Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 50

a public service renouncement

All the holiday cheer around me has me thinking about booze . . . I don’t really miss the sense of intoxication, but I miss the extreme rush, whiskey, on one hand, and the subtle flavors, wine, on the other.  Wine I can still sip, though I can’t really “drink” it – maybe a small glass along with a bottle of soda water.  But I’ve basically become a puny light beer guy.
    
I’m sitting in a bar right now, though – not a proper sleazy bar, but just the afterthought bar at the coffee place where I normally work, early mornings, with fair coffee.  Thinking about holidays and booze, at this beat-up old dark oak bar.
    
Something I hadn’t thought about in years was the Engineers’ Depth Charge.  When I was a junior and senior at the University of Maryland, I’d go to a sleazoid joint just across Route 1 from the Engineering Building (I worked afternoons in the library there), where they served up Depth Charges – a short draft of whatever into which the bartender drops a jigger of house bourbon.  You knock it back in one manly chug – even if you’re female – before the bourbon has had much of a chance to diffuse into the beer.  A curious rush of coolness and fire.
 
I highly recommend it if you want to wind up with pancreatitis or cirrhosis in your sixties.  If you’d rather live to a ripe old age, I’d suggest you stick to the beer and just imagine the bourbon.
 
This has been a public service meditation.
 
Joe

boys and girls together

(In sff.net, talking about boys and girls . . . .)

I guess there have been psychological studies about this, Lawrence – but on the other hand, it involves personality aspects difficult to quantify . . . growing up with siblings of the opposite sex must significantly de-mystify the situation.  Obversely and specifically, growing up as a boy with no girls in the household, I had only a vague idea of what girls might actually look like without clothing.  Of course that was before internet porn and even before frontal nudity in magazines, so there was an actual information gap to compound the traditional mystery.
 
Just on a crude observational level, brotherless girls didn’t have that information gap – plenty of classical statues celebrated male plumbing, but the same artists were curiously coy about female particulars.  That even extends to outer space – the Voyager plaque that shows a naked man and woman waving “Welcome to Dinner.”  Aliens from Rigel will look at that picture and say, “Hey, Martha; they’re just like us.  They give birth through the female’s armpit.”
 
Joe


file://localhost/Users/joehaldeman/De...

bye, bye, Bass

I see from the rose that T.J. Bassler has died.  A real pity; once he thought he’d figured a way around that.
 
I met Tom a couple of times at sf conventions in the seventies.  Really nice guy.  He’d published a few pieces in sf magazines, but what was interesting about him was his gonzo ideas about geriatric longevity.
 
He was convinced that by Draconian control over a person’s diet and exercise regime, he could extend the life of elderly patients indefinitely.  He had a large number of old people, former heart patients, who had dieted to skin and bones and were living on a thin gruel of protein and vitamins – and running constantly, day in and day out.  They were in their seventies and eighties, he said; they might live forever.
 
I joked with him that it didn’t make much difference, if your life was a living hell.  He didn’t laugh.
 
I wish he’d lived another twenty years, and made it to a century.  Eighty isn’t too shabby, though, whether you run or not.
 
Joe

the not so constant stars

There was a poignant note, to me, in the January 2012 issue of _Sky and Telescope_, reporting the Centennial meeting of the American Association of Variable Star Observers.  I belonged to the AAVSO in the fifties, when I was in junior high.  What amateur astronomers did for them then was observe individual variable stars and note their magnitude changes over the weeks and months, by visually comparing them to nearby stars.  You were assigned a few stars a month (maybe per quarter), and the AAVSO would send you charts that showed where your variable was in the sky, along with charts that showed non-variable stars and their brightnesses.It's very subjective and not as easy as it may sound.  And the invention of the photoelectric photometer, which basically counts the photons from a star as they come in, meant that "eyeball" estimates were going the way of tube radios and steam engines.  The article noted that a huge telescope is being built, the 8.4-meter Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which will make more measurements of variable stars in one night than the AAVSO did in a century.  So much for all those freezing nights when I was staring at Eta Geminorum and the stars around it, rather than smooching with a warm girl in a warm car.  (I also did variable star measurements in college in the winter of 1962, FMAO in the University of Oklahoma observatory, and may have done Eta.)   Of course that fancy synoptic scope is much more accurate, but it is not a time machine.  If you want to examine the light curve of Eta Geminorum in the middle of the twentieth century, some of those little dots will be mine.  It's funny, and a little fun, to think that hundreds of years from now, when my career as a novelist is only a footnote, those points will still be on that light curve -- unattributed, but unique, and perhaps less mortal than any literary record.Joe

Theseus of the mighty thews

 
When Gay’s out of town I usually go to a movie that I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t like, and I think I scored big this time – “Immortals,” by Tarsem Singh.  I rather liked his cartoon “300,” which was faithful to its graphic-novel source.
 
