Category: Literature

culture

Longer Tomorrows

I recently read (reread) Leigh Brackett’s 1955 novel, The Long Tomorrow.  In a nutshell, this is a thoroughly underappreciated classic that ought to have the same attention and regard as other social commentary novels of around that period.  Given the political landscape today, it is remarkably trenchant.

The novel follows Len Coulter, who we meet at a large county fair near his home somewhere in Pennsylvania, in a country completely altered after a world war that left the cities in ruins and the only ones equipped to survive in the reduced technological circumstances that resulted were groups of religious communities like the Amish and Mennonites and similar enclaves who had eschewed modernism to begin with.  Len is a member of a New Mennonite community.

As the novel opens, his cousin Esau is trying to dare him into attending a revival meeting outside the boundaries of the fair, something they have both been forbidden to do.

The tensions between the various groups of believers are kept in check by the constraint of circumstance.  They need each other and cannot afford the luxury of complete separation.  But there are walls and this is one of them.  As such it also represents a kind of rite of passage for the adolescents.

This is a time and place where laws have been passed to keep the possibility of another war massively in check by keeping the technology that produced the atomic bombs suppressed.  Brackett made the savvy observation that it was the expansion of urban centers that permitted the kind of wealth, leisure, and political pressure to drive an ever-increasing and complicating technological base, so the Constitution has been amended to make towns of more than a thousand people and two hundred buildings illegal.  This enforced small town agrarianism has, in fact, achieved a kind of equilibrium.  People are not unaware of the past.  Libraries still exist, people read, but the cultural paranoia created by the devastation dominates.

Behind all this is the legend of Bartorstown, a place—somewhere—where the old technologies not only exist but people work with them to create new.  It’s a kind of boogieman story, but Len and Esau learn that it is not a lie, that there is such a place.  After seeing a member of Bartorstown denounced and stoned to death at the revival he and Esau attend, it becomes an obsession for Len.

And then Esau steals a radio and the two boys commit themselves to finding Bartorstown, no matter what.

There are no bad people in this novel.  In fact, there are no good people, either, not in terms of Good vs Evil.  Len is human to a fault and Esau often has feet of clay.  They run away from home and grow up in the river towns of the Ohio and encounter all manner of people, some good, some not so good, but all of them doing what they think is right.  Brackett painted very subtle and sophisticated portraits of human beings struggling to bring about change and simultaneously resist change.  At times, it gets ugly.

If there is an evil at the heart of this novel, it is in Brackett’s chilling portrayals of mob violence.  She understood how individuals could lose their capacity to think and act as moral agents when caught up by fear and passion in a wave of group reaction.  Fear, of course, and then anger unhinges people and perhaps the next day or the next month they come to regret what they did, but they seem incapable of doing otherwise at the time.

Laced throughout this is the thesis that any time we try to establish a set of inviolable rules to make people conform, we find over time that such rules simply do not maintain, not the way they were intended.  Too rigid a stance almost guarantees that such rules, such prohibitions will not only be violated but will themselves become the source of considerable harm.

Len’s journey from adolescent obsession to mature accommodation to things he ultimately cannot understand is poignant and frustrating.  This is not a standard-issue science fiction novel in which knowledge and truth set people free and all doubts are swept aside in the Eureka glow of enlightenment.  Len finds Bartorstown and it is nothing like he expected.  In fact, at its heart is the very thing he had been raised to fear more than anything else, and yet he is told that it must not only exist but that humans must learn to control it.

If I have a problem with this novel, it is in the all-too-typical treatment of women.  Too many of them are ultimately just vain and dependent and stereotypical.  But Brackett was juggling a lot in this book, so I gave her a pass on this in light of all the rest that she was so clear and prescient about.

Given the current global scene in which mobs seem to coalesce out of the very air over some of the most inane issues and great violence is done—more often than not driven by religious leaders who are more intent on maintaining their power than on caring for their clients—this is a strikingly contemporary novel, written by one of the best.  It is in some ways dated, but not by much.  In many passages, it seems this could have been written last year.

While I no longer believe a global nuclear holocaust is likely, all the rest she depicted seems all too possible.  This is one that ought to be read with fresh modern eyes and its insights taken to heart.

Art

Still Plodding

I’m finally able to sit in front of my computer for more than five minutes at a stretch.  (Nothing painful, just really uncomfortable.)  I suppose I’m progressing. My patience abandoned me weeks ago, but since I have almost no energy, it’s not an issue.

Next Tuesday I have my follow-up at the various clinics to see if I’m doing well enough to be “unplugged” and go on my own.  Which only means that afterward I have to be vigilant for a couple of months in regards to fever, etc.  Last night I discovered I’ve lost 15 pounds, which under normal circumstances I wouldn’t mind terribly much.

