Joe's Place

off the ship and onto a boat
I don't have my land legs yet; my head is still rocking slowly back and forth. Not dizzy, but not quite connected to the earth yet.

That was exacerbated by a rapid ride through choppy seas yesterday on a wildlife tour. We did see a humpback whale swimming along, showing us his tail a few times. Beautiful sleek Dahl dolphins running in a hunting pack. And sea lions and otters and lots of birds, including the tufted puffin, weirdly colorful. Bald eagles, cormorants, common murres and killewakes.

We went by the island in Resurrection Bay where artist Rockwell Kent lived in isolation with his young son. He painted and did prints in various media. Lovely wood engravings at http://www.artline.com/galleries/aaron/prints/kent/kent.html that reminded me of sf master Hannes Bok.

Saw a few old military structures left over from WWII, isolated outposts that watched for submarines. An interesting three-hour ride.

We were met at the harbor by Jolund and Monica Luther, friends from the Iowa sf scene in the 70's. Had great halibut fish and chips in the port area of Seward. Also enjoyed walking around the old part of town, pretty well preserved despite real estate laws that make it hard to buy hundred-year-old properties. Same thing as back in Gainesville -- you could find an old house for $100,000, but bringing it up to code will cost more than building a new one.

Joe

off da boat
(Following a conversation on sffnet -- )

There's a factor so obvious that no one has mentioned it. In any society men have a universe of shared experience and women have a different one, and by default that commonality affects the way they relate thoughts to one another. Sort of like a universal conspiracy in which no one has actively conspired.

Getting off the ship in about a half hour. It's been a wonderful experience.

My blackjack fortunes went down and back up. I quit when I got back half my stake, $500. My usual philosophy is to quit when I win a thousand or lose a thousand. But besides the natural inclination to hold on to my money, I didn't want to cut short the last evening with Jack. Good thing; in many ways it was the best. He did "An English Moment," my favorite. And several new songs that will be on his next album.

On to Seward, and then another week of traveling around Alaska by train and car.

Joe

Day seven
Yesterday we didn't have a port of call, but just steamed up Glacier Bay for our rendezvous with ice. In the morning Gay and I sat in the Crow's Nest lounge and listened to an explanation of glacier science and history as we went north from the Icy Strait past Reid Glacier and Lamplugh Glacier to the huge pair, Margerie and Grand Pacific Glaciers. Margerie is brilliant white, shot through with cerulean, the typical glacier coloration; Grand Pacific is black as coal, from ground-up volanic rock.

Then we went back to Johns Hopkins Glacier, where we were allowed to come close. (We couldn't approach the others because that would disturb mating seals.) We hung around for about an hour and watched a little calving, with "small" -- car-sized -- chunks of ice sliding into the sea. There was an impressive waterfall inside Johns Hopkins.

When we last went through Glacier Bay the ship precipitated ice falls by blasting its horn. I guess that's not allowed anymore. Alas. It was still mighty impressive.

At 2:30 we had an impromptu (or at least minimally planned) concert for us "junior" performers; those of us on board who are not professionals. They were pretty accomplished, though; a couple had CD's. The venue wasn't perfect, right by a noisy escalator. I couldn't even hear myself playing on my little travel guitar, but someone loaned me a hearty acoustic-electric Taylor with a much more penetrating sound. It didn't make my voice any louder, unfortunately. But I forged on gamely with a few songs. Most of the others seemed to know each other, from Arkansas, and played along with one another. Mostly gospel, so I felt compelled to go in the opposite direction, with songs friendlier to appetites than salvation. Some appreciated that, and some did not.

At 4:00 we put away our own guitars and went upstairs to a small meeting room where we had the last concert from Jack Williams and Trout Fishing in America. It was even better than the first. Jack started off, and did a few longer songs, like the masterful complex "A Sucker For Love." He ended with his traditional pot-pourri improvisational gumbo of jazz, classical, blues, folk, show tunes -- a random stream of consciousness romp through genres and centuries.

Trout Fishing was great fun again. Keith and Ezra have been together for 33 years; Keith "escaped" a career with (I think) the Philadelphia Philharmonic to record and wander with Ezra.

(Their families sometimes travel along with them. I had enjoyable conversations with Keith's son, who's a poet and was impressed that I worked with James Dickey. Ezra's daughter is a fledgling artist; we talked about watercolor techniques and materials.)

They have an amusing routine, ragging each other about their instruments. Of course banjo and bass players always get a hard time from more mainstream folk. Ezra also has a cool baritone 12-string, a light-weight slim machine with a sweet sound. His daughter has decorated a couple of his instruments with intricate ink patterns, very elegant.

We played some blackjack, to no effect, and at 7:00 went to a song-and-dance show featuring music of the 50's, 60's, and 70's. Great hoofers and good music, though I'm not too into the seventies stuff.

Dinner was fine, dining with Ezra and his wife, talking about music and writing. I had a nap and then met everybody up at the library for jamming. I was encouraged and emboldened by Jack saying I could bring my own song sheets, so I did four or five science fiction songs, which were well received.

