Mini Alpha reunion this weekend. We showed Sarah B around NYC.
Archives for May 2009
China Mieville + Japanther at Upstairs at the Square
So on Tuesday I went and saw China Mieville at Barnes & Noble in Union Square. Mieville is one of my favorite writers currently working and also one of the most compelling public speakers I’ve ever seen. I first saw him at ICFA (International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts) years ago, and I immediately went out and bought Perdido Street Station, which had just come out. He’s on tour promoting his new novel The City & The City, a surreal police procedural set in a pair of fictional Eastern European cities. Here’s my signed copy:
A year or so ago I started asking authors to use my full name when personalizing books. “David” is such a relentlessly common name that a book signed “For David” could have been signed to — literally — almost anyone, and feels about as personalized as if the author wrote “Dear Sir,” “Occupant,” or “To Whom It May Concern.” (I also harbor a secret hope that someday some author’s going to be like, “Wait, not the David Barr Kirtley?” This never happens though.)
This was the first I’d heard of it, but Union Square Barnes & Noble is doing a series called Upstairs at the Square, where they pair authors such as William Gibson, Tom Wolfe, and Eoin Colfer with musicians I’ve never heard of. The authors read, the musicians play, and then both answer questions. China Mieville was paired with a local band called Japanther. (Their song “The Dirge” is actually starting to grow on me.) You could pretty much tell who in the audience was there to see who. For example, I’m pretty sure that the girl in front of me who was headbanging and constantly giving the band the finger (apparently in an approving way) was there for Japanther.
Finished Copying Out One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One of my hobbies is to copy out books by hand into spiral notebooks in order to pay close attention to the word choice, sentence structure, etc. I find it relaxing (it’s a good way to pass time on planes or trains), and it helps get my brain into writer mode, and I often do a lot of productive thinking about my own writing while analyzing someone else’s. I started out with a few of my favorite books, though these days I mostly do “classics,” and I try to pick ones that have a style and voice as different from my own as possible. I just finished copying out Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which took me about two years. Writers sometimes think in terms of “scene” and “summary.” I tend to write almost entirely in “scene,” and One Hundred Years of Solitude is written almost entirely in “summary,” so it was interesting to contrast the two approaches and see what can be done with a more summary-based technique, though I’m forced to conclude that I still find a scene-based approach a lot more engaging. The novel also doesn’t vary much in terms of style, and the same sorts of incidents happen over and over again, so it maybe wasn’t the most exciting book to spend two years reading. (I really enjoyed the first 150 pages or so. After that I got a bit exhausted with it — I think I would’ve been content with a mere 35 years of solitude.) Still, the book does an amazing job of maintaining a mood and atmosphere throughout, and the ending was kinda cool.
Colloidal Silver Turns Skin Blue
Okay, so take a look at this guy:
No, this is not a character from Star Trek. This is an actual guy with a permanent, incurable condition called argyria, which he got from ingesting a substance called colloidal silver, which has no proven medical benefits but which is marketed as an “alternative medicine” treatment for all manner of common ailments. (This guy was taking it for arthritis.) This is all perfectly legal thanks to super-dumbass Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who wrote the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which basically states that as long as you label something a “dietary supplement” and not a “drug” (the majority of such “supplements” are manufactured in Utah), you can basically put anything you want in the bottle and there is no oversight whatsoever. It’s not even required that you accurately list the ingredients. So be very careful about taking dietary supplements. Many of them are scams, and some of them can be very, very dangerous.
For more on distinguishing science from bunk, check out my interview with Brian Dunning of the Skeptoid podcast.
Michio Kaku on SciFiDimensions
I just listened to a great interview with Michio Kaku on the SciFiDimensions podcast. As a teenager I read Kaku’s book Hyperspace, which really blew my mind, and I’m looking forward to checking out his new book Physics of the Impossible. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
H.G. Wells wrote a book that mentioned the atomic bomb, and he mentioned that in 1933 a scientist would discover the secret of the atomic bomb. Well, in real life Leo Szilard, a physicist, read that book and said, “Oh my god, it’s 1933 right now. I gotta figure out the secret of the atomic bomb.” And he did. He worked out the chain reaction, and then he wrote Einstein a letter, and the rest is in the history books, but the history books don’t mention that it was H.G. Wells’ novel which inspired Leo Szilard to creat the chain reaction … And if you take a look at the greatest astronomer of the twentieth century, Edwin Hubble — the Hubble space telescope is named after him — he got inspired by reading Jules Verne as a child. When he was a child his father, who was a Missouri lawyer, was very strong and wanted his son to be a lawyer just like him. So Hubble studied law — went to Oxford university to study law — then as an adult — as an adult lawyer — he remembered the romance of science fiction as a child. He quit his law practice, went to the university of Chicago, got his PhD in astronomy, and went on to discover the expanding universe, and eventually the Big Bang. So many times science fiction has inspired scientists because it frees up the imagination to think about the future.
