If you can stomach the schoolyard shouting over each other that characterizes this clip (and so much of our current political "dialogue"), then you might get a chuckle out of this. Because for once, Big Media -- represented here by Chris Matthews -- calls out the right-wing loudspeaker here for his intellectual bankruptcy. "You don't know what you're talking about!" (He even takes an overdue shot at White House Spokesmoron Dana Perino.) I was giggling by the end of this, despite my disgust at this loud-makes-right style of political discourse. I'm so ashamed!
The other day the school threw a breakfast for all the volunteer parents. As we all filed into the cafeteria and tried to cram our grown-up bodies into the floor-fixed tables and stools built for slender children, I was struck by the gender disparity. I wasn't surprised that there were more women, but I was surprised that out of maybe a hundred volunteers, I only counted four men, including myself. Why are fathers so poorly represented? Some of these women I know through volunteering, so I know that a proportion of them are working professionals. Hell, I work. That's the traditional excuse, and of course work schedules do indeed prevent some parents from doing this sort of thing. But all but four fathers? No way.
That's just pitiful. Get involved, dads. Your kids spend an enormous proportion of their lives in school; it's as much a factor in their moods and their personal crises and triumphs as work is in yours. If you ignore that, you're missing out on a fundamental part of their developing lives. It means so much to them, and it'll be a revelation to you.
Today is the North Carolina primary. I just cast my vote for Obama about an hour ago. By the day's end either Obama will have put Clinton away or -- more likely, since I think she'll win Indiana -- nothing will have changed, and we'll be in or several more weeks of this. We'll see.
Here's the list, from the official site:
2007 Shirley Jackson Awards Finalists
NOVEL
* Baltimore, Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden (Bantam Spectra)
* Generation Loss, Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer Press)
* Sharp Teeth, Toby Barlow (William Heinemann Ltd)
* The Terror, Dan Simmons (Little, Brown)
* Tokyo Year Zero, David Peace (Knopf)
NOVELLA
* 12 Collections, Zoran Zivkovic (PS Publishing)
* Illyria, Elizabeth Hand (PS Publishing)
* The Mermaids, Robert Edric (PS Publishing)
* "Procession of the Black Sloth," Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, Night Shade Books)
* The Scalding Rooms, Conrad Williams (PS Publishing)
* "Vacancy," Lucius Shepard (Subterranean #7, 2007)
NOVELETTE
* "The Forest," Laird Barron (Inferno, Tor)
* "The Janus Tree," Glen Hirshberg (Inferno, Tor)
* "The Swing," Don Tumasonis (At Ease with the Dead, Ash-Tree Press)
* "The Tenth Muse," William Browning Spencer (Subterranean #6, 2007)
* "Thumbprint," Joe Hill (Postscripts #10, March 2007)
SHORT STORY
* "Holiday," M. Rickert (Subterranean #7, 2007)
* "The Monsters of Heaven," Nathan Ballingrud (Inferno,Tor)
* "A Murder of Crows," Elizabeth Ziemska (Tin House 31, Spring 2007)
* "Something in the Mermaid Way," Carrie Laben (Clarkesworld, March 2007)
* "The Third Bear," Jeff VanderMeer (Clarkesworld, April 2007)
* "Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse," Andy Duncan (Eclipse One, Night Shade Books)
COLLECTION
* The Bone Key, Sarah Monette (Prime Books)
* The Entire Predicament, Lucy Corin (Tin House)
* The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, Laird Barron (Night Shade Books)
* Like You'd Understand, Anyway, Jim Shepard (Knopf)
* Old Devil Moon, Christopher Fowler (Serpent's Tail)
ANTHOLOGY
* At Ease with the Dead, edited by Barbara and Christopher Roden (Ash-Tree Press)
* Dark Delicacies 2, edited by Del Howison and Jeff Gelb (Running Press)
* Inferno, edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor)
* Logorrhea, edited by John Klima (Bantam Spectra)
* Wizards, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (Berkley)
The awards will go out this summer, at Readercon.
He was having trouble apprehending its shape. It looked like a huge, suppurated heart. It seemed a confusion of forms, as though the weight of the atmosphere crushed it out of true: He had the strong impression that underwater it would unfurl into something sensible, though perhaps no less strange. Its skin, glistening with dew and sickly excretions, was dark green, almost black. Enfolded in the flesh near the mud was an eye: saucer-size, clouded, eclipsed by a nictitating membrane that covered it like a bone-white crescent moon. A two-foot-long gash was partly buried in the mud; it could have been a mouth, or the wound that killed it. An odor seeped from it like a gas, candy-sweet.
