Inhuman Swill

We're used to thinking of the movement of an object as homogeneous and instantaneous. In other words, for example, when I give a push to the fat end of my pool cue, the felted end moves at the same time to strike the cue ball.

But I have a question—and I'm asking this because I'm curious about the answer, not because I know the answer. Let's say I had a pool cue that was 186,282 miles long. In other words, light would take a full second to travel from one end of it to the other. So, if I were to give my end of this pool cue a push, would the far end move simultaneously? Or would the motion take something more than a second to propagate along the length of the cue (causing it to ripple, as it were)? Physicists, I'm talkin' to you.

Hey, Chicagoans! I have a reading coming up just a week from today, Tuesday, November 3, 2009, as part of Chicago's Tuesday Funk Reading Series.

I'll be appearing alongside Robert Duffer, Lynn Suh and Chris Sweet. It's my third time at Tuesday Funk, where I'll be reading another sequential installment from my memoir The Accidental Terrorist. The reading begins at 7:00 pm sharp upstairs at:

Hopleaf Bar
5148 N. Clark St.
Chicago, IL 60660

That's just south of Foster, in the beating heart of beautiful Andersonville.

Hopleaf is one of my very favorite bars in the world, specializing in Belgian ales but with a menu of over 600 craft beers from around the world. All that and excellent Belgian food too!

This is only Tuesday Funk's second time at Hopleaf, so by coming out and supporting the reading you'll help ensure that the series can return to this beautiful bar month after month after month.

I hope to see you there!

To my dear former friends at The Week:

I am highly annoyed by The Week's handling of my subscription. I received your magazine just fine for several months at my new address. Suddenly I realized that I had not received an issue for a few weeks. I checked my subscription status at your web site only to find that "the post office has notified us that the address we have listed on your subscription is incorrect."

Well, that's ridiculous because mail—including, once upon a time, my subscription to The Week—gets to me at that address just fine.

Nonetheless, knowing that the post office is picky about things, I updated my address a couple of months ago, but I still have not received any further issues. I checked the site again today only to find that same ridiculous objection about the post office.

Back while I was still receiving The Week, I renewed my subscription for something like 5 years, paying around $250. That's how much I loved your magazine. In return, you suspended my subscription. That's apparently how much you value my subscription. Sadly, during this time period when you failed to deliver the subscription for which I paid you a lot of hard-earned money, I learned to live without your magazine.

Therefore, instead of reinstating my subscription, I'd like you to cancel it. Please refund the prorated balance remaining on my account. Why should I let you keep my money when you don't seem to want to send me your magazine?

Sincerely hurt,
William Shunn

A quick update about "Strong Medicine," tonight's fiction-and-dance event at Writers WorkSpace in Chicago. Due to unfortunate unavoidable circumstances, Asimina Chremos (the dance half of Microgig) will not be able to appear in person tonight. However, she will appear on video accompanied by live cello improvisation from Fred Lonberg-Holm, making the evening even more science-fictional than it was before. Don't miss it!

We look forward to seeing you tonight at 7:00 pm at Writers WorkSpace, 5443 N. Broadway in Chicago. (Doors open 6:30.)

For more information, please visit: http://www.shunn.net/medicine

Let me tell you a story.

This morning I was out walking the dog,
who, honestly, can be a grouchy pain in the ass.
But today she was pretty good. It was clear and cold, being October,
and we had waited more than five minutes
to cross a busy street. Ella was alert for squirrels,
trotting with her head up like a tiny horse,
when half a block ahead we saw a woman walking a shepherd mix
of some kind. It was small for a shepherd, brown with
a little bit of red to it.
Ella sat down on her haunches, as she sometimes does,
and wouldn't budge. It's her way of telling the
other dog that they're equals, and she's not afraid.
I made her keep walking, though, but I kept her
on the side of me away from the other dog,
just to be on the safe side. Because you never know.

As we passed the woman, her dog lunged in front of me,
growling. Ella lunged back. She's a soft-coated wheaten terrier
and doesn't look like she could be that tough, but they
were both about the same size and it was an even match.
In the confusion of bodies and leashes and guttural snarls,
I could see the other dog's teeth, points of gleaming bone,
trying to find their way home in my dog's
throat. I hauled Ella into the air by her leash and
swung her clear of the scrap. She wears a body harness and not
just a collar for exactly this reason.
The woman, sounding shaken, could not have apologized more.
Her dog never acts like that. I was shaken too. She
thanked me for being so cool, but it's like I told her:
"Sometimes things like this just happen."
There's no reason for it.

It's much the same way that I don't like you.

It seems, I'm afraid, that Cast a Cold Eye will just miss being out in time for the World Fantasy Convention in San Jose. But never fear! In the absence of actual books, I'm having postcards printed up for Derryl and me to distribute at the con. (I'm using Moo.com, which I love, and which is also where I got my business cards. And nowadays if you order from the US, your stuff ships from the US, which is a great improvement over waiting for a shipment from the UK.) Anyway, if you want to see what the front of the postcards looks like, check out this page I built to tout our book:

http://shunn.net/cast

I'm also having postcards printed up to advertise the story reading/dance performance taking place October 16th here at the WorkSpace. I'm very happy with the way the fortuitous way the color schemes of the photographs matched up with the illustration. Check it out:

http://shunn.net/medicine

If you're in Chicago, I do hope to see you on the 16th!

I keep wanting to write a long entry about Blue Heaven 2009, but I keep not having enough time to put together something of appropriate length, depth, and breadth. (And also something that works as a sufficiently laudatory travelogue of Kelleys Island so Marvin will stay my friend.) Suffice it for now to say that I could not be happier with the feedback and suggestions that hollailama, rambleflower, and secritcrush gave me on my novel-in-progress Technomancers. And I can't fail to mention bondgwendabond, who lent half an ear to the proceedings, offered more great suggestions, and may well have renamed my novel to Endgame. (And I can't fail to mention ccfinlay for putting everything together and making it so much more than just a week of critiques, and my great once and future[?] roommate gregvaneekhout, and...)

Anyway, I thought, since I outlined my writing goals at the beginning of the Endgame project, I'd post an update about where I am on it and what I have left to do. 70,000 words into the novel, I realized I was only about halfway through the plot, if that. For a young-adult novel, this was rather unacceptable. With insufficient ruthlessness I was able to hack and revise that down to 60,000 before Blue Heaven, but there's more cutting and rewriting that needs to be done. That will come after I complete the current draft, though, which I'm already moving forward on. I'm giving myself 50,000 words and to the 30th of November to reach the end. Then I'll spend December reworking the problematic opening of the novel and cutting that first half down from 60,000 to, I hope, 30,000 words or fewer. That will give me an 80,000-word novel to start shopping. That's the plan, and a mere thousand words a day will get me there.

One of the consistent comments I got from my critiquers is that the book is pleasant enough but really starts humming around page 200. The faster I can get to that point, and the more humming I can coax out of it before that point, the better.

And now, back to executing my Endgame.

STRONG MEDICINE: A Program of Fiction and Dance
Writers Workspace, 5443 N. Broadway, Chicago, IL 60640
Friday, October 16, 7:00 pm (doors 6:30 pm)

Writers WorkSpace is pleased to host a free evening of fiction and dance in the spirit of October, featuring sound-and-movement duo Microgig and science-fiction writer William Shunn. On a mission to bring dance to places it's not normally found, Microgig members Asimina Chremos (dance) and Fred Lonberg-Holm (sound) will stage their haunting improvisations in this unusually close and intimate setting. Bookended by chilling short stories read live by William Shunn, the evening will be one you won't want to miss. Space is limited, so arrive early. Light refreshments will be offered.

(See an earlier Microgig performance, from the beer cooler at Chicago's famous Hideout, below.)

A poem that made me smile most broadly today is "Moving Day" by Ron Koertge. Read it—it won't take you very long.

So there's something of a meme on YouTube where people take that memorable scene of Hitler's meltdown in the German film Downfall and replace the subtitles. My favorite example of this used to be the one where Hitler rants about the changed ending of the Watchmen movie. That one's now been eclipsed by this more brilliant, pointed, and timely version:

I consciously realized something this evening that has been nagging at me for a few weeks now, which is that tomorrow morning, when the new episode of my podcast goes live, there's going to be a line on the front page of my web site that reads "September 11." I'm not looking forward to seeing that.

It helped this evening that Laura and I had a good friend over, and that date was one of the subjects we chatted about on the back deck amidst the wreckage of banana daiquiris, white Russians, and Tomintoul 27yo served neat with water back. I was glad to hear that I'm not the only one who gets so angry that he has to withdraw from conversations of the sort that I had a few weeks ago, when a random stranger at a bar I like to frequent on Friday afternoon tried to tell me that the American government was behind 9/11. (It's not exactly a counterargument, but my favorite statistic to trot out in such circumstances is that Manhattan [a/k/a New York County], the very borough that was attacked by foreign nationals, voted 80% for Al Gore in 2004.)

Anyway, if you have some time, browse over to my survivor registry tomorrow, read some of the posts from that confusing day, and try to remember what it was like to feel the world changing around us.

I end up with some very interesting Google Ads showing up on the page for my Accidental Terrorist podcast. Just now there was a big splashy banner ad for the Front Sight Firearms Training Institute ("Gunfights don't give second chances"). Apparently the Googlemind doesn't want you potential terrorists going out into the world without firearms training!

Support Chicago radio personality James VanOsdol's history of the local '90s rock scene, Chicago Rocked! He's funding the project through Kickstarter.com and only has 13 days to raise another more than $10,000. Please pledge if you can, because I selfishly really, really want to read this book.

Just a reminder of the reading tonight at Flourish Bakery Cafe, 1138 W. Bryn Mawr Ave., Chicago, IL 60660. I'll be appearing with five other authors and poets. What a bargain! For more information, please see:

http://tuesdayfunk.blogspot.com/2009/08/tuesday-funk-16.html

Here's a personal invitation:

Winter is not here yet, but it has definitely RSVP'd this past week. Summer had finally shown up after slumming somewhere down south but only hung out for a couple of weeks before autumn served it its eviction notice. I know that in a few months we'll be longing for temperatures in the 50s, but right now it feels cold as hell out there.

Fortunately, it was hot inside the Chicago Theater last night, once everyone thronging the sidewalks stopped taking pictures of the marquee and squeezed themselves through the doors. As part of their Rent Party '09 tour, Steely Dan is playing complete albums in a few cities. Chicago is fortunate enough to have gotten Aja last night, and gets Gaucho tonight and The Royal Scam on Thursday. I wish I could go every night, but Laura and I could choose only one, so we agreed on Aja.

It was a fantastic show, with an incredible cross-section of great songs. I won't be posting a full review, but I do want to note a couple of things. First, this was the first show we've been to in a long time, with the possible exception of AC/DC, where the majority of the crowd appeared to be older than we. (Definitely not the case at, say, The Dead Weather a few weeks back.) Second, having listened to it countless times over the past 32 years, I can't quite put my finger on why "Deacon Blues" made me all teary last night. Maybe I, I want a name when I lose.



( Aja Classic Album (Plus) Night Setlist )

Hey, Laura and I are in a book! A whole bunch of our friends too, not to mention Buzz Aldrin. Not our writings but our smiling mugs:

http://www.365portraits.com/book/

What a fun project that was to be a part of.

So Laura got home this morning from walking Ella to report to me, as I drank my unmagical coffee-n-cream, that they'd had a fantastic time. All except for one little incident.

There's a big preserve of prairie grass at the park in which the dogs like to romp. Ella herself enjoys tearing first one way then the other along the narrow paths through the tall grass. This morning Laura was nearby while a dog we know named Digger was playing in the preserve. She heard happy squeaks coming from Digger's direction. I'll let Laura report the rest in her own words:

I looked at Mike and I said, "Digger has a toy? A squeaky toy? I've never seen him with a toy at the park before! Fun!"

Mike replied, "He just caught a bunny. They sound like squeaky toys before they die."

Me: "Well, I guess that makes sense, but I have to go now."

Our own little carnivore is lying flat on her side on the floor next to me, her eyes fluttering as she fights sleep. I sure have a different view now of the delight she takes in running around the house with her rabbit toy squeaking in her mouth.

I just saw the Dairy Fairy.

I know! Can you believe it?

The Dairy Fairy is the name Laura coined for the mythical figure who comes in the night and leaves milk, cream, eggs, and other assorted breakfasty goodies on our front porch. Every Friday morning, I rise at 5:00 am, dress, and descend to the porch to discover what bounty the Dairy Fairy has left for us this time, and to haul it back up to the kitchen. Most weeks I remember to leave a white cooler out for the Dairy Fairy's use, but on those rare occasions when I forget, a magical light Styrofoam container springs up mushroomlike from the concrete to safeguard our precious dairy treasures.

For the more than two years this has been happening, never once have I caught the Dairy Fairy at his/her/its nocturnal labors. I wasn't even sure the Dairy Fairy took corporeal form. For all I knew, a milky mist floated numinous through the night to make its weekly deposit on our stoop. Until this morning, that is.

As usual, I dressed and descended the back stairs, but instead of the usual birdcalls, a rumbling truck engine broke the morning stillness. Palms perspiring, I peeked around the corner of the house. The Dairy Fairy! There before my disbelieving, sorely disabused eyes! Our preternatural benefactor took the form of a stocky man in brown knee-length shorts and a V-neck pullover shirt the color of wet sand. His body was broad and rounded, like a muscular armature shrouded in layers of wet plaster. His head was shaved but not recently. The black stubble was like a wheat field after burning season.

In his hands he carried a carton of eggs and three vials of half-and-half. He bent to place them in our cooler on the porch at the side of the house. Beyond him an idling truck awaited in the street. The legend Oberweis Dairy had been painted on the side by true artisans in a careful hand.

But as he squatted, he seemed to cock his head slightly in my direction, to where I stood in the shadows behind the gate at the back of the house. I shrank back, but again as he returned to his metal carriage he seemed to incline an ear toward my hiding place. I knew he'd caught my scent. He knew I knew, and I knew he knew I knew.

No matter. With a graceful bound, he sprang onto the buckboard of his mechanical wagon and growled off into the incipient dawn.

When I judged it safe, I scampered out from the shadows and collected the Dairy Fairy's semifortnightly gifts. I climbed the stairs with the heaviness of despondency weighting my footfalls more and more at each step. I could have dealt with the Dairy Fairy's prosaic appearance. Such disappointments are part and parcel of adulthood.

But a mechanical wagon? Not so much as a creamy white sledge pulled by flying cows?

The cream in my coffee just doesn't taste as ambrosial this morning.

Hey, Chicagoans! I have a reading coming up just under a week from now, Tuesday, September 1, 2009, as part of Chicago's Tuesday Funk Reading Series.

The reading starts at 7:00 pm sharp at:

Flourish Bakery Cafe
1138 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.
Chicago, IL 60660

That's just east of Broadway, just west of the Bryn Mawr stop on the Red Line.

I'll be appearing with Robyn Detterline, Billy Lombardo, and Dancing Girl Press poets Stephanie Anderson, Kristen Orser, and Susan Slaviero. I'll be reading from my memoir The Accidental Terrorist. Copies of my chapbook An Alternate History of the 21st Century will be available for purchase for a paltry $4.

Please come out! I hope to see you there.