Category: Uncategorized

 

I am, of course, for progress. Progress, understood as what makes human life easier or even more pleasant.

I have some doubts, though, about to what extent the place where I grew up has progressed or just become more unpleasant.

I cannot remember this place – not from growing up here.

Things have changed beyond recognition. It started with the highway that bisected the main road of the village in two, and in that way took out the heart of the village. Then, as the city of Porto grew to engulf it, the village bristled with stack-a-prole apartments. You find them in any country that has succumbed to socialism, particularly in the Eastern European countries – graceless and featureless concrete boxes, stacked one on the other, with perhaps the nominal balcony where the householder can allow his children to catch a gulp of non-recycled air.

Old Portuguese houses, even the very large ones built as apartments, have a certain Mediterranean charm adorned with red tile roofs and often graced with curving balconies or other small notes that lend the whole indescribable charm.

But at a certain point – I remember it – featureless concrete apartment blocks were the future, and that’s where these people wanted to go and where they hurried, after I left to the States. (I don’t want to imply I would have stopped it had I been here, but who knows. It is my considered opinion that not much can stop a determined woman with an opinion. Tanks and bulldozers tremble before a woman with her hands at her waist and an expression of sullen determination.) These apartment blocks are everywhere, facing other apartment blocks, with only the occasional park here and there, with maybe a dozen stunted trees.

I remember growing up in the village and spending time exploring the abandoned Roman gold mines amid the pine forests. Now the pine forests themselves have disappeared and the mines are, presumably, buried under these “developments.” I don’t even want to imagine what it’s like to be a kid in one of these apartment blocks.

They’ll find it natural, I suppose. And probably they have tons of little friends and lead lives quite unlike my lonely childhood. But I suspect they have less freedom and their visual landscape is far empoverished.

The new schools, set amid parks, are graceless brick boxes surrounded by chain link fence, looking more like minimum security prisons than like institutions of learning. Nothing like the old, whitewashed village school with one room for girls and one for boys.

I know you’ll say – or you would if you studied the matter – that nowadays, at least, these children have bathrooms in the home and are generally cleaner and better fed than we were. I realize it is probably stupid of me to feel the aesthetic impoverishment they suffer is worse than being food-deprived or dirty.

I read enough stories of people growing up in NYC in the early twentieth century to know one can learn to love an arid cityscape – even as a small child. But these apartment blocks are not set in the center of strongly linked neighborhoods nor are they even as well built as early twentieth century apartments, and I can’t help but wonder if the sterile surroundings impoverish the mind, the soul and the imagination.

Perhaps I’m just an old woman lamenting the passing of her childhood landscapes. It seems particularly pointless to me, since Portuguese population is not even growing. Instead, the villages and interlands are becoming depopulated while the city burgeons with rootless people.

I’d give quite a bit to walk again the streets of the old village where we knew everyone, but barring time travel that is impossible.

So I take my son down the old trails, and get lost, then find my way again as I trace it by a bit of an abandoned house, the ruined wall of a field where I once played.

You can’t go home again. At best, you can go to what remains of it, and trace it amid the present looking for bits of the past, like a blind man trying to read the faint impressions of print on a page designed for those who can see.

If you go home, you’re liable to find that not only do you not belong there anymore, but it too does not belong to you. Perhaps it never did.

Crossposted at Classical Values

 

It is well known I have a fear of flying, which I’m doing today – though the rest of week is “canned” posts from Portugal, since I’m not getting home till Saturday (my husband and I having decided we need a little time before I must deal with house and cats.)

What I’ve probably never explained is what that fear consists of. It’s not so much a fear of falling – that is there, too, of course. I mean, it is a possibility, as is a bomb or terrorist attack. But what I’m most scared of is the loss of control I experience while flying. I’d not feel much different if I were taking a long distance train (which I did, a lot, in my younger days) or bus.

