Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 196

Two Thirds (Almost!) of a Century and Counting!

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Saturday I went to a celebration of the 65th wedding anniversary of my neighbors Albert and Enid.  Sixty-five years!  That's an accomplishment I dearly hope to emulate.

Of course, it helps if you marry young (as I did not, quite) and choose your soulmate right off the bat, as Al and I both did.

Albert started the war as a mechanic for the RAF.  At that time, only gentlemen were allowed inside the warplanes, and he was an East Ender.  The mortality rate among gentlemen was high, however, and by war's end he was the navigator in a bomber.  Enid was a radio operator.  She invaded France two days after D-Day.

They'd both tell you that they're ordinary people, and in a sense that's perfectly true.  It was ordinary people like them and my father who defeated the Nazis and saved civilization.  For which I will always be grateful.

It was a terrific celebration with all the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren present, as well as lots and lots of friends.  A room thronged with people who all liked each other.  Marianne and I felt privileged to be there.

Oh, and did I mention that they're the best neighbors in the world?  They are.  Literally.

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Paperbacks vs. Hardcovers

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When I was young, I loved paperbacks to distraction and despised hardcovers.  In my late middle age, in fact, it was a terrible moment when I realized that I preferred hardcovers.  I couldn't say then why I assigned a moral judgment to this shift.  I assumed it was due to my dwindling eyesight.

My son Sean is emphatically a partisan of paperbacks.  "I like to hold them!" he exclaims.  In him I see my youth, and wonder.

And there it was, a not-understood phenomenon.

Until just now.  I was tidying my room and I grabbed up two paperbacks I needed for research -- the I Ching and Pu Songling's Strange Tales from Make-Do Studio.   Holding them in my hand, I could feel the density of information inside the two books, and the power that could be derived from them.  It felt like holding a hand grenade.

And that's the difference.  A hardcover is, essentially, a construction manual for whatever intellectual concern you're engaged in.  But a paperback is a revolutionary weapon.  That's why paperback lovers tend to be younger and hardcover lovers tend to be older.  The young are natural revolutionaries.  The old want to leave behind something constructive.

Nowadays, I'm into building things that will endure. So I prefer hardcovers.

Ah, but there are moments still when the inner anarchist comes out.

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Back To RUSSIA!!!

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Okay, here's my big news:  I"m hitting the road again.  This time, I'm going back to Ekaterinburg in Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia to be a guest at Aelita, Russia's oldest science fiction convention.  The convention occurs over the last weekend in May, but I'm staying over for a few days afterward.

 Why?  Because the last time I was in Ekaterinburg, I came up with the plots for " Libertarian Russia" and "Pushkin the American."  Also the inspiration for Dancing With Bears .  If Mother Russia likes me enough to give me stories, who am I to complain?

I'm really looking forward to this one.  You'll hear more about it as it happens.


And even though I try to not to waste my praise on people who are already getting it by the bucketload . . . 

I am currently watching the first season of Game of Thrones on DVD.  And it is such an extreme pleasure to be watching television fantasy and exclaiming every so many minutes on how well done something is, rather than what I usually exclaim.  Which is, you know, the exact opposite.

So, all praise to the actors, the director, all the tech people who lit and filmed and costumed and set. And, of course, to George.  I knew him back when he was merely a greatly-admired multiple-award-winning science fiction writer.

Above:  A still from a Soviet movie adaptation of Tolstoy's Aelita, the first Russian science fiction novel.  Not that Tolstoy.  The other one.

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Lost Techniques for Conveying the Unspoken and the Unspeakable

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I've been reading the Summer 2011 issue of the Paris Review, which contains interviews with William Gibson and Samuel R. Delany.  In his interview, Chip (as his many friends like to call SRD) makes an interesting observation (here cut down slightly for brevity and to be sure it falls into the category of "fair use").  In discussing the use of innuendo and the "coyly placed line of white space," employed at a time when certain things could not be written down explicitly and (subsequently) other things could be given greater power by employing that same technique, he says:

Today, I watch seminar rooms of graduate students misread both Bester and Conrad because they no longer have to wonder about the possibility of such illegal elements occurring in the story and the compensating possibility of suggestion as a writerly strategy for representing both sex and violence.  In Tiger! Tiger! the demonic antihero, Gully Foyle, invades Robin's exploded apartment and stalks across her living room to where she cowers away from him on the couh.  There is a line of white space . . .

Foyle, of course, rapes Robin.  But many of Chip's students simply can't see this.  Nor, in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness , in which the death of the African woman that Kurz has been sleeping with, occurs in another line of white space, can half the students understand that when Kurz cries, "The horror! The horror!," he is thinking of her death.

And, further down the page, he concludes:

"If he raped her, why didn't the writer say so?"  "If they shot her, why didn't Conrad show her fall dead?" my graduate students ask.  It makes he wonder what other techniques for conveying the unspoken and the unspeakable we have forgotten how to read over four or five thousand years of "literacy."

