Dick Tufeld, a longtime radio and TV announcer who intoned “Danger, Will Robinson!” as the voice of the robot in the 1960s science-fiction TV series “Lost in Space,” has died. He was 85.
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Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.
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Some time ago, a writer friend told me that he was working on a novel, and that once the novel was finished, he would begin to publicize it. He would update his website, go on Facebook. Maybe even tweet. And I thought, how do I tell him that he’s leaving it way too late? That you should start doing publicity at least a year before you have anything coming out? If you start doing it when you have a novel coming out, no one will know who you are.
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But the really interesting thing is how science fiction does its best tricks: through creating the narrative vocabularies by which futures can be debated, discussed, adopted, or discarded.
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Writers and readers coexist and invent and reinvent each other in some symbiotic way, but that doesn’t make me mistake James Joyce for a friend. He died before I was born. I would never have met him even if he hadn’t. If I had, I wouldn’t have liked him and he wouldn’t have been interested in me. Not a friend.
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I can no longer reason and cannot be trusted to make a decision. My brain is distracted by second-hand sensations. When the slightest complexity arises in my life, I crave the screen world – the simple goal of building a house in Minecraft or the easily dis-entangled one-hour conundrums that beset the Voyager crew.
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It is easy to feel overwhelmed, confused, weary, and crushingly sad. In this context, the idea of the Apocalypse can be comforting. At least then, the human story, swinging unstably as it does between heights of imagination and bottomless depths of depravity, doesn’t end, as T. S. Eliot’s bleak The Hollow Men would have it, with a whimper.
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The radicals who lent this movement so much of its character have offered American political life a gift, should we choose to accept it. They’ve reminded us that we don’t have to rely on Republicans or Democrats, or Clintons, Bushes or Sarah Palin, to do our politics for us.
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His iconic image, “A Morning’s Work,” shows a pile of amputated legs he himself had sawed off earlier that day.
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I’d brought along a photo album, and passing it around helped mitigate the awkwardness. Onwas was interested in a picture of my cat. “How does it taste?” he asked.
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“He was a serious and well-respected photographer who worked in a tradition that was denigrated as tabloid photography. He didn’t know the world of museums and galleries, but he did know one thing very well: the streets of New York. He took that seriously.”
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These make fascinating companion pieces:
Swamp’s Last Day on Earth:
Tomorrow morning, Swamp will leave town and head for L.A.; after that, “Swamp” will cease to exist. He does not know where he’ll go or who he will be. All he knows is that he will dedicate himself to the goal –revolution — maybe by hooking up with some animal-rights activists and anarchists from the Southwest and taking it from there.
Judith Clark’s Radical Transformation:
Among those supporting Clark’s release was Elaine Lord, who retired as Bedford Hills superintendent after 22 years at the prison. “I watched her change into one of the most perceptive, thoughtful, helpful and profound human beings that I have ever known, either inside or outside of a prison,” Lord wrote the governor.
I’m hugely honored that my publishers have nominated two of my works for annual awards this year.
Dad’s Eye View, my book about great kids’ activities in the Twin Cities from Minnesota Historical Society Press, has been nominated for the Minnesota Book Awards. Sponsored by the The Friends of the St. Paul Public Library, the Minnesota Book Awards showcases books by Minnesota authors and Minnesota presses; in the past, the finalists have included writers like Anton Treuer, Kevin Kling, Kate DiCamillo, Eleanor Arnason, and Bill Holm–a pretty great group. This year’s finalists will be announced January 29th.
And in a surprising bit of news, my story Open Every Womb has been sent to the Best American Short Stories editors for the 2011 anthology. The competition for inclusion is pretty stiff–there are a lot of great stories published every year, by people like Alice Munro and Ann Beattie. But to even be considered is a great honor–a huge thanks to the folks at Atticus Review!
Here’s an interesting juxtaposition: from Minnesota Public Radio, the 55th anniversary of the burning of Swede Hollow:
Some people thought of it as a sort of stopping off place on their way to greater prosperity, but for a lot of people it was the place where they lived. So, you paid five dollars a year for a right to live in that Swede Hollow. Early immigrants who came there, settled there. Some of them worked at the Hamm’s brewery just above, some worked in construction in St. Paul. There’s some indication that some of those Swede Hollow people helped build James J. Hill’s House.
And from the New York Times, a photo essay about an immigrant camp perched on the bluffs above Union City, New Jersey:
“I was shocked that people could live like this so close to a great city like New York,” she said. “I wondered: How did they live? What were their days like?”
