The Mysterious Human Heart in New York

What with awards ceremonies and other end-of-the-school year events, we've been up early and to bed late and I've been seeing all sorts of people I rarely see in between. One of them told me he's trying to "cut through the Gordian knot" of kid sports and school schedules so he can come with us to take a road trip through the inevitably predicted rain to the most crowded part of a nearby city tomorrow night.  As my friends used to say about spending too much money getting to the beach, it is a highly inadvisable thing.  And yet, well nigh irresistible.

The inimitable poet Dorianne Laux says it best, in her poem "The Mysterious Human Heart in New York," which is from her new volume that I've already touted here once, The Book of Men:

Streetwise but foolish, the heart
knows what's good for it but goes
for the dark bar, the beer before noon,
the doughy pretzel hot and salty, tied up
in a Gordian knot. It takes a walk
through Tompkins Square where
the homeless sleep it off on stone benches,
one shrouded body to each gritty sarcophagus.
The streets fill with taxis and trucks,
pinstripes and briefcases, and the subways
spark and sway underground. The sun
is snagged on the Empire State, performing
its one-note song, the citizens below
dragging their shadows down the sidewalk
like sidekicks, spitting into the gutter
as if on cue, as if in a musical,
as if there's no association between the trash
flapping against the chain link and the girl
with her skirt up in the alley. When the traffic
jams on 110th--a local pain, a family affair--
the Starbucks junkie leans against the glass
and laughs into his hand, a cabbie
sits on his hood and smokes, cops
on skates weave through the exhaust,
billy club blunts bumping against their
dark blue thighs. Everyone's on a cell phone,
the air a-buzz with yammer and electricity
as the heart of the city pounds like a man
caught in the crosswalk holding his shoulder,
going down on one knee, then blundering
into Central Park to lean over the addled bridge,
the sooty swans floating under him, grown fat
on cheap white bread. Oh heart, with your
empty pockets and your hat on backwards,
stop looking at yourself in the placid waters.
Someone is sneaking up behind you
in an overcoat lined with watches,
and someone else is holding a cardboard sign
that says: The End Is Here.

Sometimes your heart feels better when you do what you know is not good for it. As the parent of a high school senior, I would desperately like to tell my heart to go ahead, spend more time "looking at yourself" instead of having to pay attention to the way the doomsday sign is "sneaking up behind."

Fuzzy Nation

When I read that John Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation was coming out, I had to find our copy of H. Beam Piper's The Fuzzy Papers so I could reread the original of the story that Scalzi has enlarged and updated.  Then the Piper book sat on my shelf until last week, when Cassandra Ammerman at Tor sent me a shiny, new hardback copy of Fuzzy Nation, and I had to hurry up and read one book right after the other, which turned out to be a fine thing to do, as Scalzi's story is an agreeable addition to Piper's, much more than just a re-hashing of some of the old issues.

The human meets alien story has so many conventions, at this point, that it's hard for an experienced reader of science fiction to go into any story about aliens without suspecting them of sentience. Heinlein's story The Star Beast was one of my formative experiences with this genre, so the phrase "raising John Thomases" always goes through my mind when a strange alien is introduced (the "star beast" was kept as a pet until its human owner, John Thomas, discovers it has been studying them for generations).  There's not much suspense at all about the sapience of these smart little "fuzzies," and Scalzi copes with that by having his narrator, Holloway, say things to them like "your evil mystic cuteness has no effect on me" when it obviously does, and by the humor in such things as the way the fuzzies interact with Holloway's dog.

Besides humor, though, the other way Scalzi copes with the lack of suspense about sapience is by making Holloway a clever lawyer and much of the second half of the novel some pretty riveting courtroom drama.  There will be surprises even for the person who has recently reread the Piper story--you may know the secret of how the fuzzies communicate, but the way it is revealed in Scalzi's fictional courtroom will still be delightful, partly due to Scalzi's inventiveness and partly due to the possibilities offered by updating the technology (Piper's humans had "vocowriters" and video phones, while Scalzi's are equipped with security cameras and ipads).

Even though Holloway claims, at the end of the novel, that "building a nation is not all parties and fireworks," he belies his own claim even as he says it, and the author belies it by making the building of this fictional nation so much fun.

