John Burridge

WiFi Users Should Use WPA2

2011-12-29T13:37:00.000-08:00

US-CERT Vulnerability Note VU#723755 - WiFi Protected Setup PIN brute force vulnerability

http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/723755

Looks like The Bad Guys can break into your wireless network in just a few hours as opposed to a few days. Time to make sure you're using WPA2.

A Lumbering Holiday Tale: The Video

2011-12-23T14:53:00.000-08:00

The "classic" holiday tale returns in video.

Snake Dream

2011-12-23T08:21:00.000-08:00

I was going on a hike with Mark in the fields and hills between my parents' house. There was a group of us, but other than Mark, I don't recall who. I quickly became separated from everyone, and was in a kind of cul-de-sac of blackberries in a field near Bald Hill.

I could hear everyone up on the hill, and I managed to find a trail leading through a lower place in the brambles. The bramble paths pointed at an old brown cottage one way, and back the way I'd come the other. I picked my way through the brambles and stepped over a small brook.

The hill and the fields transitioned at this point, I think. They became less green and Oregonian and more arid, and more like the sonorian desert with cliffs. I was too busy wondering about the lizard I saw scrabbling up and down a sandy dune. I had the sense that this was a big lizard because I could see it well at a distance.

I wanted to catch up with everyone, so I headed toward Bald Hill, where I'd heard them last. I became concerned about rattlesnakes, because I knew they'd like to sun themselves on the rocky slope. There's a break in my recall, but the next thing I can clearly recall, I was being chased by a rattlesnake and another, smaller snake. I was running and they were wriggling after me.

I say that it was a rattlesnake, except that this snake was banded black, yellow, and red. Its rattle wasn't quite like a regular rattlesnakes, it was black and charred looking, like the remains of a log after a fire.

Despite running away, the snakes caught up to me, and then then rattlesnake proceeded to wrap itself around my neck and shoulders and sort of hang out. I might have been bitten on the hand, but it was more like a grazing bite.

The setting transformed to a busy city street. It was daylight. I still had the rattlesnake wrapped around my throat. I met a writer friend, but she was an amalgam of three different Wordos.

"John," she said, "I saw you from a distance and I said to myself, 'Is John wearing a rattlesnake around his neck?' And you are!"

We had a small chat. The rattlesnake might have changed color to something more like a rattlesnake's, and the rattle seemed less like a piece of burnt wood and more like the nestled buttons of a rattlesnake's tail. I have a strong sense of the snake's coils. Eventually the rattlesnake got bored or whatever, and shrugged itself off of me.

I must have woken up or something because I was telling some folks about the dream and A.R. (also from the Wordos) looked at me like I'd just walked backwards on a high wire over a fire and said, "Well. You've certainly made your spiritual connections."

And then I woke up again.

I'm trying to figure out this dream, because I don't normally dream about snakes. Usually after I cross a stream in my dreams, I encounter a stag or a panther or a raccoon or a white horse. As a white person of English and Norwegian stock, I'm not grounded in Native American traditions, so I'm hesitant to break out the sage and say (in deep, serious, spiritual voice) Rattlesnake Is My Power Animal.

But over the new moon and my birthday--both tomorrow--I think I'll be on the look-out for snakes and what they might be trying to tell me.

Christmas Is Coming

2011-12-18T18:00:00.000-08:00

"... he had that look you very rarely find / the haunted, hunted kind..."

Winter Solstice Fire

2011-12-12T13:27:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I bought some beeswax candles so I can be ready for the Solstice.

Every Winter Solstice, around noon, I like to use a magnifying lens to ignite a match and then set the flame on a candle. From that candle, we light the candles in our fireplace and then watch them as the day grows darker.

This year the solstice is 9:30 PM on Dec 21, so I'm calling the noon of the 21st the Solstice Noon. If it is not too cloudy, stop by with a candle after noon and I will light it with solstice fire. Um, no, I'm not going to sing any Doors songs or do a re-enactment of Rent.

Hmmm. Maybe I can light the BBQ with solstice fire too....

Masculinity & Steampunk

2011-12-04T17:55:00.001-08:00

Santos Dumont
Wikimedia Commons

Lately, I've been writing a story set in a world with an alternate history where magic works, it's the beginning of the 20th century, and dirigibles are in the air. The process has been an integrative one for me, because little bits of history that I've usually not connected in my head have come together.

My story involves a small airship, slightly larger than the one Santos Dumont flew around the Eiffel Tower circa 1900. (The really big airships, like the zeppelins of Germany, didn't appear in historical skies until about 1910. Transatlantic and trans-US crossings didn't happen until the 1930's.)


Lewis Hine, 1920. Power house mechanic working on steam pump. Wikimedia Commons

Since my characters are American citizens raised in England, they "Remember the Maine!" It also means they're Victorians. My challenge writing alternate-history American-Victorians is preserving the feel of culture while writing a gay male character who isn't committing "a sin unspeakable in Christian circles," and a female character more active than Willamina Harker. (Yes, the Harkers and Count Dracula are from this time period, too.) I think I can justify some of the characters' cultural expectation by using an alternate history religion that I've played with before -- it helps that instead of a same-sex trinity, the godhead is a gender-balanced quartet.

So I have to examine how to write masculinity. On one hand is the "muscular Christianity" that E.M. Forester commented on, with its homo-social prep-schools filled with fine young men learning Greek and honing their bodies with athletic games. With the alternate-religion of the world, I think I can focus on the strong body, strong mind ethic to help preserve that old English Empire feel. And since The Father and The Mother of the Quartet are equals, there's less pressure to have a "The spiritually manly man is the head of his household" morality.

Oscar Wilde
Wikimedia Commons

But at the opposite end of the historical definition of early twentieth century manliness is Oscar Wilde, The Aesthete. In this time period, if one was a refined, nonathletic, aesthete, one was not a manly-man. And Steampunk, the romanticized version of the industrial revolution, is firmly rooted on the Manly Man in the Steamworks; the Self-sufficient, Burly Explorer; the Civilized Marshall of the Inner-Brute. The aesthete hadn't marshaled his inner-brute so much as banished it (if he ever had one to begin with).

Anyway... that's been what's peculating in the back of my head. Now... onto writing the story. And I think I'm going to try my hand at more Steampunk, if only to try different ways of queering it.

Oscar Wilde Steampunk Challenge

2011-11-17T13:49:00.000-08:00

Last night -- after I had confessed that it had taken me something like four years to realize that the Borg character from ST:Voyager was supposed to be uber-sexy -- I was challenged by @gralinnaea and @shanna_germain to write an Oscar Wilde Steampunk story. There's monetary incentives and fuzzy dice involved.

Anyway, I had started a story on the train to OryCon that was supposed to be Steampunk, and so I've accepted...

Which leads me to to muse on, what makes a story a story that queers a genre? Shanna's take (from what I can gather after one guest post) is that steampunk is inherently sexy. But I'm not sure that just swapping out Eve for Steve in a Victorian Era story with Airships counts as queering steampunk.

And then there's the question of how historical to be. This is the era of Oscar Wilde, Bram Stroker and Gilbert & Sullivan. Having recently finished Dracula, I can tell you that Women's Equality had not quite made it into the Victorian sensibility (at least as it appeared on the written page). And society's reaction to Wilde as an aesthetic defined what it meant to be a Manly Man in the late 1800's and early 1900.

And does having a gay male character as the protagonist of a story even make it queer any more? I mean, sure, in the late 1990's... but that was fifteen years ago.

I'm still thinking about this, but I have a feeling that no matter what, there's going to be an airship called The Peacock.

OryCon 2011 Redux

2011-11-14T17:25:00.000-08:00

Friday

Taking the train is fun, especially if you travel with another writer. But expect that the train will be a little late.

2:00PM-3:00PM -- Hawthorne Political Systems in SF

Political Scientist and Anthropologists and Cultural Historians throw your stories across the room when you over-simplify The Evil Overlord's Government for the same reasons that Physicists do when you Do the Kessle Run in 2.5 Parsecs.

3:00PM-4:00PM -- Story Outline in an Hour

Give the character something they love, threaten it, and then imagine worse things. Mileua, Idea, Character, Event will filter how you show the story.

4:00PM-5:00PM -- Gender and Writing

Write complex characters. As a writer and as a reader, you have basic assumptions about men and women. You can use your writing to explore gender (and the other) but make sure to write a good story (that challenges peoples' assumptions) without being preachy.

5:00PM-6:00PM -- Designing believable archaeology and anthropology

Do your research. When doing your research on another culture's religion, make a note of if the material is written by a believer or a non-believer.

6:00PM-7:00PM -- FOOD!

7:00PM-7:30PM -- Endeavour Awards

Saturday

9:00 AM - Wordos Breakfast

More Food.

10:00AM-11:00AM -- Spicing up Your Hero

Heros are people who pick up the mess that other people would rather not so that nobody actually steps into the mess. Heros are not always Knights of Light, so much as they are folks working against the Dark; anti-evil doesn't always equal good. Your hero doesn't have to be the point of view character. Give your hero weaknesses; give your hero a dirty secret. Be aware of the biases that filter a hero's perceptions (we all have them). Be aware of how being a hero will affect how they interact with culture (i.e. Awful Good).

11:00AM-12:00PM -- Using Social Media to get Published

Social media is like a Con on the internet that never shuts down. Decide how much you want to share with people and then use that to make a connection with your readers. Don't bitch about people. Make sure that you use cross-posting so you so you limit the time you spend on social media.

12:00PM-1:00PM -- My Villain is Too Mwa Ha Ha. Help!

The villain is always the hero in his or her own mind. Make sure that the reader can see the motivation behind the villain's action so the villain's actions don't appear to be violent or evil just for violence's or evil's sake.

Oh, also: Dracula is Evil because he is a perversion of the Christian rite of Communion and a being operating outside of the circle of God's grace.

1:00PM-2:00PM -- Alien Etiquette

An alien culture can be broken down into Morals (what's right and wrong), Manners (how an individual acts and reacts in situation), Money (how they trade), Monogamy (is it a good idea or not), and The Marx Brothers (what is funny).

Make the alien POV an emotional reaction to something.

2:00PM-3:00PM -- Hawthorne But I thought it was perfect!

Play nice. Being part of a critique group is to practice critiquing manuscripts (easy) so that you can see how to critique your own (harder). A good critique group will have procedural rules to protect people emotionally; the foremost being, critique the text, not the person.

3:00PM-4:00PM -- Writers of the Future

Writers of the Future is a great beginner's market from which to launch your career. It's the most money you'll be paid for a story for quite a while. Regularly submitting to Writers of the Future is a good way to start good writing habits. It's cool, it's validating, it's network building. And... remember, have a What Next Goal ready for after you win.

4:00PM-5:00PM -- The Physics of Magic

Figure out how magic is used in your world, is it via words, or objects, or ritual or Divine Intervention, or...?

A good magic system will have limits -- the cost of using magic is prohibitive, magic spells are too specific to be of general use, and magic should be bound by a set of consistent (possibly logical) rules. If magic is unlimited, the story turns into wish fulfillment.

The use and limitations of magic should aid the story's flow.

Editors want New And Different Magic Systems, but not too new and different.

Sunday

12:00PM-1:00PM -- The Unique Challenges of Urban Fantasy

Urban Fantasy, which has some cross-over with paranormal romance, can trace its roots to detective and noir genres. It's an exploration of being outside and The Other. When writing Urban Fantasy, its helpful to think of the magic (and the magical culture) in the story as being a part of the story's main culture (which makes it alternate history), a sub-culture within the main culture, or an unknown element hidden from the main culture.

1:00PM-2:00PM -- Podcasting Primer

Decide how often you want to podcast (daily, weekly, monthly...) Decide if you want to podcast for fun (friends and family) or to build a fanbase (readings of your work) or as a soapbox/forum or ... a mix of all of these.

How often you podcast will affect your choice of podcast host - if your podcast becomes very popular, you may run into streaming issues (and be charged accordingly).

Skype is very difficult to get good sound quality from. Record in a closet or under covers to help dampen sound. Use a windsock or make one to cut down on pops in speech. You'll need to do post-recording production clean-up of hisses and pops if you want a good product.

Podcasting can eat up your life (just like other social media).

Post OryCon

When -- ahem -- new writers wish to push their mystical autobiographical science-fiction mystery thriller manuscript upon you hoping that you can back-door it to a Famous Editor (or wave a magical writing pen over the manuscript and turn it into solid writing gold) a good answer is, "Well, my editing rates are..."

Insert post-signing -- ahem -- discussion about the virtues of Scrivener here.

OryCon 33 Schedule

2011-11-09T21:27:00.000-08:00

Here's an incomplete OryCon Schedule. Of course, it appears that several of the panels I'd like to attend happen at the same time (mostly on Saturday). And I need to figure out when I'm going to eat. An additional complication is that I won't be staying at the OryCon hotel, but at another venue several blocks away....

Friday

Arrival at PDX train station: 11:35 AM -- insert possibly late train and figuring how to take the Green MAX to The Portland Doubletree here (...find stop 7763 and take it to stop 8343, Lloyd Center/NE 11th stop).

12:00PM-1:00PM

Alaska Pros At Cons Jess Hartley, Cat Rambo, Dave Howell
Hawthorne Twisted history Paul Guinan, Mary Robinette Kowal, EE Knight, Irene Radford

2:00PM-3:00PM

Hawthorne Political Systems in SF Rory Miller, Elton Elliott, Jim Fiscus, Andrew Nisbet, Mike Shepherd Moscoe
Idaho Drowning in slush Grá Linnaea, Leslie What, Lizzy Shannon, Wendy Wagner

3:00PM-4:00PM

Hamilton Workshop: Story Outline in an hour David D. Levine, Mary Robinette Kowal
Mult/Holl Cover Art in the Age of E-books EE Knight, Jim Pavelec, Carolyn Nicita

4:00PM-5:00PM

Broadway Running conventions Rick Lindsley, Suzanne Tompkins, [unlisted]
Hawthorne Theme Grá Linnaea, Karen Azinger, Bill Johnson, Richard A. Lovett
Lincoln Gender and Writing Cat Rambo, J. A. Pitts, Rhiannon Held

5:00PM-6:00PM

Idaho The fine art of description David W. Goldman, Bill Johnson, Devon Monk, Alma Alexander, Victoria Blake
Madison Protagonists vs. Antagonists Mark J. Ferrari, Adrian Phoenix, Sheila Finch, Louise Marley
Ross/Morr Designing believable archaeology and anthropology Rhiannon Held, Rhiannon Louve, Pat MacEwen, [unlisted]

6:00PM-7:00PM

Idaho Organizing a Successful Critique Group Bruce Taylor, Sonia Orin Lyris, Garth Upshaw, Ray Vukcevich

7:00PM-7:30PM

Mult/Holl Endeavour Awards Jim Fiscus, Sara A. Mueller, Devon Monk, Sheila Simonson

8:00PM-9:00PM

Ross/Morr NASA Fashion Show

Saturday

9:00 AM - Wordos Breakfast

10:00AM-11:00AM

Hamilton Spicing up Your Hero Rory Miller, Dianna Rodgers, Chris Lester, Karen Azinger, Kami Miller
Hawthorne Steampunk: Victorian marvels of science fantastic Irene Radford, Janet Borkowski, Laurel Anne Hill, Guy Letourneau, Mary Lou Sullivan
Jefferson/Adams Playing God: Apocalyptic storytelling EE Knight, Victoria Blake, Daniel H. Wilson
Lincoln How to Find an Agent Jess Hartley, Camille Alexa
Roosevelt So you want to be a writer? Devon Monk, Ken Scholes, Jim Kling, Louise Marley
Ross/Morr Research for alternate history: Mining real history for good fiction. Alma Alexander, Steven Barnes, Jim Fiscus, Nisi Shawl, Bob Brown

11:00AM-12:00PM

Alaska Using Social Media to get Published Mary Rosenblum/Mary Freeman, M.K. Hobson, Chris Lester, Cat Rambo
Broadway Funny Horror Fiction Scott Allie, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Victoria Blake

12:00PM-1:00PM

Hamilton My villain is too mwa ha ha. Help! Jess Hartley, Kami Miller, Chris Lester, Sara A. Mueller, Adrian Phoenix
Idaho Science Fiction as a Tool for Social Change Rhiannon Louve, Brenda Cooper, Grá Linnaea, Edward Morris, G. David Nordley
Madison The structure of writing S. A. Bolich, Devon Monk, Jason V Brock, Richard A. Lovett, Victoria Blake

1:00PM-2:00PM

Broadway Alien Etiquette Mary Robinette Kowal, David W. Goldman, Judith R. Conly, Ann Wilkes, Louise Owen
Idaho Writing Formidable Women Steve Perry, Scott Allie, M.K. Hobson, Adrian Phoenix, Karen Azinger, Victoria Blake
Mult/Holl EE Knight - Reimagining Vampires and Dragons EE Knight

2:00PM-3:00PM

Hawthorne But I thought it was perfect! Mary Rosenblum/Mary Freeman, Grá Linnaea, Bill Johnson, Joan Gaustad, Richard A. Lovett
Mult/Holl Intro to Steampunk Lorien Stormfeather, Diana Vick, Janet Borkowski, Mary Lou Sullivan

3:00PM-4:00PM

Roosevelt Writers of the Future Ken Scholes, Aimee C. Amodio, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Grá Linnaea

4:00PM-5:00PM

Lincoln The physics of magic Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Devon Monk, Karen Azinger, Scott Allie, Howard Davidson

Sunday

12:00PM-1:00PM

Hawthorne Spaceships, Colonists, and Castaways David D. Levine, Camille Alexa, G. David Nordley, Krista Wohlfeil
Idaho The unique challenges of urban fantasy Devon Monk, J. A. Pitts, Adrian Phoenix, Mary Robinette Kowal, Rhiannon Held
Jefferson/Adams Creatures of Magic Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Judith R. Conly, Vonda N. McIntyre, EE Knight

1:00PM-2:00PM

Roosevelt Podcasting Primer M.K. Hobson, Laurel Anne Hill

.... Departure will be tricky. I've got a train ticket for the 6 PM train, but domestic bliss would be better served if I changed it to a 3 PM train... so on one hand, there are a few last panels that I could squeeze in, but on the other hand I may be too fried by Sunday afternoon to take any of it in. Oh well.

