Stephen Chambers Blog

I'll Have Another

2012-05-07T18:47:00.000-07:00

So I haven't done much blogging recently. The Avengers was fantastic; I honestly do think Joss Whedon may be one of the smartest writers working today - he's certainly the most attuned to the what-have-you-zeitgeist of the moment.

Also, France has a socialist President, neo-Nazis may wind up winning lots of seats there very soon, and the far right (*cough*more neo-Nazis*cough*) are already gaining traction in Greece. You know what's a good idea? In the face of a financial crisis that requires the entire investing world to back you, let's elect someone who is determined to anger the entire financial world and who also plans to potentially change your currency and reorder your entire trade relationship with . . . you know what, it would make me more frustrated if it were surprising.

My horse didn't win at the Kentucky Derby. And by 'my horse' I mean the horses I randomly drew in our Derby pool, not the horse I would have bet on, if I had had the courage of my convictions and had bet on the horse that won, with an alcoholic-sounding name.

"Nazis... I hate these guys."

"There Are No Prodigies in Literature"

2012-04-01T07:31:00.004-07:00

I am not an enormous fan of Tom Robbins, but in today's New York Times, he makes an excellent point in relation to the recent upsurge in self-publishing (make that 'parent publishing') that has sprouted with precocious 14 year-olds and their novels:

“What’s next?” asked the novelist Tom Robbins. “Kiddie architects, juvenile dentists, 11-year-old rocket scientists? Any parent who thinks that the crafting of engrossing, meaningful, publishable fiction requires less talent and experience than designing a house, extracting a wisdom tooth, or supervising a lunar probe is, frankly, delusional.”
“There are no prodigies in literature,” Mr. Robbins said. “Literature requires experience, in a way that mathematics and music do not.”

Exactly.

I wrote lots when I was young; thankfully, most of it has been lost to the pre-internet era of floppy disks, etc. I was one of the 'prodigies' once upon a time too - way back when, my hometown newspaper even ran a big article about how amazing it was that I was publishing books. Thing is, those weren't self-published, and I was in college - not middle school.

I'm grumpy about most things publishing-related, but I'm also not surprised by this trend in self-publishing for kids. The real danger in the puffed-up egos of kids who have published without ever having earned it and their parents who all think they have a book to write - if only they had time from their busy jobs - the real danger is that some of those kids probably would have turned out to be good someday. But now, having seen their words 'in print' without ever having earned it, they're going to grow up thinking it's easy, thinking that writing for a living is just a matter of slapping words on paper and getting praise. You get better by having your writing broken down and getting knocked to the curb a few times - not by being rewarded with smiley faces and gold stars for rambling.

Which is why I don't like blogging. There should be a word for 'blog-as-constant-complaining'; maybe 'flog'? I'm flogging.

Hungry Hungary

2012-03-13T12:51:00.003-07:00

So I was remiss and didn't tell you why I like Drive and All About Steve, but I did get a nice note this morning, letting me know that Jane and the Raven King will be published in Hungary. It's also published in Turkey, but I have yet to see what it looks like in Turkish.

Other randomness: not long ago (a month or two maybe) I received a package of books I had written under another name - except they weren't in English. One was clearly French (with cartoons added here and there; the French love their graphic novels), and the other in a Scandinavian language I didn't recognize. I actually still don't know what it is. Long story, but basically I had no idea these books were being published in France and wherever else until I got the foreign copies in the mail.

C'est la vie.

Two Movies I Like: Drive and All About Steve

2012-02-13T09:57:00.000-08:00

That's right, I put the Ryan Gossling blood-drenched thriller Drive in the same sentence as the Sandra Bullock-vehicle All About Steve.

On Rottentomatoes, one has a 93% rating; the other clocks in at 6% (so together they are almost the perfect movie).

I'll explain why I like these movies in a bit. Consider this a teaser.

Top 10 Songs of 2011 - Why Did I Pick Them?

2012-01-14T08:11:00.001-08:00

So there you have it, my Top 10 Songs of 2011:

#10 Foster The People - Pumped Up Kicks

-An unexpected anthem of early 2011, this song has the rare kind of innocence you don't find too often in decent garage bands.

