SO MANY MEETINGS

I have an excellent teaching schedule this semester -- Tuesdays and Thursdays only, with my first class starting at 11:00 -- but I begin to fear that this wonderful schedule, which looked as if it would leave me plenty of time to write, is going to be wrecked by a plethora of meetings.

I am on far too many committees, and each of these committees seems determined to hold weekly meetings. Then we have a monthly faculty meeting. Then I have ad hoc meetings, for this and that, all of them necessary -- I agree they're necessary, each one of them -- but sweet Jesus, they're eating my life.

The biggest time suck now is a work-intensive committee involving a university-wide responsibility which ought to resolve itself by early October. Here's hoping.

And some of the other committees, I hope, will also calm down soon.

Meanwhile, though...

Changing Your Name: a Rant

Here's why I think women should not take their husband's name upon getting married -- or, well, you know, why NO ONE should change his or her name upon marrying ANYONE, though let's be honest, it's women who change their names, 98% of the time.

Reading for Vampires, Zombies, Apocalypses

So I'm reading wide and deep for my Popular Lit Spring class in Apocalyptic Lit. So far I am mostly finding books that I'm not going to include, for one reason or another, although I did find another short story to include, Naomi Kritzer's "So Much Cooking."

(That was sort of cheating, though. I'd already read it, it just slipped my mind when I was making up my list. But then when I was doing my Google Trawl, there it was. This is one of the stories that should have been nominated for a Hugo this year, had the troll pups not been up to their usual griefing.)

New Course for Spring

In the spring, I will be teaching a course tentatively titled Vampire, Zombies, and Apocalypses: Our Hunger for Destruction. It's for our general studies, sophomore level class in popular lit, and we'll be looking at why works on mass death and destruction are so population.

That said, this is a bleg, or at least a call for suggestions. What movies, books, graphic novels, or short stories do you think I should include in this class? These should be fiction and they should fall into the category of popular culture, though they don't necessarily have to be American or current.

Unpleasant Things That Happened This Week So Far

(1) My genderqueer kid got told by an adult who should know better that being LGBT is an evolutionary error, because gay people don't have babies, and evolution is all about passing on those genes, isn't it. Evolution is teleological, y'all. Who knew.

Insomnia

I'm having the worst insomnia, y'all.

I've always had trouble sleeping -- I'm talking since infancy. One of my earliest memories is being four years old (we had just moved into our new house, out of the trailer) and wandering around in the dark in the middle of the night after everyone else was asleep. This wasn't just once, either. I did this all the time.

One Good Thing From Our Pre-School Training...

This was shown during the Title IX Training session:

It's from the folks at College Humor. Watch it to the end, as those kids today say.

What's up with Me?

I've been writing and writing, which is why no posting.

Other news: I went in for a EGD, which is what they call it when they run a camera down your gullet to look at your throat and belly and decide if you need surgery to correct your ulcer or not. (Spoilers: Yep.)

Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin

I may have mentioned to y'all, a few dozen or a few hundred times, that the kid is genderqueer.

And, as you know, Bob, we live in a Red State, and in a severely conservative area, and deeply Evangelical Christian area, of that state.

All this by way of saying that her adolescence has been rough.

Just recently, and once again, she was treated to another adolescent informing her, piously, that while he didn't have anything against LGBTQ people himself, and while he certainly believed that they should have equal rights, nevertheless he believed, due to his religious convictions, that what they did was a sin.

Could This Be Good News at Last?

Why, yes, it is!

I have sold a story to Fantasy & Science Fiction. I cannot even tell you how pleased I am. F&SF is one of the "big three," the top SF print magazines, and also this story, "The History of the Invasion Told in Five Dogs," is one I like a lot.

The editor, C.C. Finley, was just great, working with me during the submission process.

I'll let you know when it comes out!

New Office

So I heard from the Committee for Central Planning. My new office has been selected.

I have to admit I was in denial about all this. The CCP has been threatening to tear down our building for years, and nothing ever came of it. Sure, every other professor in the building except me and one other has been moved out over the past year... but surely the CCP was just, um, surely...

Nope. I'm out too, as of this month.

