Author: davidbiddle

Preening, Bullying, and Lying in America: Do We Have a Leader Yet?

FAKE NEWS!
~ davidbiddle ~ 2 Comments
FAKE NEWS!
FAKE NEWS from Washington Free Beacon, dated August 17, 2015

Note: The image to the right is not real. It is fake. It is not a dead parrot, but it is not a real parrot either.

Reading and listening to the mainstream media, it has been suggested that this new president is willing to distort reality openly and brazenly with essentially no subtlety or grace mostly for his own self-aggrandizement and to protect his brand. The Trump brand has been his bread and butter for over forty years. Should we be surprised? We’ve known this guy since at least 1973. But is brand protection really an excuse for a president?

When I started writing this essay we’d just witnessed the pissing match between Trump and the media over how many people had attended his inauguration. During a very weird scene at CIA headquarters in Langley, VA, Trump said in the middle of a harangue about crowd numbers: “I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on Earth.”

He had also sent out his two main mouthpieces, Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway to stir things up. Spicer, in his first ever White House lectern performance with the media, berated them for concocting lies and misinformation. The next day Kellyanne Conway introduced the idea of “alternative facts” to an incredulous Chuck Todd on Meet the Press. Everything’s been going downhill since that first weekend in the communication department for this administration. Continue reading →

Why I Love Ayn Rand’s Books But Am Still a Liberal

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Atlas-Shrugged-Walking

A Repost from 2013, slightly modified: This piece got a lot of play over at OpenSalon (when it was open). It was an “Editor’s Pick” and got more than 2,000 views, plus a good number of comments. That was back in 2012. I’ve added a few comments here to update this for 2016. Pardon me if that messes with your time continuum. 

In the summer of 1977 I was home from college ambling around our local library looking for a novel to read. I was also there because I wanted to ask Ann Jefferson out on a date and knew she worked in the library. I found her quickly enough and we chatted a bit while I roamed the stacks. I didn’t get up the nerve to ask her out, but I did sort of stumble on this big-ass tome of a book called The Fountainhead by a writer with a weird name.

I devoured Ayn Rand’s first successful novel about Howard Roark, a brilliant young architect who will not give up his principles about art and creativity to achieve what Continue reading →

Losing Our Way: on technology and being creative in the modern world

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Apple CEO Tim Cook with iPad.

I have an open letter posted to Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, over at TW this month. I take Cook and Apple to task for not being creative with their digital book applications (the iBook Store and iBook reading system). I honestly don’t see any truly innovative digital reading applications out there offered by any company. It’s sad. But the truth is there’s not much innovation anywhere in the commercial part of the virtual world anymore. Think about it. What was the biggest application everyone wanted this summer? Yup. Pokemon Go.

Creativity in the ebook world did in fact occur on the hardware side of things beginning about a decade ago as the Kindle and iPad were being developed and ramped up. But the actual user interface has been a serious Continue reading →

My Year of Reading Slowly: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

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2666-cover
Spanish edition paperback cover (2009)

I finally finished Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 last month (912 pages in English; 1,136 in Spanish). It represents a year of reading for me (with some other stuff thrown in, but nothing I stayed with or finished). The beauty of books, as opposed to TV and movies, is that you can take your time and just tackle two or three pages a night for fifteen to twenty minutes at a shot. TV and movies make us think we have to eat whole stories quickly. If you can disavow that habit, and feel comfortable with the slow pace of reading, you will probably extend your life by at least eight years, maybe ten. Besides, 2666 is considered one of the most important novels of the early 21st century. It probably can’t be read quickly no matter who you think you are.

Continue reading →

A few thoughts on “Colin Kaepernick and Non-violent Civil Disobedience”

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I wrote a draft originally of an essay here at this blog on Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the “Star-Spangled Banner” before football games. The full piece has now been published over at Medium.com in The Coffeelicious, one of the premiere original Medium e-zines out there. You can read the whole piece here.

It starts out as follows: “San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick is following his conscience by not standing for the national anthem before football games. I get exactly what’s going on here and I am glad that our national “conversation” on race is being pushed harder than people want by someone with at least a bit of influence.”

I have been disturbed ever since the violence we saw in Ferguson, Missouri about how people who want to see more social and environmental justice Continue reading →

Why I Wrote a Novel by a Girl: When a Dude Figures Out the Power of Emotion in Literature

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I just finished revising the second draft of my next novel, which means I now have Draft #3 to print out. I’m doing that as I write this post. The whole process started back in October of 2013. Draft #1 clocked in at about 160,000 words (630 pages). Revisions for Draft #2 in December of last year shrank the book to 140,000 words. I was surprised at how many unnecessary sentences I’d written and how many extended metaphors showed up that a reader didn’t really need.

Draft #3 was an extraordinary process. My goal was essentially to lop 60,000 words off the beast. I’d gotten a fair amount of input from a few First Readers. In particular, several poet colleagues were concerned about the number of sub-plots I was offering up. They wanted focus and brevity. Poets!

I took a few weeks to think through their advice. I also got an interesting letter from a prospective agent saying, in essence, “I can’t take a look at a coming-of-age novel that is 140,000 words long.” Agents!

Continue reading →

Sounds Like a Job for Supergirl: Empowered Girls and Women in the 21st Century

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Supergirl 1
Melissa Benoist as the new Supergirl (aka Kara Danvers)

I kept getting goosebumps every time the promo pieces for the new Supergirl show came on TV in the first three weeks of October. The week before the show debuted I told my wife that I simply had to watch it. She gave me a funny look, but didn’t argue. When we finally sat down that first night, I was surprised at how excited I was. And when the moment came for Kara to say, “To hell with trying to hide who I really am,” and she went running through the dark streets of National City, leaping into the air (in fits and starts) until she was soaring through the sky on her way to save a sure-to-crash jet, I burst into tears. Seriously. No shit!

I am a 57-year-old father of three young men. My boys were all stud baseball players from the age of six all the way through high school. One of them is now a minor leaguer in the Phillies organization. I have been a lover of most male-oriented sports all my life. I revere macho writers like Hemingway, Kerouac, Henry Miller, and Charles Bukowski. And I’ve been in love with sexy Continue reading →

That Warm Gooey Feeling: The New View of Climate Change

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Source: NASA Apollo 8
Source: NASA Earthrise from the moon – Apollo 8

Over at Mashable they just posted an interesting article on social media’s perception of the climate change issue. According to the article, “Internet has revelation that climate change action won’t kill the economy after all,” during the last year or so there has been a tremendously positive shift that “reflects the increasing realization in the business and policy-making communities that the transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and other emerging technologies constitutes an economic opportunity rather than an economic obstacle.”

Even though they present wonderful graphs and data to prove their case, Mashable rightly points out the biases of the researchers. They also note that studies about social media are often fraught with Continue reading →

Fighting Violence and Terror with Art, Joy and Youth

~ davidbiddle ~ 2 Comments

We’ve all been wondering how to counteract the lunacy and mayhem that seems to have seriously marked 2015 throughout the world. Right? It’s not just terrorists, out-of-control cops, and criminals. There’s a lot of hatred a certain category of people have been spewing on TV, social media, and, probably, in your neighborhood and workplace.

You may have your own answer, but to me the most powerful weapon global society has against all this fear and negativity is the freedom and joy of young people and the art they are making. Watch this video trailer below:

The full video can be accessed by clicking here: Community of Dancers Boston Edition. This is my youngest son Conor’s project. He is a 20-year-old film student (and hip-hop dancer) at Emerson College Continue reading →