#9 The Lonely Island - Jack Sparrow

-Does this need an explanation? It's a perfect, bizarre lampoon that's a catchy song in its own right.

#8 Those Darlins - Be Your Bro

-Those Darlins Have a warm place in my heart for their unapologetic country-indie-Nashville sound.

#7 Pitbull - Give Me Everything

-Since listening to his Spanish-language pop albums, Pitbull has grown on me in spite of myself - it's probably the Cuban connection. His swagger is very genuine.

#6 The Strange Boys - Punk's Pajamas

-One of the best "indie bands" out there, The Strange Boys have a voice and a sound (harmonica and all) that makes them one of the most unique things to come out of Austin recently - and that's saying something.

#5 The Black Keys - Lonely Boy

-This song just rocks, and they get props for attracting millions of viewers to a video of a man dancing outside a motel.

#4 The Muppets - Life's A Happy Song

-Smart and sentimental, this song stays in your head long after it's over. Maybe the most memorable song of the year.

#3 Nicki Minaj - Super Bass

-Nicki Minaj is one of my guilty pleasures, and this song is one of her best. Listen to that cadence; she tears it up. Rhyming "polo" with "mogul"? Fantastic.

#2 Deer Tick - Main Street

-From my home base of Providence, these guys rock in a way that reminds me of 1970s Springsteen or somesuch. Some kinda raw energy that needs to be bottled.

#1 Beirut - East Harlem

-The most low-key, operatic of the bunch, East Harlem is Beirut being Beirut: they get under my skin in a way that rock, pop - all the rest of it - can't, precisely because the music is practically off on its own island.

Top 10 Songs of 2011 - #1

2012-01-14T08:09:00.000-08:00

Beirut - East Harlem

Top 10 Songs of 2011 - #2

2012-01-14T08:07:00.002-08:00

Deer Tick - Main Street

Top 10 Songs of 2011 - #3

2012-01-14T08:07:00.001-08:00

Nicki Minaj - Super Bass

Top 10 Songs of 2011 - #4

2012-01-14T08:05:00.000-08:00

The Muppets - Life's A Happy Song

Top 10 Songs of 2011 - #5

2012-01-14T07:57:00.000-08:00

The Black Keys - Lonely Boy

Top 10 Songs of 2011 - #6

2012-01-14T07:00:00.000-08:00

The Strange Boys - Punk's Pajamas

Top 10 Songs of 2011 - #7

2012-01-13T10:18:00.000-08:00

Pitbull - Give Me Everything

Top 10 Songs of 2011 - #8

2012-01-09T06:50:00.000-08:00

Those Darlins - Be Your Bro

Top 10 Songs of 2011 - #9

2012-01-05T08:03:00.001-08:00

The Lonely Island - Jack Sparrow

Top 10 Songs of 2011 - #10

2012-01-04T06:23:00.000-08:00

Over the next few days, I'm going to post my top songs of 2011.

#10: Foster The People - Pumped Up Kicks.

The Chambers Diet, Part III: It’s Going to Be Fine (Really)

2012-01-03T11:12:00.000-08:00

Q: How should I live my life?

A: It’s going to be fine.

Let me say that again: It’s going to be fine.

“What’s going to be fine?” you say, “Life? No it isn’t. The world is a mess, and look at my life – it isn’t much better.”

Here’s the thing: I don’t buy that. You’re reading this, right? So that means you can afford whatever medium you’re reading it on, right? You’re probably in the first-world too. Let’s assume that I’m basically right about those points: that you can read, and that you’re in the first world.

Let’s start with some tough love: there are billions of people in this world living in the worst conditions imaginable. Billions. There are slaves and child soldiers, there are curable diseases wreaking untold havoc on the lives of people all over the fucking world. The place is a mess, I agree.

But now let’s think about where we are, and where the world could be. We’re getting enough to eat, and we have all kinds of things, like antibiotics, that the rest of the world struggles to get. So there’s that.

Now let’s take another step back: suppose you were born in the ‘first world’ a century ago – or even a few decades ago. Do you know how often people died of the flu back then? It happened all the time. Life was a series of commonplace tragedies – it’s why people had (and still have in a lot of places) so many kids. Most of them weren’t going to make it. “Yes, yes,” you say, “get on with it, I know all of that.”

