Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 37
August 9, 2012
Nabokov's notecards!
http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-un...
I may have posted the text of this before, but not the fascinating pictures . . . Nabokov had peculiar writing habits, which I've discussed here and in class. But this is the first time I've seen pictures of the actual notecards and his work in progress. Marvelous!
Joe
August 8, 2012
joe_haldeman @ 2012-08-08T07:09:00
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fb...
Second, I pedaled through the University of Florida campus yesterday on my way to the dentist, and was startled to find this huge sculpture in front of the library --
It's about 25 feet high . . . reminds me of the one in the RR station in London, the one where you get off coming from France.
Joe
August 6, 2012
Three cheers for Curiosity!
August 2, 2012
Kid fare for adults
We saw a very curious movie yesterday, the truly charming Moonrise Kingdom, a story about two 12-year-olds, a boy and a girl, who run away from home to go camping out in the wilderness. They kind of hate their home situations and grow to kind of love each other. Fortunately it's pretty chaste; they are little kids. The acting is good but curiously stylized. A lot of star power, with Frances McDormand and Bill Murray as the girl's parents and Edward Norton and Bruce Willis as well-meaning authority figures, cop and scoutmaster. A sweet story without any big surprises.
I think a big subliminal strength of the movie, no doubt carefully planned, is how well it captures small epiphanies that change everyone's life at that age – at least for middle-class Americans, though I wouldn't be surprised if an audience of Zulus or Australian aborigines laughed at the same moments. The child actors (Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman) caught those moments very well.
By Wes Anderson, who did the quirky Bottle Rocket and Rushmore.Joe
August 1, 2012
Mr. Veedle
Gore Vidal is dead. A really fine writer whose politics were sometimes silly or crazy. His well-researched historical novels were engrossing fun. If in person he was outrageous, well, hell. He seemed to have a lot of fun.
In a mud-spattered book box in Vietnam I found a pristine hardback of Julian, his novel about the last pagan emperor of Rome, and read it avidly for about a week. It was one of the two or three best books I read that year, transporting me away from the terrible time and place I was imbedded in.
I read it again about twenty years later, and still found it full of wisdom and humor.
In his online obituary they quote him about the atheism he embraced all his adult life: "Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge," he once wrote, "all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here.
"Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all."
Joe
July 31, 2012
The right peacefully to pedal
a regular last-Friday thing for the past eighteen years, when they came too
close to the Olympics and were arrested en masse. They were all handcuffed,
including a 13-year-old, and kept in concrete rooms without windows overnight.
I've seen Critical Mass rides in Boston and Daytona Beach; there are about 300
cities where they are a regular feature. Organizers call them "celebrations,"
but a lot of the cyclists see them as a monthly take-back-the-streets demonstration.
Whatever; I see them as joyful, and if I'd been in London on Friday I would
have hopped on my bike and joined them – as some people evidently did, and were
surprised to wind up in the slammer, or "gaol," as Mr. Wilde would have it.
Of course the coppers were within their rights. I take it that the Magna Carta
protects the right to petition, but not the right to assemble and raise the
rabble.
Reminds me of a time when I was in a dead-dog party in some Canadian sf convention,
and the house dick showed up and reminded us that we were not in the United
States, and had no automatic right of assembly, and if we didn't break it up
he would have us all thrown in the slammer. We didn't test his assertion,
but just broke up into smaller room parties.
Googling, I don't find anybody claiming that the group intended to ride up to
the Olympics venue on purpose; it was just their usual ride. It will be interesting
to see if there's any follow-up.
Joe
July 30, 2012
[in]security with manuscripts
July 29, 2012
thumbs down
The Thumb Drive That Ate the Future
For a year or so I've been backing up my novel every day with a little thumb drive that I always have with me. I guess that's so I can add to the novel any time creativity strikes, even if I'm not near my computer.
A few weeks ago I found out that the thumb drive won't talk to Gay's computer. Well, hers is a couple of years older than mine, so I just made a mental note to get a new drive, next time I was at the computer store.
So a couple of days ago I made my daily copy of the novel and it took an unusually long time. The computer froze up. I turned it off with the proper protocol, let it rest for a minute, and then restarted it.
The novel was gone. Zip. Nada.
But there was an image of it on the crippled thumb drive. I checked and it did have the last line I typed.
