Bloomberg Got This One Right. Now Please: Go Smoke Some Pot

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I'm no fan of the nanny state (as I've said here before, more than once, I've got a libertarian streak; not enough to support Ron Paul, but yes, it's there). So Mayor Bloomberg's plan to ban Big Sized Soft Drinks In A Few Places But Not Everywhere struck me as idiotic. However --- he's come out in favor of backing off marijuana arrests. And that, in my opinion, is a good thing.  There's much reporting on this, but this article from the New York Times summarizes the gist of the matter:

The New York City Police Department, the mayor and the city’s top prosecutors on Monday endorsed a proposal to decriminalize the open possession of small amounts of marijuana, giving an unexpected lift to an effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to cut down on the number of people arrested as a result of police stops.

This decision is embedded in New York City politics, which are quite different from those of much of the rest of the country. But the fact that the mayor of one of the world's major cities and the governor of a large state are willing to rethink the dangers of pot (because, in the end, that's what this boils down to) is a good thing, not a bad thing.

When it comes to pot, I had high hopes for a new view after the bust of Michael Phelps a few years ago. (See here and here.) It's time to get over the Reefer Madness conception of marijuana use. Actually, it was time to get over that YEARS ago. How caffeine and alcohol can be legal, and pot not, is beyond my comprehension.

But --- perhaps this new stance by the state of New York and the support of Bloomberg will push matters forward.

And for the record: Yes, I smoke pot --- as in:  several times a week in the evening, I light a joint and inhale once. And then go about my business.

Yep, that's it. That's all I do.  It's satisfying and relaxing --- far more so than a martini.

And for those who are keeping track: Yes, I'm a responsible citizen who's never been arrested and who works harder than hell every single day and who, most important, lives a life of moral integrity. My inhalation doesn't change any of that.

And for those who also wonder: My view is that some one who has a "problem" with alcohol or drugs or any other kind  of "addiction" (sex? shopping? shoplifting?) is gonna have that problem regardless of the law. Most people I know drink alcohol. Almost no one I know is an "alcoholic." Because that's how the human experience works: some of us can handle, and some of us can't (probably for reasons that have to do with genetics and biology), and all the laws in the world won't change the fate of the latter.

So: New Yorkers, please: go smoke a joint. In public. Please. It's the only way we're gonna get some sane legislation nationwide.

If I'm Quiet, This Must Be Nirvana. Or: What I've Been Doing

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What have I been doing? A lot. I’m still in that wierd zone of not-quite-knowing what’s next. Not quite, but sort of. But the only way for me to get out of my condition of not-quite-knowing-what's-next is by harvesting ideas. So I’ve been spending my time reading so I can figure out not just what’s next, but, more important, what I think about X, Y, and Z.

Translation: Having written a history of meat in America, I need to prepare myself to discuss not just that book (when it comes out in 2013) but a slew of topics unrelated to it:

Genetically modified organisms; the virtues of organic farming; how to feed the world; what’s good and bad about American agriculture. How to fix a broken food system (assuming it’s even broken, an assumption I’m not sure I accept).

Because that’s how this works: I write a book, and “journalists” want to ask me about everything EXCEPT what’s in that book. And I know that. So: I’m reading up on things I don’t know about.

BUT: I’m also trying to figure out what book to write next. I have an idea but I need to work it out. Right now it's a fragment, a whisp, a ghost of an idea. I need to give it substance and heft. Which also involves, you guessed it, reading and thinking. And since the new book won't be about meat or food politics, that means that at any given moment, part of my brain is traveling one direction, and part of it is headed the opposite direction.

And all that means that on lately I've reading up on: GMOs; the Justice Department’s anti-trust case against Google and several American publishing companies; self-publishing (the ins and outs of it); the meat industry’s response to the Pink Slime debacle; the history of genetics; experiments to control E. coli bacteria in cattle; “open access” and academic publishing; the crisis in academia (U. S. version); ideas about managing urban growth; contemporary European architecture; the roots of American environmentalism; and ideas about a “new” capitalism.

