HI-
Doug Harter reports that the Xanth Character database has been updated through #45 A Tryst of Fate. In my senescence I don’t keep properly up with such listings, and depend on the excellent volunteer labor of fans like him. Xanth has so many characters now that I have to use the database myself to identify ones I’ve forgotten.
Lawrence Millman, a contributing editor of the magazine FUNGI, has been interviewing me for an article. His attention was attracted by my novel Omnivore, which features the manta, an alien species representing the third kingdom in the form of advanced slime mold which resembles Earth’s variety in the manner the human being resembles an amoeba. That is, slightly more advanced. There is the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, and the fungus kingdom, and perhaps others like the bacteria and viruses. Here on Earth we see only the more primitive forms of life, but the manta are advanced mobile one footed sapient creatures who vaguely resemble the ocean manta ray of Earth. But they run on land or water, seeming to float. Therein lies a story, which you can read in the novel. Lawrence wondered how I came to orient on the fungi. Well, my grandfather Edward H Jacob was known in the 1920s as The Mushroom King, because of the success of the Jacob Mushroom brand of edible mushrooms he started. He sold out his business two weeks before the Crash of 1929. I’m not sure whether he was astute or lucky. At any rate, his fortune paid for much of the education of his children and grandchildren, including me. So I felt I owed something to mushrooms, and gave them a place in my novel.
FUNGI magazine is impressive. You might in your ignorance suppose it would be dull and slimy, but this is hardly the case. The Fall 2021 issue has informed articles about the subject, and beautiful pictures. Earth may be backward compared to the planet of the manta, but there’s, well, a whole kingdom there to admire. Some fungi look like flowers, which actually they are, in their fashion. That is, flowers are the naked reproductive organs of plants that the purists for some reason don’t freak out about, and most of the mushrooms we see are actually the fruiting organs of the greater masses underground. Unlike plants, they can grow without light. There are pages of spectacular fungi, some the familiar toadstools, others like colonies of, well fungi. Some are like colorful paintings. The cover features Threats to Fungi (and all Life). Indeed, the fungi are a rich part of life on our planet, and what might wipe them out would surely wipe out the other forms. I, for one, suspect that fungi could represent the salvation of the world by providing versatile food emulating the meat and potatoes we currently eat, without savaging nature or cruelly sacrificing innocent animals. So yes, we should pay more attention to the third kingdom. There are recipes, and articles, among them one indicating that Covid-19 makes some patients more vulnerable to fungal infections. Another suggests that fungi could be the answer to the problem of accumulating waste plastics. So there’s plenty here of interest to those who care about their own health and that of the world. I don’t find a website, but there’s an ad for fungimag.com/store to check the book Amanitas of North America. Maybe the site before /store is it.
The Equedia Letter keeps coming. I never subscribed to it, and am cynical about both its competence and its ultimate purpose, as I tend leftist while it tends rightist, but there are items of interest. For example, the issue for November 28, 2021, explores the bypaths of the Federal Reserve, otherwise known as the Fed, whose mission is to ensure price stability, holding inflation to two percent, and to enable the highest feasible rate of employment. Equedia views this with suspicion, saying that those who opposed it, like Lincoln and Kennedy, got assassinated. Maybe, but the implication is suspect. It is like saying that if you burp, the sun will rise tomorrow. True, but not cause and effect. So read with caution; implication is not fact. Congress wanted financial stability, so created the Fed in 1913, and it has had its impact ever since, doing its best to maintain a level field. There seem to be those who don’t like that.
