Hey, guys, I didn't want to be the first one here, of course -- I was
never good at arriving early for the party. I'll stay late -- even help
with the clean up, but being first was never a strength of mine. I'm
terrible with small talk and suddenly everything I know about the host
will fly out of my head so I can't even ask about the wife and kids or
whatever.
But, I'm here, so I'll do my best.
June
sucked. I went to Arizona to help my Mom get ready for the second
anniversary of my Dad's death. There's still so much to do, mainly
because my Dad was the one who held the family together and knew what
was going on financially, emotionally, and so on. So, it's been tough
down there, trying to reconstruct all the information and keep my Mom
afloat. I can't believe it's been two years. In the middle of
everything, I got the message from Autumn about Mike. I was lucky enough
to be heading back his way anyway, so I got to spend a weekend with him
in Chicago just before the surgery. We went to a Cubs game, talked
about Shakespeare and books in general, walked the dogs -- the usual.
Everything seemed normal, but...
I've been reminded a
lot, Bill, about that book where the Earth mysteriously begins to slow
down that we all read a while ago. Everything's the same, and yet not
really...
Back in May, I agreed to teach a
science-fiction "independent study" at Dominican College for three
students -- all good kids. They just needed a three-credit course to
finish off their bachelor's degree, so it'll be low-key for the most
part. One of the students -- the only one who seems to know anything
about the genre -- said that she had been interested in the HBO show True Detective and the fact that it refers to Robert Chambers's King in Yellow and Thomas Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. I agreed to put together some works along those lines -- Ligotti's short stories, Lovecraft's "The Shadow out of Time," King in Yellow, Lord Dunsany's The Charwoman's Shadow, Patrick Suskind's Perfume,
and so forth. Super-paranoid stuff about how there's a force in the
world out to get us, and we can never really know it or see it or
understand it, but it's there. Re-reading all this stuff for the class
has perhaps not been exactly something to lighten the mood. I'm hoping
now that it won't be too much of a bummer for the students. Ah well -- I
probably should have gotten them to read Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan, too.
But
perhaps this is exactly the right time to read these books. Maybe, just
maybe, there has always been something in me that hopes that there is
some crazy force out there trying to do us all in. Maybe that means that
the time we have together as friends is a staving off of that force.
Maybe that force is there to remind us to pay more attention to each
other.
Okay, well I was hoping for something more
uplifting, but like I said, I was never good at being first, and I don't
want to spoil the party before it even gets started. I'm off to Boston
in the morning to see Anthony and to hang out at Readercon -- a science
fiction convention that doesn't cater to movies and television. So
there'll be lots of books and lots of people talking about books. Write
soon, y'all, and perhaps you guys can do something with the road I've
started down.
Be well, and I really do look forward to hearing from you.
Rob
