Blogorrhea Junior

First Novels and Contradictory Advice

Paul Ford writes this about his first book, Gary Benchley, Rockstar: "It is my first child and I raised it as best I could but what did I know? I was so young; we were so poor; there was so much mercury in the tuna." In addition to making me laugh, he got me thinking about the fact that this is his first novel (not his first published novel, though it is) but just his first novel, in general. His second one, he says, "is shaping itself into a monstrosity, a collection of interlocking stories at war with one another . . ." So I'm assuming he hasn't got, oh, three or four more under the bed somewhere, the false starts that may see publication somewhere down the line when readers are importuning Sheds & Commoner or Bounder's info desks for the next Paul Ford novel.

Then there's Miss Snark, and many others, who insist that those two or three molding, curling, musty, yellowing fire hazards manuscripts are prerequisites for entry into the sacred halls of print. First novels hardly ever, if ever, get published. Well, that must be pure bullshit, although I can't, off the top of my head, think of writers whose first novel was their first publication. Uh, Donna Tartt? Jay McInerney? That guy who wrote A Confederacy of Dunces? Bret Easton Ellis? Paul Ford?

I suppose, in the end, it depends on how brilliant a writer you are. Or
How well your prospective agent likes your first book. Or
How well your prospective editor likes your first book. Or
Er, how long you've been writing, anyway.

I suspect that more 17-23 year-old guys get their first novels published than women the same age, mostly because they're so sure they have something to say, and women, I suspect, like to take a little more seasoning time. But maybe I'm just projecting to make my almost 46-year-old self feel better.

But it's all very confusing. Should I just shove this thing under the bed and get on with number 2? Consider it "practice," like all that fanfic? Or should I keep plodding on with the revision, polishing it up to make it shiny and new-looking and send it off with a "Go, Little Book!"? Dunno. It all depends, I guess. How brilliant a writer am I? Which side of the bed did my prospective agent get up on on the day she/he picks my submission out of the slush pile? Is the moon in the seventh house? Is time ripe? And who do I know?

Oh, hell. I'm going back to bed. The one without the manuscripts under it.

Before and After 9/11

Ran across this photosite via Metafilter. It's a Before and After elegy for Lower Manhattan. Some are more subtle than others, but they're all poignant and beautifully shot. I have still not brought myself to go down and see the actual site. Apparently, I shouldn't be in any rush, cuz it's going to be a bloody long time before anything gets built there, cuz there's no money. I, like a lot of New Yorkers I suspect, am heartily sick of the infighting, the constant vetoing of ideas by the families, the single- (nay, narrow-) minded vision of what should be on the site, and the politicization of the whole thing as an excuse to cut the Bill of Rights out from under U.S. citizens. Leave the damn hole in the ground.

Nothing New Under the Sun

One of the things I like using this blog for is exploring ideas I'd like to turn into essays for publication somewhere. The problem with essays, as opposed (usually) to fiction is that somewhere, somebody's always thinking nearly the same thing you are, and there's a good chance they'll beat you into print, unless you're a journalist doing this full time. Even then, that's no guarantee. Journalists get "scooped" too. Worse, they may articulate it better than you. After coughing up that word vomit yesterday that I'd been formulating for 12 days (!) I ran across an article on the National Geographic site that pretty much said the same things I did, with the added perk that they cite a couple of cosmologists, one of whom is Brian Greene (also known as String Theory's answer to John Cusack). Worse: it's from 2004.

The only heartening (or disheartening, depending on how you look at it) factor is that I read a lot in this area in the general press and this is the only time I've seen the argument that evolution might just be one of God's tools actually articulated. Part of the reason for that, I think, is that there's so much hostility around the whole subject. Stephen Jay Gould did something similar in Rocks of Ages and was pilloried for it posthumously in at least one review by someone who obviously didn't understand the argument he was making and had closed his mind already anway. (I wish SJG had been writing this in the brief time I worked for him. It's one of those conversations I would have loved to have with him. It would have been fascinating.)

So, ultimately, it's a topic that is still timely, and still needs to be explored. But that's not true of many of the topics that get my dander up enough to write about them. On the other hand, do I want to spend that much time chasing timely topics? I'm not a journalist and not particularly interested in being a regular magazine contributor, both of which are full time careers. No, not really. What I love about writing is the actual process itself, not the business of begging people to publish me, which is much harder for people who write articles and essays than it is for people who write fiction. All those pitch letters! I loathe that. Bad enough I have to do it to find an agent for my novel, and write synopses. I'd hate to be doing it all the time for every little thing I write. Ugh.

