Blog 9-27-17 – Breaking Down

It is now deep in September after a wonderfully productive July and August. Over those previous two months I was able to keep up a good posting record of almost every day, with basically four art supply reviews a month. Now in September I’ve missed more than half the days and most of the posts have been comics and not written posts (not that the comics are bad: I love doing them), and I feel like I should explain myself.

The long and short of it is that I started school again, and I’m now grateful that I didn’t attempt to bring back an actual posting schedule in the last few months. My goal is still to post something every day, but lately I’ve been sort of creatively zapped. I am recovering, though, (I know it doesn’t look like it, but I am) and I should be picking up the pace soon (“should”). I hadn’t anticipated that this would be much of a problem, but I haven’t been back to school in several years, and it appears I just didn’t remember.

And on a bit of a tangent, as part of my “recovering” I am beginning to work on project for the Alpine Artwalk 2017, so be on the lookout for updates and new things becoming available.

-Austin

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Book Review – It Can’t Happen Here (By: Sinclair Lewis)

Sinclair Lewis’ hastily written smear/propaganda novel It Can’t Happen Here has been getting a lot of attention recently, though often in connection to Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (another one on my “to-read” list), with the election. That is the reason I picked up the book in the first place, but for the purpose of review I’ll mostly be putting Trump to the side in an effort to be more “timeless”. Also, there’s already a ton to unpack here without interjecting any modern politics. The book verges on being one of the tried and tested genre of “essay disguised as novel” (like, say, Starship Troopers) and certainly a lot of time is devoted to both internal and external political debate and theory. But does that really make for a compelling novel-length read?

Starting before the start, my edition has an intro by Perry Meisel, a fact I usually wouldn’t mention save for the fact that I tried reading it and found it slow, boring, and enthusiasm-killing (as many introductions tend to be). I didn’t get very far before stopping, and my memory is (intentionally) hazy so I have no direct criticisms other than I’d recommend skipping it.

The actual novel starts off a bit slow, beginning (as many novels are wont to do, unfortunately) with a description of a dining room and then an event taking place there. You’re introduced to the townspeople (some of whom won’t show up again until more than halfway through), given a bit of foreshadowing, and then the book settles in to its slow-burning start for several chapters. There’s some political chatter, and a few characters that, if one knows the time period, are obvious stand-ins for real historical figures (most of whom I had to look up because this time is a bit glossed over in history classes), but other than that, the start is a rather boring look into the life of a middle-American newspaper man.

That man is Doremus Jessup (dormouse sometimes), a college-educated reporter type who returned to Fort Beulah and ended up buying the local newspaper, the Informer. He’s just your average guy, with a couple daughters, one married one not, a son he hates (and you will too if you read it), a plain wife, a dog wonderfully named Foolish (one of the most clever bits of the book), a super-masculine friend named Buck, and an affair that makes all his points about the immorality of his enemies a little more dull. Though shortly after we, the readers, find out about this affair, it is then “suggested” to Doremus by his daughter with the very strangely written “kind of be lovers”, which I can’t help but feel is an attempt to justify what had just been written, even though it should be plain to the reader that, despite his flaws, Doremus is a better person than the Fascists who start running the place. In any case, I was not persuaded to forgive Doremus, nor like him much more, especially with him being written like a person I’d not want to spend much time with really, but that seems to be one of Lewis’ go-tos.

