Theophrastes' Journal

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As an antidote to the broken washer, I want to talk a little about the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention. Please note that the pre-registration deadline has been extended to May 31st.

One or two people have asked about the name, so here's the history as I recall it. There's a cartoon depicting a row of restaurants, with signs in order like this: "Best pizza in the city," "Best pizza in the country," "Best pizza on the planet," "Best pizza in the galaxy," and the last one, a tiny place with a long line of people outside it, says simply, "Best pizza on the block." During our first couple of years, Fourth Street was in a downtown hotel on, in fact, Fourth Street, and we used the motto "Best fantasy convention on the block" to indicate the combination of humility and ambition that we brought to the project.

Other people probably would tell this differently, but that's how I recall it.

I was supposed to write an essay months ago for the website, but I have been finding it difficult to bring up coherent memories. Fourth Street was a great deal like disappearing under the hill, visiting the very far lands of Faerie. It was, at least, if Faerie had chocolate-covered coffee beans and a wedding party leaving at six a.m. so that the participants, including the bride and groom, could be back at the convention for the start of panels at ten; if Faerie included Samuel Delany, leaving in the middle of a panel to catch his plane home and stopping the standing ovation he was getting with the startling words, "No, no, sit down and do what you're doing. This is valuable work"; if Faerie included Jane Yolen and Patricia McKillip doing a joint guest of honor speech; if it included Patrick Nielsen Hayden standing up out of the audience and demolishing the entire premise of a panel and providing a new one, all in a paragraph; if it included a membership so involved in the programming that moderators were sometimes obliged to say they would take only questions, not comments, until later in the hour; if it included sitting around at five in the morning while music was still going on in the other room, discussing simultaneously Dorothy Dunnett, the vagaries and virtues of fountain pens, the flavors of jelly beans, and the proper use of violence in fantasy. A few local writers, both established and aspiring, used to leave early on Sunday, followed by the pleas of their friends to stay longer, because the programming had made them want to do nothing except go home and write. Cally Soukup once stayed up for 72 hours straight at a Fourth Street, because there was always somebody to talk to.

It's ten years later now, and we're all different, and some of us are gone, but we're going to try to recapture that feeling. Elizabeth Bear, known to many of you as

matociquala, is our guest of honor, and long before this revival was thought of, reading her journal used to remind me of Fourth Street.

I'm looking forward to it with the same mixture of glee and trepidation as I always did -- it would take me a long way away and sometimes send me home again unsettled. It doesn't matter if you recognize any of the names I mention above. If you love fantasy, or are curious about it, do think about coming.

Pamela

Seeking appliance repair in the Twin Cities
Well, this isn't the way I'd meant to break my silence, but the washer is leaking. If you can recommend a place that repairs appliances in the Twin Cities, please let me know. I have asked on Natter and gotten some good leads, but I prefer to have a lot of information to compost in these situations.

Thanks!

P.S. No, it's not the intake hose; yes, the hoses are new; no, I do not propose to take apart the washer, and neither does anybody else here. Helpful suggestions of this sort, however, are definitely encouraged if you feel the impulse.

Pamela

Wait, wasn't there a "wretch" in that phrase somewhere?

Well, we can apply the adjective to my formatting, anyway.

Behind the cut is the first chapter of This Green Plot, a Liavek novel rejected by one publisher and presently undergoing reconstruction, or at least it will be when I am finished revising Going North. It's been moved through several different programs and sits a little uneasily in Open Office at the moment. I don't think there are any hideous problems, though.

( This Green Plot, Chapter One )

Revisions
I don't want to work on my revisions, so I'm going to write about them instead. I'm hoping that this will be a head-clearing activity, because in truth I am sadly muddled.

What needs to be done falls into several categories.

1. Split the huge volume into two, possibly writing a bit of fancy framework to prevent readers of the first part from feeling that they have just fallen off a cliff, and innocents who pick up the second part first from feeling that they were just fine a moment ago and what is all that rock rushing by them? Think of titles for the two volumes.

2. Deal with strong negative reactions to the ending suffered by several, though not all, of my beta readers, without disturbing the experience of those who liked it. These objections cover the motivations of the characters, consistency with the earlier books, and political implications of various kinds.

I did not anticipate the need for the above. For what's below, I did:

3. Put intimations of various important objects and characters and themes that suddenly leapt up in the second half into the first half, in a decent fashion, so that they do not come out of nowhere and cause the wrong kind of alarm.

