Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker liked art museums. Classic museums like LACMA, time-specific ones like the Getty, eccentric ones like the Musee Mechanique. There’s a Museum of Neon Art in Los Angeles (currently moving to Glendale, where it will open early next year) that she adored: coloured glass, coloured light, coloured glowing superheated gas – perfection!

I like museums, too, but my favourites are the natural science institutions. Kage would obligingly accompany me  to exhibits on fossils and such; and of course as Angelino kids we were trucked off fairly regularly to the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History in Exhibition Park. We both enjoyed strolling through its cool, marble halls – we both loved the Hall of Gems, the enormous malachite boulder in the front hall, the historic costumes … but I liked to walk among the dinosaurs, and they unnerved Kage. Especially after the buttons were installed to bring some of them to life. Kage would be out examining antique roses in the Park, while I was peering happily up into the jaws of some roaring Tyrannosaurus.

The assemblage at the La Brea Tar Pits on Wilshire Boulevard was perfect for us. It’s where we visited as adults, when we were free to pick our own museum excursions instead of being shipped off on force-fed tours. It has LACMA, the largest art museum in  Western America; its permanent exhibitions are a delight, its rotating ones are legendary (it’s where Kage once, wickedly and astonishingly, touched a Van Gogh). Being constructed, as it is, at Rancho La Brea, LACMA is built on an active and ongoing archeological site – and it shares its location with the George C. Page Museum, wherein all manner of osteological treasures reside. Someone for everyone! At least, when everyone was defined as Kage and I.

The Page Museum was opened in 1977, when we were in our early 20’s. We therefore encountered it as adults, wandering in after a morning spent amid the Rodin reproductions, admiring the mastodons sinking in the tar. There’s an amazing mastodon skeleton in the Page, with such a magnificent sweep of tusk that one gets vertigo just following the curve of its shape. There’s also an exhibit on the only human ever found in the Tar Pits, poor eponymous La Brea Woman: a Tongva lady, most likely, whose polished bones are cyclically clothed in holographic flesh as you stand in from of her case.  It’s assumed, from the scarring on her skull, that she had a galloping sinus infection; she either fell in during her delirium, or was tossed in by her frightened neighbors when she babbled like a demon in her fever. Sad lady, she gave Kage the horrors as she faded in and out of reality in her Snow White glass coffin.

Luckily, Kage’s spirits were always restored by the Wall o’ Dire Wolves. Dire Wolves were once an apex predator around here – lupine giants the size of Smart cars. Hundreds of them have been found in the Tar Pits. I don’t know to which admiring curator this idea first occurred, but eventually someone had the idea of mounting their most eye-catching remains. There was a wall of dire wolf skulls – which I think is still there – toothy jaws agape, from teeny puppy-wolves whose baby teeth were mostly pitiful, to great elders who could easily have bitten my arm off. But even those were not as impressive as the bacula display.

I don’t know if it’s still there. I should go look. It was a huge box of glass, taller than our heads, mounted in front of a window – and silhoetted there against the northern light were hundreds of bacula … Kage was entranced.

Bacula, Dear Readers, in case you are unaware, are penile bones. Most mammals have them, a handy little built-in marital aid. Even most primates have them, though they aren’t very large in gorillas or chimpanzees. They are absent, though, in  equids, elephants, monotremes, marsupials, lagomorphs, hyenas, and cetaceans. And humans.

In almost every culture, they are magic. Human culture, anyway – but then, human males don’t have any, and must have noticed their lack when butchering other animals. Maybe the wolves and ferrets and cats don’t worry about them; and the rabbits and horses have other masculine claims to fame. But for humans, they are often warrior magic; walrus bacula, for instance, are used for Inuit war clubs. Kage’s theory about the display in the Page Museum was that it was part of the place’s spiritual protection – which she felt was badly needed, what with the unfortunate LaBrea Woman out there in the front hall.

Anyway, that afternoon in the Page Museum was where we first found out they even existed. It was just the sort of revelation that museums are supposed to deliver – something outlook-broadening, something to change the whole way you look at the world around you! Ideally, these magic moments are not confined to children, but accessible to adults as well. We were certainly enlightened by the bacula display …

“Wow,” I remember Kage saying, gazing in fascination at the display. “The ways of the Lord are indeed marvelous.”

