Beluthahatchie

Read in 2011

2012-01-02T13:23:00.000-05:00

Of the books I read in 2011, a few favorites, in publication order.

Fiction:

Jim Thompson, The Getaway (1959). Scary and increasingly surreal. Arguably a dark fantasy novel.
Stephen King (as Richard Bachman), The Long Walk (1979). Relentless. A lifetime ahead of The Hunger Games.
Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010). As with all Chiang's best work, it's not only moving but keeps you thinking for months after you put down the book.

Non-fiction:

Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (1974). A spellbinding police procedural, courtroom drama, and personality study.
William R. Corliss, Science Frontiers: Some Anomalies and Curiosities of Nature (2 vols., 1994 and 2004). An annotated bibliography of thousands of eyebrow-raising articles in the scientific literature. Astonishment on every page.
Ed Cray, Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie (2004). Honest about the man's countless flaws, but awe-inspiring nonetheless.

Marcellus Shale gas overestimated by 80 percent

2011-08-27T18:46:00.005-04:00

The U.S. Energy Information Administration says it will cut its estimate of the total natural gas in the Marcellus Shale by 80 percent to match the U.S. Geological Survey estimate, according to The New York Times. "They’re geologists; we’re not," an EIA analyst said, rather sheepishly.

To be sure, 84 million cubic feet is still a lot of natural gas, but that USGS estimate itself is generous, because it counts all the gas that's "technically recoverable," meaning using every iota of extraction technology available on the planet. How much of that would be economically feasible, even amid boom natural-gas prices, is another story.

That supposedly scientific estimates of Eastern gas reserves seem to vary so wildly, depending on who's making the estimate and what's being counted and what time of day it is and whether you hold your mouth just right, is deeply troubling. I agree with Bill Powers, publisher of Powers Energy Investor:

If the country is going to embrace natural gas as the fuel of the future, there needs to be a lot more transparency in how these estimates are calculated and a more skeptical and informed discussion about the economics of shale gas.

(Thanks to Dale Sams for passing this along.)

Can a bar of soap in the bed prevent leg cramps?

2011-08-27T18:25:00.003-04:00

I've heard for years, especially from Sydney's family, that a bar of soap in the bed prevents nocturnal leg cramps. Having never suffered that malady, I've never had occasion to try it. Now Snopes.com labels the folk belief "undetermined," on the assumption that no one has proven or disproven it.

I'm inclined, like Snopes, to attribute any benefit to the ever-reliable placebo effect, but I'd still like to know whether any scientists have tested this belief.

A Father's Day remembrance on the Outer Banks

2011-06-19T16:05:00.001-04:00

While running errands today, I saw two women and two boys planting a cross beside the U.S. 158 bypass in Kill Devil Hills, N.C.

I stopped to talk and learned the cross marks the site where Victor Wilson of Kill Devil Hills was fatally injured on his motorcycle in May 2010. The boys are Wilson's sons, who were 13 and 6 when he died. Planting the cross was the family's Father's Day observance.

Here's the original Virginian-Pilot account of Wilson's death, which credits police as saying that a pickup-truck driver leaving the Outer Banks Brewing Station across the highway pulled in front of Wilson's Harley about 7:30 p.m. on May 21, 2010. "Charges are pending," says the story, but I find no follow-up online.

Here's the online obituary, courtesy of Twiford's Funeral Home in Elizabeth City, N.C.

The new cross is in the corner of the Captain George's lot on U.S. 158, a.k.a. South Croatan Highway, at the Goddard Avenue intersection. We drive by dozens of such markers every day; every one is a story.

Procrastination wins again

2011-06-02T15:03:00.000-04:00

In our absence this week, the bell post in our front yard finally fell down of its own accord, sparing us a chore we'd been putting off for five years. The timing is good, as Big Trash Day is next week.

This summer's Write-a-Thon(s)

2010-06-20T21:10:00.000-04:00

I haven't tried this before, but since I am working on several writing projects this summer, I have declared solidarity with the Clarion West and Clarion UCSD students, and joined the Write-a-Thon fund-raisers for both workshops. Writers and readers, please help me spread the word, and consider joining and/or pledging. Here's my Clarion West Write-a-Thon page, and here's my Clarion UCSD page.

A fine alternate-history illustration

2010-06-09T17:21:00.003-04:00

This fine Richard Hess cover for The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes (Oxford UP, 1985) is a work of alternate history, unlike the book it was commissioned to wrap around.

I wonder whether Hess read Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series -- though in Farmer's novels, all the world's most famous military leaders didn't wake up on the same patch of riverbank, fortunately. Moreover, most of Hess' characters are clearly older than 25.

ICFA-31: Sydney

2010-03-29T00:02:00.002-04:00

This photo of Sydney Duncan fits none of my other groupings, but I like it, and she's my wife, and she did a great job as author wrangler this year, so she gets a posting all to herself. John Kessel took this photo at the (excellent) Thursday-morning Kathy Goonan / Kij Johnson / Tom De Haven reading.

ICFA-31: The wrap party

2010-03-28T23:26:00.022-04:00

Below: The Dell Award finalists barely could contain themselves. Anthony Powers, Lara Donnelly, Rebecca McNulty, Rachel Sobel, Rachel Halpern (almost visible) and Miah Saunders.Below: Rebecca McNulty, Anthony Powers (almost visible), Rachel Sobel, Rachel Halpern, Lara Donnelly and Miah Saunders.Below: Rebecca McNulty, Rachel Halpern, Miah Saunders and Lara Donnelly.Below: Lara Donnelly and her dad, Richard Donnelly, who's so proud of her he will overlook the hat.Below: Pepe Rojo and Sydney Duncan.Below: Chrissie Mains.Below: Elizabeth Hoiem.Below: P. Andrew Miller.Below: Bill Senior.Below: Elizabeth McManus, winner of this year's Graduate Student Award for her Friday-afternoon paper "Protecting the Island: Interior and Exterior Space in Lost."Below: Jedediah Berry, winner of this year's Crawford Award for best first book of fantasy for his novel The Manual of Detection.Below: Jim Casey, new president of the IAFA, with the unclaimed power cord he cherished for much of the evening. Jim and I were classmates at the University of Alabama, where we had such hopes.Below: Joe Berlant and Mark Wingenfeld, dazed by their release from the book room.Below: Amelia Beamer and Rick Wilber.Below: Ellen Klages, Amelia Beamer and Charles Vess.Below: F. Brett Cox and Francesca Myman.Below: Two views of Liza Trombi and James Patrick Kelly.Below: Veronica Schanoes, Jeana Jorgensen and Marie Brennan.Below: Ellen Klages fails to frighten Russell Letson.Below: Amelia Beamer successfully frightens Peter Straub and Gary K. Wolfe.

ICFA-31: Ambushing people in the lobby

2010-03-28T23:11:00.010-04:00

Below: Gary K. Wolfe, Joe Haldeman and Peter Straub.Below: Rachel Sobel, Rebecca McNulty and Joe Haldeman.Below: Steven Erikson and Aidan-Paul Canavan.Below: Stephen R. Donaldson and Jennifer Cox.Below: Nora Jemisin and Karen Burnham.Below: Liza Trombi and Amelia Beamer.Below: Liza Trombi, Amelia Beamer and Francesca Myman.Below: Jeanne Beckwith and F. Brett Cox.Below: Graham Sleight.Below: Peter Straub.Below: Rusty Hevelin.Below: Rusty Hevelin and Gary K. Wolfe.Below: Tom and Santa De Haven, Rachel Sobel and Rebecca McNulty.

ICFA-31: Saturday banquet

2010-03-28T20:42:00.012-04:00

Below: Kij Johnson and John Kessel.Below: Jen Gunnels and Ellen Klages.Below: Three photos of Sydney Duncan, Liza Trombi and Karen Burnham. Their conversation eventually focused, as you can see, on Karen's amazing tattoo, a 14-hour job I should have gotten a photo of.Below: Sydney Duncan, Karen Burnham, Liza Trombi and Amelia Beamer.Below: Daphne Grace and Kij Johnson.Below: James Patrick Kelly and Ted Chiang.Below: F. Brett Cox and Jeanne Beckwith.Below: Jen Gunnels and the ever subtle Stefan Hall.Below: David G. Hartwell and Amy Branam.Below: Andy Duncan (photo by John Kessel).

ICFA-31: A Friday outing

2010-03-28T20:12:00.012-04:00

Several of us, conference-crazed, took advantage of the nice weather by fleeing the hotel Friday afternoon for the Nature Conservancy's Disney Wilderness Preserve, just south of nearby Kissimmee.

Below: What are Ellen Klages, Charles Vess and Karen Vess looking at?Below: Oh, it's a family of sandhill cranes.Below: Karen Vess and Ellen Klages on the boardwalk.Below: Two views from the boardwalk.Below: Ellen Klages meets a turtle.Below: The turtle demands a close-up. Moments later, it got tired of us and crawled off the road and safely back into the brush.I wish I had taken some photos of East Lake Fish Camp, a bit of Old Florida where we relaxed and ate exactly the lunch we wanted (catfish and beer, in my case). I did, however, take a photo to prove exactly why straying off the "main roads" in the Orlando area can be so bewildering, at the intersection of Boggy Creek Road and Boggy Creek Road:(Yes, we all immediate thought of the 1972 drive-in classic The Legend of Boggy Creek -- it was that sort of crowd -- but I believe that was set in Arkansas, not Florida.)

ICFA-31 photos: The Saturday lunch bunch

2010-03-28T19:54:00.007-04:00

A bunch of us walked to the Eastern Pearl, just off South Semoran Boulevard (Highway 436) north of Orlando International Airport. It was quite good.

Below: Timothy Anderson, Jen Gunnells, Veronica Schanoes, Farah Mendlesohn and Suzy McKee Charnas.Below: Sydney Duncan, Graham Sleight, Gary K. Wolfe and Peter Straub.Below: Amelia Beamer, Jeanne Beckwith, Liza Trombi and F. Brett Cox.Below: Amelia Beamer, Jeanne Beckwith and Liza Trombi.Below: Gary K. Wolfe and Peter Straub.Below: Peter Straub, Amelia Beamer, Jeanne Beckwith, Liza Trombi and F. Brett Cox.

