Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 90

those who are about to die say, "Shit! We're not about to die!"

(From sffnet discussion about the blog that said I was only getting the Grand Master because I was about to die . . . )

Esther, I never reply to malicious fan mail, or blogs, but I did drop this guy (who was nothing like malicious) a note to correct a factual error. They don't just suddenly say "Let's give this guy a Grand Master"; it's a long process of mailings and discussion. So they couldn't have decided to give me the distinction just as I stepped quavering out of the hospital.

I didn't ...

harbingers

Maybe the first of many . . . I found a blog that says I only got the Grand Master because I was dying. Hope they don't know something I don't.

I went to the doc yesterday and he said he would set me up with appointments with various specialists (and indeed two called today). But even with an appointment, I sat around from eleven till five to talk with a doc for ten minutes. Unusual for our VA, in my experience. Of course the holidays are a factor.

Felt low today. Here insert some disgusti...

Grandmastery

(Over on sff.net, I've gotten a few messages from people who found out I was named a SFWA Grand Master . . . )



Well, guys, I've known for weeks that I've been living under the same roof as
a Grand Master, but I haven't let it cow me. I don't let him put on airs, and
in fact make him take off the tiara at the dinner table.

Since there have been 27 other Grand Masters before me, I suspect they should
have changed the title somewhere along the way. Like "Pretty Grand Master,"
"Good Master," and f...

Unlocking the poem

Got a marvelous book of poetry and poetics in the mail Friday -- _Unlocking the Poem_, by Ottone Riccio and Allen Beth Seigel. Riccio ("Ricky") led a poetry workshop in Boston for 40 years; I attended for about 25 years, during the fall semester when I was teaching at MIT. Part of Ricky's teaching method was to issue challenges, like

"It is a dark night, with no moon. You see a bright star in the southern sky. It is blue -- the light is blue -- unmistakably blue, and it does not move. An...

Look! Up in the sky! It's a spiral!

The Norwegian lights are spectacular, and my first take was they couldn't be a hoax, because so many people evidently reported them. But I wonder: every video shows the spiral of light as being perfectly radially symmetrical. That means that everybody with a camera was close to the same perfect spot. (Which is possible, I suppose, if they were all in a city.) I want to see a picture where the spiral is flattened by perspective.

The model was okay this morning, but I was off my feed. Gay ...

an old picture

When Lore met us at the airport, she brought along a framed old photograph of my mother -- soon after I came back from Vietnam (28 Feb 69) Gay and I drove up through the snow, from Washington to New York, to celebrate a belated Christmas. My mother built a snowman beside the driveway, holding a can of beer, smoking a pipe (as I did then), holding a sign welcoming me home.

No snow here. But nice resonance.


Joe






(In chorus now . . . "Aawwwww" . . . . )

pomes pennyeach

(Neale Morison, in sff.net, wrote a poem to celebrate our transition ---

• Some places you want to remainsville,
• And some are a permanent painsville,
• A big yippee-yi-o
• For leaving Ohio
• Its loss is Florida's Gainesville.

Neale, you get the No-Bile prize for friendly poetry. Or would you rather have the Nubile Prize for friendly poetesses?

All this talk about shoes and socks. Hm. Many of you who've known me for decades have never seen me in proper shoes. I started wearing sandals...

damn bugs

Turns out that pancreatitis is a gift that keeps on giving. A culture of the gunk being extracted from the site (pancreatic fluid and little bits of pancreas) came back crawling with pseudomonas. So it's back on the IV for me, some antibiotic.

Picked it up in the hospital. (And everybody was singing, "All I want for Christmas is an opportunistic infection.")

Fortunately, since I don't yet show any symptoms, I can delay the IV drip till I get down to Florida. The surgeon here is calling my G...

fakes from the sky o my

Niece Lore has come to my rescue on the Sopranos. She wants to see them again, too, so we'll make it a Family thing.

Mitch, I don't dare get Netflix. I'd never read or write again.

My own library needs culling, Dave, by about 20-25%, to get the stacks of books lying around everywhere up on shelves. Have to be ruthless and get rid of books that I'll never open again; those that don't have any esthetic or associational value. It's not a good time of year to cart books to the used book stores....

. . . shuffling toward Gainesville to be born

Thanks for the laugh, Dave. Unfortunately, my Superman tights don't work so well with the tubes and bags hanging from the super-torso. Maybe six months from now.

Watched a couple more Sopranos last night. Utterly fascinating. The lead actor, James Gandalfini, does everyday evil so well . . . all in a day's work; get off my case. It's delicious, malicious fun to watch his two lives mixing it up. The family man who's also a Family man.

We'll have to find someone down in Gainesville who can ...