Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 32

Buy ink?

Har!  Let me try that again . . . 

 

"Gay solvent & hash RA"?  Obviously a note for the next novel.  "RA" meaning "right ascension."  No -- "Rear Admiral."  

Joe

mystery note

Okay . . . I got up in the middle of the night and scribbled a note to myself:

(the fountain-pen scribble in the middle)

[image error]


Anybody care to guess what that says?

Joe

The 5/4ness of it all

Sir Patrick Moore and David Brubeck died today, at 92 and 89.  Both important to me when I was a kid.  Here's Sir Patrick's notice:

After a short spell in hospital last week, it was determined that no further treatment would benefit him, and it was his wish to spend his last days in his own home, Farthings, where he today passed on, in the company of close friends and carers and his cat Ptolemy.

I like the quiet dignity of that, with its edge of  dry humor in the namings.  I met him in Washington, D.C., when I was in high school, when he made an appearance at a meeting of the British Interplanetary Society.  (I was undoubtedly the only nerd at B-CC H.S. who wore the rocketship pin of that august body.)  A quiet and friendly man,  I think a little embarrassed at the fuss being made over him.  We talked a little about telescopes – or I tried to talk.  He might have been the first famous person I ever met whom I met on a basis of shared personal interests. We both had Newtonian reflecting telescopes, not so common then.

I never met Brubeck, but I listened to him a lot.  Records, of course, but also at a schoolkids' concert at Constitution Hall.  I wore the grooves off Take Five, though my fixation was with his quartet's sax man Paul Desmond – and after I turned 18 I sought his groups out in crowded bars in Washington and New York. 

When Brubeck got a medal in Washington a couple of years ago, President Obama said, "You can’t understand America without understanding jazz, and you can’t understand jazz without understanding Dave Brubeck." and I think he did know what he was talking about.  If you can't hear a 5/4 beat and smile, there's something you don't know about America in the past century.

And just now, Diana Kraal started singing to that beat on NPR behind me.  Holy cow, as they say in India.

Joe

The wisdom of Butch Hancock

From folksinger Butch Hancock --  "Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things:  One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell.  The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love."  -- Butch Hancock

of glass and gas

Had fun yesterday afternoon nosing around in the basement of the science library.  Stuff germane to the novel, and also some nostalgia for the simpler days of my astronomical youth – issues of Sky & Telescope from the fifties.  Curious kind of time trip – an ad for the $49.95 4-inch Dynascope that opened up the universe for me when I was in 7th grade. (It was wobbly and fragile; they discontinued it right after my father bought one for me.  If I'd held on to it, it would be a valuable antique.) (Checking up on that, there are exactly none for sale in the old-telescope market, though thousands were made.  I should've held on to it.)Nice nostalgia trip, anyhow.  How simple life was and how little we knew that.  We went to see a pretty worthless arty movie at school last night – two, actually, mercifully short:  "Slow Action" and "I Know Where I'm Going," both by Ben Rivers.  Static random artiness, as far as I could tell.  One is on a tropical island and the other is in a Scotland winter.  That one at least has a human being, a demented old man who croaks out orphic mumblings through his beard as he picks up things and looks at them.  I suspect that Mr. Rivers can write one hell of a grant proposal.  Joe

a hundred tubas

Last week Gay and I went to the annual huge tuba concert downtown.  It must be every tuba in New England!  They get together in the morning and practice a few Christmas songs, then break for lunch, and then come back to oom-pah-pah for the public.
 
It's not the most musical thing in the world, but it certainly is impressive.  More than a hundred tubas -- "members of the tuba family," I should say, because it includes baritone horns and such -- blasting away in an echoing corridor between two big brick buildings.  Awesome!

Joe

Let me see if this pic transfers . . . it's giving me trouble . . . 

Martian matters

This is a letter I just wrote to the Naval Observatory . . . anybody out there 
have an opinion? 

I have a question about the old 26-inch refractor, for a book I'm writing for 
Ace/Putnam publishers. 
 
Various references confirm that Asaph Hall discovered the Martian moon Phobos 
at 16:06 local time, 18 August 1877. My query is how could he possibly see 
such a dim speck, 12th magnitude, against a daytime sky? Even with legendary 
Clark optics. 
 
I've actually looked through the 26-inch at dusk, about a half-century ago. 
 In the fifties and early sixties I was a teenager who belonged to the National 
Capital Astronomers, and we were allowed to use the excellent Clark five-inch 
refractor that was just down the hill from the 26-inch. On a few occasions, 
the astronomers using the 26-inch let us come up before the sky was dark and 
glimpse the moon and planets. I strongly recall Saturn at about 500X, shimmering 
in the pale blue twilight. 

I suppose I should just accept the date and time. But the memory of that sight, 
slightly after sunset, makes me wonder. Could the time that Google offers be 
a typographical error that, through obscurity, has propagated over decades? 
 
Not very likely, I'm sure. But the odd fact is that I will be describing that 
moment in the novel, Phobos Means Fear, which mostly takes place in the future, 
but does have a flashback to Asaph and Stickney Hall. It's rather important 
that I know whether the observation was made in the daytime. 

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me. 

Joe 

Out with the new; in with the newer

Finished my book yesterday and emailed it off to agent and editor.  "Work Done for Hire," it's set in the near future -- part sf, part horror, part literary.

Started the next book immediately.  Usually I give myself a couple of weeks' rest, but in this case I have to take advantage of MIT's library.  Part of the beginning of this novel (Phobos Means Fear) is set in the late 19th century, when Asaph Hall was observing Mars and its elusive satellites.  The Science and Humanities Library here – in the same building as my office – has a good collection of 19th-century astronomy books.

Most of my time for the next week or so will be wrapping up teaching, but then I shall don my writerly cape and zoom out to Mars.

First snow of the year just began sifting down.  Happy December!  Condolences for those of you who have snow shovels and know how to use them.

Joe

Hide the dental floss!

Wow!  Better throw away the dental floss . . . it turns out that dental hygiene(without a license) is illegal in Florida!    Police: Fake dentist kissed patient's buttocks  The Associated PressPublished: Thursday, November 22, 2012 at 8:52 p.m.    HOLLYWOOD — Police say a fake dentist gave a woman with a toothache a shot inthe buttocks — and then gave the wound a kiss.  Hollywood, Florida, police arrested the 47-year-old man earlier this week oncharges of practicing dental hygiene without a license.  The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported Thursday (http://sunsent.nl/T79eom )that the woman said she went to the man's apartment in November 2010 and paidhim $65 for treatment. She said the apartment had a waiting area and dentalequipment. She said the man examined her mouth and applied a paste to alleviatethe pain. He then gave her the shot and then kissed the injection spot.  -- Joe

story structure

I wrote down something for a student a couple of days ago that might have some interest to a broader audience.  Really just thinking aloud:Most successful short stories can be summed up in one sentence.  (That's not because they're simple, but because they have some unifying quality.)  That leads to a three-step process.1.  Try to sum up your story in one sentence.2.  Write down which parts of your story are not in that summary.3.  Rewrite both story and Step 1 until Step 2 is a null set.Not as brainless as it might seem.  A lot of stories don't work because the writer goes off on tangents that don't really add to the story – but once they're written down, they're hard to get rid of.  Be merciless.  The unity is more important than the decorations, no matter how pretty the decorations are.

Joe