Parric flicked his antennae about, seeking sanctuary from the coarse, abrading gale of the Nexus. And the heat. The relentless heat.
His ribs throbbed. The pain in his wing had subsided into a dull ache, punctuated by sharp, stabbing agony every time his flight necessitated a change in direction. With the rush of battle now past, his body was giving out.
Thankfully, Parric soon felt the familiar texture of the Cosm he sought. With practiced ease he crafted a Wedging--a very small one this time, as this particular Cosm demanded no more--and slipped through the gap.
Parric emerged amidst a blaze of light and a cacophony of a hundred different voices. People pushed past him, some human, some almost-human and others far stranger. Some dressed themselves in brilliant, flamboyant colors, some in dull, simple clothes. A few strode through the crowd naked, adorned only with paint, tattoos or jewelry. All of them gave Parric a wide berth.
Parric recognized the place instantly: the westmarkt plaza of Tradefare's Digue district. He started to sigh, then thought better of it when his ribs protested. It was farther than he'd intended, but it could've been worse given the circumstances.
He reached into a pouch and pulled out two shimmering, translucent Potentials. He weighed them thoughtfully in his claws, then pressed them together, bleeding a fraction of the smaller one off into the larger. Then he inserted the smaller of the coins into the slot of a slender, fluted metallic post before him. Gap toll paid, he slithered off the circular tile mosaic that indicated an anchored Nexial Gap and joined the crush of bodies. Lights suspended a hundred yards above the plaza blazed in a grid pattern, blotting out the stars above and obliterating any hint that night had fallen. Night never really fell on Tradefare--the economy kept it at bay.
To Parric's left, a great black dirigible came through one of the reenforced industrial gaps, the moans of the stressed ship echoing across the plaza. A procurement detachment from one of the war-torn Dark Cosms, Parric guessed, always in search of new types of exotic weaponry.
To his right, the crowd gave a gap anchor an even wider berth than usual as three very hairy, over-large figures attacked the toll post with venomous rage. Parric ignored them. Tradefare's laws were... flexible by most standards, but one rule was ironclad. If you’re not paying the tollings, you’re not getting in. The constabulary would arrive soon enough to deal with them.
He made his way through the sprawling lattice-roofed pavilions and past the high-fenced stock yards with bizarre creatures from a thousand different Cosms. No matter how exotic the creatures' origins, the vile reek of dung was one constant they all shared.
Eventually, gap anchors grew scarce. The crowds thinned and the open trade pavilions gave way to girdered business centers and eventually humble general merchants. Parric turned up a side street, then down a flight of well-worn steps to the lower door of a slope-faced stone building. The ruddy door opened automatically to admit Parric.
Cool, blue light illuminated the interior. A sponge-textured, ivory substance paneled the walls. Several garish fractal images adorned the walls, steadily changing their patterns in a slow-motion metamorphosis. Several low-stance chairs lined the sides of a slender table that stretched the length of the room.
In one chair reclined a grotesquely fat woman with a curly, copper shag of hair, dressed in robes of green and orange that clashed harshly with the blue light. Before her floated a translucent screen, stock quotes and other financial data scrolling rapidly past. Instead of a mouth, she had three elongated nostrils buried amid fleshy flaps of skin that hung from the wide bridge of her nose to down below her chin. With a three-fingered hand she held an ornate forked pipework to her nose. Upon seeing Parric, her green eyes widened and she exhaled a fine, silvery mist.
"Parric! Do you know what hour it is? No, wait. Do you know what day it is? I was expecting you back a week ago tomorrow," she said, rolling her body to the side to face him. "And where's Flavius?"
"Still being dead, Ien," Parric muttered, slithering past her.
"Still dead? I thought you had that taken care of?" Ien said.
"I am taking carings of that," Parric said, glowering at her. She raised an eyebrow, and Parric shrugged his good wings. "There are... complicatings."
"Complicatings. Huh. The Nexus is full of 'complicatings.'" Ien shook her head, then replaced the piping to her nostrils. "Well, when you do get Flavius sorted out, remind him that he still owes me the better part of five Potentials."
"I am sure Flavius will be having rememberings of this on his own."
"It won't hurt any if you remind him, will it?" She turned back to her stock data.
"Ien, I’m in needing of Knowcient," Parric said.
"I'll flag her first thing in the morning."
"I’m in needing of Knowicent now."
Ien waved her hand at Parric without turning from her screen, a gesture equal parts acknowledgment and dismissal.
Parric went down the hall to his room. It was just wide enough to spread his wings fully without touching the sides, and had a single window opposite the door. Books, scrolls and random parchment sheets filled the shelves, along with hundreds of curious artifacts, fossils and various other strange items both organic and non in row upon row of small cubbies crammed beneath the shelves. Gossamer shrouds of varying shades of green draped from the ceiling, conveying, after a fashion, the sense of an ethereal forest.
