Tsuris Tsummer 2023

Since Janet left for Ireland last month it’s been one thing after another — different makes and models of the struggle bus. Here are three stories.

Story number one: a few days before Janet was scheduled to leave (Saturday, June 17), friends who are moving away from State College asked Janet if they could stay at our house for a week while they dealt with moving-tsuris. It turns out they were under the impression that the house would be empty. Janet, being famously magnanimous, said that Jamie and I would be there but that they could stay anyway — we have a spare room. I was fine with that but wanted it to be clear that I couldn’t do much socializing, because I’m revising a book manuscript and doing the usual Jamie care. But I’d be happy to cook dinners for four instead of two — I would just alter my shopping plans.

Our friends arrived on Thursday. On Friday afternoon, we got a surprise text: NERF (Nick Evie Rachel Finn) had made a last-second decision to come to State College for the weekend! Well all righty then, we can manage that — friends stay in the spare room, Janet and I move to Jamie’s room for Friday night, Jamie relocates to his basement lair, NERF takes the upper floor.

Late Saturday afternoon I drive Janet to the airport and see her off. Upon my return, friends say, “Michael, did you know there’s a puddle around the washing machine?”

Oh, sweet mother of Moloch. This house has water issues. Friends were feeling bad about having done a laundry, but (as we will see) the washing machine had nothing to do with it. But I saw that the drainage basin was full to overflowing: that was the cause of the puddle. Thinking that maybe the new filter Janet had attached to the drainage hose had let through too much stuff, I plunged the drain (causing, of course, more puddling) while friends kindly wet-vacuumed the area, and quickly learned that plunging had no effect. Nor did sticking my arm into this very dirty water and trying to determine whether in fact the drain was clogged in the first place.

Nick, who had noticed that water had also seeped into the main basement room and was threatening all of Jamie’s stuff, suggested that I get a bucket and bail. So I did! That was my workout for the day — hauling about twenty buckets (and, at the end, one full wet vac, almost too heavy to lift, never mind drag up the stairs) out of the house and dumping them into various places in the backyard. I am quite sure that if I had not gotten myself back into shape over the past year, I would not have been able to do this.

I detached the pipe under the basin (with a bucket under it, but still, more mess) and determined that there was no clog there, either. Great. That meant something was wrong either in the big pipe leading out to the street, or in the city’s pipe. Thinking that it was a safe bet that I had been dealing with sewage for a few hours, I took a quick shower.

But when I went back to the basement, the horror went to the Next Level: the basin was re-filling. Now we had to ban all water usage (a shower! what was I thinking!) with eight people in the house, two of them small children. I put a stopper in the drain and started bailing again. The water pressure displaced the stopper. I put the stopper back in really firmly and stopped the bleeding, then called Roto-Rooter and said we had a legit plumbing emergency on our hands. They called back about two hours later and said they could come out around noon tomorrow.

The kitchen sink was now unusable. Friends booked an AirBnB.

Meanwhile, Janet was at Newark Airport waiting on a delayed connection, so we called to update her, making sure that she understood that everyone in the house knew that she had called down a curse on us. Unphased, she suggested calling the Borough of State College water management people. A fine idea! They came out faster than an Uber, shone a light down the city pipes, and reported that the pipes were dry — the call was definitely coming from inside the house. But at least the drain wasn’t re-filling; the next question would be how to dry — or more likely, remove — the 12 x 10 rug from Jamie’s part of the basement.

Sunday. Roto-Rooter teaches us a new word: fatberg. We Google it and learn some really foul things about the London sewers. But this makes no sense! We compost — we don’t put food down the garbage disposal. And we never flush non-biodegradable things down the toilets. So maybe this small meteorite had built up over a decade or two? And just decided to declare itself on a weekend when eight people were in the house?

As Nick and I put on our rubber gloves and shlepped the rug out of the basement (more wet vac, more fans to dry the concrete floor underneath), I said that I have always disliked the phrase “blessing in disguise,” and would not use it here, since there is nothing blessing about sewage. But if the fatberg had announced its presence when I was alone with Jamie, there is no way I would have been able to get that rug out of the house. Nick’s help was invaluable.

Over the next few days, I dried out the basement, bought Jamie some new storage units for his books and DVDs (a literal pain to assemble, since I have acquired De Quervain tenosynovitis recently), and took the opportunity to clean pretty much everything in Jamie’s lair. It now looks pretty good!

NERF left on Juneteenth. Things settled down. Until the following Saturday, when … the back door would not open. From the inside! Dang, I thought, getting my keys, going out the side door and proceeding to unlock the back — oh, no, wait, the door wouldn’t unlock, either. The doorknob lock was stuck somehow! The door could not be opened from outside or inside! Making matters worse, and this is an absurd self-own, the back door is the only house door for which I have a key. I could of course go back in the side door (it didn’t lock behind me), but long term, this would not really be sustainable. You know, leaving a side or front door open, especially when leaving town for two weeks.

I unstuck it and thought it was just an anomaly — did I close the door too tightly the night before? But when on Sunday the same thing happened and the doorknob stayed skewed, I knew I had trouble on my hands.

Janet advised me to watch some YouTubes about how to repair broken doorknob locks, and the first I hit upon said, “don’t repair the lock — if it’s sticking, it’ll stick again. It’s broken. Replace it.”

So off I went to Ace Hardware, seven-eight minutes away (this detail will matter later), and got myself a new doorknob lock. But it didn’t fit quite right, even though it said it was a standard size lock — because, never having done this before, I didn’t know that you could adjust the length of the bar-thing-in-the-middle from 2–3/8" to 2–3/4", and none of the YouTubes I consulted informed me of this. So I repackaged everything, and back I went to Ace to ask for help.

They asked me what the instructions said. “It didn’t come with instructions,” I replied. “Everything we sell like this has instructions,” they said, puzzled. “I can assure you that I did not throw them out by mistake,” I assured them; “I guess I assumed that this thing was so self-explanatory as not to need instructions.”

They opened another doorknob package and looked at the instructions with me. Aha! Adjust the middle bar thing to 2–3/4" and everything will fit right! Happily, I went back home.

And then got to the point where I was supposed to attach two machine screws that did not exist. I checked the instructions again, particularly the list of parts. Yep, Ace had sold me — quite inadvertently — a doorknob lock set that had no instructions and was missing two screws. Only at this point did I see the clear tape on the side that indicated that the package had been opened before I bought it.

So, third time back to Ace, this time to report that the package was seriously weird and to ask to exchange it for another. They were nonplussed, but could plainly see that the package had been opened.

Now here’s the place where I do the self-own thing again. The thing I had bought was the last one of its model, and I didn’t think Janet would like a silver or black doorknob; it had to be brass. Seeing nothing good, I decided to get a single-cylinder deadbolt (with instructions!). Taking it home and installing it quickly (I was getting adept at this), I realized with chagrin that I need a doorknob to open the door! This latch thing wouldn’t do it! Of course it wouldn’t! I am really bad at this.

So, fourth time back to Ace, and now I’ve literally put in an hour just in driving alone. I get a medium ugly doorknob lock, bring it home, and install it. Total time on task, three hours. But now I have a functional back door! All I needed to do after that is make extra copies of the keys, and the following day, that is how I learned that the mechanical Minute Key device at Lowe’s makes really, really bad copies of keys. So I had better copies made by actual humans. More driving around muttering to myself.

Whew! Now all I had to worry about was how to pack up two travelers for a sweltering New York and a chilly, rainy Ireland.

To dampen my travel / logistics anxiety (conscious as I am of the infinite number of things that can go wrong), I started packing three days ahead of time, which meant that (a) I was really really ready and (b) I was so ready that by the time our departure day arrived — the following Saturday (everything happens on a Saturday!) — I had forgotten where I had packed some things and forgotten even whether I had packed others. Chargers? Yes! Adapters? No! That sort of thing. (Janet told me there were three more adapters in the walk-in closet.) I remembered the lesson of my first (and only) trans-Atlantic just-me-and-Jamie trip in 2018: the chargers and adapters are almost as important as underwear. All devices must be accounted for, and of course each one has a distinctive charger that doesn’t fit anything else.

