No Stopping Any Time: pictures of downtown Cleveland 2001

Today I read the news story saying that the policeman who shot Tamir Rice, a 12 year old boy holding a pellet gun, would not be charged with a crime. Tamir Rice was black: the police officer was white.

Racism is completely visible in America: you're just not supposed to talk about it. In 2001 I spent a couple of days in downtown Cleveland. Fascinated by its unfamiliar-to-me architecture, I took a point-and-shoot camera and starting taking pictures. And what was one of the first things I noticed? Quoting myself:

"[...] racial segregation is omnipresent in this area. Without exception, every person who I saw working as a waiter or waitress in a restaurant, working at the desk of a hotel, or walking in a suit to the courthouse was white. With only two exceptions, every person working in maintenance or cleaning rooms at a hotel, working a minimum-wage job at a fast food or drugstore counter, or homeless or begging on a streetcorner was black."

I've lived in D.C., L.A., and a few other places and I've never seen that level of occupational racial segregation anywhere else. And it seems pretty clear that that's going to produce shootings like this.

I've gotten nasty Email from all sorts over the years, but one classic insulting rant was from someone who felt that I was dissing Cleveland when I made that observation on a Web site. I shrugged and deleted his Email: too bad, because it would be fitting to quote it now.

At any rate, I think those pictures have held up fairly well, given the limitations of the technology I was working with. Here's a photo exhibition called No Stopping Any Time: downtown Cleveland as I saw it, complete with mock medieval fortifications, Buck Rogers defense zones, and a statue in front of a bank holding up a severed hand:

literary criticism of Adam Roberts' work

I've written quite a bit about Adam Roberts' SF on this blog. I thought that it was finally time to collect it (including some material never posted on the blog) on a more permanent site whose home page is here. For the occasion, I've written a new piece on his novel Polystom.

From here down is a copy (without the full bibliography) of what's on the main site:

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Some notes on reading Adam Roberts

Books that I've written about are linked below. Each of these essays is in a different formal style in keeping with the individual work that the essay is about.

• Salt (2000)
• On (2001)
• Stone (2002)
• Park Polar (novella) (2002)
• Jupiter Magnified (novella) (2003)
• Polystom (2003)
• The Snow (2004)
• Gradisil (2006)
• Splinter (2007)
• Land of the Headless (2007)
• Swiftly: A Novel (2008)
• Yellow Blue Tibia (2009)
• New Model Army (2010)
• Anticopernicus (novelette) (2011)
• By Light Alone (2011)
• Jack Glass (2012)
• Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (2014)
• Bete (2014)

The order that I wrote about these works in was, if I remember rightly: 1) Stone, 2) On, 3) Splinter, 4) Yellow Blue Tibia, 5) Anticopernicus, 6) Polystom, if you want to read only the more recent ones.

Lew and Pru romantic comedy philosophical thought experiment fanfic

Once there was a post by John Holbo on a blog called Crooked Timber that was about a philosophical thought experiment from Amartya Sen -- 'his celebrated Prude/Lewd example' -- which G.A. Cohen summarized in Rescuing Justice and Equality as follows:

Lewd has two relevant desires: he likes to read pornographic books, and he would like Prude to read one, because he thinks doing so would corrupt Prude into liking pornography. So strong is that desire that Lewd would prefer Prude to read the book, rather than read it himself; his desire to corrupt exceeds his desire to enjoy his own corruption. For his part, Prude dislikes reading pornographic books, and he also dislikes Lewd reading them; he wants no one to read them, but he prefers reading the book himself to Lewd reading it: that way, he thinks, less danger lies. In light of the strengths of their preferences, Prude and Lewd agree that Prude (alone) will read the book. That is their joint first preference, and so it is required by the Pareto principle. Sen claims that the principle thereby endorses an illiberal result. (p. 187)

John Holbo suggested that stories about this pair be written, people gave various ideas in comments, and from all these ideas I decided to write philosophical fanfic.

Here it is: a romantic comedy adventure story with thought experiments. And pornographic novels.