Parric shrugged off his belts and pouches, laying the claymore apart from his other equipment. He picked one waterskin from a rack and drank down its yellowish contents. He repeated this with two others, chasing the liquid with several sprigs of herbs selected from the cubbies. He then coiled himself in the middle of the room, atop a pallet of modest cushions. Gingerly he spread his injured wing, wincing at the electric jolt of pain this invited. His other wings folded comfortably against his sides. His antennae relaxed. His breathing slowed. Parric slipped into a meditative trance to help speed his body's healing.
He lay motionless for several minutes, occasional voices or vehicles passing outside the only sound.
A soft whistle abruptly broke the silence. The air immediately in front of Parric shimmered. A swirl of sparkling motes coalesced into a tall, spindly figure. It looked around the room, then reached down for Parric’s head.
Parric did not stir.
Monday, February 11, 2008
MEMORY: 5
Friday, February 8, 2008
Stardust and Ashes
A few years ago on Ash Wednesday, I attended the evening service—complete with imposition of ashes—in my Episcopal church, drove back to my end of town, stopped by my neighborhood grocery store, and quickly realized that I wasn't the only person in the store with an ashy cross on my forehead. A smattering of other shoppers had it too. The really interesting thing was the reaction of people who didn't know what it meant. Judging by their alarmed glances, some of the shoppers suspected cultists in their midst. I heard one shopper, a bearded white guy in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sandals, ask a clean-cut black grocery store clerk what the smudged foreheads were all about. Answer: they're from the Catholic church across the street because it's a Catholic holiday.
Well. Ash Wednesday is not exactly a holiday, but a holy day, yes. The ashes come from palm fronds that were carried in festive procession around the church the previous year on Palm Sunday. At one point in the Ash Wednesday liturgy, the priest traces ash on each congregant's forehead in the form of a cross with the words, "Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return." Remember that you will die.
We are stardust, carbon and oxygen and all of the other atoms heavier than hydrogen and helium, atoms forged in giant stars that exploded as supernovas. To scattered atoms and molecules we will return; that's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is what I've been seeing for the past year: a parent with Alzheimer's. The human brain is the most complex thing we know of in the universe. Alzheimer's unravels it. The strands of cognition, perception, judgment, memory, intelligence and reason are normally tightly woven together into a supple fabric of mind that we take for granted. With Alzheimer's the strands pull loose and tangle like torn fabric. Remember that you are made of unthinking matter and to unthinking matter you will return. Remember that it may be a slow, painful, humiliating return, too.
t
In early December of 2006, I got a phone call from my mother's best friend to tell me that my mother was in trouble. The next day I flew from my home in Houston back to Columbus Georgia, where I did most of my growing up and my mother still lives. As soon as I got there it was obvious that Mom was not the person I've always known, sometimes liked and sometimes disliked, and generally been able to predict. She was different, unpredictably and in a way that had to do with cognition. She'd gotten lost driving to a doctor's office that she'd been to many times before. Her cable TV setup wasn't working right because she'd forgotten how to work it. She couldn't keep track of the day of the week. Some of the things she said were repetitive and paranoid. She couldn't think of basic vocabulary words. The window air conditioner was "that machine." It all added up to senile dementia and I didn't know how in the name of Heaven or Hell to cope with it.
Like everybody, I've had a few difficult Christmases: the Christmas in college when I had major depression; the Christmas, when I was eleven years old, that my beloved grandmother died; and probably the Christmas after my parents divorced, though I was very young and don't consciously remember that one. Anyway, for me or anybody else Christmas can be a season of crisis. In that case, it's not the kind of Christmas we Americans love to love—it's not like the birth of healthy child into a happy family in prosperous circumstances. More like the first Christmas: the birth of a problematic child to displaced, isolated people in a cold, uncomfortable and uncertain situation. In the Christian telling of the tale, comfort and joy broke into very unhappy circumstances.
So it was for me in December of 2006. Before then I'd only vaguely heard about care-giving agencies. But in a file where for years I'd been stashing information about aging that I might need to know someday, I discovered a newspaper article I'd clipped from the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. The article was a nice write-up about the local office of a national care-giving agency called Comfort Keepers. So I called them. My call came out of the blue in the middle of a busy day and I was just a random caller. But from the other end of the line, Al Abbot promptly gave me a rundown about the typical progression of Alzheimer's. He knew where I was coming from and he knew the lay of the land in question. His sympathy and knowledge made a huge difference to me that day. It was the first break in the gloom of not knowing what to do for Mom and for myself.
A few days later I called back to ask for a visit from the Comfort Keepers care coordinator. That's the first step taken with a prospective client. I had to return to Houston soon, but the care coordinator, Carla Teagle, managed to make the visit while I was still in Columbus. Compassionate, astute, and adept at conversing with Alzheimer's people and their badly rattled family members, Carla came to my mother's house, where she talked to both of us and suggested one of their caregivers to work with Mom. It's like matchmaking. The care-giver and the client need good chemistry with each other. We set up a once-weekly visit with a caregiver named Mary Ann.