The book plods along until we get to the actual election of Buzz Windrip, Democratic Party candidate, facing off against boring Republican Walt Trowbridge. At this point, to add to his large cast of political stand-ins, Lewis starts throwing some real people under the bus, most notably Upton Sinclair (I’m not sure how much was motivated by people getting their names mixed up) who’s all in for the obvious pseudo-fascists. Other real people are sprinkled in here and there; Franklin Roosevelt has to be mentioned because he was President at the time, and other people it’s just fun hearing about if you know the time period, like Harvard Nazi Putzi Hanfstaengl. Buzz is a demagoguish (called so by the Saturday Evening Post in the novel) populist styled after Huey Long to the point that it’s heavily implied he’s from Louisiana, though they never tell you outright what state he was Senator for. He gets support from religious radio hosts and everyone who wants to government to give them $5000. Apparently that makes him pretty popular (though, other than people liking money, there’s never really any indication of why he is being supported) and he releases a 15-point program that if divvied up correctly could be the bullet points of either major party currently, with a few “this guy is obviously going to try and be a dictator” bits thrown in for good measure. He then wins because the book has no plot otherwise, and starts making America a hellhole.

It might sound like I’m being pretty down on the book so far, but that’s because I’m trying to give you a bit of the plot, which for pretty much the whole way takes a back seat to Doremus’ political philosophy arguments in his own head. He spends a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a “modern democrat” (or a “Lincolnian democrat”, whatever that could possibly mean) or something and about how terrible the current regime is without doing anything about it, probably because a newspaperman doesn’t make for an exciting action hero and that isn’t how Lewis writes. Doremus seems to disagree with everyone else who proclaims a political opinion, but most of them are either communists or one of Windrip’s “fascist” “Corpos”, and it’s pretty obvious he is actually pandering to the common mindset of those likely to buy the book and read it. Still, it is excellently written and quote worthy. It’s one of those books where you feel like there’s some important message you need to remember on every page. And it’s probably the main draw for the book (which is good considering how much room it takes up) not the tale of the upstart dictator. At the very least it makes you think about and solidify your own positions, a thing Doremus doesn’t do a very good job at.

With his newfound “absolute power” (slightly explained away by him intimidating Congress) Windrip starts to do all sorts of things, like reorganize the states into many fewer zones to be more easily governed, inflate the currency, take a bunch of that money from everyone, and put people that criticize him in jail and later concentration camps. All this is done by replacing the civilian government, the courts, and much of the military with his cronies in the “Minutemen”, who the army is ordered to train, and they obey that order for some reason. The Minutemen don’t start out like your normal fascist gang, though, in fact, their turn to the violence that often characterizes such party movements happens only after Windrip becomes President, and far too suddenly for it to make any sense. They go from jolly marching squad to merry murderers in the space of a page, and most of the rest of the story for our “heroes” hinges on them becoming crueler, which those in such positions would do, but I’m just not sure as quickly.

And of course the potential backlash to all of Windrip’s plans is ignored. Lewis seems completely ignorant of the idea that states had less than 75 years (a larger amount of time has elapsed between the publication of this book and the day I am reviewing it than between it and the Civil War) before fought a war for “states rights”, and that many Americans have guns they aren’t afraid to use. It’s not entirely unrealistic to me that there wouldn’t be a second revolution, or some other large form of armed resistance, but there is no mention for ¾ of the book of anyone fighting the Corpos with guns. All the pushback from the states at being disintegrated, all the fighting men would do if they really saw a government this openly cruel and tyrannical (to white people) is swept under the rug for the convenience of the plot, without even a token reference. At one point the main character gets enraged, goes to his desk, gets out his revolver, and then puts it back into the drawer within moments. The idea of actually fighting back is never even seriously considered, and that infuriates me reading it. I get that he’s a news guy, and wants to win the battle with words, but no one else talks about it either, the only time anyone else even thinks about fighting is when a Minuteman is trying to get with Sissy (Doremus’ unwed daughter) and she mentions it. This general disregard to arm gets a character killed when he barges in on an illegal court proceeding, that follows what he knows is an illegal arrest for simply writing an article critical of the regime, and has the gall to stand there alone shouting at armed men to let the man go. As his character was supposedly a soldier, you’d think he’d have the sense to bring a gun, or a club, or at least an angry mob so he didn’t get singled out and killed so easily, or anything at all save his temper. But the story wouldn’t move along then.

