In which Our Hero is once more forcibly reminded just how annoyed he can be by Spider Robinson.
Butler: I’ve wondered, and this may be the audience to put this question to, what the likelihood is of a future in which reading is no longer necessary for the majority of the people. I don’t much like the look of that future, but I wonder if when computers, for instance, can be addressed verbally, can be spoken to, whether it will still be necessary for people to be able to read and write. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Burstein: Well one of the things that I was recently reading was an essay by Spider Robinson which points out that reading is actually difficult. He was walking along the street in his hometown, and I think it was in Vancouver, where he saw that somebody had written on a piece of sidewalk and immortalized in stone a nice big heart with the names “Tood and Janey forever.” He couldn’t believe that anybody in this society would go to the lengths of naming their son “Tood.” So his only conclusion was that young Todd didn’t know how to spell his own name, and what he found to be worse was that this is somebody who is old enough to have the hots for Janey and possibly produce progeny and yet he cannot spell his own name.
There’s a lot that annoys in Robinson: his glibly superior voice; his tin ear for moral tone; his deplorable attitudes toward sex and gender; his overindulgence in appalling puns. But the failure of imagination involved above? —Perhaps our graffitist, known for the rather large chip on his (or her) shoulder, perfers to spell their nickname as Tood rather than the more grammatically correct ’Tude? Perhaps, unused to the medium of wet concrete, Todd shaped the first “D” poorly, and didn’t stick around to fix it because he was scared of getting caught? Perhaps the light was failing as Robinson took this particular constitutional? Perhaps he leaped from under a looming deadline to an otherwise untenable point he needed to fill out his Y Tood Kant Reed column for the Globe and Mail?
I always assumed that it was Janey who couldn’t spell her boyfriend’s name and that Robinson was just unable to conceive of female agency.
That “tin ear for moral tone” counts for a lot, although I’d characterize it more as moral dogmatism. Reading the essay in which he denounces anybody who’s criticized Heinlein and says “Of course I too think Heinlein’s work has some flaws, but at least I’m moral enough not to mention them in public” or the review in which he says, well, I realized that good novelists make clear good vs. evil distinctions rather than shades-of-gray equivocations, so I no longer regard Bester and Delany as first-rate . . . eeeeww.
I love Spider Robinson dearly, and his Time Pressure remains one of my favorite books ever for having said things to me about optimism and faith at a time in my life when I desperately needed to hear them.
But yeah, the “Tood + Janey” essay bugged the hell out of me too. So did many many other things in his collection of Globe and Mail columns.
The one that upset me the most was his repudiation of the message of his Hugo-winning story “Melancholy Elephants”—he’s decided to support copyright extensions because Virginia Heinlein has a three-year-old descendant (and wouldn’t it be a damn shame if he had to work for a living when he was thirty).
He should probably stick to fiction. But then, on the other hand, his fiction has spiraled down in quality over the last decade or two; he rehashes old stories rather than inventing new ones; his characters all talk the same way and love the same music and books as he does and are endlessly self-congratulatory about it.
But dammit, I still love him.