The House Opposite, redux

Forewarned, I was able to get the telephoto lens out this morning. Less of a display, but a clear demonstration that optical zoom is better than digital zoom, I think. 

The house that lights up at dawn to herald the coming of winter. Redux. 

For comparison, same lens, ordinary day. (This was taken in August this year.)

I imagine that neighbor above in the mini-mansion must be a little fed up with his downstairs neighbor's lack of landscaping. Or maybe he just can't see it for all his beautifully trimmed trees. 

Winter is coming (yes, even though this week has been one long "heat advisory" warning)

 The House On The Hill Opposite That Lights Up At Dawn To Signal The Coming Of Autumn has taken a battering over the last few years. Abandoned - at least, it's been empty for years and it's not on the record as for sale - its grass is dead, ejecta is accumulating around its foundations and its windows are getting broken and boarded up. 

There's still a couple of intact windows that face the sunrise just before spring and just after the advent of fall, however. Yesterday was the day. 

Winter is coming. 

The Scarab

 

In my curio cabinet, among much more conventionally precious things, there’s a scarab. A palm-sized black beetle, crudely carved in stone.  Made not by the ancients, but by some fellah with a chisel maybe a year before I got it. It’s special due to the circumstances in which I came by it.

In 1981 I traveled the length of Egypt with an English-teacher friend who lived there. We started from her apartment in the dusty, traffic-jammed city of Cairo and made our way by train down to Luxor, where the glorious ancient temples tower in Brobdingnagian splendor above the modern town. Nearby, over the Nile river, lie the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens.

Luxor has a thriving tourist economy. Exiting the three thousand year old phalanx of ram-headed sphinxes at the temple of Karnak, you come to dozens of tables of tourist bric a brac. Little plaster “faience” eyes of Horus, tiny iron statues of Bast the cat god, or Bes the god of motherhood, piles of copper plates decorated with pyramids and dozens, nay hundreds, of scarabs, the Egyptian beetle that symbolized the power of the cosmos that propels the sun across the sky.

I was just out of college and had no money for these things, most of which had been crudely made by amateurs unschooled in the techniques of the ancients. As I wondered if I should at least buy a lone ushabti – a little figure of a mummy, often placed in tombs to do the scut work in the afterlife the deceased himself would not wish to concern himself with – a large man came up to us. Dressed in a galebeya, the loose robe that Egyptian men wear over their clothes and a turban wrapped from a long woolen scarf, he greeted us with a bellow: “Hey, English ladies!”

My first thought was to run before whatever sting operation he was fronting could trap us. Mandy, with all her 300 words of Arabic, was more sociable.  “Sabakhayr,” she said, the word she thought meant hello.

We got to talking. He loved tourists. He loved the English. He wanted to be our friend. He was a big cheese here in Luxor, he said. “Look,” he said, “They listen to me.” He moved between the hucksters’ tables grabbing items. Ushabtis, scarabs, cats, eyes. He handed me half a dozen. He tried to fill Mandy’s purse with more.

She declined. “Thanks, but I can’t carry all that back to Cairo,” she said, laughing.

“You live in Cairo? Me too!” he boomed.  “I have to go, but come and see me when you get back home.” He wrote his Cairo address on a piece of paper, Western letters, the numbers in the Egyptian forms.

Mandy wanted to go. Naturally, I was against it. Mandy won. We went to his apartment the next week. He pulled out all the stops on hospitality. His family were there, selecting the music and trying out their English. He had food and – illegally – he had beer.

“You want to dance?” We shook our heads, laughing. “Come on, you want to learn to belly dance?” he said. We shook our heads again. “I will belly dance!” he said, stood up and began to sway to the music. He was not wearing the galebeya he had worn in Luxor, but trousers and a shirt. He was a stout man, shaped like an oak trunk, but he danced lightly, with feeling.  We clapped along with the music.

Someone passed him a beer bottle. He stopped dancing for a moment, drank a little beer, and then to our utter astonishment, unwrapped his turban, threw the scarf over a chair, balanced the bottle on his head and began to dance again to the cheers of his family and friends.

Whenever I take that scarab beetle out of the curio cabinet, I’m once again transported to that bare-bulb apartment and the Egyptian man who took off his turban and danced.

