(Ann) Arbor Day

I went to school at the University of Michigan, and I enjoyed six of my seven semesters plus one summer in Ann Arbor. Since there's decent train service from Chicago to Ann Arbor, I decided I'd add some vacation after WorldCon. And when I noticed there was a home football game the Saturday after WorldCon, I decided to make the stay in Ann Arbor even a day or two longer than maybe otherwise so I could go to my first Michigan home game since I graduated 27 years ago.

So first, the train ride. The actual boarding areas in Chicago are even less pleasant than in New York's Penn Station, but with one difference that you can still sit in the grand hall waiting room. I purposely headed to Chicago's Union Station a few minutes early just so I would have time to sit there for a bit. And while the train won't win awards for one of America's most scenic train rides, they've done some improvements to the route and there are occasional places where the train may actually go faster than 60 mph, which is still rare-ish outside of the NE Corridor. There were 8 or 10 other people returning from WorldCon surrounding me in my train car, talking about the good and bad points of the Orlando bid as I took my seat.

I don't want to think about the cab ride from the train station to the hotel.

After I settled in at the hotel, which was in the hotel village on the south side of town, across from Briarwood mall, it was a little late to head the 3 miles into downtown and campus. Instead, I made tracks for a new Costco just over a mile from the hotel. It had opened in June, just a couple of weeks after one of the Costcos I visited in Chicago. It was a Costco! But there is some variation from warehouse to warehouse, in this instance there was a book called "Three and Out," about Rich Rodriguez's disastrous 3 years at the helm of the Michigan football program, which oddly enough you won't find at a Costco in NYC or Chicago. So I got it, it's pretty short, I should be able to make a few hours to knock it off even though I shouldn't, and then I can share it with the other Michigan alums in my family. After that, I window shopped in Briarwood mall. During the earliest family visits before I was actually a student we stayed at the Briarwood Hilton, now the Kensington Court hotel, I have fond memories of walking to the mall one night to see Animal House, and of having pizza delivered to the hotel's pool area. The Briarwood theatre was a crappy '70s/'80s sloped floor multiplex but I saw lots of movies there while I was in college and shopped lots at the mall. Probably not many stores that are still there from back then, but there is a Mrs. Field's successor to the Original Cookie Company where I used to occasionally treat myself, so I got a 12-pack of the little nibblers which may be the same as the Original Cookie Company's, and felt it was just like old times. Kind of out in suburbia, I chose Olive Garden as the chain restaurant of choice for dinner. I was a little annoyed that my beverage was mostly ice with no free refills.

The next morning, I headed off to Whole Foods #1, a mile from my hotel, then I hopped the Whole Foods Shuttle, aka the #7 AATA "The Ride" bus, which stops at one edge of the shopping plaza with Whole Foods #1, then whisks you catercorner to Whole Foods #2 on the other side of town. Walked a few miles in from the Whole Foods to the edge of the campus area, then walked down thru the Nichols Arboretum to the banks of the Huron River. While the forecast called for a chance of rain almost every day of my stay, the first of two instances of actual rain I encountered came during this walk, perfect as I traipsed through the Arboretum to get the bottoms of my pants legs a little dirty.

Which wasn't great timing, as I was meeting with a "development" person for the UM college of Lit, Sci & Arts and some History Department people for a couple hours that afternoon. Since the UM History Department educated me and the University Library gave me a part time job that paid for my Unos pizzas and movies and Doritos and soda pop during my college days, I've always given a little money to them, and in recent years as JABberwocky has done well, more than a little to where the development (i.e., fund-raising) people are nice to me. So we all had a nice chat about the history department and this and that, there were homemade cookies to enjoy, in November the History Department has invited me back to Ann Arbor to participate in a program on what sorts of things one does with a degree in history.

In the evening I went to see Searching for Sugar Man at the Michigan Theatre. This is an old movie palace in the heart of downtown that was rescued and showing movies during my college days, then subsequently actually refurbished so it looks beautiful instead of like a historical relic. I had no interest in seeing this movie. I saw it solely because I wanted to sit in the balcony of the theatre. The movie did nothing to change my opinion of it, so it was as much napping as sitting. But I can report that the Michigan's digital projection is quite nice, and the digital sound with the digital projection quite wonderful indeed.

And then I went to Zingermans for dinner. This deli had just opened during my college days and has subsequently gone on to become this foodie mecca empire of cheeses and baked goods and this and that and the other thing, but at 9:00 on a weekday evening there wasn't a line. The menu is too big to be creative, so since they still have the Bill's Two Over Prime sandwich that I remembered getting in days of yore I got one, it was OK. I get the matzoh ball soup out of habit, I need to stop, it isn't such good matzoh ball soup.

Super Breakout is still Super!
Especially when played the way
it's meant to be on the Atari 2600

Thursday The Agent Was Cultivated. This time by the University Library. This was a very interesting day. We started off on that distant and far away land known as "North Campus," where the Library has a video game archive. I played Centipede on an "Atari Legends" arcade game that somehow manages to be zillions of arcade games all in one. Then, just like I was 16 again, I played genuine Atari Super Breakout on a genuine Atari 2600 using a genuine paddle controller, with a little Yar's Revenge and Circus Atari for old time's sake. I'm not so bad at Centipede for someone who's never been good at sports, and I was kind of playing Super Breakout like I'd never stopped. Then we toured some of the very fancy new-fangled library things in the distant and far away land known as "North Campus." I got to see a 3D printer, which was a nifty new experience, it takes spools of plastic and melts them and builds things with them, and all for much less than an Espresso Book Machine because it's mostly just a single head moving around in two dimensions that is nowhere near as fancy as what you need to do to get a photocopier to bind a book for you. I saw other fancy 3D thingies. I was quite impressed. And most of this stuff is available for students to use, though it requires they go to that distant and far away land known as "North Campus."

