Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 39

bayview . . .

Friday  we walked around the top of Cadillac Mountain, which is awesomely beautiful, not much changed in thirty years.  More people, and the roads perhaps in better shape.  Dozens of bicyclists  pumping impressively up the steep long winding hill.  I might be able to do it if I trained for a month.  We're a little shy of hill-climbing practice in Florida.

The huge cruise ships in the harbor, miles away, are not exactly ugly, but are a jarring intrusion in several senses.  Too large, too white, too manufactured.  They don't really diminish the beauty of the natural scene – humans are part of nature, after all.  But it would be a little more subtle if they were painted in camo.

We got a bite in town and then took a walk around the millionaires' homes bayside.  The public path goes right along the exotic shore – I wonder if the rich people resent our intrusion into their view.  Let them eat cake, I say!  Tasty rich little petites-fours with lots of rich frosting, to clog their overpriced arteries! 

Saturday was given over to visiting friends.  We drove down to the bottom of the peninsula, Bass Harbor, and took a ferry to Swan's Island, where we were picked up by Don Junkins and Kaimei Zheng, whom we've known as Hemingwayites for a dozen years or more.  (Kaimei interviewed me extensively a few years ago, for her book about post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans – published, alas, only in Chinese.)  They have a beautiful rustic house that Don built back in the sixties and seventies.  After a fabulous lunch they drove us around the island, the entire seven miles of road.

Back in Bar Harbor, we treated ourselves to a movie-and-pizza evening at the Reel Pizza Cinerama in the middle of town.  It was the over-the-top MEN IN BLACK III, which was about what you would expect.  Some absolutely incredible makeup SFX with the wriggly aliens.  I've noted here before what a mixed blessing that technology is to science fiction – the response it evokes is primarily comic, and in sf we'd rather have people respond to fearsome aliens with fear.

This morning we went down to the ship that's docked next to our motel, and took a two-hour nature cruise.  Gorgeous weather and a good guide.  Most of the sea creatures avoided us, but we did see seals and porpoises – and a curious sad sight.  Some naturalists had come upon the corpse of a young humpback whale, and were towing it back to shore for necropsy.  The wind favored us, fortunately.  One whiff was plenty.

It's been a pleasant vacation.  I've written for two or three hours every morning, but haven't knocked myself out.  Tomorrow we head for the Norton Island retreat, where I'll roll up my sleeves and do some major surgery on the novel.  I'm cutting one whole narrative thread from the overly complex story (which I'll recycle into its own novella or novel).  Deletion is much harder than creation, for me.  But sometimes it has to be done.

Joe

the Maine thing

We had a nice time yesterday, moderately tiring.  Clambered around rocks on a tidal pool expedition led by a couple of amusing forest rangers.  (They tend to be interesting people, trading any hope of material success for a life outdoors, explaining stuff.)  Beautiful scenery and some of our companions, young mothers, weren't so bad-looking themselves.  Wound up being about 25 people, probably too large a group.  Lots of munchkins looking for ways to get into trouble.

We've looked at tidal pools all over the world, and although the identity of the creatures living inside them varies from place to place, the overall ecology is about the same.  Zones of various conditions all with their perfectly adapted inhabitants.  Oblivious to the observers who wander among them.  Could we be the same?  (Cue Fortean music . . . )

In the evening we went back to the improv club, which was great fun again.  And this time I got to be Mr. Famous Writer.  The couple we shared a table with were from MIT, and so my secret identity was out.  They and the entertainers and the guy who owns the club had all read my stuff.

It was a little surprising.  I don't often think about the public side of what I do for a living.  I mean, sit down every morning and scribble out some stuff about imaginary people in imaginary places.  After a couple of years, send it off to my agent.  Start another one.  Repeat as often as possible.

Oops! and Maine memories

Oops; that was a brain-o.  We're not in Bangor, but in fabulous Bar Harbor.  Or Bah Hah Bah, as it's called locally.  (The plane from Michigan landed in Bangor, but we rented a car and immediately escaped.)
 
This is not our first time in Bar Harbor, but it's been thirty years.  Back in 1981 or 1982 we'd been talking with Rusty Hevelin, looking at a map of the U.S. to see if there was anyplace where none of us had visited.  It was Alaska for Gay and Rusty, and Maine for all three of us.

We'd get to Alaska soon enough, but that summer Maine beckoned.  We loaded the van with camping stuff and took off for at least a month.

We camped a few places on the way up, but were really blown away by Mount Desert Island.  (Pronounced like "dessert.")  We put up a tent, I think in late May, and stayed as long as they would let us, twelve days.  

Many small things came together to make that one of the best times in our lives.  Oddly enough, the environment was perfect for my writing -- sitting at a picnic table tapping out WORLDS APART on an antique Royal manual typewriter.  (I had my first computer then, an Apple //, but don't think I trusted it yet for first-draft writing.)  I had nailed together an elaborate portable kitchen that fit in the back of our VW van, and really loved cooking on a campfire.  When I wasn't writing or cooking I was perfectly happy just to stare out over the water, Somes Sound.
 