 

I Hate That question (short story, fiction)

 

I COME FROM, I wrote on the whiteboard.

"Okay, listen up. Today we're going to talk about where we come from. Everybody here comes from somewhere, right? So, let's ask each other, 'Where do you come from.' I'll start. Vasily, where do you come from?"

Vasily, who was streets ahead of some of the other ESL students, was always a good pick to start the class.

"I came from St. Petersburg," Vasily said, reading his jotted notes.

"Good. Were you born in St. Petersburg?"

"Excuse me?"

"Is St. Petersburg your hometown?"

"Yes, Ms. Hopwood."

"OK, then we use the present tense. 'I COME from St. Petersburg.' Where do you come from, Jorginho?"

"I come from Lisbon in Portugal."

"Good!" I wrote it on the whiteboard.

Vassily spoke up. "Why is it not 'came'?"

How do you answer that in words the students have already learned? Every native speaker knows that "I come from New York" means they were brought up there, or at least it's the place they think of as home. It means "this is the seat of my culture". If you say, "I came from New York" it means you've just arrived from there. "I am coming from New York" means you're in transit, and probably want to be picked up at the airport.

I started to explain but Jorginho interrupted. "Where are you from, Ms. Hopwood?"

"I'm from San Juan Capistrano," I answered.

He laughed. "No, where is you really come from?"

Man, I hate that question.

 

Stairway to Heaven vs Taurus - a roundup of soundalikes for the undecided "is it plagiarism" voter

I've written before on the Stairway to Heaven/Taurus plagiarism court case. One of the best posts has disappeared into the back catalogue and suffered the link rot that plagues blogs. 

Here are some of the comparisons, updated as of this week. 

I won't rehash the legal case. It turns on various technicalities in the law (like the fact that at the time, sheet music was copyright but musical performances on vinyl were not copyright) and technicalities in case law, like the "inverse ratio rule" that basically said if someone could have heard a song a lot, then you can claim he copied it by showing that only a tiny amount of his song resembled the original. Which doesn't make any sense, and it's gone now, thanks to the Stairway win. 

Instead I want to rehash the emotional case. Lots of people think Jimmy Page stole the opening bars of Stairway because a) he was a bit of a naughty boy when it came to taking credit for other people's work and b) the opening bars of Stairway do sound a lot like the post-introduction opening bars of Spirit's Taurus. 

I can't do anything about a), except to point out that wherever Led Zeppelin have been caught, they've eventually paid up, even, at last, to Jake Holmes for Dazed and Confused. 

But I can do something about b) which is to say, I can point out that the opening bars of Stairway sound like lots of things, because it's a very ordinary chord progression picked in an ordinary way (sorry Jimmy). If you normally listen to say, Death Metal or Doo-Wop, you may not have heard much of it and be susceptible, if you hear Taurus and Stairway played side-by-side, to saying a few seconds in the introduction are "the same". (Stairway is eight minutes long, and the rest of both songs are clearly different. The balance of Stairway is not 'picked in an ordinary way'.) If you've listened to other forms of music, you'll be more open to hearing they are two variations on a common theme.  Baroque music has similar progressions as does the Renaissance thingy passamezzo antico. Antico, meaning old! Another name for it is a cliché line, cliché meaning old hat!

Patrick Ball's Carolan's Dream (found via Celtic Baroque Roots of Stairway)

Or here, after the introduction. (Found via a comment in the blog above.)

Sonata di Chittarra, e Violino, con il suo Basso Continuo (at 35 seconds in)

But enough of those. What about pop music? Well, what about pop music! Here we go!

Cartoone, Ice Cream Dreams (1968) – Introduction

(Jimmy Page played on this album)

Davey Graham, Cry Me a River (1963) – introductory few seconds 

The Beatles, A Taste of Honey (1963) – arrangement and melody under "I dream of your first kiss and then I feel upon my lips again."

Johnny Rivers, Summer Rain (1968) – descending figure the orchestra plays, e.g. in the intro 

Crow,  Thoughts (1968) – introduction and guitar figure under verse 

Damnation of Adam Blessing (1969), Strings and things – all of it really

Nick Drake, Day Is Done(1969) – all of it really (he's doing his Davey Graham bit here)

(That is some great guitar playing, isn't it!)