ICFA-31 photos: Saturday poolside

2010-03-28T19:39:00.012-04:00

Below: Amelia Beamer and Ellen Klages in the swim.Below: Bill Senior, Liza Trombi and Amelia Beamer wait for the group shot.Below: Austin Sirkin, Jeana Jorgensen and Anthony Powers.Below: Bernardo Fernandez (a.k.a. Bef), Charles Vess and Pepe Rojo.Below: Dennis Danvers.Below: Jeanne Beckwith and F. Brett Cox.Below: Nora Jemisin.Below: Patricia McKillip and David Lunde.

Random photos from years ago

2010-01-14T17:25:00.010-05:00

I just rescued from storage a couple of bins of old photographs, and these are among the first ones I saw in the cache.This is me at night in the living room of our house in Northport, Ala., in my natural nocturnal state, sitting and reading.This is Sydney, caught in the act of photographing the master bathroom of our Northport house. We were so proud of the first house we bought together that Sydney documented every room, once it was furnished. We moved in on Memorial Day weekend 2001.I'll spare you most of the room-by-room photos, but this one is worth mentioning because it documents that wondrous thing, an attached two-car garage. By the time we put our heads together to make a list of all the features we wanted in a house, the must-haves and the nice-to-haves, Sydney and I were such veteran apartment dwellers that an attached two-car garage didn't even make the list. When the Northport house turned out to have one, we both said, "Oh, OK, very nice," and thought no more about it. Then came the first trip home in the rain with groceries. "This is incredible!" we told each other, dancing with joy. No more splashing on foot through parking lots and scrambling up outside stairs in all weathers, just to get indoors after parking! You better believe an attached two-car garage was at the top of our list when we moved in 2006 to the appropriately named Frostburg, Md. I might add that we're unusual in our neighborhood in that we actually use our garage as a garage, and not as a storage unit, a workshop or a TV room.This photo shows one of our finest Kentuck Festival acquisitions hanging in our Northport living room. Doug Odom created this life-sized alligator from the pieces of a demolished barn. The flapping tail is made of rusty tin and is wicked sharp; you have to hang the piece high enough so the unwary don't cut themselves on it. Alas, we have no room to display it in our Frostburg house, so it's still in storage, still wrapped in the amazing homemade cardboard sheathe that Sydney constructed for shipping in 2006. How long is it? Exactly the length of the interior of a Subaru Outback; that's how we (barely) got it home. As we walked through the Kentuck crowd with this thing, the crowds parted in silent respect. "Oh," one woman said, "you're the ones who bought it!" We're thinking of lending it to some gallery or other exhibit space here in Allegany County, which could use more alligators.

I make a year's-best list -- twice!

2010-01-06T15:48:00.005-05:00

Both my 2009 stories -- my PS Publishing novelette The Night Cache and my Dragon Book novelette "The Dragaman's Bride" -- are on the 2009 Recommended Reading List at the group blog Not If You Were the Last Short Story on Earth. Also making the list are stories by Peter S. Beagle, Ted Chiang, Karen Joy Fowler, Nancy Kress, Margo Lanagan, Kelly Link ... too many to name, but great company, certainly.

Rich Horton, meanwhile, reports that "The Dragaman's Bride" is one of "the three stories that I most wished to include and couldn't fit" into The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2010.

Thanks, all!

An early review of The Night Cache

2010-01-06T15:41:00.002-05:00

Jonathan Strahan writes:

I love it. ... Duncan has taken a ghost story about geocaching and codebreaking and made it his own just by telling it in his own unique voice. ... Suffice to say that it's perfect for a cold Winter's night. It's certainly a story that will stay with me for a good long while.

Read the whole review here, at the fine group blog Not If You Were the Last Short Story on Earth. Thanks, Jonathan!

The Night Cache is on sale

2010-01-06T15:15:00.003-05:00

My new supernatural novelette, The Night Cache, is now available for online order at the PS Publishing site, in both signed and unsigned hardcover editions. Here's a taste of Ben Baldwin's fine cover art. A larger version is here, at Baldwin's site.I'm delighted to appear in a catalog alongside Ray Bradbury, Basil Copper, Joe Hill, Stephen King, Zoran Zivkovic, my friends Scott Edelman and Paul Di Filippo, etc.

Ellen Datlow's photos from the KGB reading

2009-12-23T15:46:00.003-05:00

At this link are co-host Ellen Datlow's photos from the Dec. 16 reading at the KGB Bar in Greenwich Village. Christopher Rowe and I had a great turnout, a great audience and a great time. Thanks to everyone for the support.

Talking up Launch Pad

2009-12-23T15:27:00.002-05:00

The NASA-funded Launch Pad astronomy workshop for writers and other creative folks was the topic of a recent episode of Stacey Cochran's Book Chatter podcast. It included a gaggle of call-in guests who attended the 2009 workshop, including Tara Fredette, Brian Malow, Phil Plait and Gord Sellar. Launch Pad founder Mike Brotherton called in, too. You can listen to the episode here.

Decoding Dan Brown's cover

2009-12-22T22:08:00.003-05:00

Armchair codebreakers will enjoy Greg Taylor's analysis of the cover of Dan Brown's novel The Lost Symbol, even if they haven't read the book.

(Thanks to Stephen Wagner of About.com: Paranormal Phenomena for the tip.)

The Pomeranian that fell from the sky

2009-12-22T21:52:00.003-05:00

A Pomeranian named Sadie survived a 2-mile flight over Davenport, Iowa, in the talons of a great horned owl, reports Bill Wundram in the Quad-City Times.

(In this otherwise well-written column, the reference in the first sentence to "incredulous tales" made me wince. The tales are incredible; the tales' audiences are incredulous.

(Thanks to Stephen Wagner of About.com: Paranormal Phenomena for the tip.)

Cats that stare at "nothing"

2009-12-22T21:34:00.006-05:00

In his Dec. 16 column, Gary Bogue, who writes about pets and wildlife for the Bay Area's Contra Costa Times, seeks to calm pet owners whose cats seemingly stare at "nothing":

Once I caught my dear departed Abyssinian cat, Tut, staring at "nothing" in a corner. I examined the area carefully and found a spider crawling on the wall. Another time he stared at an empty spot on the wall as if something was there. There was. Looking closer, I saw a fly on the wall at that spot.

Predatory cats are stimulated by movement. Tut may not actually have seen the fly or the spider, but his eye/brain picked up a minuscule movement that caused him to stare at the spot waiting to see if more movement/data would allow him to focus on something.

Bogue's good sense is refreshing, compared to the credulity of some pet experts.

(Thanks to Stephen Wagner of About.com: Paranormal Phenomena for the tip.)

I'm reading tonight at the KGB Bar

2009-12-16T09:04:00.002-05:00

Any of y'all in New York City tonight are welcome to join us at the KGB Bar, where the readers are Christopher Rowe and I. We'll have fun. Here's the link.

"The Dragaman's Bride" is news

2009-11-26T09:21:00.003-05:00

The Appalachian Independent has published this article about my new story "The Dragaman's Bride," which reporter Jenna Tenaglio calls "wonderfully crafted." Thanks, Jenna!

Let's all scare the tourists

2009-10-27T21:47:00.013-04:00

The Haunted Arkansas site set up by the state Department of Parks & Tourism is a fine example of the Chamber of Commerce types nationwide embracing once-shunned local legends of ghosts and monsters -- because people like me will pay good money to see those places, even if no ghosts or monsters actually turn up.

One term for this growth industry, "ectotourism," has been around for years, judging from this 1997 article in San Francisco's Examiner, but I don't much like the word. It looks like a typo for "ecotourism." We can do better.

That not every Chamber of Commerce is thrilled with this stuff is evident in a snarky comment on the "Official Site of the Villisca Axe Murders" -- which happend in Villisca, Iowa, in 1912, as you connoisseurs of unsolved axe murders doubtless recall. Click on "The Town," and you find that the owners of the "Murder House," who are flogging it for all it's worth, have encountered some local resistance:

Ten years ago, visitors inquiring about the axe murders were met with cold stares and turned heads. Today, however, these same residents seem to be on the verge of accepting the one thing that they cannot change. If Villisca is to recover and continue to grow, they must accept and eventually embrace their history.

The Villisca Historical Society has been a [sic] somewhat of a "ghost" in Villisca for some time now. Although the Society officially existed, its accomplishments were few and any interest displayed by outsiders rebuffed. The recent announcement that the Society has finally received it's [sic] 501(c)3 designation is a spark of hope for those of us who are sincerely interested in seeing the history of the town documented and preserved rather than swept under a rug.

Maybe Villisca should launch an axe-murder festival, as in David Prill's novel Serial Killer Days. Hey, equally sketchy events have turned into family-friendly annual celebrations: Point Pleasant, W.Va., has a Mothman Festival, and Fyffe, Ala., has a cattle-mutilation festival (though it's actually called UFO Days, for obvious reasons). And need I mention the venerable example of Salem, Mass.?

Our correspondent in Shanghai

2009-10-27T21:26:00.002-04:00

Sydney's cousin Megan Wilkes, formerly of Harrisonburg, Va., moved to Shanghai this fall and is reporting on her adventures in a fine blog, with many photos, titled Anything Goes In China ... Almost. One thing that doesn't go, Megan reports in her first post, is any mention of the "3 T's." I quickly guessed what those were, and I bet you can, too.

"Never underestimate the power of a good story"

2009-10-27T21:13:00.002-04:00

Greg Frost alerted me to this fine commercial, via YouTube, for the French pay channel Canal+, a.k.a. "Canal Plus."

National Solar Tour 2009

2009-10-02T17:01:00.002-04:00

From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. tomorrow -- Saturday, Oct. 3 -- our house will be part of the American Solar Energy Society's 14th annual National Solar Tour, coordinated locally by Big D Electric in Cumberland, Md. Details, including the specs of our system, are here. Y'all come!

Cat Rambo's new book

2009-09-26T19:10:00.002-04:00

This week the mailman brought a hardcover copy of Cat Rambo's new collection Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight (Paper Golem, $26 hardcover, $14 trade paper). On the front cover is a marvelous Carrie Ann Baade artwork; on the back cover are blurbs by other writers, including this one from me: "I am inspired, these days, by Cat Rambo, and after reading these stories, you will be, too."In between the covers is a fine collection, and I commend the book, the author and the publisher to your attention.

