Last night I slept a somewhat remarkable eight and a half hours. That seems like all the sleep in the whole goddamned world.
I'm not sure I actually have enough to say today to fashion a decent blog entry. Yesterday, I wrote 1,086 words on The Dinosaurs of Mars.
Any thoughts on Sirenia Digest #19? I don't bite. Okay, that's a lie. I most certainly do bite. But I don't tend to bite here.
Yesterday evening is sort of a blur. After dinner, I had a hot bath, which was really too hot given the weather, and then we walked before the sun was quite down, and that was sort of miserable. We didn't even see any bats, just swallows, and a ligtning bug (only one), and a dragonfly. Later, we watched Werner Herzog's Cobra Verde (1987), which was Klaus Kinki's last film with Herzog, and one of Kinski's last films. I'd been wanting to see it for some time. There was a little Second Life after that, but hardly anything worth noting. Oh, while Spooky was fixing dinner, we lamented the death of letter writing, and I pondered exactly how future biographers would go about writing the biographies of authors without letters. It's not like email and "chat" and whatnot will fill the void. Online journals help a little, but they are not, generally, the truly honest sorts of things that letters were, and only a few authors keep them. I tried for years to keep up letter writing, but was defeated in the end by too many unreliable correspondents. And there are baby robins beneath our kitchen window
And really, I think that's all I have for now.
I'm not sure I actually have enough to say today to fashion a decent blog entry. Yesterday, I wrote 1,086 words on The Dinosaurs of Mars.
Any thoughts on Sirenia Digest #19? I don't bite. Okay, that's a lie. I most certainly do bite. But I don't tend to bite here.
Yesterday evening is sort of a blur. After dinner, I had a hot bath, which was really too hot given the weather, and then we walked before the sun was quite down, and that was sort of miserable. We didn't even see any bats, just swallows, and a ligtning bug (only one), and a dragonfly. Later, we watched Werner Herzog's Cobra Verde (1987), which was Klaus Kinki's last film with Herzog, and one of Kinski's last films. I'd been wanting to see it for some time. There was a little Second Life after that, but hardly anything worth noting. Oh, while Spooky was fixing dinner, we lamented the death of letter writing, and I pondered exactly how future biographers would go about writing the biographies of authors without letters. It's not like email and "chat" and whatnot will fill the void. Online journals help a little, but they are not, generally, the truly honest sorts of things that letters were, and only a few authors keep them. I tried for years to keep up letter writing, but was defeated in the end by too many unreliable correspondents. And there are baby robins beneath our kitchen window
And really, I think that's all I have for now.
- Current Location:Kayne Crater
- Current Mood:
slowly waking up - Current Music:David Bowie, "Thru These Architect's Eyes"
Page Summary
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Comments
- 25 Mar 2023, 12:08One consideration is that an author's photo current at the time the book was written makes an interesting accompaniment to a given edition.
- 17 Mar 2023, 02:21Jack Black's performance is so close to working in so many of his scenes that you can see why they brought him on, but ultimately nothing about his performance works. And I feel like there was…
- 13 Mar 2023, 22:16Tár should have taken away something, though that it didn't feels amusingly of a piece with its darkly comic denouement so I can't be too mad
- 24 Feb 2023, 22:14Hopefully, the weather is more fitting tomorrow.
- 21 Feb 2023, 22:39I saw this take on twitter about the Dahl thing that I more or less agree with. Sadly Dahl isn't just Dahl's work any more. Roald Dahl is a multimillion dollar brand cynically managed by an estate…
Comments
I think I frame e-mails much the way I write letters, except that I write so much slower by hand that I learned to type in elementary school. The difference is generally in volume, and convenience. I don't know if this means that either would provide a good fossil record; or simply neither.
I think I frame e-mails much the way I write letters, except that I write so much slower by hand that I learned to type in elementary school. The difference is generally in volume, and convenience. I don't know if this means that either would provide a good fossil record; or simply neither.
The primary problem with emails as biographical source material is that virtually no one keeps them. I print a lot of mine out, the ones that seem significant or all the correspondence related to certain projects. But I get the impression very few people do this.
Gotcha. I do keep all of mine, junk mail excepted; and anything related to work is copied into print, so that even if the computer dies irrecoverably (see earlier this spring), I won't lose writing information. Some of any correspondence is white noise, but I never know what I'll need to refer back to.
