Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 203
December 22, 2011
Treasure Private Island Lives
.
It's Christmas time which means, among other things, that it's a good time for light theater. And this week I did my part.
Last Thursday I went to see the Lantern Theater Company production of Noel Coward's Private Lives. Imagine my delight on discovering that somehow I'd never seen it before. Private Lives is lighter than an air souffle. A divorced man and women meet by accident on the first night of their second marriages. Almost instantly their passion for each other rekindles and they run off together and resume the bickering that doomed their first go-around. And, um... well, that's about it, really. At the time Coward wrote it, there was a certain amount of substance to the contrast between two people who love each other for who they are and the jilted spouses who are in love with the roles they are presumed to fill because of their gender. But nowadays, one full wave of feminism later, none of this comes as anything new.
What the play is, however, is very very funny. And the actors were obviously having a great time. Ben Dibble has come in for a great deal of praise for his portrayal of Elyot, and I'll confess to being half in love with Geneviève Perrier's Amanda -- particularly the extraordinary expressiveness of her face, which is in constant motion and a silent comentary on the plot throughout. But there isn't a flat performance in the show. It's all fizz and champagne.
And today . . .
Today I went to the panto!
For most of my lives I wondered what the heck was with Christmas pantomimes. The Brits always included them in reminiscences of the holidays of their childhoods, but never explained what they were. It was assumed you knew.
Well, last year I finally went to one, at People's Light & Theatre in Malvern, PA, and it was such a hoot that I made it an annual tradition.
The panto is theater without pretensions. It involves lots of music and puns and jokes, handfuls of candy flung out into the audience, broad acting, a young woman dressed up as a punk parrot, a large man wearing dresses gaudy enough to satisfy an entire company of cross-dressing mummers, star-crossed lovers, scurvy pirates, a happy ending, and what might conceivably pass as a plot if you squint at it just right.
Treasure Island, this year's production, was a hoot and a half.
I wonder why it took so long for Americans to catch on to this? I know that when I was a kid I would have loved it.
And did you know . . . ?
Noel Coward, incidentally, was a spy in WWII. I am not making this up. He was the Twentieth Century's own Scarlet Pimpernel. "I was the perfect silly ass," he said much later. "Nobody ... considered I had a sensible thought in my head, and they would say all kinds of things that I'd pass along." Among other things, he kept an eye on the Duke of Windsor whom he privately despised as a Nazi sympathizer. After the war, it was discovered that he was on the German death-list of people to be immediately killed upon the conquest of Britain.
You can read an article about it here.
*
It's Christmas time which means, among other things, that it's a good time for light theater. And this week I did my part.
Last Thursday I went to see the Lantern Theater Company production of Noel Coward's Private Lives. Imagine my delight on discovering that somehow I'd never seen it before. Private Lives is lighter than an air souffle. A divorced man and women meet by accident on the first night of their second marriages. Almost instantly their passion for each other rekindles and they run off together and resume the bickering that doomed their first go-around. And, um... well, that's about it, really. At the time Coward wrote it, there was a certain amount of substance to the contrast between two people who love each other for who they are and the jilted spouses who are in love with the roles they are presumed to fill because of their gender. But nowadays, one full wave of feminism later, none of this comes as anything new.
What the play is, however, is very very funny. And the actors were obviously having a great time. Ben Dibble has come in for a great deal of praise for his portrayal of Elyot, and I'll confess to being half in love with Geneviève Perrier's Amanda -- particularly the extraordinary expressiveness of her face, which is in constant motion and a silent comentary on the plot throughout. But there isn't a flat performance in the show. It's all fizz and champagne.
And today . . .
Today I went to the panto!
For most of my lives I wondered what the heck was with Christmas pantomimes. The Brits always included them in reminiscences of the holidays of their childhoods, but never explained what they were. It was assumed you knew.
Well, last year I finally went to one, at People's Light & Theatre in Malvern, PA, and it was such a hoot that I made it an annual tradition.
