Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 46
February 8, 2012
rocket jockey
Last night I was idly clicking through some Google fare about Vietnam, and I came across a piece of amateur footage that was strikingly memorable for me. In LiveJournal, I’ll paste a screenshot:
This is a section of the road between Pleiku and Kontum that’s pretty easy to identify, because most of the roadway is through a flat valley, not much scenery to the left and right. That’s a real virtue, of course, for convoys, since there’s no place for the enemy to hide in ambush. This particular place, though, has thick forest on the left and a blasted-through cliff on the right.
I was in a dump truck about this size, a “five-ton dump” (which sounds uncomfortable), talking to my buddy Farmer. Shouting, actually, since conversation was difficult as we bounced along the rough road.
We were maybe eight feet apart. Suddenly, a rocket swooshed right between his face and mine, and exploded on the cliff to the right in the picture.
A very close thing. My sergeant Pop, who was riding in the cab of the truck, shouted for us to get down and don’t shoot, but we were already down, and I think more into ducking than shooting. Every truck in the convoy did pedal-to-the-metal and we were off like Robert Mitchum in Thunder Road. Well, less fast, but about as dramatic.
As we made our escape, the gunship helicopter that was escorting us swooped in to fire a couple of rockets into the woods where the enemy had been hiding.
When I was a little boy I always thought that rockets would be central to my life as an adult, but this was not what I’d visualized. The convoy got through without casualties, but it was Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride the rest of the way to Kontum.
Joe
February 7, 2012
What? The Dickens.
Merciful Lee Dickens has written reminding us that today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of his namesake Charles – still bringing pleasure to millions, and millions to his publishers, after all this time.
I remember how strangely real-yet-unreal was Great Expectations compared to the other things we were reading in the 9th grade. I mean, I was a hard sell, deep into Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke. Dickens made me reluctantly admit there might be things worth reading that librarians, somehow, approved of.
(I do have to footnote, though, that two years previous to this a librarian had refused to let me check out an armload of sf books unless I also checked out The Pickwick Papers . . . not a good choice. Could have queered me on Dickens forever.)
Guess I like best “A Christmas Carol” and Tale of Two Cities, though the most recent of his books I’ve enjoyed was a thick and uneven collection of his newspaper short stories, which I read while staying with a good friend in London, my editor Richard Evans, who did his graduate work in Dickens. (Boy, that dates me; Richard died in ’96.)
Joe
expanding universe
I never had a good memory for recitation, Dave, but I was doing dramatic readings almost sixty years ago.
A bunch of us would get together in the shade of a big sewer pipe, in the sweltering Oklahoma summer, and I would read Poe and other weirdos to the other kids. Short stories and poems. That was fifth or sixth grade, I think. In the seventh grade I discovered sex, and stopped giving public readings for the next fifteen years. (At which time I may have discovered that one can serve the other.)
Even earlier than that, I was giving science lectures to the other kids for a dime a throw, Kool-Aid served to those with ID’s. I’ve written about that here. The most impressive demonstration was melting a tablespoon or so of potassium nitrate in a test tube and tossing in some flowers of sulfur on top of it. White-hot flare for about ten seconds, the test tube impressively melting, thick plumes of sulfur trioxide flowing out to poison young lungs. Jay Amshey’s mother coming to the door of the basement saying, “What on Earth are you children doing down there?” (Just practicing up for my career as a college professor, Ma’am.)
Its funny to remember that at that time I was painfully shy under normal circumstances. Give me a page of notes, though, and some chemical apparatus or a microscope or telescope, and I was a chatterbox.
When I was by myself I mostly wrote and drew. When I was eleven, my father relinquished an unimaginable $49.95 and bought me a 4” reflecting telescope – and my universe expanded much faster than the speed of light.
Joe
February 5, 2012
manual typing
Cute little TV thing about typewriters at http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7397608n&tag=contentMain%3BcontentBody
I have a big Olympia office manual in my office at MIT -- maybe the only one on campus. I bought it about thirty years ago because Harlan Ellison raved about them and let me try his.