My point in starting this way is just to remind us where we are. Look around right now. I’m not talking about some existential search for your soul: I’m talking about taking a look at your physical surroundings. They’re probably not that bad; in fact, by any objective measure, they’re probably pretty damn good. If you’re reading this, you’re not working in a salt mine.

Let’s keep moving. If you believe in God, that’s fine. But let’s assume you sort of believe in God: maybe you believe in a higher power, maybe you believe in all kinds of things but have never witnessed a miracle. Maybe you believe the whole thing, hook-line-and-sinker. That’s fine. Full disclosure: I’m pretty agnostic about the higher powers. What I’m not agnostic about is the way the universe works, and this is going to start to sound weird and mystical (but I don’t think it is), so stay with me for a moment.

The ancients had it right: the world responds to you. There is a Goddess of Fortune, and she favors the bold. Whether she exists-exists is a different question, but that’s how the universe works. If you embrace your position in this world, and really live it – the universe will look out for you.

What does all of that mean? First, a few technicalities: when I say the universe responds to you and fortune favors the bolds, what I mean is, if you live up to your ideal – up to what you, and only you, are supposed to be – things will work out well. They just will. That may be because there is an invisible demi-god looking over your shoulder, but it probably has more to do with the human subconscious. We do things in our lives without noticing them all the time. Your brain filters out most of what happens in your life. What you experience isn’t the world, it’s a twisted version of the world, with parts missing – parts sped up, others slowed to a crawl – based entirely on your experience. Time wraps and bends inside your head all the time, to say nothing of how malleable memory and basic perception can be.

We know all of this, it’s been proven. The missing piece is that how you perceive the world informs your behavior, even when you don’t notice or want it to. You can’t help it: that’s just how it works. How you think about things informs how you present yourself, how you look at people, how you react – often unconsciously – and that informs how your life plays out. You will be dealt a better hand if you expect to be.

Embrace your position in the world – live up to the best version of yourself that you can be – and the world will respond in kind, not necessarily because of any mystical intervention, but because you force it to, without even knowing it.

To pull back again: why should you be positive, when there is so much misery and suffering in the world? Life is tough, after all. Well, for starters, the world exists. It doesn’t have to, but it does. The latest studies in physics suggest that there are many, many universes out there, and most of them probably aren’t set-up to support life. But we’re here. Maybe things repeat endlessly, maybe there’s an afterlife, but none of that is certain in the way your existence is now – you at least get one shot at this. That’s a damn big deal.

How big a deal is it? A scientist recently guesstimated the likelihood of your birth, based on your parents meeting, all the way down to the likelihood of one particular sperm and one particular egg meeting back into the recesses of your prehistory. Do you know what the likelihood was? The likelihood that you’re breathing right now – to say nothing of the fact that I’m alive too to write this too – is a rounding error.

It’s about the same likelihood as the population of San Diego rolling trillion sided dice and getting the same number.

Yeah, you heard me. A few million people drop trillion sided dice and all of them roll an eleven. What that means is you shouldn’t be here. And neither should I. We won a lottery the likes of which our brains are physically incapable of understanding just to exist.

What that means is that you get at least one shot at this. Relax and fucking enjoy it, it may be the last chance you have – but you shouldn’t even have it. That’s why, no matter how bad shit gets – and it can get bad, I know – no matter how ugly the world is, it’s going to be fine. Simply because it is. It doesn’t have to exist, and it does. That’s your reason to rejigger your mind.

Neither of us should exist right now, and we do. The universe will do what you say, if you have the balls to ask. Stop worrying and look around again. You shouldn’t be able to read this right now or listen to music or fall in love or eat Chinese food (for your one meal) – none of that should be able to happen, but it does.

It’s going to be fine.

Coming up: I've decided to post Top 10 lists on this blog for 2011. Movies, music, books, etc.

Stay tuned.

