Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 48

To the lists, Lancelot!

Got a thing today from the Science Fiction Book Club that was pleasing – Earthbound is number 8 on their best-seller list.

http://www.sfbc.com/pages/browse/best...

Of the seven that outsold me, only Jack McDevitt’s Firebird is a regular science fiction novel, not a Star Wars © book or one of the “Number Seven in the Schrodinger Cycle” genre.  Though I won’t get all high and mighty about that, since mine is the third in a trilogy.

Still, it’s nice to know that people are out there buying the things, even at SFBC discount.

Joe

Only you, Dick Diver

(Talking of various literary things in sff.net . ..  )

The Guns of August is a truly great book, Dave, though I’d say Tuchmann’s A Distant Mirror is even better.  What a terrifying time trip!

She was at Harvard and Radcliffe the first six years I taught at MIT.  I only got to see her once – a talk she gave defending funding the humanities – and she was good.  (Of course the subject is complex and studded with hot buttons.)

Nice pens, Steve . . .  I’d love to have the Charlie Chaplin, the sci-fi-ish one with gears, but googling, I find that it runs £15,000  -- which is within spitting distance, or fountain-pen-squirting distance, of what I’d make from a book written with it.  So maybe I better put the checkbook away.

Found a picture of Gay and me in a surprising place this morning, leafing through the _F. Scott Fitzgerald Review_ -- it’s a group photo taken in Ezra Pound’s Paris garden.  Gay and I were there July 3rd with a bunch of Fizgeraldites.  On our way to lunch at Michaud’s, a restaurant famous in the annals of literary penis length.  (It was here that Fitzgerald confided in Hemingway that he was worried about his stature in that regard; EH took him into the john and, upon observation, pronounced him normal.  The lesson here is never to divulge anything too interesting to a person whose life’s work is the contrivance of an interesting autobiography.)

Off to work – good company coming for lunch, Rick Wilbur.

Joe

picking locks and restaurants

(Talking about computers on sff.net . . . )

Multics, Sean?  Wasn’t that just before they switched to punched cards from clay tablets?

My only first-hand knowledge about MIT lock-picking is from a time class met at 7:00 p.m. and the door was locked.  Three or four students offered to crack it; it yielded on the first try.

Dave, I’m still haunted by the spectre of The Curve of Binding Energy – the general philosophy if not the details.  Sooner or later (and it’s already later than I’d thought) the right combination of intent and expertise, preparation and current events will result in an international nuclear exchange.  In my stories I usually have it happening, or at least starting, in the Indian subcontinent.  But there are lots of droll possibilities.

So I had a good time at open studio this morning, with an attractive young girl for a model.  (Pictures at LiveJournal.)  Gay picked me up after studio, tossed my bike in the van, and we went into town to check out a new restaurant – excellent!

It’s a feminist, nominally lesbian, bookstore and café called Wild Iris Books.  They just began offering food in the back.  Good sandwiches and beer; I’d put it on my top five.  Hope they pick up business from the lamented Books, Inc., due to close down at the end of this month.  Hard to keep a bookstore in business nowadays, even with a good café.  Hope that the relatively narrow niche Wild Iris occupies doesn’t hurt their business.

Joe

speaking of nudes

Good to be back home for the Saturday morning open studio.  Attractive young woman named Emily today.  I didn't do her justice but she was fun to draw.

joe_haldeman @ 2012-01-07T15:23:00

Hmm . . . on reflection, I realize that the lovely woman who doffed her duds at the pool was _not_ a stripper.  She was a lady of the night, unless you hired her during the daytime.  The guy who brought her as a "date" had hired her for the evening, all on the up and up, from an "escort service."  She turned out to be a science fiction reader, and had a grand time.
 
She was the model for Pansy in _The Hemingway Hoax_.  The situation in the novel was true to life in the seventies, and for all I know still obtains.  Houses of prostitution were illegal, as was pimping.  But expecting money in return for sex was not illegal, and if the escort services were not legal, they were tolerated.  They probably made the profession safer.
  
Joe

Land of tall corn and spectacular redheads

A stripper came to one of the Icons (in Iowa City) in the eighties. The hotel had allowed the con to close off the pool to non-members after a certain hour, maybe nine or ten, for a big nude swimming party. This really good-looking red-head showed up, fully clothed, with her boyfriend, and all the guys started migrating toward her end of the pool (like tubby minnows reacting to bait) -- whereupon she TWITCHED and her dress fell off. It was quite a show.