A little more blackjack, up and down. I finished the evening with $475 of the original thousand. Will tempt fate again tomorrow.

Joe

(Can't post pictures with this glacially slow connection . . . )

Day six
Gay and I went our separate ways Thursday morning, since she was not enthusiastic about hurtling down the side of a mountain on a rent-a-bike. I worked and read for a bit -- not hitting the gym for the first time afloat -- and then around seven I went down the gangway to take a short van ride to the railroad station.

The narrow-gauge railway up the mountain from Skagway to the Canadian border is one of the most beautiful rides in rairoadery. We did it with Rusty the last time we were in Skagway, fifteen years ago, and that day was rainy and misty. This morning it was clear with occasional bears. Only three, actually, and a couple of longhorns, but lots of gorgeous conifer forest giving way to swales of half-melted snow on tundra occasionally enlivened with wildflowers. Rickety trestles and close-walled tunnels blown out of the mountainsides 111 years ago.

We stopped in Canada, and a pleasant official came through and looked at our passports. Got out into bright sunshine. It was only a little cold, high thirties or forty, with a bracing wind. A van took seventeen of us down to where the bikes were parked. We got fitted to helmets and gloves (my huge head taking a little more effort than most) and found bikes that could fit with some adjustment. Rattly no-name cross bikes with efficient disk brakes in back. There was a little instruction -- mainly "don't touch the front brake or you will go over the handlebars." We positioned guides at the front and back of the group and took off. I slid in behind the front guide, feeling that he was among the least likely in the group to fall down and pose a hazard.

The road was not ideal for bicycling. Very steep and with a bike "lane" that varied from eight to fourteen inches wide. Then there was less than a foot of gravel and steel barrier about a foot high, and beyond that a long hurtle of empty space. It could have been scary if you looked in that direction. I studied the road.

We stopped four times on the way down -- once just to go through customs again, twice for scenic waterfall stops, and once when the road leveled out to go into Skagway.

That last part was the most dangerous. The amateur bikers stayed in line as we sped down the mountain, but without the fear of heights they were all over the place. The road, unsurprisingly, was still full of trucks and buses. But we avoided disaster and left the bikes at the rental place, still in one piece.

I walked the length of Skagway, perhaps half a mile, and then another half mile to where the Statendam was docked. Met Gay and we went back into the town to wander around. Bought a few gifts and went into a bar for real prospector fare -- a cappacino and a designer beer. It was brewed in Skagway with actual spruce tips, and had a mild retsina flavor.

We bought an hour on a wi-fi network that didn't work. The one on ship has been giving us lots of trouble. But we'll persevere.

At three we found the Stowaway Cafe, where (LiveJournal's) Minnehaha's son is chef, and enjoyed one of his specialties, delicious shrimp toast. Then we ankled back to the ship. We avoided the casino, since we'll be asea for two days and will have plenty of time to waste that way.

Another delicious salmon preparation, this time with artichokes. After the ship pulled away from Skagway, we went up into the library for the most lively songfest yet. Jack treated us to one of the new compositions for his next album, a wonderful new riff on an old theme -- Abraham and Isaac and God's, shall we say, inflexibility.

Off to hunt glaciers.

Joe

Day five
Writing up on the Lido Deck was eldritch this morning. It had started to get light before I got there, around 4:00, and huge misty shapes kept looming out of the fog. While I was working out on the machines and reading, the fog broke and we eased into a sunny morning berth at Juneau.

The Juneau waterfront doesn't look too promising. It's all shops selling high-priced souvenirs and "bargains" on useful things like showy jewelry and imported china. We managed to avoid them and go to the van that was to take us away from all this, into a bicycling adventure.

We drove through the length of Juneau, and it was all kind of American-small-town plus the occasional bald eagle or bear. Went by Sarah Palin's house and strained to see Russia, to no avail. The teenaged guides talked about how the town had recently gotten a WalMart and a CostCo. They had their own McDonalds now; people used to come back from Seattle with bags of a hundred burgers to pass among their friends. (Now they bring back doggy bags from Olive Garden, a step up.)

We switched vans to a heavier-duty one that pulled a trailer with about twenty bicycles, though we only used about half of them. We parked in a vacant lot and disembiked. The bikes were plain and sturdy, well used, Squeaky brakes and rattly gears, but they worked.

Within a few minutes we were pedaling through a gorgeous countryside, a perfectly cool and clear morning as we rolled down and up hills covered with lupins and other wildflowers, crowded with spruce and hemlock, on a comfortable wide bike lane It's the largest temperate rain forest in the hemisphere, fortunately not raining today.

We wound up on the shore of a lake fronting the spectacular Mendenhall Glacier, where the guides broke out welcome hot chocolate and energy bars. We took pictures and stretched our legs for a while, and then took off again, this time along a more rugged trail that splashed through the forest itself. Gorgeous but bumpy; Gay injured her wrists negotiating the potholes.

We came out in a parking lot overlooking the glacier itself, and had an hour to walk around, down trails that led to within a half mile of the glacier. We had an hour to walk down and investigate it.