Scott Walker, Hills of Yesterday (1969) – guitar figure

The Kinks – Shangri La (1969) – guitar figure

Jim Croce, Time in a Bottle (1970) – introduction and guitar figure under verse 

Andy Williams, Music to Watch Girls By (1967) – introduction (after first five seconds)

Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven (1971) – introduction and guitar figure under first verses

(Recorded December 1970)

Spirit, Taurus (1968), 44 seconds in

Eric Clapton, Let It Grow (1974) – guitar figure under verse

Dolly Parton, We Used To (1975) – introduction, arrangement

U2, Sunday Bloody Sunday – introduction after the drums

Pink Floyd, Is There Anybody Out There? (1979) – at 1:25

Foo Fighters, The Pretender (2007) – introduction

I'm sure there's more, but you get the picture. 

A lot of these song names were transcribed from a video by ThatsSoInane, but they don't seem to exist on YouTube anymore to thank them. The video itself was taken down years ago. I bet these links rot soon too!

My neighbor has a dog called Spirit who is very yappy. I just heard him start barking and my neighbor's really loud yell, "SPIRIT!"

So maybe that's some sort of omen. 

Show, don't tell in Science Fiction

 In his letter to Joan Lancaster in June 1956, C. S. Lewis wrote: 'In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me."'

'On the dam of the mill a fragment of broken bottle flashed like a small bright star, and there rolled by, like a ball, the black shadow of a dog' – Anton 'is that a gun on your mantelpiece or are you just pleased to see me?' Chekhov

'Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.' – Mark Twain

This is the goal of 'good writing'. It is claimed to make the reader do the work of feeling instead of being told how to feel, as a mechanism to engage the reader. Instead of asserting that something happened, it gives the reader evidence that it happened.

"Show, don't tell" is one of the iron laws of literary fiction, along with "murder your darlings" and "remove all the words ending in 'ly'."  It's a hallmark of western literature, and it's firmly based in the conviction that writing can and should express "universal themes".

Alexis Enrico Santi, editor of Our Stories, wrote: Literary fiction is writing that concentrates not on the climax but all the foreplay before and after […] What bridges the gap between the reader and writer is the essential senses of human emotion: smell, sight, hearing, touch -- these are universal. Everyone who reads is looking to access their own emotions to 'live' inside your fiction. Whenever you are communing with these senses, you will be connecting with your reader."

From Wikipedia: "Literary fiction is a term principally used for certain fictional works that are claimed to hold literary merit…To be considered literary, a work usually must be "critically acclaimed" and "serious". In practice, works of literary fiction often are "complex, literate, multilayered novels that wrestle with universal dilemmas".

But there will always be a major role for simply telling. Importantly, it is not possible to describe motivation by "showing".

"[M]otivation is unshowable. It must be told. […] Motivation is precisely the one thing that cannot be shown. […] When you are using a POV character, the single most important thing that you must tell the reader is the full purpose of what the character is doing, as soon as the character knows it himself. If you do not, you are cheating, and the audience gets less and less patient with you, until they lose interest because you are not telling them the most important information that people come to stories -- especially fiction -- to receive! -- Orson Scott Card. (Links to an external site.)

If you try to describe a person's inner state only by showing what he does, one problem you will run into is what psychologists call the Fundamental Attributive Error. This is the tendency to believe a person's actions are the result of their personality rather than outside forces. For example, you're likely to believe the speeding car that cuts you off must be driven by a selfish jerk, when in fact it could be driven by a soon-to-be father who is trying to get his wife to the maternity hospital and was temporarily distracted.

Even if you excel at "showing", you will be, as the reading for this class described in "constant dissociation", forever describing a cloud around a person without ever acknowledging there's a person at the center of the cloud, an "I". 

Since good writing is said to come to grips with "universal" themes, to "show" them, a writer must assume that it there is a universal way to 'be in love,' 'to be terrified,' 'watch a beautiful sunset' and so on. But is that a good assumption? Leaving aside the whole branch of anthropology dedicated to the study of "literary universals" (the upshot being that not as many things as we think are universal in discourse) literary fiction is western, largely white, and 'the canon' is still mostly male. Styles, themes and techniques fall into and out of fashion.  It is not universal.

