Strange Radiation

Andrew Willett, at it again.

While I Were Out

Right! Blog! Where were we — June? Yes. Summer was lovely, thanks. I’ve begun working on that novel I’ve been yammering on about for years now and we’ll see how that goes. I dunno how much I’ll talk about it here, at least until I’m through the first draft, but now you know. Light a candle for me. As a plan-obsessed control-freak sort of writer, thundering through a draft where it’s not only acceptable but also expected to have a paragraph end with something like THIS IS WHERE YOU’LL NEED A TRANSITION BEFORE YOUR HERO AND THE BODHISATTVA WALK OFF TO GET FALAFEL has been both liberating and terrifying. Lots of work to do on that ms today; I skipped town a little while back to turn 40 in Minnesota on a lake with my relations and then to go to Burning Man, and my momentum took a big hit and needs to be rebuilt. So today is a Get Your Groove On sort of day, much as I’d rather be at the Maker Faire.

But first! Let me tell you about last night, spent hanging out in piano bars with Velma, because she’s a bad influence. There was Old School Theatre Queen Action at Marie’s Crisis, where I had not set foot since my first week in NYC, back in 1993. And thence to the Duplex, which has somehow fit a baby grand piano into the downstairs space. And then V and I invented the next big filksinging genre: Lovecraftian R&B. That would be Rugose and Batrachian, obviously.

The first greatest-hits collection will contain:

  • “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg (To Be Eaten First)”
  • “Ain’t No Mountain Mad Enough”
  • “I Say A Little Prayer to You”
  • “Respect (For the Old Ones)”
  • “Not Just My Imagination”

I welcome any reminders of songs we’ve left off the list.

Public Service Announcement: DateTags and MT4

For those using StaggerNation’s DateTags plugin with Movable Type 4 (or, presumably, 5): there was a change in the MT3 —> MT4 transition with how entries’ date information is handled. This change can make DateTags behave in odd ways in cases where posts are assigned publishing dates other than the dates on which they were originally written — for instance, if you’re writing entries today and assigning publishing dates three weeks from now, because you’re using DateTags to create a calendar of upcoming events. To address this problem, do a global find-and-replace in your plugins/DateTags.pl file: where you see created_on, replace it with authored_on.

That is all.

Things You Can Do With the Internet

  1. Play lots and lots of Echo Bazaar, an online RPG set in Victorian-London-that-has-been-dragged-into-a-cavern-beneath-the-Earth.
  2. Enlist your friends’ help to prevent two visiting Russian women from becoming victims of human trafficking in New York City.

The first option is absolutely engrossing, if it’s the sort of thing you find engrossing, and can be done solo. The second option is… well, just read the link. A member of the MetaFilter message board posts a cry for help; over the next 24 hours, friends, acquaintances, and total strangers rally to keep two women from vanishing into god-knows-what. Astonishing, inspiring reading, and I only found out about it after the dust settled. I can’t imagine what it must have been like as a MeFi reader caught up in events as they unfolded. It makes you wonder how many stories end differently right here in New York every week because the victims don’t have a squad of internet people looking out for them.

Shut Up and Tell Her What She Needs to Know, or What I Am Willing to Put Up With When Connie Willis Is Pulling the Strings

Greetings from page 26, or the end of Chapter 3, of Connie Willis’s new novel Blackout, which is where I closed the book when stepping off the bus to tonight’s rehearsal. It’s another time-travel novel1 centered on the historians of Oxford University, who — because the laws of time travel as they are understood prevent pretty much anything else — bounce around through the less-scrutinized corners of the past, observing the goings-on and not affecting much of anything. And while in general I see holding a copy of a new Connie Willis book in my hands as a good thing, I am concerned. I shall discuss my concerns in a nonspoilery fashion below.

What gave me pause? Well, it’s the way in which I couldn’t even get to the end of the chapter without saying, Oh no, we’re not playing this game again, are we? The game being the one where someone has a piece of important information to impart that, because of communications difficulties (bad handwriting, something blowing up, an inability to get a moment to sit down and talk like grownups for just 30 seconds), cannot be imparted; and thus is the plot created, a long chain of missed connections and misunderstandings and oh my god I am going to reach right into this book and slap all of you until you sit around a table and calmly compare notes. Willis has employed this trick before, of course, and depending on your tolerance for this particular flavor of contrivance you may feel she does it very well: I loved her time-travelers-do-Victorian-travel-memoirs romcom To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is full of it, as is her time-traveler-free romcom Bellwether. There’s even some of it in her wrenching debut novel Doomsday Book: somebody knows what’s going on, and if only he could just relay it to the right person the book would be a hell of a lot shorter and less eventful.

