strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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May 31 05: small victory
I could see this as a reason for despair, but I’ll see it as a reason to be happy instead. Last night I wrote four sentences. An entire paragraph of stuff I made up. In my head.
It was my first bit of fiction-mongering in eight months.
Who knows, maybe I can even get it to go all the way to the end, and/or use it as a springboard to move on to “Slow II.” Wouldn’t that be nice.
May 22 05: 100% to Zot!
So we spent the weekend in Ithaca again. It was delightful, as usual: the weather sunny and mild, the streets quiet, the dogs happy, the produce fresh. And as usual I spent the whole long and lovely day seated at Tom and Genevieve’s dining-room table, counting comic books.
The census is finally finished. There are 5,215 comic books in those boxes, dating from the early 1980s to about a month ago. I’m one step closer to giving them all away.
Why? It’s my contention that comic books are a storytelling medium that deserves more academic attention. For that to happen, the academy needs archives of the stories themselves. Their contents can be examined along critical, historical, and cultural lines—get me started on how superhero-origin stories mirror the popular anxieties of the era in which they’re told, for instance, and I could go on for hours. (Alternatively: How did the AIDS crisis affect mainstream comic books? Initial response followed two lines. First, biological pathogens gained increased prominence among origin stories. Second, super-hero costume design, particularly among male characters, took a sudden turn towards heavy body armor, often bristling with spikes. Pop culture was saying, Don’t touch me. Discuss.) Lit-crit aside, the books are potentially useful historical documents for other reasons: who was advertising in them, and how, and why? What did readers have to say in the letter columns? What did the creators say in response?
Right. So, that’s the plan, and last I spoke to my alma mater’s Rare Book and Manuscript division, the academy was interested in playing along with it. A fair amount of homework yet to do, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens next.
May 17 05: a ray extinguished
There is no shortage of pizza joints in New York City. Anybody who has been here can attest to that. But finding a good pizza joint—the sort of place you can hit on your lunch break when you don’t really feel like anything else; the sort of place you can rely on—is another matter entirely. It’s like finding yourself a good barber: once you find a place you like, a place that serves you a decent slice or two for not-too-much money, within reasonable trudging distance of the office, you stick with it. So my fellow New Yorkers will understand the magnitude of my personal tragedy today when I discovered that my default pizzeria had suddenly gone out of business.
Aw, crap.
I wandered around the immediate area for a while, sick at heart. It’s not as though I have slices for lunch more than one day a week, maybe twice in three weeks at most, but still. Don’t think I didn’t ache with the loss. Still, life must go on, and I was getting hungry, so I auditioned a replacement. It was not a success: flaccid, lukewarm slices, with a few lumps of carbonized whatever rattling around with them in the take-out box.
Can anybody recommend a decent place for slices in the vicinity of 47th and 6th? Right now I don’t think I have the strength to do this on my own.
May 15 05: crash and burn
I spent much of today asleep, but it was good. Old friends from various corners of the country all converged on NYC last night, for various reasons, so we went out for fabulous Chinese and then took over a teeny tiny bar here in the neighborhood. I mean size-of-our-bedroom small. No, I won’t tell you which one; it’s my little secret bar and I ain’t gonna give that away so easily. But I can be persuaded (farily easily) to take the curious there. If you’re feeling froufrou, they do a pomegranate cosmopolitan thingy that’s delicious. It’s even also cheap! We stayed out too late and spent too much money, but had a lovely time.
So, right. Slept in this morning. Lounged about for much of the day. What is so lovely as a nap in the arms of your beloved, with sunight streaming past the windows? Around 5, I went to the gym to do 30 mins on the elliptical run-without-a-treadmil thingummy. At minute 8 I realized that I hadn’t really eaten anything today, but I kept going because I’d set a ferocious pace and wanted to see where it would take me. At minute 17 I saw where it was taking me: DANGER, the sign said. COMPLETE ABSENCE OF BLOOD SUGARS, 12 PACES. Ow. By minute 30 I was cursing my lack of common sense, but still, I’d managed to burn 568 calories in the process. Joe the trainer will be proud. Or he’ll tell me I’m an idiot for forgetting to eat. But hey, at least I didn’t give up, right? I’m dumb this way. I may be standing in front of a freight train, but I’ll make it work for the honor of dismembering me on its way some distant city. This evening was leftover Chinese and reading collected volumes of the fabulous Finder.
In the end, not an audacious day, but a pleasant one nonetheless.
Tomorrow is our final concert for the season, part of an ongoing concert series at Central Synagogue. I hear it’s a gorgeous space, which will make for a nice send-off to a crazy-ass year. I look forward to a month or three out of harness. First, though, I should probably try to get some sleep.
May 12 05: king lear (or, how I spent monday morning; or, the inherent dangers of being a lexically-inclined smartass)
It all started with this BoingBoing article about some folks who are composing a limerick dictionary: one entry for each word in the OED. Only it won’t be, because the legal department at Oxford University Press contacted them to express their disapproval. The project has been streamlined somewhat as a result: now it’s just one limerick for each word in the English language.
I contacted a friend who works on the OED, who replied:
I carry no torch for “our lawyers”, whoever they are. I suspect people will get bored with limericks before they get far into B. (Apart from which, has anyone worked out what to do with words like honorificabilitudinity?)
Pish, I says.
Honorificabilitu-
Dinity is something that you
Are wont to display
If you spend your day
Showing la morale et la vertu.
I mean, duh. What would you have done? His reply came back about three minutes later.
OK. How about “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”?
The problem here is that once you’ve started down this particular road, one cannot dive into the ditch without sacrificing a great deal of dignity. So I rolled up my sleeves and pretended I didn’t have a job to do and ultimately produced this:
SUPERCALIFRAG (One would think
This sort of thing tickles me pink)
ILISTICEX (but)
PIAL (for this, what)
IDOCIOUS (you owe me’s “a drink.”)I think I just injured myself.
Less merciful types would have thrown something else at me at this point, like that really really long word purported to describe a disease found among miners, but not our P–-. The sole reason for this show of kindness was probably that the workday in the UK had ended by that point, and he’d gone home. Whatever. I lucked out. Thank god we weren’t talking about sestinas, or double dactyls.
Here’s what I want to know, though: how come I can bang these out at my desk with a maniacal grin on my face and a song in my heart, whereas anytime I try to sit down and write stories the whole world turns blue-white with panic and suddenly I’m curled up in a ball on the sofa watching Changing Rooms? Maybe what I should be doing is exploring ways to create an epic-verse form of the limerick for scientifictional use.
May 4 05: reassurance
In case anyone was worried: I am not dead, just busy. We’ve had five performances and about ten hours of rehearsals since last Wednesday. There’s a Seekrit Project underway that’s nearly finished. I wish I could say it was writing-related, but no. (Poor Dr. Alice is still waiting for her turn onstage. As with the previous portion, this installment of the Slow cycle currently suffers from a lack of a central conflict—only this time, I recognized the problem before writing a single word. That realization brought the whole thing to a halt in its tracks, pending An Idea. Aargh.)
Anyway, more to come soon. I don’t have a rehearsal for an entire week, for one thing.