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, including my story "North American Lake Monsters," is loose in the world today. I went down to Asheville's Barnes & Noble and was gratified to see four copies on the shelf. It's quite a nice-looking little book, too. Stories by Jeffrey Ford, Laird Barron, Maureen McHugh, Rick Bowes, and many others should make this one an easy choice.
Bookgasm has a glowing review, including this nice bit:
On a related note, my brother -- a long-time Republican -- has come to see that Bush has been an unmitigated disaster and is going to vote Democratic this election. Until recently he's been an Obama supporter as well, but he's lately swung over to Clinton. Which is fine, as long as he'll vote Democratic when it counts. But soe of the things that have pushed him away from Obama include the flag lapel pin issue, Michelle Obama's comments about only recently being proud of her country, and Jeremiah Wright. These are, apparently, legitimate issues.
I think this country might really be lost.
Speaking of which! Here's a link to a French documentary, recently yanked from Google Video, called The World According to Monsanto. There's some discussion about the film here. Thanks go to Barth Anderson for this.
Small Beer Press has just released Maureen F. McHugh's amazing collection of short stories, Mothers & Other Monsters, for free under the Creative Commons license. Those of you who know me personally may have had to endure my many soliloquies about how beautiful these stories are. I've loaned my copy to friends and have bought copies for others. Maureen McHugh is easily my favorite science fiction writer, and this book highlights everything I love about her work. She writes about mothers and their children, husbands and wives, the fear of forgetting, and the simple joys and terrors of being alive. The genre elements are there too -- cloning, locator chips, spaceships, werewolves -- but they're there to bolster the human element; they do not obscure it. These stories are, like Faulkner said, about the human heart in conflict with itself. She's the writer I want to be when I grow up.
You have absolutely no excuse now. You have to read "Frankenstein's Daughter," "Laika Comes Back Safe," and "Oversite." And then you have to read all the others. This is one of the best collections of the past ten years. And now it's free. READ IT!
My friend April called to my attention a piece in The New York Times Magazine, published in commemoration of Earth Day, called "Why Bother?" by Michael Pollan, who wrote the excellent In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. In the article, he acknowledges some of the many reasons we all use to rationalize not taking personal action in the face of the overwhelming and perhaps unstoppable changes the planet is undergoing. Not the least of these reasons is the simple arithmetic of scale: whatever we do is unlikely to have any effect against the great tide of indifference or apathy of developed nations and the industrial ambition of developing ones. But he makes the case that we should do it anyway. Even if it is hopeless (which he doesn't quite concede). Pollan concludes the piece by suggesting we plant a garden -- either at home or in a community plot. He stresses the benefits to be derived from it, which are mostly abstract and personal. He concludes with this:
"But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction. The garden’s season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit — will you get a load of that zucchini?! — suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world."
I've been pretty despondent over the past few weeks, feeling both isolated and besieged. So maybe it's just a result of my current frame of mind; but this story hit me where it counts. I can very literally think of little more satisfying than getting on my knees in some moist earth, with Mia at my side, and making something grow. I've never been in a garden in my life. I'm precisely the kind of person Pollan writes about in that article: someone who's parcelled out every need and desire to specialists in distant cities, so that I can sit listlessly on my couch and grow fat from the labor of others, cut off from other human beings in every meaningful way.
So I'm going to do this. I'm going to find a community garden in Asheville and I'm going to do it. It probably won't save the world, but it might save me.
Maybe you should try it too.
So Cindy McCain (or an overzealous intern) tried to pass off a bunch of pilfered recipes on the campaign site as her own. And apparently, in a January edition of The New York Sun, she submitted another suspect recipe. Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton also had recipes in that paper.
What strikes me about all this is not the alleged thievery, but the unvarnished sexism of the whole idea of asking the wives of presidential candidates (or the candidate herself!) to submit their favorite recipes for public edification. Or rather, the edification of American women, because they're the ones in the kitchen, right? It's inconceivable that Mrs. Obama or Mrs. McCain do not toil nightly in the kitchen for their poor hungry husbands; it's not as if they have anything else to offer! And let's not ask Bill Clinton, the spouse of the female candidate, because he's a man and doesn't go into kitchens. (This does raise the question, though: how will Hillary Clinton find time to run the country and cook and clean at the same time?)
