Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 52
November 20, 2011
bookworming, museuming, showing
Yesterday Gay and I wandered around for a bit and wound up in the Borders Book Store at Union Square, where we met our friends Phil Anderson and Judith for lunch. After some dawdling and strolling, we went to the New York Theatre Workshop for a staging of “Once,” a musical adapted from the film musical, about musicians trying to make good in Ireland.
Lots of good music and dancing and more or less pretty people in authentic Irish middleclass costume. Seemed less structured than the film, but that might be the environment.
A lot of impressive musicianship, people playing all sorts of instruments that you don’t normally see onstage – actually playing them, which must have been a casting nightmare. Good voices, especially the leads, Steve Kazee as the Guy and Cristin Milioti as the Girl.
Funny that we came up from Boston to see it; it originated with the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge. A good show.
We walked down Second Avenue for awhile and went into a big deli for dinner, okay deli food, and then went windowshopping. Neat big toy/puppet store. Wound up at the wonderful Strand boostore, and spent a pleasant hour shopping – I got ost in some books, though, and when Gay hustled me out I hadn’t had time to buy anything. Massive guilt. Better go back.
I was boyishly fascinated by a tome the size of an unabridged dictionary, titled The Pussy Book, exactly what it claims to be, not cats. It was so well-thumbed as to be unsaleable, and probably cost an arm and a leg and who knows what else.
They did have a half-dozen of my books, which I signed. Signed some earlier at the B&N where we met P&A.
Headed down to the Goog this morning. The show sounds interesting: “This retrospective survey brings together virtually everything the artist Maurizio Cattelan has produced since 1989, and presents the works en masse, strung haphazardly from the oculus of the Guggenheim’s rotunda.”
If you’re going to be strung haphazardly from the oculus of a rotunda, the Guggenheim is as good as any . . ..
Joe
Lots of good music and dancing and more or less pretty people in authentic Irish middleclass costume. Seemed less structured than the film, but that might be the environment.
A lot of impressive musicianship, people playing all sorts of instruments that you don’t normally see onstage – actually playing them, which must have been a casting nightmare. Good voices, especially the leads, Steve Kazee as the Guy and Cristin Milioti as the Girl.
Funny that we came up from Boston to see it; it originated with the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge. A good show.
We walked down Second Avenue for awhile and went into a big deli for dinner, okay deli food, and then went windowshopping. Neat big toy/puppet store. Wound up at the wonderful Strand boostore, and spent a pleasant hour shopping – I got ost in some books, though, and when Gay hustled me out I hadn’t had time to buy anything. Massive guilt. Better go back.
I was boyishly fascinated by a tome the size of an unabridged dictionary, titled The Pussy Book, exactly what it claims to be, not cats. It was so well-thumbed as to be unsaleable, and probably cost an arm and a leg and who knows what else.
They did have a half-dozen of my books, which I signed. Signed some earlier at the B&N where we met P&A.
Headed down to the Goog this morning. The show sounds interesting: “This retrospective survey brings together virtually everything the artist Maurizio Cattelan has produced since 1989, and presents the works en masse, strung haphazardly from the oculus of the Guggenheim’s rotunda.”
If you’re going to be strung haphazardly from the oculus of a rotunda, the Guggenheim is as good as any . . ..
Joe
November 19, 2011
SPOILER ALERT!
Sorry! Gay just read my previous post and noted that I should have flagged it SPOILER ALERT!!
So here it is, for those of you traveling backwards in time . . .
Joe
New Yawk, New Yawk!
Had a nice noisy lunch at an Irish bar on our way to the Paramount Hotel yesterday, after an uneventful train ride. Then left our stuff at the hotel and went to kill some time at the Public Library, since our room wasn’t ready.
An interesting miscellany, the library sort of emptying out its attic for its hundredth anniversary. A lock of Mary Shelly’s hair, e.e. cummings’s typewriter, a primitive (1911) but beautiful movie of the Ballets Russes, letter from Picasso to Jean Cocteau, a macabre letter-opener that Charles Dickens had made from a favorite cat’s salvaged paw, Hemingway’s first draft of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (scribbled on a blank page of a John P. Marquand novel), Annie Proulx’s 4”X6” watercolor notebook (painting and writing, like my notebooks but with a little more painterly skill), a page of “The Waste Land” with Ezra Pound’s emendations, Malcolm X’s 1964 journal just before he was killed, Virginia Woolf’s walking stick (which her husband found floating in the river after she walked into it), a huge (“double elephant”) Audubon page, and a glass box with memorabilia of Jack Kerouac’s on-the-road kipple – a harmonica, corncob pipe, rolling papers, empty Valium bottle – and the one thing whose provenance I would like to see verified: a yellow see-through plastic Bic throw-away lighter.