Joe

Stripping

Picked up an interesting book at a sad book sale (our favorite used-book store is closing; the owners retiring), a quite upbeat book on the profession of stripping.  Strip City, by Lily Burana.  It came out in 2001 but doesn’t seem much outdated. 

It’s well written.  She talks about her own career as a stripper some years before the writing, and interviews three other strippers, and goes back on the road herself, stripping from Texas to Alaska.  Interesting stuff about self-actualization and sexual politics, and the quirks of this peculiar kind of literal self-employment.  No silly moralizing or man-bashing.  In her good-natured attitude she reminds me of the burlesque dancer in Stranger in a Strange Land and a couple of other women so employed in Heinlein’s fictions.

She talks about one stripper, Pillow, who is almost legally blind and has to work the stage from memory.  Strange metaphor on a couple of levels, selling something you can never perceive directly.  Her audience are just man-shaped blobs.  They stuff money in her costume, and when she goes backstage and puts on her glasses she’ll find a twenty among the ones, and not know who the generous one was.

(Pillow speaks Klingon and makes her own costumes – a crafter, bodybuilder and sort of a cracker-barrel philosopher.  I wonder if she ever goes to sf conventions.)

Charming book.

Joe

Jupiter, by Jove

One of the neat things I got for Christmas was a frame that holds an iPod in line with a telescope eyepiece to take pictures.  Here is my maiden effort, Jupiter and the four Galilean satellites . . . . (for the technical-minded, this was a 9.25" f/10 Celestron Cassegrain-Maksutove with a  Brandon 16-mm eyepiece and a 2X achromatic Barlow inline.)  It's just a snapshot; I haven't figured out how to control the exposure yet.  Nor how to "stack" photos to increase detail.

Joe

Good-bye, Rusty.

Gay called me last night about eight to tell me that Rusty had died.  She was at his bedside in the hospital all day; perhaps he waited until she was gone to let go.  Gay and I have known Rusty Hevelin since the sixties, and have been close since the seventies.  He was one of a small group who trekked down to Florida during the Apollo Program, to watch the rockets go up and benefit from the hospitality of fans Banks Mebane and Joe Green.  I think the earliest picture I have of us together is Tricon in 1976; I remember we were pals when he was Fan Guest of Honor in Denvention in 1981.We traveled around a lot together, camping in the warm months and conning in the cold ones.  Rusty drove our support vehicle, a ramshackle RV, when Gay and I bicycled across the country in the nineties.  He was one of the rare science fiction fans with whom I could share memories of combat.  He was in the Marines in the Pacific in WWII, flying weather-report missions.  One morning he was shaving on some island, perhaps Peleliu, when a Japanese sniper fired at him.  The bullet went over Rusty’s head and killed a soldier in the tent behind him.  (He never confirmed this, but maybe that convinced him that a beard might be a good idea.)He was a vastly accepting man, with endless patience for the young and foolish (and the old and clueless); everybody’s grandfather figure, but much more fun to be with than your actual grandfather.  Many of us loved him, and he loved in return.He used to say of old people when they died, “Well, he had a good long run.”  Rusty had that himself, not quite reaching ninety.  Selfishly I wish he could have made it into triple digits – but he did have seventy years of bonus time, as they said in his war; the bullet that missed him gifted us with a shared lifetime of camaraderie.  We shared a lack of belief in the supernatural, and also a wry sense of our loss in that lack.  It would be nice to think of Rusty up there somewhere cranking a ditto machine or sitting at a card table with Bob Tucker, Waddie, Mike Glicksohn, Lou Tabakow, Gordy Dickson, and my brother Jack, looking down at us and pitying our everyday mundane trials while they relax eternally in a con suite that never runs dry.  Perhaps we may hold that image for just a little while, in fond memory.Joe

Christmas presence

Here's something I start to feel about December 26th every year:  I was riding along at a nice clip until Labor Day, and then I slowed down the team, for school, and by November we'd sort of stopped on the road, and the individual horses are now off doing their own thing, munching the neighbors' oats -- Dobbin!  Get off that mare!  -- and now I have to get all those nags together and hook them up and head in one direction, one hopes toward the finish line rather than the glue factory.  But they're kind of fat and lazy now.  I have to whip some speed into them.  They're telling me, "Oh, go back and play with your presents."  Okay, but just for the day.

Joe