Julian Schnabel at the Art Gallery of Ontario

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Marianne and I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario today, one of a flock of museums worldwide that have been Frank Gehry-ed in  the wake of his triumph in Bilbao. 

When I go to a museum, I'm hoping for two things:  To discover a new artist and to learn something about a name artist I don't have a good handle on.  So it was a successful day.  There was a major exhibit of Very Big Canvases by Julian Schnabel.   There was a look back at Eva Hesse.   And there was a very big show by the I-presume-emerging Ontario artist Shary Boyle.

Boyle is one very strange cookie indeed.  The AGO is pushing her creepy-kitschy small ceramics hard, but I found her large installations the most interesting.  Particularly her life-size soft sculpture of a flat black skinned blond spider-woman tangled up in her own web.  It was a creature right out of the Jungian depths. 

Hesse was a German-born American sculptor who died at the terribly young age of 34 in  1970.  There's a touch of revulsion in her work and rather a lot of evocation of the body -- particularly skin.  Alas, the AGO had only one of her sculptures.  The rest of the show consisted of what were labeled "studio works," bits and pieces of this and that which she used to build models of what would later be her sculptures.  Which is to say, they were nothing she would have called art.  But it seems like her real art would be a bear to move and to conserve.  So maybe they had no choice.

I'm still learning Schnabel's art (this is the first time I've seen a large number of his canvases in person), so it's early to comment on him.   But at least the task is begun, and for this I am grateful to the Art Gallery of Ontario.

After several hours hard viewing, we retired to Frank's, the in-museum bar, where we had Back Stages (a variant on Manhattans, essentially).  And we were, as you can see, happy.

Tomorrow . . . off to the ballet!

Above:  A photo taken from the Allan Slaight and Emmanuelle Gattuso Staircase -- a "destination staircase" central to the museum, showing a detail of the Gehryesque exterior.

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Pub Meeting

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When Marianne and I arrived in Ontario, Rob Sawyer called to invite us to SFContario's monthly Third Monday pub meeting at Orwell's in Etobicoke.  So of course we went, spent the entire evening talking with some very charming people, and had a completely splendid time.

Pictured above are the last surviving pubbers, still there long after weaker souls had given up and staggered away.  The picture is maybe a little blurry but I attribute that to their having had a pint or two.

It doesn't show, but a lot of business got done there last night.  Not by me.  I was on vacation.


And I should correct my previous post . . .

Marianne pointed out two errors in what I said about the Dragon Staircase the other day.  The first was that I didn't just enclose coins but also a handful of Dragon Dice, the purpose of such enclosures being to charm and puzzle whoever finds them when next the stairs need to be replaced, a century or two from now. And I'm pretty sure the lucky discoverers will find Dragon Dice baffling.

The second was that half of the reason the staircase was given that name was that, yes, it leads up to my office where a plaster dragon can be seen bursting out of the top of the chimney-ruins.  Though Sean never told me about this until he was a teenager, when he was little he was afraid to go into my office when it was dark, because of that dragon.  He only got over that fear when he was tall enough to reach in and turn on the light switch before entering.

If I had known, that dragon would have been gone so fast its plaster head would have spun!  But small children are not good at sharing their secret fears, alas.


Above:  Chris, Murray, Catherine (or possibly Katharine), Mara, and Diane.

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North to Toronto!

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I realize how tedious this is for you to hear, but -- I'm on the road again!  Only, this time I'm going to Toronto, the City of Peace and a terrific place to visit.  So much so that that I'm flying out there several days early for my SFContario guest of honor gig just so I can spend some time enjoying the city.  I'm planning on having a terrific time.

SFContario premieres this weekend, November 19-21st, and its list of participants includes such stellar Canadian SF writers as Peter Watts, Jo Walton, Robert J. Sawyer, Karl Schroeder . . . and I'd better stop there before the list becomes long enough that those I leave off feel offended.

Thinking about the above writers -- and specific others who won't be in attendance -- it struck me that the long project to create a distinctly Canadian science fiction is beginning to bear fruit.  Not that I could map out its distinctions for you, and granted that Jo Walton is an immigrant, and okay yes it's an extremely varied set of writers and fictions.  But it's easy to think of Jo, Rob, Karl and (since I've never met him) Mr. Watts as being engaged on a common enterprise congruent with but distinct from that which we practice in the States.

I could be wrong, of course.  It might be simply that I know these folks all know one another and trade ideas and influences.  But I think that something positive is coalescing up in the North.


And the rather disappointing answer to my Friday teaser is . . .

There were a couple of responses to my Friday blog guessing as to why the stairs to my office are named the Dragon Staircase, and they were so much more interesting than the truth, that I'm rather sorry I brought it up.

But a promise is a promise, so . . .

When Marianne bought the house, two years before we were married, it was a fixer-upper.  In our early years together, we replaced the ceiling in what is now my office (and, ripping out drywall, discovered the remains of a brick chimney), sledge-hammered the base of the shower in the downstairs bath and ripped out the rusted shower walls (a rumpled girlie magazine fell out from behind it), and steamed off five layers of wallpaper, each one uglier than the one before, so we could repaint the walls, and . . .  Well, the list goes on and on.  We made what felt like hundreds of repairs.

These included hiring carpenters to replace the stair treads.  We left the traditional handful of coins inside the stairs and then I drew a small dragon on the bottom tread.  It was meant as a kind of sign or pledge or even prayer that our lives would not be conventional ones,

And, God knows, we have kept that promise.

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The Dragon Staircase

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Have you ever wondered what the staircase to a writer's office looks like?  Well, wonder no more.  Pictured above is the Dragon Staircase, which leads to my own office.  It's typical for a writer's abode.  You'll note that it has the standard bottle of champagne on every other step.  With, you'll note, a bottle of Perrier substituting for one champagne bottle, just in case a teetotal should ever come to visit.

Okay, yes, I'm being whimsical.  What happened was that Marianne decided to refinish the stairs the other day and, since they were still being used, varnished every other step using champagne bottles to mark those that were safe to step on and then, when the first set were dry, shifted the bottles and varnished the rest.

And why do we have so much champagne on hand?  Well . . . when you're doing as well as Marianne and I are, we find that it's useful to stock up for the inevitable celebrations.



And if you knew Dr. Jenkins . . .


The English Department of W & M is having a memorial to Dr. David Clay Jenkins on December 1 in the Great Hall of the Wren Building, at 7:00 p.m.  From Philadelphia, that's a 75-hour drive.  But I will be there.  I owe him that much and more.  If you knew him and thought well of him, I'm sure you'd be welcome too.

If, however, you didn't know him but had a teacher once to whom you owe a lot, consider this:  A few years ago, belatedly realizing that Dr. Jenkins was, like the rest of us, mortal, I got in touch with him and set a date to see him and thank him for all he'd done.  Now I don't have to experience the regret of not having done so.

It was, in the final analysis, a gift to myself.


And why, you ask, is it called the Dragon Staircase?

Actually, you didn't ask.  But if anybody does ask, I'll tell you on Monday.

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Bombay Hook and Dancing Music Players

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I played hooky yesterday -- sometimes you just have to -- and went down to Bombay Hook, the saltwater marsh wildlife refuge in Delaware.  It's a beautiful place and although, inexplicably enough, there were no snow geese (come on, guys! it's migration time!) but there were all the usual ruddy ducks and shovelers and mute swans and harriers and so on.  Plus a few yellow bellied sapsuckers.

And, oh yeah, we saw a pair of bald eagles fly in low over one of the ponds, panicking the geese and avocets there.  One struck, and then carried away a warm avocet carcass, trailed by his or her mate, the two screaming at each other proudly, off to a romantic meal of warm avocet tartare.

Life doesn't get a lot better than that.

And because I've been far too serious of late . . .

Why didn't anybody ever tell me about the Sony Rolly?  It's a music player which . . .  Well, it rolls, see?  And it has a couple of lights which turn on and off and change color.  And flaps on the ends which . . .  It's kind of hard to explain. 

Which is why Sony discontinued it.  It's hard to sell a piece of electronics whose purpose you can't even explain.

Also, they priced it at $350.

Three hundred fifty dollars for a small (it fits neatly in one hand) and perfectly pointless item of electronica that serves no known purpose and for which there is no discernible market.  No wonder it went down.  About a year ago, Sony remaindered all its stock at $99 a pop.  And, oh, had I known, I would have run right out and bought one!

Unfortunately, the only way to get one now is on eBay or maybe an antiques shop . . . and the prices are clawing their way back up toward what they cost when they were originally released.

Anyway, here are a couples of videos.  There are plenty more on YouTube.  I would've posted the one with four different color Rollies (or is it Rollys?) dancing in unison, but it began with a commercial, and I figured watching a commercial as the price for watching a commercial was a bit much.

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God, I love that!  Livin' La Vida Loca -- one step closer to a future in which our machines have have all our fun for us.

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David Clay Jenkins 1926-2010

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Doctor David Clay Jenkins died last Thursday, after a long illness brought on by a stroke.   He joined the English Department at William & Mary in 1956 as an instructor in modern poetry and advanced and critical writing. He was a scholar of Alexander Pope and Dylan Thomas, but his academic passion was reserved for Owen Geronwy, an early American poet and teacher at W&M.

That's what the official record will tell you.  It misses the man, however, the eccentric goateed semi-bohemian academic, the writer who placed two stories in the New Yorker, the founder of the William and Mary Review which published not only me but Joanna Russ, the teacher who was never my official advisor but whom I always turned to when I needed advice because the advice he gave me was always practical.

