strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Sep 25 08: the fanboy loses his tongue
Tonight I shirked my responsibilities and delayed my dinner in order to hear John Crowley read at the 92nd St Y. Crowley — opening diphthong as in cow, not as in crow — is one of my most favorite writers in the world, and unquestionably a big influence on my own writing. I discovered his most famous novel, Little, Big, upon the lending shelves of my high-school Shakespeare teacher’s classroom,1 and I was never the same. The 1986 trade-paperback edition I bought not long thereafter is one of my few treasured books not currently in storage; I reread it every year or two in full, and bits of it when the mood strikes, and needed it to be close at hand. Someday the rereadings and the carting-around will cause it to fall to bits, a victim of its own power. A while back, feeling flush, I ordered a copy of the 25th-anniversary edition to take on some of its burdens, and it should arrive around Christmas. But the battered old book is one of my Talismanic Objects, and I took it to be signed.
Crowley read a selection from his upcoming novel Four Freedoms, which is slated for publication in June of 2009. It’s one of his historicals: not a work of fantasy or speculative whatever, but something more firmly rooted in the real history of America in the 20th century. The selection was great, of course, articulate and touching and smart and funny and full of moments of lapidary detail. Unexpectedly, it was also full of sex, telling along the way with sensitivity, humor, insight, and enthusiasm the story of a young man’s maturing awareness of adult sexuality and the loss of his virginity to an older woman.
There weren’t many people in Crowley’s book-signing line after the reading. Most of the crowd seemed to be there for Marilynne Robinson, whose stuff I’ve never read but whose reading was equally enthralling. If much more chaste. I would have liked to make trenchant comments, ask insightful questions, done the cool chitchat thing, but the squeeing fanboy and the semi-intelligent reader and writer of fiction got locked in some sort of deathmatch in my head, so that was right out. It saved me, I guess, from having to blurt out that I’d been using the name of a minor character from Little, Big as an online handle for 15 years — hell, had commented on Crowley’s own LiveJournal under that name. But it also kept me from talking about experiencing New York for the first time as someone who had only known it previously through its strange and fantastic depiction in Little, Big; and from asking the question I was dying to ask, which was whether anyone had told him going into the reading, or if indeed he had noticed as he read, that a huge mob of high-school English students was in the back of the auditorium, their eyes widening, the faces of their teachers turning ever more scarlet.
1 I bless your memory, Barbara Abbott.
Sep 24 08: a creeping certainty of impending doom
I am kind of underemployed right now — in fact I’m really underemployed, and if anybody needs a freelance editorial guy with smarts and the ability to learn quick, please contact me; résumé and enthusiastic references available on request — but up until today I was not worried.
Today, however, I realize that in fact I am probably going to starve to death.
Sep 20 08: ich canne haue lolles
Okay, this is brilliant: bored medievalist daily translates the enervated, lifeless dreck of the modern newspaper comic-strip page into Middle English. Which somehow achieves the unimaginable, making it funny in the process. Proceed directly to Japes for Owre Tymes, if you please. (Via Quod She.)
I feel at this point that I would be remiss if I did not tangentially also refer you to what is without a doubt the best drunk post ever in the history of all blogdom everywhere: O dere ghod, by one T. Nielsen Hayden.
Sep 16 08: rabbit holes and other entertainments
I didn’t get much done this weekend. It’s my father’s fault. He asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and I asked him for Spore, and he gave it to me, and it ate my brain.
I have spent intermittent periods of the last week or so raising a little carnivorous floater in the primordial soup up into a rapacious carnivorous biped that rules its world with an iron claw-thingy (and also an iron poison-squirting thingy, which is located between its eyes). I fine-tuned its anatomy and its culture; I designed its houses and its factories and its theaters, its cars and its boats and its planes. It is now exploring the local byways of its home galaxy in a little spaceship that looks kind of like it escaped from a ’50s B movie. It arrived last Monday. The following morning I decided to forego the morning swim practice because I figured there was no point on attending it after 15 minutes’ sleep. I left it alone for a couple days and then stayed up outrageously late again; I left it alone until Saturday morning and then… and then suddenly it was Saturday evening. Really really fun, is Spore, but it’s also some kind of electro-hyper-crack for game players with a tendency toward obsessive behavior. You have been warned.
So anyway, after I stepped carefully away from the computer on Saturday evening I went over to Hugh’s house for dinner and Battlestar Galactica. We’re both completely addicted to it and are burning through the DVDs as fast as Netflix will let us. Yes, it’s Stress TV, but it’s also utterly brilliant. Wow. (We’re about halfway through Season 2. Spoil it for me and die.)
And then I went home and thought: Hey, I have an hour or so before bed. Why not turn that lovely skein of Valkyrie into a ball so I can make something with it? Because I just finished my first ever pair of socks last week and I want something new to work on.
And so I untwisted the skein and got ready to hand-wind the thing into a center-pull ball. I turned to lay the skein out on the bed. And then I dropped it. Within four seconds of hitting the floor, the first 6 yards of that skein had turned into an utterly spectacular tangle. I mean, that ox-cart at Gordium had nothing on this. Well, damn, I thought. This’ll take me a little longer than expected, but there’s nothing to do but to start untying it. It can’t be that bad, anyway. Right?
Right. That was fun, and all, and heaven knows I was happy to immerse myself in yet another project, but still: seven and a half hours of my life that I will never get back. Many of them hours during which I should have been sleeping. (Really, I need to just get myself a swift and a ball-winder. Because never again.)
Next thing you know I’m going to acquire an exciting new hobby like matchstick-counting or hand-washing. If that happens, send help.
Sep 5 08: things that make us happy
And so we reach the end of another week spent copy editing at Major Publication. Current music-in-head: Elvis Costello & the Attractions, (I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea, specifically the seriously kick-ass bass line. The bass lines in EC&tA stuff is always completely fabulous, and fractal with little moments of musical interestingness — little variations from verse to verse and even from line to line. Arranging their stuff for a cappella groups is surely a ferocious balancing act; you want to capture every little nuance, every great little bit, but then memorizing the arbitrary inversions and ornaments becomes an utter nightmare, so how do you standardize something that draws some of its coolness from the way it never stands still?
And on the subject of work at Major Publication: I love what I do for a living. Having wandered down several career paths that emphatically did not inspire that sort of happy, I know how lucky I am. Work at MP, when I get it, is particularly choice, because the people are great, the writing I am given to shepherd is already of high caliber, and the pay is sufficient for comfortable rent-payment.
This weekend’s plans are vague but include a mountain of laundry, meeting the visiting parents of a dear friend for lunch, and getting some exercise. Oh, and finding out how my niece’s first day of kindergarten went. She’s getting so big; I am so very proud of her. She and her brother are great kids and the thought of them is a source of joy when I’m blue.