Lord give me the serenity…

For a while there were numerous articles on a phenomenon that the press labeled “quiet quitting.” (Why am I convinced that term was generated by management and not workers?) If you read these articles, there really isn’t any “quitting” involved; people are still perfectly willing to do their jobs, no matter how crappy. What they’re not willing to do is extra, unpaid work that is outside of the scope of their job. They’re not willing to do work before clocking in; they’re not willing to take on extra responsibility without being recognized for it (preferably with a promotion); they’re not willing to work extra shifts when they’re ill, and especially not feeling as if they have to be on the hook to find someone to cover their shifts when ill (that’s what you’re getting paid for, managers).

And this is being called “quiet quitting.”

When I started work in earnest after I got my degree in computer science at 22, I had been working in the service industry for 7 years. I had put myself through college with service jobs; kept myself fed and clothed with service jobs; and was acutely aware of just how many employers tried to abuse their power in squeezing more work out of you for free. (In fact, I think everyone should be required to work in—and live off the pay of—hourly service jobs for at least a year before they take on a non-service job. And anyone getting an MBA should have to put in an additional year.)

My first day on the job in high tech, one of my coworkers, as part of his training, told me, “Well, we’re scheduled to work 8 hours/day, but you’ll get lots of overtime.” And I thought, “Yeah, no way.” And then and there I came up with three rules for my work-life balance that I have stayed with to this day:

1. No overtime
2. No working lunches
3. No trade magazines on my free time

(I think the implementation of “brown-bag lunches”, where execs schedule a talk during lunch time and strongly hint you should give up your lunchtime to attend, is yet another example of management trying to squeeze workers. My lunchtime in mine; you want my attention, you go ahead and pay me for it.)

Word, Agent Sully

Now yes, I have occasionally broken those rules in extremis. I’ve attended working lunches, mostly for political reasons (ie to make my team look good in front of an executive). I’ve read some articles in trade magazines, but almost always on company time. And while I have sometimes stayed late or worked weekends because of the press of events, it is extremely rare.

Plenty of people have told me over the last 35+ years that I was limiting myself by being so stringent; that I would get poor performance reviews, wouldn’t get promoted, wouldn’t get bonuses, etc. And that’s turned out to be nonsense; not only have I gotten raises, promotions, bonuses, and accolades, I have regularly been tagged as a top performer. I’m not saying this to brag; I’m pointing out you can have a good work-life balance and do solid work that gets appreciated.

What aggravates me with the current situation is this: Workers finally have some leverage with business, and business is whining that they’re using that power to demand a reasonable work-life balance. And I’m actually thrilled that Millennials and GenZers are fighting back against the soul-sucking demands of pushy, fascistic, out-of-control managers. That the workforce is saying, “Enough!” is nothing but healthy, in my opinion.

I want to make clear that I don’t believe all management are pushy, fascistic, and out-of-control. But far too many, especially in service jobs, absolutely are. (Read any story about Elon Musk for examples.) You have all read the stories about Amazon drivers urinating in bottles, and factory fulfillment people being monitored by the second. Or Walmart workers forced to do work off the clock. Restaurant workers made to feel guilty for not coming in and working while sick. That’s absurd. It shouldn’t be borne. And I’m glad to see fewer and fewer people are accepting it. Because you don’t have to.

So those are my three rules. What are yours? And how have they worked out for you?

The wisdom of Stephen King

I turn 60 this year. And like plenty of folks my age (and most of my friends), my body is doing its best to betray me by falling apart and attempting to cripple me with various maladies.

The first warning of this—well, “decline” is the only word that fits—was when I was 36, the same year my dad died (at only 63, of prostate cancer). I have read that many people of a physical/athletic bent experience an injury sometime in their 30s that marks the changeover from young to “guess I’m starting to get old.” For me, it was when I was skeet-shooting with my Pop (my father-in-law, this is), and I blew out a disk in my neck. The subsequent massive pain was almost unbelievable, and forced me to get the disk removed and two vertebrae clamped in place.

And consigned me to chronic neck pain for the rest of my life. Not to mention robbing me of feeling in two of my left fingers.

When your doctor tells you, “You shouldn’t lift anything heavier than a half-gallon of milk” (thought the doctor in Texas changed this to “a six pack of beer”), it gets your attention. When you ask if you can continue to ski and are told, “Well, sure, if you don’t mind risking permanent paralysis,” it focuses the mind. Yup.

And of course that accelerated in my 40s and 50s, as it tends to do. My neck is curving under the influence of gravity and my injury. I have “essential tremors”. Almost exactly two and a half years ago, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. A year ago I had bilateral pulmonary embolisms (“blood clots in the lungs” to you, my friend). Late last year, my eye doctor notified me I have cataracts (“But not bad enough for insurance to pay for surgery,” she said helpfully). My knees have been a tragic wreck since a soccer injury at 17. And so it goes.

