First New Moon of Spring

Writing:  managed to get to one of the short manuscripts; I'd lost track of the edits, and had already spruced up the manuscript.  Found a missing word when I printed it out.  I decided that it was kid-friendly enough for The Child to read and he seemed to think it was funny.

Reading:  Going back and forth between "Camera Obscura" and various medieval research books.  Camera Obscura is a fun quick read, with lots of Easter eggs in it for the well read.  It's a little tropey, but that's part of it's appeal.  

(In the parking lot)  OMG, KWAX is playing some Anonymous madrigal, and the woman (?) singing Fa-la-la sounds like an honest-to-God crumhorn; I had to listen closely to be sure she wasn't doubled-up with one.  (Sung by ? El Musical Reservata ?)

The medieval books includes "The Book of Contemplation," an autobiography by  Usama ibn Munqidh, written in the 1100's (or 500's in Muslim reckoning),  the translator has left in all the instances of "may God grant him mercy" and "may God forsake him" and I think my new favorite for driving, "may God confound them". Other books include an analysis of Medieval French Romance Prose stories about giants, which includes a side section on Sir Palamedes.  

The Gym:  Any day now...

Spring Music and Writing

Happy Spring!  It's that time of year when the mystery of new beginnings is upon us.  Or something.

I finally feel like I've got my brain back from this cold and sinus infection.  Now all I have to do is wait for the antibiotics to flush out of my system so that I can go out into the sun without worrying about being too photosensitive -- at least with all the rain we're getting, overexposure to sunlight hasn't been much of an issue.  I plan to hit the gym for the first time in about two and a half weeks.  It's funny how quickly the bicycle tire returns.

In my wanderings around Spotify, I've discovered a Danish band, called Heilung which is apparently pigeon holed into the Neofolk (folk-inspired dark ambient music) genre.  After listening to Alfadirhaiti , which I like, I decided I needed to make sure that I understood what the lyrics meant.   Because the title starts with "Alf", I thought it might have something to do with Scandinavian Elves.  But a quick perusal of a lyric site revealed that it was a hymn to Odin.  "Alfadir" probably translates to "All-Father."   Quickly zipping through their site, they have an artists' statement saying they are setting pre-Christian inscriptions to music and disavowing modern attempts to link their work to current political or religious movements (i.e. "we're not Neo-pagan Nazis, we're just using old Viking texts").   Whew.

On the writing front, I went through and collected a stack of  unfinished manuscripts.  Some simply need minor tweaks and then I  can send them out.  One is a fairy tale I need to look at  and cut out the excessive gingerbread and up some  stakes.   One is an  Arthurian romance  that loses steam and I need to up  the stakes; since I chose Sir Palamedes as a main character, I have to address his status as a Saracen (in the original stories, he's a virtuous Pagan knight who eventually converts), which means I have to be careful as a white-bread-Corvallis-boy, raised-Episcopal-turned-NeoPagan, Oregonian writer.   The more I research Sir Palamedes, the more I'm realizing that he's a complex character, and I'm not at the place where I can write from his point of view.

In other writing news, one of my stories placed in the "Space" edition of On The Premiss, so I took the family out for celebratory pizza.  Yay!  

Designing for the March For Science

I want to be in the local March for Science in April, and I'm thinking about a poster.

I started working on a Jupiter-based one with the thought that Galileo was forced to recant what he'd seen in the telescope (and I was so intent on the layout that I spelled science "sciece").  But I'd gotten the story mixed up:  he hadn't been forced to recant that he'd seen  moons orbiting around Jupiter. Instead, he'd recanted that the Earth orbited around the sun in a heliocentric system.  His inquisition was possibly brought on as a result of churchmen seeing themselves cast as the Simpleton in Galileo's "Dialogue" between a Simpleton, a Student and a Sage.  So my design with a telescope  and Jupiter wasn't so good.

Then I thought that I'd try to make a poster about the Burning of the Library of Alexandria, except that it might not have been burnt down so much as defunded.  There are parallels between defunding the Library and defunding NOAA, but I'm not sure how to make that a poster, much less a poster with cool-looking flames on it.

I wish we still had the Art Nouveau and Art Deco gods and goddesses of industry:  the burly men holding lightning bolts and gears, and women with wind-swept hair holding wheat and fish.  Maybe I could fashion an image of science and science funding with that style.  This line of thinking led me to images of industry and recruitment posters from the two world wars.