Have to admit that I don't use it very often; the MacBook Air is too comfortable and foolproof. I did write a few books (notably The Hemingway Hoax) on manuals, retyping the text into the computer. Most of the time I write fiction and poetry in longhand, though, for the first draft.
I still have the beautiful little Royal, red enamel Art Deco, that I bought out of a shop window in Iowa City almost forty years ago. Thirty-five bucks well spent. Wrote parts of MINDBRIDGE and ALL MY SINS REMEMBERED on it. Looks like this --
http://mrtypewriter.tripod.com/royal1...
Anybody else out there so retro as to use one?
Joe
Joe's in Second Life today
gomiso.blogspot.com/2012/02/author-jo...
February 3, 2012
to snipe or not to snipe
I don’t know, Dave . . . sometimes shoot/don’t shoot is not just a matter of cognitive criteria.
Case in point, that’s pretty important to one person, or perhaps his surviving children and grandchildren. In 1968 I was riding down a mud track through a forest in the back of a dump-truck, part of a convoy of about a dozen trucks and one tank, no air support, just trying to get through the jungle as fast as possible. Someone fired one rifle round at the tank.
Protocol for that situation was “stay or flee” – if we’d been on a straight paved road, we would’ve just floored it. But we were wallowing in mud, so everybody put on the brakes and those of us with guns locked and loaded, jumped out, and slogged as fast as possible to the treeline.
I took cover behind a couple of trees and looked for “targets of opportunity.” Nothing obvious.
Then I saw him: one guy in black pajamas (which was everybody’s everyday attire). He wasn’t obviously armed. He was hiding in the brush, looking off to my right.
I had a clear shot but decided not to take it. Even if he had fired one ineffectual round at a tank, he didn’t present any real danger to us. No radio to call in artillery.
It did occur to me that if I killed him I would get a pay raise, standard practice. Not that I had anything to spend money on.
Then he turned around and looked right at me. I nodded to him, and he stared for a moment and then turned his back. After a few minutes someone blew a whistle and we got back on the trucks.
I sincerely hope he didn’t go off and kill a bunch of GI’s. Maybe he even had the chance and said, well, one of them could’ve killed me and didn’t.
Interesting how that doesn’t translate to the current war[s]. I was a draftee with no dog in the fight, as they say, and deeply resented the fact that my government had kidnapped me and tried to turn me into a murderer. In the same situation today, in the desert, I probably wouldn’t hesitate to fire. Of course it’s not the same situation; can’t be.
JoeJanuary 31, 2012
sciences
Dave, I'm not sure what you mean by "falsifiable" in "A scientific proposition must be (1) testable and (2) falsifiable if inaccurate." (Ah . . . Word's dictionary has the secondary meaning, "to prove that something is incorrect.")To the accusation "you appear to have a problem with some of the "social sciences," "political science" being one in particular that you take issue with.. . . " -- well, I don't really have a problem with political "science," but I can wish they had some other word for such a gooshy "discipline." I mean, sciences like physics and chemistry work because people have observed objects in the real world and tried to generalize about cause and effect when things happen to those objects. There's nothing like a reliable axiomatic basis for political science.Admittedly, I'm standing outside, looking in. But from out here it looks like a Marxist and a Rousseauvian political "scientist" could no more converse than an Arab astrologer and an Aztec one -- they're both looking at the same stuff, but their methodologies and vocabularies are antagonistic, or at least immiscible.Joe
January 28, 2012
vice precedent?
David, I think you can make a pretty good case arguing that the virtues that make a good lawyer are not virtues in a political leader. Being a really good liar, for instance; being able to make a good case for something you disagree with – and wanting to, to show how good you are.
But there’s also the unemotional observation that the practice of law boils down to a search for precedent. That’s a bad principle for governance – “this is the way it used to be done, therefore this is the way we must do it now.”
Rather than “This is the way it used to be done; how can we improve it?”
Dave, I’m glad you clarified the various candidates’ positions on those important issues. Hate to have some non-Christian freethinker sneak into office.
Almost every time these yoyos get behind a microphone, they offer evidence for Arthur Schlessinger, Jr.’s bleak thesis that the skills that favor success in American politics are antagonistic to actual responsible leadership. Would you buy a used car from Newt Gingrich? Would you like him dating your daughter?