And you know what? Fuck it. Get busy living, or get busy dying.

It would be spectacularly easy to give in to these various maladies and setbacks and just declare defeat, as my ex seemingly has done after her stroke. But that is just not me. I hurt. I fucking ache all the time, to be perfectly frank. AND I DON’T CARE. Ima live life anyway.

I mean, of course I “care”. I see my doctors; I get scans; I take blood pressure meds, and blood thinning meds, and cholesterol meds, and god knows what else is in my pill organizer. I try to follow my doctors’ advice (which is hard, because sometimes it conflicts). I go in for regular appointments and checkups and get the tests they say I need—at least to the point where insurance and money won’t pay. I’m not stupid.

But Ima live my life, dammit.

Time of your life, eh kid?

I can’t play soccer, or ultimate frisbee, or even swim or play frisbee golf? To heck with it; I’ll learn how to dance! I can’t see my besties regularly because they are scattered all over the durn place? To heck with it; I’ll schedule regular Zoom DnD sessions with them so we can hang like we used to in college!

Yes, I’m pushing 60 (quite hard), and yes my body can’t do what it used to, and yes, I face certain physical limitations.

I’m going to get busy living. What about you?

Hardison gets it

When I was a kid, I loved a few things that made me a profound outcast:

• Comic books
• Science fiction
• Star Trek
• Musicals
• Animation

I cannot overemphasize just how unpopular and/or denigrated nearly all those things were when I was living my best GenX life. Comic books were particularly looked down upon, but there was plenty of opprobrium left over for Star Trek, science fiction, and what these days they call anime and in my experience was limited to Speed Racer, Astro Boy, and the like. (And yes, I had plenty of love for Warner Brothers, Rankin-Bass, Jay Ward, and others too.)

It was tolerated in children, but you were supposed to grow out of it and start reading, I dunno, Dickens and watching Shakespeare. (I like Shakespeare, too; I was a weird kid.) Comic books were very much “trash culture”, not something you read in any kind of serious way. And watching science fiction on TV? C’mon, man.

(How this attitude squared with grown adults painting their faces green or wearing giant cheese wedges on their head to cheer on men giving each other concussions for their entertainment being acceptable I’ve never fully understood, but let’s just move on.)

Through my childhood, teens, and 20s, I mostly nursed these loves quietly and at the constant risk of disdain. If a girlfriend caught me reading a Heinlein juvenile or, God save us, an X-Men comic book, or waiting on line to go see Star Trek: The Motion Picture, oof, it could bring up issues. It wasn’t manly, that’s for sure.

Luckily, I ended up at UC Santa Cruz, a veritable hothouse of weird, and frankly I fit right in. I found friends who were equally weird, who also enjoyed some or all of these things, with whom I could talk, exchange recommendations, play video games (and foosball), and yes, smoke weed and drink. (Although I was never much of a drinker, truth to tell.)

In the 70s and 80s, there was, to put it mildly, a dearth of science fiction films. Yes, Star Wars—more of a space western, or possibly a space fantasy, than actual science fiction—opened the door. But for every Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Empire Strikes Back, there were 20 films like Saturn 3 or (God save us) Moonraker. Even a wonderful film like Superman (1978) had plenty of camp, harking back to the that classic, the 1960s “Batman” TV show.

Valerie Perrine asking why she “can’t get it on with the good guys.” Seriously.

Don’t get me wrong; I enjoyed it all and was happy to take what I could get. I could even now happily lecture you on why Saturn 3 isn’t nearly as bad as you think (Harvey Keitel!). I won’t go all the way into the tank and say Superman: The Quest for Peace was a good film, but still; when you’re in a cultural-enjoyment minority, you really do eat what’s set before you.

All this generational nostalgia is a long prelude to the main point, to wit: I am absolutely staggered that all of the stuff that I was looked-down upon for when I was younger is now a major part of the culture.

Until 1982, there were three seasons of Star Trek, a one-season run of a cartoon version, and a single, critically-panned film. (“Star Trek: The motionless picture,” Harlan Ellison famously called it.) Now there are nearly 900 episodes of TV shows spanning 44 television seasons. There are five shows in active development. There have been 13 films. One Captain of the Enterprise has received a knighthood, for cryin’ out loud! The theme song is so iconic it only needs to be used sparingly in the various properties to evoke emotion in the massive fanbase. It’s as pervasive to the culture now as Westerns were (so I’m told) in the 50s and 60s.

And of course while science fiction is still often treated as the bastard stepchild of literature (and goodness, what they do say about sub-genres like Steampunk!), there’s simply no question that big budged science fiction films are treated as Serious Art by actual living, breathing critics. Directors like Denis Villenueve, Christopher Nolan, Doug Liman, and Alex Garland have made entire careers by creating high-quality science fiction films that people treat with reverence. Films like Inception, Arrival, Live Die Repeat, and Ex Machina not only receive praise, they show the deep ideas science fiction can address, and are sometimes credited with changing people’s perceptions of what film can do.

This film was a mind-bender, and catnip to a hardcore SF fan

A similar phenomenon has happened with comic books. Frank Miller and Alan Moore pushed the bounds of what could be done with the form. (And of course they built on the work of the people so famous it would almost insult your intelligence to mention them, but I will so as to not let people think I believe comics weren’t invented until 1980 or something: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Will Eisner, Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Steve Ditko, the immortal [and criminally-used] Joe Shuster and Gary Siegel, and many others from the “Golden” and “Silver” ages of comics. Too numerous to list, so I ask forgiveness from fans of, say, Mike Grell, or John Byrne, or whoever.) The outburst of creativity in the 80s was astounding.

Like science fiction, though, this didn’t necessarily lead to a wide acceptance of the medium, but it did help energize creators to take chances on comic book films. Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, of course, as well as Sam Raimi’s trilogy of Spider-Man films, as well as the (sometimes messy) early X-Men films. And now of course the massive Marvel Comics Universe and the big-budget DC films, employing prestige directors like Christopher Nolan, Kenneth Branagh, and Ang Lee show that Hollywood, at least, is taking the source material seriously enough to bet millions on it.

(I could make a point at how many of these creators are GenXers, but I’ll let you look up their birthdays on your own.)

So I hope you can understand how the current culture looks to me, a person who furtively read his Spider-man and Legion of Super Hero comics furtively in his bedroom, hiding them under the bed. It’s quite a mind-bender. It truly is the Age of the Geek. And horrible capitalist wealth disparities aside, quite frankly I love it.

Let’s face it: The most handsome iteration

I started reading before I started school, and have been an avid reader ever since. I very much enjoy rereading my favorites both from childhood (eg Louisa May Alcott or Johanna Spry) and my teen and young adult years (an inordinate amount of science fiction and some fantasy). I suppose I’m not much different from a lot of habitual readers in that; it’s not unlike rewatching favorite films or TV shows. It’s just something readers do.

It is a trope that people—men in particular—get more “conservative” as they age. (The scare quotes are because the terms “conservative” and “liberal” have been so abused in the last 30-40 years, and especially the last 20, as to have lost all meaning.) I don’t think that’s the case in general, which I addressed in another post, and it is absolutely not the case with me. I have only become more and more radicalized as I’ve aged, and as a proud Banana Slug and graduate of UC Santa Cruz, I started out pretty well out on the left to begin with.

I mention this because it figures into my reactions and perceptions as I reread fiction that I loved as a kid and young adult. Like everything else in the world, fiction seems to obey Sturgeon’s Law, and 95% of it is crap, and time is the filter that helps us determine what is crap, and what is Good Stuff™. And yet even some of the Good Stuff ™is, with the passage of time, changes to the world and society, and improved knowledge of history, at best problematic, and at worst…well, pretty bad. I want to take a few posts and examine some of my favorite reads in this light. Today, it’s Sherlock Holmes.

I’ll be blunt: I love Sherlock Holmes stories. I love the pastiches, the homages, the dramatizations. Despite his height, I thought Robert Downey, Jr’s portrayal was quite faithful to the spirit of Holmes. I was a huge early supporter of Benedict Cumberbatch’s modern take in the TV show “Sherlock”. I watched quite a few episodes of the show “Elementary”, although its police procedural nature eventually got tiresome to me. I was a massive fan of Tony Shalhoub’s “Monk”. And…well, you get the picture. I love Holmes in almost all of his forms.

I love Tony Shalhoub

Recently I went back and started rereading (and listening to Stephen Fry’s excellent audiobook version) the original stories again. Aside from the four “novels”—A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Valley of Fear (which are all pretty short by modern novel standards)—they’re short enough to read in one quick gulp. You get through them quite rapidly, if you have a mind.

And what I’ve found is it was sometimes quite hard to reread the stories with a modern, “3rd decade of the 21st Century” eye.

The racism woven throughout the stories is, of course, appalling. Interestingly to an American reader, hardly any of this is focused on people of African descent. I don’t know enough of British Victorian history to say whether this is because there simply weren’t a lot of Black Britons in those days, or that Doyle simply didn’t see Blacks as any different, or what. Indeed, Doyle has a story that is still surprisingly racially enlightened for its day, and was probably shocking in its time: “The Yellow Face.” If you haven’t read it, I don’t want to spoil it, but it is both delightful in it’s ending, and in how Doyle pokes racists right in the eye.

