Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 9

A Veterans' Day remembrance

This was my temporary apotheosis as Master of the Beer in Vietnam (Ban Me Thuot, II Corps).  Through a slight clipboard mix-up I was able to order 500 cases of beer, which I distributed to the guys in the field at cost, I think $1.20 a case.  I was a popular guy for awhile there.  But then I had to go back to blowing stuff up, which was my actual Military Occupational Specialty.

Happy Veterans' Day to the survivors.

Joe

Fishing for participles

I have a few of those Gregg-style notebooks in my cabinet, Mitch, yellowing with age.  I got them at a bargain sale decades ago, and they're pretty useless if you don't do shorthand.   Of course they could turn you into a Hemingway "short declarative sentences" writer.  But I do that.  Can do that.  Already.

Or you could turn them sideways and write really long sentences in short paragraphs.

Yeah, trying to use a stylus on a screen doesn't work for me, not for extended text.  It doesn't feel like writing.  I really should integrate the combination into my overall working habits, though.   The barrier used to be that the programs that interpret handwriting into type were laughably inefficient; you spent more time decoding them than you would have spent typing.  Is that still true?

I think that my brain, or one's brain, processes writing-by-hand differently than it does keyboarding.  It obviously uses different areas for the two processes.  Handwriting is primarily mediated by large arm muscles, rather than fingers – at least if you do it properly.  A lot of my MIT students wrote with little squidgy finger motions, and their handwriting was cramped and uncomfortable-looking.

Whatever gets the ideas across, though.  You could even make a case for bad handwriting as a cryptography scheme, if your handwriting is so bad that nobody else can read it!

(My father's handwriting was spectacularly bad, the cliché physician's prescription scrawl.   His secretary was the only person on the planet who could decipher it, and she followed him from Washington to Anchorage, and back to Washington.  Many years later, I found that shorthand was only one of her virtues.  But that's another story.)

I think one reason my handwriting is good is that my typing is not.  Before computers, that was a real handicap to professional writing.  But perhaps it made me write slowly.  Not a virtue in itself.  But careful writing is.  To dangle a verb seductively.  (An effective way to catch a carp.)

Back to work.

Joe

Worlds Fantasy Con

We spent the past long weekend at the World Fantasy Convention, our usual destination this time of year, the annual gathering of the clans for fantasy writers, readers, and editors – and teachers and critics and other professionals.  (Some of the few people who were just fans rather stood out.  Costumes, you know.)

It started out deliberately small, unadvertised, in an attempt to keep it purely professional.  It's broadened over the years.  Some would say diluted.

It's where I used to touch base with Stephen King, but the size of it, and the publicity associated with it,  has kept him away for decades.  Peter Straub does normally show, and we've spent many a morning hour there chatting, before the night owls get up.  This year a foot injury sidelined him.

Still, we had good talking time with a pair of Wolfes, Gene and Gary, and also a lot of time talking art and space with Gregory Manchess, one of my favorite artists.

The consuite and convention bar were both too loud for my bad hearing, but we found a couple of nearby restaurants that were quiet enough for socializing.

(The consuite was okay during the day, and well stocked with coffee,cold cuts, cheeses, and cookies, as well as things that begin with other letters.)

The part of Saratoga Springs that held the convention center also had a few interesting small shops.  A good book store and a food shop with local specialties, where we ordered a box to be mailed home.  An interesting guitar shop where I would have dropped a small amount of money if I'd been alone, but Gay anchored my sanity and held on to my wallet.  I wanted a curious lightweight drone instrument that's part guitar, part ukelele, part banjo.  But I did manage to put a drone in Santa's ear about it, so maybe later.

On the flight home I read a charming book about Jack Gaughan, one of my favorite science fiction artists, and a boon companion/drinking buddy back in the seventies and eighties.  He lived an hour or so away from my parents' place in Tarrytown, New York, so we often got together when I came up to visit them.  Lots of pool-shooting and immoderate beer consumption.

(When I googled Jack I came up with what looks like a fourteen-year-old kid wailing the hell out of an acoustic guitar --


"Stevie Ray Vaughan Rude Mood Cover (Jack Gaughan)"

.  One of those pleasant random internet accidents.)

Jack taught me how to write.  That is, how to write legibly.  Six years of taking notes in college reduced my handwriting to an illegible scrawl.  I admired Jack's handwriting, and he told me that his had also been illegible, but he took the advice of Hannes Bok and retrained himself into an italic hand.  I did the same, with less dramatic success, but at least I became legible, after a year or so of practice.

Here's a random page (visible on LiveJournal):




Someone serious about lettering would produce a more clear page, but it would be less fast.  You have to pick the pen up and put it back down just right, over and over.  Mine is a more scrawly version of that.

A side effect is that it makes handwriting more fun; more satisfying.  A few of my students at MIT took it up, because they had the same problem, with nobody else being able to read their stuff unless they printed it out.

There are books about writing "the Italic Way," but I don't think I really followed one.  I just devised an alphabet and practiced it page after page, adapting it to my own hand.