Mary Ann started helping my mother once a week for four hours, usually but not always on Tuesdays. As quickly as that, a huge thorny burden rolled off my shoulders. I'd been wondering how I could possibly orchestrate the many doctor visits my mother needed to rule out treatable conditions that could cause dementia. With Mom unable to drive and most of her elderly friends in the same boat, the logistical problems were more than I could handle from Houston. Mary Ann promptly, kindly and effectively took care of it. Comfort indeed! Mary Ann drove my mother to doctors' appointments and relayed back news of how the appointments went and when new appointments had been scheduled.
In due time, Mom's neurologist determined that her condition was Alzheimer's. He prescribed the drugs Aricept and Namenda. Note to anybody who needs to know: Alzheimer's medications don't cure the disease. With luck, though, they slow the progression of it. They buy you time.
Mary Ann helped Mom get her new prescriptions filled and refilled along with a several more ordinary medications that her primary care physician had her taking. Besides doctor visits and prescription refills, Mary Ann drove Mom around for routine errands. So Mom had a weekly outing, an opportunity to enjoy shopping for groceries for herself and her cat, and a meal away from the house. She also benefited from a reliable companion who could be calm and pleasant with her. Take my word for this: it's very, very hard for an adult child (or spouse) of somebody with Alzheimer's to be their amiable companion. You're stressed out. You remember what your loved one was like and you lose patience with what they are now. When you glimpse what they will become as the disease inexorably progresses, you're scared silly. They, however, still have the basic human needs as everyone else; they need companionship once in a while. Companionship simply means your loved one sharing a few tasks, a laugh or two and a meal with someone who isn't shaken to the core just by being in their company.
Mary Ann was wonderful. Al and Carla were there at the Comfort Keepers office number when I had questions. They saved the year 2007 for me.
2007 was the worst possible year for my life to be potentially derailed by my mother's needs. My first novel came out in July. I experienced the whole enormous emotional roller coaster of reviewing galley proofs, negotiating edits with the copy editor, and finally seeing my mind child birthed. Then I had to promote the book with press releases, book signings, interviews and appearances at science fiction conventions. I also committed to teach two new classes in creative writing through the Rice University School of Continuing Studies. How I could have kept my career afloat and taken care of my mother without Comfort Keepers I can not even imagine. A wise friend of mine commented, "The people in a business like that know they aren't just there to help your mother. They're there to help you too."
My mother was able to remain in her own house for nine more months after she started taking medications for Alzheimer's. She had time to visit with the dire truth and, I think, realize how compromised and unhappy her life was going to be if she continued to live in a house by herself. She couldn't drive. She couldn't go first thing in the morning to walk in the park, as she loved doing for two decades. She could no longer write checks with enough accuracy not to overpay by hundreds of dollars. She couldn't put things in the right places or find them where she'd put them. In the confusion of her frayed brain, she became convinced that a neighbor was regularly breaking into her house—to steal her ratty old broom or to exchange a folded blanket in her hall closet for another, less desirable, blanket.
My Columbus cousins came to the rescue in several little house-related crises, such as Mom forgetting how to operate the window air conditioner or the clothes dryer and the latter actually going kaput. Thanks to Comfort Keepers, with additional thanks to my cousins, modern pharmacology, Meals on Wheels, Mom's friends Mickey and George, and the feline companionship of her cat Jazz, Mom remained at home for a full year after Alzheimer's entered the picture. She managed not to have an injurious accident, or overdose herself on her medications, or misuse the stove or space heater and burn the house down. Meanwhile I had the freedom to take care of my book and the time to plan the next, momentous step for Mom: assisted living.
Note to anyone whose loved one has Alzheimer's: caring for a loved one with Alzheimer's is one of the harshest jobs in the world. Many people are just not cut out for it. I'm not. I turned out to be rather good at logistics, finances, and making solid and compassionate arrangements for my mother. But being her care-giver was completely out of the question. Me trying to care for my mother in Columbus, in Houston, or anywhere between here and the uttermost ends of the Earth, would have been a disaster. If your resources can conceivably stretch to cover it, employ care-givers to take part of your load. And do it before the situation overwhelms you. Care-giving agencies, not to mention assisted living, do look expensive compared to living in a home that one owns. But you're not comparing those alternatives to somebody able to get along in their own home. You're making a comparison to the terrible financial, emotional, and physical costs and risks of caring for a loved one with Alzheimer's. To our society's credit, and to the even greater credit of the fine professionals in the field of care for the sick and disabled elderly, there are alternatives that didn't exist a generation or two ago.
