Motley Kamuka

The steady churn of books becoming available to me from my library electronically makes me wonder at my book choices, though I also like the removal of choice beyond putting books on hold. All of a sudden they are coming available at once, so I have to go back in the line for some of them. I listened to the amazing 1493 , a big history book. Re-Coil by J T Nicholas made me think I could write science fiction. I guess that's what I want to do, but my first novel wasn't universally praised though might have been read by as many as 4 people. Maybe I'll keep writing it, or pick up the 5-6 novels I started but dropped. Or start a whole new one. Not sure what inspires me. There is also the interesting question, what is identity when it's not connected to a body, when consciousness can be transferred by technology. Death is erasure of backups. Death is losing some of the time on a "branch". In Altered Carbon it's called a stack, in Re-Coil it's called ...

In 1997 I got a book on Napoleon . It takes a plague to get me to read it. I wasn't attracted to history until I moved to NYC in 1990 and began to read some recommended history books by my uncle. I think I joined the history book club and got this book as one of the early freebies. I soon resigned once I'd fulfilled my agreement. It's written by Alan Schom . He set out to write a book that wasn't too positive like the French or too negative like the English. But if you read the reviews on Goodreads, it contains a political slant. It's not about hero worship. Indeed, this paragraph suggests comparison with a current American president. (p.30) Links: Schom on Booknotes on C-SPAN . Schom calls himself a lazy man, he put off writing the book for 2 years, but he also didn't take much time off and only slept 4-5 hours a night for 2 years. He seems to have gotten to some glossed over truths about Napoleon, and like Balzac whom he did a biography of, he m...

Maine is the only state that only borders one other state. It was probably named after Maine in France. I recently reread the Henry the 6th plays by Shakespeare and they mention Maine. The first colony that tried to settle there only lasted a year. Mythical creatures of the North Maine Woods : Razor-shins was an immortal  humanoid  with sharp shin bones and a thirst for  liquor  in the  prohibition  state of Maine. New employees were encouraged to leave a jug of  Bangor   whisky  outside of the camp door on the night of the  full moon . If razor-shins emptied the jug by morning, he might use his razor-sharp  shinbones  to fell a tree for the new man. But there were tales of new employees caught in the woods by razor-shins and scalped or otherwise mutilated after failing to offer the customary tribute. Will-am-alones were  squirrel -like creatures said to roll  poisonous   lichen  into small balls an...

Lalo narrator in Simone pretends to be from Paraguay to avoid Puerto Rican associations. It reminds me that I pretended to be Canadian once when I was in England. You just don't want the associations thrown on you some times. When I ask myself what the associations are, I think of my friend's girlfriend. She went to a prestigious college and said not everyone is poor from Puerto Rico. She was a social climber. I felt this attitude from many women in high school, so she felt right at home. Another social climber. I think that is universal in the world. People want status. She threw a drink into a woman's face at a perceived slight. I think everyone is insecure from everywhere in the world. I have often been told that I can be condescending, so I apologize to anyone who I've alienated that way, you have to know it comes from insecurity and other faults. Of course be offended by others stupidity, lack of really seeing you. I don't really judge Puerto Rico based on ...

I had a dream where I had a literature advisor. She was saying that I'd really have to lay into Hemingway to do the work. I got this idea. You know when a pimp suggests he'll give a necklace to a popular hooker. If you snicker along side the pimp, then you continue to support the exploitation of women. There's a kind of line. You accept that exploitation is part of the world, and you work with that system. Or you work against that system. Waking up the thinking continues. When you look at the negative side of Hemingway, you cross the divide. He goes from someone who articulated male desire and chivalry, to someone who didn't adequately credit Fitzgerald for editing The Sun Also rises, or credit Sherwood Anderson for giving him his break. You look at his shabby treatment of his family once they needed him as a rescuer. You look at the way he just moves on from women. The disillusioned veil falls away, and you see a very flawed human, who was very popular and m...

I kept a journal from a time I graduated from college, and just wrote and wrote about my life experiences. I don't really write in my journal much any more, and mostly I just blog a lot (into the void) or write on Reddit or write emails. There's a reddit that gives writer prompts, if you'd like to riff off another person's idea. I've also written like a writer. The best example of copying a writer, I thought, was A Million Tiny Pieces, which copied Hemingway in places. The memoir was discredited, and is now labeled as fiction but it was still interesting. I wrote a crappy paper once that copied Beckett's novel writing, that the professor didn't like and I had to write a paper over. There's a million books on writing. I really like writing autobiography but I haven't mustered the follow through to complete an autobiography. I had a friend who took a class with David Huddle, who put checks next to stories in the autobiography that he thought should b...

Becky Chambers was born in 1985 (that makes her 34 in 2019). She grew up outside LA in California, with scientist parents, “My dad worked in aerospace en­gineering, and my mom is an astrobiology educator." She was the outcast not being a scientist in her family. Her family is bookish and her mother read to her, and bought her books for her birthday. She studied theater in SF and then managed a theater. She noticed those devoted to theater only did that, and she liked playing video games and watching science fiction. She met her wife Berglaug Asmundardottir in Iceland (I'm extrapolating). She worked as a bartender and then a freelance writer to pay the bills till her writing career took off. This quote: "Boredom is so important. I still use boredom in my day-to-day if I’m stuck on something. The worst thing I can do is go online and start goofing around on web­sites or chatting with my friends, because then nothing else gets done." She wrote short stories for ...