Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 36

ye gods

Over in sff.net, Keith Stokes asked about the Catholic priests who were interviewing me on TV at the world con ... .

That was the Paulist Brothers, Keith, interviewing me about science and religion. I doubt that much of what I said will go into their documentary. I was polite, but to me organized religion of any stripe is more or less elegant superstition. Big Daddy in the sky. That said, I do recognize and admire the accomplishments that organizations like the Paulists and the Jesuits have done in science and science education.

The heavens declare the glory of god, it says here, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork. I knew that one when I was a boy, and even without a literal God, the sentiment retains its power for me. The poet who said "you are closer to god in a garden than anywhere else on Earth" had never been to an observatory.

Joe

da sun! da Moon! da Stars!

The issue of Astronomy magazine that just came in the mail, October 2012, I think must be the most beautiful one they've ever published. It's a Special Collector's Issue, so called, trumpeting the "100 Greatest Pictures of the Universe" – and they do not exaggerate. Stunning pictures of deep-space and solar system objects, most taken with equipment that wasn't even dreamed of when I got my astronomy degree (gasp!) 45 years ago.

Joe

in Boston

Gay and I went to school and then back here, and walked around for awhile in
a light rain, not going anywhere specific, with an eye out for a dinner place.
About 5:30 it started pouring, and we happened to be on the outskirts of Chinatown,
so we ducked into the nearest place, called Beijing Kyoto.

Unsurprisingly, it's a Japanese-Chinese restaurant (112 South Street), which
turned out to be very good. I had an avocado salad and a "crunch" roll, not
too traditional (shrimp tempura, crab, avocado, cucumber) but delicious.

We loitered long enough for the rain to let up, and strolled off toward South
Station. The rain got too heavy as we got to the station, though, and we took
a cab ride that was rather shorter than the cabbie liked. But we got home not
too drenched.
Boxes have arrived from Florida, so every day will be [un]Boxing Day for awhile.

Joe

Back in Boston

After an uneventful flight from Chicago to Boston we are safe & sound in our strange little loft – well, not "little," with its high ceiling and industrial-sized windows. In terms of available space it isn't large, though. Larger than an efficiency but smaller than a one-bedroom. Practically speaking, about as much living space as our small place last year, but inside a much larger physical volume.

Long, though. Line of sight from this desk (by the window) to the kitchen sink is about forty feet. So it doesn't feel small, to me.


The place has a European feel, unsurprisingly, since we're subletting from a European couple, off on a sabbatical to Spain. Made coffee this morning with an Italian pressure machine. Makes a delicious cup, but only one at a time. We'll get our regular pot (a French pressure machine) out of storage soon.

Quite a bit of road noise outside – someone blasting away with a piledriver down on the street. Well, he didn't start till 7:15. Get up, lazybones.

Life in the big city. We were in Boston last year, but that was the quiet gaslit streets of Back Bay. This is another planet. Trantor, I think.

Just put on the headphones with soothing sprightly Segovia. Banish that piledriver back to the twenty-first century.

Off to school soon, Registration Day. A brunch with the writing faculty and then sit in my office all afternoon, being available for students. Usually nobody shows up, but that's all right. Plenty to do.

Good to be back.

Joe

Loving astronomy

Researching a story this afternoon, I happened to look up Comet Arend-Roland, which passed near Earth in 1956 and 1957. That was the first such entity in my limited experience (I turned thirteen that year) – about two years after I got my first "real" telescope, a 4" Dynascope reflector.

Kids chart their growth with things. This or that doll or bike or, in my case, telescope. My great good fortune was that in the few years preceding this purchase, my mother had taught me how to play cutthroat poker – killing time with penny-ante while we waited in the car for my music lessons. I passed some of this skill on to the other neighborhood kids, to my considerable profit.

My parents didn't know that my growing bank account was mostly due to poker. I had a paper route and part interest in two others, so a lot of cash went through my hands. (In those days, paperboys collected cash from customers every month.) As Arend-Roland silently sailed through the outer solar system, my cash approached the magical sum of $100. For that amount I purchased an 8" f/8 Newtonian reflector, a solid hundred pounds of steel, from an amateur astronomer in Oklahoma. It was quite a large telescope for the time.

It was a good telescope for the planets and the moon. I had 12-mm. and 6-mm. eyepieces, giving me about 128X and a jittery 256X. Fortunately, I was curious about star clusters and nebulae, so I invested in the old A. Jaegers 2" Kellner eyepiece, which cranked the power down to a manageable 32X. Nothing like the wide-field marvels that amateurs have now, but it opened up a new universe to me.

And then, out of left field (Pisces, actually) along came Arend-Roland, and with the fat 2" eyepiece it really blazed forth. Kids would look at it and go home and pester their parents to come look at it, and the parents would go get their neighbors. The comet and I were sort of seven-day wonders.

I have to speculate now, more than a half-century later, how much that cometary passage changed my life. I might have stayed interested in astronomy without that dramatic week, but I don't know. It was a real game-changer for an awkward bookish kid. I went on to get my first degree in astronomy, and although I never worked in it beyond grad-school number-crunching, my love of astronomy translated into a career in science fiction writing and, eventually, a professorship at MIT. All from a ghostly dim circle floating through the night sky of Bethesda, Maryland. I wonder whether you could see it from there if it passed by today.

