Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 54
October 23, 2011
Singapore sling!
We had a whirlwind bus tour of Singapore yesterday, from about noon till about 1800. The end result is kind of a blurred montage. If you asked me "did you see the this-and-that?" I'd have to say "probably."
We did have a pleasant interval walking through the botanical gardens, very lush and extensive. They had a large enclosure called the "cold room," which was refrigerated to duplicate mountain conditions, just as lush but darker green and slightly different species, I think. Coming out of it, everybody's glasses fogged up completely!
There were of course many opportunities to buy things, which is part of how the tours are financed. We managed somehow to avoid buying anything at the jewelry showrooms, but in the rough-and-tumble madness of the market we found a delightful single-cup tea set, delicate glass, about $15 (maybe $12.50 American) -- I bought two, one for home and one for my MIT office. Glass cup and glass strainer, so you can watch the tea diffuse as it infuses.
At one of the stops there was an ice cream vendor. We got very literal ice cream sandwiches -- a block of hard ice cream inside a folded-over slice of Wonder Bread! (Well, it was a little sweeter than conventional white bread, and had splotches of red and green food coloring.) There were pictures of things that looked like conventional American ice cream "sandwiches," made without Wonder Bread, but somehow he knew we wanted the weird stuff.
Last night we walked down Orchard Street, a kind of mile-long shopping area where millions stroll at night, and got a pleasant dinner at a food court that had dozens of stands. A really fine mess of chicken chunks quickly fried and stirred into a black stock, maybe squid or octopus ink, which I dipped in a fiery pepper sauce and scarfed up with rice. I would like to say my chopstick skills are improving, but I think that would take longer than we have. (And wooden chopsticks -- the plastic ones are too slippery.)
I could have had fried chicken feet. Maybe once before we leave.
This morning the jet lag did catch up with me. Couldn't read the clock, but it felt like time to get up, so I showered and dressed and took my notebook and MacBook down to an all-night rice shop down the street. Opened the MacBook and found that it was only 1:00. So I finished the coffee and went back to bed and sort of slept for three hours.
I woke up out of a strange dream. A Chinese man was telling me the plot of a novel I should be writing. I don't remember the plot, but the title was "Spin, Spin, Spin." Interesting.
I went back to the all-night place -- the lobby of the hotel was intolerable; some workmen were sanding down the marble floor with a grinder! -- and worked well there for three cups of coffee. Until somebody started working with a jackhammer outside. That was about 06:30.
The inscrutable but cacophonous Orient. But I got more done than my normal day, so all's right with the world.
Joe
We did have a pleasant interval walking through the botanical gardens, very lush and extensive. They had a large enclosure called the "cold room," which was refrigerated to duplicate mountain conditions, just as lush but darker green and slightly different species, I think. Coming out of it, everybody's glasses fogged up completely!
There were of course many opportunities to buy things, which is part of how the tours are financed. We managed somehow to avoid buying anything at the jewelry showrooms, but in the rough-and-tumble madness of the market we found a delightful single-cup tea set, delicate glass, about $15 (maybe $12.50 American) -- I bought two, one for home and one for my MIT office. Glass cup and glass strainer, so you can watch the tea diffuse as it infuses.
At one of the stops there was an ice cream vendor. We got very literal ice cream sandwiches -- a block of hard ice cream inside a folded-over slice of Wonder Bread! (Well, it was a little sweeter than conventional white bread, and had splotches of red and green food coloring.) There were pictures of things that looked like conventional American ice cream "sandwiches," made without Wonder Bread, but somehow he knew we wanted the weird stuff.
Last night we walked down Orchard Street, a kind of mile-long shopping area where millions stroll at night, and got a pleasant dinner at a food court that had dozens of stands. A really fine mess of chicken chunks quickly fried and stirred into a black stock, maybe squid or octopus ink, which I dipped in a fiery pepper sauce and scarfed up with rice. I would like to say my chopstick skills are improving, but I think that would take longer than we have. (And wooden chopsticks -- the plastic ones are too slippery.)
I could have had fried chicken feet. Maybe once before we leave.