• Lew and Pru in Paris
• Lew and Pru and the Doctor's Orders
• Lew and Pru at the Circus
• Lew and Pru on Holiday
• Lew and Pru at the Gotham Book Mart

a model of the universe

I self-published my 6th poetry chapbook, a model of the universe. It has my (mostly) non-political poems from the last decade. Some of these are among the best things I've written, though thematically the chapbook doesn't hang together as coherently as the last one. Some of these poems were originally up on my personal Web page, which has since been mostly deleted so that they aren't up any more. The ones that were put on this blog aren't the best, but I've linked to them below.

The table of contents:

a model of the universe

• The Rock
  
• Untitled Nov 30
  
• some notes towards: four most overwritten subjects / inside and outside
  
• The Universe
  

Hitherby

• Maps (Four Explorers)
  
• Out of Order
  
• Muse of Fire
  

Everything I learned as a child

• Oscar in Samsara
  
• Gnosticism
  
• Thomas the Terror Engine
  

The Valley

• Alive
  
• Point of View
  
• In the Valley
  

Everything Else

• “Open to all forms of creative activity”
  
• Landscape
  
• Upside Down
  
• Ground
  
• Low Average Rainfall
  
• Pink Triangle
  

Here's the introduction:

Poems in the first section tend to have uncertain boundaries, as befits the universe: the second (Untitled Nov 30) is an infinite loop that can be started anywhere; the fourth has its title and introduction embedded in the poem.

Poems in the second section were inspired by (and sometimes put in the comments of) Jenna Moran's Hitherby Dragons site (hitherby.com).

The third section, "Everything I learned as a child," should probably have been titled "what I learned as a parent while watching my children watching TV," but that doesn't sound as good. Major companies who wish to sue me should note that these are parodies (as well as being major revelations of mystic truth suitable for the ages).

The last poem, Pink Triangle, is a direct parody of the song of the same name by Weezer.

for my parents

9/11 was 2001

I recently self-published my 5th poetry chapbook, "9/11 was 2001: a decade of political poems". I'm pretty pleased with it; I think it's better than all but one of my previous attempts.

Many of the poems in it here been published in draft form on this blog. Here's the table of contents:

2003: The Hostage Crisis
2004: Red, White, and Blue
2005: The Salvador Option
2005: As You Know, Katrina
2006: Signals
2006: Pebble
2007: After the Clash
2008: Larval Poets Manifesto
2009: For Obama's Inauguration
2010: The Ones Who
2011: Snow Storm
2014: Global warming activism / the dream

The rest of the poems are probably findable through Google, written in some comment box somewhere. If someone wants a physical copy, or even a PDF, of the whole chapbook, Email me at rpuchalsky followed by 1 followed by gmail dot com, or leave a message in comments below, and I'll try to get you one.

Each of the poems in the chapbook has an individual introduction, which I'm not going to quote here. But here's the introduction for the chapbook as a whole:

These poems were written from 2003 - 2014. It doesn't require close reading to see an obsessive concern with years, numbers, facts. It was a period dominated within the United States of America by myth, first and foremost the removal of the 9/11/2001 attack from history into the realm of timelessness, as the ever-enduring cause for a war everywhere against all enemies – not even against enemies, against terror itself. This all-encompassing war was used to justify a series of quite real wars, the invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003-2011 being the most destructive in terms of the number of people killed. But there were other myths, too, such as the one that said that the natural world was as it was and that nothing people could do could change it.

My first training was as a scientist. Since then I've worked as a sort of librarian, making Web sites that provide environmental and financial information to the public. It's been tempting to believe that if somehow people could be informed, these myths would be exposed as unreal. Many of these poems struggle with that idea, which has proven as far as I can determine to be false. People want to believe, and when the belief fails, people want to forget.

Many poems are written with an aspiration towards aesthetic timelessness, to the idea that people could be reading them hundreds of years later and find the poem just as affecting as they do now. These poems can not do that. They are highly focussed in time and place, sites of memory. As such, they need context: I've written a brief introduction for each one.

This chapbook is dedicated to Carl Russo, a leader of the Florence Poets Society, and to Jameson Greeley Lavo, who I met through Occupy Northampton. They are missed.