It will perhaps surprise a lot of people that I am a control freak. In my defense I am a control freak of a peculiar and localized kind. I couldn’t care less what other people do, for instance, or if they do things in the “one way I approve of.” Once my kids reached the age of being self-propelled and fairly reasonable, provided they behave like human beings, do their share of chores and do well at school, I couldn’t care less if in their own private time they choose to sleep crosswise on the bed or scratch their ear with their big toe. If their rooms are relatively clean (no rotting food, no trash on the floor and no bugs) I don’t even much care how they arrange their furniture or what they choose to display on their shelves. Ditto the way they dress. Many people at conventions seem to believe I make them wear button downs. Frankly I’d prefer they wear t-shirts as they don’t need ironing. But they like button downs and the inconvenience to me is minimal, so that’s fine. In fact, some people would call me rather slapdash when it comes to controlling my family. I never even consider controlling my friends – though I reserve the right to argue with or tease them about their choices.

So in what way am I a control freak? Me. I like to control me, my immediate surroundings and my decisions. I have never done drugs, because I like to be in control of my own mind. Illnesses annoy me (as did the excessive weight I’ve struggled with) because, curse it all, I should be able to control m own body. I don’t like roller coasters because I can’t control the way they roll. When I was very little, I used to pull my own milk teeth, as opposed to letting an adult pull them with string or otherwise, because I preferred to control the pain. Frankly, still, if I must do something which will hurt or be unpleasant, I’d rather do it to myself.

Because of this I prefer to drive myself, though I seem to have accepted my husband and son as extensions of the self (probably because I can nag them.)

Airplane travel, particularly when involving three plane changes, has way too much control in other people’s hands, particularly in the time of National Security issues. I can’t even get up when the air hostess would rather I sat down, even if I have a very, very good reason, such as a poisonous lizard down my pants. (How would I know how a poisonous lizard got on the plane? It could!)

On top of that there’s other considerations. The bureaucracy involved is mind boggling. For instance, the computers of Usairways and TAP don’t talk to each other, and since I’m leaving (have left, by the time you read this) Porto headed for Lisbon on a TAP plane, I have a boarding pass only for the first flight, after which I must navigate a strange airport (trust me, being from the North, I find Lisbon VERY strange) and get boarding passes for the next two flights, all in about an hour and a half (so cross fingers the plane is not late.) Once I’ve landed for my connection in the states (should be close if not already there by the time this post goes up) I will feel better, since I have a measure of control: even if planes are grounded, I can rent a car and drive home to Colorado. Mind you, I’ll hate it like poison, but not as much as I’d hate being stranded away from my husband.

So, send kind thoughts my way, that today’s travels go well. It always seems to be that the travel to Portugal is fraught, but the travel back is glitch-less. (Except for their losing my bags occasionally, though even that not often.) Let’s hope this holds.

I miss home, I miss my husband, I miss my cats, I miss my friends; I miss diners and having access to the internet when I feel like it; I miss my office and my keyboard and my coffee maker; I miss my walks around the neighborhood and the way th light slants through the trees in the park; I miss my treadmill; I miss my art desk; I miss the Natu… wait Denver Museum of Nature and Science; I miss the aquarium, the zoo and the Denver Museum of Art.

I guess sometimes you need to travel half around the world to find out you’re a homebody after all.

 

I was reading a book about pre-historic Indo-European cultures – actually a book about paleo-linguistics – which described, as an important part of the indo-European culture, the giving of large banquets in which long poems praising the feast-giver were recited and conferred status both upon the reciter and the feast-giver.

I suspect though of course there is no way to prove it, that elements of these have survived in sagas like the Iliad and the Odyssey. And perhaps it is because Western culture is descended from those early horse riders possibly from the Steppes (there are other hypothesis) that our literature is the form it is.

It doesn’t take a more arcane activity than watching Anime or reading Manga to understand that the literary tradition in Asian countries, venerable and well developed though it is, doesn’t tend to follow the same framework as ours. As for other lands, particularly those that were not literate when they first came in contact with Europeans, their stories can seem almost alien to us.

