Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 23

whitman

One of my favorites, apostle.  Thanks.

Joe

Music of the spheres

A couple of days ago, Gay and I walked over to the old Harvard observatory for their Thursday Observatory Night, even though it was just a hair away from full moon, and there wouldn't be much to see through the telescopes.Surprisingly, it turned out to be more of a musical than a science evening.  The Summer Seasonals are an eleven-member a capella group, and they warmed up the crowd of about eighty with "Love Songs from the 16th Century." John Dowland (1563-1626) wrote "What Poor Astronomers are They," which ends"But such as will run mad with will / I cannot clear their sight, but leave them to their study still, / to look where is no light.Or, in a sexier vein, da Palestrina's _Osculetur me_ . . . .Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth:  /for thy breasts are superior to wine, /smelling sweet of the best ointments, /Thy name is as oil poured out / therefore young maidens havve loved thee.Hot stuff for 1594!After the concert there was an interesting presentation about amateur astronomical photography.  (I may have mentioned this earlier.)  The speaker was the current editor of Astronomy Magazine, which I edited in 1975.  Gay took me up afterwards and introduced me, and I got a few moments of academic fanboyishness!The walk home was long -- well, I'd been to Harvard and back earlier in the day.  Anybody can tell you how hard it is to go to Harvard!
Joe

Here's to the man who drinks dark ale and goes to bed quite mellow ...

Quoted in the blog about Samuel Pepys's diary –


Since the Iate Rebellion, England hath abounded in variety of Drinks (as it did lately in variety of Religions) above any Nation in Europe. Besides all sorts of the best wines from Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Grecia, there are sold in London above twenty sorts of other Drinks, as Brandy, Coffee, Chocolate, Tee, Aromatick, Mum, Sider, Perry, Mede, Meheglin, Beer, Ale, many sorts of Ales, very different, as Cock, Stepony, Stich-back, Hull, North-Down, Sambidge, Betony, Scurvy-grass, Sage-Ale, Colledge-Ale, &c. a piece of wantonness whereof none of our Ancestors were ever guilty.
---Angliae Notitia: Or The Present State Of England. E. Chamberlayne, 1684.


I wants some of that Scurvy-grass, Matey!  And a draught of that Colledge-Ale to take to class.

Joe
 

Writing places

Found a fine place to write this morning . . . walked over to the big Harvard science building – less than ten minutes from our new digs – and was disappointed to see that the café where I'd written last year was locked up.  The guard told me it was closed on the weekends now, nerts.  No coffee.

But I went out front and to the side and found some really comfortable tables and chairs in an airy environment, generous with plants and space.  Wrote for a couple of hours, even without coffee.  This is what it looks like –



Fine as long as it stays warm . . .

Joe

The street where I live

Settling in to Cambridge as the school year begins.  Which is to say, yesterday we came home from the grocer to find ten boxes of clothes and books and stuff on the porch.  I've carried them all inside, so now all remains is to find a place for everything in an apartment that seemed large yesterday.

It's a pleasant location, only three longish blocks from the grocer -- a high-end yuppie deli, actually, with a Starbuck's attached, where I'll be going to work later in the day.  It's five ayem now, so it'll be another three hours before that bastion of productivity opens its doors.

In another direction, we're a few blocks from the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnography and Harvard's physics building, also nice havens.

It takes me about fifty minutes to get to MIT by shank's mare and subway.  Half that by bicycle, I think, but the traffic can be formidable.  (We rode the bicycles home from storage yesterday afternoon, and it was not boring.)  I won't be biking home after class, alas, at nine or ten at night.  Over broken asphalt and heaved cobblestones, a sporting surface for bicycles.

We have the ground floor of a slightly crumbling Edwardian manse, not obviously haunted, yet.

Joe

Pohl

(Thought I had posted this a couple of days ago.)

American science fiction has lost an irreplaceable treasure with Frederik Pohl's death.  He did everything – author, collaborator, editor, anthologist, critic, agent, SFWA leader – and he did it all well.

His perception as an editor changed the course of American sf in the sixties and seventies, with his selection and sponsorship of ground-breaking works such as Dhalgren and The Female Man.

I first met Pohl at my first Worldcon, Washington D.C., in 1963.  I'd just read Wolfbane and was impressed and intimidated.  (All I'd written at the time was some juvenilia -- can someone use that term about his own writing? -- printed in my brother's fanzine Tapeworm.)  Pohl was a huge presence to me for years, one of the immortals out of science fiction's misty pulpy past.

He bought my first story, sort of.  Before he retired from Galaxy magazine in 1969, he wrote back a note, literally the size of a postage stamp, when he returned a story of mine, saying "If you can boil down the first four pages into one, I'll look at this again."  (I did, but by that time Pohl had moved on; his successor bought the story.)