Machine of Death - Keep hanging tight, everybody

2011-10-27T16:45:00.000-07:00

Keeping my fingers crossed that my story will be one of the 35 stories out of 2000 to make it into the Machine of Death anthology: Machine of Death - Keep hanging tight, everybody This will be an interesting twist on Halloween.

This is Halloween !

2011-10-23T21:43:00.000-07:00

I was so singing, "Making Christmas" last night during the photo session when I took this shot.

Gearing Up for Halloween

2011-10-18T18:27:00.000-07:00

If we only take out one or two things a day Mark won't get Halloween fatigue.

Thinking of OryCon

2011-10-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

I'm going to OryCon in a few weeks. I haven't been in a few years, mostly because it's in Portland and it's kind of expensive. I'm looking forward to seeing folks. As soon as I know what my schedule is, I'll post it (I have a feeling it will be pretty flexible).

My fantasy is to take the train up on Friday and then come home by train Sunday. Amtrak has an annoying habit of swapping out the train for a bus. Not that the buses are old and smelly or anything, but you really can't walk around on them and it's harder to pretend you're on the Orient Express.

More Cafe John

2011-10-12T16:20:00.000-07:00

The weather was nice enough that I wanted to have some tea at Cafe John. I also wanted to write... and somehow that didn't happen. Today is one of those days where just as I sit down to write the phone rings, or a ton of other little distractions crop up. Like blogging. And tea. And e-mail. And more little distractions.

Yeah, the Writing Directorate's motto is ringing in my head... and now I have to finish my tea and go run yet another little errand.

I Feel Geeky

2011-10-11T22:28:00.000-07:00

(Cue the Sondheim!!)

I feel geeky! Oh so geeky!
Can't be sneaky how geeky I feel!
And so techie, that I hardly can believe I'm real.

(la la la la la la la la!)

(bridge)
Point your cell phone
at that pixellated QR tag
What can that infograhic be ?

Just a little link
Just a little tale
Just a little bit about ME!

Domesticity

2011-10-09T18:58:00.000-07:00

Today was a deep-cleaning day.

Actually, it's been a deep-cleaning few days.

Domesticity began Thursday night, when Mark and I planted a magnolia tree. Okay, Mark did about 90% of the digging and I helped move the tree from the back of his truck and into the back yard. We're pretty pleased with the tree, which is evergreen, and which should provide some extra privacy between our breakfast nook and the backdoor neighbor's house.

When I haven't been gardening (or writing), I've been cleaning up my office. My office is a closet. Literally. I moved my grandfathers old oak desk out of the closet, and it made a big difference. I suppose when I get around to replacing the ancient Windows98 desktop and its mondo CTR, I'll have even more space. I suppose that I should retire the machine, but I have a ton of old Illustrator files on it that wont run on any of my other machines. Oh well, it's there and available, and I am looking forward to more writing sessions actually in my office.

Sunday was cleaning day. We cleaned the kitchen, the bathroom, and the living room. Well, okay; Mark did most of the work while I moved things around. And did dishes. And vacuume out the fireplace (we only light candles in it, so I don't know how it got so dirty).

And then it was time to cook. I started the rice. Just as I'd turned the burner on, I got a phone call from a friend. We were discussing the logistics of next our next visit. As I gazed across our clean living room, I became aware of a layer of haze floating about four feet off the ground. It was like the fog was trying to come into the house. I excused myself from the phone conversation for a moment, walked into the smoke-filled kitchen. A white plume rose from the cast iron pan filled with boiling bacon grease on the front burner (note to self, RR and RF mean two different thing).

I picked up the pan. It was still smoldering, so I naively blew on it to try to stop the smoke.

With a foom and a whoosh, the bacon grease burst into flame.

I laughed, because it was kind of funny, and took the flaming pan outside.

Eventually, I did get back to my phone call.

Last Hurrah at Cafe John

2011-10-08T13:19:00.000-07:00

October has come, and with it have come the heavy rains. Today is an exceptioin, so I'm outside at Cafe John enjoying one last moment of sunshine. Then I'll roll up the indoor/outdoor carpet for another season of Very Grey Days.

Sale to Twisted Tales Anthology

2011-10-02T22:22:00.000-07:00

I discovered last week that I managed to sell a 66 word story to Delving Press. It will join 65 other similar dark stories in an anthology called "Twisted Tales."

From the Delving Press website:

Twisted Tales is a collection of 66 stories that will terrify and creep under your skin like a flesh eating virus...each story is only 66 words in length, but like the the microscopic size of ebola will eat away at your subconscious and seep into your dreams when the lights are low and the sounds of darkness frighten your every sense...

I'm happy because this was a fun story to write, I can now say that I write horror (who knew?), and I'm in an anthology with Damon Kaswell and Alethea Kontis. ... and I pretty much had the same reaction Alethea has on her blog.

Fall 2011 Equinox Coast

2011-09-27T22:06:00.000-07:00

Mark said we should go camping.

We went to Cape Perpetua.

Cook's Chasm is near Cape Perpetua.

Captain Cook sailed here in 1776.

The tide was high when I took these pictures.

There was a lot of foam on the waves. It was windy, too - so the foam would blow off the top of the waves. Which was a little gross.

The previous day, we'd stopped by about two hours after high tide. The waves were off, or so the Park Ranger said, and so the spout didn't spout.

You still had to watch out for sneaker waves, though.

Lessons from Critique

2011-09-23T14:33:00.000-07:00

I recently put two stories, back-to-back, through the Wordos critique table. One is a near-future science fiction short story and the other is set about one hundred fifty years in the future.

What struck me about the process this time is how I (sometime fail to) balance world-building between setting description. What the table told me about one of the stories was that I was using too much exposition to describe the future society's terms of kinship. One analogous example would be if I were writing a century ago and spent a few pages describing the intricacies of an oil change station. We're really used to the idea of engines and oil and gasoline, but how would you write about it to people used to horses and carriages? In any case, the draft of that story is probably a "Wikipedia story" that is slightly exhausting to read.

This leads me to the other story, which had a "Dictionary of Obscure Usage" passage. This is a problem I have because I'm a word geek, so I like to use obscure words, words' tertiary meanings, and awkward phrases because they have special (humorous) meaning to me. During a Twitter exchange about vocabulary, it was suggested that I may be writing old school science fiction, which was more puzzle-oriented.

The most important thing I learned from the critiques was that I needed the reminder that authors don't go out of their way to confuse readers (usually), and even a confused critiquer has something useful to say (um, usually).

Sheep on My Head

2011-09-20T07:52:00.000-07:00

The dream took place in a combination of the hill where I grew up and the Monroe Park neighborhood where Mark and I used to live. I've a disjointed memory of the sequence, but I think it went like this.

There was something about Kelly KMHK Ducat coming to a college, which was simultaneously Corvallis and some place like Sisters, Oregon. Although the city was on a narrow green ridge, the college was Oregon State University. There was something about helping a guy find a job while a bunch of us sat in a large wooden bar / REI.

There was a shift.

Mark and I were living in a smallish house in Eugene. There was an animal pen in the yard, with a horse, some sheep, and I think a goat. I remember the inside of the house was dark, and it reminds me in waking of the old house we rented. Sarah, our old landlady appeared at one point to say hi and perform some sort of maintenance task involving moving the animal pens around to consolidate them.

I think there were gunshots in the distance. There was a radio broadcast warning residents to stay inside, and something about the gunshots being from only one gunman.

There was another shift. I was walking around on top of the hill where I grew up. I had one of the sheep on my head. I remember recalling a college in-joke that was a riff on a Bette Midler routine: "Oh God, don't let me wake up in the morning and want to put a sheep on my head." I don't remember exactly why I had a sheep on my head. It was a pretty big sheep, but I didn't feel that it was heavy. Its stomach rested on the top of my head, and its legs draped down on either side of my shoulders. I think Mark and I had a dog (not Pickles the beagle), and the dog was frisking about, too. I'm not sure where Mark had gotten to.

After wandering about for some time, the sheep became restless. It sensed something calling it from over the hill. I let it off my head, and watched it and the dog bound away, up and over the crest of the hill... and I woke up.

Dreams of Dreaming

2011-09-18T07:59:00.000-07:00

I dreamed Mark and I were on a hike in the coastal or cascade mountians. It was a sunny day, and we were following a large creek or small river as it cascaded over medium sized boulders. Oaks and maples and other decidious trees lined both sides of the stream's banks. It wasn't cold, but I have a vague sense that there was ice on the river, or at least an image of thick ice.

The river went underground, and Mark and I followed it. At first the tunnel was rough and rocky, with basalt boulders in the middle of the water and rising up around and over us. But slowly I noticed concrete here and there, and then we came to a chamber which was mostly concrete with textured gravel embedded in it. It was darker, but not pitch black; there must of been lights somewhere, because the sunlight coming through some clerestory windows wasn't enough. The sound of the river reflected off of the rocks and concrete. A tile compass set into the concrete floor showed which way was north.

We were in some kind of park ranger station. Through a window, I saw a stone turret or observatory sitting on the top of the structure.

There was a dream-shift, and suddenly we were at someone's parent's psychometric lab. I didn't catch anyone's names; the son was twenty-something. The building stayed more or less the same, except now it was a laboratory for measuring brain activity. In the middle of the room stood a large (think two vans parked side-by-side), silver, gourd-shaped, curved sort of diving-bell thing. Voluneneers, who I think had been other hikers from earlier in the dream, entered the dream bell (what I've just now decided to call it), laid down, and two paper-back book sized metal boxes mounted on the inside measured your brain waves and made pictures. Either the interior or lights on the boxes were dark green.

At one point, I was visiting with Professor Mom while she collected data. On a screen, we saw people's hypnogogic imagery. Someone turned into a star fish, which then got eaten by some other sea invertebrate. I started singing, "Looking out on city streets / all she can see..." and Professor Mom joined in while green-hued images unfolded before us "... are the dreams made solid / are the dreams made real / all of the buildings, all of the cars / were once just a dream in somebody's head / she pictures the broken glass / she pictures the steam / she pictures a soul / with no leak at the seam." It was a bonding moment.

I think I woke up momentarily. In any case, there was another dream shift.

I was on a campus. The tone of this dream was more anxiety-driven, as I was supposed to be going on a field-trip to Portland and the instructor -- possibly Professor Dad from the earlier dream or maybe a new, different instructor -- of the class hadn't really arranged it and I was supposed to take a take-home test for the same instructor, but I didn't know how long it would take. And, I had agreed to show up in the Professor's lab to be a subject for more nueroimaging.

There was some sexual tension, too; Mr. Professor had a necktie with a spear-wielding centaur on it. The lines of the centaur were green-black, with artistic use of line length. But the necktie was also a tattoo on his chest. His tie at times was skin colored and part of his body (Oh, dear -- I'm thinking Freud would love this...).

The narrative of the dream gets a little muddled here. There was something about wanting to share a funny dream about Laurie Anderson with people, but not remembering what was so funny about it. At one point I gathered up some folks for the experiment, the only person I remember was a high school friend named Linda Claypool, who I haven't seen since the 1980's (although we see each other on Facebook). We follow-the-leadered back to the lab and then got ready for the experiment.

This kind of hurt because they pinned electrodes to my head. I also had some on my palms and a few on my spine. There's not too much more to the dream except I had the curious sensation of sitting in the lab, electrodes on my head and hands, as a kind of demonstration for the other students and being aware that I was also dreaming in my real bed. A lab assistant said, "His hands are growing lax." My dram right hand was hanging down below the lab chair. My right hand was also was curled by my face, close enough to feel my breath. "He's entering stage two sleep." And I felt my real breath go in. And out. And in. And out....

2011-09-17T06:00:00.000-07:00

We join the dream in progress...

I was part of a four or five-man expedition. I was a 17th century explorer, possibly from England. I seem to recall that we were dressed in furs, like early fur-trappers. I think it was early spring; in any case it was dry and cold.

We were in a partially explored valley, where we had discovered a mostly deserted village. The houses of the village were brown wood cabins raised up on stilts or, in one case, a stone foundation. We crept slowly through the village, wondering (and dreading) if we would find anyone. (In waking life, the houses were in too good of repair for them to have been empty for longer than a month or two.) There was a sense that we might be walking into an ambush.

We walked up the steps of a stone foundation to one house, and discovered a family of natives: a husband, wife, and at least one teen. They were dressed in red and brown clothes. I want to say their clothes were made of wool; pants, pull-over shirt, moccosans, and vests.

We gathered from them that they were not the regular residents of the village, and that they were just now leaving.

I really had to pee, and I entered the house looking for the bathroom. (Which now that I'm thinking about it in real life, should have been either an outhouse or a garderobe). I turned around a bare corner intent on finding a place to pee and stumbled across one of the true natives of the village darting behind a kind of secret panel.

Pretty much the whole village had retreated somehow into the foundation of the house. The villagers wore rough furs, and seemed more primitive than the other folks we'd found. "Here are real cave-men," someone exclaimed. We were very excited at the discovery of this group of people.

There was a little bit more, which I don't quite remember, but the gist was that different neighboring tribes sent their children to this village to be trained to lead. Or something.

Free Dead Peacock

2011-09-16T07:04:00.000-07:00

We join the dream in progress...

I was walking through a field west of 35th Street in Corvallis. The grass was long and golden. I think I may have been walking from my parent's house to Church. (In the 1980's I used to bike along a path running through the field.) The day was bright, but neither hot nor cold. I have a vague recollection that there were cows or goats or some other kind of cattle in the field.