From there I recalled the Homeric story of how Hephaestus--or Vulcan, to use his Roman name--made a shield for Achilles, showing the good life.  Would my March for Science poster show the lame god at his forge, fashioning the circular shield and showing tools of science along the rings?  I could have flames curling out of the forge!

But the martial nature of the image --a war poem about the forging of tools of war --bothered me.  I'm marching for science, and peaceful applications of science.  Should the story be retold, with a shield of war, a shield of commerce, and a shield for the rest of us?  Maybe I should turn to the goddess Athena -- didn't she create a mechanical owl?  Oh, wait, no, that was the original "Clash of the Titans."

I was coming to the conclusion that I didn't have a good narrative, something that would make a good visual image, like Prometheus bound.  Er...  Albert Einstein working out relativity?  Richard Feynman's quantum mechanics notation?  Robert Oppenheimer and the work on the atomic bomb?  Mr. Spock deciphering glyphs on an alien obelisk?  Commander Data learning the Vulcan nerve pinch?  Frankenstein and his monster?

I think it's a misstep to focus on one specific scientist, not because I don't want to celebrate particular scientist, but because I'm marching to show that I think science should be funded on a national level and data and the scientific interpretation of data should inform long-term national policy.

---

I went to the library to try to find mythical figures in science which would suggest a strong graphic to use on a poster.  There were a lot of books on the science of mythology, or the science behind magical beliefs, or the "Mythbusters" series.  But not a lot on the mythic meaning of science, or stories we share as a culture about how to do science.

There are some misconceptions about how science works:  the apple falling on Newton's head, or the idea of a rebel scientist working alone to make a breakthrough.  But these aren't myths in the sense of a story or symbol that explains.

I'm coming to the conclusion that science -- or at least science funding -- doesn't have gods and goddesses.  We have a toolkit:  measurement, rigorous observation, deductive reasoning, and disproving the null hypothesis.  And Bunsen burners.

So how do we keep our signs and march from eliciting the response, "So what?  The elites are crying because their toys got taken away," or "You guys sure spent a lot of money to put a remote control dune buggy on Mars."

"Science is hard," plays back into the idea of elites with toys, too.  Why is it that athlete-elites command so much respect, and science-elites less so?  It takes athletes a lot of practice to get to the Olympics, and some experiments can take as much time and effort, but do we have cities bidding against each other for "science Olympics"?

---

In the original Disney movie, Tron, there's a scene between Dr. Walter Gibbs, the original founder of a corporation, and Ed Dillinger, its current CEO.  "User requests are what computing is about," says Dr, Gibbs.  "Making money is what computing is about," says Dillinger.

Perhaps I should adopt a different narrative:  funding science will avoid a future Midas story, where plutocrats turn everything they touch into robots; a story not with serfs serving plutocrats, but with drones serving modern-day Borg-ias.  Maybe this isn't so much about de-funding science so much as it is about keeping a serf class uneducated, or industry unregulated.

Somewhere in the back of my mind was an early American quote about a well educated public. I did some searching and found this quote from Thomas Jefferson: 

"The value of science to a republican people, the security it gives to liberty by enlightening the minds of its citizens, the protection it affords against foreign power, the virtue it inculcates, the just emulation of the distinction it confers on nations foremost in it; in short, its identification with power, morals, order and happiness (which merits to it premiums of encouragement rather than repressive taxes), are considerations [that should] always [be] present and [bear] with their just weight." --Thomas Jefferson: On the Book Duty, 1821.

and also

"The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny are] to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes." --Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, 1779. FE 2:221, Papers 2:526

At this point, it seems like I need Lady Liberty arm-in-arm with the all Nine Muses...  And to think all this started with me wanting to make a sign to carry on a protest march.

Why I Don't Write in Coffee Shops

The other day, Mark wasn't feeling so well when I got home, so I went to a cafe to write.  It was nice enough, I guess, but it only confirmed what I think about writing in cafes:  it's really distracting and not conducive to writing or the writing mystique.  I think what I want in a cafe is more like a PG Wodehouse club, or something I imagine from Masterpiece Theatre to be a club; small tables for three or four, simply but nicely furnished with plush chairs.  Sort of like an elegant library reading room.  Only with tea and little, simple scones.