Is this the first time I've been quoted in a cover blurb? Maybe so. The other blurbers, in order, are Laird Barron, Rachel Swirsky, L. Timmel Duchamp, Vonda N. McIntyre and Sarah A. Hoyt, so you needn't take only my word for it the book's good.

A few family-reunion photos, Part 3

2009-09-26T18:40:00.005-04:00

Above: I was determined to take a photo of the fire to prove we had one, thanks to the firewood Sydney and I bought at Grant's because we got tired of everyone asking why there was no fire.Above: Sam and Laurie Steele. Sam's on the junior-varsity football team, and Mom is proud.Above: Phillip Steele. How can a three-term commonwealth's attorney look so relaxed? Granted, he's had no opposition the past two elections, which helps.Above: Fran Bowling shows off her latest four-leaf clover. She has a talent for finding them, and her daughter, Sydney, inherited the gift. When I was a child, my parents told me there were no four-leaf clovers, so I'd feel better about never finding any.

A few family-reunion photos, Part 2

2009-09-26T18:24:00.009-04:00

Above: Either Charlotte Sartin can't believe what Sheila Steele is telling her, or she's waiting for Sheila to toss corn chips into her mouth. Note in the background that the leaves only barely have started to turn.Above: Buford Steele and Sydney Duncan. We told "Uncle Bu" the stop sign looked good on him.Above: Buford Steele takes a seat. For many years Buford was a rural letter carrier and was active in the National Rural Letter Carriers' Association, just as my father was.Above: Fran Bowling, Sydney Duncan, Charlotte Sartin and Sheila Steele, in mutual astonishment.Above: Tim Steele and Bill Bowling. Since the reunion, Bill has had aneurysm surgery and is doing well, I'm pleased to report.Above: Sydney Duncan tries to show Bill Bowling something, I hope with more success than when she tries to show me something.

A few family-reunion photos, Part 1

2009-09-26T18:08:00.010-04:00

These were taken at the Stafford family reunion in Rich Creek, Va., Sept. 20. Sydney's maternal grandfather was a Stafford.Above: Fran Bowling, Sydney Duncan and Charlotte Sartin set up the snack table. Fran's cheese slaw and Charlotte's miniature Crock-Pot hot dogs are as popular as ever.Above: Sydney Duncan forges my signature, which is printed because no one could read a forgery of my handwriting.Above: Fran Bowling makes the memory board every year, to remember family members who have died since the previous reunion, and sets it above the fireplace. Everyone wishes this year's board had fewer names.Above: Fran Bowling prepares the ice chest while Charlotte Sartin tries to track someone down.Above: Pat Sartin. Once a Marine, always a Marine.Above: Tim Steele is happy to be here.

A midair hornet's nest

2009-09-26T17:58:00.003-04:00

I obviously don't have a zoom lens, but I wanted to record this hornet's nest built on a wire over Highway 311, Thompson Memorial Drive, between Roanoke and Salem, Va. The photo was taken Sept. 20.

My latest letter to the editor

2009-08-20T15:00:00.004-04:00

The Cumberland Times-News published it online, but not in print, July 15. Here's the link.

Why am I just now thinking of it? Because I just sent in another letter, of course.

(For the record, here's the letter that I was responding to.)

Publishing news: a collection, a novelette and a second edition

2009-07-25T17:31:00.006-04:00

Thanks, everyone, for the supportive responses to my previous blog entry. In particular, Jeff Ford writes, "So when's the next collection coming out? That's a great line-up of stories," and Trent Hergenrader writes, "Sure would be nice to have a bunch of those stories bound up in another collection ... any plans for such a thing?"

Funny you should ask, Jeff and Trent! Nick Gevers has given me the go-ahead to announce that PS Publishing plans to release my second collection, titled The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, in 2011. Tentative contents include "The Dragaman's Bride," "Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse," "A Diorama of the Infernal Regions; or, The Devil's Ninth Question," "Zora and the Zombie," "Daddy Mention and the Monday Skull," "Provenance," "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," "Senator Bilbo," "The Chief Designer" and the title story, plus a couple of new stories, plus extensive author notes on each story -- tucked away in the back, for easy avoidance by those who prefer not to pull aside the curtain.

In the meantine, PS also will be publishing my new novelette, The Night Cache, as a standalone volume this winter, the 2009 Christmas gift to Postscripts subscribers -- though non-subscribers can buy copies as well. The Night Cache is squarely in that fine Christmas tradition of the supernatural lesbian geocacher codebreaker romance, though the rumors that it's also a Poe pastiche are not (quite) true. Inspired by Poe, yes, but not a pastiche.

Finally, the second edition of my 2005 non-fiction book Alabama Curiosities, which made me world-famous in Alabama, is newly published by Globe Pequot Press. It includes lots of material not in the first edition.

Since "The Dragaman's Bride" is being published this fall in the Ace anthology The Dragon Book, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, I'm looking sort of prolific in 2009. Thanks to all my friends and readers for the encouragement.

My stories thus far

2009-07-16T10:24:00.003-04:00

At the Launch Pad workshop this week, both N.K. Jemisin and J.V. Jones asked me where they could find my stories. As this question comes up periodically, I'm posting here a list of every Andy Duncan story thus far, including reprints, with notes of major award attention and links to a few stories online. Note, too, that my 11 earliest solo stories (everything in the list from "Lincoln in Frogmore" downward, except for the collaborative "Green Fire") are still available in my collection Beluthahatchie and Other Stories (Golden Gryphon, 2000). If any bibliographers out there can think of any stories or reprints I missed, please let me know. Thanks again to all the editors, publishers, teachers and readers who made these happen.

“The Dragaman’s Bride.” Upcoming in The Dragon Book, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (Ace, November 2009).

“Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse.” Eclipse One, edited by Jonathan Strahan (Night Shade Books, 2007). Nebula and Shirley Jackson Award nominee. Reprinted in Nebula Awards Showcase 2009, edited by Ellen Datlow (Roc, 2009). It's online at the Night Shade site.

“A Diorama of the Infernal Regions; or, The Devil’s Ninth Question.” Wizards, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (Berkley, 2007). Reprinted in Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition, edited by Rich Horton (Cosmos, 2008).

“Zora and the Zombie.” Sci Fiction, February 2004. Nebula and Stoker Award nominee. Reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Eighteenth Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant (St. Martin’s, 2005). Reprinted in Nebula Awards Showcase 2006, edited by Gardner Dozois (Roc, 2006). Reprinted in The Living Dead, edited by John Joseph Adams (Night Shade Books, 2008).

“The Haw River Trolley.” The Silver Gryphon, edited by Gary Turner and Marty Halpern (Golden Gryphon Press, 2003).

“Daddy Mention and the Monday Skull.” Mojo: Conjure Stories, edited by Nalo Hopkinson (Warner Aspect, 2003).

“Provenance.” Cemetery Dance #40, 2002.

“The Holy Bright Number.” Polyphony 1, edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake (Wheatland Press, 2002).

“The Big Rock Candy Mountain.” Conjunctions 39, 2002.

“Senator Bilbo.” Starlight 3, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Tor, 2001). Reprinted in Year’s Best Fantasy 2, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer (Eos, 2002). Reprinted in Seekers of Dreams: Masterpieces of Fantasy, edited by Douglas Anderson (Cold Spring Press, 2005). Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy, edited by Mike Ashley (Robinson/Running Press 2008).

“The Chief Designer.” Asimov’s, June 2001. Sturgeon Award winner. Hugo and Nebula Award nominee. Reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois (St. Martin’s, 2002). It's online at the Asimov’s site.

“The Pottawatomie Giant.” Sci Fiction, November 2000. World Fantasy Award winner. Nebula Award nominee. Reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Fourteenth Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (St. Martin’s, 2001).

“Lincoln in Frogmore.” Beluthahatchie and Other Stories (Golden Gryphon, 2000). World Fantasy Award nominee. Reprinted in Asimov’s, October/November 2001.

“Fenneman’s Mouth.” Beluthahatchie and Other Stories (Golden Gryphon, 2000).

“Grand Guignol.” Weird Tales, Winter 1999.

“From Alfano’s Reliquary.” Weird Tales, Fall 1999.

“The Executioners’ Guild.” Nebula and International Horror Guild Award nominee. Asimov’s, August 1999.

“Fortitude.” Realms of Fantasy, June 1999. Nebula Award nominee. Reprinted online at Infinity Plus, October 2000.

“Green Fire” (with Eileen Gunn, Pat Murphy and Michael Swanwick). Event Horizon, January 1999. Reprinted in Asimov’s, April 2000. Reprinted in Stable Strategies and Others by Eileen Gunn (Tachyon Publications, 2004).

“The Premature Burials.” Gothic.Net, September 1998. Reprinted in Realms of Fantasy, April 2001.

“Saved.” Dying for It, edited by Gardner Dozois (HarperPrism, 1997).

“The Map to the Homes of the Stars.” Dying for It, edited by Gardner Dozois (HarperPrism, 1997). Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Nine, edited by Stephen Jones (Robinson 1998). Reprinted in Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, edited by F. Brett Cox and Andy Duncan (Tor, 2004).

“Beluthahatchie.” Asimov’s, March 1997. Hugo Award nominee. Reprinted in Isaac Asimov’s Halloween, edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams (Ace, 2001).

“Liza and the Crazy Water Man.” Starlight 1, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Tor, 1996). Reprinted in New Magics, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Tor, 2004).

Charles N. Brown, 1937-2009

2009-07-13T14:46:00.006-04:00

Our friend Charles N. Brown, editor and publisher of Locus, has died at age 72, Locus Online reports.

Looking through my digital photos of the past few years, I could turn up only this photo of Charles, snapped as he was threatening to bash me with his walking stick if I didn't put the camera down. I guess that's one reason I don't have more photos of him.When Sydney was attending a conference at Stanford a few years ago, and I was tagging along, Charles kindly invited us to dinner at his house, a.k.a. the Locus office, and we had a most enjoyable time with Charles, the Locus staff and the other guests. Charles loved entertaining and was entertaining, and he made sure all his guests were entertained, or else!