As I was walking, I was on a rough path which ran along some briars. In the middle of the path was a dead peacock, with a little sign: "Free Dead Peacock." The peacock must not have been dead long, because it still looked pretty good. I was weighing the merits of pulling feathers out of it -- I was (suddenly) wearing my new purple Venician scholar's cap, and a bunch of peacock feathers would look really good in its brim. On the other hand, it was kind of gruesome to pull feathers out of a dead peacock just lying there in the middle of a path -- even if it did had a sign announcing its availability.

I decided to leave the peacock body alone. At that point, the peacock started breathing. It wasn't dead after all. It pulled itself up and started walking about the field. Where it had been, it had left behind one peacock feather. I had a very strong sense that this was my reward for my choice.

I think there was more after this, possibly taking place in the church, but I've forgotten it.

Sermon on Evil

2011-09-08T23:12:00.000-07:00

Stephanie, a friend of mine, gave this sermon in Second Life. I wasn't able to be in-world to hear her, and I wish I had. The title pretty much sums up the topic:

UUtopia Service and Sermon 9/8/2011 - Positive Thinking and The Law of Attraction: How They Are Used to Oppress Individuals and Perpetuate Evil

I guess the Power of Wishful Thinking Errors is everywhere.

Labor Day Weekend 2011

2011-09-05T09:12:00.000-07:00

This weekend has been a writing one. I've managed to finish up two manuscripts which needed endings. I am hopeful that September (at least after Shrewsbury) will be a month where I can be more disciplined with my writing -- my writing muscles have gotten flabby.

My night-time reading has been "Tales of the Dying Earth." I can't say that I'm enjoying it much. It is entertaining to learn where the term "prismatic spray" came from. And it's supposed to be one of those genre classics. But man is it pulpy.

I can't tell if it's misogynist or if everyone is treated like a sexual commodity; I think it's supposed to be titillating. The fight and torture scenes are just icky. As near as I can tell, everyone in this world is wearing either A) boots and a cape, B) metal bracelets, C) a leather harness, or D) nothing. It's like The Dying Earth is some sort of BDSM party... and suddenly, the Heavy Metal magazine springs to mind.

In terms of character, so far we have Powerful Male Techno-Wizards, these can be good, evil, or insane; a cast of animal-men and demons acting as an id chorus; and women, mostly decanted from vats -- the ones not decanted seem to be beautifully evil seductresses or old and ugly.

One thing I could say for "Tales" is that it could win an award for baroque language. All of the excesses are described in lavish, poly-syllabic detail.

I think I'll jump ahead to "Rhialto the Marvelous", which was written in 1983 (instead of 1950) and might have, uh, less pulp.

Norton Gulch Beetle

2011-08-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

We went to the coast. Camping was ~~smokey~~, ~~noisy~~, fun! ('Cause I'd unpacked my adjectives...). At Norton Gulch, we discovered this very large beetle. I think it was a "gold bug" because it looked like the beetles I used to see at Arcosanti. Mark thought that it had gotten blown way off course, and we both agreed it looked bemused at being on the Oregon coast.

More pictures once I wash all the smoke and sand out of my hair.

Dredging Memories with the Ile de France

2011-08-25T06:00:00.000-07:00

I'm slightly weirded out. I was looking at this web page about the Ile de France, and I looked closely at a picture of the more modern funnels of the ship.

Suddenly, I'm re-living a memory and I'm seeing black sooty smoke coming out of a grey funnel. Although I would have called it a smoke stack at the time. The stack leans backward, and my memory is of just the top. I don't remember the ship -- or whatever -- it was attached to... although trying to recall more, I have a sense of a pipe railing with three horizontal pipes.

I think this is a memory of a trans-Atlantic crossing in 1967, so I would have been three. It's also connected to a memory of my grandmother's hand, she's wearing a jacket or blouse with turquoise sleeve and some kind of chunky bracelet. Actually, all I can remember is her forearm (turquoise sleeved) and her hand, which is on a round dial on a rectangular box. How do I know it's my grandmother's hand? I don't know, but it is.

These memories make my head feel funny. It's almost as if the engrams live in a space between my temples. Maybe some day I'll see if I can be hypnotized to recall more about the trip. Until then, I guess it will have to remain part of a collection of funny stories things I got into when I was three.

Last August Musing

2011-08-24T08:44:00.000-07:00

The dog days of August are upon us. Last night was one of the first nights there wasn't a midnight breeze to blow through the house and cool it down. This morning the house resounds with the whir of large box fans near the windows. It feels like being aboard an aircraft -- either a dirigible or a turbo-prop plane -- but it's worth it because two fans have managed to cool the house down by seven degrees down to 72F in about an hour.

Not a whole lot from the Dream Department that I'm comfortable sharing. This morning I suddenly remembered last night's dream and started laughing. I did what with who? At least it's kind of funny instead of icky. And it was in a cool forest house made out of stones half-set into a hill. I'm still trying to figure out what the dream means.

My writing discipline has gone out the window. This week's goal is to actually finish one of the several unfinished manuscripts I've got in my pile.

But first, the Day Job.

Good Submission Advice

2011-08-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

I think I need to add this to my list of writer's advice:

BOOK VIEW CAFE BLOG � Things I wish I’d known: In hindsight I should have realised then that if I didn’t like any of the stories in a magazine, then that magazine is not one I should have been sending stories to.

It's a variation of "Write what you love; love what you write."

Go Ask Alice...

2011-08-20T16:55:00.000-07:00

There was an Alice in Wonderland themed party. I was going to go as a playing card, but I didn't get my act together; so I went as the March Hare instead.

Mice

2011-08-15T16:43:00.000-07:00

It's the Season of the Mouse. I don't know why -- either it's the record cold Summer, it's mouse-kit time, or we've been extra cavalier with open doors -- but we've seen a bunch of mice in our garage and our kitchen.

Saturday, we watched a young mouse darting back and forth in the rosemary bed. Then it skittered across Café John, jumped up on the concrete foundation of the house, and ran along the south flower bed. We tracked it by the quivering sweet alyssum, tomato and strawberry plants.

And then the mouse was so bold as to sit there, watching us with one eye as it nibbled a ripe strawberry. Who knew that mice and slugs have something in common?

We've put out some traps in the house. But I'm thinking that it might be time to get a cat. And by cat, I mean a lean, mean, bat-catching machine like Mâtchka was. Muriel was an okay cat, but... well... she was a kind of odd, needy thing. She got points for being able to climb ladders -- but almost instantly lost them for never being able to figure out how to get out of the loft she'd climbed to (at 3:43 AM). And the poor thing had never been taught how to catch mice; in our old rental, she'd just look at them quizzically as if they were curiosities from another epoch.

Mâtchka automatically got cool points for being black except for a small white patch on her chest. She had the hauteur thing down. She could upstage anyone on giving a tour of Arcosanti simply by displaying herself in High Egyptian Cat style. And yes, she was able to catch bats.

Sigh. I know it's wrong to want a new cat just like Mâtchka. We kind of like our cat-free life. Still, sometimes....

A Brief Survey of Faerie

2011-08-11T22:38:00.000-07:00

The other day at Wordos, I was going to give a short presentation on Writing Elves and Fairies. I took copious notes from Tolkien's On Fairy Stories. I collected various research books, anthologies, and fantasy paperbacks. Alas, when it came time to give my mini-lecture, I discovered that my notes were not in my bag of Books about Fairies, and so I had to improvise wildly.

I said I'd post my notes. So, without further ado....

Dwarves, Gobblins, Dragons, Trolls, Elves and Fairies have been written about for a very long time. There are several approaches to take when writing about Faerie, Elves, and Fairy Magic, and each of them has their own merits. Tolkien writes that the words elf and fairy are equivalent, but that fairy is a Tudor word popularized by authors like Spenser, Shakespeare and Drayton. Tolkien makes a distinction between fairy stories, dream tales, and adventure, wonder- or marvel stories. More on Tolkien later.

One early source about fairies are the Child Ballads. The elves in these ballads tend appear suddenly and steal people away -- babes, maidens, queens and poets alike. Some are summoned by blowing horns, like Isabel's Fairy Knight; some appear beneath special trees, like the Queen of Fairy before Thomas the Rhymer; others pierce their victim's hearts with darts, like the Elfking in King Orefo.

Or these stories use the fairies as boogie-men in cautionary tales for children. One example is the Kelpie that takes the form of a horse and tricks children into riding it, whereupon it jumps into the nearest pool or river and drowns them.

The old stories present the folk of Faerie as strange to or unmoved by human morality or desires. They are elemental and tricky like thunder and lightning, or a rip-tide in the ocean.

Then there are the fairies of the Mabinogion, the Arthurian Romances, and the lays of Marie de France. In these, knights summon otherworldly lovers by blowing horns, ladling water out of fountains, or putting on rings. Typically these fairy women aid the knight in a quest or redress some wrong done by a mortal court. Or else the knights camp out in an old haunted castle and risk being eaten (or worse) by an ugly, riddling spirit woman who usually turns into a beautiful bride by the time morning dawns and the knight has solved three riddles.

These medieval stories present fairies as foils to the mortal courts, and even the Courts of Heaven and Hell. The fairies are both friend and foe simultaneously -- dangerous as chaotic beings living outside the walls of civilization and beneficial as magical helpers. Treating with them requires navigating taboos and prohibitions alien to mortal custom. Almost always, the mortal breaks the rule -- they open the forbidden door, they speak the fairy lover's name, they taste the brew in the cauldron -- and bring ruin, wrath and lamentation down upon themselves.

Tolkien theorizes that after the age of Enlightenment, Faerie began to be depicted in the language of rationality and science. Elvin glamour became finesse. This led to a kind of "domesticated" fairy, the Flower Fairy. He places the blame for teeny-tiny fairies dressed in flower petals with deelybopper antenna squarely on Drayton's Nymphidia.

Between Drayton, Spenser and Shakespeare, the fairies became agents of satire, allegory, and the author's plot needs (the fairies made him do it!). Sometime around this point, elves and fairies begin to be relegated to the nursery and peasant wisdom. In 1889, this (according to Tolkien) prompted Andrew Lang to complain in the Lilac Fairy Book, "these fairies try to be funny and fail, and try to preach and succeed."

Another rationalization is to explain fairies as "savage" Northern European tribes of pygmies or Picts, long ago driven into the hinter-lands by the Romans or other civilized peoples.

From the flower fairies and anthropological fairies, it's a short jump to Puck of Pook's Hill, and Rudyard Kipling's "Puck's Song." In the song, Puck sings about the rise and fall of human empires and cities. We get the sense that the fairies are long-lived, and will continue to exist long after the last human ruin has crumbled. Kipling's Puck is diminutive and pointy eared, and he appears by accident after some children perform A Mid-Summer Night's Dream on Mid-Summer Night.

Now we get to Tolkien. The Hobbit. The Lord of the Rings. On Fairy Stories. In his essay, Tolkien says of the Elves: "Elves are not primarily concerned with us, nor we with them. Our fates are sundered..."

He says of Fairy Magic:

"The part of magic [faeries] wield is power to play on the desires of [man's] body and heart."
Fairy magic satisfies the desire to survey space and time and commune with other living things.
Fairy magic enables the realization of imagined wonder.
The magic of faerie re-enchants the familiar with its wonder-ful connection to the natural, as opposed to mortal magic which is concerned with willing power over nature.

He says of Fairy Stories:

There's a distinction between myth and history. Historical people and places become attached to mythic ones.
Fairy stories are mythic tales.
Fairy-tales confound Comparative Folk-lore's list of correspondences and story element concordances.
Fairy stories are mystical toward the supernatural, magical toward nature, and the beings of Faerie regard mortals with pity and scorn.
Fairy stories contain prohibitions.

And of Faerie in general: Faerie cannot be caught within a net of words.

In Tolkien's works, Elves are so connected with Nature that they appear "supernatural." Their immortality sunders them from humankind, who is given the gift of death. This makes the Elves weary preservers of nature. Tolkien's Elves are also caught up in Tolkien's theme of the One Ring of Power, which is "Absolute power corrupts absolutely"; therefore, Tolkien's Elves have the unenviable choice of watching the nature and world they love and are intimately connected with fade away, or becoming corrupted by power that could preserve it.

Tolkien set the mold for the fantasy genre.

Since Tolkien, there have been a few other approaches to Elves and Faerie.

Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fairies in The Mists of Avalon (1982) are beings that inhabit a kind of parallel world. Faerie, such as it is, is portrayed as an other-worldly haven for an enclave practicing the old ways of Goddess Religion. It is a mist-filled place removed from the advances of Christianity and male-centric civilizations. The Fairies who do appear seem part-and-parcel of a magical, parallel-realm accessible only to those with The Sight. This realm, or possibly The Sight used to see it, is malleable to observers' expectations or state.

More modern Faerie seems to have pushed the immortality, removal, and indifference so far that it suffers from a kind of stasis or arrested development.
Prince Shadowbow (1985), by Sherri S Tepper, shows a Faerie that is fragile and must seek renewal through the more vital mortal world.

In War for the Oaks (1987), by Emma Bull, the folk of Faerie seem drawn to human music and movies to such an extent that the mortal protagonist asks the Queen of the Unseelie Court if there isn't anything she hasn't stolen from a movie. They seem to not understand love and death.

Patricia C. Wrede's Snow White and Rose Red (1989) presents a renaissance England fairy court, with magical court intrigues. One of the story's arcs concerns the nature of the connection between the Mortal and Faerie realms. "Mortal lands are our stability," says Wrede's Fairy Queen, "Without them we would fade to mist and shadows."

Ellen Kushner, in Thomas the Rhymer, (1990) has the Queen of Fairy tell Thomas that Elves are drawn to Humans because they burn bright, with a kind of fire which sustains them. Later Thomas opines that Fairies are bad liars because living in Faerie has blunted their ability to invent. In one of her last appearances, the Queen reports that she cannot change (and possibly cannot love because that would require change).

These previous four stories share Terri Windling as an editor. All though they they are long-lived or immortal, partake of magic, and have a separate fate from humanity, "Windling Elves" do not appear to have the Tolkien Elves' supernatural connection to the natural world -- their magic stems from their removal from the natural world; their other-worldliness is rooted in by their inability to understand moral emotion.

I'm almost forgetting Charles de Lint -- his Elves of European descent are close to Tolkien's; his expansion on them is to have them interact with Native American nature spirits.

And I've almost forgotten Brian Froud's Fairies. I want to be flippant and call them Muppet Fairies because of Froud's influence on the movies The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. I admit my own ambiguity of feeling toward Froud's Fairies. On one hand, I love Labyrinth for the stunning visuals, artistry, and costuming. But I used to have a friend whom I used to share the tag-line "Love me, fear me, do what I say, and I will be your slave forever" as a joke. I feel the same way about Dark Crystal, only I loved the intricate freaky magic -- even if it was hard to find just one joke in the overwrought melodrama. If I were pressed, I'd say that Froud's art in general is in touch with Faerie as wonder; Labyrinth is in touch with fairy as trickster; and Dark Crystal is in touch with a "wholistic" politics and aesthetic.

Oh yeah, and then there are the D&D Elves. And Hobbits. Um... I think these count as humans with pointy ears. With the copyright filed off.

To summarize, Faerie illuminates our relationships with and attitudes toward nature, civilization, modes of thought, and the human condition. The Realm of Faerie has ranged from the Elemental, to the Outlandish, to the Preserving Sanctuary. Faerie magic shows us how we love, what we fear, and how we die.

When I write about Faerie, I want to partake of the Tolkien essence of it. I want my Elves to shine a different light (and shadow) on the truth. I want them to reveal the wonder of the connected world. And I want the reader to risk peril in the hope of transformation.

First-Order Approximation Plots

2011-08-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I look at a manuscript, I find it suffers from what I call first-order approximation plots. They aren't bad plots exactly, but they're plots that have either stalled out without resolving or they're too well worn. The language can be beautiful and the words can flow, but in the end, if the plot isn't working, a the result is an unsalable manuscript. Here's a list of what I see most of.

