Charlie Darwin, Bewildered

December 18 1832
After passing through the straight of Le Maire at Tierra del Fuego, the Beagle anchored at Good Success Bay. Here Darwin had his first encounter with savages [sic]. He was shocked by the primitive way of life they led but was also fascinated by them. A group of four male Fuegians met the landing party. After an attempt to communicate with the Feugians the party presented them with some bright red cloth and the Feugians immediately became friendly with them. The natives initiated a dialogue by patting the crewmen on their chests. Apparently they had the most amazing ability to mimic the crew's gestures and even the words they spoke, often repeating whole English sentences back to them. Darwin was bewildered by all this.

Improv Everywhere

Always one to be behind the times, I'd not heard of Improv Everywhere until today, but a quick scan of the website explained an event I'd unwittingly witnessed a few weeks ago: No Pants 2k8, where hundreds of people in seven cities around the world took off their pants (that is, trousers -- in London I once made what I thought was an innocuous comment about "pants" and everybody thought I was making a ribald comment about underwear) and rode the subways. I'd ridden a train with one of these groups, and assumed they were participating in some sort of marathon. Or something. I don't know. You see weird stuff in NY all the time.

But the latest Improv Everywhere event is marvelous -- be sure to watch the video of Frozen Grand Central. Hilarious and beautiful. Long may they improvise!

Post-Pboz-Party Post

Pindeldyboz is migrating from being a print-and-online magazine to being only an online magazine, and so they held a party Monday night, and I went. So did other people. Including Richard Larson, Dustin Kurtz, Ed Champion, and Sarah Weinman. The last print issue of Pboz is actually only appearing as a free PDF download. It's 16 megabytes of worthwhile reading.

Of last night's readings from the last issue, I was particularly taken by two. Here are excerpts:

As internships go—is that still what this is? -- you could do a lot better than zig-zagging through no man’s land carving up no man’s cows all summer. It’s not for credit, what the hell kind of major would give you credit for that? It’s more like an apprenticeship, but with no hope or desire to take over the business. Every Wednesday $250 is direct-deposited into my account back east. This job makes a lot more sense on Wednesdays.
--from "Every Creeping Thing of the Earth"
by Patrick Rappa


I agreed with you -- wholeheartedly, in fact -- that it was a relief that you were upgrading your BlackBerry that evening. If you hadn’t, then you wouldn’t have returned to the office and received the call from the Committee Chair, confirming that she did receive the proposal and she thought it was "exceptional." I also agreed with you that the shock you suffered was unfortunate and upsetting. And yes, I do understand that just because you had -- as you stated -- a "brain fart" it was not my responsibility to take it upon myself to complete the mandatory proposal for a grant that increases our project budget by two million dollars. I was to find you and have you view the final edition so that you may “put your spin on it” and I didn’t do that and, as I said, I am sorry.

What I really wanted to say was that you would certainly know that you had a "brain fart" because your head is so far up your ass you could probably smell it.
--from "What I Wanted to Say"
by Kristin McGonigle

The good news is that the Pboz website is going to continue to publish five new stories every other week, as they have done for a while now, and impressively so -- in fact, for Best American Fantasy (which makes a great holiday present, by the way) we reprinted more stories from Pindeldyboz Online than from any other source.

Brooklyn Book Festival

Tempest and I spent the day at the Brooklyn Book Festival, mostly just wandering around harrassing various vendors. I finally got to meet Hannah Tinti, editor of One Story, in person, and she told me about the Save the Short Story project, and even got a picture of me reading Calvin Baker's "Dominion", a very fine story indeed.

We also got to meet Tom Roberge of A Public Space, another person I'd exchanged plenty of emails with, but had not yet encountered in person. I convinced Tempest to subscribe, which was one of my better accomplishments of the day. There are only a few magazines I really wouldn't want to be without for even one issue, and A Public Space is one such magazine.

Gavin Grant and Jed Berry manfully manned the Small Beer Press table. Tempest and I had discussed the fact that there haven't been any good, physical literary fights recently -- plenty of internet flamewars and such, but nobody actually punching somebody out -- and so we tried to convince Gavin that he should start such a fight, perhaps at the upcoming World Fantasy Convention, but he didn't like the idea, citing certain impracticalities and long-range effects. (Why do people have to be sensible and ruin our grand plans for entertainment?)