It’s not that telling stories is a mark of civilization – it is not, to paraphrase Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, any savage can tell stories – but that the stories we tell both are molded by and mold us into what we are.

The shift in interest from science fiction to fantasy seems to have come at a time when we moved out of what could be called the “steam punk civilization” – which wasn’t, of course, as it lasted well into the late fifties – where someone who was smart enough could master the principles of a scientific trade at home with books and determination. Instead, we were faced with a civilization that, to the average person, might as well be magic. Curiously, fantasy was most popular amid the people who should by rights know how to assemble a computer from scratch (and many of whom did.) Possibly because to assemble a computer we already need sophisticated components, which are, in themselves a form of “magic.”

Myself I think we need more science fiction, and have thought so for a while. And while I don’t object to hard science fiction that explains the insides of machines and how they work, (I enjoy it, if I’m in the mood for it) I think mostly we need science fiction that explains how society changes under technological impact, and by doing so prepares us for that change.

Look, when cloning happened it was a non-event for the science fiction reading public, even as it was a nine-day wonder to those who had never read science fiction. And the idea, so odd it amounted to nothing less than the possibility of reproducing humans without sex, left people who were prepared completely rational and able to cope with the situation. Meanwhile the non readers were having nightmares.

We’re changing now even faster than I expect and I think we need more and better science fiction to prepare people. Like those early sagas, this could prepare our civilization and make it strong and supple for the fast change ahead, giving civilization to withstand pressures that might otherwise break it.

The difficulty has been, for a long time, that publishers thought science fiction doesn’t sell. A certain type doesn’t, of course and it could be argued it’s the type they themselves favor. To sell any story has to be entertaining.

But in the fraught times ahead, I think we need science fiction writers skilled enough to attract the reading public back to the idea that a fast changing world can be wondrous rather than traumatic.

It is of course entirely possible I’m barking up the wrong tree…

Crossposted at Mad Genius Club

Returning to Portugal for a visit has both the effect of skipping forward and watching only the high points of a movie (I’ve now reached the rueful age when I can ask my mother “tell me which of my elementary school classmates died since I’ve last been here) and the effect of re-examining my childhood by viewing it as an adult and an outsider.

To an extent I suspect I was always an outsider. Like many of my SF/F writing and reading breathren I was a stranger in a strange land, forever moving amid familiar landscapes that might be dear but didn’t become any more understandable for knowing them very well.

But now I am faced with various things that would probably never have come to mind had I stayed and lived here – things like, now that I visit as my own sons are almost grown – realizing that things I viewed as imutable and the laws of the Persians and Medes, were not only not “family traditions” as something my parents decided to do and continued doing because they liked them, but also that they have not continued once I – the youngest child by 9 years – was out of the house.

Nothing particularly important, mind, but things like cleaning the house from top to bottom on Friday. Or holding Sunday dinner for all the various spread-out relatives in my parents’ house. Or…

It occurred to me today to wonder whether that’s part of the difference between first borns and second and subsequent children. I don’t know about you, but when we got married, we were making it up as we went along. I will say even now we’re not very good at falling into a routine, witness the fact we move every seven to eight years. But after we’ve been in the Front Range for almost 20 years, we’ve developed favorite places and places we do so and so at at such and such a time.

My first son probably still remembers when we were learning our way and making things up as we went along (possibly. He was born six years into our marriage) but to his brother these partake the way of imutable and sacred laws.

A lot of the certainties of my childhood seem to have been the same and my grandmother’s death, and my moving away by themselves changed a lot of them.

It makes me wonder about larger societal traditions and what I could romantically call “the memory of a people.” My sons, despite my explaining things, have picked up some funny notions about their ancestry and their ancestry’s habits from what I don’t say but do. And what I do is often dictated by circumstances that have long since ended.

