Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 170

Timon Of Athens!

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One of my many hobbies is collecting Shakespeare's plays.  Not physical texts, mind you -- performances.   It's easy to bag a Hamlet or an Othello or a Midsummer Night's Dream.  They're put on all the time.  Titus Andronicus, now, that's rarer.  Or The Two Noble Kinsmen.  So I snatch 'em up when I get the chance.  I've even seen Troilus and Cressida, and that's a boast most theatergoers cannot make.

So the other night I hurried down to Broad Street Ministry (315 South Broad, here in Philadelphia; right across from the Kimmel Center) to see Timon of Athens .  That's a true gem of rarity.  And, luckily for me, the Philadelphia Artists' Collective made a show of it.

Plot is never Shakespeare's strong suit and this play was probably a collaboration with Middleton, who was no better, so you shouldn't be put off by this brief synopsis: 

The benevolent and fabulously wealthy Timon squanders everything he has by giving presents to his friends, all the while refusing to listen to the warnings of his steward.  Debts come due and all his friends prove selfish and false and refuse to help.  Into the wilderness he flees, driven not quite mad but so misanthropic as to amount to the same thing.  Meanwhile, the general Alcibiades (the only of Timon's friends who has not been bleeding him dry, for he values only military valor) pleads with Athens' senators for the life of a friend, guilty of manslaughter but condemned to death, and is not only turned down but banished.  So off he goes to turn the army against the city which has not, incidentally, paid them for some time.

In an ironic twist of fate (the audience laughed at its implausibility), the embittered Timon, while digging for roots, discovers an immense hoard of gold.  This he uses to taunt those who, having learned of it, come to ingratiate themselves to him again.  After various encounters, he dies and Alcibiades, having conquered Athens, reads his bitter, self-penned epitaph.

 To this rather creaky plot, PAC brings several good performances, no bad ones, and one great one.  The great performance, fortunately, is by Chris Coucill, who plays Timon.  He is excellent in the first part of the play as a genial man who wishes nothing but good for his many friends.  His transformation into a ranting misanthrope is convincing.  And his howling, vituperative near-madman is just magnificent.

Timon of Athens, apparently, was written shortly before King Lear , and it's hard not to see it as a rough sketch for that play.  I mean that as very high praise.

Having dissed the Bard of Avon for his plotting, I should mention a few things he does right in this play.  The common element in the two states of this man who experiences the best and worst of human society but nothing of its middle is weakness.  In good times, he clings to the illusion that his friends are as virtuous as he and in bad times he clings to his misanthropy even when confronted by altruism.  It's also brilliant how he sows evil when wishing will and creates virtue when wishing ill.  And of course there's nobody does emotion quite as well as our Billy.

The performances end on April 20.  So if you're in a position to buy tickets, I'd urge you to move fast.  There were only a couple of empty seats the night I attended.  There would have been none at all if more people had known about the play or suspected what a good job the company make of it.

You can find the PAC website here.

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Geeking OUT in Philadelphia!

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The Philadelphia weekly newspaper titled, appropriately enough, Philadelphia Weekly , has a special issue this week celebrating local geek culture.  Click here for the overview.

I mention it in part because it contains a cut-down version of my Geekadelphia interview.  Click here to see that.

But also because it contains a similarly cut-down Geek of the Week interview with my pal, Gardner Dozois.  Click here to see that.

Also, editor Stephen Segal saw something I posted on Facebook about genetic computing and asked me to expand upon it.  You can read "In a Generation the World Will Be Unrecognizable" here.


But most significantly . . .

Philadelphia Weekly , in cooperation with Geekadelphia and arch-instigator Kyle Cassidy, has launched a campaign to have a historic marker erected in front of the apartment house where Isaac Asimov lived while working at the Naval Yard during WWII.  You can read about the kick-off event here.

And you can see the first draft (though it looks pretty good to me) of a video that Brian Siano made of the event here.

And you can sign the petition here.

If you like the idea, sign and share.


Above:  Tom Purdom, Gardner Dozois, Gregory Frost, Robert Walters, Tess Kissinger . . . in fact, I know almost all of the very interesting people in the photo above.  That makes me feel so very cool.  Photo by Kyle Cassidy.

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Geek of the Week!

