Balls and Walnuts
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Category Archives: Mishpucha (mi familia)
Jake gets reflexologized
I’m back. For those of you who popped over here yesterday and blurted “WTF?” surprising family and colleagues alike, my apologies. Every now and then, I like to experiment to see what sorts of manipulations will bump my traffic. Pandering to Technorati yesterday doubled my daily traffic. The real question, of course, is whether any of those drive-bys will stay for the picnic or scoot on to the next blog.
Yesterday, I took Jake to a reflexologist. We’ve tried damn near everything else for his headaches. Both of my employees talked it up quite a bit, so I thought, what the hell? It can’t hurt, right? Matter of fact, the foot rub is my favorite part of a massage. What could be better than a one-hour foot rub?
Checking out the fruit
This is it, our 21st anniversary. After today, you won’t have to listen to another maudlin rant for, oh, another 360 days or so.
Where we left it: quite ignoring The Rules*, I’d chosen something threatening for our first date — dinner at my apartment the following Saturday night.
I felt pretty good about this date. Karen, I found out much later, was far more cautious. “I still needed to check out the fruit,” she said. I didn’t need to check. First date, courting, the sex thing, meet-her-parents, meet-MY-parents: technicalities. This relationship was inevitable.
That Saturday, I blew off studying and spent the whole day washing clothes, grocery shopping, and cooking. My place northwest of the Berkeley campus put me within three blocks of a bakery, three grocery stores, a produce market, a wine shop, a cheese shop, and a fish market. Only the best for this meal.
The menu: salad, sourdough bread, seafood divan, a Dutcher Creek Fume Blanc 1978, and chocolate mousse for dessert. I didn’t finish cooking until 8:30. My roommates were in and out; Roger came by to haze Karen mercilessly. Having just had his heart ripped out by a feminist (who, in retrospect, was a far nicer person than Roger), he had to make sure I wasn’t falling into the same trap. Karen, I’m sure, will recall that I took part in this hazing ritual (which involved the infamous fish joke) but she’s just plain WRONG. Roger did it. Roger.
A bit later that evening, my other roommate Russ came by to snag two helpings of chocolate mousse and do the dishes. Russ was always doing the dishes whether he’d dirtied them or not, because he figured Roger and I were too ignorant to use hot soap and water. And, you know, it bothered him.
Eventually, they all left us alone, and Karen and I spent the rest of the evening up in my room not having sex. We talked until 2AM. Actually, I think I talked until 2AM. I violated one of the most important Guy Rules, violated it the way an Atkins failure violates a Krispy Kreme.
Don’t tell her jack about yourself, because whatever she imagines about you is far superior to the Truth.
If I failed to reveal all my secrets that night, I made up for it in our many late-night talks in the coming weeks. Who knows; maybe it was the right thing to do. She was checking out the fruit, after all, and I’d given her plenty to squeeze and sniff.
I walked her home. At the door, we kissed a few times, and I said, “Well, I think we’re pretty compatible. What do you think?” She agreed.
In the boy-meets-girl story, you don’t expect smooth sailing. You’d be damned bored if Adam Sandler didn’t lose Drew Barrymore at least once before the end of the movie. You mean Karen didn’t have cold feet, not even once? You mean neither of you went running back to your ex for one last fling, to the horror of the other, followed by a tearful reunion and the confession, I never realized until now how much you meant to me? Nope. Sorry. This relationship was like going down a slide on waxpaper.
Three nights later, I was trying to figure out how to invite myself over to Karen’s apartment (for some reason, I’d lost the nerve to just drop in like I used to) when Karen showed up with Kira. They hijacked me. Karen, it transpired, still wanted to check the fruit, and Kira was along as an independent grocery inspector. I grabbed my books, intending to study later (har-har), and the three of us took a lunatic trip through Co-Op. Not long after, Karen and I ended up in her room.
She put Ravel’s Bolero on the stereo and we both thought of Allegro non troppo before we thought of Blake Edward’s 10. One thing led to another, although it didn’t lead to much more than — hey kids! Remember this word? Necking. And, once again, we spent a hell of a long time talking.
