Lives of Astronomers

In summer 1997 I went to Oxford to do research on a character I thought should be an astronomer.  I went to the Radcliffe Science Library and began reading journals, increasingly aware of how ill-equipped I was to create a fictional astronomer: I should probably spend several months getting a better understanding of the kind of research he might do.

My agent, Stephanie Cabot, had said in June 1996 that with 6 chapters she could get me money to finish the book; somewhere along the line she seemed to have forgotten this, so it was not easy to know how to do justice to this astronomer.  In the meantime I went on looking at journals in the few days I had managed to take off work.  I came upon the Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, which includes a splendid feature: each issue included a brief autobiography by a distinguished astronomer or astrophysicist.

I don't think any of these were used in the book, but I offer a couple of examples, mainly as a reminder of how much better it would be if all academic journals offered this kind of feature:

Vermont, wood, silver lining

Earlier this year I joined ANUFF Wood, a loose group of people in Windham County (VT) who turn up at each other's houses to cut/split/stack firewood.  The idea is roughly that if you turn up for 4 or 5 you can ask them to come to you, though I don't think this is very strictly enforced, and the core members seem to turn up for many more sessions than they possibly "redeem."

I've been to a fair number (wd go to more if I had a car), and recently asked the organizer, Michael, whether it might be possible to have three dying beech trees at the edge of my clearing felled etc.  Someone had told me years ago that I should have them down, and had then left the business, and each year I had meant to do something and left it too late.  And I'm not confident enough of my chain saw skills to fell trees, especially if alone on the hill in a place with no cell phone access.

Michael came about a week ago to have a look, and said the trees were manageable, and a session is now planned for Sunday.  On Monday I managed to reach Mark Russ, a local workman with a pickup truck, who agreed to get some palettes for stacking (for which he thought $10 was a reasonable fee). Today I rode my bike to the supermarket 4 miles up the road to pick up provisions, and when I got home Michael's car turned up in the road - he had decided to fell the trees early to make sure there were no problems.  He headed off to the edge of the clearning.  Meanwhile Mark Russ arrived in his pickup truck with the palettes, courtesy of Ron's Husqvarna.  He said Ron had said he expected to have more palettes and offered to bring more if needed.  We shook hands on this (that is, I did not have change for a $20, and cd definitely use more palettes for other things). 

Mark headed out.  Meanwhile Michael finished felling (or rather dropping) the three trees.  The last, with a wedge in its trunk, refused to fall, so he went out in front to pull at various long branches, which eventually worked. (Timber!)

No one reading this is going to understand - I was so happy!  I had meanwhile received an email from a foreign rights agent at the agency that did not work out, declining to provide a contract template for a deal they had declined to see through on the basis that it was proprietorial.  This is the agency that managed to take over a year to handle paperwork for a French publisher who had been publishing an illegal reissue of Le dernier samouraï - I should have known better than to approach anyone who worked there, because they were all toxic and it had taken months to get maybe 70% of the nastiness out of my system.

So the fabulous thing about ANUFF Wood (ANUFF = A Neighborhood Uniting For Fuel) is that everyone is so generous with their time, so happy to turn up on a weekend morning to help out, and by the end of a couple of hours two or three cords of woods have been stacked.  Something has been ACCOMPLISHED.  Within, maybe, a week or so of the beneficiary putting in a request.  And now someone has actually come to my place and solved a problem!  And the whole thing will be sorted out by Sunday pm!

Of course, from a professional point of view, it would be better if my neighbors took a Not my circus, not my monkey approach to their fellow man, while someone who has actually agreed to represent me is a miraculous of competence and efficiency AND anxious to help.  Also from a professional point of view, it's in some ways a handicap to have Vermonters as a point of comparison when dealing with the biz.  Perhaps I am not really, in the long term, better off knowing that 15 minutes is about the time it takes to drop three trees.  But for now, no, this was the highlight of the year.  It is my substitute for the highlight of yore, which was visiting Best Dentist in the World (Roz Tritton has now retired).

you take paradise, put up a parking lot (John D. MacDonald cover)