Which is why we value Chip so greatly as a critic.  Teaching students how to literally read between the lines is simply part of his duty as a teacher.  But that final sentence is a speculation that opens vistas.  Ever since, I've been thinking about the Bible and Gilgamesh and most especially the works of Homer and what I'm not seeing when I read them.

Oh, and . . .


I may have missed out on China, but that doesn't mean that I've given up on travel.  More on that tomorrow.


Above:  Samuel R. Delany.  The camera loves him.  You pretty much never see a bad photo of Chip.


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Slow Monday

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Not much happening, for which I apologize.  Marianne gets back from China late tomorrow which, as I know from experience, means that she'll have to collapse from exhaustion for at least one full day and maybe two.

Meanwhile, I have to hustle this week in order to get a visa for . . .

But that would be telling.  More very soon.

Above:  My favorite orphan work of art, City Root, by Keiko Miyamori.  I drove past it today and stopped for a quick snapshot.  What a brave city to have such sculpture in it!

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"This Could Be Something If I Let It"

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Last week, Marianne and I went to the Whitney Biennial, as is our custom once every other year.  It struck me that a lot of the art was about process rather than a finished product.  Case in point was what seemed to be the most popular piece, Dawn Kasper's installation, "This Could Be Something If I Let It."  Which consists of her art studio, inside which she lives and works for all the hours the Whitney is open.

When I drifted by, Ms Kasper was getting her hair cut and chatting with museum-goers.  "Where are you from?  Oh, I have a cousin who lives near there," sort of thing.  There was a bit of a crowd, and they were all clearly enthralled.

Afterward, Marianne said, "It's a magician's lair.  I'd be a lot more impressed if I didn't already live in one."

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What We've All Been Waiting For

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I know what you're thinking:  When the hell are we finally going to get a Chinese Kung Fu Steampunk movie?

Soon, my children, soon.

Tai Chi 0 by director Stephen Fung is currently in post production.  That's a promo clip for it up above.  I think I'm going to enjoy this one a lot.


You can read about it here.


And meanwhile, elsewhere in the future . . .

 Google is apparently Beta-testing a lowest-possible-imagination version of Bruce Sterling's  old cyberpunk data spex.  If you wind up with a pair, be sure to read every word of whatever agreement they require you to sign.  I'm betting a lot more of your experience has potential commercial value than you realized.




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My Imaginary China

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 I'm still not in China.  But in my imagination, I am there.  So far, Marianne's been to Beijing, seen the Forbidden City, visited the Summer Palace, walked on the Great Wall, and toured Xi'an.  In Xi'an, my brother-in-law's family treated the entire family, including the two ladies on the tour who were not related but were promoted on the spot to Honorary Family and the tour guide because what the heck.
It makes up for a lot, knowing that she's having the kind of experience I most wish for her.
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Remembering Mike Ford

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In the current issue of Locus , Graham Sleight wraps up his admirable series of looks backward at the most important books of major science fiction writers with a contemplation on the works of John M. Ford, the guy we all called "Mike."  It makes me sad to think of him because he died far too young, but we owe it to the man to bring him up every now and then.

As Sleight notes, Ford's career was all over the map -- poetry, gaming scenarios (he was one of the beta testers for Dungeons and Dragons), fantasy, science fiction, even Star Trek tie-ins . . .  One year he won the World Fantasy Award for Winter Solstice, Camelot Station , a chapbook collection of formally perfect poems mashing together the Matter of Britain with Victorian transportation, which he sent out to his friends as a Christmas card.

Let me repeat that:  He won the World Fantasy Award for his Christmas card.

Sometimes it seemed like Mike was trying desperately to fail -- and not succeeding at it.  As a result, his reputation today is not a patch on what it would be if he had found one single nail and hammered on it to the exclusion of all others.  Graham Sleight effectively apologizes for indulging himself in covering a writer whose fame didn't approach that of the others he'd written about.  Albeit one who might have been as famous as any of them if he had only tried.

But so far as I could tell, success was never Mike Ford's intent.  My best guess is that he was simply looking for tasks that would entertain his extremely fine mind.  Jesus, he was smart!  He couldn't have hidden that if he'd tried.

And, um . . . that's all I had to say.  You might want to look up his fantasy novel The Dragon Waiting: A Masque of History .  It won the World Fantasy Award too.  Even though I'm certain that was not his intent

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That Beautiful Land Where I Am Not . . .

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Well, this is disappointing.

Wednesday, I came down with an infection.  Nothing serious -- two days in bed later, I was fit as a fiddle and fine as frog's hair.  But I was also on the ground, in Philadelphia.  While the airplane I was not in was on its way to China.

It's like Tracy Morgan says:  "If you want to make God laugh, make plans.  Or read Him a Dave Barry book."

Fortunately, I had trip cancellation insurance, so I can take the money and buy another tour sometime in the yet-to-be determined future.  In the meantime, I'll put the China novel on the back burner and get to work on the other novel I'm writing. The first chapter will be a bear.  But after that, it'll be a hoot.

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