Erm....yeah, so....I'm not even pretending to be awake. I got to bed sometime after five ayem. Do I have a good excuse, I mean besides the tooth ache. No. Except that I discovered that Vampire: The Masquerade is loads more fun when played in Second Life than with pencil and paper on a tabletop. A new Nareth splinter came into being —— this time a wealthy, young Vietnamese woman dying of an incurable disease. She'd been an assassin, and had learned much of the art of torture, before the illness. She used the last of her fortune to find the Sabbat. Accompanied by her bodyguards (thanks Pontifex and Misi), she entered the city, and contact was made, thanks to a nervous little man, some sort of private investigator. Much time was spent sitting in the painfully over-lit lobby of the Lincoln Hotel, vomiting onto the powder-blue carpet between her feet because the morphine she'd just injected was making her sick. She speaks in French about half the time. She told the bodyguards that their final checks were in their rooms and dismissed them, then sat and waited for the Ravnos woman she been promised would find her. Every moment the dying assassin waited was agony. But the vampire came, finally, the woman named Mara, and the assassin was led to the back room of a seedy little nightclub, where she was questioned, then allowed her first taste, and promised the embrace. She was given a slip of paper with an address, and ordered not to return to her hotel room. Then her typist went the hell to bed.

That's why I'm not awake. What noisy cats are we.

After the minute brouhaha which led to my entry on Saturday, I just keep thinks (as Ceiling Cat would say), "But aren't authors supposed to be critics?" No, not book reviewers. Critics. Isn't that one of the things authors are supposed to do, comment on the work of other authors? Hell, if anything, I think I've been neglectful of that duty. Aren't we supposed to try to keep one another honest by saying what we think about the State of Literature, including the State of Genre Literature? To quote the ever quotable Dorothy Parker, "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." (quoted in The Algonquin Wits [1968] edited. by Robert E. Drennan). Is that not a duty that we have, as authors, not merely to make shows of empty, token support but when something's shit, to say so? And so when I see these followers of a hack like the wildly successful and admittedly deceased Robert Jordan, when I talk to people who can quote his The Wheel of Time chapter and verse, but who have never even read Tolkien, is it not my responsibility to get pissed off, and to say so? I think it is. Though, I should add, before hurling one of Jordan's books anywhere with great force, the reader should acquire a trebuchet, lest a shoulder be dislocated in the process.

Spooky did the Day in the Life (didl) thing a couple of days back. You can see the fruits of her labour, and quite a bit of Providence and Casa de Kiernan y Pollnac here.

Yesterday, in preparation for writing my introduction on Arthur Machen today, I read "The White People" (1904) again, my second favourite story by him. And re-read much of Wesley D. Sweetser's 1958 thesis on Machen (published in 1964), along with various other bits of criticism. I suppose that far fewer people these days read Machen than read Robert Jordan, or even Tolkien, but its their loss. "The White People" is sublime. And it has such an exquisite opening line —— "'Sorcery and sanctity,' said Ambrose, 'these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life.'"

I was saddened this morning to learn of the death of illustrator Pauline Baynes (1922-2008). When I was a teenager, it was her wonderful map of Middle Earth that adorned my bedroom wall. When I first found Farmer Giles of Ham, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and Smith of Wootton Major, she was the artist whose work accompanied the text.

Spooky has relisted several items on eBay, so please have a look. Also, if I fail to shill both A is for Alien and the mass-market paperback of Daughter of Hounds, the platypus will be showing me those venomous spurs.

More coffee....

Generally speaking, the icon I choose to use with a given entry says something about the entry itself, just as the subject lines are very rarely arbitrary. I've been sitting here staring at today's icon, wondering what the hell it has to do with what I'm about to say or where I am right now. And I think, perhaps, it's an inverse relationship, and I must have done it unconsciously. Anyway. That's my best guess.

Today, I'll be cleaning up the loose ends on Sirenia Digest #30, and packing. All is packing. We have, for all intents and purposes, four days remaining for packing. This weekend. Monday. And Wednesday. Tuesday, we make the third trip to Birmingham in as many weeks, to retrieve everything I have in storage there. Fortunately, this is the last trip to Birmingham.