Playing around in a fancy 3-D
black box on North Campus

Back in the real world of central campus, we had lunch with Jim Ottaviani, a writer of graphic novels who in his secret identity heads up the "Deep Blue" online resource for the University Library, and after lunch we discussed Deep Blue and other things. One of my supervisors from my college job still works at the library and we chatted for a bit. While some things have changed (no more card catalog) old-fashioned books are still being circulated, they still need to have tattle tape put in when new, which still needs to be sensitized when the books return, and the books still put back on the shelf, and people still need to "shelf read," checking the shelves to be sure the books are in their proper order so they can actually be found. All the same fun things. While that is the same, the 2nd floor area that used to have periodicals where I'd go to read Variety and Publishers Weekly during my college days is now a fancy map collection area, the periodicals have been put elsewhere. And it was hard to walk about central campus, since this was the day when all the student groups had tables set up to solicit new members.

Dinner was with writers Merrie Haskell and Catherine Shaffer, who live in the area and whom I'd chatted with some at Chicon. Merrie works at the Library as well, along with Jim Ottaviani she forms a cabal of Evil Librarians -- I mean, librarian writers -- at the UM Library. They went off after dinner to a coffee shop in Saline to do that writing thing in coffee shops that writers like to do. Since Ann Arbor is on the western end of the eastern time zone, it is a very civilized place where the sun rises at a nice late hour and then gives daylight in the evening when people need it (yes, you are correct, I am not a morning person) so I found a place nicely on line with the setting sun to enjoy the last hour of daylight, reading and people watching, then headed back to my hotel.

I can't even remember which day it was that I visited Vault of Midnight, the impressive comic book and gaming store in the Main St. shopping area. I have fond nostalgic memories of the Eye of Agamotto, the comic book store during my college days, but honestly this is bigger and nicer and better and full of many more wonderful things to buy.

Friday I didn't have anything planned. So I walked in to downtown. Then I walked out to the west end of town to where the Fox Village theatre had once been. I felt very old that the cashier at the Plum Market that occupies the exact space (gutted and remodeled and all, but in the same exterior walls) as the theatre had once been, had no idea that she was working on the site of an Ancient Cinematic Burial Ground where I had seen Wargames and Octopussy and other early '80s movies. That mall used to have a Little Professor bookstore, now you have to go to the shopping mall on the other corner where you will find Nicolas Books, a very pleasant indie which is unlike most indies in having a large well-curated sf/f section that had about the same number of JABberwocky titles as even many B&N stores will have. Jim C. Hines was just there to sign Libriomancer, so they had a very nice selection of his books. I rewarded them for their excellence by buying too many little bags of chocolate to share with the office, and a Harpers magazine with a new Stephen King story.

Then I walked back to the Arboretum, to do one of my favorite things. I sat on a bench at the base of the Arboretum, and after dealing with some office stuff I curled up with a good book, in this case Seawitch by Kat Richardson. I read around 100 pages in the Arb, and couldn't have been happier. The world seems so far away when you're sitting in the Arb with a good book !!

The movies had changed, so I went back to the Michigan to see Robot and Frank. This was projected using their actual film projectors with actual film instead of the new digital projector. This movie had gotten some decent reviews, I went in thinking I would like it and especially so seeing in such nice surroundings, but no such luck. The script didn't interest me, I didn't think this was one of the better performances from either Frank Langella or Susan Sarandon, and the rest of the cast I found even less interesting. Kind of disappointing. I had a late dinner at the Redhawk, and since it was raining I took a cab instead of walking back to the hotel.

Saturday I met up with an old college friend whom I don't see really at all but who's always been on my Christmas gift list as a way of keeping in touch. He picked me up early at the hotel so we could park downtown before the lots filled for the football game. We walked around campus, had a nice lunch at the Redhawk, walked up to the "Big House" as Michigan Stadium is known. We were heading up two hours before game time so it didn't have quite the feel of when you're walking up with throngs of people a half hour before the game, but the frat houses had already started their pre-game revelries along the way. We had really nice seats on the 35-yd line.

In Michigan Stadium after
the big game at the Big House

And what can I say, I loved the experience. In my freshman year I sold some of my football tickets, the few dollars I got could pay for the bus out the Briarwood and movie with money to spare. By my senior year, I couldn't understand why I'd ever done such a thing. So many of the rituals are still intact, the band taking the field just like it always has and playing many of the same songs. It was Michigan/Air Force, so we got a flyover from a B2 stealth bomber after the national anthem (it doesn't look very stealthy when it is flying directly over you) and a halftime show of Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy and Sousa's Stars and Stripes. The game was closer than anyone would say it should have been, but Michigan did win. We stayed for the post-game band show.

Lots of things reassuringly haven't changed, some have. You now buy a t-shirt with your student football tickets, and they are rigorous about checking student IDs to sit in student sections, so that's why a fifth of the bowl at the Big House has people wearing matching maize shirts. The stadium is somewhat bigger with luxury boxes. I just thrived on all the ritual that is the same now as 27 years ago, and much of that the same as 27 years before that.