Gotcha. I do keep all of mine, junk mail excepted; and anything related to work is copied into print, so that even if the computer dies irrecoverably (see earlier this spring), I won't lose writing information. Some of any correspondence is white noise, but I never know what I'll need to
I think one of the main problems is that email is only likely to survive if printed. And I don't think people think of email the way people once thought of letters. Letters were a tangible artefact, passed from one person to another.
A question or two:
Did Missouri's love of her clockworks arise from a newly-formed connection between her rescue by the mechanic after the bloatfly attack and the addition of the mechanical arm, eye and leg, or was it a pre-existing tendency? In other words, when the mechanic saved her and offered her love, probably for the first time, did some of her feelings for him become entangled with the prosthetics (feelings enhanced probably by their innate mechanical beauty and their restoration of her to a more complete state)? Not sure if I'm being very clear here, sorry...
Also, I found her name interesting - Missouri Banks. My brain wants to interpret Missouri as Misery, and connects Banks to banking a fire, but that's probably reading too much into it.
David
Did Missouri's love of her clockworks arise from a newly-formed connection between her rescue by the mechanic after the bloatfly attack and the addition of the mechanical arm, eye and leg, or was it a pre-existing tendency? In other words, when the mechanic saved her and offered her love, probably for the first time, did some of her feelings for him become entangled with the prosthetics (feelings enhanced probably by their innate mechanical beauty and their restoration of her to a more complete state)?
I would think that, yes, much of Missouri's feelings about mechanisms follow from the mechanic having rescued and restored her. And it might well be difficult for her to distinguish her feelings for her lover from her feelings for what her lover does and what he has given her. Also, this is probably another story where I'm writing about my own narcissism.
Also, I found her name interesting - Missouri Banks. My brain wants to interpret Missouri as Misery, and connects Banks to banking a fire, but that's probably reading too much into it.
Interesting. The name just occurred to me as I was writing the beginning of the story. Then the "misery" thing hit me later on. Also, there's a sort of alliterative connection, perhaps, to "the Missouri Breaks." I think mostly it's a name that sounded strong to me, and I wanted a name to reflect the character's strength.
In the literary field particularly: no more drafts!...
There has never been as much personal informations than in our age. And yet, most of it won't survive long. Deleted e-mails. Purged blogs. Disappearing websites because the owner stopped paying. Hard-disks crashs. And so on.
In the literary field particularly: no more drafts!...
Yes, exactly! It's a bizarre paradox.
interesting point about the emails. i want to write more letters, but the take me so long and end up being rather ramblely. plus i often end up writing a rough draft of sorts in an effort to get try to make it more concise and from jumping back and forth between subjects. my thinking is not necessarily linear.
i have yet to read Daughter of Hounds so i hope i didn't ruin anything
You should encounter only the most minor sorts of spoilers in "The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles." Mainly, when, in DoH, Pearls shows up, you'll know right off her background and what the "snow globes" are.
my only question is does Pearl have any control over how cold she feels to others?
I wouldn't think so, as this is probably a physical phenomenon following from her temporal displacement. I was playing here. I think, with ideas about time travel and the behavior of quanta at or near absolute zero:
"A related effect is the Bose-Einstein condensate, theoretically predicted by physicists Bose and Einstein and experimentally demonstrated by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman (Science, July 14, 1995). In that, a collection of whole atoms is cooled to within one-millionth of a degree of absolute zero. At that temperature, the atoms suddenly all drop to their lowest quantum energy states and, similar to superconductive conditions, coalesce into one macro entity with one quantum state, yet still obeying quantum mechanical laws as a unit. The resulting condensate has many extreme properties, to put it mildly. One is that the speed of light is slowed in a Bose-Einstein condensate to a few miles per hour, walking speed! Another way to interpret it is, within the condensate, the passage of time has been slowed to nearly zero. If time is affected in this way, then the three-space within the condensate must also be warped, because space and time are interdependent. Experiments confirm this intuition. This is an extremely significant finding for physics in general and for our arguments and conjecture, here."
my thinking is not necessarily linear.
I would say there is no need for it to be. I think thought is, by its very nature, non-linear. It's one thing that makes "story" (especially first-person narratives) so artificial, is that most writers feel they must force thought to become linear.
It's a lovely story, and it would also make for a very pretty short film.
I can hear the sound of Missouri's steam driven parts as she dances to La Traviata, and I can feel the mechanical & biological flow of her movements.
That's two of the nicest things you could have said. Thank you.