A mutual friend who knew Charles much better than I did, and for a lot longer, told me once that he always believed Charles had constructed a life in emulation of Jubal Harshaw in Robert A. Heinlein's novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and nothing I saw at Charles' house that night contradicted that impression.

One of my favorite memories of Charles is from that evening, as he roared in laughter when his extraordinary collection of autographed first-edition books eventually reduced me to a sputtered stream of obscenities, just as he had intended.

I also remember my Locus interview. I followed Charles to his hotel room -- where proofs of the next issue were strewn about every flat surface -- and watched him switch on a hand-held recorder.

"Now what?" I asked.

"Now you talk," he said. So I talked, while he leaned back in his chair, fingers intertwined across his belly, and watched me -- at least, I assume he was watching me; with Charles' cocked eyes, it was hard to tell, sometimes. Two or three times during the hour, he interjected an observation, such as: "So you don't believe in the Singularity, then." He took no notes. Eventually he nodded his head and turned off the recorder.

"That's it?" I asked.

"That's it," he replied.

"Well," I said, "good luck getting a coherent article out of that."

"Oh, you're easy," Charles said, "like Bruce Sterling. Talkers are easy. Let's go downstairs and get a drink."

Charles accurately thought Sydney was gorgeous, and instead of "Hello, Andy," his standard greeting was usually "Is Sydney here?" If my answer was, "No," he'd make a dismissive sound with his mouth and turn his back on me. So instead of saying, "Hello, Charles," I took to greeting him with, "She's upstairs!" or "She's in the dealer's room!" Whereupon he'd smile broadly and be very friendly indeed.

When he did talk to me, he usually needled me about not writing more. When he found out I had started a blog, he cried out in dismay. "That's not writing!" he said. "Now you'll get even less accomplished."

I saw my first copies of Locus in the dormitory living room at Clarion West in 1994, and once I got home to Raleigh, N.C., I bought the subscription that I've kept up ever since. When the first issue arrived -- its cover story, I think, an obit of Robert Bloch -- I thought, "OK! I'm a member of this community now!" That's still what I think, every month when Locus arrives. I hope it keeps arriving for many years to come. Soon the cover story, I suppose, will be an obit of Charles N. Brown himself. I'll miss him.

"None of us is home ..."

2009-06-28T23:00:00.002-04:00

"None of us is home until all of us are home."

-- Sister Mary Scullion of Project HOME in Philadelphia, quoted in Parade

A flood myth?

2009-06-28T21:48:00.002-04:00

Cumberland Times-News columnist Maude McDaniel recently passed along an anecdote that she acknowledges sounds a lot like an urban legend:

My all-time favorite flood story, which is said to have actually happened although it sounds too good to be true, is about the man who had an old piano he had been trying to get rid of for months. No one wanted it -- it was just a piece of junk -- and when the Flood came along, he saw it as a wonderful opportunity for free trash removal. So he hauled it out onto the front porch and congratulated himself on his cleverness. After the water went down, he went back home, and, lo and behold, there was the piano, still on the front porch. And out on the back porch -- was another piano!

Has anyone heard variations of this, or tracked down an actual documented account of such a thing?

A Cheat Lake mystery

2009-06-28T16:23:00.005-04:00

Maryland novelist Gary Clites, a West Virginia University alumnus, tells an interesting story about the inspiration for his new thriller Seneca Wood:

When I was in college, my friends and I spent a lot of time at Cheat Lake, just a few miles outside of town. There was an old disused road there that ran to an old abandoned bridge to an island where a bunch of bikers used to party. One day, the school scuba team went diving in the area and found a dead body. I don't remember what the situation was, whether it was a suicide, an accident, or what, but while the police were investigating, they found a stolen car in the water near the bridge -- then another car. Then they found a bunch of illegal slot machines and other things.

Judging from the rest of the press release, Clites must have been a student in Morgantown, W.Va., circa 1978-82. Anyone else recall the WVU scuba team finding a body in Cheat Lake during that time? I'd be keen to know more about it, if so.

So that's what June was

2009-06-28T16:07:00.003-04:00

Did you know that President Obama commemorated the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots by declaring June 2009 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month? That didn't make the news, here in GOP Maryland.

Added later: Meanwhile, Manifested Glory Ministries in Bridgeport, Conn., celebrated Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month by posting to YouTube a video of church members attempting to exorcise a 16-year-old boy's "homosexual demon."

"To Lift a Nation" -- and the bottom line

2009-06-27T22:28:00.011-04:00

"To Lift a Nation," the Sept. 11 monument at the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation in Emmittsburg, Md., was financed by an illegal Ponzi scheme, says the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Now it's for sale. The asking price of $425,000 will go to creditors of the failed Coadum Advisors Inc., which allegedly commissioned the monument in hopes of a big tax writeoff, The Associated Press reports.

I wonder how many monuments and other landmarks that we take at face value today were commissioned for less than honorable reasons or beneath a cloud of financial wrongdoing. If you can think of examples, please let me know.

Sculptor Stanley J. Watts -- who himself had nothing to do with Coadum's finagling -- has an interesting page about "To Lift a Nation," with photos that show just how big it is.

The 40-foot bronze figures are based on George Johnson, Dan McWilliams and Billy Eisengrein, the three flag-raising firefighters in the famous photo by Thomas E. Franklin of The Record in Hackensack, N.J., snapped amid the ruins of the World Trade Center in the late afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. (Since that day, incidentally, the famous flag has gone missing.) The photo has been reproduced ad infinitum, even on a U.S. postage stamp. Web pages devoted to the photo and its story include this one, at Victoria Mielke's interesting 9/11: Pop Culture & Remembrance site; the Wikipedia entry; and this one, where The Record will sell you a reproduction of the photo for $23.80, not to mention embroidered shirts, leather jackets, laser-engraved ceramic tiles, etc. (Proceeds go to charity.)

Ricky Flores of The Journal News in Westchester, N.Y., took his own photo of the flag-raising, from a different angle. Though equally excellent, Flores' photo is much less well known, partially because it emphasizes neither the men nor the flag but the surreal, spooky landscape of devastation all around.

My people, my people

2009-06-27T22:15:00.002-04:00

Here are two June 24 news stories from our corner of Appalachia. In Westernport, several of the passengers in the pickup when its brakes failed "were seated in the bed of the truck in lawn chairs." Meanwhile, the assault weapon in Frostburg, police say, was "a sock that contained rocks."

Savage Mountain 2009

2009-06-27T20:43:00.008-04:00

This past week I had the honor of working with young fiction writers at the Savage Mountain Creative Writing Workshop, held each summer at Frostburg State University under the direction of my colleague Gerry LaFemina. The week culminated in a group reading this morning at Main Street Books downtown, where I made all the students hold still long enough for this photo.Left to right: Patrick Camloh, Renee Phillips, Mike Smith, Neil Ralph, Katrina Bost, Katy Dale, Ruth LaCourse and A.J. Carney.

A three-dimensional Marge Simpson

2009-05-11T19:41:00.002-04:00

A costumed Betty Love, postmaster of Springfield, W.Va., is the subject of this strangely disturbing photo from today's Cumberland Times-News.

Nebula Awards Showcase 2009

2009-04-12T19:21:00.003-04:00

Saturday at Barnes & Noble in Roanoke, Va., I saw my first copies of Nebula Awards Showcase 2009, a Roc paperback edited by Ellen Datlow, which includes my Nebula-nominated Eclipse One story "Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse."

Ed Rollins on his irrelevant party

2009-03-14T22:52:00.003-04:00

From this recent CNN.com commentary by Republican strategist Ed Rollins, who was President Reagan's political director:

The battle to be the "de facto leader" of this party is akin to the question of who wants to steer the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. Who represents the party or its values is not relevant when only 26 percent of voters have a positive impression of the party ...

Republicans are not relevant. We just lost two back-to-back elections (2006 and 2008), and obviously, what we are selling, the voters aren't buying. In the midst of the most severe economic crisis in my lifetime, we have a president who is taking the country on a dramatic sea change. This is what he said he would do and he is doing it. And where are Republicans? ...

For the foreseeable future, the Republican Party is in the position of being the minority party. Until it nominates a candidate who can attract new voters and expand the base vote of the party, it will stay there.

The Lovecraftian school-board member of Arkham, Mass.

2009-03-14T22:44:00.003-04:00

For those who haven't seen it yet, here's the best Onion article in some time. Among my favorite passages:

"Fools!" said West, his clenched fist striking the lectern before him. "We must prepare today's youth for a world whose terrors are etched upon ancient clay tablets recounting the fever-dreams of the other gods -- not fill their heads with such trivia as math and English. ...

West has served on the school board since 1997, when he defeated 89-year-old incumbent Doris Pesce by promising to enforce dress codes and refer repeat disciplinary cases to the three-lobed burning eye. ...

"Charles sure likes to bang on that madness drum," fellow school board member Danielle Kolker said. "I'm not totally sold on his plan to let gibbering, half-formed creatures dripping with ichor feed off the flesh and fear of our students. But he is always on time to help set up for our spaghetti suppers, and his bake sale goods are among the most popular." ...

West's previous failed proposals include requiring the high school band to perform the tuneless flute songs of the blind idiot god Azathoth and offering art students instruction in the carving of morbid and obscene fetishes from otherworldly media.

The Periodic Table of Typefaces

2009-03-14T22:29:00.002-04:00

I admire this without reservation.

Sumer is icumen in

2009-03-14T22:20:00.003-04:00

She's not in one of my classes, but I had to brag: Frostburg State University track star Sumer Rohrs just won her third consecutive national championship in the 55-meter high hurdles, setting a national record in the process: 7.97 seconds. Here's the story, with a photo of the champ.

Creating Indiana Jones: the paper trail

2009-03-14T22:13:00.003-04:00

At his blog, anonymous Script Magazine contributor Mystery Man on Film has posted a link to a long-buried treasure for Indiana Jones fans: "the 125-page transcript (in the form of a .pdf document) of the original 1978 story conference between [director] Steven Spielberg, [producer] George Lucas, and [writer] Lawrence Kasdan for a little film called Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Anomalies in the news

2009-03-14T21:40:00.003-04:00

What caused the two separate booms that rattled Californians in early March? Not weather, an earthquake, a meteor or an aircraft, apparently. Dittto the two booms heard in New York state.

