Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 26

joe_haldeman @ 2013-06-17T16:51:00

Interesting little video came my way . . . Ernest Hemingway's last typewriter in going up for auction at

http://www.booktryst.com/2013/06/ernest-hemingways-typewriter-comes-to.html#.Ub9d2YWRnPw.gmail


He wrote his last (and perhaps his least) book on it at a villa in Spain, which Gay and I visited a couple of years ago.  It came to the auction house through A.E. Hotchner, who had an interesting relationship with the author in his last years.
One source sets the price at $100,000; another says $60-80,000.

I no longer have the typewriter that I wrote The Forever War on, a Smith-Corona electric my mother gave me for college graduation.  After a couple of books it started to buzz like a bumblebanshee.  Think I gave it to a neighborhood kid when I followed Roger Zelazny's example and bought an Olivetti Praxis.
In fact, I wrote a lot of TFW on a manual portable, the Olivetti Valentine.  It was a beautiful typewriter that won all kinds of design awards, but it

 
wasn't sturdy enough to survive mile after mile strapped on the back of my bicycle.   The plastic cover/case looked great, but didn't offer enough protection.  They're going for $400 now.

I still have the Royal manual, "Little Roy," that I saw in a shop window in Iowa City in 1975, for $35.  I only had $25, and the guy needed cash.  Banks closed. So I pedaled ten rapid miles, to the apartment and back, to pick it up.


I wrote all or part of four novels with it, and page after page of newspaper and magazine stories from the Cape during the Apollo era.  It doesn't work too well anymore, and I don't type that well on a manual, myself.  But every now and then I take it down and dab some oil here and there, and clatter out a few paragraphs.
(It occurs to me to wonder whether anybody younger than thirty or even forty could make it work now.  Your fingers have to strike down with some force; no need with a computer keyboard.)Joe

back in Cambridge

Gay and I are back in Cambridge for a couple of days, for a symposium on teaching writing, mostly science writing.  Interesting to be back in the old stomping grounds at an odd time of the year.  (We come to MIT to teach from September through December.  Since 1983.)

We went to an interesting movie last night, on a whim.  It's called MUD, and it's about people who live in same.  Bayou country.  Cute kids of all ages.  Drunken bad guys with shotguns, usually a bad combination.  Especially when you're slipping in the mud.  A pretty girl who stays out of the mud, usually.  Lots of poisonous snakes, some of them human.  Metaphors galors.

(In spite of all the muddy bayous, it's in Arkansas, not Louisiana.  I didn't know they even had bayous in Arkansas.)  (But then I don't have the faintest idea of what they do have there.  A state that encloses the name of another state?)  (Well, I guess West Virginia, sort of.)  (Enough parentheses!)

I was surprised, and pleased, to find that  a vast majority of the participants are female, most of them younger and more attractive than me.  You wouldn't expect that from the event's title, "Communicating Science 2013."  I think of science teachers as male and balding.  Wrong, wrong.

 Joe

Day like all days?

The Big Seven-Oh party was good clean fun.  Forty-two fairly hungry souls who put away an impressive amount of steamship round and appurtanences.   It was reasonably loud but not too rowdy.  Some guitar-picking and singing here and there, but nothing very organized.

People started drifting in about four and peaked around six.  I put out a a little wine and beer and about two dozen people brought more.  Somehow I came out four or five bottles ahead – have to do this more often than once every seventy years!

Actually, my preference is for gatherings smaller than twenty people, a dinner party of about eight or ten being ideal.  Lots of permutations and interactions but not too much of a madhouse.

But of course a milestone birthday mandates a crowd.  A good time was apparently had by all.  At nine most of us hangers-on segued into the living room to share the season's final episode of GRRM's The Game of Thrones with 5.4 million intimate friends.  A surprising number of characters were left standing.

So now I have to get started on the next seventy.  Went out this morning and wrote.

Joe


 

Day before 70th

Drawing was unremarkable yesterday.  I was a little late – underestimated the time it would take to get to the atelier and then left late – so I didn't get there until the last 5-minute drawing and the long one.



For the short one I just sketched with a fountain pen, and then switched to a pencil for the long one.  Didn't feel especially in-the-groove, so I didn't stay for the prone pose.  It was getting hotter by the minute, and I wanted to bike before it got too hot or thunderstormy.

In the event, I had time for a long soak in the tub before the first thunder.

Mike and Sharon Tackaberry came up from Orlando – she's volunteered to help with my birthday party today.  Then niece Lore and Tim showed up with armloads of food!  Tim loves to experiment in the kitchen, and he went on a Turkish binge.  Great slow-cooked lamb chops and strange meatbally things.  Plenty of cous-cous and veggies and salad.

A fine party ensued, sort of a warm-up for today.  It will be smaller than New Year's Eve; I think at last count there were 43 invited.  At Gay's suggestion we're having it catered.  I wanted a Mexican fiesta from my favorite place, El Jimador, but Gay pleaded for less spicy.  We went with a catering service that Lore and Tim had success with.

My instinct is to downplay the specialness of the number, seventy being about the number of birthdays the bible allows you.  It sayeth
The days of our years are threescore years and ten; 
and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,
yet is their strength labor and sorrow; 
for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

which verily sucks.  Shakespeare doesn't improve on it in Macbeth –

Threescore and ten I can remember well: 
Within the volume of which time I have seen 
Hours dreadful and things strange . . .

Fortunately, I've had my own hours wonderful and strange.  And according to the government, I have 16.33 years left, in which case I might just barely see humans land on Mars.  Probably speaking Chinese, but that's okay.

Happy unbirthday to the rest of you!