One unchanged ritual: traffic on Ann Arbor Saline Rd. is one-way to I-94 for an hour after the game.

But this was the first time, since I was heading back to my hotel, that I actually headed off in that direction instead of downtown. I actually got to see all the cars heading down Ann Arbor Saline Rd!

The parents of one of my freshman year roommates drove out from Southfield to have dinner with me that night, the only bad thing was that traffic after the game was really bad, so we all agreed we had to stay on the mall side of Eisenhower Road, which meant a chain restaurant at the mall. But I think we all enjoyed our California Pizza Kitchen dinner, and the conversation was nice.

And then Sunday, I had to head home.

General impressions of Ann Arbor.

There are lots of changes, yet the overall feel of Ann Arbor is still very much the same, I enjoyed the trip immensely, it would be nice to be back somewhat more frequently. It was 11 years since my last visit.

There's one new building in the central campus area which I think intrudes a little too much on the "diag" area, but otherwise I'm impressed at the quality of a lot of the architecture. The business school has a snazzy new building with a gorgeous atrium to hang out in with a little cafe and seats and light and just buzzing with excitement. The new North Quad (which isn't on North Campus, but the north side of central campus) looks wonderful on the outside. You can cut through for good pedestrian circulation, and the interior space is beautiful with deep landscaped courtyard recesses that allow light to reach basement levels, and it's nine stories tall without looking like it. Money is being spent on the old dorms. The hill dorms have a great two-level dining atrium addition. My old dorm is being gut renovated to improve the dining areas and add AC and better IT and other such things. A new buidling was being dedicated for the law school that looked like a beautiful companion to the old law quadrangle. Some of the science buildings added in one corner of the campus aren't as attractive but even there have a nice elevated walkway area with a cafe in one of the buildings that provides good access from the main campus to the hill dorms and medical campus. They pen in the power plant, I guess if you're going to have bad architecture having it surrounding the most utilitarian functional ugly building on campus isn't a bad place to do it.

Three large new private luxury student housing "highrises" were opening for the school year. When I was in school, private student housing and luxury did not go together.

The South U shopping district has become very monoculture in having mostly Asian restaurants to eat at. The State St. shopping district is full of chains like Chipotle, CVS, 7-11, Panera, Starbucks, much more so than once upon a time. The Main St. shopping district is even more full of trendy restaurants than what I remembered.

Most of the old original Borders location on State St. is now occupied by an M Den emporium of Michigan stuff. Around a fifth of the space, the ground floor of the adjoining building, is given over to another store. The successor Borders store downtown is still empty, Borders signage still up on the building, the windows mostly papered over, but where I could peek in this store may have more shelving and other fixtures still intact than a lot of the other vacant old Borders locations.

And finally... when I went to UM, the video player had just arrived and not yet had a real impact. Cinema Guild, Cinema 2, the Ann Arbor Film Coop and more all had films, sometimes double-features, all weekend, and on many weekdays. You were never lacking for movies to see of all different types at very reasonable prices. You had the huge single screen Campus showing new movies, the Michigan showing films, the State Quad and the Ann Arbor Twin. Not the world's best theatres, but they were there. Briarwood was a few miles and a quick bus ride away and expanded from 4 to 7 screens. The Fox Village was a couple miles away and a quick if not as frequent bus ride. Today, you have four first-run screens instead of seven in downtown Ann Arbor, all of which show primarily art or indie films. The multiplexes for new Hollywood releases are now a mile beyond where the Fox Village was, twice as far as Briarwood, and both less convenient to get to than their '80s predecessors. The campus film scene, which had already started to diminish by the mid-1980s, hasn't just diminished further but is pretty much gone. All of this is discussed in a 2010 Michigan Daily article. I'd be a very different person if I was formed by going to UM now as opposed to then, and the me that was formed by going then definitely doesn't like the movie experience you'd get now.

Chiconic Fatigue Syndrome

I've had supporting memberships for World SF Conventions, WorldCons as they are known, dating back over 30 years. When I was just becoming an sf fan and devouring a goodly chunk of sf/f (Analog, Omni, Asimov's, the occasional F&SF, novel after novel) voting in the Hugos was a major temptation. Reading the progress reports and looking over the program books instilled a certain sense of community, of belonging to a larger community even though I was just a high school kid in a small town in New York City. Imagine how nice it is to have a job where I now get to attend WorldCon as part of it! And ChiCon, the 70th WorldCon, is the 18th I've actually attended.

The experience of attending WorldCon as a pro is very different than the WorldCon I dreamed of 30 years ago, however.

I get to be on panels, I don't so much get to attend them.

This year, I thought all my panels were reasonably successful. The one on business advice for writers at 3pm on the first day of the con when everyone was settling in had the kind of crowd you might expect when half the convention hasn't even picked up its membership badges yet. Having the "getting an agent" panel at 9am the next morning wasn't ideal either, it's WorldCon and people go to parties and who wants to have to wake up for a 9am panel? I was also on a panel on e-books.

I grew up wanting to vote on the Hugos and waiting around ten years to finally attend an actual Hugo ceremony.

Alas, I have learned over 26 years in the business that I am rife with internal conflict about awards. I love for my clients to be nominated for awards, I love for my clients to win awards, I just wish that this could all happen without my ever having to attend an award ceremony or banquet or dinner ever ever again. So much bad food, so many bad speeches, the occasional bad table full of bad conversation partners. And more often than not, the person you want to win -- doesn't !!