Meanwhile, astrophysicists at Columbia and Brown are photographing the moon every 10 seconds, hoping to solve the 400-year-old mystery of those occasional bright spots on the lunar surface that are not meteor impacts. "About 1,500 of these have been reported," Arlin Crotts tells National Geographic. His theory: pockets of gas exploding, which would mean some vestiges of geologic activity.

Also meanwhile, police say that falling metal object that punched through a Dallas roof was ... a drill bit from a nearby wood chipper (huh?) ... but that's all they're willing to say publicly, other than "case closed."

If Watchmen were a Saturday morning cartoon

2009-03-14T15:45:00.004-04:00

Barry Johnson passes along this truly sick and twisted creation, which nevertheless is utterly Safe For Work.

What's not in Columbia anymore

2009-03-13T22:41:00.003-04:00

Buddy Moore alerted me to Columbia Closings, one depressing if addictive blog for us natives of the South Carolina Midlands.

I married a senator

2009-03-13T21:55:00.002-04:00

Announced today: Sydney is one of 14 faculty members just elected to the Faculty Senate at Frostburg State University. Her term's up in 2011.

She's the only newly elected senator from the English department. Of the others, two are from history, two are from visual arts, and one each is from accounting, biology, economics, educational professions, foreign languages and literature, mass communication, political science, sociology and the library.

A quick quiz

2009-03-13T20:08:00.003-04:00

Judging from the faculty-search pages alone, which university would you guess has a College of Engineering?

Frostburg State University, or

North Carolina State University?

"The New Mother" by Lucy Clifford

2009-02-15T22:04:00.002-05:00

In this interview with The Toronto Star, Neil Gaiman says Coraline was partially inspired by "The New Mother" by Lucy Clifford (1882), which he calls "haunting like a nightmare is haunting." Indeed it is. Here's the text.

The Dragon Book cover

2009-02-15T17:43:00.003-05:00

Co-editor Gardner Dozois gave us contributors the OK to share John Jude Palencar's cover art for The Dragon Book, to be published in hardcover in November by Penguin Putnam. Here 'tis.Also included, among others, are Kage Baker, Peter S. Beagle, Bruce Coville, Diana Wynne Jones, Tanith Lee, Mary Rosenblum, Harry Turtledove, Liz Williams, Sean Williams, Tad Williams, Jane Yolen -- and me, with my new novelette, "The Dragaman's Bride." I'm tickled.

Corona and lime

2009-01-06T15:36:00.002-05:00

This article by Martin Lindstrom in the Jan. 4 issue of Parade includes some trivia about Corona and lime:

The Corona-and-lime ritual dates back only to 1981, when, reportedly on a bet with his buddy, a bartender popped a lime wedge into the neck of a Corona to see if he could start a trend.

This simple act, which caught on like wildfire, is generally credited with helping Corona overtake Heineken as the best-selling imported beer in the U.S. market.

Since the bartender and the buddy are unidentified, and Lindstrom uses the words "reportedly" and "generally credited," I wonder whether this bit of trivia is actually true. If you have any insights into this tasty question, please let me know.

Yes, I already queried the invaluable Snopes.com, as a search there for "Corona" turned up nothing.

"Women are writing science-fiction!"

2009-01-02T15:22:00.003-05:00

This is the back cover of Sign of the Labrys by Margaret St. Clair, a 1963 paperback original novel from Bantam. (I bought it in October from David Hartwell in the huckster room at Capclave in Rockvill, Md.)

Besides the gender issues, I'm interested that the hyphen in "science fiction" as a noun was still around as late as the Kennedy administration.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

2008-12-28T20:57:00.005-05:00

The most appropriate response to David Fincher's movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button may be the three-word first sentence of Keith Phipps' review at The Onion A.V. Club: "'Curious' is right." The picture starts out bizarre, then makes one strange, wrongheaded choice after another. It's always watchable, only fitfully involving, and ultimately mystifying.

On a technical level, the movie works: The makeup and digital-effects folks will have deserved their Oscar nominations. But Brad Pitt merely inhabits the makeup, adding nothing to a character that's an utterly passive cipher to begin with. Peter Sellers' Chance, in Being There, is a colorful go-getter by comparison. And figuring out what age Pitt is supposed to be from scene to scene is ultimately just annoying.

As Daisy, the love of Benjamin's life, Cate Blanchett tries harder and comes off better, but she, too, is hobbled first by the CGI equivalent of Botox (to make her look like a teenager) and later by increasing layers of latex. (That Daisy must suffer far more than Benjamin in the course of the movie is depressing but unsurprising, given that the screenplay is by Eric Roth, who also wrote the screenplay of Forrest Gump.) Blanchett's deathbed scene, to which we keep returning throughout the movie, is fully as interminable as Ralph Fiennes' in The English Patient, but saddles the star with far less expressive makeup. You'd never know, from the hospital sequences, that Blanchett is one of our most electrifying actresses; anyone could be under all that goop.

Speaking of age makeup: "Blink," a Hugo Award-winning 2007 episode of Doctor Who, requires a character named Billy Shipton to age decades from scene to scene. On the Third Series DVD set, the creative team explains the rationale for casting the veteran actor Louis Mahoney as the older Billy, rather than putting makeup on 20-year-old actor Michael Obiora, playing the younger Billy. Basically, the argument goes, age makeup -- however well-done -- is never convincing and always distracting. Such honesty in the service of storytelling is refreshing, but impossible for the makers of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Without the lure of a star turn beneath age makeup, would the picture ever have been made in the first place?

Makeup issues aside, the movie has too many other elements I just couldn't buy. I never believed that Benjamin and the black woman who adopted him (played by the talented Taraji P. Henson) had a cross-racial mother-son relationship. Queenie seemed more like Benjamin's devoted housekeeper. (Should I be ashamed that I kept thinking of Steve Martin and Mabel King in The Jerk, and thinking that their relationship was more convincing?) The movie's refusal to acknowledge the civil-rights era in any way also rings false, a big cop-out. I never believed that Daisy's daughter (a lovely but wasted Julia Ormond) would have been ignorant of Benjamin's very existence until her mother's deathbed reminiscence -- especially since we learn later that the young Caroline actually had met Benjamin, in a scene of Great Portent that any 12-year-old would have picked up on. I never believed that any of these people actually lived in New Orleans, the arbitrary setting for most of the movie. One suspects it was plunked there only so that Hurricane Katrina could come ashore at the end -- a plot element with only offscreen relevance, the ruined Ninth Ward being one of Pitt's favorite causes.

And worst of all, I never felt anything but creeped out when the outwardly elderly Benjamin and the 7-year-old Daisy (played by 10-year-old Elle Fanning) fell in love at first sight and immediately began sneaking off together for secret conversations and play dates. (Pedophiles will love those scenes.) Remember Father Guido Sarducci's old Saturday Night Live routine about the "Coming and Going Planet," where some people are getting older and others younger, and couples who meet romantically while aging in opposite directions are very soon "in big-a trouble"? I don't think the makers of Benjamin Button really believe it would be big-a trouble.

The most entertaining stuff in the movie has nothing to do with the Benjamin/Daisy plot:

The roaring, tattooed tugboat captain played by Jared Harris, son of the late Richard Harris.

The diplomat's wife who seduces Benjamin under the impression he's old enough to be her dad, when in fact she's his Mrs. Robinson. She's played by the reliably sensational Tilda Swinton, who makes any period costume look current.

The running gag about the old guy whose claim to fame is having survived seven lightning strikes, each depicted as a Keaton-style silent-movie flashback. (According to the Internet Movie Database, the actor who plays the lucky Mr. Daws, Ted Manson, died at 81 this past summer, before the movie was released.)

The period vignette at the beginning about the curious clock built by Monsieur Gateau (Elias Koteas), and his reasons for building it. This vignette includes a brief battlefeld shot that's the best thing in the movie.

Cutting all these sequences would have made the movie 40 minutes shorter without affecting the Benjamin-Daisy story -- at the cost, alas, of most of the movie's entertainment value.

Doubt

2008-12-27T18:37:00.003-05:00

Whatever else it is, John Patrick Shanley's movie of his Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play Doubt is an acting tour de force. On Broadway, the roles of the two nuns, the priest and the mother all earned their performers Tony Award nominations; Oscar nods should be distributed similarly.

Much has been written about the performances of Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Viola Davis, and deservedly so, but Amy Adams as the wide-eyed younger nun shouldn't be overlooked, either. She's terrific, and necessarily so, since in many ways Sister James is the pivotal character. In their high-stakes struggle against one another, Sister Aloysius and Father Brendan both work hard to sway Sister James' sympathies. Each succeeds, in part -- one more than the other -- but in the process, we get to watch Sister James, who is somewhat unformed at the outset, decide who she intends to be. The movie is dedicated to a Sister Margaret James, Shanley's kindergarten teacher, and the play -- corrosive as it is, at times -- must have been written in part as a tribute to her. Without an utterly convincing Sister James, the story wouldn't work nearly as well. Is there anyone alive who can portray innocence as believably as Amy Adams (witness Junebug and Enchanted)? She was robbed of an Oscar nomination for Enchanted; I hope she isn't robbed this time.

A scene in the middle of the movie, in which the two nuns and the priest are having an awkward tea and an even more awkward conversation, could be shown to acting students as a master class. Watch each performer, and you see reflected not only the character's inner life, but how the character is responding, moment to moment, to the other two characters. The dialogue sometimes reflects these responses, sometimes not, but the primary communication is through line delivery and facial expressions and body language. It's like the embodiment of the character matrix I draw on the chalkboard for my fiction-writing students (having stolen it from John Kessel): What does Sister Aloysius think of Father Brendan at this moment? What does she think of Sister James? What do Brendan and James think of Aloysius? What do Brendan and James think of each other? And so forth.

The movie is also interesting as a genre exercise. Only when it was over did I realize that among many other things, Doubt is an exceedingly well-disguised mystery play, with an artificially limited cast of characters and point of view, a set of clues to be gnawed over, a set of conflicts to erupt, a series of reversals to spring like traps on both characters and audience. It's Twelve Angry Men; it's Sleuth.

