Category: Other Writing

Meet Private Samuel H. Decker:

His basic story is this: A Union artillery gunner, Decker lost both arms in a loading mishap in October of 1862. Three years later he had *built these new arms himself*. From this account:

I’ve seen this picture crop up on more than a few blogs recently, under the heading of “This Guy is Fucking Rad!!!” and accompanied by *squeees* of how steampunk he is. And, on the one hand, he is really rad. On the other . . . jeez, it’s a little bit grisly if that’s *all* and *only* what we take away from this picture. It’s tantamount to looking at pics of female concentration campers and saying: “Damn, girl, you are skinny! What’s your secret?”
Listen: It is straight-up monstrous for any of us to even lightly draw an equal sign between what this man suffered in the name of human dignity and liberty, and the stories we write or how we may choose to dress up on a free weekend now and again. I’ve written about this a little before, and I still maintain that when we write steampunk and leave out a real and honest treatment of guys like Pvt. Decker, we’re doing a Bad Thing.
The above account of Decker’s extraordinary achievement–one of a slew of totally uncelebrated Americans who helped to transform doctors’ notions of the degree to which a “cripple” could return to “normal life”–is drawn from Photographs of Surgical Cases and Specimens, a collection of photographs (obviously) and case histories collected by the U.S. Army from 1862 on, and distributed as cards among medical professionals as a way of disseminating information on how a variety of docs and field surgeons had coped with the unprecedented carnage of the modern battlefield.
The Medical Heritage Library digitized the entire collection for the first time this year (the cards were widely circulated, so individual remarkable images–like those of Decker–have long floated around online, although often devoid of context). If you have a strong stomach and are interested in the real and remarkable nitty-gritty of the Victorian Age here on US soil, this is simply an incredible read:
Digital Highlight: Civil War photography from the Army Medical Museum | Medical Heritage Library

And, of course, I’d be remise if I failed to mention my own steampunk novella–complete with frisky robots and crippled soldiers–available for Kindle via Amazon, and as both a handmade print and DRM-free digital edition (including Kindle) directly from me.

I *love* these about 32 billion times more than XKCD itself–which I do, in fact like. But these I *really* like. Like all good scifi, they address the human ramifications of physical, scientific facts. SF, more so than any other literary sub-sect, seeks to directly address the question of how humans react to the things humans have done, and to try to fully imagine and enact how that plays out.
Everybody Jump

These are also quite nice; the “one-way” mirror section is a little weak, but the final answer is rock solid: Short Answer Section

Fiction news!
First off, The Silent History–and app-based serialized fiction project–launched for iPad/iPhone this week. I’m one of the “Advance Reporters” contributing to the geolocated “Field Reports” (as of right now half the stories located in Michigan are mine–all centered around Ann Arbor). There’s a nice concise description of the project over on Contents Magazine:

That’s actually the lead-in to an interesting interview with the project editor Eli Horowitz, e.g.,:

If you want details (or to get the app), check out the official Silent History website and Tumblr blog. There’s also a video trailer with voice work by Ira Glass (!!!):

The Silent History from Richard Parks on Vimeo.

Also, along with Morgan Johnson and Fritz Swanson
I also have a story in Ann VanderMeer’s upcoming anthology Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution, co-written with long-time co-conspirators Morgan Johnson and Fritz Swanson in the guise of our dear Giant Squid. The antho is sort of a post-steampunk re-imagining/re-examination of steampunk’s blind spots. You can buy it come Non-Denominational Gift Giving Holiday time, or enter the Tor.com Sweepstakes and win one pronto. Check out an excerpt from the antho’s intro and see what you think. FYI, I’ve got a story in the second antho in this series, too:
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded
Finally, we’ve dropped the price on my novella Tucker Teaches the Clockies to Copulate–you know, to celebrate Sukkoth, or something. Happy October, everyone!

