed it to Walker’s belief that it is unjust for the law to limit marriage to opposite-sex couples.

Nor is the neglected bias related to the fact that (as several newspapers have reported) the judge is openly gay.

Of course, Walker’s opinions about marriage and sexual preference could be related to his own homosexuality.

Now, I have no idea whether Walker is gay, and I don’t care in the slightest. His ruling speaks for itself, and if the right wants to find flaws in the decision, conservatives can make their case — without going after the motives and/or personal life of the jurist who wrote the ruling.
But consider the implications of this line of criticism. Should an African-American judge necessarily be accused of bias if she considers a case of racial discrimination? Should a woman judge consider recusing herself in a case involving sexual harassment?
For that matter, why would a straight judge necessarily be preferable to hear a case involving marriage equality?

I’ve really run out of words to express my disgust with these people, so I’ll just settle for “ridiculous little shits.”

Additionally, Boehner has decided that police officers and teachers are “liberal special interests,” which tells you all you need to know about his suitability for public office.

Oh, and the next time you hear Teabaggers babble about “constitutional conservatism,” you might want to ask them to explain this rather large list of things they want to revise.  Fair makes your eyes pop when you see it all in one place like that.

Dumbfuckery du Jour
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Dana's Dojo: Is the Plot Really The Thing?

Dana Hunter2 Comments

A long, long time ago in a website far, far away, I used to run a regular feature called “Dana’s Dojo.”  I filled it with my own articles on the art and craft of storytelling.  Some people even claimed they found those articles useful.  Ye Olde Website is sadly deceased now, but the nice thing about the intertoobz is that resurrection is always an option.  So on Wednesdays regularly, I’ll be reposting some of that old content, and mebbe even coming up with a few new dojo articles.  Enjoy!

Lately, Dana Hunter has been one pissed-off writer.  It’s that delicious, righteous rage that comes from being really angry over my favorite subject: fiction writing.  Why am I angry, you ask?  Because there’s been so much drivel and tripe lately.  Crap books and arguments over good writing vs. plot.  Thankfully (or maybe not – after all, there’s nothing I love more than a really good war over words), I have not been personally party to many of these discussions that so enraged my fellow writers that they in turn enraged me.  But I have certainly suffered from some awful writing, and I’m gods-damned angry over it.  Deliciously so.

The roaring sound you hear is Dana simultaneously pulling out her Weedwhacker of Doom and her Chainsaw of Truth and getting ready to clear the way and cut to the chase.

And the kind of gloopy sound before it was me putting my brush in the warpaint.  In case you were wondering.  But were I you, I’d focus on the instruments of mayhem rather than the paint.

Oh, yes, my darlings, I am on the warpath.  And if you can imagine a skinny-ass woman with a chainsaw in one hand and a weedeater in the other, face painted in a grotesque battle mask, running screaming at the people arguing about all the wrong things when it comes to this business of writing, by all means do so now.

It’s not like fighting this battle, even winning it, will solve the age-old argument of plot vs. good writing, but I damned sure aim to clear it up for now.  Because I personally find it ridiculous.  There should be no question: both are absolutely essential if you want to tell a ripping good story.  All right?  That simple.  And I will tell you why I sweat and labor over each and every detail of my writing: because I want to tell the very best story I can, plot and prose all inclusive.

I decided this by reading the masters of my genre.  I’ve plodded through a lot of crap books to find the jewels among the dross.  Every book that has ever stayed with me has not sacrificed one for the other.  The authors I adore write like angels (or demons) and plot so tightly you can’t measure the gaps in nanometers.  In point of fact, I don’t even notice how gorgeous the writing is because I’m so swept up in the story, in what happens next.  It’s only when I reread the book several times that I can tease out all of the fantastic devices they’ve used to make the words flow like swift streams.  Their writing may be gritty or it might be lyrical, but my friends, music is no less music for being heavy metal or opera.  It’s not the tone they take, but the depth and richness of their prose, that matters.  They have all of the elements down: plot, theme, setting, dialogue, style….  And if they have weaknesses, they de-emphasize those weaknesses by really focusing on their strengths, so that you’d never notice there’s a weak point there.

All right?  That’s the only kind of writer to want to become, one who is so good all round that people have no choice but to bestow awards upon you and tell you how incredible you are.

However.

You will have noticed that many, many books out there do not adhere to this rule.  This is because not all writers are destined to become great ones.  The best of them admit it, like Stephen King, who enjoys telling people he’s the Big Mac of the literary world.  If this is what you want to become, what the crap are you wasting your time trying to disguise yourself as filet mignon for?  Admit you’re a fast food hamburger and take pride in feeding people the junk food they crave.  Damn it.  It’s not all about genius and style and such, it’s about entertaining people. 

I’ve named my chainsaw Occam.  You’ll see why in just a moment, after I’ve stopped your screaming.  I can hear it from here, even over the roar of these two landscaping implements: “But Dana, I don’t want to be the Big Mac of the writing world!  I want to write really good stories.  Shouldn’t the power and beauty of my prose count more than plot?”

No.

Just that.  No.  It shouldn’t. It doesn’t.  And it never will, except in rarified circles.  In point of fact, only those people I’d dearly love to beat about the legs with the weedwhacker and menace with the chainsaw believe that the excellence of one’s prose means more than the power of one’s plot.

Enter Occam.  I’ve named him for Occam’s Razor.  For those not versed in scientific terms, Occam’s Razor is a theoretical tool developed, strangely enough, by a man named Occam, who proposed that when faced with two theories that explain all of the known facts equally well, one should choose the simplest one.  It’s quite useful for lopping off pretentious crap and getting to the truth. 

I shall now take dear Occam to the theories sitting on the table.  That plopping sound you hear is the idea that good writing should trump good plot falling gracelessly to the floor.