So I think the solution is to write about more or less "timeless" topics, if I'm going to do non-fiction, or things that have a long shelf-life, like the evolution vs. faith controversy.

Or, God forbid, just go back to writing fiction and poetry. [wink]

Poaching

One of my friends, who's already had a really hard, hard year (I think we're running neck and neck for the title of Excrement Blowback Queen) just posted about her husband asking for a separation after confessing he'd fallen for someone else. She and her husband have had a rough row to hoe throughout their marriage, but in so many ways, they've been best friends, too. Now he's fallen in love (he thinks) with someone who's a very much like his wife, just ten years younger—the old mid-life crisis cliche, and one of the most stupid.

When things like this happen, there's plenty of blame to go around without pointing specific fingers. He's certainly got a good chunk of the blame to carry around, because cheating on your wife is just not done, no matter what it's been like at home. Divorce is too easy for that to be an excuse anymore. That said, it usually takes two to get things to that point. But the person I really blame is the girlfriend. (Let me add the proviso that there is no way the girlfriend, who is a reporter, could not have known he was married. There's just not, whether he was wearing a ring or not, no matter what he admitted. He's come into some publicity recently and it's pretty hard to be ignorant of the fact that he's got a wife.)

So WTF was this bimbo (and I use the term intentionally) thinking? What made her think it was okay to poach another woman's husband, just because he happened to away from home without her?

I speak from some experience here; for some reason, married men seem to find me attractive, and I've turned away more than one of them. Early on, I realized that married men are a vale of tears for single women. If they're already chasing someone other than their wife, they'll chase someone other than you, too, and they'll probably never leave their wives. I also learned, along the way, that no matter how hard the lightning strikes, how hot the chemistry burns, you'll get over it, and if you're still in the middle of the deception when it does, what you'll be left with is a train wreck, strewn with bodies.

I did fall very hard for one of the married guys, and while I still have wistful thoughts occasionally, I'm not sorry I kept my distance. It ended badly enough without losing the respect of our mutual friends. The thing is, you can say no. You can, in fact, keep saying no as much as you have to until you can leave, or throw them out. And if you have any self-respect, or respect for other people, that's what you do.

After she got done sobbing, my friend called up the girlfriend and snarled at her to keep her hands off her husband, which apparently scared the girlfriend silly. Then she called her back and suggested a conversation. The girlfriend, spineless, sneaking, poacher that she is, has not returned the phone calls. Out of guilt, I would suggest, as well as fear.

One of the things that saddens me about this kind of situation is that women don't seem to have gotten over the idea that we need a man at any cost, even at the cost of another woman's misery. This is the ultimate divide and conquer tactic, to my mind. If women continue to think we are nothing without a man, even someone else's man, then the lure of being a trophy wife is going to keep us at each others throats. Sisters, will ya stop thinking with your gonads? Men do enough of that without us adding to the problem. Have a little respect, for each other, if not for yourself. Go play with someone your own age. Preferably single.

Driving Mr. Science

I've had something of a hiatus from reading hard science in the last several years, lulled into thinking I was getting enough of it in Wired and the mainstream media. Reading Jen's books (I helped edit her forthcoming one) has provided a rude awakening. I'm not anywhere near as up on breaking science news as I used to be. To remedy that, I'm letting my Wired subscription lapse and picking up one to New Scientist instead.

I've always been interested in science, thanks to my early reading in science fiction. I'm not sure I'd have thought science was so cool if I hadn't been reading SF from an early age. Fiction, and SF in particular, made the future exciting, fascinating, full of both positive possibilities and terrifying apocalyptic visions. It made tech beyond TVs—rocket packs, credit chips, computers, rockets, satellites, telescopes and the burgeoning field of electronics—attractively cool too. It was one reason I pursued biology and chemistry studies all the way through college, taught science writing as a grad student, and one of the attractions (I thought) of working for the American Institute of Physics (nerd heaven!). One of the interesting things I've noticed since I first began reading Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, C.J. Cherryh et al is that the more I read about hard science, the more convinced I've become that SF is one of the major drivers of innovative science and technology, or at least an important part of the feedback loop.

