Wait. It’s July 4th?
Posted on July 4, 2011 Posted by John Scalzi 13 Comments
As an indication of how deeply my brain is in Clarion mode at the moment, I woke up early today to send off a bunch of business-related e-mails to people so they would be out to them to respond to before I went off to do today’s teaching, and got through all of the e-mails before I realized that today is actually a national holiday, no one would be responding to my business e-mails, and I could have slept in for another hour. Hello, I’m kind of an idiot. Or just deeply, deeply committed to my work obligations. Yes, that second one. That second one is it exactly.
Although today is the third day I am in San Diego, this is first actual day of teaching here at Clarion (and yes, we’ll be working through the national holiday — the students here didn’t pay to take breaks, you know), and I’m very much looking forward to it. The students were taught by Nina Kiriki Hoffman during the first week, who by all accounts was a simply spectacular teacher, so that will be an interesting act to follow. I suspect my own teaching style will be a bit different from hers, but that’s to be expected and part of the reason Clarion offers up six different teachers over the run of the workshop. It’ll be fun in any event.
(As an aside: While I will continue to be blogging while I’m at Clarion, you will probably find I am rather vague about specifics of what I’m doing and teaching while I’m here. That partly because damn, I have a busy schedule and won’t have a whole bunch of time to blog, but also because — as with Viable Paradise while I was teaching there — most of what goes on at Clarion is both for the benefit of those who are actually here and also of probably limited interest to those outside its environs. Part of what makes workshops work is the idea that what goes on there stays there. So, hi, I’m at Clarion, teaching, and that’s probably as much detail as you’re going to get on that matter.)
While I and the Clarionites are off discussing writing and storytelling and truth and beauty, I hope your 4th of July will be delightfully explodinacious, if you are in the US, and a reasonably tolerable Monday if you are anywhere else. You kids have fun. And as regards fireworks, try to keep your fingers attached to your hands, please. I know, I’m not the boss of you or anything. But, really, once finger detach they’re hard to put back on. Or so I’ve been told, and I believe it.
I forgot it was the 4th, too, but at the moment I’m living in China. On the other hand I didn’t miss out on fireworks. They set them off here every day at any hour, for whatever reason they can think of.
Make time to have a few fish taco’s. No place better on earth to have them than San Diego.
Truth and Beauty. How utterly Romantic of you all.
I watched Naked Science on National Geographic last night. It was about fireworks featuring the Zambelli’s family buisness and I noticed that one of the employees was short a thumb. Is it an unreasonable assumption to think it was work related?
What’s the first rule of Write Club…..?
Nina was also the Week 1 instructor at the 2004 Clarion in East Lansing MI and she made us all comfortable before we were thrown into the meat grinder of read-write-crit-. (grin)
Dr. Phil
A guy I worked with at a bank in New York had to be in the UK for several weeks to set up some systems for the UK sections. He made it clear to them he wouldn’t be showing up to work on “4th July,” which annoyed them greatly, since of course it isn’t a holiday there. As far as I know they didn’t do anything, even complain of him to our boss.
I told him he should have said “Do you know what July 4th is? It’s the day we celebrate not doing what British people tell us to.”
I don’t think he took this excellent advice, however.
Clarionites? Or Clarionese?
I didn’t forget because my coworkers kept asking me about it, but since a.) I’m in Japan and b.) it was raining like h-e-double hockeysticks, all I did was call my mom.
Happy Firecracker Day!
That’s really interesting, Peter S; thanks for sharing that with us. I knew that fireworks had been invented in China, but I had no idea that they were so very popular there in the present day. Cool.
The first rule of write club….
is write.
Same for the second and third rule too.
I knew it was the 4th- my dog was hiding under my feet for the entire weekend.
I am so jealous that you are in San Diego right now. On the other hand, it’s finally cleared up here in Seattle. It’s currently sunny and 68.