The panto is theater without pretensions. It involves lots of music and puns and jokes, handfuls of candy flung out into the audience, broad acting, a young woman dressed up as a punk parrot, a large man wearing dresses gaudy enough to satisfy an entire company of cross-dressing mummers, star-crossed lovers, scurvy pirates, a happy ending, and what might conceivably pass as a plot if you squint at it just right.
Treasure Island, this year's production, was a hoot and a half.
I wonder why it took so long for Americans to catch on to this? I know that when I was a kid I would have loved it.
And did you know . . . ?
Noel Coward, incidentally, was a spy in WWII. I am not making this up. He was the Twentieth Century's own Scarlet Pimpernel. "I was the perfect silly ass," he said much later. "Nobody ... considered I had a sensible thought in my head, and they would say all kinds of things that I'd pass along." Among other things, he kept an eye on the Duke of Windsor whom he privately despised as a Nazi sympathizer. After the war, it was discovered that he was on the German death-list of people to be immediately killed upon the conquest of Britain.
You can read an article about it here.
*
December 21, 2011
Russia Captures the Imagination
.
There's a new interview of me up at SF Signal. It was conducted by Bradley P. Beaulieu and I'm pleased with how it came out. So kudos to Mr. Beaulieu.
You can find it here.
And it turns out that there is hope for me . . .
I'm not old yet, but I'm getting there. And here's an early sign that old age will work out well for me: The first trailer has been released for the movie based on The Hobbit , and I find I have problem waiting a year to see it. I'm just glad that it looks like a decent bit of work.
You've probably seen the trailer already. So I won't inflict it on you. Instead, here's Terry Gilliam's video Christmas card. I like to think of it as being not so much mean-spirited as surreal.
Enjoy.
*
There's a new interview of me up at SF Signal. It was conducted by Bradley P. Beaulieu and I'm pleased with how it came out. So kudos to Mr. Beaulieu.
You can find it here.
And it turns out that there is hope for me . . .
I'm not old yet, but I'm getting there. And here's an early sign that old age will work out well for me: The first trailer has been released for the movie based on The Hobbit , and I find I have problem waiting a year to see it. I'm just glad that it looks like a decent bit of work.
You've probably seen the trailer already. So I won't inflict it on you. Instead, here's Terry Gilliam's video Christmas card. I like to think of it as being not so much mean-spirited as surreal.
Enjoy.
*
December 19, 2011
Working Hard Ain't Hardly Working
.
I'm playing hooky today from all the obligations and chores, answering of emails, posting of packages, scanning of contracts, and suchlike, to just sit and write. I'll probably work on three or four of the stories that I'm actively engaged in and put in a little more wordage on one of the novels.
In the picture above, you can see some of the post-it notes I use to keep track of what's on the front burner. The pink slips are novels, but only the top two are being actively written. The rest are just there to keep them in mind. The green slips are short fiction, and most of them are more than half written. Mostly, though, they're alive in my imagination and jostling for attention.
And so I have a question . . .
I'm writing a scene set in a bar just before the Chicxulub Impactor kills everybody and somebody sits down to the piano and begins to play Hey Jude and The Sloop John B , which go over well, and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot , which bombs.
Which got me to wondering. What songs would be good to play if you knew nobody was going to make it to morning. Closing Time by Leonard Cohen? Or maybe It's The End Of The World As We Know It?
Bar music, obviously. If I were alone, I'd put on Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
Any ideas?
Above: Yeah, my desk looks like a tip. Creation is not pretty. You should have seen God's desk when he was creating the universe.
*
I'm playing hooky today from all the obligations and chores, answering of emails, posting of packages, scanning of contracts, and suchlike, to just sit and write. I'll probably work on three or four of the stories that I'm actively engaged in and put in a little more wordage on one of the novels.
In the picture above, you can see some of the post-it notes I use to keep track of what's on the front burner. The pink slips are novels, but only the top two are being actively written. The rest are just there to keep them in mind. The green slips are short fiction, and most of them are more than half written. Mostly, though, they're alive in my imagination and jostling for attention.