I’m reminded of a story my host mother told me. There was a woman who had learned from her mother to prepare leg of lamb. She cut it in half lengthwise, put it in two separate baking dishes and cooked it according to what she thought was family tradition. One day her mom was visiting and the woman assured her she was still preparing leg of lamb the old way. As mom watched, she split the leg lengthwise and her mom said “What are you doing?” “Well, mom, I’m breaking the leg in half, as you always did.” To which the mom says, “But that’s only because I didn’t own a baking dish large ENOUGH.”

I wonder how many of the day to the day routines that become “the way we do things” are the result of not having dishes large enough. Which is why I like to reexamine things periodically, and make sure I haven’t become ossified. Even if it disturbs the children.

*crossposted at Classical Values*

As we were landing in Porto, after our travel (mis)adventures, my son leaned out towards the window (I always claim as right of she who gave birth, the right to the window seat) at a landscape covered in terraces, in which sit massive white or cream buildings with red tile roofs, and said “Wow, it’s like someone built a Roman Civilization in a game and brought it to today’s time.”

It is impossible to clearly explain – in a way other people would understand – how densely populated Portugal is. Let’s just say that most buildings are apartments, even in relatively rural areas such as where my parents live, and that possessing a stand alone home is a sign of wealth. Let’s also say that the only time I landed in as dense a location was when landing in NYC, and even there you can see more green around the edges.

I remember, when I was an exchange student, being taken on a bus past miles and miles of forest and half-disbelieving it. Everyone knew America was more advanced than Portugal (advanced meaning of course, more urbanized, more cosmopolitan) so how was this possible?

But it is not the elbow room – or the lack thereof – that beggars the mind. It’s the elbow room in the past. You can’t go half a kilometer without stumbling on something that remains from medieval days – sometimes properly noted, sometimes in ruins and forgotten – you can’t walk down the street without stumbling on a statue commemorating some event or other. The only thing even vaguely approaching this are the older parts of Philadelphia and for in comparison they’re virtually amnesiac.

Portugal is steeped in history, ankle deep in its currents. Echoes of events unimaginably old to the average American reverberate through everyday life. The design of Roman farmhouses (some of them still bearing the lintel piece identifying a legionary ancestor and the Emperor who gave him the land at the end of his term of service) is overlaid in tile in designs brought to the Peninsula by its Arab occupiers. The carving of ropes and anchors around a farmhouse window reminds you of the lost glories of the discoveries.

Someone said in response to my bookstore post that perhaps Anglo-Saxons were more obsessed with history. This is not true so much as most Portuguese don’t view history so much as something to study as as something that IS. It would be like taking a degree in air and breathing, if you get my meaning. The histories I’ve found are either painfully generic or of the involved, detail-obsessed sort “history of the castle of a little village of no importance from nine o’clock in the morning on Thursday the thirteenth of August of 1234 to seven PM on Sunday the 12^th of April of 1246.” Also, they tend to ignore the rest of the world in their inward turning, so I had to learn the story of the castle that sits in the center of the village where I grew up from an internet site run by a British couple. (Turns out it was built as a playhouse for the daughter of a local farmer. I knew it was not a “real” castle, but I lacked the story.) And it was a book in the US that revealed to me the history of the mother of Henry The Navigator, that Portuguese queen known around here only as Phillipa of Lancastre.”

I think I got my first notion of the existence of such a thing as history when taking walks with my dad through the fields and forests around here. We’d stumble on inscriptions, demarcation stones, ruins, and many times they identified themselves in Latin, in ancient Greek, or in more recent (but archaic) versions of Portuguese. It had to wait, though, till I saw pictures of this region from above on the net, to figure out that my grandmother’s assertion that the forests had “always” been there was in fact wrong. It is clear those forests grew over abandoned fields, farms and villages, some dating probably to one of the many invasions, some more recent, like the ones left vacant by the black plague or one of the economic contractions the country suffers through with metronome-like regularity.

Portugal is not only incredibly densely populated by American standards, it is, in fact, built on Portugal.