Joe

movin' on down the road

Balticon was fun, kind of Old Home Week.  Gay and I got into science fiction fandom in the Washington/ Baltimore area, and a few of the people we knew back then are still kicking.  Notably Ray Ridenour and Alan Huff.  They used to be younger than me, but have unaccountably turned grey.  Of course with wisdom to match.

It was good to be back home, but it will be another day before I'm back in the groove.  Yesterday I didn't go to my normal writing place in the morning, recovering from travel and residual jet lag (from Japan more than California/Baltimore).

I did go out bicycling with Brandy.  That's only partially social.  I really have gone a month without regular exercise, and feel slack and bloated.  Ten miles with Brandy yesterday, and a little more by myself today.  Tomorrow out with Brandy again, and Gay feels like she could handle a bike ride, too.

A pile of mail to be sorted, of course, but in a cursory inspection, no big problems to work on.  How email has changed that part of the writer's/artist's life.  You do stay in contact with New York all the time, but if problems come up while you're in Saskatchewan, you can't claim you were out of contact.

And mail isn't the big deal it used to be for writers.  Twenty and thirty years ago, I would come home from a con and run to the mailbox, to see if there was a letter from my agent, with a check or a contract.  Now I usually know ahead of time, if it's a significant amount.

(Though there are sometimes surprises.  One of my publishers has cleverly decided to send checks in an envelope that looks like junk mail.  Not to cheat people, of course.  But most people don't have a four-foot-high stack of letters to sort through.)

Good to be back, anyhow, if only for a couple of weeks.  Going up for a Harvard "interdisciplinary workshop" on communicating science in mid-June.  Get out of the Florida heat for three days.


Joe

Frank R. Paul

There's a really fun page about the great pulp artist Frank R. Paul's take on life throughout the Solar System at . . .

http://io9.com/alien-life-in-our-solar-system-according-to-pulp-art-l-471363935

Paul had a tremendous visual imagination, and wasn't burdened by too much scientific rigor.  These paintings are all about contact, usually first contact, between humans and aliens.  All but one or two of the human space travelers are armed with pistols.  One has a futuristic version of the lever-action Winchester Model 94, causing a little bit of genre shock.

Joe

outside balmer

We are safely here in Baltimore, or wherever we actually are.   Hunt Valley, Maryland, according to the label on the phone.

The plane over was a little too interesting.  Storms up and down the east coast.  Alan Steele's plane got grounded at Dulles, less than a hundred miles south.  Ours orbited a great circle around BWI (Baltimore-Washington International) eight times, waiting for the storms to open an avenue to the runway.

Then we had to wait at BWI for another hour, for other peoples' flights to come in.  The convention's van was taking six of us to the hotel, maybe 45 minutes away.

We left San Diego about three in the afternoon, which would be noon Eastern time.  Got here at 1:30 in the morning.

The flight was less interesting in other aspects.  Old plane with no movie.  So I've got these nifty new earphones but couldn't use them.   Squeezed into the middle seat in a budget flight.   Only thirteen and a half hours.

This continent is too wide.

It does explain to me how they can sell first-class seating for jaw-dropping prices.  It's not just creature comfort, but the prevention of paralysis.  Plus being able to work, rather than juggling stuff trying not to spill your Coke onto your laptop while someone's baby screams in your ear and the fat guy next to you falls asleep at a 45-degree angle.

How long would that train ride be?

Anyhow, a few days' rest before climbing aboard again.

Joe

This space for rent?

The Starship Century Symposium proceeds apace.  Aspace?  Absolutely fascinating.  More than a hundred space people gathered
Very concentrated work yesterday, more than twelve hours.  Unwound with a glass of wine in the motel bar with a few of the participants.  But only one glass, and then staggered up to bed.  It's hard work, concentrating and taking notes (how'd I ever get through six years of college?)

Twenty-five pages in my 4X6 notebook, after fifteen pages the first day.

Greg Benford made an interesting comment from the audience yesterday.  There are billions of dollars of "junk" in geosynchronous orbit – very high-tech junk – and it belongs to whoever goes up and claims it.  Some American entrepreneur should be hatching plans now.  (No other country yet has integrated public and private sectors in space flight, but that won't last long.)  One thinks of a near-future story redolent of old pirate tales.

 "Avast, Matey – can't get me space helmet on with this dagger between me teeth!"

One of my old MIT students, Peter Diamandis, came up in this regard.  He's one of the founders of H.O.P.E. – Human Outer Planet Exploration.  They want to prospect and claim the most valuable Near-Earth asteroid.  There are about 1700 asteroids that are easier to get to than the Moon, which I didn't know, but it makes sense.  (To use resources from the Moon, of course, you have to go down its gravity well and return; the asteroids are "nearer" in terms of energy.)

Well, I'm somewhat on stage today, a panel of sf writers.  So I'd better do a little research.

Joe

starships

Got to La Jolla yesterday for the 100-Year Starship conference.  Here, a picture of our piteously meager environment:



Will try to suffer through for a couple of days.

Mettings start now.

Joe

Thank you IASFM!

I did win a prize here at the Nebula Awards Banquet, but it wasn't a Nebula . . . Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, gave me a nice certificate saying I won the Reader's Award for Best Poem.  That was "Future History," a triolet that appeared in the February 2012 issue.

Let me see whether the line breaks can be preserved . . .


                                   future history


They climbed the sky on a ladder of flame,
  who aimed toward the distant stars.

More than a thousand years ago -- they claimed
They climbed the sky on a ladder of flame.

Never got to Mars.  Only left their names
   there on the Moon.  Who remembers
they climbed the sky on a ladder of flame?
They aimed toward the distant stars?


                                               Copyright © 2012 by Joe Haldeman