I was thinking about this the other day as I used my debit card to pay for groceries. This has become such a commonplace activity now that most of us don't think about it. But sometime in the 70s, I remember reading a novel (it might have been by Philip K. Dick) in which the protagonist used something very similar—a "chip" or plastic chit "charged" with a certain amount of money, through which his movements were traced. (Come to think of it, this sounds a bit like the 1956 short story "The Minority Report," doesn't it?) Credit and debit cards are so common now that we forget they were just becoming popular with the middle class in the late 70s and cheap reliable magnetic reader technology coupled with computer networks didn't make them nearly ubiquitous (and give them their instant traceability) until much later. But I was reading about their common use in a decade when the latest thing in recording media was the 8-track cartridge and computers still used punch cards.

Of course, this proposition can become a nightmarish chicken-or-egg problem, since many SF authors either are scientists or engineers themselves or read extensively in these fields themselves to generate ideas. Good hard SF (where the story is built around the science and its consequences) requires research to make the settings and tech plausible if not actually factual. But there are some clear examples. One of the most obvious is virtual reality, which may not have existed for years in any form, if at all, had William Gibson not dreamed it up out of whole cloth in his breakthrough novel Neuromancer in 1984 (which seems a somehow appropriate year). The cyberspace/cyberpunk culture he brought to life in his novels spawned a geekboy fanclub amongst the nascent hacker culture that took his ideas and ran to their labs with them. Gibson has proven to be, if nothing else, a dramatic predictor and terminology spawner. Some of the more astonishing developments include neural implants, most of which are still under development but which may in the near future allow the restoration of sight, mobility, hearing (these are already available), or if Gibson's vision pans out here too, wireless interaction with your computer sans keyboard or mouse.

Update: And here's an example I can't help adding, though it's more a nomenclature influence than an actual tech driver. You can now teleport laser beams, just like Mr. Scott, according to New Scientist. It may not be just like Star Trek's teleporter, but this might be the beginning of a refutation of The Physics of Star Trek, which said teleportation would never happen. (See Clarke's Law #1, below.)

The most recent example of fiction driving tech is the still-experimental space elevator, first posited by engineer and SF author Arthur C. Clarke in The Fountains of Paradise in 1979. Clarke is one of the biggest drivers of space technology, in fact. As his entry in Wikipedia says, "In the 1940s he forecast that man would reach the moon by the year 2000, an idea experts dismissed as rubbish. When Neil Armstrong landed in 1969, the United States said Clarke "provided the essential intellectual drive that led us to the moon."

Providing the intellectual drive is not quite the same as dreaming up the tech on your own, but it's an indication of how influential writers of visionary SF can be. Clarke has been particularly so, if for nothing else but his three laws:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

One of the corollaries to Number 1 (I think it might be Heinlein's) is that the best way to invent something new is to find out what the experts say is impossible and then do it. This is one of the things science fiction does. Of course, it's easier to do on a page than in a lab, or at least you might think so. But even extrapolation from the state of current technology can be a bitch, and it takes someone truly visionary to imagine not only a brand new technology, or development in technology, but how it would fit into the world. What uses would we find for this new technology? How would the technology or devices affect society? Would it change human thinking or social structures in significant ways? For instance, just look at what the development of personal listening devices from Walkmen to iPods has done to music distribution and copyright theory.

These are not questions scientists routinely ask themselves, and not always because they don't think of them; sometimes they're not allowed to. The inventors of lasers probably didn't anticipate their use in gunsights, just as the inventors of GPS, closed circuit television, credit cards, and mobile phones probably weren't thinking (much) about the potential for Big Brother-style observation in their inventions. But these are exactly the kinds of questions writers and other artists ask themselves all the time. Science and technology are human pursuits that don't exist in the social vacuum scientists sometimes pretend they do, in their talk of "pure" research. As the pharmaceutical companies in general and Genentech in particular have demonstrated, research is almost always supported by a profit motive of some kind. Sometimes that's the main motive, and damn the social consequences. Those social consequences are what science fiction is good at pointing out. Maybe if we could get the research funders to read a little of it, it might drive their consciences the way it often drives their profit margins.

Update: And along comes Metafilter with a link to a site called Technovelgy.com, wherein modern inventions are paired up with their fictional precursors. And you thought I was just blowing this out of my butt, didn't you?