And the story does start to move on, at an increasingly fast pace as Lewis’ writing deadline approached and he attempted to cram in everything he wanted to say. At least that is my inference (he was on a pretty strict “get this published before the election” deadline, though). And his Nobel-Prize-Winning writing style really starts to break down. Lewis himself understood that living up to his prize was difficult if not impossible following his receiving it, and while I’m not trying to determine here what writing deserves a Nobel Prize (though I’ve been reading more by the laureates recently), I think it’s safe to say that the last half of this novel is not why he won any awards. Mistakes begin to increase, plotlines are lost, and the rest starts to fly by at breakneck speed. Nearing the last quarter, at the only time where the book goes back in time for a moment, a character is resurrected magically as the two timelines don’t line up (he’s dead in the end in both, unfortunately for him). Randomly inserted is a whole chapter about a black intellectual who attempts to explain that blacks submitting to the government would be better for everyone and gets killed for it in what I assume was supposed to be an impactful scene but since I had just learned of his existence a few pages before I wasn’t that surprised or interested. And, as with other contemporary books, “nigger” (or negro) is used quite liberally in this chapter (and in a few other parts of the book) while words that are presumably “fuck” or the like are censored with a “     “. And this is followed by the government beginning to unravel in a surprisingly bloodless manner.

The end especially, but the whole thing really, just lacks plot coherency. There is the fire of fascism (though a bit toned down from what we know now even with the torture and the murdering and such), but there is no smoke: the motivations of the antagonists just don’t make sense. And that’s a problem because it’s fairly easy to write characters that could understandably be swayed by a National Socialist agenda (there is one, and for his part Shad works). And to me that can partially be attributed to Lewis just not knowing how people work. He’s terrible at writing children (‘s dialogue), which is fine because there’s only one that does anything, and his other characters seem completely ignorant of that fact that in regular conversation people aren’t as truthful and ridged as an author is capable of being. The way Doremus talks most of the time, or how Sissy talks about affairs and rape, are gratingly inhuman, and others act more like robots for the plot. It’s probably for the better that they are absent most of the book in favor of political semi-treatise. But there’s a whole lot written for not a lot of substance. It all boils down very easily, and didn’t need to be stretched into a novel, but it’s not an egregious offense. There are parts that are quite insightful, or mirror modern problems so well one thinks “when was this book written?”, because it feels like yesterday. And that does give a little hope, that we’ve been worrying about the same problems for so long they obviously mustn’t be that big a deal.

But that does make the political aspect a bit dubious, especially in the modern day. Lewis keeps trying to hit you with the idea that some boisterous snake oil salesman can trick everyone and turn the country into a fascist state, that “it can happen here”, but it just never lands. He just doesn’t have any of the details worked out, he get the broad strokes about the people’s hate for the “’Jewish Communist’ Atheists” and the desire for money and power, but everything smaller seems missing. I get that the “facts” about how the European regimes came to power had not yet been fully established as the history was still being made when the book was written, but as someone who has read more than the average person on how Hitler (and other dictators) came to power, this just doesn’t click. In the same way that today, for all I might not like Trump and his “politics” I can’t call him a fascist, there’s too many pieces missing. Electing Huey Long president would probably have been a mistake, but it wouldn’t have resulted in this book becoming true. And I think the book is the worse for being written as allegory to him on a fairly tight deadline.