And so I have a question . . .
I'm writing a scene set in a bar just before the Chicxulub Impactor kills everybody and somebody sits down to the piano and begins to play Hey Jude and The Sloop John B , which go over well, and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot , which bombs.
Which got me to wondering. What songs would be good to play if you knew nobody was going to make it to morning. Closing Time by Leonard Cohen? Or maybe It's The End Of The World As We Know It?
Bar music, obviously. If I were alone, I'd put on Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
Any ideas?
Above: Yeah, my desk looks like a tip. Creation is not pretty. You should have seen God's desk when he was creating the universe.
*
December 17, 2011
Women Are Beautiful
.Here we are with visual proof that most women are beautiful. I'm married to a beautiful woman. If you're an adult female, chances are that you are a beautiful woman. Here's why that fact isn't as self-evident to you as it is to me.
*
*
December 16, 2011
"Is All This Cheese Real?"
.
Happy Holidays! This morning, Marianne and I went to DiBruno Brothers, the world's best and most crowded cheese shop, to buy cheeses and various olives, and pickled octopus, and cured meats. We dropped a bundle. A Christmas tradition, you ask? Oh, no, no, no. We were must buying the makings of lunch.
We've been going to DiBruno's for over a third of a century. When Sean was teething, I carried him in my arms and let him gnaw on the top of the loaf of bread (from Sarcone's, which is to bread what DiBruno's is to cheese). We've seen a generation of cheesemongers grow old and retire and be replaced by younger relatives.
My best memory of DiBruno's is the time an out-of-stater, gawking wonderingly about her at the astonishing variety of cheeses, asked, "Is all this cheese real?"
"What do you mean real?" one of the guys behind the counter asked.
"I mean, is any of it processed cheese food?"
And everybody in the shop -- everybody! -- laughed.
And speaking of yesterday's advice . . .
On Thursday I wrote about the importance of a strong opening and ending to a story you're hoping to sell. Chad Hull asked, "Do you think it applies to people who are already established and proven; such as yourself? Or can the already established writer get away with 3, 5, or 8 pages of setting before something happens?"
Good question. There are exceptions to every rule. Gardner Dozois, for example, once started a story (the quite wonderful "Executive Clemency" ) with a very long description of an idiot watching sunlight move across a floor. But it was a gripping description of an idiot watching sunlight move across a floor, a compelling description of an idiot watching sunlight move across a floor. Once you read the first sentence, it was impossible not to read on and on. And, come to think, it wasn't scene-setting at all but an important part of the story's action.
If you're a name, you get a smidge more attention, if only because the editor wants to make absolutely positively sure that you're completely lost it before spreading the word to every other editor in the industry. But if the story is so good that it sells anyway, the editor is going to want you to remove those 3, 5, or 8 pages of scene-setting. Because readers are every bit as fickle as editors -- and they're not being paid for reading. They flip through the magazine, read the first couple of paragraphs of your story, and if they're not grabbed, they move on.
In all my thirty-plus years as a published writer, I've only broken the unwritten rules for story openings twice, once deliberately and once by accident. The deliberate one was "Slow Life, " which began with a long description of the chemistry of a raindrop falling through the atmosphere of Titan. For the New Yorker that would have been a deal-breaker. But I sold it to Analog , where I felt the memory of Larry Niven's early fiction, which often began with a physics lecture, would linger.
The other was "Wild Minds," which began with the sentence, I met her at a businesspersons' orgy in London. After I'd sold it to Asimov's , editor Sheila Williams said, "You know, we usually don't buy stories that begin with a sex scene. That's an almost infallible sign of amateurism."
Um . . . well . . . actually I hadn't know that. But now I do.
And so, too, do you.
*
Happy Holidays! This morning, Marianne and I went to DiBruno Brothers, the world's best and most crowded cheese shop, to buy cheeses and various olives, and pickled octopus, and cured meats. We dropped a bundle. A Christmas tradition, you ask? Oh, no, no, no. We were must buying the makings of lunch.