One of the Tribe

There are not a lot of Kottners around, I've discovered during my peripatetic travels through the eastern half of the U.S. Every place I've lived in or visited, I've looked in the phone book for them, and I almost inevitably know them already, or they're me, in which case I more or less know them. Sometimes. Googling "Kottner" turns up mostly me.

Even the genealogy sites turn up mostly the immediate family names: cousins Gary and Eric, uncles Elmer ("Whoop," now deceased) and Ralph, Aunt Phyllis (deceased), Grandmother Edith (deceased), and Mom & Dad (ditto). Besides the tribe in Pennsylvania, there's a Kottner in upstate New York that I'm apparently not related to whom I've corresponded with, briefly. There are a few Kottners scattered in Arizona, Ohio, Minnesota, Illinois, Florida, California, Missouri, Virginia, Colorado, and even one in Hawaii (wonder if she's a relative?). In all, only 114 listings on RootsWeb (some of these duplicates and family, most of them over 50), and a measly 4,159 hits in the Social Security listings.

Unsurprisingly, most of the non-Americans seem to be in Germany, with some interesting exceptions. There are classy, modernist jewelers in Prague named Kottner (hmmm) which adds to my suspicions that my family might be Eastern European and not German. There's one in the department of Biophysics and Radiation Biology at Semmelweis University in Budapest, but I can't tell what he does because his job title is in Hungarian. There's a sea kayaker in Canada named Hedi who's co-authored a book about kayaking Vancouver. I haven't run across any other Anns or Lees and my namesakes are not as interesting as Jen's doppelgangers, one of whom is a popular milliner and the other of whom is wanted for armed robbery.

A couple of years ago, Marcia and Val ran across one of the strays. His name was Ray Kottner, and they were riding in his cab on his last night on the job. Seeing his last name on his hack license, they had a nice chat and told me about it later. This week, he turned up in the paper, as he has before, driving his vintage checkered cab around town and picking up people for free. Apparently he was in trouble with the Taxi and Limousine Commission in 2004, but seems to have resolved that, since he doesn't charge for rides. He's six years younger than Dad and still driving around town commenting on the scenery, as that generation of hacks were known to do. Like the Kottners I know, he seems to be fairly opinionated, which makes me wonder if he's a letter-writer like my dad and grandmother.

It's funny to find another Kottner here, especially one of Dad's generation, and ironic because Dad's attitude was that he'd visited New York City once in 1947 and didn't need to see it again. Ray was born and raised here and I hope he continues to live here for a long time. But at least New York won't be without a Kottner when he goes.

Librarians Rule The World

From my rad librarian friend Gretl:

Radical Reference Benefit! this Friday, Feb. 17th at ABC No Rio

Join a few radical librarians and their sympathizers for a Radical Reference NYC Benefit Gala!

With Zine Readings From

Dave Roche                               
On Subbing

Cristy Road
Greenzine

Sean Stewart
Thoughtworm                                    

Plus more TBA!

Worse for the Wear
Acoustic
From Philly

And the movie:
Party Girl
Parker Posey plays a rebellious party girl/librarian in training.  Can Mary  (Posey) find happiness by mastering the Dewey Decimal System-- while dancing  around the library to a club beat?

Friday, February 17th
8pm
$5 Suggested Donation

ABC No Rio
156 Rivington St.
NYC   

Radical Reference is a collective of volunteer library workers who believe in social justice and equality. We support activist communities, progressive organizations, and independent journalists by providing professional research support, education and access to information. We work in a
collaborative virtual setting and are dedicated to information activism to foster a more egalitarian society.

Music Therapy

Lucy Kaplansky. She's a freakin' genius. If you haven't bought her album The Red Thread, do it now. For a few days now, I've thought I was thawing out slowly, that the sheet of ice that's been encasing my emotions since Dad died was melting away in a little rivulets. Tonight I can almost physically feel it happening. I haven't had a really good cry since August, but Lucy's album is doing the trick. When I swapped out my components this weekend, I put on a bunch of CDs I hadn't listened to in a while including Richard Shindell and Lucy, which all sound entirely different through these speakers and the new receiver. Anyway, Lucy's album has a lot of 9/11 songs on it and I guess that's still a raw spot, just the precursor to later losses, cuz that set me off tonight. I still can't play Springsteen's The Rising, the way I couldn't bear to hear The Cure's Wish for years. I've been blogging madly all weekend, as though a dam has broken somewhere and things, some consequential, some not, pouring out of the cracks. I can hardly keep up with it all. It's a wonder I've gotten anything else done. And did I mention my appetite's come back? Now if the rest of the physical stuff would calm down. That's only telling me I've got more stuff in there to get out. But at least this weekend feels like a start. We got 27 inches of snow last night and today in one great outpouring too. Wonder if there's a connection?

