Où Sont Les Chaussures d'Antan?

.

It looks like another venerable tradition is dying.  I speak, of course, of the tradition of tying sneakers together by their laces and then throwing them over telephone wires.  Back in the day, you'd see great tangles of them -- twenty, forty pairs or more -- looking like the nest of some enormous child-eating bird.  There were some great ones in the Winooski, Vermont, of my childhood.  But the very best I ever saw was here in Roxborough, outside the entrance to the play yard behind Levering Elementary back when Sean went there.  How large was it?  A hundred pairs?  Too large to count, at any rate.

The funny thing was that nobody seemed to know for sure how they got there.  There were two schools of thought on the issue.  One was that when kids got new sneakers, they'd throw their old ones over the telephone wires.  Which is at least partly true . . .  I know I did, once.  The other theory was that bullies ripped the shoes off smaller kids and threw them up where they couldn't be retrieved simply to be cruel.  I never saw that happen, but it seems plausible as well.

Some people reading this are going to suggest a third possibility, that I'm making the whole thing up.  I know this because that's how people react to almost anything I say.  There's something inherently untrustworthy about me, I suppose, or maybe a better word for it would be implausible.  For years, Marianne refused to believe in Hoppity Hooper, simply because I described the show so enthusiastically.  Gregory Feeley refused to believe in Bean Day, Clothesline Night, Gate Night (aka Bicycle Night), Pumpkin Night or Cabbage Night (though I believe he grudgingly admitted to the existence of Halloween) simply because I vouched for them.   And whenever Gardner Dozois and I got to reminiscing about The Banana Man, entire roomfuls of people would start hooting in disbelief.

Nevertheless, I'm telling the truth.  The Levering Elementary tangle was eventually deemed a potential hazard by the school and the telephone people came with a cherry-picker to cut it away.  I kept expecting a new one to grow in its place, but it never did.  The other day I went by there and found a single pair of sneakers twisting slowly in the wind, lonely and forlorn.

As is the pair, above, to be found on Leverington Avenue a couple of houses down from my own.


A quick question . . .

I've experienced enough shocked disbelief in my life to have learned that in most places kids don't throw sneakers over telephone wires and never did.  Still, I've lived in two such locales.  It can't be all that rare.  Does anybody else know of anyplace where this is or was a commonplace?


And because nobody trusts me . . .

Here's proof that Hoppity Hooper, a frog, his uncle Waldo Wigglesworth, a fox, and Filmore, the strongest bear in Captivity, Wisconsin, really did exist.  In the imagination of Jay Ward if nowhere else. This is a segment of one of the very best episodes,  The Traffic Zone.

And also, the immortal Banana Man!  Who, as it turns out, wasn't the real Banana Man at all but, instead, was actually . . . but, heck, why bother to tell you that story when you're not going to believe a word I tell you?

*

Things It Ought Not To Be Necessary To Say

.

I don't keep a dream diary anymore.  I did for a while, and even wrote up a collection of the best entries, titled "Lord Vacant on the Boulevard of Naked Angels," which can be found here.  But though I managed to maintain it for a couple of years, once I read it through my curiosity was satisfied and I moved on.

Still, every now and then, a remembered detail from one of my dreams piques my interest.  Last night, in the middle of a dream in which I was back in college (but not one, for a miracle, involving final exams for a course I haven't attended), I saw the following public service poster:

"But It Smelled Like My Cat!"

DON'T PLACE LIVE WOLVERINES 

IN YOUR TROUSERS

IT'S ILLEGAL -- AND IT'S WRONG.

Which kinda makes you wonder how that particular fad got started, dunnit?

*

Hope Mirrlees on the Web

.