I continue to write a column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. It’s a small-town kinda column, ’cause we’re sort of a small town, but it’s also got an egregious deployment of number theory and nested footnotes, ’cause it’s a small town with a big damn university crammed into it. Anyway, this month we meditate on America, austerity, education, efficiency, transience, transportation, and the Traveling Salesman Problem–but, you know, it’s all *for the kids* and their *FUTURES!!!*
The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for the Money: School Transportation

The death of Neil Armstrong occasioned a lot of interesting reflections out in the geekosphere; the most unexpectedly enlightening was this from Charles Apple, the visual journalism columnist for the American Copy Editors Society [sic]:
Keep in mind as you put together your Neil Armstrong packages tonight… — Charles Apple — copydesk.org


The problem as Apple sees it? We don’t have any good pics of Armstrong on the Moon, for the same reason that we don’t have many pics of me on vacation: Armstrong was holding the camera. For example, the pic at the left–which you saw all over the place attached to Armstrong obits–is Buzz Aldrin, not Neil Armstrong, and is a primitive photoshop job, to boot.
Once Apple pointed this out, I realized that I’d actually seen the undoctored photo (shown to the right) on plenty of occasions, but the framing of the two is so different that I actually had always thought they were two distinct photos.
As Apple works through the scant selection of legit photos of Armstrong on the Moon, what we find are a tiny handful of candid shots that, in many ways, are more wonderful than the iconic posed photo of Aldrin. This unconventional view of Armstrong, focused on his work and so far from anything remotely like home, is really poignant:

And this one–where we can see an actual human face in a little super-bathyspheric bubble in that dead gunpowder landscape–absolutely gives me shivers:

Anyway, it all reminded me of my favorite portrait of Armstrong on the Moon–which, in fact, is embedded in that iconic picture of Aldrin that Apple was so annoyed to see palmed off as a pic of Armstrong. Check out the reflection in Aldrin’s golden face-shield:

At first I thought what so touched me about this picture was the work ethic it highlighted: Armstrong was the first human to touch the moon, and was perfectly happy to let the other guy be in all the pics, because that was Armstrong’s job. A guy like Armstrong is called “hero” all the time, usually because of his willingness to face down death, but I’ve gotta level with you: that’s never impressed me much. I’ve known plenty of totally pieces of human garbage that would face down death. Frankly, it’s sorta what the male animal excels at. What *I’ve* always admired about astronauts–about scientists like Aldrin and Armstrong in general–is how many names appear at the top of those academic papers; I’m impressed by their willingness to work in teams and share credit and share findings and help the whole of humanity pull itself up by its bootstraps, even if it means forgoing some small sliver–or some giant chunk–of personal fame or riches or glory. To me, Armstrong is a hero not because he got all Quixote on the Moon, but because he understood how important that Sancho Panzas and Dulcineas are to executing the Impossible Dream.

I like Armstrong because he was willing to accept the possibility that he’d end up as history’s footnote, he’d hold the camera instead of standing in front of it.

But that’s not all of it. I also love this self-portrait because of the pose. The viewfinder on the Hasselblad Armstrong used (and evidently left) on the Moon was on the camera’s top, often called a “waist-level viewfinder.” Here’s a pic of the rig mounted to his EVA suit:

When I was little my grandma always favored a goofy old Brownie box camera–something quite similar to this Brownie Reflex Synchro–which also had a waist-level viewfinder. Since her vision was a touch presbyopic, “waist-level” actually was more like “sternum level.” My point being, Grandma’s photo-shooting posture–head sagging, shoulders slumped and folded in around her camera, hands cradling a magic box topped with a glowing, misty vision of the world we were in–and Armstrong’s were the same.
All of which is to say, in my heart of hearts, I love this portrait of Armstrong because I love my grandmother, who is also dead, and who we will likewise never see again.
Welcome to the only game in town. Amen

Just a reminder that my steampunk novella (with new, original illustrations from the fantabulous Chad Sell) will be available on AMazon for just 99 cents (!!!) for about another week. Act fast, Kindle-wielding, steampunk-tolerant, literary-cowboy sex-book readers!

(SNEAK PEEK: Amazon will give you a free sample for Kindle, or get the same sample chunk as a pretty slick DRM-free PDF right here.)

I continue to write a column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. This month–for the third month running–I’m writing about the Venn diagram of Business Practices and Teaching Practices. SPOILER ALERT: I’m not of the opinion that this diagram is two primary color circles with no overlap. FURTHER SPOILER ALERT: The governor and I do not agree about what lies in that cross-hatched overlap zone.
The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In It For The Money: Classroom Sales