Nicholas Young and I completed the collaborative novel Deep Well at 45,000 words and it is now being marketed. Its thesis is that geothermal power is the most feasible present answer to the devastation being caused by the use of fossil fuels, which includes global warming that is disrupting plant and animal cycles, and the rise of the oceans. Literally saving the world. I hope we succeed. I will be starting Xanth #48, Three Ugly Nymphs, soon, escaping for a while into the frivolous realm of fantasy. Meanwhile the huge nonfiction book Hilltop Farm, by Piers Anthony Jacob and Teresa Jacob Engeman, brother and sister, is being self published at last. We tried over a hundred traditional publishers, literally, and none wanted it, but we feel it deserves to be made available for readers whose interest goes beyond who fights or sleeps or laughs with whom. It consists mainly of the wide correspondence of Alfred and Norma Jacob, 1941 – 1945, as they set up a pacifist back-to-the-earth communal farm. In the background was the idea that World War II was apt to destroy civilization – that might indeed have happened if Nazi Germany had gotten the atomic bomb before America did – and the world would revert to barbarism. Trained, informed people would be needed to bring survival skills like farming and animal husbandry back. So Hilltop Farm was somewhat isolated from the mundane realm, but it was for the purpose of preserving the best of society from destruction. Fortunately civilization did not collapse, but unfortunately inner tensions caused the project to collapse. Today, over three quarters of a century later, only two participants survive: the children, now octogenarians. We really did not contribute at the time, but we remember. If the perils of Utopian dreams interests you, do a search for Hilltop Farm. It’s a big, beautiful book, and there are truths there you won’t find in funny fantasy.
More than two years have now passed since my long term wife Carol Ann Marble, Cam to her friends, died. I am happily remarried to MaryLee, and life with her is hardly dull, but I do still miss Cam as I encounter her things around the house and handle the myriad catalogs and solicitations that still come to her name. Also the endless email she used to process. They say you don’t get over such grief; you learn to live with it. That’s true for me. Sometimes I wonder what Cam would have thought of the Covid-19 pandemic, the January 6 attempted insurrection, and the general state of the world. Perhaps her departure was well timed, sparing her those.
THE WEEK for September 24 had an article on abortion: is the end of Roe v. Wade coming? So-called conservatives have stacked the Supreme Court, and there is an abortion case coming. I don’t like abortions, having suffered the loss of our first three babies technically by abortion though it was never our choice. There was a septum in her uterus that forced premature expulsion. I never liked the notion of a living human being of any age being killed. But the antiabortionists don’t seem to care about the welfare of the babies, only punishing the mothers for the sin of having sex, though of course they don’t put it that way. I approve contraception; they generally don’t. I approve providing monetary assistance for impoverished mothers; they don’t. Forbidding abortion doesn’t stop it, it just sends the desperate mothers to the illegal providers, with a high rate of maternal death. So stifling legal abortions makes sense only as punishment. The story is that the anc>ient> Hebrews discovered that they were losing believers to the neighboring temples that offered free sex with luscious priestesses to converts. Hard to compete with that! So they made sex itself a sin, and that carries through to today though they don’t admit it. It’s a religious ban, and doesn’t belong in a secular society. Newspaper column by Caitlin Myers says that restricting abortion access restricts women’s lives, with average child care costs of $10,400 per year for an infant. About one in four women will obtain an abortion in her lifetime. She concludes “Whatever one personally thinks about abortion, it is absurd to suggest Roe could be overturned without drastic consequences.” Ah, but sin must be punished, no? Especially when the woman is poor. This should be interesting and ugly as it plays out.
Dateless printout I discovered when cleaning up some of the piled papers that magically accumulate wherever I pause, like an endless snowfall. A poem by Chris Upward, “The Classic Concordance of Cacographic Chaos.” It starts “Dearest creature in creation/ Studying English pronunciation,/ I will teach you in my verse/ Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.” As you can appreciate if you speak English, those four similar spellings have four different pronunciations. It continues for over five pages of examples. “Does” has an asterisk saying “No, you’re wrong. This is the plural of doe.” The long poem concludes “Finally, which rhymes with enough, Though, through, bough, cough, hough, sough, tough?? My advice is: GIVE IT UP!”
