But I Had a Wonderful Time Anyway

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Yesterday I was feeling disorganized.  I dashed off into the Fringe without an umbrella, left behind my ticket to one of the shows in the venue's men's room (luckily, a friend used the john next and returned it to me), lost the shark's tooth out of my earring and left my media chip stuck inside my netbook back at the flat.


Which explains why I don't have a photo of Charles Stross to post today.  Marianne and I and our friends Gail and Rob went out to dinner and then pubbing with Charlie and his wife Feorag last night.  We wound up my favorite pub in Edinburgh, The Halfway House on Fleshmarket Close.  They bill themselves as "Scotland's Smallest and Friendliest Pub" and who am I to argue?  Certainly everybody I've ever seen there, customers included, has been friendly.  As for "smallest," well . . . it has two booths, three tables, and four stools at the bar.  If there's a smaller drinking place anywhere in the country, they've surely got plans to expand as soon as they can.


And I should probably mention a play I've actually seen . . .

Just so you don't think I'm spending all my time here with a glass in my hand.   The Norfolk Youth Music Theatre production of The Secret Garden was exemplary.  There's no getting around the fact that Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel was pretty gooey and no amount of tinkering is going to fix that.  But the children sang beautifully and acted convincingly, and Callum Bicknell as Archie Craven was a standout.  But there wasn't a bad or even a flat performance in the lot.

The adaptation turned the plot into something of a ghost story, where the original was all about Viridiana -- Nature as a healing force.  But each age is entitled to its own superstitions, and if ours are a little shallower than the Victorians', we have no one but ourselves to blame.

Above:  A street busker.  "Isn't that wonderful?  I can flip my hat in the air with no hands and catch it on my foot and hold it there while balancing on a two-meter-high unicycle longer than you can clap."

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Things You're Not Supposed to Love

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I am, as I may have mentioned, in Scotland -- the home of haggis and bagpipes.  For some inexplicable reason, our culture has got a down on bagpipes and haggis.  We are taught from an early age to dislike and despise the music of the one and the flavor of the other.  And yet . . .

And yet, I love 'em both.  On Saturday, after settling into our flat on Old Tollbooth Wynd, we walked the half-block up to the Royal Mile and discovered that pipe bands were marching down the road, wave after wave of them, hundreds upon hundreds of bagpipes playing.  It was glorious.

 "Ew!" people say when I mention haggis.  "How can you eat that stuff?"  And then, upon questioning, it turns out that they've never tried it themselves and have no idea what it tastes like.

So I tell them that it's just scrapple, only made with oats rather than corn.  At which point they make the same disgusted noises before admitting that they've never tried scrapple either.

Their loss.  Last night at Wedgwood, which is only a block or two from our flat, I had the venison and venison haggis plate.  The joy I felt afterwards still lingers.


And I'm still pigging out on plays...

Four yesterday.  More today.  If I find the time I may blog about them yet.

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Blogging from the Udderground

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I'm at the Fringe!  And I found a place to blog -- in the pasture of the Udderbelly. You can expect cow puns any minute now.  Right now I'm off to a production of The Man Who Would be Thursday.  Soon . . . a Ray Bradbury world premiere.

I'm having too much fun and beer  to blog more now.  But soon, dear friends, soon.

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This Glitteratti Life (Part 5,286)

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Just a short note today, because I'm not done packing for Scotland yet.

Last night Marianne and I went to Rangoon in Chinatown for a very delicious meal with local SF luminaries and the magnificent Jay Lake.  Jay was passing through Philadelphia en route to a business meeting in New Jersey and put up an invitation on his blog for anybody who cared to do so to drop in -- whether he knew them or not.

This is typically innovative of Jay, and as a result the dinner included not only the usual people but a couple of the unusual ones too.  Who held up their ends of the conversations quite well.  But of course folks with the gumption to answer an open invite like that would.

Pictured above:  The great man himself, a little tired at the end of the evening.