This morning the jet lag did catch up with me. Couldn't read the clock, but it felt like time to get up, so I showered and dressed and took my notebook and MacBook down to an all-night rice shop down the street. Opened the MacBook and found that it was only 1:00. So I finished the coffee and went back to bed and sort of slept for three hours.
I woke up out of a strange dream. A Chinese man was telling me the plot of a novel I should be writing. I don't remember the plot, but the title was "Spin, Spin, Spin." Interesting.
I went back to the all-night place -- the lobby of the hotel was intolerable; some workmen were sanding down the marble floor with a grinder! -- and worked well there for three cups of coffee. Until somebody started working with a jackhammer outside. That was about 06:30.
The inscrutable but cacophonous Orient. But I got more done than my normal day, so all's right with the world.
Joe
October 21, 2011
arrived at Singapore
So I woke up this morning in Singapore, not surprising after a 24-hour plane ride.
I don't feel any special jet-lag, yet. Got up at 6:30, which is 18:30 at home, and I feel kind of like I'm at a science fiction convention where I turned in at a fairly reasonable hour but am waiting for the metabolic other shoe to drop.
The ride over was an uneventful day of reading. And watching the little movie set in the back of the chair in front of you. I felt lazy and let myself be entertained. Nice but un-exotic food came at proper intervals. I had a couple of light beers with names I didn't recognize, quite good. The stewardesses were charming and attractive, and although the plane was very large, service was fast and efficient. As we've noticed from Singapore Air Lines before, taking them to Australia and New Zealand.
Nothing yet to report other than a safe-and-sound arrival. After breakfast we're going to look for a half-day tour to get oriented, or Oriented. Will presumably have something of interest tomorrow.
Joe
I don't feel any special jet-lag, yet. Got up at 6:30, which is 18:30 at home, and I feel kind of like I'm at a science fiction convention where I turned in at a fairly reasonable hour but am waiting for the metabolic other shoe to drop.
The ride over was an uneventful day of reading. And watching the little movie set in the back of the chair in front of you. I felt lazy and let myself be entertained. Nice but un-exotic food came at proper intervals. I had a couple of light beers with names I didn't recognize, quite good. The stewardesses were charming and attractive, and although the plane was very large, service was fast and efficient. As we've noticed from Singapore Air Lines before, taking them to Australia and New Zealand.
Nothing yet to report other than a safe-and-sound arrival. After breakfast we're going to look for a half-day tour to get oriented, or Oriented. Will presumably have something of interest tomorrow.
Joe
October 14, 2011
new MacBook Air
The new computer is slowly acceding to my demands. Which is to say, stroke by stroke it's training me. I'm close to being as efficient as I am on the old one, and will probably love it in another week.
I'm confident enough to take it alone to Washington today.
My one complaint is that the screen is significantly smaller. So I use a larger typeface. Which does mean I get fewer words on the screen at once. A reasonable trade-off for the machine being so small and light.
Ah. I just went into Word Preferences and turned off the grammar check. It was putting grey lines under every phrase that wasn't copybook perfect. Who's the writer here, I ask! It's my job to beat the language into submission.
("In this corner, the English language, bleeding badly from a cut over its left eye. In the other corner, Joe Haldeman, who has been severely pummeled but evidently is full of Novacaine, and doesn't realize he's losing.")
Looking forward to the train trip down to D.C. I have some papers to grade, but not a lot. The novel we're studying next Wednesday is Troll, which I'll enjoy rereading. And I have my own novel to play with.
Joe
I'm confident enough to take it alone to Washington today.
My one complaint is that the screen is significantly smaller. So I use a larger typeface. Which does mean I get fewer words on the screen at once. A reasonable trade-off for the machine being so small and light.
Ah. I just went into Word Preferences and turned off the grammar check. It was putting grey lines under every phrase that wasn't copybook perfect. Who's the writer here, I ask! It's my job to beat the language into submission.
("In this corner, the English language, bleeding badly from a cut over its left eye. In the other corner, Joe Haldeman, who has been severely pummeled but evidently is full of Novacaine, and doesn't realize he's losing.")
Looking forward to the train trip down to D.C. I have some papers to grade, but not a lot. The novel we're studying next Wednesday is Troll, which I'll enjoy rereading. And I have my own novel to play with.