The Chambers Diet, Part II b: How to Be Healthy (Hint: It's All About Your Mouth)

2012-01-03T05:09:00.000-08:00

Here’s the second part of staying healthy – and this is where we start to veer into the next section, which is more philosophical – you need to relax. I’m not saying you need to do yoga or watch the ocean (although both of those things could be good) – we’ll get to specifics in a minute – but you have got to calm down.

“I’m perfectly calm,” you say.

Sure you are (and maybe you are), but this is a major part of your health. Half of your immune system (maybe more) is your mind. People with positive outlooks live longer; people who believe in God live longer; people who are married live longer, and so on – all of those things are fine (and I’m not recommending any of them in particular right now) – but what they have in common is that they decrease stress. They take it down a notch. Those fucking people are less concerned with the day-to-day. The reason they live longer is precisely because they are under less stress.

So calm the fuck down, and you will be healthier, I promise. Easier said than done, right? I realize that, which is kind of the point of the third section. Right now, I’m just justifying spending some time with you to lay-out all the reasons you have to chill-ax and change your outlook. Right now, though, I just want to get it into your head – want to repeat it endlessly, until you toss this across the room – that if you are under greater stress, you are much likelier to get sick.

Period.

This is also part of the reason that moderate alcohol intake forms a key component of the Chambers Diet: it de-stresses you. I don’t really trust you to de-stress yourself. I just don’t. Therefore, we have to cheat a little bit. You drink a little, and you will calm down. We need to set it up so that you don’t have a choice. Like when you get a good massage: your muscles have to relax, right? They have no choice. You can try to tense them up, you can try to drive yourself nuts, but if somebody is fucking pounding on your back in the right way, in a hot sauna, you will relax – you won’t have a choice.

That’s where booze can be a quick fix. It’s a cheat. It forces your muscles to stop clenching a little bit, even if they don’t want to. This works with the limited food part too: you can relax on much less alcohol, if you haven’t eaten in awhile. There’s a reason whiskey comes from the gaelic ‘a whisk of ae,’ meaning ‘water of life.’ It actually can be very good for you, if you’re careful: sanitize your mouth and relax your muscles with a drink, and you will be healthier.

The issue, of course, is that booze can be bad for you too – especially if you drink too much. So maybe we can use that as a prop, but it isn’t going to be enough to get us into full Chambers Diet mode. Taking the third step is going to require a rejiggering of how we think about things. You get now why this is important – why it matters if you are relaxed about life, right? The same reason it’s important that you eat decent food and brush your teeth: you’ll be healthier and happier.

So let’s do it already, let’s get into the philosophy.

The Chambers Diet, Part II a: How to Be Healthy (Hint: It's All About Your Mouth)

2012-01-02T06:14:00.000-08:00

II: How to Be Healthy (Hint: It’s All About Your Mouth)

Q: How do I stay healthy?

A: Brush your teeth with hard liquor.

“Again with this,” you say, “are you out of your mind? I stay healthy by drinking a lot of vodka?”

My answer is yes and no. To be honest, that lead-in isn’t completely honest – there’s more to being healthy than oral health, but that’s actually where it starts. There is now boatloads of evidence that the health of someone’s gums and teeth makes a big difference in things like heart disease. You may know that, but did you ever stop to think about the implications?

How the hell can it be that your gums are responsible for a healthy heart? Your gums – really? Really. There are plenty of good medical reasons that’s the case, but trust me, it is. It speaks to a couple themes that I want to harp on for a minute.

First, what goes in your mouth is connected to the health of your whole body. Food and drink aren’t just brands of gasoline that power the engine. The calories you put in your body actually make your body. You know that right, but again, stop and think about what that means. It means your mouth is the gatekeeper to your health. It means your mouth matters more than you give it credit for. Not only does the very substance of your physical being – those french fries that turn into cells and power your bloodstream – enter via your lips, but so do plenty of germs, good and bad. You need to keep your mouth fucking clean.

That means brushing your teeth, it means seeing the dentist – but again, as with the diet, I actually don’t trust you to do either of those things. You know you need to floss, but you don’t. Neither do I. Who has the time to run that stupid little string between your teeth? You really should floss, by the way. But let’s assume you’re like most people, and you brush your teeth maybe once a day, you go to the dentist less often than you should, and you very very rarely floss (basically before a trip to the dentist).