The "universality" of literary fiction has been challenged by on multiple grounds. For example by Namratta Podar on the grounds of Colonialism, because it ignores the orality (story telling) tradition in societies around the world. It has also been challenged for containing implicit Colonialism by Cecilia Tan because the literary form, particularly when "showing", often requires the story to be about the impact a newcomer has on a world that is new to them, and vice versa. 

It has also been challenged on the grounds that no experience can be universal. Empathy is a myth. In "Consider The Lobster," David Foster Wallace expounded on the life of the lobster. It does not have a nervous system that resembles that of a human, so can we truly say a lobster 'was in agony' when it was boiled in a pot?

"Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything's pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that other human beings experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy – metaphysics, epistemology, value theory and ethics."   In this case, 'the lobster was dropped in boiling water' – telling, not showing – is a true account. -- David Foster Wallace, in Ethical Challenge of Posthumanism. 

More narrowly, we are all, like Wallace's fish in This is Water, unaware of our environment.  We are embedded within a medium – our Umwelt, as von Uexküll named it – and do not realize that our own senses, effectors and environment are not contiguous with the Umwelten of our so-called peers.

 (Links to an external site.)named it – and do not realize that our own senses, effectors and environment are not contiguous with the Umwelten of our so-called peers.

This issue is exacerbated in speculative vis à vis literary fiction. In the latter, the Umwelt of the colonizers and the colonized may not overlap to a significant degree, but in the former one set of characters might literally be lobsters. A long time in literary fiction may be a hundred years (of solitude), in speculative fiction it may be a billion years – or a millisecond. A long way in literary fiction may be Eastern Europe to New York, in speculative fiction from Schenectady to the Andromeda Galaxy.

It is informative to see how television approaches this.  In "The Expanse" (2016–), a portal opens between distant systems. The portal – the "Ring" – is not said to be Cyclopean, Brobdingnagian, immense, planet-sized. It’s barely described by the characters.  This is a TV "show" and of course it makes sense that they will "show" the size of the Ring. But in contrast, the interpersonal relationships between the characters are talked through exhaustively in dialog. If a character betrays another character, it is explained – told – in minute detail. The precise relationship between the characters, at this current juncture of the plot, like motivation, may need to be spelled out.

In written SF, we often need to "tell" both exposition and motivation. We must find a way to describe a situation no one has ever come across before – a portal between star systems – and we have to explain how the characters are interacting.

For the former, we have two main choices: infodump, what Damon Knight called the expository lump, and incluing, named by Jo Walton, where the situation is described in small pieces as the character encounters each part of their environment.

The most famous incluing phrase in SF is Robert Heinlein's "the door dilated". This advances the action while showing that we are not in 21st Century in three short words. It's not a trick that's easily replicated, however, or it wouldn't be the go-to example.

Infodumping includes the classic, much maligned technique of people explaining things to each other. "As you know, Bob, we settled this planet almost a hundred years ago but still on occasion a wild invisible creature from the mountains attacks the settlement and steals our children."

(Perhaps "incluing" would be something like, "I walked on the outside of the trail, carrying a big stick. I didn't believe there were any invisible monsters in the mountains, but my little sis did. Four generations of settlers had metaled and graded what was once just a rocky path, but to her it was still the edge of civilization and monster lurked in the bushes.")

In summary, it's called telling a story, not showing a story. Showing has its place, but plot will always require telling. A dedication to showing will produce a work where nothing happens except for the experience of the main character, and if you don't feel like him, then for you nothing has happened at all.

SF Critic Damien G Walter wrote on the Asimov's forum: "I've noticed a lot of writers, particularly those who write novels over short stories, refer to 'show don't tell' as using scene and dialogue instead of narrative voice. IMHO that advice is not very helpful. Narrative voice is pretty essential in a good story, and trying to stick to this idea of 'show don't tell' is a mistake."

Fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson (as Mistborn) wrote: " Show don't tell is pithy, and it is good advice. But it's not the whole story. What it really should say is this: learn when to show and when to tell." 

(Written because we had to "do" show don't tell for our writing class.)

Led Zeppelin win Stairway case.

 The Supreme Court have declined to hear the Stairway to Heaven plagiarism case, and so the lower court ruling, exonerating Led Zeppelin, stands. 

