A Moveable Happy Meal

Dusty pages

2008-01-03T22:17:00.000+01:00

If you're a completist, go here and you'll find for sale dusty issues of virtually every book and magazine that has published my byline. (Also a couple books by authors with similar bylines.) Hard to believe some of these old books, magazines, and even copies of Empire, are still worth something to somebody.

If you have too many computers and too few clocks...

2008-01-02T20:33:00.000+01:00

... or if you like cool and useful screensavers, go here.

Nowhere does it say this cannot be dry-cleaned

2007-07-27T13:48:00.000+02:00

One-gigabyte SD card, used as a backup for the Treo smartphone, gone from its usual place on the desk. Rediscovered a week later in the pocket of a freshly dry-cleaned shirt.

What's your type?

2007-05-29T22:22:00.000+02:00

Authors wax eloquent on their favorite fonts.

Mine is Dark Courier, the evil twin of Courier. Maureen McHugh made the introductions, and it does the job. Still, I really miss the sans-serif Letter Gothic font I had in my IBM Selectric II. I can simulate it on my computer, but it's just not the same, damn it.

New Year's rip-off

2007-01-02T11:12:00.000+01:00

Spammers, phishers and other miscreants are increasingly inventive. A couple days ago, one of my relatives forwarded to me an e-mail warning me of a virus threat. In this case, the threat is bogus and the warning itself is the scam, although I don't know what purpose it serves. Maybe it's the modern-day equivalent of calling the corner store and asking if they have Sir Walter Raleigh in a can.

Today I got what looks like a PayPal receipt for the purchase of a cellphone for $474.99. There was a helpful link I could click if I wanted to dispute the amount. If I were to click on the link, it would squirt my PayPal log-in information to the scammers.

I get dozens of these a year, although this was the slickest so far. My e-mail program, Thunderbird, flagged it as a possible scam, but even without the warning I wouldn't have been taken in because we all know never to click on the links in a commercial e-mail or one from an unknown sender, don't we?

If you have any doubts, Google some of the unique phrases in the e-mail. The purported vendor on this one was LWPELECTRONICS. The phone was being sent to Bill Chang, 202 N Magnolia Dr., Saco ME. Google that address and you get 961 hits, nearly all of them warnings about the scam. Now, with this, make that 962 hits.

Resolved: I will get smart enough to understand this book

2006-01-02T00:40:00.000+01:00

With prophecy in the narrow sense of foretelling the future we have no concern, and we have not much concern with it as an appeal for righteousness. What will interest us today -- what we must respond to, for interest now becomes an inappropriate word -- is an accent in the novelist's voice, an accent for which the flutes and saxophones of fantasy may have prepared us. His theme is the universe, or something universal, but he is not necessarily going to "say" anything about the universe; he proposes to sing, and the strangeness of song arising in the halls of fiction is bound to give us a shock. How will song combine with the furniture of common sense? we shall ask ourselves, and shall have to answer "not too well": the singer does not always have room for his gestures, the tables and chairs get broken, and the novel through which bardic influence has passed often has a wrecked air, like a drawing-room after an earthquake or a children's party. Readers of D.H. Lawrence will understand what I mean.
-- E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Optimism

2005-11-04T19:24:00.000+01:00

"This VCR will accurately maintain its calendar up to Dec. 31, 2096, 11:59 PM."
-- Panasonic Omnivision VHS Model PV-8451 Operating Instructions

2005-11-04T18:05:00.000+01:00

Jeter!

Belatedly

2005-10-03T13:00:00.000+02:00

Been to Mexico. Returning to France, my gall bladder melted down and was removed. A pretty routine operation, made somewhat more interesting by the fact that most of the people involved didn't speak English. But more on that later.

And Herself and her fille have taken up residence in my apartment. So the question of the hour is: How often can I ask "So, how long did you say you were staying?" before I get slugged? Ten days and counting.

That byline again

2005-08-08T10:09:00.000+02:00

I just had another piece published in the IHT, here. I interviewed a couple folks from the science-fiction field to write it, which was fine, but could only use a fraction of what I got, which was frustrating. But it's a fill-in column, and the space is fixed -- you can't get even one extra line. I suppose I could put together a "director's cut" for, say, the SFWA Bulletin.

The other one

2005-07-12T22:15:00.000+02:00

Here's the other little product announcement I did for the IHT. It was published on March 19. Unlike the phone, I actually bought this gizmo. And the paper paid me enough for this piece to actually recoup most of the VAT the French authorities slapped on it, oboy. Here it is:

If your bookshelves are bulging, the IntelliScanner bar-code reader can help you catalogue your collection. The scanner itself is about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Once you have purchased the scanner, you must visit the Web site of the manufacturer, Intelli Innovations, and download any of several software packages, including Media Collector (for books, DVDs, CDs and video games), Wine Collector or more specialized programs intended for businesses and heavy-duty online auctioneers.

After the software has been configured, you read the bar codes of your old papery media and shiny new media with the IntelliScanner. The scanner transmits the codes to your PC or Mac via a Bluetooth connection, your computer hunts in Intelli's online archive for the corresponding data, and on your screen appears a wealth of information on each item, including author, title, publisher, price and genre (for books); artist, label and track list (for CDs); and stars, distributor, format and theatrical release date (for DVDs) - plus the cover for each book and disc.

You can tailor the list to include or exclude any of three dozen fields of data. For peripatetic types, the "location" field will be of particular interest; you can indicate whether that copy of "A Moveable Feast" is on a shelf in Paris or in Pop's attic in Peoria, Illinois.

The IntelliScanner is available at www.intellisw.com for $299.

Gadget review

2005-07-08T13:03:00.000+02:00

I've published two short gizmo reviews in the International Herald Tribune in recent months. Well, they're more product notices than reviews. I'd point you to the URLs, but the IHT search function is a little dotty today. Here's one of the reviews, before minor trims and copy edits:

Spark Fun Portable Rotary Phone

The latest cellphone from Spark Fun Electronics does not feature MPEG-4 video playback. It does not have a VGA camera with digital zoom, nor Bluetooth wireless capability. It does not have even one color display, let alone two, and it is not sheathed in anodized aluminum. If you want those features, you'll have to buy a Motorola RAZR V3 cellphone.

