Author Archives: Richard Bowker

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About Richard Bowker

Author of the Portal series, the Last P.I. series, and other novels

My father (and What Sarah Said and the Bonzo Dog Band)

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Today is my parents’ wedding anniversary (and my brother’s birthday — hi, Joe!).

A couple of weeks ago was my father’s birthday, and Cousin Bob sent me a touching email about him.

All of which reminded me of this great song by Death Cab for Cutie:

“And it came to me then that every plan is a prayer to Father Time.”

Sadly, I can’t think of Death Cab for Cutie without being reminded of this not-quite-suitable-for-work video of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band from Magical Mystery Tour.

Magical Mystery Tour came out in 1967, the year my father died.

The Bonzo Dog Band (they subsequently dumped the Doo-Dah, then subsequently reinstated it) was an ineffably great band (if somewhat, er, ramshackle).  You can tell how ineffably great they were just by the ineffably great titles of some of their songs:

My Pink Half of the Drainpipe
My Brother Makes the Noises for the Talkies
Tubas in the Moonlight
Noises for the Leg
Cam Blue Men Sing the Whites?
Labio-Dental Fricative

Western civilization has gone straight downhill since they broke up.  Coincidence?  I think not.

Faith and Doubt

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From the Washington Post, here is an interesting column about Richard Dawkins and belief.  Some folks are enamored of the idea that the famous atheist might have glimmers of doubt about his atheism.  But, as the writer points out, Dawkins has never claimed to be absolutely certain in his atheism — which makes him, strictly speaking, an agnostic.  InThe God Delusion, he puts his certainty that there is no God at 6.5 on a 7-point scale he came up with.  Elsewhere he goes as high as 6.9, apparently.  But he’s not prepared to entirely rule out a deistic sort of God — because he can’t.

And that’s because he’s a scientist, and at the heart of science is doubt.  All knowledge is provisional; nothing is absolutely certain; tomorrow’s data may overturn today’s laws.  There was an interesting debate on some atheist blogs a while back about whether there could be any evidence that would convince the bloggers that there was a God.  It’s a reasonable question.  Almost anything you can think of could have a more plausible explanation than an all-powerful, all-knowing God — mass hallucination, intervention by an advanced race of aliens, previously unknown laws of physics….  But even a complete lack of persuasive evidence doesn’t mean it can’t be true.

For many believers, of course, lack of doubt is something to be proud of.  But, as the column suggests, I expect that most believers cannot be as certain as they would like to be.  A semi-major character in Pontiff has a daughter who was hit by a car when she was a little girl and left severely brain-damaged.  As a result, the mother loses her faith — how can she believe in a God who would do this to her child?  But then the annoying author sets about trying to test her lack of faith when she begins to think her daughter could be “cured” — by meeting the pope, who has a reputation for being a miracle-worker.  If she has faith, maybe God will finally show some mercy….

And of course that is how the battle between faith and doubt is ultimately fought — not in books and debates, but in our needs and hopes and desires.  The woman will do anything for her child — even believe in a God she despises.

The annoying author then provides us with a stunning plot twist in which…

But you don’t want me to tell you.  You want to rush out and buy the book when it arrives at an ebookstore near you.

Write a review! Tag a tag!

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Help a struggling artist!

If you have read Summit, want to consider reviewing it on Amazon (here) or Barnes & Noble (here)?  (Or both.)  You don’t have to have read the ebook version.  You don’t have to have bought the book from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.  If you want to give it four or five stars, that would be great.  If you want to give it fewer than three stars, well, let’s talk — I promise to do better next time!  The more detailed the review (in my opinion), the better.  Amazon requires at least 20 words — they want something more than a few adjectives and exclamation points, apparently.

Another thing you can do is add customer tags — on Amazon, in the area labeled “Tags Customers Associate with This Product.”  If you like the tags that are already in place for Summit, you can check the boxes next to them.  Or you can add your own.  The idea (I’m told) is that the more votes a book gets for a particular tag (say, “psychic” and “thriller), the more likely it will show up in listings for that tag.

