Redirect

I have been adding entries to this blog sporadically for a while. Often, they have been what I can pull together in 20 minutes or less - the period of time between entering the subway and leaving it on my daily commute - as that was often all of the writing time I had in the day. And it was an interesting challenge, to see if one could populate a blog in such a way. As seen, the answer is “Sorta.” It was a good way to use that time, when I managed it.  It’s not a lot of time, though,  to pull a thought together, hash out the implications, write it down and fix misspellings and be left with something worth the posting.

Another issue is that there is too much pressure to reconsider, rewrite, redo. “Do I really want to post this? Is it Important Enough for what I Should Be Saying? Have I Properly Attributed Everything I Say?” That, too, keeps one from posting as often as one could. Which is my real reason for heading in a new direction, here: I’m going to post once a day. If I don’t have much to say, I won’t say much. If it turns out to be a stupid prediction/observation/intuition, it’s stupid. If I can do it every day, though, at least one or two items should be good enough for, well, a part-timer’s blog.

With that in mind, I’m also going to expand my vision a bit, to other topics related to Strauss & Howe that I find of interest. This might include

• News, predictions, and intuitions related to The Crisis as it unfolds, as before
• Ways of describing how this theory of history works (without churning up opaque jargon) and ways of making it useful
• Applying the theory to the arts - primarily literature and movies, although I made an accurate architectural prediction once - to see what insights it can give
• And anything related to Strauss & Howe’s books and predictions

Because you don’t jump into this sort of thing without a good running start, I’ve been practicing this daily writing thing for a little while now. Some of those previously written items are likely to end up here at some point, in which case I will copy and paste and leave them without any guilt.  Today, though, everything recent is too apocalyptic and negative to be appropriate at the start of the year. I’m making a new start, I want it to flow organically - and I don’t want to drag us down into the muck already....so here’s what I have.

There is a lot to be said about the recently released “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” - enough that I expect I will come back to it a few times. One is that it doesn't seem to quite fit in our time, right now, this Crisis.  This Slate story mentions that it was in development for about 20 years, and that the initiating event of the film - the closing of Life magazine - happened “over a decade ago.” (That depends how you count it: Wikipedia says it lived on until 2007 as a supplement, although its last proper issue was May 2000.) In any case, there was certainly the feeling that it was a pre-Crisis movie: The worst-case scenario is that your company gets taken over and you are unemployed as a result? Not a terrorist attack or a complete meltdown of the financial system or a hurricane smashing into the city? 

It seriously reminded me of a Saturday Night Live parody of Rankin Bass animations from a  few months after 9/11. The old Burl Ives-voiced snowman tries to convince the audience about the danger from the villains, including an abominable snow monster, before giving up in the face of recent real-life dangers of terrorism. “Oh, we’re so scared of some crappy abominable snow monster” is about what I wanted to say to Ben Stiller at various points.