Tomorrow: more from Castle Bacula

Kage Baker once commented that she could not recall when she first learned about evolution.  (Neither can I.) The many details of its development were unfolded to her later: Lamarck, Darwin and Wallace; its symbiotic relationship with geology; devo-evo, punctuated equilibrium and the wonderful universe of genetics which Darwin never knew.

All those details she learned later. But evolution wasn’t something that came up a lot in casual conversation (at least, before our book-soaked teens) and so nothing stood in her mind as a revelation. It wasn’t revelatory. It was just part of How Things Work.

What Kage did find amazing was that she couldn’t pinpoint where she learned this. Darwin’s theory of evolution has been a big gaudy pin around which endless garish controversy has spun since its first publication. It’s one of the few major battles of the Victorian Age that is still being fought today. Malaria is one – colonial rule is another, still hanging on here and there – and opposition to evolution is still big as well. So it’s surprising that Kage just absorbed it with a lot of other childhood information.

One of the advantages she had was a Catholic education. The Roman Catholic Church has always maintained a polite indifference to evolution, unlike the more fundamentalist Christian sects. The Days of God’s Creation are not the same length as the secular ages of geology, and the Vatican is serenely untroubled by the difference. God started the engine of life, and what life got up to after that is its own business.

I think some of the Magisterium took a quiet lesson from all the brouhaha over Galileo. You never know when one of these scientific Johnnies would turn out to be mechanistically and embarrassingly correct, so it was best not to get too involved. Besides, I think some of the Cardinals may have actually read Mr. Darwin’s work, and noticed that never once did that good man venture an opinion as to the ultimate source of Creation. Indeed, Mr. Darwin ascribed the wonder of evolution as a glory to God.

Somehow, the fundamentalists have never noticed this. They don’t know what the word theory means, either.

Anyway, evolution was something Kage “always” knew. The interesting modern stuff – jumping and junk genes, punctuated equilibrium, telomeres and gene pairs, etc. – she learned later, as the evolution of evolution. But geology and genetics interested her much more than evolution itself, which was about as exotic to Kage as gravity. I mean, there it was: what’s to get excited about?

I told her lots of what was to get excited about over the years – I remained fascinated by the biological sciences – and she incorporated what pleased her into stories. The idea that living organisms could have more than 2 sets of genes; the romances of domestication, that have given us corn and tame cows and friendly wolves; what and how mutation really works. She mourned the impossibility of the X-Men, though. But who hasn’t?

Today being August 20th, we mark an anniversary. Quietly, as befits the dignified forum in which the theory of evolution was first published. On August 20, 1858, the Darwin-Wallace Papers were read before the august Linnean Society of London:

“On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection,” By Charles Darwin, Esq., F.R.S., F.L.S.., & F.G.S., and Alfred Wallace, Esq.

The papers were subsequently published in the Journal of that body. Darwin’s entire work, On The Origin of Species, was published in November of the following year. While some people feel Darwin rushed to this publication in order to prevent his long labour from being scooped by Wallace, one must also consider that Darwin knew his researches to be much the more thorough – and  wanted to make sure Wallace got his due, though he had come  late to the argument (and still espoused Lamarckism).

I’m pleased, on this anniversary, to know that even 50-odd years ago this was a world where a little girl – armed with a good encyclopedia and some careful teachers – could absorb Mr. Darwin’s beautiful theory of the structure of Life so early and so thoroughly that she could not afterwards remember when she learned it. That’s not only The Way Things Are, it’s The Way They Ought to Be.

So get out there and contribute to evolution, Dear Readers. Here, you ancient single-celled organism, you archeobacteria, you mitochondrium that’s been riding in my mother’s genes for the last 4 billion years – a glass with you!

Kage Baker worshipped the cartoonist Walt Kelly.

That is not at all too strong a word. She always held artists in the high esteem of secular Bhodisattvas, and Kelly was a fine artist. She admired humourists who could be satiric without resorting to the crudity of meanness: Kelly’s work was unfailingly compassionate. And she prized intelligence – Kelly was (in my opinion, too) one of the best political cartoonists of the 20th Century.

Kage made do through childhood with the Sunday funnies in a now defunct San Fernando Valley paper, and a couple of Mr. Kelly’s books that were lying around the house – all sorts of things were lying around the house; Momma’s house attracted weird detritus like the attics of the Smithsonian. Later on, she assiduously collected everything Mr. Kelly wrote, and we treasured them.I need to dig them out soon. These summer dog days are the perfect time to re-read them …

I remember those cartoon compilations well: I myself learned to read from them, which permanently warped my ability to spell. However, I did learn to memorize and recite pages and pages of witty dialect in an Okefenokee dialect. Some of those distinctive comments are still staples of the family vocabulary …

Friday the 13th come on a Saturday this month  (or whenever it comes …)

This (fill in the substance of choice) got a tasteless kind of taste on it.

The Cherokees is escaped from Fort Mudge!

I done got the cold robbies.

A good-looking man look good in whatever he throw on – the serene claim of  the dapper Albert the Alligator, one of Kage’s first crushes

And then there were the names of the boats. The setting of Pogo being, after all, a swamp, our heroes spent a lot of time in boats. Kage loved those boats – especially the cunningly rendered, madly peculiar houseboats Kelly would pen, with a single pole or a rudder hung with a glowing lantern; a hammock between the stern pole and the deck house roof, and a stove pipe made of a battered top hat. Most of the them, though, were drifting flatboats, the very vessels of dream and leisure, with an entranced fisherman at each end and a universe of cypresses and flying herons in silhouette behind them …

The boats usually had the names of Kelly’s friends and family: The Hon. John Lardner. Rosemary G. Good Ol’ Bob. Sometimes the bigger ones had names from vaudeville or chautauqua shows or venerable paddle wheel boats. Kage loved them.

Walt Kelly drew a world of exquisite beauty, and peopled it with marvellous … things. A virtuous possum, a tarnished knight of an alligator, an owl and a turtle whose combined brain wattage couldn’t power a lightning bug. They were all milk-out-your-nose funny, too, and Mr. Kelly used them with perfect timing to comment on the politics of the middle 1900’s. The missile crises, the Cold War, the increasingly insane Presidential races. The obscenities of McCarthyism embodied in a scruffy bobcat named Simple J. Malarky. Edgar Hoover as a miniature bulldog in a celluloid collar, trimming two legs off a baby spider so it could double as an asterisk and change history’s footnotes.

Mr. Kelly is best remembered by most for an environmentalist punchline: We have met the enemy and he is us! But he was a canny, clear-eyed commentator on all the nonsense that comes out of Washington. I fondly think Congress might not be being quite so asinine if there were someone around to gently puncture their egos with a sword-wielding possum.

I wish to all the maker gods that he was with us right now. This deep in summer … Kage would want to be in one of Mr. Kelly’s iconic boats, drifting beneath the Spanish Moss in some shady bayou. She’d be anticipating perloo for dinner, maybe with fried catfish; she’d be utterly boneless and relaxed, sure there could be nothing permanently wrong with the world if one could just journey awhile down a cool stream of lucidity in some boat named  That Good Man, Walt Kelly …

Kage Baker.

That’s it. That’s the extent of my creativity today. That constant introductory topic; and then there’s a wall. It’s not even an interesting wall. It’s flat and beige and utterly without decorative or artistic merit, and 98% of my mind is behind it. I’m sitting on a flattened cardboard box in the doorway, blankly watching the day go by.

In my memory, Kage is sitting slumped and boneless in her armchair, in the white silk tropic jammies she wore on hot days, fighting the summer doldrums with the wind from the big standing fan and  flipping through the Mexican soap operas – she loved those things. Especially the historical ones, with medieval costuming and modern hair styles. She’s listlessly debating whether it should be ice cream or Italian ices for dinner.

“Oh, screw it,” she finally decides. “It’s gin and tonic weather.”

And that sounds fine to me. Maybe ice cream and gin and tonics. Maybe ice cream in the gin and tonics.

It’s hot and dull, here in Los Angeles, in what passes for reality – other parts of the city are at least enjoying a battle for survival, as the humidity climbs toward 50% and the temperature to triple digits.. Out at the beach they’ve got a sort of boiling fog situation; and the San Fernando Valley is reaching for 104 at the moment while the sea-fog is already trying to sneak back over the Santa Monica mountains.

Here, though, it is just hot and dull. The air smells of hot dust. The sky is that weird flat pastel blue you ordinarily only see on VW Bugs – that special ugly shade, that seems to have undercoats of grey and yellow. The air is better than it used to be here in the Valley of the Smokes, but it still forms photoreactive smog on a hot day … all my furred and feathered friends look at me with glazed eyes that say, “We died of ennui and won’t come back to life until the sun goes down.”

I fear I am both bored and uninspired. I am going to go on a mad spending spree in the discount Kindle store, and curl up with iced coffee and a dozen books.

The rest of you stay cool!

Kage Baker loved modern plumbing. She had a deep emotional relationship with her bathroom, which included a territoriality that would put a wolverine to shame.

Kage grew up in a house with a daily minimum of 8 people. There were three bathrooms, it was true, but with a horde of kids (and friends) all over the place, one of them was always out of order.  The one off the kitchen hall was a particular problem, because the toilet was the logical place to stand if you were climbing in or out of the window; it was frequently broken by falling children. Decorations or frilly touches were impossible – you considered yourself lucky if the last user had remembered to replace the toilet paper.

Doing historical  re-creation events wasn’t quite as bad – chemical toilets but none of them being used by our brothers … Still, Kage and I both wanted better, which we eventually got with some creative privacy systems. Nor was this plumbing solipsism, oh, no! – everyone in our troupe benefited from having a private privy hidden behind our set, where it was not at the mercy of 300 clumsy strangers every day … it was so popular, in fact, that we had to keep a lock on it; the combination was a great and deadly State Secret. Sometimes the combo would get out, and I’d resort to a key lock: which was chained to a privy monitor, who verified the eligibility of every postulant to the Seat of Ease and let them in …

We hung gauze bags of lavender blossoms in there – best bathroom  deodorant ever. For a while, my ladies included bottles of waterless hand sanitizer too, but while  reading the label during an enforcedly-idle moment, I discovered that that stuff is flammable! After that, I required that it be kept outside … these were still infinitely better arrangements than the public privy banks.

Once Kage and I left home,  our bathrooms were unabashedly girly. (Male guests learned to cope. They always do.) Everything was perfumed, and alarming portions of it were pink. There was art on the walls! The shower curtain had a pretty pattern! The windowsills and toilet backs were decorated with coloured glass and sea shells! Though that last custom was abandoned after a big conch shell fell into the toilet one Christmas Eve – the shell was unscathed but the toilet bowl shattered, and we had a lot worse to worry about than coal in our stockings for awhile there.

Our last apartment had the unbelievable luxury of two bathrooms!!! We got totally spoiled. We never used one another’s baths without express permission. They were the most highly individualized rooms in the place.  Kage’s was all beach deco and sand motifs; she had a hanging shelf shaped like a rowboat, and a frieze of beach chairs around the ceiling edge. She used green tissue and toilet paper. Her nightlight was a skull and crossbones carved in agate. My bathroom was moons and stars and midnight blue towels; blue tissue, blue Kleenex in a cover decorated with stars. My nightlight was a spray of glowing optic fibers, and there were blue-white faerie lights hung around the mirror.

Our bathrooms in our 50’s were decorated right out of our teens. It was great.

Today, my sister Kimberly’s bathroom went berserk. Nothing would drain or flush. One of the cats, evidently driven mad by wet paws, decided the laundry hamper was her cat box: more to mop up. This is a little stucco California cottage of a house, almost a century old – there is but the one bathroom … we have spent the last several hours waiting for, and then supervising, the plumbers who came to save us. They were quite nice, really, aside from desperately wanting to sell us liability protection we didn’t need; and they restored our one bathroom to functionality.

They heroically even stayed to help out a neighbor  across the way with the same problem. It appears the basic blockage is in the main under the street, in the 8-inch city pipes – so now we are hacking our way telephonically through the thorny mazes of the DWP. Chinatown is still happening in Los Angeles, and the water department is still psychotic – but nowadays they can stick you on hold forever instead of slitting your nostrils. I guess that’s better.

In the meantime, every flush of the toilet is like pulling the lever on a slot machine.

Me, I am gonna go dig out the old camping toilet. And a bag of lavender blossoms.

Kage Baker was a cryptozoology fan. She followed strange, mythical, newly discovered or recently missing animals stories closely, finding a lot of fodder for stories in them. It amused us to keep track of “Company projects” in the news – a lot of our friends and family still do, and send their finds gleefully to me.

I got one today from an old friend, Tom Westlake – our own, our very own Lord of Misrule. He sent me a link to a fascinating chupacabra story, complete with video – and not the usual hairless coyote loping in front of a police camera, glancing over its shoulder at the astonished arms of the Law. It’s from St. George County, Maryland, where a group of people filmed and briefly captured a strange little creature. They claim it’s a chupacabra. What is is, certainly, is yet another “unknown canid” – feral, slate blue and extravagantly bald. What the hell is going on with chupacabras?