That tag area is just below the “More About the Author” area, which will take you to the Richard Bowker author page on Amazon.  I’m still working on setting that up.  You can go to that author page directly by clicking here. This page in turn (I just noticed) links to a shopping-enabled version of my bio on Wikipedia (I really should fix the errors on that page).  Isn’t the Internet wonderful?

More on Ebook Pricing

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I’m now pondering what to charge for Pontiff.  The calculus is a little different from what it was for Summit.  Summit is available from Amazon for a pittance as a used paperback, so the ebook version has some competition; Pontiff doesn’t have that problem (alas).  So that’s an argument for a higher price for it.

Also, Jeff Carver points me to this article, which suggests that ebook pricing is trending upward, with less price resistance from readers than I would have expected.  The author’s suggested pricing for a book like Pontiff would be about $7.99, which seems awfully high to me.  But one of the benefits of ebooks is that it’s easy to tweak their pricing and see what happens.  You can put a book on sale or even give it away with a few keystrokes.  So that’s the next decision to make….

How to Make Baseball Better

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Watching Moneyball reminded me of the significant way in which Moneyball theories have made baseball worse for fans.  Moneyball emphasizes the importance of drawing walks, waiting for the right pitch to hit, and driving up pitch counts for pitchers.  So a measure of a hitter’s success is how much time he spends not hitting — just standing there with the bat on his shoulder.  Which is to say, how boring he is.  Would you rather watch Dustin Pedroia line a first-pitch single to the outfield or draw a seven-pitch walk?  He’s good at both: he ranked sixth in the American League in pitches per plate appearance in 2011; Kevin Youkilis (Moneyball’s “Greek God of Walks”) ranked eighth.

So Moneyball slows the game down.  The average Red Sox game takes over three hours to play.  When the Red Sox play the Yankees, that goes up to almost three and a half hours.  This is just too long.  No wonder the game is losing popularity.

Bill James (who was mentioned several times in the movie) had some ideas about how to speed up the game in his clunkily titled The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract.  I just wanted to mention a few.

He points out that it isn’t just the length of the game that’s at issue. He says:

The problem with long baseball games isn’t the time they take. The problem is that the wasted time inside baseball games dissipates tension, and thus makes the games less interesting, less exciting, and less fun to watch.

Anyway, here are the proposed rule changes that I find interesting:

Limit the number of times a pitcher can throw unsuccessfully to bases to two per inning. The third unsuccessful throw would count as a ball.  This would get rid of the endless throws to first base to keep a runner close to the bag and prevent him from stealing.  The result would be more steals (which is a good thing) and less wasted time.  What’s not to like?

Limit the number of times a team could change pitchers in mid-inning. James suggests once per game, and only after the current pitcher has given up at least one run in the inning.  Nothing is more tension-dissipating than having a manager waddle to the mound and bring in a lefty specialist to pitch to David Ortiz, and then waddle back out after Ortiz has batted to bring in a righty to pitch to Youkilis.  Do that two or three times in a game, and you’ve added twenty minutes to its length.  Ugh.  A variant would be to have a rule that a reliever has to face at least two batters (unless he gets the third out in an inning). This might effectively get rid of the lefty specialist, which would also be a good thing.

Don’t call time when the batter gets into the box to hit. That isn’t a rule change, it’s just a policy directive to umpires.  Why are batters always granted time when they ask for it?  Make ’em hit.  Maybe time could be granted once per at bat, since a batter could legitimately get something in his eye or whatnot.

James doesn’t mention this change, and it probably wouldn’t make a lot of difference, but:

A batter will be granted first automatically when the opposing team signals that it wants to intentionally walk him.  Why does the pitcher have to deliberately pitch four balls?  Theoretically he could screw up and throw a pitch too close to the plate, and the batter could swing at it.  But I have never seen that happen.  Have you?  So why waste everyone’s time?

If the length of Red Sox games could be whittled down to two and a half hours or so, life would be better for everyone.

Of course, James made these recommendations in 2001, and nothing much has happened since then.

