Richard Dansky's Blog, page 16

Geek's Dream Girl Interview

Generally these days when I get interviewed, it's about a video game. Less frequently, it's about fiction. And every once in a great while, someone asks me a few questions about my days in tabletop. Lillian Cohen-Moore just did one of the latter - a series of questions about Wraith , and Charnel Houses of Europe in particular - and you can find the result over at Geek's Dream Girl. Looking back over it, I realize that A)I'm a wordy bastard B)I use the word "folks" a lot and C) there were still a few things I wanted to get off my sternum about what I was trying to do with Wraith , back in the day.
So read it, if you're interested in getting down among the dry bones of the past. And let me know what you think, if you do.

Don't Read This Book

Buy it, yes. But read it, absolutely not. If you do, you'll find stories like my "Don't Be Your Father", which is about the lengths one man will go to in order to protect his daughter from the nightmares that plagued him as a child. Or Robin Laws' "Don't Lose Your Shit", which I'll let him tell you about. Or other pieces by folks like the mighty Matt Forbeck, Mur Lafferty, Monica Valentinelli, Will Hindmarch and many more.Wait. Which book am I talking about? Why, it's Don't Read This Book , a collection of stories inspired by delightfully nightmarish RPG Don't Rest Your Head and edited by devilishly clever raconteur Chuck Wendig. It's going to be good. But don't read it. Unless you're the sort of reader who doesn't do what they're told.

Park and a Little Recreation

Found a park today that I'd never been to today. I was over at my folks' place, feeding their cat and taking care of some paperwork for them while they were out of town. That took about an hour and a half, most of which was spent with their cat either in my lap or grabbing my hand with her forepaws to ensure appropriate skritches, and when it was done, I found myself making a detour on the way home. 
The Triangle's full of signs, you see. Little brown signs that mark the entrances to parks, or to wildlife viewing areas, or "Waterfowl impoundment areas", which always brings to mind traffic cops slapping a bright orange boot immobilization device onto a mallard, or possibly a great blue heron. And you drive past them a hundred times, and never follow them, and never give them a second thought. They're part of the landscape. They're white noise. They're invisible.
Except today - which, to be fair, was a beautiful day - I saw one. I'd seen it a few dozen times before, at least. A sign, lonely, stuck on the side of a major traffic artery, right by some office park and industrial stuff, and definitely looking way up there on the sad-and-lonely meter, noting the entrance to a park.
This time, I didn't drive past it. I made the turn, instead. And I drove past some office park stuff, and some warehouses, and some places that were maybe abandoned. I made a left turn, followed some more signs, and then, of course, missed the turn into the park. Fortunately, there was a warehouse of some kind just up the road whose driveway I could turn around in, and so I did.
The park was nice. Not many folks parked in the lot I pulled into, but that's to be expected. There was a lake, visible through the trees, and a lodge, and the usual message board with a map and posted activities and a map and all that sort of good stuff. I got out and walked down to the lake, skirting the chain that was up across the gravel road leading down that way. It was a trek of maybe a hundred feet. As I got closer to the water, I saw other folks on various points along the shore, heard a vociferously contested basketball game on one of the park's courts, saw water going over the top of a dam and downstream in a measured thin sheet. Remarkable features? There were none. It was a small urban park, tucked away in the northeast corner of a city, in a place where those who wanted or needed to find it, would. That was enough.
I stayed maybe five minutes. That was enough, too - to have been there, where I hadn't thought to be before. And then it was OK to go.
 

rdansky @ 2012-04-04T23:55:00

There comes a time in every man's life when he stops, looks around, and says to himself several things that are absolutely unprintable.