Meantime, I’m doing some reading.  I have a few books going at the same time.  I’m finally reading the first Aubry/Maturin novel, Master and Commander.  This has been recommended to me by so many people whose taste I trust and I have been so utterly put off by it till now that I feel a bit embarrassed.  The big problem is the plot—which proceeds at a snail’s pace.  But I’ve given it the major attention it clearly deserves and I can appreciate what O’Brian was doing.  Not sure I’ll continue on with it, but I can now declare that it is indeed a fine piece of work.

A couple of history books, and I’m reading Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow.  Yes, this is a reread, but since my first time was forty-plus years ago, it’s virtually a new book, and I guarantee I missed a lot back then.  I’ll be doing a long post about it soon.

Anyway, I’ve booted up my novel again and I’m noodling with it.  I’m only three or four chapters from done with it, which makes this past month a real annoying waste in my mind.  But the downtime has given me the space to rethink a couple of things, which is all to the good.  A better book will emerge from this.

So, till later…

“Rides”
culture

The Vital Gore Is Gone

Gore Vidal has died.

Anyone with the merest scintilla of cultural or political awareness of the last 50 years should know who he was.  My first memory of him was from the 1968 election when he called William F. Buckley a crypto-nazi and Buckley, losing his cool, threatened to “sock you in your goddam face” on national television.  At the time (I was not yet 14 and only beginning to become aware of politics in any meaningful way), I thought Buckley was the cool one, but in retrospect Vidal never got ruffled, continued speaking clearly, and made his points.

Points which I later found myself in agreement with, by and large.

At other times I’ve found myself frustratingly at odds with Vidal, particularly in some of his reframings of American policies.

But I was right there with him during the Bush years when he told us what Bush-Cheney were doing to the Bill of Rights and what a fix we were all about to be in.

Vidal is one side of the spectrum of political essence that makes up who we are.  If you read Buckley, you must read Vidal for the other side (which most people don’t, on either side: we pick one or the other and stick to it without ever giving the opposing voice a chance, which is why we are in the cultural nightmare in which we are presently trapped), because between the two you can get some sense of the totality.

For my part, I would like to say that Vidal was one of those writers whose ability I admire.  He was a first-class stylist and his historical knowledge was enviable.  When he chose a historical subject—like Lincoln or Aaron Burr or a year, like 1876—he described what happened and what people said if reliable sources were available and added in the connective tissue with a fine eye for detail and sense of place.  His essays, often maddening, never bored, and usually revealed a vein of thought or fact hitherto unremarked that could prove absolutely trenchant.

Many on the Right hated him because he identified, generally quite accurately, the foundation of their politics (money or power, or both) and aimed his barbs at their historical amnesia, cultural ignorance, and always at their political hypocrisy.

Many on the Left were uncomfortable with him because he wouldn’t let them off the hook.  If they pandered, compromised their values, paid lip-service and then voted otherwise, he called them on it.

He once commented that he thought we had lost our chance to “have a civilization” here, that it looked for a time “like we were going to have one” but apparently not.  He said it with a deep sadness and while I took it as hyperbole, I can understand what he meant.  We’ve been arguing in the Forum about who we’re going to be as a nation and while the argument rages on we’re squandering our resources.  We have all the components of a really fine civilization but by and large they don’t seem to matter to most people, so they atrophy from lack of proper attention.

I stress though that a steady diet of Mr. Vidal’s writings, with nothing to balance it, can be as bad as a steady diet of William F. Buckley (or William Safire or George Will).  He represented an important aspect, one side, that must be respected and engaged as an equal part of all the other sides.  (Put Will and Buckley on one end and Chomsky and Vidal on the other and in the mix you find the substance of what it means to be a free people of serious intent.)

He was on Dick Cavett’s old talk show, often, and on one of them they were playing anagrams with names, and Vidal asked Cavett what his should be.  Without missing a beat, Cavett said “You’re the Vital Gore.”  Vidal smiled, apparently pleased.

Some of our essential vitality is gone.

Art

Upon Finishing A Novel

Oculus, the sequel to my alternate history Orleans, is finished.  I sent it off last week to my agent.  (Which means that, in fact, I will have to do another pass when she gets through making notes, etc, but for now I am content.)

They’re all a slog at some point.  The only novels I ever wrote that weren’t were the second Robot Mystery, Chimera, and the one Terminator novel I wrote, Hour of the Wolf (which wasn’t supposed to be the title—that was the working title I slapped on it because I have to have a title before I can write a piece, but given the impossible schedule and the fact that the publisher needed it, like, THEN, they went with the title as is).  Don’t get me wrong, they were both hard work, but they went relatively smoothly from beginning to end.