I'd seen it before, in 1949, and only vaguely recalled the childhood memory, mixed up with Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. But a Forest Service guide showed me how much the glacier had receded since then, more than a quarter mile. We walked down to that place, now an observation point, and looked out over the magnificent desolation, ice streaked with soil. Hundreds of birds circling around -- Arctic terns, whose life cycle takes them from Antarctica to the Arctic every year. The distance to the Moon in one bird's lifetime.

We went back to the van and thence to our last stop, the Juneau Brewery, where they gave us generous samples of seven or eight different kinds of beers, and an intelligent presentation about how the various kinds are made.

They let us off back in town. Gay and I wandered up and down the steep sidewalks, looking for buildings that I might have passed by sixty years ago. There were quite a few dating from the thirties and before. I walked the streets haunted by my character from GUARDIAN, the turn-of-the-century schoolmarm who had just left her son to seek his fate in the Alaska gold fields.

Back on the ship, I did an unsuccessful drawing of the waterfront; too much to draw in too little time. We had another excellent meal and I went back to the cabin for a nap. Woke up and grabbed my guitar and went to the library for the music.

It seemed deserted. I later found out that everybody had gone down to watch the ship cast off from Juneau. Then I found Keith from Trout Fishing, and he and I sat for an hour and traded songs. A lot of Tom Lehrer. He has a great ear, and could play along with anything I came up with. (He also has an engaging lack of ego, for a professional performer. He works a lot with children, and you can tell he charms them completely.) The next day I found out I'd missed Jack by minutes; he'd sat there alone for a bit and then went down to find everybody else on the Promenade Deck, watching Juneau go away. Everybody else's loss was my gain.

Joe

fourth day
I've written a couple of [small] pages on the novel each morning. There's a coffee machine going all the time on the Lido Deck, and that's where breakfast is prepared. Rolls and pastries come out around 6, and they start making omelets about 6:30. I was first in line today. Wrote until about 5:30 and then chatted about writing with a couple of the songwriters. After breakfast I ran on the machines, reading GUARDIAN, for 250 calories. Will finish the book tomorrow. Brought some work and a David Morrell thriller. Wonder which I'll do.

Ketchikan was a lot of fun, though it rained hard all morning. We took a bus a couple of miles around the mountain to a crabber's wharf. We took a small boat out to check a couple of their crab pots. The scenery was beautiful, misty and mysterious. We saw a couple of salmon jumping and one somnolent seal. The crab pots they brought up each had four crabs -- the first one all boys, and thus harvestable. The second had two females, which had to be returned. (Actually, they returned all of them, after measuring them and writing down the data. I guess they don't have a commercial license, and just harvest crabs for educational purposes. The young man who supplied the patter was energetic and humorous, and well informed.)

We spent n hour and a half out on the water, very smooth, and then went back to the wharf to find that the tide had risen about eight feet (out of a total of twenty for that day), and the steep gangway we'd crept down was now less than a thirty-degree angle.

We went inside and had an immense feast of Dungeness crab, all you cared to eat, with plentiful melted butter and lemon juice. A couple of glasses of wine and I was full as a tick. Hard to stop eating that delicacy when it's free. Or "free." The tour cost about a hundred bucks.

Back aboard at 3:30, we convened in the piano bar for a workshop on composing, but it was a "workshop" only in the broadest sense, Jack and Trout Fish talking about where their ideas come from and how they form them into songs. It was all very deja vu; much of what they said I've said in similar venues, with adjustments for mediums and genres.

Then Jack Williams told us about a "secret" place for bird-watching, a deck over the prow of the ship that's not used for anything, and not marked. But you stand within the huge vessel's dead air zone, so though we're plying along at 18 knots, there's no wind unless you go to the edge.

We did see lots of little birds, exciting to serious birders like Jack and Judy, since they don't see them at home in Arkansas. Our stabilized binoculars made a hit.

Gay and I went to a before-dinner performance by ventriloquist Mike Robinson, whocombined an amazing deftness with clever postmodern exchanges between the dummy and his creator, with lots of sciencefictional AI questions lurking around the edges.

Another excellent dinner, this time slow-simmered pot roast. Jam session afterwards. I didn't play, but took along my little travel guitar because Ezra has taken a liking to its weird banjo/guitar sonority. He plays it very well, but then he does play both banjo and guitar.

To bed at midnight and up again at four. Coming into Juneau now.

Joe

third day
We spent all day yesterday at sea, which was pleasant. Very slight rolling as we plied north, usually within sight of Canadian mountains.

Didn't do much in the morning but read and write. At one o'clock I entered a low-stakes Texas Hold-em tournament, thirty bucks. I lasted about an hour, betting on five or six hands and winning three. The last one, I was sure the guy was bluffing and went all in. He _was_ bluffing, but his small pair was bigger than mine. Interpret that as you will.

At four we had a private concert with Jack Williams and Trout Fishing in America. Jack was his usual marvelous self, inhumanly fast and inventive on the guitar, soulful and funny and wise with his lyrics.

I'd never seen Trout Fishing before, and they were great! A Mutt and Jeff pair, or Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Ezra's close to seven feet tall, slick on guitar and banjo; Keith is a dynamo about two feet shorter, alternating between a modernistic skinny fretless electric bass and a huge acoustic one like a guitar on steroids. Bouncing around the stage like St. Vitus' Dance. The songs of their own composition were witty and sometimes borderline raunchy; they also did a couple of great Michael Smith covers.

Then we spent a more or less pleasant hour playing blackjack at the casino.
My stakes continued their slow erosion, to the $500 mark. Or you could be optimistic and say I still have $500 left.

Dress-up night. I didn't bring a tux, but put on a nice shirt and tie. A champagne toast to the ship's crew, followed by a show featuring Broadway tunes with pretty and talented dancers. (All of the "everyday" talent seems way above average. Maybe it's the lousy economy, driving people who'd have more conventional gigs into cruise ship service.) Fairly elegant dinner of pan-seared salmon with mango sauce.

At about nine we adjourned to the library for a free-for-all hootenanny. I was intimidated by all the professional musicians, ten or twelve coming out of the audience to improvise with Jack and Trout Fishing. I never had a good ear, or much practice playing with others. (I should have a T-shirt made up to that effect, a guitar and a report card: DOES NOT PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS.) A lot of good enthusiastic improvisation.

Got up about four this morning and wrote for a couple of hours by the coffee machine on the Lido Deck. Had an early breakfast of a salami sandwich, joined by three of last night's musicians, including Ezra, up early to go salmon fishing. Then read GUARDIAN whilst working out on the exercise machine for 350 calories. We pulled into Ketchikan just as I finished. Hard rain falling.

Joe

Second Day
Everything has gone smoothly. We had a three-hour bus tour of Vancouver yesterday morning and afternoon, which was interesting -- a great town, which has grown large fast since we were here in '86. We saw the places where Errol Flynn died and Howard Hughes lived (for six months less one day, to avoid Canadian taxes). Two nice gardens and lots of redwood trees.

The bus left us at the terminal, and we went through the usual excruciation of lines and red tape, but considerably faster than other times. The ship is relatively small (can't find the numbers right now, but it's about 1500 passengers and 600 crew) and quite efficient. It's the Holland America Line, the Statendam. We sailed with this line twenty years ago and loved it; the Indonesian crew are kind and professional, the food good-to-excellent. ("She's a good feed and a good home," to any McKenna fans out there.) The hot curries are great.

Our stateroom is the largest we've ever had, which is to say about half the size of a motel room, but with a double bed and an actual window, not a porthole. A good-sized bathtub. Plenty of room to work as well as live. Disappointed that I can't make tea; fire regulations forbid immersion heaters. But we do have free room service 24/7.

The twenty-seven of us who came because of Jack Williams convened in the piano bar as the ship was weighing anchor. Jack was tickling the ivories, but left off to mingle with everyone. He and Judy try to remember everybody's names, which would be plain impossible for me. Met a lot of nice folks, mostly midwestern (a lot from around where Jack lives, in Arkansas) and mostly musicians. Elegant appetizers and free-flowing champagne and booze.

A good salmon preparation for dinner. (In celebration of Alaska's fiftieth year of statehood, they're featuring salmon. That it's the cheapest fish around has nothing to do with it.) Then Gay and I repaired to the casino.

We had a brand-new dealer who got the hang of it pretty fast. I lost a couple of hundred bucks and Gay won about a hundred. That I quit before losing the whole $500 I'd bought in for is a mark of sterling character.

We joined Jack and his companion group, Trout Fishing in America, for a jam session around nine, in the library. Great music till about midnight. I was the only actual amateur playing, but I've never been particularly shy, and it was a good audience.

We went back through the casino, but they were closing up. Midnight, and they had run out of customers! It's a pretty senior group, and a lot of us were travel-weary. All day at sea today; maybe things will perk up.

It was great to chat with Jack and Judy, and there was lots of good music, though it was just the warm-up. Concert tonight, and then more jamming.

Off to find some coffee now, and maybe a wi-fi hotspot.

Joe

Prepare to board, maties!
Uneventful flight. In first class (freebie for points) we had a decent hot chicken sandwich and disappointingly ordinary wine, though it was "free." I read a bit and napped a bit. Bad timing on my part; got within 15 pp. of the end of a silly but fairly engaging novel, The Topless Tulip Caper by Lawrence Block. It's a pastiche of Nero Wolfe, and as such ends with everybody sitting in a room waiting for the Great Man to expose one of them as the murderer. Could be anybody; depends on what the author chose to withhold.

Not too hectic transfer at the Vancouver airport. I knocked aside a few people on crutches and got to the hotel desk first. We got ensconced to the point of getting online for ten bucks Canadian, and then hit the bricks.

This part of Vancouver is sort of ex-slum New Age. High-ticket shops and spare-change panhandlers. I did find a wine shop, not always easy in Canada. We checked a couple of restaurants that were either too noisy or had too long a wait, and settled on the Steamhouse, a good choice. It's in the remodeled old railroad station, huge turn-of-the-century brick building with a welcome fireplace and quiet friendly ambience. I was chilled, so ordered a chicken pot pie, which was perfect, and their cheapest wine was an order of magnitude better than the thimbles we got in Delta first class.

Spend a day in the air and eat nothing but flightless birds. Didn't mean anything by it.

Vancouver's an interesting city, and perhaps we should have included an extra day to nose around. We were here in '86, for a small World SF meeting, remarkable because Parnov, the "poet" who was a KGB agent, told an apparently innocent joke about skydiving which ended up being about anal rape, I think the apex of Soviet humor. We also saw the World's Fair, with big muscular white guys hauling people around in jinrikshas. Ah so, eh?

Today we leave our luggage in the hotel room and trust the steamship line to pick it up and eventually deposit it in our cabin on board. As Gay says, it's nice to be taken care of, though I'm not letting them near the computer or the notebook in which I'm writing the novel.

Which is going very well, thanks to three hours' time zone shift to my advantage. I got up at three, which is of course 0600 Florida time, an extravagant sleep-in for me. Wrote for a couple of hours on the novel and then switched on the machine.

The brochure says there are wi-fi hot-spots all over the ship. We shall see.

Joe

North to Alaska
In Vancouver for the night, ready to get on the Statendam for our Alaska tour. Timing couldn't be better; it's getting up to 101 in Gainesville today.

For our last fling in Florida, we went out with Brandy and Christina for an early movie, a new adaptation of Noel Coward's Easy Virtue. All very suave and knowing, with an undercurrent of rawness, of horror and despair lingering from the Great War. With a wonderful fuck-you-all happy ending, the beautiful girl racing off in her roadster to a new life.

Very nice dinner at Chopstix as the sun eased into the lake.

Even after dinner it was still in the nineties. Reached a blistering 100 degrees, pretty unusual for so early in the summer. Alaska sounds like the place to go.

It will be rainy -- that part of the continent is a rain forest, which I suppose becomes a "snow forest" in the winter.

I have the little Backpacker guitar, but for the past some weeks haven't been able to play it for more than a few minutes at a time. The odd angle it has to be held at wrecks my rotator cuff. But there will be other guitars aboard -- Jack Williams offered to let me use his, but the idea makes my blood run cold -- what if I dropped it? (It's ancient and extremely beat-up, with an angelic tone.)

Lots of stuff going on these couple of weeks. Working on the new novel, touring Alaska, doing music stuff with Jack Williams and Trout Fishing In America, and painting a bit as we go along. Will send along some notes, and pictures on LiveJournal.

Joe

luck
Thinking about doing a poem about the varieties of luck. Because I consider myself a very lucky person, and wonder what that actually means.

"You make your own luck" is the American simplification, and of course it has a kernel of truth. We know people who continually sabotage themselves, and seem able to screw up any opportunity. And there are those (I think like me) who have a generally positive attitude and are willing to take a swing at anything that comes our way, and not be too disappointed if it doesn't turn out.

So that's a situational kind of "luck," one's response to opportunity. But there's also a kind of baseline, call it accidents of birth, which would be the universe of potential opportunity that you start out with -- genetics, the social situation of your parents, the political restrictions of your place of birth . . . a kind of matrix of opportunity, good or ill, that the individual may react to or against; use or squander or ignore, but does comprise an initial set of "luck" conditions.

And then there is the blind bullet. The life-changing catastrophe that you had no control over.

(There's an unstoppable misapprehension that the Chinese character for "crisis" contains the character for "opportunity." It's evidently not true, but it has foma power -- it so should be true that it sort of is.)

It's not the same as a Panglossian feeling that everything will come out right in the end. What's demonstrably true is that some people are floored by catastrophe, and others accept their changed circumstances and go wherever looks best.

I suspect I wouldn't have become a novelist if not for that close brush with death in Vietnam. A writer, yes, but only as a sideline while I pursued science or mathematics. In the long run, that blind bullet was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.

Anyhow, it all belongs in a poem. I'll print it out and put it in the idea box.

Joe

P.S. Cloudy skies at night for weeks on end, it seems like, but it clears up before dawn. I've been hauling the questar out to look at the moon just before sunup, and the past two days made drawings of the same crater as the sun falls lower. Maybe I can do it for the next two days, before we leave for Alaska.)

an "up" movie from Pixar, surprise
We met Bob and Patience yesterday afternoon to see the new 3-D animation film UP. It was a charming, impeccably made film with many surprises, not the least of which is its main theme, coping (or not) with aging and disappointment.

Of course there are heroics and melodrama along the way -- it _is_ a cartoon -- but the characters are drawn well, in both senses of the word. The main character is an old man whose life we review in a compressed opening sequence, starting out with a tomboy childhood sweetheart, big dreams and romance worn away by real life.

He was a balloon vendor at a zoo, and when the city tries to condemn his (their) old house to put up condos, he ties the house to thousands of brightly-colored balloons and floats away to wherever. With a stow-away, a pudgy Asian boy scout who needs a merit badge in "helping the elderly," and earns it. A feel-good fantasy, but not too sappy.

The 3-D was used effectively, with restraint. I suspect the movie would work fine without it, but there's an interesting level of literal cognitive dissonance -- all these broadly-drawn cartoony people and animals moving through a visual space that's more "real" than any realistic movie's.

Joe

life is all you have
(Responding to Neale Morison) I liked Hemingway's statement of that so well I used it as the dedication to THE HEMINGWAY HOAX --

"He had already learned that there was only one day at a time and that it was always the day you were in. It would be today until it was tonight and tomorrow it would be today again. This was the main thing he had learned so far."

That's from "The Last Good Country." It's a funny quote because it's only a hair away from being a perfect Hemingway satire. If he hadn't written it, one of his enemies would.

Well ensconced in the next novel, EARTHBOUND, and glad to be back in the saddle, after fiddling with a short story for too long.

Before somebody else points it out, I know that the title has been used before. In fact, EARTHBOUND, by Milton Lesser, was the first sf novel my brother ever read, in 1952 (and I read it a couple of weeks later). An odd coincidence -- Milton Lesser, whose real name was Stephen Marlowe, died 22 February 08, while I was writing the proposal for my own novel of the same name. So I never got to thank him. And to pile coincidence upon coincidence, last year when I taught I AM LEGEND, I found out that Richard Matheson also wrote a book with that title, a ghost story.

Nevertheless, I have to keep it. After MARSBOUND and STARBOUND, what could I call it? Maybe FOREVER BOUND . . . nope, I used that. A novella coming out in a few months.

The current issue of The New Yorker, the summer fiction issue, had two really good stories. One I expected to like was Edna O'Brien's "Old Wounds." Along with every other male member of the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1975, I fell in love with O'Brien when she came to give a reading, and pull everybody's heart out and leave it on the floor. She hasn't lost a thing since the Country Girls trilogy. The lilting sprung rhythm of her prose: "Why, I asked myself, did I want to be buried there? Why, given the different and gnawing perplexities? It was not love and it was not hate but something for which there is no name, because to name it would be to deprive it of its truth."

The other one I loved was "The Tiger's Wife," by Téa Obreht. Also the title of her first novel, coming out next May. She just got her MFA from Cornell, and unlike most MFA people, she has a hell of a story to tell. Tigers and bombs falling and wicked old people and a deaf-mute being raped and the Germans marching into town. I don't know what her first language was, but she does well enough in English (no translator credited): "The tiger did not know that they were bombs. He did not now anything beyond the hiss and screech of fighter planes passing overhead and the missiles falling, the bears bellowing in another part of the fortress, and the sudden silence of the birds. There was smoke and a terrible warmth, a gray sun rising and falling in what seemed like a matter of minutes, and the tiger, frenzied, dry-tongued, ran back and forth along the span of rusted bars."

Anyhow, writing. When it's good I love it. When it's bad I want to tear my fucking eyes out.

Joe

Losing existential contact
I would think it would be more like "everybody else in that timeline goes on business as usual, with you dead."

But it's very late, for me, and I'm not making a lot of sense.

Had a great post-birthday bash, 16 people stuffing themselves on hamburgers, chicken, and chorizo. Man, that chorizo was good.

Quite a bit of work for the person who's supposed to be taking it easy, some said. But this kind of chore puts me in cook heaven. Straightforward stuff you ca do with a spatula in one hand and a glass of wine in the other.

Joe

life is sweet
For my 66th birthday yesterday I celebrated by doing a metric century, 100 kilometers, on the bicycle. (I didn't feel in shape to do a real Amurrican century.) Because it's getting hot around noon, I bought a nice bright light and started pedaling around 4:30. It was very pleasant, toodling around the neighborhoods in the bright moonlight.

I wanted to see some new territory, though, so I just did ten miles, had some breakfast, and then at sunup drove the bike out to the Devil's Millhopper parking lot, the beginning spot for the Pre-Columbian Ride, supposedly a 52-mile loop. That would complete the 100 kilometers. (map at http://gccfla.org/maps/NWpre.html)

Most of it was very good, horse farm and truck farming territory, along with some wild woods. About half of it was smooth and well maintained roads, though three miles of CR 235 were hairy with pounding huge gravel trucks and no shoulder, and five or six miles of CR 236 were torturous, like riding over sharp cobblestones. My right wrist, injured last month, gave up the ghost about 25 miles in, and the ride was looking pretty grim until I turned onto Pre-Columbian Road, smooth and slightly hilly through gorgeous farmland.

I suspect the only thing pre-Columbian about the road is its number, Route 1491.

The rest of the ride was fine. I rationed my two quarts of water knowing that there was a store at the 43-mile mark. They let me refill there with ice and water, and I got a pint of beer with which to wash down my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. (The PBJ, the biker's mainstay, may not be gourmet fare, but it's an exotic treat for me. With my diabetes I can only indulge in it if I'm burning carbs like mad.)

