Monthly Archives: February 2010

Some horn-tooting

My publisher just forwarded me the review from the March issue of School Library Journal of my four-book series Humans: An Evolutionary History. My first act was to call Joyce Stanton, the awesome editor who worked with me on the series, to thank her for pushing me to make each volume as strong as it could be.

This project was and is near and dear to my heart. It was also a lot of work. I’m pretty pleased with this review:

Gr 8 Up–The origin of the human species is always a topic of educational inquiry as well as fierce debate. Providing students with information that is credible, detailed, and appealing can be challenging: these books exceed the challenge. Stefoff provides an enlightening and entertaining history of the evolution of Homo sapiens, their ancestors, and cousins, from primitive origins to today. The clear, insightful texts are accented by intriguing sidebars and colorful photos, maps, and graphs. The author provides compelling details from the lives of innovators such as Darwin and Leaky, intelligently discusses the tools of the trade, and deftly explores many monumental discoveries, such as those of Australopithecus in 1924 (First Humans) and the Old Man of La Chapelle in 1908 (Ice Age Neanderthals), and of a “family tree” for mitochondrial DNA (Modern Humans). Readers will be drawn into these discussions and the mysteries that surround our evolutionary story.–Brian Odom, Pelham Public Library, AL

—School Library Journal, March, 2010

The Andre Norton project

I started reading science fiction in the fifth grade, when I came across a book called Space Cadet, by someone I thought of for years as “Roberta Heinlein.” (I was a fast but often rather careless reader.)

It wasn’t long before I discovered Andre Norton. My school had some kind of book club. You could buy books from a catalog, and a week or so later they would be delivered at school, an occasion for much distraction and excitement. I think I acquired my ancient Ace paperbacks of Daybreak-2250 A.D. and Catseye in that fashion, although they had been published years earlier.

At any rate, I soon read as much Norton as I could get my hands on, and throughout junior high and high school acquired some of her books in paperback. I’ve read a few of them since then–a couple of the Witch World books, and a while back I found Star Guard at a used-book store.

A couple of months ago I looked into one of many boxes of my books that have been packed away for years–at least since I moved to Oregon in 1993–because I have never had enough shelf space for all the books. I was thinking about rotating some books from the storage boxes in the garage onto my shelves, and vice versa. I came across ten very old, yellowed Andre Nortons and have just started rereading them.

Yesterday it was Catseye, originally published in 1961. Today it’s Sargasso of Space (1955). It’s great fun.

I’m struck by how familiar these stories, which I loved as a young person and read over and over, feel to me now. At the same time, I’m seeing  elements to which I was utterly oblivious back then.

And I’m reminded on every page of Norton’s predilection for dashes. Perhaps her dash-intensive style influenced me. Various editors, over the years, have pointed out that my mss. are liberally–perhaps too liberally?–besprinkled with the things.

Funny dream with Kelly

Two nights ago I had a dream that featured a guest appearance by my Canadian friend and fellow writer Kelly, a curious bumper sticker, and the coining of a new euphemism for sexual activity.

In the dream I was visiting Vancouver and thinking about moving there. At first I was with my maternal grandmother, who apparently had just moved to Vancouver and was big on living there. (In reality she died in 1997, in Florida.) As we walked uphill on a bustling street–a street somehow reminiscent of my early days in Philadelphia, or rather of my dreams about a city that has aspects of my first big city–on a sunny day, she was giving me a bunch of typically bossy advice about having my furniture moved and stored. Then somehow I was with Kelly and Alyx, who were encouraging me to move to Vancouver and singing the praises of Canada in general. All I remember of my response was a muttered and dubious, “Well, I should probably look into the taxes . . .”

I must have decided the taxes were worth it, because in the next part of the dream I was living in an apartment in Vancouver, in a big old building. At some kind of party or gathering I was sitting in a big chair when a man I didn’t know–nice-looking but not spectacular, 30ish (I was that age, too, how nice)–came over and sat on the floor, or on my chair, in front of me and leaned back into me in a very familiar way. We started flirting. At one point I bent over him and he leaned his head back and we shared a Spiderman-type kiss.  Then it turned out that the meeting was some kind of atheists’ activist group, and our big plan was to distribute blank yellow bumper stickers. Each of us was given a batch of them that looked just like a Post-it pad, only the size and shape of a bumper sticker. The idea was that the blankness of the stickers would proclaim the nonexistence of a deity.

In the next scene I was alone in my apartment with the guy from the previous scene. We were under a blanket on the couch. My POV was that of an observer, not a participant, so I don’t know how far along things had gotten, but the blanket was moving.

Just then the door flew open and Kelly stormed into the room, brandishing a handful of the yellow bumper stickers. She said, “What do you think you’re doing?”

I stood up with an attempt at dignity and indignation, holding the blanket (don’t know what the guy did), and said, “What do you think I’m doing? I’m getting my bing on.”  I have never heard, much less used, that expression.

Kelly then said, “You upset my beloved Nana with these things! Now she thinks there is no god.”

The last thing I remember is me saying, “Well, actually–” Then the dream ends.

Well, actually, I don’t think blank yellow bumper stickers are a very good way to promote atheism, nor do I love the phrase “getting one’s bing on.” But the idea of moving to Vancouver and being a Canadian, and a neighbor of Kelly and Alyx . . . ah, that’s a beautiful dream.

Grrr

I’m still angry about my car getting trashed by some jackass last night.

But I did get one smile out of the affair. When the police came to fill out a report, one of them took a look at my rear bumper and wondered whether my “got cthulhu?” bumper sticker might have offended someone sufficiently to provoke the attack. After I told them who Lovecraft and Cthulhu were, they discarded that theory.

Probably just some idiot walking down the street, was their verdict. Sounds plausible to me.

Monday morning I will commence the tedious business of putting in the insurance claim and lining up the body work.

The poor old Taurus. No panel left unbashed.

The poor old Taurus. No panel left unbashed.

Too bad CSI: Portland can't match this print to the miscreant's footwear!

Too bad CSI: Portland can't match this print to the miscreant's footwear!

Writers, maps, and a cool coincidence

Yesterday I started reading Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (2004). It’s been on my radar for a while. I love maps–I’ve written several books about cartography–and was curious about how Turchi would handle the metaphor of the book as map. The immediate catalyst for getting Maps of the Imagination from the library was seeing it cited in Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife.

I am finding it a satisfyingly chewy read. Here’s an early example:

Discussing the idea that a story is unexplored before it is written and thus presents  overwhelming opportunities, Turchi notes, “This explains why it can be so difficult for beginning writers to embrace thorough revision–which is to say, to fully embrace exploration. The desire to cling to that first path through the wilderness is both a celebration of initial discovery and fear of the vast unknown.”

The last thing I did last night was glance at Turchi’s afterword, which describes the genesis of and influences on the book. He mentions “the work of Edward Tufte,” which rang  a bell. I had come across a reference to Tufte quite recently, but where and what?

I looked at the facing page, which is the last past of Turchi’s bibliography, to see if Tufte were cited. When I saw a citation for Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information I remembered that my friend Magda had tweeted last week about finding an online edition of that work.

Then I happened to glance up the page and saw my own name. Turchi included my Young Oxford Guide to Maps and Mapmaking (Oxford University Press, 1995) in his biblio. Made me proud.

Maps and Mapmaking was the longest nonfiction book I’ve written to date, 900+  pages in manuscript, and one of the most challenging, but also one of my favorites. Advances in cartographic technology have rendered out of date the parts of the book that deal with contemporary mapmaking. The sections on the history of cartography and on important maps and mapmakers, though, were near and dear to my heart.

I just ordered a copy of Maps of the Imagination for my shelves. From Powell’s, not Amazon. I had to add a bunch more books to the order to meet the $50 threshold for free shipping, but that, alas for my budget, is never a problem.