Joe

tea he

(in response to a query in sff.net)

San Francisco's one of the few cities in America where you can count on good tea.  Seattle, too; Chinese heritage.Well, I should retreat from that old-fashioned position.  There are good tea shops in most large cities now, and most college towns.  The coffee shop where I'm sitting now has a couple of dozen loose teas on offer, and the barristas are properly schooled in its preparation and presentation.  (Gainesville is a college town, or to be accurate, a large town in transition to being a small city, which has a university.  Plus an assortment of small colleges and junior colleges.)There are several places here that traffic in coffees and teas.  Used to have a wonderful tea shop run by an amusing old Chinese woman, who retired or died.(A chauvinistic note:  it seems easier to get a good cup of tea in America now than in England.  A soggy bag of Lipton's  will have to suffice in most venues.  Even in London!)Joe

Tom Hanks as Jimmy Stewart

Last night I went out for a movie and dinner with Brandy and Christina.  Caught the Coen Brothers/Stephen Spielberg Bridge of Spies.  Most of it was nicely underplayed, with Tom Hanks a quietly principled American lawyer charged with defending the most disliked villain in the Cold War, Rudolf Abel.  (Abel is well played by Mark Rylance as a low-key, deliberately colorless cipher, which I take it is true of actual successful spies.)

That story is nicely balanced with the one about Gary Powers, the American spy pilot who was shot down over Communist territory, and suffers through the Soviet jurisprudential system in parallel to Abel's trial.  The one action scene, when Powers's jet is shot down, is short and convincing, with good SFX.

Most of the story is about Hanks trying to negotiate an exchange between Abel and Powers.

I think the writers and directors did a truly masterful job with a plot about as complex as a political movie can get.  Hanks is perfect for his role, the stubbornly good man (I could just see the role played by Jimmy Stewart in another era), and the supporting cast is strong, too. 

After the movie we went to a new restaurant, Blaze, an Italian place with a do-it-yourself twist.  You build your own pizza as you walk down a cafeteria-style line, minions piling on as much of everything as you want onto the kind of crust you want, and then they pop it into the oven while you get your drinks and wait a few minutes at your table.  Delicious food but zero ambience, the dining area an acoustic nightmare.  Definitely on my list as a pig-out palace, though.  Medium pizza piled high with everything – four kinds of cheese, four kinds of meat, three kinds of olives! --  for eight bucks.

Gainesville! City of Alligators and Pig-out Pizzas!  And the occasional sports team.

Joe

I saw, you saw, we all saw for see-saw

(Judith Clute in London mentioned fixing a pot of jasmine tea, so I said I'd make some, too . . . )

. . .  a few minutes later.  I had to unpack 23 boxes of tea before I found the jasmine, a tin left over from my windowsill at MIT.  Just enough for one pot, and it's still good.  I've put it on the list.  Plus honey.

(There must be sixty or seventy teas up there.  Jasmine one of the most common, of course.  It will be nice to have a fresh ounce to refill the old tin.  I'll get a fancy one.)

About 7:30 the workmen showed up.  They're sawing away over my head, working on the roof.  I'll move out to the porch.

Quieter out here, but not for long – they have blue tarps spread all over the back yard.  The joys of home ownership.

They're still using hand saws, but they have an extension cord, so I suppose they'll soon be upping the ante.  Three or four guys, from the conversation overhead.

I'm reluctant to leave, in case something happens that requires an executive decision.   But it's not exactly ideal working conditions.  I shall complain to management.

joe_haldeman @ 2015-10-14T09:48:00

So last night was mild political aggression on teevee.  Fairly civilized, the democratic candidates "debating," though they should coin a new verb for what they do there in public.  It is a kind of stylized debate, though "posturing" is more accurate.

In a large historical context, it was boringly civilized.  Fine with me.  When politics gets exciting, I reach for my hat.

I think Clinton was the clear winner, but then the game was hers to lose, as they say.  The other guys had an opportunity to stand out, and none of them clearly did; she only had to be herself, for which she's had plenty of practice.

I felt that Bernie Sanders did fine, but he has little at stake.  He's too progressive, and America is not about to have an attack of sanity in that direction.  He's got my vote, and all the other shoeless hippie anarchists will turn out in their tiny droves.  But if the mountain of fat that is the American political process does shift to the left, it won't go that far.

Ah, the sky suddenly brightened, and a couple of little lizards in the bushes, here on the godless liberal coffeehouse porch, came out to see what was happening.  Nothing to be afraid of, boys.  But the mammals are still in charge, so you better watch your stumpy little ass.

Well, no.  Not even the mighty tyrannosaurus rex had a proper ass.

Back to work.

never mine

A correspondent in sff.net had a question about land mines in Vietnam --

A lot of what I did in Vietnam, Bib, was setting up mines and boobytraps. And
ultimately one got me. In my mind it was the daily conduct of war; we didn't
have large units moving thousands of people with armor over hundreds of miles.

Our typical disposition was seventy or eighty men moving as quietly as possible
down jungle and forest trails. When we stopped for the night we'd put out Claymores -- functionally, a land mine mounted horizontally. They didn't go off automatically, though; the guy on guard duty would pop one if he heard or saw someone approaching.

