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The Eyes in the Peacock’s Tail

by Diane Duane June 7, 2011

Once upon a time, the King of the Greek gods, Zeus, was getting ready to cheat on his wife again. His latest target was a beautiful mortal girl named Io, whose resistance he’d been wearing down by sending her a series of racy dreams of which he was the star. Having finally arrived on her doorstep to make his case in person, Zeus wrapped the two of them and that whole region of the world in a thick black cloud to hide the incipient goings-on.

This was a serious tactical error. Zeus’s wife Queen Hera noticed the peculiar change in the weather, checked Olympus to see if her husband the Cloudgatherer was on site, and – not finding him there – immediately put two and two together and headed for the area of sudden overcast. She dispersed the clouds and found herself looking at her husband and an extremely lovely (and one must assume, confused-looking) white cow, which Zeus explained had sprung from Mother Earth just that minute.  Not even slightly fooled, Hera promptly confiscated the cow, and assigned to guard her – or rather, to make sure her husband didn’t get anywhere near her – one of her security staff, a creature by the name of Argus. Argus was completely covered with eyes that stared in every direction and saw everything for miles around. The eyes even slept in shifts, so that the watcher’s pitiless regard was inescapable by night or day. Hera went off confident that her husband’s case was well handled.

Myths being what they are, of course, such a situation can’t last. Zeus quickly has words with Olympus’s resident thief, trickster and inside-job man, Hermes, who disguises himself as a handsome shepherd boy and  shows up in the flowery meadow where Argus is guarding Io. There he proceeds to bore all Argus’s eyes to sleep by telling him serial tales of mortal romance.* Then, when the last of Argus’s eyes fall asleep, Hermes pulls out his sword and kills him, signaling, if not the end of Io’s troubles, at least the beginning of the end. Later on the frustrated Hera winds up putting all of Argus’s eyes in the tail of her favorite bird, the peacock — probably as a reminder to Zeus that at least this once she caught him in near-flagrante — and over the subsequent centuries Argus’s name becomes a metaphor for unsleeping watchfulness.

The world is full of people who appoint themselves to roles like Argus’s, as would-be watchers and guardians. Sometimes they’re even useful in those roles. Their motives aren’t always suspect: sometimes they genuinely mean well. But good intentions aren’t always enough. And sometimes these can lead the would-be guardians into serious mistakes, especially when their intelligence (in the informational sense) is incomplete or poor.

It looks like we’ve just seen an example of this in a recent Wall Street Journal article, which spends a while purporting to analyze the “fitness for purpose” of some modern-day young adult fiction, the kind that deals openly with difficult topics like self-harm. The reactions to the article’s assertions have been widespread and passionate. Readers and writers alike have responded at length, and lots more opinions and links to them, short and long, are to be found on Twitter filed under the #YASaves hashtag.

Having read the article, though, I found myself reacting most strongly to two specific passages that jumped out at me: and the reactions came on two different levels.

The first passage really annoys me as a former psychiatric professional:

“Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures.”

“Indeed, likely –”? I’m ready to be shown the clinical study that underlies and supports this statement. So sweeping a generalization has no business being made in a public forum without a solid underpinning of fact. What fact  I can bring to this issue is that in my time as a psychiatric nurse who worked with adolescent / young teenage patients, I never came across a single case that supports any aspect of the columnist’s opinion. If she can produce any evidence to reinforce her claim besides what I strongly suspect is wishful thinking, I’ll be glad to examine it and draw my own conclusions as to its validity.

But I really doubt there is any such data. And if (as I suspect) that conclusion just came out of the columnist’s head as a feeling or a theory, or was a vague summation of even vaguer third-person anecdotal material, I have one word for it: CODSWALLOP.

What I found while doing one-to-one therapy with adolescent patients is that to successfully start working through their problems, what they initially needed more than anything else was confirmation and acknowledgement from those around them that the problems existed in the first place – that they weren’t unique or alone in their situation, that other people knew about it and that it was real. Books dealing with the problem in question were and are often a useful tool to help that acknowledgement get started, and even (in some cases) in getting a patient past their own denial that they had any such difficulty at all.

When I was practicing, such books were often painfully dry and didactic, and I wish there’d been more young adult fiction available on such subjects… for fiction (especially when done well) tends to lecture less than nonfiction and is more likely to be successfully internalized because you’re hearing, not a dry recitation of fact, but someone’s voice. Young adult novels that deal honestly with such issues unquestionably have value for teens groping their way toward understanding of how to tackle their problems. They invite them into the dialogue: they make the troubled teen part of the solution. And at the very least, they let their readers know that they’re not alone. There are times when that knowledge is enough to mean the difference between life and death. Here, without any doubt whatever, YA really does save.

A side issue here: there are probably some who think I have no dog in this particular race, since my YA books are not known for dealing with edgy teen issues, and also have no explicit sex, not a lot of violence, and language not much stronger than the “crap” level. This is personal preference for me, a matter of style. But I support my colleagues who are working the grittier and more uncomfortable part of the young adult coalface, and I strongly dislike the casual, if not outright mischievous, mischaracterization of their works in the columnist’s article. She has done them a disservice, and owes them an apology… which unfortunately I doubt will be forthcoming.

So much for that. Now for the other statement, the one that got up my nose in my role as a former teenager:

It is a dereliction of duty not to make distinctions in every other aspect of a young person’s life between more and less desirable options.

…Oh really, now. Every other aspect? And not just distinctions, I bet, but decisions. So there are no areas in which the child or young adult can be considered competent to have his or her own opinions, and make his or her own choices, without having them vetted and pre-ratified by the ever-watchful parent? (Because from the WSJ article, you get a strong feeling that when Mommy Says No about, for example, a book — well, the poor young adult just gets to pull on his or her PJs and go to bed early: there’s no mechanism for appeal.)