That was not the only time Fred changed my life with a small gesture.  We happened to be sitting together at a meeting of the Science Fiction Writers of America, when the chairman announced that the SFWA treasurer was retiring, and asked for volunteers.  Fred grabbed my arm and thrust it up, which began my five-year incarceration as a SFWA officer.

Central Casting could have chosen Fred as a pulp writer of the thirties, forties, and fifties.  Lanky and careful, slow-moving, thoughtful.  A dark ironic sense of humor, quick sharp eyes and tongue.  Heavy smoker for most of his life and never too far from a glass, though never obviously intoxicated.

He lost the use of his right arm six or seven years ago, but taught himself to type as a leftie, and stayed in the game.  His last book, All the Lives He Led, came out a little over a year ago.

For all those many lives Fred did lead, he did an amazing job.  We'll never see his like again.

Joe

LoneStarcon

We had dinner the first night of the con with Alistair and Josette Reynolds from Wales.  We ate at one of those meat-on-a-sword places, prix fixee for all you can eat.  I opted for the salad, rather than start the con off already stuffed. 

After dinner we took a boat ride down the "river" . . . it's an artificial canal, but I found out that it did used to be an actual river.  It kept flooding the center of town, so about a century ago they terraformed it with impressive steel locks.


Next night we went with the Silverbergs to what is reputedly the best restaurant in San Antonio, but unfortunately the word has gotten out, so the ambience was din and more din.  I did have an excellent pair of quail for my hundred bucks, and two very good wines.

(Actually, if you had food that good at that price in New York, the place would be as jammed.)

Conversation was limited by the noise, though.  We see Bob and Karen so infrequently, I'd trade food quality for a quieter ambience.

We showed up at a Finnish party for awhile, congenial enough if loud and crowded.  I was quite exhausted by midnight and so, determined to act my age, I slunk back to the hotel after one beer.  (They did have plenty of that evil-smelling black Finnish liquor, but I politely declined.)

In the morning I went downstairs to write, but the airconditioning was absolutely freezing.  So I sat down at a table outside at street level – and was stung by a wasp! Thanks a lot, Mother Nature.  It bothered my arm all day, but I soldiered through four panels.

(Actually, the panels were pretty enjoyable, and in responding to one of the questions from the audience, I got an idea that I think will be central to my next novel!  So who says going to cons is a self-indulgent waste of time?  Not me!)

Meeting Rick Wilber for breakfast, so better close and post this.

Joe

San Antonio Blues

I find myself in the embrace of the Curse of Marriott, Texas style. It's frigid, of course, and the noise level is amazingly high for six in the morning – Muzak and 24-hour news television blaring against each other.  The Muzak features people singing in an artificial language.  "la da woo me shoo dory my myla de dah."  That's Boolean for "Are you insane yet?  We can make it louder."

We had a comfortable flight once we got past Atlanta.  As a bonus miles reward, we got bumped to first class all the way to San Antonio.  No meal, of course, not on Delta.  But free cheap wine and all the M&M pretzels you can eat.  They even had a movie, if you remembered to bring binoculars to watch with.

We dropped our stuff at the hotel and went off with Joe Siclari and Edie to find a beer on the famous River Walk.  Very pleasant.  Then we strolled another half mile or so and went to a pretty good Texan place that overlooked the canal – I guess you can't really call it a river.  I got a hamburger smothered in chili, no bread, the Texas Diabetic Special.

One day of peace before the festivities begin.

Joe

--> MIT

Headed for MIT (via the Worldcon in Texas) . . . see some of you soon.
Joe

wisdom from Elmore Leonard, R.I.P.

WRITERS ON WRITING; Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially HooptedoodleBy ELMORE LEONARD
Published: July 16, 2001

,These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

1. Never open a book with weather.

If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues.

They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's ''Sweet Thursday,'' but it's O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: ''I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy's thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That's nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don't have to read it. I don't want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.''

3. Never use a verb other than ''said'' to carry dialogue.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ''she asseverated,'' and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ''said'' . . .

. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ''full of rape and adverbs.''

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words ''suddenly'' or ''all hell broke loose.''

This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use ''suddenly'' tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories ''Close Range.''

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's ''Hills Like White Elephants'' what do the ''American and the girl with him'' look like? ''She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.'' That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.

Unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you're good at it, you don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character -- the one whose view best brings the scene to life -- I'm able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what's going on, and I'm nowhere in sight.

What Steinbeck did in ''Sweet Thursday'' was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. ''Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts'' is one, ''Lousy Wednesday'' another. The third chapter is titled ''Hooptedoodle 1'' and the 38th chapter ''Hooptedoodle 2'' as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: ''Here's where you'll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won't get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.''

''Sweet Thursday'' came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I've never forgotten that prologue.

Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.