Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 75

Tandy and Trajan

(various conversations in sff.net . . . )

My first year at MIT, 1983, I bought the laptop Tandy 100. Hauled it off the bookshelf a couple of years ago and reconnected the battery and it still works. Primitive word processor and spreadsheet capability. It must have been pretty new at the time; I remember what a curiosity it was on the bar car in Amtrak, going down to NYC.

Lord Acton said "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". The exact wording is worth contemplatin...

Leonard Cohen

Last night we went to the local theater for an odd musical production, a set of filmed selections from Leonard Cohen's recent world tour. The show was excellent -- much better than I'd expected; when Gay suggested it, I was kind of lukewarm. The CD of it will be coming out 14 Sept, _Songs From the Road_. I'll get a copy.

He seems older than I'd expected -- my impression (from the seventies) was that he was a couple of years older than me -- but his voice is ageless and his stage presence is...

counting on your digits

I'm sort of an in-betweener here, rather than a certified Old CyberFogie. I started programming long before BASIC, but sometime later than when people programmed in octal by flicking switches on a 1401. At the University of Maryland in the sixties, we used MAD, the Michigan Algorithmic Decoder, as an ALGOL- or FORTRAN-like language, and SNOBOL, a string-manipulation language that was more interesting than COBOL (but had similar arithmetic limitations). All punched cards, of course.

One inst...

school starts

WordPerfect! Makes my fingertips tingle with nostalgia. Of course back then we had Word 4, which worked.

Dave, let's not forget Van Vogt's only novel about the Interstellar Combat Ballet Corps -- _The Weapon Shoes of Isher_ . . .

Taught my first class last night, Genre Fiction Workshop. It went pretty well, and there's still one seat left, if somebody's wandering the campus looking for a humanities course. Science Fiction Writing meets on Tuesday, and it already has twenty pre-registrants,...

quick responses to sffnet --

Just time for a few quick responses between work and going out. Been busy most of the week . . .


Blues, TITANIC--THE NEW VOYAGES could start a whole new subgenre of aquatic living-dead stories . . .

Robin, reading bad student fiction is different from listening to amateur guitar playing in one important particular: you can walk away from the amateur guitar player. You not only have to read the student fiction, but you have to tell the author why it's bad, and expect him or her to gratefull...

How 2

[Dave in sff.net has expressed frustration in trying to write a novel, in the face of specific cognitive handicaps . . . :]

Dave, at the risk of being obvious, let me nail my shoes to the floor and yell a couple of obvious things:

1. You can write a novel. A novel is only "a work of prose fiction of a certain length that has something wrong with it," and you can write with greater speed and facility than most novelists, for instance yours truly. So your real problem is writing a novel that ot...

Farewell to Vance B.

Sad to read in this morning's Globe of the death of Vance Bourjaily. Vance was my teacher and advisor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the mid-seventies; a friend and sometimes drinking buddy. He was twenty years older than me, a World War II veteran. Probably the best writer among the professors I had there.

He had read my first novel, _War Year_, with which I applied to the Workshop. One moment that I remember vividly was when we were walking down a hall in the English & Philosophy Build...

the inks of autumn

Autumn always makes me happy. Ever since I first went off to college, I've looked forward to the fall semester's New Beginning. (Let's see . . . since I left high school I've spent eight years in college as a student, and 27 as a professor. So that leaves two years as a soldier and about a dozen as an out-of-work bum, I mean distinguished novelist. Though some of those years I taught college courses in night school.)

Wandered around campus a bit yesterday; had lunch at the Student Center. ...

Back in Boston

Settling into my new office at MIT. Moved down two doors. The office seems a little bigger, but that's because the old one had two big desks. This one is crowded temporarily; my bike and Gay's taking up most of the floorspace. Then boxes and boxes of books and [other:] paper.

It's a little short of bookcase and filing cabinet space, since I'm sharing it with Alan Lightman, who has the office in the spring semester and summer. All the pictures on the walls are his, but I do have a teeshirt ...

life & death & the alternative

(Continuing the discussion of mortality and statistics in sff.net . . . )

Of course, Blues, that 38-year average includes lots of people who died the next day and a few who lived into their hundreds.

There's been a lot of progress in 150 years. Someone white and male born in 2006 could expect to live to 75.7 – almost forty years longer. If he turned 20 in 2006, he could expect to live to be 87.6.

In my own case, an average white 67-year-old male will live 15.6 more years, to 82.6 . . . but t...