On one of our dog walks (we have since left the dogs with a friend), Jamie made the brilliant suggestion that we should go to Harrisburg and take the Amtrak from there. It would give me a 90-minute drive instead of four hours, and reduce our parking costs considerably — let alone the tsuris of driving to JFK long-term parking. "That is a brilliant suggestion, Jamie,” I said, “and I’ll see you and raise you — we’ll leave from Lewistown, just 40 minutes away.” Cost of parking at the tiny whistlestop Lewistown station: zero dollars and zero cents. And did I mention that it is 40 minutes away?

The only downside is that when Amtrak gets west of Harrisburg on its Pennsylvania route, it loses priority to freight, so it’s anybody’s guess when the train actually arrives. I used to joke that the Lewistown route sometimes involves cattle, and I wasn’t far wrong. There is no platform, and you can only board at one location, so boarding takes a while, especially for passengers (like us) with big suitcases who need the help of the conductors (this detail will matter later).

The benches at the station are ridiculously uncomfortable; the bottoms of them have only two slats about six inches apart, tilted toward each other. What bottoms were these bench bottoms designed for? I kept squirming in mine while playing Scrabble on my phone and watching the Amtrak train tracker as our ten-minutes-late train became a 25-minutes-late train. But finally, at 11:49, our 11:24 arrived, and people began to queue, because you can only board at one location, etc.

We were sixth or seventh in line, among maybe twenty passengers, and as we shuffled toward the train door I did my habitual, almost unconscious pocket checks. I don’t like making major journeys without a jacket, because I need the pockets. But in 85-degree heat, I was just wearing polo shirt and shorts, and the pocket check consisted of left rear pocket (phone), right front pocket (keys), right rear pocket (wallet). And that is how I learned that my right rear pocket was empty.

Empty! What in the world had I done? Had I outwitted myself, just as I did when I packed compression socks a few days early and then thought (on the drive to Lewistown) that I had forgotten to pack compression socks? Was the wallet in my briefcase for safekeeping? No. Then maybe it fell out in the car! That has happened before. “Wait here please, Jamie,” I nearly screeched as I broke into a run. Thank goodness Lewistown is a whistlestop — the car was only fifty yards away. But there was no wallet in it.

I looked back and saw people boarding the train — slowly, thank goodness. I began to think that I would simply have to drive back to State College with Jamie and cancel everything. And then I thought: that stupid fucking bench. I was squirming on it, and surely the wallet worked itself out of my pants? Yes, the wallet had worked itself out of my pants. And there it was, under the bench, almost imperceptible. But only almost.

We made the train. My heart rate did not recover for half an hour, and during that time I realized that if I had not done the habitual, almost unconscious pocket check, I would be even more fucked. I also realized that it would be a good idea, henceforth, to button that pocket, difficult though that is.

And then Jamie and I got to New York, and had a really wonderful time. But this is why travel anxiety exists, no?

Since we left New York for Ireland, I have made so many mistakes along the way that I cannot enumerate them. Forgetting that I hung up my jacket and slacks in Janet's cottage near Ballyvaughan, check (thank all the deities, I can retrieve them today); putting Jamie's sleep shirt and shorts in the suitcase I did not bring to Inis Mor, check; not knowing that you have to pay for the car park at the Doolin Ferry, check. This last required me to run back at the last moment, thereby losing our place in the queue, thereby leaving us to board after all the seats in the back of the boat were taken, thereby subjecting us all to the worst of the sea swells, which eventually got the best of poor Jamie. There's much more, but you get the idea. I told Gail and Martin, our traveling companions, that this is all on brand for me — I am sometimes impeccably well organized and a savvy planner, and sometimes a total incompetent. To which Martin replied, "well, would you rather be a consistent mediocre?" A fine question!

