Energumene

Imminent arrivals

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:36:32 GMT

kelly_yoyo and planetalyx will probably be here within an hour or so. I'm looking forward to Orycon this weekend, but even more to seeing Kelly and meeting Alyx. It's a blue-sky day here in Portland, sunny and very windy and cold. I hope they've had similarly glorious weather for the drive down from their sub-Arctic lair.

Zachary is at work, and Xerxes and I are passing the time until Kelly and Alyx arrive in our usual ways. Which is to say, he's curled up in his little fleece cave, sound asleep, and I am ostensibly working on a Forensics book but really fidgeting and distracting myself.

Next week I will:

--finish that final Forensics book;
--take Xerxes to the veterinarian for his annual teeth-cleaning;
--assess my Nano experience and probably post something about it; and
--redesign my two crapulous websites, with WordPress and the phone support of my WP-savvy pal Magda.

So it looks like a good weekend in store, followed by a good week. Although Xerxes may see it rather differently.

Name change

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:22:11 GMT

My room is still indigo, but I've changed my username. I microblog as myself on twitter and fb, so I decided to use my name here, too. Posts NSFW (not safe for the world) can still be friends-locked.

And now back to my regularly scheduled NaNoing.

27 index cards

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:35:51 GMT

Some months ago a protagonist and a premise presented themselves to me. I noodled around with them, on and off, and even wrote a handful of scenes. Then I stopped, because I had sworn a solemn vow not to write my way through a novel without plot, plan, or road map. I've done that before, and it hasn't worked out well for me.

I had the beginning of my book, and the ending. I knew the two or three Biggest Things that happen in between. Almost all of the second and third acts, though, remained a mystery. I needed structure, causality, escalation.

"One of these days," I told myself, "I will Grapple." I resisted the siren call of scenes that seductively appealed to be written. Did they even belong in the book? "Must . . . finish . . . plotting . . . ."

Yesterday afternoon mindseas shared with me the dining-room table in her family's Portland house, several hours of her time, and, best of all, her insightful questions and excellent ideas. We did a Taos-style plot break on my book, complete with color-coded cards. And while we did not introduce a shadowy cabal of Norwegian secret agents, we did create a three-act structure that hangs together and will bear weight. Afterward, as she prepared for the red-eye flight home, I copied those index cards into Super Note Card, feeling grateful and excited.

NaNoWri Mo? NaNoWhyNot?

Those pesky other dimensions

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:50:19 GMT

As mindseas and I left the theater last night after a showing of "The Mist" (part of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and Cthulhucon going on this weekend in Portland), I wondered why it is that whenever the military, or scientists, or military scientists punch a window through the fabric of space-time into another dimension, and the window turns into a door through which things pour into our world, those things are always (1) big, (2) mean, and (3) a lot like bugs, deep-sea creatures, reptiles, dinos, or some combination thereof.

Wouldn't you think that just once in a while, by the law of averages, we'd punch our way into a dimension of ponies and buttercups?

That said, "The Mist" is one of the better film adaptations of Stephen King. Not directly Lovecraftian, though the sense of brooding mysterious cosmic horror is Lovecrafty.

The evening's offerings also included "The Haunted Palace," a 1963 film based--loosely--on HPL's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. In the hope of cramming the film into the studio's "Poe Cycle," AIP bookended it with quotes from a Poe poem and plopped a transplanted European castle, a la the Hearst palace, into the middle of rustic Arkham. Hence the title.

I had seen bits of it before but this was my first exposure to the complete film. It's really not too bad, and has a lot of wonderful shots and some classic Price mugging. I couldn't help but notice, however, that after Charles Dexter Ward and his wife (anyone who knows HPL is eye-rolling at that!) arrive at their inherited, abandoned palace carrying a total of two small suitcases approximately the size of lightweight portable sewing machines, those reticules disgorge, in the course of the film, a dazzling profusion of full-length brocade dressing gowns and ruffled shirts (him), and lacy peignoirs, satin dressing gowns, and full-crinolined skirts (her).

Now, I love luggage, and I love packing. It has long been my dream to find the perfect piece of luggage, one that violates the laws of physics by being much bigger on the inside than its exterior dimensions would seem to allow. Apparently the prop department at AIP in the 60s had a couple of these treasures.

You want plot? I'll give you plot!