I packed until about 9 pm last night, when we stopped and watched the last three episodes of Millennium (as I prefer to imagine Season Three never happened). "The Time is Now" is one of the most remarkable, and certainly one of the most horrifying and beautiful, episodes of any series ever produced for television. I saw it when it first aired, and all these years later, it still caught me off guard, even knowing what was coming. The use of Patti Smith's "Horses" is absolutely exquisite. Laura Means' vision is such a perfect comprehension of inevitability, probability, and man's insignificance in an indifferent universe. And I'm very pleased that, in those last couple of episodes, Frank Black renounces any possibility of his belief in a literal interpretation of the Book of Revelations. I think this pretty much saves the series for me, which occasionally veers a bit too near actually espousing millenarian Xtianity. Those final shots, Frank and Jordan alone in the cabin, the blood on Catherine's pillow...sublime. And yes, I know there's a season after Season Two, but why continue when the perfect ending has been found? To paraphrase Toni Morrison, art is knowing when to stop.

Lots of thoughts on Panthalassa (and Pangaea, and related concepts), on what I'm trying to do with Wicca, but no time just now to write it all down.

Don't forget the Stiff Kitten T-shirt sale:



My thanks to Beq Janus for actually building a working version of the clock from Soldier's dreams (in Daughter of Hounds). It now occupies a table in the Professor's Abney Park Laboratory in New Babbage (Second Life). You can see two screencaps (warning, they're LARGE) behind the cut:

( The Clock's Face )

Okay. There's work that must be done, whether or not I want to do it, and I still haven't had coffee. I'll leave you with Keith Olbermann calling Hilary Clinton on her latest act of desperation:

Cleaning my office, packing, I came across an invitation to the 70th anniversary of the opening of the Lynn-Henley Building of the Birmingham Public Library (which, at the time, was the Birmingham Public Library). This is the same building I visited on Tuesday and spoke of in my first entry on Thursday, the reading room with the Ezra Winter murals. Anyway, so I found an invitation to the 70th anniversary, April 7th, 2002. The building was opened to the public in 1932. My Grandmother Ramey was 17 years old. The US President was Herbert Hoover. Amelia Earhart flew from the US to Ireland in 14 hours and 54 minutes. Anyway, here's a contemporary illustration of the library, the one from the invitation:



Also, there was a somewhat odd list on Yahoo today, "The Good, the Bad, and the Slimy: 20 Great Movie Creatures." Some of these truly are iconic movie creatures — Kong, Giger's Alien, Jabba the Hutt, Godzilla, Oz's flying monkeys, Harryhausen's skeletons, Gollum, and heck, maybe even the magnificently erotic Davey Jones. A couple may, in time, prove to be iconic — the "Pale Man" from Pan's Labyrinth and the creature from The Host. But the list, as a whole, shows too much of what paleontologists call "the pull of the recent." That is, it's top-loaded with creatures from very recent films. In a list of 20 films spanning 1933-2008, 75 years, fully 50% of the list is derived from films released in the last six years! Even admitting that advances in CGI and SFX make-up are giving us many marvelous new monsters these days, this is baloney. Where's Lugosi's Dracula, Karloff's incarnation of Frankenstein's creature, Gort, or the "gill man" from the Black Lagoon? All of these are clearly more iconic, and far more deserving than some of those who made the list. The "ultra-cute baby Loch Ness monster" from The Water Horse? Not. Kraecher from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix? Wrong. The gelflings from The Dark Crystal. Nope (though you might make a case for the Skeksis). Saphria from the godsawful Eragon? That's a joke, right? You want a dragon, then choose Vermithrax Pejorative from Dragonslayer or Maleficent's draconic incarnation from Disney's classic Sleeping Beauty. Sheesh, people. Someone needs to look up the word "icon" in a dictionary and try again.

So, Spooky called my doctor yesterday, about the tick. And my doctor immediately prescribed a ten-day regimen of doxycycline (one of of the tetracycline antibiotics), as a preventative measure, just in case the Lone Star tick in question was carrying one of the four rather nasty diseases for which they can act as vectors. But, on the other hand, my doctor is a little overzealous with antibiotics, and I've not been on any antibiotic, by choice, since August 2002 (when I needed them for an infected spider bite on my leg). But. I will take the doxycycline, though my instincts tell me not to, because I don't want to risk Alabama getting in the last laugh by rendering me sick all summer with some vermin-borne illness. By the way, the tick in question now floats in a specimen jar of alcohol on my desk. She's a rather fascinating little thing.