Wish Fulfillment Daydreams - There's absolutely nothing wrong about imagining nice things happening to nice people, except it makes for a flat plot. (Yes, I want a star cruiser and cool magic powers, too.) In most short stories, conflict and the reaction to conflict reveals character, and most wish fulfillment manuscripts have very little (or easily overcome) conflict. This type of plot frequently suffers from a passive telling of events instead of an active unfolding of action. Not to be confused with the The Revenge Fantasy.

Driving To The Plot - A big flag word in this type of manuscript is the word "decided," as in "He decided he would go to the store." ...And then the manuscript spends three or five paragraphs describing the trip from point A to the store. Getting to the store may seem like a character's problem, but it isn't. Another flag word is "wondered," as in "She wondered what it would be like to walk on Mars," followed by supposition or a wish fulfillment daydream. The problem with Driving to the Plot is that the reader has to wade through three, five, or more pages of exposition, back-story or description before we learn what the character wants, or a precipitating event threatens something the main character loves. Get us there sooner. Get her on Mars!

Satire - There's confusion about what satire is. It's not simply making fun of something. It's not even being sarcastic about mainstream society (the aim of sarcasm is to hurt someone or something). Satire aims at fixing a wrong by taking a person's, institution's or society's quality or qualities, magnifying them until they're way over the top, and then writing about them. I think sometimes authors are worried that they're going to offend somebody, and wind up calling a manuscript "satire" as a defense. Or they are being sarcastic. In any case, they shouldn't have to call it anything and let the humor and social commentary speak for the piece.

The Angry Young Man Manuscript - Pick a cause, or make one up. Now have your characters act at low capacity but nevertheless achieve the cause's goals just before dying, or fail miserably in a very un-cheery way just before dying. I'm trying to imagine Ursula K LeGuin writing an Angry Young Man Manuscript, and the closest work I can think of is The Word For World is Forrest. If you must write an Angry Young Man Manuscript (and I know you must), try to make it as layered as Ms. LeGuin's.

My Characters Are All Capitalized Stereotypes - "The Business Man stood over The Crone and smiled a wicked smile. But before he could evict her, The Child rode in on A Big White Horse with a bag of gold." Okay; I haven't read something this vague in a very long while -- yes, it may be clear in the author's head what The Business Man looks and sounds like, but all I know is that he's a male character somehow connected with a business of some sort. The problem may be that the author is trying to be ageless and dramatic. Or maybe they're relying too much on Jung's collective unconscious. The cure is to remember two things: 1) specific details are your friends and 2) give your characters names as well as descriptions.

This isn't an exhaustive list - for that you can get lost at Television Tropes or at the Turkey City Lexicon - but it's what I see the most of.

Mammoth Art

2011-07-31T21:27:00.000-07:00

When Mark and I were in the modern art wing of the Portland Art Museum, we passed by a neon sign that read, "Five Words in Orange Neon". This was one of several pieces that reminded me of Tina Howe's play, Museum.

As we were waiting for the elevator, Mark noticed the sign and said, "This is not a mammoth -- For all we know that's what all those cave painters were thinking."

This struck me as funny on many levels and I giggled. "I love you," I said and pulled Mark closer.

Cars Alluring; But Is It Art?

2011-07-31T10:07:00.000-07:00

For our anniversary, Mark and I went to see The Allure of the Automobile at the Portland Art Museum.

The phrase that sums up our experience: It was a car show. And by "car" I mean million dollar vintage race cars or vehicles that really only fit two people (and their suitcases).

After looking at the fifteen or so cars, we decided that we were looking at craft and history, but I wasn't sure that we were looking at art. Mark (and I) had hoped that there would be original draft designs on display. And I'd hoped that we'd see more radiator cap tops and sculpture. I think the show would have benefitted with the inclusion of other period objects, so we could have seen how the cars' aesthetic was interacting with the aesthetic of the time. "Well, I guess this is like looking at jewelry," Mark said.

After about ninety minutes of looking at cars, we took a break to the modern art wing. This was mostly because I was having trouble wrapping my (admittedly pedestrian) art appreciation brain around the concept of car-as-art-object, and I figured that if I looked at things like eighteen inch black plastic cubes, video loops of sunsets set to the Apocalypse Now movie soundtrack, and pictures of dumpsters taped over with silver tape (I'm not making this up, you know), I'd be able to go back to the car show with a better appreciation for the artistry.

I fell in love with Mark all over again as we chortled our way through the Modern Wing. On our way back to the cars, we gave a detailed artistic critique of the way the metal etching on the elevator walls made organic reflections of the lights. And then we were back with the cars.

Going off to view alternate art didn't quite work. I was still mentally contrasting and comparing Allure with a show consisting of Kitchen Aide mixers all lined up on artistically lit pedestals.

I made a few sketches.

One thing I noticed about this show that was different from other shows was how (ahem) aggressive everyone was with photographing (they didn't exactly say, "Get out of my way!" but they didn't say "please" either). The photograph frenzy was strange, like being on a kind of birding expedition -- and I guess when I've been in museums before, people take pictures of the art. At Allure, as often as not, people would have their pictures taken as they were standing in front of cars, sort of like one would have one's picture taken with a recently-caught trophy fish.

I enjoy photographing objects in the Egyptian wing of the MET. So I can understand the thrill of phonographic acquisition. Still....

My favorite car was the sting ray because it looked just a little bit like Luke Skywalker's land speeder. Mark's was a 1930's Chitty-chitty-bang-bang style car. I liked how the headlights on some of the older cars had magnifying lenses built into their glass, or how designs (like a candelabra) were etched into the bulb's glass. A few cars had hinged wrought-iron-looking bumpers, which was cool. But the award for most interesting goes to the car with a third, swiveling headlight stuck in front of the radiator.

We left the car show and went upstairs to look at the silverware. I really looked at those 17th-Century chocolate pots and tried to imagine that I was looking at the cars. But it wasn't the same -- the cars didn't have clawed feet, or labyrinths of leafy bronze vines coiling around Titans. The cars looked like tanks, or teardrops, or women's breasts, or phalluses, or airplanes, or cellphones. They weren't even SteamPunk. I guess cars fall into the same category for me as all those endless Madonna With Child portraits from the renaissance.

Afterward, we had dinner at The Portland City Grill. It was fun because we were thirty stories high. We ate good food while looking at Mount Hood. We got to watch skateboarders on the roof of a parking garage beneath us, and also the gyres of a red-tailed hawk.

Seven Years Annerversary

2011-07-29T16:34:00.000-07:00

Seven years ago -- August 1, 2004 -- Mark and I had a Ceremony of Marriage. Our families and friends attended the outdoor ceremony, which was held in our landlady's backyard garden.

It was purely a ceremony -- Oregon's constitution had recently been amended to forbid same-sex marriage. (And, reviewing notes, it appears that West Nile Fever had yet to make it to Oregon.) Aside from things like the car, the house and joint checking, we haven't really registered with legislative bodies.

Mark was particularly handsome that day. Some days -- just the other day, in fact -- I'll look at him and fall in love with him all over. And on the other days, the hard days, I repeat my part of the vows: "As the Earth and the Moon dance around the Sun, so I braid my life with yours."

And thinking about Mark, who will probably make a gagging sound when he reads the above, I suppose that I should prepare the Ultimate Love Gift and start the laundry and the dishwasher.

Microdrones

2011-07-27T22:03:00.000-07:00

This was in the news a few weeks back:

Microdrones, Some as Small as Bugs, Are Poised to Alter War - NYTimes.com: "The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer than 50 a decade ago. Within the next decade the Air Force anticipates a decrease in manned aircraft but expects its number of “multirole” aerial drones like the Reaper — the ones that spy as well as strike — to nearly quadruple, to 536. Already the Air Force is training more remote pilots, 350 this year alone, than fighter and bomber pilots combined.

“It’s a growth market,” said Ashton B. Carter, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer."

On one hand, cool! Robots! On the other hand, these are war toys, and some folks would like to see them being tested in Easter Oregon. What I want to know is, why isn't the department of agriculture working with microdrones to improve farming and ranching techniques? Or why isn't the parks service using these to monitor forest fires? And could microdrones become the guardians of the very young and the very old? Or deliver pizzas?

Late July 2011 Update

2011-07-27T14:07:00.000-07:00

Hmm. The day job is cutting into blogging time. So some quick updates:

The Pearwood Pipers went to Canterbury Renaissance Faire. In addition to singing The Oyster girl in drag, there was a need to fill out a women's chorus of Oaken Leaves, so Molly got a new sister named Inga.
I bought a new scholar's hat. At least it's supposed to be a scholar's hat. I'm trying to find documentation about how to wear the hat. I remember seeing a portrait from 1500-something of a man in mostly black wearing a jeweled, square fabric hat with a wire or string between a break in the brim, but it's not any of these pictures
I know there's a picture of him somewhere, maybe in a Sister Wendy book... but until I see what he did, I can't fix the hat so that the brim stops making me look like Cruella DeVille when I wear it front-wise.
Saturday night, in a pine grove, I saw a bat flitting about eating bugs underneath a starry sky.
I also saw the Summer Triangle for the first time this season, along with Arcturus, Spica, and Antares.
Eugene continues not to live up to its image as a bike-friendly city: Last week I was nearly side-swiped by an SUV as it rode the white line between the motor traffic and bicycle traffic lanes. For an encore, the SUV failed to signal right as it turned (right in front of me). This morning a city bus turn right, right in front of me (at least it signaled). I am considering attending various city committees' meetings.
After (Don't. Do. The. Math) Many Years' Service, the futon bed-couch frame is literally falling apart. I'm afraid to sleep in our bed. So we're getting a new frame.
My story submission cycle is at an ebb. I'm working a short story right now, and various critiqued drafts need final tweaking.
Google-plus has made FaceBook a little less interesting, but time spent on social media has gone up. I suspect that upgrading my cell phone to a smart phone would help.
OMG, I still have a cell phone. Everyone at my new job has a smart phone. I would like an iPhone, but I think it's too much for my data plan.

2011 June 30 - Thursday

2011-07-18T03:00:00.000-07:00

After the third or fourth time I'd sung, "What's that on your head? / A wig!" Mark finally asked me why I was channeling the B-52's. I smiled and said, "I like to call my wig, 'Olana'." Because it was true, we were driving off to the Rip Van Winkle Bridge and the magical family mansion of Frederic Edwin Church, Olana. We'd first discovered Olana last January, and between Mr. Church's over-the-top writing about it and all the sumptuous interior designs we knew we had to go.

As we crossed the bridge over the Hudson, we saw the square tower rising over the trees on an overlooking hill.

After a brief snack in the parking lot, we walked to the carriage house, which now serves as the museum and gift shop. The house had lots "gingerbread" on in, which made Mark wonder which came first, the houses in San Fransisco or Olana. Then we saw the main house.

I wanted to take photographs, but they weren't allowed inside. I wanted to sketch, but sketching wasn't allowed, either.

Mark and I probably won the Gay Men's Laser Eye Award for Interior Motif Recognition. The house was filled with chachkies from Egypt and Damascus. The whole house, especially the yellow Central Hall, was designed for family nights of children's plays and guests' tableaus. Everything that wasn't imported from the near East was designed or painted by Church. One picture frame that stuck with me was based on decagons and star zelige. Upstairs, there were samples of imported tile work Church had probably used for the exterior.

The funniest moment was learning that the meticulously stenciled Arabic script in Mrs. Church's office was complete gibberish. The most useful factoid -- he sandwiched black paper between clear and amber glass to create a stained glass window effect.

The servant's quarters were much more plain but still nice; even the utility stairs were wide with low risers.

After the tour I photographed the outside of the building. The day was mostly sunny, and it was just after the sun had passed through the local meridian. Olana strikes me as one of those buildings that demands being photographed ninety minutes within sunrise or sunset. There are so many rich details tiled or carved into the walls that navigating the contrasts proved to be an almost insurmountable challenge for my camera's light meter and auto-focus.

I also sketched some of the curiously shaped windows. Mr. Church had fun working out the brickwork and the geometry for the keyhole shaped casements.

More photos here: John's Olana Photos

After Olana, we went to a Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park. Mark called it a McMansion of its day. Whereas Olana had been a grand family chateau, Vanderbilt was a family hotel. Olana was welcoming like a Vegas show; Vanderbilt was welcoming like an Edward Gory Chase - I fully expected an urn to thud into the earth next to us.

Our Vanderbilt guide was a Park Ranger. She had long blond hair and used the word "costed", as in "it costed twelve million." I can't decide which part of the tour was funnier, learning that Mrs. Vanderbilt died in Paris on a shopping trip or the following exchange as the tour guide and I were speaking about Olana and I pulled out my sketchbook. TG: "Oh, are you an architect?" Me: "No, but I play one on TV." TD (Obviously missing the 70's TV commercial reference): "Oh, are you an actor?" Me: "No, I'm just a computer geek." (Note to self: jokes based on 70's culture only work with people born between 1950 and 1970).

Our Park Ranger Guild was less formal than our Olana Docent, and let us wander on the floors more. Although the French Empire chairs and tapestries and sculptures were cool, the most interesting thing to me was how the natural convection of air from sub-basement tunnels up through the skylights allowed for fairly good 1880's air conditioning.

After the mansion tour, Mark and I walked through the garden. Mark surveyed the landscaping and made a few note for how we could respond to our neighbor's recent construction with layered plantings of bamboo, lily, iris, and shrubbery.

2011 June 29 - Wednesday

2011-07-17T13:13:00.000-07:00

This was Playland Day! Family fun since 1928!

Visiting Playland is a Dwyer Tradition. When I first met Mark's family, one of the very first things we did was go to Playland. I'm not sure when they moved into their current house, but previously, at one point in the 1960's, the Dwyers, then a family of three, lived near the old amusement park.

I enjoy the rides (although I would have enjoyed a few more had I been wearing my contacts), but what I like about Playland are some of the old attractions from the early 1920's. The Dragoncoaster is a mostly wooden roller-coaster. Part of the attraction (?) is that people were shorter back then, so sometimes it seems like I'm about to be decapitated by some of the wood beams in the ride's structure. I think what I like are some of the old posters for the Dragoncoaster; but the really cool thing is that the operator controls the ride with a Really Big Lever -- I think it's about four feet long and it looks like you need to work out a little to move it.

The architecture of Playland has an Art Deco feel to it. I like the light tower at one end of the arcade.

But what I remember most about Playland is the carousel -- it's from something like 1910. I had romanticized the horses, because reviewing the pictures I took, there's something frantically wild about these ones. They all are pulling hard against their reigns, and their eyes have a sad, terrified, or calculating cast.

They reminded me of the carousel from Something Wicked This Way Comes, and in my storyteller's mind, I wonder what invocation has bound these beasts to the wheel -- and had it been some wicked enchanter's trap or had it been a well-deserved punishment?

We stayed until the park closed.

2011 June 27 - Monday

2011-07-16T14:00:00.000-07:00

Cookies for breakfast! (Again.) I mean; there I was. It was morning; the cookies were there, and it was breakfast time.... Actually, now that I think about it, I probably had a bagel, too.

Mark and most of his siblings went into The City. I'd opted out in order to have a more relaxed day.

I'd noticed when we first arrived that Grandma Mary's gutters were overflowing and probably needed to be cleaned out. Cleaning the gutters took a little longer than I expected, because I had to take apart the drain pipes and remove all the decomposing leaf material. Taking them apart didn't take nearly as long as trying to put them back together.

Once I finished that chore, I decided that I would have a soak in the tub. And read my newly purchased Atlas of Ancient Civilizations. And eat a Double-Chocolate Klondike Bar. You know, that Cat in the Hat had something going there when he ate cake in the tub.

Heh...

"Do you like Green Eggs and Hammurabi?"

2011 June 26 - Sunday

2011-07-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

Post-Wedding Game Day!

To accommodate all of the Dwyer relatives, many folks pitched tents and camped in Mark's Mother's (Mary) back yard. There were lots of New York Bagels (with cream-cheese) for breakfast. The newlyweds came by for a post-wedding visit -- which was pretty amazing, since the wedding lasted until at least 1 AM.

