Joe's Place

whither kudos?

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 21:11:35 GMT

(There was a lot of silliness about kudos on sffnet . . . )

So I had to look up the etymology of "kudos," which looked Japanese to me . . .

"fame, renown," 1799, from Gk. kyddos "glory, fame, renown," from kydos "glory, fame," lit. "that which is heard of". A singular noun in Gk., but the final -s is usually mistaken as a plural suffix in Eng., leading to the barbarous back-formation kudo (first attested 1941).

Kudzu, though, is just the Japanese word "kuzu," an admirably economical rendition of "green crap from hell."

We went to the annual Vets for Peace solstice concert last night. Twenty years ago it was small and folksy, peace songs and caroling. Now it has an orchestra and fills to overflowing a huge Unitarian church. The spirit is there, but it's gotten a bit fleshy.

It's grown to an hour and a half, before intermission, which is after arriving an hour early to get seats. Kind of agonizing for me, nowadays, though Lore and others donated coats and things to put between the hard chair and my butt's desolation. We limped away at halftime and went home to stare at the dead TV.

Gay went off this morning to get a new one, but she was too late -- the stores were absolute madness. No Geek Squad in sight. She finally made a choice and decided to come back tomorrow early, and picked up a lightweight 19" portable on the way out. So we will no longer be the only people on the block with only one teevee.

The thing weighs about as much as a medium-sized art book, including DVD player. I had to flash back on the first TV set I ever saw, back in 1953. We'd returned stateside from Alaska, where we spent the nights listening to short-wave radio, and discovered at a friend's house this walnut case the size of a Buick, which generated the mirror image of a juddery 8" screen, in garish black & white. Showing Howdy Doody and Milton Berle.

Uncle Milty, thou shouldst be with us in this hour.

Joe

The Xmas Bunny

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 22:34:04 GMT

There's an interesting opinion piece in the Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-debord/tiger-woods-is-so-so-so-m_b_396116.html, claiming that golf will not survive the shensnigans of Tiger Woods. Yeah, like remember football? People used to watch it all the time, before O.J. Simpson murdered it.

Big-name sports guys are no more able to keep their dicks tucked in than big-name academics or bankers or even writers. Sports pundits get all fluttery when their heroes stray and disappoint them, but after all, they get to the highest ranks by being in the top percentiles in terms of physicality. Which includes reproductive ability and enthusiasm.

Speaking academically, so to speak, it's more interesting when you find out about academics or bankers or writers who exhibit the bunnyrabbit gene. I mean, they're dignified. Not sexy at all. And only the bankers have money.

(So why are there so many movies and books about writers getting laid? Does "wishful thinking" ring a bell?)

Joe

those who are about to die say, "Shit! We're not about to die!"

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:11:08 GMT

(From sffnet discussion about the blog that said I was only getting the Grand Master because I was about to die . . . )

Esther, I never reply to malicious fan mail, or blogs, but I did drop this guy (who was nothing like malicious) a note to correct a factual error. They don't just suddenly say "Let's give this guy a Grand Master"; it's a long process of mailings and discussion. So they couldn't have decided to give me the distinction just as I stepped quavering out of the hospital.

I didn't tell him, though perhaps should have, that both Fred Pohl and (SFWA Prez) Russell Davis wrote to assure me that the choice had been made before I fell ill.

Robin, the blog is at http://antickmusings.blogspot.com/.

Maybe it's karma, though. When I was SFWA prez I fought my own board and many past presidents to _not_ give the Grand Master to a writer who I thought had scant qualifications other than impending death. (No, I'm not going to reveal who it was. All fandom would be plunged into war.)

Thunderstorms all day today, but fairly warm. Then we'll be partly cloudy and cold, down in the twenties. But maybe clear enough to take out a telescope. I'm really eager to check out this new go-to mounting.

Joe

harbingers

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 02:34:12 GMT

Maybe the first of many . . . I found a blog that says I only got the Grand Master because I was dying. Hope they don't know something I don't.

I went to the doc yesterday and he said he would set me up with appointments with various specialists (and indeed two called today). But even with an appointment, I sat around from eleven till five to talk with a doc for ten minutes. Unusual for our VA, in my experience. Of course the holidays are a factor.

Felt low today. Here insert some disgusting medical stuff, so I don't have to revisit it.