And there is a simple reason for this.

People like good stories.  They care not one whit for perfection in the telling as long as the story itself was interesting and entertained them.

How else do you explain the wild popularity of Star Wars, for fuck’s sake?

Why Occam has shaved off the bit about good writing is this: if a person has to be highly educated to appreciate what the author was trying to do, that’s not simple.  Plot trumps good writing because it’s simple to understand and appreciate.  Good plot is good storytelling.  It sucks the reader in and forces them to continue, even in the face of more pressing real-world concerns such as fighting children and having to rest up for the day’s work and dinner and video games and all that.

If you are writing for a wider audience than the navel-gazing literati, then you absolutely must – no compromise here, don’t argue with me – you absolutely must learn how to plot your stories exceptionally well.  Then and only then will the average reader stay with you long enough to learn to appreciate the quality of your prose.

I have never once had the average Joe or Jane come up to me and say of a book they just read, “Wow.  You know, nothing happened in this book, but the style (or alliteration, or onomontopeia, or what have you) was so wonderful I didn’t care!”

You wonder why books with horrible dialogue and stunted style and all sorts of other literary sins fly off the shelves?  Because the author had a compelling plot.  And that’s why much better quality books stay on the shelves and eventually sell in the hundreds and get put in the bargain bins or shipped back to the publisher, there to sit gathering dust while the author looks at his or her award for sparkling prose and wonders why the hell no one outside of the judges thought it worth two shillings and a shrivelled apple.

Look at it this way: People want a tune they can dance to.  They don’t want to have to take music appreciation courses in order to understand the brilliance of a piece.  That said, the bands that endure past the one-hit wonders offer something more than a good beat you can snap your fingers to.  And I guarantee you, these books that sell in the millions only because they tell a story people felt like reading today but offered nothing but a fast-paced plot will be forgotten.  Books that offered both a compelling plot and quality writing will survive.  But the scales are weighted in favor of plot, my darlings.  Very few books achieve immortality by a decent plot but really incredible execution of the other elements of fiction.

So what does that mean for us?

It means, first and foremost, do not fall under a literary spell and start believing that style is everything.

Jim must be quoted here.  He pointed up the major weakness of colleges: “At the end of the day, creative writing classes, professors, etc. are looking for the new style monster, not the new content monster.  They want the new Joyce, Salinger, Hemmingway, etc. to redefine writing.”  Looking for the new “style monster” sounds fine and admirable, but loses sight of the fact that this is not what the audience is looking for.  The audience is after content, not style.  The moment we forget that, we fail them.

And we risk running into Jane, editor of a literary magazine, who requires all submitters to the magazine to discuss what they think the new style of the now will be – and then rejects anyone who can make a guess.

Do you know what she’s saying here, folks?  Even in a literary magazine, do not s

acrifice content for style.

There’s too much talk of style.  It muddies the waters, makes us believe it’s more important than it really is.  Some authors are masters of style, they create something truly new and unique, and yet the ones who have done that did not sit down with that intent.  They sat down to tell a story in the way they would like to see a story told.

Style is something that happens, is my belief.  It happens in the course of writing.  We are all unique human beings, and as we write, that uniqueness comes through and becomes our style.  We shouldn’t worry overmuch if it’s a style that will take the world by storm or not.  As long as the readers enjoy it, who cares?  Outside of the literati, of course.

So with style out of the way, because it will take care of itself, let’s move on to what we really need to be concerned with.  What do the readers really want and need?

Characterization.  No one will ever like a story if they don’t like the story’s people.  And you know what I mean by like.  It means either admire or hate so much they love them.  You’ve got to create interesting people and make people care about them.

Dialogue.  Let us not get into a discussion about George Lucas’s tin ear, except to say that if he could write dialogue better, the Star Wars movies would be far, far better than they are.  If you have a tin ear, limit your dialogue.  That simple.  Thank you, Occam.

Setting.  Readers like to experience the world the characters are in.  Truly great writers create settings so vivid you’re right there with the characters, and they make that setting work almost as a character in its own right.

Description.  Again, putting the reader there is important.  Some writers get away with a little, some with a lot.  It doesn’t matter if you’re a sketcher or a painter, as long as the reader gets enough to experience the story.

Mood and Atmosphere.  “The Fall of the House of Usher”, anyone?  This is a nebulous thing, but essential to the experience.  Think of it as the HD of the literary world.  The mood and atmosphere, whether dark or light, tragic or absurd, act like amplifiers on the plot and characters and settings.

Theme.  Good vs. Evil.  Love vs. Hate.  War vs. Peace.  What are you trying to say within those things?  Figure out the theme and let it guide you, but for gods’ sake, do not belabor it.  It’s just there to underscore the plot, really.  And it’s something people adore as much as plot and characters.  Half the time, it’s what they mean when they think they’re discussing plot.

These are the jewels in your crown.  Yes, of course, you want to use all of the other tricks in the grabbag, where appropriate: similie and metaphor, alliteration, onomontopeia, all that rot.  I fully believe in storytelling as a craft, which means the right words in the right place at the right pace and exactly the right time.  And if you think nobody cares about language anymore, just listen to a group of rabid Tolkien fans swooning over how epic and graceful his language is.  Even the average Jane or Joe can tell the difference between a hack and a master.  It’s just that the master’s going to get short shrift if s/he can’t keep them entertained with more than pretty words.

So, does plot matter more than good writing?  You bet it does.  But that’s no damned reason to sacrifice good writing.  Good writing does matter.  It’s as essential to prose as proper costuming and set-dressing are to movies.  Don’t let the bestseller lists fool you: Joe and Jane would love more quality books out there.  I’ve heard them complaining about wooden prose, but what can they do? 