(My Google Reader feed looks like the detritus of a tornado: feeds from here, there, and beyond, all dumped into one reader, with not much connecting A to Z. Add in the stacks of books piled in the living room, in the kitchen, and in my office, all of them about, well, a slew of different topics, and you get my drift.)

And yes, I know that to become “versed” in a topic, I’ve got to focus, and so MOST of what I’ve been reading has been about food politics because that’s what needs to come first. Followed by the elusive whisp of a book idea floating around in my brain. (No, I’m not being coy by not going into detail. It’s still too vague. I tried explaining the idea to my agent a few weeks ago, and I got the “oh, for god’s sake! You're speaking gibberish. Get it together!” look. Which means I’ve got some work to do before the idea is coherent enough to move forward with.) (Bad sentence, but you get my drift.)

Mind you: I’m not complaining. I always thought nirvana would consist of being able to sit in a room and read, write, and think all day long.

I’m living nirvana.

The downside is that because I’m reading, digesting, and thinking, I don’t have a lot to say. Yet. So: radio silence here at the blog.

So: Onward. I’ve written two longish essays that will end up here at the blog, one about GMOs and scientific authority, and one about Food Basics, 101. As soon as I feel those make enough sense to  contribute something worthwhile to the human endeavor, I’ll be posting them.

Bottom line: Do not fear. Ranting and rambling will commence soon.

"Blessay"? "Translations of Expertise"? "Blogging For Intent" You Be The Judge

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The problem with stalling around waiting for an editor to come back with comments so I can revise the manuscript so we can push forward to publication is that my brain has time on its hands. (CAN a brain have hands?) Which means I'm thinking about not just this and that, but the other, too. To whit: I read an essay the other day written by Dan Cohen, a historian whose area of expertise is the "digital humanties." (No, I'm not gonna  explain. Ask ten people, and you'll get ten different explanations of what that is and does. Google it. Or Bing it. Or whatever.)

Cohen, suggested using the term "blessay" to identify a particular form of "new" writing: The blog essay that is relatively short, and both expertise- and idea-driven. An essay that's not just a short "here's what I had for dinner" blog entry, but also not a five- to thirty-thousand word essay weighted with footnotes and written for a peer-reviewed or for a traditional publication (like The New Yorker). An essay written for "an intelligent general audience." (Nope. Can't explain that either.)

His essay prompted a Twitter-based debate and quite a few comments at Cohen's blog. I missed the debate (and only came across the essay after the fact on my Google reader feed) so I had to do some backtracking to find said Twitter-debate.

What I found intriguing, however, was that the discussants quickly shifted from the merits of Cohen's term of choice to a discussion of the audience for "blessays."  For whom are such blessays intended? (Other than "an intelligent general audience"?

One Tweeterer (I'm waiting for someone to tell me that's the wrong term to use) suggested that the audience is

 para-academic, post-collegiate white-collar workers and artists, with occasional breakthroughs either all the way to a ‘high academic’ or to a ‘mass culture’ audience.”

To which I mentally replied: Ugh.

(I hasten to add that the people who were responding via Twitter to Dan's essay were all people I "follow." They're all WAY smarter than I am, and way more educated than I am [not, frankly, that either of those states is hard to achieve].)

Others chimed in to say that such essays were similar to the work created by "public intellectuals" back when there were still such things (there are still), back, say, in the mid-20th century. And one person wondered:

 Do academics who blogs get readers from outside? (not so much big but wide audience)

To which I thought "Hmmmm."

So where am I going with this? (Bear with me; I'm thinking on the fly.)

A large chunk of what appears on THIS on this "blog" are precisely the kind of essays that Cohen suggests naming "blessays": I use my particular form of expertise (I'm a historian) to comment on what teachers back in the old day called "current events": I discuss Events of the Day by framing them in a larger historical context. (Sometimes I also describe/talk about my work as I do it, to give readers a look behind the scenes of how historians "do history.")

