strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Jun 27 04: cheers
To all my fellow queer New Yorkers: happy Pride. Sorry I can’t be there with you.
No, really, I am. Not sorry enough not to be here instead, but I am.
that’s the way ter do it!
We’re in England, Land of the Subtly Different Computer Keyboards. Crashed the Magdalen College Garden Party yesterday. It rained, so we stayed indoors mostly—we got to watch our host (the College Archivist) steer the kiddies away from the oldest and most fragile of the displays, for instance. Over and over.
We also saw a real Punch and Judy show. I’d never seen one live—the closest I’d gotten up until this point being Riddley Walker and Mr. Punch. I kind of had the impression that we were seeing a rather low-rent version of the real deal, though. The Professor wasn’t using a swazzle, for one thing; and the Alligator looked more like Kermit the Frog’s vicious cousin. Along the course of the play (the usual formula: Mr. Punch encounters, and kills, his baby, his wife, a policeman, a hangman, an alligator, the devil) Mr. Punch met (and killed) a Surprise Guest Star who was distinctly out-of-canon: Osama bin Laden. Very very odd.
Paul’s at his seminar and I may not see him again until Tuesday morning. The rest of us are having our post-nature-walk tea and listening to music. Quite civilized, really.
I think I’ll have another cookie now.
Jun 22 04: another useless discovery
Okay, now this is groovy: did you know that ∞ is an actual HTML entity?
It’s true. You want a lemniscate, it’s just an ∞ away.
How cool is that?
Jun 19 04: What the Radio For
Hey! How cool is this? The BBC is doing a radio serialisation of Terry Pratchett’s Mort. (Mort being the hapless apprentice to the anthropomorphic personification of Death; the book bearing his name being one of the multitudinous and very funny Discworld novels; the Discworld being a round, more-or-less-flat world carried upon the backs of four enormous elephants, which themselves stand upon the comet-scarred carapace of the giant turtle A’Tuin, who swims slowly through space. You get the idea.) Part one has been posted as a Real Audio stream; I don’t know if it’ll stay up once part two is broadcast on June 22, so give it a listen now whilst you can.
Jun 14 04: Calling All Opera Buffs
Is there anybody out there who can give me a few choice examples of showpiece arias for the aspiring coloratura megastar? (I’d need to know the title and the opera from which it came.) Or of a good coloratura art song?
Furthermore, if I needed to name an opera that had a ‘very sad song’ for a coloratura to sing, what would you say?
Anyone?
All will be explained in the fullness of time, but until then I can reassure you that I’m not considering any sort of radical change in occupation. (Oh, okay. Here’s a couple of hints.)
Happy Birthday!
The charming Peter is 40 today.
And I’m not. Neener, neener, neener.
Jun 10 04: flashback
For those of you who have this vague recollection that the Reagan Administration was not quite the era of free beer and sunshine his hagiographers would have us believe, these old press-conference transcripts may help jog your memories.
Note the rise in the statistics quoted in the first and last sessions.
all together now
Say it with me:
My name is Prince! (uh)
And I am funky! (ah)
It isn’t, of course—unless it is—but you know what I mean.
Jun 8 04: romance
We had a picnic at sunset. With candles and a roast chicken and rosemary-black-pepper-parmesan couscous and a green salad and grapes. On the roof.
We watched the sky turn twilight colors and then watched the twilight colors give way to blackness above us and the orange lightfog of Times Square and of New Jersey around the edges. We watched planes go over our heads. We listened to the sounds of the city (ice cream truck, unseen neighbor practicing pennywhistle, arguments, helicopter, cruise ship’s bellowing horn) and felt the breeze and lay back on big pillows we’d lugged up the stairs from the apartment.
Nice, says I.
How was your evening?
(By the way: happy Transit-of-Venus Day. Hope those of you in a position to do so get to enjoy it.)
Jun 6 04: hp III
Tonight we got a mob together and went to see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. My verdict: go see!
This film is the first in the series not to be directed by Chris Columbus, and it’s a wonderful change. HPIII is the first of the three not to be too slavish to its source material: the attention is fixed on the meat of the story rather than the zillions of little digressions and subplots of Rowling’s book. The movie is also beautiful to look at, from the art direction (lovely architectural stuff going on with the school) to the use of long lingering looks at the natural world around the school to establish mood and signal the passage of time. The dementors are sufficiently spooky, the hippogrif is noble, and the Map is terriffic. Fans of Alan Rickman may be a little disappointed: he doesn’t get as much screen time as he might, although he’s very good when he’s around. His scene as a disoriented boggart is a little gem. (The fans who should really be howling are Maggie Smith’s. You’d barely know she showed up for work.) Yes, the actors playing the three teen protagonists are growing up, but I don’t mind that, and I thought they turned in fine performances. Hermione’s still the best of the three; Ron gets a few very funny moments.
All in all, the new movie bodes well for the future of the series. Worth your ten bucks, sez I.
Jun 4 04: milestone
I just re-sealed the envelope with my application for Viable Paradise in it. Moments after sealing it for the first time, I noticed the check with my application fee sitting all innocent-like upon my desk. But I’m over that now. My ‘audition piece’ is a story called “Slow,” which I’ve been working on for a good while. It’s the first piece of short fiction I’ve completed in…gosh, years, and I’m rather pleased with it. At first I was just using the VP deadline as a prod to get past the existential horror of the blank page and get myself working again: lo and behold, it worked. It’s finished, or at least done, and weighs in at a respectable 7600 wds. And now I’m going to take the plunge and submit. I’m not sure I stand a chance at getting into the program, but at this point, why not give it a shot, right? I’ll worry about how I would pay for the thing only when and if.
Big thank-yous to those of you who read it in beta form. If there’s anybody who’d like to take a look at it now, I’d be delighted to share—just drop me a line.
Now. What do I work on next? The urban-fantasy-horror-thing? The dinosaur story? The one about the small-town wizard?
Probably the dinosaur story. I seem to recall promising a beta version to a friend or two some while back. Watch this space.
Jun 1 04: completion
Failed, again, to go to swim practice this morning. After Paul left for work I went back to bed with Pattern Recognition, because I couldn’t bring myself to do anything else. Perhaps it was the plan all along, down somewhere many levels beyond my perception, somewhere my security clearance is not honored. Loved it right up to the end, which I’m still processing and don’t yet know how to feel about. Still: recommended.
Now I’m very late for work, but I don’t really care.