Writ In Sand

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The ocean is a battleground. Walk along its verge and you'll see evidence of astonishing carnage: helmets, shields, and claws strewn about in great profusion, and all patrolled by gulls who feed upon the warriors' remains and sandpipers who seek out the conscientious objectors hiding in their sandy bunkers.

So it is strange how we land-dwellers to to so violent a place to find peace. Yet we do.

Once a year, Marianne and I rent a place "down the Shore" for a week. Every day, I go to the edge of the sea and, picking up  a stick or a bit of shell begin to write in the wet sand. A few words at a time, a sentence at most, get laid down before the sea comes up to erase them.

What I write is never long -- flash fiction -- and nobody sees all of it but me. And because it's wiped away before its completed, it never exists as a whole save possibly, briefly, in my mind. Where it is soon forgotten.

Every day I write and every day a little slower. Until by the end of the week I am content to sit by the sea and not write.

And then I can go home and pick up the pen again.

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Finnish Fandom's Funniest Practical Joke Ever

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Worldcon 75 is coming and it will be held in Helsinki, Finland. Meanwhile, the Nobel Prizes are being announced in Stockholm, Sweden. In honor of both, I will share with you the practical joke that ran like wildfire through Finncon the year I was guest of honor there. I forget, alas, who came up with it. But if you ask a Finnish SMOF, I'm sure they'll be able to tell you.

"What we should do," the prankster said, "is next time we choose a foreign guest of honor, get a fan with a very strong Swedish accent to phone and say, "I am calling from Stockholm to inform you that you are receiving a very great honor..."

"That's funny," I said, "but what science fiction writer would possibly believe it?"

Without hesitation, the prankster said, "Stanislaw Lem!"


And later, back in the States...

I told this story to Gordon Van Gelder and he said, "Or Ursula K. Le Guin. But who would be so mean?"

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Scary Monsters: The "Tomato"

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Halloween season is coming, so it's time to consider scary monsters. Shown above is a slice of the "tomato" I very sensibly removed it from my lobster salad sandwich, lest I should accidentally eat it.

The "tomato" is very much like the tomato when viewed from the outside: red, beautiful, enticing. But where the tomato is juicy and delicious, the "tomato" is dry, crunchy, and devoid of flavor. The interior of a tomato is colorful delight. The interior of a "tomato" is dominated by whites and yellows. Nor is is at all delicate or juicy. Poke it with a fork wherever you will, you will find nothing that will give you pleasure to put into your mouth, flense the rest though you will.

The frankenfruit that is the "tomato" is the unholy offspring of advertising and greengrocery. Advertising convinced us that we wanted that perfect dewy exterior. Grocers paid to have the fruit hacked so that it arrived in the store looking like the pictures in the advertisements, at the price of both flavor and texture. The result is something whose appeal is wholly nostalgic.

Nor is this the only abomination that modern mercantilism has visited upon us. Here's a riddle for you:

Q: What do tomatoes, strawberries, and peaches have in common?

A: They didn't used to be crunchy.

If you've never had a moist tomato, if you're not familiar with strawberries  that stain your fingers, if you've never felt the juice of a ripe peach running down your chin, you've been cheated of a fraction of the bliss that is your birthright as a human being. I recommend that you go looking for the real thing. It's not easy to find, sometimes, but it's out there.

And that slice of wood pulp they put in your sandwich? Remove it. Lunch will taste better without it.


Above: Tomat O'Lantern courtesy of yours truly. Take the idea and run with it.

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Inspirational Quote du Jour

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Look what Marianne found! A website called quotefancy has turned a handful of quotes from me (and a very odd handful they are, too!) into inspirational wallpaper. Up above is a handful of words I'm proud to have put together.

You can find the quotes here. Or just go to quotefancy.com and poke around.


And speaking of mythological geography...

As always, I'm on the road again.

Marianne and I are going Down the Shore, as we say in Philly, for an inactivity-filled week at Undisclosed Location. (Motto: Where Nothing Can Ever Happen -- And Usually Doesn't.) Leaving the house in the care of My Son the Black Belt and ourTrained Attack Cat.

I expect to continue blogging while on vacation. But I can't guarantee anything. I've got a lot of doing nothing to catch up on.