What the Spark Fun Portable Rotary Phone has is heft. Lots of heft. About two pounds of it, against the RAZR's 3.26 ounces. The Spark Fun also has a rotary dial, a thick black plastic casing and a coiled cord, all of which the RAZR lacks. And while the RAZR may have a certain bling factor, the Spark Fun has a ring factor -- as in clanging metal bells, for those tired of the "Crazy Frog Axel F" ringtone.

Spark Fun, a Colorado company founded in 2002 by some college students, takes old-style rotary phones and retrofits them with a custom-made circuit board, an off-the-shelf but expensive cellular module and a hand-built ringer circuit to bring 1950s technology gasping and wheezing into the 21st century. To make the phone go, all you have to do is insert the SIM chip from your overcomplicated, delicate, fly-weight, easy-to-lose cellphone. Spark Fun says the Portable Rotary will work with 90 percent of the world's cellular systems.

Spark Fun (at www.sparkfun.com) sells its phone for just $399, a bargain compared to the RAZR's list price of $599. And when you consider the price per pound, the Portable Rotary Phone's cost advantage becomes even more obvious.

Hey, kids, let's put on a show!

2005-06-21T21:23:00.000+02:00

Watch this.

Then send Andy Bobrow money so he can do another one.

User Manual

2005-06-02T19:58:00.000+02:00

Instructions: The 12-in-1 PCMCIA Adapter is easy to use. Simply insert your Sony MemoryStick, xD PictureCard, SmartMedia Card or SecureDigital miniSD card into the adapter, then remove it once you have transferred the data to your computer. (Hammer and screwdriver not included.)

Remaining true to their heritage

2005-05-13T19:15:00.000+02:00

Lisbon. That Peruvian flute music you can't get away from these days, no matter where you go. And American Indian headresses. Okay. Well, Paris has a chain of Indian-themed restaurants called Indiana.

They do things behind my back

2005-05-07T12:02:00.000+02:00

As I am wont to do, after I got home from work last night I settled down on the couch with a DVD (from the second season of Babylon 5) and the ThinkPad, because of course I can't remain fully absorbed by just the DVD and snacking, I also have to be playing Risk and occasionally checking e-mail, and surfing. (The web-surfing is usually related to the DVD. Like, "Hmm, I wonder what Mira Furlan has been doing since the last B5 movie. And who's that guy who plays Kosh?")

I was using wi-fi again for this, of course, which is how I noticed that the long-running problem of the ThinkPad's wireless gimcrackery bogging down my CPU had somehow resolved itself. I'm wireless right now, and the CPU usage is flickering between 2 percent and 15 percent, rather than spiking at 80 or 90 percent, as it had been. I hadn't done a thing to bring this about, unless you count thinking really hard about uninstalling all the IBM wireless software and using Windows XP's.

Meanwhile, all the tasks on my Palm Tungsten E spontaneously put themselves into different categories. Rather than wait for them to put themselves right again, as the ThinkPad had, I put them back myself. Took 25 minutes. Then I backed up all the data on an SD card. Then I ran a HotSync.

The PDAs are usually well-behaved (though short-lived: I've somehow killed two Sony T615Cs, and my Tungsten T3 died, too, though it seems to have resurrected itself), but Windows machines just do stuff. We've all experienced it. You go away from the machine for a half-hour, come back, and the disk drive is just whirring away like crazy. "What are you doing!?" But of course it never tells you.

It's a small world after all

2005-05-06T11:54:00.000+02:00

And now you will have that tune running through your head for the rest of the day, demonstrating the fearsome power of the Internet.

It's pretty cool when you can read about some software in a book (a book I saw reviewed on the Internet, although in this case I bought it at Brentano's, not Amazon), order and download the software, and then have the creator show up in your blog. I'm always pleasantly surprised when I see evidence a stranger has passed through here, since a lot of my friends don't, ferchrissakes. The best bit of Internet serendipity came a couple years ago, when my long lost half-sister e-mailed me after a distant relative stumbled across my main and sadly neglected site.

This whole blogging thing would be even more interesting, of course, if the entries concerned, say, the completion of my 23rd novel, or my new deal with Dreamworks. Or perhaps not necessarily more interesting: Kevin Smith has a blog and his topics include the quality of his bowel movements (also spoilers on "Revenge of the Sith," so read with care).

Another Internet-related goodie that showed up this week: Yet another once-in-a-lifetime moneymaking opportunity from a Nigerian lawyer representing the estate of an oil executive who died in a car crash. The roads of Nigeria must be littered with the carcasses of intestate millionaires. Hard to believe people fall for these scams, but they do. And I have a vision of half the population of Nigeria hunched over their keyboards every night, sending out e-mails to unsuspecting Westerners.

More tech: We saw Mark Knopfler in concert here in Paris last month and I noticed that the flicked Bic cigarette lighter has been largely supplanted by the small glowing square -- that is, the screens of cameraphones pointed at the stage. This phenomenon has manifested itself just in the past two years; it was then that we went to our last concert, Bruce Springsteen, and there were no cameraphones in evidence. In a couple years the phones will have full quality sound and video capability and there will be a couple hundred simulcasters in the audience.

And, lastly and inevitably, a tech annoyance: Like any good ThinkPadder, I check IBM's update site regularly and download and install all the recommended driver and software updates. And once again I seem to have touched off a conflict, this time involving the vast array of wireless gimcrackery my T41 ThinkPad claims to need. The beast can latch on to and hold a wireless connection with blinding speed, but it burns up so many system resources to do it that it bogs everything down, including e-mail and web-surfing. So I've turned off the wireless, dragged an Ethernet cable out of the closet, and am now operating at flank speed once again, and growling softly.