A few miles down the road I was passed by the only other cyclist I saw, a curvy girl in bright Lycra. I probably could have caught her if it was my 36th birthday instead of 66th. And I was weighed down by an extra hundred IQ points, or perhaps pounds.

Gay was flying in about 1600, and I finished the ride in plenty of time to pick her up, but Brandy and Christina volunteered to do it so I didn't have to worry about it. Before I started the trail I'd set up a crockpot dinner, beef brisket simmered with tomatoes and (honest) crumbled gingersnaps.

Made a delicious meal with brown rice and salad. Gay gave me a birthday present I'd requested, the Leica-lensed Lumix digital camera, which looks like it will be a lot of fun.

Went to the gym this morning, and though I was noticeably tired from yesterday's exertions, the wrist seemed okay, and everything else worked fine, considering the mileage. As I was leaving the last machine, I walked through a lovely pack of college girls, sweating and glowing, and through my earphones I got a birthday present from Jack Williams, the chorus of "Life is Sweet":

Life is sweet . . .
sweet as the morning.
Cool as the sun . . .
Quiet as dew.

Life is sweet . . .
sweet as the music.
Clear as the sun . . .
shinin' on you.

Joe

arms and men
Going back to Robin's note of last week, I remember the comfortable mocking attitude some American military types had back in the early eighties -- claiming (I think with justification) that the Soviet Union started its adventure in Afghanistan mainly to give combat experience to its officer corps and NCO's. Almost two generations without a serious land war was undermining their army's credibility. Some people even noticed that that was one reason we were in Vietnam. Give the officers a taste of combat.

(In some areas, like our engineers, it got a little silly. No lieutenant was ever going to get a career moving unless he had been exposed to combat. But there are a hell of a lot of engineering officers, most of them working in the rear. So our outfit, air-mobile combat engineers, got a new loot every three or four weeks. None of them ever had time to learn much about the job, but that was okay, since the senior NCO's ran the show anyhow.)

Dave, I think the truism that soldiers in the field mainly fight for their mates rather than their country or political system has been well established for some time. I remember a diagram from WW! (British troops, I think, rather than American) that showed a set of concentric circles representing "what am I fighting for?" The innermost circle was self-preervation, followed by squad, platoon, and company, with the flag and monarchy pretty far out.

The sentiment was strongly expressed by the WWII soldiers represented in THE GI WAR, an oral history of that conflict. It seems to be very strong among the troops in Iraq, but then it would be hard to wave the flag for protecting the income of oilmen.

I just finished reading a pretty good memoir of Vietnam, WALKING POINT, by Roger Hayes. Of course in that one most of the people were draftees, and the idea of anybody expressing a willingness to die for God and country, let alone Lyndon and Tricky Dick, would have been risible to most of the boys there.

He related a fairly cute trick some anonymous benefactor pulled on a sergeant who was making life miserable for everyone -- not really smart in a combat zone. He went to put on his boots and found a hand grenade wedged into one, the pin pulled but the arming lever held in place. He'd have to be pretty clumsy to set it off, but it was a lesson learned. The author called it "frontier justice," and noted that after raising a fuss to no avail, the sergeant "didn't emerge from his bunker for weeks, and left us alone after that."

The other day I decided to see "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian" because of a passing comment in The New Yorker about some clever visual jokes about modern art (and some older art as well, it turns out) -- and indeed, those were almost the high point of the silly film. It was full of well executed special effects, but a constant barrage of them blunts the appeal of the best ones.

Ben Stiller is Ben Stiller, and if I were feeling sillier I might have liked him more. He did have some good bits, but most of the humor was too broad. The high point, in both acting and visual appeal, was Amy Adams as Amelia Earhart reincarnated. Saucy and chirpy and exquisitely contained within bespoke jodhpurs. They could throw away the rest of the movie and just do a little biopic of Adams as Earhart. Put a picture of her posterior on the poster and wait for the money to roll in.

Still wrestling with a short story I promised a friend. Up to four thousand words and may go six, long for me. Eager to start on the new novel, and have been throwing notes at it.

Whilst setting up my schedules for next semester's classes and trying to get the website sorted out. The verdammt iWeb is a poison program. It chewed up my entire website and left only one page standing, an unimportant one. Fortunately I found a mirror site and was able to laboriously reconstruct it with Fetch.

Back to Dreamweaver, I guess. Which is a nightmare-weaver.

Joe

memorial day
Dave, I wonder whether we'd even recognize kindergarten in 2084, post-Gutenberg. They might still have graham crackers and milk and nap time. But then after nappies, they plug in the nice lady who's describing quantum mechanics.

Memorial Day, and once again the local Veterans for Peace has made a silent statement along 8th Avenue. Nearly a mile of straight east-west road through forest and parkland. Crowded this weekend with nearly five thousand small gravestones, separated by year markers and notes for "Iraq" and "Afghanistan." And a small sign for May 1st, 2003: "Mission Accomplished." Lest we forget.