I really hope that’s not what the columnist is suggesting, because I don’t know about the rest of you, but it sounds like Hell on earth to me. And that would not just be because I’m one of a generation who would have laughed out loud at the very idea of my parents organizing, for example, when (or if) I went out to play, or who or what I played with. In my spare time I went where I pleased, lay out in green fields for prolonged periods staring at the sky and doing nothing remotely “useful” or educational, adventured widely through my neighborhood unsupervised, climbed trees and fell out of them, stayed out after dark (having informed my mom that I’d be doing so), and had a secret place to go and read where I spent hours on end, with no need to account for my movements to anybody. To have somebody ruling yes/no on every aspect of my life until I was eighteen? There’s a word for that kind of life. It’s jail. (And some of you will probably recall J.R.R. Tolkien coming up with something similar in a discussion of the value of the literature of escape. “Who are the people most concerned with the possibility of escape?” he asked. “The jailers.”)

I do not accept that life for kids is all that much more dangerous than it was when I grew up. I just don’t. The difference between now and fifty years ago is that we now openly discuss the dangers that were often only whispered about half a century ago. Yes, the new millennium has thrown up many new and different threats to the concept of the peaceful and safe childhood (itself something of a construct, but that’s a subject for another post). But those threats and challenges ought to be met in some other way than locking the kids up in a virtual tower until they’re eighteen. The fairy tales (always a treasury of useful archetype) tell us straightforwardly what happens to such children.

Under no circumstances am I questioning a parent’s right or responsibility to protect his or her children from danger. But I do think we’re building the protective fences way too high. Unfortunately, the sensationalistic focus of mass media on unusual events like the kidnapping, abuse and/or murder of children has successfully exploited the increasingly anxious love and cynically fanned the fears of a whole generation of parents, until they genuinely think it right that everything about their children’s lives must be rigidly controlled until they are no longer legally responsible for them.  People who advocate some kind of return to common sense in these matters are practically condemned as the Antichrist. Freedom? That’s something a child will be allowed to experience only after it turns eighteen. Or maybe after it exits college at age twenty-one or thereabouts, and starts trying to find employment sufficient to pay off those pesky student loans. Until then, many North American parents are trapped in their role as frazzled, Argus-eyed controllers of their children’s mobility, their after-school activities, their diet, their access to money, their online activity, and a whole lot of their entertainment.**

Books, though, are revealing an interesting chink in this theoretically all-encompassing defense. Some parents are apparently beginning to find books scary because they’re not like the ones they read when they were kids… and because they understand from firsthand experience that books interact directly with the imagination in an essentially noncontrollable way that movies and TV and computer games do not. After all, when you sit down to watch a TV show or a movie with your child, you can at least verify that you’re being presented with the same imagery and deriving generally the same meanings from it. But you can’t be sure of that with a book: the reader does so much of the work in his or her own head. As a result, the hypercontrolling parents whose attitudes are reflected in the WSJ article sometimes seem to act as if they consider books to be a potential delivery system for some dangerous drug that will overwhelm their child’s defenseless mind. (The concept that the child might be able to stand aside from the book’s content and evaluate it independently before accepting or rejecting it is of course rejected out of hand.)

But I think this attitude is a pointer toward the underlying problem responsible for the article’s tone of righteous (and frightened) indignation. The presence of all these awful books on the market suggests that there must be a lot of young adults reading them – kids who are obviously out of the absolute control of their parents! (Horrors.) And this undeniable fact will surely provoke, in the hypercontrolling parent, a fear that their own defenseless child might possibly listen, not to the parent, but some book-pushing friend, and read one of these deadly objects… and the parent won’t be able to stop them from internalizing the contents. This will be due to a terrible truth that no hypercontrolling parent wants to face, but which books force them to confront more clearly than usual: Though so many other aspects of your child’s life can be controlled by you, the inside of your child’s mind is simply not one of them. With this unbearable admission, the hypercontrolling parent’s only daily certainty in their relationship with their children – the illusion of control – suddenly fades away.

And those of you who may have been children at one point or another will possibly remember another aspect of this truth (if you actually remember your childhood, and haven’t idealized it into a few frozen images. So much of this whole situation flows from people not remembering…) You know that if a child is absolutely focused on a parent not finding out about something, odds are good the parent never will. Let the parent have eyes like an Argus, they still won’t be able to keep their child under those eyes for every minute of the day. And Hermes, in his aspect as the wily patron god of untrammeled communications, is always lurking just around the corner: for if a child really wants to read something without this parent knowing it, he will find a way.

One of my parents tried to exercise the columnist’s style of control with me, at one point, way back when – trying to keep me from reading material “too old for me” and calling the local library to say that I wasn’t to have access to it. I was outraged, for I considered what I put into my brain in my spare time to be my business – my personal area of greatest freedom, and one I wasn’t going to give up for anybody. (I probably didn’t phrase this exactly this way, being nine at the time. But the above sentiment renders exactly how I felt.) The joke, though, was that I needn’t have wasted the outrage, because I quickly discovered for myself that there were simple ways around the silly parental prohibition (which I knew was silly because I knew what I was after – general knowledge, nothing salacious or evil).

Don’t get me wrong here. I’d have been delighted to discuss the whys and wherefores with the parent in question, so that we could work it out, they wouldn’t worry, and I wouldn’t have to hide what was going on. But it was imposed on me as a diktat, and all such attempts on my side to get some negotiation on the issue failed. So I gave up on what was plainly a wasted effort and got on with business… though I was still sad that my parent, even after all those years spent raising me, plainly didn’t know me very well at all. For the reading I was interested in doing, I simply took a bus to the next town over and used their library instead. They didn’t know about the “guidelines” my parent had issued to the home library, and the local library could report (if asked) that I was obeying the prohibition. Problem solved. (Was I guilty about deceiving my parent? Yes. For about five minutes. [Five minutes is a surprisingly long time when you’re nine.] Did my parent ever find out? No. Did I suffer any harm from it? Not in the slightest.)

