Category: Personal

Art

Outgrowing Illusions

I met my first real live, honest-to-goodness science fiction writer when I was twelve.  It was a sobering experience.  Several illusions dissipated in a cloud of reality and it has contoured my thinking about writers in general ever since—unjustly, since the illusions banished had really little to do with writing.

Children tend to take things at face value, approaching life with a literalness that is too often confused with naivete.  Perhaps this is due to the way in which a child’s expectations—often of the most sophisticated construction, like fiction—collide so painfully with reality.

Whatever the cause, I went to Carpenter Branch Public Library with a head full of expectations, most of which were based with tortuous logic on the artifacts singularly important to me up to that point—television and books.  My father had seen the notice in the newspaper a week earlier and told me about it, knowing full well my love of science fiction and my complete disregard for newspapers.  (To me, then, the only useful part of a paper was the movie section or, on the weekend, the tv guide.  Oh, yes, the comics, but even these failed to hold my attention.  I had comic books in genres absent from the daily comics page.  At the profoundly serious age of twelve I believed that comics intended only to be laughed at were for kids.)

The evening of The Event, a week night, saw me being dropped off at the library by my mother.  I was to wait when it was over if she hadn’t returned from the supermarket.

Carpenter Branch Library is, still, a rather Gothic structure of granite resembling slightly a English castle or some American architect’s idea of one.  It’s blocky and solid and very serious-looking.  There were then two sections.  (It has since undergone a major reconstruction and while it has the same basic idea, the two sections have been combined into a single space and some of the charm has been lost.)  The main building housed the “adult” library.  A smaller annex, reached by way of a short hallway with stained glass windows, was the childrens section.  Interestingly, all the science fiction in the library was shelved here, right along with Winnie-the-Pooh, Encyclopedia Brown, and others.  There was fantasy elsewhere, but I knew next to nothing about that.  Lin Carter hadn’t even begun his Adult Fantasy series for Ballantine.

About a dozen, maybe fifteen of us gathered for The Event.  I knew none of the other kids.  No one from my school had come, which was just as well as far as I was concerned.  It was obvious several of the others knew each other.  I was asked a couple of times about favorite books and authors and had I read much of tonight’s speaker, but I was inordinately shy and my responses did not invite further conversation.

Chairs had been set out and a librarian asked us to take seats, our guest would be out shortly.  We settled down and waited and finally he came out of an office to one side.

My expectations of the world…well, I certainly expected to grow up to be very different than I saw myself then.  I was small, rather puny, and had been an easy, perpetual target for class bullies since I’d been in school.  I took comfort in the fables of empowerment in which I immersed myself.  One of the reasons I loved science fiction then, though I did not consciously understand this, was that much of it depicted worlds in which physical prowess was all but superfluous.  I did, however, read plenty that had to do with just such prowess.  I watched a lot of it on tv, loved movies about such characters, and had unfortunately built an image of the creators that conformed to their characters.  Even then I had stirrings of desire to one day be a Writer and of course I would be a writer like one of these, my idols, who were the Gray Lensman, Lazarus Long, Ned Land, the Dorsai, the Legionnaires of Space.

Out stepped the first writer I had ever seen “in the flesh” and all my illusions died.

I asked no questions that night.  I spent most of the session trying not to let my disappointment show.  Thick glasses, portly, no chin to speak of, and wearing an ordinary suit and tie.  I don’t remember a single thing he said.

What I do remember was his enthusiasm.  It was familiar.  I understood it.  He loved science fiction.

Over the next several weeks I rewrote him in my imagination.  He received a make-over.  But more important, it sank in past all the other nonessentials that here was an adult—a grown-up, dull, boring, responsible—who loved science fiction.  Loved it!  All the other adults I knew either didn’t understand it or thought it was a waste of time.  One of my teachers actually opined that it was somehow blasphemous because it suggested that we weren’t Jehovah’s one and only single most important creation.  In fact, most of my peers thought I was weird for reading the stuff.  Oh, they liked the movies and the tv shows, but books?  (To be fair, many of them would have found reading for pleasure regardless of genre a singularly bizarre idea—these were largely blue-collar kids who pretty much regarded school as something they had to “get through” before they could do what they wanted, and reading was for sissies.  The fact that I read was bad no matter what.  That it was science fiction was just sauce for the goose.)