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At last!  I have finally received an honor that will impress my son. Who, let's face it, loves me but, having grown up in my presence, is not impressed.  Hugos, Nebula, World Fantasy Award, the Game of Thrones t-shirt I got George R. R. Martin to autograph with a Sharpee?  Those didn't do it.  But now . . . now. . .

Now, I am Geekadelphia's Geek of the Week. 

You can find the article/interview here.  At the Geekadelphia website, of course.

More on this tomorrow.
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Asimov in Philadelphia

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Here it is, the apartment house at 50th and Spruce where Isaac Asimov and the woman he should never have married lived during World War Two.  In part because of his marriage, in part because of Philadelphia's muggy summers, and in part because his co-worker Robert Heinlein was an asshole, Asimov hated living in Philadelphia.

Yet afterwards, when he was the most famous science fiction writer in the universe, Asimov came back to Philadelphia every year to attend Philcon -- to be on the panels, to leer down women's blouses, and to invent limericks based on your name.  To chat with anyone who wanted to.

Asimov paid us back.  Now Philadelphia has begun to pay him back for paying us back. 

Saturday, a mob of Philadelphia geek luminaries -- science fiction writers, fans, comix people, and self-identified geeks -- got together at the park across from his former dwelling to sign a petition for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to erect an historical marker in front of it.

Will this work?  I'll keep you posted.


And as always . . .

I'm on the road again.  So I can't promise to be on time with the next post.  But I'll give it my damnedest.  Honest.

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The Shortest Pirate Story Ever Written

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Today, in honor of of Fredric Brown, the master of the short-short story and the author of the shortest science fiction story ever written, I offer . . .


The Shortest Pirate Story Ever WrittenbyMichael Swanwick
The last pirate in Neverland sat alone in a room.  There was a croc at the door.
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Flash Mobbing for Isaac!

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Two posts in one day!  I had just put up the nifty science video on Prince Rupert's drop when Marianne alerted me to the following I guess press release:

Here at Philadelphia Weekly, along with our friends at Geekadelphia, we’ve decided the time has come to call for an official Isaac Asimov Pennsylvania Historical Marker to be placed at the corner of 50th and Spruce, where Asimov lived while he wrote those historic stories.So on Saturday, April 6, all Philly-area Asimov fans are invited to gather alongside as many local geek-culture luminaries as we can assemble in Barkan Park at 50th and Spruce, where noted science fiction photographer and PW contributor Kyle Cassidy will shoot a group photo as we express our support for an Asimov historical marker.We’ll begin gathering at 4:30 pm, and mingle for a bit before shooting the group photo promptly at 5:30 pm. (We’ll also collect everyone’s name and contact info to sign the historical marker nomination form.) Afterwards, all are invited to wander down to Locust Moon Comics at 40th and Ludlow for Asimovian schmoozing and light refreshments.

 This is a worthy cause (and the neighborhood which Asimov and his wife lived in and hated while he was working at the Navy Yard during WWII would benefit from the plaque), and I urge anybody wo's close enough and can spare the time to join in the fun.*

The Wonder That Is Prince Rupert's Drop

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Okay, kids . . . it's Science Candy Friday!!!!

I'll confess that I had no idea how easy it was to make Prince Rupert's drop.  This is one of the reasons that God created the Interweb in the first place.

Enjoy.

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One Foot in the Time Machine

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Pictured above is the time machine in the Kimmel Center in Center City, Philadelphia. It's not a real time machine, of course, just a prop/art installation created to serve as a focal point/brand for the second-ever biennial Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts.

The time tunnel itself is pretty nifty, actually.  There are pleasantly low-key ambient sounds and projections that can be created/altered by tapping on a transparent touchscreen (for the sounds) or grabbing two copper grips (for the images).  But PIFA?

Well, I'm still hopeful but . . .

First, I have to explain that the original PIFA was the result of a ten million dollar gift by philanthropist Leonore Annenberg, who specified that the money had to be spent on a single event. In the hope that it would spark something great, you see. So there was a month of citywide dancetheatermusicart, capped by a street festival on Broad Street which, because it occurred on a suddenly perfect spring day exceeded all expectations.

It was a triumph.