Joe Haldeman

What a rush!

Yesterday we saw Premium Rush, sort of an ultimate bicycling movie.  Absolutely visceral for a bike-rider.  Brandy and Gay thought it was comical, my full-body twitching while the stars and bit players cranked their lightweight brakeless messenger bikes through New York City traffic.  That's all it is, a high-speed bicycle chase scene with just a sprinkling of love interest as the characters hurl themselves through unforgiving streets.  For the right viewer, like me, it's a nonstop adrenaline high.

The story is propelled not so much by a plot as a tropism.  Faster, chancier, ouchier.  Felt like the actors were really into it, too.  Jordon-Levitt especially – there's a clip at the end of him bleeding and laughing at the scene of an accident where he smashed into the rear of a car.  Jamie Chung is cute as a semi-love interest and Michael Shannon is good as the absolute bad guy who pursues the messengers with a snarl and a gun.

Best movie I've seen in a while, though it was admittedly kind of tailor-made for me.  If you love biking and speed, oh my god, you have to see it.  Be prepared to twitch.

Joe

touching base

Gay noted a couple of days ago that I've been neglecting my journal.  So I sat down and wrote about a page, and then when I went to save it – it disappeared!  Without a cybernetic trace, which is kind of scary.  Punishing me.

Fortunately, I'm not superstitious.  So I'll try again this morning.  As the skies glower and the sticky air promises the same thing the weatherman is saying:  Wicked thunderstorms.  But I'm safely on my porch with a cup of hot coffee and the birdies are tweeting to each other some avian version of "Get under cover, you stupid cloaca."

No blog activity the past while because I've been trying to finish a novel before we take off for Cambridge, via the worldcon in Chicago.  Probably no more than twenty pages left.  Maybe I will finish it before we leave, or maybe at the worldcon.  I think I've done that before, some novel due September first.

(Fortunately a novel contract is not as strict as, say, murder for hire.  Unless you're Peter Straub or Stephen King, you can send in a novel a year late and people will say, Oh, is he still alive?)

I've also been taking notes and gathering stuff for the next novel, though I probably won't do much work on it at MIT.   First priority is a novella for Gardner and George Martin's antho on "Old Venus."

  

(Reminds me . . . need to pack some references for that.  I have a great solar system text from the 1920's, as well as a couple of 1950's-era sf stories set on our "sister planet." )

  

A couple of weeks ago I was bicycling with Brandy and tried to conjure up the relevant lines from Green Hills of Earth – "We rot in the molds of Venus / We retch at her tainted breath / Foul are her flooded jungles / Crawling with unclean death" – or something.  Have to look it up.

When I read that as a 12-year-old, I had no notion that in another twelve years I would myself be crawling through flooded jungles, trying to keep a weapon out of the mud, on the watch for enemy soldiers – and if I had known, I would have thought the 1955 equivalent of "How cool is that?"

Cooler to think about, little Joe, than to do.  But that's true of a lot of cool stuff.

Back to work, you lazy swine.  (Sound of whip whistling through the air and snapping.)

Joe

(Here's Saturday's model, with notations . . . )

Nelson Algren on life

Nelson Algren was a good writer.  I had occasion to quote him this morning in the novel I'm writing.  This is the (I think true) version, from Walk on the Wild Side:   

“Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.”

That's a great quote, but it's not the way I first heard it.  Algren taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop a couple of years before I was there, and I'm told his oral version of the saying ended with "Never fuck a woman who's crazier than you are."  Which probably wouldn't have seen print in 1956.

Joe

Happy Mars Day!

Some lovely pictures from Philadelphia Magazine – reactions of the mission scientists in the control room when the rover Curiosity sent back its great shots of the martian surface.

http://blogs.phillymag.com/the_philly...

One bunch of happy geeks!  And do they deserve it.

Joe

a martian chronicle

I was on campus (U. of Fla.) yesterday and picked up a copy of the student paper The Alligator, which had as its lead story "NASA Sends Rover to Mars, awes students," which is good – I mean, most college students don't know or care too much about space flight.

The third paragraph of the story, though, gave the U.S. space effort a little more credit than it deserves:  "A U.S. rover the size of a small car landed safely on Mars at 1:31 Eastern time Monday before heading back to Earth."

Wow.  A "Mars return" mission.  I thought that was years away!

The article goes on to say "Curiosity is the world's second spacecraft to land on the Red Planet.  The first was a 1971 Soviet Union rover that stopped working shortly after landing."

Actually, about fourteen spacecraft have landed on Mars – out of forty-some tries, true enough.  But there have been successes.

(One lander, the British Beagle 2, might have crashed, or it might have been smooshed by a Transformer.)

It's kind of mind-boggling.  Not just that an ignorant writer should be given the assignment, but also that no one else who read the story knew enough about space flight to blow the whistle on her.  How many editors and copy editors looked at it?

Ah well.  When our Martian overlords show up to enslave us for our ignorance, maybe the writer and editors of The Alligator will be offered supervisory jobs.

Joe