As time passed I stripped away everything else about that night and kept the one thing of value gripped tightly.  It was a validating experience.  I wasn’t weird or broken or from another planet.  And I could look forward to an adulthood in which I could still love science fiction.  It was possible.  After all, I’d met an adult who loved it.

Art

Beginnings of a Lifelong (Addiction) Love

When I became infected by literary influenza (a longterm, chronic condition treatable
by a steady diet of words) I had four sources of books.  The library, of course, both the one at school and the public one; the books my mother had bought through the Doubleday Book Club and had stored in boxes in the basement; the Scholastic Book Club at school; and Leukens’ Pharmacy around the corner from my house.

At first my reading tended to be omnivorous, with strong leanings toward books upon
which favorite films had been based.  But these weren’t that easily obtainable then.  Jules
Verne and H.G. Wells were the most prominent examples—they along with many other
writers whose works comprise the category Classics.  My mother’s collection contained
mostly contemporary mainstream—contemporary to her youth and late adolescence, writers we seldom hear of these days.  Sometimes I wonder if any of them will be read in centuries to come and which, if any, will become the basis of new canonical debates.  Some were prominent writers at one time: Paul Gallico, Frank Yerby, Kathleen Winsor, Mildred Savage, Paul Horgan, Edison Marshall, Norah Lofts.  I haven’t seen their names on anything, reprint or otherwise, for a long time.  I went to a parochial school, so the books in that library were limited by the strictures of religious sensibilities.  As to the Scholastic Book Club, it seems to me now that they consistently underestimated the sophistication of its customers.  Still, I made considerable use of it.  Flyers were passed around in class periodically with an order form attached.  After a couple years, it got so the orders came in two boxes.  One contained the books everyone else ordered, the other box was all mine.

There was very little science fiction available through these sources.  Even the public
library I went to had little at first.

But Mr. Leukens stocked the stuff.

Summer days soon entailed almost daily walks down the block, around the corner, up
to the next intersection, and across the street to the pharmacy.  This was the real thing.  He even had a soda jerk and you could buy honest-to-goodness Cherry Cokes and hand-dipped malts, served by a high school student in a paper apron and cap.  Along one wall—to the left as you entered—stood the magazine rack.  This one was made of wood, but the design hasn’t changed fundamentally since.  Leukens’ stocked a lot of science fiction magazines, which you could read there if you bought something at the fountain.  I pored over the pages of Worlds of IF, Galaxy, Venture, Analog, and  F&SF.  The word at the time was “keen”.

But to the right of the big glass door, just as you came in, was a circular rack filled
with paperbacks.  I have no idea how orders were handled then—I gather Mr. Leukens had very little say in what paperbacks he received and certainly there was no logic to what you found in wire slots—but he seemed to have a source for some of the neatest books.

The summer of ’67, when the country was beginning to be impacted by the emergent
Youth Culture and the Summer of Love was on-going, I bought my very first Isaac Asimov book, plucked from the circular rack in Leukens’ Pharmacy.  It was Foundation and Empire, the Avon edition with the Punchatz cover.  I didn’t know what a trilogy was, but the back cover copy alluded to two more books related to this one.

The book simply felt important to me.  There is an aesthetic to the physicality of
books rarely talked about, but everyone acknowledges, even publishers, else why so much money and effort taken on covers?  But there is a smell, a feel, things only incidentally related to the text, but details that can shape a book’s reception.  This book represented everything I wanted in those terms.  I didn’t realize this at the time, but it turned out that way.  This, I thought, was what a book—especially a science fiction book—was supposed to be.

Then I read it.

