The Un-power of TIK-TOK

On the eve of the camp horror-show that is Halloween, I am thinking of a different but also pseudo-horror our legislator have taken to sound alarm to.

You might be tempted to divide humanity not by nations, races, genders or whatever else. Instead, think of the TIK TOK app, and do it this way:

 

1.      The billion who love it

2.      The billion who see it as dangerous

3.      The billions who don’t know what it is and why others make such a fuss.

 

Call me old (you wouldn’t be wrong) and put me in the third category. Neither the charm nor the existential calamity of Tik- Tok manage to reach my consciousness.

 

Data sharing? All the tech apps and the companies behind them already do that. This includes this platform, Blogger, owned by Google. It seems no one does it better than Google, and who they sell it to is not an open book.

 

I wonder if this brouhaha isn’t a way of distracting Americans from real issues, only one of them having to do with China as a menace. These issues include but are not exclusive to our right to privacy, which (big news) is long gone.

 

The wild world of the Interwebs and smartphones have changed everything. We gave them this power. Tik-Tok is but a dot in a vast international matrix.

YOU WILL LAUGH, EVENTUALLY

 

Some months back, my trusty old computer stopped functioning. I learned that I shouldn’t trust a machine, which had the audacity to take with it much of the functionalities I had built in to suit the way I work, and many of my contacts.

 

I didn’t lose any work, because I had my files and photos backed up on a USB drive. Setting a second computer properly took time and this computer is not yet up to the one that was.

 

I can look back now, and see that I survived. There are (much) worse things.

 

But, at that time, I felt so lost and disconnected that I lamented to DD how I long for the innocent days of my childhood, when connecting meant seeing someone in person or writing a snail mail letter.

 

Her response, pasted here from Messenger (my phone worked):

“…Do you miss your boyhood in surrey, romping with your school chums in the fens and spinneys?”

And then she sent this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?fbclid=IwAR1dU0AIpsn42MFtviaSRQhaDPb2Kjl2sSfGP9AaCuQ1AZcrkEKiJS-Cmk8&v=PM8WPZtnBAw&feature=youtu.be

 

It’s a brilliant section from an old episode of Frasier, a TV show we used to watch when she was but a youth. Her comment was a quotation from one of the characters in it, and her pointed reflection on the uselessness of nostalgia for “simpler times.”

 

I laughed. It made a difference.

 

Eventually, we laugh at so many things we had experienced as important.

There’s no point in lamenting what isn’t anymore.

 

Meanwhile, back up your computers, everyone.

Justice, Justice You Shall Pursue

 

 

“צֶ֥דֶק צֶ֖דֶק תִּרְדֹּ֑ף לְמַ֤עַן תִּֽחְיֶה֙ וְיָרַשְׁתָּ֣ אֶת־הָאָ֔רֶץ אֲשֶׁר־יְהֹוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֶ֖יךָ נֹתֵ֥ן לָֽךְ׃”

 

“Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that your God יהוה is giving you.”

Deuteronomy 16:18-21:9

 

I find it impossible at the moment not to repeat this injunction as I watch the horrors once again visited upon the middle east.

 

A time will come, when we can contemplate mercy. Justice without mercy (such as Hamas clearly demonstrated) is hell on earth. But mercy without justice is suicidal.

 

That is all I’m able to put out at this moment. I hope to return to gentler contemplations on the writing life and life in general, which, for me, are one and the same.

Just like the dove who signaled to Noah— after the great flood— the return of life on earth with a single olive branch, we await her once again.

WHERE’S YOUR BAOBAB?

 

Many (many!) years ago, in a land far away, I discovered The Little Prince.

 

He was a curious creature, born of fantasy. His journey was metaphorical. Even then, I knew his various stops on many small planets with their curious inhabitants were not to be taken as realistic.

 

On his own planet, the Little Prince spoke of Baobab trees. The sound of that, BA-OH-BAB, made them creatures of fancy, not real things to be found in our world.

Turned out I was wrong. Baobabs are real. They grow in Madagascar, where my son served in the United States Peace Corps until a short time ago. I told him I would value a photo of him near one of these.

 

Before leaving Madagascar, right after his close of service, my son made a point to travel to where the oldest Baobab in all of Madagascar stands proud. The locals claim it’s a thousand years old, while arborists say it’s likely seven to eight hundred. Old enough, either way.

My son bequeathed his smart phone to a local individual, because he knew it would be useful to his Malagasy friend. What my son took with him on the pilgrimage to the old Baobab was a not-very-smart borrowed phone that could only manage poor photos. But you can imagine that, regardless of quality, the photo is one I value. It holds a special meaning, joining one of the circles of my life.

 

My little Prince communed with a Baobab.

 

Here he is with the Old Tree of Mahajanga~

Life continues to be magical even as it is ever real. Maybe especially then.

Story ARC, Story Conventions

 

How-to writing books and literary analysis courses have distilled storytelling conventions this way:

Inciting incident > Main Character accepts the challenge >Three attempts in increasing intensity at resolution > Climax/crisis> Resolution.

The most amusing pithy presentation on story ARCs is this mini joyride of a presentation by Kurt Vonnegut here, well worth the seventeen minutes it takes.

There are posts online that show simple graphs of story ARCs, such as this:

This is the tried and true. No argument there.

But then, ever so rarely, someone challenges these conventions and (even rarer) succeeds in making something new and wonderful. I was intrigued to read a post on this here.

 

When I began writing, I knew less about writing conventions and I did in fact write less conventionally. By now the story-ARC  rules are so ingrained in me that I wonder if I even could, or dare, to set them aside.

 

But it’s food for writerly thought.