Quicksilver!

So, after I got off work yesterday I hurtled over to Patrick Bear for a haircut I desperately need. My hairstylist, Qing, is out, so I'm handed over to Rusty, who's about as queer as one can be without getting his own show on Bravo. He's sitting with a woman who's giving off resentful waves of the kind that can only come from intimacy. "That's my daughter," he tells me. "We were having a family fight."

He tries to convince me that I really should wear my hair short. But omahas and shemayazi would both mourn such a decision, so we split the difference, doing it short up top and long in the back. He tells me his life story and we go back and forth on topics like The Wetspot, Seattle Men in Leather, the Gypsy Arms, and the rest of the scene I'm no longer so deeply involved in. I have young kids these days.

Afterwards, I grab a bus to the University District, where I meet up with fallenpegasus and pick up my reserved copy of Quicksilver, then run over to Kane Hall to attend the reading. As we walked along the long queue waiting to enter the hall, I was struck by the surprising uniformity of Stephenson's fans. It's still hard to put my finger on what, exactly, constitutes that uniformity, but it was there: a penumbra of geekiness about each person, about the line in general. The discussion in front of us is some high school kids enjoying their new cell phones with cameras; behind us, someone who has barely an idea what he's talking about is going on about space elevators. I wonder if he has even the slightest clue what a "kilopascal" is. There was this girl across from us, lounging against the railing in a "nymph with the broken back" pose that, combined with her green turtleneck sweater and long hair in dark brown curls, who knew exactly how hot she was.

I know people in this audience. It's strange how many-- almost a dozen people, including some I haven't seen since Yamaarashi-chan was born. "You have a six-year-old," Galen muttered, shocked. "It can't have been that long." Sure it can.

Neal wasn't a great reader. He obviously hadn't rehearsed his work, although some of his elisions of the text were deft and made the audience laugh. The Q&A afterwards was more interesting, and he promised the audience (at my prompting) to put up a bibliography. I stood in line and had my book signed. I flirted with another pretty girl in a blue sweater while we waited.

Fallenpegasus was kind to drive me home, and when I got in Kouryou-chan said, "Daddy, you look weird." It took her a minute to figure out the haircut, but Omaha thought it looked good. Now I have to read this Massive Tome. I liked Cryptonomicon, but I don't look forward to lugging this monster about.

Grrrr.....

Last night, I had everything ready for bed and got to bed only five minutes or so past the usual bedtime, despite being out late hanging with the Quicksilver crowd.

At 4:40 this morning, I am roughly awakened by Omaha and Kouryou-chan arguing. Kouryou-chan is trying to get into the grown-up's bed, something she knows she's not allowed to do on a work week, when schedules are tight and parents are exhausted. She's whiney and crying and clawing, and when I decide to lay the hard-ass this time Omaha capitulates.

Of course, for the next half hour, if she's not kicking me, Kouryou-chan is reaching out to grab me, to make sure I'm still there. I do not sleep well with this. The alarm goes off at 5:30 to tell me to go swimming.

I ignore it. I'm tired, I'm cranky. The alarm cycles through twice again, and finally, ten minutes behind schedule already, I crawl out of bed. I discover that Kouryou-chan got her hands on my sports watch and dismantled part of the wrist strap. Fine, I can live with that, I don't have to wear it when I swim. I go to get ready for the pool.

The cat has peed on my sweatpants.

I'd finally had it. Maybe I had a small breakdown this morning, I don't know, but I couldn't help just sitting down on the floor of the changing room and having a good cry for a few minutes. I mean, is there something malevolent in the universe that doesn't want me to get better, to get the exercise I want and need to improve? I have this terrifying image of myself ten years from now, fat as Homer Simpson, scabrous with psoriasis, hands gnarled to uselessness with tendonitis, carpal tunnel, and arthritis, back bowed with choronditis...

And I don't feel like I get support for fighting this fate from Omaha. She doesn't take it seriously. Maybe she's right; after all, after carrying around a textbook on Japanese for two years, I'm still in chapter four. I still have a sketchbook in my backpack with only six sketches in it a year after I bought it. The only thing I take seriously is my writing.

But I take Omaha's hobbies seriously too. I have dutifully driven her to her radio gig every Monday. This even though it is a year after the deadline by which she was supposed to have started making enough money to at least afford her own ride to the studio. I stood by her during the whole Pirate Software debacle.

Heh. Here I am, 37 and still whining like a 16 year old, "I just wish somebody understood."

Bloom on King: Right, but still Wrong.

Harold Bloom, at 73, has gone on record as being America's official curmudgeon of letters. Most famous for The Western Canon, an enormous collection of books one "should" read to be considered literate, Bloom has generated a lot of heat recently with his attack on the National Book Foundation's decision to award this year's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to Letters to Steven King.

This is nothing quite like his attack on J.K. Rowling last year, an assault on the readibility of the Harry Potter series that left many blandly outraged, although few were surprised. Bloom is a man who believes that should be accomplished upright in a straightback chair, top button buttoned. There is no such thing as "easy reading."

Bloom lists Don Delilo, Philip Roth, and Thomas Pynchon as three of the four writers left in America. I've read all three. (The other is Cormac McCarthy, whose work I've never seen.) Every single one is truly a master of his craft, a brilliant writer of note, worthy of close scrutiny and attention. So is Vladimir Nabokov. So is John Clute, who so scrupulously guaranteed that every sentence was unique, each paragraph a glittering diamond cleaned of cliche', that he failed to notice that his plot was as hackneyed and meritless as a monster truck rally.

The Delilo book that Bloom pimps in his anti-King rant is Underworld, which I've read. It, too, is a work of art. I read each chapter in breathless awe at the precision and concision of Delilo's craft, only to end the book with that most awful of all questions, "What was that all about, anyway?" Delilo has characters give tight, lovely expositions that all come down to the same theme: there are some very fucked-up aspects to the human condition. But there are no solutions offered.

Bloom is right that King won't do for the American readership what Nabokov could do: tell a magnificent story magnificently. But these days we have television, and video games, and a zillion other time sinks that once upon a time a man of letters could fill with books. King is in competition with those forms of entertainment, and he still attracts readers despite their hypnotic character. This is more than Delilo or Roth can claim.

Yet Bloom is simply wrong if he believes that there was ever a time when schoolchildren would willingly line up at midnight to get their hands on the latest Kipling novel, or Thurber, or Grahame, or that we could ever mold the minds of students to a point where they would do such in those numbers. Bloom is sorely pining for good old days that simply never have been. And if it were not for King, there would be a great many more man hours spent watching television. I presume that is not what he wishes.

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Mindboggling. A water park in Detroit called the police on a three-year-old girl whose mother allowed her to walk around topless. The park officials said that the tot's toplessness could "induce lust in adults."

Y'know, if the park officials thought that, I have to know what was going through their minds. Did any of them experience "lust"? The girl's mother responded correctly: "If there are pedophiles in the park, go harrass them." Park officials were then informed by the cops that both mother and child were within their legal rights and do nothing offensive. Good for the cops.