Kage was quite fascinated, not so much with chupacabras as with their swift, modern evolution in the news. What began as bad sketches of red-eyed insectile humanoids has changed universally to videos of hairless blue canids – at least in the United States. Here, though, they seem to wander back country roads and primly leave the goats alone; this one was trapped using leftover Chinese food – which it seems to quite enjoy. Far from the snarling little bidedal horrors of the original myth, what we see nowadays are usually pegged as coyotes or foxes with appalling mange.

Take a look:

http://www.tbd.com/articles/2011/08/prince-george-s-county-chupacabra-caught-on-video-65184.html

Its captors immortalized it on video and then turned it loose. I don’t blame them; there is something a little pitiful about it. It’s so very bald … on the other hand, while I applaud not turning the chupacabra over to heartless scientists, I rather wish they had at least consulted a vet. Maybe something could be done about its mange. Or we could at least find out if some branch of the Canidae  has thrown a mutation that is normally, healthily, bald as an egg and the colour of a walking bruise.

Frankly, I think it’s rather pretty. I also think it’s a fox – the long legs, the delicate facial bones, the huge ears. Also, at the end of the tape, there is the hint of a white tuft of hair still decorating its very, very long tail. All in all, it’s a rather fey looking wee beastie, and not scary at all. I guess a chicken or a mu gu gai pan might feel differently, but I can’t imagine this critter successfully menacing a goat …

A far cry from the South American versions, which attack goats fatally and make threatening gestures at distressed goatherds with huge, lobsterish claws. But it’s definitely the same thing seen in recent years all over the United States. So what it is? No one knows, it’s a mystery.

I must have watched this clip a couple of dozen times today, studying the beastie. That’s one of the reasons this post is so late. Also, though, I had to write that forward for  Tachyon Publishing on Kage’s silent movie reviews – which I did manage to complete and get in on time! Took some family members shoe shopping. Waited by the door (biting my nails supportively) while nephew Michael took his first driving lesson, and applauded his triumph as he returned not only unscathed but more than ready to hit the road in the family car. Have cheered on the production of meatloaf, and failed to convince Harry the parrot that sugar cane is a nice treat and not a disguised parrot-eater.

Busy day. Kage business, writing business, ordinary life business, and a nice little dollop of weirdness just so I know it’s still my life.

And now, Dear Readers, time for a refreshing iced coffee drink and a dive back into “Marswife”. Because a volume of Mars stories is due next year, and I’m a little short …

I ordered egg roll ...

Kage Baker dearly loved the city of San Francisco. She never lived there – in that she never inhabited any structure in the city (except, from time to time, the Cow Palace …) – but she experienced a great deal of her life there. As it were.

It had been an important city to Daddy, in his youth; he took Kage there once when she was 4 or 5, on a trip. Just the two of them; Kage was never sure why, and so I don’t really know why a young husband and father went to that great Babylon By the Bay with his toddler daughter in tow … I only know they had a great time, and Kage spent the rest of her life trying to re-locate landscapes from that trip. She had a remarkable success rate, too, based (I think) on a combination of memorized geographic coordinates and knee-level eidetic memories of assorted building fronts … this is just a guess on my part, though, based on driving by lots of places on impossibly slanted streets, with Kage hanging out the passenger side window yelling, “That’s where Daddy was a car salesman!”

One torrentially raining afternoon, we drove around the hills South of Lombard Street (a very interesting place to go up and down streets, rather like test-driving an Escher print) while Kage looked for a place Daddy had lived. She’d seen a small black and white photo of it once; in a rare instance of locating source material, she actually had it with her. And we found it! At least, we got close – close enough to see the address numbers and know it was, indeed, The Place. Kage was half out the window, rain soaking her hair and running down her braid like a waterfall, as I tried to get the car closer – but the tidal surge of the water rushing downhill by the curb caught us, and literally swept our tiny car halfway down the block … in the rear view mirror, it looked like a definite possibility we were going to be swept right across Lombard and Chestnut and the Marina and straight into the Bay. I was screaming like a banshee by the time I got the car under control and the spectre of Alcatraz diminished behind us.

Kage was exultant.

“We found it, we found it!” she chanted, bouncing up and down in her seat like that 4-year old. “I want a drink to celebrate!”

“You maniac! We nearly ended up in the Bay!” I screamed at her.