Two weeks of talkin’ and neckin’ later, we finally got around to checking out each other’s fruit for realsies. Karen asked me afterwards, “So. Feeling the thrill of conquest?”
“I thought it was all pretty mutual –”
“Conquest on both sides?”
“I think it was all decided two weeks ago,” I said. “That’s when the ‘conquest’ was, if there ever was one.” And she agreed.
Hey, we were a couple of over-educated science geeks who thought we could control everything with our brains. To some extent we were right. We had some stressful months ahead of us — Berkeley College of Chemistry was never what you’d call easy, and the elephant in the room was the question, Where will Doug be nine months from now? I hadn’t been accepted to med school yet (hadn’t even interviewed), and Karen still had a year left at Berkeley. But Fate gave us a cakewalk. Stanford accepted me into their medical school. One year later, they accepted Karen into their graduate program in Chemical Physics. In our year apart, we were never more than 60 miles away from one another; that’s a long distance relationship even we could manage.
Yeah, Fate gave us a cakewalk, at least until She decided to take a fat crap on Karen’s head in late ’83. Our first seven years of marriage were pretty rough, thanks to Karen’s multiple sclerosis. But the fact we’ve made it to 21 years ought to tell you something.
I love you, Karen. Glad you liked the fruit.
D.
*The as-yet-unpublished Guy Rules. More on this some other day.
Wherein I am rogered by a cactus
. . . for two-and-one-half hours, no less. Youch.
Here’s the deal. My son still suffers from daily headaches. Propranolol and ibuprofen are helping some, but he’s miserable a lot of the time. Someone (okay, it was me) had the bright idea of having him see a psychologist who specializes in headache. Karen and I hoped he might teach Jake some useful techniques for managing pain — visualization exercises, meditation, etc. No success as of yet.
Karen and I both think his headaches are organic, not psychological, but if you show a hammer a nail, don’t expect a Hello Kitty purse. At some point, something was said by someone (me again) which made Jake a bit weepy. The psychologist felt this was Significant and asked him, “What are you thinking right now? What’s on your mind?”
After fifteen minutes of Jake’s silence, I asked the doc, “Can any 9-year-old answer that question?” He had me tripping through Flashback City. When I was thirteen, a psychologist asked me that same thing. Thirteen. Four years older than Jake. I remember looking inside, trying to find an answer, and finding instead:
(A) a wall of white static
(B) a radio that wouldn’t stop playing — oh, back then, let me see, I wasn’t particularly cool; I’ll bet it was Yellow Brick Road — something that passed for music.
(C) sheer terror that all I could find inside me was (A) and (B)
(By the way: this was in ’74, well before Roger Waters did his rock opera schtick, so my wall was not a tired metaphor. )
Point — points — being:
(A) I couldn’t understand how Jake could answer a question like that, and
(B) this line of questioning was making me squirm.
See, I’ve gotten used to being empty inside. I realize it’s a superficial sort of emptiness, and I’m okay with that. I mean, there has to be some degree of depth in there somewhere, otherwise where does the fiction come from? Or am I merely channeling someone who has an inner life?
Jake couldn’t answer the question any better than I could thirty years ago. It eventually emerged (the passive voice was created for situations like this) that he is upset by the way someone raises his voice too often (two guesses who), and Would Like It To Stop.
Lest you think I’m a child-abusing ogre, I grew up in a household where the decibel level caused permanent noise-induced hearing loss after twenty minutes. Jake may hear a yell, but all I hear is a warm-up to a yell. Not even that. A yell isn’t a yell unless the neighbors three doors down know your business. The pets should run and hide. Next day in school, people should stare at you and whisper.
Aw, don’t mind me. I’m simply adjusting to the idea that it’s all my fault. And here I thought that our mothers were always to blame.
D.
Smorgasbord
My friend Stan, bless his heart, wanted to find me a girlfriend. Guess he’d finally gotten fed up with my two-year-long depression following my breakup with GF v1.0. A week or two before winter break, he hosted a dinner party and invited me, Karen, Suzie, and their roommate Kira.