That’s actually fine.

Here’s the rub: you need to sanitize your mouth. You need to kill the germs that like to hang out on your gums and in-between your teeth. That’s oral hygiene 101, right? So how do you do it? Well, you can use mouthwash, and that’s fine. But I’ve already advised you to drink a little booze. Why not make it hard liquor?

Hard liquor has a lot of interesting properties. Mostly it kills things, like your brain cells and your liver – but it also kills bacteria. Hell, you could perform surgery with a bottle of strong whiskey. Suppose you accidentally ate something with dangerous bacteria in it – you are much less likely to die of ecoli, if you complimented it with booze with a greater than 30 or 40 percent alcohol content. Beer and wine are less helpful with this, but the hard stuff actually sanitizes. So here’s part of your new routine: if you’re not going to use mouthwash (which, by the way, typically has some form of alcohol in it), go straight to the source. Drink some hard liquor, and that cold sore will go away. When that cold sore goes away, you’re much less likely to – yes, you guessed it – get a cold.

So that’s part one: keep your fucking mouth clean. Sanitize it. Kill the germs that hang out in it with some straight bourbon.

The Chambers Diet, Part I: BTFB (Back to Fucking Basics)

2012-01-01T08:36:00.000-08:00

I: BTFB (Back to Fucking Basics)

Q: What Do I Eat?
A: Anything you want.

Let me say that again. Eat anything you want. “Well okay,” you say, “I’ll see you at McDonalds.”

Here’s the catch: you only get to do it once a day.

This is not a diet of fish or greens or other wonderful things that make you healthy, that give you strong bones and a positive outlook on life. That’s not the way life works. If you want to eat those things, fine. But you don’t have to.

The nuts and bolts of how the diet part of the Chambers Diet works are pretty simple. You get one meal each day. Eat it any time you want, in the morning, mid-day, evening – hell, eat your meal in the middle of the night, I don’t care. But remember, you only get one.

Sound unrealistic? “But I’ll be hungry all day,” you say, “and when I do eat, I’m liable to just eat ten hamburgers. That can’t be healthy.”

Here’s the thing, if you limit yourself to only one meal each day, your body will adjust. It will stop craving so much Goddamn food, I promise. Within a few weeks, you won’t be hungry – except at mealtime. And then you will be very hungry, but you will also be unable to pack it away, because your stomach will physically shrink.

Now, I know this sounds unhealthy. And what about those times in the middle of the day or night when you have to go another three hours until meal-time? There is actually a pretty simple solution to that too.

Our bodies aren’t designed to eat three meals a day and then sit around. The way communication between the stomach and brain works is pretty fucked up. Neither one knows what the hell is going on. And let me be clear, the Chambers Diet isn’t for everyone. If you are working in the shit, if you’re chopping wood or digging ditches, for example – if you’re running around all day – this might not work. You probably need more regular calories. But even for manual labor, most of the time then I suspect it will still work. Why?

Have you ever been to the Zoo? Animals are constantly running around, stressed that they’re going to get eaten and won’t find enough food. That’s the way the world works. It’s also what we evolved to do. Here’s the big secret to our diets: eating more doesn’t necessarily correlate with longer life spans. In fact, in studies of chimps, there’s pretty compelling evidence that the moneys – which are 98% human – live significantly longer, if you just cut lots of calories out of their diets. In that study, most of the scientists were so dumbstruck by the evidence that they immediately tried to cut their own calories too. It’s a lot of damn work to process food all day. Our bodies are stressing all the time to deal with phenomenal amounts of calories we never evolved to consume. We just aren’t made for this.

Imagine yourself in the prehistoric savannah: you’re hunting or gathering, doing your thing. How many calories are you getting each day? Not many, right? And when you do eat a lot, what kind of calories do you think those are? Prime rib? Not likely. How often do you take down a wooly mammoth? Pretty rarely, right? And when you do – here’s the kicker – that meat doesn’t really save. Our prehistoric ancestors – in the hundreds of thousands of years when we did most of our evolving – didn’t know a whole lot about preserving food. So when they came across a big meal, they went all out. The rest of the time, they ate a little of this, a little of that, whatever was easy. That probably meant nuts and fruit.