Notes on Moneyball

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So let’s get off cosmology and talk a little baseball.

I finally saw Moneyball last night, in time for the Oscars.  Some comments:

  • For weeks Moneyball has been at the top of my Netflix queue, but they never sent it to me, so I finally had to get it on-demand from Verizon.  Netflix is having problems with its business model, seems to me.
  • Paul DePodesta (the original for Jonah Hill’s character) didn’t allow his name to be used in the movie.  I don’t know which came first — DePodesta refusing permission to use his name or the decision to make the character fat and unathletic (DePodesta is neither).  Oddly, they also made the character a Yale graduate, whereas DePodesta went to Harvard.  Maybe Aaron Sorkin was tired of writing about Harvard characters after The Social Network.  Or maybe they thought that going to Yale went along with being fat and unathletic.  (Jonah Hill was terrific, by the way.)
  • The movie glosses over the central difficulty with the pure Moneyball approach — that it ignores the player’s character in favor of his statistics.  The scene where Billy Beane yells at Jeremy Giambi is great — but we aren’t reminded that the scouts explicitly warned Billy about Giambi’s character when his name came up before the season.  On-base percentage isn’t everything.
  • Of the nominated movies I’ve seen, I think The Descendants probably has a better adapted screenplay than Moneyball.  But the Ricardo Rincon trade scene with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill was Aaron Sorkin at his best — almost as good as the opening scene of The Social Network. Nobody writes dialogue for intelligent people as well as Sorkin.
  • I was wondering how the movie would handle the ending; after all (spoiler alert, I guess), Billy Beane has never won anything with his Moneyball theory.  It takes the odd approach of using the Red Sox World Series win in 2004 as its happy ending — since John Henry embraced Moneyball when he bought the franchise.  OK, I guess…  The problem for Billy Beane, of course, was that once big-budget teams started copying his methods, he was pretty much back where he started — trying to make things work with a shoestring budget.

Two Months of Blogging

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Today is the two months’ anniversary of this blog.  Here are some thoughts:

  • Rule #1 of fiction writing (it’s also Rule #2 and Rule #3) is “Write every day.”  This appears to be true of blogging as well.  One big difference between blogging and writing fiction is that embedding a YouTube video counts as blogging; this is not true of fiction-writing.  Another difference is that, if you don’t blog constantly, your audience starts dropping pretty quickly.  There are a bazillion other blogs out there that people can waste their time reading.
  • I think it’s important to have some variety in your blog posts.  I worry that potential readers may say: “Dear God, not another post about cosmology and religion.  Why doesn’t he read more 900-page Japanese novels and write many many posts about them?”  This is a valid criticism.  In particular, there hasn’t been one item about the Red Sox.  I think about the Red Sox way more than I think about cosmology or Haruki Murakami.  This needs to be addressed.
  • I don’t understand WordPress’s business model.  It appears to owe something to the underpants gnomes.  Phase 1 is “Provide all kinds of great free software and lots of storage.”  Phase 2 is “Profit!”  Phase 2 is ???.  So far, out of pure vanity I have paid WordPress a pittance to register the name richardbowker.com instead of richardbowker.wordpress.com.  And that’s it — everything else has been free.
  • I should probably experiment more with the look and feel of the blog.  I like the WordPress theme I’m currently using, but they make it really easy to switch to a new one.  And there are limitations with the current theme.  For example, if you click on Books up at the top, you see links to pages about my books.  But the longer titles spread out onto two lines, so it looks like I’ve written a book called “Forbidden” and another one called “Sanctuary”.  I don’t know how to fix that.  So don’t be surprised if this place undergoes a total renovation at a moment’s notice.

Feel free to tell me how things could be improved around here.

The Big Bang Theory and Pope Pius XII

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I’ve started reading A Universe from Nothing — $11.95 for the Kindle edition, not cheap for a short book but not ridiculous, I suppose.

The Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe was first proposed by a Belgian priest/physicist, George Lemaitre, in the 1920s. There’s some significance there, because religious people find the Big Bang very appealing.