I suppose through this review I’ve sounded pretty down on the book, a side effect of it being easier to list faults than to heap praise, but if it had been a truly bad book I wouldn’t have finished it. I was interested the whole way through, and the politics and philosophy are intellectually stimulating. It’s a book that really makes you think about, rescale and reorganize just what your beliefs are. I took copious notes as I read both for this review (which are included below because of the sheer mass of them, especially when considering how few I take for other books) and for myself to read in the future in the form of photos of paragraphs to pages. It really does seem like there is something important to remember on every page, and that the opinions are well-considered and wise. But as a side effect it is quite dense, and the actual story, already a mere ghost, starts sliding to a halt many times. I enjoyed the book and it’s worth a read if you’ve been considering it; I’d recommend snippets before I’d recommend the whole book, though. As post-prize work of a Nobel Laureate it isn’t as good as one would imagine, as a smear book to prevent the presidency of Huey Long it was late but perhaps would have been effective, as an expression of a political philosophy to which you can compare your own and think about heavy decisions it works well, but as a tool for evaluating modern politics, or story about a realistic rise of Fascism in the US it falls a bit flat.

Notes

Intro by perry meisel is terrible  

Why do they always describe the dining room first, it’s a bore? 

Pg 16 “for the first time in all history” I think not

The rarely seen whisper exclamation

When was this written?

I ask again (comic books and radio complaints)

Page 26, error or intentional

Page 31 last paragraph

Spit and image

Pg 40, paragraph after break

I have yet to find an author that can describe characters in ways I can remember

I always loved the idea of the communists being Jews, and then you find out the communists hate the Jews

Interesting list style in pairs with no oxford comma

Jewish atheists said the cardinal

Chapter 6 excerpt

Doremus isn’t the greatest person in the world

Democrats in cleveland

Pg. 58 flags and song

Capitalize the he when referring to God

These 15 points sound like a mixture of both parties today (that’s why two parties doesn’t make sense, they don’t always line up)

Windrup is like dr oz selling fake medicine

Napoleon wasn’t short  

Lincolnian democrat?

I like all the special character œ just isn’t around much anymore 

He doesn’t look as nice as a nazi

Never mentions the state buzz is from

Saturday evening post calls him a demagogue

Lots of real people (putzi)

The colonel speaks in unexpected places where its news to speak

“summer schools  in which well-know writers taught the art of writing to eager aspirants who could never learn to write”

Interesting collection of people voting for him

Trance well foreshadowed

Cherishes the woe(?)

Chapter 13

One problem is it seems every page is worthy if remembering

John ball 1381

Spelling mistake “adanced” 114

“kind of be lovers”

I feel like the daughter suggesting adultery just after we learned about it is just meant to try and make it okay(or maybe she knew)

Just ripping at upton Sinclair, tearing him apart

The states would fight way more fiercely than portrayed here, I feel like he’s hand waving

Firing workers paid a dollar a day(nobody gets their 5,000 dollars)

He pandered to both groups in private. 

Why inflation is bad

Lewis neglects how many people in the us own guns and would form mobs of their own to fight the minute men however small their resistance ended up being (and more soldiers would likely disobey orders {if they saw white people getting hurt})

The minute me are far from the average facist gang, intentionally, but perhaps unrealistically so, their turn to evil seems rather abrupt

Jung

He can’t write children

Will rodgers censored

The book takes a while to get going

“it can happen here” 217

Rexall

Robbed him of bootlegging

Sissy talking about rape is strange

It tasted like saltpeter, was that so hard to say Sinclair Lewis

Plaint

Depreciated? Pronunciation

Why censor words?

The the mistake

Defended itself out wards

It starts to ramp up near the end

They know when to break with family

Apparently they re-incarnated swan

So far in the boo there’s been the fire of fascism, but there was never the smoke

Few typos and mistakes near the end, he’s losin’ it (still more mistakes)

That bit about “today’s” youth and all around it seem like thy were written yesterday (and give a little hope)

His rebuke of private corporations and talking if the need for government control seems overly strong

Even then war with Mexico wouldn’t last long at all

Mexican, Ethiopian, and Chinese patriot

Second to last work misspelled

Strange rebellion

2016 The Year of Oops… Redux

Back in the dark ages at the end of 2013 I wrote an article about how that year, mostly in tech but also in other aspects of life, was full of enough flubs that it should probably be forgotten. I lamented that the tech industry specifically and the mountain of humans in charge of things in general had lost touch with reality and were making decisions seemingly based on what they thought was a good idea without doing any testing. I made a few predictions for the future that these tone-deaf companies would roll back what they did and use the “frog in hot water” method to bring them back. I was slightly more accurate than I expected, but I still held out hope that the people in charge would take the hint from their customers (probably in the form of declining sales) and change their tune. Three years later and I couldn’t have been more wrong. So I’m back again to take a look as some of the “facepalm” (I guess) worthy instances of the last year.