Early on, I visited an assisted living facility in Columbus called the Gardens at Calvary. I loved it at first sight. The locale (beside a wooded stream valley with trees and birds), the architecture (up to date but not objectionably modern, with elder-friendly details and lots of natural light) and the pleasant professionalism of the staff deeply moved me. The place actually struck me as rather like a motel in or near a national park. If you enjoy traveling to marvel at nature, you may have stayed at such a place, and you'll recognize what I mean. A lodging place that's not excessively fancy, but with all the amenities you really need; right near of a remarkable natural destination; staffed by employees who feel lucky to work there; and with people staying there who have much in common and are enjoying themselves. It may be hugely counterintuitive that an assisted living facility struck me that way, but this one did.
One important consideration was that Mom wanted to stay in Columbus. I felt sure that being in Columbus with the birds and the trees and the light and weather she's used to would be good for her, not to mention having friends, nieces and nephews nearby. Also, I admit, I emphatically did not want my mother in Houston with me. In March 2007, Mom visited the Gardens at Calvary. She liked it as much as I had. We even saw a bluebird in a tree in front of the building. The bluebird of happiness, perhaps? Her name went on the waiting list.
Three times last year, Mom's name came up on the waiting list. The first two times I was in the throes of book promotion, including a sequence of four science fiction conventions in three months. My cousins reported that Mom was still getting along fine in her house. Mary Ann and Carla concurred. The third time, just before Thanksgiving, felt like the charm. I took a deep shaky existential breath and put the wheels in motion. Note to anybody who needs to know: the best time for an Alzheimer's person to move is before they lose so much cognition that they can never adapt. Back in March, Mom's neurologist point-blank advised us to look at assisted living and make it happen within a year. And we did.
My Columbus cousins had helped Mom move into her house 30 years ago. In December of 2007, they moved her from her house to assisted living. Mary Ann came for several more weeks to provide continuity and help Mom with odds and ends she needed. In the future, if Mom ever needs one-on-one care for a few days, if, for example, she sprains an ankle or has the flu, I can call on Comfort Keepers again. That's another thing they do, and it can keep an assisted living resident from having to being dispatched to a nursing home to recover from a serious but temporary ailment. By Christmas, Mom was in residing in the Gardens at Calvary.
For the first Christmas in my life, I didn't get a Christmas present from her. That felt sad and deeply unsettling. On the other hand, I got what I wanted for Christmas: Mom comfortable, safe and happy in her new home.
My first impressions were on target. The Gardens at Calvary is a good place. It offers nourishing meals and a full slate of activities for body, mind and soul. Nursing staff give my mother her medications, which eliminates the dangers of over- or under-dosing. There's companionship for her too. The other residents include people with many degrees of functioning and non-functioning bodies and minds. When the time comes—which it will, unless physical health crises trump the brain's unraveling—the Gardens has a Greenhouse. That's a wonderful new concept in Alzheimer's care: having architecture and daily routines that evoke a private home rather than an institution.
The Gardens at Calvary, Greenhouse and all, is even a joyful place, as surprising as that may seem. I felt joy in visiting my mother in her new studio apartment, in her showing me the floors and the sunny back porch and the chapel on New Year's morning, in meeting some of her new friends, and in hearing her look forward to the birds in the springtime. (Joy also happens to be the apt name of the indefatigable activities director!)
Well-designed surroundings, wholesome daily routines, and humane, effective care are what all assisted living facilities aspire to, and from what I can tell, a fair number of them succeed. What's good, right, and joyful about the Gardens at Calvary goes even deeper. It's a ministry of Calvary Baptist Church. The staff of the Gardens includes a chaplain. What an excellent idea! The residents are highly likely to experience illnesses and the deaths of friends and relatives while their own death is not too far off. The residents' adult children experience the emotional turmoil of having a parent in advanced age with illness, debilitation and/or Alzheimer's. An assisted living facility is on a par with a battlefield or hospital as the natural habitat of a chaplain.
And then there's that first impression I had. The counterintuitive impression of a national park motel: not luxurious but with all the amenities you really need, very near a remarkable natural destination, with staff who feel lucky to work there, and people staying there who may not be staying for a really long time, but who have much in common and are enjoying themselves. That impression has stayed through the visits I made since the first. Yes, there's the whole human spectrum of health and sickness, good days and bad days, various moods and motives. And yet: this assisted living community truly does seem to be near—and aware of being near—a remarkable natural destination, like a Grand Canyon, not made of rock and water, but rather in the landscape of the spirit. The natural, grand, nearby destination is breathtakingly obvious. It's death—the kind of death that ends a long journey through life and enters the nearer presence of God.
t
After Mom moved to assisted living, I had to get her settled, empty her house, give away/sell/throw away/gift away innumerable belongings loaded with memories, and prepare to sell the house. There were misplaced bills to uncover and missing documents to look for. I had to find a home for Jazz the cat. I had to figure out what to do the childhood mementoes of mine and the family furniture that remained at her home. And clarify and arrange her finances to pay for her assisted living. And on and on. I had tremendous help from my Columbus cousins. Very happily for me, they are in the estate sale business. They are pros at handling all of this stuff! It wasn't easy, but the house got cleaned up, the junk thrown out, the valuable possessions sorted out. I did all of this in a blaze of emotion and energy, a physical and emotional tour de force from which I'm still feeling the aftereffects.
