Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 205

Your REAL Thanksgiving Feast

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What foods are required for a Thanksgiving dinner to be authentic?  I like to ask that question of friends because the answers are surprisingly interesting.  You'd think the lowest number would be one -- turkey.  But I've found any number of people who said ham.  Or Chinese food.  Or "Anything at all."  These last people are probably the holiday's natural citizens . . . folks who are grateful for all the good things they receive and do not dictate what they should be.  I admire such people.  But I'm not one of them.

For the record, then.  Here's what I require for a Thanksgiving feast to be real:

Turkey (of course)
Stuffing (real sausage-and-bread stuffing, not those things involving oysters or cornbread or pecans)
Gravy
Mashed potatoes
Celery
Radishes (cut into radish roses)
Sweet midget pickles
Creamed onions (these last are so important that I cook them myself)
Cranberry sauce (the jellied stuff with the ridges, straight out of the can, and Mama Stamberg's cranberry relish both)

The smallest number of required items was zero.  The largest -- and I apologize for not having counted; I was standing stunned with admiration -- came from my New England friend Gail, who required three separate cranberry dishes (one relish, but not Stamberg) and, among many other dishes, three different pies . . . and the squash pie had to be baked in a square dish.

It was only when she was an adult that she realized that the reason the squash pie was always baked in a square dish was that by the time the women of her family got around to it, every round pie pan had been used.

So how about y'all?  What do you require for a Thanksgiving feast to be real?


Above:  I spray-painted autumn leaves and stamped DEATH on them so I could strew 'em about the parks of Philadelphia.  But it's been raining all week, so I didn't have the opportunity.  Believe it or not, I found them waiting on the table yesterday, making a natural Thanksgiving centerpiece.

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Anne McCaffrey, 1926 - 2011

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Today is an international day of mourning for science fiction readers.  Anne McCaffrey is dead.

You almost certainly knew this already.  The news spread faster than wildfire.  Most SF writer blogs will devote today to the great lady's passing.  Memories will be shared.  Words will be dropped at her feet.

I met Ms McCaffrey only once, at a Forbidden Planet signing in London in the 1980s.  She had endless lines of fans -- mostly young women wearing natural fabrics in earth tones -- each with the sort of expression a devout Catholic might have in the presence of the Pope.  I had a much shorter line of young men in punk leather who shrank away from me in horror when I said I was working on a fantasy novel.

During the time when my signing was done and McCaffrey's was still going on and on and on, I reflected on the fact that almost every one of her acolytes clutched an enormous stack of her books.  There's my mistake, I thought.  I haven't written a tremendous number of novels that readers love passionately.

There is much that could be said in praise of McCaffrey's work.  But I'll leave that to everybody else.  She wrote a tremendous number of novels that readers love passionately.  That's the epitaph that we're all working toward.

And now she has it.

Rest in peace, Anne.  Thanks for the books.

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In Which I Witness Cultural History . . .

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I never watch The Big Bang Theory because my son forbids it.  He tells me that it's an ethnic slur against his kind.  Marianne and I are expected to watch Community instead.  (A friend who works for Community College of Philadelphia tells me that the latter is an ethnic slur against his kind, but that's another story.) 

Which makes it ironic that I was present at a historic cultural nerd-moment last Friday at SFContario.  I was at a room party when Lawrence M. Schoen, challenged to translate on the spot, sang Soft Kitty in Klingon for the first time in human history.

You may marvel at my cultural on-linedness.


And coming soon . . .

I just got a look at the lineup for Jonathan Strahan's forthcoming The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year .  It's not public for a few days yet, but there are some really good names there.  I'd buy it in an instant, if I weren't going to be getting a contributor's copy.


Above:  A fleeting glimpse of the Niagara River from my train window.  It took some seventeen hours to get home yesterday, with no delays.  Still . . . better than flying.

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Leaving Ontario

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I went through all of SFContario without once running into Karl Schroeder who, being guest of honor, had many duties and obligations to fulfill.  Which I seriously regretted, because he is a brilliant guy and a font of really good science fictional ideas.

But I caught up to Karl at the end of the closing ceremonies and managed to delay him sufficiently to have a long talk with him about his career as an innovationist.  I won't share what he had to say because I didn't ask his permission to post any of it here and, anyway, I might want to steal some of it for my own fiction.  But I will say that it was a pleasure to listen to someone who's actively working to ameliorate the world's ills.  What a positive guy he is!  A genuine force for good.

I only hope that the people who run things listen to what he has to say.

And as always . . .

I'm on the road again.  Specifically, the railroad from Toronto to Philadelphia.  I expect to reach home by midnight, tired but happy and grateful to the good folks of SFContario for a convention I enjoyed immensely.




Immediately above:  The conservatory in Allan Gardens, across from the convention hotel, at night.


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Harbinger, Chagall, Toronto, and Me

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I'm at SFContario with such luminaries at John Scalzi, Rob Sawyer, and Gardner Dozois, and from the window of my hotel room I can see Harbinger , a skyscraper-top artwork which changes color depending on the wind speed.  If you're here too, I suggest you go out at night and look for it.  Pretty neat.

And I took in some art . . . 

Over at the Art Gallery of Ontario (highly recommended at all times; don't miss the Frank Gehry staircase) there's a show of Marc Chagall's artwork, along with paintings by his contemporaries in the Russian avant-garde.

Looking at Chagall always makes me want to write.  And this time was no exception.  I discovered Clowns in the Night, a dark and beautiful work that surely was about the Holocaust.  I learned more about the art of Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov and Ivan Koudriachov and other artists about whom I know far too little.  And then I looked at the biographical data for the artists and saw how many died in the Holocaust or else shortly after returning to Russia.