Executive Function Fatigue

On Friday evening I had my first meltdown of the quarantine. It wasn’t a big meltdown, and hey, I went through seven weeks of generalized dread spiked by seething rage at the psychopath in the White House and his many enablers and sheer WTF facepalms at the cosplaying fools at the “I Need A Haircut / Kill the Jews” rallies without having a single freakout, so yay me. And everyone was like, “chill, Michael, it’s not a big deal,” because it wasn’t, but I could feel a wire snap somewhere in my brain as I was trying and failing to make dinner.

So, dinner. When we locked down seven weeks ago, I took it upon myself to do most of the groceries and cooking, because Janet’s teaching and I’m not. Also, why not take the opportunity to widen my repertoire? Up until now I have been a competent maker of

-       Omelets

-       Toast

-       Breakfast sandwiches

-       Frozen dumplings (Jamie’s standard breakfast)

-       Sandwiches

-       Things on the grill, burgers, steaks, hot dogs, fish

-       Really good pasta sauces with lots of onions

-       Potatoes

-       Salads

-       That’s pretty much it

Back in February I invented a thing with meatless chorizo, onions, peppers, and rice in a salsa verde sauce, and then in Week One of the quarantine I actually looked up a recipe for shrimp and scallop scampi because we’d bought a bunch of shrimp and scallops from the local awesome seafood place, thankful that it was still open. That was a big hit, so I made it again when Nick, Rachel, and Finn joined us in Week Four. (Pro tip: you really need fresh basil.)

Planning the grocery shopping was a thing (as is true for many people), since in ordinary circumstances we just run to the local Weis three minutes away whenever we need something. We didn’t do any crazed paper-products hoarding, but back in February we did get a bunch of soups and canned goods and ramen noodles and rice and Gatorade, just in case. But in Week One we went to the store four times, yikes, and have been trying to get it down to once a week ever since, with only gradual success. And on Saturday we get a bunch of local meats and soups from the farmer’s market, ordering online the day before. The real challenge has been lettuce and bread, which disappear astonishingly quickly.

I found almost immediately that I can’t do the “cook once, eat twice” thing if I’m cooking for five people. Instead, I wind up with maybe one and a half dinners, which of course produces the what-to-do-with-leftovers problem. Thank goodness we have a second refrigerator in the basement, which I suppose will make some Very Online people very angry because Nancy Pelosi is wealthy. But by Week Seven, I was thinking I had found my calling: quartermaster and sommelier for a family of six. (Five, really—Nick and Rachel do all the baby foods.)

I wasn’t cooking every night—we want to keep India Pavilion in business, so we order two nights’ worth of food from them about every ten days. Janet made salmon burgers one night, and helped out with almost every other meal (sides, salad dressings, etc.). There was one pizza night, and Nick’s birthday dinner was takeout from one of the nicer local restaurants. But still, especially with the Indian food, there is the leftovers problem.

OK, so, for the meltdown. I had purchased about two pounds of beef cubes from a local farmer, and I knew I had three bags of egg noodles in the pantry, so I decided that now would be the time for me to make my first beef stroganoff. This required some things I didn’t have, like mushrooms and beef broth, so we made a grocery list of everything we could think of for this recipe and a couple more. Rachel added another list for a chicken thing she and Nick will make tonight (they have made dinner a couple of times so far). Working from two lists fried my brain a little, because Janet had written hers very thoughtfully in the order of my counterclockwise travels through Giant from produce to cereals to beverages to meats to dairy/yogurt/bread, and Rachel had written hers as a recipe, randomly. As a result, I almost forgot to get the chicken stock she needed. But I did not forget, after all!

And yet the yogurts did me in. Four different kinds of yogurt, and no one told me that Activia doesn’t have a plain yogurt. (I got vanilla, but only four little ones, because I was sure they were the wrong thing.) Janet had written “Greek plain” and Rachel had written “Fage,” and since I am a boy, I had no idea that Fage was a Greek yogurt too. I spent about ten-fifteen minutes scanning all the yogurts, trying to make sure all the time that I wasn’t being That Guy blocking more adept purchasers of yogurt from getting their favorite brands and flavors.