Terrific piece by Craig Pittman on John D. MacDonald, the Travis McGee series, and Floridian environmentalism smuggled into the adventures of a knight in tarnished armor:

The more I read, the more fascinated I became. MacDonald’s books weren’t just straight-ahead puzzle mysteries like my grandfather’s Perry Mason books. This author digressed. He quipped. He had a lot to say about a lot of things—particularly about the greed and carelessness driving the bad decisions being made about my state. What he had to say was a revelation to teenage me. I’d spent lots of time hunting and fishing with my dad, as well as camping and canoeing with my Boy Scout troop. Until I read MacDonald, I didn’t realize that the places I’d enjoyed visiting might someday be turned into cul-de-sacs and convenience stores, or that such changes might not be for the best.

My experience with MacDonald’s writing is shared by a lot of my fellow Floridians.

“I read all JDM’s books in my early 20s,” non-fiction author Cynthia Barnett (Rain: A Natural and Cultural History) told me. “My father and grandfather had both read them all and it was a point of inter-generational connection for us. We didn’t agree on many things, but Travis McGee and Florida and rapscallions, we could agree upon.”

The whole thing here.

I read all the McGee books in Jan 2018 (2C2E); it's interesting to me, at least, that both Carl Hiaasen and Lee Child took him as a starting point.  It's interesting that lifestyles that have mass appeal are so scandalous to the people representing the people who dream up these gloriously marketable gigs. Interestingly or not so very, it's seen as dodgy if influencers who promote, as it might be, brand of makeup don't use it, and A Good Thing if they do.

The unbearable lightness of Twitter

I went to The Film Council with a two page outline of what it might be. Based on that they gave us the money to cast it and then with the two actors – it was a very, very small amount of money so we had enough money for two actors effectively – I workshopped it and wrote it with the actors. And it was shot in 12 days.

This is going back some time. These days that’s not unusual micro budget filmmaking, but at the time people weren’t doing that at all. And then we had a simultaneous webcast, the first of its kind apparently, at the same time as it was distributed in not very many cinemas.

And at each stage of the process we were trying to break the rather leaden way the film industry works, where contracts go to and fro, and things take forever to agree. We said, ‘Right, we’re going to write it in this amount of days, and you have to greenlight it over the weekend, and we’ve got to go the next weekend.'

That’s impossible; it takes a week just for lawyers to say, ‘No, my client wants egg sandwiches not ham sandwiches.’ We said, ‘What if everyone sits in a room together and we agree on everything?’ They said, ‘Well that never happens, that’s the whole point of having agents and managers, we all disagree.’

And we said, ‘But what if we say yes to everything, and money’s not an issue, we’re all going to work for nothing, so that is off the table.’ So they got round one evening and did all the contracts over some glasses of wine one evening. They all really loved the process. The whole thing was made and shot in a matter of weeks – which has its good and its bad side.

Simon Beaufoy interviewed for the Bafta Screenwriters' Lecture, the whole thing here.

corruption in a minor key

1. If you teach, and select texts for your courses on the basis of which poets (not poetry) you like personally, or owe a favor to, or are part of an organization with, or want to impress, and not on the basis of a text’s pedagogical utility -- its value to those you were hired to teach and whose intellectual welfare is partly your responsibility -- you may be a tiny bit corrupted.

2. If you slander or libel poets you don’t know based not on information you actually have but your own personal guesses about what type of person they might be, and / or a disagreement they had with a friend of yours many years ago, and can’t find it in yourself to forgive and / or forget but instead only to pass your bitterness on to others down through the years, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.

3. If you can’t take joy in the successes of friends and / or those who are not friends but whose work you recognize as having substantial artistic merit, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.

4. If you choose when and where to write a poetry review on the basis of personal allegiances and not genuine admiration for the work you’re reviewing, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.

5. If you choose which poets to read based on anything other than your admiration for their work -- their clothes, their haircut, their power and influence, their friends, the extent to which you see them or their lives as a mirror of your own, their physical proximity to you or to someone/ something you want -- you may be a tiny bit corrupted.

Seth Abramson, Northern Poetry Review, courtesy (wie so oft) Woods Lot, the rest here