Tired all the time, and weaker than I was in Cincinnati. No serious pain, though, and no nausea, no trouble eating. (A curious phenomenon is that my appetite suddenly switches off after about half a normal meal. Then I can eat again an hour later. Probably due to digestivus interruptis. Cut a foot and a half out of your bowel and the darnedest things happen.)

Gay and I walked around for a while today and then went to the print shop to get some stuff bound. Then we went over to Brandy and Christina's for a nice spaghetti dinner.

Our TV self-destructed last night. Repairman coming tomorrow, but I'm not sanguine. Looked like the tube blowing out. Very pretty for a few seconds.

Joe

Grandmastery

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:29:06 GMT

(Over on sff.net, I've gotten a few messages from people who found out I was named a SFWA Grand Master . . . )

Well, guys, I've known for weeks that I've been living under the same roof as
a Grand Master, but I haven't let it cow me. I don't let him put on airs, and
in fact make him take off the tiara at the dinner table.

Since there have been 27 other Grand Masters before me, I suspect they should
have changed the title somewhere along the way. Like "Pretty Grand Master,"
"Good Master," and finally "Okay Master," which means your dog sometimes obeys
you.

Seriously, it is a welcome honor. If I had a list in front of me, I know I
could come up with several people who deserve it more than I do. But I don't
have the list, and I'm not gonna look very hard for it.

Joe

Unlocking the poem

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:36:06 GMT

Got a marvelous book of poetry and poetics in the mail Friday -- _Unlocking the Poem_, by Ottone Riccio and Allen Beth Seigel. Riccio ("Ricky") led a poetry workshop in Boston for 40 years; I attended for about 25 years, during the fall semester when I was teaching at MIT. Part of Ricky's teaching method was to issue challenges, like

"It is a dark night, with no moon. You see a bright star in the southern sky. It is blue -- the light is blue -- unmistakably blue, and it does not move. Any form, sixteen to eighteen lines. For extra challenge, try incorporating a rhyme scheme of your own devising."

I wrote this in response --

The Star

(from and for Arthur C. Clarke)

That star flared up the week my mother died:
Nova Scorpius, low in the southeast --
the brightest in nine hundred years, so bright
you could see it with the sun up. "Star of Peace,"
they called it, the propagandists on both sides,
because they signed their treaty then. At least
neither one took credit for the light.
That was God's doing . . . God the Beast
of Sacrifice: seven planets spun
around that star. Could any one of them
have harbored life? The scientists say not.
A hot blue star like that is just too young.
There were no scientists at Bethlehem
when in the east a star flared up so hot
and bright and blue and young. That week the Earth
was bathed in radiance. They say wise men came forth.
Did planets burn to cinders in the light?
And mothers die, to celebrate the birth?

(My little Xmas offering.) The book has 450 such assignments, in 337 pages, along with illustrative poems from Ricky's students. Nine by yours truly.

I'm feeling better, after several days of reversal. Should hear from the doc today. Why do I always get sick on Friday?

Joe

Look! Up in the sky! It's a spiral!

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 21:02:01 GMT

The Norwegian lights are spectacular, and my first take was they couldn't be a hoax, because so many people evidently reported them. But I wonder: every video shows the spiral of light as being perfectly radially symmetrical. That means that everybody with a camera was close to the same perfect spot. (Which is possible, I suppose, if they were all in a city.) I want to see a picture where the spiral is flattened by perspective.

The model was okay this morning, but I was off my feed. Gay came by about 11:30, by prearrangement, and I left early and crashed.

Last night we had a nice chicken dinner with Brandy and Christina and then watched the DVD of _Up in the Air_, with George Clooney perfectly cast as a soulless hatchetman who fires strangers for a living. His perfect Cary-Grant-leading-man looks are well used in the story. The people he's firing can't believe such a nice guy would walk in and ruin their lives.

The acting is subtle, though. A man with no home or family, who would like to think himself unencumbered by feelings, obsessed with collecting frequent-flyer miiles. Of course he meets his opposite number in Vera Farmiga, thinking she's just another babe he picked up at an airport bar. She drops the truth on him in a killer scene that ends with a minute-long shot of Clooney staring at a destination board in an airport, his expression revealing almost nothing as his inner world disintegrates.

(There's a light-hearted throwaway line where they're talking on the phone, where she says, "You know, I'm just like you, but with a vagina." He doesn't see the truth of that.)

Christina showed off her new kitchen, gorgeous, more than a year in the construction. All marble and hardwood and stainless steel. A cook's kitchen, with big gas range and two ovens. Brandy ruefully noted that it cost more than his first house.