Georges Lemaitre

During my endless commute I’ve been listening to a fabulous Open Yale course on Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics, and the professor, Charles Bailyn, notes that Catholic scientists tended to favor the Big Bang explanation, while atheistic scientists preferred the alternative Steady State theory.  The Big Bang was the one that finally received convincing empirical support in the 1950s, and here is Pope Pius XII exulting:

It would seem that present-day science, with one sweep back across the centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to the august instant of the primordial Fiat Lux, when along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, and the elements split and churned and formed into millions of galaxies.  Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, [science] has confirmed the contingency of the universe and also the well-founded deduction as to the epoch when the world came forth from the hands of the Creator.  Hence, creation took place.  We say: “Therefore, there is a Creator.  Therefore, God exists!”

Here is Pius XII, who always struck me as a pretty grim-looking guy:

Pope Pius XII

Pius’s approach is standard.  The belief comes first, and if there is corroborating evidence, the believer will embrace it.  He may even come to believe that it’s the basis of his belief.  In this case, the pope is delighted to embrace modern cosmology when it can be interpreted as confirming the Church’s teaching.  But of course the teaching was there before the cosmological evidence, and it has no empirical basis whatsoever.

It is Krauss’s contention that the cosmological playing field has now changed.  And this is going to cause problems for theologians who have been content with the Big Bang Theory.  He notes that, when he talks about a universe from nothing, they challenge his definition of the word “nothing” — that it’s not really nothing if something can spontaneously appear out of it.  Ultimately, he thinks they want to define it as “that from which only God can create something.”  Which may make theologians happy, I suppose, and people who want to hold on to their beliefs.  But not the rest of us.

Assassin and Victim

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Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard jumped to the head of my reading queue.  It’s the story of James Garfield’s assassination by Charles Guiteau in 1881 and, in particular, the grotesquely bad medical care Garfield received after he was shot, which had as much to do with his death as the bullet from Guiteau’s gun.

  

It’s an interesting little story, although maybe not quite interesting enough for an entire book.  A few points:

  • Garfield’s life story was every bit as inspiring as Lincoln’s — born in a log cabin; lost his father at an early age; studied relentlessly to better himself; became a successful general in the Civil War despite having no military training; elected president in 1880 despite trying his best not to be nominated, then refusing to campaign….  His problem is that he ended up serving as president for only a few months, and the big national issue of his time was not the survival of the union but civil service reform.  Who cares?  So now he’s lost in the backwaters of history.  Millard tries hard to make us feel his greatness, but really, the best we can do is agree that he was a helluva guy.
  • Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln was his secretary of war.  He was nearby when his father was shot at Ford’s theater.  He was nearby when Garfield was shot at the Washington train station. He was with McKinley when he was assassinated in Buffalo in 1901.  This caused him to have second thoughts about accepting later invitations to presidential events.
  • We learned in school that Guiteau was a “disappointed office seeker.”  But the key element to Guiteau’s character was that he was absolutely bonkers.  The assassination theme of the book is relevant to Pontiff, but in novels characters need comprehensible motivations.  Being absolutely bonkers works in real life, but not in fiction.  And being a helluva guy doesn’t really work for the victim; you need something more than that to keep the reader interested.

Vatican Intrigue: Life Imitates Art

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Pontiff is about a plot to kill the pope.  Mixed into this a complicated subplot about financial misdealings and corruption in the Vatican.

So here we have screaming headlines about a plot to kill Pope Benedict

And here we have the New York Times reporting about a  leaked documents detailing financial misdealings and corruption in the Vatican.

You’d think they got their hands on an advance copy of my novel!

Of course, art is also imitating life, because there were financial misdealings and corruption at the Vatican Bank in the 1980s.  And papal assassination attempts are nothing new: John Paul II was shot, and there have been no end of conspiracy theories about the sudden death of John Paul I a month into his reign.  (The most likely explanation for discrepancies in the Vatican’s reports of his death is that they thought it unseemly that his body had been discovered by a nun. Quelle horreur!) There are some strange goings-on in Pontiff, but there are strange goings-on in the Vatican all the time.