We've been going to DiBruno's for over a third of a century. When Sean was teething, I carried him in my arms and let him gnaw on the top of the loaf of bread (from Sarcone's, which is to bread what DiBruno's is to cheese). We've seen a generation of cheesemongers grow old and retire and be replaced by younger relatives.
My best memory of DiBruno's is the time an out-of-stater, gawking wonderingly about her at the astonishing variety of cheeses, asked, "Is all this cheese real?"
"What do you mean real?" one of the guys behind the counter asked.
"I mean, is any of it processed cheese food?"
And everybody in the shop -- everybody! -- laughed.
And speaking of yesterday's advice . . .
On Thursday I wrote about the importance of a strong opening and ending to a story you're hoping to sell. Chad Hull asked, "Do you think it applies to people who are already established and proven; such as yourself? Or can the already established writer get away with 3, 5, or 8 pages of setting before something happens?"
Good question. There are exceptions to every rule. Gardner Dozois, for example, once started a story (the quite wonderful "Executive Clemency" ) with a very long description of an idiot watching sunlight move across a floor. But it was a gripping description of an idiot watching sunlight move across a floor, a compelling description of an idiot watching sunlight move across a floor. Once you read the first sentence, it was impossible not to read on and on. And, come to think, it wasn't scene-setting at all but an important part of the story's action.
If you're a name, you get a smidge more attention, if only because the editor wants to make absolutely positively sure that you're completely lost it before spreading the word to every other editor in the industry. But if the story is so good that it sells anyway, the editor is going to want you to remove those 3, 5, or 8 pages of scene-setting. Because readers are every bit as fickle as editors -- and they're not being paid for reading. They flip through the magazine, read the first couple of paragraphs of your story, and if they're not grabbed, they move on.
In all my thirty-plus years as a published writer, I've only broken the unwritten rules for story openings twice, once deliberately and once by accident. The deliberate one was "Slow Life, " which began with a long description of the chemistry of a raindrop falling through the atmosphere of Titan. For the New Yorker that would have been a deal-breaker. But I sold it to Analog , where I felt the memory of Larry Niven's early fiction, which often began with a physics lecture, would linger.
The other was "Wild Minds," which began with the sentence, I met her at a businesspersons' orgy in London. After I'd sold it to Asimov's , editor Sheila Williams said, "You know, we usually don't buy stories that begin with a sex scene. That's an almost infallible sign of amateurism."
Um . . . well . . . actually I hadn't know that. But now I do.
And so, too, do you.
*
December 15, 2011
Something Every Gonnabe Writer MUST Know
.
I've always regretted I didn't have a video camera with me the time I dropped in on Gardner Dozois at the Asimov's Science Fiction offices and, before going out to lunch, he went through a two-foot-high pile of submissions in fifteen to twenty minutes. While we had a pleasant conversation about other matters.
The video would have shown Gardner pick up the first manuscript, read the first page, turn to the last page, read that, and then put down the story. Then he did exactly the same thing with the next. And the next. All the way down to the bottom. At the end of which he had two piles -- one for people who might someday write something good, who received a polite rejection slip; and one for those who never would, who received a discouraging rejection slip. He set aside exactly one story to actually read.
Not buy. Read.
I've talked with any number of editors about this and they all agree: That's all the time they need to tell if a story might be publishable. Fifteen seconds -- maybe thirty, tops.
Over the years, I've taught at the various Clarion Workshops, and I'm here to tell you that the single most common mistake not-yet-published writers make is to spend several pages setting the scene before anything actually happens. Reading their typescripts, I'll strike out paragraph after page before finally coming to the point on Page 3 or 5 or 8 where I write: BEGIN HERE.
Because no matter how brilliant the story is, no editor is going to read it unless something interesting has happened before the second page.