What I do know about Victorian attitudes is, if you weren’t European, you were inferior.

Indians, unsurprisingly, take the worst hit. They are ungrateful for Britain bringing them “civilization” (ignoring that India has been civilized an awfully long time before Europeans came marching in); they are back-stabbers; they are superstitious; and on and on. None of this is stated baldly—according to what I’ve read, Doyle was quite broad-minded…for his era. And therein lies the rub.

Koh-I-noor diamond, ripped off from India and inserted in the literal British crown

Related is the inherent imperialism that is clear throughout (and which Downey impishly referred to in his first Holmes film; “What a busy little Empire!”). Britons were of course unapologetically imperialist during the Victorian era, and Victorian England became one of the largest empires in the history of the world by the end of Victoria’s reign. And to a modern reader, knowing what we do about colonization, slavery, cultural repression, religious persecution, and on and on, eliding all the Imperial references in the Holmes stories can be…a bit difficult.

In my view the best example of this is the Andaman Island native Tonga in Sign of the Four. The nature of the language characters use to describe Tonga makes it quite clear he’s viewed as somewhere between a wild animal and a pet. He was “venomous as a young snake”; “he was devoted to me and would do anything to serve me”; “we earned a living at this time by my exhibiting poorTonga at fairs and other such places as the Black cannibal”; etc. It’s clear Mr. Small cares for Tonga; it’s equally clear he doesn’t consider him quite human.

And of course the sexism is pretty bad. Yes, Doyle created one of the great female characters of fiction in Irene Adler, who I adore. And yet even Irene makes her way through the world by…well, to put it bluntly, marrying up. One could reasonably argue that there simply weren’t that many options for advancement during the Victorian era—”You will inherit your fortune; we cannot even earn ours,” notes Elinor Dashwood in Sense & Sensibility, only a few decades prior to the Victorians—and I would not dispute it. I will simply point out the number of women who are said to be suffering from “brain fever” and other female-specific “maladies” is enough that practically make it an epidemic.

Then there’s the classism. Even today, the classism in the UK can be problematic; in the Victorian era, it was probably at its height, and most entrenched. All of the upper class are assumed to be “gentlemen”, while all the lower class are, almost by definition, suspect and sketchy. And before someone complains yes, I am well aware that Doyle sometimes turns this presumption on its head. This doesn’t change the baseline assumption that, if you are a member of the upper class, you are trustworthy unless proven otherwise, and if you are a member of the lower, suspicion falls on you immediately. This attitude tends to drag on me after too many pages.

They had classism diagrams, FFS

It should be said that Doyle does regularly subvert this trope by having Holmes work closely with “the lower classes”; boatmen, factory workers, boxers, and most famously the street urchins “the Baker Street Irregulars”. This is definitely to Doyle’s credit. And it still doesn’t change the entrenched classism displayed in the stories.

Very much related is the absolutely appalling state of working class. There’s no minimum wage, of course; no weekends off; very little job mobility. Servants can be dismissed by the nobility immediately and on a whim, regardless of years (or even decades and, in Hound of the Baskervilles, a full century!) of loyal service. This is bad enough, but in many cases this not only deprives the servants of their livelihood, but also their home, as many live with “the master”. And several times the nobleman threatens to give them bad references, dooming them to joblessness and homelessness for heaven’s knows how long. This is…well, it’s disgusting.

(And yup, I’m well aware we have similar problems today. At least we have weekends, overtime pay, healthcare, 40 hour work weeks, no child labor…I could go on, but you get the point.)

Finally, there is a terrible tendency for Holmes and Watson (and other “experts” with whom Holmes consults) to rely on what we know today to be pseudo-science. Phrenology—ie the idea that the shape of a person’s skull, face, the bumps on their head, etc.—is in my view the worst, but there are quite a few other examples. Assuming someone is a criminal just because they have a particular shape to their face is a terrible form of prejudice. This is especially ironic given Holmes is one of the very first “scientific detectives”.

Many would argue that we have to take into account the era in which Doyle wrote. Yes, we do; but the whole point of this post is that I’m reading it in my era, and we currently don’t believe a few bumps on the skull indicate criminal intent. Indeed, this kind of toxic thinking is part of the reason policing is still so informed by prejudice.

In conclusion I want to say that yes, I still love the Holmes stories, I always will, and I will no doubt reread them in the future. Which absolutely does not preclude me from noticing their many built-in prejudices.

Next: Mote in God’s Eye.