(Bic’s site says they’ve been making lighters for 35 years. Kerouac died in 1969.)
On our way back from the library we made a traditional stop at the Pain Quotidien for a coffee and nibble. Gay did some phoning and we nailed down a free movie, a Paramount showing for Writers Guild members of the new Charlize Theron vehicle Young Adult.
I’m not wild for movies about writers, as I’ve said here before – they never seem to spend a lot of time scratching and staring at a blank piece of paper (or, as Joyce Carol Oates memorably said, “picking your nose and playing with the cat”), but Charleze Theron gets a lot of mileage out of this film’s unusual premise – she’s a YA novelist, prolific but blocked, and she goes back to her highschool hometown, ostensibly for inspiration. Then things get ugly. And beautiful.
When Theron wants to be beautiful she could wake up a dead man. And of course she plays ugly with scruffy intensity. She gets to do both here, and we get to be voyeurs in the transition, as she goes from hung-over to seductive in careful steps. Her writer is a truly serious drunk, knocking back doubles and triples of Early Times but still able to put one foot in front of the other. On the way to seducing the guy she loved in high school, she carelessly falls in bed with a shmendrik any sf fan has to identify with – or at least identify – a bookish model-maker who hobbles along on crutches, having been beaten up and left for dead by hoodlums in high school.
His epiphany, slow and then sudden, is the movie’s elegant pivot: they are both still stuck in high school – he from trauma and she from a measure of success that didn’t continue into adulthood. When she sees it, or tries not to see it, she has a breakdown of cringing intensity. Worth seeing for both of them.
Joe
An interesting miscellany, the library sort of emptying out its attic for its hundredth anniversary. A lock of Mary Shelly’s hair, e.e. cummings’s typewriter, a primitive (1911) but beautiful movie of the Ballets Russes, letter from Picasso to Jean Cocteau, a macabre letter-opener that Charles Dickens had made from a favorite cat’s salvaged paw, Hemingway’s first draft of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (scribbled on a blank page of a John P. Marquand novel), Annie Proulx’s 4”X6” watercolor notebook (painting and writing, like my notebooks but with a little more painterly skill), a page of “The Waste Land” with Ezra Pound’s emendations, Malcolm X’s 1964 journal just before he was killed, Virginia Woolf’s walking stick (which her husband found floating in the river after she walked into it), a huge (“double elephant”) Audubon page, and a glass box with memorabilia of Jack Kerouac’s on-the-road kipple – a harmonica, corncob pipe, rolling papers, empty Valium bottle – and the one thing whose provenance I would like to see verified: a yellow see-through plastic Bic throw-away lighter.
(Bic’s site says they’ve been making lighters for 35 years. Kerouac died in 1969.)
On our way back from the library we made a traditional stop at the Pain Quotidien for a coffee and nibble. Gay did some phoning and we nailed down a free movie, a Paramount showing for Writers Guild members of the new Charlize Theron vehicle Young Adult.
I’m not wild for movies about writers, as I’ve said here before – they never seem to spend a lot of time scratching and staring at a blank piece of paper (or, as Joyce Carol Oates memorably said, “picking your nose and playing with the cat”), but Charleze Theron gets a lot of mileage out of this film’s unusual premise – she’s a YA novelist, prolific but blocked, and she goes back to her highschool hometown, ostensibly for inspiration. Then things get ugly. And beautiful.
When Theron wants to be beautiful she could wake up a dead man. And of course she plays ugly with scruffy intensity. She gets to do both here, and we get to be voyeurs in the transition, as she goes from hung-over to seductive in careful steps. Her writer is a truly serious drunk, knocking back doubles and triples of Early Times but still able to put one foot in front of the other. On the way to seducing the guy she loved in high school, she carelessly falls in bed with a shmendrik any sf fan has to identify with – or at least identify – a bookish model-maker who hobbles along on crutches, having been beaten up and left for dead by hoodlums in high school.
His epiphany, slow and then sudden, is the movie’s elegant pivot: they are both still stuck in high school – he from trauma and she from a measure of success that didn’t continue into adulthood. When she sees it, or tries not to see it, she has a breakdown of cringing intensity. Worth seeing for both of them.
