books

A so-so snow day

I went to sleep a little early last night. Even though I didn’t think the snow would be as apocalyptically bad as some of the heavier predictions, I thought I still might want to catch an earlier than usual train into Manhattan, should there be just enough snow to screw with my morning commute, but not enough to close down my office.

And that’s exactly how much snow there was. I called our office emergency number to confirm that we hadn’t closed due to the bad weather, and then I made the executive decision to be on the 7:20 train, rather than do the sensible thing and stay in bed all morning. Walking to the train station, which is only a block and a half away, proved to be surprisingly difficult, if only because the only spots that had seen a plow or a shovel yet were in the very middle of the road. But I made it to the station with plenty of time to spare — thanks, in no small part, to a thirty-minute delay.

I have to admit, after almost forty minutes of standing out in the cold of the station platform, during which time other trains would periodically fly past, kicking up sparks on the electrified rail and flinging powdery snow in everyone’s face — while announcements no more helpful than “the 7:20 train to New York is being delayed” played on what seemed like a near-constant loop — I came very close to making another executive decision and returning home. The thought of calling into the office, taking a vacation day, and spending it by lying in bed watching TV and reading seemed altogether preferable to freezing my ass off for a train that might never arrive.

But it did, finally, around 7:50. And I have to say, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the train that empty.

We arrived at Penn Station a little less than an hour later, which, despite the slowness of the train, the occasional roughness of the ride, and a few unexpected stops, is about normal. I got into work just before 9 o’clock.

Of course, it wasn’t a particularly exciting day from that point forward. A few people had obviously decided to stay home, but otherwise it was just a normal day at the office.

Until, that is, later in the afternoon, when a rally started up directly outside our building. The Haitian Consulate is across the street from us, and today marked the one-year anniversary of last year’s terrible earthquake in Port-au-Prince. It was difficult to work with the rally going on, since even four flights up they were incredibly loud, but they were for the most part peaceful. Police barricades, which had been sitting out on the sidewalk all week, were set up for them by the NYPD. It was only when a few of the demonstrators decided to block traffic on Madison Avenue altogether that things got a little out of hand. A few of us stood at windows overlooking the street as the police arrested a few and the rally dispersed.

And to think, I almost didn’t go into work today.

After that, it was back to the average Wednesday. I didn’t run into any problems on the train ride home — nowhere near as empty as in the morning, but still much less crowded — and I even managed to finish reading William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. (I might have more to say about that later, although maybe only after I’ve bought and read the next books in the trilogy. For now? I really liked it.)

Tomorrow, I have a conference I need to go to, filling in for a few hours at our sales booth at the Waldorf Astoria. So maybe I should go to sleep a little early tonight as well. Hopefully we won’t get any more snow for at least a little while.

That was Sunday

Today was Sunday, so that meant I mostly just did the Sunday crossword and went to my weekly writing group. This is what I came up with there:

He took another sip of his whiskey, then told her politely to go to hell.

“I know you think you’re helping, Rachel,” he told her, “but your kind of help, we really don’t need.”

“You don’t have to be such an ass about it, Jim,” she said. “And it’s not your decision anyway. If Justin wants to bring me on board, then that’s between him and me.”

“On the contrary,” Jim said, swirling the last few dregs at the bottom of his glass, then reaching again for the bottle. “It’s between him, you, and the investors. And it’s my job to make sure the investors doesn’t start looking for reasons to walk.”

“You’re saying the producers don’t like me.”

“The producers hate you and everything you stand for.” He tested the contents of his refilled glass and smiled. “I thought that much was understood. But I’m talking about higher up, the people actually financing the damn film.”

“You mean my mother.”

“Among others, but yes.”

Rachel sighed. So again it came down to this.

“Save me a glass of that, would you,” she said.

He poured the whiskey and handed her the glass. She stared at it for a moment, saying nothing, as if willing some argument to rise from whatever rotgut it was that Jim Gilbert was drinking these days. Then she downed the glass.

“Look,” she said, “I’m not my mother, and yes, clearly, if she finds out I’m working with you, she’ll take her money and her friends somewhere else. But I think I could be a valuable addition to Justin’s film crew.”