This year's Hugo Awards were not bad as such things go. Connie Willis can be a great toast"master" but sometimes there can be too much Connie, because when you have someone as good as Connie you want to take advantage. John isn't Connie, he wasn't uproarious, but there also wasn't too much of him. They made an interesting decision to have John do most of the presenting which may have saved a good 15 or 20 minutes of time introducing presenters for 12 more awards.

Alas, they did not take the equally radical decision of doing away with the clips for the long-form and short-form dramatic presentation awards. Each took ten minutes to present, all told, which is an eternity. Around 16 awards all told, if every one of those takes ten minutes and you add in the other stuff you're looking at a three hour ceremony. If you don't think the Hugo Awards should go on for three hours, and they most certainly should not, you have to do away with the damned clips for the dramatic presentation. If you're going to leave in the ciips, then I want people to read one-minute excerpts from the nominated pieces of fiction. Believe it or not, the Hugos are supposed to be a literary award, so none of these damned clips for the dramatic presentations.

My guy won! Well, one of my guys. Though the glory is in both instances reflected since the nominations were not for literary work represented by the agency, we had our client Jim C. Hines nominated for Best Fan Writer, and our client Brandon Sanderson is one of the masterminds of the Writing Excuses podcast that was up for Best Related Work. And Jim Hines not only won, but in the voting breakdowns we see he won quite quite handily. And then he did something very well, and said he would recuse himself from this category in future years, so he won't become like Locus and take home a statue every year for twenty or thirty years.

There wasn't any of that music playing at the 30-second mark, so the winners could give thank you speeches that went on pretty much just as long as they pleased. This can be unfortunate. But... I'll take this approach over the Oscars and their 30 second limits. Yeah, there were some over-long thank yous at the Hugos this year, there were also some really touching and moving speeches like Jo Walton's accepting for Best Novel, and John Picacio for Best Professional Artist, that were only possible because people had the time to speak passionately and from the heart.

I am a bad person. During an award banquet, usually held in a brightly lit hotel ballroom, I will quietly read a text-rich magazine (fewer page turns) during the speechifying. In the darkened ballroom for the Hugos, the iPad was quite delightful, and I think I read 15,000 words of a submission. Lest you think I wasn't paying attention -- I assure you I can read a good 40-50,000 words in the time the ceremony occupied, so that's 25K of paying attention to the ceremony. I had the brightness all the way down, and had the cover held tight over the screen. With all the people that have their phones out to tweet and text and whatever, as we are wont to do in the modern age, I hope I wasn't upsetting the atmosphere of the room.

Just to say, was it just me, or was the dealer's room a little quiet and mono-cultured this year? Something seemed to be missing.

The parallel con that I attend now vs. the con I dreamt of attending as a wee lad consists of a lot of time spent in meals and meetings with clients and editors. Since my business has grown, some of those meals have to breakfasts, which are always way too early for my tastes. I hate paying for overpriced booze at hotel bars. On days when I have a breakfast, a lunch and a dinner on my schedule, and then visits to the party suites filled with M&Ms and Doritos (this year, prawn-flavored Walker Crisps on account of the 2014 London bid) I am certainly eating too much, especially since there isn't a lot of time for exercise during a WorldCon. Oh well! I did find an Argo Tea cafe a few blocks from the hotel and did a couple meetings there, I don't actually like tea or coffee and Argo is really really big on the tea, but it's nice to get out of the convention hotel. There was also this little sunken park on an ancient golfing burial ground a couple blocks from the hotel, and we did a couple meetings there on a nice bench under a nice shade-giving tree with a wonderfully designed fountain providing that nice relaxing burbling sound of water.

I don't understand people who travel to these conventions and decide they can't leave the hotel or convention center. Yeah, you want to do your business, but you're in Chicago, a world capital, one of the major cities of the US, get out and see the world! In my early days of attending WorldCon with way fewer clients I could do some of this during the days of the convention and not feel too guilty, now I have to add on a day or two but I did get around. Especially the Wednesday before, 15+ miles of walking around Chicago to take in 3 Whole Foods, 2 Costcos, and a Cubs game. Not the usual tourist stuff, but it was 15+ miles of walking around and seeing the city and the weather was gorgeous.

It was my first time at Wrigley. I enjoyed it a lot. The park is full of atmosphere and history. Strange in some ways, they have an organ but all of the music seemed to be a little bit of organ music grafted on the same rhythm track for every song that sounded like some special kind of Christmas music. Definitely strange. The stadium got really really loud, I could hardly hear the person next to me. The game to most people was an afterthought, so many people going to see Wrigley and not that many who cared whether or not the Cubs won. The concourse had the feel of a carnival midway, which is definitely not the feel you get from most of the modern stadiums.

Thursday night Adam-Troy Castro had a launch event for his new book at the Magic Tree children's bookstore in Oak Park. Previously I had gone to Oak Park to add the Borders there to my list of conquests, a Borders conveniently near to the River Forest Whole Foods. I did visit the Whole Foods, but I also walked around and saw other parts of the neighborhood. I need to make an Oak Park day the next time I'm in Chicago to admire more of the Frank Lloyd Wright houses, maybe even visit the Hemingway birthplace and museum.

I'm going to stop here, there's more I could say but maybe I'll do another WorldCon post later, or maybe not.

