Report from the Last Redoubt

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The Endless Snowstorm continues here in Philadelphia . . .

On the third day of snow, we began to run out of supplies.  First we ran out of ammunition.  Then we ran out of food.  Then, and cruelest of all, on a trip to the Roxborough post office, I discovered this sign in the door:

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(Yet Another) Snow Day!

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It snowed all last night and well into the morning, so rather than be responsible, and write, and blog (which are three separate things, incidentally), I played hooky.  I went to an auction at Freeman's and then wandered about the city taking lots of pictures of the snow.

Pictured above is Walk A Crooked Mile Books, located in an old train station in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia.  Quite a nice store with a varied selection of used books in a warren of tiny rooms.  An awfully nice way to spend a long autumn day, just moving slowly from room to room, browsing and slowly amassing a short stack of books.  The only complaint I have with it is that they have an awful lot of books.  More books than they really have space for.  The only bookstore I can think of that had a higher density of books was run by somebody who was literally insane and refused to sell any books for cash -- he only accepted other books in trade.  But that's another story.

Somebody ought to help the Crooked Mile folks thin things out by going over there and buying a lot of books.

Above:  I know what you're thinking:  They're selling books on their front porch in a snowstorm?!  No, no, no.  Those are the books they don't think anybody wants to buy, so they've put them out for whoever wants 'em.  That way, you don't have to wait for them to be open to get a free book.  

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TH.2058

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Sometimes I'll read one of those finding-a-new-career articles and speculate on what I might wind up doing if this whole writing thing falls apart.  As it could.  Times are harder in publishing than you think.  Problem is, the guys who write those articles all have one strategy and one story to tell:  "At age fifty, Gregor Samsa woke up from a night of uneasy dreams to find himself unemployed.  Worse, nobody was hiring buggy whip designers.  Luckily, under questioning, I discovered that his hobby was designing world-class starship models.  So I called Industrial Light and Magic and . . ."

Won't work for me.  My hobby is writing.

Actually, I have several hobbies and they all consist of writing.  One of them is writing art reviews.  Here's a sample:

TH.2058 by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

The Tate Modern.  Bankside, London

October 14, 2008 through April 13, 2009

reviewed by Michael Swanwick

The TH in TH.2058 stands for Turbine Hall and 2058 is the year in which the work is set.  Which is to say that this major installation at the Tate Modern is science fiction.   It is not, as the explanatory material is careful to explain, “just” science fiction, but the artist clearly understands what we are up to.  She is not simply slumming in genre.

But, first, a few words about the venue.

To understand this installation, it is necessary to begin with the building in which it is situated. The Bankside Power Station, built in 1947, was conceived by its architect, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, as a kind of industrial cathedral.   This tremendous structure was rehabbed into the Tate Modern, a collection of international modern art which in 2000 was split off from the Tate Gallery.  The former boiler house now holds three levels of galleries.  The former turbine hall became a dramatic entrance area as well as a deliberately challenging display space for very large sculptural projects.  Its enormous size (it is 35 meters high and 152 meters long) encourages ambition.

Every year, the Tate Modern commissions a new installation for the Turbine Hall.  The current installation is by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.  Here is what she wrote about her imagined future fifty years from now:

It rains incessantly in London – not a day, not an hour without rain, a deluge that has now lasted for years and changed the way people travel, their clothes, leisure activities,  imagination and desires. They dream about infinitely dry deserts.

This continual watering has had a strange effect on urban sculptures. As well as erosion and rust, they have started to grow like giant, thirsty tropical plants, to become even more monumental. In order to hold this organic growth in check, it has been decided to store them in the Turbine Hall, surrounded by hundreds of bunks that shelter – day and night – refugees from the rain.

And also:

 Museums have been closed for years because of water seepages and the high level of humidity. In the huge collective shelter that the Turbine Hall has become, a fantastical and heterogeneous montage develops, including sculpture, literature, music, cinema, sleeping figures and drops of rain.

One enters the Turbine Hall to the amplified sound of water ceaselessly dripping, and encounters a grid of empty metal bunk beds painted in bright blue or yellow IKEA colors.  Scattered among them are 25%-larger-than-original mockups of famous works of sculpture – a Claes Oldenburg apple core, Henry Moore’s Sheep Piece, Bruce Nauman’s Untitled (Three Large Animals), among others  – fabricated, delightfully enough, by Pinewood Studios.  Calder’s Flamingo nestles up to one of Louise Bourgeois’s spiders.  Maurizio Cattelan’s supersized cat skeleton arcs its back and displays nightmare teeth.  On the walls are insect-like devices with blinking lights, meant to suggest that the refugees are being constantly spied upon.  A single radio endlessly plays a dreary 1950s bossa nova.