At this point in history, Karen had broken up with BF v1.0, landing her in fresh rebound territory. Stan figured this put her off limits, which left Suzie and Kira, but Kira could serve High Tea on my head (she’s that tall), so that left Suzie.
We played monopoly and poker after dinner. I glistened like a coked-up Robin Williams and Karen was a whip-crack herself, witty and intelligent. Suzie was Suzie (cute and bubbly) and Kira was funny as hell, but Karen had most of my interest. In my anemic language of the time — what I told Stan, and soon after, what I told Karen — I thought she and I were on the same wavelength. That we were psychic twins. Amazing thing is, this didn’t scare her off.
I’ll skip most of winter break. I had a disastrous reunion with GF v1.0. You’d think after two years I could manage a let’s-be-friends scene, which was all I wanted*, but I didn’t give sufficient credit to my capacity for sheer unmitigated assholishness.
Winter quarter: Karen and I had one class together, Physical Chemistry Lab. She sat with Kira (we were all Chemistry or Chemical Engineering majors), I sat by myself. We had a senile instructor, Professor O’Konski, who provided endless jeering entertainment. Once, for example, he drew a stick figure of two-legged creatures and four-legged creatures (I think this was meant to demonstrate some subtle point regarding reaction kinetics) and said, “Here are the cowboys, riding on their cows.” I’m not kidding.
I’d have had more stories from that man, save for the fact my attention was riveted not on him but on Karen. Specifically, on trying to work up the nerve to ask her out. My tongue would not work. I had no trouble calling her on the phone, nor had I any qualms about dropping in at her apartment unannounced. I found ways of getting us together, but not in a manner that would be confused with a date. No, when it came to asking her out, I was verklempt**.
At the beginning of class one day, I passed her a note:
“This is a gimpish way to go about it but what the hell. Would you want to go out with me?”
I’d hoped she would pass the note back with a “Sure!” but no such luck. She made me wait until after class. Then she cornered me in lab, with Kira standing over her shoulder as bouncer-on-call.
“Are you going to explain this note to me?” she said. “What’s a gimpish thing to do?”
I hooked a couple of fingers around her arm and dragged her away from Kira.
“Will you go out with me?” I half-whispered.
“Elaborate!”
“Huh?”
“When? What? Where?”
But I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I mean, jeez, did I have to have everything planned? So I invited her over for dinner the following Saturday night. I gave her my address. As she walked back to her lab station, she called after me: “Jeez, some people are shy.”
Friday night, Kira and Stan walked over to my apartment in the rain. “Kira wants to see your apartment,” Stan said, but I think actually Kira wanted to check me out a bit closer. She borrowed a few books from my bookshelf, undoubtedly a ruse to see which books I had on my shelf. Fortunately, my 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, and Autopsy, Volume 3 were safely tucked away. And, fortunately, the half-naked Billy Idol poster belonged to my roommate Russ, not me.
Following a detour to Mama’s BBQ for Stan, the three of us returned to Kira’s apartment. Karen was there. We all played cards until 1 AM. That evening, the feeling returned — what I called kismet yesterday. A sense of inevitability.
On Sex and the City, the women hump their beaus like brain-lesioned rabbits and date for months before the subject of marriage ever comes up. Yet here I was, thinking about the future, the far future, and we hadn’t even dated yet. Sure, Sex and the City is a 21st century phenom, while all this stuff with Karen, that was in the OLD days — the 80s! Did people even have sex back then?
D.
*And isn’t that dishonest as hell.
**Fake American Yiddish, courtesy of SNL: overcome with emotion.
Some people have decided to cast their BlogHop votes according to their honest opinion. This misguided policy has shunted Shatter off the first page of their ‘Best’ list. Take a look at that list and ask yourself: does Whurdsderodan really deserve such status? Or Coffee Achiever? Or Much Ado About Me? It’s up to you, my non-voting lurkers, to boot yours truly back into the stratosphere. CLICK ON THE DARK GREEN SMILEY FACE (just check out the right-hand margin . . . scroll up a bit . . . there.) And, while you’re at it, hop on over to Bare Rump’s Diary and do the same for her. You wouldn’t believe how many arachnophobes are bringin’ the old girl down.
