Fossils Under Ontario

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The first SFContario has begun!  So I am busy as busy.

Yesterday afternoon, however, I was in the Royal Ontario Museum enjoying a behind-the-scenes tour of the paleontology department arranged by Rob Sawyer.  Rob, his wife Caroline Clink, Marianne, and I were shown the main collection room, the vertebrate oryctology lab, and of course the museum displays by paleontologist Kevin Seymour.

That's him, above, uncrating the holotype of Parasaurolophus for us to see.  A very cool moment for us all.

At the opening ceremonies for the con, Rob said that we'd gotten the V.I.P. tour -- V.I.P. standing for Very Interested in Paleontology.  I've gotta give him ten points for the witticism.

Above:  There are about a hundred thousand fossils in the main collection room.  You can see a few on the shelves there.

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The Stone of Loneliness

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Last night I did a reading at the Merril Collection of Speculative Fiction and Fantasy, which is based upon an enormous donation of books by writer and anthologist Judith Merril and was originally named (back in 1970 when it was founded and such a title seemed like a good idea) The Spaced Out Library.  I also got a tour of the stacks, which contain a really astonishing collection of SF and fantasy.

I read my latest completed story, "For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I'll Not Be Back Again" (my latest assault on the current trend toward giving stories damnably short titles) and then went out for Chinese food with the cream of Ontario fandom.

Today, Rob Sawyer is taking me behind the scenes at the Royal Ontario Museum.  And then SFContario begins, and I'll be as busy as busy can be.  I'll let you know how it goes if I can find the free time to post.



And because I've just given myself an excuse to tell my one and only Judy Merrill story . . .

I only met Judith Merril once.  This was at a Readercon, not long before she died.  I was sitting at a table with a batch of writers, talking, when she came up, walking with difficulty, and sat down.

"You're looking good, Judy," somebody said.

She fixed him with a basilisk glare -- the kind of look you give a fool -- and very carefully said, "I am in constant pain."  Then she smiled the very best smile in the world and added, "But what does that matter?"

God bless you, Judy.  You set the standard for us all.

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Another Pleasantly Odd Day

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It's been another pleasantly odd day in Toronto.  Marianne and I went to Paddington's in the St. Lawrence Market for lunch and had peameal bacon sandwiches -- which for some reason Paddington's calls "the Big Oink."  Delicious, though.  Then we took the ferry to Ward Island and wandered about.

Ward Island is an odd little place -- lots of small houses on small yards off of small roads where motor vehicles are prohibited, and each yard featuring decorations or sculptures or eccentric decorations such as would mark one as the neighborhood oddball if everybody else weren't doing something completely different.

It's a congeries of individuals is I guess what I'm saying.  And their neighborhood association has a permanent croquet lawn.  With astroturf.

Marianne was ready to move there today.  Me, I want to come back in warm weather and spend a full day there.

In the evening we went to see Cinderella at the Four Seasons Center.  It was first-rate, involving, and well worth the money.  But during the intermissions, I counted the people streaming out of their seats and those remaining and discovered that the female to male ratio was roughly eight to one.

Eight to one?  Come on, guys!  Can you really be that afraid of a chick ballet?  Man up!

Above:  A typical Ward Island backyard.  Doesn't it make you want to write a fantasy story and set it there?

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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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