The judgment also means that a long-standing (and much debated) copyright case rule in the ninth circuit called "the inverse ratio rule" has been overturned. This said in effect, that if you had a chance to hear the song that is claimed to be the basis of your song, then you *could have* stolen the sound, and if you had a lot of chances to hear the song, then you could have stolen the song even if your song doesn't much sound like the original. No, that doesn't make any sense, but copyright rarely does. It's gone now, we don't have to worry about it. 

I wrote about the case in 2016 and appended a number of YouTube videos of "things that sound like Stairway". It's a fairly common sound in music, both before and after Stairway (and before and after Spirit's Taurus).  And even if it wasn't, it's a bit much to suggest that the first 30 seconds or so of Stairway is the part that made it so iconic. But I won't rehash all of that. There's plenty of takes out there on the interwebs, most of which are "Page nicked things so this case is his just desserts", which I don't agree with either. 

There's a write-up of the case from Variety here, and one from Rolling Stone here.  The Rolling Stone piece has a good write up on the inverse ratio rule. 

Online all the time

Social Media looms large in our lives these days. Almost everyone has a Facebook account or a twitter account, and we all are tempted to share the posts that engage us the most.

Some of the posts are from, or about Qanon orphans. These people, we're told, are younger people who have "lost" their older relatives to a rapidly-spreading conspiracy theory called Qanon, after its supposed founder, who hold a "Q" (top secret classification) in the government administration.

This phenomenon follows on from similar social scares ranging from the Satanic Panic of the Eighties to the Fox Widows of the Oughties – people who have been radicalized by the media and then isolated from their "normie" – non-radicalized – relatives.

My own experience with online communities is very different. I emigrated to the US in 1989, just as the wired community was ramping up. I was online immediately, using the ability to talk to my friends in the UK and make hundreds of friends all around the world. Friends who have lizard pets. Friends who watched (and obsessively detailed) the X-Files. Led Zeppelin fans. Jack White fans. Star Wars fans. All of these had messageboards – or ‘communities’ as people now call them – dedicated to the topic, and quite often had messageboards limited to a few friends, dedicated to talking about the people on the main messageboard. There was LiveJournal, Archive of Our Own, Fanfiction.net, the comments sections of popular blogs. Many people have had a similar journey, from listservers to Compuserve, Deja News, AOL, to Facebook and Instagram in the twenty-twenties. From modems in the early nineties to cable or free wifi in cafes, the experience has been positive and encouraging.

What, then has gone wrong in the relatives of the orphans and widows mentioned above?

In my opinion, two things. First, personally, I wanted to make friends and involve them positively in my life and thoughts. I looked for similarity in hobbies and outlook and sought to think of mutually interesting topics to write about. I did not wait for people to find me and attempt to influence me. Secondly and more importantly, old fashioned message boards did not have "algorithms". These computer programs are written by such as FB and Twitter to work behind the scenes and bring you, the reader, content you will engage with (click on or linger on). They know you will engage with it because you have done so with similar items before. This is a positive feedback loop – if you click on something, you will see more of it. You will click on it again, and so the algorithms are trained to show you EVEN MORE.

Unfortunately, it's a feature of the human psyche that we click on (and linger over) items that make us angry. Get us up in arms, as the cliché goes (alas, literally these days). The algorithms have taken us away from our friends, who post pictures of their cats and lasagnes, and into the arms of Q, who gets us mad about crazy happenings elsewhere that we can't take care of ourselves, and so we go back, over and over again, to make sure that SOMEBODY is doing something.

We can't do much about FB's algorithms and their tendency to show us a world where things are out of control. We can, however, trim our own behavior and look for – and click on – posts from those we trust, and join in the celebration of togetherness.

--

We were asked to write an opinion piece in our non-fiction writing class, and this was mine. 

Bones on the Couch (short story, complete)

Bones on the Couch 

The first skeleton turned up in May on, I think, a Friday. I remember we were preparing to go out. Yvonne knew a place had great social distancing, so we could sit outside without a mask and look at the ocean while drinking cocktails.

We finished getting ready and came out of the bedroom and the skeleton was sitting there on the sofa.

"Who's that?" Yvonne said.

"I think it's my boss's father," I said. I knew he'd been sick.

"It can't stay on the couch."

