b.rox

Title: Nova
Author: Samuel R. Delany
Published: 1968

Nova is a seminal work by one of my favorite authors. It’s a relatively short novel, written in an easy and accessible style, with poetic flourishes that don’t overwhelm, beautiful imagery, iconic characters, and just a dash of of avant-garde ambition.

And I liked it OK. I mean really, it was pretty cool. But I don’t feel it’s Delany’s best work. For an “accessible” Delany story, I’d point people to Empire Star or Time Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Stones.

We read Nova in my book club as the first of three New Wave entrees, and it serves that function well. Counter to most of science fiction’s New Wave, Nova reads like a classic old-style space opera. It actually reminded me quite a bit of Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. So it comes off as very old school in some ways, but the seeds of the new school are strewn throughout — though you might miss them if you’re not familiar with the history of the genre.

For example, the characters have some ethnic diversity. It’s not a big deal but it’s there. At the time this was published, that in itself was somewhat revolutionary. But more to the point, there’s one character who is forever making notes on a novel he intends to write. He’s made thousands of notes but hasn’t written one word. He’s given to holding forth extemporaneously on various literary problems. Reader of the genre were not unused to spontaneous exposition, but usually the topics were scientific. I think Delany was pushing the envelope, shifting to a more introspective focus that might be considered a hallmark of the New Wave.

The novel is peppered with brilliant and bizarre ideas that leave you scratching your head. For example, did it ever occur to you that the future might be filthy dirty? Think about it.

There was a thousand-year period from about fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred, when people spent an incredible amount of time and energy keeping things clean. It ended when the last communicable disease became not only curable but impossible. There used to be an incredibility called ‘the common cold’ that even in the twenty-fifth century you could be fairly sure of having at least once a year. I suppose back then there was some excuse for the fetish: there seemed to have been some correlation between dirt and disease. But after contagion became an obsolescent concern, sanitation became equally obsolescent. If our man from five hundred years ago, however, saw you walking around this deck with one shoe off and one shoe on, then saw you sit down to eat with that same foot, without bothering to wash it — do you have any idea how upset he’d be?

He drops little mind-bombs like that without warning.

Also, Nova has one of the best concluding sentences I’ve read in a novel. Given how disappointing endings can be, that is nothing to sneeze at.

PS: Speaking of science fiction, here’s a new blog by a fellow New Orleanian and co-worker of mine: Sci-Fi Lessons.

Against my better judgment, I’ve set up a new site for the podcast known as J&B’s Nightcap. It’s at nightcap.rox and the second installment is now available.

In answer to Mr. Konrath’s query, yes, there is a magical way you can add these to your iPod. Just go to nightcap.rox and look for the iTunes link. If iTunes isn’t your bag, use the generic link (marked “subscribe in a reader”) to choose your poison.

Here’s something I’ve never seen before: It’s snowing in New Orleans.

Update: So early this morning as I was taking the girl to school, I thought to myself, “It’s cold and wet and damp and nasty — but at least it’s not snowing.” Rimshot.

Boss Lady and O were beside themselves. Sadly enough, the only thing they could think to do with their excitement was prank call me: “Hey B, we’re doing a project and we need you to come in to the office right away. And be sure to wear shorts and a tee shirt.” Sad, sad stuff.

All this puts me in a mind to a silly rap I used to chant to myself while stomping through the snowy streets of Bloomington in the late 80s:

well I gotta relate that I hate the snowy weather
and if you think it’s great then I put you together
with the marquis de sade or charles manson
yo crazy mofo no the snow isn’t handsome
or pretty like it’s supposed to be
it’s a pain in the ass for pedestrians like me
i gotta walk around everywhere that i go
and i’d like to stay dry but the sticky wet snow
is piled up to my neck, it soaks my clothes
right thru to my bones and then i’m frozen when the wind blows
like an ice cream cone, a popsicle, a nutty buddy
don’t try and tell me that i’m some kinda fuddy duddy
who’s lost all vitality and joy for living
i’m still kicking, i’m just not into giving
a damn what anybody else may think
and i’d rather have a sidewalk than an ice-skating rink
so take your flaky opinions, you can keep ‘em to yourself
i’ll talk to you again when the snow melts

I’ve got a recording of that I made with the Submersibles lying around on a tape somewhere.

Today’s snow was not a mere flurry. It kept on for a good three or four hours and actually accumulated a bit. More photos here.

Here’s a number of Mid-City things on my mind lately:

• Looks like they’re working to renovate the bar at the corner of Bienville and Rendon. Anyone know if they’ve applied for a liquor license? We should keep an eye on this. I don’t mind a bar near my house as long as they know how to prepare my favorite cocktails, but good bartenders are hard to find these days.
• Speaking of bars, has anyone been to Lookers at Jeff Davis and Canal?

  

  Can we at least agree that’s a terrible name for a bar? I wouldn’t be caught dead in a place called Lookers.

• Speaking of Jeff Davis and Canal, I notice they’re tearing up the earth all around the statue of Jefferson Davis. Does anyone have any idea what they’re doing? It looks like the continuation of a project that’s been going in fits and starts for years, but what the end goal is I can’t imagine. Perhaps they are going to put up an electrified fence to ward off vandals. Or maybe lights to illuminate the visage of this great champion of white supremacy at night. In any event, we never seem to hear about this project through MCNO so I can only assume the folks behind this have no desire to communicate their intentions to the neighborhood.
• I read yesterday about how the City is persecuting some poor woman for painting the sidewalk in front of her house. They want to remove the sidewalk and bill her for it. So today as I was walking my daughter to daycare, I took a picture of a typical sidewalk in our neighborhood:

  

  This is neither the best nor the worst Mid-City has to offer, but it’s clearly in need of repair. Compare this with the painted sidewalk the city is all worried about:

  

  That makes no sense to me. Where is the sense of priority?

Update: When I posted this to our neighborhood discussion group, one person replied, “I think your comment on white supremacy was out of line. I personally take that comment offensive.” At first I thought he was defending Jeff Davis. Then I thought maybe he just didn’t like hearing anything about racial politics. Then it occurred to me that he might be coming from a completely different angle. Really, his complaint was so vague that I really didn’t know what he meant. I thought it best to at least clarify myself, which I did thusly:

I am sorry. I did not intend to offend anybody. I was trying to write about some neighborhood issues with a humorous slant. Perhaps you thought my comment was made in earnest, so please allow me to clarify: I believe the ideology of white supremacy is wrong. I’m against it, and when I cited Davis as a “great champion” of white supremacy I was being sarcastic. That is, I do not feel there is anything “great” about white supremacy. I understand that in the time of Jefferson Davis almost all white Americans believed in white supremacy. Yes, Jefferson Davis was a white supremacist, but he was far from the boldest proponent of that cause. Today white supremacy is largely repudiated even amongst white folks — as most clearly evidenced by the election of Barack Obama. I think that’s progress. Yet the past is not so easily escaped. I believe the notions of white supremacy still have a tenacious hold in all our minds. In our region of the country in particular it is a special moral challenge which we all should face up to. I understand this is complicated. I’m not trying to put myself on a pedestal of moral superiority. I say such things in hopes of renewing the commitment we all share as we work together for a more just and humane society.

I really don’t mind a long convalescence. It’s the initial descent that I hate. Anyway, I’m on the upswing now. Still a little unsteady but close enough to function. I went back to work today and was fairly productive despite some lingering queasiness. Today was the day of the big Fifth Floor Xmas Potluck. (In Indiana we’d call it a “pitch-in.” Never realized that was a highly localized usage.) Unfortunately I was too far gone the last couple days to actually bring a dish. I was going to bring my famous brandy balls. Actually I meant to bring them Monday, for my unit’s day-long open house, but I missed that entirely, which was a shame. My unit’s just not complete without my balls.

I was feeling slightly off when we headed out to Sam’s Club yesterday. (I really despise Sam’s Club, but somebody bought us a membership, and like lemmings we go.) We’ve found the excessively long lines can be avoided by going on Sunday when the Saints are playing. So we went at noon, and by the time we finished I was feeling really out of it.

Got home, took a hot bath, crawled into bed. After lying down for an hour or so and burping with an almost mechanical regularity, I asked Xy to bring me a bucket, just in case. Good call, as it turned out, because an hour or two later I used that bucket. After that, the chills came on strong, and I spent the night in a semi-delirium. I suffered a recurring delusion that Barack Obama and his transition team had broken into our house and were replacing my body with an identical life-sized sculpture made of sugar — one particle at a time.

Feeling much better today. Staying home from work to sleep. Convenient, too, because Sears just delivered and installed our new stove. That will be a nice surprise for Xy when she gets home.

The podcasting mania continues. This is rough, raw, intimate, easy, and definitely low-fidelity — kind of like us. No, it’s not ROX, it’s J&B’s Nightcap.

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Nightcap #1: The Old Fashioned

On the 75th anniversary of Prohibition’s repeal, your hosts J&B launch a new enterprise: this podcast, J&B’s Nightcap. We begin with that classic cocktail, the Old Fashioned. Our conversation diverges also to the joys of fatherhood, vomiting and marijuana.

Links for this episode:

• Photo by hellabella, licensed under Creative Commons
• Old-Fashioned recipe from the Webtender
• ProhibitionRepeal.com
• There She Blows! Projectile Vomiting in Infants by Shannon McKelden
• Projectile vomiting by FreshMD
• Ex-Missoula neurologist pens paper on old stash by Michael Jamison

I suppose I should really set up a blog specially for this. Maybe.

The girl threw up several times overnight. Rather alarming, but she had no fever and otherwise seemed normal. After two a.m. her stomach seemed to settle, and she slept more or less peacefully. This morning, when she woke up around 6:30, she threw up once again, but after that she was bright-eyed and playful, in good spirits, with no fever or other symptoms of illness.

So we think it was just a case of indigestion. Perhaps the jar of chicken noodle I fed her for dinner didn’t agree with her. That jar was a little sketchy — only in that it was an older item which we got secondhand from a friend whose daughter has outgrown baby food. I checked the label before feeding, and the expiration was in May of 2009. But she’s never had that particular entree before.

Anyway, I took her to daycare like normal and asked them to stay alert for anything out of the ordinary.

I’ve been working over the past few months to get a new podcast launched here at work, and I think we’ve finally gotten to the point of promoting it. Here’s our formal announcement, more comments follow.

The Center for the Advancement of Teaching (CAT) at Xavier University of Louisiana is pleased to announce the official launch of our new podcast series, Teaching, Learning, and Everything Else.

Each episode is a conversation with a teacher in higher education, in which we examine how teaching intersects with a diverse range of topics. So far we have completed four episodes and touched on issues relating to technology, service learning, master teachers and dealing with personal problems of students. But we’re just getting started, and hope to continue branching out and exploring new topics with each episode. It’s a fresh and personal approach to faculty development that will appeal to anyone who teaches at the college level, regardless of discipline or rank.

The series is produced by Bart Everson, Media Artist at CAT. Dr. Elizabeth Yost Hammer is the Director of CAT and host of the show.

For more information, and to listen to the show, please visit our website at cat.xula.edu/podcast

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We’re extremely fortunate that we did not burn down the house last night.

Xy had just made a couple trays of her famous pseudo-enchiladas. She had a tray baking in the oven when a strange odor began to permeate the kitchen. It smelled like something burning. Perhaps some food remnant crusted on the bottom of the oven?

Nope, turns out it was the particle board in the cabinet next to the stove. It was burning, not an open raging flame, but a slow smoldering burn, blackening the interior, peeling the veneer. Our electric mixer was in there and melted partially. Wow, did it stink.

I think it’s time for a new stove. I’m not sure what caused this problem, but the stove really is very old, maybe 50 years old or so. It’s got a great look, but it’s not in very good shape. If properly restored it could be a really cool antique stove. But I think we’ll just get something new.

Anyway, yesterday was a very lucky day, it seems. We’re lucky Xy caught this before it became more serious. We’re lucky her car pool was able to change up on short notice when the car wouldn’t start.

I celebrated our excessive good fortune with an extra dollop of cognac in my eggnog.

Here we go again. It was probably the coldest morning of the season so far.

No crank, no start.

Xy was pissed, and I can’t blame her. It was her turn to drive for the carpool. Two co-workers were depending on her. Fortunately they were able to switch it up at the last minute.

Of course, a short time later, the car started up — no problem.

Having read a bunch of internet forum posts about this, I’m convinced some weather condition improperly triggers the Passlock anti-theft system. However, aside from the cold-morning pattern, the problem is so frakking random that it’s frightening.

There’s at least one guy who advocates using a bypass/override module. These modules are designed for people who want to use a remote starter, but in theory it should solve our problem even without a remote. I’ve found various models online, like the Omega IB-PLJX. Only $23. I think I could install it myself.

I’m hesitating for two reasons. One, I want to hear what the guy at the dealership might have to say. I’m waiting for him to call back. Two, I’ve been searching the net for a success story, and I can’t find one. I’ve seen plenty of people ranting about this problem — They oughta have a recall! We oughta sue! I’ve seen a number of people theorizing about the bypass module solution. But no one is bragging about actually having done it, and that makes me leery.

Did I mention that she’s started crawling? No longer belly-flopping. Honest-to-gosh hands-and-knees full-on crawling. When she sees something that interests her, and she heads for it at full speed, she’s so pleased that she starts laughing out loud. It’s really something.

Three cheers for Steve Volan. He’s blogging again. He’s writing about a hot topic in New Orleans. And he’s the only person on the City Council that I look up to.

I mean that last part literally. They call him “Tall Steve,” and there’s a reason for that. Did I mention he’s on the City Council? In Bloomington, Indiana, that is. But trust me, the folks on the New Orleans City Council aren’t any taller.

Regardless of his physical stature, I’ve always been impressed by Steve’s towering intellect. I’d recommend his blog to anyone interested in local governance issues, especially as they play out in Bloomington, but also with an eye to bigger national and global issues.

In a recent post, Steve takes note of the current plan for a LSU/VA hospital. Even from a distance of 800 miles he can see the misguided nature of this plan. Why can’t our local leadership see as clearly?

I don’t share Steve’s inherent distrust of campuses. I suppose that’s because I work on a campus and love it. But I do understand where Steve is coming from. His perspective is undoubtedly influenced by the prominence of Indiana University’s campus in Bloomington. I think of Bloomington as a small (but sprawling) city wrapped around a big campus. When I moved to New Orleans I found the world I’s known inverted: Now I’m working on a tiny campus in the heart of a big (but shrinking) city.

We got our Malik Rahim campaign sign, and it is proudly on display in front of our house.

I chatted with Christian Roselund a bit when he dropped the sign off. He informed me that Malik’s candidacy has caught the attention of many Greens across the country. Some of them are, as one might expect, a little flaky, bless ‘em. But the monetary support is pouring in, and the campaign is using that money for media buys.

Therefore I read with some interest Michelle Krupa’s article in this morning’s paper, about the Republican candidate’s fund-raising efforts. After detailing Anh Joseph Cao’s financial situation and comparing it to William Jefferson’s, toward the end there is a mention of Malik’s campaign.

Jefferson’s other two challengers do not appear to have had much success raising money. Rahim reported that he collected about $2,000 from individual and corporate donors during the six-week period starting Oct. 1, and had pumped another $3,000 of this own money into the campaign. Records show he spent $900 on T-shirts.

But that is substantially less than the numbers mentioned to me by Christian. Sure enough, Christian has since confirmed by e-mail that, according to the SEC, Malik’s campaign raised a total of $10,985. He even supplies a link. He adds that by this time the campaign has raised closer to $20,000.

It’s also worth noting that Stephanie Grace’s recent opinion column made no mention of any candidate other than Cao and Jefferson.

Today we gathered with friends and family — well, really it was just our little minimalist nuclear family and our friend James.

We thanked Dame Fortune for the health of our new child, for all our friends, and for gainful employment in these grim economic times.

We had a fantastic meal. I made the smoked turkey legs in a satsuma-honey glaze — second year in a row for these, and I’m closing in on perfection. They were pretty good, but the skin was almost black in some spots rather than that deep dark golden brown. I think the grill was too hot at first. Also, I think mesquite would be a better choice than hickory. But the glaze was a screaming success: honey, oil and freshly-squeezed satsuma juice, with a dash of cayenne, salt and pepper, fresh rosemary and sage from the garden, and just a dash of Rhum Clément Creole Shrubb liqueur.

I also made dressing for the first time ever. Frankly I’ve never liked dressing. I’ve never even understood dressing. But then I’ve never had oyster dressing. Never even heard of such a thing until we moved down here to New Orleans, though it turns out Xy’s uncle made it every year back in Evansville, Indiana. I found a recipe and gave it a try, and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t pretty tasty. James, a native New Orleanian, pronounced it similar to what his Mom used to make, which I consider a high compliment.

Also on the menu: salad in imitation of Venezia, mashed potatoes and yams, and fresh-baked bread.

But the highlight of the day? No doubt. That came early when Xy organized a cleanup of the overgrown vegetation in front of the derelict property next door. Here she is with Josh and Lamar:

I’ve been perplexed by the behavior of our plumbing system recently.
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The results from yesterday’s doctor visit confirmed our suspicion: Persephone’s ear infection never entirely cleared up, even though she took a full course of antibiotic. In fact she now has sinusitis. So the doctor prescribed something stronger, and she seems to be feeling much better today. This picture was taken Sunday when she was still slightly feverish.

Xy had a series of painful ear infections when she was little. She still remembers them. We hope our girl has better luck.