Writing, Books, Painting, Politics, Neuroplasticity

I am to be a speaker at 2012′s Global Competitiveness Forum in Riyadh. Past keynote speakers include Bill Clinton, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates. Attending are CEO’s of most multinational corporations. I will speak about my vision for inexpensive international community-based Montessori-type preschools. http://www.gcf.org.sa/en/.

Part of Paul Di Filippo’s marvelous review of IN WAR TIMES and THIS SHARED DREAM   Nice to be in the same league as PK Dick, Pynchon, Priest, Moorcock, and Crowley! 

IWT:  “And her sly depiction of warping realities is worthy of Philip K. Dick. In short, this novel reads like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, seeded with Christopher Priest’s The Separation and watered with some of Michael Moorcock’s multiversal inventions. It should really be on every fan’s shortlist of best books of the past decade.  Additionally, there’s a kind of mythic, familial John Crowley ambiance, as the doings at the ancestral Dance homestead, Halcyon House, resonate with the magical affairs at the Drinkwater manse in Little, Big.”

TSD:  “Goonan also gets a good Henry Kuttner vibe going — recall that writer’s classic “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” in which toys displaced from the future cause children to evolve strangely. Goonan’s take: “The essential agents in Hadntz’s Device, which fostered altruism, were also in the cereal toys she had just sold to General Mills. These agents were transmittable through touch, and through the very air. They formed networks, which would grow. Their molecular design came from another timeline, one in which engineering had accomplished molecular replication. Should one be cut in two, each would regenerate a complete figure. This practically guaranteed worldwide distribution in a short period of time. . . .The urgent necessity for our species to master its worst impulses and take charge of its own destiny — a core tenet of the SF genre — has seldom been conveyed with such emotional and intellectual force.”

Find Paul Di Filippo’s review at BarnesandNobleReview.com and at Salon.com.

I used the Serendipity Book Shop, where I worked (“which I inhabited” might be a more descriptive phrase) for several years in the early 1970′s as a template for the bookstore in This Shared Dream. 

The original was in the Pickett Shopping Center in Fairfax, Virginia.  It was across Little River Turnpike from Robert Frost Middle School, which I attended when it was brand new (we double-shifted at Woodson High until Frost was completed).  As if it had been picked up by a tornado and deposited in Oz, I situated my fictional bookstore in Washington, D.C. 

When you enter DC via Key Bridge, you see directly before you a row of townhouses on M Street, remnants of early Georgetown.  As is the perogative of fiction writers, I used this picturesque location for my fictional bookstore.  In the early sixties, when my family moved to the Washington area, these were decrepit, boarded-up squats.  Presently, they are filled with tony shops.  Sonny’s Surplus was right across the street, and was THE place to stock up on the military outfitting, such as boots and handy, many-pocketed Army jackets (I wore my father’s, but got my Army pack, boots, etc. there) that were de rigueur among certain circles in the late sixties. 

Up Wisconsin Avenue was a tea and coffee shop where I made regular stops; I was a tea connoisseur and loose tea was essential.  I also frequently hit an art shop that carried my green Morilla Clipper Ship blank spiral notebooks; all of my early writing is in these notebooks (easily a hundred of them, presently in boxes).  I went to The Cellar Door, situated almost under the  golden-domed Riggs Bank at the corner of Wisconsin and M as often as possible.   In fact, in doing a search, I realized that I saw the premier performance of “Country Roads” there. 

Georgetown seemed the perfect place for my fictional bookstore, and Serendipity was my home for a long time.  The intellectual spectrum of the books Steve Aloi, the owner, stocked, was lovely, and the books, as they will, infused my being.  I spent all of my pay there and at Giant Music, unfortunately in the same shopping center.  My parents were understanding, and glad that they could afford me this incredible luxury.  Steve Aloi opened several other bookstores, and I worked in two of them, including a closet-sized store in Springfield where I worked all one summer, alone, steadily devouring books, as there were few customers. 

The Serendipity Book Shop was tragically destroyed by a tornado in the mid-1970′s.  It never re-0pened. 

I recently received a nice letter about Serendipity: 

Ms. Goonan — I just started reading This Shared Dream, and found your note about Serendipity Books! My family lived in Fairfax from 1967 and shopped at Pickett. I graduated from Woodson High School, virtually across Little River Turnpike from the shopping center, and I have many fond memories of browsing in Serendipity. What great bookstore, and what a loss.

I’ve enjoyed your work ever since Queen City Jazz, and am delighted to have this chance to say thank you.  

It’s always nice to hear from my readers, and I especially appreciated this note. 