Yesterday, we read over what I've written on Chapter One of The Red Tree, again. Recall, we just did this on Sunday. But I wanted to be sure I have the narrator (Sarah Crowe) solidly in my head. With luck, I can finish Chapter One and maybe even toss in a vignette for Sirenia Digest sometime between now and next Wednesday. That will be my last normal "work day," the 21st, before the move (14 days remaining). We also did a lot of packing yesterday. I lost track of how many boxes of books. The new battery for my iBook arrived via the post.

I've been asked to write a "signature review" (one with my name on it) for Publisher's Weekly, though I cannot yet identify the novel or the author. I even get paid. This was one of those things I really didn't have time to take on just now, but I did, anyway.

As promised yesterday, behind the cut are photos that Spooky took on Tuesday of the Ezra Winter murals at the Birmingham Public Library. They are a far sight better than the ones that the Library has online (the link above). Ezra Winter was born in Manistee, Michigan in 1886, and was educated at Olivet College and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. He also studied at the Prix de Rome and the American Academy in Rome. After returning to the US, Winter began a successful career as a muralist, and did work in Manhattan, Chicago, and Washington, DC (his studio was in New York City). In "the early 1920s," the Birmingham Public Library commissioned him to do the murals for the main reading room of their (then) newly constructed library building, depicting various figures from literature and history. They're oil on canvas, fixed to the walls with white lead. Winter was present for the mounting of the paintings. I first saw the murals sometime around 1975. Back then, they were sooty and in bad shape, but were cleaned and restored in the 1980s. Anyway, the photos:

( Ezra Winter and the Birmingham Public Library )

Last night, Spooky made a big pot of chili, and after dinner we watched two more episodes from Season Two of Millennium — "Midnight of the Century" and "Goodbye Charlie." It was cool seeing the late Darren McGavin as Frank's father in the former, as McGavin also appeared twice on The X-Files, as agent Arthur Dales. Anyway, then I worked on the Palaeozoic Museum in New Babbage, mostly on the wall in the Great Hall devoted the pterosaurs (Dimorphodon, Pterodactylus, Rhamphorhynchus, and Pteranodon) and fossil birds (Hesperornis and Archaeopteryx). And I think I was in bed sometime after two ayem, and Spooky read to me from House of Leaves until about three ayem. I was up at 9:30, because I'm trying to get on an earlier schedule, even if it means I slept only about six hours. Truly, I've already cut back on Second Life, and will be doing so even more in the end of May. The move, my health, and far too many deadlines.

And this is the very last time I'll post a link to the Amazon wish list thing before birthday -04, though we are only halfway through the Royal Birthday Month. And my thanks for all the comments yesterday. They help, these days, and I don't know that we've had that many for one entry in quite sometime. I should include nasty x-rays of my teeth more often.

350.org.

As days off go, yesterday wasn't bad at all. If not for this problem with my wretched feet, which has made me somewhat miserable of late, it was a good day. I read. I napped. I read some more. I escaped into Second Life. I came back and watched an episode of Firefly ("Heart of Gold"). I actually rested, which, I suppose, is why we have days off. I drew an "O" on Sunday, June 30th. And now it is July, and it's time to get back to the novella and Mars.

---

A few days ago, I had it in my head that today — the one-month anniversary of my introduction to Second Life — I would sit down and write some sort of comprehensive statement on the pros and cons of the experiment. But this afternoon, well, there are other things that need writing, and I admit I'm not feeling in a very comprehensive frame of mind. But there are some things I will say.

For one, my ups and downs with Second Life are right here for everyone to read, the highs and lows of the past 31 days. I have had moments when it amazed and dazzled me. I have had moments when it disappointed me, and made me wonder why I was investing so much time in such an enterprise. The truth of the matter, of course, lies somewhere in between those extremes. I'll get to that in a moment.