I've been resting up for the astronomy club party tonight, which we've always missed because we're still up at MIT this time of year. Should be fun.

Joe

an old picture

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:51:25 GMT

When Lore met us at the airport, she brought along a framed old photograph of my mother -- soon after I came back from Vietnam (28 Feb 69) Gay and I drove up through the snow, from Washington to New York, to celebrate a belated Christmas. My mother built a snowman beside the driveway, holding a can of beer, smoking a pipe (as I did then), holding a sign welcoming me home.

No snow here. But nice resonance.

Joe

(In chorus now . . . "Aawwwww" . . . . )

pomes pennyeach

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:55:48 GMT

(Neale Morison, in sff.net, wrote a poem to celebrate our transition ---

• Some places you want to remainsville,
• And some are a permanent painsville,
• A big yippee-yi-o
• For leaving Ohio
• Its loss is Florida's Gainesville.

Neale, you get the No-Bile prize for friendly poetry. Or would you rather have the Nubile Prize for friendly poetesses?

All this talk about shoes and socks. Hm. Many of you who've known me for decades have never seen me in proper shoes. I started wearing sandals in the mid-seventies, when we lived in Ormond Beach, and scaled up to Birkenstocks in the eighties. When it gets cold, I add woolen socks, knitted by my skillful niece Lore.

It is a nerdish look, but its roots are powerful. Some years ago there was a magazine article that showed a newly unearthed monumental sculpture of a Roman centurian, and it noted with feigned shock that the heroic figure was wearing leather sandals with woolen socks -- they conquered the known world but had no fashion sense! I rest my case.

Tim and Lore and Barbara met us at the airport with a hastily organized flashmob of another half-dozen friends, and a big sign that Barb had printed up, welcoming us home. Then we went back to our house, where Tim had made a huge crockpot full of roast beef and vegetables, simmering since morning. We had a good feast and chat, though I had to excuse myself every hour or so to lie down for a few minutes.

Maybe the antibiotic drip I'm getting tomorrow will give me back some energy. Just being home will take me a certain distance. (But then I do have to gird myself and hit the mall for St. Nick.)

A basic piece of Xmas lore that I'd missed all these years -- the gift that St. Nicholas gave was gold coins, to young girls who would otherwise have been forced into prostitution. (Checking, I see that Nicholas in the patron saint of prostitutes, but he gave the money, three bags of gold, not to the girls, but to the girls' father. For lack of dowry, he was otherwise going to sell them into prostitution. Ambiguous moral lesson there.)

If it were not the Christmas season I would say it's a good thing God is fooled so easily.

Came home to a mountain of packages, many of them FedExes with DVDs of recent and current movies for the Oscar voting (all Writers Guild member get 'em). The FedEx guy just came to the door with _Public Enemies_ and _It's Complicated_. Hot damn, Brad Pitt as a gangster. I've never heard of _It's Complicated_ (haven't been inside a movie theater in three months), but it stars Meryl Streep.

And I can watch movies and work at the same time. Have a big box of cover sheets to sign for Easton Press's limited edition of _Starbound_. I can sign two or three hundred per movie, depending on how engrossing it is.

Among the foreign editions sitting here in boxes is the Japanese edition of _The Hemingway Hoax_. I have to wonder how well that ambiguous and mysterious book can translate out of American idiom. A lot of Americans wrote to ask me "What the Hell?" (It's all made clear on p. 152. I think. But I'll never again write a book that people can't understand if they miss one paragraph . . . , )

Joe

damn bugs

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:10:36 GMT

Turns out that pancreatitis is a gift that keeps on giving. A culture of the gunk being extracted from the site (pancreatic fluid and little bits of pancreas) came back crawling with pseudomonas. So it's back on the IV for me, some antibiotic.

Picked it up in the hospital. (And everybody was singing, "All I want for Christmas is an opportunistic infection.")

Fortunately, since I don't yet show any symptoms, I can delay the IV drip till I get down to Florida. The surgeon here is calling my GP there. It's not a rare or particularly dangerous thing. Just another little oy vay, to stay in the holiday spirit.

Hope I don't have to be admitted, to do an IV. I had one at MIT a few years ago where I just had to show up once a day and let it drip for an hour or so. I need to be out on the street, buying last-minute presents.