I write "blessays" in part because doing so helps me think about my own work, but also because I'm aware that, in general, Americans don't much care for history, and who can blame them? (Read: the teaching of history, like the teaching of most subjects, is done badly if at all.) So my general goal in blogging is to "do" history in real time, if you will.

Who is my audience? Anyone who comes strolling past. I don't care if the reader is "intelligent," a "para-academic," an "artist," or works in a "white-collar" job. I don't care if the reader collects garbage, collects debts, or collects comic books. I don't care if the reader is from the "outside" world, wherever that may be, or the inside one.

All I care about is communicating the complexity of the human experience to ordinary folks like myself. That means I intentionally structure my blessays to be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.

After all, the truly amazing and wonderful aspect of the web (and of software/platforms that have made "blogging" so simple and accessible) is that our potential audience is everyone, and so we need not limit our content for a specific audience.

Can we (self) impose limits to our intended audience? Aim the content for a specific slice of possible readership (eg, "para-academics," and no, I don't know what that is or means. I'll look it up when I'm finished.) Of course!

But slapping a label on the scholar-who-uses-blogging-as-a-way-to-communicate-with-a-general-audience strikes me as defeating the purpose of the scholar-driven blog. If we wanted to aim at "intellectuals," middle brow or otherwise, well, hell, we can all just write conventionally (on paper) and send said writing off to someplace like The Atlantic or The New Yorker and hope the editors there will take the piece.

So:  it's the big, 'ol high-middle-low brow audience for me and my decidedly low-brow form of scholarship. But if no one minds, I think I'll just stick with "blogging."

I Always Loved The Part I Didn't Hate

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There's apparently a theme circling 'round this blog these days, much to my surprise (by this particular theme, I mean). This is first hilarious, and then not, and then rueful and wise. I'm glad (and lucky) that I never hated the part I love most. (Well, except when it won't cooperate, but that's what makes it interesting).

The gist:

But I secretly drew a line in the sand at Twitter. Most prostitutes have their boundaries, and for me tweeting was the one act so degrading I had to quietly take it off the table.

Most writers are closet exhibitionists, shameless only on paper, and having to perform and promote themselves is a kind of mild custom-designed torture . . .

I learned the meaning of the German word “sitzfleisch” — literally, the ability to sit, to spend serious time at something, devote your sustained attention to a single subject for four, six or eight hours, and resist the impulse to get up and take a break or check e-mail when you get fidgety or bored. I became a more disciplined person than I’d ever imagined I could be.

When you’re doing any kind of serious work, one of the most hazardous distractions you have to figure out how to ignore is the interference field of hope and anxiety associated with the results of that work, its imaginary payoff.

The part you hated was your favorite part.

All true ---. Glad he wrote it. Glad I read it. And damn! I'm STILL the luckiest person in the world.

Dumbass Comment of the Week (If Not the Year); Or When Business Isn't

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Oh, boy. Just ran across this while reading a blog entry by a self-publishing maven.

Most agents, especially those in very large firms, no longer represent authors. Those agents represent themselves, and exist to make money off writers. It’s that simple, and that disillusioning.

Uh, duh? And: WTF? OF COURSE agents exist to make money off writers (and athletes and actors and artists). OF COURSE they do. They're in BUSINESS. What the fuck? Does this person think agents (of any kind) are in business to "help" someone? Uh, no. They're in business to make MONEY.

(I should add that the article from which I took this inane quote is otherwise quite good: smart, detailed, solid. Which makes the inanity of the quote even more, well, inane.)

Lately I've been thinking about "business" in a general sense (all toward pondering my next book). I keep being surprised by how many people-in-business ascribe "noble" motives to various kinds of business people --- while not failing to ascribe those same motives to themselves or to their employers.

Eg, agents are there to represent authors, but not to make money. But self-publishing authors are there to make money. Craft brewers are supposed to represent the noble art and craft of making "artisan" beer, but the beer-drinkers who get pissed when those same craft brewers expand in order to make money are themselves interested in earning money from their own jobs or businesses.

Weird.