Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman is an author, born in Oklahoma but presently residing in Gainesville, Florida. He may not be a household name, but he's very well known to science fiction fans around the world. He's a recipient of the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, a SFWA Grand Master, and a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

He was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving as a combat engineer in the Vietnam war. He was wounded in combat, and received the Purple Heart. These experiences inspired his first novel, War Year, in 1972, and also influenced later books such as Old Twentieth and Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds.

In 1975, he received an MFA degree in Creative Writing. Somewhere along the way, he drifted down to Florida, and why he chose Gainesville as his home, I'm not sure. His brother, the late Jack C. Haldeman II, also lived in Gainesville, and both brothers authored Star Trek novels - Jack wrote Perry's Planet and Joe wrote Planet of Judgment and World Without End.

His greatest claim to fame, some say, is his 1974 opus The Forever War, but for my money you can't beat his novella The Hemingway Hoax.

In 1921, Ernest Hemingway's wife lost a bag containing the manuscript of his first novel on a train. Since that time, people have wondered what the book contained, and whether it could still be floating around out there. Haldeman's story tells of a man named Baird who, along with a Key West grifter named Castle, propose to create a fake manuscript of Hemingway's lost novel and pass it off as a historic discovery.

Baird later finds, however, that there are cosmic time-traveling entities who monitor life in our universe and in parallel universes, and for complicated reasons, anything that affects the cultural influence of Hemingway is a matter of grave concern to them. If Baird publishes the fake Hemingway novel, it will alter the future in ways that will lead to nuclear war, Baird is told, and will create reverberations that will be catastrophic all through the omniverse as well.

Hemingway himself time-travels to 1996 to personally confront Baird on a train from Boston to Florida, and warns him to give up on the idea. What happens then? Well, read the book.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Marjorie Kinnan was born in 1896 in Washington, D.C., and was a precocious writer, publishing short stories in newspapers in elementary school, and winning a literary prize for her story The Reincarnation of Miss Hetty at the age of 15.

She married Charles Rawlings in 1919, and the couple moved to Louisville, KY, where they both worked for the Louisville Courier-Journal. By 1928, they'd relocated to Cross Creek, Florida, where they lived on a 72 acre orange ranch. Mr. Rawlings did not take to Florida living, but Marjorie fell in love with the area and its "Florida Cracker" culture, which transformed her writing. But the crackers weren't so in love with Marjorie and didnt know what to make of this big-city girl who was suddenly writing about them. In 1930, Scribner's accepted two of her stories, "Cracker Chidlings" and "Jacob's Ladder," with characters based on her neighbors at Cross Creek. Locals became paranoid and uppity, in a textbook example of one of a writer's worst problems - the "Hey, is that character supposed to be ME?" syndrome. One mother reportedly recognized, or claimed to recognize, her son as the subject of a story and threatened to whip Rawlings until she was dead.

(Oh, those Florida crackers! They're a little funny in their ways, but you gotta get to know 'em. Oh, they may threaten to kill you, but that's just their way. Marjorie should have just thanked her lucky stars she wasn't yet living in the age of meth, "bath salts" and oxycontin.)

Marjorie's first novel, all about the lives of Florida Moonshiners, was called South Moon Under, published in 1933. To get the necessary realism for the story, she actually lived with a moonshiner in Ocala for several weeks. I wonder what hubby thought of that? Apparently not much, for in that same year he left her and moved back north.

Her three most popular books then followed: The Yearling, When the Whipporwill, and Cross Creek. In particular, The Yearling was her true claim to fame, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1939 and was subsequently made into a very successful Hollywood movie. Suddenly she found herself deluged with offers, deals, fan mail and friends, but chose to continue living the simple life in the swamplands.

But reality just wouldn't stand for Marjorie's reportage. In 1943, she faced a libel suit over Cross Creek by her friend Zelma Cason. Ironically, Cason had been the one who helped to smooth over the fracas with the woman wanting to kill her for writing about her son. Now Cason was the one who was furious over Marjorie's depiction of her:

"Zelma is an ageless spinster resembling an angry and efficient canary. She manages her orange grove and as much of the village and county as needs management or will submit to it. I cannot decide whether she should have been a man or a mother. She combines the more violent characteristics of both and those who ask for or accept her ministrations think nothing at being cursed loudly at the very instant of being tenderly fed, clothed, nursed, or guided through their troubles."

Though Marjorie and Zelma eventually mended their friendship, she moved away and never wrote about Cross Creek again. She bought a beach cottage ten miles south of St. Augustine, and married Ocala hotelier Norton Baskin (who remodeled an old St. Aug mansion into the Castle Warden Hotel, which is now the Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum).

