Look! Up in the Air! It's . . .

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I've got mixed feelings about this one.  On the one hand, it's completely mad, and I'm definitely in favor of that.  On the other hand, it strongly suggests that all the real adventures have already been done and so we're reduced to what is, after all, a stunt -- and a rather artificial one at that.

The folks at National Geographic have replicated the house in the Pixar film Up! 

It took three hundred weather balloons, a batch of engineers, and a 16 by 16 foot shell of a house to accomplish the feat, which was filmed for a show called How Hard Can It Be?  The house rose to 10,000 feet and flew for over an hour. 

Me, I'm going to spend the rest of the day contemplating Baudrillard's concept of the simulacrum.  Which is what you get when you blend "reality" and representation and come up with something where there's no clear indication of where the one stops and the other begins.  Hyperreality really seems to have the Twenty-First Century by the short hairs.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 44

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Two short fiction reviews and one diary-equivalent entry from Locus.  This falls easily within the fair use provision of copyright, so I don't have to say anything more.  But I will.  Locus is an extraordinary accomplishment, the one indispensable non-fiction magazine in the field.  I read it cover to cover every month.  Every serious SF or fantasy or horror professional ought to subscribe.

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The Storyteller Rock

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Last night I dreamed that I called the Storyteller Rock on the phone.  "How have you been?" I asked.

"It's a long story," he replied.

But you probably don't know the context.  All my life I've been, off and on, writing stories in my sleep.  Not dreaming stories but actually writing them out, word by word.  In the morning I'd quickly forget everything about what I'd written, save that I'd written something.

Eventually, I got curious enough to teach myself to memorize the story and then quickly write it down after I awoke.  For a couple of years I wrote the stories down as I dream-wrote them.  Finally, unaltered, I published them as a series in the New York Review of Science Fiction.

"Storyteller Rock" was one of those dream-writings.  Here it is:

Storyteller Rock

You ask me why I'm such a good storyteller.  Well, I ought to be.  I learned how from the Storyteller Rock himself.

The Storyteller Rock is as old as the hills, and he started telling stories before there were any ears to hear them with.  He invented storytelling.  He told the first story there ever was.  Over the years, he made up all the stories there ever were or ever will be.  He told them all.  He told them over and over to himself until they reached their final forms.

Every story you've ever heard, he told it first.  And he told it best.

I met the Storyteller Rock when I was a boy in Winooski, Vermont.  There was a field out in the woods, and there he sat, just a little in from the edge, old and rounded and powdered white with lichens.

Down low to one side were three little holes, just big enough to stick your little finger into.  If you brought him a cigarette, lit it and stuck it in the bottom-most hole, he'd smoke it down to ash and then he'd tell you a story.

I stole a pack of my mother's Chesterfields from her purse and fed them to him one by one, a story a smoke.  When it was gone, I waited my chance and stole another.

At first the Storyteller Rock found it hard to focus on me.  He had the long view.  He kept confusing me with the last kid to give him tobacco, and telling the stories in Iroquois.  But as the years went by, we got to know each other better, and he taught me a lot.  He was a good teacher, but tough.  He didn't take any guff.

I remember how he said, "Boy.  You'll never be a first-rate storyteller until you learn to stop being so God-damned sincere."

Well . . . I listened to him.

And now I'm not.

Copyright 1991 by Michael Swanwick

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 43

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Another collage.  All images taken from an art magazine, I believe.

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Mudlarks of London

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There's a lot to love about London.  I could spend a month just going to its museums.  But it's all those strange social institutions that give that city its peculiar flavor.  Some of them go back for centuries.  The Worshipful Company of Bakers, for example, who in 1986 held a ceremony in Pudding Lane to offer a formal apology for accidentally causing the Great Fire of London in 1666.  Others are more recent.  The Society of Thames Mudlarks has only been in existence for twenty years.

And exactly what is a mudlark?  I'm glad you asked.  In Victorian times, they were generally children, ages eight and up, who, when the tide went out, waded into the mud of the Thames, looking for chunks of coal, bits of metal, or tools dropped off of boats and lost.  If they saw a chance to steal coal, scrap, or anything else of value directly from the boats, they took it.  You can read Henry Mayhew's account of their lives here.

Today's mudlarks are a different breed altogether. The society is a group of hobbyists who have been licensed by the city to grub about in the muck on the north side of the Thames, below Parliament, looking for artifacts of the city's history. Pilgrims' badges, medieval floor tiles, Tudor daggers, the leather shoes of Roman children are collected, their locations are recorded -- and if an item is over three hundred years old is automatically run past an archaeologist.  The very best finds go into museums.

It sounds like good fun.  Filthy, dangerous fun, mind you.  But fun nonetheless.  You can read about these guys here.


And that reminds me of a story I heard back when I used to hang out with American archaeologists . . .

In colonial times, cheap clay pipes were everywhere.  When you bought tobacco in a tavern, there was row of tavern pipes for your use.  You simply snapped off the end of the very long stem (for hygienic purposes, the same way you used to wipe the top of a shared soda bottle with your hand before drinking from it) and threw the shard away.

Because the smaller the passage for the smoke was, the cooler the smoke, and because the technology for making those passages smaller steadily improved, these pipe shards serve an important function in Colonial American archaeology.  You find a shard, measure its thickness and the thickness of its bore, plug the two numbers into a rather clever formula, and voila!  You've got a reliable date for it.

Pipe stems also have the advantage of not degrading very fast.  They've got the lifespan of a pebble.

A Virginia archaeologist went on vacation to England, back in the early 1970s, and while getting a tour of a major British castle, noted that the grounds surrounding it were speckled white with clay pipe shard.  "My god!" he exclaimed.  "Somebody should do something about them!"

"We'd like to, sir," said the guide apologetically.  "But we simply don't have the budget to properly clean up after the tourists."

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 42

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I like anime and manga, but sometimes they're like the sweet old aunt who was always nice as nice to you when you were a kid but whom you know to keep away from the subject of Jews.  They can make you cringe.

Here's a picture of a blood-spattered cutie with breasts larger than her head, a sword in each hand, and . . .  well, just look at her.  You wouldn't want to have to explain the artistic merit of the genre using this as an example.

The picture was so extreme of its kind that I pasted it in and did a kind of postmodern ironic halo of remarks around it.  None of it sincere, of course.  But that's what makes irono-pomo so obnoxiously slippery.

Finally, I wrote a title down at the bottom:

"MEN Explain Gender To You"

I put "men" in all caps in an attempt to make it clear that the whole is meant as a criticism of manga's excesses, rather than a  reveling in it.  Did it work?  Probably not.  Even I'm not entirely buying it.

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O Brave New World! That Has Such Proctors In it . . .

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I'm home again, and (as always) exhausted, and so this will be short.

But I thought I'd share a tiny little non-news-note from what used to be the future:

One of my favorite undergrad connections reports that his chemistry professor applied a heuristic program to the results of an online chemistry test and, as a result of its comparison of the timing of the posting of the answers, the eighty students who gathered in the library to take the test collectively were all given a flat 0.

Online tests!  Heuristic programs!  Cheating students penalized a full grade rather than being kicked out of class!  This is how the future arrives . . . not in an armada of flying saucers that suddenly appear over Washington, D.C., but in the middle of the night, when you turn over in bed and come face to face with a cyborg.  Or your transsexual spouse.  Or . . .

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