Over the last eighteen months or so, I’ve become pretty good friends with my co-worker Gwen and her husband Mike. Well, they’ve just had their first baby, a little boy! (I’ve yet to visit, for various reasons including a niggling cold I wouldn’t want to pass on — though don’t babies have a strong immune system? Er, I dunno. I’ll call and ask Gwen.) Anyway, congratulations to them! And suddenly, the balance of weight has shifted back to me being the one who looks more pregnant. This afternoon I’ll be heading across campus to sign my contract for my current …
Month: January 2009
You Have Nose Star Calipers? AKA Maybe I Should Practice Korean More?
Today’s fun conversation in Korean: ME: You have a nose star calipers?1. DOLLAR STORE CLERK2.: Huh? Nose star? ME: Yeah, you know. Nose star calipers.3. DSC: You mean a nose hair trimmer? ME: Uh… maybe. Nose hair? DSC: Yeah. Like, this? [Makes snipping motion.] ME: No, no. I mean like this… [Makes a buzzing noise, and spins finger round in a circle quickly.] DSC: Oh! Yeah, right over here. ME: What’s this called? DSC: A nose hair trimmer. ME: Ah. Right. Hair. Stars are in the sky, hair is in my nose. DSC: [With a giddy laugh.] That’s right. Shall …
“… the somewhat lumpen kind of pseudo-magical realism that mainstream writers… tend to write when they want to extrapolate to make political points…”
Mainstream writers don’t trust their readers to make connections. Sf understands that the human mind is an intrinsically metaphorizing machine, and that therefore you do not have to labor the connections to make your point. That’s why Suzy McKee Charnas’s work or Le Guin’s better novels are better and more intelligent and persuasive about women’s oppression than, say, The Handmaid’s Tale [1985]. The polemics and satire in Perdido Street Station don’t undermine the secondary world I create, I hope. China Mieville said that in an interview in 2003, so please, before you get out the pointy sticks, don’t blame me. …
새해복많이받으세요, & Bread & Beer
In other words, Happy Korean New Year! (And yeah, they got it from the Chinese. Whatever.) Me, I’m stuffed with rice cake and dumpling soup, and am now having having a nice Leffe Blond, which brings back memories of Montréal. (Not my favorite beer, now, as it was then, but then, it was my first beer, followed by Sleeman’s Honey Brown Lager, Guinness, Harp, and whatever else I could afford. It took till my second year in Montreal to arrive at beer; the first year was taken up with red wine. Which is to segue gracelessly to the fact that …
Slow and Fast Shifts
Something I’ve been thinking about is that moment in certain Philip K. Dick novels (for me, UBIK and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said come to mind first for some reason) where reality just suddenly shifts, turns itself inside out, and you–the dear and much-blessed reader–follow along, feeling the “Woah!” and maybe some of the “Huh?” but not so much that you feel disoriented beyond the effect of, say, a few glasses of wine. Now, a lot of SF does this from page one, I know, and a lot of stories don’t necessarily involve any second-stage WTF?–though I think the …