Joe

fakes from the sky o my

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:08:30 GMT

Niece Lore has come to my rescue on the Sopranos. She wants to see them again, too, so we'll make it a Family thing.

Mitch, I don't dare get Netflix. I'd never read or write again.

My own library needs culling, Dave, by about 20-25%, to get the stacks of books lying around everywhere up on shelves. Have to be ruthless and get rid of books that I'll never open again; those that don't have any esthetic or associational value. It's not a good time of year to cart books to the used book stores. But there's always Friends of the Library, good for a tax write-off.

Actually, I don't even want to think of that now. I want to be home, surrounded by walls of books in every room. (I even put shelves in the tiny third bathroom, for all the cartoon books.)

Had a nice dinner last night, spaghetti carbonara, with four Cincy benefactors. It's one of my favorite dishes now, but I realized that if my mother had ever put it on the table when I was a kid, I would've run screaming. Raw eggs! Poison! (The heat of the spaghetti actually cooks the eggs, at least partially, but when I was young my eggs had to have the consistency of leather.)

First actual snow of the season out there, maybe half an inch accumulation. That's enough, now. Tomorrow we drive up to Dayton. Spend the night with Rusty and take the first plane south in the morning.

Joe

. . . shuffling toward Gainesville to be born

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 16:51:47 GMT

Thanks for the laugh, Dave. Unfortunately, my Superman tights don't work so well with the tubes and bags hanging from the super-torso. Maybe six months from now.

Watched a couple more Sopranos last night. Utterly fascinating. The lead actor, James Gandalfini, does everyday evil so well . . . all in a day's work; get off my case. It's delicious, malicious fun to watch his two lives mixing it up. The family man who's also a Family man.

We'll have to find someone down in Gainesville who can loan us the rest of them. Surely we know someone with both the appetite and the bucks.

Laura Resnick coming over in a few minutes for lunch. Better get everything together.

Joe

Homeward bound

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 15:12:29 GMT

Thanks for the good wishes, all. Gay and I are both still adjusting to the idea -- I guess out of self-preservation we haven't let ourselves be too optimistic.

It was undramatic enough. The doc looked at my tubes and wounds and said, well, you could go home now if you want. Do you feel okay to fly?

In fact, I'm not sure I would need a plane.

Just have to get in touch with my primary care doctor at the VA in Gainesville, who will hook me up with a couple of specialists -- a gastrointestinal surgeon and a radiology person (who follows up on CRT results). Then let un-nature take its course.

Then there are the non-medical complications of having lived in a borrowed apartment for months. Getting everything spic and span and scouring the place for our gear. Mail home a few boxes of books and magazines. Get the borrowed car in shape.

As a celebration, when it got dark we drove through "A Holiday in Lights" at a local park, Sharon Woods. Lots of garish electricity in the service of Santa and Hannukah and Xmas and all. We stopped at an exhibition hall and watched a Scrooge puppet. Gay got her annual gingerbread man. Gosh, the excitement.

Joe

FLORIDA BOUND!

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 20:55:33 GMT

We're headed home! The surgeon released me, and Gay's been on the phone arranging things. Be back home in Gainesville about 1700 Wednesday.

Have a doctor appointment down there on Friday, so that aspect of life will continue uninterrupted. Still a couple of surgeries to go, but at least I'll be able to recuperate in the sunshine. And I'll recover much faster, surrounded by my telescopes and art stuff.

Joe

post-op memories

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:28:28 GMT

An old friend who has been through the mill with cancer wrote and asked me how I felt during and immediately after surgery . . . .

my earliest recollections after I went under were a series of ghastly dream images, where I was involved (as a third-person character) in painful and disgusting ways. But for some reason I think that those were only in the first hours after surgery. When I slowly came out of it I was of course drugged to the gills, but my memories are mostly pleasant, a succession of close friends coming by. I could spell out responses (couldn't talk because of tracheotomy) on a Speak 'n' Spell board.

A measure of how out-of-it I was . . . when they prepped me for the ambulance ride to my recovery hospital, they pulled out -- yanked! -- the tube than ran down my nose to my stomach, and the catheter up my penis. I hadn't really been aware of either! Good thing, I suppose.

When I was recovering in the bed-rest place, I went through a kind of dreamy fugue state. I was aware that I had come extremely close to dying several times, but my feeling about that was eerily positive. "If I had died I wouldn't even have known it," and so forth. That calm acceptance has evaporated, replaced by my normal state of mild anxiety.