“Oh, screw you, we’d have stuck on the lawns down in the Marina,” said Kage imperturbably.

Which was true – there’s a whole wide park there – so I calmed down and we drove out to Cliff House for Irish coffees. They make wonderful ones there.

Even when we not doing anything in the City herself, Kage liked to drive through it. Most of our routes between Pismo Beach and Vallejo, or Los Angeles and Novato, or just here and there on an open-ended jaunt, were designed to at least take us through San Francisco. Kage just liked to breathe the air and bask in the glassy vistas. Well-meaning friends were always giving us shortcuts, unaware that the actual point of our eccentric routes was to swing through the Mission District and end up going east on the Bay Bridge so as to catch the lights of the Embarcadero at just the right time …

Even when we stayed in nearby towns – for Faires, usually – Kage liked to check up on the night life in San Francisco. We seldom got there, and never on a Faire night – we were the walking dead on Saturday nights during Faires – but she liked to see what was happening. For years at the Faire in Novato, one of our troupe members would bring in the Sunday Chronicle every week; Kage would sit under the great buckeye tree, sipping coffee and happily reading the Pink Pages. Those are the Entertainement supplement, giving all the plays and movies and art riots scheduled for the next week.

What Kage loved most about the Pink Pages was their rating system – not stars, not thumbs up or down, but The Little Man cartoons. These were a sketches of a prim little fellow with a bowler hat, whose posture in his theatre seat indicated how good the show was. The poses ranged from an empty seat – too bad to go see – to an ecstatic little man leaping up and down in his seat and about to smoosh his bowler into happy mush. That was Kage’s favourite. An amusing interpretation of it can be found here; I saw it on the excellent BoingBoing site this morning:

http://boingboing.net/2011/08/15/anthony-ausgangs-reinterprets-the-sf-chronicles-famed-little-man-cartoon.html

I will be in San Francisco next month, from the 9th to the 12th – going to SF in SF, a wonderful monthly series of readings hosted by the splendid Terry Bisson. You can find out all about it here: http://www.sfinsf.org/, including the important fact that all proceeds go to the Variety Children’s Charity. And you may take my word for it, Dear Readers, that it is a splendid event. With a bar.

I’ll also be going to the anniversary party of the esteemed Tachyon Press, with whose noble publisher – Jacob Weisman, may his tribe increase! – I just concluded a phone call regarding his release of Kage’s silent movie reviews. Jacob hopes to debut the volume at the September 13th party. Sooo … I had better go and work on the 500 word forward I just promised Jacob. By tomorrow.

The Little Man is definitely jumping up and down now!

Kage Baker often complained about the sporadic nature of a writer’s life. Either one has half a dozen deadlines gnawing at one’s heels, or nothing happens for months on end. She once went through an entire year where she sold only 1 story (the nadir of her career,she felt). But by the year she died, she literally could not finish stories fast enough to satisfy editors. Everything she wrote was bespoke; the only things she didn’t do on request are in the notes and conversations she left to me.

She also said that the only way to even out this boom-and-bust cycle was to write every single day just as if someone were jigging from foot to foot by the front door, begging for the copy. And that’s what she did. And when a request came in for a story about cyber-badgers in a month, or editing changes that had not been sent to her until she had 72 hours to complete them – why, the machinery was already in motion; all she had to do, as it here, was replace the paper in the press with something fresh and keep going.

Once you are flying like a bat out of hell, she said, you can change direction easily. You’ll get wherever you’re going fast, at least.

That equipoised philosophy did not prevent her from screaming imprecations and raging around the living room when these things happened. But it kept the hysteria down a good ways. And she never said NO to anything. She probably should have, from time to time, but she would instead grin and quote that story about the thief who persuaded a sultan to postpone his execution for a year while he taught the sultan’s horse to sing: A lot can happen in a year. I might die – the sultan might die – the horse might die. And maybe, just maybe, the horse will learn to sing.

I have a ways to go, I think, before I can reach that plateau of confidence where I feel aggrieved to be interrupted.  I’ve spent so much of the last year and a half clinging to a log off a lee shore, I’m grateful for any little sign that things are working out. If the vortex swings me a few yards closer to shore – huzzah! Maybe a gull will drop a turtle on me. Or a Big Mac.