Tennis, Anyone - 2012 Version

This wasn't the best year I've had at the US Open. As an example, in 2010 I enjoyed seeing:

Bernard Tomic, an Australian with a good run or two at the Australian Open who maybe isn't the next big thing but is still a solid and reckonable player

Ryan Harrison, a definitely up-and-coming American who's had too many bad draws, constantly facing top players in early rounds and not yet beating them, thus not as many ranking points as if he had a few easier early round opponents, but definitely going places

Jerzy Janowicz, a Polish player who had a really good Wimbledon this year

Ricardas Berankis, a Lithuanian who advanced to the final of the DC tournament this summer, helped since the field was weakened because of the Olympics, but still if you can get to the final of an ATP mens tournament that ain't chopped liver.

So this year I thought I was really lucky that Berankis had his breakthrough to late to get into the US Open automatic entry, so I could watch his coronation in the qualifying like I did with Andy Murray the year he was stuck qualifying for the final time. No such luck. I watched Berankis struggle in the first two rounds of the qualifying this year and then lose to a fairly unheralded American. Really entertaining match, but it was an awful week for a player who is still very young and should have done better.

It was that kind of year. I saw six matches on Tuesday for the first day of the first round, and some of the matches I'd forgotten by today. The highlight: Rhyne Williams, a 21-year-old American who was a good college player and had a good summer on the European minor league tennis circuit, upset Vasek Pospisil, a Canadian player who looked wonderful in 2011 and carries expectation and was the #7 seed in the qualifying. It wasn't even close, really. In fact, Williams went on to win his next two matches without breaking a sweat. If the home town crowds can help him along... I also caught my first glimpse of James Duckworth, a 20-year old Australian who may have promise.

Day 2 was maybe a little better. I caught a glimpse of Hiroki Moriya, a 21-year old from Japan who looked worth following. Hard to say what's up, his 2nd and 3rd round matches were both long drawn-out endless deuces and long rally affairs that suggest neither he nor his opponents could force a winning shot into the equation, but he did end up prevailing in both to qualify. I saw only a smidgen of Guido Andreozzi, a 21-year-old Argentine, but he showed me something in that little bit of viewing.

Day 3 was an odd kind of day, Brady McReynolds, the newest member of the JABberwocky team who is handling foreign rights, came out for the afternoon. So we left the tennis center for a little bit so I could give a walking tour of Flushing Meadows Park, we popped in to Armstrong and the Grandstand to eat while watching a smidgen of practice, he was doing the video recording thing with his phone of Andy Murray. But before Brady arrived, I saw James Duckworth and Bobby Reynolds play a hugely entertaining match on Court 17. Duckworth, 20 and solid and with an all court game, was probably the better player, but Bobby Reynolds had a huge and vocal rooting section even by the standards of the home-town crowd for an American, and I do think that made the difference when Duckworth was broken to lose this really tight 3-set match. Hugely entertaining.

On Day 4, I wanted to watch the #1 seed in the qualifying, Dutchman Igor Sijsling. Enh. He won, but not all that impressively. Ahead of that, I watched Jimmy Wang from Taiwan and Romanian Marius Copil in a long and tight three-setter on the same court. Like with Moriya's matches a little bit because the players couldn't always find winners. Wang won and qualified, but it wouldn't surprise me if Copil sticks around if he can find that little something extra in his game. The Sijsling match at least was boring and quick, so I was able to see the last half of the 2:30+ affair with Berankis and Tim Smyczek. With Berankis losing, maybe crowd helped a little but you could hear more vocal cheering from a few courts over for Bobby Reynolds than for US player Smyczek.

The weather was solid, just a little bit of rain that delayed play for an hour on Wednesday, and then a little hotter on Friday, the first day I really needed to visit the water fountains after each set. I stopped going to the Lemon Ice King of Corona, for some reason the ices just didn't seem as wonderful as in my recollection and I didn't feel I needed to add the (not much) time to go back the last couple of days. I did stop in on Thursday in Manhattan for the grand opening of the Whole Foods on 57th St. and 2nd Ave., which is the 133rd Whole Foods that I have visited. I was glad to add one on Opening Day but honestly it was too crowded to really enjoy. It's a very small store, maybe not much smaller than the first Manhattan store in Chelsea but that store was built without a cafe which this one has, which is nice that you can sit and eat but also means the actual selling space is really tightly designed. I finally went to Donovan's Pub for what some places rate as one of NYC's best burgers. It was OK. And tried a Thai restaurant in that section of Elmhurst that is filled with Asian ethnic eateries that really I should have eaten at more of.

Still and all, even on an off year, the 4 days of qualifying are among the more satisfying of the 365 I get during a year.

Looking ahead...

Igor Sijsling might not be all that good, but the draw is on his side. His first round opponent is Daniel Gimeno-Traver, who is currently ranked #102 for singles, i.e., lower than a player like Berankis who had his good week too late to count for the US Open. That's a very winnable match. If he wins, no matter what happens in the 2nd round Sijsling is assured of a nice check and at least 70 ranking points for the qualifying (25) and making the 2nd round (45). And against either Kevin Anderson of South Africa or top 10 player David Ferrer, Sijsling doesn't get to round #3.

Rhyne Williams does not have the luck of the draw. He gets to play Andy Roddick in the first round. Roddick is having a bad year, who knows if he has another good year in him. The good news for Rhyne Williams is that he probably gets to play a night match in Arthur Ashe Stadium, this seems like the kind of perfect early round match-up for Arthur Ashe. But as surprised as I was to see Rhyne Williams beat Vasek Pospisil in round 1 of the qualifying would be way more to see him beating Roddick at the US Open.

