Emergency Monday Post

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If you've been reading this blog since forever, as so few have, you know that I do not guarantee to post every day or even every other day but only on two days, Monday and Friday -- if at all possible.

Today, alas, I almost failed you.

This morning I taught a class at the USNA in Annapolis.  Young and earnest midshipmen -- some of whom were women -- who listened to every word because they wanted very much to improve themselves in every way possible.

For people like these -- and I have met them in many countries -- I will do almost anything.

After the class (and a couple of other experiences which go into the lockbox of memory, because they might prove useful in future fiction) was over, the students filed out, pausing to shake my hand and thank me, "sir."  Then Marianne and I hit the back roads of Maryland and Delaware, through Sassafras and Unicorn and other small towns, homeward but in no particular hurry.  Which is why we got home late, and then I had a flurry of business correspondence to deal with, and to kerfluffle went my syntax, and almost, almost, I failed you.

Yet here I am and here we are and I have saved myself from humiliation at the last possible instant.

Whew!

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Quiet Friday

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It's been a quiet day.  Lat night I was in Brookyn at Andy Heidel's bar, The Way Station, having a Manhattan (just as Marianne does, they spice their own cherries; making the drink far superior to those with maraschino cherries) and talking with the local SF folk.  Before that, I listened to N. K. Jemisin reading -- and quite well -- from her work and enjoyed a demonstration of stage and movie combat by Mike Yahn.  The moves were terrifyingly brutal, even when you've just been shown that they involve no physical contact.  A great presentation, and I regret only that I didn't write down the name of his friend and fellow stunt man, who sold the demos by convincingly acting as if he'd been punched.  It really is a collaborative art.

Did I mention I had a terrific time?  I had a terrific time.  Why doesn't Philadelphia have a steampunk bar?

And I couldn't help thinking about steampunk because . . .

Wallace and Gromit movies were running continuously on a monitor by the bar, and apparently the Way Station has a weekly W&G-watching event.  So occasionally (not during the readings or demo) I glanced up at the screen and in context was struck by how, well, steampunk that series is.  Clunky Victorian machines that nevertheless work brilliantly, on-the-spot engineering, mad inventions, the lot.

Of course, Wallace and Gromit predate the steampunk phenomenon.  But there was definitely something in the air.  Or water.  Or aether.

Not Above:  I really should mention the Wold Newton Reading Extravaganza, which organized the evening.  Well done, chaps!

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Down at the Tardis Bar

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I''m reading tonight as part of the Wold Newton Reading Extravaganza at the Way Station in Brooklyn, along with N. K. Jemisin and a stage combat demonstrator.  I lead a strange life.

The Way Station is a steampunk/Dr. Who themed bar and has its very own tardis (pictured above).  One of the websites I found claims the tardis is also their toilet.

I lead a very strange life.  I keep coming back to that observation.

Anyway, if you're in the area and your evening is free, why not drop by?  I'm very eager to hear Jemison read, and I'm looking forward to the stage combat demo.  Also, I'll be reading something good.  It ought to be a hoot.

Strange, mind you  But a hoot.

And here's their press release . . .

Arriving at an EXCITING NEW LOCATION, The Way Station, Brooklyn's greatest Steampunk and Doctor Who themed bar, will be multiple Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy award winner Michael Swanwick, whose new book _Dancing with Bears_ is about con men in a delirious future Russia.

With him will be recently Hugo nominated and critically acclaimed NK Jemisin, in honor of the release of the final book of her Inheritance Trilogy, _The Kingdom of Gods_, which is about deities as weapons of mass destruction, a city on a spire and one hundred thousand kingdoms.

There will also be an exhilarating stage combat demonstration by stage combat instructor, stunt man and kung fu master Mike Yahn. Books will be sold by the Community Bookstore.

WHEN: Thursday, November 10 @ 7:00 p.m.
WHERE: The Way Station
683 Washington Ave
Prospect Heights
Brooklyn, NY 11238

Part reading series, part carnival, the Wold Newton Reading Extravaganza is a speculative fiction event held at The Way Station bar that promises to change the way you look at readings forever and to call you in the morning. It may actually deliver on one of those promises.

http://waystationbk.blogspot.com
http://woldnewtonreading.com

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Paul McAuley's "Bruce Springsteen"

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I used to nominate a lot of stuff for the Nebula, before they changed the rules.  If I admired a story and thought it worth being on the ballot, I nominated it.  Then, at the end of the year, I used that informal list to help me decide what to vote for.  Nowadays, you get only so many nominations (five, I think) per category, and you have only a few months out of the year in which to make them.  Which is to say, you have to keep track of what you read through the year and then, when it's over, go through your notes to determine what you think are the five best works per category before you nominate any.

Alas, I'm just not that organized.  So the nominating process has to go on without me.  However, I do like recommending good stories.  So I thought I might occasionally review one here.

Let's hope the following off-the-cuff review is the first of many.

"Bruce Springsteen" by Paul McAuley

Asimov's Science Fiction, January 2012

Novelette

"Bruce Springsteen" pretends to be set on another planet but is actually an exploration of the myth of the American West.  The West of the high desert, I mean, not that of cowboys and gunfights and genocide.  The roads out there are empty and go on forever.  You turn the nose of your car into the Great Lonely and pray to an untenanted sky to dissolve your self and make you into something you are not.  I was on Route 50 in Nevada, "the loneliest road in America," recently and I can testify to the pull of that myth.  You want to just go down that road forever.

But there's a dark side to the myth.

The nameless protagonist of this story is a working stiff in a dead-end job at the edge of town who may or may not be aware that he's reached the end of his rope, when a woman crosses his destiny.  "Rachel was definitely my type," he says.  "Older than me by five or ten years, easy with what she was.  Someone who'd lived a little and taken some hard knocks, who knew how to look after herself.  Someone, I thought, who was passing through.  A change from the waitresses and kitchen staff."

The fated pair go the Stardust Hotel and fuck.  Then they hit the road, intending to pull an easy and bloodless heist that will be the key to some vast and unspecified alien treasure.  Two dead guards later, they're in a car and on the run, carrying an ancient soul stone back to the tomb from which it was stolen.  They talk.  They steal another car and accidentally kill another person.  Along the way, McAuley rather cunningly conflates Bruce Springsteen's work (particularly his Nebraska album) with Samuel Beckett's.  One of the two is betrayed.  The other is gunned down by the police.  The survivor winds up in jail and speaks the epitaph for them both:  I thought we'd have a bunch of adventures until the law caught up with us.  I thought we'd be together right until the end . . ."

There is a kind of coda at the end of the story which, with the help of a useful alien, makes it clear that the story is about the uncanny power of stories to ride us and make us do their bidding.  And here I have to hesitate because I'm not entirely sure the story has earned its own ending.

But I'm also not entirely sure that it hasn't.  This is one of those stories you have to think about for a long time.  Someday, years from now, most likely, I'll come to a conclusion and turn thumbs up or thumbs down.  Either I'll conclude that "Bruce Springsteen" managed to not say but imply something deep . . .  or I'll decide that it was a noble attempt.

Good story, either way.

Back when I was in college, I was riding in a pickup truck driven by a young woman who, I realized abruptly after the truck nearly went off the road, was a lot drunker than I had realized.  So drunk that, she being who she was, I knew there was no chance of talking her into slowing down or stopping.  So, realizing there was a good chance I was going to die, I leaned as far out the window as I could and laughed.

This is a story that happens every day in America.  In Zen Buddhism, it's called the koan of the strawberry.


Above:  According to its YouTube caption, this is the only film footage in existence of Mark Twain.  I didn't have anything appropriate to the review, so I threw it in.

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VOTE!

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I'm a pretty reasonable guy about most things.  But not about voting.  Charlton Heston will voluntarily turn in all his firearms to the Enemy long, long before they're able to pry the vote from my cold, dead fingers.  Patriots died to give me this right.  I'm not going to give it up just because there are some ballots that fill the soul with dismay.

In all the time since I came of age, I've failed to vote in exactly one election -- and that's because my college roommate put the absentee ballot atop the furnace, where he figured it would be safe, and by the time I got home a hole had been burned all the way through the center.  Every single other election, primaries included, I'm there at the front of the line.

The reason I'm so enthusiastic about representational democracy is that where it counts most -- the presidential election -- my candidate usually loses.  And yet, because there's always hope, and because the system confers a strange kind of legitimacy (the kind that has you muttering that people get the kind of government they deserve), I have never once been tempted to pick up a gun and participate in the violent overthrow of a government that sometimes appalls me.

That's worth a lot.

Above:  I picked that image off of the Web.  I sure hope that those tiny little words I can't render decipherable don't say anything hideous.

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And Now For a Commercial Break . . .

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Mea culpa.  I've missed two days' blogs -- and it's been a long time since I've done that. (I've got a case of the Grunge, and it's sapped my energy entirely.)  So to make it up to you in part, here's a genuinely demented work of advertising art.

See how long it takes you to figure out what they're selling.


And is it just me or . . . ?

Does it seem to anybody else that this is Paprika, played as it if were a good thing?

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Celebrating Murray Leinster

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I'm off to the Big Apple for A Tribute to Murray Leinster at the Soho Gallery for Digital Art.  If you're in the area, why not drop by?  It's only seven dollars and these New York Review of Science Fiction reading series events are always lots of fun.

That's 138 Sullivan Street  (between Houston & Prince St.).  The doors open at 6:30 tonight.


And because I'm traveling . . .

This will be a short blog.  But I thought I'd share the above photo with you.  I took it at the Occupy Philadelphia site and it shows some of the protesters' tents with, looming above them from across the street, Jacques Lipchitz's statue Government of the People.

Government of the People is one of Gardner Dozois's favorite statues.  He likes to point out that it's a graphic portrayal of human beings being crushed by an enormous load of shit.  Over the years I've come around to the viewpoint that that may have been the sculptor's intent.

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