When we encountered conventional mines, the dish type, we just blew them up
in place. We'd spent a day learning how to disarm them but were told never
to do it if you could avoid it. Just put a pound of TNT next to it and back
away.  (You might also throw a grenade at it from a safe distance, but experience showed that that was not reliable.  And I personally can't even throw a baseball from the pitcher's mound to first base.)

Joe

Coincidence? Or moral turpitude. Your mind will decide.

Department of Moral Rectitude

Note the salacious sub-headline on this recent issue of New Scientist:

[image error]




I rest my case.

(What was my case?)

Joe

Stephen Becker II

Here's a good article about Becker from the Orlando Sentinel, when he and Mary moved to Florida from the British Virgin Islands.  Gay and I had visited them for a week or so there, in the house Mary designed.  It was gorgeously situated on the side of a mountain, a sun-drenched swimming pool nestled in green jungle.  Copyright © 1992 by Sam Hodges.


A Professor Of The Old School

Stephen Becker Is The Sort Of Learned Man That Learned Men Once Prided Themselves On Being.
 

May 5, 1992|By Sam Hodges Of The Sentinel Staff
 
From the outside, Stephen and Mary Becker's house looks like 50,000 others in Central Florida. It's one-story, concrete block, with a tiny front yard, a bigger back yard, a concrete slab of a driveway. It's on a quiet asphalt street in a quiet Winter Springs development. Nice place, but uniform enough to need its number on the box, so a visitor can know where to stop.

Inside, books set the house apart. Hundreds occupy the available shelf space. And what distinguishes the house further is that Stephen Becker wrote more than a few of those books - two shelves full, counting foreign editions.


Becker, 65, is an old-fashioned man of letters, and even among that endangered species he has shown extraordinary range, writing novels, biographies, screenplays, reviews and translating from French into English the fiction and journalism of Elie Wiesel, 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Needing the job and (for health reasons) a warm climate, Becker joined the English faculty of the University of Central Florida six years ago. The gig ended last week. Becker has retired, and other UCF English professors seem as depressed by that as by the budget cuts squeezing their institution.
University of Central Florida six years ago. The gig ended last week. Becker has retired, and other UCF English professors seem as depressed by that as by the budget cuts squeezing their institution.

''We will never replace Steve Becker,'' said John Schell, chairman of the UCF English department. ''Steve Becker is unique. Not only is he a fine writer, but he turned out to be a fine classroom teacher. And there was no one on our staff who was nicer, or more congenial, or more generous with his time. He's just a real gentleman.''

Becker, who plans to keep living in Winter Springs, will miss the classroom.
''There's something ethically satisfying about teaching,'' he said. ''You're not killing anything, you're not raping the Earth, and you're not concentrating on making money.''

If you're Becker, you're also not writing enough.

''I want to write fiction now,'' he said, almost rubbing his hands with anticipation. ''I've got enough work to last me three years.''
Becker's career resists summary. In fact, a synopsis biography of him in the reference book Contemporary Authors takes up a column and a half. At last count, he had published 11 novels, two non-fiction books (including a biography of the Chicago newspaper publisher Marshall Field III) and translated 14 novels from French into English.

His own novels have been translated into 16 foreign languages. One novel, A Covenant With Death, was made into a film by Warner Bros. in 1967. Others are under option to the movies. Interest is stirring now in his Civil War novel, When the War Is Over, which was published in 1970.

His story of Northern troops needlessly executing an alleged Rebel guerrilla is one writers have admired for years.

''I agree with George Garrett (novelist and critic) and many others that When the War Is Over deserves its underground reputation as a distinctive, original Civil War novel,'' said David Madden, writer-in-residence at Louisiana State University and editor of the recently published Classics of Civil War Fiction (University of Mississippi Press, $15.95).

Becker, son of a pharmacist, grew up in Yonkers, N.Y., and graduated from Harvard in 1947. He and Mary, his wife of 44 years, lived in China in the late '40s (they married in Beijing on Christmas Eve, 1947) and then moved to France, where they knew the novelist Richard Wright. Becker learned French quickly, in part by reading detective novels.


''After learning Chinese, French was easy,'' he said. ''My advice to young people who want to learn French or Spanish is to learn Chinese first.''

Becker would use his French as a translator, but he was mainly interested in writing fiction. At 24, calling on his experiences in China, Becker finished his first novel. Wright got him an agent and an editor, and Harper published Becker's The Season of the Stranger in 1951 to favorable reviews.

As a real live American in Paris, one who spoke French fluently, Becker got asked to translate Romain Gary's 1953 novel, The Colors of the Day.

''It was instructive to a young writer,'' he said. ''I had to subdue my ego. I had to remember I was second banana.''

The Beckers moved back to the United States in the early '50s and raised their three children in rural New York and Massachusetts. They spent six years in the British Virgin Islands, in a house Mary designed, before moving to Central Florida Florida in 1986.

It has been a full, adventurous life, with Mary running a farm during the New England years, and Becker always writing and sometimes teaching, including a stint at the University of Iowa. Along the way, the Beckers' friendships have included Bernard Malamud, John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut and John Cheever.



Joe