Category: Art

Art

It Was Thirty Years Ago (Plus One)…

Not that I think anyone is especially interested in me as subject for biography, but once in a while I stumble on something that brings back a flood of memory and I feel compelled to say something about it.  Recently a friend of mine wrote in his blog about the Twenties being the most painful time of life, at least of his life, and it got me thinking.  All pain is relative and certain periods possess character, and characteristic pain.  The Twenties are painful insofar as most of us assume—and have it assumed on our behalf—that we know what we want, know how to get it, and, most importantly of all, that we know who we are.  I think it fair to say that few of us are astute enough at that time to know that who we are is something that changes constantly, and that who we are at Twenty is definitely not who we were (we hope) at Ten, or Twelve, or Fifteen.  By the time we’re over Twenty-One, we may assume that we have shed all the more awkward and embarrassing characteristics of our pre-Twenty-One self.  It’s an illusion, but a powerful one, and may have utility as a survival mechanism.

With that in mind, here’s a photograph of me from 1979.

me-1979-copy.jpg

Firstly, a disclaimer.  The original is black & white.  I’ve been having some fun with Photoshop lately and I couldn’t resist colorizing this a bit.  It’s not particularly good, but it is rather useful to me in certain ways.

You see here the image of a supremely confident and, what is more, happy young fellow.  I still have that camera.  The setting is of some local interest—that is the building that became Off Broadway, a night spot which I believe still exists (at least the building is there with that marquee) and is still open.  Not sure about the latter.  I’d become acquainted with the man who was doing the rehab.  There were big plans afoot for the place and he thought it would be a good idea to record the progress.  So I spent a few week ends in the shell during construction making images of the work being done.

Eventually, the plan was, we’d have a series of before-and-after images and I’d produce 16 X 20s for them to hang to show how the old, broken-down structure had been transformed into the delightful venue the patrons were then enjoying.  It was a good project and for a time I was having a great deal of fun doing it.

Then everything fell apart.

See, the key ingredient to all this was the person who shot this image.  The woman who, at the time, I was madly in love with and had made plans with.  Plans for the rest of our lives.  I was giddy with joy at the prospect.  It was through her I’d met these people and developed this project and she worked with me on it.  We were, at the time this image was made, having one hell of a good time.

By the forthcoming October it was all over.  Crashed and burned, and the demise was about as painful and brutal as could be imagined.

So in this sense, I can agree with my friend’s assessment that the Twenties were in some ways the most painful period of my life.

I’d attached myself to this woman in a fit of desperation.  I didn’t think it so at the time, of course, but the fact was I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life but a very sharp sense that whatever it might turn out to be what I’d been doing was a dead-end and I did not know how to get out of it.  I’d been pretty much alone, in terms of what is known as “meaningful relationships” since…

Well, forever.  I had had a steady girlfriend for only one not-quite-year-long period right after I got out of high school.  Before that, I staggered through adolescence always wanting, unable to figure out how to get, exactly that—a girlfriend.  Ignorance is not always bliss.  For a host of reasons, most of which I understand now but couldn’t figure out then, I drifted through my teen years oblivious to the rituals and subtleties of dating and all that.  I was one of those benighted, highly-intelligent idiots who just “didn’t get it.”  As I entered my Twenties, it appeared that this would continue to be the case.

So I seized an opportunity, attacked the situation with the kind of blunt force by which I did everything then, and tried to “break out” of the rut I saw myself in at the time—and it very nearly landed me in a marriage that, in hindsight, would have been disastrous.  I have since recognized that my thick-skulled obliviousness to the ins-and-outs of boy-girl fraternizing was a boon to my future.  I would likely have fallen into the “accepted norm” of such things and woken one day to find myself miserable in a completely different way.

So the pain of various periods of life quite often turn out to be excruciating learning curves we must ascend.  Obstacles overcome and so forth.  And really, no decade is consistently one thing.  The “painful” period of the Twenties, for me, only lasted till I was 25.  That’s when I met Donna and things took a decided turn for the optimistic.  The second half of that decade, for me, was hardly painful at all.  In fact, it was quite blissful.  Part of the benefit of the first half of that decade was that I could recognize the bliss while I was going through it.  I was able to appreciate what I was living through because of what had gone before and for that I am very grateful to all the crap I endured while trying, clumsily and obstinately, to shed the ignorance that very nearly became a cage.

The only thing I wish now is that I’d had a chance to finish that photographic project…

Art

What You See

One of the challenges I’ve always confronted as a visual artist is the fact that the image I conceive in my mind rarely is matched by what I’ve been able to produce as an artifact.  Some photographs I’ve made I have been inordinately proud of.  The ones I’ve liked best are those that have emerged sans expectations.  I’ve “seen something” and made the image, only to discover later, in the lab, what it was I saw.  But by then, it’s changed, because memory plays fast and loose with reality, and the picture I ended up making was its own thing.