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This Glitterati Life -- Part 31,473

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This appears to be the reading season. On Sunday, I made what may be my last public appearance to promote Not So Much, Said the Cat. Which is, as you know, my newest and most lavishly-praised collection of short fiction. The reading was in Wayne, PA at Main Point Books. This is a really lovely independent bookstore, which I celebrated by buying a book (Cixin Liu's  Death's End, as it happens).

I read a story, answered questions, chatted with patrons (some of them friends it was good to see again), and autographed books.

Then, yesterday, I went to the downtown Barnes & Noble to see Fran Wilde and Chuck Wendig read from their latest books, answer questions, chat with patrons (some of them friends), and autograph books.

Book events are, with rare exceptions, free and pleasant entertainments. I encourage you to attend as
many as you can. And remember that if you get a book autographed, it increases its value as a collectable if you ask the author to add the date -- but only on the year of first publication or on a date when the author does something significant like win a major award or commit suicide.

I always tell my friends that if if they ever find me signing and dating all my old books, they should buy me a drink and try to cheer me up.


And if you can read Hungarian...

I got quite a lovely review (even when viewed through the lens of Google Translate) from SF Mag.  You can read it here.


Above: There I am, reading. As is traditional, I have taken off my shoes.

Above right: Fran Wilde and Chuck Wendig. As befits rebellious youth, they performed their readings completely shod. They'll grow out of it.

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My Geek's Guide to the Galaxy Interview

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For everything there is a season and as we move gratefully into autumn, the promotional season for Not So Much, Said the Cat is drawing to a close. And what better way to close out the season than with a good long interview at Geek's Guide to the Galaxy?

The interview focuses on the collection, but it covers a lot of ground along the way. Here's an excerpt:

“I have one story which I began in 1973 and I still haven’t finished it. … I wrote a story with William Gibson back in the early ’80s, called ‘Dogfight.’ We did the ‘hot typewriter method,’ which is where you hold onto the story for a month, and during that month you can make any changes whatsoever—you can change the main character’s gender, you can change the plot, you can change anything. And then at the end of the month you send it to the other person. … So there were things that I put into the story that Bill Gibson just took out. He’d send it back to me, and I’d put that thing back in and send it to him, and he would take it out again. … And when the story was done, I had a number of things that he had taken out, and I came up with a different idea for a story and I started writing it. … And I have not found the central plot of it yet. It’s a story called ‘Robot.’ So that’s about 33 years old, that story.”

You can hear it here or read parts of it here.


And speaking of closing out the season...

My final public appearance promoting the book was also my first such in the Philadelphia area. It was held yesterday at Main Point Books in Wayne. It was a very pleasant event and I ran into some old friends there.

Main Point Books moved recently, and their new store is beautiful. If you're in the area, I encourage you to stop by and read a book. I bought Death's End by Cixin Liu. Because I wouldn't tell you to do something I wouldn't do myself.

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Art-in-a-Box

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The world, as Robert Lewis Stevenson famously said, is full of a number of things...

Today, I am happy as kings because Marianne gave me a reproduction of Marcel Duchamp's "Boîte-en-valise."

The original "box-in-a-valise" was a museum in a box, containing miniatures or reproductions of all of Duchamp's most famous works. It was created in the 1940s and Duchamp eventually made (with the help pf Joseph Cornell) and sold some 300 of them.

Duchamp is best known, perhaps, for signing a urinal and submitting it to a major art exhibition under the title "Fountain," an act widely taken as establishing that art was anything an artist said it was. (To my mind, it would have been a far more subversive act had he signed the urinal with his own name rather than a scrawled "R. Mutt," but that chapter of the art history books has already been written.) But "Boîte-en-valise" was a shrewder response to the artistic winds of his times.

An artist I know likes to say that the history of art in the 20th Century is all a hysterical reaction to the inventions of photography and mass-produced images. Who needs a Courbet when an Instamatic and a willing subject will get you the same results at a fraction of the cost? Why spend a fortune on an original Paul Émile Chabas when a mail-order poster looks just as good? 

This explains a lot of things, including landscape art, performance art, and the flight from representation. 

Duchamp, more canny than most, embraced the mass-production of art -- to a degree. It was a shrewd move.

And there's no getting around the fact that the box is a fun little toy to play with.



Above: There it is, the distinguished thing. Not the miniature "Fountain" at the lower left.

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