Whenever I watch a movie full of Catholic priests and nuns, I think about how visual and cinematic Catholicism is -- which is why Catholic themes outnumber Protestant ones 10 to 1, in movies that treat organized Christianity with any seriousness at all. While watching Doubt, I also found myself realizing that it would be a very different movie if I were Catholic -- devout or casual, current or former -- and if I ever had attended a Catholic school. Sister Aloysius had no parallel in my young life, at W. Wyman King Academy or St. John's United Methodist Church.

The Lord's sport utility vehicles

2008-12-17T23:14:00.004-05:00

Here's a Reuters report on Sunday's service at the Greater Grace Temple in Detroit (site of Rosa Parks' funeral), at which the Rev. Charles Ellis prayed that Congress save the U.S. auto industry. Check out the photo slide show.

Yes, those are three hybrid SUVs (Chevy Tahoe, Chrysler Aspen and Ford Escape) parked at the altar. Hundreds of auto workers gathered before them to be anointed with oil.

"We have done all we can do in this union," a United Auto Workers vice president told the congregation, "so I'm going to turn it over to the Lord."

Actually, since the oil embargo of 1973, the Lord's advice to the U.S. auto industry has been pretty consistent, and pretty consistently ignored: Build smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. What have they been waiting for, a burning bush?

I just realized why that altar crowded with SUVs unnerves me so: It reminds me of the ICBM on the altar of the ruined St. Patrick's Cathedral in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Is Bishop Ellis confusing scourge and savior?

(Thanks, I think, to Greg Frost, for disturbing my sleep with this.)

The world's first drive-in service station

2008-12-12T10:05:00.003-05:00

The Associated Press reminded us Monday that Dec. 1 was the anniversary of the opening of the world's first drive-in service station, in Pittsburgh. The Gulf Oil Historical Society has the admirably obsessive details here, with photos. Too bad there's nothing on the site now but a parking lot.

"Keep Wiseman," 1969

2008-12-12T09:11:00.002-05:00

I just learned that my colleague John Wiseman, emeritus professor of history at Frostburg State University, once was a cause celebre. In his latest Cumberland Times-News op-ed piece, he writes, "My teaching career began at Keene State College," but adds that his tenure there "was shortened by a protracted battle I experienced with the president of that school, one that I lost, along with my job."

He's not kidding. This article in the summer 2008 issue of the Keene State alumni magazine, a nostalgic look back at the campus in the 1960s, includes a photo of a crowd of students who "boycotted classes on behalf of faculty member John Wiseman." Beneath the headline "Convocation on the Wiseman Case, 1969," the article elaborates:

[President Roman "Jay"] Zorn's conflict with one faculty member, John Wiseman, began as a disagreement over salary and evolved into major student demonstrations on behalf of Wiseman, whose contract was not renewed for a third year. The Board of Trustees eventually supported the administration's decision, but a Faculty Evaluation Advisory Committee was created to advise the Dean on tenure/promotion decisions.

I wish I had one of those "Keep Wiseman" buttons.

The undecided voter speaks

2008-11-26T14:40:00.003-05:00

Late in every presidential election cycle, pundits begin to fret openly about those mysterious undecided voters: Who are they, how can they possibly still be undecided, are they just lying to reporters in hopes of meeting Campbell Brown, how will they make up their minds, and when, and should we even expect them or want them to vote? Now we have some answers, courtesy of the invaluable Onion columnist Jim Anchower. When political analysts talk about "low-information voters," it's Anchower they have in mind.

"The Dragaman's Bride"

2008-11-14T21:56:00.002-05:00

I have sold my first sequel, a 12,000-word novelette titled "The Dragaman's Bride," to co-editors Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann for their original anthology The Dragon Book: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy, to be published by Penguin Putnam in 2009 (I think).

The protagonist and narrator is Pearleen Sunday, who also was the protagonist and narrator of "A Diorama of the Infernal Regions; or, The Devil's Ninth Question," my contribution to the Dozois-Dann anthology Wizards: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy (Berkley, 2007); that book was a World Fantasy Award finalist this year. Since The Dragon Book is something of a follow-up to Wizards, I thought checking in again with Pearl, to see how her magical education is progressing, would be a good idea.

Set in the Virginia mountains in the 1930s, "The Dragaman's Bride" is partially inspired by the traditional Jack tales of the Appalachians, especially the one Richard Chase called "Old Fire Dragaman" in his great 1943 book The Jack Tales. Tina L. Hanlon's fine AppLit site devotes a page to the tale's variants and ancestors. Traditionalists may not like my version, which also is informed, oddly enough, by my hero Jeffrey Ford's fine novel The Girl in the Glass. My most obvious debt, as with many of my stories, is to the Appalachian stories of the late Manly Wade Wellman, especially the Silver John series.

The rest of the anthology's contents haven't been announced, to my knowledge, but I know "The Dragaman's Bride" isn't the longest story in the book, because Jane Yolen notes in her journal that her contribution, "The Tsar's Dragons" (co-written with Adam Stemple), is nearly 15,000 words.

I'm delighted to be included in the book, and to have gotten such a long story finished -- in mid-semester, at that!

Gov. Barkley of Alabama?

2008-10-29T22:45:00.003-04:00

Charles Barkley tells CNN's Campbell Brown he plans to run for governor of his home state, Alabama, something he's been talking about for 15 years, and he means it this time.

Brown: So are you going to run for governor?

Barkley: I plan on it in 2014.

Brown: You are serious.

Barkley: I am. I can't screw up Alabama.

Brown: There is no place to go but up in your view?

Barkley: We are number 48 in everything, and Arkansas and Mississippi aren't going anywhere.

Two-term Gov. Bob Riley won't be running again in 2010, but Barkley has to wait until 2014 because Alabama law says he has to have lived in the state seven years to be governor, and he established his residency only in 2007.

Opie, Andy, Richie and the Fonz support Obama

2008-10-29T22:32:00.001-04:00

In case you haven't seen Ron Howard's campaign video, here's the link.

It warded off spirits, 300 years ago

2008-10-26T00:33:00.002-04:00

University of Maryland archaeologists have unearthed in Annapolis a 300-year-old sand-and-clay bundle of lead shot, pins and nails, with a stone ax on top. They think it was set in the gutter in front of a house to ward of spirits, as in Africa.

Annie Taylor takes the plunge

2008-10-26T00:01:00.005-04:00

On Oct. 24, 1901, sixtysomething schoolteacher Annie Edson Taylor became the first human to ride over Niagara Falls in a barrel and live. That was 107 years ago yesterday.

Sam Patch had done it without the barrel, way back in 1829 -- in fact, he did it twice -- but Taylor's stunt is no less remarkable for that.

The Daredevil Museum, on the falls' New York side, has an impressive collection of photos and memorabilia of other attempts, successful and un.

A Smith Miniplane on the roof

2008-10-25T23:22:00.003-04:00

Frostburg's Main Street Hangar, a new restaurant and bar with a military-aviation theme, has a Smith Miniplane on its roof, to the delight of fans of homemade aircraft. Here's a link to John A. Bone's photo in the Cumberland Times-News.

The Miniplane was designed by the late Frank Smith of Fullerton, Calif., who built and flew the first one in 1956. Smith's original DSA-1 (the initials stood for Darned Small Airplane) is in the AirVenture Museum in Oshkosh, Wis., run by the Experimental Aircraft Association.

Here's a 1970 article by Budd Davisson on Smith's achievement:

The Smith Miniplane is right out of the back of every pilot's mind. It flies in the margins of notebooks and lands on the backs of napkins. We've all doodled something similar when our subconscious takes over and the "perfect" airplane flows out of the pencil. I'm sure, at one time or other, most of us have thought about our own personal little biplane. We've all dreamed, but somehow not many of us get past the doodling stage. Frank Smith did.

Ringo Nelson, American

2008-10-25T22:52:00.007-04:00

The more I read the campaign statement of Ringo Nelson, write-in candidate for sheriff of Mineral County, W.Va., the more I admire it:

I saved an older lady from her apartment that was in flames. I also saved a woman who was stabbed with a screwdriver by another woman. ... I got enough money to have new roads and a roof put on at Abraham Lincoln’s mother’s birthplace. ... I helped a woman find her mother after 35 years. ... I want to give $10,000 of my money to get a center built for our youth and donate to every fire company in Mineral County every year. I bet my opponents won’t do that. ... I love America.

Unfortunately for Mr. Nelson, I vote in Allegany County, Md.

Nelson ran for sheriff in the Democratic primary in May, finishing fourth (and last) with 381 votes. During the spring campaign, he reported the theft of 17 campaign signs.

A corrected letter to the editor

2008-10-25T22:44:00.002-04:00

I wrote this letter to the editor published in the Oct. 15 Cumberland Times-News -- my first published letter in four months -- but when I saw it in print I immediately noticed a gaffe: I had written "November 1997" when I meant "November 2007." I let the paper know, and a correction followed, though the correction doesn't seem to be attached to the online version. Oh, well.

A history professor backs Obama, Part 2

2008-10-25T22:33:00.004-04:00

Earlier I linked to the eloquent letter in the Oct. 12 Cumberland Times-News by my colleague John Wiseman, endorsing Barack Obama. On Oct. 15 the paper printed Wiseman's follow-up letter, or Part Two of the original letter, as the case may be. A baseball enthusiast, Wiseman compares Obama to a lifelong Republican, Jackie Robinson:

Should he [Obama] win the Presidency, the Robinson "experiment" would become the democratic fulfillment. ... Having resolved the racial dilemma, we could then get on with the serious business of rebuilding America for everyone and reclaiming the respect of the world. Robinson would be pleased with that. And my grandchildren would grow up accepting a black president as naturally as breathing air.

Area cheesemakers win in Dublin

2008-10-12T22:32:00.004-04:00

Goat cheeses from FireFly Farms of Bittinger, Md., won gold, silver and bronze medals Sept. 29 at the World Cheese Awards in Dublin, says the press release in today's Cumberland Times-News. Yum!

(Bittinger is about 23 miles away, south of Grantsville.)

