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They say it’s a Wednesday

I’ve lost track of the days, although not enough to be unaware that I’m quickly running out of vacation, just four short days left in this end-of-the-year run before heading back to work. I spent this day doing some of the same as yesterday, working on the Kaleidotrope website. It’s not a major overhaul, at least in terms of design, but it’s taken more than just a few tweaks to go from being a print to an online zine. I’m sure it’ll be a whole new learning process even after I launch.

When I wasn’t doing that, I watched “An Unearthly Child,” the first batch of episodes ever of Doctor Who, from 1963. I received a DVD set of William Hartnell’s first episodes as a Christmas present, and while I’d seen some of the Dalek episodes that followed these, I’d never seen the very beginning. It’s…well, maybe it’s easiest just to say it was a rather different show back then from what it is now.

This evening, I picked my parents up at the eye doctor, since they both had appointments, and their eyes were too dilated afterward to drive safely. We went out to eat at a new Latin place that had been written up in the New York Times (and for which we had a coupon), which turned out to be quite good. Even if service was a little confused. Friendly and attentive, but confused. And even if getting into the bathroom was a ridiculously complicated production number: first through a very heavy beaded curtain, into a dark room where you had to stumble around to find the light switch, only to discover to discover the toilet was behind you. Limited space, but a little ridiculous.

Anyway, the food was quite good.

And then we came home and I watched All About Eve, which was really terrific. Bette Davis, in particular, gives a deservedly iconic performance, but the whole film’s great fun.

And meanwhile, it’s gotten remarkably cold and windy the past couple of days. One might almost be tempted to start believing in winter again.

Sunny Sunday

Looking out the window right now, you’d almost think it hadn’t snowed at all yesterday. The sun came out, the temperature rose, and almost all of it melted. It’s true, there wasn’t a whole lot of snow to begin with — despite all the hand-wringing of “but it never snows in October!” (Which, even here on Long Island, I don’t think is remotely true. It’s just that it’s been so unseasonably warm right up til now.) But just about all of it’s already gone.

I didn’t do a whole lot today, though I prepped several more copies of Kaleidotrope for mailing — next Saturday, almost certainly — and I joined my weekly writing group for our regular free-writing exercise. Here’s what I came up with:

Lu Chen was crazy, a rabid dog, and he would have brought not only dishonor but destruction upon us all if Fei Yu had not stepped in and killed him. Those of us who had trained with Chen in the beginning — and especially our classmates who had sided with him in his early, more innocent insubordination or laughed off the chaos he routinely introduced into our sessions — worried we too might face reprisal at the swift steel blade of Fei Yu’s sword.

But Yu knew, even better than us, that there had already been too much bloodshed, too much of that blood spilled on the great temple’s floors. If he blamed us for Lu Chen’s actions, or at least for failing to take action against him ourselves, he said so only with his silence. If he thought we did not mourn the loss of Master Pai Mei, or weep at the sight of the Old Dragon’s charred and broken body amidst the rubble that Lu Chen had left behind, he did not say so, nor did the blade against the throat that so many of us expected — and, in truth, might have welcomed — come in the night. Fei Yu had acted where the rest of us would not, put down Lu Chen with no more effort than he might have wasted on cutting the chaff from the grain, and in doing so he had saved the temple where we could not.

The common quarters, the dormitories where we and Pai Mei had lived during our training — and where Fei Yu would have been our honored guest had he not returned from his travels to the capital a day late and in the middle of Lu Chen’s destructive spree — these buildings had burned in the fire, had been reduced to ash just as Lu Chen’s body soon would be. There would be no burial for him, no funeral rites, as we were allowed with Pai Mei or the others who Lu Chen had killed. On this one thing was Fei Yu insistent.

“Let the fires have him,” he said of Lu Chen’s body. “Let his evil deeds be burned from this earth.”

It was not always this way. Once, Lu Chen was just a farmer’s son, and the anger in him was no more or less than in any of us who had come to study with Master Pai Mei. Had the demon showed its true face back then, I do not think that anyone, much less the Old Dragon himself, would have opened his door or heart to Lu Chen.

