Alexander Jablokov's Blog, page 8
March 13, 2017
Back from London
I took my daughter Faith to London for school break, and it's taken me awhile to get back on schedule. We were absolute tourists, all the big sights you would expect. So don't expect any undiscovered gems or anything. Thought February was a great time to go, not too cold, not many other tourists. A few highlights:
Faith is a big politics fan, so we saw sittings of both Commons and Lords. The Commons chamber was destroyed during WWII, and is kind of bland, but Lords still has the elaborate 183...
February 12, 2017
The kind of sentence I like
From Song of the Vikings, by Nancy Marie Brown:
They brought home bright-colored cloaks and tunics and hose in the brilliant scarlets and leaf-greens of the alum-fixed dyes that were all the rage in twelfth-century Europe; an ell of scarlet wook sold for six times the equivalent length of undyed gray.
Alum is what is called a mordant (a lovely word that, according the Griffin Dyeworks, comes from the French "to bite"): something that gets dye to actually stick to the fabric. I love the deta...
February 6, 2017
Laying rails for the locomotive
Some writers are able to think of stuff while they write.
I sure can think of stuff, but it is almost always clever, glittery distractions from whatever it is I am trying to accomplish. Pointless flashbacks, cool devices, elaborately describe artworks...name it, I've done it.
In order to actually write a scene, something unified in space and time that has a structure and focus and conflict and a decent ending that kicks you into the next scene, I have to already know all of those things befor...
February 1, 2017
A hissy fit is not a strategy
I never used to write about politics. I didn't feel that I had anything particularly useful to say about it--no more useful than most people, anyway. But things seem...odd. Almost science fictional! So maybe my profession does give me some specific skills in viewing our current situation.
Which, no matter how things work out, people in the future will study earnestly. If nothing else, my statements here will get fed into some gigantic opinion parser. "What were the people of what was then kno...
January 22, 2017
We will always be the country that elected Donald Trump as President
I every much dislike someone identifying a moment as the one where "America lost its innocence". The United State is a real country, with real people in it, real people with real needs, fears, prejudices, and false beliefs. Its citizens have done many terrible things, to each other and to others. They have also done great things. That is why there is less excuse for us.
My headline comes from Jonathan Kirschner's excellent article America, America, in the LA Review of Books, where he also say...
January 21, 2017
Recent reading: Lady Susan
In her teens, Jane Austen wrote an epistolary novella. It was published decades after her death as Lady Susan. It's flawed, but entertaining. Lady Susan is a manipulative yet observantly witty, and is a dominating character--no one else in the narrative is of much interest.
It involves money and marriage, no surprise, and is no one's idea of a romance. Lady Susan tries to marry her daughter off to a wealthy but otherwise inappropriate suitor, but her plans are thrown off by her own urge to mi...
January 17, 2017
Did you ever notice...?
At the risk of chan
Too European for you?nelling the late Andy Rooney: did you ever notice that the small, double basket carts at the grocery store are always gone?
People don't actually fight over the things, at least not here in Cambridge, where people are really well behaved, but sometimes it seems like they should. While there are dozens of the big, traditional shopping carts, large enough to hold an entire side of beef, case of PBR, and a gross of Lean Cuisines, all of which require divin...
January 8, 2017
Where I'll be at Arisia
I'll be attending our local con, Arisia, next weekend (January 13-15). I probably won't be there Friday night, but will be all day Saturday and Sunday. If you're there, say hello. My panels are:
10 am Saturday Fashionpunk
A discussion of various aspects of fashion and SF, with Chris Brathwaite, T. X. Watson, and Nightwing Whitehead.
10 am Sunday How to Self-Edit That Steaming Hot Pile of Crap
Thrilling editing stories and methods, with Trisha Wooldridge, Matthew Kressel, Jackqui B., and Ken Sch...
January 3, 2017
'Twas ever thus
Sometimes the world seems totally different, when it is actually completely the same.
I was reading Sean Davis Cashman's America in the Gilded Age (research for a possible book), when I came across an account of a conflict the urban reformer and founder of Chicago's Hull House, Jane Addams, had with a corrupt local boss, Johnny "DePow" Powers. She wanted to clean the streets of trash, and so launched two campaigns, in 1896 and 1898, to unseat him. She failed both times. As Cashman puts it:
S...
December 27, 2016
Our political Morton Thiokol O-ring
On January 28, 1986 the space shuttle Challenger took off from Kennedy Space Center, in unusually cold temperatures. Morton Thiokol had built the boosters out of four segments each. Field joints containing rubber O-rings seals connected the segments. That morning, the cold rubber of the joints, operating in temperatures far lower than ever tested, became stiff.
A jet of exhaust came through one of the cold-stiff seals and played on an external tank containing oxygen and hydrogen, until the ta...