A history professor backs Obama

2008-10-12T22:17:00.004-04:00

My colleague John Wiseman, emeritus professor of history at Frostburg State University, has a good letter to the editor in today's Cumberland Times-News, explaining why he's backing Barack Obama:

If vast experience on Capitol Hill were the determining factor in my vote, I would surely cast my ballot for John McCain. But then what Washington record has he produced? During the Bush administration, McCain has consistently supported deregulation of both Wall Street and corporate giants and has supported huge tax cuts for those who need them least.

His major presidential financial sponsors have been the ones he faithfully protected. When his presidential campaign nearly collapsed a year ago, he wooed the culturally conservative base of his party to revive it. Now he is resurrecting himself as the maverick he was before his long quest for the presidency compromised his earlier principles.

Paraphrasing I.F. Stone, Wiseman calls the Bush-McCain approach "socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the rest of us."

Had I known John had written this letter, when I saw him at our party last night, I'd have commended him.

Charles Fort and I are in the Appalachian Independent

2008-09-25T22:01:00.003-04:00

The Knight Foundation has provided startup funding for the Appalachian Independent, a fledgling online newspaper with the ambition of covering Allegany and Garrett counties in western Maryland via a network of "citizen journalists."

The hurdles are many and obvious, but the thing will never get off the ground if lots of folks don't submit work to it, so I took the plunge and contributed an article about a recent Cumberland get-together of the International Fortean Association, which the Independent has published here.

One of the links within the article doesn't seem to work, but I copied that URL into a new browser window, and it worked just fine, so go figure. I'm not involved in the HTML coding; I just hope to submit stuff occasionally. If you know anyone in the vicinity who might be interested in doing the same, please spread the word.

Quote this, G-men

2008-09-13T10:17:00.005-04:00

I admire without reservation this ad for the MAFIA, a.k.a. the Mollie A. Fearing Insurance Agency in Manteo, N.C., which we saw in Real Estate Outer Banks magazine during our May vacation. Fearing must have seen Big Bad Mama at a formative stage, but that's true of many of us.

I wonder who the cartoonist is.

Fearing's online presence, alas, is considerably more demure.

A cameo by the 15th Street Diner

2008-09-13T10:02:00.005-04:00

You can't tell from the crop in this online version of the article, but I was pleased to recognize immediately, in the May Southern Living profile of Rick Bragg, where Mary Margaret Chambless snapped the photo. "Hey!" I said aloud. "That's the 15th Street Diner."

Many a meal I've eaten at that Tuscaloosa, Ala., establishment, often in the very booth where Bragg is sitting. In this scanned and cropped image from the print magazine, you can read part of the logo, backward, on the window behind the headline:Such is the profusion of good Southern cooking around Tuscaloosa County that the 15th Street would not even make my Top 10 list of favorite local eateries -- a list headed by the incomparable Brown Bag in Northport -- but if I had even the 15th Street here in Allegany County, Md., I'd be grateful.

Crunch!

2008-09-13T09:49:00.002-04:00

I share this ad for Claussen's pickles in case you missed it in the Sunday newspapers a few weeks ago. Once you're done wincing, squirming in discomfort, etc., note the photo in the corner, and how the angle emphasizes the jar's steadfast erectness.

Side note: Isn't it annoying when you go looking for an official Claussen's pickle site and can find nothing closer than the portal site of the behemoth parent company, Kraft?

Baseball, hot dogs and lethal injection

2008-09-13T09:18:00.008-04:00

I support Maryland Citizens Against State Executions (MD CASE), which opposes the death penalty, but I nevertheless was startled to receive this postcard in July.

None of the images exactly shout "death penalty" -- but what image does, these days? One of the many reasons states opted for lethal injection over the electric chair in the first place was the chair had become too loaded an image, like the noose, the guillotine, the stake and the cross; it was no longer the property of the executioners alone. Now there is no loaded image for execution in the United States -- a syringe, after all, could represent so many things, good and bad -- which helps keep execution out of people's minds, which helps the status quo, and so the executions continue.

Not so many in Maryland, though. According to the invaluable Death Penalty Information Center, Maryland has executed five people since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, and the first one wasn't until 1994. Six prisoners currently are on Maryland's death row, all men. (What's their racial and socioeconomic breakdown, I wonder?)

I wrote my story "The Executioners' Guild" (I thought) in a hot haze of righteous anti-capital-punishment anger. After it was published, dozens of people came up to me and said: "I loved the story. By the way, what do you think about the death penalty?"

Does revulsion sell?

2008-09-13T08:48:00.005-04:00

I once thought that Ollie's Bargain Outlet had the most moth-eaten mascot ever seen in retail, but that was before Elmer's House of Bargains & Good News Outlet opened in Cumberland, Md. Yikes!

Bless you for asking

2008-09-12T23:35:00.002-04:00

I recently was mailed an offer to subscribe to The Christian Century at the "professional clergy discount" of $39 for the year. "I am confident that you will find the magazine an invaluable partner in your ministry," says the insert.

From what alternate timeline was this mailed?

The Living Dead

2008-09-12T23:17:00.003-04:00

From my Aug. 26 "Ripley's Believe It or Not!" calendar:

Henri Christophe (1767-1820) of northern Haiti ordered his guards to prove their loyalty to him by marching over a 200-ft. cliff. Those who obeyed plunged to their deaths and those who refused were tortured and executed!

Mad Henri figures briefly in my Nebula- and Stoker-nominated story "Zora and the Zombie," which just has been reprinted in John Joseph Adams' new anthology The Living Dead, published by Night Shade Books.

Boom! That was the sound of my Robert E. Lee cuckoo clock

2008-09-12T22:56:00.008-04:00

Speaking of the Civil War: If you're wondering what to get the secessionists on your Christmas list, consider this item from The Bradford Exchange.

In the South's hour of need, a gallant soldier named Robert E. Lee won timeless glory for himself and the fighting men of Dixie. Now, you can be reminded of the enduring pride of the South with a timeless Civil War cuckoo clock ... At the start of every hour, miniature doors decorated with the Confederate flag swing open and a handcrafted cannon announces the hour with the sound of cannon fire.

My first thought was, aren't the only truly "timeless" clocks the broken ones?

My second thought was, are the boys in gray picketing the Yankee headquarters of The Bradford Exchange (Niles, Ill., home state of Lincoln and Obama) for likening Robert E. Lee to a cuckoo?

My third thought was, there's no limit to the Civil War kitsch that people will buy -- if it's pro-Confederate kitsch, anyway.

Heck, I'd buy one of these myself, if Marse Robert himself popped out of the doors every hour to say, "Ah surrenduh!"

Civil War News trading cards

2008-09-12T22:41:00.001-04:00

During my recent visit, one of the display cases in the Stockyards Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, included several examples of the gory Civil War News trading cards published by Topps in 1962, featuring the artwork of the great Norman Saunders, whose immediate follow-up for Topps was Mars Attacks. Apparently no one's parents got bent out of shape by the Civil War News cards, since they were "educational"; Mars Attacks, of course, was a different story.

The museum exhibit, presumably put together by a Confederate sympathizer, refers to them as "War Between the States" cards. The museum's offerings are "Death Barges In," "Dynamite Victims," "Painful Death," "Rebel Power," "Massacre," "No Escape," "Savages Attack," "Victim of the War" and "Deadly Defense."

Here's Bob Heffner's fine site full of information about the Civil War News series, though the artwork itself is seen to better advantage at the Norman Saunders website, or here.

The Palace light bulb and the Stockyards Museum

2008-09-12T21:32:00.008-04:00

On my August business trip to Texas, I found myself in a town I never had visited before, Fort Worth. At first opportunity, of course, I went to the Stockyards Museum to see the 1908 Palace Theater light bulb, the second oldest still-working bulb in the world. (The oldest is in Fire Station 6 in Livermore, Calif.) I feel a kinship with the Palace bulb in its centennial year, as we share a birthday; come Sept. 21, it will be exactly 56 years older than me.

The bulb was all I had hoped for, but I was delighted to discover the museum's many other attractions, which included: a display of dozens of different patented barbed-wire designs, with annotations; a vintage "bad luck wedding dress" that seems to have inspired at least one novel (by Geralyn Dawson); copies of the meatpackers' newspaper The Armour Oval, featuring "News and Views of Armour Crews"; a years-old cast model of a proposed Fort Worth monument to the great black cowboy and rodeo star Bill Pickett, a monument that unfortunately seems never to have been erected; a giant framed movie poster for Pickett's 1921 "all-colored" Western The Crimson Skull, co-starring Anita Bush, Lawrence Chenault and Steve Reynolds, "the One-Legged Marvel"; a 19th-century washtub with a sign offering "First Water" for 15 cents, then cheaper rates for bathwater that already had been used once, twice, etc.; and a circa 1915 Meilicke Payroll Calculator, essentially a tabulated card catalog as long as my forearm. (The instructions note, for example, that "42¾ hours at 34c per hour is found on card tabbed 34, intersection of 40 and 2¾ -- $14.54.") All this is interspersed with signs that say things such as "Please don't lean on this creaky ol' case." In short, the Stockyards Museum is well worth your time.

Tonight's gallery visit

2008-09-12T21:09:00.004-04:00

Tonight en route to a milkshake at the Frostburg Freeze, Sydney and I dropped by campus for the opening reception of the latest Roper Gallery exhibition, this one dedicated to works by the art faculty at Salisbury University on the Eastern Shore. Our favorites were Sally Molenda's color photos of Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary and two science-fiction-flavored bronzes by Jim Hill, "CrabKing's Palace" and "Skygate," the second of which you can see here and here. You can't tell from those photos, but "Skygate" is taller than 6 feet. We also liked Hill's bust of himself, which I think was titled "Creativity."

I'm on Facebook, too

2008-09-12T20:59:00.004-04:00

After years of urging from Sydney, I finally created a Facebook page, during a spare hour in a hotel room during our July driving tour of the Hudson Valley and New England. So if y'all are on Facebook, Friend me now!

