The pink dot

Do you have that little pink dot on your driver’s license?

Or maybe in Utah and New York they’re blue, but I mean the thing that alerts hospitals that you are willing to donate your organs, should you be in a condition that they’re not a whole lot of use to you any more.

Barbara Seranella just died, a fine writer and great woman, with a wicked sense of humor and a bum liver. More great women, and men, and children, will die because not enough people are willing to put that pink dot on their driver’s license. MJ Rose blogs today about this, joining me in hoping others might be willing to sign their little donor card and be cremated with a couple of bits missing.

The link is http://www.organdonor.gov/donor/index.htm (I've given the address for those of you whose computers don’t read my links.) There’s a little card you can print off and carry around, and a list of frequently asked questions to settle your mind.

Do this now. I’ll wait.

Thank you.

Holmes and King

I promised to say something about Laurie Meets the Sherlockians, my trip to New York earlier this month. I will have a photo or two on the March newsletter (for which you can sign up at my web site, or for those of you whose computers don’t like my links--and honestly, I do give them for things like Sarah Weinman’s blog, http://www.laurierking.com/newsletter.php )

It started last June, when I received a letter from Michael Dirda, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic of the Washington Post, asking me to come and give a talk to the assembled Sherlock Holmes society, the Baker Street Irregulars.

It was a remarkably generous request, considering the rocky relationship Holmes and I have had over the past years. I began by stealing another writer’s character, then having the temerity to saddle this honored and dignified gentleman with a smart-mouthed apprentice (who, moreover, occasionally beats him at his own game.) And as if these indignities were not enough, when she grows up, she marries him.

The nerve.

Had it been pretty much any other name sending the letter, I’d have figured it for a joke, but… Michael Dirda? Why, that’s capital-L Literature talking. And what’s more, he promised they wouldn’t throw tomatoes at me. And I checked with a couple of friends who were going to be there—Peter Blau, who has been a friend since Beekeeper days, and Les Klinger, author of the recent Annotated Holmes (and both of them, by the way, characters in The Art of Detection)—and they agreed, the Sherlockians didn’t bite.

So despite the hazards to us hothouse types of a New York sojourn in January, I said yes.

Besides, they said they’d put me up at the Algonquin, home of all those other capital-L Literary types who sat around the round table and made up insults so clever they made people bleed.

So I wrote a paper, since it would be impossible to recreate afterwards a talk given in my usual extemporaneous fashion, and if you’re interested, you can see it later this spring in the Baker Street Journal. And I managed to hit the right note, I think, a combination of tongue-in-cheek Sherlockian scholarship with some personal reflection and autobiography, because nobody threw anything and a lot of people actually brought books for me to sign.

And I have to say, those Sherlockians know how to party. Thursday night cocktails, LRK’s lecture, and dinner at a private club, terribly posh. Friday a raucous lunch (a picture I’ll put on the newsletter showing me with a glass of beer and a large grin is pretty much how I spent the whole three days) put on by the legendary women’s group (didn’t know there were female Sherlockians, did you?) the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes. Ever since I heard of them, I wanted to be an adventuress, and now that I’ve seen their lunchtime revels, even more so.

Friday night was the formal BSI banquet, men in tuxes, women (about ten percent, quite large, considering) in sequins, and me. Well, I’m an artist, we don’t have to do black-tie. Silly songs, challenging contests (I think I got one of the answers, testing knowledge of the Holmes stories), very edible but instantly forgettable banquet food, and a good time was had by all. Including yours truly.

The Eds are out!

The 2007 Edgars awards nominations have been announced—Sarah Weinman has them on her blog. I’ve been the general chair this past year (salute when you call me general, soldier,) which mostly involved badgering thirteen hard-working writers back in December 2005 into agreeing to chair the individual committees, then standing back. Theoretically, I was there to settle any disputes, but since no disputes came up that the chairs couldn’t handle themselves, I was relegated to the job of cheerleader (“You’re doing a great job—thank you SOOO much!” and “Nearly there, only 250 submissions yet to go!!”)

The Edgars are an award judged by writers, five judges to a category (except the Best award, which has eight, and if you look at the number of submissions to that award, you’ll know why.) Chairs are asked to aim for diversity in their committees—geographic, gender, and genre-based—which makes for some interesting discussions come December. But the nominated books are uniformly great, so I’d suggest you print off the list and toddle down to your local independent bookseller, and get them all on your shelves right now before other people with the same idea order the end of the print run (and no, publishers never schedule a new print run after an Edgars nomination. Why? Don’t get me started.)

A curious posting

Why. lookie who's on Myspace!

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=149069146

Will you be her friend?

(Good to know the old lady has a proper sense of the ridiculous, isn't it? Although kindly note that, due to the ageist policies of Myspace, her year of birth cannot be corrected to 1900. Apparently they don't think 107 year-olds post to Myspace. Tsk tsk.)

The country, at night

Flying over this country on a clear night is a powerful lesson in the actual and metaphorical existence of the human animal. By daylight one can see patterns, the circular trace of sprinkler systems, the clusters of buildings that crop up wherever the monotonous grid of roads make a crossroads. Human beings gather together (having just returned from New York, I can say, and HOW they gather together!) like planetary systems and galaxies gather, pulled towards each other for no other reason than the simple mass of their existence.

But at night, once one leaves whichever urban sprawl has spawned the airport, and without daylight to turn landscape into potential residences, there pass hours of darkness nothingness below, black on black punctuated by a dot of light here, a cluster there.

Until out of the blackness emerges a vast lake of lights, a golden smear against the darkling plain. Shaped like an amoeba by invisible boundaries, with no clue whatsoever why it would be there instead of half an hour from there, it is impossible to gaze down at the city of lights below and remain unaware how very alone we are in inhospitable space.

Holmes (and Mary!) in the Big Apple

I’m off today to an unseasonably warm and peculiarly smelly New York, to deliver an address to the assembled Baker Street Irregulars. When Mary Russell first came to the public eye, they were not amused, and although I was embraced by some, many turned a shoulder decidedly cool, at this scribbling female who turned Holmes into a character of romance—and with a young girl, at that.

Time mellows, and also gives reassurance that LRK is not writing romance or thinly disguised porn. Few Sherlockians lack a sense of humor, which helps. So I grasp my lecture, the first time I’ve delivered a talk from paper in I don’t know how many years (high school speech class under Mr. Russau?) It will appear in the Baker Street Journal, and I will ask if I might let it be added to, or at least linked to from, the site, for your entertainment.

Have to say, I’ve had fun writing a tongue-in-cheek academic paper.

I probably won’t be reporting in, as I’m only on the ground there for two days, but I’ll let you know next week how it goes. And if any of the faithful brought overripe tomatoes to the lecture.

Jeffersonian principles

The other day when our new Congress was sworn in, among the many was Keith Ellison a Democrat from Minnesota, our first elected Muslim Congressman.

Despite protests from proponents of the founding principles of the country (such as Virgil Goode, a Republican from Virginia) that this was a sure sign that we must tighten our immigration policies (although Ellison was born in Detroit, and converted to Islam in college) so that a swarm of Muslims wouldn’t try to follow his example and take over the country from within (my words, but seriously, has the man been reading Robert Ferrigno?) Rep. Ellison was sworn in, not with a Bible, but with the Qur’an.

And not just any Qur’an, but a 1764 English translation that was once the property of Thomas Jefferson.

This is a great country. I think Jefferson would be proud.

And Minnesota should be even prouder.