Turn to us, is what, because we are simply going to blow them away with incredible plot and prose.  We will start a whole new movement in writing, because we’re going to stubbornly answer “both” whenever somebody asks us whether plot or prose are more important.

And now, my arms are tired, Occam’s almost out of fuel, the little plastic wire thingy on the whacker is frayed from beating against literati legs, and my warpaint’s running, so I’m going to leave it at that for now. 

Dana's Dojo: Is the Plot Really The Thing?

Dumbfuckery du Jour

Dana Hunter7 Comments

I must begin with a special shout-out for those responsible for understaffing us on Wednesdays.  I can’t describe how excited huge queues, justifiably angry customers, and working late makes me.

But at least I didn’t have to do much political reading today in order to find some delicious dumbfuckery.  There’s so much ripe, juicy, low-hanging fruit dangling out there it’s hard to resist plucking it all.

Let us begin with the best graphic ever:



People pounding the pavement against these dumbfucks can print this out, paste it to their clipboards, and just hold it up silently for voters’ consideration.  It’s simple, elegant, and speaks far louder than words.

Moving on to Senate Con stupidity, which has gone beyond extraordinary and is blowing past mind-numbing.  Now they’re threatening the passage of the START treaty, willingly throwing America’s credibility on nuclear issues down the shitter and tossing a (perhaps nuclear) grenade after it.  Why?

In this instance, the main GOP complaint is that the Obama administration has called for spending $80 billion over the next decade on modernizing nuclear weapons facilities, and $100 billion on strategic bombers and long-range missiles that carry nuclear warheads.
Republicans are arguing that this isn’t enough, which is why they won’t let the treaty advance from committee.
In other words, the most important treaty this Congress will consider is stuck because Republicans want to increase spending.

Congratulations, America.  The citizens of large swathes of this once-great nation managed to elect a cohort of the most irresponsible idiots possible to serve as Senators, and this is the result.  What really horrifies me is that some liberals think it would be a good idea to allow more of this sort of fucktard to be elected in order to teach our centrist Democratic overlords a lesson. 

Sigh.

And just think, this fall, if voters in Nevada don’t show some sense, we could end up with Sen. Sharron Angle.  After this recent outburst, I can hardly wait for her floor speeches:

Sharron Angle (R), the extremist Senate candidate in Nevada, has her own “unique” take on the First Commandment, which may be the single craziest thing she’s ever said. Jon Ralston reports on recent comments the lunatic candidate made on a Christian radio talk-show.

“And these programs that you mentioned — that Obama has going with Reid and Pelosi pushing them forward — are all entitlement programs built to make government our God. And that’s really what’s happening in this country is a violation of the First Commandment. We have become a country entrenched in idolatry, and that idolatry is the dependency upon our government. We’re supposed to depend upon God for our protection and our provision and for our daily bread, not for our government.”

This mindset will further reinforce to some that religion infuses everything Angle believes but also might explain her hostility to government programs, believing essentially they are produced by a false God.

Referencing her Senate campaign, Angle added, “I need warriors to stand beside me. You know, this is a war of ideology, a war of thoughts and of faith. And we need people to really stand for faith and trust, not hope and change.”
[snip]
The Las Vegas Sun recently reported that Angle, who said she’s running because God told her to, embraces a radical church-state philosophy that “parallels that of a religious political movement — Christian Reconstructionism — seeking to return American civil society to biblical law.”
If you’re unfamiliar with Christian Reconstructionism, it’s quite literally analogous to the Taliban and radical proponents of Sharia law — just as they want to replace secular law with laws based on their interpretation of the Quran, Reconstructionists want to replace secular law in the U.S. with their interpretation of the Christian Bible. In this vision, a radical take on Scripture would take the place of our Constitution.

Some of my liberal friends may want to tell me that a fundie freak like this is harmless, even if set loose in the Senate, and it’s far more important to make sure Dems know progressives are very unhappy with them.  I’d just like to advise them to save their breath, as I highly doubt I shall be able to believe them.

Dumbfuckery du Jour

Life on the Rocks

Dana Hunter4 Comments

This whole post started because Lockwood asked me a question on Facebook:

Where was your profile photo taken? Those are some rocks I would classify as Om Nom Nom.

That was pretty much my response when I first saw ’em.  That’s the South Bluff at Discovery Park.

 Moi at Discovery Park.  All photos taken by my intrepid companion, unless otherwise noted.

I still remember standing before it the first time.  It looks like nothing but compacted sand from a distance, but up close, you find it’s actually sandstone.  I stood there tracing its bedding planes with my hands.  It surprised me with its cool, slightly damp, almost smooth but a touch gritty feel.  I’m used to rocks in the sun being hot.  The waves that carved our stones stopped breaking millions of years ago, in most cases.  Here, water’s still busy sculpting.  Dear old South Bluff is probably just a brief blip on the radar, a mayfly in geological terms.  The waves will wear it away in time.  Most people think of stone as somehow permanent, just like I used to.  But the vast majority of it is ephemeral, destined to be worn away to sand and soil again, perhaps buried and melted.  Some of it will end up stuffed into a subduction zone, some will end up metamorphosed and barely recognizable.  But that first moment, coming upon this, is for me eternal.

Folks sometimes ask how I ended up in Seattle.  It’s because of geology.  I came up here on a research mission for my magnum opus in 2000, and when I first saw the snow-capped Olympics embracing our plane as it landed, I knew I was home.  Only took seven years before I came home for good.

Seattle denizens look at me like I’m insane when I tell them I left sunny Arizona for the near-perpetual rain of the Northwest.  They’ll probably never understand the pull of this place, unless they’re Lord of the Rings fans, and remember what Bilbo said:

I want to see mountains again, mountains, Gandalf!  And then settle down somewhere quiet where I can finish my book.

