Today I sold a revised version of my 8,000-word essay, "The First Woman on Mars," to White Fungus, a beautifully-produced English-language Art Journal published in Taiwan. Because of the strong visual-arts orientation of the journal, my essay is likely to be accompanied by several original works of art, photographic and otherwise; I'll be working with the editor on developing those aspects, and the lead time is sufficiently long to encourage and accommodate a nuanced approach and possibly the contributions of multiple artists. Really, almost anything could happen. Spell delight!

In the mid-1970s I read an essay about humanity's future and the future of life in the universe written by the eminent physicist Freeman J. Dyson. It was called "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil", and it was among the most astonishing reading experiences of my life. One section of the essay in particular, "Big Trees", completely blew me away. In it Dyson speculated about how one day we could use genetic engineering to teach trees how to grow on comets. Dyson's vision of enormous trees growing hundreds of miles tall, of trees flinging their seed-pods across space in search of other comets on which to take root (there are billions of suitable comets in our solar system alone), indeed of their eventually achieving the literal greening of the galaxy, has never left me.

Dear Mr. President:

The Wall Street banks perpetrated the greatest fraud in the history of the human race; this is indisputable. The fact that much of that fraud was technically legal obviates nothing. 2012 may be your last year in which you can intervene positively and decisively in the course of human history: failure on your part to do everything in your power to stop the big banks and big corporations from effectively taking over the world will have catastrophic long-term consequences on the health and well-being of the human race and of all life on Earth. Please, sir: do the right thing. Use your power to stop the banks from completing their takeover. If history remembers you for anything, it will be for the moral courage, or lack thereof, in your response to the evil of plutocratic tyranny.

Respectfully Yours,

Ron Drummond

I just found out that my 4,300-word autobiographical essay about Joanna Russ, "Getting to Joanna", is being published in the December 2011 issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction -- it's at the printer right now and should be out within days.

My friends in the San Francisco or Palo Alto areas might be interested: this weekend the New Esterhazy Quartet is giving the modern premiere of Anton Reicha's fabulous F minor String Quartet, Opus 94 No. 3, on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, November 26th and 27th, together with quartets by Haydn, Zmeskall, and Beethoven. I consulted with the group on their selection and provided them with the musical parts for the Reicha quartet. I dearly wish I could attend these recitals, but alas it was not meant to be. The concert details will remain at the foot of the group's homepage through the weekend:

http://newesterhazy.org/

Update: The irrepressible calimac posted a brief review of the latter of these two concerts. I'm so delighted he was able to make it! Since I couldn't attend myself, if I could have formally appointed a proxy to attend in my stead, it would have been him.

I wrote an 8,000-word essay, a kind of prolegomenon that shades into fiction in its closing pages, and published it informally as a chapbook, The First Woman on Mars, and distributed about 60 copies at the Women and Mars Conference in Washington, D.C. on November 9-10. I'm unsure how successful this publication and distribution experiment was (my hope or purpose was and is to inspire people about the future prospects of the human race, and so far the limited response I have received suggests that I may not be entirely deluded in maintaining that hope and purpose) but for sure I need to recoup some of its expense, and so for a limited time I am offering copies for sale.

Those interested can send $20 (17 + 3s&h) in the U.S. or $25 (17 + 8) outside the U.S. via PayPal to vranizky at speakeasy dot net. Once printing costs are recouped, all money from further sales will go to the Little, Big Project. The chapbook is beautifully printed, with full color imagery on the front and back covers. I had approximately 150 copies printed, though only 50 or so remain; more copies may or may not be printed in the future.

Creating The First Woman on Mars was the most exhilarating writing experience of my life, thus far. I am very happy with it. I hope you like it.

I saw Anonymous today. I liked it! Great sets and costumes. The cgi-derived evocation of Elizabethan London is fabulous -- I would have been happy if the whole movie had just wandered those streets, evocating away -- and many of the views and scenes set in the various Globe-style theaters do a magnificent job of evoking what it must have been like to be crowded into those spaces and watching plays. Even when it's raining!