Fuzzy Nation comes out tomorrow, and you don't have to have read any previous science fiction to enjoy it, although if you want to, that will add another dimension.  I like being reminded that in the 1950's, writers thought that "cocktail hour" was an immutable human custom and would be carried out to all the planets. It makes me wonder if the environmental concerns of our generation, reflected on Scalzi's fictional planet, will seem similarly transitory sixty years from now.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

Children's: What type of bird showed Mary Lennox where the rusty key to The Secret Garden was buried?

Classics: What novel sees ambulance driver Lt. Frederick Henry escaping execution by jumping into the Tagliamento River?

Non-Fiction:  What 20th-century trustbuster got the royal treatment in Edmund Morris' Theodore Rex?

Book Club: What Texas town did Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae meet up in, before starting a cattle drive to Montana?

Authors: Who had already penned Player Piano by the time he became one of Saab's first U.S. dealers?

Book Bag: What comic included the classic stand-up routine "A Place for My Stuff" in his collection of cerebral scat called Braindroppings?

Starship

Have I been catching up on my reading?  A little. But what I've been doing more of is catching up on my video watching.  We're still on the first season of Veronica Mars, the second or third season of Big Bang Theory, we just got the new season of South Park, and then yesterday my kids sat me down and we watched the new Starkid video on YouTube, Starship.

Have you heard of the Starkids?  Originally musical theater students at the University of Michigan, they wrote a musical parody version of Harry Potter which is still on YouTube as A Very Potter Musical.  Then they veered off into territory I found less delightful--maybe just because I'm old and stodgy--with Me And My Dick.  But they came back with A Very Potter Sequel.  And now, with the departure of the guy who wrote a lot of the music and starred as Harry Potter--Darren Criss--to the TV show Glee, the rest of the Starkids have formed a company and perform in Chicago, although they always put their entire production on YouTube and have now made a DVD, too, available on the Starkids website.

I thought the Starship parody was delightful, from first to last. You have to watch it in 9-10 minute segments, which actually kind of heightens the humor.  I thought the high point was the love song in Act II, scene ii, "You don't know you the way I do."  But there's a good villain song and lots of good jokes, not least about the way the "Galactic League of Extraterrestrial Exploration, the G.L.E.E." is "always making twisted abominations of everything" (wink).  The bugs on the alien planet are represented by puppets, reminiscent of the way the actors use puppets and animal heads in The Lion King and Avenue Q.  

This is inventive parody, good music, and it's free.  What more could you ask?  Watch it, and spread the word!

What She Said

I learned a lot, working with high-school-age people for a month and a half, and remembered some of what it was like, being 15 or 16.  That's probably why when I read the new volume of poetry by Billy Collins--Horoscopes For the Dead--this poem stuck out, for me:

What She Said

When he told me he expected me to pay for dinner,
I was like give me a break.

I was not the exact equivalent of give me a break.
I was just similar to give me a break.

As I said, I was like give me a break.

I would love to tell you
how I was able to resemble give me a break
without actually being identical to give me a break,

but all I can say is that I sensed
a similarity between me and give me a break.

And that was close enough
at that point in the evening

even if it meant I would fall short
of standing up from the table and screaming
give me a break,

for God's sake will you please give me a break?!

No, for that moment
with the rain streaking the restaurant windows
and the waiter approaching,

I felt the most I could be was like

to a certain degree

give me a break.

This poem's speaker and I are, you know, like, aging!  And this is the kind of thinking that can go on inside an aging person's head when she hears a fragment from a 15-year-old girl's conversation.  It's not useful.  It's certainly no more pretty than the original phrase.  And yet it circles around and around in there.

One of the things I notice about the difference between people who age gracefully and are still interesting to talk to, and people who become curmudgeonly and boring is that the first type stay open to new experiences and ways of saying things.  They sometimes listen to music they know they might not like, and they occasionally read books that aren't exactly suited to their tastes. They continue to grow intellectually.  I want to, like, know what younger people are saying, if only to make fun of it, in the manner of this poem.  What about you?

Maul

On Saturday night I got a plaque that says "It's kind of fun to do the impossible."  That's exactly how it felt to pull off a high school musical in only five and a half weeks of rehearsal.