I just ran across Erin Kissane's website Hope Mirrlees on the Web.  A very handsome site and a most welcome one as well.  There was a time not long ago when if you wanted to find out anything about Mirrlees, the only reliable source was . . . well, me, because I'd written a short biography of her.  (It's called Hope-in-the-Mist, and this is not a plug, because Temporary Culture has already sold all the copies printed.)  But as more and more people become interested in Mirrlees, I'm beginning to fade into the background, and that's good news for all fans of the woman who made herself one of the most important fantasists of the Twentieth Century with one single novel, Lud-in-the-Mist.

Ms Kissane does not appear to update the site very often, which is perfectly understandable once one realizes that she is currently a grad student, with all the lack of free time that implies.  But her posts are intelligent and lucid and in one she has even managed to find joy in Mirrlees's first novel, Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists, something which neither Virginia Woolf nor I were capable of doing.

She has also put the entire text of Madeleine online, which makes an all-but-unfindable book available to scholars and the curious.  I'm not sure that Ms Mirrlees would approve (she quietly dropped the book from her biography and in her will stipulated that it not be reprinted until either twenty or fifty years after her death -- I've misplaced the reference, I'm afraid -- so its extreme obscurity was not unwelcome to her), but it allows those who are passionately interested in her work to make up their own minds about its merits.

You can find the site here.

Above: Arthur David Waley, Lytton Strachey, Hope Mirrlees, and Georges Cattaui.  Photo by Lady Ottoline Morrell.  From the National Portrait Gallery.  The British one, not the American.

*

A Worthy Book I Won't Be Reviewing

.

Aqueduct Press just sent me a book for possible review which, for all its virtues, I won't be passing judgment on.  The Secret Feminist Cabal, subtitled A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms, by Helen Merrick looks to be a very smart history of feminist thought and activism in science fiction.  But the thought of writing about it makes my heart sink.

The thing is, I vividly remember the feminist upsurge in the 1970s, characterized by some extremely important works of science fiction and a number of passionate essays explaining the thinking behind the fictions.  I also remember the male response to them.  Even at the time, the worst of those responses made me cringe.  Today, looking back, even the best of them makes me . . . is there a comparative verb form of cringe?  Or a superlative?  Cringier?  Cringiest?

Part of the problem, admittedly, was that the sexual revolution was still underway at that time and so to a lot of us it seemed that being outrageously outspoken was virtuous.  (Theodore Sturgeon's "If All Men Were Brothers . . .", a thought experiment defending incest, seemed brilliant then for making its case for the unthinkable, where today it looks wrong-headed and embarrassing.)  Thus, Michael G. Coney's response to Joanna Russ's classic story "When It Changed," was to declare that it showed that the author hated him "because Joanna Russ hasn't got a prick."  SF gadfly Richard Geis titled his review of Russ's The Female Man, "Pardon Me, But Your Vagina Just Bit My Penis."

I'd like to think that even then, when I was young and a fool, I had enough sense not to write crap like that.  But what about the responses to feminism by men like Isaac Asimov or Poul Anderson or Philip K. Dick, who come across today as paternalistic and patronizing?  Back then, I only wished I could write like them.  But Merrick hangs them up to dry simply by quoting them, fairly and in context.

Worst of all (to a potential reviewer) were the men who came out wholeheartedly in favor of the feminists, and proceeded to make total asses of themselves by setting themselves up as spokesmen for the movement and then presenting overstated and condescending rehashes of observations made by women who knew what they were actually talking about.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of Herland, had a name for these guys  -- she called them "women worshippers," and it was clear that she despised the lot of them.

So, no.  I won't be reviewing The Secret Feminist Cabal.  If you're the sort of person who needs to read this book, however -- and by now you should know whether you are or not -- this is a book you really do need to read.  You can read what the publisher has to say about it here.


But if I were reviewing the book . . .

I'd point out that the index is unforgivably bad.  All the info above about Russ, Asimov, Dick, Coney, Anderson, and Geis, can be found on pages 59 through 68, which include generous quotes from Dick, Coney, and Anderson.  Asimov and Dick are not mentioned in the index at all, and of the others only Coney has a citation which will send you to this section (though not to a page mentioning him).  The entry for Russ reads:  250, 252, 254, 232.   There must surely be a simply explanation for how this foul-up happened, but damned if I can figure out what it is.