And then when I got home my groceries were criticized. Janet assured me I had gotten all the right yogurts, but wanted to know why I had not gotten Pacifico hot dog rolls, since those are the ones I like. “Uh, no,” I replied, “I think Pacifico are the best hamburger rolls, but I prefer potato rolls for hot dogs.”

“But you told me to get Pacifico last week and I was really proud of myself that I found it and really happy to find out they’re a local bakery.”

“Right, but that was burgers.” And I’m like, why is this a thing? Janet eats neither hot dogs nor burgers. Except for bison burgers, which leads me to….

“Why did you buy all this ground beef?”

Now I was vexed. “Because Nick told me to,” I replied incredulously, my voice going up an octave, “and you were in the room when he did.”

“Lower your voice! The baby is sleeping.”

“No he’s not,” I said, nonsensically, because in fact he was sleeping. “I just got what Nick asked for.”

“But you told him we had plenty of ground beef. I heard you.”

“Then you missed the rest of the conversation. I told him we had three pounds of bison downstairs, and he said no, he wanted ground beef. So I’m making bison burgers tomorrow night and he’s making something with his beef next week. Yeesh.”

OK, that was the preamble. Then came the dinner. Thirty minutes prep, the recipe said. (I had asked Janet to choose between two recipes, and she threw out one of them because it called for ground beef in a stroganoff, and was therefore not real.) About an hour into my prep, with all my onions and garlic and mushrooms and Worcestershire sauce and wine and stuff all set to go, I couldn’t find any beef broth. Everybody else was huddled around the kitchen counter Zooming with friends, so I had to interrupt the Zoom to ask where the beef broth was.

This is not the kind of question a competent quartermaster should be asking.

“We don’t have any beef broth,” Janet said. “It was on your list. Did you not get any?”

“It was not on my list,” I shot back. I went over those two lists very very carefully.

“It certainly was on the list. Maybe it was on Rachel’s list. I know I saw it,” Janet replied.

“It was not on Rachel’s list either. She asked for chicken stock.”

“I’m pretty sure she said beef broth.” So now here I was, fishing through the garbage for the two lists, which of course I had thrown away earlier in the afternoon. Aha! Found them. And guess what? No beef broth.

“Oh, wait, I know what happened,” Janet said. “Luna ate the first list and I had to recreate it from memory, and I didn’t remember beef broth.”

Yes, you read that right. The dog literally ate my homework.

Confusion ensued. I asked Nick to run to the store for beef broth; while he did that, everyone else in the kitchen, except Finn, and everyone on the Zoom assured me that chicken broth would be just fine. But then our friends said, wait, are you making this right now? For tonight?

“Well, yes,” I said. “That’s the idea.”

Oh no, they said. For a stroganoff you should make everything the day before.

Well, holy flying mother of Moloch on a pogo stick, did the recipe say anything of the kind? No. It said this was a thirty-minute prep, very easy to make.

I smacked the counter in exasperation, we wound down the Zoom call (“Michael’s fried, we gotta go”), we waited for Nick to return, and Janet kindly decided to take over the dinner. There was one more residual criticism of my groceries, in the form of “why did you get beef cubes when the recipe calls for flank steak,” and I replied, “because the recipe says ‘I recommend flank steak for this recipe, but any stir-fry-friendly cut will do’ and I had beef cubes in the freezer, and I bought beef cubes because I am trying out different things from this farm” and everyone agreed that my beef cubes would have been better for a stew, but everything worked out. I demoted myself to salad prep, Janet saved the stroganoff, and Nick took charge of breads and butters.

“You just need to learn to improvise,” Janet said. Which is true. Janet is a far more versatile and accomplished cook than I am, and when it comes to following recipes, I am about as spontaneous as a Japanese tea ceremony. I need to walk through everything ploddingly, and don’t know where or how to go off script.

I was now very annoyed with myself. Regardless of whether beef broth was on the list, I should have double-checked my own goddamn recipe before leaving for the store. For that matter, I should have looked at more recipes; I only read four, eliminating Paula Deen and Betty Crocker before Janet eliminated the one with ground beef.