So here's what every writer hoping someday to be published must know: Your very best prose should come at the beginning and end of the story . Because that's what's going to catch your editor's attention.
Oh, and the electronic submission revolution? Last convention I went to, an editor told me that she loved electronic submissions because then she didn't feel obligated to read all the way to the bottom of the first page.
And here's a case in point . . .
I picked up the new Granta yesterday and read " The Infamous Bengal Ming" by Rajesh Parameswaran. It's about a Bengal tiger with a complicated emotional life. Here's the first sentence:
And here's the last:
The first sentence is an attention-grabber. You wouldn't want the entire story to be written in such elaborate prose (not this particular story, anyway), but it alerts you to the fact that Parameswaran is one heck of a writer. The final sentence gains its considerable emotional strength from the cumulative effect of the rest of the story. But even the most superficial reader can figure out that this writer has stuff
And even the most superficial editor would put it on the To Read pile.
Above: This card was sent to me by my college chum Mario, who collects pop-up books. It has absolutely zilch chance of winning this year's Godless Atheist Christmas Card competition.
*
I've always regretted I didn't have a video camera with me the time I dropped in on Gardner Dozois at the Asimov's Science Fiction offices and, before going out to lunch, he went through a two-foot-high pile of submissions in fifteen to twenty minutes. While we had a pleasant conversation about other matters.
The video would have shown Gardner pick up the first manuscript, read the first page, turn to the last page, read that, and then put down the story. Then he did exactly the same thing with the next. And the next. All the way down to the bottom. At the end of which he had two piles -- one for people who might someday write something good, who received a polite rejection slip; and one for those who never would, who received a discouraging rejection slip. He set aside exactly one story to actually read.
Not buy. Read.
I've talked with any number of editors about this and they all agree: That's all the time they need to tell if a story might be publishable. Fifteen seconds -- maybe thirty, tops.
Over the years, I've taught at the various Clarion Workshops, and I'm here to tell you that the single most common mistake not-yet-published writers make is to spend several pages setting the scene before anything actually happens. Reading their typescripts, I'll strike out paragraph after page before finally coming to the point on Page 3 or 5 or 8 where I write: BEGIN HERE.
Because no matter how brilliant the story is, no editor is going to read it unless something interesting has happened before the second page.
So here's what every writer hoping someday to be published must know: Your very best prose should come at the beginning and end of the story . Because that's what's going to catch your editor's attention.
Oh, and the electronic submission revolution? Last convention I went to, an editor told me that she loved electronic submissions because then she didn't feel obligated to read all the way to the bottom of the first page.
And here's a case in point . . .
I picked up the new Granta yesterday and read " The Infamous Bengal Ming" by Rajesh Parameswaran. It's about a Bengal tiger with a complicated emotional life. Here's the first sentence:
The one clear thing I can say about Wednesday, the worst and most amazing day of my life, is this: it started out beautifully.
And here's the last:
I had never felt so much love in all my life.
The first sentence is an attention-grabber. You wouldn't want the entire story to be written in such elaborate prose (not this particular story, anyway), but it alerts you to the fact that Parameswaran is one heck of a writer. The final sentence gains its considerable emotional strength from the cumulative effect of the rest of the story. But even the most superficial reader can figure out that this writer has stuff
And even the most superficial editor would put it on the To Read pile.
Above: This card was sent to me by my college chum Mario, who collects pop-up books. It has absolutely zilch chance of winning this year's Godless Atheist Christmas Card competition.
*
December 14, 2011
An Armful of Toys and a Sad Thought for Christmas
.
The Christmas tree is up and lit but the ornaments -- millions! galaxies! universes of them! -- await tonight when we'll light a fire in the wood stove and bring out boxes and boxes of decorations from storage.
This morning Marianne and I spent shopping. We went to an independent bookstore and bought Where the Sidewalk Ends and The Dangerous Book for Boys. Then we bought an alien invasion set of Legos, an enormous tub of Duplos and a stuffed toy dog that was as big as a real one. And then we dropped them off at the Toy Drive bin at our bank.