It wasn't putrid or anything. No smell or scraps of flesh. Just clean bones, still attached together somehow, without any wires or ligaments. Maybe some sort of magnetism? When I gripped it, it just pulled apart, and I stacked it in the cupboard under the sink. The ribcage was the largest and most unwieldy segment, so I put the little bones inside it, the long bones around it to make a sort of flattish platform and placed the skull on top.

We had a nice time at the bar on the pier that evening, and I don't remember any skeletons for a while.

One turned up about a week later, on a stool in the kitchen. It was my brother's friend, an ER nurse, or at least that's what we decided after a brief debate. That skeleton fitted under the sink as well, but when two turned up the next day, I started having to stack them in the bathroom cabinet. One was my brother's garage mechanic – I don't know why I was getting my brother's – and one we weren't sure about.

By then, we were hearing about other people getting them. Most did as I did – I learned it was called 'disarticulation' – but a few people just left them where they were. "They get less noticeable after a while, " a work colleague said.

"It's a nine-day wonder," another said, "I bet they disappear after the election."

In August, our son Ian came to stay with us. He said his apartment was full of skeletons and he had to move out for a while.

"You'd think a young guy like Ian would have fewer skeletons," I said to Yvonne.

"I think he has a lot of heart, and that makes them stick around," she said. She was disarticulating our mortgage loan manager so she didn't look up. He fitted under the sink. They did tend to pack down after a while, and you could get more in each space.

She was right about Ian. A skeleton turned up the next day and after a lot of inquiry, we realized it was a Black Lives Matter protester who'd been run over in the streets in Portland, so clearly it belonged to him. Ian wouldn't disarticulate it, so it stayed in the bathroom, sitting on the floor and grinning up at the shower rail.

"It wasn't a nine-day wonder after all," I said to my co-worker, who had to move the bones of one of the secretarial staff out of his cubicle to sit down that morning. "It's still only August," he said. "Anyway, you're outliers here – both you and Yvonne. Born worriers. Most of us just get on with life. It's not like you can put a stop to it."

"Ian gets them as well," I corrected.

"He'll grow out of it," the co-worker said. "It's you I'm most worried about. You should take a vacation."

I didn't – it never seems to be the right time to take a vacation. There's always a crisis. Riots, police-involved shootings, COVID-19 travel restrictions. Middle East in an uproar, again. Climate refugees on boats in the Mediterranean. It's hard to keep up with the news sometimes.

We had a few more. Mostly Ian's, I think. He was no help and his tended to hang around the longest. Yvonne wouldn't acknowledge any of hers and I would put them in the cupboard under the sink for her. One day in late October, as I was leaving work, I got one in the passenger seat of the car.

I sighed and drove off, and by the time I reached home it had gone.

End

 

 

Sam Redlark, star commenter, aces the wand debate

I haven't been around much, have I?

Well, here's some light reading suggestions for you.

A chance remark by a friend on twitter has led to me learning of the existence of a true heir to the surreal wordsmithing of the Bonzos' Vivian Stanshall. The wonder-writer's name is Sam Redlark.

The friend tweeted about a comment on a Guardian article which was wonderful, loopy and inventive, and really nothing at all to do with the article. She said "he has form" and pointed to the commenters' page. (For the Guardian, realizing that we may not want to slog through its wet and weedy articles, provides a link to a particular commenter's replies.)

Sam Redlark's comment page, worthy of a novel, is available here. A tiny sliver of his oeuvre is inserted as a picture. (On the Grauniad site, the headline for the article appears on the left, and is a link. The comment appears on the right. There is no requirement to read the article in order to enjoy the replies.)

I've found a couple of hints that Sam may have had the urge to spin webs of fancy before this year, when he discovered the Guardian's comment page. There's a long-abandoned blog by a Sam Redlark that has much of the same character, here. 

There is also a reply to a Warren Ellis blogpost  by a Sam Redlark that leads to an (also long-abandoned) LiveJournal by one "backwards7" here. 

Put together it does seem to me that the author of Sir Henry at Rawlinson End has come to life again. (Though it would be too much to hope that Sam could have Vivian's mellifluous voice tones.)

Interzone science fiction magazines available free online

In 1989, I had my first story published in a glossy magazine - semi-professional magazine, as the terminology goes, the wonderful and long-lived Interzone, edited at that time by multi-talented and Ballardian extraordinaire, David Pringle.