Joe
November 18, 2011
Bill Morrissey
Last night we went to the Somerville Theater for a Bill Morressey tribute concert. It was quite a showcase; most of the folk singers who do the New England circuit showed up. Thirteen of them; most sang two songs, one that had a special connection to Morressey and one that was a favorite. So quite a variety of good pickin’ and singin’ . . .
Morressey died last year at the age of 59. He was sort of “the” New Hampshire folk singer, a good growly emotional voice; impressive talent for writing poetic lines. Tom Rush said of him (copying from Wiki) that he was “a true intellect, a literary writer,” who deserved comparisons with John Steinbeck. Rush talked of Morrissey’s show-stopping performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1985, saying “One of the exciting things about Newport in the old days was to see who’d emerge as the major new artist. Bill won the brass ring that day. He really did steal the show.”
The last time we saw him was at the Cambridge folk club Passim a couple of years ago. I remember being shocked to find out that he was six or seven years younger than me; he looked older, and pretty burned. Well, a lot of people’s reminiscences of him were about drinking and singing till dawn, so maybe he lived more years in those 59 than some people who are better behaved.
There’s a kind of tinny YouTube of him singing Mississippi John Hurt’s “Candy Man Blues,” which does capture his essence, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1loy1.... Those of you who knew my brother might see a resemblance.
One of the best performers at the tribute was Cormac McCarthy, who is not the novelist, but could be mistaken for him. On LiveJoural I’ll post a picture of him, and one of Shawn Colvin, an attractive woman who played herself on Treme.
Joe
file://localhost/Users/joehaldeman/De...
file://localhost/Users/joehaldeman/De...
Morressey died last year at the age of 59. He was sort of “the” New Hampshire folk singer, a good growly emotional voice; impressive talent for writing poetic lines. Tom Rush said of him (copying from Wiki) that he was “a true intellect, a literary writer,” who deserved comparisons with John Steinbeck. Rush talked of Morrissey’s show-stopping performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1985, saying “One of the exciting things about Newport in the old days was to see who’d emerge as the major new artist. Bill won the brass ring that day. He really did steal the show.”
The last time we saw him was at the Cambridge folk club Passim a couple of years ago. I remember being shocked to find out that he was six or seven years younger than me; he looked older, and pretty burned. Well, a lot of people’s reminiscences of him were about drinking and singing till dawn, so maybe he lived more years in those 59 than some people who are better behaved.
There’s a kind of tinny YouTube of him singing Mississippi John Hurt’s “Candy Man Blues,” which does capture his essence, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1loy1.... Those of you who knew my brother might see a resemblance.
One of the best performers at the tribute was Cormac McCarthy, who is not the novelist, but could be mistaken for him. On LiveJoural I’ll post a picture of him, and one of Shawn Colvin, an attractive woman who played herself on Treme.
Joe
file://localhost/Users/joehaldeman/De...
file://localhost/Users/joehaldeman/De...
November 17, 2011
Earthbound comes home!
Whoop-de-do, the first copy of Earthbound came in the mail today! Love the cover painting, which is the familiar "diamond ring effect" as the sun (or an alien star) emerges from behind the limb of a planet or moon. The artist, Fred Gambino, makes the the sun incredibly bright, white-hot, with judicious composition and use of contrast. One of the best covers I've ever had. The book's pretty good, too. You should only buy a few copies.Joe
Earthbound (A Marsbound Novel)
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Earthbound (A Marsbound Novel)Close Window
November 16, 2011
Earthbound
Hey! Amazon has a picture of my next novel's cover illustration, which I hadn't seen -- pretty neat.http://www.amazon.com/Earthbound-Mars..., out December 6th.Joe
November 13, 2011
What happens in Degas stays in Degas!
