Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 27

Books into movies

On Facebook a reader asked why none of y other books (besides The Forever War) have been made into movies . . .

Russell, so many factors are involved in "Why hasn't X been made into a movie?" that the answer has to be a helpless shrug.  Books that seem like naturals fail time and again – look at "The Great Gatsby," for goodness's sake! – and obscurities like Clarke's "The Sentinel" make history.

One factor may be that I don't care desperately enough.  Hollywood is full of writers constantly pestering producers, doing lunches, sending scripts around wholesale, and investing blowjobs real and metaphorical in pursuit of The Deal.

I'd rather just write books and hope that the Deal finds me.  If it doesn't, well, I will have written books.

Joe

What's your town's crime rate?

I don't often get to chill and read the university's student paper, but here I am, stuck in a coffee house waiting for the car to be serviced.  So I open up the Alligator and read "Attempted butter-knife stabbing results in Gainesville man's arrest."

You may have read it here first (if you live someplace else).  His aunt refused to give him more than $25, afraid he might spend it on cocaine.  So he grabbed her purse and they began to struggle.  (He's 49, so his aunt is probably well past Social Security age.)

He grabbed a butter knife and raised it to stab the poor lady, so his uncle stepped in and knocked the knife away, and all three of them were rolling around on the floor trying to gain control of the sublethal butter-stained weapon.

The cops showed up and the 49-year-old genius tried to snatch the officer's gun while he was being handcuffed.  They found his crack pipe, and he admitted that he "was trying to get ahold of the officer's gun so he could shoot someone."

No, he wasn't released on account of honesty.  He will probably be in the pokey for days.

And you thought your town was tough.

Joe

Home to touch base . . .

(In sff.net, a reader wrote in about artificial beef, yum.)

Like Pohl and Kornbluth's Chicken Little in _The Space Merchants_, Bruce.  An idea whose time had come a half-century ago.  I predict a lot of market resistance in America and Europe, which might evaporate as the cost of meat skyrockets.  And Madison Avenue applies its creative might to the problem. Home from Japan five days now, and nothing much has happened.  Unpack, do laundry, get ready to pack the suitcase again.  Off to the Nebula Awards weekend in San Jose on Thursday.  Then to UC Davis for the 100 Year Starship Symposium.  Then Baltimore, GoH at Balticon.  At the end of May I get to come back to Florida, until mid-June.  Then up to Harvard for a "Communicating Science Through Fiction" symposium.  Then patriotically home till the 4th of July, and off to Spain.I don't really hate travelling as an abstraction, though I do hate airports.  Long flights at least give you time to sit and read.  The nonstop Tokyo-to-Atlanta was too long, though; more than twenty hours in transit.  My right knee seized up pretty badly.Yesterday we did get out for a little bike ride with Brandy, ten miles through the woods.  My right knee and foot complained.  My usual Raleigh had blown out a tire (valve core failure when I pumped it up) so I went out on its alternate, a hardcore Trek that saw better days ten years ago.  Hard pedaling and as comfortable as being ridden out of town on a rail.  A stiff "touring" bike, it has all the comfort of a bouncing sawhorse.Got the Raleigh fixed this morning after writing, so I do have two days of regular biking before flying off into the sunset.Joe

no charge

First thing we did yesterday was go into a huge photo store, to try to buy a recharger for my camera, whose battery has expired.  No luck (ancient three-year-old camera).  And of course the new batteries come "empty," with instructions to first recharge them.  (I may have left the recharger in Portales.)

Then we went on a bus tour of the city, which started with a 45-storey elevator ride to Seaside Top to look down on  mostly modern Tokyo, since the Americans, including James Dickey, did some drastic urban renewal in 1945. 

Then we walked around the Emperor's Palace grounds (which the Americans tried to miss), about an hour's circumnavigation.  Think I'll go back for a watercolor.  Some beautiful shapes and textures.

Of course we took an hour to invade the Asakusa shopping district, which was bad timing, since about a million people were on holiday and had the same idea.  It was crushingly crowded, but kind of fun.   We inched our way down to the temple, but only paused long enough to sniff some incense and buy some cake, and then crawled in reverse back to a cross street, where we were ejected into a merely busy traffic stream.  After a few blocks we spotted our tour guide, who was holding aloft a fluffy pink duck.

She escorted us onto a river boat, where we were treated to a 45-minute cruise down the central waterway.  Good scenery and of course a welcome break, sitting in the breeze with a cool beer.  We went under nineteen bridges.

The tour ended in an area new to us, near the train station.  We started walking, looking for a dinner place, but almost every restaurant was closed for the holiday.  Finally we ducked into a small sort-of-Italian place, the Boo, which was delightful.  Crunchy fried whole shrimp.  (Fortunately, I'd had them at a Japanese place in San Francisco, so I could just chomp down bravely.) And pizza.

Gay figured out the subway system well enough to get us across town and within a few blocks of our hotel.  We collapsed exhausted.

Joe

imagine that

I got a note from Gary Robbins, science writer at the San Diego Union-Tribune.  He said "I’m putting together a science page that focuses on the opening of UC San Diego’s Center for Human Imagination. I’m asking  (various writers)  a simple question: What is imagination?  . . . . "


Off the top of my head, I'd say imagination is what you get for free – and if you don't have it, you can't "purchase" it with any currency.