But it does get irritating after a while, or perhaps as time has gone by and I have put more energy into telling stories myself it has become harder for me to ignore a big noisy machine marked PLOT DEVICE DO NOT TOUCH sitting in the corner of the room. And so when in Chapter 3 — in which we see many, many people trying to get important information out of people they can’t locate, because no one’s ever where they’re expected to be — there’s an extended sequence revolving around an illegible phone message that the surly roommate has taken but is unavailable to explicate, I had a moment of panic. But by the end of the chapter the roommate has been found and cajoled into translating and events have moved on. At which point I decided that Willis had been fucking with our heads and heaved a great relieved sigh. We’ll see, I guess. I’m probably being way too optimistic.

Thinking about this sequence, though, revealed a bigger problem, or at least a big thorny weirdness, with the book. Because the narrative “now,” the future era from which these time travelers are setting forth, is 2060, and people are still getting crucial, time-sensitive information to one another by calling their rooms and asking their roommates to leave a note by the telephone. It would seem that we’re reading about a future in which nobody knows how to send a text message, in which nobody thinks to send an e-mail to all graduate researchers that says, “You will have noticed that we’re rescheduling all your trips into the past on short notice, and here’s why it has to be this way,” in which it’s impossible to ping your roommate with a simple WHERE R U? And that, in a novel published this year, is kind of nuts.

I think it’s because we’re looking at a future that is already nearly 30 years old. Willis’s short story “Fire Watch,” which established this continuity, was published in 1983, and Doomsday Book came out in 1992. And given the state of technology then, it probably never occurred to Willis that her future of 2060 needed to be mapped out via the ubiquitous smart phones and text messaging of 2010. (See also the dazzling future of 2001 in Carl Sagan’s Contact, written in 1985: the big schmancy technology in that book is the wondrous “telefax.”) Perhaps, having envisioned a world without such devices, Willis feels obliged to stick with her original set of tools. I know that trying to pull off such a retcon would feel like cheating to me if I were writing it. What do you think?

I rambled on at some length2 about all this to one of my fellow singers on the crosstown bus after rehearsal. He asked if I intended to finish the book, and I probably looked at him like he’d lost his mind. I’m a long way from wanting to give up. But I sure as hell hope that actual communication starts to occur somewhere along the way. I’ll let you know.

1 More accurately, it’s the first half of a novel in two parts. The second half comes out this fall. I had planned to wait for all of it to come out, or for the paperback of Vol. 1 at least, but then I found a cheap copy at the Strand and my resolve imploded.

2 Yeah, yeah.

Yet Another Demonstration of Why Marriage Equality Matters

Because nobody would ever do this sort of thing to an elderly straight couple:

Clay and his partner of 20 years, Harold, lived in California. Clay and Harold made diligent efforts to protect their legal rights, and had their legal paperwork in place—wills, powers of attorney, and medical directives, all naming each other. Harold was 88 years old and in frail medical condition, but still living at home with Clay, 77, who was in good health.

One evening, Harold fell down the front steps of their home and was taken to the hospital. Based on their medical directives alone, Clay should have been consulted in Harold’s care from the first moment. Tragically, county and health care workers instead refused to allow Clay to see Harold in the hospital. The county then ultimately went one step further by isolating the couple from each other, placing the men in separate nursing homes.

They weren’t finished there: to pay for the bills, the county decided that Clay and Harold’s house and all its contents would be auctioned off. And three months later, Harold died, alone.

Read more at the website of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. Thanks to Towleroad for the tip.

Books/Baked Goods/Memewrangling

So I went to Books of Wonder, the best kids’ bookstore in NYC or anywhere else in the universe, so far as I can tell, the other day. My niece is turning 7 shortly, and I had duties to perform. (She recently saw Coraline, and expressed a desire to read the book. How can I say no? She’s also getting the fabulous Clan Apis. Science!)

Anyway, you can’t go to BoW without stopping at the cupcake counter. Or I can’t, anyway: it’s run by the fabulous Cupcake Cafe people. You can keep Magnolia Bakery’s vapid and oversweet efforts — the only reason people eat them, far as I can tell, is because they saw them on Sex and the City. For my money, CC’s dense cake and heavenly buttercream frosting whomp MB’s efforts into next week. And that’s without mentioning how totally beautiful their creations are to look at. Almost a shame to eat them, almost.

I told a friend about my visit — okay, I gloated about it — and he asked, “Did you take a picture for that website?”

“What website?”

Dudes with beards eating cupcakes.”