21st Anniversary: T minus 3 days
Karen and I met during my last year at Berkeley. I had recently changed my mind about my future. All of those pre-meds I had despised for the last three years — well, I still despised them, but I decided maybe they knew something I didn’t know. Mind you, I had zero interest in patient care, but that (my counselor told me) wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. There was this new creature, see. All the rage at places like Hahvahd or Stanford. They called ’em MD-PhDs. I’d get to live in a lab like a PhD (something I wanted at the time) but I’d get paid like an MD, and NIH would rain grants down upon me, a veritable golden shower . . .
Anyway, this change in direction meant I had to take a hard look at my appearance on paper. The one thing I lacked was research experience. And so, in Fall Quarter of my senior year, I cast around looking for a lab, and soon found myself with Professor Sung-Hou Kim.
I was years-young and world-stupid enough to get deliriously excited over the prospect of twenty hours work per week with no pay, and in that mood I first laid eyes on Karen. I left Melvin Calvin Lab and skipped over to Hildebrand Library. (I did a lot of skipping in those days, skipping and moping. A sure target for the Moonies.) I had to tell someone of my stunning good fortune. I ran over to a table where my friend Stan sat with two girls I didn’t recognize. I began to effuse, but Stan would have none of it.
“What?” I said. “Are you still mad at me?”
He was mad about something, and it was probably me. He’d dropped in on me at my apartment earlier that week, unexpected, and I hadn’t been too welcoming.
“Should I be mad at him?” he asked Karen and Suzie. They both kept quiet. You couldn’t really answer a question like that.
Later, he told me that Karen and Suzie were roommates, and I could take my pick. Later still, he found out that Karen had a boyfriend and retracted his offer. (Stan was like that back then. Different.)
This bummed me out. He’d hyped her to me — told me how smart she was, how she took math classes for fun. (Karen denies this. She says all of those math classes had a purpose.) It didn’t take much hype to keep me interested.
It wasn’t love at first sight. It wasn’t even lust at first sight. No, what I felt was far more ominous.
Kismet.
D.
Harris Beach
I had a productive morning. Finished a 1300+ word scene (tough one, too), finished the week’s laundry, drank two cups of coffee. Aaaah.
Also cool: we increased Jake’s dose of propranolol last night and today he felt better. Yippee! He felt well enough that we drove up to Oregon and spent several hours at Harris Beach State Park. Currently in bloom: foxglove, daisies, salmonberry, milkweed. Present year round: pillow moss, horsetail, poison oak. We had a clear blue sky, temp in the high seventies, and a stiff wind.
Nothing of note in the tidepools except hermit crabs, and regular crabs of the I-don’t-need-no-steenking-shell ilk. On the beach, we found lots of desiccated sailors by the sea. Here’s a photo I pilfered from the web:
They’re Cnidarians — related to the man of war, medusae, and jellyfish. There: you’ve met your cool critter of the day. Here’s another link for Velella.
With all the wind and sand, I pretended to be T. E. Lawrence while Jake spent a couple hours building dams and destroying them. When it came time for DBE (deep beach extraction), I steeled myself for the inevitable five-hours-per-mile departure, what with Jake stopping for every hermit crab, every odd rock, and — especially — every running stream of water (more dams, more destruction). My son the hydraulic engineer.
We stopped off at the pet store and bought two land hermit crabs. I’ll get a photo or two up sometime soon. Cute devils. Land hermit crabs are known to swap shells rather promiscuously, all for fun.
We also made it to the library today. I picked up Michael Swanwick’s Jack Faust and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. I was tickled to see that they have John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War on the shelf, and shocked to see Cintra Wilson’s Colors Insulting to Nature. And here I thought I was so cool, probably the only person in Del Norte or Curry County who knew of Cintra Wilson. If you’re unfamiliar with her work, Cintra is a razor-sharp humorist — I prefer that to the stuffy ‘social commentarist’ — best known for her articles in Salon. I think she’s gorgeous (check out her gallery), but her home page is way, way over the top. Poor kitty!
