Saturday, July 28th, 2007

Time	Event
7:20a	Personal update note.... Sometimes life comes with unscheduled and inconvenient interruptions; I've just had one of those. I spent Thursday in an Emergency Room and Friday in the hospital, and that interfered with a number of things I was planning to do, including posting to this journal. I am very glad to be home again, and will be getting caught up with my regularly scheduled life over the next few days. Sometimes life also provides a little icing on the cake to make up for the inconvenient interruptions; I've just had one of those as well. I came home last night to a freshly-arrived box of copies of Twenty-One Novel Poems -- my new book of science fiction poetry from Sam's Dot Publishing, the one that didn't make it to Conestoga with me -- and the book is just beautiful. Beautifully produced; beautifully designed; beautifully printed. Sam's Dot did a wonderful job on it; the cover is gorgeous. I am so pleased. It is definitely worth having waited for. I recommend it, even if I did write it myself. There's a link to its homepage, a picture of its cover, and a link for getting the book, all at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Index-21NovelPoems.html . (7 Comments | Comment on this)
8:29a	What happened? idiotgrrl, in the context of my note this morning about going to the ER and the hospital, posted a very reasonable question: "What happened?" I understand the question, and I am grateful for the interest and concern it demonstrates. But I'm not going to answer it. First of all, because the details would bore you, and I'm not here to bore you if I can possibly avoid it. And second, because there's a metaprinciple in the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense that goes like this: "Anything you feed will grow." It holds for houseplants and livestock and crops and pets and children and relationships and communities and verbal altercations; it also holds for bodyglitches. The more you feed them, the more they grow. In the case of bodyglitches, the food comes in the form of attention, and -- with a few very specialized exceptions that I won't go into at the moment -- the more attention you pay them, the more they grow. I'm not going to feed this particular bodyglitch by writing about it, or by favoring it with any other sort of attention. The day in the ER and the day in the hospital already constitute more attention than it deserves; time to cut off its nourishment. And I am, as they say, unanimous about that. (8 Comments | Comment on this)
11:36a	Launching Twenty-One Novel Poems, upstream against the current.... You already know that the book launch I was planning for Twenty-One Novel Poems fell through because I didn't have copies of the book in time for Conestoga 2007 in Tulsa... That's once, and I haven't whined about it much. [I hope. I've certainly tried not to whine about it.] But now I feel a tad tempted to whine. Because the next event on my schedule for launching that book is an event called "Ozark Writers Live!" [I don't know whether that's "live" as in "live long and prosper" or "live" as in "we're bringing this news to you live"; all my contacts have been by e-mail, so I haven't had a chance to hear it pronounced.] It's happening at the Fayetteville (Arkansas) Public Library on September 8, 2007, under the auspices of an NEH grant, and it's quite an impressive fandango; I'm honored to be part of it. There are three tracks of programming: a writing workshop track and two speaker tracks. I've been given a 50-minute session, which means, in theory, that I can read quite a few poems from the new book and answer quite a few questions about them. In deference to the NEH-grant-frame I titled my session "Science Fiction Poetry and the Ozark Storytelling Tradition," which qualifies as what academics refer to as A Rubric. And to top it all off, the event welcomes sales tables, which means that George will be there with copies of my books, including copies of the brand spanking new Twenty-One Novel Poems. This is all wonderful, right? It couldn't be better, right? Unlike "Books in Bloom," this event is even indoors, with air conditioning! But there's a problem. I'm scheduled for 1:00 p.m. in one programming room, and in the other programming room, also at 1:00 p.m., is ... get ready ... Donald Harington. This is roughly equivalent to being scheduled to play a fugue on the harpsichord in one programming room while in the other programming room, at the same time, a fugue is being played by Johann Sebastian Bach. You may not be familiar with Donald Harington's work [although I consider his recent book With to be a science fiction novel and have reviewed it as such], but he is a Giant Name. Here's a quote from his bio at http://www.donaldharington.com/about.html : "His first novel, THE CHERRY PIT, about Little Rock, was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published twelve other novels, most all of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. These include LIGHTNING BUG, SOME OTHER PLACE, THE RIGHT PLACE, THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE ARKANSAS OZARKS, THE CHOIRING OF THE TREES, and, most recently, THIRTEEN ALBATROSSES. He has also written books about artists. He won the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 1999 and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of Arkansas Library Association. John Guilds in his anthology, ARKANSAS, ARKANSAS, wrote, 'if Miller Williams ranks as the greatest poet born, bred, nurtured, and still living in Arkansas, Donald Harington is by the same standards Arkansas's greatest novelist.' " The only thing worse that could have happened to me in this context -- since what I'm trying to launch is a book of poems -- would have been finding myself scheduled at the same time as Miller Williams. Woe is me, youall. I understand that somebody has to be scheduled at the same time as "Arkansas's greatest novelist." But why me? I am the writer who has already paid my dues by not having my book ready in time for Conestoga. Heck, if I had my druthers I too would go listen to Donald Harington's talk, which has the irresistible title, "At Home in Stay More: Fiction with an Ozark Allure." Woe is me, for sure. I'm half a century too old to offer a Dance Of The Seven Veils as a competing example of Ozark Allure, and I'm fresh out of birds of prey, lemurs, wolves, alligators, desert foxes, albino raccoons, and beautiful pythons. That's twice now. Either Providence is saying "Hey! Yo! Pay attention! Having a successful book of science fiction poetry is NOT on your schedule!", or Providence is telling me that if I'm audacious enough to hope for a successful book of science fiction poetry I had better be smart enough to think of a launch event spectacular enough to justify that. Whine, whine, whine..... (19 Comments | Comment on this)
11:50a	Brief book review; With.... Here, Gentle Readers, FYI, is that review I mentioned of Donald Harington's book, from the July/August 2005 issue of my Linguistics & Science Fiction Newsletter: With, by Donald Harington (The Toby Press, 2004); 491 pages; ISBN 1-59264-050-8. Diana Cook sent me this book, and I'm grateful. [It's not every day that you read a novel and discover that your very own personal dentist is one of its characters (minor, but a character all the same)!] With is unlikely to turn up anywhere with science fiction fantasy specified as its genre, but I assure you -- this novel is science fiction fantasy. It has semi-ghosts called "in-habits", both human ones and animal ones; it has animals as narrators, and carrying on conversations with one another, and greatly concerned with the task of getting their mistress exactly the right birthday present. It has a young girl who grows up in total isolation on top of an Ozark mountain -- and succeeds in doing that, a most unlikely outcome -- helped by her assorted animals (including a bobcat and a bear) and in-habits. It's an extremely bawdy book -- explicit sex, explicit language -- not suitable for children; it's also a horror story, starting with a child kidnapped by a despicable sexual predator, and including a man's corpse established in the outhouse that eventually becomes a skeleton sitting there in the outhouse. The reason it's not called science fiction fantasy is because it was written by Donald Harington and is therefore called "literature." Recommended. Here's a quote from page 223 to give you the flavor of the thing; the narrator is the dog Hreapha.... "She tried to tune in to her old Stay More in-habit but it had long gone to the Madewell Mountain house, where its presence was sending her such strong signals that she was tempted to turn around and go home, even if she had to mate up with a coyote along the way. She had nothing against coyotes; their breeding was just as good as, if not better than, her own. ... But she didn't like the idea of quick mating with strangers, and after all, coyotes did not speak her language, or rather they spoke a form of it that was not at all intelligible to her." (2 Comments | Comment on this)

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