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:28:04 GMT

I just came across this hilarious short article that appeared in slate.com in July. It's about a guy who peddled plot-generators to aspiring screenwriters and novelists in Hollywood back in the DeMille era. The beauty of it is that he was living a fabulous plot line himself--a plot line complete with a serial killer and buried treasure, I add--and never saw it.

www.slate.com/id/2221392/

Shameless self-promotion

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 21:23:45 GMT

My four-volume series for high-school-age kids on Human Evolution is among the new offerings on my publisher's website. You can check it out at bit.ly/wAvTF

I wish the sales department had included in the catalog copy something along the lines of "Prepared with the assistance of paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall and molecular biologist Rob DeSalle of the American Museum of Natural History . . . ." One of the greatest pleasures of writing this series was having those heavy hitters review--and, best of all, like--my manuscripts. And my trusty publisher did a wonderful job on the production values; the books are gorgeous.

Let the hate mail from fundies begin. *sigh*

Iceland pix

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:23:42 GMT

I've been battling a debilitating sinus infection since about 2 days after I got home from Iceland, but I finally managed to put a selection of my photos from the trip on Flickr at www.flickr.com/photos/41367823@N07/sets/72157622011291732/

They are especially soothing if the temp is soaring and you're in need of some psychological cooling!

To the land of ice and snow

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 02:16:11 GMT

Turned in long-overdue ms. of bio of Stephen King not 90 minutes ago. Last 8 days = major write-athon with far too little sleep. Now unable to think or write in complete sentences. Hope I managed it in the ms.

Packing now, and watering yard, and writing note for cat-care person, etc. We leave for Iceland tomorrow at 11 a.m. Last I heard, temps in Portland are supposed to hit triple digits for at least the first 3 days of next week, and generally very high otherwise. Forecast for Reykjavik for same time period: 61 and showers. Yay!

Pix and details on the other side. May all here have an excellent week.

End of the world dream

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:04:36 GMT

This morning I had the most vivid and exciting dream I've had in a long time.

Zach and I were in a large chamber atop a tower, maybe in Mexico. We had ascended by climbing 150 steps--the place was a landmark we had come to see. There were about a dozen other people with us, and we all knew that the world was going to end that day. It was an astronomical catastrophe of some sort: rogue planet crashing into Earth, Sun exploding, not sure. Scientists knew it was coming, and people all over the world were preparing in various ways.

The people in our place were mostly calm, talking to each other in low voices. Zach and I sat next to a wall, holding hands, but I was curious and kept going to a big arched window to see what was happening, then recounting what I saw to Zach. First the horizon was rimmed by hundreds of small rainbows, like the scalloping on the edge of an old-fashioned pie plate. Then the sky got dark and thunderous. In the distance on the scrubby plain below, geysers of steam and water burst through the soil. I looked down and saw a herd of brown-and-white cattle running in confusion. Then I looked up and saw that the sun was a strange pinkish-white color, ringed in a glowing aura, and although Sol was not appreciably larger or hotter, I knew that it was time.

I went back and sat next to Zach. I said, "I hope you've had a good life. You're a good man," and we kissed (his glasses dug into my cheekbone). Then everything went dark.

I woke up in the same chamber, but on a cot. Through the window I saw an unnaturally blue sky. It was exhilarating being alive, but I my first words were, "Wtf? What happened?" There was a sense of anticlimax, almost chagrin; if we had all thought the world was going to end and it didn't, I might feel rather silly, like those "end of the world" sects that have to keep revising the due date when their prophecies annoyingly fail to come true.

I ran to the window. Our tower was now surrounded by dozens or hundreds of structures: round buildings made of clay or porcelain, huge metal constructions, elaborate palaces of bricks and glass, examples of many wildly varying architectural traditions all plunked down cheek by jowl. Then another form, like a huge metal eel studded with glass globes, glided silently past just above eye level.

The others were looking out the window and trying to figure out where we were ("Is this real?" "Is this heaven?" and so on). I ran to the opposite side of the room, which had been solid before but was now one huge window. I called out, "I think I know what happened--we were rescued by a race that travels around the galaxy, saving people from dying worlds!" The view was of a huge landscape (think <i>Ringworld</i> or Jack Vance's <i>Big Planet</i>): ocean, mountains, and this surreal city that stretched on and on, with flying machines and spaceships. Zach and I were jumping up and down with excitement, thinking of the extraordinary adventure that was about to begin. (Even better than Iceland, although that may have been the source of the geysers.)

When we woke up and I told him, he said, "Don't tell that one to my sister. [fundamentalist evangelical] She'll say it was the Rapture." But I'm pretty sure it was aliens.

Media matters

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 01:18:07 GMT

I've been following the Twitter feed of my publisher, Marshall Cavendish, since I started Twittering, not all that long ago. I didn't realize that they have a Facebook page, too, until just now I looked at their website for some reason and saw a "Find Us on Facebook" button. So I did, became a fan,and saw to my surprise that of MC's recent posts--www.facebook.com/ext/share.php--was about a 10-book YA series on Forensics, for which I've written 9 of the titles. (Okay, some of them aren't finished yet, but 4 are out and look great.)

All of which made me realize that:

1) I am spending more time than I expected to do on LJ, FB, and Twitter

2) I like finding out about things that way, and I should start using those tools more intelligently

3) Marshall Cavendish's little FB post is about 40,000 times better-looking than my own two crapulous websites, which are the Internet equivalent of tarpaper shacks and waaaay overdue for a makeover. Which in turn has made me resolve that when I get back from Iceland I will either learn how to build a decent website and do so, or pay someone to do it. I'd love to launch shiny redesigned sites with a splash about the Human Evolution series, which is coming off press soon.

Still shaking

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 21:50:24 GMT

I've just had a terrible experience. I'll eliminate all suspense up front by saying that everyone survived. But it could have gone otherwise.

I was sitting outside on our back deck, with my laptop on a little table in front of me and Xerxes on his 12-foot leash attached to my chair. He had just returned from a prowl in the ground cover and was about 8 feet from me when Eva, the wretched German shepherd from next door, burst like an artillery round through the yew hedge between our properties.

This dog barks dementedly when released into her fenced backyard several times a day. A couple of weeks ago when I was walking Xx in our front garden, Eva erupted through that hedge, terrifying Xx and causing him to climb me like a tree. The dog belongs to our neighbor Linda, and at the time of the front-garden incident was nominally under the control of Linda's girlfriend Flora, who apologized. I pointed out that we had tolerated Eva's occasional breakouts into our yard when all she did was tear up our plants, but that now I worry about the cat. The whole point of this dog is that she is supposed to be under restraint when outside her own house because she has attacked other animals before. So there were renewed promises not to let it happen again.

You can see where this is going, can't you? Just last night we were sitting on the deck--Zach, me, and Xx--and Eva ran over. Nothing much happened, I scooped up Xerxes, and Eva ran back to her own house without even barking. This afternoon things went rather differently.

I didn't see the dog coming until she was right on top of us. She leaped down the bank and grabbed Xerxes. I started screaming--I must have been pretty loud, too, because neighbors came running from up to three houses away! but I'm not embarrassed--and tried to wrestle the dog off Xerxes. Eva dropped Xx but snapped at me, which was scary--she's a big dog. I've never been scared of her, but she seemed maddened by blood lust. She broke away from me and went after Xx again, knocking over the table and running across my laptop. (It seems okay but still has a dusty dog-print on the screen; this just happened and I haven't even cleaned it.) Xx was snarling and bristling and trying to get away, hampered by his leash, and Eva kept snapping her horrid jaws and leaping on him. I was screaming bloody murder.

Linda and FLora came running over to try to get Eva, and just then Xx squirmed out of his leash and was off like a shot around the corner of the house with Eva in pursuit. Linda nabbed Eva and took her away, but by that time I had lost sight of Xx. I was terrified that he would bolt out into the street in a panic and get hit, or that he would run away. Fortunately the crowd of neighbors aroused by my shrieks had seen a whitish streak running through another neighbor's yard and into the woods. Soon Zach spotted Xx up in a tree not too far into the woods. The tree was thickly surrounded by a dense, nasty patch of blackberry, so when I charged in in shower thongs, my feet got a bit scratched. By the time I had worked my way to the base of the tree Zach was already on a mission to bring me a stepladder. Xx was on a branch about 3 feet higher than I could reach. He showed no inclination to go higher and in fact reached toward me with a paw, but was clearly unsure of how to get down. Zach manhandled the ladder up through the blackberry. The ground was very uneven and full of holes, but I managed to balance on it long enough to grab Xx. Then we both fell down. So did the ladder. But I didn't lose my grip, Xx didn't freak out (much), and the blackberry bushes cushioned our fall (sort of).

Xx was shaking with what I assume was fear, but he seems okay now except for some blood between the toes of his hind feet. I think he just tore up his little indoor pads tearing through that brush at top speed. If his paws seem sore later or I can't wash away the blood after he calms down, I'll take him to the vet. The only other sign of the ordeal was dog saliva on his back where the wretched beast grabbed him. I feel sick when I think about how much worse it could've been.

I talked to Linda, who felt terrible about it--she has a cat, too. She was relieved to know that Xerxes is okay. And I'm glad we had a calm and even friendly conversation. But I did tell her that Zach and I have been very forebearing about Eva, and that if there is another attack on Xerxes (who never leaves our yard and is NEVER outside except when I have him on a leash) or another snap at either of us, we are going to call Animal Control and the police. We can't be afraid to sit on our own deck, with our own pet on a leash, because we might be attacked!

Linda swore that Eva will be on a leash every second she is outside from now on, except when she's in her back yard (which she can't escape from). I hope so. We shall see. The sad thing is that it's not the dog's fault. She's friendly to people she knows, and to Flora's little dog, and to Linda's own cat. But the dog regards anything outside her own house as prey, and Linda has done nothing to discipline her.

Now Xx is curled up on the sofa, with Z sitting next to him petting him, and he appears to be okay. Time to clean my computer screen and my own scratches. Zach said something kind of sweet--might not be meaningful to anyone who doesn't know that I am terrified of arachnids and go to great lengths to avoid any possible contact with them or their webs. He said, "I wish Xerxes could know that when you saw him up in that tree you ran through not just a huge blackberry thicket but also several huge spiderwebs." Never even saw them. Not quite the same, perhaps, as a mother lifting a car off her trapped toddler, but still.

A really great five minutes

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:48:29 GMT

The last couple of days have been pretty damn crazy. I've been spending what some people (er, my publisher?) might consider way too much time following the Iranian situation online and, when possible, checking in with my two Persian friends here who are plugged into info from friends and family. Enough has been said about it all elsewhere, but just--damn. Gives me chills. I hope for the best for the greens.

On a more self-centered front, I had a really great five minutes just now. I finally finished a (way overdue, as usual) manuscript on Forensic Anthropology, a topic with which I am utterly in love, maggots and all. It was fun to write and much, much more fun to email to my editor. Just as I was tidying up my desk, removing the stacks of forensics research and preparing to gird my loins for the next project, Zach came strolling in to give me the news from his office (on the other side of the wall from mine).

We had learned that next month Icelandair is launching a nonstop from Seattle to Reykjavik, and we had talked about going to Iceland for a week to take advantage of it. Zach's big news was that he had just come from the Icelandair site, where he had scored tix for us for July 25-August 1. He has also promised to arrange the rental car. What a guy! I am indeed the luckiest of women.

So within five minutes I had turned in a piece of work that I've been working long days to finish, then found out that I'm going to Iceland in little more than a month. At least now I have good motivation to get some work done before then.

Whee!

Inside the Snow Globe

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:38:12 GMT

We have an enormous black cottonwood tree in front of our house. This is not a tree that should be on a residential urban property. This is a tree that should stand in all its glory in a river bottom in Utah.

Your cottonwood is not a well-domesticated tree. It is messy. Starting in about April each year, it sheds, in this order:

1. small, amber-colored sticky things, the split coverings of leaves or seed pods or something, that adhere to your shoes, your tires, your cat, and everything that touches them, and get tracked into the house for several weeks

2. lint, fuzz, fluff, cotton--whatever you want to call it, it is the stuff that hangs in bunches from pods high in the tree and then floats through the air in vast quantities, this way and that as the wind takes it, for several weeks

3. dried sticklike pods, empty of their fluff

Nor is that all. In the fall Old Man Cotton sheds truckload after truckload of leaves. The tree is more than 100 feet tall and thickly branched and vastly productive of leaves. The raking goes on for weeks.

And then there are the sticks. Cottonwood wood is brittle and breaks easily. Twigs, sticks, branches--sometimes quite large ones--rain down frequently and unpredictably from the heights.