I suppose that brain scientists can locate some place or process that's the locus of imagination – but then again, I wonder.  No one ever suffered a head injury and said, "Oh, no!  There goes my imagination!"

Imagination seems to be a characteristic that eludes qualification.  Certainly there's a random factor to it – but just as certainly, there's a quality of distinction.   You could write an abstract poem that used a random number generator to "choose" its vocabulary (I've done that, in fact), but telling a good poem from a bad one made that way is discrimination -- the opposite of randomness.

I shouldn't try to improve on what Ernest Hemingway said about imagination – that "it is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine. If he gets so he can imagine truly enough people will think that the things he relates all really happened and that he is just reporting."

Joe

Japan diary

2 May 2013

I am "getting some writing done," although this morning that consisted of a couple of hours answering technical concerns my editor had about the gun business in Work Done for Hire.

Yesterday we spent the morning and most of the afternoon in Shinjuku Gyoen Park, which is 144 acres that was privately owned before being destroyed in 1945.  It's carefully manicured in three distinct styles:  Japanese traditional, French Formal, and English Landscape.  (Which is almost too English and too quaint -- bosky dells with little arcuate bridges that must conceal trolls.)

I spent an hour or so on an ink drawing with some watercolor.  Will take a snapshot of it for LiveJournal.

The park was full of amateur artists; a couple of classes being conducted, too.  I wanted to sit in.  Curious to see whether I would understand anything without knowing the words.

A quiet and peaceful place that is occasionally jarring, when you look up and see futuristic skyscrapers looming.

Scurried through the rain to a dinner place near the hotel, and it was really fine.  A kind of special barbecue restaurant, with two cooks working feverishly on braziers in front of the place.  One cook used delicate scissors to trim off the burnt edges.  I had really good whole sardines dripping with a spicy cooked-on sauce.

With salad, vegetables, and desert, it came to less than thirty bucks for both of us, with beer and sake.

(Probably won't be the last rainy night; good to know there's an inexpensive place within scurrying distance.  All of the eight or nine restaurants within the hotel complex are pretty pricey.)

Joe

signs of the times

When I saw this sign at the park in Tokyo, I assumed it meant WATCH OUT -- DON'T TOUCH THE BUGS!



What it actually says is "Don't pick the crawdads up and eat them!"

Joe

Japan diary

30 April 2013

The place where I wrote during the con, while Gay slept in the morning, was the lobby of the hotel, well lit but severe.  A beige couch surrounded by beige walls (pseudo-marble).  A worn brown carpet and two potted plants, a palm and a stand of bamboo.  Western Muzak that was not too obtrusive.  A rack of free newspapers, all in Japanese.  A too-brilliant arrangement of artificial flowers.

There's a very good coffee machine, free.  You push a button and it noisily grinds a measure of fresh coffee, and then pushes steaming water through it for a nice demitasse of espresso.

Two clerks work silently behind a plain counter.  Strings are weeping "Someone to Watch Over Me."

The people passing outside are bundled up, mostly, but it's almost sixty.  Girls in miniskirts with warm leggings.  Every now and then a sturdy youth in shirtsleeves.  It should be perfect sightseeing weather.

We're moving this morning to another part of Tokyo for the rest of our stay.  We'll be at the Keio Plaza Hotel.  An intimate little place in Shinjuko, with only 1435 rooms . . .

political math

I'm having a problem with campaign logic.  We once gave some money to a political party to help campaign against some Neanderthal.  So now we keep getting urgent messages to give them more money, parsed like this:

"If you send $20, we will match your contribution."

So if we don't send in $20, what?  They spend it on beer?  Maybe they invest it in a high-yield savings account until some more patriotic person sends in a double sawbuck?

Enquiring minds want to know.

Joe

party time

Yesterday was rather full.   After breakfast we went over to the convention hall, where I was introduced and read a few remarks.  Then there were various speeches about space travel and a writing contest, all in Japanese.

We hit the bricks and found a nice coffee house/restaurant not far away, and with Regina Glei had lunch and ice cream – more ice cream joints than bars around here.  Then returned to give a little talk.  I was interviewed by Naoyuki Katoh and Gay was interviewed by Regina.

Then I gave a reading, the first six pages of a Playboy story, “Blood Sisters.”  Not my finest work, but someone requested it.  Maybe because it’s easy to understand, a private-eye thing.  A woman named Ikeda Kun read the Japanese translation.  (We alternated paragraph by paragraph).

We went back to the hotel to put our feet up for an hour, and then went to the GoH party, which was an elaborate buffet feast with dozens of plates of more or less identifiable things.  Okay sweet wine.  There was a bingo game; I won a little model helicopter and Gay won some coasters.  Then people milled about talking for a couple of hours, fueled by plenty of beer and the odd wine.  I didn’t try the whiskey.  It was only 75 proof, but it’s really not on my diet anymore.  (And I remember Japanese whiskey from Vietnam.  Useful for treating external wounds.)

It was a very jolly time.  Now off to the final day.

Joe