The evocation of post-apocalyptic fiction is made explicit by two elements.  The first, and more obvious, is a giant screen dominating one wall which runs continual fragments not only from science fiction films such as Solaris, Fahrenheit 451 and La Jetée , but also from such disparate works as Zabriskie Point , Spiral Jetty, and L'Oeil Sauvage.  This montage, titled The Last Film, is dominated by images of water and rain and does a great deal to establish a weary sense of sadness and futility.

Far more surprising is the presence, scattered about the bunks, of science fiction paperbacks.  It’s not a roundup of the usual suspects, either.  There’s J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World, of course, and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, but also Jeff Noon's Vurt, Jorge Luis Borges's Ficciones, and . . .  well, here’s the complete list:

            Dead Cities Mike Davis

            The Drowned World J.G. Ballard

            Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury

            Ficciones Jorge Luis Borges

            Le Goût de l'immortalité Catherine Dufour

            Hiroshima mon amour Marguerite Duras

            Un homme qui dort Georges Perec

            La Jetée. Ciné-roman Chris Marker

            The Lathe of Heaven Ursula Le Guin

            Luftkrieg und Literatur W.G. Sebald

            Make Room! Make Room! Harry Harrison

            El mal de Montano Enrique Vila-Matas

            The Man in the High Castle Philip K Dick

            Pattern Recognition William Gibson

            The Purple Cloud M.P. Shiel

            2666 Roberto Bolaño

            V for Vendetta David Lloyd / Alan Moore

            Vurt Jeff Noon

            The War of the Worlds HG Wells

            We Yevgeny Zamyatin

Which is a surprisingly sophisticated selection, and one that would make an excellent syllabus for a college-level course.  The books are meant, I suspect, to provide an intellectual underpinning to the work as a whole, to provide a running commentary on it and a lively dialogue with each other.  As indeed, with a little reflection, they can.

Those are the pieces.  To judge TH.2058 as a whole, the viewer must wander around it for some time.  There is much to consider.  It is a privilege to see the Calder and Bourgeois works nestled together in a way that would never be allowed with the originals, for they visually chime and echo against each other.   The Calder, which to the eye is made of massive steel, turns out upon being touched to be painted canvas over wood.  “On the beds are books saved from the damp and treated to prevent the pages going mouldy and disintegrating,” Gonzalez-Foerster writes, but there is no sign of weathering, and the pervasive damp which is apparently integral to her vision is simply not there.  There air is comfortably dry.  There are no mattresses on the bunk beds, which look to be completely unused, and this tends to undercut the installation’s narrative.  The cat skeleton would definitely invade the dreams of any children sleeping nearby it.

And in the end?  When all is weighed and considered?

This is, I’m afraid, a rather nostalgic work. The artist has said that she was in part inspired by the Blitz, and that backward-looking focus shows. The Last Movie is heavily evocative of Jean-Luc Godard, the milieu equally so of J. G. Ballard.  Despite the perfectly apt inclusion of more recent books by Gibson, Bolaño, and Noon, TH.2058 cannot escape that gray still moment in the Nineteen-Seventies when briefly it seemed that all art aspired toward the perfect expression of inertia and entropy.

All of which is, of course, a perfectly valid subject for art.  Though Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster used science fiction as a starting-point for TH.2058, there is no requirement that her art be forward-looking.  London flooded, bombed, and invaded, is a powerful image both in reality and fiction.  But the pervasive sense of dread that the installation so obviously desires to instill in the viewer simply never materializes. 

The fault lies squarely in the space itself.

That lofty ceiling undoes any feeling of oppression that the scenario strives for.  The space is too light and airy for the spy devices to render sinister.  The aisles between the bunks are generously wide and nothing seems crowded or cluttered.  The installation as a whole is too clean and bright and filth-free to feel squalid.

This is not to say that TH.2058 is not worth an attentive afternoon.  It contains much to engage the mind and the eye.  But, enjoyable as it unquestionably is, it never quite manages to achieve profundity.  Earlier I said that the Turbine Hall encourages ambition.  It also punishes anything that fails to dominate it.

As I was leaving, I saw a docent kindly but firmly shooing a group of small children off the bunk beds.  They had swarmed up the sides and were bouncing joyously up and down, as if on playground equipment.

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I See Dead Books . . .

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 Courtesy of Henry Wessells, international man of mystery and proprietor of The Endless Bookshelf, as well as chief bookbinder for the Temporary Culture publishing empire, comes the following catalog entry.  Which phenomenon, he tells me, is called a "ghost."  Literally.

Database: WorldCat
Query: pn= "Swanwick, Michael."