On the positive side, the tree stands between the afternoon summer sun and the corner of the house that holds my office and our bedroom. Its welcome shade saves us a fortune in AC bills. The tree is home to raccoons, squirrels, and lots of birds whose antics entertain me (and Xerxes). And it fills much of the view from the front window of my office; without it I would see the far less appealing house across the street.

It is difficult to love Old Man Cotton in the middle of cotton-shedding season. Which is now. All up and down our street, drifts of white are piling up on people's doorsteps and windshields. The sides of the street look as though a snowplow has recently passed. The tree is so big that it is a nuisance over a wide area. I half expect to look outside some night and see a mob of angry neighbors brandishing torches and pitchforks, shouting, "Kill the tree!"

And yet . . . just now I was out walking Xerxes in the back yard. The sun had come out, and he lay down on the grass to bask, and I lay down, too, and looked up. So much cotton was drifting through the air, from just above my face to as high as I could see, lit by the sun against a blue sky, that I felt as though I were inside a freshly shaken snow globe. Or in the southern ocean on that magical night one hears about on nature shows, when the full moon inspires all the jellyfish or corals or something to spawn at once, and the camera pans up from the depths toward the moonlit surface through a sea thick with floating, er, ocean creature sex stuff. (Okay, it's been a while since I saw that documentary, and the details are as fuzzy as every single plant in my garden, now thickly coated with the cottonwood's sheddings.)

Two days ago the Oregonian had an article about how fluff from cottonwood trees had clogged the air intakes of the high-tech cars on Portland's new west side rail, several times bringing the commuter trains to a halt. We live on the east side, far from there, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of our tree's lint had managed to get there.

Ballard

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:46:07 GMT

I just saw on the morning news crawl that J.G. Ballard has died. A sad loss to speculative fiction and to the world of words. I've read and liked (or loved, or been baffled by, or been challenged by) many of his works over the years, but what stands out most clearly in memory is the sense of wonder and dread and possibility I felt when first reading books like The Drowned World and Vermilion Sands way, way back in the day.

Thanks and goodbye.

Last Watch

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:04:05 GMT

Just finished this fourth volume in the Night Watch series. I posted it at goodreads.com and am copying that post here:

Last Watch would be fairly confusing to anyone who hadn't read Night Watch, Day Watch, and Twilight Watch. Even though I've read and enjoyed the whole series, I had some trouble remembering who was who among the minor characters; details of what happened in the earlier books, often mentioned in this one, were also a bit fuzzy. Still, I enjoyed this a lot. The protagonist, Higher Light One Anton Gorodetsky, remains a fresh, wry, and occasionally surprising voice, and the intersections of the magical and real worlds continue to be weird, clever, and often violent or amusing. I found this story sketchier but also more poignant than the earlier episodes in Anton's career; there are echoes of Arthurian (or Merlinian) legend and The Tempest woven throughout. Overall, not as strong as the first two entries in the series, when Lukyanenko's world-building was new and startling, but satisyfing.

To those who know the Night Watch series only through Timur Bekmambetov's sensational films, the original story line of the books is different from that of the movies and is worth exploring. But the films are dazzling, and I adore them.

Fantasy vs. SF? Near the end of Last Watch, in a conversation between two of nonhuman characters about the future of the world, Lukyanenko--who has published lots of both sf and fantasy--tosses off a few observations about the two genres. One character speculates about the appeal of fantasy worlds, magic, etc. to human readers. It's a brief interchange, not a dissertation, but readers and writers of both genres may find it entertaining.

Three, count 'em, three!

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:12:14 GMT

ZOMG.

Luckiest Scrabble game ever last night. Early on I drew the tiles for three seven-letter words in a row. "Striver," "daemons," and "unheated" (the last built around an "e" from an earlier play).

Usually Zach and I are evenly matched. I have a slight vocabulary edge and typically make one or two seven-letter words in the course of a game. (I don't remember getting three before, and certainly never consecutively. Nice fluke.) But he is a superior strategist and will often cannily block future plays or cut off building spots while I am fooling around trying to make fancy words. Being an accountant, he not only keeps score for each game but has also kept all the score sheets. Our scores for each game are generally close, and at last tabulation our lifetime win/loss records were very close as well. But last night I kicked his ass! I had great tiles and he had suckish ones, mostly vowels (at one point he expressed the wish that we were playing in Hawaiian or some other vowel-intensive language).