When the Dwyers gather, there's usually lots of party games. Folks gathered mostly outside on the porch and a general atmosphere of "Brunch meets Cookout" ensued. The kids and some adults had their faces painted -- the kids as bunnies and the adults (or at least one of the "adult" kids) as a wolves.

And then it was time for the newlyweds to go and pack for their honeymoon to the Caribbean. The next thing everyone knew, there were percussion instruments everywhere. I had a giant conga drum. There were other large drums -- and a collection of tambours, cowbells, clacking sticks, and other noise-makers suddenly materialized in the hands of the kids. I want to say there were bubbles, but I might be splicing that in from earlier in the day.

Kevin and Jackie slowly walked down Mary's driveway. By this time more tribal face-painting had occurred, so they were followed by what might have looked like a cross between The Muppet Show and Cirque du Soleil. At about 2 PM. I think we nearly caused three fender-benders from drivers slowing down to rubber-neck at the spectacle.

Kevin and Jackie drove away to a cacophony of jingling rhythms.

Afterward, there was smoke and fire.

2011 June 25 - Saturday

2011-07-15T22:19:00.000-07:00

Saturday was Wedding Day.

Mark has six siblings: Micheal, Melora, Matthew, Melissa, (Mark), Maria and Megan. Melora's son, Kevin, was getting married to (his now wife) Jackie. One of these days I should get some genealogy software and draw a picture of where all the aunts, uncles and cousins fit.

The wedding was fun. Since there were so many family members traveling from Mark's Mother's house, someone arranged a party bus. It had curving benches side-winding through its length and a big vertical chrome pole in the back. Yes, Mark and I both did about five seconds of pole dancing on the bus. Um, yes; there were drinks on the bus. And a music-driven light show. I think it was a good thing Mark was on the bus with his wedding invitation or the bus driver would have been totally lost.

There was pre-wedding discussion about the flavor of the minister, but based on my automatic responses to the service, I'm sure she was Episcopalian. The service was short. Jackie was a beautiful bride in a traditional white dress and demi-train. When Kevin, was saying, "For better of for worse," a golfer plunked a ball into the nearby lake.

The food was endless. The music was mostly fun -- there were times when I did wish the DJ would turn the volume down and talk less -- but there were stretches when the music made me dance. When the beat is fast and the words aren't too stupid dancing is what weaves the world.

Apparently there was an unofficial competition about who the best dancer was on the dance floor. My personal opinion was that of the three people who I thought were the best dancers on the floor, Joe F was the best couple dancer, the tall young woman in black was the best line dancer, and I was the best veil dancer. And everyone was slightly worried that I would throw my hips out (um, yeah; I did feel a little pull the next day across my left front hip).

Olana in Late June

2011-07-13T08:50:00.000-07:00

Whew... things have been busy since we've returned. I've been meaning to post but have been focused on writing and The New Day Job. So for now, here's a picture of Olana, Edwin Church's mid-1800's chateau. Kind of Victorian, kind of Persian. Hard to photograph on a sunny day just after noon.

2011 June 24 - Friday

2011-07-09T11:10:00.000-07:00

7:25 - On the bus to the MET! I must remember the stop is at the CVS.

We've just entered the Turnpike. Riding the Shortline Bus must be getting easier because I don't have the nagging fear I'm heading to Ithica or Buffalo.

When I got to the New York City Port Authority Bus Terminal, I had a moment's hesitation as I tried to decide if I should walk to 4, 5 or 6 Metroline or enter the system under the Terminal and take the S line.
I wasn't completely awake, I wasn't sure which way I was heading, and a Very Friendly Person latched right onto me. He was kind of short, he was dark skinned, and he was unkempt.

"Where you going to?" he asked. He was kind of like a concierge on steroids.

It was one of those awkward moments where I was too nice to insist that I knew the way. The next thing I knew, my New Best Friend was leading me down to the subway entrance to the S line. It was then that I noticed the alcohol on his breath.

Once my guide had pointed the way, he got very still and said, "Help a brother out?" I figured, What the Heck, and gave him some money.

He thanked me, I walked through the subway gate, and I never saw him again. I did ponder, as I joined the stream of people shuffling to the S train, what kind of Greek plot I'd stumbled into. Would my drunken guide have been Mercury, or Charon?

I exited the subway near the MET and started walking in the direction I figured would be correct. In the past, I navigated by the sun's position, but it was cloudy and gray, with what felt like a genuine Pacific-Northwest drizzle threatening.

I knew I was heading in the right direction when I saw La Maison du Chocolat. Unfortunately the shop was closed, or I would have slipped in.

I arrived a few minutes later at the steps of the MET. Before opening. O Bliss, O Rapture Unbounded. Oh... A line.

Security has tightened at the MET, because my bag, which I've always been able to take in before, is ordered to the hat and coat check. This necessitated some awkward re-shuffling of things like my sketchbook and my contact lens case.

My first decision was choosing which wing to go first, then race to the end of that particular exhibit and work my way back toward the Great Hall. Until I win the lottery and can afford to arrange to spend the night (or a week of nights) in the MET, it's the best way to be in near-empty galleries.

For two hours I wandered the Egyptian wings. I love Egyptian art. It makes me want to twirl around with my arms flung out and sing "The Sound of Music" and then say, "Almighty Isis! (Isis Isis...)" At first I hunted for crisp examples of hieroglyphs that I have not already photographed.

I was aware of my own photography because I kept running into a young woman dressed like Lauraa Croft in tight black; she wielded a mega-zoom extra-clicky camera. Every time she paused in front of an exhibit I expected the Jay Giles band to shout "Freeze Frame!"

This time around the statue of Hatsheput compelled me. The artists communicated a sense of the Hatsheput the Monarch of one of the most powerful empires of the time constrained by her throne.

One of the objects I always seem defeated by is the black sarcophagus. Its glossy surface confuses my camera's auto-focus and the fine hieroglyphs on it come out blurry. At a carving next to the sarcophagus a man and two women stopped to look at the hieroglyphic inscriptions. The man was loud and sounded like a child dragged to culture.

"Look at those chicken scratches," he said. "They look like chicken scratches."

One of the woman said wistfully, "It's supposed to say something."

Since I was photographing right next to them anyway, I leaned over and pointed at the inscription. "This triangle shape is 'given' and this shape, ankh, means 'life' -- so together this means the phrase 'given life.' The wasp and the plant over the half circles is the title 'Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt.' This figure here is a god -- we know he's a god because he carries he rod of dominion in one hand and an ankh in the other. This man here is a king because he's wearing a crown with a snake -- the crown of Upper Egypt. This part in a cartouche is one of the king's names, but I'm afraid I can't read it."

"Wow," one of the women said. "Uh, thanks."

Later, I had more fun being amateur Egyptian docent explaining spirit doors to enthusiastic kids. There's something that strikes the storyteller in me to be able to say (while enclosed in stone passages enclosed in glass) "And this is Perneb's spirit door, where his spirit appeared to receive offerings brought by his family." I could almost smell the incense, and I'm pretty sure the kids could almost see an ancient Egyptian ghost.

I'd made a list of objects to see, then cleverly left it in the bag. And the bag was in forced check-in. But I found the MET's mark-down clearance sale instead!

When I'm in New York City, I always hear foreign languages. I like the ones that have guttural CH's or short, nasal E's. I heard a (presumably) father and son speaking as I went into the men's room to remove my contact lenses. I don't know if it's the humidity, or dust, or some funny museum chemical, but I only seem to be able to wear my contacts in the MET for about three hours before they start giving me problems.

As I stood in front of a sink, holding my left eye open and using one of those little plunger thingies to remove my contact, I felt the boy's stare. The scene reminded me of Laurie Anderson's spiel about being "The Ugly One with the Who Keeps Her Jewels in her Eyes."

I turned to the boy. In addition to whatever language he'd been speaking with his older relative, I'd heard them using English. So I said, "I have an astigmatism and my eyes are old. So I have to wear rigid, semi-permeable contact lenses. I can't just blink the contacts out, so I use this to take it out." I removed my contact lens and dropped it in its case. "But they're bothering me, so I'll wear my glasses instead." I removed the other one and put on my glasses.

About this time, the older relative realized that the boy had been staring at and was talking to a stranger in the men's room.

I enjoyed the Courtyard of American Sculpture and Arts. It's the silver. And the Tiffany's tile work. And the Art Deco. And... This time around I enjoyed the sculpture "Young Artist's Hand Stayed by Death." Perhaps enjoyed is the wrong word -- it communicated a sense of motivation to me.

I wanted to wander through the galleries of the Ancient Near East, but, alas, there was a huge queue snaking along side the displays. I kind of wished I'd stopped to take a picture of The Assyrian Bulls with the queue snaking between them, but I didn't want to photograph people's backs.

I think all the folks in line were going to see some dresses. This was too bad, because I couldn't really look at the ritual objects from the Levant and Fertile Crescent. They fascinate me -- so many of them seem to be saying something about the chariot (or cart) of the sun. While I didn't get to see examples of early Scythian art, I did get to see the Elomite Cow! Again! (I love the Cow.)

Walking through the Greek and Roman statuary, I must have hit a sugar crash, because the artwork made me meloncholy, and I wrote bad poetry. What triggered the poetry was a sphinx with no face; I've seen it before, but this time I felt for it and wondered what it might be like to come alive in a gallery some moonlight midnight and have no face. Then I looked around at the other fragments statues missing arms, legs or heads.

Fragments

Wandering among the dead

Within the marble halls.

Clay and stone

House the ghosts

Of long ago.

Who can call their names

When their forms crumble?

In some wing undiscovered

There must be restoration

For faceless sphinxes and

Angels' shoulders crack'd.

7:50PM - Mark IM'ed me and ... OMG! Will you look at the time!? I had no idea it was so late. By this time I was in the bookstore and I'd become distracted hunting for bargains and gifts.

8:45 - On bus back to Suffern. I've spent almost eleven hours in the MET.

Death Staying the Hand...

2011-07-09T06:00:00.000-07:00

Hey Kids! Don't let this happen to you. Seize the day and finish that project before the ultimate deadline!

2011 June 23 - Thursday

2011-07-08T21:49:00.000-07:00

Woke up at 10 AM after minor dozes. Being nocturnally inclined plus being three time-zones east is a difficult thing. When we visit Mark's relatives in Suffern, it's way too easy for me to stay up late. Thus, it becomes way too easy for me to get up late.

There's cable TV here. We don't have a TV at home, much less cable. I tried to watch Game of Thrones and The Lightning Thief. I decided that Game of Thrones was going to be too edgy for me in terms of visuals, and that I'd enjoy the story more if I were reading it.

The Lightning Thief was cheesey and the Young Adult structure kept jumping out at me, especially the "I'm the female romantic interest, therefore, you must defeat me in armed combat" part. There was more parental angst than Bambi and about as many Greek warriors as Troy. What I found somewhat troubling was the teen-hero's dyslexia and ADD were explained as being a result of being hard-wired to be a Greek Demigod. Indigo Children, anyone?

After I turned off the TV, I edited a short story manuscript and thought about its structure. I'm tempted to cut out the first scene because it feels like a lump of exposition that the story has to drive to to get to the plot. I want to keep it because I don't want to confuse the readers.

Ate too many Klondike Bars.

2011 June 22 - Wednesday

2011-07-07T22:33:00.000-07:00

Had a strange dream of animalmorphic Faeries cavorting on ocean cliffs during a dark Summer Solstice night.

12 Noon: Waiting in Terminal A2 for our flight.

The planes on the tarmac are kind of loud. I expect we're taking a trubo-prop to SLC. We've gotten food at the terminal because we don't expect we'll be fed in flight.

I have a nagging feeling we've forgotten something, like locking all the windows. If I didn't always have this feeling when embarking on a two-week long trip, I'd be more worried.

I need to force myself to write. I've gotten out of practice and during vacation it will be difficult to focus on writing between all the wedding activities, family visits and tourist stops. This time I'm bringing no electronics and have brought a few manuscript drafts. While we're gone I have to write a Machine of Death story. The Wordos suggested "IN-LAWS" but I figured that would be a good way to get into a lot of trouble.

On the first plane. It's not a turbo-prop. I'm a little jammed into the bulkhead, but I'm sitting next to a good window. There's an extra-loud loudspeaker over my head, and I jump every time the captain chimes in -- which is usually just as I'm nodding off.

Noon-time glare off of the Three Sisters fills the cabin with white. Air travel always reminds me of when I was a skydiver. I look down on the ant-trail highway and feel myself count three-two-one and step backward off of the plane of my memory and into its air-stream. Half the time the soundtrack in my mind is Enigma's Eyes of Truth, the other half it's Uncle Bonsai's Lois Lane.
I miss skydiving. My bank account, however, does not.

Later, looking out the window over the southwest at a tan road trailing along umber ground, it seems as though I'm looking sideways and the road is climbing into the sky.

The circular fields are plowed in labyrinthine furrows. I'm sure there's an agricultural short story in there somewhere.

MET Pegasus Clock

2011-07-06T22:36:00.000-07:00

This is a clock on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I've seen this piece before, and have another photograph of it somewhere, but it was only with this shot that I realized that the piece is meant to be seen from this angle. Or maybe I should say this the the side of the clock that is the art and imagination side. The other (top) side has the dials and markings that allow you to tell the time and (probably) the seasons.

I like this because it's a clock, and astrolabe all rolled up into one. I like it because it's (mostly) silver. And I like it because Pegasus - unlike the Sisyphusian Atlases holding up other globe clocks - looks like flying with the heavens on his back isn't any trouble at all.

Ride In Style

2011-07-05T13:17:00.000-07:00

Look! It's me at Playland (last week) on a Really Old Carousel -- er, I think
it's from 1910. Playland factoid: Tom Hanks in "Big" uses a fortune
telling machine in Playland to turn himself back into a child.

Seatle and Tea

2011-06-18T22:29:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across this photo of Mark and myself in Seattle on Oct 3, 2009. I don't have too many photos of the two of us because I'm usually the one behind the camera. Something about this picture captures our respective attitudes toward posing for pictures, and provides a glimpse into our characters.

Imagining what we might be thinking made me smile.

Working for a Living

2011-06-09T10:16:00.000-07:00

I've started a new desktop support job. So my mind is a little focused on learning new routines.

It also means things writing-related have been back-burnered.

My new job is too far away to walk to, but close enough that I feel guilty riding a car there. The bus routes, unfortunately, are awkward enough that it would probably take less time to walk than it would to take a bus. So that leaves me with the biking option.

On one hand, riding a bike to work will be good exercise, and it is good for the planet. On the other hand, I stopped riding my bike to work after being rear-ended, on my bike, stopped at a stop-sign, by a car. Luckily, I wasn't knocked over, but my shoulders were a little jerked and I was lucky that I wasn't propelled into busy traffic. Oh - and this was on a bike route.

Anyway, my bicycle is in the shop (after about eight years of neglect) and I should be riding off to be productive some time next week. On a new route. Through school zones.

Now if I can only find that kryptonite lock key....

Young Adult Fiction & Culture Wars

2011-06-05T18:42:00.000-07:00

Saturday night I read a Wall Street Journal review of Young Adult Fiction. The article starts with a scene of a mother who "pops into" a big-box bookstore and fails to find a book she feels comfortable giving to her 13 year old daughter. Then it laments that Young Adult (YA) books are much darker in 2011 than they were in 1970. We're given a list of "hideously distorted portrayals of what life is" in YA books:

kidnapping
incest
brutal beatings
pathologies (not sure what she means here)
profanity
murder
rape
pederasty
male-male pederastic rape
self-mutilation
suicide

(Uh, gee -- read any lower elementary Pirate books lately? If only Judy Blume had written a YA book called "Lubber.") Then follows the argument that it is much more likely that these books will either sully the innocent or feed depraved desires instead of challenging a teen's sense of isolation. Briefly lingering over comparisons between YA books and the Internet and violent video games, the review concludes:

"...it may be that the book industry's ever-more-appalling offerings for adolescent readers spring from a desperate desire to keep books relevant for the young. Still, everyone does not share the same objectives. The book business exists to sell books; parents exist to rear children, and oughtn't be daunted by cries of censorship. No family is obliged to acquiesce when publishers use the vehicle of fundamental free-expression principles to try to bulldoze coarseness or misery into their children's lives." Book Review: Young Adult Fiction - Darkness Too Visible:

The article got many of my friends up in arms. I have to admit, my first response was, "What is this person really saying?" and my thoughts: "If there's objectionable materials in the library or bookstore, then read with your kids." (This is the same answer I give people who freak out about children unescorted on the internet.)