The new office is in a (slightly) newer building, which I suppose is good news.  It has a window (yay!) and only one bookshelf, but a much bigger desk. It's on a long hallway filled with my colleagues, so that's nice. The one bookshelf is going to be a problem -- I have three here in this office, and they are crammed full. I think I can fit the small one into the new office. Aside from that, I am going to have to weed out books, I guess. (NOOOOO.)

It's a nicer office in general, except for the bookcase issue -- by which I mean it doesn't look like it was built in a day and a half, which this office does, since it was. The walls aren't made of sheetrock, and the floor isn't indoor-outdoor carpeting laid over cement slab. That sort of thing.

Also I'd imagine the mold and dust issue is better over there.

I'd be pleased, in general -- and I will be pleased -- except for how I now have to moved. Once the move is done, I'm sure I will be pleased.

So Where Have I Been

Laid low, y'all.  Laid low.

I got some sort of evil virus, or flu, or demonic infestation, which made me sicker than I have been in year. For a few days there I did almost nothing but sleep. Seriously, at once point, clawing my way to consciousness, I googled sleeping sickness to see if, you know, maybe....

It's not endemic in Arkansas, though.

I went back to school on Monday, which was probably a mistake, even though all I had to do was meet students for conferences over their papers; and on Tuesday, which was definitely a mistake. I taught for about forty minutes (I do not remember most of what I said -- I vaguely remember going off on a rant about Plato), realized I was very close to passing out, and sent them home.

Today, like a miracle, I am all but well.

Lying there on the sofa at my sickest, though, racked with misery, fever, and pain, I thought about Elizabeth Barrett Browning -- who lived for years like that, in pain like that, unable to move from a sofa, and all the while managed to write poetry*.

A better man than I am.




*I couldn't write. I read, during the hours I managed to stay away, straight through Kage Baker's Company series. The entire thing.

Here's What I'm Doing

Two of the kid's friends have come to visit, so I have a house filled with young adults.

These are her two best friends, Rabid and Neon (those are net names). She met them over the internet, which according to internet lore means they ought to be 57 year old pedophiles. Instead they are nineteen and twenty-two and delightful.

They've spent the week talking comics (they are all web comic artists), catching Pokemon, drawing and discussing their drawings, and watching movies. On Friday we went up to Crystal Bridges.

Crystal Bridges has a wonderful new painting, by the way, by  George Copeland Ault.  This one:

It's much more amazing in person. I tried to find prints in their gift shop, but no go.

Then yesterday we drove up to Devil's Den to hike Yellow Rock trail. It was hot and humid, but due to all the rain we've been having lately, so green. And so many flowers. More hikers than I've ever seen up there as well. My little pack of artists were hiking on only five or six hours of sleep (they have also been staying up until four-thirty every night) but seemed to enjoy the climb nonetheless. Many hikers had their dogs along which helped. Also we saw tiny toads, lizards, and also one snake.

When we reached the top, some adorable Christian had used the loose rocks of the scree to spell out GOD! in big rock letters.

My kid (making an annoyed face): "Rabid. Help me change this to GOD IS DEAD, okay?"

But instead, what they did was rearrange the rocks to read DOG.

"After all," as they put it, "God is probably a dog. Or at least he likes dogs."

Book Review: Ringworld

Apparently this summer I have decided to read a great deal of 1960s/1970s SF written by men.

Why? I do not know.

Ringworld, written by Larry Niven, was published in 1970. I read it as a kid. I can't remember when, exactly, although it would have been sometime after it was published, probably when I was fourteen or fifteen.

It was the first Niven I read, and I do remember liking it. I liked it a lot. I liked it so much, that I read every book I could find by Niven, no matter how terrible they were, right up until Footfall, when I just gave up. I couldn't take anymore.

Reviews of 1960's SF

I am currently reading -- I can't even remember why -- two SF novels published in the 1960s, both by men. One is Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, which I read I was (much) younger, and a big Heinlein fan.

The other is William Nolan's Logan's Run, which I had never read before.

One point I'm going to make up front is that, wow, science fiction is terrible at predicting the future.

The second is that these particular SF writers certainly have an interesting attitude toward women.

The third point I will only mention: LGBT issues. Yeah, wow.