I'm still experiencing a variety of post-op depression. Mostly a constant desire to sleep, some of which is just physical recovery, but I recognize that part of it is "if I'm asleep I don't have to deal with anything." I'll talk to the doc about it tomorrow. I don't want to join the Prozac Nation, but I wonder if there's a short-term, less powerful medication that could make me a little more peppy and productive. I hate creeping around like a fucking invalid, and don't like the application of that word to myself, with its double meaning.

I'm still in constant low-level pain, which is manageable with naproxin but never goes completely away. It's a distraction, but I can't blame it on my low productivity. The current novel's in a rough patch anyhow, and I wish I could bring 100% of my ability to it. Fortunately, everyone around me, very much including my editor, is forgiving and understanding. So I inch along knowing this, too, shall pass.

Love, Joe

Diet on the American Plan

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:45:59 GMT

Jeff Carver took over my sf class, Keith, and I couldn't have made a better choice. (Not that I personally made the choice -- I was still unconscious.) The Longer Fiction was picked up by a writer I don't know, a friend of Junot Diaz.

I don't know whether I will get to Florida quicker than if I were still teaching at MIT . . . I'd be leaving Cambridge on 18 December. Guess I'll find out tomorrow, whether we'll beat that. Hope we will.

Dave, if I opt for cryonics I don't think I'll use a Denver winter as an intermediate step -- thanks anyhow. I know it would save energy and all. But when they pump the blood substitute into my brain, I want it to retain the image of beautiful babes in bikinis. Not shapeless lumps in parkas.

Saw an interesting early gangster movie on the Turner channel last night -- _Petrified Forest_, with Humphrey Bogart and Leslie Howard, and Bette Davis as the obligatory woman. This was Bogart's first stubble-chinned tough guy role, which of course he repeated for years. Howard's role was interesting, surprisingly nuanced for the genre, if ultimately sappy with romance.

Gay just suggested we go out to Steak & Shake for a hamburger for lunch -- my first since August. Gaining weight on the American Plan. (Actually, I only have eight pounds to go. At 175 I'll go back to a normal diet. Meanwhile, pass that apple pie and ice cream!)

Joe

The right to keep and try to lift arms

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:59:04 GMT

Dave, when I was in high school in Bethesda, Maryland, there was a place across the Potomac called "Ye Olde Hunter," which was the retail outlet for Interarmco, an international weapons dealer. They had thousands of old rifles from WWI and the Spanish-American War for less than twenty bucks (I googled, and the basic Krag carbine now goes for $600-$1600.) A buddy of mine got a British Enfield jungle carbine there (without ammo) and I was so jealous.

I was totally impressed by their WWII anti-tank rifle. Just the thing for a big-game hunter. It was .75 caliber and fired high-explosive armor-piercing shells, which you could buy by the box. No permit required, of course. It wasn't a _handgun_.

(Life was simpler then. I googled and found a 20-mm. one, with the information "there are some around and for sale every once in a while. The problem is not only the cost but the category, since they are not Title II firearms and a Class 3 dealer can't handle them. They are Destructive Devices and require a special license (not an SOT). There are several states that don't even have one licensed dealer, meaning that, regardless of state law, residents of those states cannot buy DD of any kind.")

Nothing has happened around here that required anything so formidable. The cleaning lady came but she only threatened the dust. But then a guy came with DSL and installed the internet right here in the house! So I don't have to hobble out to a coffee shop to talk to you guys. Just hobble into the kitchen, and get my exercise elsewhere.

The nurse also came, and inflicted various wound-cleaning rituals on me. I'll be grateful in the long run. As opposed to the short hobble. Doctor day after tomorrow, perhaps with a Florida prognosis. Man, it's gettin' cold up here.

Joe

Blazing saddles and other breaking medical news

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:11:30 GMT

How could I have missed _Blazing Saddles_ and _Butch Cassidy_? I've never seen the bowdlerized version of B.S., for which I'm grateful.

Interesting coincidence -- or probably just an example of subliminal recall -- hours after I wrote down that list of Westerns, I looked at the TV listings and saw that the Turner channel was showing _The Treasure of Sierra Madre_, included on the list in spite of its modern elements. So we watched it after dinner and much enjoyed Bogart chewing up the scenery as the gold-crazed drifter. The movie's identified in the first establishing shot as happening in 1925. But it has cowboys and Indians and Mexicans and gold fever and sixguns and several shootouts, so what do you want?