What is the process of imprinting that goes on between a reader and a text?  What is
it that creates a reader, transforms someone passive into someone active in the pursuit of reading?  I have no way to reconstruct the experience, only the memory that it was a
complete one.  I took that book home, having spent all of seventy-five cents on it, and read it over the next few days and became a science fiction fan.  The magazines hadn’t done it, much as I liked them.  I still read westerns and comic books and war stories and if you’d asked me then what my favorite television shows were I’d have given a list of ten or twelve, not even half of which were sf.  Certainly Star Trek was on at the time, but I’d missed the first season because of parental disapproval (my mother thought it would give me nightmares) so I can honestly say that, while my aesthetic had been prepared by a lot of science fiction, it wasn’t until this encounter that I became utterly enamored of the genre.

It took me nearly a year to track down the other two volumes.  I haunted Leukens’
Pharmacy waiting for them to arrive.  I had no idea how unlikely it was that he’d actually
get them in, only faith that if I waited long enough they’d turn up.  In the meantime, I rarely left the pharmacy emptyhanded.

Years later the incongruity of it all struck me with a large dose of melancholy.  The
pharmacy is gone now, of course, part of a vanishing feature of our culture.  Leukens’
Pharmacy was a hold over from a mythic American past.  Ironic that I had encountered the future within its fading reality.

culture

Ada Lovelace Day

I just discovered that there is a day for this brilliant woman.

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, a scholar, and wrote what is arguably the very first computer program in an essay about Charles Babbage.  Of course, since she was a woman at a time when women were considered not to have either brains or rights, she would have been seen as an anomaly at best, a monster at worst.  Since she had some position, however, she has not been forgotten or dismissed.

Warning: personal opinion follows.

Women who denigrate the idea of Feminism and fail to understand how tenuous their position is vis-a-vis  history cause me heartburn.  If they think about it at all, they seem to believe Woman As Property happens in the Third World and nothing like that can happen here (wherever the particular Here happens to be).

But then you run into something like this.  One paragraph from this report says it all:

Females do not have voting privileges, but are generally allowed to speak at meetings, according to Klaetsch. Sunday’s meeting was the first time in recent history that St. John’s Council President Don Finseth exercised his authority to prevent females from speaking, church members say.

This is in Wisconsin.  Recently.  I grant you, this is not a state practice, but in these times when so many people seem to feel that religion trumps civic law, it’s a disturbing thing to behold.  The question in my mind is, why don’t all the women there pick up their marbles and leave?

Because they either buy into the second class status accorded them or they like something about the condition they inhabit.  Western women have it easy in such matters—no one will stone them if they get a little uppity.  For them, this is a “lifestyle” choice, at least functionally.  In parts of the Middle East and Africa it’s life or death.

Back when I was in high school, in the supposedly enlightened United States of America, in 1971, I took an architectural drawing class.  The room was filled with boys.  All boys.

One girl was taking the class.  Where was she?  The teacher put her in a separate room, the supply room at the back, with her own drafting table and tools.  Why?  Because the morons inhabiting the rest of the class wouldn’t leave her alone, wouldn’t let her do her work, teased her, ridiculed her, abused her, told her she was weird, unnatural, a lesbian, that she wanted to be a man, that all she needed was a good screwing and she’d get this crazy notion of being an architect right out her system.  I heard this, witnessed some of it.  It made me profoundly uncomfortable at the time, but I didn’t understand it other than as the same run-of-the-mill bullying that I myself had been subjected to all through grade school.

But it went beyond that, I now see, because what was doing ran counter to some idea of what the relative roles of men and women are “supposed” to be.  Did the boys indulging the abuse understand that?  No, of course not.  They were parroting what they’d grown up seeing at home and elsewhere, with no more reflection or self-awareness than the hardwired belief that Real Americans all love baseball that Communism was automatically evil and John Wayne was just shy of the second coming.  Analysis would be the natural enemy to a traditional view that maintained an absurd status quo and should therefore be resisted, hence anyone among their peers that preferred reading to sports was also an enemy.

So celebrate Ada Lovelace Day.  No one, male or female, should accept restrictions imposed by cant and tradition and national dogma.  But until it is entirely recognized that we are all of us People first, male and female next, and that equal rights accrue to people, not types, none of us are safe in our predilections and ambitions.

career

Remains Still Available

A couple days ago I received my royalty statement on my last novel, Remains.  There are still copies available and if you go directly to the publisher’s site here you can pick one up at a discount.