But it was late, so I went to sleep. Thinking about the article more, my sense is:

The author's introductory scene - that of a frustrated mother leaving a bookstore empty-handed - is indicative of a culture of parenting that wants children's products delivered to them without a time-investment. To re-word this, a consumer walked into a specialty store looking for a children's product without bothering to do prior safety research. Granted, books are not children's car-seats, but still.

Taboo functions in our society as a protocol of engagement which protects the unprepared from powerful, sometimes deadly, situations. Last time I checked, people were free to choose how they navigated taboo. I'm not sure how publishing companies are bulldozing families otherwise; I mean, the mom in her example left the bookstore with no book and no money lost. Welcome to the free market.

There's a disingenuous tone in this review. When I see phrases like "real life," I'm reminded of the phrase, "Where is Middle-America anyway, and why would someone want to live there?" Overtly, the article seems to be about books, but secreted here and there are comments in code that say, "Our children's precious innocence is being fouled by dangerous books that will fester like a canker within their psyches and tastes. (Oh, and Books are like the Internet! You can't control it! It's everywhere! BOO!!)"

So the article isn't a book review, per se; it's a culture-war manifesto from folks who like things black-or-white, and therefore more easily controllable. Young Adult Writers, welcome to the world of Neo-Paganism and of folks who want network neutrality and an uncensored Internet. Welcome to Don't Ask Don't Tell. [Editor's note: Oh, wait; Catcher in the Rye, and Lord of the Flies ... we've been here before...]

Personally, I'm not wildly crazy about dark books; I'll be happy when Dystopia stops being the New Paranormal and becomes the Old Dystopia again. The migration of f--k into the general American lexicon strikes me as a little sad. But if you wont force me to read Anne Tyler or 1984, I won't force you to read The Complete Compleat Enchanter.

A lot of my friends have been Twittering with the YAsaves tag. Reading their testimonials, Young Adult Fiction has helped a lot of folks. I'm not sure that Young Adult Fiction saved me, although I was very glad for Mercedes Lacky's Magic's Pawn (when I was thirty). Truth be told, although I practically lived in the school library, Judy Blume didn't inspire me in 1977. I was too busy reading Tolkien, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Crystal Cave, and The White Mountains.

And playing Dungeons and Dragons.

Reading Fiction in Second Life

2011-06-01T22:21:00.000-07:00

I read some flash fiction in Second Life today.

It was a little strange. On one hand, interacting with avatars is enough like interacting with people (or at least I'm used to it) that I don't notice that they're virtual people until I'm doing something like a performance.

In this case, the crowd didn't rustle, laugh, or say "ooh." Also, my point of view was above and a little behind my avatar's head, so I couldn't make eye-contact with people. And I had to watch an instant-message area for any feedback, like "We can't hear you." (No one typed this, so I can only assume my sound levels were OK.)

I haven't figured out quite yet how to hold a manuscript and change my avatar's focus. I'd wanted to use Mary Robinette Kowal's tip about assigning characters to specific spaces in a reading hall and looking at those spots depending on which character is speaking as an aid to presentation. As it was, my avatar mostly stood still with a glowing green sound icon over his head.

Today's reading was like recording live in a studio. Only with instant feedback (at the story's end) from a virtual audience. While I missed the synergy of a live group, having a layer of technology between myself and the audience allowed me to focus on the words more and not get so spazzed-out that I read words too quickly.

I think I'll do it again, and I think I'd want to figure out some way of adding more to the presentation so that it doesn't seem so wooden from my end.

eBook Technical Snags

2011-05-31T17:14:00.000-07:00

Slow day on the eBook front.

I sat down and reviewed the Scrivener manual for the Macintosh.

I've discovered that editing CSS style-sheets only works for screenplay manuscripts.
I also hoped that I might be able to finesse opening paragraphs using some sort of trick with document headers, titles, notes or synopsis fields - but that means making a manuscript unusable for anything but ePub format.
Finally, it turns out that our old Mac's hardware is PowerPC, not Intel-based; this means I can't save the manuscript for Amazon's Kindle.

Sigh. I'd sort of wanted to do all of this myself, but I'm beginning to think that I should use Smashwords because I'll have access to more formats and a easier time formatting the layout.

Your Own Personal Action-figure

2011-05-29T13:44:00.000-07:00

Wow. Okay, this video has been out a while but it is so cool! Can you imagine how much business they could do if they re-tooled this for weddings? The groom and groom could have their picture taken and voila! Cake topper!

Or let's say you want to make a doll house that looks like the place where you live. Or maybe instead of a Barrel of Monkeys, you could have a Barrel of Yous.

Kinect and 3D printer turns people into action-figure souvenirs - Boing Boing:

"Barcelona's Blablablab set up a 'Be Your Own Souvenir installation that used a Kinect and a 3D printer to allow passersby to pose for on-demand action-figures of themselves and their night out on the town:"

Be Your Own Souvenir! from blablabLAB on Vimeo.

Cover Reworked

2011-05-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

There. I think I've managed to get a clean design that says "Mask, Glass and Magic." And neither myself nor the camera are being reflected in the shiney bits. Much.

Now to work on the title and credit placement...

eBooks & Design Philosophy

2011-05-27T11:45:00.000-07:00

I should add here that there are folks who go to school and actually learn how to design book cover layout and take photographs. I am not one of them. I feel like I'm exploring the boundaries between DIY, professional work standards, and how eBooks are going to put pressure on writers and graphic designers to collaborate. Or not.

First Attempt at Cover Photos

2011-05-27T11:37:00.000-07:00

I started out with this. It's wrong because the image says, "Tea!" Which would be fine, except the story isn't about tea. Also, the title is too small and the author's name is way too small.

So it was time to work on a new cover. One that said, "Mask Glass Magic!" I had a design idea, so I assembled the appropriate Visually Interesting Props.

I fiddled around with the shadow theatre. And this photo says "Theatre!" Or possibly "Shades of Milk and Honey." The other question is, how does this look on a Kindle screen?

This was the image I was aiming for. I can see I'll have to try again. But, while it's a cool image, it's also a confusing one seen up close and I should look at it through a black and white filter to get a feel for how it would translate to the Kindle or Nook. It's possible I'd get more mileage if it were zoomed in really close.

Well. It says "Mask" and it says "Glass." I think it also screams "Amature!" And, looking at this again after a rest, it also says, "Shampoo." Sigh. Back to photographing -- good thing the camera batteries are recharged.

Oh. Writing. Right, back to writing....

Making an eBook Cover

2011-05-26T12:56:00.000-07:00

I had an idea for the cover art for "Mask Glass Magic": We've got some small metallic mask decorations, and if I can fix them so that two reflect each other it would look cool and relate to the story. So, it was time to set up a photo shoot.

Step one: Clear off the table. Euw, at least I know what we had for breakfast... and who was eating there... anyway. The next step is looking at the shadow theatre I made a few months ago.

Unfortunately, the shadow theatre's been a little beat up -- it's a cereal box, so it's been re-purprosed as a storage box, and the paper screen has some oil or food or something on it. I thought I could be lazy and use the old paper, but it looked more dirty than antique, and I ended up replacing it with new paper.

We have a lot of glass objects d'art in the house (I'm sure Mark has another name for them). I want to photograph the two masks in front of some stain glass that Mark's mother made. The trick is to make the photo interesting, but not cluttered. Must. Not. Arrange. Every. Glass. Object. In. The. House. Into. Picture.

I actually own some lampworking tools and I could... no, Mark would probably not appreciate me trying to photograph a live blowtorch flame in the house and I'd probably melt the plastic parts of my camera.

And, of course, after fourty-five minutes of gathering, cleaning, and repairing objects, I have an errand I have to go do.

I've returned! I arrange the masks, fastening them together with bits of Post-it Note. Unfortunately, the masks I want to work with make the photo look like flier for a Night at the Theatre. I take a couple of shots of mask shadows cast on the theatre. But the light's not right. Arg. Mask. Glass. How hard can this be?

I move to a darker part of the house where I can control the lighting. As I'm shooting I'm trying to remember that I'm going to want an image that divides horizontally into five sections. More prop-wiggling.

As I'm about to snap a photo that it approaching what I'd like the cover to look like, the camera batteries die.

OK. This probably a sign to go play with CSS.

Pictures later when my batteries have recharged.

Re-thinking Manuscript Format

2011-05-25T22:49:00.000-07:00

Whew. Copy-editing is changing how I think about formatting.

When I turn stories in to the Wordos or send them to a professional market, they need to look like they came off of a typewriter from 1988. In other words, a mono-spaced typeface, double-spaced, with inch-margins. Straight-quotes, two spaces after a period. Underlines for italics, and other "before the world had LaserWriters" formatting involving dashes. It's how I've formatted stories for the last ten years.

Formatting for eBooks is different. In traditional publishing, there's usually a type-setter working on an author's professionally formatted manuscript before it becomes the hard-copy a reader holds. So I need to un-learn some formatting habits if I am going to be producing an end-product.

For example, when I use Scrivener, I need to take advantage of its export functions instead of forcing formatting options at the raw document level. I say this because it's a real pain -- even with a wonderful tool like Scrivener -- to go through a document and curl quotes that used to be straight.

At least with eBooks I don't have to specify gutter widths and pantone colors.

Copy Editing

2011-05-24T15:07:00.000-07:00

I've been focusing on preparing the manuscript for Mask Glass Magic for ePub formatting.

The copy that I have is what I sent off to Writers of the Future back in 2006. I stupidly did something with the galley copy that I okayed for the anthology and I wish I had hung onto it. I can see all sorts of little usage things in my copy of the book that were fixed. It appears I should re-read Fowler's Usage on hyphens. And I don't want to re-write the story... but there are some places where word echos could be polished out.

Some of the expletives in my manuscript were toned down for the anthology; which is fine with me -- although it does raise the question of profanity use and portraying "edgy" characters. Not that Michelle Horn was supposed to be that edgy, and the global word substitution probably made her a more sympathetic character.

I hope this doesn't come off as whiny, because I really appreciate the work whoever line-edited my manuscript did.

First Foray Exporting an eBook

2011-05-23T22:02:00.000-07:00

I'm beginning the process of releasing some of my stories to ePub format. Authors like Jay Lake, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Niomi Kritzer have released some of their short stories and novels for e-readers like the Nook and Kindle. If I want to take advantage of indie publishing, it would be better to do it sooner, rather than later (and it appears I should have started six months ago), because it appears that eBooks now are at the cusp that web pages were in 1997. If I don't establish a readership now, it will be exponentially harder to do so once everyone's grandparents and dogs are publishing. (And yes, I intend to keep submitting to physical markets because there's something to be said for editorial filtering.)

Originally, I was going to release Mask Glass Magic, The View from the Top, Up, and a few non-professionally published stories in an anthology. But I was persuaded by some Wordos to release each story as singles for ninety-nine cents and then offer a discount price anthology of all the works.

Luckily, I have a head-start with formatting because I've been using Scrivener. I love Scrivener. It's great for researching, outlining, and editing. It's easy to break text up into sections, which helps me to focus on working on one scene at a time (instead of working and re-working a beginning). Ease of sectioning off text makes it easy to deal with intruding chunks of other stories -- I can write what comes into my head, sequester it into its own section, and get back to the main story. Scrivener remembers various manuscript formats: I have a default for Wordos Crititque, and a few others for the odd market that demands manuscripts be non-traditionally formatted. And -- the important part for making an e-book -- Scrivener saves in ePub and other reader formats.

Creating a an ePub format file was pretty simple, especially after I watched this five minute YouTube Scrivener Tutorial.

And then I ran into my first real snag. I have no Kindle or Nook to double-check the formatting. The iMac we have is running older software, and the version of iTunes we have only plays audio books. iTunes displayed the cover art I'd put together, but wouldn't open the book. What was interesting to notice was that the iTunes book cover looks like it wanted to be eleven by eight; I'd designed a cover with a photo that was more like five by eight.

I needed some sort of ePub reader. After skimming Ars Technia, I downloaded FBReader for Windows. With a little fiddling so FBreader knew where to find the ePub file, I opened up my test manuscript....

Uh, Wow. It's utilitarian. And it seems to be reading my manuscript backward? Or... no, I'm simply unused to the reader's interface. And... okay, the reader is hyphenating the text depending on screen size. Scrivener put in a table of contents that would be more useful if my first attempt had chapters or were an anthology. My art looks okay, but the image -- an artsy photo of a tea infuser -- doesn't have much to do with the story -- a fantasy story set in modern Eugene.

As Niomi points out in her blog, the reader, not the author/publisher controls the font face. This is probably a good thing, because it will prevent type-face faux-paus (remember the mid-eighty's when the Macintosh let you print documents with Too Many Type-faces? It wasn't pretty.) But it makes formatting text to be slightly less catatonic a challenge.

It appears that there are some CSS tricks I can do to make the opening lines of sections more spiffy. I would like to have the first letter in the first word be twice as large as a reader's normal font, and I'd like the first line to be SMALLCAPS. Figuring out the CSS code for paragraphs will be the next step.

But there are a few questions I need to be clear about before I can start selling stories:

Can the Nook and Kindle can handle unicode 4.0 characters? If yes, then I could use them for section breaks instead of blank spaces.

Where are the formatting controls in Scrivener again? And what I'm doing is called galley work. Which means I have to expand my notions of proper manuscript formatting and get used to seeing my prose with things like em-dashes, ellipses, and italics instead of double-single dashes, triple periods, and underlined text, respectively. And, uh, whoa! There's a missing word: time to break out a paper copy and a red pen because I can't blame anyone else for production mistakes.

What's the best use of metadata. If I want my books to sell, they need to be findable by search engines. Metadata is where I put in tags and other search engine flags, and I need to make them work. "John Burridge" would be one -- or should I put in my whole name so I don't have irate British soccer fans looking for Britain's Oldest Goalie. "Fantasy" (at least for this story) is another. But do I put in "Eugene, Oregon -- fiction" and "lampworking -- fiction" and should I put in a tag for a reprint's original publication (i.e. "Writers of the Future," "Analog" "Whidbey Student Choice"?)

Oh, and about that cover art, what are the ideal book cover dimensions, anyway?

More as I figure stuff out.

Fun Dream Parts

2011-05-20T09:16:00.000-07:00

I've been having unpleasant dreams lately, which I wont go into here... instead...

Last night I dreamed that I was on a cruise of places that Tolkien probably used when writing The Lord of the Rings. The cruise started with a map of the Bay of Balfalas, and a crescent-shaped island on the map happened to match a real live island.

I don't recall if the island was near Iceland or Tahiti. I'm going to guess Tahiti because we could swim in the water. Although Iceland has some possibilities, because there was a small volcanic vent near the island. A fiery pool heated the water within the lagoon. And it was the home of a Nazgûl-steed. This was a friendly, black-scaled, winged, four-legged, vaguely equine, aquatic Nazgûl-steed. Everyone on the cruise jumped into the water in a kind of "Swim with the ~~Dolphins~~ Nazgûl-steed Event."

The dream went onto other things.

I was the only man at some kind of historical / spirituality / Neo-Pagan event. Now that I think about it, the women may have been old high school friends: Ranel Hackett and Amy Beltaine were there, and possibly Audrey Pitts and Libby Riverstone. Ranel was working on a clay statuette, which looked like it came from the Paleolithic era. She was tuning the statuette, carving away bits and then striking them to make tones. I think I had a singing bowl, and the event turned into an impromptu jam session.