There was an article in the paper this morning saying that, because of the economy, donations to Toys for Tots are down eighty percent this year. So we thought we'd take in a little bit of the slack. As we were carrying the toys back to our car, Marianne said sadly, "Imagine not being able to buy your children Christmas presents."
I can't.
You have no idea how grateful I am to be able to say that.
*
The Christmas tree is up and lit but the ornaments -- millions! galaxies! universes of them! -- await tonight when we'll light a fire in the wood stove and bring out boxes and boxes of decorations from storage.
This morning Marianne and I spent shopping. We went to an independent bookstore and bought Where the Sidewalk Ends and The Dangerous Book for Boys. Then we bought an alien invasion set of Legos, an enormous tub of Duplos and a stuffed toy dog that was as big as a real one. And then we dropped them off at the Toy Drive bin at our bank.
There was an article in the paper this morning saying that, because of the economy, donations to Toys for Tots are down eighty percent this year. So we thought we'd take in a little bit of the slack. As we were carrying the toys back to our car, Marianne said sadly, "Imagine not being able to buy your children Christmas presents."
I can't.
You have no idea how grateful I am to be able to say that.
*
December 13, 2011
Watch the Players in White
.
This turns out to be a surprisingly nifty video. Watch it and you'll see what I mean. It demonstrates an important principle too.
Marianne and I were in Center City this morning, because we needed black envelopes, and on impulse had lunch at Parc. That's why she looks so happy above. She had a glass of white wine and I had a sazarac. Then three different types of oysters. And then lunch. We sat at a window table overlooking the Curtis Institute. Which is why I wasn't surprised to see a rather punkish-looking young man roller-skating purposefully down the middle of the street with a French horn case in one hand an a trumpet in the other.
If you know an adolescent mired in the Slough of Despond, tell 'em that I've been there and it gets better. Lots, lots better.
Above: I missed the color change AND the gorilla. I like to think it's because I'm admirably focused.
*
This turns out to be a surprisingly nifty video. Watch it and you'll see what I mean. It demonstrates an important principle too.
Marianne and I were in Center City this morning, because we needed black envelopes, and on impulse had lunch at Parc. That's why she looks so happy above. She had a glass of white wine and I had a sazarac. Then three different types of oysters. And then lunch. We sat at a window table overlooking the Curtis Institute. Which is why I wasn't surprised to see a rather punkish-looking young man roller-skating purposefully down the middle of the street with a French horn case in one hand an a trumpet in the other.
If you know an adolescent mired in the Slough of Despond, tell 'em that I've been there and it gets better. Lots, lots better.
Above: I missed the color change AND the gorilla. I like to think it's because I'm admirably focused.
*
December 12, 2011
The Parable of the Creche Scene
.
This is the time of year when some folks get upset about other folks saying "Happy Holidays!" rather than "Merry Christmas!" What makes this particularly ironic is that in my experience the biggest offenders are the church ladies at Roxborough Baptist Church. I've had them wish me "Happy Holidays!" in church on Christmas Eve.
Why? Because they're Christians and they don't want to inadvertently hurt anybody's feelings or make them feel excluded.
People are complicated and nobody could with justice claim that we're a logically consistent bunch. Here's a true story. I call it . . .
The Parable of the Creche Scene
When I first came to Roxborough, thirty years ago, I was amazed to discover that every year a creche scene was erected in Gorgas Park. It was privately funded, I believe, but Gorgas Park belongs to the City of Philadelphia, so the creche was an obvious violation of the principle of the separation of church and state. "Sooner or later," I said at the time, "somebody's going to complain."
And, sure enough, several years later, somebody did. So the city, knowing which side the courts would take, announced that they would not allow the creche to be placed in the park.
This got almost everybody upset. The creche was one of those things that had "always" been done and people looked forward to it. There were angry mutterings and intemperate words.
