Wasteland Wrap-up #54

More book promotion, an anxiety dream made real, some work on fallout simulation...

What a busy week it has been! I’ve been in total book promotion mode, on top of everything else, and you might not be shocked to know that this requires a lot of time, energy, attention, etc. Podcasts, interviews, recording myself describing the book, an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) on Reddit, figuring out a system for signing copies remotely, adding documents to my website about the book, sending a bunch of e-mails to people in Paris about my upcoming book talk on December 16 (which will also be on Zoom for those NOT in Paris: event information here, registration link here)… yowza.

What book?, you may be asking, confused and out of the loop. The one I wrote about this week in Doomsday Machines last week:

It’s amazing how long it takes, by the way, to do the documents part of the website that I linked above. I have all of these sources as PDFs, and their citations, and so on. But getting the best version together, making sure it looks right, etc., is a big huge pain. And in some cases, like the rare interview with Leslie Groves from the 1960s, I ended up deciding that I needed to make a new version of the PDF from scratch, because the “working” version I had been using was not really fit for public consumption (as it was based on photos I took at the National Archives ages ago). I have tools for these things, some custom-made, but it still all takes so much… time.

It’s also not really work I enjoy doing, truth be told. Despite what some may think, I’m actually not really a fan of self-promotion. (It’s not that I don’t mind promotion, I would just much rather that other people promoted me.) It takes a lot out of me. It feels awkward and ridiculous.

A murder of crows at Le Cimetière du Montparnasse. Caw.

And while I am proud of this book and stand by its conclusions, it is also making some pretty big claims and one never knows how such things will be received once it is out there in the world. So far the reception from people who have looked at it has been positive, but how many early readers are going to send e-mails saying “actually, this is lousy”? Sigh.

If one is going to put one’s work (and self, by extension) into the world, one must develop thick skin about these things, and I have, but still, the anticipation is always worse than the reality.

This morning it was raining but not that cold. Here’s Lyndon posing at the Garden of Great Explorers, which is just south of the Jardin du Luxembourg. Despite having a dog run inside of it, the signs say you aren’t supposed to take dogs there, but I figured on a rainy day I could get away with one photo.

On Monday, I took part in a roundtable at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, which is a really interesting place. It is not a university, it is a campus where foreign students attending other universities in Paris can live — like a giant International House. It looks like a university when you are there, and I was marveling how it was the first “university” like place I’ve seen in Paris that looks like an American-style university campus. And then I learned that it was modeled on American university campuses, and some of the mystery was resolved!

The roundtable was on a serious subject — academic freedom in the world in comparative perspective, and I was there as someone who could talk both about the history of universities in broader perspective, and the United States in particular — but did have a somewhat humorous element to it. I had made it very clear when I agreed to do it, many weeks ago, that my French was not good and it would need to be in English. I was told this was fine. I got there on Monday and… the plan was to do it entirely in French! It was like an academic anxiety dream made real.

No, I do not know why this place is named “Café Baby-Foot.” Do I want to know? I am not sure. Am I amused? I am. Snack Bar Baby-Foot. If they do serve baby feet, the odds are they are organic.

Well, I went up on the stage and just did my part in English. Was I nervous about the entire thing, dear reader? I mean, of course, a bit. But I thought, well, what’s the worst that can happen? Nobody even knows who you are! And, anyway, there’s no pretending you speak French, so it is what it is.

It was fine. The (very nice) law student asking the questions of the panel conveniently translated his questions for me into English. Everyone else spoke in French, but it was better than I would have guessed. My speaking French is still pretty basic, and if someone says something very short to me it is often easy for me to miss it, but if I am listening to someone explain something at length in well-articulated French, especially something I know something about (academia), I can understand most of it. It just requires a lot of concentration. All in all, it was a good experience, and did make me think, wow, my French is not good but it is getting better in a way that would be very unlikely if I was not actually immersed in it, but jeez, what a way to start an already busy and somewhat hectic week.

How will next week be, when the book actually becomes available for sale? Yikes, we’ll see. If you are thinking about buying my new book (!), I will just say that pre-ordering it, or ordering it the moment it is released, is very helpful, because it gives it some “momentum” in the stores, encourages reviews, etc. So consider it!