Joe
on the (rail) road again
Going off tomorrow on the train down to Washington, D.C., to go to my fiftieth (gasp!) high school reunion.
It will probably be a bunch of old people. How will I recognize them?
Joe
It will probably be a bunch of old people. How will I recognize them?
Joe
October 10, 2011
post-postmodernism, anyone?
Went to a strange panel discussion at MIT yesterday – actually not a panel as I normally think of it – four short solo presentations, seriatim. It was called Present Past: Contemporary Art and the Uses of History. A fast hour and a half. Left me kind of dizzy.
To be fair, I'm no good at artspeak. It would be easy to parodize what the panelists said by presenting it out of context, but in fact there was not much time for context! So a lot of it just made this loud rushing noise as it went in one ear and out the other.
I liked what Matthew Buckingham said about the limits of realism, which I've said myself, less economically: "The only complete description of an object is the object itself." (Of course quantum physics introduces an uncertainty about that completeness, too.)
Jaleh Mansoor said that Seurat demanded to be paid by the hour (which the web verifies) – not surprising when you consider that his most famous work, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, is made up of over three million individual dots of paint.
We got a laugh out of her showing Brancusi's famous portrait of James Joyce, printed in Finnegans Wake, a few vertical lines and a spiral. Googling, though, I find that he also drew a more realistic cartoon picture of Joyce with a few economical brush strokes, really capturing the man's curious mix of reserve and humor.
She also showed an ad for Crayola's Mess Free Color Wonder – a drawing medium that only works on the ground also sold by Crayola – which makes a kind of postmodern point just by existing. (Maybe "post-postmodern," a term two of the speakers used without any amplification. I guess I know what it means.)
A Vietnamese speaker, Danh Vo, was probably pretty interesting, but in between his accent and the room's echoing acoustics I could hardly follow him – a pity, because he showed slides of the Unabomber's typewriter and a newspaper clipping of George W. Bush's wedding to illustrate some abstruse point. I'd love to know what it was!
I also had a little trouble following Dieter Roelstraete, but I think he was quoting Nietzsche in his observation that we (presumably America) "inhabit an environment of studied cultures" rather than having one ourselves. Perhaps that's less true now than in Nietzsche's zeit. Should that be one word? My own impression is that American culture is almost always traceable to roots in British and European culture, with obvious exceptions from native American and island sources, and of course African, and with a distinctly American gloss or spin, not often an improvement. (And in the 21st century, what's American and what's global-industrial?)
As I said, most of it went over my head, but it was a lot of fun anyhow.
Joe
To be fair, I'm no good at artspeak. It would be easy to parodize what the panelists said by presenting it out of context, but in fact there was not much time for context! So a lot of it just made this loud rushing noise as it went in one ear and out the other.
I liked what Matthew Buckingham said about the limits of realism, which I've said myself, less economically: "The only complete description of an object is the object itself." (Of course quantum physics introduces an uncertainty about that completeness, too.)
Jaleh Mansoor said that Seurat demanded to be paid by the hour (which the web verifies) – not surprising when you consider that his most famous work, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, is made up of over three million individual dots of paint.
We got a laugh out of her showing Brancusi's famous portrait of James Joyce, printed in Finnegans Wake, a few vertical lines and a spiral. Googling, though, I find that he also drew a more realistic cartoon picture of Joyce with a few economical brush strokes, really capturing the man's curious mix of reserve and humor.
She also showed an ad for Crayola's Mess Free Color Wonder – a drawing medium that only works on the ground also sold by Crayola – which makes a kind of postmodern point just by existing. (Maybe "post-postmodern," a term two of the speakers used without any amplification. I guess I know what it means.)
A Vietnamese speaker, Danh Vo, was probably pretty interesting, but in between his accent and the room's echoing acoustics I could hardly follow him – a pity, because he showed slides of the Unabomber's typewriter and a newspaper clipping of George W. Bush's wedding to illustrate some abstruse point. I'd love to know what it was!