This is when everyone said chill, Michael, it’s not a big deal. But I was like, look, I had one job to do, and it’s not like I was trying to make a very fancy dinner. I thought it was like one step up from tuna noodle casserole, with actual mushrooms instead of cream of mushroom soup.

And then I read that Twitter feed about executive function fatigue, and I went OMG YES THAT’S WHAT I HAVE. I have spent seven weeks joking that 60 percent of my waking thoughts are “what am I going to make for dinners this week” and “how do we cut down on cold cuts but still have them for lunch sometimes” and “how can we limit our trips to supermarkets” and “under these circumstances food waste is not only wrong but an actual mortal sin so I have to keep track of everything.” But really, that’s the way it feels. And though the burgers last night were simplicity itself, I am always struck at the contrast between the no-brainerdom of burgers (though I do like to spice them with cumin or sriracha sauce) and the bewildering array of accessories they require around here (hot ketchup for Janet, ketchup and Nathan’s mustard for Jamie, Dijon for me because Obama, plus pickles, tomatoes, jalapeno slices, and usually that one last avocado before it goes bad, oh and Janet prefers her bun toasted and we don’t and Nick and Rachel take two slices of American cheese and I take one and Jamie takes one of nondairy cheese).

I have the night off while Nick and Rachel make their chicken thing, and for that I am grateful. And also for them, and for Finn!

Are you a troll if you think Afrofuturism is racist?

Yes. It's like the literary/cultural version of "But All Lives Matter!"

A brief followup to yesterday's Asimov parody

Lest anyone conclude, on the basis of yesterday’s Asimov parody, that I am insufficiently appreciative of the achievements of the Great White Men of postwar science fiction, here’s a remarkably prescient little snippet from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001, published in 1968. Heywood Floyd on his way to the moon:

“Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles per hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word ‘newspaper,’ of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the everchanging flow of information from the news satellites.

“It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.

“There was another thought which a scanning of those tiny electronic headlines often invoked. The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials—these still seemed to be the main concerns of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether. Worst of all, without question, was the so-called Book of Many Faces, connecting billions of human beings in order to mine their personal data and foment tribal hatreds and dark obsessions. There were even grounds for suspicion that the Soviets had used the device to tamper with the most recent U.S. presidential election. Floyd didn’t know whether to give the rumor any credence, but, scanning through the Newspad, he found it impossible to dismiss altogether.”

Upon finally reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy

“Hurry Seldom tells me you just finished reading Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Is this true?”

“Yes. In fact Seldom knew this would happen because of his expertise in psychohistory, the principles of which I will proceed to explain to you even though everyone in the Galaxy is aware of them.”

“You fool! The Seldom Plan does not predict the behavior of individuals. And may I ask, why are you reading this classic series only now, instead of doing so at the age of 15, when you should have?”

“Precisely because I did not read it then, First Speaker. And here I am in my 50s, having taught two large classes in science fiction, preparing to teach a third, and I have been feeling like the Shakespeare scholar who has never read King Lear. You know well from your encephalographic research how susceptible academics are to Imposter Syndrome. I am certainly not immune. And you also know, though I will proceed to tell you as if you did not know, the story of how I began my first class five years ago. I told my sixty students that I was not a specialist in science fiction, even though I have read a good deal of it. And I confessed to them that twenty years earlier, I was offered the science fiction course at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. According to my department head, the recently-retired person who had been teaching it had set a fairly low bar, and he assured me that anything I would do would constitute an improvement. Furthermore, he said, it would give me the chance to teach a class of 150 students, almost all nonmajors, which he thought would be good for me—it would broaden my teaching experience considerably. And it might even recruit some students to the English department.”

“You would have underpaid teaching assistants, of course.”

“Of course. And probably a podium and a microphone too.”

“And you decided not to take him up on the offer.”