I loved the TV series _Paladin_ back in the fifties; it was so noir and grown-up for a kid in junior high. Saw one recently, though, and I'm afraid it doesn't hold up.

I'm trying to think of the name of a lovely transitional Western that came out about 25 years ago, set around 1908, where the first Model A (or T) comes to a Western town, to everybody's disapproval, and some cowboys ooh and ah over a brand-new automatic pistol. (Was that in _Butch Cassidy_?) There was a striking scene where a daredevil, I think Paul Newman, rode a new-fangled bicycle backwards, down a steep bumpy hill. Anybody remember? I recall that Newman did his own stunts.

Nothing much happening today. The front-page headline on the Cincinnati Enquirer is "Lead exposure, brain damage linked." A couple of days ago, I kid you not, it was "Cholesterol has a role in heart failure risk." News? Am I caught in a medical research time loop?

Tomorrow will be "Firearm death rate linked to gun ownership." Just to stay consistent with the above.

Joe

Heinlein Award

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:21:14 GMT

(Response from sff.net -- )

I was happy about the Heinlein award, of course, when they told me about it. Decided before I got sick, glad to know, so it's not a sympathy thing.

Dave, I like the specialized use of the word "valid" in symbolic logic. An argument is valid if (so to speak) both sides of the truth-value equation balance. But that has nothing to do with actual truth. If any of the elements of the argument are false, the validity of the algorithm has nothing to do with "truth."

Good lists of westerns. I would definitely add _Unforgiven_. _The Shootist_, _High Noon_, _Treasure of Sierra Madre_, _True Grit_, _Fort Apache_, McCabe and Mrs. Miller_. Haven't seen _Shane_ since I was a kid, but it might hold up.

We didn't get _Firefly_, but I've seen most of them on DVD. Excellent. Likewise _Deadwood_.

Last night we watched the first three hours of _The Sopranos_ on DVD. Pretty cool. First time I've seen any of them.

Reading the "donnish" Michael Innes mystery, _Hamlet, Revenge!_ Enjoying it immensely. A locked mansion mystery.

Joe

Ah believe in John Wayne

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:53:17 GMT

Dave, I don't even believe in Newtonian physics or Einsteinian relativity, as I understand the verb "to believe." I think they provide good answers to the right questions. One counter-example and I'm reaching for my hat.

I've been comfortable with this state of nonbelief since I was in my teens, though my atheism predates it. My juvenile atheism was a kind of belief; I wasn't old enough to be comfortable with absolute uncertainty. Now I take comfort in it. Belief of any kind makes me tired. (Sometimes scared.)

I don't think it's cynical; I'm a skeptic but not a cynic (embracing the classical distinction of price versus value). If I were to hook up with any religion, it would have to allow so much latitude that its borders with nonbelief would disappear.

Guess I'm a secular hedonist. I can claim to be a humanist, too, but that's harder to demonstrate.

Interesting coincidence after watching the DVD Western -- "Tombstone" was on last night, and we endured the commercials to watch it. Interesting comparisons, though of course "Tombstone" did have to more-or-less conform to historical incident.

(It wasn't accurate, even in broad strokes. There's an interesting take on that at http://www.clantongang.com/oldwest/movie1.htm.)

Gay and Rusty and I saw the movie when it came out, in 1993, only about a dozen miles from the real Tombstone. We were camping just north of the town, and didn't know about the movie until we drove through. So we did the Cook's tour of the place and then saw the reconstructed (I assume) town in the movie that night.

A pretty entertaining movie, though it was drastically cut for TV. Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday was a lot stronger in the actual movie, and was a high point. The other acting was good, too.

I'm a sucker for the genre, though I've only written one novella that might roughly be categorized as a western. That's "Manifest Destiny," which was in the '83 F&SF and the Year's Best for that year, plus my collection _Dealing in Futures_.

Maybe I should do another one. Slap leather, you sons o' bitches.

Joe

holidays and horse operas

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 20:08:50 GMT

I like your take on Christmas, Dave. I try to get the best out of it, too. Won't be able to do much high-caliber gift-giving this year; too much time spent on my back. But we'll have the family and feast and the streak of goodness that runs through the commercialism like the delicious apple and cinnamon through a plain roll of a morning. Like morning coffee with a surprise shot of Grand Marnier (no longer for me, unfortunately).