D.
Time travel convention a failure? Not for the reasons you think!
In a recent news bit, the journal Science reported on the apparent flop of the May 7 MIT time travel convention (Times up on Time Travel, Science 20 May 2005). Although Dorothy (of Wizard of Oz fame), Bill, and Ted were present, the travelers themselves failed to materialize.
Theoretical physicists Alan Guth and Ed Farhi were on hand as pallbearers to speed time travel to its grave. Guth lectured that wormhole-mediated time travel could only occur at the quantum level, and cosmic strings (the other contender) “could take half the energy of the universe to create”.
I love how these bigheads are so quick to dismiss the endless scope of the future: as if technology 100 years from now will only be a refinement of present-day technology, and theoretical frameworks will only be tweaks on the mess we have today. Folks have ignored the most obvious reasons for the conference’s failure.
Curious? You’ll have to sit through a story, first.
As a twelve-year-old, I decided it takes humans two or three years to forget pain. Hence the usual spread between siblings, and hence the fact that our summer Voyages of the Damned happened at the same interval. My parents, Bostonians transplanted to California, regularly schlepped us across country to visit our cousins, great aunts, great uncles, and my Dad’s mom.
Throughout the 60s, my Dad dreamed of buying a motor home so we could make the trek with all the comforts of home. In 1974, he made it happen: he bought a great big green-and-white 25-foot Harvest. He taught math* at Roosevelt High School in East L.A., so when school wrapped up in June, we were on the road the very next day.
We made it as far as Clinton, Oklahoma, before the beast broke down (for the first time). For the next two weeks, we holed up in a motel while the Harvest sat in someone’s shop, waiting for parts. I’m not sure what my parents did to preserve their sanity (deep irony there, by the way), but all my brother Randy and I could do was hang out by the pool, play cards, and watch TV. Not much else to do.
I think Randy was 19 going on 20 at the time, so whenever he walked, his hormones jangled. You could hear him from a hundred feet away. One day, two girls came to the hotel — oh, they were maybe in their twenties. “Whores,” my mother insisted. But Randy was on the make. He’d made it as far as their motel room when my thin tissue of lies fell apart.
Mom: “Where’s your brother?”
Me: “Out by the pool.”
Mom (looking out the window): “I can see he’s not out by the pool. Where did he go?”
Me: “I don’t know . . . oh, stop! Stop! The pressure is too much to bear. He’s in Room 19 with those whores.”
That’s a paraphrase, naturally. Mom called over to Room 19.
Mom: “Helloooo? Is Randy there? This is his mother. Tell him his little brother has a high fever and we need him to run down to the store to get some aspirin.”
Poor Randy. I can imagine what followed. “Your mother? You told us you were transporting rattlesnakes to the Texas roundup, and that you’d stopped in Clinton to settle a score with those mob bosses who crossed you back in Vegas. Well, our boyfriends are gonna show up in ten minutes, and Clem, he wrestles alligators . . .”
Randy and I used to play cards with a good ol’ Southern boy, a forty-something fella named Dave. He was a dead ringer for Mac Davis, a country-western guy who had his own one-hour variety TV show back then. Remember, “I don’t like spiders and snakes / But I got what it takes to love you”? Yup, that was Mac Davis. During a three-handed game of hearts down by the pool, Dave spied a forty-something gal with no ass and no boobs. But she was a loner, no band on her finger, no guy tagging along, and Dave had all the jangling hormones of my brother but another twenty years worth of finesse. Randy and I watched, slack-jawed, as Dave loped over to her poolside umbrella table, chatted her up for five minutes, and came back to announce success.
“Room 22, seven o’clock,” said Dave. “And forget foreplay. That pump’s already primed.”