Book sale adventures

Sunday, I stopped by the Wake County Library booksale, mainly out of reflex. Every year I go, usually in the company of Melinda and/or friends, and every year I buy books. Usually, I circle it on the calendar; there are excited emails between me and various book-loving friends, and then once the sale arrives, the frenzy begins.
This year...not so much.
I parked probably a quarter of a mile away from the actual book sale building. This was deliberate, to discourage me from filling up more boxes with books than I could carry that distance (i.e., 2). We're at the point where the primary cost of getting books is the space to put them in; the days when I could snaffle up books on a "that looks like it might be interesting so I'll take a chance on it" whim are gone*. Now I have to be picky, which is why I went on Sunday.
Sunday, you see, is when most of the good stuff is gone. For three days it's been picked over; what's left on Sunday is the obscure (which I like), the weird (which I like) and the stuff there's so damn many copies of that a few have, salmon-like, run the gauntlet of grizzlies/readers and made it all the way upstream. It's also the day you see people literally shoveling books by the armload into their boxes, but hey, at $5 a box, can you blame them? (OK, maybe a little). And since the stuff I want is generally the stuff that makes other people go "buh?", I'm OK with Sunday.
The horror section had been picked mostly to bones by the time I arrived. 95% of what was left was Dean Koontz, Koontz in hardback, Koontz in paperback. Koontz from the early days, Koontz' most recent books. I could barely imagine how many Dean Koontz novels had been up for sale originally for there to still be this many. Mystery, for its part, was still pretty densely packed. I picked up a couple of Michael Connollys on the premise that they make good plane books, then put them back on the grounds that they were heavy, and didn't regret the decision. I think I ended up with a couple of oddball Swedish mysteries on general principle; at this point, I'm really not sure.
Science fiction had been picked over pretty thoroughly as well. I did manage to find some goodies - a Kage Baker I didn't have, the hardback edition of Mythago Wood, a copy of The World and Thorinn, old-school stuff that presumably was already owned by people who wanted it and too creaky for those who didn't. Most of the long tables were bare, though, with just occasional oases of clumped books, and book sale volunteers consolidating, consolidating everywhere.
One exception - there were a couple of dozen copies of Elemental, by Brad Wardell, all shiny and new and suspiciously far apart from all of the other science fiction novels. It was if the other books wanted no part of them, and having read the first few chapters, I can see why. If you ever wanted a book-length, less interesting "Eye of Argon", this is your read. It's a tie-in novel for a game that didn't exactly set the market on fire, written by the game's designer, and apparently edited between the hours of 3 and 3:15 PM on the last Friday before Christmas break. Those books were still sitting there on the table when I left; for all I know, they're sitting there still.
Whoever set the sale up had a sense of humor; Religion and Science ran side by side down the same long tables. Of course, Religion was Religion, while Science consisted largely (by the time I got there) of books about cats and innumerable copies of Marley and Me, which are to science what I am to dunking from the foul line, which is to say, what the hell? Science, though, is where I generally make out like a bandit, grabbing books on spruce trees or cod or whatnot that are engrossing reads without the weight of being Very Weighty Books indeed. I like nibbling around the edges of knowledge like that, historical and scientific in the same place, and in a normal year I can fill a box in that section alone. This year, I was a little more cautious, a little more "am I actually going to read this at some point in the next twelve months", and a little less "one man's guide to trying to catch every species of catfish in Argentina? AWESOME!". Still picked up a book about a female explorer and pandas, and an alternative medicine debunker's magnum opus, and a few more, but it could have been worse. It could have been much, much worse.
I wrapped it all up with a few titles out of the history section, then paid up and walked out. To cover the distance to the car, I ended up balancing the box of books on my head; it seemed the most sensible way to distribute the weight. And on a day when there was a marching band competition inside the Dorton Arena building - one of the buses that had hauled kids there had the legend "Chariots for Hire" on the side - it was far from the weirdest thing anyone was wearing on their head.







*Please, no "You should switch to ebooks" rants. If you like ebooks, great. More power to you, happy reading, and it's great you've found a way to experience literature that works for you. Seriously - I'm glad you enjoy reading that way. Me, I like my books solid state and platform independent, not to mention tangible, and that's just how I like reading them. This does not make me a bad person, a relic survival along the lines of an australopithecus, or a hipster. It means I like books that way, and that is all.