Starting off strong where I left off: Yahoo! (a company I’m already not a fan of for reasons that could be a post on their own) disclosed that it got hacked (“hacked” always being a relative term) years ago and that a huge number of accounts’ information and passwords were stolen. As anyone who uses the system knows, they now advise you to change your password and personal information. Thank you for telling everyone a few years too late. Your security is so good that I, the “owner of the account” can’t log in, but some other random person who stole millions of accounts data can and I appreciate that. At least it’s good news for Verizon who could negotiate to pay a capitol “B” Billion dollars less in their acquisition that now seems even more questionable than that time they bought AOL. So with Verizon in a slap-fight with Sprint while cutting off customers’ unlimited data plans and Yahoo! (who I’m pretty sure still runs AT&T’s email) bleeding money like it’s done for the last decade it seems like Tumblr is still the most sane member of the family.

My segues didn’t get any better in the intervening years so I’m just going to move on to Apple, who seem to be determined to destroy everything I once liked about them. The Apple watch isn’t doing so hot, even with its second generation. I don’t know why they thought it would work well. I, and others, made fun of Samsung for doing it back in 2013. I guess they probably still made boatloads of cash, so success is relative. Their Macbook Pros finally followed their desktop brothers and restricted users to a single port-type, to which I respond “I get it, I get it, the future is coming, but could you please not shove it down my throat?”. But I guess I’m an outlier. I’m still kinda mad they got rid of optical drives. It seems like their innovation has become more desperate to put out a new model of at least 2 devices each year. Their last iPad had me bored, their touchbar had me snoring, and Bluetooth headphones had me enraged. At least the iPhone 7, while being bigger than a datapad from Star Trek and having the worst audio playback quality of any phone in recent memory, has enough internal storage now to replace my iPod classic that lets me have all the music I want anywhere I want it; thank you very much for not coming up with a suitable replacement. People might just say I’m behind the times with my clunky old devices, but as Apple’s OS’ bugs increase, their product lines diversify in the weirdest, most confusing possible way, and they start to become more locked down. I get the impression that Apple thinks I’m an idiot, and an idiot who can be counted on to buy their chained-down PC’s time and time again without question. They’ll still probably get one more generation of devices out of me, and hey, they’re one of the richest companies in the world, but I’m seeing a downward trend I hope they can pull up from.

But while Apple might be specifically annoying to me (and making some general duds) the whole message coming out of the tech industry this year is one to make them not be trusted. While there hasn’t been too much negative press at the announcements themselves, things like Uber’s new “fleet” of self-driving cars and Amazon’s grocery store show that the ideal future in the minds of emerging companies is one without you (and anti-trust laws). And this latest attempt to begin the demolition of these two huge employment sectors in the US comes after years of union gutting, tax evasion, and price slashing that competitors can’t keep up with, while offering no compensation and spitting in the face of one of the core tenets supposed to keep capitalism in check “if the people working for you don’t earn enough to buy the products, your sales will diminish”. Amazon has gone the pacification route by also introducing a way to donate to charities without changing much of your shopping routine (maybe someone’ll create a charity for helping Amazon’s warehouse workers in poor conditions) while Uber and Lyft decided to stamp their foot down and declare “We don’t need you, you need us!” and pulling out of Austin (and other cities) when a clunky but reasonable local law made it necessary to fingerprint their drivers. Their leaving sends the interesting message that the law, their customers, and their contractors can all go to hell, they’re playing for some imaginary future where they win. The future isn’t quite here yet: Teslas are smashing into trucks they think are the sky, Samsung’s phones are literally exploding (because seriously, maybe they should test their products a little better; they don’t have to release a new pocket-dinosaur every year), and a private company landing a rocket is still something to be impressed at, but as the most recent job-destroyers gain footholds on the coasts, it’s only a matter of time before they start moving inland.

And well… I mentioned politics last time so… Trump, am I right? or more the fact that he created a social-media campaign strategy that no one seems to really understand, even the facilitators like Facebook and Twitter. Presumably afraid that any human interference would be labeled as bias and hurt their image (which did happen) Facebook got rid of human news “editors” and replaced them with an algorithm that gave everyone a healthy dose of fake. I’m still not sure if I’d prefer a biased human serving me up news or a robot feeding me wrong information, because given two bad answers, why choose? (-Apparently Everyone in 2016). Twitter (or Reddit, or really anywhere,) didn’t fare much better, as every attempt at policing they did was interpreted as an infringement on peoples’ rights (which it might be?) and only served to bolster the things they were attempting to be rid of. But public confidence in their ability to be arbiters was only destroyed once they were all that was left after most of the “regular” media came out as crazy biased, as in “blatantly endorsing a political candidate when you’re supposed to be a neutral arbiter of truth” biased. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not happy with the fact that there was an election between, and I don’t have the exact numbers here, about 176,000 people all of whom I hated, but someone had to win, and if anyone stating an obvious political opinion when their job is supposedly based on facts and not opinion, is obviously shooting themselves in the foot. Even sites like Wikileaks that don’t really even have stories, just documents, appear to be extremely biased with the specific documents they release (but who was trusting information from potential traitors anyway?)

Without a segue, but with a bad taste in my mouth, I’ll just move back to less political industry topics. Time-Warner Cable was going to merge with Comcast in a deal that was shady enough they were going to give a significant chunk of their subscribers to Charter Communications and create a new company with other divested subscribers that would be controlled by both of them. But even still, it apparently wouldn’t make it through anti-trust regulations so they had to give up and Time-Warner merged with Charter instead creating the second-largest telecommunications company. Now they’re trying to re-brand, meaning people will get the same terrible service with a new uninteresting name: “Spectrum”. They’re even shooting themselves in the foot a bit by continually saying “Time-Warner Cable is now Spectrum”… way to get your name off of it. But at least they’re addressing their criticism, albeit by running away from it, unlike the Youtube/Google/Alphabet (who cares?) machine that long ago figured out it didn’t have to answer to anyone, especially customers. Even as Youtube sparks large controversies that alienate creators (3 in the last year if my (minimal) count is correct) there is no danger of any competitor catching up and thus a negligible number of creators will leave. Google (and Alphabet) like to keep their big mouths shut about how they can control your online lives for the most part (smart tactic I suppose), and Youtube mostly does as well, but its actions affect so many people that they are pretty uninterested in how to run the business so it benefits the creators and the consumers more than it does at the moment. And they’re big enough that they don’t have to answer to anyone, and even though they’re guilty of many of the things I’ve already talked about here nothing sticks. They just put their heads down and barrel forward with only their own internal monologue to hear.

So I guess the moral of the story is that everything is terrible and you shouldn’t trust anyone? I don’t want that to be the case, and while one should be watchful of that potential outcome we aren’t quite there yet. But as these newer companies get larger, they grow increasingly out of touch with regular people. In many cases they’re just sort of forgetting that people exist, and it seems like more often than not they’re being forgiven (or maybe just forgotten) for it. Hopefully, there are greater potential repercussions for these companies than just me and a few other people talking into the internet void, and hopefully that means more of a dialogue between the parties that will lead to more awesome things in the future. But now my internal pessimism disguised as realism begins to show through. I would feel equally confident in a prediction that the increasing complexity of electronic systems will lead to companies focusing even less on the end user and more on simply creating a product that they can put out, and still crashes, bugs, glitches, and hacks will become more prevalent and more disastrous. And even if things get better, I’ll probably be back in 3 years to talk about some other perplexing failure. But hopefully not sooner.