However, this one was a slog because the first draft was really rather not good.

Anyway, it got better and I sent it off.  Now comes the decompression and the preparation for the next project.  Cleaning the office, becoming reacquainted with the dog, having some kind of food that takes more than two minutes to prepare.

I have written 21 novels, beginning to end.  Ten of them have been published, six of them probably never will see the light of day again.

It’s difficult to describe to people who don’t do this what it’s like.  The total immersion in the world of your fiction, and having now written other things besides science fiction I can tell you that it doesn’t matter.  The world of your novel is A World and you have to live in it while you’re building it.  So far I haven’t found myself confusing the fictional realm with the “real” world, but I have found myself ignoring a great deal of what’s around me.  There have been a couple of times I’ve felt like someone emerging from a shelter after a nuclear war, wondering how much the world has changed while I was underground.

It’s also, for me, an act of faith.  Having the confidence or the optimism that a book will turn out worth while after all the work can be based on experience once you’ve written enough of them, but it’s still a gamble.  You could very well write a piece that is wholly inaccessible to anyone else.  While you’re inside it, making it, it becomes, at least for me, problematic as to whether or not it will appeal to anyone else.  It’s always a pleasant surprise when it turns out others like it.

Next week, I dive into the major rewrite of another, this one a historical—straight history, with a mystery—and the rest of my summer will be devoted to making it as good as it can be.  I do, however, intend to do a few other things this summer besides just tour the precincts of my fictional realms.

I’ll also have a special essay for the Fourth of July.  Something I’ve been working on for a bit.  Just a little heads up.

Ah.  There’s something else needs tending.  See you later.

history

The Golden (Silver?) Good Ol’ Days

I just finished skimming through a fascinating little bit of fannish history, Earl Kemp’s Who Killed Science Fiction?  Fannish in the sense of science fiction fandom.  It has a rich and varied history and the concerns within the genre are as fraught with angst, ennui, and ambition as any literature.

I am always a bit bemused when I read about this sort of thing, because I came into science fiction through the rotary rack at my local drug store.  (Literally—Leuken’s Pharmacy, on the corner of Shenendoah and Compton, a good old fashioned drug store with a soda fountain, a magazine stand, and two circular racks for paperbacks, two blocks from my house.)  I had no idea about where these books came from, who wrote them, how, not to mention the whole publishing industry and its workings.  I used to think authors were “gray eminences” who occasionally deigned to write a new book and “gift” it to the public.  The notion that they did it for money or to meet a contract deadline or anything so mundane never occurred to me.  It was a wholly mysterious process, with arcane rituals and secret rites.

Nor were all books created equal in my mind.  For some reason—purely aesthetic—I early on decided that the best science fiction, the stuff with true weight and merit, was all published by Avon.  They did Asimov’s magisterial Foundation Trilogy, after all, and that was Significant Literature!  They put out a lot of Zelazny and some Silverberg.

But I knew nothing about fandom.  Occasionally I’d see a notice in the back of one of the magazines I read—If, Galaxy, Amazing, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vertex, Venture—for a convention somewhere, usually a “World Science Fiction Convention” (!), but I thought they would necessarily be by invitation only (where all the gray eminences met to determine the future offerings, etc) and I’d never go to one.

Kemp’s little tome is the result of a survey he sent out around 1960, asking the title question, among others.  Damn.  I started reading the magazines regularly around 1963 or ’64, so if already in 1960 there was concern over SF being dead, then…

Most of the seventy-odd respondents thought SF was not dead at all, but was in the doldrums.  This was right after the so-called Golden Age has ended (roughly between 1938 and 1954 or so) and there was apparently a sense that the Next New Thing hadn’t arrived yet and maybe it wouldn’t.  It was right on the cusp of New Wave and a few years before Campbell changed the name of Astounding to Analog.  There’s the sense of people sort of milling around, waiting for Something To Happen.

Well, it was five years before Dune and seven years before Dangerous Visions, two books that arguably changed the field.  In a way they represent two extremes, the last great epic of traditional SF and the compendium of All The Wild Shit coming down the pike.  (Both books are almost continually in print to this day, and while Dune has become more a media and franchise phenomenon, Dangerous Visions and its sequel is still a touchstone for serious literary study and the taking-off point for the changes in approach and trajectory that drove everything until Gibson, Sterling, and Cyberpunk worked another set of changes on a field that has always been as good as its most recent thing.)

The general consensus throughout the responses was that magazine SF was not dead (and there did seem to be an over-emphasis on the magazines, which at the time were still seen as the major outlet for SF.  Book publishers had not yet really crowded into the field as they did by the end of the decade, although some were putting out quite a lot, like ACE) but it was sick as hell.  I’ve sat in on similar conversations over the last three decades of my own involvement in fandom and I was struck reading this by the similarity in tone and even in content of the arguments.  (Horace Gold, editor of Galaxy, thought everything was fine except for too much psi.)

Kurt Vonnegut chimed in with a particularly venomous assault, that not only was it dead but he would be glad to help find the corpse so it could be properly buried.  He wrote a note to Kemp later apologizing and blaming his attitude on his isolation from the field.  Vonnegut made his bones in SF and took many opportunities to diss it because he didn’t want to be regarded by the critics—and therefore his potential audience—as a hack.  Fair enough, but sometimes I wonder if something else was going on there.  He could have distanced himself without pissing all over the whole genre.  Or maybe not.  I have to bear in mind that the critical arena is not what it was then.

The last section of the book contains revisitations some 20 years later, when science fiction was going through an enormous boom.  Some of the pessimism of the earlier responses had to be explained.

A lot of of them credited Star  Trek  with the “revival” of science fiction.  It did bring a much larger audience into the field.  It did open the door for many of those new readers to discover that, as good as they thought Star Trek was, the stuff between two covers was much better.

That all changed again in the 80s with the massive upsurge of Fantasy, all, in my opinion, in the wake of Star Wars, which did something very similar—brought many tens of thousands of new fans eagerly into the field.  But in this instance, a different realization occurred that led to a collapse of science fiction.  Instead of discovering that the material in the books they were now buying was better than Star Wars, they found that it was utterly different—and that they really didn’t like it.

Star Wars—and I’ve said this before, often—is not science fiction (even though Lucas rather hamfistedly and stupidly tried to retrofit it as science fiction in the “first” three movies) but heroic quest fantasy in space.  Or, simply, Fantasy in Skiffy drag.  Audiences went from this to the less reifying work of writers like Brin, Bear, Clarke, Benford, Cherryh, et al and it must have been like a cold shower.  Science fiction requires thought, analysis, its virtue is in the explication and championing of reason, logic, and science, and while there are heroes aplenty in SF there’s not a lot of destiny or “born to the throne” heroes who just Are.

As fast as they blew up the SF bubble, they left it for all the Tolkein clones that began to dominate the publishing field by the late 80s and still command a hefty market share.

Science fiction, it seems to me, has always been a minority taste.  It appeals to people who also find science appealing.  It has always had a fairly solid core of supporters and as a percentage of the publishing market has remained fairly constant, with certain boom times punctuating a more or less steady, dependable foundation.  Science fiction offers marvels, of course, but they are, the best of them, marvels still grounded in an idea of reality.  And reality is tough.  It takes work to survive and thrive.  A good sword arm won’t do you much good when a meteor has holed your ship and all the air is leaking out and you have to figure out how to fix it.  Orbital mechanics couldn’t care less that you’re of the House Royal as your ship starts spiraling down to a nasty end because you didn’t do the math right for re-entry into atmosphere.  Science fiction says “Yes, the future can be wonderful—but it will still be Real and you’ll have to deal with it the same way you deal with what’s real now.”

So, who killed science fiction in my opinion?

Lot of assumptions in that question with which I do not agree.

blog

Petty Stuff, Harlan Ellison, and Therbligs

I am inspired to write this because of two things, one significant, the other merely annoying.  I start with the merely annoying.

I’m hopelessly behind the curve tech-wise.  I can barely make my way around the internet, and if something melts down on my computer I run in panic from the room wondering who to call to fix it.  Partly, this is a result of being too busy the last three decades to keep up, partly it is a response to the incessant demands of the digital marketplace to constantly, eternally acquire the latest gadget, the newest thingie, the most recent incarnation of Nousmasticator 3.1, all of which is both time consuming to install and maintain and often pretty damn expensive.  As a child I remember jokes about people who had to buy a new car every year, which later morphed into the “planned obsolescence” of Detroit product that required a new model after sixty thousand miles, but the auto industry never had a thing on the computer world.  I resent it.  Perversely, I’ve refused to keep abreast.  This is classic surgical removal of probosci to articulate displeasure with one’s demeanor.

And it’s petty.

This morning a notice for an available upgrade appeared in the hopper of my blog and I haplessly accepted it.  My blog promptly disappeared.  After messing with this, on the phone and by email, for over an hour, I discovered that for some reason the upgrade trashed the files of the existing blog template, rendering it unusable.  Since my system indicated that I still had the damn thing in my archives, I was unable to upload a new version and had to install a brand new theme.  You’re looking at it now.  And actually I kinda like it.

But that’s not the point. I shouldn’t have had to go through all that nonsense.  I do not need another little Gordion knot of dyspeptic resentment toward the nature of the modern world binding itself into my psyche along with all the other little bits of tedious, petty anoetic effluvia cluttering up my memorative gestalt.

Which brings me to the other inspiration for this piece.

Recently, I received in the mail volume 6 of Harlan Ellison’s On The Road lectures.  (An aside, briefly, to suggest you avail yourself of some of these, especially if you are an appreciator of the spoken word and good repartee—they are collections of Harlan’s public presentations over his long career and they are a delight.  They are available by mail through here.)  The liner notes of this one comprise a longish essay by Harlan in which he discourses on one of his attributes.

He is, he claims, a petty man.

This is also part of his acceptance speech for the Grand Master of Science Fiction Award, given him by SFWA in 2006 (included in this collection, along with Neil Gaiman’s excellent prefatory words).  He’s copping fair on a characteristic he expresses some regret over, some wonderment about, a puzzle, a burden, an inextricable part of his nature.

My initial reaction was big deal, aren’t we all?  Then I thought he might have been laying the groundwork for distancing himself, the man he is, from the work he has done, leaving behind nothing unadmitted and owned up to for future biographers, chroniclers, and literary archaeologists (and, let’s face, academic parasites) to “discover” and base a “reassessment” on which will completely miss the point.

In one of the best author biographies I’ve ever read, Julie Phillips, in her chronicle of the life of Alice Sheldon, aka James Tiptree Jr., manages to do something rare and remarkable, which is to study the source of fiction without suggesting that the fiction is useful for some kind of psychoanalysis.  She examines the forces in Sheldon’s life that led her not only to adopt a deep cover pseudonym from which to write but to write the kinds of stories she did, but at no point does she suggest the stories are what they are only because Sheldon was troubled, flawed, paranoid, suicidal, whatever.  In Phillips’ hands, the stories are something apart, works of art, certainly created out of the life that shaped them, but once created took on separate status, to be regarded on their own terms and not taken apart or essentially deconstructed based on who Sheldon was (or who we might think she was).  Sheldon wrote the way she did out of her own essence, true, but she nevertheless created something distinct from herself that should be taken on its own terms, for what it is, not for who made it.

Harlan has as vivid a public presence as himself as his work does as itself.  It’s evident, reading over his essays, that he has mined himself for the substance of his stories, for the raw matter that he then shapes into dramas.  It is legitimate to say that he assays autobiographical themes in many of his best stories, even as it is a mistake to see the stories themselves as autobiographical.  He’s done what good artists do—lived, reacted, felt, put the result into his art, saying to us “I am human, I have felt these things, witnessed these things, concluded these things, and because you, too, are human you will know what I’m saying to you.”  He is not saying in his fiction “This is who I am” but more importantly “This is who we are.”

But because we live in a culture obsessed with celebrity and the insistent need to bring everyone down to the level of those who prance shamelessly upon the stages of talkshows where their least indiscretion is blown up into a life-changing, earth-shaking moral verdict, it is too often the case that biography trumps creation in the mind of the Public Beast.   Separating the artist from the work is a problem, because the work, while inextricably part of the artist, is not the artist.  The work is the work.

With that in mind, I read the essay thinking that this was something Harlan was trying to do.  “I know who and what I am and I’ll tell you about it here and now so you don’t have to let its discovery later poison the work I have done.”

I’ve since reread the essay and listened to more of the CD and I don’t think that’s what he was doing.  At least not primarily.

He relates an instance of coincidental karma concerning another writer and cosmic payback.  Within the context of his theme—I am a petty man—he suggests that petty gets what petty gives.  It is perhaps an examination of the conundrum some people are that the more they have, the more they succeed, the higher up whatever ladder they’ve been trying to climb they get, it is the little things that never let them fully be as complete as the work they do.

We’re all petty.  Not so much that we do petty things, but that we have petty thoughts and petty concerns.  Myself, I have a roomful of memories in my hindbrain of embarrassing, unkind, thoughtless things I’ve said and done that I just can’t seem to be rid of.  Most of the time I don’t think about them, but every once in a while, when I’m least expecting it, one of these damn things pops up in my mind and taunts me with the fact that there is nothing I can do to change it!  It happened, it’s done, it’s part of history, and I can never undo it.  I obsess over them for a while, imagining myself behaving differently, using different words, taking a different course, or just paying closer attention at the time.  I’m a writer, I can imagine whole novels of better responses, better motives, better outcomes.

But there’s nothing I can do and apparently I can’t even forget them.

Like time and motion studies, I analyze them for clues of my essential cluelessness, which I will also never be able to change, because I didn’t understand it at the time.  Or maybe I did but I still didn’t think it was a bad idea.  Or I knew, but couldn’t figure out how, at the time, to avoid the mess it was about to be.  I rework them in my head, trying vainly to optimize the therbligs of my past and utterly helpless to do so.

I consider my continual obsessions with these things petty.  The events themselves were petty, inconsequential in the greater scheme of my life, and I imagine that the other players may well not recall them at all.  But I can’t let them go.

They do turn up in my fiction.  Not the events themselves, usually, but the fact of the pettiness, the nature of the embarrassment or resentment or anger or stupidity.

And it doesn’t help to Know Better.  It is part of my nature.

Confessing doesn’t help either.  I could detail here some of the things that occupy these worthless interludes of longed-for repair, but it wouldn’t do me a bit of good.  I’ve learned that sharing embarrassment doesn’t really lessen it, but it does lessen the anxiety you might have that people will judge you for the events in question.

I suggested that a word had been left out of Harlan’s claim.  It should have read “I am a petty man too.”  He might just as easily have said “I am a compleat human being, having my full measure of all that is human.”  That has the advantage and drawback of distracting people from his point, because, while true, it allows for a generous reception and validation of that “compleatness” as an altogether admirable thing.

I think he wanted people to focus on a specific point.  “I am a petty man” is the same as saying “It is human to be petty” and therefore, “we’re all petty.”

From time to time, here and there, more or less.

Let me tell you something not petty about Harlan Ellison.

Donna and I attended his last convention, MadCon 2010, in Madison, Wisconsin.  We were in the hotel lobby when he came in.  It was the first time we had seen each other since 1996.  Prior to the convention, when it wasn’t a sure bet that he would make it, due to health issues, I sent him a few photographs I’d taken at that prior occasion.  They weren’t great pictures, but I thought he might want them for his archives.  In fact, they were pretty much not good.  When he realized who I was, he put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Tiedemann, those were the worst pictures in the world.  Terrible.”  In front of a small audience.

By Sunday, he was dancing on his last nerve, and still signing autographs.  I’d given up trying to get one and just lingered at the periphery, and for whatever reason he looked straight at me and said, “Tiedemann, go.  Just go.”

I riffled my brain to figure out what I’d done, but he had The Look, and I knew better than to argue, so Donna and I went to dinner.

Afterward, we came back into the hotel.  The lobby was empty except for Harlan and Susan.  Whereupon he sat down with us and we had half an hour of very good, private conversation.  He was generous, interested, and, I think, appreciative, at least of the chance to quietly talk to just one or two people, away from the crowds and the demands of Being On.  Whatever, it was special and very, very human.  (No, I won’t tell you what we talked about, it’s none of your business.)

As I said, petty gets as petty gives.  As far as I’m concerned, Harlan can cop to being petty if he wants, and he would know, but that is simply not my take on him.  He gets no petty from me because he’s never given me any.

In the final analysis, we should strive to regard people by their best.  If we can’t, at least we should remember that no one is a homogeneity.  We are all amalgams.  And from certain amalgams, strange alloys, bright, alien, and dark, emerge in gnostic forms and Damascene patterns, texture of nous and passion…

Art

Miscellany

Just a bunch of assorted items of some minor interest.

First up, I did a new interview!  Jared Anderson runs a blog specializing in author interviews and he asked me to contribute.  Mine is now up, for the pleasure of anyone interested.

Apropos of writerly things, I have finished the second book of my Oxun Trilogy.  The first book, Orleans,  is currently making the rounds via the good offices of my agent, Jen Udden.  Among the various projects I had on hand to work on this past several months, I decided finishing book two might be a good idea.  Oculus is finished.  At least, it will be once Donna completes picking the nits from it.  I hope to hand the manuscript over to Jen some time next week.

This opens the way for volume three, which I intend to call either Orient or Ojo.  Haven’t decided yet.  Ojo is Japanese for rebirth (roughly) and fits with the theme of the book.  This is the one I’m both really looking forward to and dreading, as it will be primarily historical.

Meantime, I am about to dive into the rewrite of my historical mystery, per my other agent’s notes (yeah, two agents, it’s complicated, don’t ask, it works), which will likely take up the rest of the summer.

This afternoon, my friend Russ is coming over with his horn for our last rehearsal before this weekend’s coffeehouse.  We’ve been working on a version of Harlem Nocturne, which we both love and hope to do Saturday.

Prior to his visit, I have to go mow the lawn.  Tedious but necessary.

In between all that, I’ve been working on some new short stories.  As I’ve mentioned from time to time, I’ve been having difficulties with short form for—well, for the last several years.  A few months ago I got very angry with myself and just sat in front of the computer, staring at a story fragment, refusing to do anything else until Fred (Fred was the name Damon Knight gave to the unconscious, which he acknowledged but didn’t like calling the Unconscious)—as I say, until Fred belched up the story solution.  I promptly finished three or four more and I intend to keep hammering at the others.  I must have a couple of dozen half-completed short stories and there is no good reason for them not be completed.  Except for Fred.

Donna’s sisters will be coming into town next week (one from Florida, one from Iowa) and, I assume, hijinks shall ensue.  In the middle of their visit will be a major party and ongoing we have housecleaning.

I’ve been reading Ray Bradbury, prompted by his death.  I wrote about Ray here.  The other day I finished Something Wicked This Way Comes and, through the eyes of experience, I marveled at the exuberance of his language, something I sort of took in stride the first time I read it back at age 12 or 14.  I’m going to go through I Sing The Body Electric next and then maybe The October Country.  Ray was a unique voice in American letters, a high-wire act and a national treasure.  Unlike many great artists, he did get acknowledged and rewarded.  I think he had an exceptional career, all the more so for having done pretty much what he wanted to do most of the time.  He will not vanish into obscurity, I think.  He was misidentified as a science fiction writer.  What little genuine SF he wrote fell apart on most metrics of good SF, but that’s not what he was trying to do.  He was an American mythographer.  His stories were about the things that informed our national character, down deep inside where we live, and reflected the romance of a national vision that was fractured at best, overambitious always, and essentially naive.  Not that he wrote naively—on the contrary, I think he wrote very perceptively about naivete, and somehow rarely in a judgmental way.

We’re on the threshold of summer.  We inherited a gas grill which I need to figure out how to get working, because this year I want to barbecue, something we haven’t done here in years.

There’s more, but I’m rambling.  So to conclude, let me offer up another photograph and bid you adieu till next time.

 

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The Martian Chronicler

Ray Bradbury died today.

He hadn’t been well, a stroke many years ago left him damaged, doubtless uncomfortable.  But he hung around, the world gave him a few more awards, celebrated him in the small and varied corners where writers of moment get celebrated.  Some people probably thought he’d died already, years past.

But, ironically, he published an essay in the New Yorker a few days ago, autobiographical.  I say ironic because of the title.

I met Ray Bradbury a couple of times.  On neither occasion was it enough to become first-name basis camaraderie.  But he was gracious, friendly, and generous with his time.  The first occasion was at the 1986 World Science Fiction Convention in Atlanta, Confederation, where he was guest of honor.

The main hotel, the Peachtree Marriott, was something out of Asimov’s Foundation stories, and the entire sixth floor, if I remember right, was an open deck given over to the hospitality suite.  One evening Ray came bounding through, jogging shorts and a t-shirt, grinning, signing autographs, and talking to people.  I ended up in a small group with him.

One young man wore a dragon on his shoulder.  It was quite a piece of work, with a long neck, all made out of some rubbery material, and he had run tubes through it connected to an air bulb in his pocket.  When he squeezed, the neck stretched and twisted, the little thing looked inquisitive, and Ray was delighted.

All of a sudden he says, “Did you make that?” When the young man said yes, Ray said, “Do you know Ray Harryhausen?  He’s a friend of mine, he does special effects.  He’s always looking for new talent, an apprentice.  I’m going to tell him about you.  You should call him.  Here.”

Phone numbers were exchanged.  It was…amazing.  I don’t know if that kid ever followed through, we watched a career in the making.

Did I say generous?

I don’t know what to call Ray Bradbury’s fiction.  Except for a few stories, it isn’t science fiction.  Nor is it really fantasy.  Harlan Ellison likes the term fantasist, so I’ll go with that.  Bradbury wrote stories that spun webs in the cracks between categories, filled in the gaps in the mind left by tales too one thing or the other to suffice. His Mars only exists as a metaphor, based on nothing but the childish nightmares, daydreams, and fanciful speculations filtered through a gifted artist.  His rockets weren’t really space worthy, but boy were they voyage worthy.  He was romantic according to some.  He was the lineal descendent of Scheherezade.  As long as he was telling the story, everyone had one more day to live.

On a more analytic note, he captured mood better than 99% of anyone else.  I don’t even think his midwest ever really existed, except for one day, lazily drifting through the mind of a passerby who thought he saw Camelot in a farmhouse.  But that state of mind…yeah, that was real, that lived.   Despite its elegiac pace, there was an urgency to it.  It said “Don’t waste time—dream!”

