• Location: Panchaia Rupes
• Mood: more coffee
• Music: Editors, "This House is Full of Noise"

"We've all seen the posters, but nobody has seen Honey the cat."

Yesterday evening, just before dusk, there was another house fire on our street. That's two in less than seven months (the first was on November 13th, 2009). We'd just finished dinner, and Kathryn heard the sirens. Moments later, our street was entirely filled with firetrucks and rescue vehicles. I went downstairs and out the front door, and saw that the house two houses down was belching a wall of flame fifteen or twenty feet high. No one was injured, and the fire was under control and out within fifteen or twenty minutes. Fucking terrifying. It left a gaping black hole in one of the most beautiful old Victorian homes on the street. This morning, construction crews are out, boarding the place up. The house next door, the one that caught fire in November, is still undergoing repair and cleanup, so I imagine it will be a long time before the house that burned last night is again habitable.

Spooky got two photos:







Photographs Copyright © 2010 by Kathryn A. Pollnac



---

Yesterday, I finally began "The Maltese Unicorn." I wrote only 617 words, but at least it's a beginning. Since May 8th, this story has been kicking about in my head. This week, I wrote many pages of notes for it, actually working through the plot, something I might never before have done with a short story. But it's an unusually complex plot for me, plottier than most of my plots, with all the crosses and double crosses one expects from noir. Plus its a period piece, which makes the whole process several times more difficult than usual. It's a first-person narrative set in May 1935 New York City, inside a frame set in German-occupied Paris in October 1941.

Last night, we saw Bruce McDonald's Pontypool (2009, based on Tony Burgess' novel, Pontypool Changes Everything). A brilliant, terrifying movie that I can't recommend strongly enough. Superbly suspenseful. Every single moment is pulled taut. In a film about a linguistic virus, sound and silence are used to maximum effect. Nods to both Burroughs' language as virus and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. A stunning performance from Stephen McHattie. And no, it's not a zombie movie. It's something worse, but I'm sure people have called it a zombie movie. Exquisitely surreal, claustrophobic, and it wields dread like a scalpel. See it.

And I guess that's it for now.