They've been doing it along the south side of the road for years. This year they ran out of room, and have started doubling back down the north side. If the count grows to over ten thousand, they'll just have to make smaller gravestones.

There's a lot of pious and sometimes well-meaning celebration of the sacrifices soldiers and sailors and airmen have made for our freedom and dignity over the years. Many of the boys and girls under those stones agreed, and went willingly to join the silent legions of the dead. Many of them, if they could, would join me now in saying cut the crap. War is the controlled use of force to bring about political ends. It's young people asked to murder strangers to protect the fortunes of the old. In its final escalation it may kill us all.

It will take a long time and a basic redesign of human nature, to end war. But we could start with these two.

Joe

Michael Caine acts his age
Yesterday we went off with Brandy and Christina and Bob Mason and Patience to see the current Dotty Old Folks Movie, Michael Caine's Is Anybody There? His acting was very good (acting his own age, 76, for a change) and so was that of his 10-year-old sidekick Bill Milner. But the story is pretty much an unrelenting downer punctuated my senility shtik which is more ghastly than funny. It's a good plot set-up -- Caine is a retired magician and Bill, whose parents run the one-house old folks' home, is goofy about spirituality. One of those movies that you leave feeling vaguely guilty for not having enjoyed it.

Good dinner at a new Asian place, Buddha's Belly. Low-rent refurbished Duncan's Donuts, but really good food, and cheap. A bottle of good Chardonnay for $17 makes up for Formica tabletops.

Joe

shaken or stirred or simply bothered?
One of my respondents sent me a martini joke, so I responded with a 1950's one that Ben Bova passed on --

A canny white hunter was assembling a safari for a wealthy American. It was a walking safari through the deepest jungle, so they had a small army of carriers -- weapons and ammunition, food, tents, water . . . and ten men who each shouldered a plastic 55-gallon drum.

"What are all the fuel drums for?" the American asked. "You expect to find a Jeep or something out there?"

"Oh, no," the white hunter said. "They're just in case we get lost."

The party wanders through the jungle for a week or so, gleefully shooting various things, but on the seventh day the white hunter stared at his compass, tapped it a few times, stared at it again, and announced, "I'm afraid we're lost."

He ordered the men to put down their 55-gallon drums and take up shovels and dig a deep hole. They lined the hole with a sheet of plastic, and then filled it with 550 gallons of Bombay Sapphire gin.

"Lost no more," said the white hunter, as he took from his blouse pocket a miniature bottle of white vermouth and an eyedropper. "Watch this." He carefully added one drop of vermouth to the gin.

Ten white men jumped out of the bush and said, in unison, "You call that a dry martini?"

====

In fact, I do have a couple of martinis a week, when we go out to dinner. Used to have them at home, but now prefer to reserve them for occasions.

I read an interview (New Scientist 9 May 09) with incurable optimist Ray Kurzweil, where he talked about the Singularity, that future time (perhaps as short as an instant) when human nature will change profoundly, as a result of merging human and machine intelligence. He makes an interesting case, as does Vernor Vinge, but what was interesting about this article is he actually made a hard prediction of when it would happen, around AD 2045. Hmm. I'd be 102 then, not impossible with reasonable advances in gerontology.

Interesting to me, he talked about his new Singularity University, which he's starting up with Peter Diamandis, founder of the X-Prize Foundation. Peter was one of my students at MIT about twenty years ago, one of the few really good writers I've encountered there.

Joe

manu$cript
[Dave on sffnet offered his first-born for the FOREVER WAR draft manuscript . . . ]

That's the best offer I've had for the TFW manuscript today. Though I was offered $5000 about twenty years ago. Don't have the faintest idea what it would be worth now.

Rather cold and rainy yesterday, which is plain strange for mid-May here. Evidently there's a tropical depression building up in the Caribbean, which is related. But it was actually too cold to work on the porch, even with long sleeves. At least too cold for a thin-blooded Floridian.

So I worked indoors, and got a good start on a new story. Took advantage of the cool weather to make some hearty food, bean soup and a frittata.

I'd never heard of "beatboxing," where people make more or less musical percussion sounds with their vocal apparatus. Adam Holland sent me this Youtube -- http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2009/05/the_beatbox_battle_world_champ.html -- which has a couple of champions. The young woman Julia Dales is plain otherworldly. She could do a wonderful sound track for alien conversation. She mixes percussion with nasal singing and speech and speech-like sounds. Not pretty, but fascinating.

Adam also sent me a link to a strangely cool superhero strip -- a dyslexic cute teenage psychopathic murderer -- http://www.goonpatrol.com/planb/planb1/planb1.html -- people who follow comics probably have a name for this subgenre. It obviously owes something to manga, but is thoroughly Western in style.

I've been picking up the guitar for an hour or two every night. Have to get somewhat in shape, and memory jogged, for the Alaska cruise, about a month from now. Hosted by Jack Williams through "Traveling Troubador"; there will be a certain amount of pickin' and singin'.

Joe

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