Doctor Burridge, I Presume?

2011-05-18T06:00:00.000-07:00

Someone brought a pith helmet to Wordos. And I just happened to be wearing my white sweater. And they had a brass sextant, too. And someone else had a camera. And there I was, surrounded by books at the end of a table.

I love it when life turns into a gigantic photo-op.

Writing Synchronicity

2011-05-17T08:27:00.000-07:00

I was speaking to a neighbor the other day about old landmarks when out of the blue he was telling me how he had a capped well on his property and then how, when he was digging a fence post hole, he struck an underground stream. "It was just flowing - zip!" he said, and made a cutting motion south to north.

It was one of those moments of synchronicity, because I'd recently workshopped a short urban fantasy story set loosely in the local neighborhood which featured an underground stream flowing in a northerly direction.

[Insert spooky music here.]

Review: The Hidden Spirituality of Men

2011-05-16T17:02:00.000-07:00

Every now and then I would stumble across the name Matthew Fox, so I finally went to the library and checked out a copy of The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine. I was excited, at first, because Matthew Fox is a former Dominican who became an Episcopal priest after his expulsion from the Catholic Church. Episcopal: That's Catholic-Lite; twice the ritual with only half the guilt! And Starhawk had dropped his name once or twice, so I thought as I cracked the book, "At last, something about male spirituality with some theological teeth in it."

I became uneasy as I read; the paragraphs seemed to be fuzzy and disjointed. Sort of like, "Purple is a color between red and blue. 'The Color Purple' is the name of a book by Alice Walker. Donnie Osmond liked purple socks, and Prince had an album called 'Purple Rain.' As you can see, purple has an attraction to artists of all genders and orientations." Except Fox would have used chakras, Robert Bly, Meister Eckhart, and Native Americans.

I flipped ahead to the chapter on The Green Man, where I read "The Green Man is an ancient pagan symbol of our relationship to the plant kingdom." My earlier vague misgivings crystallized. I checked in the index, and failed to find Lady Raglan, the British folklorist who wrote in 1936 about the foliate heads she'd notice in English church architecture, and who started the Frazierian theory that they were were symbols of pagan fertility and tree worship. There followed some more loosely related paragraphs, ending with Greenpeace.

The Green Man is an icon, and the cultural meaning of this icon has changed throughout the centuries: from ancient Bacchus, through the medieval images of the Tanglewood and renaissance agents of festival crowd control, to Lady Raglan's theories about restored church architecture in the twentieth century. To make assertions about ancient pagan interpretations of the Green Man is about as valid as asserting that motorists in the modern age worship Pegasus because they gather underneath an icon of a red winged horse. Certainly, Neo-Pagans today use the Green Man as a symbol of the interconnectedness of Nature and Humanity, as a male avatar of Nature's spirit incarnate, and as a paragon to emulate. However, this contemporary use begins with the assumptions of Lady Raglan. I don't mind so much that Matthew Fox wants to imagine new scripts for the Green Man, but I do wish he hadn't grounded them in outmoded folklore theories.

Moving along, I flipped forward to the chapter on Masculine Sexuality. By the fifth paragraph, I read about Toaist practices of controlling seminal fluids (code for "orgasm without ejaculation") and how there's chi stored in the testes. At least Fox did spend some time addressing issues of infertility and male sexuality -- but then out came the berdaches and winktes. This section made me angry because it was titled "Honoring, and Learning From, The Gifts of Homosexuality." It was so old-school-Harry-Hay-elitism: "because we're a persecuted minority we've got special powers." Okay, Fox gets points for saying a Spiritual Warrior must exorcise homophobia, but then he loses points for implying that doing so will give access to, among other things, the homosexual gift of spirituality. Here's a special note for all of you Spiritual Warriors: when I'm having hot, throbbing, man-to-man sex, my primary motivation isn't to bring straight allies a spiritual gift. (And by-the-way: I'm a white guy, not a First Nations person). Muttering "Magic Negro" under my breath, I flipped forward.

By this time my attitude toward "The Hidden Spirituality of Men" had deteriorated into a mix of "Ha, where is your Goddess now?" "Someone is wrong on the internet!" and the feeling of looking/not-looking at a traffic accident. My eyes fell randomly on the end of Chapter Eleven: The Sacred Marriage of Masculine and Feminine. Yep, there it was, a reference to hieros gamos, and the Jewish tradition of Yahweh consummating a marriage with Shekinah, feminine bride. Which is fine, except Shekinah wasn't formulated as feminine, much less a cosmic bride, until probably sometime in the ninth century, and was first written in the "Book Bahir", written around 1185. Earlier writing presented Shekhina as an ungendered concept to enable limited humans to perceive Deity.

As with the Green Man, I don't have a problem with a modern reworking of Shekinah as a Cosmic Bride; but Fox seems to have confused medieval Shekinah with Sophia or ancient Ashera. Shekinah's sexing a thousand years ago by rabbis was done to develop a spiritual toolkit to fix the imbalance in the emanations of the Tree of Life. Fox is looking for a metaphor of the union of two cosmic opposites; but originally, Shekinah was the facade Deity wears so that the Nation of Israel might comprehend the divine.

Yes, I'm knit-picking on this last example, but by now it was too late. I felt betrayed. What I'd hoped for was a Priestly Ronald Hutton or a poetic Margot Adler. What I found was an odd grab-bag of "ancient" and "native" "wisdom," a Frazierian regurgitation of art history presented as archeology, and a kinder, gentler Men's Mythopoetic movement. The symbols and icons of the Divine Male are active and available; use them, re-work them - and if the re-working is a good one, it doesn't need a populist pedigree to justify it. I'm sure Matthew Fox has given us some symbolic gems, and the divine male does need to explored -- but for me, the Spirituality of Men was too well Hidden for this book to be useful.

I Seahorses

2011-05-13T17:08:00.000-07:00

As I was walking to the store the other morning, this fern plant caught my eye. At first I thought I was looking at an aquarium of sea horses. This picture doesn't quite catch the effect of the light diffusing through the leaves -- maybe because I took it at a slightly different time of day and the light had changed; or maybe because I had was in a hurry and didn't have time to play around with aperture and shutter speeds. It's still a cool fern, though.

May 2011 Irises

2011-05-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, the irises started opening.

Last year they all seemed to open at once. I might be remembering incorrectly, but this year they seem to be taking turns.

Purple irises like these are my favorites, although I like cobalt blue ones, too. When I was growing up, we had some giant bearded irises that were descendants of ones from my maternal grandmother's homestead. They were light blue or yellow. There may be a few at my folks' house, but I think a really cold winter killed most of them off.

I love irises before they are fully unfurled because their triangular symmetry is apparent. They remind me of NASA equipment opening, or alien telescopes, or ceremonial hats, or craftily folded napkins at an erudite café.

When I see the fuzzy yellow insides, I wonder what the iris would look like with ultraviolet light.

I wonder if the stripes on the inside of the iris are a kind of landing strip for insects to follow for pollination.

In the early morning or late afternoon, shadows and light play upon the blooms.

The sphinx looks on from a short distance.

The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory

2011-05-09T09:45:00.000-07:00

A while back I read The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, by Cynthia Eller (Chapter One excerpt: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/e/eller-myth.html). I keep referencing it, and I realized I hadn't blogged about it much.

The basic gist of The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory is that the prehistoric record is such that no one can say with certainty anything about prehistoric people other than things like, "they left behind these ruins," or "they buried people this way," or "they produced these sculptures and drawings." Eller then goes on a point-by-point argument against the story of a golden, pre-historic age (roughly 5000 to 2500 BCE) where society was centered on women, in which women were revered for their mysterious life-giving powers and honored as incarnations of the great goddess, and which was subsequently somehow transformed into what is called "patriarchy."

Eller concludes that the story of a golden age of woman-centered society (especially a pan-European one spanning over 2000 years) is a myth which should not be treated as historical fact. As a myth, Eller argues that it is neither helpful as a guide for how women and men conceptualize their self-perceptions of gender and how the genders relate (her view is that the myth engenders sexism by heightening the differences between male and female), nor is the myth of prehistoric matriarchy required as a template from which to model a future society that has reached feminist goals (since it's a myth, it's not a history we're doomed to repeat; let's move on to equality). She concludes, however, that adherents of the story of a golden age of prehistoric matriarchy are unlikely to abandon their "passionate hope and religious faith" in the story.

Eller's tone is sarcastic in places, and I found myself saying "ouch!" after reading several passages. I did wonder at times if she was using particularly silly sources (ala Philip Davis in Goddess Unmasked). However, I would recommend The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory and I found it useful for generating the following questions:

Does Harry Hay's story of the Qeddishim count as a "Golden Age of Male 'Homo-archy'?"
Golden Age stories seem to feed into 'apocalyptic end-times,' 'after the revolution' or to 'boosting self-esteem' thinking; is there another way to incorporate them into a world view?
As someone who is seeking the Divine Queer, is there such a thing as a "divine queer way of knowing?" How would a story help to weave together our erotic, the spiritual, and mental lives -- and how would my story as a gay man be different from someone with a different gender and orientation? Or, to put it another way, is a book like "Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-sex Love" (in the Eugene Library, 0974638838) going to be useful?

In applying The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory to my own experiences and observations as a gay man, I came up with the following:

In my experience, gay men have tried to seek myths of how gay men have functioned in various other cultures (for example, Greek, Japanese, First Nations). The rational behind using other cultures as material for gay myths has been to bolster gay self-esteem by providing modern U.S. gay men with prototype gay ways of being.

These myths are unsatisfying to me because I am neither an aristocratic warrior nor an indigenous pre-industrial native. And instead of synthesizing new cultural solutions to the question of what it means to be a gay man, it seems to me that there are many "Indian-wanna-bes" trying to heal their self-esteem issues by being something they aren't.

This is not to say that the myth of a prehistoric matriarchy would motivate women the same way that my gay male examples seem to motivate gay men.

There is also a "Golden Age" in American Gay Culture, which would have been around 1980 in New York City (post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS). This golden age helps support the stereo-type of the urban gay male (think Will and Jack from Will and Grace and the Bravo TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy). As evidence for my supposition that the gay golden age promotes stereotypes, I'd present the movie, Jeffry; and the novels An Arrow's Flight, by Mark Merlis and Like People in History by Felice Picano. These are mostly literary sources, and could be biased.

But - like the myths borrowed from other cultures - this golden age (at least as it is represented in cultural and literary sources) is not helpful to me because I am not a Castro Clone nor a Greenwich Village Artist. The internal push-and-pull about personal identity and big city gay social expectations can be seen in the book Life Outside by Michaelangelo Signorile -- which basically blames Wall Street for seducing gay men into restrictive roles about what is "masculine" and "gay" -- think Tom of Finland. (Unfortunately, Signorile seems to have not read Starhawk, Niomi Wolf, nor an introductory statistics text.) Signorile's solution was to suggest that gay men move to small cites and find mentors.

I should point out that I'm very lucky - I've never been institutionalized or beat-up physically for my orientation (although 1976 through 1983 were very rough years to be a nerd and perceived queer) . And I'm very lucky to be maintaining a household with a loving partner.

So, to bring this back to The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, I can empathize with Eller's written preferences for a history grounded in archeological evidence (as opposed to imagined or intuited myths), although I don't know how easily applicable an archeological history of people can be mapped onto today's culture. Rather than fetishizing a place (such as Stonehenge or Isreal or Canterbury Cathedral or the Parthanon), focusing on prehistoric cultures seems to fetishize a particular time.

Eller argues that the story of a prehistoric matriarchy comes with strong expectations about what it means to be a woman (and by inference, a man) which set up restrictive gender roles. Given my experiences with the Golden Age of Gay New York City, I would have to agree with her.

But maybe I'm stuck in a pre-Hegelian modality - or perhaps I need to re-read a copy of Godel Escher Bach and practice writing "mu."

Others have not been so amused as I have been with The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory and here are their reviews and critiques:

Review by Kristy Coleman: http://www.cynthiaeller.com/colemanreview_new.htm

Eller's response to Coleman: http://www.cynthiaeller.com/responsecoleman_new.htm

Review by Joan Marler: http://www.belili.org/marija/eller_response.html

Comentary by Marguerite Rigoglioso: http://www.belili.org/marija/rigoglioso.html

Eller's response to Marler and Rigoglioso: http://www.belili.org/marija/c_eller_response.html

Review by Max Dashu: http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/eller.html

Eller's response to Dashu: http://www.cynthiaeller.com/responsedashu_new.htm

May 2011 Irises

2011-05-06T13:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the first of our irises bloomed -- this time by our driveway. I expect the other bed in the backyard to have opening ones soon; right now they are reaching up with darken tips.

I love our irises because they're deep purple, somewhere between plum and eggplant. I love the spears of bloom before the tight buds unfold and reveal their bearded insides. And I love the dusky scent of freshly opened iris -- it's sweet, but with a strong base note that gives it an extra potency.

Now if the darn slugs would just lay off of them....

Ancient Mayan plumbing!

2011-05-05T06:00:00.000-07:00

I saw this link on Plumbing ancient Mayan plumbing!:

"... a new study indicates that the Maya were building pressurized pipes between about 450 and 750 AD, in Palenque, a major Mayan city in modern-day Mexico."

Hmmm. Given how much slope there is in our yard -- no; I'm pretty sure putting in a natural fountain wouldn't work.

Cabela's Traffic

2011-05-04T22:47:00.000-07:00

Oregon is getting its first Cabela's. Look at this map (thanks to KVAL). See the loopy red bits and the arrows superimposed over the loopy green bits? The green parts are called "The Beltline" and are -- at the most -- two lanes wide. The part of the road under the big red arrow (next to the "Welcome to Springfield") is one lane wide.

Oh -- and, by-the-way -- where it's one lane? That's where the southbound and northbound traffic from the interstate merge.

And, um, right -- there's a traffic light that will make the traffic along that single lane stop.

Now, recall that the next closest Cabela's is something like 300 miles away. So...compress all the folks in a 300 mile radius who want camping equipment and compound bows into one lane. Now put them into SUV's, Very Large Pick-up Trucks (with extra-wide back wheels), and have some of them pull trailers.

An hour later, add 5 PM traffic as the folks working in Springfield hit the Beltline to go home, or folks who work someplace else try to get home to Springfield.

Oh, what? You want to leave? Sorry, you need to use Highway 126 for that. Same problems, though.

And Happy Cinco de Mayo! (The ODOT site should be pretty entertaining.)

Derek K. Miller's Last Post

2011-05-04T12:01:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled across this, a post-humus blog post. It's made more surreal by the fact that the Tannhauser Overture is playing over KWAX. The author's matter-of-fact post-death statements reflecting his non-participation-in-spiritual-things reminds me of things Mark says. It seems ironic that this is his virtual voice from beyond the grave.

The last post - Penmachine - Derek K. Miller:

"Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote—the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive."

Man. He left instructions for his family to post this as part of the process of dealing with his estate. Essentially, its an extended obituary. I guess the internet is still at a point where it can only offer eternal memory, but not eternal life.

Nettles at The Bonnefont Garden

2011-05-02T19:25:00.000-07:00

This showed up the other day on The Bonnefont Garden's web site: "The nettle has a long relationship with humankind, and has been exploited as a fiber, a food plant, and a medicine. Cloth woven from nettle is stronger than the linen made from the stems of flax; remnants survive from the Bronze Age, and the fabric was still produced in both Scotland and Denmark in the eighteenth century."

I had heard the story of the Seven Wild Swans, where a princess has to weave clothes out of nettles to break the enchantment on her brothers, but I'd forgotten that it could actually be done.

This is one of the better posts the Bonnefont Garden has put out. What's interesting to me, in addition to the information about nettle, are the excerpts from ancient and medieval sources.