I remember, though I no longer can do this, living as though time were another dimension – locating myself not just by WHERE I am but WHEN I am, and knowing, as far as I could everything that happened in that space in at least the last millennium – feeling all the past generations and their struggles. It was something less than psychic visions and something more than mere knowing what had happened. It felt like an extra dimension in the world, if that makes sense.

I can no longer do it because though America has history and even pre-history, it is not of the same sort, not as densely packed, not unavoidable. The closest I came to it was while walking around Dinosaur Ridge, in Colorado.

The feeling it induces is akin to walking by the ocean and feeling its immensity dwarf you and knowing that it was there before you were and it will be there when you’re long gone. It makes you feel very small and very unimportant, but at the same time it also makes your current problems seem negligible as you pause in the presence of something bigger than you.

Unfortunately for Portugal I think it also acts as a ball and chain of sorts. To know that almost everything has been tried, and what you have is the current mess means most people don’t try.

Not that this is why I left for America. I left because ya’ll seduced me by flashing a bit of Constitution, a lot of personal freedom and the swelling mountains of “can do” spirit.

But sometimes I wonder if America will eventually become like Portugal – bowed under the weight of history, warming itself by the fire of past achievements and dreaming of long gone times.

I don’t think this is now, yet. I think we’re more likely to be suffering growth pangs. I don’t think our senescence will come till I’m long in my grave and one of those whose ghostly achievements (I hope) haunt my yet unborn descendants.

And for that I’m glad.

*crossposted at Classical Values*

(A guest post by my friend, Doctor Tedd Roberts, whom I thank for doing this.)

 

I am a scientist.  In a very real way I write for a living.  My Curriculum Vitae lists over 75 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, over 10 chapters in books, and hundreds of meeting abstracts and presentations.  I have written more than 30 research grant applications – about half have been funded, requiring annual or even quarterly progress reports.  Each journal article runs to about 15,000 words, book chapters to 20-25,000, grant applications and progress reports are only between 5,000-10,000 words each.  If all of these were converted to short stories or novels, I would have “sold” around 15-20 books-worth of material and been ranked among the more prolific fiction writers by this point in my career, and spent more time “on stage” than most movie stars (or TV, maybe, but it doesn’t approach theater and stage appearance). 

 

Scientific writing takes a lot of time.  The fiction writers I know spend a lot of time either researching or “ideating” to get the story right in their head, then sit down and pound out 10-15,000 words in a long weekend. Granted, they usually have a target of 120,000 words for a novel and typically cannot keep up that pace until completion; six months for a good draft seems typical.  For me to perform the work necessary for a 15,000 word journal article takes *at least* 6 months.  First the experiments are run – mostly by my technical staff, but I am involved in all of the planning and analysis – then the data is analyzed, charted and graphed, statistics calculated, and I can start to write.  I can get 15,000 words written in a week if I have no other duties, but the work of a professor usually doesn’t allow that.  I have to do most of my writing late at night, when the house is quiet and I am the only one awake. Then comes the editing and re-writing as I pass the manuscript over to a colleague who will approach it from a different perspective.  Meanwhile I remake figures, and run new analyses since I usually realize that the results are incomplete, but I didn’t realize it until I tried to write them.  Meanwhile I am also reading recent papers by scientists in related fields so that I can cite the appropriate comparisons to existing scientific literature when I finish writing the discussion of the paper.  So, six months is optimistic; the more appropriate comparison is 6 months to perform experiments, 2 months to analyze, 4 months to write and edit the manuscript.  *If* it is accepted to a scientific journal without the need for extensive changes, I will not see it in print for a year or more! 

Yes, this is very much like the life of a fiction writer, and it’s my day job. SO, why is it that I find myself wanting to write Science Fiction?

Well, part of it is because I *read* Science Fiction, and quite often despair over the misuse of science in books, TV and movies.  Dr. Travis Taylor says he started writing because he complained loudly about books and TV that were poorly written, and claimed that he could write better.  His wife told him to “put up or shut up.” Five solo novels and six collaborations later, “Doc Travis” is a respected SF writer.