So that’s my answer: when you are hungry during the day, when you absolutely need to eat something before that one meal, eat some nuts, eat an apple. But that’s it. You don’t get a meal, you get a tiny snack. Then you wait a few hours, and if you need more, you eat more. Most of the time, if you’re hungry your brain just wants to stimulate your stomach. Drink some water.

Then, when you have your meal, I guarantee you’ll be less and less likely to crave junk food and crap. Your body is going to tell you what it needs when that one meal rolls around. See the thing is, unlike other self-help gurus, I actually don’t trust the human mind. I think we’re lazy and can’t control ourselves. I’m not asking you to control yourself. That’s why we have laws. If people could control themselves, society wouldn’t need traffic lights or rules against stealing. But we make rules, because otherwise we’re liable to run a little wild.

So here’s your rule: one meal, and in-between nuts and berries.

Within that law, you get to do whatever you want. I promise, no matter how many burgers you think you’ll eat, eventually that number will drop. Eventually, you won’t get hungry during the day. Your body will get the message. ‘Oh right, we’re back in the savannah. I can’t eat constantly. I get one meal I look forward to, and the rest of the time, I deal with it.’

There’s another trick to handling that meal: alcohol.

“Oh my God,” you say, “listen to this fucking guy. This is the most unhealthy diet I have ever heard of. The burger and booze diet.”

It actually can work like that. If you’re an alcoholic or a prude, ignore me. Flip to the next section. Actually, if you fall into either of those categories you should probably put this down. But for the rest of you, I’m going to be a big enabler/pusher for a few minutes. Bear with me.

Civilization began when people learned to store grain and foodstuffs, right? Guess what they did the moment people figured out agriculture. That’s right, they made booze. I’m not inventing something new – the Chambers Diet has been around since before time began – I’m actually getting back to basics.

I want us around the campfire for our daily meal with a bottle of alcohol. I’m not saying you have to drink everyday. In fact, you probably shouldn’t. But there’s also plenty of scientific evidence now – just as with the monkeys that are always hungry – that a little alcohol never hurt anyone. For most people, it actually helps. Moderate alcohol usage makes you healthier. Make some of those daily calories alcoholic. This is getting us into a later section – about stress and health – but the point, as with the food, isn’t that I want you to keep a chart or stress about points or buy into some packaged plan. The Chambers Diet builds on a holistic philosophy. Let’s get back to fucking basics.

Eat your nuts, berries, and mammoth; drink your booze, and you will be merry. You’ll also lose weight, I promise. You simply won’t be able to eat as much, because your stomach will shrink. You also won’t be as interested in food. Stop fetishizing it. Food is what we need to survive, but it shouldn’t occupy so much of our time. Make that meal a good one, by all means – and I suspect you’ll pay more attention to it too, if you only get one – but look around. There’s a whole lot more to this life than calories.

To say nothing of the fact that when you drink on a pretty empty stomach, you’ll get more bang for your buck – you’ll enjoy it more – and you’ll care so much less about eating. This is all about tricking our bodies that have been conditioned into the modern world, it’s about convincing – re-convincing – our cells that we’re back where we belong. See, we haven’t evolved to this. We haven’t evolved to deal with the Chicken McNugget, because the modern diet – as anyone who knows anything will tell you – has changed radically in the past few decades, to say nothing of the past few hundred years. How fast does evolution happen? Not that quickly. It can’t keep up. We’re designed to eat very little and drink booze. Back to basics.

That’s where the Chambers Diet begins.

The Chambers Diet, Introduction

2012-01-01T08:28:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year. I don't make resolutions, but I've decided to post sections of a new writing project, titled "The Chambers Diet" on this blog in the coming days and weeks. It seems appropriate for the coming year.

First things first: this isn’t a guide to dieting. The Chambers Diet is more than a ‘diet’ – it is a philosophy. Food and drink are only part of the story. They’re part of it, not because I want you to lose weight (although you will, if you listen to me), but because food and drink are part of who we are and how we relate to the world.