Yes, there are serious flaws with the fundamental concept. The obsession with currency, with Lindens, that's one of the worst. I have traveled far and wide inworld over the past 31 days, and I am very sad to say that too much — probably most — of Second Life amounts to a sort of strip mall/exurb sprawl purgatory. Because that is what the members of the experiment (there are presently almost 8 million worldwide, I think), shaped by the commercialism and sprawl of their First Lives, have made it. Instead of exploring the possibilities afforded by the simulation, too many residents go looking only to buy and sell, to amass virtual wealth and virtual belongings, to open businesses and rake in the Lindens, etc. And I think this is something the Linden Labs people are at fault for encouraging. It is a pity, because it has rendered much of Second Life hideous and wasted. But, again, I think this problem ultimately stems from the simple fact that few people who enter SL make any effort to be anything more — in any truly significant way — than what this First-Life world has made of them. And that is the truth, I think. At least, that is the truth as I have witnessed it.

Second Life is not a game (though it makes possible fabulous, and not so fabulous, gaming). It is not an MMORPG. It's not another take on The Sims. But if that's what you bring to it, you'll likely take nothing else away. In SL, one has a great say in creating the reality one experiences. As is often the case in First Life, perception plays a great role in determining what is being observed.

For me, Second Life is possibility. And here we enter into the specific positives, which are, sadly, only a tiny fraction of SL. Same as this First Life. Either way, unfortunately, Sturgeon's Law applies. If you come to SL expecting something delightful to be handed to you, ready made, ready for easy consumption, then you've missed the point and you'll probably miss the wonders. But the wonders are there, if you take the time to look. And in a month I know I have only begun to scratch the surface. But already I have seen the possibility SL presents as a teaching tool and as entertainment and as an international forum. I have found a niche for myself in the steampunk worlds of Babbage and Caledon. I have walked through Van Gogh paintings. I've visited Mars. I have begun the construction of a museum that was never built here, in this world. And for these things I am glad, and because of these things — despite the common ugliness and consumerism that clutters and defines so much of Second Life — I know now, a month in, that I'm going to stick with this thing awhile. It requires time and patience and imagination. I have very little of the first and only a smattering of the second, but quite a lot of the third, so I figure I'll do okay.

All that said, there were some questions asked a few days back by dlemoine that I promised I would answer when my first inworld month had passed. He writes:

I wanted to raise this question for a while now, but do so in a respectful manner, so please do take it with that intent. I've tried out SL in the past, and while it never did much for me personally I can understand the appeal of it for others, I myself have, in the past, spent good amounts of my youth playing some other popular massive multiplayer online games. I've stopped in recent years, but I do have fond memories of them.

That said, there is a particular criticism I have with Second Life, and massive online games in particular, that I've always wanted to ask someone who has similar views to my own on other issues. As someone who has on many occasions come out as an avid protector of the environment, and someone who seems to believe in the conservation of materials that can be easily depleted, and are generally against much of the ridiculous capitalism that America and much else of the world falls prey to, causing them to buy needless and wasteful items; I am slightly baffled by your appreciation of something like SL which, for all the fun and enthralling entertainment it might bring, is basically getting you to pay to suck up your own electricity (and subsequently oil used along the way to create that electricity and get it to the general populace), but also getting you to pay to suck up the electricity needed to power SL's multitude of servers (usually housed in nice air conditioned rooms as servers are).

All in all, I myself have grown to see how such MMORPG's and other such games have just as big an impact on the environment as people driving oversized SUV's, using air conditioning 24/7, etc. etc. I can only imagine the amount of energy that could be saved from removing the servers for and usage of the 8 million World of Warcraft players alone.

First, as I've said already, I do not consider SL to be an MMORPG, though it certainly contains a great potential for role-players. Beyond that, my response would be that these comments are mostly true. But I see no reason why Second Life (or, for that matter, World of Warcraft) should be singled out here, as this problem will present itself if we examine any sort of mass media, whether we're talking about the recording industry, book and magazine publishing, film and television, electronic gaming (online and console), sports, and the internet in general. Indeed, compared to many of these things, the carbon footprint left by SL is negligible. Those things that humans do are damaging to the world around us, and it is almost impossible to conceive of genuinely "green" technologies.