Marcos Baghdatis has had some career highlights since I first saw him in the Open qualifying something like 8 years ago but has faded a lot. This seems a more likely opportunity for a German qualifier Matthias Bachinger. Upset, yes, shocking if it happens no.

Hiroki Moriya against Ivan Dodig? Winnable for the qualifier. Jimmy Wang against hard-serving Ivo Karlovic isn't winnable.

Bobby Reynolds and Tim Smyczek may get to play on the Grandstand, but they get to play one another. The PTB at the US Open are (a) glad that one of them is guaranteed of being in the 2nd round (b) not glad to have two vaguely marquees players facing off in the first round. On the other hand, they will get either the Argentine qualifier Andreozzi or Japan's #17 Kei Nishikori in the 2nd round, even if they get the #17 player in the world, playing at the US Open with a home town crowd pulling big time, I would give one of those Americans a fighting chance for the 3rd round, and could even see a winnable 3rd round match looking further down the draw.

The good news on having WorldCon on the traditional Labor Day weekend instead of August is that it means I can go to the qualifying, the bad news is I can't watch much of the Open during WorldCon, and this year I have other travel both sides of WorldCon. But it's always fun to see how it plays out.

And just to say, if you like tennis, the qualifying is free and open to the public, and you can do worse than schedule a trip to NYC to watch some good free tennis !!

Josepha Sherman

I'm saddened to hear that Josepha Sherman, a long-time writer and editor and one of the first people I met in the sf genre, passed away on Thursday. She was 65.

Those of us who are experienced at reading and evaluating manuscripts, it's sad but true that we can often tell in a matter of sentences whether there's any "there" there in a manuscript. Jo might have the best raw evaluator I'd ever come across, she could tell more in ten pages than anyone I've ever come across, and when I started out doing freelance work for Baen almost 30 years ago, Jo was someone I'd look up to in awe and amazement. She was always willing to put in that little something extra in giving feedback to an author who had earned it.

My respect for Jo was such that she was one of the first people other than myself to do work for JABberwocky. When it was getting to the point that I had a hard time just doing triage on the requested partials out of the query pile, I asked Jo to help out. We'd usually meet up at the Starbucks at 60th St. and 1st Ave., I'd hand off the pile of partials and a week later I'd know which ones could head off, which I needed to spend more time with, which ones needed encouragement, and she knew my tastes and interests about as well as I knew them myself.

She was a writer in her own write, author or co-writer of close to twenty novels. She was a folklorist who compiled many well-regarded anthologies and used her knowledge well in her own fiction.

She was a raconteur. If you found yourself late at night with Jo and a few friends in a con suite, you were likely to be there until early morning, much entertained and much the wiser for the experience.

She moved from New York around ten years ago and kind of fell off the face of the Earth even though she wasn't all that far away. The Jo Sherman that many of us knew left before she herself did this past Thursday.

The Jo Sherman that many of us knew was one of the unsung heroes of the genre, somebody who quietly helped many to achieve their own dreams of writing fantasy and science fiction.

True Romancing the Danger Zone

What do you say about Tony Scott?

Well, I don't think you'll be hearing this too many times in the obituaries and reminiscences that are going to be out and about in the wake of his tragic suicide, but I think I'd compare him most to Martin Scorcese. Yes, Martin Scorcese.

Because I think the experience of going to the movies isn't just about if a movie is good or bad but about the memories it creates. There are directors who don't create memories at all, I can't rouse myself to like or dislike a Betty Thomas film, let's say, Beverly Hillbillies wasn't good but I don't dwell on it. But at both his best and at his worst, Tony Scott created great memories.

There's Top Gun, which I'm now watching on Blu Ray. It was made 20 years before Blu Ray and yet if you're wondering if it's worth upgrading from a regular DVD, Top Gun could be the test reel. It wasn't the first movie I saw at the Loews Astor Plaza, but it was the first I saw after I started working in New York City, a few months before I moved to NYC, the first movie when the Astor Plaza was my hometown theatre. Like the best Tony Scott, it's got great special effects and lively music and an OD of testosterone. Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Gene Hackman, Christian Slater, Will Smith -- Tony Scott always loved his leading men. Many of the actors he worked with including Cruise, Denzel and Hackman, found the Tony Scott experience one worth repeating.

And there's the needless remake ot The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 which was memorably bad.

Scorcese has Goodfellas and The Age of Innocence, Tony Scott had Top Gun and The Taking of Pelham, and I'll give Tony Scott an advantage here because the bad Tony Scott films were never as excruciatingly dull and miserable to sit through as The Age of Innocence or The Last Temptation of Christ.

When I was in college, I saw a Scorcese movie I really really liked called After Hours, which I've never seen again.

That too has an almost analog in True Romance, which I saw in 1993 and didn't revisit for 18 years. It held up. I don't think I can call it a masterpiece, but it's full of charm and romance and spunk, it's fun. When I went to see Oliver Stone's Savages several weeks ago, with more recent memories of True Romance fresh in my mind, I sat through the movie thinking "wow, this is probably the best and funnest violent drug movie since True Romance." And the interesting thing was that the person I was seeing the movie with was thinking that exact same thing.

And then Tony Scott could come up with Man on Fire, a thoroughly entertaining and entirely reprehensible movie which tells us that all that is wrong in the world can be taken care of with a little bit of maiming and torture. Well, I did loathe and detest Man on Fire on multiple levels, but I'm never going to forget it.