The point is that now it would be way, way easier than that to game the parental system. You could make a case that books are the most easily concealed of all information technologies, and as technology continues to explode around us all, the situation just gets better for the clandestine reader. Besides libraries where your kid can read out of your sight, there are computers that don’t have NetNanny installed on them. There are other kids’ smartphones, left unlocked by parents not quite so controlling or paranoid. You think you’ve got your own kid’s phone locked down? What technology can limit, technology can defeat, and info on how to hack the protective apps on a phone, how to get around the parental-choice software on a laptop or a desktop PC, is common currency in every schoolyard, in newsgroups and online forums, on Facebook and in Tumblr and on Twitter and many other places. It passes in stealthily exchanged thumb drives, and jumps like lightning by text, in codes parents can’t understand, from phone to phone. Even that epitome of “safety” and supervision, the playdate, can be subverted if the kids know what they’re doing, and are careful about how they coordinate the manipulation of their parents. (It’s a choice irony that parents who have been manipulating every aspect of their kids’ lives for decades routinely have no idea where the kids have picked up the talent, and are horrified when it’s turned on them.)

It must be terrifying for the hypercontrolling parent to be jailer in so porous a prison. You have to feel for them.

…For about five minutes. If you’re a parent who’s become committed to such a role, you have only one hope of successfully discharging your “duty.” You must bribe or blandish or scare your prisoners into believing that your actions are either for their own good (that most horrifying of justifications, sometimes worst when genuine), or just too much trouble to fight. Otherwise you have no chance of maintaining any significant level of control. The minute the kids decide to stop cooperating, you’ve lost the game. But while you’re winning, you’re as much a prisoner of the regime as they are. And you’ll remain so until your children leave home – possibly ill-equipped, due to your actions, to be out on their own in this century – and you collapse, exhausted.

I think there is a way out of this trap. But it’s dangerous, and it flies in the face of too much of today’s unquestioned “wisdom” about childrearing. It involves building a genuine informed partnership with the resident child or young adult as regards reading material, with give and take on both sides; and a real attempt to put yourself into the other party’s head, instead of merely imposing sheer brute-force control (which will eventually fail).  It involves actually reading books that you’ve heard scary things about to find out if those things are true, before you start issuing reading fatwas.  And – scariest of all –  it involves standing up to other parents who will try to force you back into the role that they’ve succumbed to for the sake of being seen as a good parent, sometimes even when way down deep they’ve disagreed with it.

Of course it won’t be easy. As my mom used to say (I believe quoting the cookbook writer Peg Bracken), “For every pint of wine you drink in this life, you’ll drink a quart of vinegar.” While forging and implementing this agreement with your child, there will be screaming and yelling and carrying on, “human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria,” and so forth ad infinitum. But if you stick it out and make the break, you and your child together will have a chance to experience a shared experience of literature that in retrospect will make both childhood and parenthood memorable.

And as the certainty sets in that your children are going to be all right – as they assert their ability to handle their own growing freedom, and you realize that you’ve clawed back at least one precious sector of yours — you will at last be able to sigh with relief and start shoving those sleepless eyes back into the peacock’s tail… right where they belong.


*Attn: romance-writing colleagues: I’m not taking a poke at you. It’s in Ovid. Apparently after a long warm thyme-scented Greek afternoon of sweet reed-piping and storytelling, the tale of Pan and Syrinx is what pushes Argus over the edge into Snore City.

**I have to add that most European parents I know from a quarter century’s life on this side of the water find the whole North American “helicopter parent” concept kind of bizarre: some use it as yet more evidence that a lot of my people need their heads felt. As a former head-feeler, I normally invoke possible conflict-of-interest issues and seek an excuse to either leave or order another pint.

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June 7, 2011
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Parousia delay (re-re-redux…)

by Diane Duane May 17, 2011

I was going through Twitter this morning on the phone before getting out of bed, and suddenly started wondering what all the “rapture” stuff I was seeing was about.

Normally when at home I don’t use US-based news sources much, finding them way too limited — mostly because of a tendency of such sources to ignore the rest of the planet unless it’s somehow impinging directly on the US to the point where it can’t be ignored any more. None of the outside-USA sources I follow have as yet had a word to say about anything rapture-oriented.

However, Google News soon made plain what I’d been missing (partly due to being caught up, among other work, in the final proofreading and corrections on the international edition of A Wizard Abroad) (thank you again, faithful proofers! You caught a whole pile of errors that I missed, and I’m doing your acknowledgment page this morning).

Anyway, my initial response was, “Oh good. At least they picked a date after my birthday.”

But as for the rest of it…  Plainly it’s parousia-discussion time again. (I can’t very well avoid the amusing irony, for today at least, that the word also can be used to mean “a state visit”.)

As is so often the case, C. S. Lewis dealt straightforwardly with this sort of phenomenon some time back. The full text of the essay “The World’s Last Night” is here, but this bit goes to the core of the matter — Lewis’s version of the question, “Don’t you people read your own docs?  And if you do, why do you accept one part of them and ditch another?”

We must admit at once that [the doctrine of the Second Coming] has, in the past, led Christians into very great follies. Apparently many people find it difficult to believe in this great event without trying to guess its date, or even without accepting as a certainty the date that any quack or hysteric offers them. To write a history of all these exploded predictions would need a book, and a sad, sordid, tragi-comical book it would be. One such prediction was circulating when St. Paul wrote his second letter to the Thessalonians. Someone had told them that “the Day” was “at hand.” This was apparently having the result which such predictions usually have: people were idling and playing the busybody. One of the most famous predictions was that of poor William Miller in 1843. Miller (whom I take to have been an honest fanatic) dated the Second Coming to the year, the day, and the very minute. A timely comet fostered the delusion. Thousands waited for the Lord at midnight on March 21st, and went home to a late breakfast on the 22nd followed by the jeers of a drunkard.