The brief glimpses we get of various productions (all but one of which are from Shakespeare) are beautifully done, with the most pronounced exception being a ludicrous dramatization of how the opening soliloquy of Richard III drives the mob into a frenzy so great that under their own collective recognizance they stream out into the streets to cross London Bridge en masse and make their way to the Queen's London palace to murder Robert Cecil, or to call for the Queen to murder him, that must be it, this for the sole reason that the actor playing Richard is made up to look like Cecil, hunchback and all. Unfortunately for them Cecil knows this is going to happen, in the absence of any reason why it should, despite the nefarious and ominous intelligence Cecil has received regarding Richard's matching hunchback, a portrayal that should have surprised no one given Sir Thomas More's well known, decades-old description of Richard as being hunchbacked, and so Cecil orders an army of cannoneers and musketmen to lie in wait for the rabble rousers at the London end of the bridge and shoot them on sight. His queen, meanwhile, is presumably completely ignorant of this action, nor does she appear to ever learn of it. All those dead rabble rousers, practically on her doorstep! It's among the most patently idiotic scenes I've ever seen in any film of any genre, let alone one so portentous it appears its writer and director consistently failed to take a goodly crap before settling down to their work each day. I suppose that's mean of me to say, but honestly, Anonymous feels like the work of men who have forgotten how to shit.

I do think it is important to point out that, as idiotic as the two men helming this movie are, that idiocy did not and does not extend to the people they hired to do the costumes and the cgi reconstruction of London and the staging and acting of the play fragments, all of whom are first-rate artisans who really know their stuff. And the acting is generally pretty good, Rhys Ifans suitably soulful in his portrayal of Edward de Vere, a man well-documented at the time for being both a major asshole and a minor poet, but Ifans' portrayal is nothing if not sympathetic, indeed if you want to enjoy it even more pretend he's secretly channeling the real William Shakespeare -- you know, the guy who, yes, really did write 3/4ths of the plays attributed to him and co-wrote the remaining 1/4th -- acting out Will's pain at Emmerich and Orloff's betrayal of him, except that of course if Will were magically whisked out of his time to watch this film, he'd laugh his ass off at it more than anything else. And then would applaud, more than just a little, there at the end, for the sake of the true artisans under Emmerich's thumb who made this film anything worth seeing at all. Still, I like that image, it really works for me: Ifans portraying the real Shakespeare, author of the plays, doing a proper actorly job of portraying a faux Shakespeare-writing De Vere. Still, I was struck that there were a few good lines that you could take straight out of De Vere's mouth and put into Shakespeare's in another movie entirely, a movie where as in the real world Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare and no one has any cause to question it, and could then get on with telling a much more interesting story.

The peanut gallery in Anonymous is of course provided by a bunch of rival playwrights, one or more of whom are already dead when we begin, who have nothing better to do than attend plays and say snarky things about that supposed idiot Shakespeare, played splendidly by Rafe Spall, who steals at least half the scenes he's in. There is the small matter that Orloff has his drooling Shakespeare murder Christopher Marlow (played ineptly by Trystan Gravelle) something like seven years after Marlow's original death, a neat trick. For a much, much better one, indeed a genuine work of art, I highly recommend the single best "review" of Anonymous I have yet read (and I've read several dozen), As cutpurses in his good queen's day -- worth reading thrice, in fact, at the very least -- it starts off amazing and gets better with each new reading.