I'm sorry winter is such an unrelenting downer for you. We get to your Colorado every few years during the winter, and the brisk ice and snow are a bracing tonic for our subtropical sensibilities. But we always get back to the sunshine before the chill reaches bone.

My really cold winters in Alaska are colored with the optimism and fun-seeking of childhood. Building igloos, sledding down long slopes, battling from behind snow forts with unlimited snowball ammunition. Playing with my black cocker spaniel, who would roll in the snow and wind up looking like some animated confection.

Even the twenty-below cold of Iowa in graduate school was not without pleasure. I don't mind walking when it's too deep to drive, and still love the creak and whistle of snow, walking when it's too cold for mammals.

Yesterday got up at 4:30 to be at the hospital by 6:00 for a routine procedure, removing a tube that drained the pancreas and replacing it with a smaller tube. The predictable happened -- I lay in a hospital bed for hours (having had nothing to eat or drink since midnight) and finally was wheeled into the operating room at 10:30. Wheeled out at 11:30, after a five-minute procedure. Lay in a room for another hour or so, but a kindly nurse brought me an 8-oz. Diet Pepsi and some graham crackers.

Gay fixed me a huge leftover turkey sandwich when I got home, though, followed by a slice of Becca's good peach pie. So even though I had a new bag depending from my abdomen, to match the ileostomy on the other side, the world became all right.

I mostly slept the day away, still fuzzy from the sedatives they gave me for the procedure. Roused myself around dinnertime for one of my favorite meals -- post-Thanksgiving casserole. Joel had bought the DVD of Sergio Leone's epic _Once Upon a Time in the West_, the director's cut, almost three hours long. I had a hankerin' for it, as we aficionados say, and because I'm sick the others went along with it.

Well, it was sort of like a Sergio Leone western with a lot of air blown into it. The bad guys in long coats, the dusty pseudo-realistic western town, the beautiful woman and the complex not-so-good guy. A thousand pregnant pauses. Two minutes of Claudia Cardinale admiring herself in the mirror with a troubled look that slowly mutated into a troubled look. Several massacres and a shoot-out. A really mangy bad guy with a sawed-off lever-action rifle hanging from a string around his neck. A harmonica tying everything together, sort of. Cool horses, kind of scruffy. Good railroad stuff.

Symbols galore. Water. Money. Bullets. Hats. Lanterns. Facial hair.

Water was especially interesting. The bad guys wanted the beautiful woman's land because the railroad's a-comin' and her land has the only water in fifty miles. (You might wonder why they didn't put the town there, instead of several miles away.) At the end, after a bad guy dies just inches from water, she takes water to the assorted minorities who are working on the railroad in her front yard. She evidently performs a Jesus-class miracle, because she takes care of a hundred semi-legal immigrants with less than two gallons of water.

Henry Fonda enjoys playing a really really bad guy, a smooth-cheeked child-murderin' rapist who cheats at cards and throws away parking tickets.

I did like it, though. Made in 1968, it pointed toward a genre that may not have a specific name -- dramas set in a late-19th century West that attempts to be historically accurate in terms of background and quotidian details, and that are more or less realistic in terms of blood and gore, but retain the dime-novel fantasy tropes that have characterized the movie genre from the beginning.

Of course the take-home exam is to think of a sciencefictional analogue to that mixture. For me it was a large part of the attraction of the original _Star Wars_ movie -- rusty robots and homesteaders scratching out an existence on an alien planet, looking kind of ragged and dirty. Then it got all flashy, unfortunately. I guess some cineastes might have a similar problem with the Leone movie; oil and water.

Joe

take a turkey to dinner

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:33:51 GMT

(In response to sffnet -- )

Actually, I like putting on a big feast myself, when I have normal energy. I like to do a couple of ducks (used to be a goose before they went sky-high) and have plenty of meat and fat for cassoulet the next week. The family picks over one of the ducks the day before Christmas.

For some reason I've been especially feeble the past couple of days. Maybe the approaching (two and a half hours now) holiday. Did I mention that I don't much like holidays on principle? I guess I do like the part with family and food and giving presents. But all the public greed and sanctimoniousness and sheer ubiquity of it makes me vaguely ill from late November till early January.

Of course we should all emulate Baby Jesus and treat one another with love and respect during these special days. And, to quote Tom Lehrer, be grateful that it doesn't last all year!