There's the quintessential Tony Scott, movies like Crimson Tide and Enemy of the State that maybe aren't particularly memorable or particularly worth a repeat viewing but which were well done examples of everything Tony Scott could do well.

And when you have things that you can do well, you can sometimes make a movie that surpasses simply by being the best of all of your best qualities. I'd put Unstoppable in that category. It's just so unstoppably good at all of the good things it is. There's Denzel, again, no longer the young guy with a gleam in his eye but being oh so Denzel and sharing the stage with Chris Pine, who is everything the Tony Scott leading man could be. You can't help but think if Tony Scott were with us, probably someday he'd be back working with Chris Pine again. The special effects were quietly good, Tony Scott wasn't a Peter Jackson who can get lost in the joys of fake special effects. This is a train going down train tracks looking to make a real tight curve in a real midwest city. You can feel it rumbling down the tracks way more than you can feel anything that was going on in King Kong. Like a train slowly gaining speed, Unstoppable just chugs along and chugs along and then comes up with about as good a last 40 minutes as you can find in film, 40 minutes that won't have you looking at your watch or squirming in your seat or doing anything other than looking rapt at the screen until the final moment of release.

So ultimately, what I can say about Tony Scott is, that it would sure have been nice to have seen another Tony Scott film come along. I don't know if it would have been Top Gun or Man on Fire, but there's a darned good chance it would have created some kind of cinematic memory for me.

I mean, every time that Top Gun theme starts playing, Howard Faltermeyer's bah-da-da-da-dum da-da-dum da-da-dum, I've got to look up at the TV and see what it's underscoring, and there's Tom Cruise beautifully lit and radiating the same kind of charisma that we'd get every single time from every single leading man in every single Tony Scott film being what movies and movie stars are all about.

As one Marvin Hamlisch song says "nobody does it better."

One of the anniversaries of the many deaths of Borders

I should be reading a manuscript but it's late and I'm tired and it's not the right conditions for work reading.

So instead, let's reflect on one year of life after Borders. Technically I could do in September, but this week marks the real end, the week when the liquidation became official, when the theory of the Borders bookstore gave way to the going out of business sale.

And it still sucks.

To tackle some good news first, the end of Borders wasn't the end of publishing as we know it. I don't know of any publishing company that went under because they were left holding a bag with a hole in the bottom of it. At least not yet. I'm also not aware of any publisher with cash flow issues where our receivables get kind of long in the tooth that's had its circumstances improve over the past year.

But that's about the extent of the good news, that the Borders bankruptcy wasn't the start of some fancy game of dominoes where we could watch them all merrily go falling one after the other after the other.

So I should be happy, right. The business I'm in took one of the biggest hits it's faced in my quarter century in publishing and it's muddling along without disaster in its wake.

But...

The same store sales figures at B&N have increased by a very small amount, considering the number of customers and book sales that were up for grab after the demise of Borders. There hasn't been any rush of bookstores to fill the vacuums or the bookselling deserts left behind in Borders' wake. Some of this is because a lot of the sales could move to e-books, which are much more opaque to track still than print book sales, so it could be that the sales haven't gone so much as gone behind a curtain. But I still don't think of this as good news. One of my biggest worries is that the outlets for selling print books will disappear faster than the appetite for print books.

I can't go to bookstores any more. I used to spend a huge chunk of my life visiting bookstores, and I loved doing it. I felt a little empty when Borders was around that life and business had gotten busier to where I wasn't able to spend as much time visiting bookstores as I'd liked. But it turns out that was because I could visit Borders. Even in its diminished struggling state, even after all the management missteps and the remodels and everything else Borders did to make their stores less enticing places to shop, Borders had better bookstores. A better curated selection. When I could go to a Barnes & Noble and play compare & contrast I could tolerate going to Barnes & Noble. When the only bookstore option I had was to go to a Barnes & Noble, I couldn't bare to do it. Especially because B&N hasn't even been B&N any more. Once upon a time it used to be that Borders were the more interesting and sometimes better and sometimes worse stores while B&N was the boring consistent chain that you could count on to have a core selection from store to store. Now, the difference between the good and the bad B&N is as extravagantly bad as it used to be at Borders, with bad stores having half the JABberwocky title count of good ones and not having core selections like the complete Lost Fleet series or the complete Nightside series. By and large, I just get depressed.

I still drag myself into a B&N every once in a while, maybe tomorrow I'll drag myself in to the one on 46th and 5th since I have to meet a friend a couple blocks away. But there isn't any joy to me in visiting bookstores. It's all just work now.

And there aren't choices. Most indies have crappy sf/fantasy sections and don't give me much joy. The only place where people can go and buy a book in an old fashioned bookstore is a depressing boring chain that doesn't even offer the benefits of consistency the way it once did.

I still think of Borders when I think of the world. When the Silver Line on the Washington Metro starts running in very late 2013, that will be the line that was going to allow me get to the Borders in Tysons Corner more often. If they ever build a streetcar line down Columbia Pike in suburban DC, that will be the streetcar line that would have made visits to the Borders in Baileys Crossroads much easier. When I head to Chicago for WorldCon, this will be the WorldCon that won't finally give me a chance to get down to the Borders on Beverly in the far South of Chicago. I don't see dead people, I see the ghostly apparitions of the Borders that were.