Clearly, no one wishes to say anything that will reawaken such mass hysteria. We must never speak to simple, excitable people about “the Day” without emphasizing again and again the utter impossibility of prediction. We must try to show them that that impossibility is an essential part of the doctrine. If you do not believe our Lord’s words, why do you believe in his return at all? And if you do believe them must you not put away from you, utterly and forever, any hope of dating that return? His teaching on the subject quite clearly consisted of three propositions, (i) That he will certainly return. (2) That we cannot possibly find out when. (3) And that therefore we must always be ready for him.

…Our Lord repeated this practical conclusion again and again; as if the promise of the Return had been made for the sake of this conclusion alone. Watch, watch, is the burden of his advice. I shall come like a thief. You will not, I most solemnly assure you you will not, see me approaching. If the householder had known at what time the burglar would arrive, he would have been ready for him. If the servant had known when his absent employer would come home, he would not have been found drunk in the kitchen. But they didn’t; nor will you.

…Of this folly George MacDonald has written well. “Do those,” he asks, “who say, Lo here or lo there are the signs of his coming, think to be too keen for him and spy his approach? When he tells them to watch lest he find them neglecting their work, they stare this way and that, and watch lest he should succeed in coming like a thief! Obedience is the one key of life.”

 

(sigh) It’s not that I can’t occasionally understand (like any other human being) the desire to be swiftly and painlessly snatched out of a painful and annoying world into a better one. Or to have the Creator of the Universe implicitly pat you on the back and say “You got it right: never mind the rest of them, they’ll get what’s coming to them.” But right now I just find myself feeling sorry in advance for the people who will wake up on the 22nd (if in fact they don’t sit up all night waiting for the event they are hoping will mean the end of the world) and who will start desperately making up new stories about how and why it didn’t happen. The word for this in psych is confabulation: it made me sad when I used to see it in my patients, and it’ll make me sad again on Saturday.

Anyway: back to work. Because (as Lewis says elsewhere in that essay) the important thing, should you by unlikely chance be around when the world ends, is to be at your post, doing your job the best you can.

May 17, 2011
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PoliticsPsychology / psychiatry

On Running your Fake Presidential Campaign

by Diane Duane October 9, 2008

Paris Hilton consults Martin Sheen.

 

 

October 9, 2008
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Film and TVHistoryPsychology / psychiatry

In the O RLY? Dep't: Dinosaurs helped build the pyramids

by Diane Duane August 24, 2008

Srsly.

Now all we need to hear is that Hitler was somehow involved and we’ll have the perfect documentary pitch for The History Channel.

(It could have made a good Stargate SG-1 script too, but unfortunately it’s a little late for that. See, the Goa’uld started experimenting with re-evolved saurians as hosts, but then the Ancients…  oh, never mind.)

Tags: dinosaurs, dinoceros, Job, Hitler, pyramids, Stargate+SG-1, Discovery+Channel
August 24, 2008
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Current eventsEuropeMediaMedicine, nursing, healthNewsPsychology / psychiatry

''Crockefeller'': the story just keeps unfolding

by Diane Duane August 11, 2008

(EDIT: Scroll down to the bottom of the posting for video of the August 11 press conference with Rockefeller / Gerhartsreiter’s attorney.)

I’ve continued to follow the “Clark Rockefeller” / Christian Gerhartsreiter story over the past few days as it just keeps getting more convoluted, and as the subject’s apparent/alleged pathway between Germany and the USA starts getting clearer. (With some surprises along the way. Today’s bizarre revelation: “Rockefeller” may have to give back his $800,000 divorce settlement, because it appears that he and the woman in question may not have been legally married.  Get this — )

The 48-year-old suspect married London-based based management consultant Sandra Boss in 1995 during a small ceremony in Nantucket, Mass. But there is no official record of the union in Massachusetts, and it’s unclear whether the couple provided a marriage license during divorce proceedings.

“They weren’t legally married,” Rockefeller’s lawyer Stephen Hrones said. “How can you divorce when you’re not legally married?”

(Boy, somebody missed something there. How did this piece of data not emerge during the divorce proceedings?? How do you get a divorce without producing proof that there was a marriage in the first place?)

Meanwhile I continue being fascinated as more data slowly adds itself layer on layer to the situation, and other people start to ruminate on where the truth of the case lies (mostly the question seems to be boiling down to: Is he crazy, or is he a con man, or both?) And on the first count — for a former psych nurse, at least — the temptation to play the Diagnosis At A Distance game is tough to resist.

The most interesting factor for me at the moment is Rockefeller’s / Gerhartsreiter’s purported memory loss. His attorney claims he doesn’t remember anything prior to 1993, except for fragments (“a Scottish nanny” , a “childhood visit to Mt. Rushmore in a station wagon”) — though if he is Gerhartsreiter, this would have taken place during a period when he had never yet left Germany). So is this real memory loss, or something else?

There’s a phenomenon known as “confabulation” in which the mind fabricates memories to fill in spaces it feels or knows “need filling”. Are these memories confabulation? Impossible to say at this distance, and without expert psychiatric evaluation and possibly also an MRI (some concrete physical causes for confabulation have been discovered).

The attorney elsewhere describes his client’s memory as “shattered”. It’s an interesting word. I’ve seen various internal crises produce this kind of spotty-memory result in patients, temporarily or over long periods — and sometimes the crises in question aren’t at all obvious, sometimes not even detectable. But then we have perhaps too much mythology in modern popular culture that suggests you need some kind of blatant, major trauma to cause an amnesic response (or similar broad-based mental unhinging).