Issue #1

A string of other semi-professional and zine sales followed. Most of them are lost in the mists of time (though Mike Ashley has the story of them and the zeitgeist of those days in his book Science Rebels, available here).

A dozen dozen of the first couple of hundred Interzone issues are digitized and online at the estimable Internet Archive. I do not know if the estimable Internet Archive actually has permission to do so or if this is one of its regular excursions around copyright in these Plague Years.

And one of those issues is the one my short story is in.  I called it The Continuous Council Workman, but editor Pringle persuaded me to dial that title down to The Outside Door.

You can browse the Interzone archive at this link


You can find the link for the issue featuring The Outside Door here.

Really takes me back!

Counterfeit bills

A long time ago - maybe 1986 or so - I tried to pass a counterfeit £20 bill.

I didn't know it was counterfeit. At the time, I wasn't exactly Peter Thiel and such huge bills (to me) only came my way when I got my weekly wage out of the bank.

The store didn't believe a bank (it was a Giro bank, British folks) would hand out fake notes, and the police, when they arrived, didn't believe me either. I was marched out of the store and deposited on a hard bench in a East London police station. The copper said that Special Branch or whomever would be along to question me, but nobody bothered. About an hour later, the original copper came by with his cup of tea in his hand, and said, "Are you still here?" I allowed as I was, in fact, still here, and he indicated I should get lost.

I did. I got back to work, they accepted my excuse for having taken such a prolonged lunch break, and that was that. 

None of the police involved handcuffed my hands behind my back and knelt on my neck for more than eight minutes, killing me.

So I guess I got off lightly compared with George Floyd, God rest his soul. The East London police were pretty hard - the Giro bank post office where I deposited my paycheck was just opposite the Blind Beggar where Ronnie Kray murdered George Cornell, for example, so they had to be - but they weren't psychopaths.

Alice Cooper - Don't Give Up (Official Video)

That nice Alice Cooper has some encouraging words for us.

Creative Writing in the time of Covid

The Creative Writing class continues apace, if by "apace" we can include facing each other in the little screen boxes of a Zoom meeting. It's beginning to feel natural to avoid seeing others face to face and instead to gaze stonily at a tiny dot on the top of your screen and see yourself in one of the little boxes.

“O, wad some Power the giftie gie us. To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, An' foolish notion.” - Robert Burns.

Done. I even turned off mirroring. Not yet freed of foolish notions, but I've discovered I'm asymmetric.

The team continues to write and we continue to critique. I learn a lot but write very little. Fifteen or so people turn up to the Zoom meetings, three send pieces for critique, and we have one or two 5 or 10 minute periods of 'freewriting', an exercise that makes my mind go completely blank.

The teacher gives us two words and asks us to write a piece about them. If meditation teachers knew about it, they'd adopt the technique. They'd pull two pieces of paper out of a tin of stamp-sized sheets with words written on them and tell us to think about what the words bring up in our imagination.

Teacher: "Umbilical. Ma Po Tofu."

My Brain: ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Uhhh.

There are some very good amateurs in the class. One is a phenomenal writer in the word/sentence/paragraph sense but rambles like Trump in speech, which I find interesting. One loves European writers, which shows in terms of his subject matter and attention to detail. Many are concentrating on memoir and have interesting stories to tell, although it's hard to know if they have a book-full each. I'm not interested in it myself, and balk at questions about what I've done or what I feel, almost as hard as I stall at the freewriting exercises.

One thing I don't bring up in critiques and probably should is the treatment that the Serious Men of the class bring to female characters. I spend a lot of time on the internet reading people who are so woke that you couldn't scare up a cis het white male character in there if you waved an AR 15 and a jar of mayonnaise and shouted, "Hey soy boy!" In contrast, the Serious Men of the class write about exciting, deep, dark, disturbed white men. Women are presented as objects, which the protagonist acts upon.

We had a short story where a man goes to visit a woman for no reason as far as I could tell, then beats her up. She does not fight back. For more information reread the last sentence. She has so little agency she doesn't even try to run.