Letter received without a return address on the envelope, only the words TIME SENSITIVE: RESPONSE REQUESTED IN 7 DAYS. Those are not good signs. Sure enough, it was a push poll, the kind designed to use prejudicial language to evoke particular answers so they can claim that most respondents agree with their stance. So here is a sampling, together with my push poll reactions. Question #1. “Have you seen the impact of Joe Biden’s inflationary policies on the price of gas, food, housing, or other goods and services in your area?” I remember when Barack Obama came in and spent big money to pull the country out of the abyss it was plunging into because of Republican mismanagement, and of course the Republicans blamed him for the crisis they had caused. Now President Biden is trying to save the country from the disastrous Trump mismanagement, and getting blamed. Question #2. “Do you believe the liberals defied science and went too far locking down many parts of America and killing jobs during the pandemic?” Oh, you mean the pandemic that Trump loosed upon the country by pretending it was fake news, so that it was infinitely more widespread and deadly than it should have been? And you still object to measures to diminish it? Question #3. “Do you support the radical Left’s efforts to bring Big-Government Socialism to America?” You mean the trillion dollar bills to create jobs and repair our deteriorating infrastructure, thus benefiting the common man? That effort really gags you, doesn’t it. And so on. Question #14. “Do you support Republican priorities including free markets, individual liberty, fair trade agreements, job creation, a strong military, and secure borders?” Oh, like drastically cutting taxes on the rich, or taking away the children of families fleeing persecution in their own countries? The “Survey” concludes of course with a solicitation for $3,000 or less. No, I did not fill it out, suspecting that my response would be burned before reading. I’m a liberal immigrant who identifies with the lowly common man, in case you haven’t yet caught on.
Now clippings, then back magazines, a related region. Newspaper item on a local woman who entered a residence, took off her clothes, and proceeded to hug, grab and sit on the laps of the men there. She refused to stop, and got arrested. Sigh; too bad they didn’t have a news camera there, so we could all see it and judge her mental state for ourselves. Newspaper headline “How to avoid buying a house that might be haunted.” One indication is if a death occurred there. My wife Cam died here, so maybe this house is haunted. I love ghosts, but I have no belief in them. The Hightower Lowdown for November 2021 remarks on cultured meat. Not the plant based variety, but the lab grown stuff deriving from actually living cells. I admit that that makes me queasy. I’m a vegetarian verging on vegan, and meat from living but non-sentient flesh is ugly borderline. Sure, no live cows are carcassed, but… The same issue introduces me to a new word: monopsony. That looks like a typo for monopoly, but it’s sort of the reverse. Monopoly is the control of the sale of products by a very few corporations; monopsony is the control of the purchasing of products or services offered by many, like the way many farmers have very limited markets. Neither situation is much good for the welfare of the common man. More from the box of Oatly oat milk: “Another side of our packaging providing no reason at all why you should try this product.” I disagree; their humor is a reason. They do seem like my kind of folk, meatless and halfway mad. From THE WEEK: the Justice Department is suing to stop the publishing merger of Penguin Random House acquiring Simon & Schuster for $2.18 billion. That makes sense to me, as a writer, though I have real respect for Penguin Random House, having worked with them as a writer and an investor in the early self publisher Xlibris. The income of the average professional writer is at poverty level, because publishers have the leverage. I escaped that, but mainly by luck; the system itself is ugly. The arts, including writing, are largely controlled by the mercenary interests, an ill state for creativity. Also THE WEEK: the Delta variant of Covid-19 is sinking hopes for a quick economic recovery. Yes, and now there is another variant spreading, OmiGod, um, I mean omicron, and we don’t yet know if the existing vaccines cover it, but there is doubt. Cute cartoon in the newspaper showing the baby next year arriving, in the form of a little death skeleton with a scythe labeled omicron. There’s a new kind of house arriving at Citrus County, and I assume elsewhere: the container home. You know the shipping containers they use for national and international goods? Put two of them together to make a residential house at maybe half the price. Looks somewhat like a house trailer, outside and inside, not beautiful, but practical. I understand the average family can no longer afford the price of an average house. Maybe this can ameliorate that. Question in NEW SCIENTIST: How does a photon know to travel at the speed of light? Answers vary, but one is that since the photon is light, it travels at its own speed. Another is that what we call a photon is actually an interaction of magnetic fields. Between those interactions, photons don’t exist. Which makes me wonder how a nonexistent thing can travel. Comment in THE WEEK that as gas prices rise, electric vehicles become more appealing. Indeed; at such time as recharging stations are common, I’ll be really interested. SCIENCE NEWS ponders the demotion of Pluto as a planet. Yes, it orbits the sun, it has several moons, it has weather of a sort; what more is needed? Of course I am biased in favor of P planets, aligning with my first name. THE WEEK remarks on the new James Webb Space Telescope will be a hundred times as powerful as the Hubble. It will peer at the edge of the universe. I really look forward to what it will show. THE WEEK also says that in 1909 the top ten percent owned 60 percent of the country’s wealth. Now it owns 70 percent. Any attempt to make the rich pay more is stifled in Congress. Is anyone surprised? Money talks, politically. PARADE says that people who exercise regularly usually sleep well. Yes, I do, and do. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a 10,000 mile wide storm the planet Earth could fit into, is between 200 and 300 miles deep. That’s actually pretty shallow. Imagine a puddle 10 feet across and three inches deep. That’s the shape of it. Iceland is getting serious about scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere. But to do the whole job would cost five trillion dollars a year. You’d have to burn a lot of coal to finance that effort. Better simply to cut carbon emissions, via conversion to geothermal power. What is a metaverse? NEW SCIENTIST says it’s a shared online space that incorporates 3D graphics, either on a screen or in virtual reality. Now there is a metaverse called OASIS. This promises to be entertaining, as technology advances to enable it. I fear I would be a sucker for it, and my writing would suffer. I’m sure I’ll like Star Trek: Lower Decks at such time as I catch up with it, too. NEW SCIENTIST also had a feature on what the world will look like when we’ve taken the steps needed to limit global warming. This is set in the year 2050. It predicts a big shift toward plant-based diets, but not quite vegan. Which is exactly where I am now. That may be just as well, as I’m not sure I will live to 2050. I’d be 116 years old. And one on consciousness, one of my buttons. “Without it, there is no world, no self, no interior and no exterior. There is nothing at all.” But the article doesn’t really define consciousness. Ever thus. It seems that telling the truth can be a firing offense. A Georgetown University law professor was terminated for musing out loud that many of her Black students tended to have the lowest grades, not the only one let go. Such folk get attacked as racist for saying the obvious. Maybe that’s easier than tackling the problem of inferior treatment of Blacks throughout so that they are ill prepared to compete with privileged whites. I’m white, but I got a good taste of second class treatment in schools, being a foreigner learning the American culture, and poor, thus excluded from the rich kid perquisites. I did not shine in school, but did enormously better when I got free of that system, as some may have noticed. A letter in the newspaper recommends the Fair Tax system. That’s a new one to me. I tend to favor the Flat Tax, which requires everyone, rich and poor, to pay the same rate, but maybe the Fair Tax, which is not an income tax but a consumption tax, is better. I will ponder. A new video, the Tampa Baes, is an unscripted documentary about twelve local lesbians. As a heterosexual male I like their look and wish them well; they are as entitled to their orientation as I am to mine. After all, we both like the look and feel of women. But one caution: I understand the word “bae” is Danish for poop. Yet in my day poop was also a word for truth, to get the real poop. A different slant: in the Dear Abby column for 10-13-2021 a Scotsman who often wore the traditional skirt-like kilt had complications. Women would lift his kilt, exposing him. Some would scream with glee and become physically aggressive with their hands. Once one ripped off the kilt, and the police were going to charge him with indecent exposure. What? I trust that the Baes would agree with me that this was wrong. Women don’t like men ripping off their clothing; they should return the favor. The State of Florida seems to have a poor notion of the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech. When Florida restricted the right of minorities, seniors, and the poor to vote, the League of Women Voters sued. Three University of Florida professors were going to testify as expert witnesses, but the University forbade it. What? There’s going to be a reckoning. Florida was still part of America the last I heard. Let’s act like it. Climate change: I learned from a newspaper article that peat when burned is a bad polluter. It stores as much as 30% of all the carbon locked in the soil, and burning releases it. Leave it in the bog! The Annie offers advice column for August 5, 2021 (yes, it must have gotten lost in my papers for a while) remarks on a useful word, “Frenemy.” That’s when a persona who is supposedly your friend torpedoes you in public. “Wow! You have a big nose.” This is called shaming, and it is a form of bullying. I am agnostic, but I would say that your nose is the size God made it. I believe Jesus would agree.
