(Mobile post.) In Portland. Went to Vancouver Island, then Seattle. Lovely lovely time. Now Portland. Identity crisis at hipster over-exposure. Am I like that? One hopes not. Went to a bridge festival, an incredible farmers’s market with talented young hipsters playing hobo ragtime, spent too much at Powell’s, pesto pizza, microbrews and microbrews. Dance show, free play at theatre festival - Will Eno’s “Gnit,” satirical modernization of Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt.” Hilarious, thoughtful, made me want to write. Chai and dolmas at Tea Lounge, watched indie band with too much delay on lead guitar, made me sleepy. Today, craft fair, brewfest, free concert on bar patio. Loving this town. It’s like they made it just for me.

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I’m in Canada right now. That’s why I haven’t been updating so much. Our wifi connection in this igloo is pretty tenuous. It’s beamed in from a retrofitted Soviet spy satellite.

It was a fairly pleasant journey, though the final four hundred miles by dogsled were a bit arduous. We lashed our animals cruelly, though necessarily, over the frigid peaks where the iron bones of the earth protrude darkly from their icy blankets of death. We passed the frozen skeletons of less fortunate travelers, the foolish yet brave trailblazers whose deaths made our own passage across that forsaken hellscape possible. The wind howled and tore at us as if it would rip the skin from our bones. Then a short bus ride, and we were in Vancouver.

Vancouver is a pleasant city of about two million, situated on the Frozen Hellgulf, where icebergs crowd the black barely-liquid water. Every day is a struggle against the encroaching ice, a Sisyphean war fought by flameships, battleprows, and, rudimentary yet effective and above all necessary, mere men and women armed with pickaxes. The price of failure is apparent in the frozen towers of old Vancouver, trapped in the invincible continent-wide Mother Glacier; the dead poised there still, caught in endless surprise at the advance of this life-hating behemoth.

Yesterday we swam in Deep Cove, where the pine-covered mountains roll down to the blue sea. The water was bracing, remaining liquid somehow at a few degrees above absolute zero, the temperature of a black hole. I swam out to an iceberg and climbed the pellucid peaks of that majestic mountain, and there confronted and slew the wendigo of Canadian lore, cutting its throat with the only weapon capable of piercing its wooly white hide: its own claw. Too tired to swim back to shore, I fashioned a harness of moose leather and tamed a walrus for my mount.

Now, the aurora borealis dance in ethereal ballet above the snow-heaped lawn, a stunning yet inadequate compensation for the perpetual night with which Canadians are punished for their hubris, their fatal pride in settling where humans were not meant to tread. Soon we will eat a sumptuous and welcome dinner of the remains of the crew of the HMS Terror, whose yeti-mauled corpses the Mother Glacier preserved in perpetuity. Randi fumbles with her last match, her numbed fingers frozen into hooks; she considers removing her sealskin mittens to grasp the match better, but at what cost, payable in the cold currency of frostbite?

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Robert J. Sawyer frets that the full-time scifi novelist will be extinct in a decade. Why? Book sales, those internets, etc. There’s a funny moment where he blames the death of Flashforward (the TV series based on his book) on people downloading it and not on the series being terrible, maligned by critics, detested by viewers. I guess he can’t really say that sort of thing. Then he says that really ambitious, complex works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy can’t really be done on a part-time basis. Maybe, maybe not. There are numerous examples of people who believe so much in the power or worth of their projects that they bring them to fruition under the most adverse circumstances. (Then he mentions his WWW trilogy in the same breath as KSR’s majestic Mars trilogy, which, sorry, no.)

Then Scalzi rebuts that Sawyer’s only fretting about a very small percentage of writers. Only a very few, regardless of genre, regardless of point in time, have made a living at writing. Huh. Now that I think about it, wasn’t Poe the first person to make a living from his writing? That would mean that Austen, Defoe, Milton wrote part-time, or as a hobby. Melville wrote everything in the second half of his career while working in a customs office. T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land while working in a frikking bank. Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov under the most penurious poverty. It seems that if you have inspiration and passion, then you will make it happen. Perhaps Sawyer is worried because he doesn’t have the inspiration or passion to keep writing if he can’t do it full-time.

(Well. That’s not exactly fair - after all, he made it to the big time, back in the 80s. He had to have been  struggling writer once, working on his lunch breaks or whatever. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.)