Man, I left the 2013 article on so much less of a downer… Maybe pessimism is just the curse of a thinking people… No that’s not funny! Um… At least we won’t hear “Do it for the Vine” anymore? Maybe… Samsung and Apple should be less conspicuous with their Hitman™ exploding phones… Sure, good enough.

 

Post-Script: Here is a link to a Verge article that, while not being the inspiration for this article, helped guide the direction it went.

Blog 7-10-16 – July Update

Hello everyone, Austin Smith here, and it is July 10th, also known as the absolute last day one could possibly consider in the first week of July. Though I must admit I believe I did fail when I said I was going to have an update up during the first week. I did spend some extra time making sure the two posts I put up as tokens of proof that I am still going to update this site were a little more polished. The update is: I have not reached the point yet where I am in a position to fully restart my posting schedule. But I have said all of the things before about how I’ve seen Internet projects disappear, and how not getting things done snowballs. So I won’t go over them again, instead I’ll tell you about some of the things I did that are holding up the content but were still great to do. I’ll post another update by the first week of September.

The first really exciting thing that I did was go out to California and administrate a wedding for a family member. Unfortunately for me right now the photos haven’t come in, and all of the others that have me in them aren’t great (but I wasn’t who people were there to see) so I don’t have a photo from the ceremony right now. So instead here is one of me in Texas in the same outfit that looks like the Lord is shining down upon me.

photo-178

I’m also still moving, and here are ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos of what a literal ton of books (as in actually 2000 pounds) looks like boxed up and on the shelf.

photo-179photo-176

Most recently I went to both of my local 4th of July festivities, in Alpine Texas. The first one, Fiesta del Barrio, I attended as a vendor selling some of my books. But I’m bad at taking pictures so I only got one of the parade, and one of a horned lizard. I also missed the second parade and only got one picture of it as well.

photo-183photo-180photo-181

And here is a panorama someone took of me from the Reds show I was featured in in early April.

photo-177

Anyway, hopefully those photos and my posts from yesterday sufficiently prove that I am alive and dedicated to these blogs. Thank you for your patience.

-Austin

Dragoncompany.org    Dragonfunnies.com   Artsupplycritic.com

Blog 11-30-15 – Thanksgiving and Artwalk

Hellooo… It’s Blog time again. I’m still sort of in a Thanksgiving vacation type thing where everyone I’m around acts like I shouldn’t be working, but I still work but a lot fewer things get done. Anyway, I’ve got a few things I feel I should keep posted about.

First of all, my Artwalk showing in Alpine went wonderfully and it was much less cold than previous years (though at one point it did get quite cold). I met a lot of great people and talked to many more I’d met in previous years. And since I’ve officially unveiled my new books at the event, I will just leave the link to my Amazon author page where they can be purchased here again.

My Thanksgiving also went well, and I hope yours did too. It’s the first time I’ve really celebrated (had dinner that wasn’t just my normal dinner with immediate family) in a few years, and the occasion was much more pleasant than when I was last celebrating it because I was able to eat foods prepared closer to how I’m used too. Anyway, enough about me that doesn’t relate to this site: I hope your Thanksgiving went as good as mine or better and that any traveling done went smoothly.

And finally, due to several factors, including the two events mentioned above, it being the cold season and several other things, I am still behind schedule in my written items. And any lead-time my previous advanced planning for this site gave me has eroded. So things will still be late and at wonky times into December. Which, while past the date when I had hoped the problem would be solved, is not past when I actually thought it would be solved. And if things go well everything will be mostly back on track for the New Year.

Thank you,

Austin Smith