The Twentieth Century was an evil one.  Let's pray the Twenty-First is better.

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Remember to Die!

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It's autumn, and autumn is my season.  Part of my annual duties is to wander about, stamping the word DEATH on fallen leaves.  This year, as an experiment, I spray-painted some of those leaves white.  To make them stand out so they'll be easier to find when I strew them about.
The reason I do this is because autumn is the season that implicitly says MEMENTO MORI.  Which is Latin for Remember to Die .  There's no big hurry on this one.  But it's on your list of things to do.  
Because if you haven't died, you haven't lived a rich, full life yet.

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Days of Future Past

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Look what I found in the twenty-five cent bin of the comic book store -- my childhood!  Specifically, two General Electric comic books, Science in Your Future and Our Place in Space .  They were benign works of corporate propaganda published in the early 1950s and typical of the goodies which my father, who was an electrical engineer for GE, brought home from work.  They were part of what made me a science-mad and space-mad kid.  And they both, interestingly enough, came out of the Schenectady plant, where Dad was employed.

Read today, they're intelligent, well-made works (the cartoonist and writer -- almost certainly not Kurt Vonnegut who would have left GE's employment by then -- were uncredited), which do display certain cultural biases.  The comic on space, for example, featured not one woman.  Apparently we were going to conquer the universe without their active participation.  The science comic did feature a young lady and included a few lines about "men and women scientists."  But in all the vast lab spaces pictured (and they really were vast!  I saw them on the yearly open house for employees' families), there was only woman.  And she was so fashionably dressed that it was possible she was meant to be a secretary.

But GE's not to blame for that.  It was the times.  Women knew then that, with rare exceptions, if they wanted a career, they could choose between teaching and nursing.  General Electric was actually being surprisingly open-minded in encouraging girls to think about becoming scientists.

Things got better, later.  Not perfect by any means.  But better.



And as always . . .

I'll be on the road tomorrow.  I'm taking the train to Ontario for SFContario.  I was a goh there last year and it was great.  This year Gardner Dozois is the editor guest of honor and SFContario is the Canadian national convention, so it'll be even greater.

If you see me, be sure to say hello.  Or bonjour, as the case may be.

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Easy Money

.My apologies for a second day without a picture.  I'm prepping for SFContario.

One of the side effects of being a science fiction writer is that you're constantly coming up with items that you think would make a lot of money . . . if you only had the connections to bring them to market.

Here's one.  For all I know, it may already exist.  But if so, I've never seen it:  Frames for calling cards .  Nobody's asking for 'em.  But I can't help but think that if they were available businesspeople would buy them.

Let's say an elaborate silver frame for a single card, and four-, eight-, and sixteen-card frames for greater numbers.  The single frame you'd reserve for Desmond Tutu's business card, or Ursula K. Le Guin's or Gene Wolfe's.  The larger frames you'd use for the cards of all four Rolling Stones, eight Nobel Prize winners, or all the Supreme Court and the seven lawyers who pushed through the decisions of which you most enthusiastically approve.

Let's face it.  Business cards are all about status and prestige.  Surely, showing off that Steve Jobs or Germaine Greer felt obliged to hand you that rectangle of cardboard is worth overspending on a designer frame.

If you have the connections, take this idea and run.  Make a fortune with it.  You have my blessing.

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Emergency Monday Post

.If you've been reading this blog since forever, as so few have, you know that I do not guarantee to post every day or even every other day but only on two days, Monday and Friday -- if at all possible.

Today, alas, I almost failed you.

This morning I taught a class at the USNA in Annapolis.  Young and earnest midshipmen -- some of whom were women -- who listened to every word because they wanted very much to improve themselves in every way possible.

For people like these -- and I have met them in many countries -- I will do almost anything.

After the class (and a couple of other experiences which go into the lockbox of memory, because they might prove useful in future fiction) was over, the students filed out, pausing to shake my hand and thank me, "sir."  Then Marianne and I hit the back roads of Maryland and Delaware, through Sassafras and Unicorn and other small towns, homeward but in no particular hurry.  Which is why we got home late, and then I had a flurry of business correspondence to deal with, and to kerfluffle went my syntax, and almost, almost, I failed you.

Yet here  am and here we are and I have saved myself from humiliation at the last possible instant.

Whew!

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Quiet Friday

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It's been a quiet day.  Lat night I was in Brookyn at Andy Heidel's bar, The Way Station, having a Manhattan (just as Marianne does, they spice their own cherries; making the drink far superior to those with maraschino cherries) and talking with the local SF folk.  Before that, I listened to N. K. Jemisin reading -- and quite well -- from her work and enjoyed a demonstration of stage and movie combat by Mike Yahn.  The moves were terrifyingly brutal, even when you've just been shown that they involve no physical contact.  A great presentation, and I regret only that I didn't write down the name of his friend and fellow stunt man, who sold the demos by convincingly acting as if he'd been punched.  It really is a collaborative art.

Did I mention I had a terrific time?  I had a terrific time.  Why doesn't Philadelphia have a steampunk bar?

And I couldn't help thinking about steampunk because . . .

Wallace and Gromit movies were running continuously on a monitor by the bar, and apparently the Way Station has a weekly W&G-watching event.  So occasionally (not during the readings or demo) I glanced up at the screen and in context was struck by how, well, steampunk that series is.  Clunky Victorian machines that nevertheless work brilliantly, on-the-spot engineering, mad inventions, the lot.

Of course, Wallace and Grommet predate the steampunk phenomenon.  But there was definitely something in the air.  Or water.  Or aether.

Not Above:  I really should mention the Wold Newton Reading Extravaganza, which organized the evening.  Well done, chaps!

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