Xerxes joined in the game, hopping onto the tabletop and trying to move our tiles for us until he got bored, curled up in the top of the Scrabble box, and fell asleep.

I went to bed all exhilarated, tingling with good fortune and victory, and promptly had the most mundane dream of my life. I dreamed that I cut and filed my fingernails, all ten of them, in excruciating detail, right down to brushing the filed-off nail dust from my black jeans. Sadly, when I woke up I was as much in need of a manicure as when I went to sleep. Slightly more so, given the minute growth of the nails during the night. Perhaps the endless tedium of the dream was my conscience paying me back for being a bit too gloaty over my triumphs with the tiles.

Nikki Heat? Oh, come on!

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:55:19 GMT

I've been kinda enjoying Castle. Early days yet, only two episodes, but fun and waaay pretty. Then it was revealed in last night's episode that Mal's, I mean Rick's, new series character, inspired by the delectable Detective Beckett, is named Nikki Heat. Now, even in a made-up universe of banter and poker games with Steve Cannell, I gotta believe a bestselling novelist who is taken semiseriously by not unintelligent readers such as the aforementioned Detective Beckett would not be so lame to as give that name to a character based on someone he seemingly admires. Stripper? Check. Videogame vixen? Check. Contestant on "Rock of Love?" Double check. Detective in a series of dark novels? Bit wrong-footed, I think, unless it's a deliberate move to rile Beckett. But boy, is everyone pretty! So, fun overall.

On another note, Loins of Punjab Presents opens this week at our local art- and cult-film palace. Described as Monsoon Wedding meets Best of Show, it's a spoof of an American Idol clone for aspiring South Asian American singers, who perform Bollywood-style extravaganzas and engage in backstage intrigue. Could be terrific.

Finally, check out this hilariously eviscerating restaurant review from London's Sunday Times, in which A.A. Gill channels the righteous scorn of Swift and the masterly invective of Mencken to indict an entire culture of empty chic consumerism: www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/eating_out/a_a_gill/article5880725.ece

The Right One

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:14:55 GMT

Wanna see a good teenage vampire romance horror flick?

I recommend one about kids, fear, sexuality, love, trust, growing up and fitting in and fighting back. It's a subtle, elegant, beautifully acted, touching, scary Swedish import called Let the Right One In, and it's amazing.

Here's one review:
www.cinematical.com/2008/04/27/tribeca-review-let-the-right-one-in/

See it now, because it will probably not play forever at the multiplex like a certain pop phenomenon that shall not be named. And don't wait for the Hollywood remake by the guy who directed Cloverfield. Not joking. Already greenlighted.

Word Smith Redux

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:09:49 GMT

Here are the meanings of the words I had to look up while reading the Clark Ashton Smith stories:

nacarat--a pale orange-tinted red; also, a type of cloth of that color

invultuation--inflicting damage on a wax effigy, as by sticking it with a pin, in the belief that this will cause harm to the person represented by the effigy

inenarrable--unable to be narrated; i.e., indescribable

fescennine--lewd, licentious, or scurrilous, as in poetry or song; from Fescennia, an ancient Etruscan town notorious for bawdy songs and verses

parapegm--an engraved plaque or tablet displayed in a public place, usually of brass

The meanings suggested by Daw and Kelly in response to my previous post are, of course, vastly superior! To Daw, the Samuel Johnson Wordful Goodness Award, and to Kelly, the Daniel Webster Medal of Mucho Merit.

Added later: Argh. I meant Merriam-Webster, of course! The perils of writing something first thing in the morning, without enough Mountain Dew in my system to wake up my brain.

Word Smith

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:23:52 GMT

Missed deadlines are piling up around me like the leaves of Vallambrosa, only less picturesquely, and I'm scrambling to catch up with my writing and fend off the wrath of my publisher. Until the current write-a-thon ends I have only small chunks of time, far apart, in which to read for pleasure. It's a time for short stories.

So I turned to a purchase I had made some while back but not yet cracked--the first three of Night Shade Books' handsome new five-volume set of the collected fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith. It's been many years since I've read more of Smith than the oft-anthologized greatest hits: "The Return of the Sorceror," say, or "A Rendezvous in Averoigne." I'm enjoying the strangeness.

