A Spiritual Journey to Olympia

04 Saturday Jun 2016

Posted by in Journeys, Musings and ponderation, The Ideal Vehicle

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For all the time my daughter attended The Evergreen State College in Olympia, I talked about riding my bike up from Portland to visit her. I have the dream of one day riding across the United States over the course of a summer, and a ride to Olympia, which I initially estimated at a little over 100 miles, seemed a low-stakes training run, a kind of exploratory sally for this larger dream. Google Maps quickly disabused me of the 100-mile estimate–the distance on a bike is closer to 130 miles–but I toyed with the idea during all of Gloria’s student years.

Now, in late spring of 2016, my daughter is nearly a year out of college and planning to move away from Olympia for good. And so I recognized a few weeks back the familiar sight of my dithering, the ease with which I spin up romantic, poetic dreams and the difficulty I have seeing them through. I realized that if I was going to pay my inner guide any mind, the time to ride out to my daughter was now.

I bought a few supplies–bottle cages, bottles, new cycling gloves–and asked the mechanic at Community Cycling Center to true up my rear wheel, in hopes that the long-suffering rims would roll another 150 miles. “This wheel won’t go another 150 miles,” the mechanic said. “In fact, I advise you to stop riding on it today.” So that weekend, after buying a new hand-built 36-spoke rear wheel, I set off at 6:51 am on May 29 to make a 137-mile ride, ideally in a single day.

Such a ride is about twice as far as I’d ever ridden in a single day. I knew that many people ride the 205-mile Seattle-to-Portland in a single day every year, but generally on unloaded road bikes rather than on cyclocross commuter setups with fenders and racks and stuffed panniers. However, I started with the best attachment to non-attachment that I could muster: either I would finish in a single day or I wouldn’t; I could stop when I got tired and stay in a motel somewhere along the way. The stakes, therefore, were pretty low.

outside Scappoose

The day was gorgeous, mild and mostly cloudy, with a decent tailwind, and dry for the first 4/5 of the ride. I was anxious because the ride was a journey into the unknown for me: I worried about being run off the road, about being run over by a back-roads pot smoker, about hitting a physiological wall and bonking.

And, as is so often the case in my life, none of what I feared came to pass. I stopped every twenty miles or so to stretch and have a Lara Bar. I was surprised at how well, and how easily, I rode. With very few exceptions, I had generously wide shoulders to ride on, though for many hours I was surprised at how often I had the road to myself for as far as I could see and hear.

In both physical and mental ways, it was easier to ride between the towns than through them: the only wrong turns I took, and the only times I tired of riding–because of the constant starting and stopping–came as I went through Longview and Kelso, Chehalis and Centralia, and very late in the ride going through Tumwater.

I have driven along I-5 from Portland to Olympia dozens of times. And riding along the back-roads–the Westside Highway along the Cowlitz River, Military Road, The Newaukum Valley Road, Old Highway 99–I was rarely more than three or four miles from that motor-clogged artery that is the Interstate. And yet, close as I was to the freeway, I was in a different world: quiet and peaceable, breezy and bird-filled.

The motorist’s view from the Interstate

Some of the places where I-5 had taught me to expect ugliness, like the approach to Chehalis, were beautiful and tranquil and friendly. And, while I rode through some of the most conservative country in the state of Washington, I saw only a single Trump sign along the whole 137 miles.

The view from the bike: at the top of Military Road, between Vader and Napavine

I remember standing in the pedals to get up a short hill at the end of the day and feeling the wonderful deep soreness that comes from a long contest, and I felt a euphoric gratitude that my body had done everything I had asked it to do that day, hour upon hour, for more than 130 miles. I was too tired and out of it to hold the camera steady when I arrived at Capitol Lake, but I managed to snap one blurry shot of the capitol on my arrival, like a personal grainy Loch Ness Monster photo, to show my wife and daughters that I had arrived.

Capitol Lake, after 137 miles in 11.5 hours

 

 

 

 

Finn the Human Boy: a Modern Gilgamesh

27 Friday May 2016

Posted by in Biology, Literary criticism, Musings and ponderation

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I’ve been trying to learn a little more about graphic novels–a literary genre that I have almost no experience with–and pulled from the public library shelf Gilgamesh: A Graphic Novel by Andrew Weingarner. I have always been fascinated by the epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest written story known to humanity: I loved the old John Gardner translation of the story, and I had a good time with this graphic retelling. The various cosmic monsters that Gilgamesh battles are drawn very well–they’re intense, original, but also evoke a Mesopotamian vibe.