Pinchbottom presents The Day After: Postapocalyptic Burlesque
I ended up not being able to make it to last month’s burlesque show, so this one was my first, and it was a perfect introduction for me because the show was science fiction-themed and was really sort of awesome. Also, I guess because of the topic, it seemed like half the young NYC fantasy/science fiction publishing crowd was in attendance.
In the show, a humorously vague disaster has befallen earth, and the remnants of humanity live in a sealed-up city where everyone is required by a prudish dictator to remain clothed at all times, lest they become “infected.” But there are some who resist. Rebels who are captured are forced to undergo a procedure that turns them into mindless cyborgs with no desire to undress, though needless to say the treatment doesn’t take. There are many, many references to science fiction literature and film, from Brave New World to Mad Max. The story features a gadget known as the Personal Laser of Teleportation device (i.e the PLOT device), and the climactic confrontation comes down not to rollerball, nor deathrace 2000, nor even thunderdome, but to a slow-motion, red-lit, histrionic game of “death scrabble.” The whole thing was an absolute riot.
By Blood We Live, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Here are the two latest John Joseph Adams anthologies from Night Shade Books, to be published in August and September respectively.
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle on Writing Imaginary Societies
Here’s another one of my favorite discussions about writing, from “Building the Mote in God’s Eye,” an essay by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle that appeared in Niven’s book N-Space, a collection of stories and essays. There’s a ton of fascinating material in this piece, but I want to focus on one particular thing. Niven and Pournelle’s collaborative novel The Mote in God’s Eye is set in a futuristic interstellar society whose government has reverted to monarchy. The authors defend the plausibility of this:
It is fashionable to view history as a linear progression: things get better, never worse … [the] proposition is that we of nineteen seventy-five are so advanced that we will never go back to the bad old days. Yet we can show you essays “proving” exactly that proposition — and written thousands of years ago. There’s a flurry of them every few centuries.
They also point out that monarchy has some practical advantages:
The leader is known from an early age to be destined to rule, and can be educated to the job. Is that preferable to education based on how to get the job? Are elected officials better at governing, or at winning elections?
But the part that relates directly to writing is this:
We had a choice in MOTE: to keep the titles as well as the structure of aristocratic empire, or abandon the titles and retain the structure only. We could have abolished “Emperor” in favor of “President,” or “Chairperson,” or “Leader” … We might have employed titles other than Duke … and Count … and Marquis. But any titles used would have been translations of whatever was current in the time of the novel, and the traditional titles had the effect of letting the reader know quickly the approximate status and some of the duties of the characters.
There’s a definite trade-off here. It feels more plausible for future (not to mention current) dictators to call themselves, say, “presidents,” but it’s clearer for a reader thrust into an unfamiliar milieu if the titles communicate the character’s actual status. Writing is full of these sorts of choices. Plausibility versus Clarity. Explanation versus Pacing. Many new writers paralyze themselves because they see writing as like solving a Rubix Cube where you have to get all the colors to match up, and they can’t seem to do it. In fact writing is usually more like trying to solve a Rubix Cube that has no solution. You get to a point, after lots and lots of work, where the colors mostly line up, but it’s not perfect, and anything you do to try to fix one problem will mess up something else, and at some point you just have to make a judgment call about whether it’s better to leave one red square among the blues or one yellow square among the whites. And you just have to trust that some readers will have the same tastes and prioritize things the same way you do, and will go along with the choices you made.
Art Documentaries: Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock?, My Kid Could Paint That
Here are two terrific art-related documentaries that are definitely worth checking out. (If you have Netflix, both are available as instant downloads.)
My Kid Could Paint That starts out as the heartwarming story of a normal, likeable family who discover one day that their four-year-old daughter can paint brilliant works of abstract expressionism that sell for tens of thousands of dollars, and the little girl soon attracts major media attention. But midway through the film, the story takes a plunge down the rabbit hole, when a 20/20 investigation suggests that the little girl isn’t doing the paintings by herself, and that her father is either directing her or retouching her work. The filmmaker, who has become close to the family, doesn’t know what to believe, and he gradually loses faith as his attempts to capture on film the little girl painting something exceptional prove fruitless. But in the end he’s still not sure, and man, neither am I. The owner of the gallery who first displayed the girl’s paintings talks about the frustration he feels as a photo-realist painter who spends months on a piece — deploying the most exacting technique — as he watches canvases that consist of nothing more than a few splashes of paint selling for millions of dollars, and his glee at being able to prove to the art world that even a four-year-old could do it. The question of whether this little girl is a scam or not is therefore set against the larger question of whether abstract expressionism itself is a scam.