Seriously, it's a valid story because plagiarism is a valid story; but I'm disappointed that nowhere in the coverage of this absurd item is it being remarked that perhaps asking these women for their favorite recipes is belittling, both to them and to us. Unless they're prepared to ask the fellas about their best car repair advice. Because that would be helpful.
Mia was watching the Beastie Boys on tv. She has been a Beastie Boys fan since two. She turned around and studied me for a moment. "Daddy, would you be mad at me if I became a rapper?"
"Of course not, honey."
" ... well, what if I used bad words?"
Mia's mom listens to rap, and when Mia visits she hears it sometimes. Her mom tries to screen the more profane stuff, but sometimes things slip through. You don't even want to know some of the questions I've had to answer after the fact.
"If you were a grown-up, then that'd be okay, I guess. I would listen to your raps."
"Okay." She turned back to the tv and watched the giant robot from the "Intergalactic" video take on the weird lobster monster.
"Do you want to be a rapper?"
"Maybe. Or a paleontologist."
"Okay, kiddo."
Reviews are starting to trickle in for The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, (out April 29! Only $10.88 at Amazon!) edited by Ellen Datlow. Here's a snippet from one by Nick Gevers:
" ... Datlow’s ambitious volume, The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, could easily be Sci Fiction resurrected in trade paperback. Much the same authors, much the same sensibility—edgy contemporary or near-future stories, full of good prose and suspense, with a touch of horror often evident ... A couple of brief diversions into surrealism are quite entertaining: “The Passion of Azazel” by Barry N. Malzberg, which (chiming with Cadigan’s story) avenges the Biblical scapegoat on a flock of trainee rabbis, and “Daltharee” by Jeffrey Ford, a typically Fordian efflorescence of miniature domed cities. The surreal also perhaps applies in “North American Lake Monsters” by Nathan Ballingrud: certainly its monstrous corpse by a lake reflects all too accurately the mingled inner impulses of the criminal protagonist, a jailbird just reunited with his unhappy family. All of these stories are worthwhile, some very much so."
It's funny, the story doesn't strike me as being even remotely surreal; someone once said "The Monsters of Heaven" indulged in surrealism, and I was baffled by that too. Not that I mind; as long as people like them, I'm happy!
I know I'm late to the party on this, but I just watched the movie called Once and I think I love it. I have to watch it again because I spent half the movie in a state of tension waiting for them to screw it up. But they didn't. It's very low-key, very sweet, and filled with beautiful songs. The guy is Glen Hansard, from an Irish band called The Frames. I'd never heard of him before but now I'm going to try to listen to every song he's ever recorded.
Incidentally, hearing stuff like this makes me wish I was a singer/songwriter instead of a writer. I write for catharsis, mostly, and the catharsis you'd get from a performance like this seems as though it would be so much more immediate and gratifying. This man is screaming in the middle of the street. You know what he feels, because you feel it too. God I wish I could do this.
I tried to prepare Mia for the possibility of Apple's death Thursday night; the vet had been careful to walk the line between optimism and honesty in her presence, but the signals were clear, and I had to prepare her for it. She cried, and then felt better for a while, and then cried some more. That cycle continued throughout Friday, when we had to put her to sleep. She wanted to come with me to say goodbye to Apple, which I think was a good idea. I warned her that Apple was still going to be drugged and likely wouldn't know we were there. She was okay with that. I was too. Frankly it made the whole thing easier, because in that state she seemed mostly gone already. When we got there, though, Apple was alert and very glad to see us. She rubbed our hands and licked our fingers. It was too much for me, and the tears started flowing. Mia's did too, of course. When the doctor injected the drug that put her under into the IV drip, I was hugging Mia. From time to time she pulled back and looked at my face; it occurred to me that she'd probably never seen me crying before. I don't know if my own tears made it worse or better.
On the way home we got a phone call from her grandfather: his dog Lulu, which she sees every day, had just been hit by a motorcycle and killed. Since we were on our way to his house to bury Apple, I had to tell her then. I pulled the car over and came around to her side and broke the news to her. Her face registered about four different emotions before she broke down again. It was too much for one day. It just wasn't fair.
I think she handled it all as well as she could, though. I say "I think" because I honestly don't know. As I said, her mood cycled between tears and apparent indifference. "Indifference" is
We buried Apple in her grandparent's front yard, which has a small stand of trees beneath which other pets have been interred over the years. Mia wrote a number of things on Apple's box, mostly a litany of Apple-facts, including her name, the date of her death, her owners, other pets she'd known, and her temperament ("feisty: 100 %"). We threw flowers on the box and buried it. Mia was caught up in the ceremony of it all; she was distracted from death and focused instead on the ritual of farewell, which is I suppose the primary function of a funeral. While we did this, the grandparents took Lulu to the vet, where she was cremated (Lulu was a Great Dane, and too big for the yard). The girls discussed briefly what the animals were doing in Heaven, and who they were meeting, and whether or not there were any flowers there ("Of course there are," Mia insisted). Mia found a large stick and planted it there as a marker; she had me carve an "A" into it.