Stuff. By Me.

This month's Storytellers Unplugged post is up. Beware: It includes harsh language and a Zardoz reference.
There's a review of Charles De Lint's Eyes Like Leaves up over at Sleeping Hedgehog.
And there will be all sorts of news about short stories coming soon. Promise.

Bigfoot Versus Aliens Versus My TV

As some of you may have surmised, I dig Bigfoot. I have for years, ever since I was a kid and caught my first glimpse of the “In Search Of” episode dedicated to the Patterson-Gimlin film, and I feel absolutely no need to apologize for it. I think there’s something ineffably cool about the notion of a big old critter like that still lurking in the weeds, and I will continue to do so until the day the very last clump of trees larger than a portapotty is knocked down to make way for a strip mall, leaving the big fella without any cover.

Now, I don’t consider myself a True Believer. I don’t wander out into the woods every weekend to make noises like a Ricola spokesman on a coke bender, and I don’t think that there are sasquatches in my backyard. I’m more fascinated by the stories, and the need for the stories, and the scientific implications, however unlikely, of the critter being out there.  And, to be honest, I’ve had more than one friend – solid, serious folks who spend a lot of time outdoors and know what a bear looks like – tell me they’ve seen something out there that wasn’t quite human and wasn’t quite right, and I’ll be damned if I call any of those folks a liar.

So color me a hopeful agnostic on the whole Bigfoot issue, and in the meantime, I livetweet Finding Bigfoot every Sunday night when it’s on. This is partially done for humor value and partially done out of blind rage on behalf of the scientific method; I’m fairly certain that if you had to list the least effective methods of Bigfoot tracking out there, they’d include tramping around in the woods with a camera crew, setting off fireworks, and shouting DID YOU HEAR THAT every time a squirrel farts in the near vicinity. If you condensed down all of my tweets from all of the episodes of that show, they’d probably equate to one long “HYYYNNEEEARRGGHH”. But I enjoy it, and people seem to be amused by it (judging by the number of folks at GDC who wanted to talk to me about Finding Bigfoot), and, well, yeah.

However, season 2 is done, and God knows when season 3 will arrive, which meant that the other night, in an attempt to fill the Sasquatch-shaped hole in my viewing, I actually tuned in to the episode of Ancient Aliens” that was about the supposed link between Bigfoot and UFOs.

This, as you might have guessed, was a mistake.

Now, Ancient Aliens may in fact be the dumbest show on television. One gets the feeling that the mastermind behind it, whom I will call George Molari of House Molari of the Great Centauri Republic, took at look at his fridge one day in college, noticed that his six pack was missing a beer, and rather than question his roommates, decided that his PBR had been stolen by ALIENS. It’s that kind of show. Ancient humans did something? ALIENS. Two rocks are stacked on top of each other? ALIENS. You get the idea. So the idea of watching him trying to wrap Bigfoot in shiny space alien packaging, and maybe claim Bigfoot made the Nazca lines, had all the right elements of train wreck TV.

To be fair, I actually tuned in by accident Friday night – I’d finished off another project and was going to watch a little TV before bed, and hadn’t realized that the show was on. But it was, and the little box in the corner of my tv screen informed me that if I wanted to, I could restart the broadcast so I could watch the thing from the beginning. Of course I wanted to see it from the beginning, so I hit the appropriate button on the remote, and waited.

And the TV turned itself off.

So I said, “Hmm.” And I turned it back on. And once again, I hit the button when I was asked if I wanted to see the show from the beginning. This time, the television didn’t shut off. It just waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. Until finally, it told me that it couldn’t show me that particular piece of television.

I tried again. Twice. 

I got the same result. Twice.

All of which tells me that my television has limits. It will let me watch all the Finding Bigfoot I want. It will let me watch Thundarr the Barbarian marathons at 2 AM on Boomerang. It will let me watch Philadelphia Eagles football. But at Ancient Aliens: Bigfoot and UFOs, it draws a line. It would rather die, than show me that particular slab of television.