I also had a little trouble following Dieter Roelstraete, but I think he was quoting Nietzsche in his observation that we (presumably America) "inhabit an environment of studied cultures" rather than having one ourselves. Perhaps that's less true now than in Nietzsche's zeit. Should that be one word? My own impression is that American culture is almost always traceable to roots in British and European culture, with obvious exceptions from native American and island sources, and of course African, and with a distinctly American gloss or spin, not often an improvement. (And in the 21st century, what's American and what's global-industrial?)
As I said, most of it went over my head, but it was a lot of fun anyhow.
Joe
October 9, 2011
and apples . . .
. . . and apples, of course,
a movie and a memorial
Last night's movie was a lightweight sentimental story rather elevated by the acting abilities of the two stars. My Afternoons With Marguerite, with Gerard Depardieu and Gisele Casadesus. A mildly miserable middle-aged guy meets a sprightly nonagenarian in the park. He's barely literate, but she starts reading Camus to him, and turns him into a book lover. That's about all there is to the plot, with a couple of character-actor decorations, but it was the most enjoyable movie I've seen in a while.
Funny to characterize it as "good writing" when I can't tell good French from bad. Maybe it was Depardieu's expressive voice and face, and Casadesus's.
On the way back to the subway we passed through Technology Square, a large open space across from MIT which has been torn up for more than a year. They just started laying the final layer of tiles, some of which name names in IT, and perhaps it was a coincidence that they just put down the one for Steve Jobs. People have been putting flowers on it, and pebbles. Maybe I can find an old chip for the purpose . . . .
Joe
Funny to characterize it as "good writing" when I can't tell good French from bad. Maybe it was Depardieu's expressive voice and face, and Casadesus's.
On the way back to the subway we passed through Technology Square, a large open space across from MIT which has been torn up for more than a year. They just started laying the final layer of tiles, some of which name names in IT, and perhaps it was a coincidence that they just put down the one for Steve Jobs. People have been putting flowers on it, and pebbles. Maybe I can find an old chip for the purpose . . . .
Joe
Walking Boston
A lot of hoofing today . . . set out in a slightly wrong direction this morning and (as it turns out) missed the one coffee place that was open at 7:00 on the way to the Atheneum, where I'd planned to write after nine. Wandered on downtown and wound up in the lobby of Parker House. Holy cow, five bucks for a cup of coffee and a cookie. But not a bad place to write, big-hotel quiet, no Muzak, a choice of nicely upholstered places to spread out.
At a quarter to nine I went up the hill to the Atheneum, showed my ID, and took an old elevator squeaking up to the fifth floor. My own nice table and chair, surrounded by books in languages I can't read. Writing bliss for a couple of hours; not another soul on the floor.
Went home and picked up Gay and we went to The old Otis House to begin a walking tour of our neighborhood, Beacon Hill. Otis House is an eighteenth-century mansion that belonged to Harrison Gray Otis, politician and real estate hustler nonpareil. This area was pretty much on the edge of town before 1800. They were in the process of lopping off the tops of three hills (Tremont) and filling in the swamps to make what is now a pretty tony neighborhood, Charles Street.
The old house was interesting. Not even a generation after the Revolutionary War, there was a fascination for things British, and high-class families like the Otises had rooms full of British furniture, British wallpaper, British carpets – when the shipping often cost more than the goods themselves.
After scrutinizing the old place we went across busy Cambridge Street and up into our neighborhood, Beacon Hill proper – or not so proper, in the old days. For some time a lot of the people who lived here, the North Slope, were the black servants of the rich people who lived a few blocks away. Evidently there was a lawless period when the black people moved out and a criminal element moved in. The name "Mount Whoredom" was associated with various parts of Beacon Hill from the early 1700s until the CivilWar.
By the 1920's it was just a wild neighborhood. During Prohibition it was evidently the preferred place for "youths with artistic temperaments and a penchant for synthetic gin." It's a little less steamy, and seamy, now. Rather expensive, too.
Anyhow, after eyeballing all the interesting architecture, we got off our feet for a pleasant hour of late lunch on Charles, the Café Bella Vita. Then nap and work for a while. I threw together a chicken stew and we went down to Kendall Square for a good movie. Write about that tomorrow; it's getting late.