One of the things I’ve gotten very little of is feedback on my work.  At conventions I’ve spoken to readers about one or another, but aside from the Robot novels, very few people have let me know how they felt about either the Secantis books or this one.

I’m still looking for a new publisher for my work and at present feel pretty cut off.  I thought I’d put it out there that new copies of this book can still be had and eventually I will put up a link here for people to buy what stock I have of the others.

But let me know what you think.

Absurdity

In Charge and At Large!

Over this past weekend I had a couple of conversations with some people about the whole prom night controversy and one of the things that got said, which I’ve heard many times before in other contexts, was that, “don’t you think the people in authority know what they’re doing?”

As if that is any answer when they demonstrate that, clearly, whatever they’re doing it has nothing to do with common sense, ethics, or any kind of honesty.

I’ve  been hearing that rejoinder for decades, ever since Vietnam, and I keep coming back to that scene in All The President’s Men when Deep Throat lectures Robert Redford about the nature of the administration and he tells him, really, these are not very smart guys.  It was a revelatory moment for me, way back then, and ever since I have had a difficult time accepting any kind of authority Just Because.

Because no, I don’t think many of these folks who are In Charge know very well what they’re doing.  They got these jobs on some kind of popularity contest basis and as long as nothing requiring a great deal of thought comes before them, it’s just administrative blank-filling.  But when they actually have to make a decision about something for which there is no line on the form…

The school board—and maybe some of the parents as well—in Itawamba County, Mississippi, reacted from personal revulsion.  They looked at Constance McMillen and thought  “Oh, that’s not right!” and gave it no more thought, because, hey, who’d gainsay them?  The Students?  Big deal.

But when Constance sued their asses, it changed to a “who the hell do you think you are?” affair and those In Charge, in a fit of pique, demonstrated even more clearly that, regardless of right or wrong, no  student was going to dictate to them, nosirree Bob, and most especially not some tuxedo-wearin’ dyke…I can picture the seething, redfaced rage at the presumption of that girl, tellin’ us we can’t bar anybody we damn please from the prom, like she has rights…

They reverted to the school yard and turned it into a pissing contest.  Do I think they know what they’re doing?

No, I don’t think such people are very smart or have good reasons for what they do and I think people who defend their actions on that assumptions themselves don’t give these matters much thought and would likely do as bad if not worse a job.  And that seems fairly consistent with what I see as a given in this country, that, when people get together in a large enough bunch, I.Q. is the first casualty.  No one wants to rock the boat, no one wants their sacred cows slaughtered, and no one wants to offend their neighbors.

Is it any wonder things are a mess?

Just askin’…

blog

End of A Long Week…

I’m at sixes and sevens, waiting for Donna to read the manuscript and give me her notes.  I sort of want to work on something else, but I also want to clean my office, but I also want to read about a dozen books, and I can’t settle on any one thing, so I end up doing a great deal of very little. I should be used to this, but I’m not.

Once this book goes out the door it will be the first time in about four years that I will not be working on a novel.  (Yes, I do still have two novels “in process” and I can go back to work on either one of them, and I will, but I don’t have to.)  It’s been that long since I’ve actually had down time.

I’ve been futzing with electronics.  A couple weeks back I bought Donna a new computer.  She wanted a flatscreen, but her old computer was quite old and I wasn’t altogether sure a new screen would connect to it.  But she also wanted a CD burner, which we lost when I got my new computer.  After pricing what I thought she wanted and the software to run it and this and that, it was only slightly more expensive to just replace her whole system.

And she’s been using it.  Especially after I then went out and bought a router and got her connected to the IntraWeebs.  Which was a chore.  “Oh, you won’t have any problems with this,” the helpful techie at Best Buy said,  “it’s plug-and-play.”  Three and a half hours on the phone with my ISP and it works.  And works well.

