Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 227

Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 116

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refurbished power plant and the turbine hall (the TH in the show's title) is reserved for very large and very ambitious installations.  Ms Gonzalez-Foerster -- who was born in Strasberg and lives in Paris -- has temporary control over it and she has created . . .

Well, primarily it is a shelter.  Hundreds of blue and yellow metal bunk beds.  Scattered among them are oversized reproductions of famous sculptures.  As the artist explains, "

Then, moving back to fill in the middle of the paragraph:

on the (bare, mattressless) beds are copies of science fiction disaster novels.  NAME as it transpires was a fan of SF from an early age and her choices are pleasantly literate:  Fahrenheit 451, The Purple Cloud, Vurt, Make Room! Make Room!, Hiroshima Mon Amour, We, The [something] of [something], The Man in the High Castle, and so on . . .  Scattered among the beds are giagantic sculptures.   As the artist explains, "The 

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Nothing to Say Today

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I'm playing hooky from blogging today.  I finished a short, tragic, and romantic science fiction story called "The Woman Who Shook the World-Tree" this morning, and just now placed it in the pie closet to cool off.

Later today Marianne and I drive to NYC for separate interviews with Jim Freund of WBAI.  And early tomorrow morning, we drive back.

So I think, right now, I'll take a nap.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 115

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Did you know that if you go to Elk County in Pennsylvania during the mating season, you can see elk?  The alpha males form up harems and the betas hang around hopefully.  Sometimes one will build up the courage to challenge the alpha and they'll fight.  It's a lot like high school.

Marianne and I have been out to look at the elk twice.  It's an extraordinary experience.

I forget why I pasted that business card in there.  I may have promised to send something to its owner. At any rate, there's no reason to put his name and contact info out on the Web.

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"Glaciers . . . Really, Really Fast Glaciers!"

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This trailer would be the very best disaster movie spoof ever, except for one thing . . .  It's not a spoof.  It's for a real movie.

Watch and enjoy.


And there's an article about me in the Roxborough-Manayunk Patch . . .

Every few years somebody writes up something about me in the local media, and it always makes the folks in Roxborough, my Philadelphia neighborhood, happy.  Because I'm one of those people you see wandering around at odd times of day and have to wonder about.  So it's a relief to them to know that there's a reason for this and that I'm not simply mentally deranged.

This is my first time in a local e-paper, and it went pretty well.  Writer Tom Sunnergren did a good job with what I gave him.

You can read the article here.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 114

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Like cattle to the gods are we -- placid, balky, and blissfully unaware of our purpose.  Save for the time traveler Amanda Nelson.  She broke through, into the superchronic plane where our owners dwell.

"Why, Bossie! What are you doing on this side of the fence?"

You can tell this is nearing its final form by the care I take with my handwriting.

"What is the Nature of the Catastrophe?"

The Unilever Series: TH 2058

by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

The Tate Modern, 10/14/08 - 4/13/09

"It rains incessantly in London," the artist writes in the show's explanatory notes -- "not a day, not an hour without rain, a deluge that has lasted for years and changed the way people travel, their clothes, leisure activities, imagination, and devices.  They dream about infinitely dry deserts."  An impeccably science fictional opening to an installation whose inspiration was SF.  The Tate Modern, in London, is a 

The opening to a review of an art installation I saw in London.  It was later published in the New York Review of Science Fiction .
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Alas, Dirigibylon!

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So close!  It looked like Marianne and I were finally going to ride the Eureka this afternoon.  Unfortunately, all flights were canceled and for an extremely unhappy reason.  A blimp burned and crashed in Germany yesterday, killing its pilot.  Because the airship communit is so small, everybody pretty much knows everybody else.  So airship pilots worldwide are in mourning.

Mike Nerandzic, an airship pilot with over twenty years experience, died a hero.  He managed to save his three passengers, though at the cost of his own life.

Before a sacrifice such as that, one can only stand silent.


Above:  The Eureka, attached to a mooring truck.  My snapshot, taken from the field.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 113

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This is just a note that was left to us by a friend when we were staying with her in London, just before Marianne and I took the train to Edinburgh.  That would have been early in 2009, just after Marianne retired from the Bureau of Laboratories.  We went to London, Edinburgh, and York in a kind of victory lap.

This particular notebook didn't go with us, though.  The note somehow made its way back to America with us, and so I pasted into the most convenient notebook.  As a kind of diary substitute.  For some reason I seem to be congenitally incapable of keeping a diary.

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