The inside story

2005-05-03T14:13:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I had an endoscopy, where the doctor feeds a tube about a half-inch in diameter down your throat. There's a bright light and a small camera at the end of the tube, so the doctor can look around your esophagus and stomach and anywhere else he'd care to virtually roam. Step One of the procedure is swab your mouth and throat with a local anesthetic. Getting a general anesthetic was also an option, but that seemed a little extreme for a little endoscopic look-see. Also time- and money-consuming. So, a local.

Step Two is to put a small plastic apparatus in your mouth so you can't bite down; it's held in place by a big rubber band that's wrapped around the back of your head. It was at this point that I thought to ask how long this procedure was going to take, but with the plastic bridle in my mouth it was too late.

Step Three is getting the camera down in there. They made two attempts to feed the tube down my throat, and I gagged impressively both times. The doctor allowed as how this was a matter of physiology, not willpower, and I'd have to be put under. Which meant delay, and a bigger investment of time and money than I cared to make, so I asked him to try it again. This time I managed not to choke. He looked around for maybe 30 seconds, then the tube was gone, the mouthpiece removed, and I was left with a fresh appreciation for Jenna Jameson's skill set.

The bill was an American-sized 950 euros, but then, this was the American Hospital outside Paris. I'd decided to seek treatment for the hiatal hernia there so that if I said, "Everything is going dark...." someone would understand me. On Friday, Herself and I saw a surgeon there, who declined to immediately pop me open and wrench my stomach back into place. Instead, he sent me along to the endoscopy guy. Who confirmed that I have some small ulcers, and some pain in the wallet. Next step comes tomorrow, when I get the acidity level in my esophagus checked. I can't help but think I have better things to do with my time and money.

I haven't been writing, but I did bestir myself sufficiently to download two note-taking and thought-organizing programs, BrainStorm and NoteMap 2. I first read about BrainStorm in Hitchhiker, M.J. Simpson's biography of Douglas Adams, and was all hot to try it. Later, it occurred to me that the fact that Adams used the software might not be much of an endorsement -- he seems never to have gotten his shit together as a writer, although what he did write, on those rare occasions when he could, was often wonderful. NoteMap's target audience seems to be lawyers and other besuited types, and its web site is much more corporate-looking than BrainStorm's. And though I've just started to explore both programs, their approaches seem to reflect an artistic vs. corporate approach. BrainStorm seems looser, like a comfortable flannel shirt. NoteMap seems a bit more hierarchical and better organized. It remains to be seen whether one is better than the other for taming the megabytes of notes, lines, scenes, excerpts and other junk that accretes around one of my story ideas. Also, whether either program is better than, say, a stack of 3x5 cards.

Tomorrow's news today

2005-04-26T10:51:00.000+02:00

Having temporarily exhausted medical chores to deal with, I turned to the towering pile of writing projects on my desk and knocked off the easiest one. On my lame, creaky web site I've posted a little project that was commissioned but never published, and a short intro explaining how it came to almost be. Take a look here.

Warranty expired

2005-04-22T13:12:00.000+02:00

I'm hale and hearty now, but was sick more or less continuously from early February to early April with a variety of ailments, including the aforementioned infection, followed up by a bad cold, the flu, another cold, sinusitis and bronchitis. The good news is I ran up just under 1,000 euros in medical expenses. That's good news because in the States it would easily have been four or five times higher. Doctor visits, of which I indulged in many, are 30 euros here, or about 39 Bush-era dollars. Prescription medicines cost 5 or 10 euros, instead of 50 or a 100 dollars. And I'm not even covered by the French national health care system yet, so I'm paying full boat instead of a token co-payment. (Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist who has been pantsing the administration for years, is currently writing about how much the U.S. pays for health care, and how little we [or, I guess, you] have to show for it.)

I am covered by a CIGNA health plan the New York Times Co. has for its overseas employees, and I'm eager to see how well its employees can parse French-language receipts and what the reimbursement will be.

Amidst the microbial onslaught, I missed two weeks of work, had to cancel a one-week vacation in San Francisco, and was forced to pass up an REM concert.

The only pending health challenge is that I have to get a hiatal hernia repaired sometime soon. My stomach has decided to migrate north of the diaphragm, and one-third of it has made the journey. Unfortunately, hiatal hernias are so common that I get no street cred for having one, and the surgery will certainly be laproscopic, so I won't even get a good scar out of it. Oh, I also have to lose mumblety-mumble pounds, I'm told. But, we knew that.

Blizzard!

2005-02-23T11:43:00.000+01:00

I've been here two and a half years and this is the first snowfall that's stuck around more than an hour.

"A pool of mermaids"

2005-02-21T09:58:00.000+01:00

It was in the heat of deadline that gonzo journalism was born while he was writing a story about the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan's magazine, he recounted years later in an interview in Playboy magazine.

"I'd blown my mind, couldn't work," he told Playboy. "So finally I just started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody."

Instead, he said, the story drew raves and he was inundated with letters and phone calls from people calling it "a breakthrough in journalism," an experience he likened to "falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids."

-- New York Times obituary on Hunter S. Thompson (1939-2005)

The Spleen Cafe

2005-02-10T06:09:00.000+01:00

Florence, December 2004

Dawn Patrol

2005-02-10T05:56:00.000+01:00

I'm heading back to work this morning, three kilos lighter, after four days off. I've felt better ... though not usually at 6 a.m.

Observation: From the tenor of the birthday and post-birthday e-mails I've received, my closest friends and relatives do not read this blog. (Total strangers do. Herself does.) So I've decided to pull a Dr. Phibes on you, salting these entries with clues. So that will teach you ... though not before a couple of you end up as poodle-chow.

Happy birthday to me

2005-02-06T14:44:00.000+01:00

Yes, the big 4-7. To get an early start on the celebrations, I came down with an infection that necessitated a trip yesterday to the American Hospital emergency room. They fixed me up with an IV to make the excruciating pain go away, then sent me away with three medications, a note to take a week off from work, and a directive to make a follow-up appointment.

It's all my fault, of course. The day before, I was thinking how fortunate it is that I've never gotten sick or injured in Paris, where I would be hard-pressed to describe my symptoms. Fortunately, the roommate bundled me off in a cab and they speak English at the American Hospital, as you might have guessed.

The upside is I'll probably lose some weight. It's 3 p.m. and today I've had one (1) banana and about (50) milliliters of SlimFast. I'd kill for some Chicken McNuggets, but it's a hollow threat. I'm going back to bed.

Nose first

2005-02-01T20:48:00.000+01:00

I put my nose in my writing* today for the first time in more than a month. I now have seven little piles of paper, representing seven projects, neatly arranged on my desk. One of them is notes for a 300-word gadget review; another is reminders for a couple blog entries. Those are gimmees.

Then there's three short stories for which I have some notes and some text, but not a whole bunch. These are the "fresh" projects. One of them came to me when Herself and I visited Brussels last May.

Another pile, substantially taller than the others, represents a story that was "fresh" when I thought of it about five years ago. I've worked on it on and off since then, sometimes for a couple weeks straight. Sometimes I think it's 90 percent there; sometimes I think I should pitch it.

Then there's a mighty pile of paper, the rewrite-in-progress of a 25,000-word novella that was well-received at Walter Jon Williams's Rio Hondo workshop in the summer of 1999.

These last two are what I cheerfully refer to as any-idiot stories. As in "any idiot could polish these off in a couple weeks." I've got a few more of those lying around, and this idiot will be taking another crack at them in due course.

Finished Sebstian Junger's The Perfect Storm today. I bought it when it came out in '99, wondering about this guy who came out of nowhere to write a non-fiction best seller. I've got literally a hundred books on my "to read" shelf (I just counted them), and at this rate I could burn through them all by the end of the year, assuming I develop no external life and buy no more books. (The latter is unlikely.) Then I could spend another couple years reading back issues of magazines. I get pleasure from reading books, and a separate pleasure from buying them. Now I'm trying to cultivate the pleasure of walking into a bookstore and coming out empty-handed.

Before settling my nose in my writing, I played a truly epic game of Risk: 37 turns, when the normal game is 10 or 12, and I was lagging until the 32nd. I know, I know, it stirs the blood.

* "Put your nose in your writing every day" was Herself's advice. (Credit where due.) It has a simplicity that my own writing prescriptions have always lacked. I come up with things like: Write for two hours a day, every day. Or except on weekends. Or except when I'm away from home. Or do a Hemingway -- 500 words per day. Not including revisions. Or including revisions. Or with a discount for revisions. Make up missed days. Or not. Use a rolling average. Multiply by pi and always allow for windage. Like that.

She prolly thinks I been out drinkin' 'n' whorin'

2005-01-31T17:57:00.000+01:00

This month I read Friend or Foe by Alistair Horne, Four Past Midnight by Stephen King, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Heartsnatcher by Boris Vian, Man of Bronze and The Thousand-Headed Man by Kenneth Robeson, Incubus by Ann Arensberg, By-Line: Ernest Hemingway edited by William White, The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons, several magazines and a pile of comic books.

I watched the DVDs of Cube, Dark City, Lewis Black Unleashed, Peter Gabriel: Play: The Videos, The Iron Giant, and 28 Days Later, and had a Ray Harryhausen film festival: H.G. Wells' First Men in the Moon, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Jules Verne's Mysterious Island, It Came From Beneath the Sea, and Clash of the Titans.

Printed several copies each of three pictures on the new Olympus P-10 photo printer and sent them to a couple friends and relatives, tucked in some very tardy "Bonne Année" cards.

Played two games of Scrabble and about 50 games of Risk. (Against other humans? Are you kidding?)

Sent about 90 e-mails (hey, that's a lot), several of which were substantive.

Had one phone conversation. Stopped turning on the cellphone, although I still carry it in case I'm caught in a Métro snarl on the way to work and have to phone in.

Re-bagged about 600 comics. This entails taking older or (somewhat) more valuable comics out of cheap poly bags, which encourage decay, and putting them into expensive Mylar bags, with backing boards. This is one of the most stultifying tasks known to Man. Even if you take frequent breaks to read some of the comics.

Ate at McDonald's approximately 24 times. In Paris!

Yes, it's a full life.

Can't get enough of Papa

2005-01-23T01:08:00.000+01:00

"There is no use writing anything that has been written before unless you can beat it."
-- Ernest Hemingway, "Monologue to the Maestro," Esquire, October 1935

I'm reading "Byline: Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades." Once you start to read it, you cannot stop even though you may want to. You have to go on and on, even though you are tired, because the words keep coming and you must follow them. And when you write, you will write like this, even when you do, you will realize the old man has beaten you again.

Older than you look

2005-01-12T19:50:00.000+01:00

I just finished reading Friend or Foe by Alistair Horne, the perfect Christmas present for an expat. It's a well-written, broad-brush history of France since Paris was a Roman outpost. Sometimes the brush is a little too broad, the pace a bit too rushed, but that's to be expected in a book that covers so much ground in just 400 pages. It's a fair tradeoff.

I thought I knew at least the broad outline of French history, but it turns out I'd failed to take note of several revolts and revolutions, and one of the wars with the Germans. Those French used to be a feisty bunch, and if they weren't after some of la gloire in foreign lands, they were squabbling amongst themselves ... mounting barricades, trashing the Palais-Royal, or parading around the streets with someone's head on a stick.

And while I knew Paris was old, I didn't really appreciate how old. One of its streets (near the Palais-Royal, in fact) is rue des Mauvais Garçons. Turns out this refers not to the 1995 movie with Martin Lawrence and Will Smith, but to a band of ruffians that were operating in the neighborhood in the 1500s. They'd still recognize a lot of the buildings.

Quote of the day

2005-01-11T21:00:00.000+01:00

If anyone can claim they're all right, so can I.
-- "Rachel's Song," James McMurtry

progris riport

2005-01-11T20:57:00.000+01:00

The office, where careful planning, single-minded determination and raw talent all combine ... to little result.

2005-01-11T20:52:00.000+01:00

Et voila, a mere four months later.....

2004-09-01T11:34:00.000+02:00

Have I mentioned how much I hate moving?

Only on paper

2004-08-20T00:36:00.000+02:00

Trolling through web sites I bookmarked long ago but haven't visited recently, I chanced across an article by Malcolm Gladwell, he of The Tipping Point. "The Social Life of Paper," published in The New Yorker in March 2002, is an extraordinary examination of the role of paper in modern society. It begins with an examination of why air traffic controllers are wedded to little slips of paper to help them track the planes they are responsible for, and why the process of developing a computer-based system to replace those scraps has already taken decades, and billions of dollars.

Gladwell finds convincing evidence that while the computer is great for storing data, when it comes to using and manipulating data, it often loses out to piles of paper pushed around on a messy desk. He cites The Myth of the Paperless Office, by Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper. Gladwell writes:

"Paper is tangible: we can pick up a document, flip through it, read little bits here and there, and quickly get a sense of it. (In another study on reading habits, Sellen and Harper observed that in the workplace, people almost never read a document sequentially, from beginning to end, the way they would read a novel.) Paper is spatially flexible, meaning that we can spread it out and arrange it in the way that suits us best. And it's tailorable: we can easily annotate it, and scribble on it as we read, without altering the original text."

Since I moved to Paris, leaving behind nearly all my files and books, and trading a really sweet home office for work on a dining room table, I've been trying to put more, and do more, on my computer. I keep previous drafts of stories on my hard drive but don't print them out. I try to download and store reference material rather than clip or copy it. Part of the motivation for that -- aside from the lack of a nice, big flat surface to work on -- was an environmentalist impulse. I like to print out a fresh copy of every page I revise, and subsequent pages if the revision changes the line count. I'll change a single word, print out the page, look at it, then decide whether to keep it. I could easily burn through a carton of paper to produce a single short story. Why kill a tree if I could accomplish the same result by moving around some electrons?

Turns out I can't accomplish the same result, and now I know why.

An Occurrence at Barter Books

2004-08-16T22:58:00.000+02:00

So we're knocking around England's Lake District last week and it is, of course, raining, it being England. In Kendal, where there is not much to do, particularly when it's raining, we shelter in an Ottakar bookstore (but the sovereign in the Tintin adventure is King Ottokar, go figure), and I pick up Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, not because I don't already have several hundred books and magazines to read, including a half-dozen I've brought along on the trip, but because buying books makes me feel good, at least until I remember I have several hundred books and magazines I haven't yet read. It's the new edition from Bloomsbury, with drawings by Ralph Steadman.

I'm not sure I've read Bierce before, but I'd certainly heard the name. He disappeared without a trace in 1913 on his way to cover the Mexican Revolution and was never heard from again. Bierce, Judge Crater and Amelia Earheart figured in a lot of tales about alien abductions. The introduction to Devil's Dictionary, by Angus Calder, piqued my interest in Bierce and his fiction (which owes something to Poe, but Bierce's language remains clever and sharp where Poe's, these days, can seem musty).

So, days later, we're in Anwick, in Barter Books, reportedly one of, if not the, best used bookstore in Britain. (Housed in a former railroad station, it certainly must be one of the best looking.) I walk inside, and am struck by a display of wee books, orange bindings facing out. Turns out they're Penguin 60-shilling editions. Released to coincide with the publisher's 60th anniversary, they're about half the area of a trade paperback and run less than a hundred pages.

I reach onto the shelf of about 40 of the things and pull out ... An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce.

Devil's Dictionary doesn't have an entry for coincidence but I like the one for accident: "An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws."

Et la vache dit << Meuh! >>

2004-07-23T08:23:00.000+02:00

There are posters up for a Disney movie called "La Ferme se Rebelle," which is the French title of "Home on the Range." I don't know if the movie is funny, but the posters provided an amusing lesson in barnyard French. There are three different posters, each quoting one or more farm animals. "Meuh!" is obviously French for "Moo!" but the others were tougher.

"Groin! Groin!" is the local version of "Oink! Oink!" and please get your mind out of the gutter. "Cot!" is the sound a hen makes, and arguably closer to the mark than "Cluck!" (Who would bother to make such an argument is another matter.) "Cui! Cui!" was a gimme, since it appeared on a poster with a Tweetybirdesque creature.

Then there's "Bëëe!" Don't feel sheepish if you can't figure that one out immediately.

I get a kick out of this, but then, I still think any word is funnier if you put "la" in front of it.

2004-07-20T20:11:00.000+02:00

Someone asked what my apartment looks like. Here's the salon -- that's the living room, to you Americans -- awaiting furniture. On the mantlepiece is my collection of flags of countries I've visited, the Concorde model S. got me for Christmas, my Tintin rocket, a leather mask I got at a Florida crafts fair about 15 years ago, and a lovely photograph by Aurelia Bismuth. I bought the photograph at a photo show in Paris in November 2002. It was Bismuth's first show, and her first sale. "Well, you'll never forget me, will you?" I said.

Rotterdammed

2004-07-20T00:02:00.000+02:00

It is theoretically possible that someone, somewhere, has had a pleasant experience with a moving company, but I've never heard of it.

I handed off my stuff -- furniture, 60 or so cartons of books, 30 years worth of writing files, 7,000 comic books, a lifetime of photographs, paintings and other memorabilia -- to the movers on May 15, a rendezvous they had postponed, at the last minute, from two days before. The two-man crew didn't know about the arrangement I'd made for their employers to bill my employer, so I had to come up with cash and a cashier's check on a Saturday. Par for the course.

The estimate then was six to eight weeks to get my stuff to Paris. That would make the happy reunion anywhere from June 26 through July 10. As the time approached and I heard nothing, I sent an e-mail to the company and was told that my stuff would arrive in port on July 5, and would clear customs and be delivered in seven to ten business days. Which would bring us up to July 15-20, which is to say today.

Today I hear from the U.S. moving company's European partner, based outside Rotterdam, the Netherlands. They do not know how this July 5 date was arrived at, because the ship carrying my stuff has not yet steamed into port. They don't know when it's going to get in. But they do e-mail me several forms to fill out, plus requests for much documentation. Hopefully, none of it is in my files on board the ship that is steaming, with agonizing slowness, across the North Atlantic toward Rotterdam.

Among the documents requested is a suggested route from the nearest highway to my front door. Which, I would wager, most clients are not able to provide because they are not familiar with the area because, hello, they are moving there. Which segues neatly into my plea that moving companies spend a couple bucks on GPS, or at least on Internet-capable computers so they can order up some directions from Mapquest or the charmingly named European equivalent, Mappy. When I moved from Manhattan to Washington, the Virginia-based crew that came to collect my stuff arrived frazzled because, seeing my address was in the 1000 block of Second Avenue, assumed the cross street was 10th Street, because (a) that would make sense and (b) that's how they did it in DC. My apartment was 70 blocks further north.

I see dead people.

2004-07-15T17:54:00.000+02:00

One of the big attractions here is Pere Lachaise cemetery. For Americans, it's because Jim Morrison is buried here. But there are other residents who are, in some circles, even more highly regarded: Honore de Balzac, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde and Moliere; Maria Callas and Simone Signoret; Gustave Dore; Frederic Chopin.

For a cemetery covering 105 acres, it's not a dismal place. But you also won't find the occasional levity to be had in the Key West Cemetery, where the epitaph on one headstone reads "I told you I was sick," and toy airplanes adorn another marker. The atmosphere at Pere Lachaise is quiet, respectful, but not morbid or creepy. Nice place for a picnic. Almost.

2004-07-15T17:53:00.000+02:00

Avenue des Peupliers, Le Pere Lachaise.

2004-07-15T17:51:00.000+02:00

Grief distilled in bronze.

2004-07-15T17:50:00.000+02:00

Balzac's last book, in bronze.

2004-07-15T17:49:00.000+02:00

If you stop at Pere Lachaise, you just gotta see the grave of the Lizard King.

2004-07-11T20:17:00.000+02:00

The working writer makes it a priority to set up a functional work space. (Or: I never thought it was possible to miss a desk so deeply.)

Consider yourself warchalked, mon ami

2004-07-07T15:36:00.000+02:00

As occasionally happens, I tried to get on the Internet just now with my ADSL connection from Club-Internet. The remote computer, being all remote -- even moody -- did not respond. Just for the heck of it, I fired up the WiFi on my T41 ThinkPad and, voila, there were two networks floating around in my neighborhood. So, M. Netgear, thanks for the ride.

I'm not much interested in tennis, unless you count my tendency to pause while channel-surfing when I hit a broadcast of lithe young women in short skirts leaping to and fro, swinging rackets and grunting. Still, my attention was snagged by the BBC's interview with Andy Roddick after his defeat by Roger Federer at Wimbledon this week. In describing the game, Roddick said, "I threw everything at him including the kitchen sink, and he went and got his tub." And then, after the interviewer asked about the great rivalry with Federer, "I'll have to start winning some of these if they're going to call it a rivalry."

Elsewhen, Maria Sharapova apologized profusely to Serena Williams for beating her to win Wimbledon. Williams's smile didn't even look strained.

"No strike planned for arts festival this year"

2004-07-05T13:43:00.000+02:00

That's a headline in the International Herald Tribune today. Need I add that the dateline is France? The article is about the forthcoming festival of performing arts in Avignon. Last year's was canceled at the last minute after French mimes, clowns and other artistes went on strike over a plan to cut their unemployment benefits. The 100,000 unionized artists used to be able to get a year's worth of unemployment benefits if they worked for three months.

The electrical workers' union went on strike for a couple days recently. Demonstrators ripped the meter off the prime minister's house. Between 40,000 (if you believe the cops) and 80,000 (if you believe the union) of them marched in the Bastille. The government wants to sell some shares in the electric and gas utility, which is now wholly state-owned, and the union fears this is the first step to privatization and, eventually, layoffs.

I figure that if 40,000 or 80,000 electric workers take the day off and the lights stay on, there may be some fat to be trimmed.

I read recently in the World's Best News Magazine that a greater portion of the work force is unionized in the U.S. than France. You'd never know it. The unions have a lot of clout here, in large part because they have public support, albeit sometimes only tacit. Fraternite may be part of the motto of the Republic, but there are many deep division in society. One of the deepest may be the one between workers and "the bosses," to use a quaint socialist term that's still au courant here.

A walk to the comic book store

2004-06-25T15:34:00.001+02:00

Wherever I am, particularly if I'm flying solo, I seldom make it a priority to check out the museums, the top restaurants, the interesting stores. Mostly, I just walk ... and Paris provides the most interesting walks of any city I've visited. This is a typical walk for me on a day off. In fact, I'd been on all these streets before, seen all these sights, although I hadn't photographed them. Without any planning, the route from my apartment near the Folies Bergeres to the comic book store Album near the Sorbonne covered the spectrum of what's out there, everywhere: an odd little store, something new and striking, a moment of "what the--?", a historic building, a historic sculpture. On a good day, sights like these make me glad I'm in Paris. Even on a bad day, they provide a welcome break from the routine, like a couple hours in the exercise yard.

2004-06-25T15:34:00.000+02:00

One of a pair of dragons, Saint Michel.