Egg Hunt 2009 Photo
Star Trek (2009) is Great
So the new Star Trek is thrilling. It was much better than I was expecting, even knowing that it had a 96% approval rating on Rottentomatoes.com. The story does have more than its share of tenuous logic, but the characters are so winning, the scenes so entertaining, and the effects so breathtaking (especially — holy crap — on an IMAX screen) that you just won’t care. When it was over, I gladly would have sat there for a second showing if I could have, and maybe even a third. I can’t even remember the last time I would have said that about a movie.
Star Trek (2009)
Going to see the new Trek flick tomorrow on the IMAX screen. Figured I’d blog about it now, while I’m still excited, in case it turns out to be lousy. Advance buzz is good though. Wil Wheaton posts “Star Trek has been reborn, and it is SPECTACULAR” and the Onion reports Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film as ‘Fun, Watchable.’
And here’s someone else who’s excited:
“I grew up on Star Trek —
I believe in the final frontier.”
Roger Zelazny’s “For Ecclesiastes: A Rose”?
From the files of “What Were They Thinking?” here’s an excerpt from the acceptance letter that Avram Davidson sent to Roger Zelazny when accepting Zelazny’s early, classic story “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”:
We are taking your novelet, ‘A Rose for Ecclesiastes’ (a minor point: to avoid inapplicable comparison with A Canticle for Leibowitz, would you consider, ‘For Ecclesiastes: A Rose’…?).
Ugh. I mean, that’s not as bad as Horace Gold on “Flowers for Algernon,” but it sure ain’t good. Fortunately Davidson goes on to say just a few sentences later:
It has occurred to me that the parallel with Miller’s title was deliberate. If you wish the title to remain as it is, it will.
And so it did. Thank goodness.
Science Fiction Author Robert Heinlein Deeply Involved in Upton Sinclair’s Campaign for Governor?
This morning I was doing a bit of historical research on poor working conditions, and I came across this tidbit on Wikipedia:
Upton Sinclair’s plan to end poverty quickly became a controversial issue. Conservatives in California were themselves galvanized by it, as they saw it as an attempted communist takeover of their state. They used massive political propaganda portraying Sinclair as a Communist, even as he was being portrayed by American and Soviet communists as a capitalist. Science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein was deeply involved in Sinclair’s campaign, a point that Heinlein tried to obscure from later biographies, as he tried to keep his personal politics separate from his public image as an author.
That’s interesting, both because I’d never heard about any Heinlein-Sinclair connection before, and also because when I think about science fiction authors who tried really hard to keep their personal politics separate from their public image as an author, Heinlein’s not exactly the first name to come to mind.
Paley Center presents Star Trek Smackdown
Event: Star Trek Smackdown
Tuesday, May 12, 20096:30 pm to 8:00 pm
25 West 52 Street, New York
Featuring:
Matt Mitovich, Senior Editor, TVGuide.com
Bones Rodriguez, Author, Captain Kirk’s Guide to Women
Moderated by David Bushman, Curator, Television
O Captain! My Captain! Who’s the greatest leader in the history of science fiction on television? We’re pitting Captain James T. Kirk of Star Trek against your choices, based on the results of our Star Trek Smackdown poll. We’re beaming aboard a panel of sci-fi experts to debate the pros and cons of all the leading contenders, but we also want to hear what you think, so set your coordinates for the Paley Center and come join the debate. Bring your tricorders to help you answer some trivia questions to win some DVDs and other special prizes! Costumes welcome! Tickets include admission to the Paley Center (free to Members, $10 for non-members).
Alien Spotted in Qatar
Here’s a photo and news story that appeared in a newspaper in Qatar:
Mysterious figure ‘spotted’
A mysterious figure resembling a human being was sighted on the Doha Corniche’s parking lot, according to a report published in a local Arabic daily. The report is based on the statement of an Arab expatriate lady who said she had seen the strange figure near the Oryx statue while walking in the area. Quoting the woman, the daily said she took a picture of it in spite of being terribly frightened. “She was very soon surrounded by a large number of people who also attested to the fact of what she had seen. But it suddenly disappeared out of their sight when they tried to go near it,” the report added.
Well, this report seems reliable. I mean, there were a “large number” of witnesses present who backed up her story. The article says so itself.
But still I felt sure that there must be a rational explanation, and sure enough, someone pointed out that this “alien” bears a striking resemblance to a well-known toy:
So there you have it. Nothing to see here. No aliens. Just another case of a toy magically coming to life and running around scaring people.
Society of Illustrators Student Exhibit
Tentative plans to go to this:
Society of Illustrators Student Exhibit
Friday May 08, 2009
6:00pm-9:00pm
Free
128 East 63rd Street
New York, NY