Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 88

Crazy Heart and other failing organs

Day before yesterday we enjoyed the preview DVD of CRAZY HEART, which could have been a snooze cliche collection without the talents of Jeff Bridges and the down-home beauty of his costar Maggie Gyllenhaal as the burned-out country singer "Bad Blake" and his single-mom rescuer.

The movie's sin, suffer, redemption pattern has no more originality than the average country song, but it succeeds because Bridges creates a riveting and believable character. He plays guitar well and finds a voice lik...

Gyoza & gossip

The signing at Books Inc. went unexpectedly well. It started raining as I took off for studio, and pelted down for some time, which usually kills book signings. But a lot of people showed up, more than half (it felt like) from art connections and astronomy. Signed a lot of both STARBOUND and MARSBOUND hardbacks.

SF writer Michael Capobianco showed up; he's been visiting relatives in southern Florida and saw the announcement on this blog. So Gay invited him to have dinner with us and stay t...

Book signing in Gainesville

Tomorrow (Saturday the 30th) I'll be signing books at Books, Inc, from 1 till 3. That's 13th Avenue and 7th Street NW in Gainesville, Florida.

Y'all come!

Joe

P.S. We'll be having lunch at their vegan restaurant beforehand. Good food!

GAVDIVM.TIBI

My cold seems a little better today in spite of standing out in the cold last night. The moon was gorgeous, with a wealth of subtle detail. I took paper and pencil and eraser out, but my fingers were too frozen to draw.

The moon was too bright to look at directly, magnified, so I stacked a red and a pale green filter together, resulting in a pleasant rose color.

Mars yielded less detail than the previous night, the sky shimmying.

Clear forecast tonight, but even colder, 27 instead of 29. I'll ...

PICC and choose

Didn't mention that I had a welcome medical milestone yesterday. The nurse came over and said the VA doctors had told her to take out the PICC line in my arm. Meaning my lab results said that I wouldn't be needing the antibiotic drip anymore.

I took a shower afterwards and had this discomfiting notion that I was forgetting something. Oh, yeah. The antibiotic bottle I've been carrying around like a pet on a leash.

Joe

thermogodammics and terpsichorean topix

(In sffnet, we were talking about the increase of entropy, among other things . . . )


Dave, that's our old friend the Second Law of Thermogodammics. The universe favors going from a state of order (two separate liquids, each usable) to one of less order (a mixture of liquids, which can't be separated). Or, to put it more simply, the entropy of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium, and the entropy change dS ...

old age and acid

(Over on sffnet, we're talking about age and loss.)

Dave, your experience is terrifying. One almost would prefer the state of some Alzheimer's victims, who so lose contact with reality that they don't realize there's anything wrong with them.

Like anybody over sixty, I have to deal daily with cognitive defects related to age. I see them in other people in my cohort, though, so accept them the way I accept not being able to run up flights of stairs or catch a penny in midair. I can't remember...

animals and artists

Sherry Gottleib sent along a wonderful quote:

"The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."
-- Henry Beston, naturalist and author (1...

guts and music

Went to the VA doctor yesterday morning, and it was all good news. My wounds
are recovering well and clinical tests have come out good -- mainly the lack
of pancreatic enzymes, indicating the pancreas has healed well. But I also
"don't look sick," which means a lot to him. I did look sick a couple of weeks
ago.

He said it would be possible to schedule the surgery to reattach my ileum and
colon as early as March, though he would advise waiting longer. It's a serious
operation, and the stronger...

writing stuff

Interesting breakthrough on EARTHBOUND yesterday. I say that I usually don't outline my novels, and that's true in the sense of working them out beforehand. But what I do is write myself notes about the various things that are going to happen -- and, as in this case, stuff I have to go back and _make_ happen -- and paste the notes in the back of the notebook I'm using for the first draft. I glance over the notes every few days to make sure I'm not leaving something out.

So what happened yes...