The central partnership in the story–the ur-dynamic duo that informs so many later character dyads–is that of Gilgamesh and Enkidu: Gilgamesh, the civilized, anxious, ambitious king, and Enkidu, the wild and natural “hairy man.” The duo appears later as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza,  as Prince Hal and Falstaff, as Han Solo and Chewbacca.

And, I realized a little later, as Finn and Jake from Adventure Time.

Besides the cosmetic similarities of the two pairs, Finn the human boy and Jake the magical talking dog are also spiritual and characterological siblings to Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Finn and Jake are perfectly matched combatants, each unable to defeat the other, whether in combat, in their long-running pranking competitions, or in their frequent video game and Card Wars match-ups. Like Gilgamesh, Finn is a rambunctious upstart, eager to attack real or perceived injustice head-on, usually through violence. Like Gilgamesh, Finn is also beset with anxiety–often as a result of his phobias or bad dreams–yet Finn and Gilgamesh are also paradoxically able to set aside their nagging dread and fight fearlessly, even foolhardily, in battle.

Jake is a striking modern recreation of Enkidu, literally a magic talking animal. In much the same way that Enkidu advises and guides Gilgamesh, Jake is wiser and more experienced than Finn in most matters, especially those relating to the basic animal appetites for sex and sleep and food.

Both duos spend their time hustling from cosmic battle to cosmic battle with monstrous or demonic antagonists. It’s easy to imagine Humbaba, the earlier epic’s demonic guardian of the cedar forest, as a creature drawn for Adventure Time (even Humbaba’s name would fit well in Adventure Time); it’s just as easy to imagine an Adventure Time antagonist like Hunson Abadeer appearing in a sculpture from some Sumerian ruin.

Found on a Mesopotamian fresco…

The mapping of one duo to another isn’t perfect–Gilgamesh is a character rooted in a 3000 year-old value system that doesn’t translate well to our own. He is cruel by our standards: violent, an abuser of women, a despoiler of the environment (ironically, the pre-civilized Enkidu is much easier for contemporary readers to sympathize with). But the Gilgamesh-Enkidu pairing still speaks to us in much the same way that Finn and Jake speak to us, because the relationship is archetypal. The relationship speaks to our odd predicament as creatures that are both animal and transcendent of our animal nature: we are, as Hamlet says, “in action how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god,” yet we are at the same time deeply aware of our brutish status as just another mammal, tied down to the “Four Fs” of feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproducing that govern all animal life. For both Gilgamesh-Enkidu and Finn and Jake, we are promised that all good things in life–justice, mercy, peace, love–come to us when these two natures are reconciled and act in partnership. We are warned that madness follows when we act in opposition to it.

Real Life Takes Center Stage

21 Saturday May 2016

Posted by in A Place for my Stuff, Uncategorized

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Hello, Friends:

My two month-long radio silence from this blog has been a little sad-making for me. I have a lot to report about my writing; my incisive (to me) observations are piling up, waiting to be observed in this blog. But dang–work life and my dadly responsibilities have made blogging hard of late.

There’s more to come on The Subway Test: I am hopeful that the coming two months will be less bananas at work than the last two months have been. There are books I want to share with you, scientific discoveries I’d like to philosophize about, news about my own writing to share. I hope we’ll see each other here soon.

–Joe

writing hands

Photo Credit: Marco Castellani

Joe Pitkin ~ The Mount Meager Expedition

20 Sunday Mar 2016

Posted by in My Fiction

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I’ve had my longest dry spell in publication in many, many months. But the curse broke this week with the publication of my little story “The Mt. Meager Expedition” in the lovely journal Danse Macabre. I’m very grateful to Adam Henry Carrière, Danse Macabre’s editor, for taking on this odd little absurdity of a story–extra points to any readers who can find a quote from David Petraeus hiding here!

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From The Autobiography of St. Morris Roger Lindenford-Fitzroy, Lord Chadwick

Chapter LXVII: The Mount Meager Expedition

My service as His Majesty’s Secretary of State for War coincided neatly with the end of the War on Poverty and the beginning of the First Balkan War, a seven-year period during which our country also fought wars against Illiteracy and the Khedivate of Egypt, as well as suppressed insurgencies in British Honduras, Algebra, Southern Rhodesia, and the Marianas Trench. Given our daunting expenditure of blood and treasure over all corners of the Empire, therefore, the gentle reader may imagine my dismay when the Prime Minister requested that The War Office prepare a dossier investigating the feasibility of a war against lupines.