"Now we can know where she is, so we can dig her up if we want to see her again," she said. There followed an awkward conversation in which I explained that when animals are buried they have to stay that way, because they were being taken back into nature. How? she asked. Well, nature uses their bodies as nutrients, and in that way they help the trees and the flowers and the plants all grow, so that in a way the animals here become part of the forest.
"You mean they get eaten?" Mia said.
"Well ... yes."
Okay, she said. And then it was over. The girls went off and played, and I sat there on a stump and watched them, and listened to them, while Apple slept at my feet, and Lulu disappeared into smoke. Later they would cry some more, and they would ask questions which would be difficult to answer. But just then they were laughing. I needed to hear it.
Last weekend Dale Bailey's little girl had a birthday, so Mia and I drove over to Hickory to help them celebrate. Six other girls were there too, ranging in age from seven to nine. There was cake, a movie, a sleeping bag slumber party, and a mass dance to the soundtrack of High School Musical, lead by Dale's wife Jean, who has a genius for keeping a lot of very self-conscious little girls with high expectations happy. There was also a fifteen year old girl who'd been recruited to do hair and make-up; at Mia's insistence, and to the frenzied excitement of all the kids, I got my nails painted hot pink. I wore them that way all day, and all the girls called me Hot Pink Nails for the duration of the weekend (even after I cleaned them off Sunday morning; some things you just don't shake, I guess). The waitress at Pizza Hut informed me that they looked very fine, and we all agreed on my elegance.
It's funny how seeing your kid in an unusual setting can reveal new aspects of her. When the kids were dancing and hollering to the musical soundtrack, she joined in for a few moments but then moved over to the couch and just sat there. She looked upset. When I took her aside and asked her if she was okay, she said she wanted to go home. She didn't like dancing and yelling. I said the dancing would end in a few minutes (we were getting ready to go see Spiderwick), and not to worry about it, she didn't have to dance. So we just sat together on the couch and enjoyed the show. It brought home to me how like me she is, in that respect. She's an introvert. Big, loud social displays make her intensely uncomortable, just like they do me. What's a shame is that she feels embarrassed by this -- as though it's somehow her own failing -- just like I did for years. We live in a society that stigmatizes the introvert; they're accused of having social anxiety disorder or of being pretentious or cold, when in fact none of these things are true (or at least they rarely are). We just like the small scale. We like the quiet, and we like to live in our own thoughts. I'm going to try to help her understand that she doesn't have to be ashamed of how she is, or feel as though she's somehow defective because she doesn't feel like a character in a Mello Yello commercial. It took me way too long to figure that out for myself. And after the dancing and screaming was over, she had a good time again.
That night Dale and I retreated to his basement, where he keeps his office, and talked shop for a long time and drank single malt. We showed each other drafts in progress and dismantled and rebuilt them and reassured each other that we were geniuses. We talked about being fathers. We talked about music. It was a good weekend. It's what life is for.
I hit the save button. "Sure, go ahead."
She examined the screen for a moment (don't worry, this was G-rated stuff). "Who is that lady who makes your books?"
"Um ... you mean who bought my stories?"
She waved me to silence, already arriving at the answer. "Helen Adler!"
"Ellen Datlow."
"Yeah yeah! I'm Ellen Datlow." She took the glasses from my face and put them on, casting me a stern and disapproving glare. She leaned over and peered at the story, then started tapping furiously at the keys. "Oh, no, no," she said in an arch British headmistress accent. "Oh this is horrible. Just horrible. You'll have to start all over!"
I started laughing, but I tried to do it silently so she wouldn't stop. But my body was shaking, and she turned around. "What are you laughing at!"
"Nothing!"
"You think horrible stories are funny!? Just for that -- no ice cream for you ever again!"
She wields her awesome power so well, and with such brutal confidence; she'll make a great editor. I just hope she keeps the accent.
That's me: God's right hand man (or John Grant's. Whatever.)
It is perhaps indicitave of the low esteem in which God holds me that when the sublime convergence of me, New York City, and snow finally occurs, it does so on the day I have to go to JFK International and fly home to North Carolina. So I find myself in the odd and deeply unsettling position of begging the snow to stop. I don't know if I've ever done that before, and I hope never to do it again. It seems to have abated a bit: as I sit here at Gate 20 waiting for my flight, I'm staring out the window at several parked airplanes, their tops and their wings covered in snow, and what is falling from the sky looks more like slush than the big white flakes I saw this morning. If it had snowed on Wednesday it would have been perfect; I'd have had a few days to enjoy it and it would have melted enough not to affect my flight home. What's more, by coming down today it forced me to get to the airport as soon as I could, forcing me to miss a planned lunch with Ellen Datlow and several other writers and editors. That's even worse than being stranded at the airport for hours. At least here I have reading and writing to take up the time.
But! The few days I had here were great. The KGB Bar reading went well. I met Nick Kaufmann and Sarah Langan, though sadly there was no time to sit down and talk to them. I'm sure another occasion will present itself. I consoled myself with spending time with Jeffrey Ford and Rick Bowes (Rick, as always, giving me deserved grief for my slow rate of production). I also met John Grant (who made me eat jellyfish!) and his wife Pam, Elizabeth Bear, Rose Fox, K. Tempest Bradford, Jim Freund of The Hour of the Wolf radio program, and the wonderful Mary Hobson (that's M.K. to you, pal), who showed me where Forbidden Planet and The Strand are, and thereby secured herself a position in my personal pantheon of saints forever. Ellen Datlow hosted Mary and me at her apartment yesterday, and we drank some awesome single malt Scotch and Red Breast Irish Whiskey and gossiped about you. I was supposed to meet Livia Llewellyn this morning but she wisely feigned illness and avoided me altogether. That's all right, she can't run forever!
It's funny, I expected to be completely seduced by the city -- I loved it so much and visited it so often during the year I lived on Long Island -- but it didn't really happen. I mean, I do still love it, and could be very happy here, but when I was here last time I didn't have a kid, and that of course makes all the difference. Walking around, I could imagine what I would do here on my own, but I couldn't imagine raising Mia here. More specifically, I couldn't imagine yanking her away from the life she knows and the family that surrounds her. Not that I was thinking about relocating here -- it's just that I thought I would wish I could, and I'm surprised and kind of relieved to find that I don't. That being said, I wished she was with me the whole time. I mean the whole time. I felt guilty being here without her, and I kept imagining what she would say to the double decker buses, and the Empire State Building, and the snow covered trees, and the lights and the noise and the little fruit stands on every corner ... next time I'm bringing her. I guess I won't be able to hit the bars, but I didn't really do that anyway.
Anyway, it was great. I can't wait to come back.
Here's a picture of my bald noggin and Elizabeth Bear getting ready to read. It was quite dark in there, and in this picture she's trying to angle the book just enough so that she can catch some extra light off my head. I'm pretty sure it worked.
All photos are cribbed from Ellen Datlow's Flickr account. Don't look at them because she has worked some dark magic upon them to make me appear Fat. In my heart I know I am really Quite Svelte.
"Besides, readers aren’t viewers; they recognize their pleasure as different from that of being entertained. Once you’ve pressed the ON button, the TV goes on, and on, and on, and all you have to do is sit and stare. But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness–not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won’t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it–everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not “interactive” with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it."
I've been practising for the KGB Bar reading next week. I've been told to expect a block of approximately twenty minutes, and I think there'll be enough time to read the whole story. Or most of it, at any rate. I may have to slice away some pieces. I have to admit I'm a little nervous: I've done a reading before, but that was a few years ago for my piece in The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide for Eccentric and Discredited Diseases. I was essentially reading faux-textbook prose, which required no emotive inflection on my part. In this story, people are occasionally yelling and crying. Does anybody have any advice on how to handle points of extreme emotion in a reading? I'm not one of those monotone readers, but then again I'm no Harlan Ellison either; how do you do a reading featuring distraught characters without a) sounding like you're reading The Wall Street Journal, or b) sounding like an idiot?
In any case, I'm excited. I'm leaving for New York on Tuesday and coming back late Friday night. I wanted to have a couple days just to be in the city again. I miss it so much. Mia is sending along Prance -- one of her stuffed cats -- to keep me company, and I suspect to keep me safe. She's having some separation anxiety, I think. I promised to call her everyday. She's also jealous that she's not coming with me, because she's heard about the world's largest toy store. I'll have to go again sometime soon and take her with me.
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