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The End of the World . . . and What Comes After

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Yesterday, just after posting the last of the Tuckerizations, I appropriately enough received my contributor's copy of The End of the World:  Stories of the Apocalypse.  Edited by Martin H. Greenberg (may he recover swiftly from his current illness) with an introduction by Robert Silverberg.  It contains what is either my first or second published story, "The Feast of Saint Janis."

And it provides a good jumping-off spot for an announcement.  I'll be on the road for all of next week, off to Edinburgh and the Festival Fringe . . . which I am attending, mirabile dictu, just for the fun of it!  I have no obligations, no duties, no speeches, no appearances to make.  I'll just be reveling in avant- and retro-garde theater.  I may drop in on a friend or two.

So I have no idea how often I'll be blogging.  A lot depends on how much trouble it is to get a connection.  If it's easy, I'll blog often -- the Fringe is one of those great experiences that fills you with the joy of life.  But if not . . .  well, I'm issuing myself an exemption here.  Normally I guarantee a blog on all Mondays and Fridays.  But I may well fall silent next week.  We shall see.

Meanwhile, there's tons of other stuff in the works.  Stay tuned!


Above:  It's the end of the world.  Captured, apparently, on Kodachrome.  Which, again appropriately, is now (save for the rogue roll being kept in a refrigerator somewhere) extinct.

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Yes, In The World

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This is the  last Tuckerization  -- "In the world?" as my friend Turtle might have said, back in the old Acid Wars days -- that I agreed to do for Clarion West.  It's number 43 in a series of 42 and, appropriately enough Henry Wessells commissioned it to include himself, Eileen Gunn, and "maybe Avram Davidson as well.  So I Tuckerized Henry, Eileen and . . .

Well, see for yourself.

 Fleeting Notations

by

Michael Swanwick

Henry Wessels, mounted on a Czechoslovak two-stroke motorcycle, was following the trail of Alexander the Great and had almost reached Libya, when he met the American.  It was in a shabby hostel which by North African standards overcharged outrageously.  He’d stowed his meager gear and was glancing through the books in the common room – paperbacks mostly, left by earlier trekkers – when she said, “You look like a bookman.”

“Why, yes,” he said, “Why do you –?”

“Out of all these books –” there couldn’t have been more than thirty, left by earlier trekkers – “which do you think has the greatest wah, the most presence?”

It was an interesting challenge. After thought, Henry chose one with green boards and a gilt title worn illegible by many fingers.  “This.”

The woman snatched the book from his hand and flipped through it until she found a notation at the bottom of one page:  The griffin, it has been postulated, was invented by Scythian nomads to explain Protoceratops skulls discovered in the Altai Mountains.  What monsters will my mummified corpse give birth to, long after humankind is gone?  A kinder man would turn back now.

The American stuck out her hand.  “Eileen Gunn.  I’m on the trail of a magician and I need someone who can find these things.  You’re hired.”

So the adventure began.  They traveled first by camel and then by airship.  They stopped at inns and bazaars and the estates of the wealthy, and everywhere Henry found books with the magician's anonymous annotations.

I have seen computer languages rise and fall like the cities of Lemuria and Mu, so that the 1960 Census, the first to be preserved on magnetic tape, is now as indecipherable as the as yet undiscovered Linear G.  Yet da Vinci's notebooks remain.  There is nothing so enduring as a book.

and

Edmund Hillary, of Everest fame, commissioned Michael Ayrton to create a golden honeycomb for his estate.  Daedalus, perhaps, created something similar when he invented the lost wax process.  When it was placed on a low pillar as sculpture, “Bees came,” wrote the critic Guy Davenport, “and filled it with honey and their young.”  If only Davenport could have gone back in time to mentor Hillary, Aristotle to his Alexander, the allegory would form a perfect Gordian knot.

and

Iron filings were mixed into the feed of Weyland Smith's geese so that their droppings (gathered, doubtless, by some poor sonofabitch graduate student) could be smelted down to yield nitrogen-rich metal for a sword blade of superior murderousness.  It makes one wonder what dirty secrets Mother Goose was hiding.

 “We're getting closer,” Gunn said.  “We'll catch up to him soon.”

Yet when they finally reached the oasis of Jupiter Ammon, they found nothing there but a book carelessly dropped on the sand and a most profound absence.  “Avram’s dead,” Gunn said flatly.  “We came all this distance for nothing.”

Wessels picked up the last book and scanned it for notations.  “Look,” he said.  “What does this mean?”

After a very long silence, Gunn reluctantly said.  “I think it means that he wants us to write.  Not sometime.  Not tomorrow.  Today.”

They walked away from the oasis, leaving the book open behind them.  One last notation glowed in the desert sun.

All your life you’re running from something, it read.  Then it finally catches up with you and you discover that it’s nothing.  Nothing at all.  Sheesh.

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Above:  A tiger lily.  It won't last long.  But while it does, it rules the Earth.

Vanilla Raspberries with Summer Ice Cream

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Carthage delenda est!  Or at least my Quixotic quest to write 42 Tuckerizations in as many days.  In the end, somehow I managed to miss one day -- probably one of the days I was driving to or from Pittsburgh in the last couple of weeks.  So today I post my 42nd story in 43 days.

But wait -- there's more!  One more, to be specific.  The Clarion West folks tend more toward the Asimov's side of the SF spectrum than to the Analog side.  Which is to say, they're a little weak on math.  They multiplied six weeks times seven days and came up with 43.  So there'll be one more and final work of flash fiction tomorrow.  Will I end in grand style?  We'll know as soon as I write it.  Tomorrow.

Stay tuned and fine out.

Meanwhile, here's today's story.  It was commissioned by Gregory Scheckler, who mentioned that he liked to eat summer raspberries with vanilla ice cream.  So I wrote:

Vanilla Raspberries with Summer Ice Cream

by

Michael Swanwick

Artists are subtle and quick to wrath.  They strike like lightning and they choose their enemies almost at random.  So it’s entirely possible that Gregory Scheckler had never met whoever it was who dosed his coffee with a synesthetic drug.  It could well have been a stranger who envied his work.  It might have been an artist manqué driven mad by aesthetic theory.  It could even have been someone with no motive at all – a student, perhaps.

All Scheckler knew was that shortly after drinking that coffee the blare of car horns in the street outside was a jagged orange and the morning sun slanting through his office window smelled of honey and cinnamon toast.  The coffee dregs, when he sniffed them, felt like flannel.  So did the empty vial he found on the floor by his desk.  When he stepped outside hoping the air would clear his head, a breeze sprang up that tasted like sugared grass clippings.

So far, so odd.  But when he started mixing paints on his palette, preparatory to an oil he’d been planning for some time, the cadmium yellow was as loud as a chromed truck horn and the French ultramarine as cold and salty as the water in the Marianas Trench.  He dropped his brush in astonishment and its clatter on the floor felt like six sharp little raps on his knuckles.

He couldn’t work like that.  Nobody could.  If this continued, it would be the death of his art.

In a panic, Scheckler fumbled out his cell phone (it felt like garlic butter and celery) and tapped out the number for a friend in the Chemistry department.  “Hello?” said a voice as rich and smooth as black granite, and Scheckler’s words tumbled out like so many sulfur-scented canaries.

“Okay, I know that one,” his friend said.  “You’ve got nothing to worry about.  It’ll wear off in a few hours.  Just take it easy and drink plenty of fluids.  Do you want me to come over and stay with you?”

Scheckler took a deep magenta breath.  “No . . .  no need.  I’m going out.”

“Out?”  A distinctly denim texture entered his friend’s voice.  “Where?”

“On a picnic.” 

Scheckler spent the rest of the morning outside, listening to the wind ruffle gold through the aspens.  Eating . . .

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Above:  Marianne and I went for a walk at the Morris Arboretum today.  We saw a butterfly.  This caption sounds like one of those essays I had to write in second grade.