Joe
At a quarter to nine I went up the hill to the Atheneum, showed my ID, and took an old elevator squeaking up to the fifth floor. My own nice table and chair, surrounded by books in languages I can't read. Writing bliss for a couple of hours; not another soul on the floor.
Went home and picked up Gay and we went to The old Otis House to begin a walking tour of our neighborhood, Beacon Hill. Otis House is an eighteenth-century mansion that belonged to Harrison Gray Otis, politician and real estate hustler nonpareil. This area was pretty much on the edge of town before 1800. They were in the process of lopping off the tops of three hills (Tremont) and filling in the swamps to make what is now a pretty tony neighborhood, Charles Street.
The old house was interesting. Not even a generation after the Revolutionary War, there was a fascination for things British, and high-class families like the Otises had rooms full of British furniture, British wallpaper, British carpets – when the shipping often cost more than the goods themselves.
After scrutinizing the old place we went across busy Cambridge Street and up into our neighborhood, Beacon Hill proper – or not so proper, in the old days. For some time a lot of the people who lived here, the North Slope, were the black servants of the rich people who lived a few blocks away. Evidently there was a lawless period when the black people moved out and a criminal element moved in. The name "Mount Whoredom" was associated with various parts of Beacon Hill from the early 1700s until the CivilWar.
By the 1920's it was just a wild neighborhood. During Prohibition it was evidently the preferred place for "youths with artistic temperaments and a penchant for synthetic gin." It's a little less steamy, and seamy, now. Rather expensive, too.
Anyhow, after eyeballing all the interesting architecture, we got off our feet for a pleasant hour of late lunch on Charles, the Café Bella Vita. Then nap and work for a while. I threw together a chicken stew and we went down to Kendall Square for a good movie. Write about that tomorrow; it's getting late.
Joe
October 8, 2011
Stop it, you animal!
I swear to god this is straight:
http://www.care2.com/causes/peta-to-launch-porn-site.html
That's right – PETA is advancing animal rights by setting up a hard-core porn site that contrasts XXX sexuality with shots of animals being mistreated.
I wonder whether they have thought this completely through. Maybe they're too high-minded to visualize the grotesquerie that immediately came to my (low) mind – some loathsome dweeb jerking off to scenes of animals being mistreated – and yeah, girlz on the side! Wow, a twofer!
Of course if it works I'm sure we can expect Disney to get in on the act. Through their new Pixxxar division.
Joe
http://www.care2.com/causes/peta-to-launch-porn-site.html
That's right – PETA is advancing animal rights by setting up a hard-core porn site that contrasts XXX sexuality with shots of animals being mistreated.
I wonder whether they have thought this completely through. Maybe they're too high-minded to visualize the grotesquerie that immediately came to my (low) mind – some loathsome dweeb jerking off to scenes of animals being mistreated – and yeah, girlz on the side! Wow, a twofer!
Of course if it works I'm sure we can expect Disney to get in on the act. Through their new Pixxxar division.
Joe
October 7, 2011
Boston day
Today was kind of laid back and kind of otherwise – things not going quite right but for random reasons. Got up pretty early with what I thought was a clean slate. Transferred the most recent chapters of my novel onto the iBook and took it with my (ink-powered) notebook down to Panificia, the good coffee shop at the bottom of the hill.
So it wound up being a "clean slate" literally. Got my coffee and roll and sat down to read the latest chapters – and hit some damned button on the Mail program that erased it. Not gone for good, of course; I could put it back as soon as I got home to the main machine. But I only had a couple of pages of fountain-pen text, and hadn't written on the book for a week, having been off building starships.
Oh well. Just write some notes. I fired up the keyboard for the iPad . . . and nada. Nada y pues nada. The long-term battery on it had reached the end of its long term.
So I could write some stuff in my auxiliary notebook, in my purse. But it wasn't in my purse. Not a scrap of paper that didn't have a picture of a president on it. I finished my coffee and went back home.
A beautiful fall morning, and Gay wanted to go out and do stuff. So while I fixed lunch we reviewed a couple of options and then set off for the Boston Atheneum.