Suddenly, all manner of things are gelling. The Women of Nell Gwynne’s II was accepted by Subterranean Press – to my growing amazement and delight, the lovely Bill Schafer likes it as is, without any cuts or further revisions. (Note to all my fellow writers – naturally, what the publisher gets is never the first version: more like the 5th or 6 generation of the original idea. It’s still a rare delight when they don’t want further major changes!)

I can now confidently report that the sequel to Nell Gwynn will be:

Nell Gwynn’s On Land and At Sea; or

Who We Did On Our Summer Holidays

Unbelievable as it seemed, I got the subtitle accepted. Whoo-hoo! It’s silly and childish, but it’s what pleased Kage. And, for further delight, J.K. Potter will once again be doing the cover, so it will be gorgeous. That’s all I know so far, Dear Readers, but I do know that much.

Also, Tachyon Press is looking into printing Kage’s reviews of silent SF&F films (done for tor.com in her last year) as a stand-alone volume. Tachyon are the grand people who did such a lovely job on Hotel Under The Sand (thank you, Jacob!). I’ll be in San Francisco on September 9th and 10th, for Tachyon’s anniversary party and to discuss that. A great idea!

In the meantime – I need to write some flap copy and a  brief “How We Did It” forward to NGII. Also work on “Marswife” and “The Fog King”. And wait for whatever new requests come in from the aether. Because, as sure as winter comes, no sooner will I get stuck well into part of the current tasks than a new one will arrive. Or an idea will strike my brain irresistibly. Or the little black cat will disconnect a vital cable behind my slave drive and plunge me into the outer darkness; where there will be weeping and the gnashing of cats …

Or perhaps the parable of the thief, the sultan and the sultan’s horse will come true! I would certainly say, as this point, that the horse is undeniably humming …

Kage Baker was left-handed. Not the impaired type of left-handed: she could use her right hand for some things. In fact, she couldn’t even use those special southpaw scissors, because she learned how to cut with ordinary scissors at home long before she got sent to the nuns. Paper dolls and spaghetti – we both liked the old Betsy McCall dolls in the magazines (does anyone else remember those?), and Momma’s creative solution to half a dozen small kids and noodles was to issue baby scissors with the spoons …

Not that the nuns in school were inclined to indulge her lefty tendencies. Most of the sisters pointedly ignored it, though they did issue poor grades in penmanship – a fair cop, as Kage’s cursive was astoundingly unreadable. There were only a few of them who decided to punish her handedness – the usual lectures and knuckle rapping. They failed. Kage was left-handed, and obstinately refused to change.

She always claimed this was a very wise decision on her part: had she given in to changing hands, she would have had a wall-eye and a stutter.  That’s very likely true – forcibly changing handedness is one of the causes of stuttering. Kage wisely decided to skip that stigma. She had enough trouble, with the more medieval-minded nuns, in being left-handed and red-haired.

Being left-handed taught her to improvise a lot of ordinary coordination tricks. She was always interested in calligraphy – which she taught herself to do backwards and upside down, so as to avoid smearing the newly-inked letters with her following wrist. The finished script was oriented normally: she just wrote it out starting from the right, and wrong way up. Sometimes she penciled it in first, just to be careful. But I have seen her printing long passages for notes and invitations ex tempore and totally back to front with never a flaw.

She liked to assemble model ships; right-handers watching her would cringe and fret, expecting her at any moment to slice her fingers off with the strangely-held Exacto blade. On the other hand, Kage used a computer mouse with her right hand, simply because most CPU’s and keyboards initially only had ports  for the mouse on the right side. By the time cordless mice appeared, she was set in her ways – the mouse stayed on the right. Besides, that left her dominant left hand free to do … dominant things.

She frankly did not care which way refrigerators or cupboards opened: but she always noticed which way they went. Left-handers do.  Huge amounts of the world are hinged backwards for them. They also automatically head for the ends and corners of booths and tables in large seating arrangements – they need the extra elbow room to avoid their right-handed dining companions. The last few years of her life, Kage especially like sharing Thanksgiving dinner with the blessed Skolds and Rettinhouses – half of them are left-handed too, and everyone knew how to compensate for the forks flashing in all directions. (Thank you, Carol Skold!)