I biked down to the copy shop with the thumb drive and had a copy printed and bound. So if every computer in the house crashed and burned, I wouldn't lose any text. Then I went to the computer place and got a new thumb drive – Newer! Faster! Bigger!
Restored copies of everything important. So all is right with the world.
How quaintly twentieth-century, you may say. Why not just use the Cloud?
Because I don't trust it yet. Not rational, I suppose. But my experiments with it didn't make me happy, wasteful of space and time. And space and time are all we have.
Space and time and thumb drives. The latest novel by Murray Leinster. (Magazine title: "The Interstellar Hitchhiker.")
JoeJuly 24, 2012
When is a rock not a rock?
People who read this chronic screed must know that I subscribe to way too many magazines. Well, I protest weakly, I'm interested in a lot of things, and magazines give me easy little bites of this and that.
Sometimes they deliver the unexpected. This afternoon I was relaxing in the tub, belatedly paging through the June number of Modern Painters (which, as I've pointed out here, is an art journal that goes far afield from painting) – and I came across an article that might have appeared, tongue in cheek, in Astronomy or Sky and Telescope. It's about two artists, Katie Paterson and Cornelia Parker, who both want to use meteorites as artistic mediums.
Paterson has a postmodern idea that's not going to warm the hearts of any astronomers. She wants to make a mold of a substantial meteorite, then melt the meteorite down, and recast it in its own form. It's a pretty interesting po-mo statement, but in terms of science it's just plain vandalism. All relevant information is lost – including, actually, the composition of the meteorite, since there wouldn't be any attempt to save or measure volatiles.
On the other hand, a meteorite is an object, which can be bought. She's looking for a substantial one, about 150 kilograms, maybe half a meter wide. (Googling, I found a 106-kg. one for – price lowered! -- $96,400. Hope she's good at writing grants.)
Still, art is art, and objets d'art are objects. I could buy a drawing by Leonardo, shred it, bleach the shreds, and turn it back into a piece of paper, and then write upon that piece of paper a villanelle about the process. No reasonable person would deny that the result is a piece of art, though even I, the artist, would admit that it also was irreversible vandalism.
Cornelia Parker has less destructive ideas for performance art done with meteorites. She would like to shoot one back into orbit, an idea that kind of tickles me (NASA wouldn't give her a rocket, though, because she's not a U.S. citizen). She's put a ground-up Chinese meteorite into a fireworks display, appropriate on a couple of levels. Her most interesting act, though, was throwing a tektite (a kind of meteorite blasted from the lunar surface) into a lake in Boston in the middle of the night. By the morning she had commemorated the event with aluminum signs reading "At the Bottom of this Lake Lies a Piece of the Moon 2000."
I do cringe a little at the loss of exhibit materials, but have to admit I kind of love this stuff. Art and science kicked off the rails by imagination.Joe
July 23, 2012
Are you ready for TED-y?
I've been fooling around with some notions sparked by an excellent article in The New Yorker (7/16), "Listen and Learn," by Nathan Heller. It's a description of TED, a loose organization for Technology / Entertainment / Design.
Broadly speaking, it's about problem-solving – defining problems accurately and devising approaches toward solution, then implementing them in the outside, or real, world.
I'm automatically suspicious of groupthink, but maybe professional artists and writers are self-selected against teamwork. I sign the painting or put my name on the spine and take responsibility for its success or failure. And then go on to the next one.
This TED business, though, is pretty attractive in spite of its distinct nut-like flavor. There are a lot of broad assertions not examined at leisure, a certain amount of arm-waving and (to me) intimidating nonstop enthusiasm – but there really is something here, and I want to look at it more closely.
I've fiddled with it for half a day and have to get back to finishing the novel, but wanted to fix it in my mind for continuing, a couple of weeks from now. Here's the (unfinished) map of it, for LJ people.
There's an entertaining demonstration of a basic tenet, having to do with the relationship between happiness and creativity, that really rang bells for me:
youtube.com/watch?v=GXy__kBVq1M
Here's the blurb -- Shawn Achor is the winner of over a dozen distinguished teaching awards at Harvard University, where he delivered lectures on positive psychology in the most popular class at Harvard.
A lot of fun. Maybe very useful.
Joe
Joe Haldeman's Blog
- Joe Haldeman's profile
- 2191 followers
