A thank-you, an apology, some unseemly preening, and some blatant commercials, in that order
4:31 PM PDT, July 26, 2007
To start with the obvious, I'm a little stunned and overwhelmed by the volume and friendliness of the responses to my last post. Normally this blog doesn't see as many visitors in a year as I've had in the last 48 hours. I'd like to publicly thank John Ringo, who writes fun-to-read military science fiction (buy his books with whatever you have left over after buying mine), for urging me to expand a couple of paragraphs in a private newsgroup, put it out in public, and drop some notes to blogs where he said people would be interested. (Some of which I was reading anyway). Thanks, John, you were right!
Let's start with some fence-mending first. My remark that "With 160,000 people, mostly young men, many armed, many beyond the eyes of authority, there will be some thuggery and sadism and it is doubtful that superior officers will be devoting any large amount of time and effort to finding or suppressing it," was ill-thought-out, and those of you who pointed out that "Scott Thomas" was not the only person in the discourse who was embarrassing himself by writing about things he was ignorant of were dead right, and you got me. I'll cop to charges of hypocrisy, writing while under the influence of ignorance, needless offense, and second-degree prejudice (why second degree? Well, see the next post, though I should probably warn you there will be more semiotics). On the other hand I'll plead innocent to any charge of intentional malice. Now that "Scott Thomas" has revealed himself as Scott Thomas Beauchamp in The New Republic's own blog the main thing I can say is, whew. Semiotics is anything but an exact science (there's a pretty good argument, which I buy, that semiosis itself is impossible without inaccuracy, error, misinterpretation, and so on). So although I was pretty sure of my analysis, partly because it was rooted so deeply in my working life, there was still the potential to be spectacularly wrong. While I've certainly been wrong before, and sometimes been wrong in front of people who were paying me to be right, I had no idea I might be putting myself in a position to be wrong in front of quite so many people, and it's a great relief to have no more than the usual small dose of crow to consume. (And will some enterprising reporter please get over to the University of Missouri campus and nose around the creative writing program, and see just what Mr. Beauchamp's niche in the social ecology was? I feel like I have an incomplete scorecard here!) Finally, here are the blatant commercials ... for those of you who were so kind as to say you wanted to read more by me – well, this is an Amazon blog, so there are several places to click to see what I've written -- full list at my profile. Probably my most popular series is the one about Giraut Leones, sort of a spies and troubadors in space adventure, which starts with A Million Open Doors. It continues on through Earth Made of Glass, The Merchants of Souls, and The Armies of Memory, and I'm at work right now on the final book in that series, so it's your chance to get all caught up before the last book comes out. The book that seems to get talked about the most is Mother of Storms, which is an ecological disaster novel about sudden global warming (as in maybe 5 degrees Celsius in a single year, brought on by sudden discharge of a lot of sea-bed methane clathrate, which (based on the fossil record) actually looks a lot more likely as a possible event than it did when I wrote it back in 1992-3. For all those strange people who are not into meteorology, let me add that it contains a great deal of sex and violence. Probably the book nearest my heart, which is not very much like any of the others, is a sort of postmodern deconstructed fairy tale, One for the Morning Glory, which sells very badly but generates more mail than any of the others, and structurally there's quite a bit of semiotics and middle-falutin' literary theory and theatre history running through it, sort of the way there's math running through Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. For more of me picking through texts and messages and so forth, you might look at my Amazon reviews– back when I was teaching a history of American rhetoric course, I reviewed a lot of "Great Speeches" videotapes, and since I tended to do it late at night after a little too much red wine and a lot too much grading student papers, there's a certain amount of aggressive style that gets into those. And of course, for those of you who happen to be interested in the present war, (I suspect there are a few of you), there's Payback City, my long-lost 1997 thriller about an Islamic terrorist attack on the United States, which I recently put out as an e-book with a simply gigundus introduction (written earlier this year) about what didn't turn out that way and what did and what I think it all means. There's an excerpt a couple of posts down the blog – the one called Sort of political, sort of anti-political, and spoiler-free. And of course you can always email me if you want to hire me as a book doctor or editor (I'm not cheap but you will get what you pay for) -- that biz address is johnbarnesphd@mac.com . If you really do think you might need a consulting semiotician, drop me a note at barnesstatsemiotics@mac.com ("There's a signifier in my basement and I don't know what that means!" "Don't worry, ma'am, I'll be right over with the deconstruction crew ...") More seriously, if your marketing isn't doing what you want it to do and you think the problme might be your marketing intel, it's just possible I'm the guy you need, and quotes are free.
Initial post:
Aug 1, 2007 1:10 AM PDT
Last edited by the author on Aug 1, 2007 1:13 AM PDT
Dorothy Parker says:
Your attack on Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp was a cheap smear, and your "semiotics" is clumsy arrogance on the hoof. Your act fools no one.
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Bio
I used to teach in the Communication and Theatre program at Western State College. I got my PhD at Pitt in the early 90s, masters degrees at U of Montana in the mid 80s, bachelors at Washington University in the 70s; worked for Middle South Services in New Orleans in the early 80s, so yes, I'm THAT John Barnes. There are also many John Barneses I am not. I am not the British footballer, the Tory MP, the expert on ADA programming, the biographer of Eva Peron, the authority on Dante, the mycologist, the travel writer, the film historian, or that guy that Mom said was my father. Wish I'd written the book on titmice, though.
I used to think I was the only paid consulting statistical semiotician for business and industry in the world, but I recently met another one. So now I have a large market share of a growing field. Semiotics is pretty much what Louis Armstrong said about jazz, except jazz paid a lot better for him than semiotics does for me. |
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