It felt quite different from clearing a house when someone had suddenly died or is suffering in a hospital or nursing home. My mother was in her new place and happy. I had work to do, but it wasn't agonizing. It was, however, intense. Part of the work I had to do was salvaging memories. Not for my mother, but for me. My mother has never been good at remembering things. Not the major milestones in my life, much less things important to me for other various reasons; not vacations and trips we took together, much less anything I ever did on my own. Or if she ever remembered she was never able articulate it. In that regard, I've been on my own for a long time. One of the areas of failed memory pertained to my maternal grandmother. She helped raise me for seven years, between my parents' divorce and her own death. She loved me—I know that—but I've always had a mystifyingly hard time remembering her. That may have to do with the divorce, which was botched and went even worse for me than it had to. If your earliest experiences of relationship and loss go badly wrong, subsequent ones are very likely to follow suit.
In cleaning my mother's house I found myself recalling my grandmother. There were things of hers still in the house. It was easier to remember her ways and habits in that house than elsewhere else, and for the first time ever, my mother was not around. I could remember in solitude. It helped that the Columbus cousins reminisced about our grandmother. I soon realized that with her having been the industrious woman she was, there was no better way to remember her—almost channel her—than by rolling up my sleeves and doing hard work that needed doing for the sake of love.
Just before Epiphany, my uncle died. The oldest sibling of Mom's, and the only remaining one, he was very elderly and in poor health, so his death came as no surprise. It was nonetheless a shock. Fortunately I was still Columbus. I broke the news to Mom in person the day we cousins got the word. On the way into the Gardens at Calvary, I mentioned it to the people in the front office, just in case they wondered about why she was suddenly withdrawn or forlorn.
Chaplain Vern materialized almost immediately. He talked with Mom about her brother, and then was she able first to cry and then to reminisce about him. Chaplain Vern is good at what he does, and what he does is good.
I drove Mom to the funeral in Troy, Alabama. This was probably the last trip my mother will ever make. It was a surprisingly good one for her. All the way over she recognized favorite landmarks—the Alabam two-lane-road scenery, downtown Union Springs, North Three Notch Road in Troy. At the funeral home, we met up with a lot of members of the extended family, including people I hadn't seen in decades. They showed a lot of love for my mother. The graveside service took place in the cemetery where my grandmother and many other family members are buried. All in all it was far more a healing occasion than a hurting one.
Afterward, we visited another of my cousins at his home outside of Troy. He lives in the onetime farm house that my mother and another uncle helped build for my grandmother in the 1940's. He's remodeled it but, to my great joy, in doing so he respected the original integrity of it. It was where I lived with my grandmother and my mother right after the divorce; it's the very first home I can consciously remember living in. A good feeling has always suffused my memory of it. That came of my grandmother, I think. She was a deeply loving, greatly generous, incredibly hardworking woman. A southern lady and a school teacher in her younger days, she loved playing the piano. She played sacred and secular music, Broadway tunes and church hymns until arthritis finally afflicted her fingers to much for her to play the piano any more.
The last thing I did at my mother's house in Columbus was something I haven't done in many, many years: play a few notes on my grandmother's piano, in my grandmother's memory. My cousins and I think we've found a good home for the piano. If not, we'll keep looking. We want it to make music and make people happy again.
t
For obvious reasons, Epiphany makes me think about stars. Not ordinary main-sequence stars, but stars that suddenly brighten and blaze— novas or supernovas. This particular year, all the way through Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, I was in a blaze of physical and emotional energy. After it was done—the assisted living wheels set in motion, finances lined up, the move to assisted living orchestrated, house cleaned, stuff given away, mementoes stored at my cousin's place, Mom settled in, cat transferred to a good home, uncle buried, Grandmother channeled, house in Columbus said goodbye too, house in Troy said hello to, and a thousand other problems and opportunities, most of them highly emotionally charged—I finally returned home to Houston. For the whole three weeks since then, I've felt like a pile of burned-out ashes.
How fitting, considering what day it is as I write this: Ash Wednesday.
One of the best things about traditional, liturgical Christianity is that parts of the church year consist of holy days that are not happy holidays. There are four weeks of Advent, the season of waiting and watching in darkness, even while the secular world prematurely revels in Christmas. There are forty days of Lent, and though stores trot pastel Easter-related merchandise, in traditional churches, it's most emphatically not Easter until after Lent. Also, every Friday in the church calendar echoes the Friday called Good.