Sebastian Armesto is very sympathetic as Ben Jonson, the go-between, despite the fact that he is ill-used by Orloff, but then everyone in this film is, in one way or another, even or perhaps especially de Vere. Given the fact that almost every play published before say 1610 or so carried no author attribution whatsoever (Shakespeare's being among the few exceptions), so that the vast majority of playwrights were indeed Anonymous (plays were the property of the playhouses that commissioned them, not the writers, who often worked in groups to crank out their product), if De Vere had wished to publish his rotten plays (the real De Vere, that is, who categorically wasn't Shakespeare) he could have done so with impunity and no one the wiser, thus rendering any need for a go-between or a pseudonym moot and void. All the real workaday professional playwrights of Elizabethan and Jacobean times were from the merchant classes anyway, every last one of them, just like Shakespeare, and regardless of whether they went on to university all of them benefited mightily from the incredible public school system that Elizabeth instituted almost from the moment she took the throne. Jonson, like our man from Stratford, had only a grammar school education, which back then meant a greater grounding in Latin and classical literature by the time you were 12 than a graduate student in those subjects would have in an American university today -- and like Will, Jonson too did not go on to University. Beyond grammar school, Jonson taught himself so well that his classical erudition was greater than any other playwright of his time, certainly greater than Shakespeare's and De Vere's too for that matter, so much so that Jonson's more serious plays are positively weighed down with classical allusions and rhetoric. Yet Orloff sees fit to portray him as a minor talent at best, a bumbling, slow-on-the-uptake servant boy, despite Derek "I'll do anything to promote Oxford's cause no matter how idiotically portrayed or maybe I just really need the money" Jacobi's pat on Jonson's back there at the very end. Oh right, and with the Globe newly completed, Orloff has Shakespeare telling Jonson that his plays will never be produced there, when we know for a fact that Jonson's plays were often performed by Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's and later the King's Men. And on and on, endless sweepings-away of well-documented fact.

Yet the film is fun, sure, bodice ripping, or bodice popping anyway, and one must mention Joely Richardson's charmingly lusty portrayal of the young Elizabeth and her mother Vanessa Redgrave's charmingly dotty portrayal of the ancient Elizabeth, and whoever has the honor of portraying her at any given moment Orloff's Elizabeth is perpetually and all-too easily swayed into action by whoever happens to be catching her ear or eye at the moment; this includes giving in to those changeful bedfellows who have her dashing off to her country palaces to deliver bastards on a regular basis, none of whom are girls. Oh gosh how the dotty Elizabeth swoons over the newly-published-in-1601 Venus and Adonis, written especially for her of course by her son and lover De Vere a full eight years after it was actually written and published in 1593 (and reprinted five times before 1601) carrying a dedication to her son and grandson the Earl of Southampton from a chap called William Shakespeare. But if Orloff can wipe away and rearrange all that history whenever it suits him, what's a little dedication to an epic poem when we're among friends?

And then finally at the end Ifans' De Vere movingly exalts his own aristocratic Oxfordian ancestry, implying heavily that it bears more responsibility for the greatness of Shakespeare's works than his own supposedly supreme individual talent, only he seems to have lost sight of the fact that, being Elizabeth's eldest bastard, and by an unknown father no less, the 17th Earl of Oxford isn't related to the earlier earls at all. Heck, for all we know, De Vere's true father was a mere commoner wandering through the forests of Arden one fine late summer day in 1549 who just happened to come upon the lovely young Princess Elizabeth, out for a constitutional, and before you know it a mutually exuberant fuck ensued between them, after which the young man answered her parting question with the words, "Me? The name's John Shakespeare, your majesty: at your service, always."

On a slope by a highway with others, in a yard, and on wheels there is a huge long rail that comes loose and rolls down the slope, straight into on-coming traffic, and I run after it to watch, horrified, unable to stop it, and in the distance it strikes vehicle after vehicle and a whole series of crashes occur and then suddenly all the disaster is sweeping towards me at speeds much too great to outrun or avoid and a horrific calamity of metal is coming towards me but then in front of it, leading the charge, are two white horses running and one of the horses is almost on top of me and suddenly the force and being and spirit of the horse envelopes me and projects me instantaneously to a place hundreds of meters further along and on the far side of the highway, out of harm’s way, and that’s where we are, standing not running, standing not being blasted aside or crushed, standing facing one another in silent communication, inside a bubble of space or time, protected, alone, however briefly, a white horse and I am alone.