This part of the day went perfectly. Our landlord had given us memberships to the Atheneum, a two-century-old "membership library" a few blocks away. It's a serious library, with 600,000 volumes, but also a very serious place to work, with five stories of book-lined rooms with hundreds of tables and chairs in absolute quiet dignity. Antique furnishings, classical paintings, calm quiet people working.
(I've known writers, like Harlan Ellison, who work best surrounded by noisy stimulus. I'm the other kind.)
The obvious down side to it is trying to write inside a building that has six hundred thousand books that want to be read. I think I can handle that, the way I've worked in libraries before. Not allowed to touch a book until I've written three pages. Then knock yourself out. (And in fact the place doesn't open till nine. So I'd work for an hour or two at a café first.)
On the fifth floor we'd gone out on the balcony and looked down on the Old Burial Ground, whose restoration had just been featured in the paper, so we thought we'd go take a look at it.
It took us about a half-hour to stroll our way down there, and our coincidental timing was excellent. We joined a Park Service tour that was just starting, with an excellent lecturer all duded up like a Redcoat. We followed him around the Freedom Trail, downtown Boston, soaking up trivia about Revolutionary times.
Went into a bar after the walk and the Redcoat came in, too. Bought him a beer and we talked for awhile. About my age, he's a scholar and a history teacher at a local college, as well as a re-inactor. Or whatever the term is.
Back home, I cooked up a mess of greens and some haddock. Good weekend kind of day for a weekday – so then things went a little haywire. I was treating it like a weekend, and in fact I'd forgotten that I had an appointment with a student in the afternoon. Straighten it out tomorrow, I hope. I'm not good with memory things, but usually I can keep my academic calendar straight.
Joe
So it wound up being a "clean slate" literally. Got my coffee and roll and sat down to read the latest chapters – and hit some damned button on the Mail program that erased it. Not gone for good, of course; I could put it back as soon as I got home to the main machine. But I only had a couple of pages of fountain-pen text, and hadn't written on the book for a week, having been off building starships.
Oh well. Just write some notes. I fired up the keyboard for the iPad . . . and nada. Nada y pues nada. The long-term battery on it had reached the end of its long term.
So I could write some stuff in my auxiliary notebook, in my purse. But it wasn't in my purse. Not a scrap of paper that didn't have a picture of a president on it. I finished my coffee and went back home.
A beautiful fall morning, and Gay wanted to go out and do stuff. So while I fixed lunch we reviewed a couple of options and then set off for the Boston Atheneum.
This part of the day went perfectly. Our landlord had given us memberships to the Atheneum, a two-century-old "membership library" a few blocks away. It's a serious library, with 600,000 volumes, but also a very serious place to work, with five stories of book-lined rooms with hundreds of tables and chairs in absolute quiet dignity. Antique furnishings, classical paintings, calm quiet people working.
(I've known writers, like Harlan Ellison, who work best surrounded by noisy stimulus. I'm the other kind.)
The obvious down side to it is trying to write inside a building that has six hundred thousand books that want to be read. I think I can handle that, the way I've worked in libraries before. Not allowed to touch a book until I've written three pages. Then knock yourself out. (And in fact the place doesn't open till nine. So I'd work for an hour or two at a café first.)
On the fifth floor we'd gone out on the balcony and looked down on the Old Burial Ground, whose restoration had just been featured in the paper, so we thought we'd go take a look at it.
It took us about a half-hour to stroll our way down there, and our coincidental timing was excellent. We joined a Park Service tour that was just starting, with an excellent lecturer all duded up like a Redcoat. We followed him around the Freedom Trail, downtown Boston, soaking up trivia about Revolutionary times.
Went into a bar after the walk and the Redcoat came in, too. Bought him a beer and we talked for awhile. About my age, he's a scholar and a history teacher at a local college, as well as a re-inactor. Or whatever the term is.
Back home, I cooked up a mess of greens and some haddock. Good weekend kind of day for a weekday – so then things went a little haywire. I was treating it like a weekend, and in fact I'd forgotten that I had an appointment with a student in the afternoon. Straighten it out tomorrow, I hope. I'm not good with memory things, but usually I can keep my academic calendar straight.
Joe
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