Those are my two best stories from that two-week dip into the bolgias. Aside from that, nothing to talk about but the usual pitched battles that were de rigeur for mi familia. But the boredom was the worst thing; I’d brought three SF novels with me (the only one I remember: Frank Herbert’s Hellstrom’s Hive) and had finished all three. And that’s when, out of a mind-numbing not another game of Hearts or another rerun of Gilligan’s Island panic, I conceived of something, a glimmer of hope that would tide me through the next few days.
I would, three days hence, meet up with my future self.
To achieve this, I’d have to remember the precise time and place of the meeting. This became my mantra. The irony of replacing one boring activity with an even more boring activity was, I’m sad to say, lost on my twelve-year-old self.
You can guess the rest. I was a no show; my version of the MIT Time Travel Convention flopped every bit as badly as theirs. Only difference is, I understand why.
Let’s say I wake up tomorrow to discover I’ve inherited a time travel belt (anyone out there remember David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself ?) Would I use that belt to go back in time and make that meeting? No way. Two reasons:
1) I’ve forgotten the precise time and place of the meeting. I can’t even remember the approximate time and place of the meeting. I had to think mighty hard to come up with “1974, Clinton, Oklahoma”, and I’m only 95% confident of that data.
2) I have no interest in meeting 12-year-0ld Doug. None whatsoever.
In my opinion, those two reasons, writ large, account for the failure of the MIT convention. The conventioneers assumed that a bit of internet press would guarantee some sort of eternal memory of the time and place of the meeting. Does anyone doubt for a moment the fragility of the internet? Or the vulnerability of our knowledge to the crush of centuries? Besides: if a time traveler wanted to announce himself (herself, itself, themselves), why choose a convention of geeks dressed up like Bill and Ted and Dorothy?
Which leads me to the next point: the conventioneers also assumed that our future selves would want to come visit us. This seems like one hell of a leap of faith. When I think about visiting mini-me, I feel apathetic and faintly nauseated. I suspect those future us’s would feel the very same way.
No, there’s only one reason they’d come back. To steal Nazi gold.
D.
*British translation: maths
Muwahahahaha!
The fact my hit counter is twitching in epileptic ecstasies means my plans for global domination are proceeding apace. Excellent. And all this new traffic has nothing to do with John Scalzi mentioning yesterday’s Shatter column on his blog – nothing, nothing, nothing. This isn’t just fifteen minutes of blog fame. It isn’t, I tell you.
Karen says that if stoking controversy is what it takes to drive blog traffic, she has a few ideas for future Point-Counterpoint columns from the two of us:
What’s wrong with America today: Not enough shame.
This is part of Karen’s plan for the Japanification of America. When someone does something wrong, he should be encouraged to go home and commit suicide – or, at the very least, never show his face in public again.
Karen’s plans for expansion of the death penalty.
Fry white collar criminals, sex offenders, corrupt politicians . . . oh, hell. Fry anyone Karen doesn’t like.
A fourth branch of government: Internal Affairs.
IA will be empowered to investigate all three conventional branches of government – and their own. Corruption will be treated with compassionate understanding (see above).
Why I hate Christianity.
Hey, she’s an atheist. What can I say.
***
Ephemera
Jake had a good day today – that makes two in a row. For newbies here, my nine-year-old has been plagued with chronic daily headaches for the last three months. After an MRI, CT, numerous blood tests and a lumbar puncture, we’re no closer to understanding this. So we’re doing what any good physician would do: we’re treating him with every drug we can think of that we haven’t tried yet.
The winning combo thus far seems to be melatonin and propranolol. Melatonin to get him back on a normal sleep schedule, propranolol on the off chance he’s having migraines.
Clear skies today, gentle wind, temperature in the high fifties. We went out and did the Del Norte County doubleheader: Smith River, then the beach. Jake wanted to see if we could find quicksand. There’s a branch of the South Fork off Walker Road where, on a particularly rainy winter day, we once found several patches of quicksand by the riverside. We’ve been back several times since then, but the conditions have never been right. I’m beginning to wonder about how rare that day must have been.
He did his usual: throwing flat rocks and watching them sink with nary a skip, building dams and tearing them down, terrorizing frogs. It seemed like only a week or two had passed since we’d been down this way, yet we haven’t done any of this since he became ill. Three months must seem like an eternity to a nine-year-old, but to me, it was yesterday.