No, I didn’t, for the record. Maybe next time. But I was pleased to note it as an addition to an emerging internet meme: blogs entirely devoted to juxtapositions of three things. The other two sites I’ve seen are Selleck/Waterfall/Sandwich and Bea Arthur/Mountains/Pizza, which offer endless collections of weird surrealist landscapes. Dudes/Beards/Cupcakes doesn’t have the others’ zen-bouquet quality; instead it feels more like somebody’s personal fetish run amok. It’s noteworthy, I think, that they’re all tumblr blogs, but whether that tells us something about tumblr or the state of web culture in general I’m not sure. As to the inevitable why? In the words of Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing, “Because INTERNET.” And that’s the best explanation we’re likely to get.

Wheels on Fire

So. Last night Hugh and Randall and Jim and Bill and I went to the opening night of the Gotham Girls Roller Derby. Last night’s card: the Wall Street Traitors vs. the Queen City [Buffalo] Furies, then the Gotham Girls All-Stars vs. the Charm City [Baltimore] All-Stars. It’s tremendous fun and we’re going back in a month or so.

On the one hand, it’s a spectator sport, in which a bunch of women who, in many cases, have only been playing the game for a year or two, go like hell and take no prisoners. Imply that this is some sort of silly cheesecake thing and they will fuck your shit up. And there’s real strategy going on beyond the body-checks, and it only takes a few minutes to appreciate the rules enough to start seeing that. But on another hand, it’s also a spectator sport with a tremendous sense of humor — I mean, how can you not love a game where players are expected to make up awesome skater names? How can you not cheer and scream yourself raw for Ginger Snap, and Carmen Monoxide, and Donna Matrix? And Joy Collision? And Beyonsláy? (For my part, my heart belongs to Em Dash. As her entry in the 2010 souvenir program states, “There’s a new serif in town.” Word.) And we ate hot dogs, and the people-watching in the stands was superlative, and the jeerleaders (yes) were great.

Consider joining us at the May 22 event, at which the Queens of Pain take on the Manhattan Mayhem.

They’ll Need Something Snappier for the Movie Version

A Collection Of Voyages And Travels, Consisting Of Authentic Writers In Our Own Tongue, Which Have Not Before Been Collected In English, Or Have Only Been Abridged In Other Collections. And Continued With Others Of Note, That Have Published Histories, Voyages, Travels, Journals Or Discoveries In Other Nations And Languages, Relating To Any Part Of The Continent Of Asia, Africa, America, Europe, Or The Islands Thereof, From The Earliest Account To The Present Time. Digested According To The Parts Of The World, To Which They Particularly Relate: With Historical Introductions To Each Account, Where Thought Necessary, Containing Either The Lives Of Their Authors Or What Else Could Be Discovered And Was Supposed Capable Of Entertaining And Informing The Curious Reader. And With Great Variety Of Cuts, Prospects, Ruins, Maps, And Charts. Compiled From The Curious And Valuable Library Of The Late Earl Of Oxford. Interspersed And Illustrated With Notes, Containing, Either A General Account Of The Discovery Of Those Countries, Or An Abstract Of Their Histories, Government, Trade, Religion, &c. Collected From Original Papers, Letters, Charters, Letters Patents, Acts Of Parliament, &c. Not To Be Met With, And Proper To Explain Many Obscure Passages In Other Collections Of This Kind

Thomas Osborne, editor. London: 1745. First edition currently available from Charles Agvent, bookseller.

More Fun With Headlines

As seen on Towleroad today:

DOCTOR WHO USED ‘SHOCK’ THERAPY TO ‘CURE’ GAYS UNDER INVESTIGATION FOR SEXUAL ASSAULT OF DOZENS OF MALE PATIENTS

I was very happy to see that I was not the only person who had a “Wait, David Tennant did what?” moment there.

In other news, I’m still looking for work. Perhaps I should offer my services to Towleroad as a copy editor.

Andrew Is Easily Amused, Example No. 31,287

It may astonish you, gentle reader, to hear that jobs are not thick upon the ground at present. To facilitate my networking, which I am doing nigh unto my own demise, I think it would behoove me to have some sort of distributable premium. A card, perhaps, with my name and contact information — one that fits easily into a wallet or a vest pocket. I hear those are good.

I should probably include a line just below my name that describes what I do and thereby jogs the memory of the recipients when they draw it from their pockets and wallets and whatnot. The obvious text would be something like —WRITER • EDITOR,— of course, but I am this close to going with —SUPER GENIUS— instead. Because what says professional competence better than a reference to a 58-year-old Warner Brothers cartoon?

To wit, Operation: Rabbit, 1952. Yes, the card the coyote presents at the start of the picture just says “Genius,” but this line is a deathless classic of Western drama, and I defy you to say otherwise.

Plus, Bugs’s take to the camera at 0:17 is Chuck Jones at his best.

Page 3 of 65

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén