Bureaucracy at its finest

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You know the Paul Simon song “The Afterlife”? It’s the one where the singer imagines he has died, and even just to enter Heaven, in his words:

You got to fill out a form first
And then you wait in the line

Well, let me tell you, I know for certain now that Paul Simon never had to deal with the California Department of Motor Vehicles. I am not so lucky. Today, I had to go to the DMV to correct an error they had made on my driver’s license renewal some three or four weeks ago, and I hadn’t seen until the new license arrived in the mail two days ago.

I would have done anything to avoid going in, and judging from their website, that would have been their preference too. I might have been able to correct an error in my name or address, but they had gratuitously issued my new driver’s license with the restriction that I must wear corrective lenses.

Where had that come from? >dramatic shrug< Who knows? I had come in with a DMV form 926 properly completed by my optometrist stating that my vision is within acceptable parameters. The DMV had accepted the form as correct and waived the eye exam.

But when the brand new license came in the mail, behold! Corrective lenses required. And there was no recourse but to go in to have it corrected. I made an appointment for 9:10 a.m. in order to avoid, well, waiting in line. But of course there was a line for people who had made appointments in order to avoid waiting in line, and so . . . I waited in it.

When my turn finally came, I was told that I would have to complete a new application in order to make the correction, and for that — yes, you guessed it — there was another line I needed to wait in.

When my turn came around, the friendly staff member told me I had to — yes, you guessed it — fill out a form first. This, I was able to do at a computer electronically and was issued some sort of verification number I would need when I — yes, you guessed it again — went back to wait in line again.

The staffer reviewed the form and told me there would be a charge to issue the corrected license. Name and address corrections were free, but this . . .

I objected. It wasn’t my fault! I had done everything right! It was entirely a DMV error!

Luckily, the staffer was kind, and she had the authority to waive the charge. I just had to take my machine-issued control number and . . . wait in another line.

At the other line, I was issued a different number and told to . . . wait in the line. This time, luckily, I could just sit and wait for my number to be called. Time passed. I caught up on today’s news and on my emails. More time passed. I did a few of the puzzles from the New York Times. Finally, my number was called, and I was sent to — you knew this was coming, didn’t you? — wait in the first, no, the second line again.

This time, the staffer informed me that I would be issued a new (hopefully correct) license, and for this I would need a new photo. And for this — you saw this coming, didn’t you? — I had to wait in another line.

While waiting, I over heard the following at the next window over:

Customer: [requests the service he’d been waiting for]

Staffer: “We don’t do that here. You have to go outside to the kiosk and wait in line over there.”

I am not making this up.

Photo taken, I was told to — no joke, this really happened — go back and wait in line again at the other window, where I had to carefully review a form that did not indicate whether or not I needed corrective lenses, while the staffer printed out several forms for the DMV’s records. After receiving my approval, she also printed out some forms for me: a temporary driver’s license, and a $0 receipt for the charge that I did not pay.

By my calculations, I waited in line seven times, and participated in the generation of at least four forms, two control numbers of some kind, and one photograph. The visit took two hours, but at least I wasn’t charged for it. And I was free to go.

Paul Simon, you ain’t seen nuthin’!

Resident Pigeon

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Okay, maybe (just maybe) my husband and I watched too many episodes of the TV show “Resident Alien” before we set out on our trip to France, but bear with me here. There are pigeons that walk among us as humans. Somehow, they have managed the art of taking on human form. I don’t think that, like the resident alien Harry, they want to eliminate all humanity. To the contrary, judging from those still recognizable as pigeons, their goal is to devour all the croissants in France. Or perhaps even all the food of every kind.

They may think they’ve mastered the art of appearing human, but we have seen through their disguise. Just look at the feet. As the pigeons grow ready to take on human form, their feet get more and more red.

Those that are very red . . . well, they might just be seated at the table next to you at the café tomorrow morning, ordering croissants.

You can tell which so-called apparent “humans” are actually resident pigeons by looking at their feet. Still red! It’s a clear giveaway.

I don’t think we’re in any danger. There’s plenty of croissants to go around. But if the pigeons ever learn to disguise the color of their feet, who knows what they will do next? Run for president?

The invisible building

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Once upon a time, I got a masters degree in architecture, and then I went to work for a well-known and well-respected architect and urban designer, Lou Sauer, a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. Sauer was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania at the time, and he spoke passionately about the need to teach architects good urban-design principles. In one conversation, he said he had assigned a project to his architecture students to design a building to be located in the central quadrangle of the Penn campus. It was a “trick” project because the right answer, according to Sauer, was not to put a building in that beautiful iconic space at all. Only one of his students got it right, putting the programmed spaces underground and leaving the quadrangle more or less as it is. “When you give a person a hammer, all problems look like nails,” he lamented (or something to that effect), “but sometimes they’re just not.” I’ve never forgotten this lesson, for it applies to so much in life, not just buildings.

However, after all these years, I’ve finally seen another solution to the problem of putting a building in an iconic open space that is arguable better to leave untouched. An uncompromisingly modern building in a beautiful classical environment best left unspoiled. For I have seen an invisible building.

My mind is still reeling a bit from this. Was it a trick of the sky and the time of day, the weather and the angle of approach? The building happened to be along a route that my husband and I walked getting to and from our hotel. It can be seen a bit better from another angle and another time of day, but it’s still tricky.

The building is the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art. Its architect, Jean Nouvel, has this to say about it:

Architecture where the game consists in blurring the tangible boundaries of the building and rendering superfluous the reading of a solid volume amid poetics of fuzziness and effervescence. When virtuality is attacked by reality, architecture must more than ever have the courage to take on the image of contradiction.

Well, I’m not entirely sure what all that architect-speak is about, but I do know that this building makes me laugh in delight. And there’s a lesson here, too. It’s always worth looking around the corner for an unexpected answer to a problem. You just might find it.

A riff on rhetoric — and music

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Personal confession: I am an unabashed lover of rhetorical devices. Never thought I would be, not after my freshman year at St. John’s College, reading what Socrates says about rhetoric in Plato’s Gorgias and other dialogs. And it is not favorable:

…the rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know…

But then I became a writer and user of (I hope) beautiful language, and was fortunate to take Margie Lawson’s excellent course in deep editing, in which she taught a number of rhetorical devices. It was an eye-opener.

And zeugma is one of my favorite rhetorical devices because it invariably makes me smile—and smiling is good, right? Zeugma, per Merriam-Webster, is “the use of a word to modify or govern two or more words usually in such a manner that it applies to each in a different sense.”

I thought of zeugma recently while listening to Adam Cohen‘s song “What Other Guy” from his album Like a Man. I really like this song, it’s on my “Favorites” playlist. The lyrics are lovely, and overall the song hauntingly speaks of unrequited love. But one phrase in particular always brings a smile:

“Seen you with nothing on but the radio”

Obviously, the woman is not wearing a radio. Or anything else.

This in turn reminded me of a song, “She Moves On,” from what might be my all-time favorite album, Paul Simon‘s The Rhythm of the Saints:

“She takes the corner that’s all she takes / She moves on”

A song about a break-up, but again, I can’t help but smile.

Actually, Paul Simon uses a lot of rhetorical devices in his songs, including on the album The Rhythm of the Saints. I listened to this album over and over again as I was writing the early drafts of my book Saving Aran in late 1990 to 1991. This verse near the end of the song “The Cool, Cool River” was in many ways the inspiration for that book:

…these streets
Quiet as a sleeping army
Send their battered dreams to heaven, to heaven
For the mother’s restless son
Who is a witness to, who is a warrior
Who denies his urge to break and run

The verse contains another rhetorical device: synecdoche. Per Merriam-Webster, this is “a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole.” Here, the streets stand for the neighborhood, perhaps even the whole city.

If you’ve read Restless Son, you might recognize the city at the foot of the aliens’ starbase, where Cort grew up. Perhaps you might even recognize Cort, the hero of the book, the earliest drafts of which were named Restless Son.

In a recent interview, Paul Simon discussed the meaning that may be found in his music. And one thing he said in particular spoke to me:

I believe that the listener completes the song.

If this is true, then I’d like to acknowledge him here as a kind of coauthor. I listened to that album every night as I wrote the book’s first drafts, and the feel of that music certainly permeates the book. Thank you, Paul Simon!

Mightier Than Magic: Alaric meets the Mouse

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Here’s a small excerpt from my latest book Mightier Than Magic. I hope you enjoy it.

The door opened tentatively, and only wide enough for a wisp of a girl to peer in from the threshold. She gripped the edge of the door so tightly that her knuckles were white. She’d probably bolt if he frowned at her. Hadn’t he seen her before? He tried to make his expression pleasant.

“Leave the door open,” the guard warned.

“Yes, sergeant,” the girl said almost inaudibly. She nudged the door open a bit wider and took a small step. Now he recognized her—the girl from the banquet hall last night. She’d called the queen Mother, but she didn’t act like the other princesses. She wasn’t much to look at either, all shrunk into herself, maybe fifteen years old. The cut of her clothing suggested nobility, but the costly fabric was dyed an unassuming shade of dull brown, a color that nearly matched her long, straight hair.

Her eyes were pretty, though, somewhere between green and brown, with long, arched brows. Her generous mouth promised a hint of more boldness than all the rest of her put together. This was a surprise, and an enticing one. Alaric smiled.

The girl relaxed. Slightly.

“Your Majesty.” Her voice barely carried across the small room. “My mother the queen has asked me to visit you. To thank you. In person . . . for last night. And to . . . to see if you need . . . anything.”

“What, you?” He’d meant that it seemed strange to send a princess on such an errand, when a servant might do. But the instant the words escaped his mouth, he realized it was the wrong thing to say.

The girl’s cheeks flushed pink. She shrank against the door jamb and wrapped her chest in her arms. The protective gesture accentuated her womanly shape.

Alaric couldn’t help but notice, and his own face flushed with embarrassment. He raised his estimate of her age. She must be seventeen or eighteen, almost as old as he was, and he’d implied . . . “I’m sorry.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d apologized to anyone. “I didn’t mean that the way it must have sounded. I only meant that if the queen is your mother, you would be an unlikely serving maid.”

He offered his best smile, well aware that sometimes people trembled when he smiled. And with reason. He hoped that now he would appear welcoming rather than frightening. “Please,” he said, rising and motioning to the chair, which he held for her as if she were a lady being seated for dinner.

“No, thank you,” she said. “There’s only the one chair, and I wouldn’t . . . I couldn’t make you stand while I . . .”

The room he’d been given was clean enough, and light streamed through its narrow window. But it was tiny and pressed in too closely. There was only the one chair, a narrow bed pushed against the wall, and a small table barely wide enough to hold two books side by side. “I can sit on the bed,” he said, then felt his face grow hot. The bed. Not a piece of furniture that should have been on display to this visitor, and he was sorry to have mentioned it. He cursed the room for its meagerness and himself for a fool.

But his guest appeared not to notice the implications. “Oh. Yes, of course.”

He held the chair as she sat, and then settled his tall frame onto the low bed. He avoided watching her too directly—her worried face, her hunched figure—as she fidgeted with her hands.

He waited.

“That was very kind, Your Majesty, what you did last night,” she said at last. She nibbled at a thumbnail, watching him from the corner of her eyes.

She was not as plain as she’d first appeared. Her skin was porcelain and clear, her face heart-shaped and perfectly proportioned. Though her nails were bitten to the quick, she had long, delicate fingers. But why so timid? And why had she not been invited to the dinner?

“Please, call me Alaric.” He spoke as gently as he could. “What’s your name?”

She hunched inward a little more and again wrapped her arms around herself. “Mouse.” Her voice was only a hair’s breadth above a whisper.

“Mouse? It’s . . . an unusual name.”

“That’s just what people call me.”

He could understand why. But he said, “Is that what you want me to call you?”

She didn’t answer.

“What’s your real name?” He attempted the friendliest expression he could muster. He was afraid this timid young woman might bolt like a deer scenting a wolf. He didn’t want her to bolt. He could use an ally, even one as unlikely as her, in Queen Claudia’s hostile court.

“Alicia Aurelia Katrina Emilia.” She raised her chin and straightened a little.

This time his smile was genuine—amusement at the string of names that stretched longer than his room was wide. “And how would you like me to call you, Alicia Aurelia Katrina Emilia? If I needed a glass of water and I had to ask you for it, I might die of thirst before I’d quite gotten all that out.”

She smiled shyly back at him. Fear still hovered around her eyes, but her face lit up. “Katie,” she said. “Call me Katie.”

Alaric’s heart catapulted. In the instant of her smile, she was radiant. She’d been wearing an expression of fear and worry so deep-seated that it masked her beauty. “And remember, you may call me Alaric. Please.”

Here was a person who was extremely competent at projecting her insignificance. He wondered if magic was involved.

An un-electrifying trip to Ribe

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Ribe was the far point in our planned trip through the Danish countryside, almost 300 kilometers from Copenhagen. But our goal was to see some of the Danish countryside outside of Copenhagen, and Ribe was worth the effort to get there. At well over a thousand years of inhabitation, Ribe is the oldest settlement in all of Scandinavia. It’s also lovely, as is the countryside along the route. The clouds were magnificent, and so was the pristine farmland with nary an electric line in sight. Approaching Ribe, we got a sense of the delightful experience that awaited us.

But we were feeling frazzled and stressed, or at least I was. Why? It involved an electric car we rented from Hertz that had a fairly short range. “Don’t worry, they’ve got electric chargers at almost every gas station,” said the rental agent at the counter in Copenhagen. “You can just use your credit card.”

I’ll be as brief as I can in summarizing the woes of this car. Enough to say that your credit card will be denied unless you’ve downloaded an app for that charger (and maybe even if you do have the app). That there are many brands of chargers, and each requires a different app. That you cannot download the app “on the fly” unless you have internet on your phone. That I do not have internet on my phone while traveling abroad. And that although the chargers exist at many gas stations, they are not affiliated with the stations, and the attendants know nothing about them and can’t help. Fortunately, the very nice Danish customers at other chargers nearby will help, and after two painful charging experiences, we arrived in Ribe. There, we were completely unable to charge our albatross car at three separate charging locations.

But this blog post is not about that. It’s about the charming town of Ribe and the curative properties of the magical Wadden Sea.

Ribe has been inhabited for some 1,600 years. I think it’s safe to say that none of the houses we saw this month has survived since that time. But still, the town changes slowly. Here are two pictures of the same spot ninety years apart.

Some of the houses do show their age and look to be, well, maybe three or four hundred years old. Maybe more. They seem right for a town that’s as proud of its long history as Ribe is. All in all, the effect is unmitigated charm.

The residents are welcoming. Open gates lead to charming inner courtyards. For example, the Bladt-Hansen family welcomes visitors to their backyard, with a view over the gardens. A café and shop in the same structure face the street. Here’s a link to read about their house and its history. On this page, you can also see the commercial side of the property, and how they have restored it to a look similar to the one it might have had when it was built–over five hundred years ago.

Thank you, dear family, for giving us a peek inside!

Fortunately, the friendly hotelier in the lovely Kammerslusen Hotel outside of Ribe allowed us to hook our electric albatrossvehicle up to an outdoor electric outlet.

I’d like to add here that, in addition to a sparklingly clean room with a view of the river Ribe Å, the Kammerslusen also offers an excellent dinner menu and great Danish hospitality. Surprisingly (to us, anyway), it’s not within walking distance of the town, an attribute we generally look for. Instead, it’s located well withing the Wadden Sea National Park, a large nature preserve of marshes and tidal flats that borders (and extends into) the North Sea.

We climbed the protective dike along the coastal marshlands and got a close look at the lock at the mouth of the river. I gained a whole new respect this day for the sheer beauty of this seaside terrain.

The next day, we knew with certainty what we had to do. Thanks to the Kammerslusen, we had enough charge to get to a Hertz counter, where we traded in the car for a car whose fuel we could pay for with credit card or with cash.

The most charming island

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It’s a lovely island. Enchanting, beautiful, windswept, and enduring all at once.

Its name is only three letters long, and apparently I can’t pronounce even one of them correctly. It’s spelled Ærø. To my ear, that sounds a lot like “Air-rue” [with the “r” trilled slightly]. But try as I may, I can’t seem to tell about it to anyone who actually lives in Denmark. The conversations go like this:

Me: “We visited this really great island. We liked it a lot.”

Danish person: “Oh? What island is that?”

Me: “Ærø.”

Danish person (with a squinty-eyed, puzzled look): “Uh… where?”

Me: “Maybe I’m not pronouncing it right. It’s spelled with that letter that looks like an A and an E combined, then R, then an O with a slash through it.”

Danish person (with a broad smile of recognition): “Ah… Ærø!”

They pronounce the island’s name in a way that sounds to my American ears exactly, but exactly, like the way I pronounced it.

My linguistic failures notwithstanding, I loved the name with its alluringly foreign letters. And I loved the island even more. Its soul is sailing the seas, and its heart is on the land.

Seafaring is particularly evident in Marstal, the largest town on Ærø, from the building of large wooden ships to the small details on the buildings.

The ferry from the mainland town of Svendborg arrives in Ærøskøbing, a delightful town of cobbled streets and colorful houses.

Everywhere, there are hollyhocks and roses, and many of the windows seem to be made for passers-by to look in as well as homeowners to look out.

Outside of the towns, the island has its beauty as well. Sea and sky and land come together very harmoniously on Ærø.

The weirdest museum I’ve ever seen

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The MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) museum in Hobart, Australia may not be the weirdest museum in all the world, but it has to be in the running. Created by billionnaire David Walsh, a math genius who made his money playing the odds, this museum has to be a much better contribution to the world than spending his billions on, well, many of the other things that other billionnaires spend their money on. And let me say right off, Huzzah Mr. Walsh!

How to describe it? First, it’s built into a cliff underneath some existing buildings, cut into the solid rock. If you’re interested in architecture, this interview is worth reading. Also, you have to take a ferry to get there, and you know it’s going to be strange the moment you walk inside.

And it gets stranger after that. Yes, there’s artwork, old and new and new-mimicking-old. There are entire installations. There’s music to experience it all by. There are jazz musicians creating new music real-time on the spot. There are artists creating paintings real-time on the spot. There’s a restaurant and a winery, too. And it’s still being built.

I’m really a little at a loss for words. Fortunately, I have pictures. So, if a picture is worth a thousand words, here goes.

I see I’ve added a number of photos of pictures on walls. This is an impression that is seriously misleading, and I must correct it. This museum is not about pictures on walls. I mean, it *is* about pictures on walls, but it’s also so much more.

White books, white pages
Room of crystals
Soft car

Is it worth a visit if you happen to be, say, anywhere in Tasmania? Yes, absolutely. But is it worth a journey? Let’s just say that Tasmania is worth the journey, and so, yes, please don’t miss this unique museum!

Melbourne — where architecture is fun

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It’s confession time: I studied architecture, have a masters degree in it, in fact, from a university that is very serious about good design. And I believe that most modern architecture, particularly the high-rise vernacular of our center cities, is anything but good design.

But Melbourne is different.

Any city where the architecture makes you smile or even laugh, or shake your head in sheer disbelief… Well, that city has to be fundamentally delightful. And Melbourne is.

Now, come on, tell me, doesn’t this make you laugh out loud? Or at least maybe smile, just a little?

There’s something about the sheer modern exuberance of Melbourne that’s positively contagious.

(Yes, the reflective glass really is purple and blue and orange and green.)

And here’s another thing I like about Melbourne’s architecture: There is a certain respect for their architectural heritage. And that heritage is rich.

Often, the facades of old buildings are preserved even after the building is torn down to make room for a modern high-rise. Sometimes, in fact, the entire old building is preserved, and the high rise is cantilevered right out over it.

The juxtaposition is jarring, but also in a strange way, delightful. And Melbourne is fortunate to have preserved these fine old buildings.

Here and there, too, are classic, timeless, and perfectly lovely details.

Writing Alien Son

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Like my other books, Alien Son is science fiction, with more than a hint of romance.

It’s set in the same world as Saving Aran, and those of you who have read that book will recognize some of the characters. You may remember that there was a mystery in Saving Aran that was not resolved in that book: How can it be that there are humans on both Earth and Aran? These are people so genetically similar that they can interbreed. The odds they would evolve independently on two planets light-years apart are miniscule, like the odds that simple Brownian motion would suddenly lift your entire desk up into the air. Yet, though scientists have searched both planets for any archaeological or other evidence of any kind of alien contact in the past, there is nothing that can explain the existence of these two entirely separate human populations.

There’s also an unresolved personal mystery in Saving Aran. Cort’s father is no longer around. His mother tells him his father “went to Earth.” Does she mean that literally, that he somehow managed to get aboard one of the Earthers’ starships and literally fly to planet Earth? In the slang of the city where Cort grew up, the phrase “went to Earth” is a euphemism for dying. It seems more likely his father died than somehow managed to get to Earth. In the khenaran–the ancient forest–those who die are reborn, but the wise whynywir, who know everything about the planet, have no information about Cort’s father. Is it possible he really did fly to Earth?

Alien Son answers both of these questions. And way more, besides. Best of all, there’s no need to read Saving Aran first. Instead, you can read Alien Son first as a completely stand-alone book, and then later, if you wish, enjoy Cort’s back story.

In Alien Son, we meet Mikel, half Earther and half Arantu, the much-younger son of Cort’s father. The son born on Earth with an Earther mother. The son who is driven to pursue some great accomplishment in his life that will be worthy of his martyr father’s heroic efforts to save Aran from Earther exploitation.

We also meet Aiana, a historian from the far-distant future, who is using time travel based on technology-enhanced lucid dreaming to seek out a historically significant personage from Earth’s past (as she sees it). She finds Mikel on Aran. He’s the one she is looking for, but he has no intention of returning to Earth. Yet he must, for history has already been written. How can she get him to fulfill his destiny, even if it means his death? Worse, her dreaming self is getting harder to control. She’s falling in love with the man.

Time travel, it turns out, is incredibly hard to write. My future could be your past, and both of these might be different from an objectively drawn timeline. There is a very large time loop in Alien Son, spanning millennia of objective time. At any point in the story, the two protagonists know very different things because they’ve been in different objective times at different subjective times.

Finally, I had to draw a flowchart to keep it all straight, and to make sure the time-twisted story is actually self-consistent. I’ve shown this flowchart to a few people, but never publicly, not until now. You are seeing it first, here.

Spoiler alert! If you prefer to enjoy your surprises in the twists and turns of the book, scroll down no further! You can buy the book (or read for free on Kindle Unlimited) here.

Alien Son time loop