The Ghosts of Christmases Past

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I was in Williamsburg recently, and went for a walk down DOG Street into the historically reconstructed part of town and ran into a fife and drum corps marching up the street .  It struck me then that I'd spent my entire college life sunk in Frederick Jamesonesque hyperreality without realizing it.  Is it any wonder that I became a fantasist?

I'm still sunk dream-deep in the novel's revisions.   And I've got an intro to write for a story in a friend's collection.  So this will be a short post.  Also, I'm working on this year's Christmas story.  Every year I make up a story for the family and tell it on Christmas Eve.  It's a tradition that goes back -- my God! -- over twenty years.  The first one, I remember, was about the ghost of a mouse.  And I've been making 'em up and telling 'em ever since.

In retrospect, I probably should have written them down.  I'd have the makings of a collection by now.

But, oh well, that's not what matters, is it?  Love and family and hot buttered rum by the woodstove.  That's what makes the world go round.

Above:  A ghost fife-and-drum corps.  The makings of a decent Christmas story.  I may tell it some day.

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And those wonderful people out there in the dark . . .

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As I warned, you, there's nothing happening here.  But I was sitting, writing, and watching TV tonight (Sunset Boulevard,  to be specific) when it struck me that Joe Gillis never did fall in love with Betty Schaefer.  He just wanted to get back to work again.

There is a poetry to work, and I fear it has not found its Homer.

But, lemme think, Robert Heinlein was good at the joys of work, and so is Gene Wolfe.  Any others that you can name?

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Slow Day Origamicat

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It's a slow news day because I'm still working on editorial revisions and Marianne was away for the past two days, making arrangements for her mother's 100th birthday party.  Plus, any minute now, the mechanic takes our car away for what he swears will be all but the next to the last time necessary, so it looks to be an uneventful day today as well.

So, while one of my core ambitions as a blogger is to not be one of those guys who's always foisting off cute picture of his cat on you . . .  Look at how cute Miss Helen Hope Mrrlees looks, curled up on Marianne's lap, pretending to sleep.  Awwww.

I'll do my best not to over-share Hopie with you.  But if we ever get a picture of her arching her back, it'll be so here.  She rises up twice as high as you'd think she could.  It looks like a feline lift-bridge.


And on the movie channel . . .

I saw Letters From Iwo Jima the other night.  What a gutsy movie for Eastwood to make!  My father was in the European Theater in WWII on a bomber.  Marianne's father was in the Navy and he resolutely refused to buy a Japanese car.  "I'm not a bigot," he'd say.  "But those people tried to kill me!"  So I'm not your stereotypical Liberal soft-on-America's-enemies kind of guy here.

Still.  To see what may have been the most brutal fighting of the war from the perspective of the Japanese -- who knew that they were hopelessly outnumbered, that they were going to die, and that their superiors had given up on them -- was a revelation.  There's a particularly brilliant scene where an officer reads a letter he finds on a dead American from the G.I.'s mother, not realizing how he's demoralizing his subordinates.  The viewer, however, sees their faces as they realize that the men they're going to die fighting are as human as they are.

Wonderful stuff.  I recommend it.

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You Don't Have To Be A Christian to Know This Is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

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Gardner Dozois is still trying to get me onto Facebook.  The first time he tried, I said, "Well, what good is there to being on it?"

"No good at all," he replied cheerily.

"What do people usually post on it?"

"They usually post what they had for breakfast."

"Gee, Gardner," I said.  "You make it sound awfully attractive.  But I think I'll give it a pass."

Yesterday I was at a party hosted by Sally and Daniel Grotta.  Gardner was there, so he had another whack at it.  "If you were on Facebook," he said, "you'd have seen the post of the Twenty Worst Nativity Sets Ever."

"I did see it, Gardner," I replied.  "You sent me the link."

You can see it too by clicking here.  Marianne, who is a sincere Christian, thought at first that it was shameful to make fun of people because their idea of good taste doesn't correspond with one's own.  But then she looked at the above picture and said, "It is, however, abhorrent to manufacture and sell such things."


And in that spirit . . .

Allow me to wish all Christians reading this a Merry Christmas, and all others their own happy holidays.  I realize that I'm rushing the season a little.  But what the heck.  Joy is good.

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"Jenkins. I live in the apartment opposite. Want to help me catch a hawk?"

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Wednesday, I said goodbye to Dr. David Clay Jenkins at a memorial service in the Great Hall of the Wren Building at the College of William & Mary.  Marianne and I were the only people in the room who referred to him as Dr. Jenkins, rather than David.  In a weird way, I felt that gave me a kind of parallax view that those who only knew him as a friend and colleague didn't have.

I could write a book about all I felt and thought that evening.  But, time being finite, I shan't.

Instead, I will take some of what I heard at the memorial to create a fable or possibly even (if you are, as I know you to be, charitable) a prose poem.

Skellig Michael

Dr. Jenkins had an appointment with a friend in Edinburgh.  But when he got there, the friend's landlord said he'd moved on to Skellig Michael.  Skellig Michael is an island, mountainous and steep, where monks once went for solitude.  A visitor had recently fallen from its cliffs to the ocean and her death only three hours after her arrival.  There Dr. Jenkins went nevertheless, only to find the seas too rough for anyone to risk a boat from the mainland.  For three days he lingered, occasionally speaking to his friend on shortwave radio, his Alabama accent strange on the local ether, before his time grew short and he had to turn back.

Some years later, a colleague took the appointment on as his own, traveled to Ireland, hired a boat, and got within feet of the dock at Skellig Michael.  But the sea was too wild for him to put ashore.  So nothing came of that either.

Late in life, Dr. Jenkins forgot all the particulars and came to believe that he'd once gone to Skellig Michael.  His friends did not disillusion him of this belief.

Later he died.

It is  recorded, though how or by whom is unclear, that after his death Dr. Jenkins came at last to Skellig Michael.  The boat was unsteady, but his foot landed solidly upon the island.  With a song in his heart and a hawk flying far over his shoulder, he began to climb.

And because I'm waxing nostalgic . . .

Here's a story Dr. Jenkins told me:

Rather strange for a professor of English, Dr. Jenkins made a custom of befriending all the writers of any significance in Tidewater Virginia.  Which is how I came to meet Murray Leinster, but that's a different story.  One of those writers was Jack Woodford, who in his time was the king of the soft-porn writers.  In an age when all of the verbs and most of the nouns we use in erotic fiction were strictly tabu, he was the master of implying terrifically smutty scenes using prose fit for a rather naive nun.  In his later life, Woodford stumbled into a remunerative second career as a writer of how-to-write books.  And toward the end his life, because of tragedies that had nothing to do with his career, he was institutionalized in Eastern State Asylum as being mentally ill.

Dr. Jenkins went to visit Woodford regularly.  One day he confided in me that on his most recent visit, as he was leaving, a nurse drew him aside.

"I saw you were visiting Mr. Woodford,"

"Yes?"

"The poor dear," she said.  "He thinks he's a writer."

Dr. Jenkins never tried to discourage me from being a writer.  But quietly and without fuss he let me know right at the outset what the price might be.

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Golden College Days . . .

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I'm in Williamsburg, Virginia, for a memorial service and, oh, how the memories come flooding back of those golden college days!  Of course, I went to college in the Sixties, so my memories probably aren't much like yours.  Here's one:

My junior year in college, I lived in Old Dominion Dormitory -- known informally as "O. D. Dorm," though nobody ever made the tacky movie the name cries out for -- which, oversimplifying some and doing a great injustice to the serious scholars who lived therein, might be characterized as the Animal House for freaks.  One evening I came back from the shopping center to discover that the entire dorm was surrounded by police cars, lights flashing.  "Excuse me," I said to an officer.  "I live in there.  Could I possibly get past --?"

He turned a face cold with outrage toward me.  "No!"

Oh-kay, I thought.  Giving the peace officers a wide berth (always a good tactic in those days) I circled around the dormitory, trying to figure out what was going on.  And on the side of the building facing Richmond Road, I saw enormous white letters had been freshly painted on the roof, as large as they could possibly be made, reading:

K I L L  C O P S

Obviously this was not a dialogue I wanted to enter into.  So I went to another dorm and found a friend who was willing to put me up for the night.  By morning, the cops were gone and the roof had been mysteriously repainted black.  Later, a friend of mine admitted to painting the roof and told me he was in the dorm attic on his way down when he heard the police noisily approaching.  So he dropped into the roofless sub-attic room of another friend (long story) and gestured for silence.  Eventually, he too made his way safely back to his own room.

Wild horses would not get me to divulge the guilty party's name.  It wasn't me, though.  I was at the shopping center, buying toothpaste.

Above:  The toy store on Duke of Gloucester Street.  Known to the local students as "Dog Street."

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Pickles, Names, and the Road

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Marah Searle-Kovacevic has very kindly forwarded some more electric 

pickles pix to me.  Thanks, Marah!  I love the smell of electrified pickles 

in the morning.

I'm on the road again, but I should be able to post something in the morning.  In 

the meantime . . .

And there's been some question lately as to why I pronounce my name wrong, so . . .

Among the reactions to Saturday's introduction to Miss Mrrlees, was Hanah's Dad's peripheral revelation that Robert Silverberg had told him that I pronounce my last name wrong.  To which I have three responses.

First of all, how cool is it that Silverbob knows how I pronounce my name?  That made me happy for the rest of the day.

Secondly, I pronounce the second W in my name as an act of filial piety.  It's the way my father pronounced his name and by the time I learned about the British (or, as they would say in Britain, the "proper") pronunciation of my family name, he was dead and there was nobody I could have asked who might have known how it was changed.  My father was a great guy.  Every time I use the American pronunciation (or, as they would say in Britain, the "wrong" one), it's a small reminder of him.  And it makes me feel happy.

Which said, whenever I'm in England or Scotland, I am careful never to correct people who pronounce my name properly.  Dad wouldn't have either.

And thirdly, it's not at all certain the American pronunciation is the wrong one.  The first time I went to Scotland, I discovered that in the south my name was pronounced "swannick" but that in the north it became "swanwick" again.  So it all depends on where my ancestors came from and how that particular moniker got hung on them.  Alas, like most Americans, I have almost no knowledge about my ancestors at all.  The family Bible was stolen sometime during the Great Depression.  While the family was at my great-grandmother's funeral, I believe.  That sort of thing happened a lot in New York City.

That's the medium-length explanation.  If you want the long one, try buying me a beer and asking me about Orkney.  The short explanation is:  Yes, I pronounce my name wrong, because it's the way I was brought up to pronounce it.  But I don't mean anything bad by it, and I acknowledge that the British pronunciation is almost certainly the correct one.

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