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My “Man Cave”


I have been given a “man cave” in the new apartment. I don’t exactly know how it got to be called a “man cave.” I feel like “man cave” should be the name of a low budget, swiftly cancelled sitcom starring some particularly egregious and misogynist comedian.

Had I been asked – I would have suggested the room by called “my study.” Because the point is to have  a place to work and write. My current contract will eventually end and I will find myself back at home and unemployed, scrounging for gigs. No doubt, a study would be a relaxing and utilitarian sanctuary. I have a desk – custom made by a furniture maker from Staunton, Virginia out of recycled wood stained black. Some bookcases, which are in no way exceptional, being your standard IKEA fare. My record player – a gift from many years ago to replace the massive old stereo I lugged around to play all my vinyl LPs. A little leather covered chest, designed to hold files and papers, but re-purposed to contain my record collection (a gift from my Uncle Kim that I couldn’t figure out what to do with for years, until I discovered it was the perfect size to hold my LPs). And, of course, my old black typewriter.

I’ll post pictures when it’s completed.

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The Dying of Christopher Hitchens


I don’t know what I think about Christopher Hitchens. And I suspect that a lot of young, left-leaning intellectuals feel that way.

He still sometimes describes  himself as a “soixante-huitard” and life a revolutionary-cum-public intellectual is one any would be poet worth his or her salt aspires.

But…

The whole Iraq war thing.

And it is clear that he welcomes my feelings of discomfort – which are mixture of disgust, a sense of betrayal, and raw envy. This is also compounded by my own Catholic faith and his own (and my once) strongly felt atheism.

I also wonder if Hitchens is not the Arthur Koestler of the those generations who came of age after Stalin? Will Hitchens, like Koestler, fade into a sort of gentle obscurity as the wars he gave his life over to cease to have meaning? Not just the Iraq war, but his polemics on such ultimately ephemeral figures as Mother Theresa and and President Bill Clinton. Which of his writings will survive?

My Aunt Millie gave me a copy of Letters to a Young Contrarian one Christmas. This seems to me to be the most likely to survive, though I could not take much of his advice. And perhaps, because I could not, it is not just envy and betrayal, but also shame he inspires.

But don’t we also want him to feel ashamed, too?

Anyway.

He is dying. His rakish hair is gone, but he still has the insouciance of a classic bad boy intellectual.

I don’t know how I should feel. In a strange way, I am reminded of the way I did not know what to feel when Hunter S. Thompson died. He was a larger than life figure from my adolescence I had outgrown by the time of his death.

That’s all. Except that maybe I’ll re-read Hitchens’ Letters.

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Science Fiction: A Personal Archaeology


Not unusually for a (dare I say?) precociously intelligent young, American boy, I devoured science fiction and fantasy novels, gathered up from a dozen used bookstores and often dating from the golden age of science fiction (roughly th 1940s through the 1960s).

Then, as Paul told the Corinthians, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

Whether because I won’t grow up or for some other reason, part of what I call my personal archaeology, I have been filled with a great desire to revisit these novels.

Some time ago, I picked up Fredric Jameson’s magisterial study of utopian (and dystopian) literature, Archaeologies of the Future, and it has given me some ammunition in my quest to justify spending time reading pulp sci fi.

I followed it up with both volumes of A.E. Vogt’s Weapon Shop novels, The Weapon Shops of Isher and The Weapon Makers. Not great stuff, but reaussuringly familiar to a lover of the pulps.

Now, I am almost halfway through with Gene Wolf’s Book of the New Sun.

Damn does it feel good.