Even as I write, that turkey is waiting for us across the parking lot in the Kroger's. And mashed potatoes and gravy and all those things to feel thankful for. Hope you all have a good feast and a sound nap watching the Lions lose. (In ancient Rome, they never did . . . )

Joe

philosophers and root vegetables

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:04:43 GMT

Nothing of great import to report. Went to the hospital and had a CAT scan, which will guide the doctor[s] in moving the tube that I think runs over the top of the pancreas (and then out through a hole in the upper abdomen to a vacuum receptacle). That will be day after tomorrow.

Another schedule shake-up, keeping us in Cincinnati some days more. (Not a big problem, since I'm not yet physically up to a thousand + mile car trip.) Going to have the little "procedure" Friday on the abdominal tube, requiring sedation but no serious surgery. Then a week from Friday I'll finally see the original doctor, out of town for a week, and perhaps get a travel verdict. Maybe have the tube removed.

Made a pretty good dinner, all vegetarian, almost all from Becca's garden. She and Gay dug up all kinds of root vegetables. Then Gay cleaned them and I prepared sweet potatoes and carrots as "oven fries," cutting them like oversized French fries and tossing them with olive oil and cinnamon, then baking; on top of the stove I did a big bunch of fresh Swiss chard, just wilted in olive oil with a squeeze of lemon. Avocado and tomato from somewhere south of Ohio. My customers thought it was all great.

Read a fascinating graphic novel, _Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth_, a 300+ page biography of Bertrand Russell and his friends and enemies, wives and lovers. With a bit of propositional calculus thrown in for spice. Well drawn and written. (Authors Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou; art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna.)

Wishing everybody a happy T-day. (Tryptophan?) I may be offline for a couple of days, though so far they don't plan to keep me in the hospital.

Joe

stars and tears

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:16:14 GMT

Elizabeth, our experience was just like yours. When I first got the Questar, I could use it in the back yard and see lots of galaxies and nebulae. Now, with the football stadium and shopping mall, forget it. At least with a small scope. With my 12" and a Skyglow filter, I can glimpse deep-sky objects. I hope that will also be true with my next scope, a 9.25" Mak.

We do have dark sky about eighteen miles away, in Paynes Prairie State Park. Have to rent a campsite to get in at night, though.

A few days ago Stephen Leigh brought by a guitar for me to play if I was in the mood. I tried it once and found it too difficult -- my main guitar at home is a nylon-string classical; the only steel-string I play regularly has ultra-light-gauge strings. These were regular gauge, and they hurt my fingers too much; I couldn't bear down enough to make a decent tone.

Today I thought I'd try it again, and when it hurt I bore down harder -- don't be such a wuss -- and after a few minutes I was able to play right through the pain. My fingers remembered "this is the way it always is, coming back from a long absence." I haven't played since August.

I strummed around and subvocalized until I found a song I thought I could sing with my hoarsened voice, a high one with not too many notes. When I sang it, Gay burst into tears. Another part of her husband was back.

Joe

war and peace and moon and stars

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:22:27 GMT

Mitch, I have to admit that I didn't take note of the viciousness in the attitudes of the crew in the new Trek movie. I'm too inured to it, I guess. You make a good point, though, or a good set of points. The generation that created the pacifistic Star Trek knew what real world war was. The generation working on it now sees the good guys doing their thing in the desert on TV. That's war, and the grainy black-and-white cataclysm of world war isn't even memory anymore, just history.

Not that I don't think they are good guys, or at least gooder than the ones they're fighting. But moral murk is the province of war, as well. Like W characterizing as "cowards" people who trained for years to drive a jetliner into a building. There are better words for them. And most of the men and women protecting our interests in Afghanistan know that they aren't GI Joes and Janes; defeating Hitler was a different and less subtle game.

Your points are good, too, Elizabeth. We live in a charmed and relatively peaceful time and place. People like me see it as unstable equilibrium, though. Spend an afternoon listening to hate radio and see the dark side. We lefties tend to dismiss them as nutcases. As German lefties did in the thirties.

I just got a joyous phone call from London. When Judith Clute was here I gave her a small telescope -- a 3" Dobsonian reflector that Celestron brought out to celebrate the Year of the Telescope. The skies cleared over London and Judith took the little scope out onto her garden terrace and looked at the moon, which is the best target for the little scope.

Does make me wish I was back home with my little Questar. Maybe in a couple of weeks. Having a CAT scan on Tuesday and a meeting with the surgeon on Friday. Hope my stars are lucky.

Joe