There's something utterly true about Advent and Lent, Good Friday and Ash Wednesday. Some days are dark. Some seasons are times of desolation. Someday your life will end. And yet: ashes signify not only desolation but also renewal, not only sorrow but also the hope of joy, not only death, but also transformation.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Aquaman v. the Internet
Boing Boing and Beyond the Beyond are both reporting the story of the mysterious severance of four undersea telecom cables carrying Internet and voice traffic. Barring photographic evidence that the Sub-Mariner is cranky again, I am inclined to look to sabotage by other friends of Poseidon.
As John Jeremiah Sullivan brilliantly outlines in the February issue of GQ, our former friends in the animal kingdom have had enough and are starting to fight back in earnest. Not only cutting off our routers. As recapped in the Washington Post (unfortunately, GQ does not have the article available online):
'The animals are coming after us and they're out for blood!
'The birds of the air and the beasts of the field are sick and tired of being hunted, caged, neutered, beaten and eaten. They're mad as hell and they've begun to fight back. It's not just grizzlies and sharks who are ripping people to shreds these days. Elephants, stingrays, dolphins, beavers, chimps, even chickens and hermit crabs are on the attack!
'The whole horrific story is laid out in "Violence of the Lambs," John Jeremiah Sullivan's article in the February issue of GQ magazine about "the coming battle between man and beast."
'Sullivan interviewed Marcus Livengood, a zoologist who blows the whistle on the alarming worldwide increase in animals attacking humans: In India, leopards invaded Mumbai, killing 22 people! In Albania, a pack of 200 wild dogs rampaged through the town of Mamurras, attacking humans! In Sonoma County, Calif., chickens turned on local children! In North Carolina, hermit crabs besieged a jogger on a beachside boardwalk!
'The animals are fighting back against human encroachment, says Livengood: "We are a threat to the animals. They're just doing what nature designed them to do." '
The best thing about this story: it boldly mixes fact and fiction, in a manner only revealed at the end. Bold genius in this reader's view, managing to construct a beautiful if rickety three-legged stool straddling Nova, Fortean Times, and Leonard Nimoy's In Search Of. Check it out.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Lansdale, Mayhar headline Nebula Awards
AUSTIN, Texas -- Home-grown Texas authors Joe R. Lansdale and Ardath Mayhar have been named Toastmaster and Author Emeritus, respecitvely, by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America for the 2008 Nebula Awards® Weekend April 25-27 in Austin, Texas.
The event will take place at the Omni Austin Hotel Downtown. The event will be hosted by the Austin Literary Arts Maintenance Organization (ALAMO), with the assistance of SFWA members Elizabeth Moon, John Moore and Lee Martindale.
Joe R. Lansdale of Nacogdoches, Texas, is widely regarded as one of the most thoroughly Texan authors writing today. The author and editor of more than two dozen novels, short story collections and anthologies, he has won a variety of awards in multiple fields including the Edgar award for The Bottoms, the Bram Stoker Award six times and the British Fantasy Award. In 2007 he was named Grandmaster by the World Horror Convention. He has also written westerns, comics, dark suspense, humorous pieces and gonzo fiction that can only be described as “Lansdale-esque.” In addition to his writing, Lansdale is the founder and grandmaster of the martial arts system Shen Chuan and an inductee of the International Martial Arts Hall of Fame. His website can be found at www.joerlansdale.com.
Ardath Mayhar of Nacogdoches, Texas, is widely known for her sweet, grandmotherly appearance which belies a quick wit and fast tongue. The author of 36 novels along with numerous short stories and poems, her publishing career began in 1979 with the philosophical fantasy How the Gods Wove in Kyrannon, and in 1982 she published Golden Dream: A Fuzzy Odyssey, a sequel to H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy. From there she published a wide variety of works including science fiction (The World Ends in Hickory Hollow), fantasy (Exile on Vlahil), westerns (under the pseudonym Frank Cannon), a mountain man series (under the pseudonym John Kildeer), horror (The Wall), folklore (Slewfoot Sally and the Flying Mule) and contemporary fiction (Medicine Walk). She also served on the Writers Digest instructional staff, passing her knowledge and critical eye on to younger writers. Her website can be found at www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/7172/ardath.html.
The Nebula Awards® are voted on, and presented by, active members of SFWA. Lloyd Biggle, Jr., the first SFWA secretary-treasurer, originally proposed in 1965 that the organization publish an annual anthology of the best stories of the year. This notion, according to Damon Knight in his introduction to Nebula Award Stories: 1965 (Doubleday, 1966) “rapidly grew into an annual ballot of SFWA’s members to choose the best stories, and an annual awards banquet.”
Since 1965, the Nebula Awards have been given each year for the best novel, novella, novelette, and short story eligible for that year’s award. An anthology including the winning pieces of short fiction and several runners-up is also published every year. The Nebula Awards® banquet, which takes place each spring, is attended by many writers and editors and is preceded by meetings and panel discussions.