Continuing on this tangent, there are plenty of writers who claimed that they wrote only for money and would quit if they had enough, or couldn’t make any more - Jack London, for one. To myself, and most writers I think, writing is a thing we do because we like to do it, and we’d do it anyway. There’s a lovely Gillian Welch song, “Everything is Free”, which seems like a reaction to file sharing - “Everything is free now/ that’s what they say/ everything we’ve ever done/ they’re gonna give it away”. Then, “I can get a tip jar/ gas up the car/ maybe make a little change/ down at the bar/ because we’re gonna do it anyway/ even if it doesn’t pay.” Yesssss, thinks I. It’s a simple affirmation of her love for her art form.

Cultures do require excess wealth to produce art, but perhaps we overestimate the amount of excess wealth required. It’s not essential, for example, to have an elite of full-time novelists pushing our prose forward. Primitive hunter-gatherers living at a subsistence level had their cave paintings and their oral traditions. It’s the human impulse to create, to make narratives as a tool for understanding the world or enlivening our experience here, and I’m not at all worried that impulse will go away; simply that the model of a few full-time novelists (representing the very top stratum of novelists, each one resting on top of a hundred dayjobbers) can’t survive. That doesn’t bother me. No mistake: I would love to be a full-time novelist. It’s the one thing I’m good at, the one thing I want to do. But I don’t expect it, and I won’t be devastated if it doesn’t come to pass. I like to think I know better than to build my life plans around the whims of indifferent, overwhelmed New York editors and indifferent, overwhelmed audiences. Maybe Sawyer doesn’t realize this because he’s been a pro for so long, but the traditional publishing model is broken, broken, broken, and it must change to survive; or maybe he does realize this, and he’s worried because he doubts his ability to change with it.

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I don’t mind getting vaccinations, but I wish they wouldn’t use the special corkscrew needles. But they tell me they penetrate bone more easily, so…

Yesterday I got Hepatitis A in one arm and Hepatitis B in the other. This is part of the gauntlet of fun that one must brave when becoming an EMT. Next they will ram a giant spear through my torso to see how I react to giant spears rammed through my torso. Next time you see an EMT, shake his hand.

By the time you read this, I will be in the back seat of my parents’ Honda Pilot, bound for Iowa, the state voted “corn-stubbliest”. Family reunion. I’ll be playing bluegrass with some extended family members. I’ve met some. I’ve never met some others. I’ve not seen yet some others in six years or more. I expect it will be a good time. I’m not sure what it says about me that I look forward to periods of enforced nonactivity, like car rides, when I am free to read or play video games on my sundry portable systems. Can I not make time for these things in normal life? Or can I just not justify spending time on these things in normal life? Dunno.

I’ll be finishing David Simon’s Homicide, the book that he wrote after following Baltimore’s homicide unit for a year. It’s funny, it’s beautifully written, it’s profound, it’s generally all things The Wire is. I wish I’d read it before seeing The Wire; it contains important background information regarding the operation of police departments, stuff that you kind of have to piece together in The Wire. I’ll also be finishing my critique of my friend’s first novel, on which I’ve been taking entirely too long.

And I’ll be playing Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey. It’s a more story-driven dark scifi version of Etrian Odyssey, which I will always love, even though it hates me. And I’ve got the Megaman Zero collection to keep me awake when first-person dungeon crawls get too slow.

Steam, the digital distribution service that shows other digital distribution services how it’s done, is having a massive summer sale; I snagged And Yet It Moves, which took all of five minutes to be too hard for my feeble brain - why do I keep buying puzzle platformers? And The Maw, which I might have pirated long ago but never played because I felt guilty about pirating from an indie company so I redeemed myself by buying it on sale for 75% off; and Rocket Knight, which is pure fun shot up the nostrils of my brain. I might also buy GTA IV, which is only five bucks. Five bucks! And the game cost a hundred million to make, sold for sixty bucks a year ago. What a world.

Went to Half Price Books yesterday. Because we’d spent so much on books in the past two months, I’d forced myself to stay away for a few months. My bookshelves were all but full. I could only feasibly hold so many more books in our current domicile. So I waited, like, a month at least before I bought some more.

Got a book by Matt Taibbi. A book on suburban sprawl. A book of Barbara Ehrenreich essays. Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels. The guy at the counter told me, “I tried to get into him. I think you need to be high on something.” Maybe, maybe. Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Sharing Knife, volume four. Someone dumped a bunch of Gene Wolfe, and I snatched it all up, including The Death of Doctor Island and Other Stories and Other Stories, the collection that has such awesome story names: “The Death of Doctor Island,” “The Island of Doctor Death,” “The Doctor of Death Island.” Got China Mieville’s Un Lun Dun. A book by Doris Lessing, whom I’d been wanting to investigate. She won a Nobel Prize, you know. They don’t just hand those out.

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