Another of the Serious Men wrote a long and very well-written piece about a man who is obsessed with another man. The object of his obsession is described in great, loving detail, from his college days (which the protagonist had researched - it was before they met) to his shirt and to his car. The story is named after him, and he is nicknamed after his car. The car, like the man, is described in detail, and the car has agency - its temperamental ways are a plot point. The reason the protagonist is obsessed with him is that he knows a woman the protagonist had interacted with before the story began. The previous interaction is never described. And the woman, when we eventually meet her, is barely described. The protagonist is driven to her house by the car-man in his erratic car, where the protagonist kills the woman and the man as well.

To be fair, some of the Serious Men write about themselves and don't really mention women, or about a character's childhood, much of which seems to be spent in reform schools or orphanages and not have any women in it. They don't all write about psychopaths.

The women are a more varied lot - from the spiritual seeker to the memoirists to the one with the fabulous voice - and tend to have both men and women in their stories. I think because of our mutual age, there is a tendency for the men characters to be doers and the women to be opinion-havers, but for most of us, that's what growing up was like. Stories set in the present day, written by the women, generally treat men and women as two types of human beings.

Going to video conferencing has reduced the tendency of readings and critiques to become therapy sessions. When someone writes about a father being distant, or a  father womanizing, or someone being sexually assaulted, there's a minefield where criticizing the writing may be criticizing the writer. Safely behind our screens, sending marked up Word documents back and forth, this is minimized.

It's certainly an interesting class, and a first for me. I've been to workshops like "How to write the perfect query letter!" (A: Enclose a $50 bill.*) Or, "What is tight third person omniscient pluperfect?" (A: "He hadn't worked out by then that he had written in the tight third person omniscient pluperfect.") I hadn't been to a long course where I was expected to write things.

OK, now write for ten minutes on these two words: Error. Nature.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Uhhh.


*This is not the actual way to write the perfect query letter.

Merope (fiction, 500 words)

My creative writing class prompt was to write about the rituals that evolve when you are trying to survive in isolation. Here's my 500 words.

***

I got wearily out of the bunk, folded it into the wall and stuffed the bag into the sanitizer. My daily checklist was on a clipboard because there was something tactile about pencils that I didn’t get from a tablet. They say that knowing what you like and sticking with it is the key to these long periods on the watchtowers.

Khaliunaa was already at the watch station, as usual smelling of flowers, a remarkable feat since we were three and a half million miles from earth. Whatever perfume she’d smuggled on board had lasted – what? I was losing track of time. More than eleven months. At first I’d considered objecting. Some people are allergic to fragrances, I considered saying. It’s antisocial, I imagined myself arguing. But getting on with your team-mate is the key to these long periods on the watchtowers. And anyway, it covered up the smell from the food preparation area. (The food itself was perfectly seasoned, designed to keep us lonely crew members relatively satisfied on these long, tedious tours. The lingering smell was not lovely.)

The watch station was in the center of the cupola, where you could observe the stars slowly rotate around you. Occasionally, dim pepperoni-red Mars or bright coral Jupiter would appear for a stately procession outside the glass. The instruments, of course, did all the watching, but Mission Command had psychologists by the truckload, and they had advocated for a big, wide, panoramic window to keep the inhabitants sane. The instruments could detect the signature of a rocket engine tens of astronomical units away. Millions of miles before a person could see a flare.

Khaliunaa, too, had a checklist – hers was on a tablet – because a checklist to keep you mentally moving forward is the key to these long periods on the watchtowers. I swear the first item on hers, because she says something like it every morning, is her little joke. She spotted me and prepared to say it.

“Hey, Kareem, can you see something moving – there – across the Pleiades?”

“Ha ha, very funny,” I said, fumbling with the squishy plastic packaging of a breakfast. I’d gotten bored with the formerly astonishing sight of the constellations months ago and didn’t look up.

“I mean it this time.”

“Sure you do.” I munched the vanilla granola, trying to keep the noise down because getting on with your team-mate is the key to these long periods on the watchtowers.

“Kareem? We have to alert Mission Command.”

Unnerved, I looked at my instrument display. There was nothing hot out there. Maybe she’d spotted a comet? Not unheard of. I grabbed a bar and pulled myself up into the cupola. My eyes tracked across the constellations to the bright blue throng of the Pleiades. The beautiful Seven Sisters of legend shone brightly. Then there were six. Then seven. Something had briefly eclipsed Merope.

Something coasting in.

Then the unknown body flared red. A rocket engine had fired.

Klaxons blared across the watchtower. 

Battle stations.

***