4. Clear up ambiguities, at least to a point.

5. Give the first volume some kind of narrative movement. Or not. I'm still up in the air on this one.

6. Clean up all the fiddly, line-by-line problems with voice, clarity, pacing, theme, and so on, so that they all do what they are supposed to, unless what they are actually doing is better, in which case, leave them strictly alone.

7. Cut where possible, from single words to lines to scenes, since some new material must go in and both these volumes will still be awfully long.

8. Agonize about how long some of the chapters are, but decide to try to preserve the viewpoint switches. Oh, right, and write another Arry chapter, if possible, because I muddled up the viewpoint switches. Yargh.

No. 1 has to be the last thing I do, I think, except that thinking of titles is running as a background process and also serving as a form of cat-vacuuming, since I can look up quotations and pretend it's research. No. 2 terrifies me, but I've done a great deal of work on it, and have at least as much left still to do. No. 3 is going very well and is nearly finished, except for the water-clock. No. 4 has been tackled but needs more work. No. 5 is on hold. No. 6 is going quite well, though it will have to be done separately for all the new bits. No. 7 is not happening at all except that occasionally I'll take out a word or two. I can see such trouble. No. 8 is ongoing, except for the actual writing.

P.

Late Winter Visitation
I've been wanting to post more, both to entertain you loyal people who haven't given up on me and to jog my memory a year or more from now, but haven't been doing very well at it. I thought I'd at least do some brief notes on Eric (aka

arkuat)'s visit, since it was a remarkably fine one.

( This is simply too long not to cut )

This is just to say
I suppose I should mention that Eric is here, that we are having a perfectly splendid time, and that I'm not very likely to read much until next week. Happy early spring to all of you. We saw three robins yesterday.

P.

All right, K, just for you
A very happy birthday to

minnehaha K.

And a kind of mulligatawny of an entry, because I have been remiss of late.

Spring is thinking about coming in. Woodpeckers have been drumming for weeks now, and the sound is interspersed with the rattling of crows. A little later chickadees began singing "phoebe, phoebe," and the cardinals warmed up with a kind of hoo-wa, hoo-wa and have now moved to the full-blown "what cheer, what cheer." Lilacs that lean over west- and south-facing pavements have swelling red buds. My periwinkle and creeping phlox have emerged from the snow all evergreen and fresh.

A few years ago, my mother gave me a metal, ivory-painted figure of a cat, curled up but with its head raised, as if it had just sighted a bird. It's a curly ornate cat in a vaguely Victorian style. I put it in the front flower bed where it could look out from underneath the irises. The last few years it's looked out from under hairy bellflower, but it seemed happy enough with that too. A few weeks ago I was getting ready to go for a walk, and I saw a young woman with a toddler coming slowly down the street. Except that there was no leash, she was proceeding as a person with an elderly curious dog might do, letting the toddler look at whatever seemed interesting, sit down on the sidewalk, reverse direction, or be carried. They passed the sidewalk leading up to our house, and then the toddler stopped and backtracked. They came a little way up the walk and peered earnestly at the north-facing snowbank for some time. I wondered if there was an injured bird or something like that, and whether I should go offer assistance. But they didn't seem distressed, only interested. So I stayed inside, in case the toddler was shy. Eventually they took themselves off, and I went out. Sure enough, the snow had melted from around the head of the little cat figure, so that it was peering out of the snowbank. I saw the same adult and toddler just a few days ago, checking the cat out again.

David and Greg spent last week working in the basement, moving the shop out of the space designated as the new bathroom and putting up a lot of sheetrock in the shop and laundry room. On Saturday, the upstairs furnace went out. Greg heroically, after spending the whole day here, came back over at 11:00 in the evening and helped David rig the furnace for manual operation. The next day he replaced the thermocouple, and now all's well. That is, aside from the fact that the new expansion tank achieved with such trauma ten years ago is already rusting out.

I'm working on my revisions, and hosted my tea group on the Ides of March with a spread that included two kinds of Roman fish-pickle and some stuffed dates fried in honey and red wine. The dates got a little lost in the shuffle of rosemary shortbread, gingerbread, and chocolate tofu pie, but we're enjoying the leftovers.

It's almost time for Minicon, and I'm looking forward to it a lot.

P.

Minicon Programming Schedule (well, my bit of it)
Just for the record:

Reading: Pamela Dean | Saturday, 11:00-11:30am, Grand Ballroom East B (Readings room)

Signing: Pamela Dean | Saturday, 2:00-3:00pm, In front of Dealers' Room

There's a strong warning in the email that information in the pocket program trumps any other information about programming.