Just spent a foot-tiring but soul-stirring morning and afternoon hoofing through the Museum of Fine Art's big new Degas exhibit, Degas and the Nude, co-hosted with the Musee d'Orsay, my third favorite museum in France.If you're like me and think of Degas as a kind of refined guy, pretty ballerinas in their wired-on tutus, you could be in for a surprise. A lot of the 140 pictures and sculptures are pretty raunchy. Lucian Freud said of them “You might say that Degas’s people were more naked than nude — that he was making portraits of naked people.”A more disapproving critic said he made the women look like animals, which I think is close to truth, but it's objectivity more than a moral or esthetic attitude. He did notice that they had vaginas, like more than half the human race, and even pubic hair. Nothing that would raise eyebrows in most church groups nowadays. The only shocking thing about Degas to today's sensibilities is that he was always surrounded by naked women, but was evidently celibate.Gay and Judith and I enjoyed the show a lot, and had a nice but expensive lunch at the restaurant. Actually, there's a big new dining area in the new building, but it looks bright and loud, and we didn't mind paying extra for quiet and subdued light.We were there mainly for the Degas, but saw an arresting new thing in the Egyptology section on the way . . . in 1927 a Harvard - MFA expedition found an untouched skeleton in a tomb, with a desiccated body covered with beads in an odd pattern. After some study and analysis they figured out that the beads were the remains of a complex garment, a dress or shift that was carefully fashioned of beads and thread -- and of course the threads had long since gone the way of Tut's tutu. They painstakingly reassembled it and draped it over an abstract plastic model, gorgeous.Joe
November 11, 2011
ones!
All-ones day . . . Gay and I were going through Building One day before yesterday and there was a table set up by the Korean student organization, handing out lots of delicious cookies . . . eleven’s a lucky number in their culture. So don’t play poker with any Koreans today. (Actually, my experience with Korean soldiers who were in the Sixth Convalescence Center with me in Vietnam would indicate that playing poker with them at any time would be sort of a losing proposition.)
I always sort of brace for the nutjobs to come out of the woodwork on any day with numerological significance. You read it here first. Though it probably has crossed your mind independently.
Judith Clute is in town, and we’re doing artistic, or at least arty, things. Drew and painted in the rain yesterday, sitting in a café under an awning. My picture doesn’t have much to recommend it, except as a record of the moment, people rushing through the rain. I’ll post it in LiveJournal.
We went to the Peabody Museum at Harvard, and marveled for a few hours at their ethnographic displays. A very well set-up collection, going back more than a hundred years. I can see all those Teddy-Roosevelt-type manly explorers setting out to gather trinkets and shrunken heads. For the greater glory of the Crimson.
A very nice temporary exhibit, “Wiyohpiyata,” “Lakota Images of the Contested West.” Primitive drawings by warriors recording the interesting things they did to the U.S. soldiers and civilians who were attempting a land grab.
The colored, or tinted, drawings are from a ledger found after the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876. It’s not a unique artifact; Plains warriors often recorded their exploits in tablets or blank books traded from the Euro-American invaders. The naïve art is exceptionally powerful in a “you-are-there” way. You can see the warriors squatting around the fire the night after a battle, passing around precious pencils and chalk to record what happened. A real time trip.
Of course, Wiyohpiyata looks like some kind of acronym. Why Are You Ho’s Playing In Your Absent Tenants’ Atelier? A phrase that comes up all the time.
We’re going to crawl around the Harvard Art Museum this morning. Meeting Jag and Antony (who visited Judith in London) for lunch at the big vegetarian joint – Vegan, I think — on Central Square.
Joe
I always sort of brace for the nutjobs to come out of the woodwork on any day with numerological significance. You read it here first. Though it probably has crossed your mind independently.
Judith Clute is in town, and we’re doing artistic, or at least arty, things. Drew and painted in the rain yesterday, sitting in a café under an awning. My picture doesn’t have much to recommend it, except as a record of the moment, people rushing through the rain. I’ll post it in LiveJournal.
We went to the Peabody Museum at Harvard, and marveled for a few hours at their ethnographic displays. A very well set-up collection, going back more than a hundred years. I can see all those Teddy-Roosevelt-type manly explorers setting out to gather trinkets and shrunken heads. For the greater glory of the Crimson.
A very nice temporary exhibit, “Wiyohpiyata,” “Lakota Images of the Contested West.” Primitive drawings by warriors recording the interesting things they did to the U.S. soldiers and civilians who were attempting a land grab.
The colored, or tinted, drawings are from a ledger found after the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876. It’s not a unique artifact; Plains warriors often recorded their exploits in tablets or blank books traded from the Euro-American invaders. The naïve art is exceptionally powerful in a “you-are-there” way. You can see the warriors squatting around the fire the night after a battle, passing around precious pencils and chalk to record what happened. A real time trip.
Of course, Wiyohpiyata looks like some kind of acronym. Why Are You Ho’s Playing In Your Absent Tenants’ Atelier? A phrase that comes up all the time.