In this case, though, the source was evidently “Bullshit’s Mythology.”
 
I was born in 1943, and that was a good year to be born if you wanted to see the epic movie “Ben Hur” at the hormonal age of sixteen.  But that set a glandular standard to which “Immortals” might not reach for a present-day 16-year-old.  He would be too jaded.  I am too jaded and a half-century older.
 
The girls are still great.  The guys are mighty-thewed and the blood is brilliant Type O.  Much more blood and entrails than Charlton Heston could whack out of his hapless enemies, given the primitive movie code of the day.  Theseus lugging about the Minotaur’s lopped-off head with its windpipe dangling out of the gore, that was a nice touch.  And the girls, wow.  Not to mention the women.  But nothing could rescue this Mulligan stew of a plot from feckless inanity; not even the gods themselves, who drop down to make house calls and lop the bejeezus out of subhuman drones.
 
They swing those heavy broadswords around like they were badminton rackets.  Wow, backhand!  They never miss until the plot requires that they slow down and bleed and grunt, which causes the enemy to respectfully move out of sight while they gasp unintelligible dialogue.
 
All building up to a transmogrificational ending that evokes the Old and New Testaments, Freud, Krafft-Ebbing, Dianetics, and “Science and Health With a Key to the Scriptures”!  Not to mention Atlantis and “The Titanic”!  You don’t get this stuff just anywhere.
 
Which is to say I enjoyed it, but wish it could have been a half-hour shorter.  With more girls. Maybe an extra box of popcorn; I was getting hungry.
 
To be a little serious, I guess I was lucky to have read Bullfinch’s Mythology in grade school, so I had all of these wonderful mental images before the cinematic ones came in to compete.
 
It was the biggest book I’d ever owned, at the age of nine or ten, and I read it with difficulty, and a dictionary.  But I remember how grown-up and challenged I felt when I unwrapped it on Christmas morning.  When I started reading it, I tried to incorporate some of it into the comic strips I was drawing – a plagiarist even at that young age! – but I think the Minotaur was beyond my skill.  (My characters were dinosaurs, with heads that were relatively easy to draw.)
 
You ought to see it if it’s your kind of thing.  Two thumbs off.
 
Joe
 

joe_haldeman @ 2011-12-11T11:42:00

 A website called WritingRaw asked me to answer a few questions . . . .
 
Please let us know who you are and how we might know you: 
I am Joe Haldeman. Have been writing full-time since 1969.  Thirty-some books and hundred or so shorter things; a couple of movies.  Best-known novel THE FOREVER WAR.  Currently writing WORK DONE FOR HIRE. 
 
Any news you would like to share concerning upcoming projects: 
 This month (December) the last book of my Marsbound trilogy, Earthbound, is coming out.  I’m past the halfway mark on my next novel, Work Done For Hire.
Thoughts concerning the current state of the literary world: 
 Seems pretty healthy.  When I started writing people were moaning about the death of the novel.  That was evidently premature.
Who is/are your favorite author/s and why? 
Hemingway and Fitzgerald are enduring fascinations.  Partly because they’re good quirky individual writers, and partly, I suppose, because I envy their life situations – being novelists when the world in general still thought that novels were important.
 
I don’t read as much current fiction as I should, perhaps.  I read contemporaries like Stephen King and Peter Straub while travelling; in science fiction, I read the “best of” collections, especially Dozois, every year, to see who’s sneaking up on me.
 
Have you written a book you love that you have not been able to publish? 
No.  I did write one that I didn’t particularly like that was not published.  But it was the novelization of a movie, and it was not published because the director and I had a difference of opinion.
 
 
Do you have anything specific that you want to say to your readers? 
Definitely:  Thank you for buying books.  Without you, people like me  would have to go out and teach, or do something even less savory.
 