For me it was the Martians that had me.  The Martian Chronicles is one of the few books I’ve read more than once.  It served as the springboard for one of the better homages, Desolation Road, but Ian McDonald did something else with it, unable or unwilling to follow Bradbury.  For Ray, settling Mars was the West, the frontier, and he populated it the way the Rockies stood sentry over the encroachment of the nearer plains.  Only then, everyone left.

Except the dreamers.  The true Martians.

Others will write about his life, his views, his other books.  No doubt someone will point out that he wrote the screenplay for John Huston’s Moby Dick.  All I’ll mention is some of my favorite titles, most of which I read between the ages of 12 and 18.

Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, R Is For Rocket, S Is For Space, Dandelion Wine, I Sing The Body Electric, and of course Fahrenheit 451.

It’s the words, my friends, the words.

My original copy, still in hand, price .50

And then, quite suddenly, summer was over.

He knew it first when walking downtown. Tom grabbed his arm and pointed gasping, at the dime-store window.  They stood there unable to move because of the things from another world displayed so neatly, so innocently, so frighteningly, there.

“Pencils, Doug, ten thousand pencils!”

“Oh, my gosh!”

“Nickle tablets, dime tablets, notebooks, erasers, water colors, rulers, compasses, a hundred thousand of them!”

“Don’t look.  Maybe it’s just a mirage.”

I wish.

Quite suddenly, summer is over.

Art

Missouri Has A New Poet Laureate

From the Governor’s Office we have the announcement of Missouri’s third state poet laureate:

Gov. names university professor poet laureate

Jefferson City – Gov. Jay Nixon announced the appointment of William Trowbridge, Lee’s Summit, as Missouri’s new Poet Laureate.

Trowbridge is a distinguished university professor emeritus at Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, Mo., and the author of more than 340 published or forthcoming poems. His appointment will run for two years, and during his term, he will present and lecture on poetry to school, community and civic groups throughout the state.

“Professor Trowbridge is one of the country’s outstanding poets, and we are honored to have him as Missouri’s poet laureate,” Nixon said. “With a number of outstanding candidates from our state, the decision is never easy. I appreciate the work of the Missouri Center for the Book and of the advisory committee in making its recommendation to me.”

Trowbridge has published eight collections of poems, including Ship of Fool in 2011, and his work has been reprinted in more than 30 anthologies and textbooks. He was co-editor of The Laurel Review from 1986 to 2000, and his poetry has earned several awards.

Trowbridge is Missouri’s third poet laureate; he succeeds David Clewell, of Webster Groves.

http://governor.mo.gov/newsroom/2012/Gov_Nixon_appoints_William_Trowbridge_as_Missouri_s_new_Poet_Laureate

career

Some Tribble Time

Last Friday, the 6th of April, I had the pleasure of being on-stage host to Mr. David Gerrold, writer.  If you’re not familiar with his work…but what am I saying?  Of course you are!  Even if you may not know it.  David Gerrold wrote one of the most loved episodes of the original Star Trek, the marvelous The Trouble With Tribbles. Even those who don’t especially care for the show tend to like that one.

But if that’s all you’re familiar with by him, then I urge you to correct that lack.  David Gerrold is one of the best SF writers in the business.  I pointed that out last Friday to a packed house.

 

Me as host as photographed by Robert S. Greenfield

 

Donna and I had dinner with David prior to the evening’s performance.  We’d met him long ago so could not say we knew him.  Conversation ranged over the map, but kept coming back to writing and voice.  I sometimes find it hard not to go on about how much I liked someone’s work, but the fact is he wrote some stories that stuck in my head, chief among them being The Man Who Folded Himself.  We talked short fiction, novels, politics, the ill-fated St. Louis Worldcon of 1969 (which he attended and I didn’t) and then did a quick tour with the estimable Jenny Heim of the St. Louis Science Center.  The Star Trek exhibit really is very good and it amazed me how much there was, just how long we’ve been living with this fictional universe.

I did a quick minute or two song-and-dance to introduce him, then he took the stage and regaled us with behind-the-scenes stories of working on the original Star Trek and related minutiae (for instance, the episode was initially called A Fuzzy Thing Happened To Me but had to be changed because of a potential conflict with H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy stories).

David Gerrold, April 6th at the St. Louis Science Center, photo by Robert S. Greenfield

I still pay too little attention to the credits on television shows, a habit from a childhood like, probably, most others in which the stars of the show were the most important aspects.  I did not know till that night that he had written one of my favorite episodes of Babylon 5, one called True Believers, which I thought then and still consider one of the most powerful of a strong series.

Anyway, it was a great evening and I am thrilled to have been invited to be part of it.

Oh, and please note—the photographs were taken by Robert S. Greenfield.  You should check out his online galleries.