Then, off to the beach, where we got thoroughly waterlogged. But that’s why we’re here in this land of No Borders (or Barnes & Noble): 180 degrees of ocean in front of us, wildflower-strewn mountainside behind us, crystal blue sky above. Still too early for blackberries, but Jake showed me a reddish-pink flower with nectar that tasted like honey. He picked his mother a bouquet on the way back up the hill. He’ll be a florist someday, or maybe a mechanical engineer. With any luck, he won’t have the damned headache.
More ephemera: Karen’s younger P. metallica morphed out male, so now she has a breeding pair. With any luck, I may have some pornographic tarantula stories to share with you in the days ahead. (Why ‘ephemera’? She’s mating tarantulas. Think about it.)
D.
Between one thing and another . . .
It’s past 10. I was home late from the hospital (had to remove a hazel nut AKA filbert from someone’s esophagus), then I had to have a fight with Karen over cleaning the litter boxes, and THEN Jake decided he wanted to work on his Lego website. Jake and I have a lot of work left to do on this one, so be forgiving. In particular, the jpegs could be a lot nicer. Just the one page, by the way.
I’d intended to ruminate on the subject of political subtexts in fiction. For tonight, I’ll merely pose the questions: how important is it to understand the historical backstory for a novel — or short story, or film, or play . . . ? Can you appreciate Dr. Strangelove if you’re ignorant of the Cold War? Is your experience of Orwell’s Animal Farm poorer if you don’t know your Trotsky from a hole in the ground?
Can a political subtext ruin a novel? (Will Republicans boycott the upcoming Star Wars movie just cuz it equates W with the Emperor?)
Can a writer pen a novel with a clear political message, yet be unconscious of that message?
Coming soon . . . Karen gets a wild hair over Old Man’s War; Fantasy & Science Fiction publishes Wonkophilic Fan Fiction.
Stay tuned.
D.
What’s your favorite first contact story?
So we’re watching Alien Planet* on the Discovery Channel, and I’m asking myself: how do you take such an intrinsically interesting subject and make it boring?
Here are the problems, dramaturgically speaking:
1. No protags. In Alien Planet, what passes for protags are two robotic probes, ‘Ike’ Newton and ‘Leo’ (Galileo). They’re cute bots, but they’re not human. Not even close.
2. No plot. Funny thing, a lot of SF novels suffer from that same problem: as if exploration alone were enough to drive the story forward. I had that problem with Ringworld, for example.
3. Few new ideas. Many of these critters look alike: roughly mammalian, with tiny heads (or no heads), and no discernible eyes. They have a few birds, too, but these look like flying versions of the mammalian critters.
Their heart is in the right place. They’re trying to teach terrestrial biology in a new and interesting way, and they’re also attempting to depict such an expedition in a scientifically reasonable manner. In the real world, you would explore such worlds robotically; in the real world, you wouldn’t have much more of a plot than ‘let’s go out there and see what we find.’ But that doesn’t necessarily make for good entertainment.
What’s your favorite first contact story? I’m not sure which one I would choose, but here’s an old, but not-half-bad list I found on the web. Lots of novels I haven’t read here.
***
Jake’s Medford pediatrician called me late yesterday to give me the LP results: no meningitis. We’re back to square one, a presumptive diagnosis of ‘chronic tension-type headache’, with little left to do but try him out on Elavil and — get this — biofeedback.
Karen and Jake came back this afternoon. Jake has a sore throat, upset stomach, and headache, making me wonder whether he caught a virus at the hospital. I pushed the fluids and he rallied enough to eat some dinner.
The apple pie turned out okay. Store-bought puff pastry is about as good as it sounds (not). My bottom crust, a galette from Baking with Julia, was far better than my puff pastry top crust. Live and learn. I may be a foodie, but I’m not nuts enough (yet) to make my own puff pastry.
D.
*If you missed this program, here’s the idea. A manned mission to an Earth-like planet, Darwin IV, encounters one new organism after another.