*

Oh, Noble Holstonia!

.

Yesterday, I got an email from one Jim Glanville, modestly titled "Of Possible Interest."  In its entirety, it reads:

Mr. Swanwick:

A few days ago I posted  http://www.holstonia.net/files/Paq&CabOnLine.pdf. It notes your recent book.

Jim Glanville 


It turns out that Mr. Glanville is a retired chemist who is writing a dual biography of Paquiquinero, the "first gentleman of Virginia"and an early Native American patriot, and James Branch Cabell, who wrote a historical novel about him.  My contribution (and a very small one it is) was to write What Can be Saved From the Wreckage?, a literary overview of  Cabell which briefly dealt with that book.


Being an inquisitive man, I naturally snooped about the parent website and found that it deals with Holstonia, the biogeological province of southern Virginia and Northern Tennessee created by the headwaters of the Holston River.  A region that he Glanville named and defined.  You can find the maps here.  


This is not only eccentric, but is the sort of eccentricity we need a lot more of.  What microregional area do you inhabit?  How much have you done to promote it?


You can find out more about Glanville here in an article that makes him out to be quite an admirable man.  I particularly like his dogged determination to record the history of the Olin chemical plant, despite the disinterest of all contemporary historical journals.  A century (or two or nine) from now, researchers will bless his name.

*

A Writer's New Year's Mummer's Day

.

Above, l-r:  Gardner Dozois, Barbara Purdom, Susan Casper (in red), Marianne Porter (with orange scarf), Michael Swanwick (in red), Tom Purdom (with red cup), Greg Frost (in black), Frank Crean (with blue cup). Photo taken by Christopher Purdom.


Well, that's it in a nutshell.  I wasn't well enough to make the New Year's Eve dinner party with friends or the waiting-for-Dick-Clark-to-fall-over party with other friends.  But on the first I was strong enough to drop by Gardner Dozois's and Susan Casper's open house, where we sat around critiquing the Mummers groups on TV.  (I thought Duffy was looking pretty good this year!)  And talking with old friends, of course.  It felt great to be out of the house.

I am not, as you may have noticed, much of a snapshotist.  So how do I get shots worth keeping?  I pass the camera around at parties and ask everybody to take one shot.  Usually, there's somebody in the group who knows how to frame a photograph.  In this case, Christopher Purdom.

And I cannot help but point out . . .

I have kept my mouth shut about the DHS's shameful failure to protect us in the most recent citizen-thwarted terrorist attempt and the even more shameful aftermath as well because, frankly, the Web has enough angry voices already.  But luckily Christopher Hitchens has already said it for me.  Here.

*

In Praise of Gruel

.

The very best thing about last week?  Gruel.

Let me explain.  Friday was Christmas.  On Saturday, after long and careful thought, I said aloud, "I think I'm coming down with something."  Sunday, the illness was a minor irritation until that night when everything fell in on me.  Monday, my biggest accomplishment was eating a piece of toast.

Then on Tuesday, I started getting better.  So much better that I was capable of eating gruel.  Dear God, you have no idea how delicious gruel can be when you've had all of two slices of toast over the past day-and-a-half.  I ate an entire mug of it in one sitting.  Feeling like one of the Saints feasting in Heaven: simple, joyful, grateful.

Wednesday I was able to go around the corner to the post office.  I came home dizzy and triumphant and collapsed on the couch for an hour and slept.  Thursday, I was able to write again -- only a brief book review, but the first thing I'd written since falling ill.  And today, I'm going to visit Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper briefly.

So the entire week has been a process of things just getting better and better.  You can see where it's been a good one for me.

But, oh man, that gruel!  Wonderful stuff.  I'll treasure the memory of that first cup forever.

Above:  A snapshot of me in the tub, taken by Marianne, showing how much better I am now.  I shaved for the occasion.

*