The thing to remember is that the mind’s major priority is keep itself running as well as it can, and otherwise to preserve its own status quo, usually along the lines of the basic human existential position, “I am blameless!” . And I’ve seen parts of people’s brains run all kinds of just-forget-about-this numbers on other parts of their brains to keep them away from the dangerous, sometimes unbearable realization that they’ve failed, or done something wrong. Sometimes the wrongdoing / failures are surprisingly minor: sometimes very major indeed. But memory does sometimes fail, in small spots or big swathes, as a result of a prolonged imbalance or slow buildup of chronic issues rather than anything sudden — so that no other human being but the one most intimately involved may ever be aware of the event that starts the process of leaving the mind “overdrawn at the memory bank”.

(As of August 12, however, Rockefeller / Gerhartsreiter’s recall seems to be improving. His attorney reports that he now remembers some details from his 1990’s California life, including the couple from whom he rented the San Marino guest house, though he says he “hardly knew them”.)

What Rockefeller / Gerhartsreiter claims to be experiencing could indeed be real. The problem is that when criminal law starts getting involved, a certain amount of cynicism starts to intrude itself into the diagnostic process. In this case in particular, where there seem to be multiple aliases involved, a certain amount of intelligence and cunning, and a fair amount of manipulation (vide today’s story about a woman who claims the man married her strictly for the purpose of getting a US “green card”, then dumped her*), it’s hard to avoid the idea that this “shattered” memory is very convenient. (Scroll down in this article for more details about what he claims he can remember.) Especially when it seems likely that at least some aspects of the criminal proceedings surrounding him are going to involve the determination of his (mental) fitness to stand trial. …Though this may of course be just me getting the wrong end of the diagnostic stick — as is all too likely when working at thousands’ of miles distance and with fifth– or twelfth-hand data. So, verbum sap., caveat emptor, and other similar cautionary adages.

But what keeps bringing up the cynic in me particularly strongly is the fact that some aspects of the man’s history as now presented make him sound like a fairly in-control scammer who also has (or has been developing over time) a medium-strength dose of something like narcissistic personality disorder, with maybe a dash of one of the other so-called “cluster B” / “dramatic-erratic” disorders, like borderline and histrionic personality disorders. A lot of the news accounts I’ve seen over recent days — especially some of those coming out of the man’s (apparent) hometown in Germany — particularly suggest that he has routinely displayed some of the major traits or symptoms of NPD. People who housed him or knew him describe the self-importance and haughty attitude, the spinning of elaborate and grandiose origin stories about royalty or otherwise important and monied people in the family background, and the unpredictable on-and-off charm, coupled with an underlying sense among the people around “Rockefeller” that they were being manipulated — a sense that grew so strong over time that many of these people seem to have been glad to have the relationship dissolve.

(ETA: And now we have the August 12th revelations, which complicate matters.Iis this reported “improved recall” genuinely the slow recovery of lost or trauma-buried memory which is slowly being stimulated by questions about something the person hasn’t thought about, or wanted to think about, for years? Or are we simply seeing a man trying to keep a decades-long, consciously built “house of cards” of false identities from coming down all at once, by surrendering it a little at a time?…)

…(shrug) At the end of the day, there’s still no telling where the case may go. (Like any other CSI fan, I’m wondering when someone will suggest DNA testing, and how long it will take to meander its way through the labyrinth of legal barriers that will doubtless be involved.)

We’ll just have to wait and see what happens…

(BTW, fellow CSI fans: how many bets that something like this turns up in the next season of one or another of the series? Their writing staffs will be breaking out ‘09 script ideas in the story rooms just about now…)

*ETA: some more detail has turned up about this —

The woman who actually married Christian Gerhartsreiter, Amy Jersild Duhnke, 49, of Milwaukee, was unavailable for comment. In a telephone interview Friday, her husband, Eric Duhnke, confirmed that the marriage took place, but he said it lasted only a day. Public records obtained by The Associated Press indicate Amy Duhnke waited 11 years before filing for divorce from Gerhartstreiter.

Eric Duhnke promised to issue a clarifying statement Friday, but it never materialized.

(Below is video of the August 11 press conference with Rockefeller / Gerhartsreiter’s attorney.)

Tags: Clark+Rockefeller, Christian+Gerhartsleiter, Crockefeller, personality+disorder, amnesia, memory+loss, confabulation

August 11, 2008
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ConventionsFilm and TVMediaPsychology / psychiatryToysWriting

A webmastery interlude

by Diane Duane August 9, 2008

(Non-technically inclined people, look away now. Or skip down to the bottom of this where it gets less technical.)

I have a lot more screenplay stuff to do today, but I had to take an hour or so off from that after having a quick look at the “Out of Ambit” log files on arising, and noticing that someone had been trying repeatedly to access pages on my site that didn’t exist. The URLs they were trying to reach had all the telltale signs of attempted SQL injection attacks, which I hate as they mess up my tidy logs. So I spent a relatively pleasurable short time watching the Doctor Who episode “The Girl in the Fireplace” on UK Gold while getting things fixed. (There was a certain enjoyable resonance to watching the Doctor blowing up robots while I dealt with other people’s bots to their detriment.)

I am not going to reproduce the actual string in question, but info about it and a detailed analysis of the string and the attack are here. If you’re a webmastery-type person, or you run a blog or website and are technically capable of dealing with problems of this kind, you should have a look at your logs and see if you’ve been having this sort of attack. Then decide how you want to deal with it — redirects, blocking via your .htaccess file, whatever.  (IP blocking is of no use because the attacks are coming from all over the place.)

Since I didn’t feel like spending all day futzing around with writing redirects, I downloaded a copy of the Redirection plugin for WordPress, activated it, and created a custom redirect to deal with this problem. Works fine. The naughty people (or the poor bot-infested machines that have been dragooned into this) who come to OOA and attempt to inject this string are now being sent to a place of appropriate punishment.

That’s all the techie bit for today.

The only other thing of interest that’s happened is that (after finding myself thinking how long I’ve liked the Doctor, and liked him a whole lot) I got vaguely curious about the whereabouts of an article I wrote for a Balticon program book many years ago: a discussion of the uses of imagination (among other things). It was called “Meetings on the Stair”. I dug it out, updated and cleaned it up a little, and posted it so I can find it later if I want it for something: it’s here, if anybody’s interested. I suppose I’ll also stick it up as a pre-dated blog posting, so it won’t screw up the present blog entry sequence.

Now then… back to that script.

Tags: Balticon, injection, Doctor+Who, Girl+in+the+Fireplace, webmaster, redirection, plugin, WordPress, UK+Gold, bots, robots, program+book, Meetings+on+the+Stair
August 9, 2008
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Hobbyhorses and General RantingHome lifeIrelandMedicine, nursing, healthPsychology / psychiatry

So bitter, so bizarre

by Diane Duane July 17, 2007

Some of you will know approximately where we live in Ireland, so I am sorry to tell you that this story is locally germane:

Post mortems due on County Wicklow bodies

They were our neighbors. Not the kind you’re close to, perhaps (though they were close to many others), but they were the kind you’d always wave “good morning” to as you walked or biked past their property.

And now, suddenly, gone: they and their son. This is too odd, for our part of the world.

Meanwhile, I am already tired of the local media presence. You really don’t want the satellite vans double-parked down the road from you, and the people banging on your door trying to manufacture a story out of nothing.

(sigh) And I think about the family’s defensive but not deadly sheepdog, which used to run out at me when I was walking and threaten me to Stay Away From the Gate. Who feeds him, now?…

July 17, 2007
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HumorMediaPsychology / psychiatry

Meanwhile, back at the gossip mill

by Diane Duane November 30, 2006

I now have a personal referent for the phrase “horrified fascination”. It’s the inability to stop watching this unfold.

The latest developments:

Haha, I’m partying with Paris and you’re not.

Boo hoo. Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I’m gonna go eat worms. (Noises off: “Yes, you’re right, we all hate you, just STFU.”) Also: Im sorry, I luv u, pls tk me bak…

No way. What do I need you for? I’m so important I can show everybody my crotch. Repeatedly. And I’m gonna have a big important show in Las Vegas. And I’m gonna go there for New Year’s and be the star of a big party in the club where you recorded your last flop, and you’re so not invited. AND I’m gonna be the hostess of the Billboard awards with Paris. NYAH NYAH!

(However: inferred but not yet confirmed — Britney gets wind of something that Paris has supposedly said about her. And immediately thereafter:)

And I thought you were my friend! So I’m not doing the Billboards, and you can just stand there and be host all by yourself and everybody’ll know why, you traitor. Take that!

(Paris Update: Well, I’m not doing them either. I didn’t like the jokes they wrote for me. Which were probably about you.)

(headclutch) Dear Goddess, it’s like watching a train wreck. It just keeps… on… going… It can’t get worse than this, really it can’t.

(waits in a resigned manner for the world to prove her wrong)

[tags]K-Fed, britney, spears, federline, paris, hilton, train wreck, gossip[/tags]

November 30, 2006
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Current eventsMediaOnline lifePsychology / psychiatry

And meanwhile in the gossip department…

by Diane Duane November 22, 2006

I swear, it’s like watching high-stakes poker on TV. But high-stakes poker played by six-year-olds.

i m divorcin u kthxbye

Oh yeah? I want a lot of money or I’m taking the kids because you’re a bad mom.

No I’m not and no you’re not. Read the prenup again and buzz off.

Oh yeah? Well I have a sooper sekrit sex tape and I’m gonna sell it for a gazillion dollars.

No you won’t, I’ll leak it to the filesharers first and nobody’ll pay you for what they can get for free. And I’m selling the house and buying a loads bigger one that you’ll never have been inside of. Nyah nyah.

Oh yeah? Well there is no tape. Hahahahahaha. And I’m going to write a book about you anyway and tell everybody all your secrets.

…(sigh) Okay, what’s the next card down on the table?

(Update: And now we know.)

Haha, I’m partying with Paris and you’re not.

Boo hoo. Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I’m gonna go eat worms. (Noises off: “Yes, you’re right, we all hate you, just STFU.”) Also: Im sorry, I luv u, pls tk me bak…

No way. What do I need you for? I’m so important I can show everybody my crotch. Repeatedly. And I’m gonna have a big important show in Las Vegas. And I’m gonna go there for New Year’s and be the star of a big party in the club where you recorded your last flop, and you’re so not invited. AND I’m gonna be the hostess of the Billboard awards with Paris. NYAH NYAH!

(However: inferred but not yet confirmed — Britney gets wind of something that Paris has supposedly said about her. And immediately thereafter:)

And I thought you were my friend! So I’m not doing the Billboards, and you can just stand there and be host all by yourself and everybody’ll know why, you traitor. Take that!

(headclutch) Dear Goddess, it’s like watching a train wreck. It just keeps… on… going… It can’t get worse than this, really it can’t.

(waits in a resigned manner for the world to prove her wrong)

[tags] Britney, K-Fed, Fed-Ex, prenup, sex tape, did didn’t did didn’t did didn’t did so did not did so did not neener neiner niener[/tags]

November 22, 2006
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Film and TVHobbyhorses and General RantingHome lifeMediaPsychology / psychiatryStar TrekStar Trek and other licensed propertiesWriting

Notes

by Diane Duane October 31, 2006

There are just a couple of things on my mind that (in light of earlier posts and responses) I want to share before I get back to the various pieces of work I need to be doing today.

Re whatever might have been going on in the ST:TNG offices as the first season got underway: I suspect the full story would probably take nearly as long to tell as it took to unfold. I’ve only heard bits and pieces of the story from those who were there, and I got a sense at the time that the people involved were trying to put it all behind them and didn’t want to go into tons of detail.

This I’ll say, though — and it must be clearly understood to be just my theory, one for which I have little concrete evidence, but am basing on gut feeling and later experience elsewhere. I have this feeling that all the trouble boiled down to money, one way or another, and the influence that given amounts of the green stuff have on any given project in Hollywood.

The more money is involved in something, the more people start to have a say in what’s happening to it and where it goes (since often they’re the sources of the money to begin with), and the more people start mixing in and trying to wrest the context in which the money’s being used into shapes that will serve their own agendas, whatever those might be. For the first time, I think, (televised) Trek was perceived as being about to have truly serious amounts of money thrown at it. (I leave the films out of this equation at the moment, as film and TV hold two very different and separate niches of importance and power in Hollywood.)

This being the case, and Trek having the (even then) considerable effect on popular culture that it’s had, the scrum and scramble for power and influence over the unfolding project would have started very quickly — as inevitable as the jostling and clambering-over-each-other in a bucket of crabs. I have seen this elsewhere since then, from the inside, in other productions; and always the cause of the trouble (or the cause of the lack of it) has been the amount of money involved. The more money, the more severe the agida. From this end of time, this realization leaves me suspecting that the same thing was going on in the ST offices, at root. For details of who did what to whom at the time, and why, and how, those interested are probably going to have to look elsewhere: I have only my one data point to contribute…and a certain reluctance to stir the pot.

But the money thing… Let me suggest a backwards diagnostic that I’ve found useful from the writer’s point of view. You can always tell how much money is being spent on a project, and how hard people are fighting over where it goes, by how many notes you get, and from whom, and how hard they are to deal with.

For those who may have missed the definition in an earlier post, “notes” is the code word for the suggestions (read “mandatory corrections”, usually) that the production staff above the writer in the food chain hand back to that writer after reading the submitted material. (This is not like writing a book, where you don’t have to do what your editor tells you. Notes carry more weight.) Sometimes you get notes as a memo or an e-mail, sometimes (in more informal settings) as literal notes scribbled in the margins of what you’ve turned in. Sometimes you’re given them in a meeting, or a phone call, during which you either scribble them down at top speed and hope not to miss anything, or else record the session (if your story editor or producer doesn’t mind) and play it back later. Then you rewrite your material, taking into account the notes that you’ve been given: doing what they say, insofar as your creative instincts allow you: arguing about the stuff you don’t think works, or can’t be made to work as the notes suggest: sometimes ignoring one point or another in hopes that the person(s) who gave you that note will just forget about it. (It happens. There are people who give you notes Just Because They Can: notes are their power trip, their assertion of their “rightful” position higher up in the creative food chain than yours.)

Then you turn your rewritten work back in, and inevitably, there are more notes on that draft. And so it will go from beginning to end, from premise to final draft script.

(Brief joke here: I very occasionally “dream true” — predicting some minor thing that’s going to happen, rarely anything of interest to anyone but me. These dreams have a specific feel to them, one I’ve learned to pay attention to: and when someone gives me advice in one of these dreams, I’ve learned to work hard, on awakening, to remember what that was. It usually pays off. In this regard, a number of years ago I had one of these dreams, and into it walked the much-missed, much-loved Filmation producer and story editor, Art Nadel — mentor and friend to a lot of the younger animation talent who were working in LA in the early 80’s. I was surprised that he should turn up, because Art had died some time earlier, and in the dream I remembered this. “Art,” I said, “I’m really glad to see you!” “I’m glad to see you too,” he said: and he smiled. “And now I have some notes.” …I woke myself up laughing out loud: first of all because Art was always fun to be around: and secondly, because I knew the dream had to be a “true” one, because Art was going to give me notes.)

You get used to the notes over time, truly: and to dealing with them. (Or, if you’re smart, you get out of TV and film before you are driven completely loopy.) Sometimes the notes infuriate you, and you fight as hard as you can to avoid doing what they say. Sometimes you acquiesce to what they require of you as gracefully as you can, because you realize — sometimes very belatedly — that the person giving you the notes was really right. Sometimes you acquiesce as gracefully as you can because, though the other person is incredibly wrong, there’s nothing you can do about it: that person outranks you, and you and your job will be toast in minutes if you rock the boat too hard. In this regard I have a few (until now) unwritten rules which have served me fairly well so far.

Unwritten Note Rule 1: The more money made by the person who gave you the note, the more attention you have to pay.

UNR 2: The more highly placed in the production entity the person is who gave you the note, the more attention you have to pay.

UNR 3: when notes given you by separate people are at odds, you follow the lead of the more highly positioned / better paid of the two, and let them fight it out if they need to.

It’s always a tightrope walk…or maybe better thought of as a gauntlet that you have to run through with every draft. Or, if you’re lucky and your production staffers and higher-ups are good people who’re genuinely trying to improve something which they want to turn out well, it’s a dance: everyone moves through patterns of agreement or civil disagreement, alliances form and shift from day to day as new people are added to the project or drop out of it. Your co-story editor may agree with you that one of your executive producers is insane, and you may band together to make sure that you only get notes from the other one, the sane one. Or you and your producers may agree that there are some of another producer’s notes that you don’t need to pay attention to, they’ll sort that person out themselves. But at all times…the money talks, and you have to listen to it. The more money is being spent, the harder you listen when dealing with the notes.

And another thing: you always get notes. Not to get notes suggests that you are on another planet. Or possibly working for the BBC in some dim and golden past.