And now I'm going to bed, with yet another blog post in draft mode, to be finished later.

Blizzard of '06

Woohoo! It's definitely a blizzard! Overnight, the forecast went from 6-12 inches to 16-24 inches, and when I went to bed, even the low amount didn't seem likely. Sometime in the night, things changed, and I woke up to thunder, though I didn't see the lightning. There's always something a little eerie about that, but it shows what a whopper this storm is. It's pretty much white-out conditions; all the airports are closed, as are even the local stores. And still there are people out wandering around. I like snow, but it takes a lot to get me out in a blizzard anymore. It looks like it's supposed to taper off in the midafternoon, but by then it will have really dumped a load; we've already had a record 23 inches in Central Park. Announcers are calling this the second largest storm in history. Of course, that means since anybody bothered to record the weather, i.e., in the last 100 years. I might go out later and take a few more photos, to add to the ones I just posted in Flee's New York.

On A Winter's Night

Not exactly this glam tonight, but I am having a nice glass of sherry and typing this by candlelight while it blizzards away outside. I sort of spent the day anticipating the snow, watching out the window for it, but it's only in the last hour that it's really started to stick and come down in a serious way. We should have a nice accumulation by morning. So far, no plows or shovels out, so it's still pretty quiet. And very cozy with the candlelight. Except that my big green man, the one Kath called Percy because he's blowing a kiss, looks gaunt and a bit unsettling flanked by candlelight. I thought the Bamberg guys would go all spooky in the candlelight, but no, it's benign, ahistorical Percy who's freaking me out.

I swapped out my old receiver and speakers today for Mom's newer ones, an activity that proved to be as big a pain in arse as I suspected it would be. But now I have a nice, practically new Onkyo receiver (and CD) and a set of really amazing Bose speakers that are a lot smaller than even my bookcase-sized Klipsch, and are clear as a bell. I may never buy anything but Bose ever again. These aren't even the really tiny ones, but they're white and about a third of the size of my old ones (which I'm passing on the Jennifer DeMeritt, whose last name I've finally learned to spell). I also cleaned today, so it wasn't a total loss of a day, though I didn't get through my email messages or do any writing or baking.

What I spent a lot of the day doing, and late into the night last night, was reading Matt Ruff's Set This House in Order; A Romance of Souls, which is deeply disturbing, but really well done. The two main characters are suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder so there are actually several main characters wrapped up in two, and lots of Ruffian (what a great word!) plot twists. This is the second of his books I've read, the first being his debut, Fool on the Hill, which I loved though it was obviously a first book. Hell, everybody's gotta write one, and his was better than most. He usually gets billed as speculative fiction, but I tend to think of him more as a North American magical realist, like Margaret Atwood, or Alice Hoffman. The house in question is the one Andrew Gage has inside his head, housing his many "souls," the ones that split off from the original one "killed" by his stepfather's abuse. There's a thinly veiled comparison to virtual reality that, halfway through has not quite gotten off the ground and may be a red herring, but the house is more metaphysical than virtual. And what's the difference, you ask? Aye, there's the rub. You tell me.

In other news that sort of dovetails in an odd way with this, Jen made her first official blog post over on Cocktail Party Physics, firing the first salvo in what she hopes will be a congenial discussion of faith and science. Notice, I did not write faith vs. science or religion vs. science. This is what makes Jen's post interesting and different: she's eschewed the adversarial attitude that forestalls any intelligent conversation before it can even start. As I said in a comment over there, dogma is dogma, whether it's scientific narrow mindedness or religious fundamentalism. And there is no discussion with dogma. It's believe or die. Both camps will expel you from the tribal hearth if you dare confess a heretical belief in anything the other camp espouses.

Which is just stupid. More on this later, when I'm not so pie-eyed from booze and staying up late.