On the tenure track

2008-09-12T20:46:00.003-04:00

Life has been a whirlwind since my last blog posting, in July. Shortly after Sydney and I got home from Readercon, I was offered a tenure-track teaching job in the English department at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Md., teaching professional writing -- including business writing, technical writing, journalism and editing & production. Yes, that's the same department where my wife, Sydney, teaches. I accepted, gave my notice at Overdrive magazine, "The Voice of the American Trucker," and then spent a hectic August trying to wind down one job (which involved a business trip to Texas for the Great American Trucking Show, among other things) and crank up the next one. I had exactly one week between my last day at Overdrive and the first day of fall classes, Tuesday, Sept. 2. This is the first night I've felt able to draw breath in weeks! But I'm delighted, of course, by how everything has worked out.

Here's my faculty Web page, what Wikipedia would call a "stub."

And how are y'all doing?

The summit of Sharp Top

2008-07-06T19:47:00.020-04:00

Sydney and I have been visiting her parents in Roanoke, Va., this weekend, and today we took a Sunday-morning excursion to the summit of Sharp Top at the Peaks of Otter, on the Blue Ridge Parkway north of town.

We briefly considered the 90-minute one-way hike to the summit from the parking lot:But cooler heads opted to take the bus instead:The bus takes you up a one-lane switchback road to a turnaround 1,500 feet short of the summit -- still a good half-hour's walk.I became "Big Chief Bring-'Em-Up-Rear," as my father-in-law called me, and from time to time took a photo of the path behind:This stone overlook was welcome, as it made a good resting place, but that was its only use this morning because the clouds surrounding the mountain hadn't lifted:My father-in-law reminisced as we climbed about the weeks he spent in 1948 dismantling old barns on this mountain as a National Park Service summer employee.The mist got thicker as we ascended:This was a welcome sight:We think the stone house at the summit was built in the 1930s by the same New Deal-era work crews that built the switchback road and most of the Blue Ridge Parkway:The summit is all rock, so the stone house built upon it is downright biblical in its solidity. I wouldn't want to spend a winter in there, though:My mother-in-law, age 83, was determined to make it all the way to the topmost point of the path, and did, but the gnats, wasps and other flying critters that beset her just after I snapped this photo made her reluctant to linger for a portrait at the summit:We retraced our steps downward, back into the mist:When we reached the stone overlook on the downward trip, we found that the folks ahead of us had been arrested by a deer grazing contentedly only a few feet away:The deer kindly posed for some photographs. The deer in congested Eastern parklands have grown too tame for their own good, alas, as they've lost their necessary skittishness around highway traffic, and the "people food" they mooch hurts their digestion:Another welcome sight, a few hundred feet downhill, was our bus driver, Mr. Ronnie Mitchen:Mr. Mitchen enjoys his captive audience, stopping the bus a couple of times on the way down the mountain to tell stories:He said his grandfather, who died this past Easter at age 98, helped build the switchback road we were traveling on. This was good for years of family comedy, as Ronnie would ask, "Granddad, how come you made that road so narrow?" and his grandfather would reply, "If we had known you'd be driving on it, we'd have made it as wide as U.S. 460."On the way down, though I wasn't fast enough to get photos of them, we saw more deer, a group of wild turkeys (two adult females and a number of youngsters), and a male black bear that scrambled out of the road just ahead of us. Mr. Mitchen said he wasn't surprised by the bear, as he had seen a hawk that morning -- and on days when he sees a hawk, he always eventually sees a bear, too.

Back at the Peaks of Otter Lodge on the parkway for lunch, I took this photo of the mountaintop we just visited. Sharp Top isn't the tallest of the Peaks of Otter, but the starkly beautiful crag at the top has been a tourist draw since the 19th century:This excursion was my idea, and I told Sydney later these photos are proof that I'll climb a mountain to get out of going to church.

The end of Justice Talking

2008-07-04T21:23:00.002-04:00

I'm sorry to hear that the excellent National Public Radio show Justice Talking is no more, its nine-year Annenberg grant having run out.

To paraphrase the old Women's International League for Peace and Freedom poster: It will be a great day when National Public Radio shows get all the money they need and Rob Schneider has to apply for an Annenberg grant to make a movie.

The Fly on the opera-house wall

2008-07-04T20:40:00.004-04:00

"I actually might get you to this opera," Sydney says, and she's right. It's an opera of The Fly, directed by David Cronenberg, music by Howard Shore, libretto by David Henry Hwang, conducted by Placido Domingo.

While set in the 1950s, the opera apparently closely tracks Cronenberg's 1986 movie, rather than the 1958 Kurt Neumann movie (starring David Hedison and Vincent Price) and the 1957 George Langelaan story in Playboy that launched the franchise.

Actually, Sydney got me to one opera already in this lifetime: Jerry Springer: The Opera in London, starring David Soul. It was a stitch, and I even bought the T-shirt.

Metropolis found

2008-07-04T20:31:00.003-04:00

The discovery of the only known copy of the complete three-and-a-half-hour cut of Fritz Lang's Metropolis is big news for movie buffs -- and science-fiction movie buffs in particular.

Thanks to Lokke Heiss for alerting me, via the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts listserv.

Jack Speer and "The Atheism Issue"

2008-07-04T14:34:00.012-04:00

I was sorry to hear of the death of science-fiction fan Jack Speer. I commend to everyone his pioneering history of fandom, Up To Now, written for distribution at the first World Science Fiction Convention in July 1939, when the historian himself was all of 18. (That Worldcon concluded 69 years ago today, in fact.) Up To Now is a 35-page PDF at the invaluable eFanzines.com. Speer's chapter headings include:

The First Staple War.

The Decline and Fall of the Era.

The Nature of Wollheim’s Dictatorship.

The Crucial Period.

The Undertow.

The Situation in the West.

The Order Begins to Crumble.

The Decline and Fall of Wollheim.

Some indication of the pacing can be gleaned from the fact that "The First Months of 1938" is only the 17th of 28 chapters listed in the table of contents.

Today I'm most interested in the chapter titled "The Atheism Issue," which I briefly excerpt here:

When the November, 1937, Cosmic Tales carried, as what was to be the last of [Donald J.] Wollheim’s Phantaflexion columns, an article later reprinted in the first Science Fiction Advance as “Science Fiction and Religion,” it seemed that another bombshell had been dropped into fandom from the hand of the genial W. Some months later appeared “Anent Atheism and Stf” in Imagination!, which debated the possibly question-begging proposition that scientifictionists were scientifictionists because they were atheists, rather than atheists because they were scientifictionists,as Wollheim argued. ... It became customary for new correspondents to inquire each others’ religious stands, or to state them without inquiry, as a natural part of getting acquainted. ...

Curiously, it never became a red-hot issue. ... the general sentiment seemed to be to avoid religious controversies before fandom as a whole, as being unpleasant and getting nowhere ...

But perhaps the most important reason for the flat-falling of the atheism issue was lack of interest—lack of opposition! ... The only prominent fans known to acknowledge church beliefs were Catholic Baltadonis and Episcopalian McPhail, tho doubtless there were others. When the IPO got around to putting the question, agnosticism and kindred showed a definite, tho not overwhelming majority, with many
of those on the other side of the line doubtful, tongue-in-cheek, or indifferent.

In defense of religion little showed up. ...

There wasn’t enough opposition to give any thrill from attacking the churchmen. So atheism was taken pretty much for granted, and fandom rocketed merrily on its way. But there is no guarantee that the controversy may not blaze forth again.

No, indeed -- though, in my experience, atheism is still taken pretty much for granted, in science-fiction circles. When I recently told a group of sf cronies, for example, about a Potlatch panel titled "Coming Out as Atheist," I got in return a half-dozen confused expressions. Many atheists in the field can't imagine the need to "come out" as atheist, since that's the default expectation -- and certainly can't imagine the need to defend the position, or risk suffering hardship for publicly taking it.

Speaking of the first Worldcon, check out the contemporary coverage in Time magazine, which notes that the sf magazines of 1939 average 150,000 readers apiece and pay 1 cent to 4 cents a word.

Also, Speer's other major fannish writing project, the 1944 Fancyclopedia slang dictionary, is online here.

Is this StoryCorps account a bust?

2008-07-04T13:55:00.007-04:00

In a StoryCorps conversation with her niece, recorded in Cincinnati and subsequently aired on National Public Radio, a 94-year-old woman recalls her inflatable brassiere exploding during an airline flight in the Andes -- which apparently happened at least 70 years ago.

At his urban-legends blog, David Emery wonders whether Betty Jenkins' experience was the inspiration for a half century's worth of unverifiable tall tales about exploding bras on airplanes, or whether it was merely one of the incidents that inspired those stories ("It may be that some urban legends grow from the seeds of the truth," says the NPR producer), or whether -- gasp! -- it maybe didn't actually happen to Ms. Jenkins at all. After all, when I'm 94, I'll probably have utterly persuasive memories of personally rescuing Princess Leia from the Death Star.

In praise of Doctor Zhivago

2008-06-08T14:09:00.002-04:00

On NPR, Ursula K. Le Guin recommends Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. I second that, as if she (or, for that matter, the Nobel committee) needed a second.

I know that Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are responsible for a number of recent acclaimed English translations of classic Russian novels, but have there been more recent English translations of Zhivago than the 1958 edition that so many millions of us are familiar with?

And yes, I'm fond of the David Lean movie, too. As a friend pointed out when we saw it on the big screen in Chapel Hill, N.C. (during the 25th anniversary re-release in 1990): If you must look at 40-foot-high close-ups of an actor and actress, you could do a lot worse than Omar Sharif and Julie Christie circa 1965.

Questions? Talk to the monkey

2008-06-08T13:42:00.006-04:00

The fine fiction writer Michael Martone, who did a stint as chair of creative writing while I was a graduate student at the University of Alabama, once explained to me that administration, especially higher-ed administration, is all about the distribution of monkeys.

"You sit at your desk," Michael said, "and someone walks in the door with a monkey. That person's goal is to hand you her monkey. Your goal is to make sure that she not only leaves with that same monkey, but takes one of your monkeys with her when she goes. You want to go home at the end of the day with no net gain of monkeys."

I thought of this when I read that the new chairman of a business school in Uttar Pradesh is Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god:

"When we were looking for a chairman for our institution, we scanned many big names in the field of technology and management. Ultimately, we settled for Lord Hanuman, as none was bigger than him."