I had the wonderful honor of seeing and hearing Richard Thompson perform at the smaller of the two theaters in The Egg in Albany NY tonight, from the fifth row. It was the first time I've seen him live and I dearly hope it won't be the last. I've been hearing his tunes off and on for over thirty years, usually when friends played me his music. I had the early Fairport Convention albums but only bought a disc or three of his solo music in the last decade. So I only recognized maybe a fifth of what he played tonight, a solid two-hour show with three encores. This was a joy in its own way, because being introduced to all of these new songs by the songwriter in person was a treat. He is a blow-away performer, to be sure, a man who puts every ounce of his guts and strength and soul into playing the guitar and singing, and the result is so devastatingly, viscerally communicative as to be just plain jaw-dropping, shove you back in your seat, lift you out of it. Add to this the fact that he may very well be the greatest living guitar stylist -- I've never heard anyone play an acoustic guitar more fiercely, with greater passion, precision, delicacy, and sheer percussive force. Never heard anyone with greater stylistic range. His chord patterns often shear off, veer off at tangents that are simultaneously unpredictable but absolutely compelling. The lyrics and the voice he gives to them are like a single muscle, which can clench and punch and double back and then on a dime unclench and articulate the minutest, most delicate of digital operations -- and I mean digital as in fingers, hands, wrists. In the next day or two I will start searching the internet for a set list to tonight's show: about half the songs he played are ones I'd really rather not live without, though it's okay if I do. Something that might be called "Sunset Song" being one, "I wouldn't have it any other way" another.

An oddment: in the lobby before the show, talking to friends, the so-called Shakespeare Authorship Question was raised and I made a brief case for our man from Stratford that was warmly received. Near the end of his show, Thompson played a 1940s-era song, a kind of compressed, street-jive Hamlet, and asked the audience, Does anyone here think Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare? He asked it so suddenly that there was a long beat of silence and then I called out, not loudly, "I do." A few other voices murmured their assent. But that was it. Virtually the entire audience remained silent, a silence that lasted a goodly few heartbeats. Then he asked if anyone thought someone else wrote Shakespeare's works, and about as many people said yes, more loudly than we few humble Stratfordians, but a comparable number. Again, total silence from the vast majority of the people there. And what about this Oxford fellow, Thompson said, De Vere, what do you think of him? It may be someone cheered half-heartedly, but after a pause I called out a quiet, sighing "Boo." And then Thompson urged everyone to join him in the lobby after the show to discuss it, though he never showed up. But this is what it's come to: 95% percent of the audience at a Richard Thompson solo acoustic show doesn't know or have an opinion or belief as to the true identity of the author of William Shakespeare's works, or if they do they are unwilling to speak up. I was so tired by this point that after the Hamlet song, which failed to live up to its introduction, I had trouble following most of the last half hour's batch of songs, until the final two songs, the final two encores. But even when providing a background to my exhausted Shakespearean ruminations, Thompson was brilliant.

Who wrote the songs of Richard Thompson? Someone else entirely, with the same exact name.

I was standing with at least two other people in a garden. There was a big, three-foot long lizard sunning itself. It had six legs, two pair near the front and one at the end of its torso, where you’d expect it, before the short tail. This guy was explaining to me that the lizard generally left people alone, unless you provoked it – but once you provoked it, it would never leave you alone. I said Oh yeah? And grabbed the lizard around its upper body, between the two front pairs of legs. It immediately went nuts, twisting its neck around, trying to bite my arms, hissing and spitting and growling. Keeping it under control and its jaws well away from my body was exhausting work. Finally I was able to throw the lizard a goodly distance away, but as soon as it hit the ground it came at me again, and I had to grab it around the body in the same place to prevent it from chomping on me, and again we wrestled intensely for minutes before I flung it away. This time it sat on the ground where it landed, panting, resting, but within a minute it leapt at me again, and again we wrestled. This repeated itself over and over and over again, until finally I woke up.