Based on the timing of the first round of liquidation sales, I knew that the most likely last week for Borders would be the week I was in St. Louis for Bouchercon, and that this would make it very difficult to be the last person, turning off the lights, in a Borders somewhere. This proved to be correct. The only Borders accessible by transit from St. Louis was already closed, the signs already taken down by the landlord. The idea of taking a car service out to the suburbs was a theoretical one, the actual closing time for a store on the last day of business was a moving target. One thing to take the car if you knew you could get there at 8pm and hang around until 9, another when nobody could really say if the store would close at 2pm or 5pm or 8pm.

This still depresses me.

Part of me says it's just as well. It would have been horribly depressing going to a Borders and seeing the closed off sections of the store, the last dregs of the liquidation sale, the people scrounging around the dregs for some final bargain at 90% off. It would have been awful and sad.

But when a loved one dies, by and large you still feel that urge to be at the bedside to give your loved one a proper send-off.

And like a loved one that died after a long illness, the best memories I have of Borders don't date back to the days closest to its death. They date back to the mid and late 1990s, the earliest years of this century. The Borders that was still good enough that I could spend a day in 2002 traipsing by BART and bus and foot to the Borders in San Ramon and the Borders in Pleasanton and the Borders in Fremont and the Borders in Emeryville and feel like that was a really really wonderful way to spend a day and see the world one Borders at a time. By 2011, if I did a day like that it was because that was the kind of thing I did, because it connected me to that day in 2002.

But yes, on balance, I wish I had been at the bedside when the lights went out.

As it was, though I hoped maybe it wouldn't be, I kind of knew that my last visit to a Borders the week before the very very end had all of the depressing aspects of being at the bedside without actually being there. It was a struggle to find in the depleted selection that book that might be the last book I actually purchased for pleasure at a Borders. The one good thing was that it was the closest bookstore to my hometown, at the successor mall to the one that once had a Book & Record store, and later a B. Dalton.

But it sucks, it totally totally sucks.

It's a year now since we knew there'd be no Borders, since it became apparent that the white knight to try and save some semblance of the chain wasn't going to materialize.

And it sucks.

There are two other posts that I could do some day. One is the optimistic one, where I can talk about how recent months are showing how e-books and the internet really can help people find an author in a better and nicer way than the old-fashioned bookstore and the old-fashioned review outlets. Take that, NY Times Book Review! Who needs to worry about all the newspaper book review sections that don't exist any more when we have iO9.

Then there's the depressing post, about the total market failure of indie bookstores that don't care, publishers that don't help them, and which I'm supposed to love because why? and love the publishers because why?

Maybe some day.

The Harvard Square Theatre

There's no doubt that there's a stretch in 1980/81 that was the most formative in forming the film-loving part of my self.

May 1980, when The Empire Strikes Back opened, and we drove down to see it in 70mm on the huge screen of the RKO Stanley Warner Route 4 Paramus Quad.

Around that same time, that I saw The Shining.

December 1980, when I saw Altered States at the Loews Astor Plaza.

The summer of 1981, when I was on my own in Boston for several weeks.

So it's with extreme sadness that I read on Monday in the New York Times that the AMC Loews Harvard Square theatre has shuttered.

According to Cinema Treasures, the theatre opened in 1926 with 1700 seats. Who knows how many seats it had in 1981, and I'm not sure that the balcony was in use at that time, but it was still one massively mammoth theatre with one humongously huge screen, and it showed a different double feature every night. And you could buy a card for ten prepaid admissions for, if memory serves, $18. I got at least one of those.

The strange thing is that I have to confess, I can't really remember all that well what all movies I saw at the Harvard Square in the summer of 1981. I can tell you what first run theatres I went to that summer to see The Great Muppet Caper or Stripes or Escape from New York or For Your Eyes Only. I can tell you that the Orson Welles was running its neverending run of Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears. There are a gazillion things I can remember about that summer, and running down a list of the 10 or 15 movies I must have seen at the Harvard Square just somehow doesn't make the cut. I know one of them was The Last Waltz, which I didn't care for. I think I saw The Shining again. I'm reasonably sure I took in a showing of 2001, but I wouldn't want to swear to it. But it was one of the first theatres I fell in love with, and one of the places where I fell in love with the movies.

Down the road a piece, the independent Harvard Square theatre was purchased by the local Sack movie chain, which became USA Theatres, which became part of Loews, which eventually got gobbled up by AMC, and the theatre died as the AMC Loews Harvard Square. It got chopped up over the years, the balcony was cut in two, then then downstairs was cut in three. The main entry to the theatre which fronted right on Harvard Square was turned into retail space, and the main entrance was the side door of the old lobby on a side street without any visible sign on Harvard Square that a movie theatre was in the neighborhood. There was little grandeur left, other than for having the grand stairs leading up to the balcony theatres. I ended up seeing only one movie at the theatre after 1981, so it's not like it's that big a difference to me if the theatre is there or not, I probably shouldn't waste a blog post on its demise.

But in the back of my mind, the knowledge that there was a theatre there, that the link to my past was there if I wanted or needed it, that I could look at the film times in the Boston Globe and think on what was, it means something to me.

As well, in the same way that the loss of Borders is a loss in part because of the book-buying deserts it leaves behind, places like downtown Boston or downtown St. Louis that don't have a good bookstore with wide selection, the loss of the Harvard Square is a loss to Harvard University. There's the Brattle Theatre, an arthouse/repertory theatre that still hangs on in Harvard Square. But there's no place to see Amazing Spider Man in Harvard Square. If you're a student at Harvard you've got a long walk ahead or a T ride to go see a movie. And that doesn't seem quite right to me. Who'd want to go to Harvard without the Harvard Square across the street?