I then made the mistake of buying another piece of electronics online.  I know better.  We have never bought anything electronic mail order that worked right.  Never.  But Donna’s car stereo can handle an MP3 component and with her new computer we can do that, so I ordered one.  The damn thing didn’t work right at first and then ended up not working at all.  This morning I packed it all up and sent it back.  We’ll got to a store, with a People, and buy it there, so we get explanations that haven’t been translated twice from some language barely within the IndoEuropean group.

I now have to do some serious thinking about the future.  I have a couple months of unemployment left and still no book deal.  This is becoming seriously annoying.  I have had some nerve-wracking news, but no sale.  With this novel, there will now be four of these things knocking on doors, bringing its sad bowl up to the front, plaintively  saying  “Please, sir, may I have a contract.”  So I have to start thinking about a new day job.

I really don’t want to go there.  I’ll think about that next week.

This morning I booted up an old short story that’s been lying in my hard drive, incomplete and forlorn.  I don’t know why I can’t get a handle on these anymore, they just don’t go where I want them to.  Granted, what I always wanted to be was a novelist, but even so…

It is Friday.  We have a weekend ahead of us.  Next week…

Ah, next, March 6th—-this is rather stunning to contemplate—is our anniversary.  One of them.  Our First Date.  March 6th, 1980.

Yes, folks, Donna and I have been “going together” for…*gulp*…three decades!

Breathtaking.  Yes, it is.  Thirty years.  If you’re impressed, think how we feel.  Three decades.  And you know what?

I still like her.

blog

Meanwhile!

Coming down to the last two chapters of the final draft of (drum roll, please)  The Drowned Doll.

The title may change before it sees print, but that’s what it’s called now.  It ties into the plot, trust me.  My first shot at a contemporary murder mystery.  In describing it to my agent, she termed is “a cozy” which I gather means it’s in the vein of Nero Wolfe or Hercule Poirot rather than Thomas Harris or James Lee Burke.  Minimum of gore, emphasis on problem solving.  Except for a smidgin of bad language and the fact that there is, y’know, some sex (none on stage/page), kids could read this.  (Actually, I think adults are far too worried about what kids read, as if they couldn’t handle it—I was reading Harold Robbins at 13.  Of course, considering how I came out…)

Anyway, I’m going to take pains with the last two chapters, so I probably won’t have this draft done done till, say, Wednesday.  At which time I print it out and hand to Donna, who insisted on one more read-through before sending it to my agent.  Two weeks tops, I think, before it leaves the house on its lonely journey into the world of savagery that is modern publishing.

Just wanted to let everyone know how it’s going.  After I mail it I’ll have a few new bits of blog for the Muse.

Art

Bridges In Need Of Crossing

Busy stuff today.  It’s warm enough (again) to go to the gym, but I have to get an oil change in Donna’s car (which means I get to drive the new one!) and then run a grocery errand.  Donna is doing a quick review of her second go-through on my new book, which means some time this week I’ll be starting on final draft stuff.  So I have to get a few things out of the way.

Last night I had a phone interview for a job.  I have serious problems with this, of course, but that’s a post for another day.  Suffice it to say, I need Book Deal sooner than later, but that’s like (apparently) forestalling the advance of a glacier with a hair dryer. Grr.

Which brings me to my image for the month of February.  This—

chicago-iron.jpg

—was shot in Chicago, back in 2000. I like it.  There’s symmetry, there’s detail, there’s iconic inference.

February is my month for crossing bridges.  Sometimes you get stuck in the middle of a bridge that needs crossing because it seems like such a cool and safe place to be.  Solid.  You know where you are.  The other side?  Not so much.

Cross it, though.  You’ll be glad you did.

Art

Celebrity and Unread Books

J.D. Salinger is dead.  Age 91, he died, according to reports, of natural causes, at home, away from the media.

I confess—I never read him.  Catcher In The Rye is one of those touchstone books everyone had read, but not I.  For whatever reason, it never crossed my path.  I remember those bright red covers in high school, sort of wondered about it, but…

We can’t read everything, and some books, if you don’t get to them at a certain period in your life, you might as well not bother.  I doubt Holden Caulfield’s adventures would mean to me now what they would have back then.  Besides, I have a lot of other stuff to read and I know I’ll never get to it all.