(I like the perennial political poster: “Would you buy a used war from this man?” Pick your president.)
Still feeling a little rocky from my close communion with the pavement. Decided not to bicycle to studio this morning. Gay’s going to the market, but she arranged for another ride. (Yeah, we’re a one-car family. Once or twice a year that’s inconvenient.)
Joe
January 26, 2012
Heavier-than-air flight
This morning was a little more eventful than necessary. I took off on my bike as soon as it was light enough to ride, heading for Santa Fe Community College. Nice fresh path, paved last year. It’s about a four-mile ride with lots of interval training, “hills” to those who speak English.
Heading down one of those hills I fortunately slowed for an attractive Chinese girl who was jogging up, and unfortunately moved just an inch too far to the right.
Some conscientious homeowner had raked all the leaves off the path, but had piled them up in a neat line that hid the three-inch drop-off. So just as I passed the girl, my front tire slid off the edge and the bike threw me onto the pavement.
I made a two-point landing, left knee and elbow. The girl came back and helped me up, very nice, and asked whether I was hurt. I said I was okay and sent her on. I’d hit pretty hard but was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved flannel shirt; I’d skinned the elbow and knee, but not badly.
I went on to the campus and wrote for a couple of cups of coffee in the student center there. Regretted that I didn’t have any painkillers, but it didn’t hurt enough for me to go out of my way and buy some.
Taking advantage of the beautiful cool weather, I left early and pedaled around for awhile. Stopped for a coke a mile or so from home, and wrote another page. Elbow throbbing but no big deal.
When I got home, though, Gay was on the Skype-phone with a friend, and I told her/them that I’d had a little spill. Gay had to look at the arm, of course. I was startled to find that I couldn’t roll up the sleeve; the elbow had swollen up too much. Took off the shirt and there was a actual goose egg over the elbow joint. I’ve had my share of scrapes and all, but don’t recall that particular symptom.
If it were broken it would hurt a lot more, I figured, so I just put on some dumb daytime television and sat with an icepack. Then I graduated to reading with the icepack, and relaxed in the tub, and now I think everything is okay. Still swollen, but the joint’s mobility is unaffected and it just aches a little. (And no, it doesn’t make any distressing noises when it moves.) About four I started moving around the kitchen, company tonight.
More tomorrow, comparing this undramatic boo-boo with Alabama ten years ago. Thrills, spills, can’t tell the players without a program.
JoeJanuary 25, 2012
joe_haldeman @ 2012-01-25T11:05:00
A bunch of old questions, Dave, with the same old answers perhaps no longer sufficient. Since we have created a kind of life on several fronts, have we
also changed the definition of death? It was already an old paradox, with the
Turing test and von Neumann machines, when I was in graduate school. Has its
basic nature changed with the ubiquity of artificial intelligence (at least
by some functional minimum standard)?
Hmm. Trying to think while the maid vacuums around me. Dangerous business.
I'l paste in the review of last night's play . . .
Last night we went to see the little play Sirens , which was amusing, a little
bit sexy – maybe a little too short, which is an unusual complaint for me.
Perhaps I didn’t see enough of the cute mermaid.
The male character is a songwriter who had one big hit and dried up. He and
his slightly shrewish wife have been living on the royalties from that one song
since they were married, 25 years ago. On an anniversary cruise, he jumps overboard
and is (pun alert) washed up on a little island with a siren, a buxom lass
who delights in luring sailors onto the rocks with her eerie voice. She does
a fine comic turn, vicious and vapid. The logic of the play gets a little herky-jerky,
but he comes back from the island a couple of weeks later – the siren released
him to go get batteries for her newfound love, a calculator -- to find his wife
prematurely celebrating widowhood by going out on the town with his old rival.
Things bounce around a bit and come to ground with a happy and not-too-sappy
ending.
It was a fun evening, with astronomy friends Chuck Broward and Judy. Had a
good Italian meal at Amelia’s and indulged in ice cream afterwards.
This Ron Paul parody is vicious and kind of innocent at the same time . . .
Merciful Lee Dickens sent it along . . .
www.youtube.com/watch?v=igQlbesF0zA
Joe
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