Luckily, in the real cafe I ended up at, the stereo was playing fairly bland, jazzy odes to New York, which I could tune out.  I was able to sit far enough away from the woman who was on a cell phone, using the place as if it were her own office--but that meant that I needed to share a long table with this guy who was sneezing and sniffing and snorting and talking to himself as he worked on what I thought was a sociology paper, but apparently was a music video.  There were the obligatory young women oversharing their personal lives with the crowd, but they managed to mostly speak below the ambient sound of crooners crooning New York arias.  The counter staff were very nice; the hot chocolate was OK, and the scone OK in an industrial kind of way; I really just wanted a poppyseed bagel, but they were out--next time I will have to see if they have any grapes or cheese.  

I managed to clean up some scenes and do some story maintenance in the thin hour I had before I had to go pick up The Child, who said that I smelled like coffee when he hopped into the car.  

---

Post cold recovery continues.  Mark decided that Saturday would be cleaning day, so he moved most of the furniture around and I mopped our floors.  And then we napped.  We didn't do a whole lot this weekend except read and nap at the house.  The big excitement was the light snowfall we got Sunday (and again this Monday), which The Child hoped would cancel school, but it melted by 10:30.  Lots of snow fell Monday morning in the hills (I guess the snow line must be about 300 feet), which made for some picturesque tree lines, but we had maybe a quarter of an inch of mostly slush.  

Post February Cold Dream

Coming out of a twelve-day cold that's been going around town.  I had a fever last week for a few days, and I've spent most of the time congested and not really able to focus on things.  If I get enough sleep, I'm hoping that I'll be able to beat this thing without it moving down into my chest, which apparently is what happens for some folks.

I was struggling to finish a story in time for a deadline.  I was disparing of being able send something in when I recalled I had a free -- and finished -- manuscript that would fit the bill, so I've sent that manuscript in (3/2/17) with crossed fingers.  I had one of those ambigious moments reviewing the older manuscript (corrected a typo), where I really liked the story, and it was something I wrote mostly three years ago, so I had a "gee, I used to be able to write" moment.

No gym (because I've been napping and trying to write), although I actually managed to plank while I was waiting for a computer reboot, so that's something.

---

The other day I had a very long dream.  It started out with The Child going on a walk across the nation and ending up in Conneticuit or Maine.  He walked into a school play being put on by fourth, fifth, and sixth graders.  I was sort of there, sort of not, in a dream-narrator-participator way... I might have been overseeing his journey like some Greek diety overseeing a hero... anyway... I don't remember what the play was about, but The Child unrolled a kind of kite that was navy, purple, and yellow, and turned out to be a dog-sized dragon named Elliot.  

There was a scene shift, and I was a wandering bohemian.  Actually, there was something about an open library night, and a group of us--who all seemed to be in our early twenties--were wandering in a labyrinthine collection of rooms; each room was a different part of the Dewey system, so there was the Religions Room, and the Sculptures Room, and the Astronomy Room, (only it was the 300's room, the 600's and the 700's rooms). 

The dream became more Moulin Rouge technicolor, sort of like Clue, now that I think about it, because everyone had their signature color.  I was popping in and out of third-person omniscient and various characters' points-of-view.   

There was a scene in a kind of common hall or study.  A young woman in a white, knee-length crinoline dress sat on a red couch in a used-to-shabby room with no carpet on the hardwood floors.  There were bookshevles of some dark wood. 

There was more, but I should have written it down when I had the dream, because the recall is poor.  A group of us--we were all twenty-something and in signature colors--decided to stage a protest and prank.  It ended up me (as a purple-clad twenty-something) shooting a policeman or security guard with a shotgun (which wasn't supposed to be loaded).  I had a moment where I was directing the dream from a short distance, and I muttered "Poof! And you're shot," under my breath.  The actor playing the shot person took my utterance the either as an accusation about being a poof or else as being very dismissive of his dying scene.  I leaned against square column in a train station like area and watched him angrily walk away (he was wearing a long rain coat, which reminds me vaguely of Sherlock Holmes).

There was another scene--I have a vague notion of being on the lam-- which ended in some kind of reality dancing show; and as the camera panned out on the judge, there was a black bar across the face of the dancer in purple, to protect his identity from the police.