On the topic of preservation of journals, which I know really wasn't your topic, do you keep versions of your journal entries saved on disk or printed out?
Generally, I have not, and I know that's stupid of me. I am, however, starting the process of backing it all up to my hd, after which I'll print it out. I shudder to consider the size of the manuscript.
Yes, I finished reading it last night. I loved reading "The Daughter of the Four Pentacles"--partly because it put me back in the mood Daughter of Hounds established for me, which was nice. But the story is an entity unto itself and actually improves Daughter of Hounds a little for that. Because I like how the snow globes are essentially the point of "The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles," while they're a device among many in Daughter of Hounds. Both stories are consequently richer.
The miniature stories within the snow globes were great, and made me feel like I was watching some very good Twilight Zone episodes, but with better acting.
I loved "The Steam Dancer", too, and I must say I loved the bit with the maggots. I think it nicely tempered the fantastic elements of the story, and made the prettier things even prettier (I read about myiasis for a bit in the impromptu Lord of the Rings fic we did. I was fascinated to see that maggots were medically administered).
The mechanic reminded me a little of Tom Waits or Ron Perlman from City of Lost Children, which was nice. And of course I loved Missouri Banks herself. After "In View of Nothing" and "A Season of Broken Dolls", it seems you have a thing for mechanical prosthetic limbs lately.
I realised I hadn't told you what I thought of "Houses Under the Sea"--it's a very nicely Lovecraftian story. It's a little like The Shadow Over Innsmouth except with a beautiful girl, which I have to like. I loved the bit where the little girl appeared in the warehouse, and your description of that sort of feeling writers have tried to describe since Poe--it really well conveyed the wrongness of the girl's existence. It was also interesting reading a story of yours that featured a location I was familiar with, though I'm used to just thinking about El Cajon as a crappy part of town (I've been to Birmingham, Alabama, but not since I was a kid).
we lamented the death of letter writing
I'll send you a letter (and I don't mean to sound like Frank Booth when I say that). What's the address? I'll send you a bunch of anime, too.
Because I like how the snow globes are essentially the point of "The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles," while they're a device among many in Daughter of Hounds. Both stories are consequently richer.
That was the effect I was hoping the story would have upon people who have already read DoH.
The miniature stories within the snow globes were great
They were my favorite part to write. I was especially pleased with the alien one.
I think it nicely tempered the fantastic elements of the story, and made the prettier things even prettier (I read about myiasis for a bit in the impromptu Lord of the Rings fic we did. I was fascinated to see that maggots were medically administered).
Which reminds me, are you still interested in doing some sketches based on "The Lay..."?
I'll send you a letter (and I don't mean to sound like Frank Booth when I say that). What's the address? I'll send you a bunch of anime, too.
P.O. Box 5381
Atlanta, GA 31107
After "In View of Nothing" and "A Season of Broken Dolls", it seems you have a thing for mechanical prosthetic limbs lately.
I meant to say and forgot, regarding prosthetics, it's a shame you cannot meet Nareth Nishi in Second Life.
Heh. I'm constantly thinking that. Then again, I'm always slightly afraid of things I suspect I'll really like.
Absolutely. My life's just been a little cluttered lately--along with my grandmother tearing out the carpets and wanting badly to tear out my wall, there have been a lot of general disapproving rumblings from my family about how devoted I seem to be to this writing and drawing thing they haven't paid much attention to but instinctively hate, so I've had this dread lately about easy computer access being taken away from me. I've mainly been concentrating on the comic I want to get published, but I ought to have some time in the next couple of days to work on some sketches for "The Lay of Sindeseldaonna".
As for "The Steam Dancer", Steampunk isn't normally my thing, but in your capable hands, you managed to twist it just enough to make it compelling. I would be interested in seeing what you could do in a longer format. Thanks for the great reads!
Two: Again, there's something curiously subversive in Missouri's sensual preoccupation with her prosthetics. Did I detect a kind of morbid fantasy in the "false dream" narrative? No one else here has necessarily mentioned it, but I found the story had certain parallels with ero guro (although no distinct intersection, sensu stricto).
I haven't gotten to "Daughter of the Four Pentacles" at this point, I'm very much trying to savor this issue.
BTB, my jaw nearly hit the floor when I saw this issue alone was 42 freaking pages (give or take) of either exclusive or hard-to-find content. You don't need poison spurs to convince people that's a good deal.