Disappointment usually followed when I preconceived something at the time the shutter snapped and later I just couldn’t get that perceived image out on paper.

I’ve been making my first forays in the digital realm and dipping my toe into Photoshop.  There is so much control one has through this program that it’s potentially narcotic.  One could become lost in the ability to change, alter, enhance, and distort endlessly.

Because I’ve done photography for as long as I have, I’m already putting the breaks on in terms of Out There exoticism.  But I’m finding the ability to bring an image more into line with what I originally conceived (or what I am imagining at the moment of manipulation) to be…wonderful.

For instance:

sylvan.jpg

The original capture was a vertical shot.  I “saw” something in this otherwise ordinary stand of trees.  Cropped close, horizontal now, and manipulated for color saturation and contrast, I have something approaching that initial perception.  The ethereal rendering or what might be termed timelessness in the forest is a direct result of what I’ve been able to do in Photoshop.
This is very cool as far as I’m concerned.  This could be much fun.

Art

Reading Lists

I started keeping lists of the books I’d read when I was fifteen.  I don’t know how many people used to do this, it may be a habit peculiar to myself, but the list has come to comprise a catalogue of sorts as time has passed and hundreds of titles become thousands and memory runs into itself.  I stopped doing this between eighteen and twenty-three for reasons forgotten and probably never very clear.  Now, of course, there are reading list websites, like Shelfari and Goodreads, so I suppose it’s more common than I once imagined.

That first list, though, held surprises, one in particular that has become part of an on-going internal debate.  It concerns Robert A Heinlein.

The name can’t be spoken anymore without certain responses, either pro or con, among avid science fiction readers.  Even a few people I have known who read very little SF have read Heinlein and have an opinion.  Interestingly enough, the non-SF readers with opinions about Heinlein echo my second opinion about him, which is not—at least, not directly—political.

I didn’t like Heinlein when I was fifteen.  (That is not the opinion, but bears directly upon it.)  I was by then acquiring tastes in reading which I would carry with me for the rest of my life, for good or bad, and when I made that first list it was partly with the view to determine who represented those tastes.  Of course, I didn’t really think about that clearly then, but in an intuitive fashion that lay behind the project.  Who had I read a lot of and secondly why had I read a lot of them?

I’d read a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  To this day, though, I can’t read the Tarzan novels.  I first encountered ERB in the Mars novels, the John Carter series, and I had read most of them by then.  Loved John Carter.  (Not so much Carson.)  And, of course, H.G. Wells and Jules Verne represented a substantial portion of the list.  I had also read a lot of Doc Smith, someone I adored then and can’t get through now.  Among the rest of what I then consciously thought of as a separate genre, the other science fiction writers I’d read made up a mixed bag.  I had read Piers Anthony—the earliest one of his I had found was Sos the Rope—and I had read Isaac Asimov, by then all his Foundation novels, I, Robot, Pebble In The Sky, and a couple of the “Lucky Starr” books.  Among the others of whom I’d read more than one title were Ray Bradbury, Gordon R. Dickson, Keith Laumer, Alan E. Nourse, Roger Zelazny, and Poul Anderson.  Others, I’m sure, most especially Andre Norton, who, it seemed, had written more books than god, but for the most part my list consisted of single authors.  Bob Shaw, Robert Silverberg, John Brunner, Avram Davidson, Martin Caidin, Robert Sheckley, and so on.  It was quite a list, actually, with quite a few titles destined to become, if they weren’t already, classics.

But I had read more Robert A. Heinlein than any other single author.

This puzzled me, because I remember at the time not liking his stuff very much.  Not being overly disciplined, I tended to avoid things that I disliked, and since no one was holding a gun to my head to make me read SF—or anything else for that matter—it baffled me that I’d worked my way through so much of this guy’s stuff that really put me off.

I hadn’t read many of his so-called Juveniles—Have Space Suit, Will Travel sticks most clearly in my mind, as well as The Rolling Stones.  No, mostly I’d read his earlier novels, like Beyond This Horizon, Sixth Column, Methusaleh’s Children, Orphans In The Sky, The Door Into Summer, Citizen of the Galaxy, The Puppet Masters, and Revolt In 2100.  I’d read a lot of what he’d published in the Sixties and when I was fifteen I read Stranger In A Strange Land.  (I’d tried to read that one even earlier, when I was eleven or so, because it, like all the rest of science fiction in the library, was shelved in the Children’s Section, no kidding.  But it was, truly, out of my ability.) Each time I picked one up, though, I remembered it being a struggle to get through.  My head felt caught in a vice, my throat burned, and I couldn’t wait to get from chapter end to chapter end so I could put it down.  Until then, if anyone had asked, I would have declared Heinlein at the bottom of my list of favorites.