Stap my vitals, but that man could sling a thesaurus. He makes HPL look like Hemingway. I rarely have to resort to a dictionary while reading for pleasure, but by a third of the way through the first volume I had had to look up the following words:

nacarat
invultuations
inenarrable
fescennine
parapegm

A profound obeisance and a complimentary OED to anyone who knows the meanings of all five without looking them up. (Just kidding about the OED, unfortunately.)

Grandma did what?

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:15:26 GMT

This afternoon my mother gave me a magnificent necklace of jet beads--long admired and coveted by me--that had belonged to her great-grandmother. Real jet. Lovely.

As she took the necklace out of her jewelry cabinet she started to laugh and asked, "Did I ever show you these?" She had not. "These" proved to be a set of 5 notes that Mom had found in an old college yearbook belonging to my maternal grandmother, who was born in 1900 and attended Valparaiso University in Indiana during the years 1919 and 1920. Space does not permit me to describe my grandmother, but she is fondly remembered by those who knew and [mostly] loved her as "pig-headed" and "a hellion."

Each note was addressed to Miss Delefern Slocum [yep, that was my grandmother's name, but she went by Dele, pronounced "Del"], Altruria Hall. The notes were from Ida A. Powell, Dean of Women at the university, and each one instructed my grandmother to "Please come to my office this afternoon between two and four," or words to that effect. The dates ranged from November 1919 through May 1920. By the fifth note Dean Powell was reduced to saying, "Come to my office as soon as possible."

On the front of the envelope containing each note my grandmother had pencilled, in the same unmistakable handwriting I used to see on my birthday cards, a note concerning the infraction that had provoked the summons. Here are those notes, in order by date:

"No. 1. Smoking?"

"2nd show at movies, eating with fellow in restaurant after 10 o'clock unchaperoned, talking to man in front of building"

"Phoenix Club dance--going to restaurant after"

"dishes thrown out of windows, roof to take pictures"

"N.D. dance 1:30--should have been 12."

I expect that "N.D." referred to Notre Dame. But I would love to know what made her hurl dishes out her windows.

Looming New Front in the War on Homosexuality

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:14:22 GMT

This article should scare the shit out of all of us, not just those who happen to be GLBT: http://www.slate.com/id/2193841/

The gist: Researchers are looking for nongenetic, prenatal influences that may determine homosexual orientation (i.e., hormonal "imbalances" in the womb). Early evidence suggests that these influences may be significant. If so--and it is by no means proven--some people (Southern Baptists, a majority of parents according to one poll, etc.) believe that the condition can and should be "fixed" through prenatal treatment (i.e. hormone adjustments). Bottom line: The prospect of eliminating alternative sexuality before it is even born.

Brave new world.

Primer

Fri, 30 May 2008 20:30:44 GMT

I just finished watching Primer online through the instant-view option at Netflix. I saw this film in a local theater about three years ago, when it played Portland briefly after making a splash at Sundance and winning some prizes. I was mightily impressed at the time and thought the movie would be worth seeing again someday.

It was. In fact, it looked and sounded better on my laptop than in the theater; it's a movie with a very tight focus and is set almost entirely in close spaces, so it seems almost made for laptop viewing.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in successful first-time moviemaking (and some online interviews are available in which writer/producer/director/cinematographer/composer/actor Shane Carruth talks about the process--oh, and his mom and dad did the catering). Also great for those interested in narrative complexity, time travel, or the morality of science. Don't look for a tidy batch of exposition to explain the ending, but if you pay attention (as I was careful to do just now, seeing it for the second time) it comes together with a subtle but powerful wallop.

Read or Die

Mon, 05 May 2008 01:07:00 GMT

The past few weeks have been full of work.

I've been doing all the follow-up stuff (writing captions, reviewing page layouts, etc.) for the books I wrote from November through February. And then I've been writing the first book in my four-book series on human evolution; the series is now aimed at high-school age readers and called Origins. While writing, I realized with chagrin that I had been packing information that could be spread out over the entire series into volume one (which is "Earliest Ancestors to Australopithecines"). I took a few days away from writing to do a more detailed plan of the entire series--deciding, for example, in which volume I will put the various sidebars, including one I just wrote called "So You Want to Be a Fossil?" I also put together a Glossary that I can use in all four volumes. That should help me avoid unnecessary repetition.