About SFWA
Founded in 1965 by the late Damon Knight, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America brings together the most successful and daring writers of speculative fiction throughout the world.
Since its inception, SFWA® has grown in numbers and influence until it is now widely recognized as one of the most effective non-profit writers' organizations in existence, boasting a membership of approximately 1,500 science fiction and fantasy writers as well as artists, editors and allied professionals. Each year the organization presents the prestigious Nebula Awards® for the year’s best literary and dramatic works of speculative fiction.
Monday, February 4, 2008
MEMORY: 4
The otherwhereian lifted two legheads to strike, not bothering to turn itself around. Just my luckings, Parric thought as he thrashed to right himself, omnidirectional threatenings. I wondering where its brains is keeping?
The mouths opened wide. The rings of teeth gnashing together.
The English cannon fired. Grapeshot. Point-blank range.
The otherwhereian felt that.
It charged the new threat. Ragged flaps of flesh dangled from three of the legheads, and thick yellow blood oozed from shrapnel wounds on its body. It was upon the gun crews in an instant, before the second rank of cannon could be brought to bear.
Parric righted himself, swatting away three over-enthusiastic English footmen charging him with fixed bayonets. He took a quick inventory of himself. Several small but bloody cuts and two, maybe three, broken ribs. Parric couldn't remember the last time he'd suffered broken bones. His left forewing was worse off. It hurt too much for him to tell if it was dislocated or something more serious.
Parric glanced back at the otherwhereian. The English artillery had been a welcome distraction, but they were suffering dearly now. The otherwhereian's attention would turn back to Parric at any moment.
Cringing from the pain, Parric pulled in the injured left forewing and held it fast with his right. Then he took off.
Parric flew slower using only one pair of wings, but he could manage. He knew right where to go this time, as well. The claymore lay right where he remembered, splattered with muck and blood but undamaged. Parric picked it up and gave it a cursory shake--just enough to get the worst of the filth off of it--then slid it into the sheath fastened across his back.
A large cannon tumbled through the air overhead, crushing a rank of footmen as it crashed to the ground. The otherwhereian was back again.
Parric launched himself into the air, not giving the legheads a chance to strike. The otherwhereian lumbered after him with staggering steps, no longer so spry as earlier.
Parric once again flicked his antennae about, searching for a Nexial gap. He'd recovered the sword. Time to going.
He sensed one to the right. He veered toward it, crafting a Wedging to open it enough to slip through--
The otherwhereian slammed it closed.
Parric pulled up, stunned.
Obviously, the otherwhereian could open Nexial gaps. He'd seen it arrive through one, after all.
But block them?
Parric flicked his antennae, searching for another Nexial gap. And there one was, high overhead, above even the smoke of battle. Up Parric flew, his wings a furious blur as he strained to reach the gap. Shots whistled past him as confused musketmen tried to draw a bead on Parric through flighting breaks in the smoke. Parric ignored them. The gap was nearly within reach. His antennae stretched toward it as he crafted a Wedging--
And the otherwhereian slammed it shut.
"Kraaak!" Parric screamed, his antennae going into spasms. He glared down at the otherwhereian, murder in his heart.
It was following him.
The otherwhereian wasn't flying. It couldn't--it had no wings. But it followed all the same. The eight footheads extended in turn and bit into the Cosm itself, using the extra-spatial dimensions as scaffolding to clamber after Parric.
"I'm having enough of this," Parric said. "If you're wanting surprisings, I'm giving you surprisings."
Parric thrust his Wedging into the Nexial gap. He pushed forward as hard as his wings could carry him. The otherwhereian's block held. Parric crafted another Wedging. And another. And another.
The space around Parric began twisting, distorting. Far below, the smoke and fire, the mud and the corpses took on a reddish hue, as did the brooding gray rain clouds above. The rain fell at Parric as blue streaks, weaving around him at the last moment before turning crimson for the rest of their journey earthward. The chaotic din of battle receded into the distance.
The otherwhereian fought its way closer, nearly indigo as it heaved itself along the tortured, spasming reality.
Parric crafted another Wedging, then abruptly flattened his antennae and folded his wings tight against his body. "Breakthroughing."
The otherwhereian's block shattered.
The Nexial gap ripped asunder.
The rending was felt more than heard, a resonant wrongness that lodged deep in the bones and refused to leave. Void replaced the overcast, brooding sky. A thousand fissured radiated outward as the earth and sky crumbled away, sucked through the void into the maelstrom beyond.
Parric felt the convulsions of the wounded Cosm, shielded himself from them as best he could. He fought back the rising guilt. He'd had no choice. It wasn't as if he'd punched through solid reality. A gap had already existed there, albeit a small one. The Cosm would heal. Eventually.