Part of the problem—a problem I have to this day, although it is no longer an impediment like it was then—was the number of Heinlein novels written in first person.  I didn’t like first person.  I still prefer third person.  First person puts me off.  I like to imagine myself in the title roles and every time I encountered that declarative “I” it let me know that it was someone else’s story.  For me, despite what so many wide heads claim, it is not “more intimate” but less.  Still, Heinlein didn’t write in first person all the time, not even, I think, most of the time.

No, something else annoyed me about Heinlein then.  With perfect hindsight I can tell you what it was.

He made me think.

Critical thinking is not natural.  Look around you.  I’ll risk sounding like Heinlein here, but all one need do is look at the proliferation of pseudoscience and mystical nonsense to recognize this fact.  Everyone thinks, certainly, but critical thinking is a particular form and not easily learned, nor natural.  This is a paradox when it comes to reading, because all manner of interpretive mechanism in the mind comes into play and thinking, critical thinking, is on some level essential, but very few novels take the time to show you the process.  Most novels bury that part and concentrate on just telling a good story and letting all the gears and such remain hidden.
Heinlein didn’t let a reader off the hook so easily.  Heinlein’s characters, for good or ill, were almost all consciously engaged in the processes of their stories.  Most of them were dynamically self-reflective.  They confronted problems and, step by step, thought their way through it on the page, so that you, trapped in the momentum of the story, had to think right along with them to the conclusion of the problem.

It gave me headaches.  I didn’t like that.

But I read more of them by the time I was fifteen than any other single author.

The irony, of course, is that this didactic approach offered in itself the very tools one could later use to realize how flawed Heinlein’s own works became.  To my mind, whatever else Heinlein may have been or what he has been labeled since, he was a true subversive.

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.

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

Kage Baker, A Fine Writer, Gone

Following upon the previous post, Kage Baker has passed away.

A few years back she was guest of honor at ConQuest, in Kansas City.  Here in St. Louis some folks at the public library contacted me to see if I could get her to come here to do a presentation.  In my office at the time as president of the Missouri Center for the Book I made inquiries, set up a venue, and actually made arrangements.  A couple of local fans who were at the Kansas City convention volunteered to drive Kage and her sister to St. Louis.  They said they had a marvelous time with her and were pleased to take Kage around the city on tour.

I’d expected more from the library.  Of course I sent around a notice that Kage would be in town, doing a reading, but book events are notoriously hard to get people, even dedicated readers, to attend, and we ended up with a very small gathering in a hall much too large.

Kage was gracious.  We huddled around and she read a pirate story to us and we had a terrific conversation.  It was a fun evening and I came away very impressed by her wit and charm.  That’s kind of a cliched expression, but it was true.  I liked her very much.  I’d already been quite taken by her books, which are the kind of treasures you find from time to time that you come to feel a special warmth for.  Great characters, wonderful storylines, and a terrific premise.

She actually published quite a bit.  There’s plenty there to read and reread.  Nevertheless, there doubtless was much more we will never now discover.  She will be missed by some of us.  She should be remembered.

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.

Art

New Draft and Other Stuff

This morning I completed the second draft of the new murder mystery, The Drowned Doll.  The first draft came in at about 70,000 words, this one is just shy of 93,000, which is right about where I wanted it.

I then got dressed and went to the gym.  January has been abysmally cold, so I haven’t been going.  I used to be very susceptible to colds at below 25 degrees, and although I’m not so much anymore, I still draw the line at 10 degrees and stay home.  It’s been push-ups and aerobics for the last few weeks.  This week the weather broke a bit and it’s been up in the 30s and 40s.  But I wanted to get this book done, so I haven’t gone.  Pumping iron as partial celebration.  How perverse is that!

Anyway, I kind of like the new book.  It’s got a nice shape, interesting characters (I think), and a serviceable mystery.  Tomorrow I’ll print out this new draft and let Donna tear into it, after which I’ll pick up the bleeding corpse and fix it up and it should be really good, then.  (All my books are, at some point, Frankenstein creatures, sewn together parts and repaired viscera.)

Also this morning I got an email from BenBella.  They’ve put up my essay from the Hitchhiker’s Guide anthology they did, The Anthology At The End of the Universe, and you can read it here .  It’s a strange piece, even for me, but I had a good time writing it and every time I read it I think “my, I was reasonably clever with this, wasn’t I?”  Or something like that.  I’d like to think Douglas Adams would be pleased with it.

I’m going to go upstairs now and read.  I get to rest now.  Tomorrow I can print the manuscript and start cleaning my office.

Oh goodie.