The Worst Speech I ever gave was at the 2011 Maker Faire Detroit.  I had an outdoor booth at the Faire, where I was making free upcycled water rockets with kids, showing off some of the projects from my book, and generally spreading the gospel of Making Something Rad Out of Rag and Bone.  I’d subsequently been invited to give a talk about toys and the sorts of things that were in my book.
It was a 90/90 day in a week of 90/90 days, and because of a misunderstanding during registration, my booth had no shade apart from some stunted ornamental cherry trees.  My primary assistant has basically the exact some species of social anxiety as I do–one that makes you a garrulous raconteur when you have an audience, but a total wreck in the solitary run-up to getting in *front* of that audience.  Neither of us had any stomach for food, and subsequently had only brought a couple liters of warm water and a jar of cashews as rations.  It was like we were on some misguided vision quest. I was slated to talk at 2pm, and by the time I made it onto the savagely refrigerated mini-stage in the Henry Ford museum, I had been standing in the blazing sun for seven unbroken hours and eaten about 200 calories.
My talk was set to run 30 minutes.  I had a PowerPoint presentation that consisted of maybe six slides, one of which was an antique photography of a man riding a wall-of-death with a lion in his sidecar. I haven’t the foggiest what that image was intended to convey.  The year before, in 2010, I’d given a small-scale presentation, but that was before the book was finished, and I’d ended up speaking in excruciating detail about the project I’d been working on at that time: electromagnetic pick-up design for cheap, easy, home-brew electric guitars (I mean “cheap”–under $10 in supplies–and I mean “easy”: It’s a 2 hour project at most, plus letting some glue dry overnight). This had actually gone over fairly well.
I was supposed to be talking about “toys” in 2011, but my conversations with the folks at MAKE had been sort of foggy in the run-up, and I’d decided I wanted to talk more generally about toys and toy making and why it’s a Good Idea to make toys out of junk with your kids. Meanwhile, a program was printed listing me as the author of such-and-such book, there to talk about toys. I did not see this program until I left the stage.
But, so, when I took the stage I was in front of about 40 people, many of them children.  I was reeling from the sudden shock of AC; all I could think of was Shackelton abandoning his whiskey at the Pole.  I had six slides, maybe, and although I’d written a book about making toys, and was spending two days making toys out in the fantastically beautiful Michigan summer, I wanted to talk about something abstract and neurosciencey and meta-analytic that occupied, literally, six sentences in the 340 page book that was my ticket on to that stage.
The speech was a disaster.  I opened my mouth, got about halfway through my first name, and then a steam-engine power plant exhibit started up, a banshee wail that made it impossible for me to hear my own amplified voice, which was fine, because it also drove every thought from my brain.
Things went off the rails from there: I said the word “toys” at some point near the start, but then found myself in a fugue, talking about Henry Ford and Edison and the “Great Man” theory of history and cellphones.  Audience members smiled faintly, in the manner of people slowly stepping away from a knife-wielding chimp. Five children in an Indian family in the third row fell asleep as their parents stared at me blankly, at least enjoying relief from the heat and the crowds.  At one point–and bear in mind that I was here because I make super-kid-friendly water rockets out of old bottles and tire stems–I found myself talking about the Arab Spring.  A bald white man with a droopy walrus mustache rose from his front-row seat and walked out.  Crickets sang during the Q&A, I left the stage to polite not-booing, then almost passed out in a *very* ornate men’s room.
A few weeks ago I was retelling this anecdote to a group of friends who, clearly, I’d regaled with this tale enough times already.  My dear friend Fritz Swanson interrupted me at the mustachioed-man-walkout to say “Yeah, yeah, we know, you activated a future domestic terrorist while giving a speech about toys. That guy’s gonna park a van in front of a federal building in a few years, and we’ll all know why.  Good work.”
Anyway, if you want to see something akin to the things I was trying to say that day, check out my next column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle (UPDATE: Here’s the direct link to my latest column on education, Great Men, cell phones, picking fights, swapping innovations, and so on. ).
See you at Maker Faire Detroit this year! We’ll be making water rockets, rocking out on electric diddley bows, and learning to make synthesizers you shove in your mouth (maybe)!

Sorry that the posting has been light here for the last week; I’ve been struggling with a Basement Plumbing Disaster, which I’ll fully report next weekishly. For now, I’d like to point you to my latest column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. This piece feels especially salient this week as I’m spending Wed-Fri doing a teen workshop at the Henry Ford Museum on DIY, making, and innovation, more-or-less coordinated with my participation in this year’s Detroit Maker Faire.
This column is the first in a series on education, and broadly covers how we measure outcomes in our schools, and why being overly focused on test scores and “career readiness” might be a pretty hollow goal. I also talk about my boy’s first year at kindergarten, Super Mario Brothers, the Jewish People, KRS-One, and decision fatigue. Consider this the loose framing of Dave Nelson’s Totally Impractical Education Plan.
The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for the Money: Getting Schooled