In the midst of this storm of bad feelings, Leverington Presbyterian Church, which was located directly across the street from Gorgas Park, stepped in to save the day. They found out who actually owned the creche, and arranged for it to be displayed throughout the Christmas season on the lawn in front of the church. Now the creche could be experienced by the community just like before. The only difference was that it was located a few dozen feet away from its original location. It was an act of wisdom worthy of Solomon.
But were people happy?
No. The local weekly paper was flooded with letters complaining that the church had hijacked the creche scene and was trying to use it for their own religious purposes.
And so . . .
Happy Holidays, everybody! And, since I enjoy saying it, Merry Christmas too! I don't give a damn who that offends.
Above: There's the creche scene as it exists today in front of Leverington Presbyterian. It was good of them to adopt it, and I'm always happy to see it come back.
*
This is the time of year when some folks get upset about other folks saying "Happy Holidays!" rather than "Merry Christmas!" What makes this particularly ironic is that in my experience the biggest offenders are the church ladies at Roxborough Baptist Church. I've had them wish me "Happy Holidays!" in church on Christmas Eve.
Why? Because they're Christians and they don't want to inadvertently hurt anybody's feelings or make them feel excluded.
People are complicated and nobody could with justice claim that we're a logically consistent bunch. Here's a true story. I call it . . .
The Parable of the Creche Scene
When I first came to Roxborough, thirty years ago, I was amazed to discover that every year a creche scene was erected in Gorgas Park. It was privately funded, I believe, but Gorgas Park belongs to the City of Philadelphia, so the creche was an obvious violation of the principle of the separation of church and state. "Sooner or later," I said at the time, "somebody's going to complain."
And, sure enough, several years later, somebody did. So the city, knowing which side the courts would take, announced that they would not allow the creche to be placed in the park.
This got almost everybody upset. The creche was one of those things that had "always" been done and people looked forward to it. There were angry mutterings and intemperate words.
In the midst of this storm of bad feelings, Leverington Presbyterian Church, which was located directly across the street from Gorgas Park, stepped in to save the day. They found out who actually owned the creche, and arranged for it to be displayed throughout the Christmas season on the lawn in front of the church. Now the creche could be experienced by the community just like before. The only difference was that it was located a few dozen feet away from its original location. It was an act of wisdom worthy of Solomon.
But were people happy?
No. The local weekly paper was flooded with letters complaining that the church had hijacked the creche scene and was trying to use it for their own religious purposes.
And so . . .
Happy Holidays, everybody! And, since I enjoy saying it, Merry Christmas too! I don't give a damn who that offends.
Above: There's the creche scene as it exists today in front of Leverington Presbyterian. It was good of them to adopt it, and I'm always happy to see it come back.
*
December 9, 2011
Holy Guacamole!
.Almost . . . almost I didn't blog today. There were reasons, but never mind them. I almost didn't blog. This is a big deal to me because right at the start, some thousand-plus posts ago, I committed to blogging every Monday and Friday. Wednesdays I aspired to but didn't guarantee. Tuesdays and Thursdays weren't even mentioned in the implicit contract.
Imagine my surprise to find myself consistently blogging five days a week, almost every week! Who the hell was this organized man? Assuredly not me. I am the least organized of human beings.
So imagine my dismay when, five minutes ago, lying in bed and falling asleep, I realized that I had let down the side. Wearily, I got up and went to the 'puter. Local time: 11;38 p.m. Not quite midnight. Which meant I hadn't failed yet.
And I wrote this.
Not up to my usual standards, admittedly. But here. Posted.
Honor is served.
*
Imagine my surprise to find myself consistently blogging five days a week, almost every week! Who the hell was this organized man? Assuredly not me. I am the least organized of human beings.
So imagine my dismay when, five minutes ago, lying in bed and falling asleep, I realized that I had let down the side. Wearily, I got up and went to the 'puter. Local time: 11;38 p.m. Not quite midnight. Which meant I hadn't failed yet.
And I wrote this.
Not up to my usual standards, admittedly. But here. Posted.
Honor is served.
*
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