But if I condemn and abandon SL as an unnecessary use of energy, then, in all fairness, I must also say the same of LiveJournal and my Gmail account, my website and MySpace and those Wikipedia entries I've written. I must say the same of all personal computers (Macs included). I must stop buying CDs and books and DVDs. It's not so much that you don't have a point. You do. It's just that picking on SL, in this regard, is like standing in the midst of the Great Chicago Fire and complaining that someone has struck a match. In the end, I have no reply beyond that. I do what I can to limit my personal and household energy consumption, and I would guess I do a fair sight more than most. But I am guilty when it comes to art, and to popular arts, and to the internet. Art is only another technology, and we express ourselves, almost without exception, at the expense of Nature. I have not yet stopped writing, though I know full well that my writing is the cause of pollution and energy depletion. It is a conundrum I have not yet solved, and fear I never shall.

Other than that, I can only say that Mother and I are still collating.

Okay. This has gone on too long. It's almost 1 p.m., and I'm wondering how much energy was depleted that I could write and then propagate this entry...

A couple of quotes before bed.

"All art is knowing when to stop."
— Toni Morrison (1984)

"I sat and wondered. How to make an artist do something he doesn't want to do or can't do. There are no threats, no blandishments that have effect because the 'art' part comes from within and is more subject to fears that result in nightmares of death than to warnings of guild denunciation or even simple greed. They can be assuaged sometimes only by walking away. When Joan Crawford told F. Scott Fitzgerald in the thirties, 'write hard, Mr. Fitzgerald, write hard," she was saying the only thing that can be said. She was shrewd enough to know that 'write well, better, faster, deeper' has no practical bearing on an interior process ultimately unknowable."

— Steven Bach (1985)

Yesterday, I wrote only 1,268 words, which filled me with hope that maybe the Forced March hasn't warped my daily word count after all. I might still be a tortoise. I'll be a glacier, and someone else can be a babbling brook. This new piece for Sirenia Digest, this grim new piece, it still has no title, but I don't want it to be "Untitled 24." I suspect I shall finish it tomorrow. I think I know what the second piece for #15 will be, and I think it's not erotic, nor grim, and I think it's a short bit of something from that flat half-globe world in Murder of Angels. I do not yet know this for a fact. I only think it might be.

I was reading Mind Fields last night, because Harlan sent me a copy this week, and came across this marvelous quote at the beginning of the book:

"Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution." — Karl Kraus (1874-1936)

I've spent long, circuitous paragraphs trying to say what is here said with such beautiful and precise brevity. So I will only add yes, exactly.

And here's an odd thing that occurred to me after yesterday's post. May one be both an iconoclast and an icon? Here this new review of Daughter of Hounds labels me an iconoclast. Yet, many times in the past, in various contexts, I have been called an icon. For example, in his introduction to Tales of Pain and Wonder, Doug Winter called me an icon of Gothic literature. So perhaps icon and iconoclast are entirely context dependent terms, completely relative, subjective. Based upon one's point of view. One woman's icon may be another man's iconoclast, etc. In fact, this seems rather obvious. Besides, I have long grown used to existing as a contradiction.

All the new Sirenia Digest subscribers who are due signed copies of the Silk trade paperback, the books went into the mail yesterday evening. You should have them sometime next week.

Despite his poor showing early on, Raven Blue has now taken the lead in the Ravens Four auction and has spent the morning gloating and casting all sorts of perfectly pointless charms. Raven Red is livid. Raven Green is sulking. I guess this is what I get for telling them popularity contests are for the birds.

Last night we had a truly bizarre double feature: John Shiban's Rest Stop and Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep (La Science des rêves). The former was dull, artless, and as entirely devoid of imagination as any film could hope to be. I'm tempted to say that Australian filmmakers need to step away from this sort of thing, but then someone will immediately cite a good recent Australian thriller to prove me wrong. Anyway, The Science of Sleep was in all ways brilliant and delightful, and I loved it pretty much unreservedly. It tread very near the dreaded subject of dreamsickness. Afterwards, I went to bed and read chapters three and four of Joan Druett's In the Wake of Madness. And that was yesterday.