Now it was Jim’s turn to sigh. “I understand why you think that,” he said, “and Justin’s obviously fond of you. But I’m going to say it again: we don’t need your help. And if you think you can force yourself in, you can definitely go to — ”

“I can help you find Hoffman,” she said. “I know where he is.”

“Hoffman’s a myth.”

“He’s what Justin’s film is all about. Justin doesn’t think he’s a myth. And neither, I should tell you, does my mother.”

“And you’re saying you know where he is? The world’s spent thirty years trying to figure out if he’s even real and you’ve found him?”

She grinned. “Yes.”

“Then maybe we have something to talk about after all.”

I’ve been reading William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition recently, and really enjoying it. This is decidedly not that, but I can see the (or at least feel) the influence.

Wednesday various

Tuesday various

  • Lots of people are pointing out why retroactively censoring Huckleberry Finn is a bad idea, but I think I like what Gerry Canavan says most:

    If we’re going to retroactively censor Mark Twain, I’d say “slave” seems significantly more offensive to me than “n*gger” insofar as it accedes to the noxious proposition that some people can be slaves in the first place. People can be enslaved, of course—but no person is a slave. In my own rare writing and teaching on slavery I try to favor “so-called slave” and “enslaved person” in a quiet effort to highlight that slavery is not an essence but a structure of violent domination.

    It’s not the fact that we’re still having this conversation that bothers me — we should have continued and open discussions about race — it’s that we’re still faced with people who think not discussing it, pretending the words we don’t like don’t exist, is the right way to go.

  • In happier news, Nel Gaiman and Amanda Palmer are married. As Patton Oswalt writes:

    Marriage of @amandapalmer and @neilhimself confirmed. Like the Hatfield/Coy War, the Nerd/Goth schism is laid to rest — by love!

  • And in other amusing, geeky wedding news, Doctor Who‘s David Tennant is engaged to one-time co-star Georgia Moffett. As Peter David amusingly notes:

    The Tenth Doctor is going to be marrying his own daughter who also happens to be the daughter of the Fifth Doctor and Trillian from the TV version of “Hitchhiker.”

    Most meta engagement EV-er.

  • Speaking of Doctor Who, these one-of-a-kind nesting dolls may very well be the coolest thing ever. [via]
  • And finally, Udo Kier…honestly, in interview, the man comes across like he’s playing an Udo Kier character — erudite, macabre, and often delightfully unhinged:

    I cannot answer you, because it’s totally unknown to me what you just asked me, and also very boring.

Monday various

  • Caitlin R. Kiernan on coincidence:

    Coincidence is a constantly occurring phenomenon with a bad rap. Lots of people treat it’s like a dirty word, or something rationalists invoke simply to dispel so-called supernatural events. And yet, an almost infinite number of events coincide during any every nanosecond of the cosmos’ existence. We only get freaked out and belligerent over the one’s we notice, the ones we need (for whatever reason) to invest with some special significance. Co-occurrence should not be taken for correlation any more than correlation should be mistaken for causation.

    • Although you have to admit, with all the weird news of Arkansas recently, it’s tempting to look for correlations and common causes.

  • Theodora Goss raises an interesting question — namely, does fantasy writing, with its made-up languages and grammars, present unique challenges for copyeditors?
  • Peter David on why Aquaman is actually cool.
  • David Forbes re-examines Frank Herbert’s Dune. It’s fascinating, not least of all for its glimpse at the original edition’s semi-ridiculous back cover copy:

    A page of medieval history? Not quite. Duke Leto Atreides is moving from a planet, which he owns, to another planet, which he has been given in exchange. The Emperor, Shaddam IV, is Emperor of the known Universe, not a country. And Duke Leto’s son, Paul, is not a normal noble heir. In fact, he is so little normal in any way that he happens to be possible key to all human rule, power and indeed knowledge! [via]

  • And finally, a fascinating look at Yogi Bear — and there’s a phrase I never thought I’d write — as District 9:

    Yogi Bear is not a kids’ movie. It is a bleak futurist parable about humanity’s inability to accept a non-human sapience. It is also about a bear who wears a hat. [via]