I get the year off from being on panels, which means that if there is an interesting panel, it cannot be opposite another panel that I am on. It could be opposite my reading or my signing, but there is less opportunity for conflict than usual. Hooray.

I'll be reading from Going North, again, but from much further on in the book, from chapters not even written at this time last year.

I'll see some of you there, I'm sure.

P.

"Utopia, Ltd., or The Flowers of Progress"
David and Lydy and I went out last night to see the Gilbert and Sullivan Very Light Opera Company do what's certainly the most obscure G&S production I've ever seen. The program was very amusing, explaining that Gilbert and Sullivan had written the thing while they weren't exactly speaking to one another, so that Gilbert kept putting in the entire kitchen sinkful of gimmicks and long passages of dialogue, and then Sullivan would "retaliate" with long orchestral pieces, songs, and dance scenes. The current company had spent two years revising the thing to be playable.

We enjoyed it very much, although I liked the words more than the music, as a rule. The operetta is set in the near future for G&S, the 1920's, so the characters from England were all wearing real twenties fashions. The chorus was a batch of barefoot women in sarongs and barefoot men in sarongs and Hawaiian shirts, with one or two brightly-colored but not Hawaiian shirts as ballast. Utopia is ruled by an absolute monarch, but he can't actually do much because his two chief counselors have at their beck and call the Royal Exploder, who is charged with blowing up the king if he becomes too despotic. "Despotism with Dynamite." I liked the character of the King a great deal. His counselors were making him write scurrilous stories about his own conduct to print in the local gossip rag.

The King has sent his three daughters to be educated in England, and they come home again complete with their very proper governess, who is in love with the King, who returns the favor. However, so long as he does nothing about the author of the scurrilous stories, she won't marry him. The eldest daughter, Zara, is in love with one of the four members of the army that she's brought back with her as part of a project to bring examples of all the kinds of people who have made England great. This fellow was played by the same actor who played the wandering minstrel/lost prince in "The Mikado." I found this curiously distracting. Captain Corcoran from "H.M.S. Pinafore" made an appearance; we haven't done the research to discover whether this was the fault of Gilbert and Sullivan or of the revisers. It was nicely done and well received; the Captain made a "never" statement and was obliged, in the time-honored fashion, to qualify it.

Princess Zara and her entourage proceed to Anglicize the island. I wondered, during the intermission, whether all the sarong-wearers would turn up in twenties costumes too, but they retained their sarongs, only adding to them such objects as a pair of yellow galoshes, a pair of elbow-length white gloves, an umbrella, various plaids, a bowler hat, and a tennis racket, croquet mallet, and another sporting implement that I can't recall the game of, with which they pushed about a small wooden football. Although it would have been easy enough to play this so that the natives looked stupid, in fact they looked quite competent and made the various accoutrements of civilized English life look silly, instead.

The grand finale before the intermission was a rousing chorus celebrating the Joint Stock Company Act of 1862, as Utopia is incorporated into a limited-liability corporation. In the second act, it's revealed that every citizen of Utopia is also now a limited-liability corporation, and not a baby is born but gets its little prospectus. This situation frees the King of any obligation to heed his counselors, because, as he explains to them, a limited-liability corporation may be wound up, but it cannot be blown up.

While various romantic situations develop, the counselors raise the populace against the King by pointing out how many people are suffering from the Anglicization of Utopia: all neighboring islands have given up warfare because the army and navy of Utopia are so well regarded; doctors have no business because of the improvements in sanitation; and so on. In a scene that I strongly suspect was added, but one can never be at all sure with Gilbert and Sullivan, Princess Zara says that she has forgotten one important element of Anglicization: the two-party system. She distributes large numbers of red and blue ribbon rosettes, and explains that now the army and navy will be in disarray, doctors will have plenty of business, and all will be prosperity. Hurrahs and dancing.

There was the usual misogynistic bit where a couple of gentlemen from England muse on the properties of the proper English girl and talk the two younger princesses out of displaying them, but it wasn't as awful as some G&S can be. The King's dilemma regarding the scurrilous stories, and the huge tribute to the Joint Stock Company Act of 1862, were my favorite parts.

The second act was rather disjointed, but it was all great fun.

P.

All Sewed Up in Horse Pies
I was walking innocently down the hall yesterday when I heard Raphael laughing uproariously. Cautious inquiry elicited a series of quotations from this article:

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/idiom_shortage_leaves_nation_all

I was a little surprised not to see it all over my friendslist. Possibly it is not to all tastes, but it still cracks me up every time I think of one of its unique phrases.

P.