I had grown up believing the lupine a particularly glorious summer flower, so far as I knew entirely peaceable and not at all contentious. Indeed, in my boyhood my mother had led…

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A Modest Reboot

17 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by in A Place for my Stuff, Welcome

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I had dinner with a friend a couple of weeks ago who mentioned how much she likes the blog posts I send her way. But, she said, she wasn’t sure who was the author of these posts. That was when I realized that perhaps I’ve been overly anonymous on this blog.

So, at last, the picture on the avatar is me (I was a methane molecule for Halloween last year). My name is on the title. To be honest, I feel a little uncomfortable with my name in little lights like that. But I suppose it’s fair, if I want people to read my work, to let people know who I am.

A Meditation on Time–Ten Years Later

18 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by in Biology, Musings and ponderation, My Fiction

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I was trawling through some of my old posts on The Subway Test, and I noticed that I had published this one, “A Meditation on Time,” exactly ten years ago. As I reread it, I realized that a lot of what I was struggling with back then has gotten even more visible, more acute, with the advent of LLMs. It feels like a message in a time capsule to my future self. And maybe to you: I hope that time is not your enemy.

Here is what I wrote on that long-ago February day:

I have been taking my sweet time in reading Anna Karenina, a Christmas gift from my lovely stepdaughter. At the rate I’m going, I would guess I have two more months with this delicious, painful, hilarious book. Meanwhile, as I dither through this enormous work of art, it’s been hanging over my head that I don’t keep up my blog as befits a serious writer, dispensing witty remarks and novel observations at least once per week.

I really don’t yearn for “simpler times” (e.g. Tolstoy’s time), in which the world of ideas moved more slowly and people had time–from our perspective, anyway–to write long letters and long novels, to linger over an idea in a journal for months and even years. Many people of Tolstoy’s day didn’t regard their time as leisurely: they felt as rushed and harried as we do now, since the era of railroads and electricity had sped up life for them at an unprecedented rate. Perhaps in a hundred years my descendants will regard my lifestyle as leisurely, since most of us today don’t yet have Adderall prescriptions or cranial implants or other technological prostheses to speed up our rate of pumping out new ideas and reacting to new ideas we see.

This morning as I read my ten pages on the bus, I was taken by Tolstoy’s words about time: Prince Shcherbatsky is reacting to being told that “time is money,” and he says, “Time, indeed, that depends! Why, there’s time one would give a month of for fifty kopeks, and time you wouldn’t give half an hour of for any amount.”

It occurred to me as I sat with that quote today that I have given away lots of time in my life for fifty kopeks, or for less. When I returned to graduate school in my thirties, I was so excited to be able to take classes at public expense (since I am an employee of the state, my classes cost $5 per course)–I often joked with people that I had spent more money on parking tickets than on tuition when I was in grad school the second time. I feel thankful to the Great State of Washington every time I think of what I learned there.

But I also made a huge blunder by valuing my labor at zero in those days. The courses cost $5, so my degree must only cost about $100, no? Yet, of course there was the massive opportunity cost of my shutting myself up for years to read academic papers on ecology and statistical analysis: there were hikes I didn’t take, other skills I didn’t learn, traveling I didn’t do. I’ve written in a couple of my stories from that period about students who get into ecology because they love spending time outdoors in nature, but that their ecological studies lock them up in a lab for months on end doing gas chromatography or grinding up plant tissue samples.

I’ve come home with a fever tonight–ironically, the fever is what has slowed me down enough to be able to meditate about time in this blog post. And I have realized that as I age, I am becoming less and less willing to give up time to others (that is, to people I don’t love) for any amount. Even if by magic I could, I wouldn’t give up this feverish time tonight–unpleasant as it is–for money. I’m sure I have my price for taking on more work, but I’m realizing that the price is much, much higher than a community college would typically pay. I would just rather have the time.

Writerly Updates

04 Thursday Feb 2016

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It’s a gas to hear that Tom Dooley’s awesome and quixotic Eclectica Anthology Kickstarter was a rousing success and the books are coming out! True to my style as a writer, I’ll be in the Speculative Edition.

Closer to home, I finally got my newest story, “Proteus,” out the door to an editor. Maybe he’ll take it, maybe not, but it feels good to have new work going out.

The Gamification of Everything

31 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by in Games, Musings and ponderation

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I’m a casual gamer. Once a serious gamer, even: I was quite capable of spending ten hours, fifteen hours at a stretch playing Civilization in my twenties. Today I don’t have that kind of time, but I still love the possibilities that games provide to hone players’ skills or introduce them to new interests.