This is not a traditional self-help guide. I’m not going to tell you to exercise or get more fresh air or reconnect with your mother. Instead, I’m going to lay it out – one, two, three – and let you in on a little secret: no one has it all together. There is no magic bullet; there is no ideal life or perfect way of seeing the world. Let me say that again: you can’t be perfect.

What you can do is make peace with your place in the world, lose weight, and chill-ax. It’s going to be fine.

That’s the Chambers Diet. So let’s do this thing.

In the coming days, I'll get into three major sections for my philosophy of food, drink, and health:

I: BTFB (Back to Fucking Basics)

II: How to Be Healthy (Hint: It’s All About Your Mouth)

III: It’s Going to Be Fine (Really).

Cuba Video

2011-02-27T12:58:00.000-08:00

Some home video from my recent trip to Cuba:

Writing For Free

2011-02-14T10:35:00.001-08:00

Today's NY Times article, "Media Companies, a Nation of Serfs" helps to explain why I have always had a difficult time blogging or keeping up with twitter. I'm usually pretty busy writing or researching (to put it crassly) for money, whether from publishing companies or universities. So it's difficult for me to get motivated to provide free content for a site like this one (Blogger). At the end of the day, anything I write on here is driving traffic to Blogger, right? While some blog readers might also be interested in seeing what else I've written, etc., I have a hard time believing that translates into sales. Am I wrong?

Also, You Can't See Cuba From Key West

2011-02-13T13:10:00.000-08:00

As it turns out, you can only see about thirty miles into the ocean, looking south from Key West, and although I'd been told that on a clear night, you could see the light from Havana looking south from Key West, I didn't see anything.

So there's that.

Also, although everyone is denying it, I noticed an article in The Miami Herald this afternoon, which was all about the GOP longing for a Jeb Bush 2012 President run. I can't remember if I wrote about Jeb on here, but as far back as 2004-ish?, when I was writing for The Radical Center website, I ranted and worried about Jeb Bush, in part because I've long seen him as the Michael Corleone of the Bush Family. Dubya was Sonny, BTW.

I'll go into the reasons I'm concerned about Jeb Bush if it looks like he's liable to make a run. Really though, I think it's much more likely he runs in 2016 or 2020, which still puts us in the right timeframe for a total financial/social catastrophe.

Also, I always love it when people read things I've written, and it seems that an English class is reading 'Jane and the Raven King'. Way to go, Mrs. Duff!

Researching Hard For The Money

2011-02-11T13:26:00.000-08:00

I have been working at the University of Miami's Cuban Heritage Collection for the past few weeks, mostly with a collection of papers related to American investment in early 19th century Cuba (which I knew they had), but also with the unprocessed papers of Cuban historian, Portell Villa (which I didn't know they had). So that's what I've been up to. Also, did you know rum is cheaper in Miami than in Rhode Island? It is.

I'll be presenting an article, "'No God But Gain': The Business of Cuba and U.S. Foreign Policy" at the April "Slavery's Capitalism" conference at Harvard in April. I just finished a draft, which I'm pretty excited about.

I have nothing else to blog about, except that I'm not as optimistic about Egypt as most people seem to be. Nor do I think we should return to the gold standard and abolish the federal reserve as a few people seem to think we should. *cough*Rand Paul*cough*

The reason I don't think we should return to the gold standard is because I study a period in time in which the United States banking system functioned on a standard of 'specie,' meaning gold and silver. Most of this came into the U.S. via Cuba (from mines in Central and South America). You how you can get a loan to buy a house? (Or should be able to, if the financial infrastructure weren't so absurd?) You wouldn't be able do that as easily with a gold standard. Specie limits credit and consolidates wealth.

Head down, power through

2011-01-23T09:15:00.001-08:00

First off, thanks to everyone who turned out at the signings on 1/14 and 1/22, it was a lot of fun. I have been busy with writing and planning for a February research trip to Miami. Yes, I know how that sounds, but I will be staring at 200 year-old mail on a fellowship at The University of Miami's Cuban Heritage Collection, not lounging by a pool. Promise.

Another nice little review of Jane and the Raven King was sighted at motherdaughterbookclub.com.

What else? Go Bears!