Do I think I could do that?  Well, no, frankly, for all I know, Doc doesn’t sleep.  I do not have that much time in my day; and as I have written elsewhere, my mind can either write science, or fiction.  I find myself unable to alternate my writing between professional and recreational topics.  Once I get an idea for what *I* think would be a good story, I have to clear time to put aside my professional writing and finish the story.  Otherwise, I have to stop the story in mid-thought, so to speak, and will have trouble picking it up later.

Don’t get me wrong, I *do* have story ideas.  I have 5 novel-length stories blocked and outlined, I have even written about 20,000 words each in two of them.  I have 5 short stories and 2 novelettes written and ready for submission, five more in various states of completion, and a nonfiction book nearing completion.  It’s just that I understand that I may never complete the long-form fiction before I retire from the day job.  I read the words of advice of authors – I know not to give up the day job for the insecurity of a fiction writing career.  I know that for my own purposes, I need a secure base and plenty of time before I can devote the effort that I know it will take to be able to write at the professional SF/F level – let alone be able to *sell* any of these pieces.

But I *am* a writer.  I am published.  My record is envious even within my field.  SO why do I feel a need to write?  Perhaps it is because I am a teacher.  I have taught preschool age kids in Sunday school, elementary through high-school as a substitute teacher, college undergraduate & graduate laboratory as a graduate student, and medical and graduate students as a professor.  I don’t teach much know, but I enjoy – not always, I had to *learn* how to teach – but I enjoy it when I can.  As the first in my family to earn a degree in a medical field, I have been called on as “interpreter” to explain what the doctor said to all members of my extended family.  I am asked questions by writers to explain some aspect of science and/or medicine in a way that makes it easy to fit into a story.  Then there’s that little bit about despairing that writers and Hollywood will ever get brain science right.  My compromise between the science-writing and fiction-writing halves of my brain is a blog, and eventual book, which explains brain science in layman’s terms.

And again – why write SF?  Perhaps the best, the most important reason, is that I tell stories.  When I teach, I tell a story that seeks to lead young minds to understanding and knowledge.  When I write science, I tell a story of mystery, detective work, and discovery.  When my children were very young, my wife and I read and sang to them every night.  When their grandparents visited, they also joined the routine.  My mother-in-law sang children’s songs, my father-in-law had a wonderful style of recitation for classic poetry, my mother snuggled and sang and read – but my father told *stories*!  Not experience or personal events – no, my father made up stories on the spot, and the kids were riveted.  My Dad could make *any* simple topic into a fantastic adventure.  *He* is a storyteller, and I guess I inherited that from him.

So I write stories, and tell stories.  It seems to be a common feature, that humans are natural storytellers – some get up on stage, others write it down, and some stories never make it out of the imagination.  In ancient times, people made up stories about the constellations and patterns in the sky.  Cave drawings tell a story, as does oral history.  Science is a story, a story of how things work and in some cases, how we *want* them to work.  Writing stories means I have to give up a few things to do so: a bit of family time, a bit of sleep, even reading more SF.  Do I think I can do it better?  Not necessarily – but to quote Sinatra – I know I can do it “My Way.”

Yesterday while in the car on the way to the seaside, my son remarked that all Portuguese songs are sad. While this is a gross generalization, it is true that most, and perhaps the best, Portuguese songs partake a note of wishfulness or sadness.

You can find the same note vibrating through the poetry and novels, even those that are ostensibly cheerful. This is how, in the same way, it took until well into the late eighties for Americans to master the “nevermind” novel Europeans specialize in. Unlike their European counterparts, Americans always feel as though there is a solution to everything.

It is that feeling that impels our “can do” spirit. P.J. O’Rourke in describing the dismal conditions in a restaurant in the newly fallen Soviet Union/new Russia said that an American with a couple of rags and a bottle of windex would set it all to rights.

It is not imperial aspirations, despite what a lot of our intellectuals think, that lead us to do this, but the rock-bottom belief that every problem has a solution and that the solution can’t be much farther to seek than the next average Joe with a will and a plan. (The endless wait for “experts” is part of the European disease, but more on that later.)

While visiting here, I have to repress a thousand times a day the wish to set something straight that is crooked, clean something that is dirty, straighten something that is fallen. But there is not much point. It would be perceived as, if not “imperial” at least as intrusive. And I’m only here for two weeks and would much prefer not to make enemies. So I endure it, as do those who are submerged in the population and who wish the could straighten and clean and fix. I’m sure that the mix is about the same there and there, of those who prefer to let things be, and those who would improve them. The difference is one of, for lack of a better term, the national soul.

If nations have souls, America is the young man setting out into the world. It has had some smacks on the nose and a couple of pratfalls, but it’s still hopeful and knows the future is bright ahead. On the other hand Portugal….

Portugal as I told my son, has been part of three lost empires – real empires, not the imagined American Empire: Carthage, Rome and their own empire, all of them have vanished. And now Portugal is like the old person sitting in the corner, reminiscing on bygone glories.

Perhaps this is appropriate for a country where demographics has tilted and where in 25 years they expect the population to be halved. (Mind you for a country of old people, they all drive like bats out of hell… OTOH, so do the old people in my neighborhood.)

The problem, perhaps compounded by a melancholy walk around the area, pointing out to my son the remains (mostly ruins) of the village I knew, is that I’m having issues writing space opera. Space Opera is a quintissential American genre. I’ve read French and Portuguese space operas and they fail to convince at the gut level. Here, surrounded by the remains of past grandeur, I find myself wanting to write the sort of epic fantasy that starts with “Let me tell you of the lost city on the edge of the congealed sea….”

It was pithy and charming and had … charm, yeah, it’s charm.  Among its excellent qualities must be counted invisibility, as I don’t appear to have saved it in this drive.  RATs.   I’ll try to get it up later.  I’m at my brothers, at my nephew’s birthday party, and maybe I can go down the street and get my file….

For those who don’t know this, I am in Portugal at the moment, visiting my parents till the middle of June.

 

It’s not quite a return to familiar hunting grounds.  First, I’ve never lived in Portugal as an adult – I went to the States straight out of college.  The rhythms and obligations of a responsible adult in Portugal are completely unknown and often mysterious.  Second, the country has changed a lot since I was here.  When I left there was one mall.  It was a mini-mall, with maybe ten shops, and it was in downtown Porto.

 

So I was a little surprised when a visit to the bookstore, to spend a gift card my dad got for his birthday took me to the mall in what used to be one of the nearest villages.  The mall was both familiar and oddly different.  Yes, there were all the usual accouterments of a mall, including a food court, but the lay out was different, and there were very few people there, and none of them looked like mall rats.

 

The bookstore was different too.  Portugal, in some ways has always been ahead of the US when it comes to book marketing.  Okay.  In a bad way.  You know how towards the end of the old model, there, before ebooks changed the game, no one kept back lists?  Portugal was always like that.  I’m not sure why, perhaps because of the pressures of a smaller market, but the first printrun was all you got.  So bookstores are smaller.  On the other hand, they are still, strictly, bookstores.  There are no cds, no coffee shops, no movies.  Just books, in clearly marked sections.

 

The books are, and this is a reflection of the national character, at least in terms of the people who CHOOSE to read, mostly non-fiction of a scholarly nature.  There were a lot of books I wanted, ranging from a comprehensive history of Portugal (almost impossible to get in the US) to fictionalized biographies of various Portuguese princesses.  Unfortunately I was with my dad, who had announced his intention to buy me anything I wanted.  Even more unfortunately, these books ran in the neighborhood of 40 Euros, which is daylight robbery.

 

When my dad asked me to find him a book I enjoyed, I was stumped.  Apparently, only our more turgid bestsellers make it here, including Dan Brown’s Opus (opuses?) which really shouldn’t sell that well in a Catholic Country.  I mean, people know that the Catholic church doesn’t have assassins, right?  (If they did, I’d be a nun, duh.)   There were also, disguised under historical covers, book after book of undead porn.  (Some of it very good undead porn, but not my dad’s cup of tea, and certainly not the sort of thing I should recommend to my dad.)   There were other bestsellers too and I ended up settling for recommending him a scholarly book on World War II and one of Phillipa Gregory’s historical books.  I probably would have recommended Raymond Feist, too, but I doubt my dad would “get” Fantasy.

 

The good news is that Science Fiction and Fantasy were shelved in the middle of the other fiction.  The bad news is that there was so little of it.

 

How does this relate to where we are, and what the ebooks are bringing?  Ebooks are unknown here.  I had to explain my kindle over and over and over again.  The funny thing is that once explained they take to the concept like ducks to water.  They want them.  Badly.

 

If my dad read English I would, right now, be leaving him my kindle.  As is, though, there is no Amazon pt selling translations of works.  And here I must ask, why not?  Surely I’m not the only writer who is fluent in two languages.  If we’re going to do this thing on our own, why not sell translations?  I wonder if Naked Reader would like a Portuguese translation of ATON?  The sales will be slow, but due to the lack of back list and limited selection, the market is wide open.  It will be slow only till e-readers catch on.  And I think I know someone who can do a French Translation, and I wonder if I can get a friend to translate into Japanese if I give him a cut of the action…

 

This is something we haven’t even started to think about, but we should.  Ebooks are by nature worldwide.  Oh, what brave new world…

 How do you think we should go about it? 

«crossposted at Mad Genius Club.»

Today we went to the fair.  The fair – actually several fairs – take place in various villages around here on different days of the week.  It says something about the mind f the Portuguese people – to whose composition the Carthaginians made a considerable contribution, at least in the North – that the days of the week are not named after divinities of other abstractions but after fairs.  Saturday and Sunday remain from the Roman calendar, but Monday is Segunda Feira – second fair – and Tuesday is Terca Feira, and the rest of the week is properly numbered as the type of fair it is.

 

There are fairgrounds in Portugal still that were established as part of the gift of some monarch or other, and which have stalls made of stone and with proper roofs.  The fairs around here, in municipalities that used to have too few inhabitants to matter, are more ad hoc.  I’m sure you pay a fee to sell there (not sure how much) but after that it’s a matter of getting two sticks on the ground and a bit of cloth overhead.  Mind, these days there are a lot of beach umbrellas and other bits of civilization intruding.  Also these days half or more of the merchandise offered is unlicensed Disney knock offs and illegal copies of movies (the Portuguese are almost as bad about copyright as the Chinese.)  There are also piles of t-shirts, rolls of fabric, mountains of shoes.  The merchandise offered falls into either the “fell off the back of a truck” category or the “discount outlet” category (which otherwise don’t exist in Portugal.)  Tons of knock offs and brand name imitations.

 

The prices are reasonable, too, even for discount outlet merchandise, something that can’t otherwise be said for most of the stuff sold in Portugal.

 

And here and there, like survivals of the past you find stuff that would have been at the medieval fair, likely held in the same spot or close by: redware which I wish I knew I COULD afford to stick in my luggage (the weight is problematic) including a charming stewpot in the shape of a chicken body with the chicken wing and legs as the top; various hand painted wares; vegetables sold by the farmers; and, in vast crates, chickens, ducks and geese, including the young of the species.  (It was hard to convince my son we didn’t need a pet goose.)

 

Overall, the atmosphere was something like what you might imagine a medieval fair might have been.  Nothing of our sophisticated, bloodless shopping expeditions in an air conditioned mall, but probably how most of the world still shops.

 

No, I wouldn’t like to live here permanently, and the shopping is too haphazard (you’re never sure what you’ll find or for how much) but for the writer eye and the writer mind, it was a great experience.  I’d done it before, of course, growing up here, but this time I took notes.  I’m sure you’ll see the results in a future work.