We shared our campsite with a chipmunk who grew increasingly bold -- actually, we encouraged him by tossing peanuts closer and closer, until he finally was eating out of our hand.  (We know better now.) He took to raiding my precious cook box, where he discovered and gnawed open a bag of rice.  I named him Felonious 'Munk.
  
Before we left the campground I called my agent, Kirby McCauley, and he mentioned that he had another client in the area, guy named Stephen King.  Gave us his number and we called him up, and he said to come on over.  We had a wonderful afternoon with Steve, drinking beer on his porch.  I guess in another year or two that wouldn't be possible, with the success of CARRIE.  Steve is a great guy, but he became so famous that he couldn't have a private life unless he did keep it totally private.

So we're back in Bar Harbor, and find it little enough changed in thirty years.  Of course it's bigger, and there are more tourists, but it seems to have kept its pleasant and mildly exotic nature.

Oh . . . I do have one humbling memory from that trip.  I was sitting in a harborside bar doing a watercolor of the harbor and islands.  A little girl, maybe eight or nine, came up and said, "What you doin'?"
 
"Painting a picture," I said.
 
She studied it.  "You're not very good, are you?"
 
Joe

Up in Maine

A drizzly gray morning here outside of Bangor, Maine, at the rather swank Atlantic Oceanside Hotel.  I'm in the common room of the main building, sitting in a bay window that runs about forty feet, modernistic steel and glass, curving up to include the sky to the zenith. The sea is gray fading to silver sky. which darkens to gray again. The rain was a bare sprinkle when I came out before five; starting to be heavy a couple of hours later.

The weather forecast is crappy today, crappier tomorrow, continued crappiness on Thursday and Friday – it is Maine, after all – with a chance of isolated photons breaking through over the weekend.  If we're good.

But it is a very nice hotel to be stranded in, and the city of Bangor is just a mile down the road.  We had a good time strolling around there yesterday afternoon, after we drove in from the airport.  It's a touristy place, but the fare on offer is not quite as brainless as we're used to in Florida.

A good place to write, I think, the shade of Hemingway still hovering from Michigan.

Joe

Free advice for sale

I answered a letter from a beginning writer today, and then thought it might be of some general interest.  So here it is: . . . .  [T]hings have changed a lot since I was trying to break in, the main differences having to do with web publishing/blogging.  A lot of people leverage that into mainstream fame 'n' fortune, but I don't know anything about it.Some of my reactions might be reactionary, so take them with a grain of salt.  I'm very old-school.You shouldn't take on an agent until you've published something.  An agent who is eager to represent someone who has no credentials probably has no clout himself.  The best strategy is to get a small track record on your own, and then get a good agent.(As you probably know, the American Association of Authors Representatives has a listing of reputable agents.  There might be a good agent who isn't listed by them, but I'd prefer not to chance it.)In my day it was not a good idea to try to sell a complete book. An outline with a couple of sample chapters will be read sooner.  And a huge manuscript from someone with no publications will be read by someone on the bottom of the editorial totem pole.  I don't know anything about small presses, except that the situation has changed for the better since I was a pup.  A prestigious small press might position you better – for reviews and for subsequent books – than working with a third-string editor at a large mega-house.The Robert Jordan world of doorstop-sized books is totally alien to me; I've never read one and would find it physically impossible to write one.  That may be where the action is, though.   If you have the talent for it, I'd say go for it, though probably an outline-and-sample-chapter approach would still be best.  Joe H.

Still up in Michigan

Yesterday we took a long schoolbus ride up to the northern peninsula, where many of Hemingway's early stories are set.  He revisited the area  himself when he was starting to write.  It was marvelous to walk through the actual country he was talking about.  We visited the Fox River, which was the actual location of the story "The Big Two-Hearted River" (many miles away, but inarguably a better name for a title).

We stopped by the railroad bridge where he jumped off the train, going back to "the last good country" after the war, and had lunch there – good and rather surprising, large Cornish pasties.  (A lot of the original settlers of the area were from Cornwall, miners.)  The river does look like great fishing.  Not the first time I've wished I could jump off the academic express and relax with a pole.

We drove on and visited an impressive waterfall.  It was sprinkling when we started to walk to the falls, and by the time we got there it was fairly pouring.  I had my trusty anarak, which is rustic but not exactly waterproof.  I saw the falls and then walked briskly back, a half mile or so, and got a good local pint at the rustic pub in the park headquarters there.  I drank it at leisure, and Gay caught up with me just as I finished.  The ride back to the hotel was long, through the muffled rain, but enjoyable enough, finishing up The Paris Wife.  A good book, even if you aren't fascinated by Hemingway.

Meals at this hotel have all been good, but last night was striking – planked trout, fresh and local.  The filet is pegged to an aged board and roasted, so its flavor is subtly changed by the wood; it's served on the plank and thus stays warm.

Leaving later this morning, but will be in the general area another day.  Going back to the lakeside Sugar Beach motel where our Yooper (for U.P., "upper peninsula") adventure began.

Joe

remembering Papa

No diary entries for the past week because I've been too busy!  We came up to Michigan for the International Hemingway Conference and have been going to panels and talks and field trips.  The conference as an academic enterprise ended last night, but we have one last day-long event, a bus trip up to the deepest darkest north, where stories like "The Big Two-Hearted River" are set.  (That is the name of an actual river, which we'll visit.)

We've been to almost all of these meetings since we stumbled on the second one by accident, in Key West in 1988.  It's been a good excuse to go to Europe every other year, with occasional American meetings like this one.  (I think the criterion for selecting a meeting site is "Did Hemingway ever step into the country for at least an instant?")  It looks like the 2014 meeting will be in Venice, which is not so hard to take.

Many of the panels this time have been directly or obliquely concerned with PTSD, which Hemingway had in spades after his wounding in WWI.  It does explain a lot of his odd behavior.  One paper noted that EH described his own PTSD with unsparing accuracy, but of course couldn't cure himself.  He was also bipolar and alcoholic and depressed – just the guy to describe his half of the twentieth century.

He was a difficult man and probably nobody's model for the ideal man nowadays, but he had virtues as well as quirks.  It's funny to reflect that I'm most of a decade older than he lived to be, but most of the time I feel like a young man who has somehow piled on all these years.  Hemingway was the opposite; when he was less than half my age, he insisted that people call him "Papa," and was famously defensive of being an authority on everything.

It's always fun to be in contact with him again, filtered through all these years and all these different viewpoints.  In my life I suppose he's like a crotchety old uncle, to be tolerated and loved.  And a man ferociously in love with his language, with no tolerance for its abuse, and a large talent for expressing his love by example.

Joe

art for art's sake

Started a watercolor after lunch yesterday, but ran into weather difficulties . . . 



Joe

joe_haldeman @ 2012-06-18T18:18:00

(Oops . . . for some reason this didn't post yesterday ... )
 
We're happily ensconced in the Perry Hotel in Petosky, Michigan, where Hemingway and his family vacationed from the Chicago suburb of Oak Park.  The Hemingway conference started yesterday, with a very pleasant musical review and a cocktail party with "substantial" munchies.  Very substantial, as the food tends to be in this neck of the woods.

Gay and I had a fine drive of a couple of hours through farmland with a little woods, all reminiscent of her family's Western Maryland.  Room wasn't ready yet, so we wandered the streets of Petosky.  A nice lunch at Uncle Lou's.

This grand old hotel was built in 1899, the year after Hemingway's birth.  I haven't nosed around looking for evidence of his passage.   (I always have to think about the bar in Barcelona that has a plaque, "Ernest Hemingway Never Ate Here.")

Hemingway's reminiscences of his youth are complex and not remarkably happy, but I think he always loved this place, where he learned to fish and hunt.  (I've just seen a famous picture of the embryonic big-game hunter, a gangly teenager grinning over about twenty microscopic fish taken from this lake.)

About two hundred people showed up last night for the reception and concert.  Especially glad to see

Strange how everybody else seems to be two years older, while Gay and I continue unfazed.

Off to the opening ceremonies.

Joe

Venus redux

Forgive me for repeating this, but I finally have the picture to go with it --

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(Venus is the little dot above the blob.)

Well, my big ambition on this trip (besides making enough to pay for it with blackjack) was a spectacularly fulfilled!  We saw the transit of Venus – but only by  a hair.

I carried the Questar (a small suitcase-sized box, about 25 pounds) to dinner and then upstairs to the Sky deck.  It was more than an hour before the transit of Venus. 

Conditions had to be nearly perfect.   The transit would begin less than an hour before sunset.  (The event would be seven hours long, but that didn't do us any good.)

Sky conditions were miserable.  It had rained during dinner and was still almost completely clouded up,  just a little patch of blue here and there.  But I wandered around the Sky deck, through puddles of rainwater nearly an inch deep, and found a solid protrusion where I could position the telescope with a view to the west.

The sun wasn't visible, but I focused on the farthest horizon and waited.  Then the patches of blue filled up with cloud.  I didn't quit, but I did pack up the telescope and go down to the promenade bar to join Gardner and Sue.

With about twenty minutes to go, it was still socked in.  But you could see some sunlight filtering in to the west, through layers of cloud.  I went back up to the place I'd found and set up again.

And at the very last moment, less than ten minutes before actual sunset, a glimmer broke through and I could glimpse the sun!   Only about half of the orange disk was visible, floating in billowing clouds, but superimposed on it was the hard dark circle of the planet – much bigger and more dramatic than I had imagined.  We could see it off and on for about five minutes, and then it crawled dramatically to its demise, with the crisp outline of palm trees and luxury homes in front of the fiery disk.

During the whole thing I was holding the Questar solar filter in my right hand, but the light was so attenuated I didn't need it.  The sun was about as bright as a moderate neon light at maximum.

(Don't Try This At Home note:  You don't want to stare at the magnified image of the sun even when it has been dimmed by clouds – the ultraviolet light is still being collected and magnified, and can burn your retina.   Under these conditions I judged the risk minimal.  I checked several times, and the sun was invisible with the filter.)