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Photo Credit: Graham Holt

In recent years there’s been a huge amount of buzz around gamification–the use of games to accomplish certain social goods or reduce harmful behaviors. A couple of years ago I gave my students a writing assignment on citizen science using this video about gamers who solved a protein-folding problem that had stymied AIDS researchers. More recently, I’ve had a chance to look at the gamified approach that two websites use for teaching math: IXL and Khan Academy.

 

I’ve used IXL a good deal with my daughter, and I’ve loved it: I can tell that the skill-building exercises have been designed in consultation with psychologists to create positive reinforcement loops with all kinds of little badges and power-ups that a user receives as her score increases–and the way to increase one’s score, of course, is to correctly complete more math problems.

And that’s the problem with IXL for my daughter. The gamification of the process does appeal to her at some level, I can tell, but at the bottom of the game is a lot of math problems. The gaming aspects of the activity have not turned her from a math hater to a math lover, or even a math accepter.

When I decided to try an buff up my math skills–I never got farther than a basic calculus class as an undergrad–I went to Khan Academy. (I would gladly have just used IXL, which I was already familiar with, but IXL seems geared towards younger kids and seems to top out at pre-calculus). And, while I am new to the Khan Academy game, I will say right now that I love it. In fact, I have loved it so much that I am finding myself choosing Khan Academy over other games.

The difference between my daughter and me in this regard seems to be how much interest we had in math in the first place. While I would not consider myself a math-lover exactly, I definitely like math enough to want to cultivate my math skills. My daughter, on the other hand, hates most math activities and would be happy never to spend another minute on IXL.

I suppose the whole gamification movement is a way of making desserts out of broccoli. I guess I could imagine something like broccoli ice cream being tasty, but then, I like broccoli pretty well in most of its forms. For someone who hates broccoli to begin with, broccoli ice cream is still broccoli.

 

Whither Wikipedia?

18 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by in Musings and ponderation

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For several years, I made a very small yearly donation ($10-$15) to Wikipedia when I would come across their oddly ugly banner ads. I use Wikipedia daily, often multiple times a day, not just because of the convenience, nor because of the way Wikipedia has muscled its way to the top of Google’s search rankings, but because I honestly believe in Wikipedia’s mission. The idea of creating a free and open repository of human knowledge, with versions in many languages (potentially all human languages), strikes some deep chord in my psyche. I suppose, now that I am daring myself to put it into words, that I am fascinated by Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of The Omega Point: that goal of universal love and community toward which humanity is striving–and which I believe it is our destiny to find. Wikipedia seems to me a step on that dim path.

One might ask, if Wikipedia is a sign of the coming Omega Point, why I would only give $10. That’s an excellent question, and I don’t come out looking very good in any of the answers I could come up with. And anyway, I haven’t given any money at all since reading David Auerbach’s piece in Slate on the misogyny and trollery of many of Wikipedia’s core of editors. As a teacher of research writing, I’m well aware of the uses and misuses of Wikipedia, the many inaccuracies and at times true mendacity, the often flabby writing and foggy explanation. I’ve lately felt ambivalent about this tool that I use so often: is this worldwide experiment in democracy and collaboration so fatally flawed that I should begin looking for a better encyclopedia, something which accomplishes what Wikipedia tried to and failed?

Wikipedia’s glaring flaws notwithstanding, I suppose I still see it as one of the best things in town: non-profit, devoted in principle (and often in practice) to human betterment and the common good. The low participation of women in the project troubles me, but I’m heartened a bit at least to know that the Wikimedia Foundation is actively trying to close that gap (and that the participation of women has increased last year over the year before, even if not by as much as the foundation had hoped). Perhaps it’s time to put aside my gripes and give a little to this project.

An Anthological Appeal!

04 Monday Jan 2016

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Happy New Year, gentle readers!

As many of you know, my work will be coming out in three anthologies over the next few months: Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy and Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction; both of them are anthologizing my story “The Daughters of John Demetrius.”

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The third of the anthologies is a different case: in honor of its 20 year publishing history, Eclectica magazine is publishing an anthology of the best speculative fiction to appear there–including my story “Better than Google.”

Eclectica’s publisher, Tom Dooley, is hoping to move beyond the print-on-demand market and actually place the book in bookstores. To that end, he has a Kickstarter campaign to gin up support. If you are a fan or a generous well-wisher, please consider contributing!

The part that blows my mind is that Eclectica is a magazine that has been published online since 1996. I was getting on the internet using a 14,400 baud modem back in those days. Eclectica was some of the best literature around, all at 14.4 kilobytes (yes, kb) per second.

I’ve still been sitting through a dry spell with my new material–it’s been several months since I’ve had a new story picked up. But keep watching the skies–I’ll have more stories out soon.