It went well.  Now it's over.  I feel like I've been a little mauled by the experience, or maybe that's just because of the title of the YA novel I was reading in very small bits during the last week of rehearsals and performance--Maul, by Tricia Sullivan.

As a novel, I didn't like it.  It begins with a scene designed to shock its readers, progresses to a story they don't realize is parallel to the first one for a few chapters, and then starts weaving some details of the story together so readers think there's going to be a satisfying ending for both, and then just...stops.  We're told "the game's over now" and that's it.  Humph.  Not a game I would have let myself get interested in if I'd been able to see that the ending didn't succeed in making sense of the plethora of detail given earlier.  Even if you're someone who likes to read the ending first, though, you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell.  There's some video-game-world-echoing-the-real-world stuff going on here.

Despite the fact that I don't think it's well structured, there are some parts that are absolutely amazing, many of them in terms of how well they describe adolescent emotion:
'Did you ever feel so much of something that you just couldn't control it? And you've tried shit like going to the basketball game and screaming your head off for hours and you had the orgasm or six or seven and you drank the SuperSize Chocolate Shake from 7-Eleven but in the end you didn't feel as empty as you hoped to feel. Did you ever feel something so strong you thought it was a physical hunger but it couldn't be satisfied that way, it was thicker than physical, it stuffed your axons, it was a pregnant idea begging to be born and it was using you for that shit, but you just didn't know what it LOOKED LIKE or WHO inseminated you or how to get it OUT.
Did you ever feel that? It feels like being slapped upside the head about 20,000 times a day and you'll do anything to escape it but you CAN'T.
Subversive behaviour. What a fucking world. It's like everyone's flowing along and the only ones stopping are the ones who can't hack it, they are the worldly possessions it hurts YOU ARE ALL SO FUCKING DELUDED & HELPLESS and I'm reduced to paying $18.99 for a CD to express this for me because you won't let me do anything REAL until after I've been indoctrinated broken down and seduced into submitting to the same CIVILIZING WILL that's sitting on your face."

Even the little throwaway lines, the random thoughts, are fabulously provocative:
'Then I saw a live picture of myself in one of the TVs. I stuck out my tongue just to be sure. It's a well-known fact that TV is more real than real life so when people say get a life what they really mean is, get on TV. Because either you're watching TV or you're on it, and if you're doing neither it's a little like Schrodinger's cat, neither alive nor dead till observed. So when I saw myself on the video screen I was pretty happy because it meant I was alive."

There's some interesting commentary on gender politics, ending with a logical absurdity about where we could end up if we go on as we have been.  This passage is from along that road:
"There they are with their uniforms and their discipline, an abstract and codified representation of all the construction workers who ever whistled at you and there you were, too polite to pee in their toolboxes in retaliation, too polite to challenge them, walking away red-faced because the worst part of it is that you were wondering whether they were really whistling like they'd whistle at Caprice or if they were just being sarcastic and were even now laughing at you with your short skinny legs and flat ass. Besides, you're not supposed to let it get to you. You're supposed to have a sense of humour: they do. See them waving their cocks at each other and farting? You aren't allowed to break the rules of their society which say that you are a cold uptight lesbian bitch if you don't like their hohoho aggressive male ways so just hold your head high from your position of moral superiority and go home and tell your boyfriend (if you have one, which I don't) who if you're lucky will offer to go beat them up knowng you won't take him up on it because you know perfectly well he'd probably get his ass kicked, most of the boys you know are highly ass-kickable because they've been brought up nicely. They were brought up in the luxury of knowing the money power of the military-industrial complex would protect them from the dirt and grime of uneducated testosterone."

There are also wonderful moments in the Maul (Mall), like when the heroine finds a clothing store with items that help her feel what she needs to feel right then in order to survive, and a bookstore where the books become exactly what she needs to read.

Lots of flashes of brilliance, but no final explosion, no settling of the dust so readers can glimpse the new world that has been created.  It's the end of the game just when you've figured out a few of the rules.

Code of the Lifemaker

Phoenix Pick’s free ebook for May is James P. Hogan’s “Code of the
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The Coupon Code for May for the free ebook is 9992144. The coupon will be
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Instructions and download/purchase links at www.PPickings.com (Phoenix
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