We’re going to crawl around the Harvard Art Museum this morning. Meeting Jag and Antony (who visited Judith in London) for lunch at the big vegetarian joint – Vegan, I think — on Central Square.
Joe
November 9, 2011
correction --
Oops! This is what I get for typing fast and not having Gay here to check my blog . . . . I wrote
“I took the T out to Hell & Gone, also known as Waban, where Ellen Seigel (who
was also one of Ricky’s poets) picked me up with her hubbie Ron, and we drove
out to Mary’s, somewhere near the planet Neptune, or perhaps Carlisle. Perhaps
I exaggerate the distances. For these three months while I’m a city mouse,
anything past Somerville requires a native guide and beaters.
Ricky’s widow Dolores came with her daughter Lucy, whom I hadn’t met. All of
us wordmongers of one sort or another – Mary is a serious technical writer as
well as a poet, and works part-time at the MIT Writing Center, like Gay.
Mary’s a great cook. Pork tenderloin with coconut rice and roasted winter vegetables.
She also made a deliciously sinful appetizer, a simple dip with equal parts
shredded cheddar cheese, grated parmesan, and mayonaisse, dusted with paprika
and baked in a medium oven for half an hour. Ooh. Have to make it for New
Year’s Eve. (“You can walk in the door, but you’ll have to waddle out.”)
But Mary found, oh-just-a-few mistakes in those 176 words – how could I have missed the onion? –
Hi Joe, So glad you could come and that you enjoyed yourself.
A few corrections to the blog, just because I don’t want mistakes circulating on the internet.
Ellen’s husband is Don, not Ron.
I don’t work in the Writing Center, I worked (past tense because I’m retired now) for the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, or, more specifically, the Writing Across the Curriculum, but not the writing center.
the appetizer was mayonnaise, mozzarella, and chopped onion, 1 to 1 to 1, with a bit of romano added. the original recipe says cheddar instead of mozz. baked 350 for 45 minutes.
the vegetables were not roasted. it was carrots and apricots, boiled, and spiced.
“I took the T out to Hell & Gone, also known as Waban, where Ellen Seigel (who
was also one of Ricky’s poets) picked me up with her hubbie Ron, and we drove
out to Mary’s, somewhere near the planet Neptune, or perhaps Carlisle. Perhaps
I exaggerate the distances. For these three months while I’m a city mouse,
anything past Somerville requires a native guide and beaters.
Ricky’s widow Dolores came with her daughter Lucy, whom I hadn’t met. All of
us wordmongers of one sort or another – Mary is a serious technical writer as
well as a poet, and works part-time at the MIT Writing Center, like Gay.
Mary’s a great cook. Pork tenderloin with coconut rice and roasted winter vegetables.
She also made a deliciously sinful appetizer, a simple dip with equal parts
shredded cheddar cheese, grated parmesan, and mayonaisse, dusted with paprika
and baked in a medium oven for half an hour. Ooh. Have to make it for New
Year’s Eve. (“You can walk in the door, but you’ll have to waddle out.”)
But Mary found, oh-just-a-few mistakes in those 176 words – how could I have missed the onion? –
Hi Joe, So glad you could come and that you enjoyed yourself.
A few corrections to the blog, just because I don’t want mistakes circulating on the internet.
Ellen’s husband is Don, not Ron.
I don’t work in the Writing Center, I worked (past tense because I’m retired now) for the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, or, more specifically, the Writing Across the Curriculum, but not the writing center.
the appetizer was mayonnaise, mozzarella, and chopped onion, 1 to 1 to 1, with a bit of romano added. the original recipe says cheddar instead of mozz. baked 350 for 45 minutes.
the vegetables were not roasted. it was carrots and apricots, boiled, and spiced.
November 8, 2011
Mercury falling
The current Astronomy Magazine has a cover story "AMAZING MERCURY: Planet of Fire and Ice." Checking my bibliography, I find that 35 years ago I had one called "The Surprising World Called Mercury," which I wrote just before I became editor of that magazine (for what was certainly the shortest tenure in its history). I'd like to compare the two – but that was about four years before my first computer, so I don't have a copy handy.
Maybe if the work load backs off I can go check it at of the MIT journals library. Interesting to see what's no longer new; what's no longer true.
Joe
Maybe if the work load backs off I can go check it at of the MIT journals library. Interesting to see what's no longer new; what's no longer true.
Joe
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