This year faces the volume-two-of-a-trilogy problem.  It can't possibly live up to the first year (for one thing, it doesn't have the funding and for another, nobody's talking about closing down the center of town for its climax).  So a lot of potential sponsors are holding back, waiting to see if this PIFA has the chops to keep the the momentum rolling.  If it succeeds, they'll pile on for the third one and Philadelphia will have one heck of an arts festival.  So there's every reason to be rooting for its success.

The problem is that so far as I've been able to determine -- and I went through the Kimmel Center looking at all the freebie literature -- there's no schedule for PIFA.  Oh, there's an elaborate thing at the home site where you can search by day or by category.  Five clicks will take you to an individual event and another one will take you back to the beginning of your search.  If you're patient enough, you can get a sense of everything you might want to see tomorrow.  But if you want to know if there's anything worth seeing in the coming week . . .  well, you'll probably rely on the reviews in the newspaper.

A great deal is made about the difference between a book and an e-book.  I think the real chasm is between a schedule and an e-schedule.  

But maybe that's just me being old and resistant to electronica.  If you're curious, you can check the schedule here. 

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Judith Moffett on The Left Hand of Darkness

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Last week I had a blog post with the admittedly provocative title Is The Left Hand of Darkness Sexist?   My answer was No.  But in the comments, various people raised issues from the decades that ensued of examination of, argumentation over, and engagement with the novel.  For my money, that's an indication that the book was a success.  

The longest response, almost an essay in its own right, came from Judith Moffett, who unintentionally triggered the post, long ago when she let Gregory Frost and me teach her class in her absence.  It was so thoughtful (and, I must confess, so in line with my own thoughts on the book) that I'm reposting it here so everybody can see it.

You can read the original post here.

And you can read the comments here.


And what Judith Moffett had to say was . . .

Hmm. I may have worshiped at UKLG's altar so ardently that those students may have felt they wouldn't get a fair hearing if they brought their issue up in class. That's too bad. But I didn't only teach content. When I first read the novel, in 1973, I was utterly blown away by the androgyny trope, it's true, but also by the beautiful prose and a taboo-busting love story that moved me personally more than I can say. I hadn't been reading sf for a dozen years or so, but while I wasn't looking the genre had grown up. I taught the book all of a piece: form, theme, style, structure, like you would teach any mature and serious work of fiction.

I was not disposed to quibble over pronouns while reeling from my initial encounter with Le Guin's Gethenians. But later, when I read "Is Gender Necessary?", the essay Mary Anne Mohanraj mentions, included in The Language of the Night (1976 version) and then in Dancing at the Edge of the World (1987 version), I agreed absolutely with what Le Guin says in the second revision. Later still Virginia Kidd let me read in ms. a screenplay treatment Le Guin had written, in which she attempts to rectify her mistake by inventing and applying the neuter pronoun English lacks and needs. The pronoun is "un" in nominative and accusative cases (Un invited un to the dance), and "uns" as a possessive (Un did uns homework and went out to play). Not such an easy problem to fix gracefully, alas.

I don't think it makes sense to label the book "sexist" or "homophobic." It may look those things from a contemporary perspective, and my students may have called it sexist for reasons that made sense to them in the 80s, but in 1969, its year of publication, Left Hand made a groundbreaking assault on traditional gender attitudes and entrenched homophobia. Change has to begin somewhere. Fair enough to see and say that the novel is grounded in the moment of its appearance; not fair to dismiss the many more ways it burst through that moment to carry feminist consciousness forward, to the point where people can look back and mainly see, not the revolutionary message, but the flaws!


Judy is best-known in science fiction for such highly-regarded novels as Penterra and her Hefn on Earth trilogy -- she should be forgiven the punning ubertitle -- but she's also the author of  the suburban homesteading nonfiction classic Homestead Year, and various critical works and translations of poetry.  I'm a particular fan of her second (I think) collection of poetry, Whinny Moor Crossing.

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How Chemists Celebrate Easter

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Chemists are, as far as I'm concerned, the most benign loonies on earth.  There are more off-kilter folks -- but on the whole, they're not particularly fun to have around.  Chemists add a pleasant touch of madness to the world.

So how do chemists celebrate the holiest day on the Christian calendar?  With Cadbury Creme Eggs, of course.

Enjoy.


Above:  It shouldn't need to be said, but I like and respect Christians.  I married one.  And I don't think that chemists being silly in any way denigrates their religion.

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