Marjorie was vociferously about rural and beach living, and harbored an intense hatred of cities. She wrote a sonnet titled, "Having Left Cities Behind Me", a portion of which states:

"Now, having left cities behind me, turned away forever from the strange, gregarious huddling of men by stones, I find those various great towns I knew fused into one, burned together in the fire of my despising..."

She died in 1953 in St. Augustine, and is buried in Antioch Cemetery near Island Grove, FL.

Pumsy

There have been many instances where a small but shrill segment of the population rages illogically against something being taught, or not taught, in public schools. But the most insane of them all, I think, would be the furor that was caused by a dragon handpuppet named Pumsy in the early 1990s. Doctors Inlet Elementary School in northeastern Florida pulled the Pumsy program from its curriculum because one parent said it hypnotises children, and that parent in turn was getting all her information from one obscure psychiatrist's opinion.

According to the Associated Press:

The complaint came from Candy Johnson, who has a second-grader at Doctors Inlet Elementary School in northeastern Florida.

"There's a psychiatrist who says this program is very threatening to a child's welfare. It becomes a hypnosis session after a while," she said.

Dr. George Twente of General Hospital in Decatur, Ala., said Pumsy teaches children they can change the way they feel. "You're almost convincing the child he has magical powers," he said.

Twente and Mrs. Johnson said Pumsy was part of the New Age movement, a collection of philosophies often associated with self-healing and reincarnation.

Seriously? What were the teachings of these Pumsy stories that rang alarm bells for these cranks? Well, for one: "It's a practice where you go over what you're going to do in your mind before you do it. For example, when you learn to ride a bike, you go over it in your head first." Okay. And........... the problem with that is?

The Pumsy stories basically taught self-esteem and self-control, urging kids to stop and think logically before jumping into reacting and doing something rashly and impulsively. What parent would have a problem with that? Some severely confused ones, I should think. In fact, the panic reaction to rumors about Pumsy are a textbook example of why people should stop and assess what they're seeing before going off half cocked and blowing their horn like an angry torch-bearing peasant in a Frankenstein movie. More, from the New York Times:

Students are supposed to identify with Pumsy, who learns in the course of her adventures to overcome feelings of confusion and doubt, which she thinks of as "being in her mud mind," by thinking positive thoughts with her "clear mind" and creative thoughts with her "sparkle mind." This metaphor, having three minds for three different clusters of moods or attitudes, was among those that provoked storms of protest from conservative parents.

"They complained that we were teaching children to be schizophrenic," Ms. Anderson said. "So in the new edition we simply added the explicit clarification: of course, Pumsy doesn't have three minds."

Heavy sigh. I suspect these same gullible parents, if properly guided, could also be convinced to extend the same logic and call for a ban on the works of Sigmund Freud, whose fundamental basis of modern psychiatry posits a trifold model (and remember, it's only a model) in which the human mind is composed of an Ego, an Id, and a Superego.

Of course, to do so would discredit the same quack psychiatrist that this angry mom put all her faith in. QED.

The flames of the "controversy", such as it was, were fueled by right-wing pundits and Ultra-Christian conservatives like Chuck Colson. Yes, that Chuck Colson, the Watergate conspirator. Said Colson:

The Pumsy story is just a fairy-tale way of teaching Hinduism. Hindu doctrine teaches that the human mind or spirit is part of God--a spark in the divine fire, a drop in the divine ocean...

What we're seeing here is New Age pantheism in education. It's not sold to teachers that way, of course.

I'm not sure, but I don't think the Pumsy stories are used much nowadays. And that's a shame - everything I've read about them sounds like some of the most logical attitude-improving stuff for children to come down to the pike in a long while, at least for public schools. I suppose these activist parents would prefer their kids be hypnotised by television, ritalin, and goalless boredom instead.

Haslam's Book Store

There's a lot of websites - you know, those kind of websites - that claim Haslam's Book Store in St. Petersburg is haunted. And it could well be. There's certainly no shortage of weird mojo around St. Pete. Problem is, some of those kind of websites seem to think practically everyplace is haunted.

Which, come to think of it, could well be too.

Be that as it may, my interest in Haslam's is not for its haunting legends but for, firstly, the simple fact that it's just a darned fine bookstore. Surprisingly, though, for a place with so many books, there's a lot of certain subjects and certain authors I found lacking in their stock; maybe I'll sneak some in and just place them on their shelves as a little gift from me to them.

Secondly, their sign says they have every kind of book from "A" to "Izzard". What the hell is that about?

Thirdly and most significantly, Haslam's was regularly frequented by Jack Kerouac during the final period of his life when he lived at 5169 10th Ave. N in St. Petersburg. Stories are oft told that Kerouac was always getting in trouble with the owner for rearranging the books in a manner that suited him, especially his own books, which he would constantly sneak and place on prime display at eye-level.

You'd think the mere act of being Jack Kerouac would have earned him certain indulgences.