 
How do you feel about what WritingRaw.com and other literary sharing sites are attempting to do for new writers? 
I think it’s great that you are opening up a place on the web for people who still scratch out stuff on paper.  I never submitted things to “literary” magazines (who back in the day did not print things that could be identified as science fiction, fantasy, and horror); I’m glad you’re opening a good market willing to consider work by people without a pubishing record.
 
 
BONUS QUESTION: If you could suggest one book that everyone should read… what would that book be and why?“One” is hard.  A list of six would be easier.  But avoiding the obvious silliness of naming one of my own, I think I would recommend Boswell’s London journals.  A unique glimpse into a past that everyone who writes in English should visit; a riveting confessional from a young man unafraid of exposure; the delightful record of a country mouse becoming a city mouse, a meticulous and charming style of writing. 
 

There is no darkness but ignorance

Those of us who live on the East Coast and across Europe and Africa are going to miss the total lunar eclipse tomorrow – actually, it starts about sunup for us in eastern America.  People in Hawaii and Australia will see all of it.
 
Last one till 2014.  Hope you get a good view.
 
Joe

Metrics of ambiguity

In the summer of 1970 I went to the Milford SF Writers’ Workshop at Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm’s place in Milford, Pennsylvania.  For ten days, we did an intensive roundtable workshop all day, broke for dinner, and then some of us came back at night to discuss some more or less formal topic.
 
The night I’m recalling, besides Damon and Kate, we were Gene Wolfe, Gardner Dozois, Gordon R. Dickson, Harlan Ellison, Doris Pitkin Buck, Norman Spinrad, Joanna Russ, and James Sallis.  Kate came up with a strange topic (which I don’t think was the only thing discussed) – “What is the difference between ambiguous clarity and clear ambiguity?”
 
On the surface, that might look like a semantic shell game.  But I think it’s more interesting than that.  It’s something that fiction writers and poets deal with all the time, even if they don’t call it by name.
 
I don’t remember whether we came to any conclusion – the atmosphere was somewhat contaminated by alcohol fumes – but the question has remained with me, and I find it freshly germane because of one of the characters in the novel I’m writing.
 
The details of the novel are not important, and I don’t want to go into detail about a work in progress anyhow.  But the question is of some general sciencefictional interest.
 
Ambiguous clarity.  Clear ambiguity.
    
I brush the chalk dust from my sleeve and posit that clear ambiguity is more or less plain writing about something that can be seen in at least two ways.  
 
“I love you,” she said, and shook her head.
 
Ambiguous clarity is when the description itself  can’t be unambiguously decoded. 
 
She was born on Earth but had always been an alien.
 
I think a functional difference, in storytelling, is that ambiguous clarity does not have to be resolved; in fact, its ambiguity can be the point of the story.  Clear ambiguity, on the other hand, sets up a question that will be answered later on.
 
Must be answered, if the story is to be resolved.  One thing that muddies the water is that a “modern” (let alone postmodern) story does not have to be resolved in order to be complete.
 
The “what is the difference” question, I’ve come to believe, is kind of a koan.  The question itself is what’s important.  Grasshopper.
 
I just threw this out in case you don’t have enough things on your mind.
 
Joe
 
 
 
 
 

Where there's Hope there's life

Hmm – I googled and found a film clip from that Bob Hope show.  The sound is from a different one, though. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAm77O...  I think I glimpse myself at 4:16 and 5:59; I’m in a wheelchair, wearing blue hospital pajamas, so stand out from the green crowd.  The second one has a good Hope joke on the sound track – about the Paris Peace talks he says, “Well, it’ s sort of like milking a bull.  You can do it, but you wouldn’t want to drink the result.”  (over the laughter)  “That’s probably one they won’t put on TV.”  Joe

a season of Hope

A friend sent a u-tube of excerpts from Bob Hope’s Xmas shows –
 
www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-HeETwJSUc&feature=player_embedded I always look carefully at the montages of soldiers – once I saw myself in a crowd shot at Cam Ranh Bay, up in the front row with the other guys in wheelchairs. 
 
(That’s how we started out, anyhow – a minute into the show, Hope invited everyone to come closer to the stage.  On sand, my wheelchair was almost immobilized, so a few thousand guys were suddenly in front of me.)
 
The show was pelted by a warm December rain.  Hope made a joke about it and just carried on.  The dancing girls’ costumes got soaked, which didn’t bother the audience at all.
 
Joe