But it hasn't all been work. Oh, no. A well-meaning friend gave me a free month of Netflix. Actually, she's my publisher, so she'll have no one to blame but herself when I'm even later than usual on my current deadlines. It's not so much the movies. I mean, it's convenient to have movies come to your house and all, but what's really fun--and a time suck--is watching the instant stuff on my laptop. Just yesterday I watched an anime I first saw a couple of years ago and have wanted to see again: "Read or Die" (the OVA, not the TV series, which I have not watched--but now I probably will). It's no Miyazaki, but there are some things in it that I like a lot. And what a title.

5 days, 4 nights, 7 museums, 2 operas

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 16:51:43 GMT

From which you will gather that my visit to Berlin last week did not include a lot of idle time. And yet my friend Fred and I did find time to take rides on commuter trains to Spandau and a couple of other outlying neighborhoods so that we could stroll around. We also did a fair amount of walking in the part of town where we stayed (Charlottenburg) and the areas around Potsdammerplatz and Alexanderplatz.

This was my first visit to Berlin, which is an exciting and user-friendly place. Great trains and trams and subways, good signage, and tons of things happening in music, theater, and art. There's a lively street and cafe scene, but it was not at its peak during our January-February visit. It's also a very youthful city. The eastern part of Berlin remains, for now, one of the few places in urban western Europe with a lot of relatively cheap housing. Creative types from many nations are coming there to live, or at least to spend a year or two, giving the city an appealing air of raffish chic.

We saw Die Zauberflote Friday night at the Staatsoper, with one of the great orchestras in Europe. The whimsical production design was based on German Romantic Orientalism; it suited the music, all of which was very well if not spectacularly sung. On Saturday we dug ourselves into seats at the Deutsch Oper for ~~the Siege of Nurnberg~~ Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, five and a half hours of glorious Wagner. Walther's voice broke up a bit toward the end, but I didn't care; for me that opera is all about Hans Sachs, and that singer did a superb job. Eva was fine, too, as were all of the minor characters. The production was simple and handsome and, for some reason, set in the late 19th century. That seemed odd to me at first, but I came to think that it worked; it gently highlighted the basically absurd faux-medieval pretensions of the meistersinger tradition. After all, the opera is, in its high-minded way, a comedy.

Highlights of the trip were the Pergamon Museum (massive architectural antiquities from the Near East) and the Museum of Natural History. The latter combines delightful old-fashioned features, such as big dioramas and tall old polished wooden display cases (you can imagine Alexander von Humboldt bending over them), with a wonderfully up-to-date overview of evolutionary biology. It also has a huge and dazzling mineral collection. I fell in love with neptunite. The most thrilling thing at this museum, though, is seeing the world's finest archaeopteryx fossil. It's housed in a special little darkened alcove, almost a chapel, with special lighting and climate control and bulletproof glass, because you are looking at the real fossil, not a mold, and I felt a frisson of awe as I gazed at its marvelous toothed beak and its claws and the delicate impressions of its feathers. Take that, you no-transitional-fossils idiots!

I ate a grilled pig's knuckle, something I would not have expected to do. But it was at dinner in the cellar of Berthold Brecht's old house, and the waiter said that it was Frau Brecht's very own recipe . . . it was delicious.

Not being much of a photographer, I took only a few pix. Here are some of them.

Fred walks in the distance along the Wall--one of the few sections of it still standing. There was a little museum and a viewing tower near this segment.

The Ishtar Gate at the Pergamon Museum.

This old church was bombed in WWII; it has been preserved as a memorial (the locals call it the Rotten Tooth). Next to it stands its modern replacement, much less severe on the inside than it looks from outside; the walls are hundreds of tiny panes of beautiful colored glass.

The old town of Copenik is noteworthy because it wasn't bombed (and you can see that we had glorious weather for part of our visit). The schloss in Copenik now houses a museum of decorative arts, full of things like the kaisers' dinner services. There are also two magnificent 16th-century rooms entirely paneled--floors, ceilings, and walls--with inlaid wood. Marquetry of the highest order, and you almost swoon from the delicious smells of the old wood.

Things that will have to wait for my next visit: the Egyptian collection on Museum Island, the sculpture museum, renting a kayak to paddle around the city's many canals and rivers, and an excursion to the Spreewald. (A line from a brochure I picked up: "What was life really like in East Germany? Was it all Spreewald gherkins, nudism, and concrete-slab buildings?" Jeeze, I hope not.)