Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 51

See Dick run

We saw “The Adjustment Bureau” last night, a good movie made from Phil Dick's novel.   The NY Times said “a witty mix of science-fiction metaphysics and old-fashioned fluttery romance, “ which sums it up pretty well.  More suspenseful than most movies, with a really nice Dickian twist.  (An adjective that I suppose will never have the recognition of “Dickensian.”)  We could conventionally say "I wish Phil had lived long enough to see what a cultural icon he would become," but that's presumptuous and ultimately trivializing, I think, of a complex man who saw things most of us never glimpse.  Maybe we can be glad that they're beyond our ken; maybe we can praise Dick for going there and having the strength to come back and report.Joe

Dick and stoned

(A friend asked about Philip K. Dick . . . ) I remember the first time I met Dick – or “saw” him; he wasn’t quite aware of the people around him.  Sitting on a folding chair in a party room at a Worldcon, wearing a big floppy shirt with stars and planets, listening to the sound of some distant drummer.
 
This would have been in the early sixties.  I was socially familiar with people (including myself!) overindulging in alcohol and marijuana, but didn’t know many people who did rilly cozmic drugs.
 
 
Didn’t go into school today – just down to the Panificia coffee shop to write for a few hours.  Then Gay hijacked me to go volunteer for a neighborhood holiday decoration thing, just to meet some local people.  It was kind of fun, wiring together greenery to decorate the local streetlights.  Also worked indoors a bit, assembling beribboned loops to go on trees.
 
 
Last night I made pea soup, nice for this weather.  We went to see the new George Clooney movie The Descendants , which is kind of eh.  They gave away too much of the plot in the trailers –
 
  SPOILER ALERT!
 
 --  guy’s wife is dying comatose and he finds out from their daughter that said wife was cheating on him.  Going into the movie knowing that is way too much preparation; there’s not much else to it, except for an elliptical ending.  Gorgeous shots of Hawaii, but for whatever reason they decided to keep the sex neutral, if even that.  No axe murders or H-bombs, either.
 
Actually, I think it would have been a wonderful 1940’s movie, with what would have been a fairly daring plot and script.  Maybe we’ve grown up too much.  (If, on the other hand, not enough . . . )
 
Joe

You'll believe in fairies!

For weeks we’ve been seeing big white tents up by Government Center, which were set up for Peter Pan.  Finally we gave in and bought tickets last night, and it was charming.  Good kid acting by Chuck Bradley and Evelyn Hoskins (who are not actually kids) playing Peter Pan and Wendy.  Josh Swales was good as Captain Hook, too.  All the performers had to be pretty athletic, not to mention unafraid of heights.
 
The stage effects were really quite amazing.  It was presented in-the-round and very much in three dimensions; as many as five actors at once could float around above the stage.  They had subtle attachment points built into their costumes; pairs of thin wires would be lowered into place while a scene was going on; the actor would walk to his mark and snap on the wires  and be effortlessly airborne.   All very elegant and airy.  An impressive 360-degree projection system gave airborne backgrounds of period London scenes from above.
 
It opened in Kensington Gardens in 2009 – where the original story was set.  The company is called threesixty.  Good effects and costumes, including a fantastic crocodile that scuttles around the stage with two nimble guys inside, manipulating a lath frame.  The croc’s roar is about as loud as an Apollo launch, kind of startling.
 
The costumes were cute and, in three instances, sexy – Tinker Bell and a couple of mermaids.  Of course everything was appropriate for a kid audience, but I was glad they tossed a bone to us guys in the horndog contingent.  Always did have a thing for mermaids.
 
Come to think of it, there might have been a few gay guys in the audience, enjoying different parts of the cast, shall we say.
 
A pleasant evening, no matter what turns you on.  You’ll believe in fairies!
 