State of Oregon: Sustainability Program

2011-04-29T21:06:00.000-07:00

I recently discovered the State of Oregon: Sustainability Program which seems to be sponsored by the Oregon Department of Transportation.

So far I've only had the time to read about the osprey nest relocated out of an illumination tower and into a nesting platform built by ODOT and EWEB.

ODOT seems like an unlikely place for sustainability information, but it appears their jurisdiction includes things like bikes, buses and railroads in addition to highways. I guess it's not that far of a jump.

Airships!

2011-04-28T08:41:00.000-07:00

Airships for the 21st Century - IEEE Spectrum Airships! I love airships. When I think about why, the Jules Verne area of my brain lights up. As a kid, I loved the Disney version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and from there it's a short hop to imaging an airship with Art Nouveau or Art Deco bits.

Then there's romance of the solitary designer, builder, pilot and captain of the airship (pause to imagine a double-breasted wool coat, turtleneck sweater, gloves, stainless steel tools, and binoculars) standing at the helm while the craft plies the clouds underneath stars. Oh, Alberto Santos-Dumont, are you sipping tea at some celestial cafe you've flown to in your personal dirigible?

But the reality is that one really good storm will rupture your envelope and there goes all your lift. Then you crash into the ocean. I'm sure there's a metaphor in there, somewhere.

we say gay

2011-04-27T18:11:00.000-07:00

I applaud the students organizing to fight this bill.

we say gay: "We say gay for the students who won’t be able to. This site is dedicated to fight against the Tennessee state bill SB0049 (Don’t say gay bill), which would make it a misdemeanor to talk about homosexuality in grades bellow 9th."

Japanese Tsunami Stones

2011-04-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

I read an NY Times article on Tsunami Stones in Japan. There's something about century-old stones with warnings on them instead of someone's birth- and death-dates on them that strikes my imagination. Some of the Tsunami Stones are so old, that the characters etched into them have crumbled away. It's easy for me to imagine the spirits of ancestors hanging around the stones in their effort to speak across time.

As a speculative fiction writer, I have to ask myself how I would make a marker. Would I use titanium? How deeply would I etch it? What would I warn my descendants about? Don't build your house here; there's an old landfill underneath? Hey, there's Cesium burried here?

Or would I make the stone out of Nanites! Or would I make a ... oh! Hey! Gotta stop blogging, just got a cool idea....

TSA Wiccan Fired

2011-04-26T06:00:00.000-07:00

Things that make you go hmmm. Whistle-blowing witch grounded by TSA This whole story seems a little muddled. The only clear message I got from this story is that working at TSA is stressful.

I think the most interesting thing about this article is Selena Fox's comment that as Wicca becomes more visible, the general populous is both more tolerant and more hateful. Not to blame the victim or anything, but the flip side of her comment is that as Wicca becomes more visible, the Wiccan community becomes both more mainstream and more obnoxious (in a let's "freak the mundanes" kind of way).

The other aspect that strikes me is how readily the non-Wiccans in this story believed that their car heaters had been hexed by magic. Like the TSA Wiccan said in response, "If spells were that easy, I'd have won the lottery by now."

Coastal Hole

2011-04-25T21:21:00.000-07:00

Somewhere between the Sea Lion caves and Yachats there's a beach. We went at low tide a few weeks ago, so we could actually see and walk on the sand. Part of the beach includes some basalt cliffs, where I found this hole. The tide was coming in, and I didn't particularly want to crawl on squishy anemones or scrape myself on sharp barnacles -- so I didn't squirm through it.

But I wonder what kind of wish I might have had granted if I did.

Finished Zelige

2011-04-23T21:18:00.000-07:00

Yay! After a couple of nights of wiggling lines in Adobe Illustrator, I finished the design. Technically, this isn't zelige because the lines don't weave over and under each other; but interweaving lines like this in Illustrator is a pain.

I think if I ever got a tattoo, this is the sort of thing that I'd get.

(Thinks some more...) Nah; I think it would be the Pythagorean theorem plus some other things like how to construct a golden rectangle.

Remembering Elisabeth Sladen

2011-04-21T11:55:00.000-07:00

Elisabeth Sladen passed away last Tuesday. She played Sarah Jane Smith on Dr Who in the mid 1970's.

The very first Dr Who I ever watched (by accident) was her last episode on the series, "Hand of Fear." It was cheesy, and I missed the first part, so I didn't have a good feel for any of the story or the plot. But it was Science Fiction -- British Science Fiction. And the low-budget special effects were endearing (the show was produced in 1976, when the height of special effects was four TIE fighters chasing after the Millennium Falcon and I was watching it in post-Battlestar Galactica 1982).

A few years ago at OryCon, (where else am I going to bump into a television screen?) I managed to catch her farewell scene with a much later incarnation of The Doctor. What struck me was, A) wow, she can act, and B) OMG, I hope I look half as good as she does at... her... age (oh, wait).

What I liked about her portrayal of Sarah Jane Smith was that she was competent without being

an alien (Time Lord or otherwise),
Nobel Savage Cheesecake,
or a Ditzy Whiner.

Farewell, Ms. Sladen; you will be missed.

Saturn and Enceladus Electrically Link

2011-04-20T10:49:00.000-07:00

Cassini Solstice Mission: Cassini Sees Saturn Electric Link with Enceladus Wow. This is really cool. I'll have to add it to the list of cool things I should write a short story about (along with every other hard science short fiction writer on the planet...).

It's a New Tool (For Me)

2011-04-20T07:33:00.000-07:00

What is BlogThis! ? - Blogger Help There. I should have installed this tool ages ago.

Ruby, Writing, and Zelige

2011-04-16T18:26:00.000-07:00

Lots and lots of rain today.

Lately, I've been teaching myself Ruby and Ruby on Rails. The Ruby part is fun; it's a little like PHP or perl, and the methods make coding easy to read. I'm still trying to keep everything straight in my head where all the Rails scaffolding goes, especially since I've already converted some tab-delimited text files into an SQLite database.

When I'm not trying make Ruby display tables, I've been writing, critiquing and working on a zellige tile design from Gök Medrese in the Tokat Province of Turkey. The part I'm interested in is based on pentagons. Since drafting pentagons is difficult, it's easy to get the geometry wrong, and then the lines making up the stars meet in the wrong places (see my example). Trying to reproduce the pattern has given me new respect for ceramic artisans living in an age before electricity and autoCAD.

What I like most about this design are the arc of stars around the center. I find the weaving of the lines relaxing and I enjoy how I'll see stars, or a decangle, or diamonds depending on when I look.

If I can get something reproducible, Mark is not adverse to having one or two of these on display in the house.

Scoring a Manuscript

2011-04-13T08:13:00.000-07:00

I had a critique last night. Using the John is Writing Game as a scoring guide:

The manuscript scored big points for "The Twin Towers of Tolkien Sclerosis and Not Enough Details" because, despite copious amounts of beautiful writing, the readers were confused by irrelevant descriptions.
Probably the most points from "The Dictionary of Obscure Usage" came from the word "dwimmer," followed closely by "were-geld" and "sibilant" (which, I see, I misspelled "syllabant").
And from the expanded edition of the game, the manuscript garnered minor points from a "Very Clever Little Girl" character.

Oh well. Now I have to figure out what to cut, what to save, and what to re-write. Despite the road-bumps, the manuscript seemed to be well received. My favorite part of the critique was when the table argued about keeping ("it's beautifully creepy") or cutting ("there's no action moving the plot") the first eight pages.

Sea Lion Cave Snail

2011-04-11T07:36:00.000-07:00

This is a snail from the Oregon coast. I'm not kidding: this guy was slithering around about two blocks away from the parking lot for the Sea Lion Caves. You would think that all the salt air would inhibit snails; but no, this snail was about the size of my index finger curled against my thumb. On the other side of its shell, you could see where I'm guessing a crow had dropped it or tried to break open its shell with a rock.

D'you Remember Tom Baker?

2011-04-10T14:46:00.000-07:00

Saturday we went to the coast. We saw:

giant coastal snails
waterfalls
mating bald eagles
agates, jasper, and a tide line of tiny plastic bits
a raft of sea-lions in the coastal surf
real fishermen feeding real sea-lions ten feet away from us while we stood on a dock (no, lunging sea-lions never crossed my mind....)
a harbor seal
herons
large crows
seagulls of assorted sizes and shapes
historical, two-masted sailboats (by accident)

Because it's the first Spring Visit to the Coast, I got a sunburn on my face and the top of my head. I thought I had packed my hat, and Mark was the only one smart enough to put on sun-screen.

Lately, the leitmotif for Mime has been on my mind. As I was walking around the beach looking for agates, I tried to "recuperate" (as Chris Siosal says) the theme. The ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three-FOUR rhythm of Wagner's pensive tune turned itself to a disco tune; and I wondered if the Muse of the Opera Babes was near-by. Or else Mime's leitmotif wanted to become "Over the River and Through the Woods." I kept picking at the theme and imagining it as a strophe and antistrophe.... and out popped the theme to Doctor Who.

I am not making this up; Mime's theme is quite easy to make into the ground underneath the electronic whistling melody. (Pause to imagine how the opera might have ended if Tom Baker had been the Nibelung blacksmith.)

Spenser Butte Hike

2011-04-09T08:18:00.000-07:00

We went on an evening hike. The clouds had mostly gone and the sun was out.

I'd been listening to Wagner all week, so the woods in my mind echoed with heroic strains.

There were mushrooms. I think the one I saw is called bird's cup. The failing light confused the auto-focus on my camera.

Many folks were on the trail. Most of them seemed to be under eighteen.

And we made it back to the car before the sun set.

More on Mime

2011-04-08T12:10:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me, once the sun came out and the caffeine kicked in, that A) liking Mime's leitmotif didn't doom me to a life like Mime's and B) I could always use Garage Band to write a set of happy techno-dance variations on Mime's theme.

Take that, Wagner!

Wagnerian Observations

2011-04-08T09:07:00.000-07:00

This week I've been listening to a condensed review of Wagner's Ring Cycle. It would be fun to take a week to hear the whole thing. The worrisome aspect is that I really like Mime's (not pronounced like the French silent street performer) leitmotif. It has fun clangs and clanks, and it sounds like a horse ride in the night, or a distress signal in Morse code.

Mime likes to brood and tinker with things, but he has problems putting things together. And he doesn't ask the right questions. And bears come into his house. And he's a treacherous, would-be poisoner. Sigh. He's got cool music, though.

Back to writing.

The Writer's Desk

2011-04-06T18:55:00.000-07:00

It's complicated, but my desk is in a closet in our house. My desk, inherited from my grandfather -- who was also named John Burridge -- has been a part of my life since the late 1970's. It's oak, with a white Formica top. A large top drawer spans the breadth and width of the desk. It's about three inches tall -- now that I'm thinking about it, I should get three or four unused, medium sized pizza boxes to use as interior project trays. Two smaller drawers on either side of the chair well are almost but not quite wide enough to hold a ream of paper, so they end up storing CDs. And... ~~junk~~ ~~stuff~~ ~~knick-knacks~~ office supplies. The drawers are painted purple on the inside (did I mention I've owned the desk since the late 1970's?).

It just fits inside the closet. This is good and bad. It's good, because I can close the closet doors and viola! no office clutter. It's bad because there's about three feet of dead space on either side of the desk. Dead closet space equals a giant junk drawer. Also, the closet door trick increases the likelihood that I'll crack open the closet, thrust a stack of ~~whatever~~ office supplies onto my desk, and then close the door.

About every six months the closet's inefficiency gets to me and I try to reconfigure the closet so that I have a productive working space. The latest incarnation involved cinder blocks on the desk with a plywood shelf. The collegiate shelf worked wonderfully for holding the volumes of books I have borrowed (Hi Nina!) and checked out from the library. But the shelf displaced the pre-LCD computer monitor. And I found myself needed an ergonomic stand for my laptop.

I think when I can use the computer by typing on my pants and what I'm working on lights up on my glasses, I'll be fine. Then I could turn the closet into a reading room....

Jung, homosexuality, parents, and gods

2011-04-04T12:46:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I indulged in a nice hot bath and read Jung's Aspects of the Masculine. The thing that struck me the most was Jung's comments on the "problem" of male homosexuality. The kindest thing he had to say was that among students, it wasn't a bad thing for them to experiment with.

Given that Dr Jung's comments were from essays written before he had formalized his theory of the collective unconscious, and given that I was reading essays from 1905-1930, I wondered what Jungians have to say about homosexuality in general and gay men today. (Note to self: time to hit some peer-reviewed materials...)

The other thing that struck me were his comments on transference, fathers, and gods. Jung presented a patient's dream. She was on a hill overlooking a field of grain. The mountain grew into a kind of god, who cradled her in his arms. The wind blew, and the dreamer was rocked in the arms of the god while the fields of grain waved.

Jung seemed more interested in how the dreamer had made a connection between wind and spirit -- but the passage made me wonder if the need to gender our deities, and the tendency to confound our parents and our gods is a part of a kind of cultural transference process.

And thinking about this particular dream more, it seems so Neo-Pagan to me; I wish I knew more about the (presumably) Judeo-Christian woman who dreamed it. What about her upbringing enabled her to have a vision of "Father Earth" ?

Update on the Outdoors

2011-04-03T21:30:00.000-07:00

Our cherry tree is about to bloom. The buds are still wound, with only the tips showing any signs of pink.

Which means that it is pollen season here. Topologically, every flower in the valley drops its pollen in Eugene. I'll know it's really bad when I have to run the windshield wipers to clean all the plant reproductive matter off of the car in order to drive (I believe that's the pines' fault).

In the mean time, I'm enjoying the grape hyacinth, jonquils, and daffodils. The roses are putting out small red-brown leaves, and the iris swords are pushing upward; they won't flower for about four more weeks.

It's still a little early for writing at Café John. Showers will be common until mid June, and writing outside still requires a jacket, blanket and fingerless gloves (I get cold!). The new gazing globe is near-by, and I amuse myself by looking at the sky's reflection and tracking the clouds.

And, yes; the bugs came out -- but they weren't mosquitoes.

The Grumpy Chef

2011-04-01T10:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a bad day. A "the world is a seed in an old, rotten apple; and then a bear comes and eats it" day. A "the glass isn't half-empty or half-full; it's a broken glass and I've been drinking from it" day. A "Trent Reznor and Annie Lennox singing dysfunctional duets in my head" day. A "now it's time to stop writing day because I have all these little errands clambering for my attention" day. A "I'd better not post things to the internet or a they'll send someone to collect me" day.

The new moon does that to me. Or else the pollen.

Surprisingly, I managed to saute mushrooms, onions, garlic and cubed free-range chicken breast in olive oil and nothing blew up or caught fire, and it was kind of tasty. Without a real recipe.

Not sure how that happened.

Blossoms

2011-03-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

The spring's cold dawning
Brings no coating snow to paint
camellias white.

It's the time of year when the trees flower. This tree is not in our yard. We have a camellia, which is dropping fleshy pink blossoms onto the grass. Where they rot and turn into a pile of decomposing brown necrotic detritus. With slugs on them. Oh wait, that's not quite right; some of them turn brown and rot before they flop off of the camellia bush.

I wouldn't mind so much if the blooms were smaller and white. The pink makes the blooms look like toiletry items from my grandmother's boudoir. Or body parts. Of course, Mark loves the camellia because it's an evergreen, and says disparaging things about the roses and the irises looking like dead sticks four fifths of the year.

Ah spring.

Ladybug Photo

2011-03-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

I was walking around the other day with my camera and noticed a ladybug. So I took its picture.

This ladybug is more orange than the ones I'm used to seeing.

Grape Hyacinth

2011-03-25T12:49:00.000-07:00

These are some of my favorite flowers. I think what I like most about them is their color, followed by how robust the blooms are.

Mark planted some in our front flower box.

The tiny fractal blooms are cool, too; I like how their development seems to travel up the stem of the plant.

They grow from bulbs. I think they're too tiny for bees to pollinate, but I could be wrong.