Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 268 entries, all of them here in full.
May 4, 2010 · 331 words
Needle to the Neck
War’s tragedy doesn’t end with the war, nor does trauma end when the precipitating cause goes away. When my father’s generation came home from the Second World War, a lot of them brought the war home with them. The traditional cure for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in those days was lots of alcohol, followed by kickin
Read entry →May 3, 2010 · 57 words
The Great Lost Essay
I started an essay on fiction writing on April 26, but never got around to finishing it till today. Blogger went and posted it as if I’d finished it on April 26, which means it’s buried amid old postings and you probably won’t see it. Here it is, if you want to jump right to […]
Read entry →May 1, 2010 · 460 words
Advancing, the Creeping Enemy
What is this, you ask? It’s the entire Afghan war reduced to a flow chart and put on a PowerPoint slide. Of what use is this slide, which was presented to General McChrystal as part of a staff briefing?Well, none. But it sure looks like it contains a vast amount of information, doesn’t it? It […]
Read entry →April 28, 2010 · 57 words
Dangerous Encounter
I was contemplating the moon at 2:30 this morning from the hot tub, and I looked down to see an enormous hound standing under the elm tree staring at me. It looked big enough to rip my arm off. I had a moment of frigid horror, and then the hound moo’d and wandered off, chewing […]
Read entry →April 26, 2010 · 697 words
The Persistence of Vision (New Mexico)
Saturday night we drove to Santa Fe to enjoy a baroque concert. It might as well have been titled “Music You’ve Heard a Lot,” as it included Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Bach’s Concerto in D for Two Violins, and a concerto grosso by Handel, the precise title of which escapes me. Whether you know it or […]
Read entry →April 22, 2010 · 635 words
Dead Print, Dead Paper
I’m trying to decide whether or not I want to drop my subscription to Albuquerque’s sole surviving daily paper.I don’t want to, y’know, be Part of the Problem. Newspapers are dying. Friends of mine in the newspaper business have been laid off and can’t find jobs. Journalism is a (potentially) noble profession and a (po
Read entry →April 16, 2010 · 214 words
Come Up the Mountain
Y’know, yesterday was one of those days when it occurred to me that I might just be a good teacher. I got an email from my sometime student Saladin Ahmed (Taos Toolbox 2007) that he’s just got an agent. This is on top of an amazing few weeks: a Nebula nomination, a Campbell nomination for […]
Read entry →April 16, 2010 · 370 words
Goldman Sachs Gets Theirs
Ah, lovely! The S.E.C. is finally suing those meretricious smart bastards at Goldman, Sachs for selling their customers the same bonds they were shorting in the market. And which were, furthermore, structured to fail and to make Goldman a ton of money. The instrument in the S.E.C. case, called Abacus 2007-AC1, was one
Read entry →April 16, 2010 · 372 words
New This Week!
Tor Books has done an amazing job of publishing two of my friends on the same day! First up is my former student, Ian Tregillis, who is a Los Alamos physicist, and who in his spare time wrote a trilogy that has me clenching my jaw with bilious envy. Bitter Seeds is the first in […]
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