I will be heading to Riyadh this January as one of five members of SIGMA, an SF thinktank, to participate in the 2012 Global Competitiveness Forum. 

I was invited to participate in September, and arrangements are now complete. 

President Bill Clinton and Bill Gates have been recent keynote speakers at the Forum, which includes an international array of CEOs, educators, entrepreneurs, and artists. 

My part of the presentation will include speaking about the possibility of inexpensive, nanotech-produced preschools.  These preschools will be autotelic learning environments that will enable preschool children, who are at the peak of their ability to absorb language, mathematics, and spatial concepts, to become literate and contributing members of our international community. 

I introduced this idea in a talk I gave to the JSSAP in Crystal City a few years ago, and used it fictionally in THIS SHARED DREAM. 

I’m looking forward to this opportunity to put this idea in front of those who have the ability to make this vision real. 

http://www.sigmaforum.org/news.php

Barbara Stafford, a brilliant Visiting Professor (from the University of Chicago) at Georgia Tech,  author of many incisive books about the confluence of the latest neuro research and art, has invited me to read a selection of my fiction to kick off the Neuro-Entanglement Conference at Georgia Tech this coming April.  I am excited about this conference, as it sounds as if it will embody all of my most recent interests.  We live in an exhilarating time–we are in the midst of a revolution in neurology that echoes the revolution in physics that took place a century ago.  I think that it will change many aspects of society, technology, and culture.  It will change us.  We just don’t know how. 

The Neuro-Entanglement Conference is free and open to the public, so watch this space as the time draws near. 

My friend Pam Noles made this work of art for me.  It’s much more beautiful than in this photo.  I was waiting to hang it before posting a picture, but we’ve decided that will require a major rearrangment of Stuff On The Walls, so here it is. 

It was inspired by Queen City Jazz, and here’s a story:  I met Pam in Lakeland, Florida.  We both lived there.  She was on the Lakeland Cop Beat for the Tampa Tribune.  She had just been to Clarion, and wanted to meet other Clarionites and form a writer’s group. 

She showed up at my house one Saturday afternoon.  Soon we moved into the front yard, which was on Lake Morton, the main downtown lake/park in Lakeland.  Everyone has to drive around Lake Morton to get around.  It’s small, but it has Swans.  You can’t beat swans for peevishness and beauty. 

As we sat there, car after car slowed so that people could wave and say hi to Pam–she knew everybody in town because she’d interviewed them or contacted them about stories.  We had great fun, and I gave her the manuscript of Queen City Jazz, then a Work In Progress. 

This hanging is called “Verity” after the main character in QCJ.  Pam sent me the Details of Cloth Provenance with the hanging.  The red and green batik is hand woven and dyed by a woman’s collective in Ghana, the Bees are from “Vintage Mom Cloth from the ’70′s and “snippets from my dining room curtains, which were perfect Bee Yellow color.”  Other greens and yellows are from the Garment Disstrict in downtown LA.  And the Red Button in the center is Vintage Mom Stash. 

Wow. 

We’re hanging it so that it’s one of the first things you see when you come in the front door. 

Wow.  Thanks, Pam!

Dr. Burnett generously did a photoshoot last week.  It was very kind of her, and thanks to her expertise, we came up with some that turned out very well.  Credit for this photo is R.E. Burnett 2011

Jacqueline Royster, Dean of Ivan Allen College at Georgia Tech, where I am a Visiting Professor, came to my Barnes and Noble reading and bought a book!  I was so pleased to see her there.  She said that she and her husband, Patrick, are fans.

If you’re in the Atlanta area, plan to come to the Science Fiction Symposium at Georgia Tech on November 17th.  The public is invited, and it’s free.  Here’s the schedule and description of events:  Science Fiction Symposium 2011 .  This is the same information on the Ivan Allen College schedule:  http://tinyurl.com/6w4r3rt

I will moderate a panel from 4:30-6 featuring Eugie Foster, Chesya Burke, and J. M. McDermott, which will include readings.  I hope to see you there! 

What am I?  I am Everything From My Suitcase in Escondido, just before heading to a fabulous Halloween party on Saturday night near Escondido.  I am so sorry that I left my phone/camera behind (for fear of loss) because there were creaking caskets opening and closing, Eye of Sauron balloons, Skulls with Red Blinking Eyes, a Life-Sized Zombie Removing His Own Head, and lots of wild dancing to a great band next to a big stone bar and a pool.  Most everyone else had bespoke/rented costumes–I particularly liked the Tin Woodsman, Dorothy, and a Toto stand-in, their own Little Dog Too.  But this is me, doing my best with what was at hand–what a blast!  I danced and danced.