Not long ago, the screenwriter Josh Olson (A History Of Violence) did an essay about the problem of time and professionalism.  I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script nails on the head certain issues all professionals face, that of giving time to those seeking validation, unwarranted assistance, or just some kind of reason to feel put upon.  I’ve been guilty myself of violating some of these strictures—wholly unknowing, naively—but, once I realized the mistake, never repeated it.  Some authors get downright strident about this issue and occasionally sound like screaming paranoid misanthropes when they finally come back at someone for not getting it.  See, it’s a no-win situation.  You take the piece and read it and it’s awful, you have a choice—tell the truth or lie.  Either one will get you into trouble and you end up looking like an ass.  But what if it’s good?  You still have a problem.  There is a lot of “good” work out there that will simply never find a publisher or producer.  It ain’t fair, it just is what it is.  There’s not enough room in the world for every piece of work.  So what do you do?  Recommend this person to your agent or publisher?  And what if it continues to be unsalable for any of a hundred reasons that have little or nothing to do with the work in hand?  You don’t run the universe, but if your acquaintance still can’t sell it, you look like either a moron or obviously someone who didn’t sincerely go to bat for the work.

But in my case, this seldom comes up.  I’m one of those who doesn’t sell well most of the time.  It hurts, but there are reasons, and I’m not going to take advantage of people who have no stake in my career to either vent my frustration or climb over other people who may be just or more deserving.  (Maybe I’m a sap for doing that, but you have to live with yourself and shouldn’t do things that might make that difficult.)  But it does apply to reading in general—there just ain’t enough time for all the great books in the world.

Salinger is not likely to be on my shelf anytime before my own demise.

What I don’t get in people like Salinger is the recluse stuff.  I admit, to me it looks like a pose.  He’s never been out-of-print.  Nor has he ever had to write another novel.  I sometimes wonder if he engineered it so that he could just stop when he was on top.  Not a bad strategy, especially if you subsequently can’t finish another book.  But I admit, one of the reasons I’ve always done the work I’ve done has been a secret desire to be in the limelight.  Art of any kind has a bit of performance about it and artists who shun the stage always struck me as insincere.  I’m probably wrong about that and that’s okay.  I just don’t get it myself.

But J.D. Salinger, who published his three volumes way back when and took the accolades to the bank ever since, who eschewed publicity and thereby generated mountains of it, has died, and has done so quite publicly even though he was at home, out of the limelight, with family and friends, apparently getting what he wanted.  Famous for rejecting fame.

In the meantime, another writer, of considerable talent and certainly more productivity, is in the process of dying on the other side of the country, and except for the community of people who love her books will likely die largely ignored by the media and the public at large.  Kage Baker writes science fiction.  Her series of novels and stories of The Company are fine pieces, the first few exquisite disquisitions on history.  She writes fun yarns about characters who are both fully realized and compelling.  No, it’s doubtful any of them would ever become iconic in the way that Salinger’s relatively meager output has, but then I bet Kage’s, page for page, are a lot more fun.

I’m not suggesting that there is any cosmic unfairness going on here.  The Universe doesn’t give a damn about fair.  The very idea is absurd.  I’m just saying that the perverse manner in which our attention gets manipulated often results in overlooking wonderful things.  Such is the case with my own indifference at age 15 or 16 when I should have read Catcher In The Rye, but instead…let me see, that was 1970 or 71, so I would have been reading Heinlein and Clarke, Bradbury and Zelazny, Henderson and Asimov.  (I read both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged about that time as well, not to mention a goodly dollop of Dickens, Hugo, Twain, and Hemingway.)  I had my sites set on what I thought were loftier planes of literary territory and this one just…slipped by.

My point?  Only that it makes no sense to regret what you haven’t gotten to, especially if what you have discovered has enlivened your existence and widened your vistas.  If you haven’t read certain books because your were busy reading others, well, good for you.  The only sad thing would be is if you didn’t read certain books because you couldn’t make up your mind which and didn’t read any.  Or, worse, if you didn’t read any because you had no idea there was anything worth while inside them.

But I would urge anyone reading this to go find a Kage Baker novel right now and indulge some wonder.