Hi :) It’s Disco Diaries number something — I don’t know for sure because I’m on a beach bum vacation, with salt in my hair and Tecate in my belly. We’ve been cooking all our meals at our extremely Lysoled rental house, and keeping our distance on the not-too-crowded beach.
In any case, in my vacation version of the newsletter, I’m sending you a few posts from my late blog, Our Little Something, which I did with some friends a few years back. Each month had a theme, and we’d write, create art, and share images, videos, and songs within that theme. Check out the entire thing here.
Without further ado….
Ad month: Winston tastes good
My mum was three years old when she saw this commercial. Struck by its catchy jingle, she spent a part of one afternoon riding her tricycle around her grandmother’s tiny country kitchen singing its poetic catchphrase: “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” Problem was, being three, she hadn’t yet mastered no-hands steering, so when it came time for the clap, out the screen door she flew and down three concrete stairs, crashing into the back lawn.
Evidently, when I was three, I rode my tricycle off of the porch as well — in some kind of freaky subconscious ancestral homage — down three stairs too, and got all banged up just like my mum.
I guess the fall must have trained her for the better. Even though that jingle has stuck with her to this day, she never bought a single pack of Winston’s.
Extraterrestrial month: Stranger in a strange land
Drawing by Ariana Rinehart.
Robert Heinlein
July 7, 1907-May 8, 1988
32 Novels, 59 Short Stories, 16 Collections
Zodiac: Cancer
Robert Heinlein was a nudist, a casual stonemason, a member of the International Fortean Organization (a group of researchers and writers interested in the paranormal), a world traveler, and one of the top three writers of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. His work was adored by juveniles and adults alike, by astronauts and by fellow writers. (Isaac Asimov was humbled by the notion that Heinlein was the best sci-fi writer in existence.)
Despite his influential success, Heinlein wasn’t exactly born with the stars (and Mars) in his eyes. Young Robert graduated from Annapolis, Maryland’s Naval Academy as a Naval Engineer. After a hiatus at the hospital for tuberculosis (during which he more or less invented the waterbed) he returned to the US Navy where he did aeronautical engineering alongside Asimov and a little lady named Ginny who would, in the future, come to be his special manuscript reader (among other things).
It wasn’t until Heinlein needed a way to pay off his mortgage—after real estate and silver mining got him nowhere—that he decided to give writing a try.
Writing seems to have been the natural fit for Heinlein, who had more radical social opinions than many of those around him. Growing up in Missouri, he was surrounded by the Bible belt and, like many-a-youth in the thralls of religious zeal, rebelled against it. His writing became a place where he could express his bemusement at organized religion, his libertarian political ideas, and his notions of free love and individualism.
In 1948 — surprise, surprise — Robert and Miss Ginny were married, making her his third and final wife. The couple worked well together, both highly intelligent and left-brained, but both creative enough to take on little adventures like designing their own custom house. Their home was featured in the magazine Popular Mechanics due to its convenient, sleek and minimal design. The original article speculates whether, in the future, a captain of a spaceship will live like Heinlein, lying on a built-in bed, basking in the natural light created by his mirrored skylight panels.
Beyond providing a new standard for science fiction writing, beyond igniting the imagination of so many on a playful level, and on a though-provoking philosophical level, Heinlein left another little concrete mark: the fellow coined some terms. Here is a best-of roundup of Heinlein jargon:
TANSTAAFL (there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch)
from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Speculative fiction (where all elements, characters and settings are created strictly from the human imagination)
Grok (“to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience.”)
“[Mike’s] trip to the Palace had opened his eyes to enormous variety in this world and he resolved to grok it all. It would take centuries and he must grow and grow and grow, but he was in no hurry–he grokked that eternity and the ever-beautifully-changing now were identical.”
-Stranger in a Strange Land
Obsolete technology month: The cauldron
Fortune cookie
Eating a pie is good, but making a pie is better.
Love you all, see you next week.
Katya