I tried to find Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press to catch up with him, since we haven't had a chance to chat for a while, but he was off watching some hockey game or something involving steel. I thought for a while that this was just a ploy to get me to go away and stop scaring customers away from the Soft Skull table, but Ed got the same info.

(Except I never saw Ed. Sure, there were 10,000 people at the festival, but still. If anybody can stand out amidst 10,000 people, it's Ed. I think one of us doesn't exist. Actually, during the entire day the only litblogger I encountered was Levi Asher. I think they were all hiding from me. Or wearing disguises. After all, it took me a moment to recognize Levi...)

Tempest and I had lunch at a wonderful place serving wraps and smoothies, a bunch of blocks away from the festival, down some roads. (Brooklyn remains a mystery to me.) We had many fun moments during lunch, but one particularly fun one for me was watching somebody reading today's Times, utterly engrossed by Maria Headley's amusing and touching essay about being a stepmonster. I restrained myself from going up to the poor, unwitting soul and screaming like a little girl, "Hey, I know her! She's great! Omygawd you're reading her essay!!!" It took a lot of self-denial and inner strength to avoid doing this, but I somehow persevered.

The only panel/reading we went to was a reading by Uzodinma Iweala, Doreen Baingana, and Mohammed Naseehu Ali, all of whom were excellent. I knew Iweala's and Baingana's work, but Ali was new to me, and I will now most certainly seek out his collection The Prophet of Zongo Street. Doreen Baingana, who I first became acquainted with in Kenya last year, read part of a story from her excellent collection Tropical Fish, and Iweala read a story from the latest Paris Review. (And I guess here is the place where I have to admit I don't read The Paris Review much anymore because it has become so thin. A few stories, an interview or two, a handful of poems, some pictures. The design has gotten better, but the contents have been put on such a diet the magazine just doesn't hold much interest for me anymore. Alas.)

There were other panels that looked fascinating, but there were long lines to get tickets to see them, and getting tickets would have required planning and organization on my part. So we only saw the one. And a good one it was.

After the reading, I found Tom Burke, who is one of the organizers of the Summer Literary Seminars program through which I visited Kenya last year. Tom kindly introduced me to some of the people behind one of my favorite websites, Words Without Borders, and pointed out a new lit mag to me, the St. Petersburg Review, which is published from my home state of New Hampshire and features a bunch of excellent writers, including George Saunders, Gina Ochsner, Padgett Powell, Josip Novakovich, Aimee Bender, Jeffrey Renard Allen, Mark Halperin, Timothy Liu, and, appropriately, many Russians whose names are at the moment unfamiliar to me. It also includes a special section of poetry by women from the Gulags.

By the end of the day, I was too tired to make the trek over to the Sunday Salon, so that's going to have to wait for another Sunday. It's good to have things to look forward to.

JPK Speculates

James Patrick Kelly is touring New Hampshire at the moment as part of the NH Humanities Council's year-long Speculate program, and I went to his presentation at the Pease Public Library in my hometown of Plymouth.

Jim, Meghan McCarron, and I went out for dinner beforehand so that we could be geeky and talk sci-fi. (Meghan and I had, earlier that day, caused a slight scene in the dining hall of the school where we work, because we were discussing some writer or another, book deals, sub-subgenres, conventions, etc. all in the space of about a minute and a half, because we share common reference points and can thus speak in what sounds to everyone else like a different dialect. We stopped when we realized everybody around us was silent and staring at us in bemused horror.) It was a marvelous dinner, and Meghan didn't insult New Hampshire, the state Jim and I have lived in for much of our lives, too vociferously, which disappointed us somewhat, because there is nothing a true New Hampshire-ite likes more than for somebody to proclaim the state impossible to live in -- it makes us lifers feel hardy.

Meghan then had to return to work for dorm duty, and I led Jim to the library, where about twenty people were waiting to hear him read and listen to him talk about whatever he was going to talk about. He began by reading his story "Unique Visitors", which proved a fun warm-up, and then he discussed The Singularity. This was not a discussion that people who have been familiar with the concept for a long time would have found to be a revelation -- although Jim's presentation style is so engaging that it would nevertheless be fun -- but was, instead, intended to let an audience know about some of the things that contemporary science fiction writers think about. It was a big hit, and the audience seemed both inspired and enthralled. Jim even got into an extended discussion of the Metaverse. As we say around here, great fun was had by all.