Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 34
October 26, 2012
Linda Gregerson
Last night we had the pleasure of going to a poetry reading and discussion by Linda Gregerson. Very good stuff. Most of her poetry would be hard to reproduce here, since (like me) she usually lays her stanzas all over the page, and the computer wants to round them up and herd them into rectangular corrals.
I bought her fifth book, The Selvage, whose title poem does have normal stanza appearance. It's in three parts, and this is the first one:
1.
So door to door among the shotgun
shacks in Cullowhee and Waynesville in
our cleanest shirts and ma'am
and excuse me were all but second
nature now and this one woman comes
to the door she must have weighed
three hundred pounds Would you be
willing to tell us who you plan to vote
for we say and she turns around with
Everett who're we voting for? The
black guy says Everett. The black guy
she says except that wasn't the language
they used they used the word
we've all agreed to banish from even our
innermost thoughts, which is when
I knew he was going to win.
Copyright © 2011 by Linda Gregerson.
A good controlled voice and she writes about interesting important things.
Went to see the MIT doc and he gave me some pretty potent pills and cough syrup, and they seem to be working pretty well. He also reassured me that the lump on my tongue is probably not cancer; he's seen plenty of oral cancers, and they look more dramatic than whatever my thing is. Will see an oral surgeon in November at Mass General for a more specialized opinion.
Fingers and eyes crossed.
Joe
October 21, 2012
October 18, 2012
bleah
The new bike works great but its rider is kind of second-rate. Picked up a bad cold during the St. Louis trip that has really slowed me down. Wouldn't have taught last night if there were any way to get out of it – when you only have 11 class meetings, the teacher has to come to class even if he comes in an ambulance.
Nice to be looking at five days without teaching. A lot of stuff to clear up. Mainly finish the proofreading on the collection The Best of Yours Truly. Get it in the mail before the weekend. Also have four or five hours of teacher stuff, but that can wait till Monday.
Hope I'm well enough to go to a lecture tonight, lecture and dinner. Think I'll slither into the tub and breathe steam for a while.
Joe
October 7, 2012
a swinger in his sixties
Yesterday aft we took a commuter train out to West Concord to visit with Ethan (our former landlord) and his partner Anne. Went into Concord to have dinner at the Concord Inn, a kind of faux-old Colonial joint that has a good restaurant.
They're restoring a nice 1950's house in the 'burbs – much bigger project than I would want to take on, but their enthusiasm is infectious. They have an adult-sized children's swing in the back yard – I had fun trying for an altitude record.
Joe
October 6, 2012
hacking and HONKing
I did get the new bicycle in an abstract sense yesterday, but I won't be able to pick it up till Tuesday. They have to assemble it and transfer my accessories. But I'm not bikeless; they let me take my old one back.
(That's literally true; I paid for the bike and walked out to get lunch and thought wait! Went back and "borrowed" my old bike, sans accessories, from their shop downstairs.)
After writing for a few hours I met Gay at Club Passim and we spent the evening enjoying David Mallet's singing and playing. He noted that he first played there 34 years ago – we first saw him not long after that, in '83. Excellent voice and guitar, both fingerstyle and flat-pick, with a good bassist playing one of those curious electric hybrid basses. He wrote "The Garden Song" ("Inch by inch; row by row…") and other down-East songs.
I've been practicing almost daily; the guitar and music have taken over the couch in this little apartment. I have to get in shape for Archon next week, where I'll be doing a half hour of my own "filk" compositions.
Right now I have a solid cold that's helping me on low notes. Have to compensate for that next week – at least I hope the cold will be gone then.
Today I'm meeting Gay in Somerville in the afternoon for a strange street thing celebrating silly music, the HONK! Festival (http://honkfest.org). Will report.
Joe
October 5, 2012
limos and bikes
On the way to the office this morning, about nine, I passed the new postmodern MIT Media Lab building, and parked outside were four shiny black Cadillac limos, New York plates, with four big tough-looking drivers standing by, stuffed into big suits, looking intently at the morning. In the middle of the four limos was a dusty white Ford 4X4, sitting low with armor. Wonder what's coming down. Or who.
What's much more exciting, though, is that I'm going into town noonish to buy a new bicycle. Nothing fancy, just a commuter bike. My ten-year-old cheapo is making alarming noises. A man of my years and station does not have to ride a creaky bike. It's a charming eccentricity, but I'd rather glide by on my shiny new Raleigh and have people wonder whether I've entered into a second childhood. (It's the third, actually.)
Closing in on the end of the new novel. I'll write on that for two hours before taking on the stack of student papers.
Joe
October 1, 2012
Square meals and round
Yesterday we walked a mile or so through gorgeous weather down to the Morgan Library, always a high spot. The featured artist was Josef Albers, whose spare work was technically exciting. Squares of oil paint on paper, studies for his Homage to the Square, which is really just a series of paintings of juxtaposed squares.
He carefully worked out his compositions with subtly varying colors and sizes of squares, calculating their dimensions and comparing one to another – it really appealed to the proto-scientist in me; he was experimenting just as surely as if he were working in a laboratory with test tubes.
The absolute essence of minimalism: How does this color feel? How does it feel next to this one? Maybe the man on the street wouldn't get much out of the series. This guy off the street loved it.
We went to the dining alcove and shared a plate of little sandwiches and confections, and then of course hit the museum shop. I bought a book bag – the one I just bought at the MIT Coop is fractionally too large for my bicycle panniers. I can stuff it partly in, but then it can pop out when I hit a chuck hole – not something you want to do more than once, with a computer in the bag.
We walked back uptown to the New York Public Library, where they have a fine show celebrating "Lunch Hour NYC," about how that meal and time has changed over the centuries. A lot of fun stuff about the late lamented Automat, which I loved so much as a kid. (That memory is starting to date you – the last incarnation closed in 1991.) They opened a century ago.
Of course we had to head for lunch after that, and we went to our usual haunt in that area, Le Pain Quotidien. We got a fairly quiet corner and enjoyed sandwiches, mine an open-faced curried tuna salad with apple slices on a big round of rye. Then we made our way back to the hotel to work and rest for awhile.
For dinner we just hit the bricks, and within two blocks found a Japanese barbecue, Gyu-Kaku, which was wonderful! I'd been to one in LA about ten years ago, but Gay had never had the experience. It's a dry version of the shabu-shzabu "hot pot," where you dip raw meat and vegetables into hot oil. In gyu-kaku, there's a central pit with a barbecue grill, and you put slices of raw meat and vegetables over the coals and roast them to your liking, and then dip them in a variety of sauces. I like it better – less guilt, but equally delicious. I had an iced plum wine with it, a pleasant indulgence.
Took a picture of the moon outside the restaurant. 
Home before ten to sleepily watch TV.
September 28, 2012
ode to Romney
I loved this, from a 92-year-old WWII vet. Dedicated Romney fans might want to give it a miss . . . .
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08...
JoeSeptember 27, 2012
pros at cons
I don't know, Geoff . . . big cons are more hassle, but you're more likely to find people you want to hang around with. Small cons paradoxically feel more lonely. But then I'm a priori more visible at a small con. Hard to fade into the woodwork when there's no woodwork.Joe
September 26, 2012
Nothing if not Normal
My brother and I (both of us OU non-graduates) were joint GoH's at a convention there sometime around 1980 . . . maybe the first Norman Conquest? It was fun to walk the narrow streets of "Normal," Oklahoma without having to be a student there.
Also fun to sit at the soda fountain where I read "Dune" when it was serialized
in Analog, and read my own story in that same venerable mag.
Joe
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