What’s the difference between these two shanty towns? Besides half a continent, half a century, and a few shades of skin color, not a thing. Swede Hollow (and the Irish camp nearby, Connemara Patch; Minneapolis had the Bohemian Flats on the west bank of the Mississippi) have taken on a gauzy layer of nostalgia, and upstanding people can proudly trace their immigrant roots to such hardscrabble settlements. But the similarities are much greater than the differences.
The piece on Union City’s camp notes that it has “been there for decades”; much as we would like to imagine that shanty towns are a new development of our current economic distress, they’re a much more systemic phenomenon. Where there’s a need for cheap labor–whether to build a railroad monopolist’s mansion by the cathedral, or to clean a hedge fund manager’s Manhattan apartment–there will be off-the-grid, casual camps for people who can’t afford more than discarded tarps and tar paper. The powers-that-be regard them with a wink and a nod, at least until they become more inconvenient than the laborers they house are worth.
Sneachta
le Máire Nic a’Daird
Nach deas í an tuath
lena cota bog ban
ina codladh go sáimh
sa sneachta geal glan.
Snow
by Máire Nic a’Daird
How lovely is the world
with its soft white coat,
sleeping snugly
in the bright, clean snow.
It’s not the first snow of the season–we had an icy shot across the bow a couple weeks ago that left a sleety, slushy mess on the roads for a few days–but this morning’s dusting has a nicer feel to it. The weather forecast calls for cold and colder temperatures, so perhaps this dusting will stick around for a while. I need to get the studded tires on my bicycle this weekend.
“Sneachta” by Máire Nic a’Daird was the first Irish poem I learned. It was in an early Irish lesson in the basement of the Irish Well, with the late and much-missed Sean T. Kelley, and I think it was meant to demonstrate that modifiers come after the noun in Irish–”cota bog ban” is “coat soft white,” “sneachta geal glan” is “snow bright clean”. But I remembered it because it has some lovely sounds packed into a little space: those “s” sounds and “b” sounds, all the broad vowels (“a”, “o”, “u” are broad in Irish, “i” and “e” are slender, with much import all around–Irish orthography is too big a topic to tackle this morning). It sounds like a quiet, softly-dusted winter morning to me.
It’s Banned Books Week again, so I thought I’d trot out my story Peer Review, which was published in MediaVirus in August 2009. You can read the whole true story behind the story here.
It’s the season for my more difficult stories to find homes! In July, Open Every Womb landed at Atticus Review; next month, a story that made about eight outings over as many years (some publishers respond very slowly …) will come out; and last weekend, Summer Rotation went up at NONTRUE. This story went out twelve times over eight years before finding its place, but I believe that eventually every story finds its place.
“Summer Rotation” takes place in the context of the “Army brat” world. I’ve only found a few examples of military dependents in fiction: The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald, Sweet Talk by Stephanie Vaughn, You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon, and Durable Goods by Elizabeth Berg. It’s an interesting world–a strange balance of security and danger; a society more stratified than any other in American culture, yet also deeply meritocratic; a culture where ready-made patterns are filled and re-filled every season as families come and go according to the Army’s whims.
This story is a love story, a coming-of-age story, and a story about damage, inflicted by others and by ourselves. Even though it involves children, it’s very much an adult story. I hope you like it.
Barbara Ehrenreich, as always, hits the nail on the head in her observations on the tenth anniversary of Nickel and Dimed:
So what is the solution to the poverty of so many of America’s working people? Ten years ago, when Nickel and Dimed first came out, I often responded with the standard liberal wish list — a higher minimum wage, universal health care, affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation, and all the other things we, uniquely among the developed nations, have neglected to do.
Today, the answer seems both more modest and more challenging: if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions.
Our most recent round of political ineptitude (both nationally and in Minnesota) is leading us down a path of meanness, in both senses: both stingy and malicious. Ehrenreich has also observed that “America’s substitute for decent wages has been easy credit,” but of course that all dried up a couple of years ago.
What to do about the immiseration of the working class (I suppose I’m sounding like an old Marxist again …) has not been on the priority list of either party for many years. Indeed, the policies that both parties agree on tend to maximize rather than minimize the immiseration.
I for one am glad that Ehrenreich’s books (Bright-Sided and Bait and Switch are worthy companions to Nickel and Dimed) are still out there, but I’m very sorry that they’re even more timely than ever.
