Month: June 2003

Buffalo stuff today:

:: Michael Niman is a professor at Buffalo State College, and a writer of left-wing political columns for ArtVoice, Buffalo’s main alternate weekly newspaper (their site may be down). Lately he’s been writing a lot about Buffalo as a cycling city: Niman is a very avid cyclist, and his columns about biking in Buffalo have been even angrier and more provocative than the normal tone he brings to his political commentary. Over the weekend, he managed to get arrested in an altercation with police during a big cycling event. Being a walker, I know some of Niman’s frustrations — people in cars these days tend to be a little more unaware of anything on the road other than other cars each year, if they’re even aware of those — but judging by the tone of his recent articles, I can’t say that his arrest comes as much of a surprise.

:: AmericanStyle Magazine’s annual ranking of the Top Twenty-Five Arts Destinations is out.

1. Chicago

2. New York City

3. Washington, D.C.

4. Boston

5. San Francisco

6. Santa Fe

7. Philadelphia

8. Buffalo

9. Los Angeles

10. Milwaukee

11, New Orleans; 12, Columbus; 13, Pittsburgh; 14, Cape Cod, Mass.; 15, Cleveland; 16, Saugatuck, Mich.; 17, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla.; 18, Asheville, N.C.; 19, Athens, Ga.; 20, Albuquerque, N.M.; 21, Sedona, Ariz.; 22, Corning; 23, Baltimore; 24, Seattle-Tacoma; 25, Atlanta.

Buffalo moved up, after being ranked ninth last year. Huzzah! Now, the city really needs to get going on taking advantage of this. What’s more likely to draw people to Buffalo? Our arts institutions, which are some of the finest in the country, or a casino? And setting tourism aside, which is more likely to get people to want to move here?

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Guilty pleasure: One of Buffalo’s “independent” TV stations is showing the first season of MTV’s Road Rules on Saturday nights. Man, that takes me back to the halcyon days of 1995….I miss the 90s. Well, some things about the 90s, anyway. I was a total slacker about writing, back then — I was one of those “I write when the Muse strikes me” kind of people. It took me a long time to learn the lesson that the Muse strikes people who work hard at it, every day, with a lot more regularity than the people who don’t.

Anyhoo, the only season of Road Rules I liked was the first one; watching a bunch of 20-somethings attempting to drive a Winnebago in city traffic lost its cachet pretty quickly after that. Now, if only I could see the San Francisco and London editions of The Real World again. I liked the London edition, even if they chose two of the most idiotic, vapid Americans they could have hoped to find: the hick race-car driver who wanders through a London grocery store bemoaning the lack of Ranch dressing and the 18-year old playwright twerp who didn’t seem to ever leave the Real World house. I think that if I’d been given an expenses-paid, three-month stay in London, I’d manage to find something to do.

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Hey! Caption this photo!!

(EDIT: My personal entry is: “So, Mr. President, does it matter what hand we use for a Dating Game kiss?” “Gosh, I dunno….”)

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Only two weeks remain in “Short Fiction Month”, after which I return to reading novels. Sigh….

:: I read five stories from Roald Dahl’s collection, Tales of the Unexpected. My favorites were “A Dip in the Pool” and “The Hitchhiker”, although everything by Dahl is great. This man had one wonderful, twisted imagination — not horror per se, just one story after another riffing on the idea of “unintended consequences”. Dahl’s stories are markedly different from his children’s fiction, although his grim outlook is not entirely lost in the children’s novels. (He’s best known for Charley and the Chocolate Factory, but my personal favorite is Danny, the Champion of the World — which really should be a movie.)

:: I’ve often read testimonials to P.G. Wodehouse, especially that he is one of the funniest writers of all time. I had forgotten about a Wodehouse anthology I bought a few years back (The Most of P.G. Wodehouse) until now, and thus I figured, “Hey! It’s short fiction month!” So I read two Wodehouse tales. The first, “The Purity of the Turf”, was mildly amusing. It’s a story about English gentlemen and their sporting interests, and it’s clever and entertaining. But the second Wodehouse story I read — “The Reverent Wooing of Archibald” — was simply side-splitting. This thing had me laughing from beginning to end. I can’t describe it much, except to note that it’s about a dunderheaded clod who falls hopelessly in love, at first sight, with a lovely lady he spies across a street. This man’s single undeniable talent, unfortunately, is his impression of a hen laying an egg. The way this talent plays into the story’s denouement had me giggling and guffawing like a fool. And Wodehouse’s gift for language is enormous, adding to the humor with descriptions like this: “It has often been said of Archibald that, had his brain been constructed of silk, he would have been hard put to it to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers.” And now I’m laughing again. Wait a minute….

:: This month has gone to show that if I’m saddened by all the novels I’ll never get to read, I’m even more saddened by all the stories I’ll never read.