I mentioned before that I read educational magazines, but distractions following the death of my first wife Carol caused me to get about 50 magazines behind. Now I am working on that backlog, and have cut it down to about 20. I have set myself the task of getting it down to zero before I start writing my next Xanth novel. This is my discipline; unlike other writers, I don’t have to force myself to write, I have to force myself to NOT write in order to do other necessary things. They are all good magazines, or I would not subscribe to them. Here is some comment on what I am finding there.
One is FREE INQUIRY, representing the secular, that is, nonreligious side of Humanism. “We are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems.” “We are committed to the separation of church and state.” “We respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfill their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health care, and to die with dignity.” “We believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility.” “We are deeply concerned with the moral education of our children. We want to nourish reason and compassion.” “We are engaged to the arts no less than by the sciences.” There is more, but this provides a basis that indicates why I, as an artist with words with an active interest in science, am a humanist. Also: “For many, mere atheism (the absence of belief in gods and the supernatural) or agnosticism (the view that such questions cannot be answered) aren’t enough. It’s liberating to recognize that supernatural beings are human creations … that there’s no such thing as ‘spirit’ or transcendence’ … that people are undesigned, unintended, and responsible for themselves. But what’s next?” “Secular. Pertaining to the world or things not spiritual or sacred.” “Humanism. Any system of thought or action concerned with the interests or ideals of people. … the intellectual and cultural movement … characterized by an emphasis on human interests rather than … religion.” Again, there is more, but you get the idea.
Another is The HUMANIST. “Humanism is a rational philosophy informed by science, guided by reason, inspired by art, and motivated by compassion.” I love science and reason and the arts, and yes, I believe we should practice compassion. I tend more to secular humanism because I am not religious, but I do not condemn religion. I was after all married for 63 years to a Unitarian-Universalist minister’s daughter. Another is THE PROGRESSIVE, a leftist magazine, celebrating 111 years of continuous publication. The February/March 2020 issue says to prepare for the upcoming civil war. Yes, in the intervening time we have been seeing it, as the rightists try valiantly to destroy democracy. Articles here are titled “Pass Medicare for all – and More” “Build a Fairer Economy” “Build Infrastructure for the Future” “Hold Wall Street Accountable” with a picture of a girl blocking the way of a charging bull; I’m a bit concerned for her welfare. “Take on Corporate Power in Agriculture” “Push for Racial Justice Beyond Race Alone” and “Protect and Empower the LGBTQ Community.” Generally in my ballpark.
I ran out of time before really getting into the magazines. Ever thus. But as you should be able to see, there is real substance there. Some of their articles I found mind shaking. I will cover them next time, if the world doesn’t spin out of place. Meanwhile my life proceeds in its petty pace. For example, I was driving out to fetch mail and close the gate when there was a bump! as if the car had hit a passing stone. I stopped and walked back to assess the damage, if any, but there was nothing. Then I saw a deer lying on its side in the adjacent brush, kicking its legs. Uh-oh; it must have been spooked and jumped in the wrong direction as the car passed, colliding with it near the back. I hoped the deer was merely fallen and not hurt. So I resumed driving, praying that when I returned a few minutes later the deer would be safely gone. And to my huge relief, it was.