Through the expanding fissures Parric plunged, into the Nexus of All Realities. His breath spilled from his lungs into the throbbing inferno. A howling wind more debris than air buffeted him, and Parric spread his wings again to stabilize himself. In the center of the maelstrom spun the pulsing, hellish heart of the Nexus, the physical manifestation of infinite universes clashing against each other at this one, singular point beyond any reality. The disparate sensations of infinity and oppressive claustrophobia were immediate and overwhelming.
The otherwhereian tumbled past him, clawing frantically at dissolving shreds of reality. Even though it could move from Cosm to Cosm at will, it apparently didn't do so well when such moves were involuntary.
Just to be on the safe side, Parric reached out and crafted a Turning around a rogue boulder the size of a small town tumbling through the Nexus. It was ancient--the remnant of some long-ago Cosm rupture--and covered with decompositional frothing. The Turning only needed to nudge it a little to change its course. The boulder slammed into the tiny, flailing otherwhereian and then both were gone, lost in the blur of the Nexus. With luck, the decomposition might even take root in the beast and dispose of it once and for all.
Satisfied the otherwhereian posed no more immediate threat, Parric flicked his wings to put more distance between himself and the rupture. Already dozens of screaming soldiers were falling through the gap as it widened to consume both armies. Smoke and rain, half a dozen horses, the odd tree and lots of dirt and sod tumbled through as well.
Parric didn't want to be around when bedrock started spewing through the hole. And if the rupture grew deep enough to reach magma...
No matter. Parric was never returning to that Cosm again.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
When Our Beds are Burning...
The British Woolworths chain have now withdrawn the bed, intended for 6 year old girls, from sale - but reportedly, no-one on their staff, including their website design team, had heard of Nabokov's novel, either of the film adaptationss, or any other use of the term until it was pointed out by a justifiably angry mother. That's not as disturbing as the possibility that someone deliberately intended it as a sick joke, but it's still decidedly sad - particularly as the store also sells books (though not that book) and DVDs, including the DVDs of both movies!
Friday, February 1, 2008
How to write your own canon
Over the holidays I picked up this nice little pamphlet from the sparkling next gen intellectual Teen Titans at n+1 magazine:
"What We Should Have Known" (n+1 Research Pamphlet Series #2)
...which consists of the transcripts of two stimulating (if sometimes ridiculously hand-wringing) round table discussions among various formal and informal members of the editorial board of the magazine regarding the important reading material they, upon reflection as to their own undergraduate experiences, think contemporary college students ought to read and won't otherwise be exposed to through a mainstream university education. Even if, as appears to have been the case with most of the n+1 crowd, they are fortunate enough to study philosophy or literature at Columbia or Harvard.
The transcripts are accompanied by appendixes including all the great books referenced within, and lists by each contributor of 8-12 "Books That Changed My Life." It's pretty good stuff. For example, this most worthy selection from the impressive Benjamin Kunkel:
1. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951)
2. Donald Barthelme, 40 Stories (1987)
3. George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871)
4. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957)
5. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (1962); The Age of Capital (1975); The Age of Empire (1987)
6. Javier Marias, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (1994)
7. James Salter, Light Years (1975)
8. W.B. Yeats, Collected Poems (1889-1939)
Nice! (If you know an earnest, intellectually curious 18-year-old, n+1 will send them the pamphlet for free.)
As noble as their groping around to discover a new 21st century canon is, it caused me to reflect that the real way to redefine the Canon is for each person to invent their own: a collection of books, great and not so-, that define their own intellectual being. What greater declaration of identity could any reader have?
So, reading this on the plane home from a business trip, I scratched out my own stab at such a list. I have supplemented the n+1 approach by listing the books in the order I actually read them, and the age at which I read them. Some of this is definitely not on the reading list at the Columbia philosophy department, whether the Frankfurt School faction or the postructuralists.
1. Philip Jose Farmer, Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973) (age 12)
2. Robert E. Howard, Conan of Cimmeria (1969) (age 12)
3. Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961) (age 17); The Last Gentleman (1966) (age 21)
4. Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (1975) (age 15; reread age 30)
5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) (age 19)
6. Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845) (age 19); Das Kapital (1867-) (age 20).
7. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975) (age 19); Madness and Civilization (1961) (age 20)
8. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904) (age 20)
9. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) (age 20)
10. William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984) (age 21)
11. J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) (age 22)
12. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (1958) (age 28)
13. Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net (1988) (age 30)
(I cheated and added a thirteenth early adulthood book.)
What did I miss?
The first few volumes of Soldier of Fortune magazine, alas, while a seminal part of my adolescence, does not qualify as an actual book. I have to say, this exercise was a somewhat illuminating bit of self-explanation regarding the formation of my own adult identity. You should try it!
So, what were your books? Fellow NFOTF bloggers? Other peers?
P.S. -- For more about the guys at n+1, check out this wonderful NYT Magazine piece from 2005 regarding them and their peers at The Believer.