It’s a humbling thing to know. And I guess I’ll have to Hulu the show on my iPad instead.

And the Big Man Left The Band

The first time Melinda and I went to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band live, it was two or so tours ago. Organist and longtime band member Danny Federici had just passed away shortly beforehand, and there was a fairly lengthy remembrance of him during the show. Springsteen told a few stories, there was a shared moment, and then the show went on. It felt warm and appropriate and suitably moving, that they were taking time to acknowledge the loss of their friend while doing what they had all done together so well, for so long.

We went Monday to see him again. Before this tour, long-time E Street Band member Clarence Clemons, the Big Man, had passed away. It wasn't entirely surprising - he'd been looking unwell for a long time, and had taken to spending most shows seated on an overstuffed throne onstage until it was time to limber up his mighty saxophone. But there's a difference between knowing it's going to happen one of these days and actually having it happen, and going on anyway.

This time, Springsteen didn't stop the show to tell stories. He didn't eulogize Clemons, nor did he stop to tell stories, or call specific attention to his absence. Of course, he did replace the Big Man with a five piece horn section - one man simply being not enough - that included Clemens' own nephew, a lumbering giant in cool shades and superb saxophonist in his own right. But there were no shout-outs, not projected pictures, no moments of maudlin sentimentality or pausing in loss. Three hours, non-stop, no intermission and no let-up.

And then, in the last song of the last encore - and there was none of the usual passive-aggressive running off stage just to get called back on again, because these guys act like they've been there before - Springsteen and the band launched into "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out". For those who don't know, it's one of the band's classics, and it details the story, more or less, of how Bruce, aka "Bad Scooter", got the band together. According to legend, Springsteen and his then-band, a sort of proto-E Street, were onstage on a rainy night in New Jersey when suddenly, the door to the bar they were playing in was literally blown off its hinges. Standing there, framed in the doorway with rain whipping around him, was a big man with a saxophone, who said, "I want to play with your band." And the rest, it was music. "The E Street Shuffle", which they played Monday, references this. So does "Tenth Avenue Freezeout".

For the last verse, there's a little shift in the lyrics. Springsteen shouts, "Now listen, this is the important part," with the next two lines being "When a change was made uptown/And the Big Man joined the band".

And Monday night, he got there, and he stopped. The band stopped. Springsteen held up the microphone. And the crowd, it roared.

Sometime later, much later, the song started back up again. Which was, come to think of it, just right.

A Quick Note On Travel Stories

My dear friends:

I freely admit that I have travel goblins. In the immortal words of Mike Lee, regarding an evening that included wild dogs, an unexplained circus, a Serbian oompah band, meat frisbees, and Joe Biden, "This shit never happens when you're not around". Weird things just happen to me when I travel, and most of them involve lengthy flight delays.
And yes, I post these things, and often I do so in a certain style that is, shall we say, calculated for effect. Why?
It's not because I'm mad, honest. It's not because I want sympathy. It's because, honest to God, I find all this crap funny. A flight crew trapped in Tulsa? "We're going to try to reboot the plane"? Seriously, how can I take it...seriously. So I write the stories, and I try to write them in a way that will be suitably amusing, and I post them.
Hopefully, they provide a chuckle or two. That's all I want or can ask for. They're most certainly not serious, nor are they intended as blows against the Pearson-LaGuardia machine. Just a giggle, often at my own expense.
And I wouldn't want them to be anything more.

Hey, Look. Book Reviews

In no particular order:

Jonathan Wood's No Hero , about yet another plucky but underfunded British secret agency saving the world from icky death
Cecil Castellucci's First Day On Earth , which hammers home that both high school and being abducted by aliens can suck
Daniel Polansky's Low Town , a tale of a detective in a world of magic, drugs, magical drugs, and real estate values
Peter S. Beagle's Sleight of Hand, which is a collection of short stories largely about family problems, with occasional monsters
Warren Ellis' Desolation Jones , an old review of an old graphic novel that can be summed up as Spider Jerusalem's Burn Notice