I had this happen while working on an educational show called “Science Challenge”, in the early 1990’s. I had it happen repeatedly, to the point that I began to doubt my sanity. I would turn in a script, and my producers would say “Fine, let’s go.” They seemed to have this weird idea that a writer could be trusted to, you know, write. Sometimes the phone would ring and my producer would say, “You know, we’re shooting episode six this afternoon, and it looks like we’re going to come up three minutes short: can you fax us over a few more pages?” “Sure,” I would say, and I’d write three more pages, and fax them over, and they would shoot them. Very, very unreal. After years of working in Hollywood on and off, I would pinch myself. Planet BBC was a very different place from Planet Hollywood. (I understand this has changed, alas.) But at the bottom of this unusual behavior was, you guessed it, the money. Or lack of it. BBC productions were famous for being run on a shoestring: why do you think the old Dr. Who always ended up in the same gravel pit in Wales (or wherever) when they needed a ravaged alien landscape? (When I first started working for the Beeb, I spent some time walking around the neighborhood of the building where my producers were, and laughed again and again as I recognized background after background from Monty Python. Why go any distance to shoot when you have perfectly serviceable suburbia three blocks away? Waste of money…)

The notes are always about the money. The other end of the dear-Ghod(dess)-they-shot-what-I-wrote spectrum is the OMG-how-am-I-supposed-to-reconcile-all-these-idiotic-ideas?! end: the situation you get into when you’re involved with a multimillion-euro multiple-co-production-partner operation like Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King (aka Die Nibelungen, aka many, many other names in many many markets). Some of the notes that came down from our coproduction partners were beyond surreal…yet they all had to be dealt with somehow, because they were giving us the money to make the thing in the first place. Peter and I were lucky in that our producers at Tandem Communications, Rola and Tim, were smart and sane people, good friends, genuinely committed to making something worth watching. They were our lifeline on that project (and will be again some day, I’ll bet).

But at the end of the day, when you’re working in film or TV, it boils down to this: you’re part of a really big committee. And the heads of the committee are the ones who give you the money.

And we all know what art by committee looks like. It’s amazing when it works at all. Every time you get involved, you run the risk of finding your name on something that looks nothing, nothing whatsoever, like what you initially wrote. And them’s the breaks. You pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start looking around for the next project. Or, if you’ve had enough, you get the heck out of Dodge. (“What? And give up show business??”)

…Now I have to go to work on another piece of committee stuff. Right now it’s all mine. Right now it’s still at that pristine stage where there are, as yet, no notes.

But there will be. There will be….

October 31, 2006
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Current eventsHumorPsychology / psychiatry

Sooooo glad I wasn’t drinking anything when I read this

by Diane Duane July 28, 2006

I can’t often be bothered to blog about the antic caperings of the various political punditti and pundettes in my native land, but every now and then something comes up that’s just so, so …!!!

I was browsing through Wonkette, as I sometimes do, and ran into this in the midst of a transcript of a recent “The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch” show. Ann Coulter was a guest, and Bill Clinton’s name came up —

Ms. COULTER: I think that sort of rampant promiscuity does show some level of latent homosexuality.

DEUTSCH: OK, I think you need to say that again. That Bill Clinton, you think on some level, has — is a latent homosexual, is that what you’re saying?

Ms. COULTER: Yeah.

(snort) But wait, there’s more! Get this:

Ms. COULTER: No. I think anyone with that level of promiscuity where, you know, you — I mean, he didn’t know Monica’s name until their sixth sexual encounter. There is something that is — that is of the bathhouse about that.

DEUTSCH: But what is the homosexual — that’s — you could say somebody who maybe doesn’t celebrate women the way he should or just is that he’s a hound dog?

Ms. COULTER: No. It’s just random, is this obsession with his…

DEUTSCH: But where’s the — but where’s the homosexual part of that? I’m — once again, I’m speechless here.

Ms. COULTER: It’s reminiscent of a bathhouse. It’s just this obsession with your own — with your own essence.

DEUTSCH: But why is that homosexual? You could say narcissistic.

Ms. COULTER: Right.

DEUTSCH: You could say nymphomaniac.

Ms. COULTER: Well, there is something narcissistic about homosexuality. Right? Because you’re in love with someone who looks like you. I’m not breaking new territory here, why are you looking at me like that?

(eyeroll) That poor woman really needs to stay out of the psychological mode. (chuckle)

(And since when is nymphomaniac a term one applies to a male? [bemusement…])

[tags]Ann Coulter, Donny Deutsch, Bill Clinton, promiscuity, plainly someone’s missing the Freudian implications of her own statement…[/tags]

July 28, 2006
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Medicine, nursing, healthPsychology / psychiatry

Simply Beyond Cool: "Man's brain rewired itself, doctors contend"

by Diane Duane July 4, 2006

I love it when things like this happen. Once again neuroscience gets stood on its ear…

Terry Wallis awoke from a coma-like state 19 years after tumbling over a guardrail in a pickup truck and falling 25 feet into a dry riverbed. Now doctors armed with some of the latest brain-imaging technology think they may know part of the reason why.

Wallis showed few outward signs of consciousness, but his brain was methodically rebuilding the white-matter infrastructure necessary for him to interact with the outside world, researchers reported yesterday in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

…Using both Positron Emission Tomography scans and an advanced imaging technique called diffusion tensor imaging, the researchers examined Wallis’s brain after he regained full consciousness, and found that cells in the relatively undamaged areas had formed new axons, the long nerve fibers that transmit messages between neurons.

…Dr. Steven Laureys, a neurologist at the University of Liege in Belgium, said the findings will force doctors to reconsider the way they treat patients who are in minimally conscious and persistent vegetative states.

Damn straight it will. (And I’m afraid the repressed researcher in me is screaming, “Someone take a real close look at this guy’s DNA”!! — as another doctor cited in the article correctly points out that in the normal scheme of things, this man’s recovery is a one-in-three-hundred-million kind of thing.)

But the point in the article where I just had to laugh out loud:

In his last few years at Stone County Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Mountain View, Ark., Wallis’s family began to notice that Terry, a Ford enthusiast, would grunt when a Chevrolet commercial came on the television.

Sometimes serendipity dresses up in really strange costumes…

Now playing: Duke Ellington – Satin Doll

[tags]brain, neurology, rewired, coma, recovery, neuropsychiatry, white matter, corpus callosum[/tags]

July 4, 2006
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