February 1998 L&SF Online Bulletin
Greetings to you, one and all -- and I hope that by now you have received your January/February 1998 issue. It went out late, and many of you live where the weather recently has made mail delivery (especially third-class mail delivery) difficult. If your copy hasn't arrived by the time you get this bulletin, send me an email note and I'll mail you a replacement issue immediately.
1. Corrections, Imprecations, and Explanations Department:
** I'm not at my best today, because we had to take our little dog Snowflake -- who's been with us more than a decade -- to my veterinarian this morning, for euthanasia. It was hard, but it had to be done, and would have been done six months ago if I weren't such a wimp. I'm very much at a loss: The last time I had no small creature around to look after, it was 1955; I don't know what to do with all this freedom. Please don't send me any new small creatures to look after just yet, however. One of the worst things about the past year of Snowflake's life has been the trauma each time we had to put her in the kennel when we needed to travel on business or for family emergencies; she couldn't handle that any more. When I truly feel that I'm no longer able to do on-the-road gigs, I will want another dog, because to me a home without a dog is like a home without a window -- but I want neither chick nor child until I am someone for whom travel is *rare.* At any rate, if you find typoes and infelicities of expression in the Bulletin this time, if you find it too short or too long or too muddled or too violent, you'll know why. (We had one member who complained at me at great length that the Online Bulletin is too "fluffy" and "downhomey"; I sent him a full refund and an apology, and advised him that I don't expect that to change.)
** I gave you the wrong date for a science fiction convention in the last issue; sorry about that. Conestoga 1998, which I am happy to be attending, will be in Tulsa on June 26-28. Dates for Conquest and Conjuration were correct as stated.
** I've received just one note from one of you asking NOT to be included in the email directory for L&SF members, scheduled for the March/April 1998 issue. If anyone else prefers to be omitted -- and you haven't already told me so on your Directory Page or by some other means -- now's your chance to send the message.
2. The Spring 1998 issue of "The Bulletin" (that's the SFWA one, available in most bookstore magazine sections) has a terrific article by Melisa Michaels titled "Authors on the Web." It has some information about the good and bad features of having Web pages if you're an author, but that's not why I'm recommending it. Michaels also included a large number of Internet addresses for all sorts of very useful things that I suspect would be interesting to L&SF members; you might take a look. Among the items were several addresses that offer free personal Web pages: WebSpawner [http://www.webspawner.com], which provides simple forms that you fill out and turns them into Web pages *for* you; Tripod [http://www.tripod.com]; Angelfire {http://www.angelfire.com]; and GeoCities [http://www.geocities.com]. (According to Michaels, the last three are somewhat more sophisticated than WebSpawner). Science fiction reviews, she says, are available at http://www.serve.com/sfreview.
Also in the Spring 1998 issue is a truly useful article by Connie Willis (many many awards); the title is "Hula Hoops, Josephson Junctions, Willie Lincoln's Body, and the Molasses Swamp Card: The Arcane Art of Researching Science Fiction." Recommended, for sure.
3. I would like to ask you for some help with the book on multilingualism that I'm writing right now for Plenum. I want your honest opinions (solid knowledge also welcome, of course) in response to two questions. The first question is for those of you who speak (or sign) more than one language; the second is for everyone. Here we go...
** When you speak any of the languages you know, do you feel as if you are *a different person*? If so, could you tell me a little bit about that?
** Suppose that someone is a native speaker of two languages, Language X and Language Y. Suppose that those two languages are in substantial conflict over something that plays a large part in human lives. Suppose the word "dead" in Language X presupposes "gone forever from this world," while the word "dead" in Language Y presupposes "gone from this world only temporarily." [Let me explain this sense of "presupposed," just in case. For English, "Mary stopped writing science fiction" presupposes that she *started* writing science fiction at some point, because "stop" presupposes "start." Presupposed; an inextricable part of the meaning.]
Now, how would you think the person for whom both Language X and Language Y are native tongues handles this conflict? By choosing one or the other? By rejecting both and looking for a third alternative? By somehow managing to keep both alternatives in cognitive space at the same time, as in classic doublethink? By "averaging the two out" somehow? Some other way??? (It will be obvious to you that the possibilities for such conflicts become enormously greater if one of the languages is Terran and one isn't; fortunately, I'm not being asked to deal with that particular issue in this book.)
4. Last week, quite suddenly, out of nowhere, the plot for "Native Tongue IV" fell into my lap. I know exactly how to do that book. (I have no idea how to *sell* it, of course, but that's an entirely different matter, and not of general interest.) This creates a curious cognitive situation for me -- cognitive pregnancy, I guess. Being "with book." And totally unlike "being with nonfiction book." When the idea for a nonfiction book falls into your lap, it's usually pretty vague -- you can look at it, think it over, go "Naaah.....that doesn't appeal to me especially," and erase it from your head. When the book is a novel, however, and it arrives with plot and characters and setting and all the rest of it attached, it doesn't go away. It sits there in your head and waits, patiently, to be written down. ( Fortunately, the human mind is capacious.) The first time this happened to me I was terrified that I'd *forget* it before I could get it written down, but I've learned that that not only isn't likely, it's impossible. (At least for me it is.) I don't know what I'll do about this.
Writing an entire novel which would be the fourth commercial failure in a series of commercial failures strikes me as less than intelligent for anyone not independently wealthy. But it's an interesting phenomenon, and one I don't understand very well. We're told that whole symphonies arrived in Beethoven's head that way, but not whether they arrived as complete musical scores or complete musical performances or both; Mozart too, I think.....
5. Finally, there is now an online list for Octavia Butler. The address is Octavia-L@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu. I've torn this house apart looking for the instructions for subscribing, and can't find them -- which is infuriating. But I can make a guess. Send a message to Listserv@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu, and in the subject line type only "subscribe octavia-l" or "SUBSCRIBE OCTAVIA-L" and your name. That should either sign you up or get you a cross note from the server telling you what to do instead. ... Octavia Butler is the author of "Parable of the Sower" and many other wonders; she recently got one of the MacArthur no-strings-attached "genius grants"; if you haven't been reading her work you're missing something, in my opinion. This list is brand new -- I've subscribed, and have had only two or three messages instead of the more typical thirty at a time. I hope it's a smash hit.
That's it for this time....
Best wishes,
Suzette