Aftermath
ETA: The migraine aura I experienced is not called a scintillating scleroma, which is really a rather daunting notion, but rather a scintillating scotoma. I have corrected it below. Just in case any of you are magpies with regard to terminology.

( Cut for medical whining; there's nothing really wrong )

I fail remedial colonoscopy prep
ETA: All right, we seem to have dodged that bullet. I am going to bed, and some of you probably should as well. Thanks for the company.

( Cut for the uninterested or squeamish, but not detailed )

Eclipse
This is only the third lunar eclipse that I've paid close attention to. (I credit Eric with focusing my attention.) The thing that always strikes me most, but that I always forget, is that at totality, the moon stops looking like a flat disk painted on the sky and becomes three-dimensional. It seems much closer then, like a hot-air balloon or a strange spaceship.

It's mostly clear here, and bitterly cold. Raphael and I have been looking at the moon from the second-story windows, but it's now too high for that. The glass in the back door gives a magnificent view, however. The moon is not a very deep red, but rather a pleasant dark orange. I have seen scarier eclipses. This moon rose a mellower orange and then went pale yellow before the shadow touched it.

If we ever replace the back door, we must get another with a glass panel in it. I've done a great deal of stargazing through that glass when the weather was inhospitable.

P.

Adventures in Public Transportation
I took the bus downtown on Saturday to pick up a prescription. I went home again at around four in the afternoon. A lot of people were going home to South Minneapolis at the same time. The bus was jammed with Hispanic people speaking Spanish and Somali people speaking Somali; there was also a group of young women speaking a nice mix of English and some tonal language. This is completely normal. And there were a couple of young black men dressed like Europeans, speaking French. This is far from unheard-of, but is more likely to happen in the summer.

To them entered a nondescript middle-aged white guy, with a Minnesota accent. "Speak English," he commanded them, rather as if he were speaking to a puppy.

They went on speaking French.

"Speak English!"

"We are French," one of the young men said to him, quite amiably, "and we speak French to one another."

This flummoxed their interlocutor to the point that I thought he was probably drunk. After a pause, he said, quite mildly, "Speak English when you're on the bus."

They laughed and went on speaking French.

"Speak ENGLISH," said the drunken guy, "when you're on the BUS!" He got up and addressed them with a lecture so banal and predictable that I don't recall most of it. He became quite enamored of his new principle, that the least people who "come here" can do is to speak English on the bus, and iterated it loudly.

The person sitting next do me did what I usually do in such situations. She stared straight ahead and got off the bus at the next stop. The other people on the bus were rolling their eyes and laughing at the drunken guy, but didn't attempt to engage him in argument. I did call, "Why?" across the aisle to him, but he was much too wound up in his declamations to notice. Besides, I don't really have a very loud voice.

He decided to get off the bus too. At the door he turned and made a theatrical gesture to include the entire busful of people, the majority of whom almost certainly did not speak English as a native tongue. "The least they can do when they come here," he told us all, now in definitely slurred tones, "is to speak English on the bus." Then he suddenly snarled, "Fuck you!" at the French guys, and made his exit.

One of the French guys, in an uncannily perfect imitation of his voice, snarled, "Fuck you!" back. Everybody laughed. The other French man said something displeased, and another native speaker said, "Well, he was drunk."

A third native speaker, behind me, said in a tone of world-weary amusement, "As long as they're here legally, I don't have a problem with it."

"Gosh," I snarled in my turn, "THAT'S big of you!"

He didn't choose to engage me in argument either, which is no doubt just as well.

The French man who was such a good mimic delivered a brief satirical rant: "America is white! America speaks English! America is all the same!" This was accorded one of those really disconcerting Minnesota silences. I should have applauded.

I decided that I'd wish the two French visitors a pleasant stay when I got off the bus, but they left well before my stop. I'm still boggled, and half-wishing I'd said more. But the silence of a busload of Minnesotans -- and that is exactly what it felt like, regardless of where they came from or what language they were speaking -- was a weight too heavy for me to lift. They were probably more accustomed to drunks on the bus than I am, and possibly knew from experience that having arguments with such people was fruitless. The visitors did not seem noticeably in need of reassurance. But still, I keep pondering it.

P.

David and I are celebrating our 25th anniversary
-- with a party.

Details here:

http://dd-b.net/ddbcms/2008/01/25th-anniversary-party/

The day itself is December 30, but this is really a terrible day to try to have a party. We managed the wedding itself, and a small party for the 10th anniversary, but every other year we've just shaken our heads. Twenty-five years, however, seems worth celebrating, so we are just waiting a little.