I have never been a diligent student — eager to please, perhaps, and adept enough to parrot the movements and lessons taught to me, but too lazy to put in the real work required. I recognize this shortcoming, and admit it freely, knowing that it is possibly the only thing that saved my life. I was a friend to Lu Chen, in the beginning and even through his more recent troubles, but I was neither an ally nor a threat of any value. I could do little but watch in horror as he tore through the temple, set fire to the outlaying buildings, and gutted three of our fellow students.

No idea if there’s actually a story in there, but I had fun writing it.

Aside from the weekly free-writes, I’ve done practically no writing since returning from Banff at the beginning of September. Part of that’s been me being sick, my mother being sick, working on editing this and future issues of Kaleidotrope. And part of that’s just being thrown out of the groove of writing that I’d somehow managed to get into while I was there. I miss writing at Banff, and I miss the Centre there, but I need to get back in the regular habit of writing, working on stories, here at home. I’d like to go back to Canada some day, but I also need to apply what I worked on there to my everyday writing.

Snow? In October?!

It snowed today, the first time this season, and supposedly the snowiest October on record in New York. We had no real accumulation, just a heavy white dusting on the lawn and disgusting and cold slush in the streets. It really did turn brutishly nasty almost overnight, right from very early fall — or even late summer; most of the trees still have green leaves on them — straight into winter.

I spent the day almost entirely inside. I finished reading Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, which was okay, I guess, although I don’t think it’s her best work. Maybe her best character development; she spends an awful long time introducing us to people before anything really nefarious gets underway. But as a fun whodunit? I guessed who the killer was relatively early — well, as early as you can when the murder doesn’t happen until halfway through the book — but I didn’t do so on any evidence in the book. And, in the end, it seemed like that’s how Hercule Poirot solved the mystery too, unfortunately. Still, it was entertaining enough.

I also re-watched The Silence of the Lambs, which a recent episode of Judge John Hodgman (and last night’s brief capping of it) made me want to see again. It really holds up remarkably well for a twenty-year-old thriller I’ve seen more than once. (The book’s not terrible either, although Red Dragon is better. I never made it more than a couple of chapters into Hannibal.)

I watched a few episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise and the most recent episode of The Walking Dead.

I updated the Kaleidotrope website. Check it out: the cover art for the new fall issue, the last one in print, is up now, along with a quick taste of each of the twenty — count ’em, twenty! — stories contained within.

And this evening, I watched the 1972 horror anthology Asylum. It’s got a great cast, that includes such stars as Peter Cushing, Charlotte Rampling, and Britt Ekland. And some of the stories — written by horror legend Robert Bloch — aren’t bad. But ultimately the movie’s more than a little silly. Some good fun, but not remotely scary.

Well, that more or less was my Saturday, such as it was.

A chilly Friday

Today was a Friday, right? Because I sure as heck am not going into the office again tomorrow or the day after.

It got fairly cold here all of a sudden, with a storm warning (and even possibly snow) on the way. That wouldn’t be so bad — it is almost November, after all — if the weather hadn’t been so unseasonably warm for so long. When the snow does come, the leaves might not even have lost all their leaves.

If the world ended on a Monday, would anybody notice?

I wish I’d worn a jacket today.

It got cooler unexpectedly — although unexpected only if you discount the fact it probably ought to have been cooler a whole lot sooner, that days with highs of 80 degrees (something like 25 Celsius?) maybe aren’t the norm for late September or early October. But just a week ago, I was wearing short-sleeved shirts to work, and I didn’t think I needed more than the long-sleeved shirt (plus T-shirt beneath) I decided to wear today. It was a little cool, but I figured once the sun came up, I’d be fine.

And I was, but I kind of wish I’d worn a jacket. The sun didn’t come up all that much.

Metaphorically, though, it came up pretty nicely.

Oh, sure, there was that police shooting around the corner from my office. I mean literally around the corner. It happened last night apparently, and today it was just a crime scene investigation that had the block cordoned off and blocked to traffic. But still: yikes.