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I completed my first draft of the “Snow White” story yesterday. This one took me by surprise. I’ve been nursing the basic idea of the story for a while, but I was unprepared for the way this one just poured out of me. Usually, in the course of writing a story I’ll make a bad wrong turn or two, and end up going back and eliminating a lot of material. This one, though, was a straight shot from beginning to end.

Now, as to whether that translates to a better story — i.e., one that sells to some market — time will tell. I still have to type it up and then edit it.

(Oh, and the baseball story — titled, “One More Dying Quail”, a Bull Durham reference using a bit of arcane baseball lingo — is now edited and will be heading out for rejection this week.)

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OK, just a quick “Grab Bag” of stuff today, and then more substantive (!) stuff tomorrow. Or not.

:: On the “Geek Test”, Caledon Hockley beat my score, and suggests some of his own additions to the list. Here they are, with my answers:

— You know what the only improvised line in The Empire Strikes Back is and who said it. YES

— You know what the original line was supposed to be. YES

— You know how many times Buffy has died in the series. NO

— You know the real name of the ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ YES

— You have calculated, with inflation, what that amount is today. NO

— You know what K.I.T.T. stands for. YES

— You have attempted to synchronize the CD soundtrack to the movie scene at home. NO

— You become aggrivated when someone misquotes from a movie you know by heart. YES

— You can name at least 5 characters from the Star Wars movies whose names aren’t actually spoken in the movies. YES

— You can name at least 5 characters from the Star Wars books that don’t appear in the movies. YES

— You know who “Q” is in at least two long-running series. YES

— You can hum the theme to “Superman” in a moment’s notice YES

— You know what kind of a gun James Bond has to give up in Dr. No to get his Walther. YES

— You have uttered, at least once in your life, “I HAVE THE POWER!!!” YES

— You know who the original Green Lantern is. NO

— You have used the phrase ‘cunning linguist’ with a straight face. NO

— You have used physics skills in real life situations. NO (I’m not sure what would qualify, here.)

:: Speaking of the Geek Test, these guys are officially granted an automatic score of 100%. They don’t have to answer a single question. They’re a lock.

:: Sometimes I wish I knew the first thing about economics, if only so I could tell Jane Galt she’s wrong without the intellectual content of my argument consisting of variants of “Nanny nanny boo boo!”

:: It’s a beautiful thing when a guy in Dallas embraces his inner postal worker.

:: Atrios recently revealed himself as a Philadelphia gym teacher. For some reason, I am picturing him as Coach Cutlip from The Wonder Years.

:: Open letter to Barnes&Noble: The Southtowns area in Buffalo constitutes a perfect location. Buffalo has two B&N’s, and both are in the northern suburbs. And there’s a shopping plaza less than half a mile down the street which hasn’t achieved full occupancy yet. And I just the other day found a back way there: an abandoned service road for the airstrip that used to exist behind my apartment complex, but exists no longer.

:: On second thought, a B&N or Borders within walking distance of my home would not be a good thing.

:: On third thought, I want one anyway.

:: Snopes.com is an invaluable resource, really and truly. Right now they have a post up about “noodling”, a questionable means of catching catfish. I have a problem with something they write in this post, though: “Although tales of giant catfish as big as grown men are the stuff of urban legendry, some varieties of catfish can indeed grow quite large (such as the Mekong giant catfish, which can weigh as much as 650 pounds and measure up to 10 feet in length)…[snip]” Maybe I’m parsing this incorrectly, but are they saying that catfish as big as a man don’t exist, but catfish way bigger than a man do exist? Huh?

:: Six or seven years ago, Buffalo’s NHL team, the Sabres, moved into a new arena. Since then, the old arena — Memorial Auditorium — has sat vacant. The building itself is still quite viable, and people here are always talking about what to do with it. Now, it appears that two main possibilities exist: converting it into a casino which would be run by the Seneca Nation of Indians (which I think would be a staggeringly bad idea), and converting it into retail space anchored by something called a “Bass Pro Outdoor World” store, which as I understand it is a Borders for fishermen, but even better (imagine Borders outlets the size of Wal-Marts, and only in select cities nationwide). So, we can have a lame knockoff casino, when there are casinos in easy reach of most people in the country; or we can have a store that would have sport-fishermen flocking to Buffalo. Gee whiz, what to do? (The Buffalo News has a good editorial on the store today. I’m not a fisherman, so I wouldn’t get too much out of it. But apparently these stores are big.)

:: Maintenance notes: 1. That supplementary blogroll (“The Common Room”) I added is not powered by Blogrolling, so the blogs there won’t be demarked when they are freshly updated. So don’t avoid them on that basis. 2. Sometime this week I plan to add one more section to the sidebar, which will hold links to reviews and articles I write for Green Man Review, as well as adding a few new permalinks to “Other Shores”. 3. I may be joining a webring. More details as they become available.

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