Even More Edinburgh Elegance

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Remember last Wednesday's photo of the Burke & Hare Strip Bar? I'll bet you were wondering what kind of business would be right next door to it. Well, wonder no more! It's The 3 Stooges Barber Shop!

You have to wonder what sort of person thinks: Getting my hair cut by the Three Stooges? Sounds great!


And in unrelated news . . .

Kathryn Cramer has posted the contents list of her and David Hartwell's best of the year volume, and it includes my story, "The Scarecrow's Boy."

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The Story Race

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Here's something nifty. It's an old list which Marianne found when we were moving everything out of the living room and dining room to make way for the plasterers. Who were needed because the ceiling fell down. Which . . . look, it's complicated. So let's just cut to the race.

Many long years ago, in the good old days when mastodons roamed the earth and food was plentiful and summers lasted forever and my son Sean was a little boy, I resolved to make up a story for him every night -- or as close to it as I could manage. Because you're never always up to making up a good story.

To keep me focused on the task, I created the institution of the Story Race. Every night when I made up a story, I wrote down the title. Every night I had to resort to a storybook, I wrote down the date. If I reached twenty days of stories first, Sean got one free Nintendo game rental, which was a very big deal back then. Twenty days of failure would net him one dollar. (The imbalance of value was so that he wouldn't be rooting against me.)

Above is one of the Story Race lists. As you can see, I always won. And here are the titles of the stories I told:

1. Comet Jack, the Giant Rider
2. Prisoner of Waldo
3. ROTTEN KIDS!!!
4. Arrested: A True Story
5. Smurgatroyd Goes to the Beach
6. JimJim the Pirate
7. Geese Are Never Silly
8. The Runaway Teevee
9. Alligator Express
10. Good Ladybugs Make Good Neighbors
11. Jack, Who Wasn't a Thief
12. How Smart, How Wise, How Like a Goose!
13. 3 Little Triceratops
14. Angry Buses
15. The Hungriest Boy in the World
16. Voyage to the Top of the Refrigerator
17. Hey Diddle Diddle
18. The Strongest Mouse in the World
19. The Magnetic Man
20. Piggy to the Rescue!

And only six nights when I was so tired I couldn't come up with something! Not bad at all. I believe that I made up hundreds of stories before the kid outgrew the need for them.

There are a couple of those stories that Marianne's been after me for over fifteen years to write down. Maybe I'll do that after the current novel's done. We'll see.

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Am I HAPPY?

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Okay, I've started getting congratulations from my friends, so it seems the news is officially out . . . I've been nominated for the Hugo in the short story category for "From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled..."

People ask me occasionally, doesn't the thrill of being nominated lessen after winning the award five times?

The answer to which is: No, no, no, no, and no.

Here's the short story slate:

Best Short Story (448 Ballots Cast)

‘‘26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss’’ by Kij Johnson (Asimov's Jul 2008)
‘‘Article of Faith’’ by Mike Resnick (Baen's Universe Oct 2008)
‘‘Evil Robot Monkey’’ by Mary Robinette Kowal (The Solaris Book of NewScience Fiction, Volume Two)
‘‘Exhalation’’ by Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
‘‘From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled’’ by Michael Swanwick (Asimov's Feb 2008)


And . . . oh, bugger, I'm up against Mike Resnick again. Which is unfortunate because Mike has this superstitious belief that I always win. Which is far, far, far from true. In fact, I think I looked it up once and determined that I had never won when I was up against him.

Well, there's a bright side to this. I get to recount the tradition Mike and I have established in such situations. Before the ceremony, I go up to him and say something like, "Mike, since it will have no effect whatsoever on the outcome -- I hope your story wins."

And he replies, "On exactly the same conditions, I hope your story wins."

Congratulations to everyone! I'm happy for us all.

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The Elegance of Old Edinburgh

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This Wednesday's postcard from Great Britain is a special treat for the literary among us.  If you don't see why this is so amusing . . . well, there's always Google.

A Conversation With Marianne . . .

"So there's a Website which is doing a March Madness thing, pitting new fantasy novels against each other and letting the fans vote on them.  The Dragons of Babel just made it through the first round."

"Well, that's good."

"I dunno.  Maybe it would have been better if it had lost the first round and that was it."

"I see what you mean."

I have an aversion to the whole let's-drop-these-books-in-a-bottle-and-make-them-fight-like-two-scorpions thing because . . . well, because it's nonsense.  Right now my novel is up against Niven and Pournelle's Escape from Hell, which I haven't read yet.  But I quite enjoyed Inferno, the book to which it is a sequel.  So I wouldn't get any pleasure out of besting (if I did) what is presumably a worthy book.

Still.  I can remember what simple fun the competition would have seemed to me before I had a dog in the fight.  A great opportunity to gossip about books I liked.  So, what the heck, the site hosting the enterprise is Bookspot Central and you can access the thing here.

Just don't tell me when I drop out of the competition, okay?

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Being Wilma Before Wilma Was Wilma

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The Wilma Theater, here in Philadelphia, is celebrating their 30th Anniversary Season.  I cannot help but be amused.

To be fair, yes, the Wilma-Theater-as-we-know-it-now began when Blanka and Jiri Zizka came to America from Czechoslovakia and assumed leadership of a struggling nonprofit, which they subsequently turned so successful that they were able to build a theater to house it on the priciest stretch of Broad Street, Philadelphia's "Avenue of the Arts."

There is no denying their extraordinary achievement.

But I remember Wilma back when it was housed in the social hall of a church on Spruce Street.  By the time I discovered it -- more than thirty years ago, children -- the theater's feminist origins had been lost.  All that remained of them were the name and an incident which later almost sank the enterprise entirely.  More on that later.

Back in the mid-Seventies, Wilma had devolved into a single employee (I'm guessing there was also a board of trustees, but I never saw any of them) who booked outside theater, dance, and Whatever into the church hall.  I saw a  lot of cutting-edge stuff back then and it was all great.  And I also picked up one of their flyers, which had a form you could send in if you wanted to volunteer to work with the organization.

What can you do? the form asked.  More than one of my friends wrote back that they could write the flyers, programs, and publicity in a more artistic manner.  They never heard back from Wilma.  "I can sweep the floor,"I wrote, and got a call the next day.

My contribution to the theater was to set up the chairs before each performance and take them down afterwards.  Beforehand and during intermission, I also sold apples and hot cider, heated up on an enormous church gas stove.  I knew that I'd proved myself when the head guy (whose name, and I feel terrible about this, I've forgotten long long ago) set me to collecting admission money from the patrons as they came in.

Eventually I drifted away from the Wilma -- I was engaged in learning how to be a writer, remember -- and sometime after that the theater lost its church sponsorship.  One of Wilma's founders had written a play (feminist, of course) involving nudity and she insisted on getting permission for this from the church's Board of Trustees.  On reflection they, predictably enough, said that this wouldn't really be appropriate, what with their being a church and all.

The playwright exploded.  She told the trustees they were being hypocrites.  The Wilma had, she pointed out, put on performances involving nudity before.

The trustees blinked.  "It has?" they asked.

Oh yeah.  It was artistic nudity, but a certain display of googlies was undeniable.  I remember vividly the time, right in the middle of some very funny mime, a performer abruptly doffed his trousers in search of a cheap laugh that never came.  "Jesus," I thought then.  "He's a natural redhead."

So they lost their performing space.

But the Wilma survived that and outlived me, and now it's doing just fine.

Still . . . thirty?  Oh my dear, please.  Forty if a day.

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"No, but I read the comic book..."

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I've just received some pleasant news which, however, I am not at liberty to share until some later date.

So, in the absence of anything substantial to relate, allow me to be the umpteenth person to offer you . . .

My take on the Watchmen movie

I went to the movie and was pleasantly surprised.  This has got to be one of the most respectful adaptations of a pre-existing work I've ever seen.  Yes, a great deal had to be cut or condensed in order to bring the film in (just) under three hours.  But it was extraordinary how close to the original series this thing came.  The slob intern in the right-wing magazine office at the end looked just like the character in the comic.  The expressions of the cops in the publicity photo with Miss Jupiter matched up one-to-one with the drawing.  An enormous amount of work and ingenuity went into delivering to the fans exactly what they hoped they'd be getting.

So why is everybody so disappointed?

One reason, I think.  Against all reason they expected the film to be better than the comic.  This is a particularly American delusion, compounded of movie-worship and the idea that the more money goes into a thing, the better it will be.  

But in matters of art, once a certain level of craft has been mastered, what matters is artistic vision and that Alan Moore had in spades.  Watchmen was a landmark in its genre.  What were the odds a movie was going to top it?

One of the guys in Showcase Comics in Bryn Mawr a while back was trying to interest me in a comic book adaptation of one of Cory Doctorow's stories.  I told him I'd read the original and he (in friendly way, I hasten to add) suggested I was being snobbish by valuing print over graphic novels.

"Well," I said.  "Name one novelization of a comic book that was better than the original."

So, too, here.  

Good movie, though.

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There will always be an England

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I'm going to post a few more photos from my last trip to the U.K. between my real blog postings. This one was taken outside the British Museum. All I can say is: If there were no England, it would be necessary to invent one.

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