Otherwise, though, things were good, even for a Monday. I discovered first thing that Kaleidotrope had again been reviewed in Locus. The review, of the past two issues, is kind a mixed bag — Rich Horton singles out a couple of stories for praise, but he’s not uncritical of them — but it was still great to see the zine reviewed in those pages. (Even if the physical pages proved exceptionally difficult to track down. I eventually purchased the PDF direct from Locus, decided to re-up my lapse subscription in the process.)

Then this evening, after work, I attended a short panel discussion ostensibly on Utopia/Dystopia at the Center for Fiction. It was the start of a month-long series on fantasy and science fiction at the Center, most of which I’m actually (right now) planning on attending, and it was interesting, if not exactly what was advertised. Though authors Anna North, Kathleen Ann Goonan, and Charles Yu seemed to be, occasionally, trying to steer the conversation back towards all things utopian and dystopian, I’m not sure moderator DongWon Song was on the same page as everyone else. The discussion, for the most part, was a lot broader, about being a science fiction writer and the differences (real and market-imposed) between it and “mainstream” or “literary” fiction.

As such, it was interesting, but nothing especially new. The debate over where genre begins and ends, the benefits and drawbacks to writing within it, has been raging for years.

Still, it was interesting. Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe was one of the best books I read last year, and I enjoyed Goonan’s Queen City Jazz well enough years ago. (I thoroughly gave up on the first of the sequels just this year, however, and I felt a little guilty about that sitting there. I may feel guiltier on Wednesday, when the panel on fantasy includes Lev Grossman.) I’d never heard of North before, though I thought she spoke quite knowledgeably about science fiction, and she seemed the most determined to (subtly but repeatedly) steer the conversation back towards the end of the world.

No small surprise since that’s kind of what her book is about.

Still, these seemed like good people to be talking about utopia and dystopia and the contrast between the two. That what they mostly discussed seemed closer in spirit to the topic of Margaret Atwood’s upcoming talk — one of the few Center events this month I think I won’t be attending — was amusing, especially since it was only back in March that I went to hear Atwood herself speak about utopias and dystopias. (She favors the term of her own coinage, ustopias.)

Noonan defended her most recent novel, which apparently posits an alternate history, as not a utopia, as if that in and of itself was a dirty word. Changing some things just creates new problems, she said — I think rightly — which led later into a discussion of whether utopias are even possible. The odds of something terrible happening, even if it’s not specifically another ice age (North) or nanotech gone wild (Goonan) or “time travel as a means of regret” (Yu), are a lot better than a perfect world. The real world, after all, isn’t perfect, and it’s full of fallible people.

In many stories, in fact, dystopias are the price the characters (and/or world) pay for the creation (or failed creation) of someone else’s utopia. Perhaps every dystopia is simply a failed utopia, or the nostalgia for a lost one. Specific examples cited by the authors (and by the one audience member who really asked a question about the topic) included Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Atwood’s own The Handmaid’s Tale. These are often utopias at first glance — Wells’ Eloi, for instance, who live a life of comfort and ease — with a dystopia lurking beneath — the Morlocks, literally beneath, toiling in slavery underground. Or they are stark dystopias — Atwood’s repressive Republic of Gilead — brought about when someone — in this case the leaders of Gilead — attempt to impose their brand of utopia on the world. As North pointed out, the villains in dystopias tend to think they’re creating utopias, much like supervillains in comics.

“There’s always a mad scientist,” added Goonan.

Yu’s book, by contrast, is more a “personal dystopia,” or rather “not a dystopia, but just a super-sad universe.” Still, he talked about being liberated in his writing when he actually created that universe, gave it structure, form, and rules. “I was bound by my own constraints,” he said, and that’s what was so freeing as a writer.

So, in all, it was an interesting evening, if not exactly what I’d been led to expect. I didn’t stay for the book signing or wine reception afterward, but I’m glad I went all the same.

Even if, on the walk back to my subway, I kind of wish I’d worn a jacket.