All Libraries that Own Item: "Stations of the dead."( Record for Item | Get This Item )

Location Library                                       Code     

  US,MO  HICKORY CNTY LIBR                             HK#     

Record for Item: "Stations of the dead."( Libraries with Item )

Stations of the dead.Michael Swanwick 1992 English  Book [1 v.] [N.p.] Harper Collins Publishers, Get This Item Availability: Check the catalogs in your library. Libraries worldwide that own item: 1 External Resources: Find this item at Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (Bookseller) Find this item at Biblio (Bookseller) Cite This Item Find Related Find Items About: Swanwick, Michael. (1) Title: Stations of the dead. Author(s): Swanwick, Michael.  Publication: [N.p.] Harper Collins Publishers, Year: 1992 Description: [1 v.] Language: English Standard No: ISBN: 0380817610 Document Type: Book Entry: 20030811 Update: 20070309 Accession No: OCLC: 52824761 Database: WorldCat

FirstSearch® Copyright © 1992-2010 OCLC as to electronic presentation and platform. All Rights Reserved.

A Simple, Reasonable, and Ultimately Workable Proposal for Future Winter Olympics --And Why It Will Never Happen

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What's your favorite Winter Olympics sport?  If you didn't say curling, I feel only compassion for you.  There's no winter sport as pure as curling.  Skill in skiing and skating could save your life someday, when you're being pursued by a pack of starving wolves.  Tobogganing is great fun.  Winning the biathlon might well help your career in the military.  But curling is done only for the love of shoving a big rock with a handle on it across the ice.  Curlers don't care that you've never heard of them.  They don't care that you can't make heads or tails of the rules or that while they're out there sweeping their hearts out, all the world is staring at them in baffled indifference.

Like I said, pure.

So the other day I was talking with my son Sean and the Olympics were on in the background and I said something about it being Women's Curling.  "Why women's?" he asked.  "Men don't have any advantage in curling.  Weight, strength, whatever, don't matter.  Shouldn't it just be curling?"

And for a second, something thrilled inside of me.  Yes!  Mixed-gender teams, coincidentally-single-sex teams, all competing in a feminist ideal of equality.  It would work.  It can work.  There's no reason why it won't work.

Save one.

"It'll never happen," I told Sean.  "And I can prove it to you in three words."

"What are they?"

"Half the medals."

"Ah," he said.

Oh, well.  We can still watch the Winter Olympics and enjoy the thrills and agony that are curling.  Which is undeniably the single best winter sport there is.

Except for sex.  Which is best practiced in private anyway.

And relevant to absolutely nothing . . .

Do you know what the chief vice of writers is?  Aside from the obvious sex-related ones, I mean.  It's going onto Amazon and checking the standings of their books.  Apparently, there are writers out there who check their sales stats as many times a day as you check your emails.

Well, Homey don't play that.  I've never checked my stats because I know it would only depress me.  Shakespeare STILL outsells me?!  How is that even possible?

But I do occasionally check the function which shows how many visits this blog has had in the past month from every country in the world.  So I can see that in the past month I've gotten one hit from Ulaanbaator (hi, Molly!) or possibly four from Kolomna (big shout-out, Alexei!).  I can see that my friends in one particular country can only rarely get past the Great Firewall of China, since even though I am very careful never to post anything here that would make their government angry with me, Blogspot.com is routinely blocked as a place where dissidents might gather.

My point being that those of you who check in from the remoter and less-wired corners of this glorious Earth are doing more than just satisfying a momentary itch of curiosity.  You're making me feel connected to places I may never visit but often hope I will.

For which I most sincerely thank you.

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A Visit to the Wizard

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I’ve had several exchanges of emails lately with Wenllian “Billee” Stallings, daughter of the late, great Will F. Jenkins who, under the pen name of Murray Leinster, was one of the people who built the genre of science fiction.  As David Hartwell recently observed, “In a parallel world, Murray Leinster is as famous as Robert A. Heinlein."

Billee and her sister Jo-An Evans are currently at work on a memoir of the creator of the parallel worlds story and author of the first “first contact” story (which was titled, appropriately enough, “First Contact”), and in the hope that I might provide an otherwise undocumented bit of tid (and thus a mention in their book), I started jotting down my memories of my one brief encounter with Mr. Jenkins.

Here’s what I came up with:

A Visit to the Wizard

In 1972, when the Summer of Love was a recent memory and dimetrodons still roamed the Earth, I was an undergrad at the College of William and Mary.  My friend Paul Fuchs and I had the privilege of accompanying my favorite English teacher, Dr. David Clay Jenkins, on a visit to "Ardudwy," his home in Clay Bank, Virginia to see Murray Leinster.  It was like visiting a wizard.  I was overawed by his intelligence, by his kindness, by the enormous piles of books in his living room, by the experimental apparatus he had set up on the dining room table for an invention he was trying to find a practical use for, indeed by pretty much everything about him.  He was quite a raconteur.  Clustered on a corner of his kitchen table were trophies for several science fiction awards, and he had a funny anecdote for each one, save the last.  “And that’s my Hugo,” he said in a way that indicated he would have valued it more if only it had given him a story to tell about it.

One detail that impressed me greatly was his vast array of shelves of his own books.  If I recall correctly, they covered an entire wall. It seemed impossible that one person could write so many books.  He mentioned that he kept three copies of everything – and was looking for another copy of The Time Tunnel, of which he had only two – so that when he passed on, each of his daughters could have a complete set of his works.  .

And then there was the Submarine Story

During World War II, Robert A. Heinlein created a volunteer think tank with fellow science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp, who worked with him at the Philadelphia Naval Yard.  They met formally once a week in the evening to consider problems given to them by Navy officials.  Several other science fiction writers were involved as well, including L. Ron Hubbard.

Will Jenkins told me that Heinlein had wanted him as a member but had been overruled by the top brass because he had only a grammar school education.  However, Heinlein did arrange to informally pass along problems that he and the other writers were stuck on.  One of these was the problem of the submarine periscope.  When it was up, it left a V-shaped wake in the water, and enemy aircraft pilots used that fact to spot their location.

So Jenkins build an apparatus in his bathtub to simulate the movement of a periscope through water and after some tinkering came up with a solution.  Long strips of cloth attached to the periscope would break up the wake sufficiently to make it undetectable.  He sent his solution in to the Navy.

The solution had no practical value, as it turned out, because by then both sides had radar, so the periscope wakes were irrelevant.  But he got a response back from the admiral who evaluated it, with a question written on the cover sheet:  "I understand that the inventor came up with this solution in the bathtub.  My question is -- what was he using for the periscope?"

He also said (and this is something I don't think I've seen written down anywhere) that for a time after the publication of Cleve Cartmill’s “Deadline” (a story published in 1942 which was so conversant with the mechanics of atomic bombs that officials worried that the Trinity Project might have been compromised) the government arranged to read the stories John W. Campbell had bought for Astounding before publication, to make certain further inadvertent leaks didn’t occur.  Something he wrote apparently fell under this category, for one day “a very polite young man from the FBI” appeared at his door to request his file copy, early drafts, and any notes for the story, which he of course handed over. Earlier, Campbell’s copy had been confiscated as well.  A quarter century after the event, he was sure the need for secrecy was long past – but that it would be next to impossible to have the story de-classified.  Which was a pity, he said, for he had completely forgotten what the story was about, and he would like to know!

On that same visit, I asked Will Jenkins one of those questions that only a naïve young man can ask:  Whether he was optimistic or pessimistic about the future.  With a little smile, a distinct twinkle in his eye, and a whimsical touch of an Irish lilt to his voice, he quoted the Virginian ironic fantasist James Branch Cabell, saying, "I contemplate the spectacle with appropriate emotions.”

And now, decades later, a writer myself, I still find that the simplest imaginable statement of my duties.

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Duck Feet and the Lantern Theater Company

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That's not really "Romian Lettuce" above, but a package of duck feet.  I was in a grocery store in Chinatown, stocking up on this and that and discovered that all the meat was wonderfully mislabeled. 

I was in Chinatown because it was close by St. Stephen's Theater, where the Lantern Theater Company presented The Breath of Life by David Hare.  It was a terrific production, though more for the bravura performances by Ceal Phelan and Cheryl Williams than for the play itself.  Here's the plot:  a dumped wife who's planning to write a memoir spends an evening with her husband's ditched mistress who thinks it's a bad idea.  They're both women of a certain age, as the saying goes, and that's the absolute best thing about the play.  I can spend forever listening to smart, experienced women talk, especially if they're "difficult" women, as Ms Phelan's character was.

What I liked least?  What they talked about was the husband/boyfriend, and they spoke about him as if he hadn't really done anything wrong.  I realize that he was the excuse for banging these two dissimilar women together, but I really wished the playwright had found a more interesting excuse.  It made me wish that a dramaturge would go through the collected Dykes To Watch Out For and craft a play from it.  Or, better yet, a mini-series.

The play doesn't really achieve much in the end.  I saw the Wednesday matinee, which meant that the audience was almost entirely made up of pensioners, and at the end they gave it enthusiastic but not rapturous applause.  Given that it addressed summing-up-of-one's-life issues that everybody in the audience was surely going through, I thought that was telling.  But I also think the play is going to be around for a long time.  It has two serious virtues.  First, because it has one set and two actors, it's cheap to put on.  And second, it gives actresses of a certain age the opportunity to strut their stuff.

For which, in this case, I was grateful.

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