"I'm not in the mood to write" (4,300 word edition).

Grief. Finally. Probably has too much of a lead-in. Lots to cut. But I finally got Zia to say those three small words. Damn, that woman is hard to write.

Now to get Dove employed and Illonca & Rhiane married, and maybe I'll have something worth editing.

I was having awful ADHD this evening. I would flip between the editor and the web or a live video feed or whatever constantly. It wasn't until the last 90 minutes or so that I put everything aside and just wrote. 20 WPM is a terrible writing speed for me.

"A Tranquil Star" by Primo Levi: SF, or pretentious BS?

I recently read "A Tranquil Star", a short story billed as "science fiction", written by Primo Levi in 1978 and published in The New Yorker, available in the online edition. Levi is best known for his fictional accounts of life during and after the Holocaust. He wrote SF fitfully, unsuccessfully and most of it has never been published in the United States.

"A Tranquil Star" reminds me of so much of what's wrong with writers who believe that you can get away with "science fiction as metaphor" without knowning enough, without reading enough, science fiction to appreciate the tropes. It becomes hard to sell to either market.

The story is very short; you could read the whole thing in ten minutes. After reading it through twice it becomes obvious what Levi is trying to do, making an analogy between a supernova destroying a solar system and one man's quiet desperation balancing the rough outlines of his family life and the clearer outlines of his career, and how the two intersect one day-- in one paragraph, in fact.

In the end, "A Tranquil Star" is neither SF nor pretentious bullshit; it's a high-literature meditation on our inability to speak clearly about things outside the human scale, and our equally poor capacity to work within that scale. As such stories go, it is not poorly done, although it has an awkward late 70's sensibility that just barely manages to dodge the ambience of new wave. It's problem is that it invokes that ambience in the first place. Billing it as science fiction weakens it by attracting the wrong audience and repelling the intended one, and the editors at The New Yorker ought to have known better.

Failure to drink one's own kool-aid.

There are fewer things more depressing than watching someone gleefully rub his hands together and cry out, "I can't wait for a lot of people to die!."

But the Lefty Transhumanist blog Cybordemocracy does exactly that. There's no getting around it: calling for the end of modern agrobusiness, predicting that the post-petroleum economy will also be a post-reliable-electricity economy, and hoping for the return of a "localized economy" also means that human lives will return to being nasty, brutal, short, and scarce.

Don't lefties even read Marx anymore?

Maybe Freud was on something.

The other day as I was reading some doujinshi on one of those shared viewing forums, some cutesy girl-on-girl porny thing, I happened to see one of the other readers say, "OMG, clitoral stimulation. So unlike het comics where it's the cock that gives the orgasm!"

( Y'see, it's like this... )

I hate it when translators mess with your head.

I'm reading "Introduction to Japanese Literature," which indexes its Kanji using SKIP. They're direct, educational renditions of Natsumi Soseki's Ten Nights, with translations on the facing pages. In the introduction to this introduction Giles Murray, the translator, states "The translations follow the Japanese scrupulously. I have striven for direct semantic purity, omitting nothing and taking nothing away."

Which is why the first sentence of the book annoys me. The sentence reads, "こんな夢を見た," konna yume wo mitta. The best translation I can come up with is "I saw a dream like this:" Not a bad opening for a 19th century Poe-esque horror story. A little ideomatic, but I get the picture.

What does Mr. Murray do with it? "I had a dream."

Which is also not a bad opening for a Poe-esque horror story. But I would argue that it is not a scrupulous, semantically pure translation. A little ideomatic, I think.

I can't tell if he's trying to put me on my toes, or what. Actually, the story's pretty nifty. And the Kanji education is amazing.