This Baffling World

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The cocktail shaker pictured above is the newest -- and, at three dollars, possibly the cheapest -- addition to my small collection of barware. It is also the most baffling.

A Pepsi Cola shaker? Seriously. What kind of cocktail involves vigorously tumbling a carbonated beverage in a cocktail shaker?

Other than a Cuba Mentos, I mean.

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Vacation In A Box

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Last week, you'll recall, I spent at Undisclosed Location, down the Shore, and did nothing.

Above is the diary that Marianne and I kept of that week. It contains pebbles, sea glass, mermaids' toenails, swan's down (from mute swans), a very handsome leaf, and so on.

The diary is nonlinear, not text-based, and adamantly unmonetizable.

Also proof, as I said, that I spent an entire week doing nothing.

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Bob Dylan Setting Foot On The Road To Stockholm

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Everybody's heard by now that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Some people are getting snarky about it going to him rather than their own personal favorite singer-songwriter, and others are calling those people out for their snark.

Not me, though. I applaud the selection and feel that there can be no more sincere homage to the man than snarking about it. He was, after all, the king of snarkitude.

To prove it, here's an excerpt from the Nat Hentoff interview (you can find the whole hilarious thing here) in Playboy, back when he was only 24:


PLAYBOY: Mistake or not, what made you decide to go the rock-'n'-roll route?

DYLAN: Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a "before" in a Charles Atlas "before and after" ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy - he ain't so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?

PLAYBOY: And that's how you became a rock-'n'-roll singer?

DYLAN: No, that's how I got tuberculosis.

You have to admit, that's not bad. Kid's got a future ahead of him.

Doesn't suffer fools gladly, though.


Above: Image swiped from GAMbIT Magazine. You can find their list of Dylan's 75 best songs here.

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My Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

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It's that time of year again, when I grace you with...

My Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

(Presented Here Against the Unlikely Chance I Never Get to Deliver It)

It’s about time!

You lousy bastards should have given this to me decades ago, and you fucking well know it.  Look at the morons and retards you have given it to.  Okay, so Albert Einstein, personal hygiene aside, wasn’t a total loser.  But Niels Bohr, Desmond Tutu, Ilya Prigogine, the Dalai Lama?  You’d think this award was being given for having a funny name!  And whoever decided it would be a cute joke to give the prize in literature to the likes of Thomas Mann, Anatole France, and Selma Lagerlöf obviously never bothered trying to read those boring old windbags.  To say nothing of that self-promoting fraud, Mother Theresa!

I could go on, but I think my point is made.

The Nobel Prize was created by Alfred Nobel, who was – I trust I’m not hurting anybody’s feelings here – a neurotic recluse and a mass-murdering Swede.  So, when one considers the source, I really shouldn’t be surprised that you only gave me the one.  There are five, you know.  (I don’t count the Economics thingie as a real Nobel, and neither should you.) It’s not as if the single greatest Writer/Peacemaker [note to self: scratch out whichever category these idiots neglect to honor me in] the world has ever known couldn’t be adept in chemistry and physics and medicine as well.  I assure you I could.  Not that I have, granted.  I’ve been busy.  But surely intentions should count for something.

Oh, and a word about the venue.  Stockholm??  In December???  No wonder your bikini team never showed up.

So here’s what I propose: Vegas, obviously, for the climate.  Ditch the king – nice guy, but no Robin Williams.  For the MC, rather than doing the safe thing with Madonna or J-Lo, go visionary with the Osborne Family.  Can you picture them wandering aimlessly about the stage?  Hilarious.  Maybe we can even convince Ozzie to bite the head off a (fake) bat.

To get television coverage in the major markets, you’re going to need music – Guns ‘n’ Roses, Aerosmith, maybe even get the Stones out of their retirement homes and back in spandex again.  Back ‘em up with a few flash-pots and some fly-girl dancers.  Filmed testimonials from Michael Jackson and the Simpsons.  Choreography from The Producers.  A line of Elvis impersonators.  Dignified and elegant, that’s the key.  Keep the wire-work to a minimum.

I get shivers just thinking about it.

Now I realize that these suggestions might seem startling to some.  But that’s why I’m up here and you’re down there – because I’m a genius and you’re not.  So shut up and think it over.

Meanwhile, I accept this Award with a modesty so profound that pissants like you cannot even begin to comprehend it.

Thank you.

Copyright 2002 by Michael Swanwick. Which explains why a couple of the references are dated. Who now remembers the Swedish Bikini Team?

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Mission Almost Accomplished

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I don't return home until Sunday. But I'm happy to report that my compulsion to write (see Wednesday's blog) has been almost conquered.

Hence the brevity of this post.

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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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