Joe

fish story

I jotted this down in response to one of my students' stories this week.  Why not recycle it?Your story reminded me of a weird experience I had fishing, maybe ten years ago.  I was alone in a canoe in a shallow bay in Florida, off the Gulf of Mexico, fishing for sea trout.  Caught a couple.The tide was going out, and I found myself in only a foot or two of water.  I was about to pack it in, and the strangest thing happened – what looked like the dorsal fins of a couple of dozen large sharks came drifting in from the deeper water.  The sky had gone overcast from a cold front, and the light was pearly, directionless; in the distance you couldn’t tell where the water ended and the sky began.  With these dorsal fins moving in.I was creeped out, because those sharks would be more than half the size of my canoe, and they were moving in my direction.  I knew sharks that size aren’t supposed to school, but that made it even scarier.  Like, what’s wrong with them?When they got closer, I saw that the dorsal fins were pointed – so they weren’t sharks after all, but a school of large tarpon.  You do sometimes see individual tarpon in shallow water; they’re aggressive hunters.  But I’ve been fishing in Florida since 1970, and I’d never seen anything like that.  (I asked a park ranger and he’d never seen it either; he figured a school of porpoises had herded them and forced them into shallow water.)Joe

fishing for something

Since early childhood I’ve been aware of a maxim that I sssumed was from Buddha
or Confucius, which came to mind when I was reading about the Occupy [name of
city] movement – “the young at times run straight where wisdom has built a winding
path” – even as a child I was struck by the paradoxical symmetry of that, since
it could be offered in support of either attitude. This morning I Googled
it and was delighted to find that the author was our own Theodore Sturgeon,
who penned it in 1951, in “The Skills of Xanadu.”

Not a deep observation, but it’s a truism worth keeping in mind. I arrived
at it via a thought that is also about as deep as a puddle: I don’t really
“see” capitalism. I’m aware of arguments against it, and in an abstract way,
think they can have merit.

But I was born into capitalism, grew up in it, and to some extent have prospered
within its mild – to me -- strictures. But it’s as transparent to me as water
is to a fish.

The comparison doesn’t end there, either. It nourishes me and gives me an environment
to move through; it provides me something like oxygen.

So what are the people, mostly young, who make up the Occupy troops? Are they
like rudimentary air-breathers, struggling up onto a post-capitalist shore?
Or are they fish out of water?

Both, I think. History will tell us whether they were a turning point or a
footnote.


Joe

tradition bound

This morning I wrote to my editor at Ace –
 
Dear Susan:
 
This morning’s paper had a story on yesterday’s successful launch of Curiosity, the car-sized probe that will land on Mars next year, sometime between August 8th and August 20th. 
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory
 
If ever there was a perfect time to release a uniform Marsbound Trilogy set, this would be it.  It might even be worth a dump.  Nail some of the people who are going into bookstores just before school starts, while Mars is on their mind – and all over the news!
 
Why not let NASA help subsidize our ad budget?
 
Hot jets!
 
(a “dump” is a standing box display)
 
But reconsidering, I wonder whether it’s do-able.  The last book in the trilogy, EARTHBOUND, is coming out next week, so in the normal course of things, the paperback would come out one year later.  Three months after the probe lands.
 
Trade publishing is flexible and inflexible.  If I turned in a manuscript the week before Election Day that proved Newt Gingrich has sex with other newts, it would be on the stands before people went to the voting booth.  But to ask for a regular trade book to come out three months early, it’s “Sure, if you win the Pulitzer.”
 
It’s like what we used to call a LILO stack in computer science, “last in, last out.”  Once a book gets in the queue, it has to wait its turn. 
 
(“But it’s about MARS!”  I insist.  “Talk to the astrology editor,” they say.)
 
Joe

urban housing

 
We had a restaurant T-day dinner with Mike Berlyn and Muffy, McCormick and Scmidt’s, down at Faneuil Hall.  The fare was fine, although I couldn’t actually taste much of the food – head cold -- and could only have a sip of wine.  They brought along  friends we hadn’t met, Charlie and Margie, who were good company.  They’re moving to Beacon Hill, just a couple of blocks from where we’re renting, and we went to see their home-in-progress.
 
They bought a brownstone and gutted it, and are having it re-made board by board.  A small footprint, maybe half again what we have, but four stories, two with working fireplaces.  Elegant wood and tile and polished metal throughout.  A nice place to live, more than “nice,” though of course a constant headache for the past year, coordinating all the various workers and correcting their mistakes.
 
If I were going to spend a million bucks on a place to live, I’d want one where they just hand me the key and I move in.  I remember feeling differently when I was younger – the attraction of creating a space exactly for ME – but now I know I can live anyplace within reason, and don’t care about impressing anybody.  And the idea of taking a year out of my limited number remaining, just to customize a nest, is just absurd.
 
Maybe I’d feel differently if I had unlimited funds.  I love Peter Straub’s place, for instance, which is a somewhat larger version of Charlie and Margie’s (near Central Park), and I suppose it would be worth some time and expense to establish it.
 
Still, I’ll wait till I sell a movie, and then go looking for one I can move right into.  Maybe wait till I sell two movies.
 
Joe

R.I.P. Anne McCaffrey

Sorry to hear of Anne’s passing. She was quite a woman – full of life; in some ways larger than life. My memory of her is always Annie the Good Witch – in 1970-something Gay and I went to greet her in a shopping mall in St. Louis, for an autograph thing, and she swooped down on us in her huge billowing black cape, and we went off with Harry Harrison and Mack Reynolds to severely damage a bottle of scotch, maybe two. 
   
  I suppose it’s unfashionable to say, but she brought a woman’s touch to the boys’ club that was John W. Campbell’s Astounding/Analog, and helped to humanize it. 
   
   She’s sorely missed, both as a groundbreaking writer and a charming vivacious person.
    

Joe Haldeman

old lizards and new books

The book that the movie guy was interested in was CAMOUFLAGE, which I do think would make a good movie.  With Gay’s help I pitched a few others.  Will send him the MARSBOUND trilogy when I get home.  (This morning got word from Lore in Gainesville that a box of EARTHBOUND was just delivered.  Not bad; pub date is December 6th.)
 
Continuing from yesterday . . . after the Guggenheim show we wandered through Central Park for awhile, headed for the American Museum of Natural History.  Had lunch at the cafeteria downstairs and ogled a bunch of exhibits.  They still have the most impressive dinosaur bones on display anywhere, which in their stolid solid way are more impressive than CGI.
 
 
Part of it’s personal time-tripping, remembering how awesome those bones looked when I first saw them almost 60 years ago.  They still give me a thrill – especially the Mamenchesaurus, whose tiny head looks down from sixty feet up, as a predator skeleton goes after her skeleton baby.  She’ll stomp him in a few seconds, surely.  Once the signal gets down from her walnut-sized brain . . . . no analogy with political process here.
 
For dinner we went to the Jazz Standard, under the Blue Smoke Restaurant, for outstanding barbecue and music, both.  The BBQ for me was an assortment of ribs – too peppery and spicy for Gay but just the thing for unsubtle Joe – and she loved her milder Memphis ribs.  The music was George Coleman on a soulful sax with a solid group behind him, notably Russell Malone on an incredibly fast flatpick semi-acoustic guitar and Larry Golding doing thrilling double-jointed magic on an old B-3 Hammond organ.  Coleman’s son George Jr. backed him on traps and Daniel Sadownick thumped conga-type drums. 
 
We went to the early show, 7:30 – we showed up at 6:30 and got great service on food and drinks – and when we left there was a jam-packed crowd waiting for the later show.  The grown-up one, I guess.  We post-grown-ups got back to the hotel by 10:00 and crashed.
 
I got up at 5:00 and went out to write. 
 
Joe

outa time

Oops . . .started writing but ran outa time . . . The Maurizio Cattelan show at the Guggenheim was visually stunning, a life in modern art floating suspended throughout the inside of the seven-storey spiral that defines the building.  Maybe a hundred photorealist sculptures, mostly of people and animals.  Cattelan is an imp who covers a spectrum from jester to experimentalist to criminal – he once literally stole all of another artist’s  work out of a gallery and posed it as his own, in Another Fucking Readymade (1996), until the Amsterdam police threatened to arrest him!   The most photographed element of this exhibit is probably La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour), a life-sized sculpture of Pope John Paul II, struck by a huge meteorite.   Oops, running out of time.  Going to go talk to a man about a movie (or at least the possibility of one); will report later.  Joe