I first met Dr. Jenkins in my freshman year when I asked permission to join his creative writing class, despite the fact that it was only available to sophomores and above.  He recognized my passion and let me in, and for two years I submitted terrible stories and fragments for his and the class's advice.  His suggestions were always good and invariably infuriated me, and I would rewrite the story in question from top to bottom in order to correct his criticisms without taking his suggestions.

I learned a tremendous amount about writing from him.

As a very small example, when I was writing "The Edge of the World," I remembered a story he had written in which a mugged cripple falls to the sidewalk with his arms extended, and Dr. Jenkins's explanation that this was a crucifixion image (which was a new and startling idea to my teenaged self), and so found the end of my story.  As a larger principle, I remember his mentioning in conversation that he was working simultaneously on two essays -- one serious on Dylan Thomas and the other frivolous on an obscene limerick found in the margin of one of Alexander Pope's manuscripts, proving that it was not written by him.  Ever since, I have sought to balance the serious with the frivolous, the light with the timeless.

Once, he told me that he'd liked something I'd written but it had "aggravated the hell out of" him.  I knew what he meant and was elated.  I was still years from publication, but he'd seen the virtue in what I was trying to do.  Not many people could have.

When I failed to graduate on schedule and was estranged from my family and had no way of earning any money, Dr. Jenkins heard me out and then offered to hire me by the hour to plant tulip bulbs in his yard.  He pointed out that I could perform similar services in the neighborhood and in short order I was supporting myself.  Which gave me a platform from which to launch myself out into the world.

Many years later, I returned to William & Mary to thank him for all he'd done for me and meant to me.  We had dinner at the King's Arms Tavern and, overruling my objections, he paid.

Dr. Jenkins was instrumental in bringing Avram Davidson to W&M as a writer in residence and published one of his Dr. Esterhazy stories as a chapbook.  Rather than focus on such safe academic perennials as Pope and Thomas, he put his best efforts into the reclamation of the 17th century poet "Black Owen" Geronwy, the first serious intellectual (in a series that would later include Thomas Jefferson, James Branch Cabell, and almost but not quite me) who was violently ousted from the College of William and Mary.  He chose to devote his life to promoting a writer who could benefit from his work rather than those who could advance his career.

Along the way, he helped me.

God bless you, Dr. Jenkins.  Wherever you are, Black Owen owes you a drink.

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A Chance to Own a Bit of Fun Home

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I was wandering through Alison Bechdel's website (here) and took a look at the Art for Sale section (here) where I discovered that she was selling original art pages from her graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.

Here's what she has to say.  I couldn't post the picture she referred to, for reasons of copyright, so the picture above is of the book's cover:

I have lots of pages from Fun Home available for sale. The originals don’t look exactly like what you see in the book because I worked on separate layers and did the lettering in Photoshop. For each page, there’s a black and white drawing on 11 x 14 Bristol board, and a 9 x 12 sheet of watercolor paper with the ink wash shading on it. In this photo, I’ve also included a print of the way the finished page looks in the book, including the text.

If you buy a page, I’ll give you these three components. And if you like, I can also hand letter the drawing.

The prices for the pages vary based on how interesting they are. This one (page 137) is medium-interest, and I’m asking $375 for it. Click here for a little closer look at the individual pages.

The prices are not exactly cheap (and you'll have to fork out good money to have them matted and framed, too) -- unless you consider what you're getting.  Fun Home is a brilliant and trail-breaking work of graphic literature.  Getting to own a page of it is akin to owning a page of the original manuscript of Catcher in the Rye. 

So if you've got lots of money and a sweetheart of a literary bent . . . well, Christmas is coming.

And if you haven't read Fun Home yet, rush right out and nab yourself a copy.  I've been reading comic books and comix and graphic novels all my life, but before reading this I had no idea how good the form could be.  And, yes, I have read Maus.  

Which gives me the opportunity to tell my only Alison Bechdel story . . .

Years ago, I discovered it was possible to buy the original art for Aliscon Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For strip.  I wrote to her asking for the price for a particular strip and in between the query and the reply, my car's transmission died, sticking me with a very big repair bill.

For a time I thought I wouldn't be able to afford the artwork (but later some royalties came in, so I could and did buy it) and wrote to Ms Bechdel apologizing for having wasted her time.

She wrote back, beginning with the sentence, "Michael Swanwick isn't rich?"  Then she explained that this was a joke, that a great many people assumed that because she was famous she must necessarily be rich, and were terribly disillusioned to find out otherwise.

And I stood there, looking at those words and feeling a terrible sense of the inherent wrongness of this world.  Aloud, I said, "Alison Bechdel isn't rich?"

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