“As you remember, I thought about it for a couple of days and then came back and said, ‘I’m 32 years old. I honestly don’t have the self-confidence to walk into a classroom in which many of the students will know more than I do about the subject.’ I told him I imagined the class would be nearly all male, with some students wearing Star Trek uniforms (red, of course—it’s always the engineers) and insisting to me that I am wrong, the quantum flux drive does not emit a telltale trail of positrons when the ship re-emerges from hyperspace.”

“And you said all this to your students in a 100-level gen ed class twenty years later.”

“Yes, with this closing twist: I told them that now I was 52 and that I just don’t give a shit. ‘It is absolutely going to happen, in the course of the semester, that one or more of you is going to know more about something in the course than I do. I can promise you that when it comes to 2001: A Space Odyssey, I am one of the leading obsessives on the planet. But sooner or later, one or more of you is going to able to tell me something I don’t know, and you know what? That will be a good day. That will be a day on which I learn something from you.’ And it did happen, more than once—about the Drake Equation, about the Voyager missions, about Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama—and that was great. Those were two of the most successful and well-received courses I’ve taught.”

“So now you have been reading all this dystopian fiction for the past couple of years, and right after finishing Octavia Butler’s Parables, you decide to plunge into the icy bath that is the Foundation trilogy, just so you don’t feel like a complete fraud. Is that it?”

“Yes, First Speaker, that’s pretty much it.”

“Was this wise? Was this well-considered? Did no one warn you that the books would consist largely of dialogues between two men, one of whom is cleverly outwitting the other until, thanks to a sudden reveal, it turns out that the outwitter is in fact the outwittee? Did you not know that Asimov would repeat that formula a few dozen times with a few dozen characters over three books covering a four-hundred-year time span? And tell me, were you adequately prepared for the pervasive misogyny, and the surprising paucity of imagination suffusing a far-future scenario in which men smoke cigars and wear ties and read newspapers?”

“You well know that the answer to all your questions is no, and yet you ask anyway. I am beginning to think you are a man of the Second Foundation, except that if you were, you would probably want to delude me into thinking that you are a man of the Second Foundation, so that I would speculate that the Second Foundation is on the planet Calgon rather than on the planet Tantrum, where you would expect me to suspect its location to be precisely because it would be the least likely place to occur to me, who was born on Tantrum, unless of course the Second Foundation does not exist, in which case you would not be a man of the Second Foundation and you would not have asked me those questions in such an impertinent way, which proves that the Second Foundation does exist and that the Galaxy is on Orion’s belt.”

“You have learned much about the Foundation trilogy, no-longer-young Skybérubé. And yet you have said nothing about how the one character with disabilities, the mutant, throws a wrench into the Seldom Plan and conquers the galaxy because he is so pissed off that he is a mutant, and sterile.”

“Yes. Reading that, right after reading Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined and her awesome discussion of intellectual disability in Butler’s Parables, was very much like returning to a more primitive era in a dark corner of the Galaxy, where people are still relying on oil and coal for energy.”

“And yet, for all that, it is a classic trilogy in the genre, winner of a one-time Hugo Award for Best Series Ever. Its influence on postwar American science fiction cannot possibly be overstated. Why, with its Galactic Empire and its rebels, its capital planet that consists of one massive, densely-populated city, its wise-cracking, swashbuckling traders and its one admirable female character … you know where I’m going with this. We couldn’t have Star Wars without Foundation.”

“Quite true. I never really liked Star Wars.”

“Apostate! You have no business reading or teaching science fiction. I will blast you into atoms.”

“You will not, you fatally overconfident interlocutor, because the one thing the quantum flux drive does do is render blasters inoperative. Had you taken my class, you would have known that.”

The end.

_________

Next on the get-to list: N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series.

Petition to replace Ian Buruma with Avital Ronell at the New York Review of Books

I am assuming you clicked just out of curiosity, and not in the hope that there was such a petition.

Not Again!

Jeez, you'll fall for this old "read the whole thing" trick every time, won't you? No, there is no transcript of Troy Aikman and Joe Buck debating this call on Wittgensteinian grounds. Really, there isn't. I made it all up.

Why? Because I'm in St. Louis and recovering from a nasty cold and I had nothing better to do.