2004-06-25T15:31:00.000+02:00

The Institut de France, across the Seine from the Louvre, at the foot of the Pont des Arts. The most famous of the five institutes is the Academie Francaise, the "immortals" who decide what is and is not proper French. (When the word "spam" entered the language, the immortals decided whether it was masculine or feminine.) The building was constructed in the 1600s and is far from the oldest in the city.

2004-06-25T15:24:00.000+02:00

There were a couple dozen of them, on their way from here to there. Something you don't see in New York or Washington.

2004-06-25T15:22:00.000+02:00

Rue de Rivoli. I don't know who they were, but I'll find out.

2004-06-25T15:20:00.000+02:00

Scaffolding detail.

2004-06-25T15:19:00.000+02:00

Art deco scaffolding, Place du Lieutenant Henri Karcher.

2004-06-25T15:17:00.000+02:00

Elvis My Happiness, Paris's pre-eminent magasin for all things Presley. Rue Notre Dame des Victories.

Current events

2004-06-23T17:37:00.000+02:00

I have this transformer that will knock France's 220-volt current down to 110. I don't use it much, since my ThinkPad and peripherals can munch on either voltage (except for the Tungsten, which would fry on French current), and the small appliances I've bought in France -- an electric toothbrush, a hand blender -- are, of course, happy with the local cuisine. But I do have the Tungsten, and the motor on the air mattress needs 110.

Since the air mattress is the only piece of furniture in the new apartment, I figured I'd blow it up to make my wait for Darty less excruciating. But ... nothing. I tried several outlets. Then noticed the lights didn't work. Nor the refrigerator, when it arrived. I found what looked to be a tripped circuit-breaker, but it wouldn't untrip. Just flopped back and forth.

I made another trip to the new apartment just now, unplugged the transformer, then tried flipping the circuit-breaker. Worked fine, lights came on, refrigerator hummed. Plugged in the transformer -- blooie.

Why this should be so bears further investigation. If I can't use the transformer, my plans for cultural domination (plugging my U.S.-spec television, VCR, DVD player and stereo, when they get here, into the transformer and creating my own little American Media Zone) are undone.

2004-06-23T16:47:00.000+02:00

As well as being Continental in appearance and generally pleasing to the eye, the courtyard provides an alternative light source when the electricity is out in the apartment. (View from the salon. That's "living room," to you.)

Qu'est-ce que c'est?

2004-06-23T13:34:00.000+02:00

I'm on the third day of a two-week vacation. Originally, S. and I were going to spend this week moving her belongings into our new apartment, and then next week vacationing somewhere not-too-expensive to recover from this week. But in May I awoke in a classic alternate universe scenario. You know the drill: change one pivotal event (the South wins the Civil War, Oswald misses, the Supreme Court hands the 2000 presidential election to George Bush) and explore the ramifications. So, I'll be moving into the new apartment by myself.

I suppose "the move" has been in progress for close to two years and won't be completed until my belongings, which I put into storage when I moved to Paris in October 2002, complete their leisurely trans-Atlantic crossing. In the meantime, I've lugged over the astounding number of books I've bought since I blew into town, which has made my current abode, a furnished studio apartment, a bit more roomy. S. was kind enough to set up accounts for me at Electricite de France and France Telecom. I bought a microwave oven and brought it over on my little luggage cart, and today two young mecs from Darty brought over my new refrigerator. Because an unfurnished French apartment is really unfurnished.

Unfortunately, the new refrigerator is not humming away because the electricity is out.

I can puzzle my way through written French, which is how I was able to check out the refrigerators at Darty, order one off their Internet site, and figure out that they were going to deliver it today between noon and 8 p.m. And I can grasp enough spoken French so that when Darty called shortly before noon today, I could grasp that they expected to be by in about 20 minutes (although, by the time nearly an hour had passed, I wondered if they had said they'd be by at 20 hours, which is 8 p.m.). I probably even have enough French to call EDF and ask what's up with the lights. I'd sound like an idiot, but I think the sympathy that tends to engender among the natives is my greatest asset. But I certainly don't understand French well enough to puzzle out an EDF representative's reply to my pidgin inquiry.

Which is how life is here. I can bump along for days without incident, kind of skimming along the surface of the culture. I can order at a restaurant, buy movie tickets, navigate the bus and Metro. In a store, I can ask where the shoelaces are (if I first look up the word for "shoelaces"). But if I have to go one level deeper, I start floundering.

There's ways around it. If I walk to the EDF office, bill in hand, I will certainly find someone there who knows at least enough English to understand me. Odds are, in fact, it'll be someone (either customer or employee) who speaks perfect English. I can ask someone at work to make a call for me. I could even ask the gardien at Rue Bleue for a hand. She doesn't understand English, but I can flick the light switch, point to the circuit-breaker box, wave my paid-in-full EDF bill and look defeated.

My plan now, though, is to read a couple more chapters of Jane Kramer's fine collection of New Yorker columns, The Europeans, and hope the problem kind of goes away by itself.

That's one off the list

2004-06-13T19:36:00.000+02:00

I have a little list. Several. Many. And a Tungsten T3 to contain them. One of the lists is "France," reminders of things to do while I'm here. I add to the list occasionally, strike items from it very occasionally. Most days, I get up, I go to work, I take the Metro home, I watch the BBC or CNN or surf the French-language channels. I write a few paragraphs. I read. Eventually, I get tired and go to sleep. I don't take any items off the list. Or, if I do, it's off the list called "Shopping," or the one called "Books" or "Music." (It's easy to knock something off those lists, and you do get a fleeting sense of accomplishment, although all it takes is spending money.)

But yesterday I knocked an item off the "France" list, by taking a L'OpenTour bus tour. A lot of big cities have at least one such service; Paris has two, the other being Les Cars Rouges. Both services run double-decker buses through the more interesting neighborhoods and past the big landmarks, with pre-recorded commentaries delivered in several languages. Les Cars Rouges has one route; L'OpenTour has four, one of which, of the Montmartre and Grands Boulevards neighborhoods, has a stop a couple blocks from my apartment.

I'd recommend it for the rubes -- sorry, "the visitors" -- but for me it was kind of a bust. I've been here for 20 months. Apparently I've seen all the sights, at least from the outside. Oh, look, there's the Opera. There's the Gare du Nord; been there a half-dozen times, to catch the Eurostar to London or the Thalys to Brussels or Amsterdam. There's Gare de l'Est, went through there maybe every other weekend, on average, when I visited S., who lived out in Champagne country. Oh, look, there's Printemps and Galleries Lafayettes, where I've dropped a bunch of euros. And there's my neighborhood again, time to get off.

I'll have to review that list.

I did see one sight that was new to me, a Conran's Habitat store that appeared to specialize in office gear. I made a note of the address (on the Tungsten T3) and will be going back soon. I'm not sure it was worth 22 euros to discover it, though.

Last night I saw "Le Jour D'Apres" -- that's "The Day After Tomorrow," to you -- in English, with French subtitles. It was not as bad as many of the reviews I've read had suggested it would be. It was even engaging at times, though annoying at times as well. There are a couple "wall of water chasing us" scenes that are twins of the "wall of fire chasing us" scenes in "Independence Day," also directed by Roland Emmerich. And there are a couple "Run! Run! The cold will catch us!" scenes that are just silly. Even granting that the air temperature could drop 5 degrees per second, running into an enclosed space and slamming the door won't save you.

I believe this was only the second time in my life I've gone to a movie theater by myself. The first time was to see "A Boy and His Dog," released in 1975. Back then, for a high school nerd, it turned out to be an acutely lonely experience. This time it was okay. I'm made of sterner stuff now, and starved for English-language entertainment.

"You bid me rouse myself...."

2004-06-10T21:03:00.000+02:00

"Blocked," an article in The New Yorker by Joan Acocella. Published in the summer fiction issue, which must be some sort of meta-irony. Informative and entertaining. Entertaining, that is, in the same sense as a really bad car wreck you've just avoided. Take Joseph Mitchell, who joined The New Yorker in 1938, wrote a series of brilliant pieces, culminating with what was thought to be his greatest (about a blocked writer) in 1964. After that, he continued to come to work as usual, day in and day out, for the next 32 years, but never submitted another word. Two thoughts immediately come to mind:

"Wow, at least I'm not that bad."

And:

"Wow, what a great job that was."

Acocella cites Ian Hacking, a philosopher, who has written about "dynamic nominalism." That's when you invent a category, and people "sort themselves into it, behave according to the new description, and thus contrive new ways of being. Possibly, some writers become blocked simply because the concept exists, and invoking it is easier for them than writing."

I haven't read Hacking, but it wouldn't surprise me if he notes the influence of society in this phenomenon: you not only sort yourself into the new category, but you're accepted by society as a member of the new category. When people discover I've published, and then how long it's been since I have published, the usual response is "Oh, writer's block?" No one's ever said, "Oh, lazy fucker?"

Lever, coucher

2004-06-10T06:22:00.000+02:00

Okay, so the photo uploadification process works, courtesy of Hello. This is software from the folks who brought you Picasa, a photo-handling package I started using a year ago. It's wonderful, except it can't do captions. For that, I have ACDSee. And for quick editing, I use Microsoft Digital Image Suite. (I bet there's a photo program that can do everything. And I bet it's exclusively for Macs.)

So, yes, the photo, although you have to click on it to make it big enough to read the sign in the window. But you can click on it, which is cool.

And yes, it's a little after 6 in the morning. Until I moved to Paris and got a day job, I had no idea I could wake up and actually function at such an hour. Most newspapers publish in the mornings, which means they're put together in the evenings, so that's when the production editors work. I worked from around 4 p.m. to midnight most of my life, would get to bed around 2 or 3 a.m., wake up at 11. The IHT has a shift like that, too, for the European edition, but I usually work on the Asia edition, so I'm on a Hong Kong schedule.

The day shift is not the problem. The problem is axial tilt. Sunrise was at 5:47 today. Sunset will be at 9:53. It's still twilight when I go to sleep. Or try to. Still, I'd rather deal with too much sunlight than the Stalingradesque winters, with their short days, perpetual overcast and frequent rain. (For those of you humming "April in Paris," try November here.) Most people don't realize how far north Paris is -- farther north than Halifax. Although not as far north as Saint Petersburg, Russia, which I have ruled out as a retirement destination. I'll head for someplace closer to the equator.

2004-06-10T06:16:00.000+02:00

"Here We Talk English." Rue La Fayette, Paris, May 31.

Without haste, without rest

2004-06-09T00:26:00.000+02:00

Especially the "without haste" part. My last short story, "The Mercy Gate," was published in the March 1998 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. After six years, you'd be forgiven for thinking it really was my last publication and not the most recent. When I came to Paris, in October 2002, I figured it would be a good opportunity to hunker down. This was the city of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and all that crew, after all. I'd shake off the dust, clear away the cobwebs, pick up some new material and maybe some fresh perspectives. And, despite it being Paris, there'd be few distractions. I didn't know anyone. I didn't speak the language (and still don't speak it very well). Most of the television was broadcast in French, oddly enough, and CNN and the BBC compromised most of the English-language programming. What was there to do but write?

But, you know, when you're having trouble writing, there's always something to do besides writing, even if it's just sitting around, staring at the walls, and thinking about why you're not writing. I did a bit of that. Also, watched CNN and the BBC for hours on end. Read a lot of books and bought a bunch more I haven't gotten around to yet. Did some traveling. Had a volcanic, inspiring and distracting love affair. Negotiated the French bureaucracy on various matters, such as the all-import visa and titre de sejour, which is a part-time job in itself. Oh, and worked full-time at the International Herald Tribune.

But I've been writing lately. No reason for it, just as there was no reason, really, not to do it. I'm not going to write about the stories, just as I don't talk about them, because if you talk it out you don't have to write it out. But they're there, reeling out word by word, and now so is this.