Kage was actually proud of being left- handed. Whether or not it’s true that lefties are more creative, she nonetheless shared the condition with a lot of very creative people. Leonardo de Vinci, Michaelangelo, Durer, Holbein, Raphael, Escher; Lewis Carroll, H.G. Wells, Cole Porter, Paul McCartney; W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo. Also 8 U.S. Presidents and assorted crowned heads – Queen Victoria, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Ramses II … for a star-studded list of examples, check this out:

http://www.indiana.edu/~primate/left.html

Also, in Kage’s own multiverse, all the Children of the Sun. Every last one of them is left-handed; she made it a racial trait, striking a symbolic blow for the sinister minority of this world. Then she made them master artificers as well, so that somewhere there would be an entire clever civilization where nothing was hinged backwards. If you were left-handed, anyway …

Today – August 13th – is International Left-Handers Day. Find someone who is left handed and be especially nice to them. Buy them a drink or a left-handed pen. Open that backwards-hinged cupboard and give ’em a cookie. The world’s just not the same without them.

Kage Baker didn’t like most humans very much. But she didn’t like most animals, either.

The curious thing about her generalized dislike is that it led her to a wider recognition of sentience, emotions, intellect – humanity – than most people develop. Maybe it was being a science fiction writer, whose tendencies  favour a more experimental view of what constitutes “people”. Maybe it was the Asperger’s, which really makes one work at defining human in the first place. Maybe it was just hyper-critical Kage, who never took a revealed  truth for granted until she’d analyzed it herself.

She especially didn’t like primates – the larger ones, particularly; the more they looked like human beings, the less she could stand them. We always had to avoid the ape displays in zoos, unless it was for some of the tiny little guys that look like evolved cats – tamarins, marmosets. The clever hands were cute – the humanoid faces gave her the horrors. There is nothing so disturbing as something that looks almost human.

And, let’s face it, most of our relatives act like us. Which is not too attractive a set of behaviours.

Oddly enough, gorillas were pretty much acceptable – perhaps because they don’t look or act as much like us as chimps do. They are honestly a little alien. They have an innate slowness, thoughtfulness and steadiness that is not apparent in either chimpanzees or humans; maybe because they are basically herbivores. Maybe they just pursued some quieter intellectual pathway than anything the more hysterical members of the family – that would be us and chimps – bothered to explore. She was horrified at the plight and fate of gorillas, but not by the creatures themselves.

But Kage couldn’t stand chimpanzees. She thought they were downright horrible. Until she began to research them …

For a story called “Hanuman”, she decided to find out all she could about chimpanzee society. It’s a fool these days who denies they have societies, even culture; the information compiled over the last 30 years or so makes it very plain that there is a lot going on under those hairy foreheads. Kage encountered this information with very few preconceptions, due to her lack of previous interest. She studied  intently; she pursued the articles on communication, ritual behaviour, tool-making, mental illness, child care … she finished with The Chimpanzees of Gombe, figuring that Dr. Goodall would be both the most scholarly and the least objective.

When she was done, she looked up and said, “Jesus, these are people.”

And that was how she wrote about them. Also how she spoke of them hereafter; how she regarded them. She continued to collect information, to study and learn about chimpanzees. She came to the conclusion that they were getting a rotten deal from us, that Homo sapiens was committing a dreadful sin in its treatment of Pan troglodytes and that someday we’d have a huge debt to pay off.

It wasn’t anthropomorphism – I think Kage had trouble anthropomorphising humans. But she had no difficulty at all in recognizing sentience when it bit her on the nose, as it were. She became convinced, as the goal posts kept moving all over the field with desperate scientists in pursuit, that there was a lot more to intelligence than the cut and dried definition of Man. Darwin commented that he felt the intelligence of non-humans was a difference not of kind, but of quality – that animals’ minds worked just like ours, but not with the wattage we exhibit.

Mr. Darwin has proven to be, in this as in so much else, essentially correct. Test after study after article has shown – in all animals, but especially in primates – that while we might be the only 8-cylinder mental engines, everyone else is still using the same model we are. We can even see how a tune-up might increase the power available to our closest relatives.

I was brought to recalling this by a spate of recent articles like this one:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/science/09chimp.html?_r=1

And this one:

http://io9.com/5830123/chimp-and-human-brains-are-even-more-alike-than-we-thought

Also, by the fact that I have to re-read “Hanuman” today – which was the pivot point of Kage’s change of attitude. And the fact that a new Planet of the Apes movie is out. I have watched them all so far. I read the Boulle novel when I was 12, and have loved the ideas ever since. Kage finally read it too, when this new view of our cousins burst on her – it contributed to the weight of her final observation, horrified and astonished as it was. It’s how I’ve always felt, too:

“Jesus, these are people.”