“Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.” –George Sand
Why can’t I learn this lesson once, instead of once a month?
What lessons do you learn over and over again?
I really do love doing research. I’ve been doing a lot of it (on plagues, pandemics, and public health) as I work on this draft of the novel (if you’re remotely curious, I’ve been keeping a running bibliography on what I’m reading for the novel over here). Today, I came across a gem that I just have to share (and for the ethnically Jewish out there, it’ll probably explain quite a bit about our mothers’ constant fascination with our digestive health while we were growing up), a reference to a “plague” thrust upon the Philistines as punishment for stealing the Ark of God.
From the Old Testament, 1 Samuel 5: 6-12
6: But the hand of the LORD was heavy upon them of Ashdod, and he destroyed them, and smote them with emerods, even Ashdod and the coasts thereof.
9: And it was so, that, after they had carried it about, the hand of the LORD was against the city with a very great destruction: and he smote the men of the city, both small and great, and they had emerods in their secret parts.
12: And the men that died not were smitten with the emerods: and the cry of the city went up to heaven.
After exercising the full extent of my google-fu, I came to learn that emerods can mean…hemorrhoids. Yes. Jehovah smote them with hemorrhoids.
There’s also a bunch of scholarly research that contends that emerods actually refers, in this instance, to bubonic swellings–which is, probably, more likely. But, hemorrhoid smiting paints a much, uh, richer picture, doesn’t it?
Dang, I really love this book.
“No one has ever written truly immortal poetry about how good their dog looks in knitted garments.”
Amen, brother.
On Monday, John Howell posted an excellent article about the ridiculousness of the SFF “ghetto”:
Especially interesting to me is that this continues, considering that the top-grossing films of the past several years are all, you know, SFF.
Also interesting: to read that Brian Aldiss was informed (when he was on Desert Island Disks) “…that SF readers were nerds who were poor and could not ‘get a woman’.” Rea-lly.
Woo. Now that’s some fine company I’ll be keeping.
Table of Contents for Destination: Future, to be published early 2010, edited by Eric T. Reynolds and Z.S Adani.
“The Angel of Mars” by Michael Barretta
“When You Visit the Magoebaskloof Hotel Be Certain Not to Miss the Samango Monkeys” by Elizabeth Bear
“Memento Mori” by Sue Blalock
“Hope” by Michael A. Burstein
“Ambassador” by Thoraiya Dyer
“No Jubjub Birds Tonight” by Sara Genge
“Jade Flower” by C.E. Grayson
“The Gingerbread Man” by James Gunn
“Games” by Caren Gussoff
“Rubber Monkeys” by Kenneth Mark Hoover
“One Awake in All the World” by Robert T. Jeschonek
“Watching” by Sandra McDonald
“The Hangborn” by Frederick Obermeyer
“Dark Rendezvous” by Simon Petrie
“Encountering Evie” by Sherry D. Ramsey
“Monuments of Flesh and Stone” by Mike Resnick
“Mars Needs Baby Seals” by Lawrence M. Schoen
“Edge of the World” by Jonathan Shipley
“Alienation” by Katherine Sparrow
“The Light Stones” by Erin E. Stocks
“Embians” by K. D. Wentworth
So, I was lucky enough to snag a free copy of the August/September 09 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction in a blogging promotion, which made me really excited because I’m a pretty shameless F&SF fangirl, with a respectably sized pile of back issues stacked on one corner of my office bookshelf. So, when my issue arrived, fat and ripe, I was stoked.
It’s a damn fine issue, although it’s lighter on the SF this time around, and weighted towards fantasy. Good-enough fantasy, well-crafted and tempered, but enough to remind me that I just don’t love reading high or middle fantasy in general. I’m cool with singular elements of fantasy–dragons, swords, magic, and the like–but I zone out of a piece if there’s a convergence of multiple classic fantasy elements. In fact, as I paged past a few of the opening fantasy stories, I came across Elizabeth Hand’s Books column which quotes the great Ursula Le Guin (Hand is reviewing Cheek By Jowl: Essays in this part): “The only kind of fiction that is read with equal (if differing) pleasure at eight, and at 16, and at 68, seems to be the fantasy and its close relation, the animal story.” And all I could think was, Oh, Ursula. I wish it were so.
So, I have to admit there were some stories in here that I skimmed. But there were a few that stood out and will earn this issue a place on top of my groaning stack: “Icarus Saved From The Skies,” a translation of a short piece by French Fabulist Georges-Oliver Chataureynaud whose ending has all the punch of a tickle but bowls over in its restraint; Albert E. Cowdry’s “The Private Eye,” worth its weight in gold for style alone; the moody and quiet (and done in artful second person), “You are Such a One,” by Nancy Springer; and my favorite, editor Gordon Van Gelder’s choice reprint from 2000, Tina Kuzminski’s “The Goddamned Tooth Fairy.”
All in all, fangirl status remains thumbs way up.
I’m not very good at waiting. For anything. Never have been. It brings out some sort of OCD tendency I know I directly inherited from my mother that causes me to do things like click refresh on my email repeatedly and check my bank balance every half hour on the hour. I also have a tendency to want to talk about the same topics over and over even beyond their threshold of interesting for anyone.
I have so many things that are out there, somewhere. Stories I’m waiting for responses to, things I am waiting to bounce into my lap, opportunities I know will soon present themselves but have not yet shown their faces.
Oh, I have a lot to do in the meantime—I am pretty much doing something from the time I wake up until the time I eventually try and lie down to sleep (which usually involves popping up a few times to check on things like my email and my bank balance before the Klonopin/Ambien cocktail kicks in (I TOLD you it’d be a difficult six months, right?). But I have a very big issue with the whole “being in the here and now” moment. My mind has been six months in the future. In six months, things will look very different than they do right now. That’s what’s keeping me so busy from wake to pass-out. All this tapping refresh and obsessing is like some kind of demented way to mark this time passing.
But what all this has me thinking about is a quote from Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters, which is weirdly keeping me fine with the tapping and the refreshing and the circling around things and the waiting:
“The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don’t be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.”
Crap, that man has taught me a lot, both in person and in his books.
I am not fighting this. I am Caren’s perverse urge to roll with not being able to roll with things.