That’s why I’m here.  But the yearning for mountains began long, long ago in a state very far away. 


I grew up with the San Francisco Peaks and Mount Elden framed in my back window.  This isn’t exactly the view – none of those long-ago photos are digitized yet – but this will give you an idea:

San Francisco Peaks and Mount Elden, snagged from Coastline Journal

That glacier-carved stratovolcano dominated my childhood.  So much so that when my grandmother stood with me admiring the view on one of her visits from Indiana, I turned to her and asked, “Grandma, how can you live in a place without mountains?”  She laughed, and she and my mother tried to explain that people who’d lived in flat country all their lives got used to it, but I didn’t understand.  No more than I understood why people called the Ozarks mountains.  We crossed them once, driving to Indiana, and I remember seeing a sign saying something like, “Ozark Mountains, elevation 600 ft.”  I burst out laughing.  Where I come from, anything under 2000 feet is a hill.  Well, parts of them qualify, but not the bits we were crossing.

My childhood was rocky, and I mean that in the best possible way.  Everywhere I went, there were rocks: old rocks, young rocks, dark rocks, light rocks.  In my literal back yard, you could find limestone from ancient seas, basalt from young volcanoes, and pumice blown out by the Peaks, among a great many other varieties.  The rock collection we plucked from our yard and the national forest backing it won me first prize at the Coconino County Fair one year.  To be brutally honest, the competition must not have been fierce, and no one was more shocked than I was to see that blue ribbon pinned to the collection, but it was nice.

Within easy driving distance of my house, sometime within walking distance, geologic wonders abounded.  We used to catch tadpoles in Wildcat Canyon, a large gully cut in Kaibab limestone, just a short hike through the pinon forest.  None of us kids realized we were chasing amphibians while 250 million year-old seabeds loomed over us.

Just a short drive away, we could see something that was obviously awesome: an actual impact crater, 50,000 years old but looking as if it got gouged out just last year:

Moi at Meteor Crater

Someday, really truly, I’m going to do a post all about it.  I have the research done and everything. 

This is where I found my first-ever fossil all by my lonesome:

Mah first fossil: A Wormcast!

Look, it was impressive to me, all right?  But if you want really impressive, here’s just one piece of the meteor that struck the high desert plain and left this gargantuan hole:

Moi with meteor

That is one enormous chunk of iron-nickel, that is.  And it’s only one of many enormous chunks scattered about – there’s another equally as large at Lowell Observatory, and doubtless plenty of others in various places.  I’m not sure where they all ended up.  It’s appropriate they’re scattered now, as they were strewn all over the place when it struck.

You can’t help but be impressed with astronomy after viewing this.  Appreciation for its geological significance came a great many years after I first visited.  For a while, though, I was under the spell of our neighbor, an astronomer at Lowell, and I was all about being an astronomer.  Wasn’t long, though, before the rocks started drawing me back.

It is very, very hard not to be impressed by the majesty of geology when you have this practically in your back yard:

Moi with the Grand Canyon

Now, mind you, we ferried various out-of-town relatives to the Canyon that it got to be a chore.  “Aw, do we have to go see that great big hole in the ground again?”  But that was before I started getting interested in its geology.  Look down into the Canyon, and you’re peering into nearly 2 billion years of history.

Moi giving my intrepid companion a heart attack by appearing to sit at the edge of a two-billion year drop.

And of course, it’s a great place to get your rocks on, especially if you like limestone:

Moi with limestone

But appreciation for deep time had to wait many years.  First, I’d live a life dominated by sandstone.  We moved to Sedona when I was 12, and for the next two years, you’d usually find me scrambling about on the red rocks, climbing Sugarloaf, staining my white socks red in the deep red sandy soils.  In the summer, we’d head for Oak Creek Canyon for the blackberry picking; in winter, for the icefalls.  It was fantastically beautiful, a red-splashed green oasis in dry country:

Moi with Misha at Slide Rock State Park

I had no idea of the eons of desert and sea that went in to the making of those rock formations, of course.  All I knew was that it was pretty, but I missed my mountains.  I pined for them.  And then came the happy day that my parents announced we were moving – to Page.

More desert.  No mountain.  Argh.  I spent my high school years scrambling over ancient lithified sand dunes, running along slick rock ledges a few inches wide with a sheer drop of hundreds of feet one misstep away.  But that old sandstone never let me down.  We called it slick rock because of what happened when it rained.  In the dry season (which was most of the time), the sandstone gripped my soles tight, and never let me fall.

Wind and water carved ancient dunes into fantastical shapes.  I washed windows for Michael Fatali’s gallery, and got to spend a lot of time studying the slot canyons carved from flash floods that he captured in their astounding natural light:
Eternal Voyager, Michael Fatali

He risked his life for those images.  Flash floods didn’t often announce themselves on the plateau, and you didn’t have much chance of escaping when one thundered down those sheer-sided slots.  People died.  An entire group of French tourists were drowned one year.  That pretty much cured me of any desire to go playing around in the slot canyons myself, but I did end up taking a gentleman from New Zealand around to see the sights after having been volunteered for tour guide duty by our local coffee-shop owner.  It might seem crazy to head for the middle of nowhere with a perfect stranger, but he wanted to see the Horseshoe, and I figured it was a long enough dive into the Colorado River if I needed to take care of any unwanted advances.  The desert was friend, enemy, and convenient weapon.  Fortunately for all, he turned out to be a perfect angel, and we spent a delightful day trekking all over the canyon country. 

I hated Page, but I still deeply love its surroundings.  The silence there is indescribable.  It’s as if all those millions of years bear down, hushing noisy civilization and allowing you to sink deep into deep time.

Speaking of sinking deep, one of the prime destinations for Arizona folk was Montezuma’s Well, an enormous sinkhole close to Cottonwood. 

 Moi at Montezuma’s Well.  This is the typical view my poor intrepid companion gets.  And yes, that is a Peacemakers tattoo.

I’d visited it as a kid, but didn’t really get to know it until I took a physical geography class from the incomparable Jim Bennett.  For our field trip, he hauled us all out there, and showed me a spot I’d never before seen, where the waters of the well escape in a narrow creek.  It’s quite possibly the most serene place in all of Arizona that’s accessible by car.  Water in the desert is a precious and awe-inspiring thing.

For my physical geology picture project, I dragged my poor friend Janhavi all over the Flagstaff area.  And you might not think sinkholes when you think Flagstaff, but it happens just to the north, where the old sea left lots of limestone, and great caves got carved into it later.  There’s a great place at Wupatki that might one day end up being a sinkhole, but right now, the underground caverns have few outlets, and the blowhole at Wupatki is just an outstanding demonstration of air pressure.  I re-created the demo photo with my intrepid companion when we were there:

 Moi having my hair done by the blowhole.

Those were the years.  I’d moved to Prescott to attend college.  I could admire the Mingus Mountains (yes, technically, it’s Mingus Mountain, but the locals call the whole range by that name). There was an ancient shield volcano and an even more eroded volcanic neck (where quite a bit of necking got done), and then the Granite Dells, where we spent more than one afternoon happily scrambling about the granite boulders.

Moi and Granite Dells

No better place to get intimate with how granite weathers, really. 

But in the end, I had to go back home, back to my old stratovolcano and the young cindercones that surround it like courtiers.

Moi reliving my childhood at Red Mountain.

Most of the cones are healthy and intact, but Red Mountain got half of itself rafted away on a lava flow, leaving a spectacular view into its interior.

I spent many happy years with my mountains, often taking the long drive up the San Francisco Peaks to the ski resort, wandering around Sunset Crater National Monument, exploring the places I’d grown up.  But Flagstaff is poverty with a view, and the wonderful company I worked for was headed on a downhill slide, and it was time to leave.  I’d already settled on Seattle, but couldn’t afford it alone.  I ended up in Phoenix instead, surrounded by concrete, the rocks too damned hot in the summer to go play in, the mountains too low and the Valley too wide.  Miserable years, until the very end, when all my friends moved down just as I was preparing to leave.  So it goes.  But by then, I had a friend who wanted Seattle as much as I did, and nothing was going to hold me back from those mountains.

There was only one drawback: active volcanoes.  I grew up with volcanoes, but they were all dormant, y’see.  I have a wee bit o’ a volcano phobia.  I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to get up close and personal with an actual live, actively-erupting volcano, but we made the trek to Mount St. Helens, and I discovered that awe is a fine antidote to fear.  I stood on the banks of the Toutle River, which had channeled a devastating lahar on May 18th, 1980.

Moi at the Toutle River, courtesy of me former roomie

I ran my hands through its gritty sand, volcanic ash mixed with eroded rock, and marveled at its texture.  The volcanic soils in Flagstaff are elderly – the youngest is over 900 years old.  This was younger than I was.  And then we drove on up to the mountain itself, and I stood staring down into its steaming throat, without fear:

Moi and the volcano, likewise

A poem by Walter Savage Landor rather captures the moment:

Death stands above me, whispering low
I know not what into my ear:
Of all his strange language all I know
Is, there is not a word of fear.

You still couldn’t pay me enough to camp there, though.

Once I’d set foot on the flanks of one active volcano, I couldn’t resist doing another:

Moi and Mount Rainier, ye final photo taken by ye former roommate

Hiked a snowfield in late August and saw my first glacier that year, which, I can tell you, is a pretty damned astounding sight for someone who grew up in Arizona, even northern Arizona.

The geology bug bit me in dead earnest not much later.  It had taken a few serious nibbles in Arizona, but Washington State has really turned me into an avid geology buff.  I think it’s because it’s so young and raw here.  Oh, granted, Arizona looks more raw, but its geology is all pretty much in the past.  Until you know more about how those landforms formed, you don’t feel its immensity, its immediacy.  It’s all just lovely scenery.  Out here, though, you can’t help but to notice geology’s astounding power.  And it’s not just the volcanoes, but floods so powerful they stripped the land to bare bedrock.

Moi at Dry Falls, trying to get my crappy old PhotoSmart camera to take it all in whilst ye intrepid companion laughs his arse off .

The fact that I now have to go searching for rocks rather than just looking down and seeing hey, there they are probably has a bit to do with it, too.  One ends up taking even the most spectacular scenery for granted when its too familiar.  I had to leave home before I could love it again.  I had to discover yesterday’s dramatic geology before I could fall into deep time.  Now, when I go back to Arizona, I can appreciate those two billion years of history.  I wriggle my shoes deep into dry dirt, lay my hands on my old friends sandstone and limestone, and feel myself sinking into a past whose history is written in chapters of strata.

I’ve lived my life on the rocks, and I haven’t regretted it a bit.

Life on the Rocks

Dumbfuckery du Jour

Dana Hunter1 Comment

If John McCain’s thoughts were a swimming pool, we’d have difficulty getting the soles of our feet damp:

McCain co-hosted an event on the Hill this morning, giving the senator a platform to complain about the Recovery Act again. One of the questions from reporters, however, was whether McCain agreed with his Republican colleagues’ concerns about the 14th Amendment. He dodged the question and ended the press conference.
Some reporters, including Brian Beutler, followed him, pressing him to state a position. “Do you support the Minority Leader’s push for hearings into the repeal of birthright citizenship?” Brian asked.

“Sure, why not?” McCain said briefly. 

This appears to be the extent of the consideration he’s given to the idea of amending our Constitution to strip birthright citizenship from our future citizens.  This would be pathetic from any pol, but from the Putz Who Would Be Prez, it’s so fucking pathetic I don’t think we have an appropriate word in the English language.  When you add to that his inability to determine which stimulus projects were useful, which weren’t, and which projects weren’t even part of the stimulus, all I can say is you have a man whose photo would illustrate the word “dumbfuck” very handsomely indeed.

Now ’tis time for a dumbfuck follow-up.  Regular readers know that the “ZOMG SKEERY MOOSLIMS R COMIN TO ENDAWKTRINATE R CHILDRUNS!!1!!1!” crowd planned a protest against a new mosque in Temecula, CA.  Their brilliant ideas: sing songs because Islamic women can’t sing, and bring dogs because all Muslims hate dogs.  The big event has come and gone.  So how’d it go?  As my best friend would say in his best Southern accent,  “Nawt too guud!”

Here’s how it all turned out: the anti-mosque protesters were outnumbered by pro-mosque supporters, the local tea party disavowed the protest and called it hate speech, the protester we talked to dropped off the face of the earth and only one dog made it to the planned protest.

Something tells me this current anti-Muslim crusade will work out about as well as all the anti-Japanese furor did in the late 90s.  Actually, probably worse: the folks who freaked over those damned Nips coming to take all our jobs and own America were fucking idiots, but amateur idiots compared to these professional fucktards, and thus their fail fails to measure up to the major-league fail of today’s frothing fuckwit failures.

And finally, addressing a whole different level of mega-fail, Sen. John Ensign, whom we last encountered having his parents try to pay off his mistress’s husband and discovering himself under investigation by the FBI for his epic fucking fail (ye gods, I slay me sometimes), is now expecting us to see his legal defense as a worthy political cause:

Roll Call reports today that Sen. John Ensign has registered his legal defense fund as a 527 political organization.
A 527 is tax-exempt, but Ensign must report contributions to the IRS.
As Roll Call notes, it’s an unusual move:

Campaign finance experts called the decision unusual and possibly unprecedented, noting that Members of Congress do not typically register legal expense accounts in such a dual fashion. 

“I guess he somehow considers the use of these legal fees, these contributions, to be political, and while they’re related to political charges, typically those defense funds are not set up as 527s,” said Ken Gross, a campaign finance attorney at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom.

I guess Mommy and Daddy’s pockets are only so deep.  Myself, I’m just wondering how much it would cost his little 527 to process penny donations, because I could amuse myself immensely flicking copper coinage at them, one cent at a time.  They’d make such a nice gloopy sound sinking into his sleaze, but it wouldn’t be worth it if he earned a profit from my entertainment.

Now if you’ll excuse me, coming even this close to Ensign has given me the urge to take a bath in industrial-strength bleach.

Dumbfuckery du Jour

Fangirl Gets Noticed by the Rock Stars, Freaks the Hell Out

Dana Hunter4 Comments

And when I say rock stars, I mean geobloggers.  Y’know, the real rock stars.

My darlings.  Please put down the handy throwable objects.  I promise that’s the last silly pun in this post.  Now stop aiming at my head.  Thank you.

Now, allow to ‘splain, or at least sum up.  Earlier today, several geobloggers I admire (and some I’d never heard of) were discussing Scientopia’s sad lack of geology on Twitter, and I threw in my two cents as a reader by telling them to storm the gates.  I happen to believe every good general science blogging network should have a hefty helping of geobloggers, and it’s about damned time geology got some respect.  Leaving geology out of a science collective is Just Not Right.  It gives the impression geology isn’t a hard science, or isn’t science worthy of equal standing with other branches of science, and it makes it damned hard for readers like me to track down good geoblogging.  Travesties all.

Of course, I expected no response to said tweet.  I’m just an interested amateur egging on the professionals.  Do not consider myself a scienceblogger nor geoblogger.  Take no notice of me, folks, except as a fan cheering you on.  I went grocery shopping.  I lounged on the porch and debated knocking on the neighbors’ door to ask them to please shut the window because their activities were a distraction.  Came back in, checked my email, and just about fell out of my chair, because Twitter was informing me that Actual Professional Geologists such as Ron Schott and Silver Fox were now following me.  Not only that, I had a comment from Real Live Geoblogger Lockwood welcoming me to the Geoblogosphere and saying he’d gotten here by way of Ron Schott’s shared items feed.

It was about this time my mind said, “ZOMG WTF oshitoshitoshit.”

I figured I’d given some poor souls the wrong impression.  I’m a potty-mouthed political blogger who sometimes pontificates poorly on science, but spends quite a bit of time ranting about religion, wanking about writing, and generally going off on whatever else catches my atten – ooo, shiny.  Where was I?  Oh, yes – there was a wild moment of terror in which I wondered if my next step would have to be applying to U-Dub for an actual degree.  Then I realized that Ron would’ve had to comb through all that other stuff to find the actual geology, that my welcome message gives some hints, and that my science posts are usually pretty well-hedged about with the “I’m no professional” and “I have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about” disclaimers, so I could probably stop the I’m-not-worthy routine.  Still, I feel a bit like I would if Neil Gaiman suddenly dropped by ye olde blog and then told his friends and fans that I’m an SF writer worthy of their attention.  I’d wonder if the poor bugger had gone completely mad.

And then I’d wonder what I’d have to do to really earn that esteem.

But, just in case some new folks swing by the cantina with certain expectations that I am, at this time, unable to meet, let’s be clear: I’m a rank amateur whose amateurish attempts at blogging about geology, biology and whatever other bits of science caught my attention that day are buried amid the detritus of politics, atheism, catblogging, squees about music, and, in the right season, fiction writing. 

I’ve taken one (1) class in actual geology, a class in physical geography, and zero (0) in any other science.  All I know, I’ve learned from blogs and books.  And what I know ain’t much.

Why, then, do I bother to blog about science at all?  Follow me after the jump, and I’ll try to explain myself.

Still with me?  Unbelievable. 

Right, then.  Well, I started blogging science because of PZ Myers.  Attended two of his talks a few years ago, y’see, and came away all fired up.  You can read the whole story here.  The upshot of it is, he made me realize that all of us who love science, from the scientists to the science writers to the fanboys and girls, must advocate for it.

Many of my readers already love science.  Some don’t.  I write about science for all of them.  And I hope for two things: that this laywoman’s passion for science will reinforce scientists’ passion to communicate the beauty and the wonder of it, and that these posts will inspire those who never considered science as anything more than a desperately boring requirement for graduation to fall in love, just as I have. 

I write about science because I’m appalled by my own ignorance.  That may seem like a bizarre reason to blog about science – why not simply keep reading, or take a class, and shut up about the shit I don’t know?  I don’t think I really knew the answer to that until I read this at George’s blog:

The generation effect, as studied by cognitive psychologists, shows that knowledge is better retained if it is “generated” by the learner than simply read. “Generation” can be as simple as learning a spelling by “filling in the gaps” or as complex as writing a book about your studies
Alex Kessinger: Notetaking as a way to stay smart

I hadn’t thought of it this way but it could seriously be the main reason I blog.  Yes, I have various passions that I like to share, but my brain is chaotic and unreliable.  Blogging helps me get my thoughts straight.  Once I’ve put it into words, (and when I am lucky, people have commented on it), I have a much better chance of holding on to it and integrating it into my understanding of the world. 

Lightbulbs weren’t even in it – halogens flashed on.  Yes.  Yes.  When I do those write-ups of my geologic journeys, I’m forced to go back and integrate what I’ve read into a coherent whole.  Reading is passive.  Writing is active – I know this because of the buckets of sweat that pour out of me when I’m trying to get the details right.  I’m astonished by how little I’ve actually retained from my reading.  Writing those posts confronts me with the enormous gaps in my knowledge and forces me to fill a few of them in.  Bonus, there’s always a chance that my wiser readers will kick me arse over mistakes and pour a little more knowledge in.

And finally, I blog about science because I can’t not do it.  I go running all over the Pacific Northwest chasing down interesting geology, sometimes encounter fascinating biology, run in to a hell of a lot of beauty, and I’m supposed to keep it to myself?  Some people whip out pictures of their grandkids and wax poetic for ages.  Well, I’m like that about the incredible science I’ve seen.  Remarkably, some of my readers actually like it when I do that to them.  So I keep doing it, for them, and for me.

Sometimes, I consider doing nothing but science on this blog, but I can’t.  I’ve got a magpie mind and a mouth prone to running.  I enjoy taking the Smack-o-Matic to idiotic politicians on a semi-regular basis.  There are times when I can’t help babble about writing, especially during the winter writing season.  Dangle a fundamentalist in front of me, and the temptation to ridicule them becomes overwhelming.  My cat is my kid, so of course I sometimes have to show her off, murderous wee beastie that she is.  And then there are the sublime moments, where something captivates me so thoroughly that I have to point it out to others.  That might be a song, or a piece of art, or just a perfect moment.  There are readers to brag about (because you know all you all are precious to me), and various and sundry to celebrate.  I could no more confine myself to one topic than my cat could confine herself to being a perfect angel all of the time.  For those of you wondering what the metaphor means, put it like this: it would be like a tiger deciding to become a vegetarian.

So that’s it, my long-winded explanation of What This Blog’s About and Why.  Probably silly to have babbled on like this, when I could have just pointed to Lockwood instead and said, “Likewise!”

Geology is important. And it’s woefully undervalued and ignored in our society. When I created this blog, it was mostly for my own entertainment; an online archive, scrapbook, what have you, of things that captured my attention for a while. As it turns out, about 3 in 20 of those things are geology related. That’s certainly a higher ratio than it would be for a typical person. I think I came to geology for the beauty and stayed for the awesome- and I mean awesome in the old, now somewhat archaic, sense of conferring a sense of awe. Of being somewhat paralyzed by the spectacle, by the connections, by the implications of something I’ve learned or seen. Even a little fearful, perhaps. As regular readers know, I’m quite fearful for the fate of our species in light of what we know of the past, and what our collective decision making is like in the present. The earth, and some fraction of its biota, will abide. Humanity, if it cannot learn from its environment, will not.

Having some sort of geoliteracy is critical to understanding our environment. That has become a part of why I do geology posts: I have a great diversity of readers, some geoliterate, some not. I enjoying sharing my excitement with the beauty and power of our planet, and I feel an obligation to help people understand some of the forces that shape it.

Amen, brother.  A-fucking-men.

In that post, he called himself “a peripheral member of this ecosystem.”  I don’t even know if I’m that, really, but I certainly won’t argue if I become so.  There are far worse things than being Pluto in relation to the Really Real Planets of the solar system.  At least we all get to orbit the same sun, even if some of us are distant and awfully erratic.

Finally, and most importantly: Thank you.  Thank you for pulling me into your orbit, and most of all, thank you for blogging the good science.  You give ordinary folk like me knowledge, hope and wonder, and those are never small things.

Fangirl Gets Noticed by the Rock Stars, Freaks the Hell Out

Dumbfuckery du Jour

Dana Hunter

I walked out on the political blogs today.  I’d been busy bemoaning the fact that the new science blog collective Scientopia doesn’t have any geobloggers on board just yet, finding out Neil Gaiman ended up on EW’s 20 Classic Opening Lines in Books, and various and sundry else.  Then I tore myself away from all that and tried to focus on the day’s pollyticks.  I got through Political Animal, but felt the gears grinding.  When I got to Think Progress, I fled.  Somehow, a trip to the grocery store seemed far preferable to killing another neuron with more Con stupidity.  And I really bloody hate going to the grocery store.

Afterward, since the sun had decided to once again shine on Seattle, I tried to settle in on the porch with a book on Yellowstone’s geology and the cat.  Alas, the neighbors were busy proving to the world that they had a healthy sex life, and the results of other neighbors’ healthy sex lives were busy screeching on the teeter-totter, so that plan failed as well. 

Now here we are, and all I want to do is sit quietly contemplating What Do I Really Want Out of Life?  But I simultaneously want to search the woods behind my house for a large stick and then use it to smartly whack some extraordinarily stupid politicians over the head.  Which means you’re getting an installment of Dumbfuckery today after all.  Don’t you feel fortunate?

First, the single thing in pollyticks that made me laugh today: it turns out Sarah Palin’s Palm can’t save her from being a damned fool:

On “Fox News Sunday” yesterday, Chris Wallace chatted for a bit with former half-term Gov. Sarah Palin (R) about, among other things, tax policy. Wallace noted, for example, that taxes went up during the Clinton years and the economy did really well. For that matter, Palin demands keeping all of Bush’s failed tax cuts in place, but as Wallace reminded her, she doesn’t say how she’d pay for them.
She replied:

“Yeah. No. This is going to result in the largest tax increase in U.S. history. And again, it’s idiotic. And my palm isn’t large enough to write — to have written all my notes down on what this tax increase — what it will result in.

“Let me just go through a couple of things that I want people to be aware of, because, you know, the spin coming from Gibbs and the White House — you’re never going to get the truth out of their messaging.

“But Democrats are poised now to cause this largest tax increase in U.S. history. It’s a tax increase of $3.8 trillion over the next 10 years, and it will have an effect on every single American who pays an income tax. Small businesses especially will be hit hardest.”

When Wallace asked what Palin had written on her palm, she explained, “$3.8 trillion, next 10 years, so I didn’t say 3.7 and then get dinged, you know, by the — by the liberals saying I didn’t know what I was talking about.”

That’s right.  Sarah Palin’s still writing notes on her palm. She can’t fucking remember what she wants to talk about unless she writes it down on her palm.  And the shit she’s written down on her palm is, as you will see upon visiting the above link, completely fucking wrong anyway.  There will someday be a dictionary entry for the word “pathetic” that displays a picture of Sarah Palin and uses her as the shining example.

And yet, despite her remarkable idiocy, there is another Con with ambitions to higher office who is very nearly as stupid as she is.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the wit and wisdom of Rand Paul:

In April, two miners were killed at the Dotiki Mine in Western Kentucky after the mine’s roof collapsed. The non-union mine had been cited for 840 safety violations by federal inspectors since 2009, and the Kentucky Office of Mine Safety and Licensing issued 31 orders to close sections of the mine or to shut down equipment during the same period. But when asked about the incident, Kentucky’s Republican Senate candidate, Rand Paul, said “maybe sometimes accidents happen.” And as it turns out, Paul doesn’t believe that the federal government has any responsibility at all to set safety standards to protect mine workers:

“The bottom line is: I’m not an expert, so don’t give me the power in Washington to be making rules,” Paul said at a recent campaign stop in response to questions about April’s deadly mining explosion in West Virginia…“You live here, and you have to work in the mines. You’d try to make good rules to protect your people here. If you don’t, I’m thinking that no one will apply for those jobs.”

That echoey sound you just heard, like a coconut hitting a concrete floor, was my head hitting the nearest convenient solid object.

Let’s parse this a bit: what Rand Paul is really saying is, “I am too ignorant and naive to become a US Senator, and if I do, I have no intention of performing my job, but I hope you’re stupid enough to vote for me anyway.”

No wonder the few somewhat-sane Republicans who haven’t yet run screaming into the loving arms of the Democratic Party are getting disgusted enough to start calling their fellows “crazy-cons.”

Dumbfuckery du Jour

Wither Geology?

Dana Hunter2 Comments

I hadn’t perused Scientopia’s categories until a brushfire broke out on Twitter regarding the absence of geoblogging there.  So I looked.  Sure enough, no geology.



That’s just not right.

Look, I know biology and chemistry and physics are all shiny and exciting, but so is geology, damn it!  One of the things that always annoyed me about ScienceBlogs was the dearth of geoblogging.  That irritation looks set to carry over to Scientopia.

So I have just one message for them:



Want moar geology!

Networks and collectives that cover a wide range of science gives layfolk like me the chance to stumble across blogs we never otherwise would have known existed.  Do you think I would have ever found Highly Allochthonous had it not been for their stint on ScienceBlogs?  Highly doubtful!  Especially considering I didn’t visit them for a bit even there because I had no idea what “allochthonous” meant.  But the beauty of a collective is that intriguing posts get splashed on the front page, and lightbulbs light up for ignorant idiots like me.  For those of us wanting to find geobloggers but having no idea where to look for trustworthy ones, it gives us a key to the kingdom.  For those of us who (gasp!) didn’t actually like geology, it gives us a chance to fall in love with a totally awesome branch of science.

So, Scientopia: go forth and dig up some geologists!

*Update: Scientopia’s already been taken to the woodshed, and it appears they’re having trouble finding geobloggers.  So, if you’re a geologist: volunteer, damn it!

Wither Geology?