Pamela

The manuscript
David took this photograph while the second copy of the manuscript of Going North was being printed. I was much too focused and flustered to think of asking for a photo, but he is always good at knowing when there should be one. I'd meant to link to it earlier, but my brain is not yet grown back.

People in California, please don't hurt me. I flew out there on January 2nd to see Eric and didn't tell anybody. I was seriously brain-dead. We had an exceptionally lovely visit, despite three winter storms. We saw new birds (black turnstones! white-crowned sparrows! more than one spotted sandpiper!). We also saw whimbrels, first at Moss Beach and then a single one at Oyster Point. After we had walked a considerable distance, we were looking at some nice clown-faced surf scoters with the binoculars, and a pleasant elderly couple came up and asked us what we were seeing. We reeled off some names of birds, and they told us that they had seen an egret and an ibis. Eric very tactfully suggested that they had seen the whimbril, since it has a curved bill. We were particularly delighted with this misidentification. Another fine thing was that we looked at the same beach just before, just after, and at low, low tide a little longer after, the various storms. We went to a movie together, only the two of us -- we'd never done that. We ate a lot of sushi, including splendid vegetarian sushi. It was exactly what I needed. I am extremely, extremely fortunate in my sweeties. I'll try to be more sociable the next time.

Oh, right, the link.

http://dd-b.net/cgi-bin/picpage.pl/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/2008/01xxx-misc?pic=ddb%2020080101%20010-001

Brain still growing back. I am mostly caught up on LJ, though I haven't said much and am not sure how much information I actually retained. My regards to all.

Pamela

A milestone
I just finished the rough draft of Going North. I am not done in any reasonable sense, even for today. I have to go over the last five or six chapters, which were written at white-hot speed (for me, anyway) and put in as many revisions as I can do in a few hours. Then I have to see if I've really truly conquered Open Office -- that is to say, to see if it will actually print a manuscript with consecutive page numbers and each chapter starting on a different page and everything handsome about it. All the signs look good.

Still, most of the time over the past three years, I thought that I would never get here. The view is lovely.

Happy New Year, everybody, whether you are happily alone, or celebrating with friends, or trapped with people you'd rather have some distance from; whether you're hopeful or wistful or both at once; whether it's been a fine year or a fraught one, I hope that you too can have a pause, a place to feel refreshed, before plunging back into the maelstrom.

Pamela

Nodding in
Hello. I've gotten to the point where I cannot stand my prose style for a moment. Quite apart from the gigantic size of the as-yet-unfinished manuscript, I keep having to look things up in my other books, and the amateurish mistakes in The Whim of the Dragon, in particular, are causing me to want to find a nice cave and never come out. The Dubious Hills is a little, well, enigmatic, but I don't hate it. Whim is layered, rather like Homer; parts of it are excellent, parts workmanlike enough, and parts are stubborn survivals from my teenage habits of phraseology. Ordinarily I view these fossils with great fondness and amusement, but like many aspects of adolescence, they have become wearing through the necessity of being in such close quarters with them for so long.

I'm beginning Chapter 29 of Going North. Ten chapters ago, I decided that there would probably be about thirty to this book. It's tolerably clear by now that there will be a few more than that. I think the last one, which is more in the nature of an epilogue, will be short, at least by my standards.

I thought I'd offer a few ways of dealing with writerly neurosis before I plunge back into the maelstrom. I find that if I start to write while still in my pajamas, I can fool my brain into thinking that I'm not really working, I'm just dinking around, which resolves the perpetual anxiety of starting up a cold engine. After a while, the conviction that I'm only dinking around leads to reading novels or posting to LJ, and then I go and take a shower and get dressed, after which the Work Day Has Begun and dinking around is permitted only to prevent total insanity or serious aches and pains. Then in the evening I tell myself that I'm just going to do a little revising. This is really the only way that I can make myself write morning, afternoon, and evening.

This book is monstrous. Just monstrous. But it's a benign monster. It only breaks things by accident. So far.

May you all be well.

Pamela

Extremely Shiny Adornments, with Bonus Narratives!
Many of you know this already, but all of you probably don't.

My dear friend

elisem is having a clearance sale of her amazing jewellery. Necklace crowns, linked necklaces, pendants, earrings, and a few lovely oddities in addition, many with evocative and inspiring and hilarious names. I've never seen anything like her work. Go have a look. The prices are marked way, way down from the usual. The last time I checked, the sale ended at midnight tonight, presumably in U.S. Central Standard Time.

http://elisem.livejournal.com/1162747.html

P.

P.S. YES, I SPELLED JEWELLERY THAT WAY ON PURPOSE. YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT?