Brought by the lee

So it turns out that my 95% certainty is worth very little. This is an object lesson: Don't expose yourself to ridicule by approaching possible celebrities in person. Do it on the internet; it allows a much larger group of people to enjoy your mistake.

Least I didn't lend the guy money.

Heaven in a black leather jacket and 90% humidity

Notwithstanding the gharstly heat and humidity of the morning, I did make it to the National Book Festival this AM for the annual fix of hangin' with the bookfolk. Last year's mobscene around the Terry Pratchett reading was still in memory green, so I got there early enough to get a good spot and ended up hearing a couple of other authors speak. One, who writes picture books about historical figures in the African-American community, would be a first-rate presenter for little kids, but I get the squirms when someone demands that there be audience participation, especially if it involves singing. The second was more my speed; although he writes mainly for teens, he seemed to notice that the pavilion was rapidly filling with adults, so he ramped up the technical content about researching primary sources and Native American languages. I had never heard the term "agglutinative language," but now I know that Abenaki is one. ("Like German and Russian," said BK, who I was surprised to find sitting just behind me. "But Turkish is considered the classic agglutinative tongue." I hadn't expected to see BK at the Festival, still less at the Gaiman event, but it turns out that his girlfriend got hooked on Sandman at 16 and has been a hopeless fan ever since. Clearly a woman of taste and sophistication.)

The tent was entirely packed by the time Michael Dirda took over from Ron Charles (bah) and introduced Neil Gaiman, who despite the heat was wearing his usual leather jacket. In trying to describe his interaction with his fans to IE, I settled on saying that he's treated as our favorite uncle, who happens to be a rock star. He probably wishes he weren't so widely recognized, but he deals with it gracefully. He read a bit from The Graveyard Book and answered some questions. Best line, in talking about how he'd stolen a book idea from something his son had said, "I told my five-year-old son that he had to go to bed, and he said furiously, 'I wish I didn't have a dad! I wish I had a...,' and you could see him trying to think of things you could have. 'I wish I had...some goldfish!' And I thought, what a good idea. He has never seen any of the royalties." Best I-think-it-was sighting: Terry Pratchett, who without his signature hat can blend into a crowd better than Alec Guinness, but who I think saw me eyeing him.

We decided not to risk the storms just for the chance to stand in an endless signing line, but as the crowd was streaming away, I took the chance to thank Mr. Dirda for returning to his column at Book World and especially for his righteous ticking-off of Neal Stephenson's latest crypto-brick (for the record, I ripped through Snow Crash with glee, liked The Diamond Age despite its random ending, enjoyed Cryptonomicon but struggled with its overload of math lectures, and threw Quicksilver across the room after three pages). Technical material and research is all very well and good in its place; its place is not in 500 pages of your 600-page novel.

A very pleasant lunch at Brasserie Les Halles (baked brie with cracked black pepper and honey, and a salad with apples and sugared walnuts), and thence homeward. Neil is probably signing still.

Match It for Pratchett

Terry Pratchett, as has been mentioned here before, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It's horrible to think about someone like him having his mind eroded piecemeal, but it's a shitty diagnosis for anyone. Pratchett has donated $1,000,000 to Alzheimer's research, saying that he would eat the arse out of a dead mole if it would give him a fighting chance, and no sooner had the news hit the papers than fans set up Match It for Pratchett to make it an even million quid. You can stop by and make a simple donation, buy a t-shirt, or, if you're feeling flush, check out some of the online auctions (I hear tell that the Luggage, full of autographed copies of all the Discworld books, is available). Then maybe head over to one of the US Alzheimer's funds and give them something as well. To quote the Omnians, we are here, and this is now. Go do a good thing.

Grief

Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer's.

He mentioned the phantom stroke at the LOC bookfair this summer, and I hoped that it was something that his remaining neurons could work around. I want my favorite authors to live long lives, ideally to outlive me no matter how chronologically improbable that is, and to be writing straight up to the moment when they painlessly step out. I am greedy for them to produce more books and have good lives. This seems like a cruel trick.

All hail Quetzovercoatl!

Quetzovercoatl: Half man, half chicken, half jaguar, half serpent, half scorpion, half mad.

Although he now has to avoid reading fanfic for prophylactic legal reasons, Terry Pratchett has said that writing the stuff can be a useful training exercise for aspiring authors and that one of his own early stories was a Jane Austen/J.R.R. Tolkien crossover fic (the MS is tragically lost to history). He was particularly proud of the scene where the orcs attacked the rectory.

All of which is by way of saying that "The Night The Aztecs Stormed Glasgow" reminded me of Pratchett's gleeful wholesale rummaging through world mythology. Doesn't he seem the sort of man who would appreciate a song that rhymes Quetzalcoatl and anecdotal? For my own part, I cherish the illusion that perhaps such an invasion would have prevented the invention of butterscotch-flavored candy haggis.

[H/T Making Light, again some more.]

Oh, sodding hell and death

It looks like Terry Pratchett and the rest of the serious SF fans in DC were at Mandalay on Saturday night. You know, Mandalay, that funky Burmese place that is approximately ten minutes' walk from my apartment, next to the gun shop, tattoo parlor, santeria supply joint, and used bookstore of fame. Son of a bitch, what a meal to miss.

Let us not linger overlong on my grumpiness, though; here's a fan's very good write-up, which neatly explains the shirt I wasn't close enough to make out, and she was also kind enough to link to the webcast of his speech.

Weekend rundown

We need the rain, but I can't bring myself to lament gorgeous clear autumn skies too sincerely. It's been ridiculously beautiful all weekend, and for once there have been things to do. Metro did its best to make sure that nobody made it to anything on time, but lo, we would not be thwarted.

• The LOC book festival was reedonkulously crowded, which is how it should be. I skidded in just in time to hear Michael Dirda's intro to Terry Pratchett (summary: You know who he is, I think he's as good as Chaucer, without further ado etc.), who was his usual engaging self. The news that Christopher Lee will be voicing Death in the next movie sent me scrambling for my phone to call Weebat as soon as the speech was done. Also the story about how the ALA's Carnegie medal is just the same size and shape as a chocolate coin, and fun to be had with that information, was a classic.
• Magical Montgomery, conveniently close to home, was full of dancers, volunteer coordinators, and local artists, some quite good. I picked up a triptych of photos from one booth, each showing a different path through woods or boulders. The Joy of Motion tribal-fusion belly dancers were very impressive, smiling faintly while they demonstrated first-rate (from my uneducated perspective) torso work and hand precision, and it was hard not to be charmed by the tiny and distinctly non-Celtic moppets performing soft-shoe Irish dance with a ceilidh band.
• Watching a dress rehearsal of La Mère's tai chi group at the Lisner, I boggled again at the coaches' daughters, who are hyperflexible and strong and look far too sweet to be the kind of martial artists they clearly are.
  
• Crafty Bastards was worth the trip, but a leetle too insanely packed with the city's entire hipster population (I ran into Rockninja and the Object, who agreed that it looked like some of Brooklyn's population might've been bused in). I give some negative marks for overuse of felt and Bob Ross as self-consciously ironic jokes, but there were still things worth checking out.
• Fiesta DC 2007, up in Mount Pleasant, featured a lot of great demos by local dance groups, including a Bolivian troupe who soldiered along despite wearing clothing not at all suited to the 80-degree weather. It takes guts to pay tribute to Pachamama when you're in a swampy Indian summer day and wearing three layers of nylon and corduroy. I especially liked Batala, a DC-based all-female samba drum band, and the various groups wearing huge frame-and-feather sequined costumes.
  

The only problem with a weekend like that is that it's hard to get motivated to do actual exercise. I felt triple guilt: One friend rode a century race on Sunday (clearly not the act of a mentally balanced individual, but there it is), the DC triathlon meant that the streets near the book festival were fill of tasty sinewed folks in spandex (reason enough to make that a regular event), and my masseuse on Friday pointed out that my lack of flexibility is putting further strain on my back and hips. Damn, there really aren't any good excuses for dodging exercise, are there?

No news is good news

Some power that be seems to have decreed that lo, those of us who work downtown today should commemorate the day with a massive traffic jam with random fire trucks. I grouchily wedged my earphones in a little tighter and put on my best commuter scowl, honed by years of dealing with random Metro delays and passes through the infamous Mixing Bowl.

In hopes of dissipating the morning snarls, I present a classic: The Discworld Cake. When La Mère first saw these photos, she warned that she would not ever make anything remotely resembling this cake. That comes as something of a relief, because while the cake is impressive as hell—continents, Rimfall, Cori Celesti, oh my!—it also gives me to wonder just a tiny bit about the maker's sanity. Behold the Great A'tuin!

Countdown to sweet freedom!

A three-day weekend and a new Terry Pratchett book? Mm, tasty. My newly minted plans to check out the Saturday Pilates class may be undermined by the inertia induced by a shiny new book with adjacent caffeinated options. Who wants to do the Hundred when they could be giggling through a latte?

Lately I've been reading mostly food porn, including M.F.K. Fisher excerpts that should probably carry some sort of warning label, or at least drool-proof pages, and a book summing up the Julie/Julia project (blogger versus the entire Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a single year). All the talk of butter and and pate choux and duck and rich winy sauces tends to trigger my late-summer/early autumn Slavic craving for heavy starchy baked things, lest winter catch me unprepared and blubberless. "They throw thin ones to the wolfs!" warns the inner babushka. "Have a pierog and some kartoshki, you feeling better." I'll bake something and then give most of it away; so far that's kept the yen for massive piles of carbs under control.

Next week the barn goes back to a regular class schedule, so I'll be riding three times a week rather than twice, hip permitting. Scheduling snafus meant I got only limited horse time this week, but I did manage to eke out time to take Doc for a graze. He claims to live on the ragged edge of starvation, and I am not above bribing him to think that my arrival means happy food time as well as happy games of running around in the woods. As long as we can sustain the "me != misery for Doc" equation, it counts as an equestrian success.

Like a massive drug deal, but legal

I hang my head in shame and admit that there is, in fact, one thing that the current administration has done for DC that doesn't make me want to man the barricades. Oof, just saying that makes me vaguely queasy. But it's true: Laura Bush helped get the Library of Congress National Book Festival off the ground, and since 2001 it's been a regular event on the Mall. Pavilions for different genres are scattered across the grounds, with authors speaking and signing and shilling and generally getting out to see the fans, and the paths are busy with people scrambling to catch sight of their favorite writers.

For reasons that I wot not of, it wasn't until 2004 that the festival offered an official science fiction and fantasy section or invited SFF authors. Once the penny dropped, though, they started with a bang: Connie Willis! Neil Gaiman! Frederick Pohl! Neal Stephenson! All introduced by a visibly thrilled Michael Dirda! Yow. To nobody's surprise except possibly the organizers', the SFF pavilion drew by far the biggest crowds, and the line in front of Neil Gaiman's signing table started forming hours before the festival officially opened.

Since that watershed year, maybe to keep the disparity in crowd sizes from looking too great, they've folded SFF into a broader "Fiction and Fantasy" group. I disagree with the name, which implies that fiction as a genre somehow excludes fantasy, and with setting "Mysteries and Thrillers" as another group altogether, but what the hell, at least authors I like are being invited.

This year, happy sigh, they've gotten Terry Pratchett to headline the fiction crew, which is great both because he's a wonderful speaker (a few years ago he appalled and amused Serial Karma by opening a speech with a joke about invading Czechoslovakia) and because it means that it's that time of year again: He's got another book coming out. Making Money, drop date September 1, follows Moist Von Lipwig's attempts to establish a paper currency in Ankh Morpork. I will be shocked if there's not at least one Nobby/Colon conversation about trying to track down a floating incorporeal hand. Break out the Strawberry Wobblers!